FOOD-PRODUCING TREES 



BY J. RUSSELL SMITH, PH.D. 

 PROFESSOR OF INDUSTRY, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA 



HERE is a hybrid idea in search of a father. I seek 

 not its creative father, but rather adoptive fathers 

 who may take the hybrid idea and give it such 

 fathering and fostering as it may merit. The idea itself 

 is a hybrid between horticulture and forestry. It might 

 be called fruitful forestry, if the foresters would not take 

 offence. It is nothing worse than the production of food 

 and wood on the same tree. 



We have now reached the state in our industrial devel- 

 opment when we 

 need large areas of 

 land put to trees 

 that will produce 

 many crops of use- 

 ful fruit, nuts, 

 beans, or other an- 

 nual or occasional 

 product before the 

 final crop of wood. 

 It is merely the in- 

 tensification of tree 

 culture that shall 

 parallel the intensi- 

 fication of animal 

 husbandry. In 

 Australia, in the 

 early days, cattle 

 were reared for 

 their hides and tal- 

 low, all else being 

 thrown away. Then 

 came the export of 

 meat, and lastly the daily crop of milk and its de- 

 rivatives for several years before the final crop of meat. 

 The wood of a tree is no poorer for the fact that it has 

 supported fifty or a hundred crops of nuts, fruit, or beans. 

 I hope I may not cause any one to miss the main 

 point by rousing questions of definition as to whether 

 I am talking about horticulture or about forestry. My 

 greatest delight would be for both foresters and horti- 

 culturists to adopt the idea and act on it. I have the 

 notion that the forester has been missing great oppor- 

 tunities and has been limiting the field of his usefulness 

 when he thinks of trees merely as producers of wood. 

 Similarly, I think the horticulturist has been grossly 

 neglecting opportunities when he has limited his energies 

 to the production of crops for men to eat. Both forester 

 and horticulturist have been too bashful. The great need 

 of American agriculture to-day is not primarily things for 

 men to cat, but things for the beasts to eat. Our domestic 

 animals eat many times as much as we do, and trees, 

 whether attended to by horticulturist or forester, can un- 

 doubtedly be made to yield vast amounts of forage if care 

 228 



and attention are directed to that object. I suppose most 

 foresters are aware of the fact that half or two-thirds of 

 the entire weight of pork grown in Portugal is produced 

 by the acorns of the cork oak and evergreen or ilex oak. 

 There are many other trees that might join the oaks and 

 make a series of crops that would supply a surprising 

 proportion of the needs of domestic animals, especially 

 swine and sheep. 



With this idea of tree crop forage in mind, and with 



the added fact that 

 with the rising price 

 of meat we are 

 steadily increasing 

 our consumption of 

 nuts and are im- 

 porting them by the 

 millions of dollars a 

 year, it becomes 

 evident that forest- 

 ers have been giving 

 us, particularly 

 farmers, bad advice 

 in merely advising 

 us to raise wood. 

 There is little doubt 

 that this idea of 

 fruit harvests as 

 well as wood har- 

 vests should have 

 its proper place of 

 beginning on the 

 farmers' w o o d 1 o t. 

 Over and over again I have heard the foresters' advice to 

 the farmer to "plant his steep hillsides in trees." The 

 hillsides need the trees but the advice as given is often 

 bad for two reasons: (1), the process is so slow that the 

 farmer is not reached by appeal; (2), the yield is so small 

 that the farmer can't afford to put part of his small 

 acreage into this low and slow form of production. In- 

 stead of being told to plant trees and wait until they die 

 to get something, he should be told to plant trees that 

 will yield annually, or certainly every other year, and 

 then finally a crop of wood. With this advice, the chances 

 of getting him to plant his hillside into trees are greatly 

 enhanced, because he can begin to profit in three, five or ten 

 years instead of waiting twenty-five or fifty or seventy-five. 



Crop Tree Areas and Wood Tree Areas 

 I am not advocating that all forests should be of har- 

 vest-yielding trees. We need the utilization of land in 

 the many ways which combine to the best service of the 

 nation. Some lands should be in wood-producing forests 

 only. These lands, however, should be those which have 

 from man's standpoint some climatic handicap. Unfor- 



A GIANT GRAFTED OAK 

 This tremendous oak stands in a garden in Majorca. It produces a crop of acorns which provide food 



for a number of pigs. 



