THIRTY-THIRD BIENNIAL, SESSION 
1 19 
wild persimmon for the same purpose is quite common, and the pig dearly 
loves both these kinds of fruit. The wild persimmon bears up to the breaking 
point of the tree, and it is the most nutritious fruit widely grown in 
America. It is worthy of being made a crop. So is the honey locust, with 
a bean greedily eaten by cattle, and an analysis which shows it to be worth 
one cent a pound in comparison with bran. 
The acorn orchards of Spain and Portugal are as valuable as corn lands 
in Indiana, and are not declining in fertility so rapidly. Even the oak tree 
can, with care, be made to push corn hard as a pig fattener, and the oak 
tree can do it in places where the corn is unthinkable. 
We now have possibilities of a plowless agriculture. Plowless soil 
management is a problem which agricultural science has not yet had time 
to investigate fully. I have, for example, been told by Mr. W. A. Taylor, 
Chief of the Bureau of Plant Industry, U. S, Department of Agriculture, 
that so far as he knew there had been no official studies made in managing an 
apple orchard where the orchard was well fertilized and kept in leguminous 
cover crops without tillage. Yet there are a few such private orchards 
that are succeeding wonderfully, and indicate the possibility of not only 
growing apples, but also other tree crops without tillage. This would per- 
mit us to get crops from our steep mountain slopes and the unplowable 
corners of our farms — easily doubling our crop area. 
The tree is capable of rendering another type of service better than 
any other plant. I refer to dry farming. A great deal has been said about 
dry farming. It has ruined lots of people, and that, too, in regions of rain- 
fall of from 10 to 16 inches. They were trying to grow grain, but when 
it comes to compete with drought, grain is not in the race with trees. 
Trees can send their roots down 20 or 40 feet. There are records of them 
going 60 feet. They can send them far out along the surface to drink the 
moisture from any slight shower. This fact enables the people of Tunis 
to have a great dry farming boom, and a successful and continuing one, 
in regions where the average rainfall for the past ten years has been 7 
inches and a fraction. The point of the whole story is that they are using 
tree crops — the olive. If the Arab can use land with a rainfall of 7 inches, 
why can not we? We can, if, we develop the crop-yielding trees that 
America possesses. 
There is little doubt that in many parts of the country we can develop 
a two-story agriculture: large crop-yielding trees above, such as the pecan,, 
Persian walnut, honey locust, persimmon, and beneath, the plowed crop 
like clover, cotton or vetch, sweet potatoes, and peanuts, which pigs will 
eat. Two-story agriculture is a practice in many parts of the Old World 
and there is one crop which lends itself to three-story agriculture — the date 
of the oasis — which lets enough light come through its feathery top to 
supply oranges, apricots and figs beneath, and beneath the smaller fruit 
trees grow garden vegetables, and over all towers the date, which is the 
king of crops. The date may properly he called king for it has been yielding 
on the same land continuous crops for at least two thousand years, and its 
crops make from three to fifteen times as much actual food as wheat crops, 
and will do it on poorer land. 
That these things are not all beautiful theory, I wish to demonstrate by 
pictures showing these things as I have seen them in a six months’ journey 
