the girls
who do the work on the picking belts.

Our future plan for this fall is to buy a million and a half pounds this
year and process them. I believe one of these gentlemen a while ago
mentioned something about the pure food laws. They are pretty rough on
us. We have to pasteurize our walnuts. The state law of Kentucky
requires 190 degrees of heat for an hour and a half. That's a lot of
heat.

We package our nuts in two-ounce packages and in 35 and 50-pound cartons
for the wholesale trade.

That has created quite a little industry there in our county. We have
one county there, Clark County--Winchester, Kentucky, is the county seat
of it--and out of that one county last year alone I bought 800,000
pounds of walnuts. That was, walnuts in the hull that the farmer had
picked up and brought to us in trucks.

Our success was not too great in this method of hulling green walnuts to
get our supply. We weren't adequately fixed up to dry the walnuts and
take care of them in storage. We lost a few of them that way, but I
think this year we have a little better sense and will let the farmer
stomp them out.

We are working now on an educational program, both newspaper and radio,
to persuade the farmers in our locality to let their walnut trees grow.
We tell them nearly all the walnut trees will produce enough kernels or
shelled walnuts to bring in as much money as they would if cut down and
taken to the mill and used for saw logs. That is our main problem now,
to try to keep the black walnut industry working there in our community.
And our future plans call for plantings of black walnut seedlings and
convincing the farmer and the 4-H Club members and all the boys in the
Future Farmers of America and organizations like that to protect and
cultivate their black walnut trees.

I am kind of on the fence this year. I stuck my neck away out the other
day and bought a farm. After checking the farm I found I had about 600
walnut trees. Now, then, I am hollering on one hand for an increase in
prices of raw material, and as a sheller I am hollering on the other
hand to get the prices down. But I believe as a producer for next year I
am going to try to forget about the shelling and let the prices go to
the devil.

Mr. McDaniel: Would you mind telling us what you had to pay for the
walnuts in the shell?

Mr. Mullins: Our average last year was $4.33. We went as high as $4.80.
Some of those we bought hurriedly--

President Davi