hich have already been so valuable and promise us so
much more for American horticulture, we have received the San Jose
scale, the chestnut blight, and probably others will follow. For the
next twenty-five or fifty years while the nut industries are in what may
be properly considered the experimental stage, I wish to urge the great
necessity of some kind of crop insurance for the man who plants out any
kind of nut tree. Say what you please, the nuts are not as well known
and as reliable as the other fruits, such as the apple, and even apples
are uncertain enough.

_Crop Insurance Through Two-Story Farming._

By the term "crop insurance" I mean having something else on the same
land that will make a profit year after year, whether the tree pays or
not. If this is not feasible, there should be something else which can
be quickly converted into a crop if the main hope suddenly disappears.
For the man who is growing nuts on level, arable land, I believe I
cannot emphasize too strongly the pastured pig. Pigs below trees (and
nuts maybe above). This is merely the two-story farming that Europe was
practising when Columbus was a boy. Upon all good nut growers I urge the
pig for the first story. This unromantic but very practical aid to
income for the nut-grower has had the great honor to be accepted by a
president of the Northern Nut Growers' Association, Mr. Littlepage, and
by a president of the National Nut Growers' Association, Colonel Van
Duzee. Colonel Van Duzee, from the financial standpoint, really does not
have to have his pecan trees either to live or bear. He is making money
out of the oats, cowpeas, crimson clover, vetch, soy beans, velvet
beans, and other forage crops which he is growing between the pecan
trees, and which the pigs are harvesting for him and converting into
salable products. Of course this makes the pecan trees grow like weeds,
but I am now talking about the crop insurance aspect of it. This crop
insurance aspect of Colonel Van Duzee's last planting cannot be too
strongly emphasized. He has planted the trees 100 feet apart,
practically four and one-quarter trees to the acre, and has then
proceeded to the hog farming business as though the trees were not
there. This may sound somewhat fantastic to the man of the North.
Perhaps it sounds well-nigh criminal to the man who is trying to sell
pecan tree land to schoolmarms, talking fifty pecan trees to the acre.
When a tree has the habit of spreading tw