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AMERICAN POMOEOGICAE SOCIETY 
THE POMOLOGICAL TREE CROP. 
J. Russell Smith, Virginia. 
I presume you are all supposed to be pomologists. I asked Mr. Lake, 
your Secretary, what Pomology is. He said I could talk about anything that 
grows upon trees except turkeys and political plums, but that if I got! to 
talking about the smaller birds I had better be careful or I might get into 
trouble with the entomologists. 
I am proud to belong to the oldest organization on earth, for you know 
that Adam and Eve were the first pomologists. It is a fact that is to be 
proved by Chapter two, of Book one, that the only crops in Paradise were 
tree crops. Trees made it Paradise, and the curse that was laid upon 
Adam was that he had to go out and dig in the field, grow the herbs of 
the field, and eat bread in the sweat of his face. What we really need is 
a restoration of the tree crop conditions of Eden. 
I want to start a society for the prevention of hunger in dumb animals. 
The point is this. Despite the great possibilities of tree crops, — and treesl 
are the great engines of nature — we have thus far grown almost no tree 
crops for animals. Yet it is for animals that the American farm primarily 
exists. The quadruped eats about eight or nine tenths of the entire product 
of the American farm. We should make the tree help feed him. 
Now that plant breeding has come and we are again beginning to realize 
the great possibilities of trees as producers, we need a careful examination of 
all the trees of the country, and selection and breeding to make us new crops 
for the extension of agriculture. The possibilities of plant breeding are strik- 
ingly suggested by the recent achievements of Dr. Van Fleet of the United 
States Department of Agriculture, who is trying to circumvent the chestnut 
blight whose devastations are so widely known. Before the blight has made 
a clean sweep of trees in any one State, Dr. Van Fleet has produced, by 
the crossing of the worthless big Japan chestnut with the sweet hardy 
Chinquapin, a new variety of chestnut of fine quality, great precocity, 
and almost blight proof. There is little doubt that before many years we 
will, with the plant breeder’s aid, be able to again grow chestnuts, despite the 
tremendous destruction of this recently imported blight. This is but a 
typical case of what the plant breeder and the tree can do for us. 
The tree can give us agriculture where we now have none, and can have 
none by the existing plow method. This is well proved by conditions in 
Corsica where mountain slopes about as steep as our Appalachians are 
covered with grafted chestnut forests for miles and miles. The forests 
are filled with villages of people who live from chestnuts. They make a 
greater average annual yield per acre than is given by average American 
wheat fields. And whereas the wheat field is soon exhausted, the chestnut 
has been yielding for centuries and the ground is still in good condition 
because it has not been plowed and eroded. 
Fruit as Stock-Food. 
I have seen farmers in North Carolina who tell me that an acre of 
ever-bearing mulberry trees is worth $50 as hog feed. The planting of the 
