Southern Nursery Company, Winchester, Tenn. 
for the race to displace meat. Certainly the article that 
supplants meat will be of great commercial iuuxirtauce, and 
everything about the pecan, Its food characteristics, its 
economy of production and of market distribution show it 
to be the leading candidate for this place in public favor. 
The cost of production is always vital. Statistics show- 
that six acres of ground are reiiuired one year to put one 
good three-year-old steer into the slaughter house. The 
grazing lauds of tlie country are already almost exhausted. 
We are already in sight of the time when it will be too expen- 
sive to feed humanity on meals. And right here a whole 
page might be written al«nit the economy of the pecan nut 
because it is not a perishable product to ship or srore. It will 
lie the poor man's staff of life l>ecause he can store a year's 
supi)ly as safely as his rich neighbor. -The market price of 
pecans will be high, and comparatively free from fluctuation. 
Population rapidly increases but the number of our acres 
remains the same, and we are often startled with the ques- 
tion, "Where will our food come from?" I>et us compare 
pecans with meat a little further. One acre busy six years 
sends one steer to market whose weight is, say, one thousand 
two bundled pounds. One acre of twenty i)ecan trees, 
yielding fifty pounds per tree, in six years produces six 
thousand pounds, and the chemical food power being thre« 
and a half times that of beef, multiply by 3%, so we liave 
The cost of handling and getting to the consumer is a 
two hundre<l and ten thousand as the ligure to compare with 
(me thousand two hundred. This sum contained in two hun- 
dre<l and ten thousand just I'o times. As a business propo- 
sition, then, an acre of good pecan trees is worth 175 times 
as much as an acre devoted to cattle raising. 
point in which the pecan has every other known food pro- 
duct discounted twice at least, and in this acTvantage both 
consumer and producer will justly share. 
Hence we say, after thoroughly c-onsiderlng the gravest 
question of human progress as well as the conunercial pros-* 
pects of the fcK)d (piestion, we believe the arrival of the 
paper-shell pecan marks au epoch in the history of the race. 
