Northern Nut Growers Association, Report Of The Proceedings At The Tenth Annual Meeting.: Battle Creek, Michigan, December 9 and 10, 1919 — John Shaqi
Northern Nut Growers Association, Report Of The Proceedings At The Tenth Annual Meeting.: Battle Creek, Michigan, December 9 and 10, 1919
Science
Northern Nut Growers Association, Report Of The Proceedings At The Tenth Annual Meeting.: Battle Creek, Michigan, December 9 and 10, 1919
Northern Nut Growers Association -- Periodicals; Nut trees -- Periodicals; Nuts -- Periodicals
Conservation activities must repair errors of the past which have left
denuded forest lands and empty game covers and waters; they must afford
and direct the present use of the forests and the streams; they must
safeguard the future supply, if they would meet the requirements of a
conservation which shall raise the standards of life and lower the cost
of living. That is a conservation embracing both the aesthetic and the
economic, the only kind worth while. It is a conservation wherein the
arable areas and the so-called waste lands and waters have a very
intimate interrelation of interests. And, I submit, Gentlemen, that the
American people too long have failed to recognize and to account as in
the class of waste lands, "The Farms by the Side of the Road."
The reclamation of waste lands is a compromise between the activities of
the Conservationists, who claim that in the more thickly inhabited
portions of the United States the cultivated or semi-cultivated areas
are out of sane and safe proportion to the wild forest sections, and the
advocates of intensive and extensive agriculture. It is not the purpose
of this article to take sides in that controversy, but rather to invite
attention of both sides to a safe and practical field for their
endeavors, namely, the reclamation of the "wasted lands" along the
roadsides, the farms along the highways.
During the War Garden campaigns of the past two years, these heretofore
largely unused strips of tillable land, forming in the aggregate
thousands of along-the-road acres in every state, received considerable
attention from the thrifty plow and hoe. But in the main, the results
were not encouraging. The public will trespass, unintentionally or
otherwise, upon the land cropped along the highway. Then, if the farms
by the side of the road are to be conserved--used by present as well as
future generations--there remains but one practical recourse: productive
trees.
The American people love beautiful trees, possibly the expression of a
reaction from the sentiment of the pioneers who regarded trees as their
enemies, handicaps to agriculture to be removed as thoroughly and
expeditiously as possible. But with virgin soil producing enormous
crops, they naturally centered their interest on ornamental trees
without reference to their fruits. Hence the horse-chestnut, buck-eye,
maple, locust, oak, poplar, along the highways and byways of America,
instead of the native nut trees and the Persian or English walnut.
And, speaking of highways, this is the age of concrete. Taking the hint,
I am selecting one concrete example of which I have intimate and
personal knowledge, well aware that there are numerous others that I
might cite were my acquaintance with practical nut culture more
extensive than it is. The one that I know about of my own personal
knowledge is, a very good example of the plain common sense of
productive trees which combine the useful with the ornamental.
IT READS LIKE A FAIRY TALE
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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