ink of it. A little nut
orchard 200 miles square supplying one-third enough food to feed one
hundred million of citizens. The trouble is the frogs and cattle are
eating up our food supplies. We feed a steer 100 pounds of food and get
back only 2.8 pounds. If we plant 10 pounds of corn we get back 500
pounds. If we plant one walnut we get back in twenty harvests a ton of
choicest food. In nut culture there is a treasury of wealth and health
and national prosperity and safety that is at present little
appreciated.
* * * * *
Here is a veritable treasury of wealth, a potential food supply which
may save the world from any suggestion of hunger for centuries to come
if properly utilized. Every man who cuts down a timber tree should be
required to plant a nut tree. A nut tree has a double value. It produces
valuable timber and yields every year a rich harvest of food while it is
growing.
Every highway should be lined with nut trees. Nut trees will grow on
land on which no other crop will grow and which is even worthless for
grazing. The pinon flourishes in the bleak and barren peaks of the
rockies.
The nut should no longer be considered a table luxury. It should become
a staple article of food and may most profitably replace the pork and
meats of various sorts which are inferior foods and are recognized as
prolific sources of disease.
* * * * *
Ten nut trees planted for each inhabitant will insure the country
against any possibility of food shortage. A row of nut trees on each
side of our 5,000,000 miles of country roads will provide for a
population of 160,000,000. With a vanishing animal industry, nut culture
offers the only practical solution of the question of food supply. As
the late Prof. Virchow said, "The future is with the vegetarians."
THE IMPORTANCE OF NUT GROWING.
H. W. COLLINGWOOD, NEW JERSEY.
In these days the importance of most things is valued in figures. I
never was good at figures. It seems to me that you can do anything you
like with figures, except make them clear, yet it was the failure to
figure that gave me my first idea of the importance of nut culture. Some
50 years ago a small boy on a New England farm could not, or would not,
do his sums in the old Coburn Arithmetic. It made no difference that the
teacher called it Mathematics, and pointed it with the end of a hickory
stick. By any other name it was not sweet.
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