CACTUS AS A FOOD CROP 
THE SPINELESS OPUNTIA AN ESTABLISHED FACT. 
PART ONE. 
The Fodder Crop for Arid Regions. 
F OR more than fifty years I have been quite familiar with “thornless cactus” of many 
species and varieties. In fact, one of the first pets which I had in earliest childhood 
was a thornless cactus, one of the beautiful Epiphyllums. The Phyllocactus and 
many of the Cereus family are also thornless, not a trace to be found on any part of 
the plants or fruit. Thus the somewhat indefinite popular name of “thornless cactus” has 
been used by persons unacquainted with these facts, for be it known that “thornless 
cactus” is no more of a novelty than a “thornless” watermelon. But among the Cacti 
which grow to an immense size with great rapidity and which can be readily cultivated 
in garden, field or desert no perfectly thornless ones were known and very little interest 
taken in the cacti of any kind either thorny or thornless as to their agricultural or horticul¬ 
tural value until the work of improvement was taken up on my experiment farms and 
improved perfectly thornless rapid-growing varieties had been produced and made known 
within the past few years. Some of the best growers among these will produce three or 
four times as much weight of food per acre as will the wild thorny ones under exactly the 
same conditions. But better yet, hardy ones are being produced which will already 
withstand 5 or 10 degrees more freezing than others of the wild type. This was not un¬ 
expected as the genus Opuntia is a surprisingly variable one even in the wild state. The 
best botanists—even those who have made the Opuntias a special study—declare it to be 
one of the most difficult genera to classify, as new forms are constantly appearing and the 
older ones so gradually and imperceptibly merge together. The facts without doubt 
are that their ancestors had leaves like other vegetation and were as thornless as an apple 
tree, but in ages past were stranded in a region which was gradually turning to a desert, 
perhaps, by the slow evaporation of some great inland lake or sea. Being thus stranded 
the plants which could adapt themselves to the heat and drought which as the years passed 
by became each season more and more severe, survived, at first by dropping the leaves 
thus preventing too much evaporation, leaving the fat smooth stems only to perform the 
functions of leaves. The Opuntias even to this day always shoot out very numerous rudi¬ 
mentary leaves which persist a few days or weeks and then having no function to perform 
drop off. But the Opuntias had yet to meet another enemy; desert animals were hungry 
for their rich stores of nutriment and water, so the rudimentary leaves were replaced by 
awful needle-like thorns placed at exactly the right angles for the best defence, and, at the 
base of these—partially embedded in the stems— (now leaves) are numerous bundles of 
smaller needles, more than ten thousand to each leaf and these are even more dangerous 
than the larger needles, often producing great pain, inflammation and at last death, to 
animals who were pressed by starvation to consume them for food. 
