the trees are
tall enough to be beyond the danger of damage from livestock, we graze
the pasture under and between the trees. No damage is evident from
trampled earth (the walnuts are deep-rooted) and the hazard of fire is
eliminated because there is now no need to mow excessive grass, weeds,
or brush.

7. The most precocious seedling walnuts began to bear nuts at about 7
years of age. New bearers are coming in each year. All are still counted
as adolescent trees, yet, last fall, picking up the nuts from none but
trees marked for their better quality of nuts, we gathered some 40
bushels of nuts in the shell.

8. Today, we can count about 2,000 walnut trees which promise to be of
good timber quality 35 years hence. At a reasonable estimate, 1,000
trees will then survive, be 50 years old, be worth $50.00 each, at
present prices. Total, $50,000.00. This represents an annual increment
in value of $1,000.00 per year for the 20 acres which are closely
planted to black walnuts. Can the average farmer _save_ that much in his
lifetime? Can even the exceptional farmer do it on 20 acres? With as
little investment of money and work? If so, how?

Any farmer can do as well, or better, without losing a single
immediately productive acre. Why doesn't he?

The answer is in the very nature of the farmer's business. As has
already been said, he is primarily a producer of food. If trees stand in
the way, he chops them down. He has always chopped them down. It has
become a habit. If the farmer is to be persuaded to change his ways and
turn to planting trees, instead of destroying them, I repeat, the
entering wedge into his interest will be, I believe, through
dual-purpose trees--trees for food crops, as well as for timber crops.
Of these species, the black walnut of eastern America is probably the
most outstanding one of all, at least in the mid-section of America. The
butternut--"white walnut"--flourishes better in the north. The chestnut
is another--a tree almost literally raised from the dead by the efforts
of a few miracle workers like Dr. Arthur H. Graves of the Connecticut
Experiment Station, who, with others of his kind, has been in the throes
of producing a blight-resistant, tall-growing hybrid timber tree out of
the bushy Chinese chestnut, a producer of the sweetest of nuts. The
pecan, too, is being pushed northward. Great groves of wild pecans have
firmly established themselves along the Ohio River. Their timber is
fair; not