l8o AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS 



the bread supply and the money crop of thousands of mountain- 

 dwellers. Over some hundreds of thousands of square miles of terri- 

 tory below Mason and Dixon's line the 'possum waxes fat on the 

 toothsome, nutritious fruit of the persimmon tree. In Japan and 

 China the persimmon has been improved until it is as large as a peach 

 and is an article of diet as fresh, dried, and preserved fruit. At the 

 present time we leave most of our eastern nuts to grow, fall, and waste. 

 But the plant-breeder tells us that it is only a matter of time and 

 patience to make, by repeated crosses, a good crop-yielding hickory 

 tree. We may have almost an ideal hickory nut with the delicious, 

 sweet flavor of the shellbark, the thin shell of the Kentucky nut, and 

 enough ol the size of the Indiana giant to put it in the English- walnut 

 class so far as food value, accessibility, and desirability are concerned. 



For New England the point of the discussion is this : these trees, 

 these engines of production, do not depend upon the plow. They can 

 wedge their trunks in between the rocks, send their roots far down 

 into the glacial subsoil, rear their spreading branches out into the 

 clouds, rain, sunshine, and produce. What care they for rocks ? If 

 there is earth among them, the tree roots will find it. If the rocks 

 encumber the surface, they merely serve as a mulch to keep in the 

 moisture. 



What New England needs is an intelligent agriculture that is 

 adjusted to her resources. The agriculture of New England came 

 from Old England, Old England got it from the Romans, the Romans 

 got it from the Egyptians, and the Egyptians got it from the Nomad's 

 wife. There is nothing like a good old ancestry, but possibly we have 

 overdone it a bit in our farming. New England, like all hilly and 

 rocky countries, has a greater need for a tree-crop agriculture than it 

 has for any other thing in the whole list of relations between man and 

 nature. With the proper improved varieties of tree crops there is 

 no reason why Massachusetts might not, square mile for square mile, 

 produce as many fat pigs or fat sheep or fat turkeys as Kansas. The 

 proper succession of fruiting mulberries, chestnuts, walnuts, pecans, 

 hickories, shagbarks, filberts, and many other tree crops that might 

 be introduced from this and other lands would give one continuous 

 succession of workless harvests to which the pigs, sheep, and turkeys 

 could walk and eat. Then those small sections of the land that are 

 fit for tillage could be tilled to the limit, intensively, to fill in the gaps. 

 A sugar-maple orchard of selected and improved varieties would, of 

 course, yield much more than the present scrub maple orchards of 



