1010 • GENERAL FARM PROGRAM 



Mr. Rowlands. This tree takes i peculiar type of soil and climate 

 and rainfall. First of all you have to have about 60 inches of rainfall 

 and you have to have a semiacid soil. Yoa have to have well drained 

 land, because you must have a water table 22 feet below the ground 

 in order to be sure that your trees will live. 



We made a great mistake in starting our plantings in areas where the 

 water table was nearer the surface and the result was that those trees 

 had to be taken out of the picture. It was very costly. In the early 

 days there was very little kno\\ai of the tung trees. We gathered all 

 the information we could. 



You will notice the flowers on the tree and that out of each little 

 stem come 40 or 50 blossoms. Most of those are males; there are 

 four or five females which bear the fruit and then the males drop to 

 the ground. 



First of all I would like to tell you something of what interested us 

 in going into the tung-oil business. First of all, it was an article of 

 comm.erce that appealed to us as a luxury or semiluxury. It appealed 

 to us when we found that we had the climatic conditions that might 

 be suitable for its growth. The tung tree is a deciduous tree. There 

 is a very short area, probably about 100 m.iles in these five or six 

 Southern States, where these trees will grow advantageously, because 

 if you get a little frost in the early spring it kills the buds. 



When we started in, we thought that we would get about three crops 

 out of five, but in the last 10 years we have had fairly good crops 

 right through. Some of that is because of better fertilization. 



I shall proceed with my brief at this time, if I may, Mr. Chairman, 

 and ask that it all be included, although I may skip portions of it. 



Although tung oil, or China wood oil as it is known to the trade, 

 has been produced in China for m.ore than 5,000 years and used in 

 the manufacture of American paints and varnishes since 1869, it was 

 not until the year 1902 that culture of the tung tree was first intro- 

 duced in the United States of America. 



In that year, L. S. Wilcox, American Consul General at Hankow, 

 China, shipped some Chinese tung nuts into this country. One report, 

 commonly circulated is that the nuts whose exportation from China 

 was said to have been forbidden under penalty of death, were smuggled 

 into the United States in a diplomat's brief case. At any rate, the 

 nuts, smuggled or otherwise, found their way to the San Joaquin 

 Valley of California where they were planted, presumably in fruit 

 orchards, but failed to thrive. 



The reason they did not thrive was that it was an alkaline soil and 

 those trees will not grow in an alkaline soil. It has to be semiacid. 



More nuts were sent to the United States by Wilcox in 1903 and 

 1904 and some, according to reports, were distributed throughout the 

 Gulf Coast States for planting. As far as can be ascertained all 

 seedlings grown from these three original shipments failed to live. 



Authority for this statement is C. C. Concamion, writing in Tung 

 Oil, a bulleting of the Department of Commerce, Bureau of Foreign 

 and Domestic Commerce, published in 1932. Concannon was chief 

 of the Chemical Division of the Bureau at that time. 



It was not until the following year, 1905, that the culture of the 

 timg tree can be said really to have gotten a start in the United States. 

 In that year, an eminent plant scientist, Dr. David L. Fairchild, in 

 charge of the Division of Foreign Plant Introduction, Bureau of Plant 



