GROWING RUBBER IN CALIFORNIA — PERRY 355 



breaking activity at the height of the campaign, half of them women 

 and girls recruited from the town and surrounding country. Weeds 

 are killed in the nurseries with oil sprays now, but there was no time 

 to experiment then. 



All this frenzied activity subsided somewhat once the nursery crop 

 got established, but not for long. The 700 acres of guayule fields taken 

 over from the company, plus that spring's plantings and even the 

 nursery beds, began to ripen seed. The company had developed a 

 mechanical picker, but it was wasteful of seed so again a large labor 

 force was recruited and put in the fields with brushes and trays col- 

 lecting seed. When it became obvious that a larger quantity of seed 

 than had been expected was going to be harvested, Congress raised the 

 75,000-acre limitation on the planting program to 500,000 acres, 

 and once again the project went into a high-speed nursery-building 

 program. 



With the hope that a crop of seedlings could be grown during the 

 winter, two groups of nurseries, each comparable in size to the Salinas 

 lay-out, were constructed in southern California. In order to have a 

 completely realistic unit of measurement in connection with nurseries 

 a standard "bed" was established, being 4 feet wide and 400 feet long. 

 Thus, the Salinas nurseries contained 12,000 beds, while those at Indio 

 and Oceanside contained 9,900 and 11,100 respectively. Later, a 

 6,000-bed nursery was built in the San Joaquin Valley, one of 3,000 

 beds near Las Cruces, N. Mex., and two of 1,500 beds each in the Salt 

 River Valley of Arizona and the lower Rio Grande Valley in Texas. 

 We had a total at one time of 45,100 beds, sufficient to produce stock 

 for an annual planting program of about 200,000 acres, assuming 

 that the southern California nurseries could be double-cropped. For 

 the benefit of those who may have difficulty in thinking in terms of 

 "beds," these nurseries occupied a net area of about 2,000 acres, all 

 equipped with overhead irrigation. 



REVISIONS IN PROGRAM 



It will be noted that a good deal of this latter discussion has been 

 in the past tense. Actually, some of this acreage was never seeded, 

 some of it has been dismantled, and doubtless more of it will be. In 

 the spring of 1943 the rubber director advised the Secretary of Agri- 

 culture that in his opinion the rubber situation no longer justified 

 diversion of highly productive farm land to guayule, and later, by 

 arrangement between them, the program was curtailed to a total field 

 acreage of about 32,000, that being the amount of land then planted 

 or on which the Government had commitments which could not be 

 released. 



