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DISEASES OF NUT CROPS 

 IN THE NORTHERN UNITED STATES 



By Dr. II. JV. Anderson, University of Illinois 



Commercial nut orcharding on a large scale is a comparatively new 

 field of" agricultural endeavor. For this reason very few observations 

 have been made on the effect of the disease factor in this venture. We 

 know for a certainty that crops of wild nuts of the kinds we are inter- 

 ested in are produced in the woods year after year with a fair degree 

 of regularity. But when these same nut trees are placed under arti- 

 ficial conditions of culture the results may be entirely different. To 

 illustrate this point we may draw upon the experiences of the fruit 

 growers. Our native crab apples, while subject to most of the dis- 

 eases of the cultivated apples such as scab and blotch, prodiiced 

 enormous crops of apples year in and year out, but wlien cultivated 

 apple trees were grown in the same region it was soon discovered that 

 the fungous diseases and insect pests completely ruined crops from 

 a commercial standpoint. At first, however, our forefathers did not 

 find it necessary to protect the apples by spraying but as the or- 

 chards became more numerous and new insects and diseases were in- 

 troduced from foreign countries and from other sections of our own 

 country, the necessity of protection became more and more acute until 

 today failure to spray spells "ruin" to the orchardist. 



We might picture large orchards of walnut, hickory, filbert, chest- 

 nut, etc., in the region such as southern Illinois, where thousands of 

 trees of the same species would be associated. Some disease such as 

 chestnut blight or leaf spot enters and becomes esta'bli.slied. The nut 

 culturists of this region have spent liundreds of thousands of dollars 

 develojjing their orchards to the ))oint wliere they are getting crops 

 and are now ready to reap their reward. Instead tlie dread blight 

 kills out the chestnut and the leaf spot defoliates and weakens the 

 walnut, hickory and butternut, while tlie blight destroys all the filbert 

 plantations. Or worse yet, some unknown, foreign disease is intro- 

 duced and almost before we are aware of it, it destroys thousands of 



