The wild hickory, wild pecan and wild black walnut trees, offer the best
field for profitable work along this line. We have topworked a great
many hickories to pecan, but we do not expect permanent satisfactory
results. The experience of the pecan on the hickory is not very
satisfactory. The hickory is a dense, hard wood, that has a short
growing season, and matures its nuts early; the pecan is of the coarser,
faster growing wood, whose nuts grow until late in the fall. This
inconsistency of the growing habits of the two trees prevents the pecan
top on the hickory from producing normal crops of nuts. The pecan
topworked to the pecan, however, is a perfect success and there is no
reason why the wild hickories of all descriptions cannot be successfully
and profitably topworked to the better varieties of the good shagbark
hickories. I believe that there are great opportunities in the state of
New York for successful nut culture by utilizing the wild black walnut
trees and the hickories. I have seen hundreds of English walnut trees
growing around Rochester, some of them bearing perfectly wonderful crops
of walnuts. I am surprised that the people in this section have not
availed themselves more of the opportunities along this line. If the
farmers in this section would take up nut growing as a side proposition
and set five or ten acres of nut trees on each farm, they would soon
find that these nut trees would be producing them more than all the
balance of their farms. We hear a great deal today about the back to the
farm movement, but my opinion is that for everyone who is going to the
farm, ten are leaving it, and the reason for this is that the heavy
operating expense of the annual crops, such as corn, wheat and potatoes,
etc., lay such a heavy toll on the farmer that farming is not
profitable. The requirements of time, labor and money in producing these
crops are so great that it discourages many farmers. I have made the
statement to some of the farmers in my part of the country that they
must produce alfalfa or go broke. I believe that alfalfa and tree crops