The Philosophy of Crop Trees in Solving Our 
Economic Problems 
We need a line of popular investments that not only 
earn interest but save the business man 25% to 50% in 
taxes. A thrifty people’s code is “a nickel saved is a nickel 
earned,” so let’s have an investment that will save taxes 
while it earns. 
Here is the Solution 
Organize land development companies and procure liti¬ 
gation making such companies tax free for a given period 
(just as a city offers to new industries) as an induce¬ 
ment to buy up large acreages of raped and abandoned 
lands. Millions of acres in the forest and farm areas of 
the north and south hold a haven for restless money, 
which with fire kept out would grow into a fabulous 
fortune for posterity. Add to timber growing game, tree 
crops, hogs, and cattle, and while grand schemes of 
finance in utilities, manufacturing, and transportation 
are born, bloom, and peter out on the stage of time, you 
will develop a perpetuality of income far superior to the 
original type of American investment. 
Many want to shy away from tree crops as something 
new and untried but it is the original and most permanent 
way of producing food. Nuts were used as food thousands 
of years before either milk or eggs were known to be 
edible. That is why the decree of Moses: 
“When thou shalt besiege a city a long time, in making 
war against it to take it, thou shalt not destroy the trees 
thereof by forcing an ax against them: for thou mayest 
eat of them, and thou shalt not cut them down (for the 
tree of the field is man’s life) to employ them in the 
siege.” Deut. 20: 19-20. 
An Illustration of Tree Crops’ Possibilities 
Emory Smith, a consultant engineer of San Francisco 
decries the fact that Governor Stanford died before he 
got his intended planting of cork o^k made as an en¬ 
dowment to Stanford University. Today it would be 
netting $250,000 to $300,000 in cork, plus thousands of 
dollars’ worth of pork per year from the acorns, a per¬ 
petual endowment while Rockefeller’s fifty million en¬ 
dowment for his foundation invested in those so-called 
gilt-edged modern securities find their resources badly 
curtailed. 
In our short, whirlwind campaign to annihilate our nat¬ 
ural resources in making money, millions of acres of 
land have been stripped of their virtue (timber and forest 
products—including game, tree crops, climatic balance 
and flood control) and left as worthless as a Wall Streeter 
after a gold digger is through with him. 
Yes, I too, was a doubting Thomas about the hue and 
cry of wasted resources until I saw for myself. Said I, 
“We’ve been living here all our lives and we’ve done 
pretty good, haven’t we?” Then why all the fuss? But I 
hear a voice, “that without vision my people perish” and 
the handwriting on the wall shows these indisputable 
facts. 
In the short 150 years of raping Mother Earth, we have 
guzzled: 
1/2 our supply of oil 
1/2 our iron 
2/3 our copper 
3/4 our timber 
50.000,000 acres—or the same acreage Japan has 
used to feed her 65,000,000 people for 
many centuries—are irreparably lost 
to agriculture 
135,000,000 acres have lost their humus, hence 
useless to agriculture 
100,000,000 more are nearly so. 
Three hundred and fifty million acres are now in use 
to supply our foods, but how long will these acres last 
on our present scale of destruction? . 
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