Vol. XVII, No. 4 



WASHINGTON 



April, 1906 



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OUR PLANT IMMIGRANTS 



AN ACCOUNT OF SOME OF THE RESULTS OF THE WORK OF THE 



OFFICE OF SEED AND PLANT INTRODUCTION OF THE 



DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE AND OF SOME 



OF THE PROBLEMS IN PROCESS 



OF SOLUTION 



By David Fairchild 



Agricultural Explorer, in Charge of Foreign Explorations 



THE era of pork and hominy has 

 passed forever in this country, 

 but so short a time ago that our 

 fathers refer to it as the time of plain 

 living. What has wrought this change 

 throughout the table menus of the 

 country since the days of the California 

 gold fever? It is not the gold fields of 

 the Pacific slope, nor the industrial de- 

 velopment of the country that has caused 

 it, so much as the introduction of new 

 food plants. The changes that have been 

 going on since those wagon caravans fol- 

 lowed each other across the great plains 

 have been gigantic, but in no respect 

 have they been more remarkable than in 

 those which Plant Introduction has 

 brought about. 



Slowly at first, with the establishment 

 of those plants that the immigrants 

 brought over with them, this work has 

 gone on, unchronicled by historians, until 



today the very things that we look upon 

 as characteristic of great regions of the 

 country are vast fields and enormous or- 

 chards of introduced plants. 



some; notld importations 



The discovery of gold at Sutter's mill 

 was the beginning of the great industrial 

 development of the Pacific coast, but the 

 introduction by the Catholic Fathers of a 

 single forage plant — alfalfa — has turned 

 two million acres of land into the most 

 generally profitable farm area of this 

 country. 



These same Fathers brought with them 

 to their missions olive cuttings, whose 

 descendants today cover thousands of 

 acres of the best tilled olive orchards in 

 the world. A few orange cuttings from 

 the east coast of Brazil, called to the at- 

 tention of the world by an American 

 woman, have grown until they number 



*The substance of an address to the National Geographic Society, February 9, 1906, and 

 published by permission of the Secretary of Agriculture. 



