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The work of breeding new and better varieties of nut bearing 

 trees for their nuts and for their timber will take land, money and 

 time, but are not really worthwhile results promised? What better 

 work can be found for say $1,000,000.00 than the establishment and 

 endowment of a nut arboretum, or the taking up of such breeding 

 work in earnest by an existing arboretum. We import about $36,000,- 

 000.00 worth of nuts annually. The year book of the U. S. Dept. of 

 Agriculture for 1927 shows about $25,000,000.00 worth of nuts raised 

 in the United States. It also shows the production of over 18,000,- 

 000,000 pounds of meats raised, the value of which is probably over 

 $2,000,000,000. If, as we firmly believe, nut kernels will to a 

 considerable extent take the place of meat, it means that we shall have 

 to raise many times the nuts we are raising now, and that we shall 

 have to grow nuts not simply in a few small sections, as in the case 

 now, but that we must have varieties that can be commercially grown 

 almost anywhere in the United States and Canada. This will add 

 many millions of dollars, if not hundreds of millions, annually to the 

 value of our farm products, a rich return for an investment now of 

 say $1,000,000. 



Systematic work on nut trees may also solve the problem of grow- 

 ing timber, which is absolutely impracticable in many locations on 

 account of the length of time needed to mature the crop. Producing 

 trees that will grow to marketable size in a relatively few years will go 

 a long way toward solving the problem of timber growing. 



, I might say, furthermore, that the work of the past few years has 

 shown how short cuts may be taken. While it would take ten years to 

 get a brand new nut arboretum established and ready for hybridiza- 

 tion work, yet by taking proper means it is not necessary to wait that 

 length of time before anything other than preliminary work can be 

 done. Ten years ago this was not possible, but now a good deal can be 

 done even the first year, and the results would increase each year. 



Taking everything into consideration, is not the promise of results 

 from systematic work on the nut trees most alluring? To be instru- 

 mental in developing and perfecting a new agriculture and a new 

 forestry is indeed worth while, and an opportunity that comes only 

 occasionally. 



