ernels

ROGER W. PEASE, Assistant Hillculturist, West Virginia University,
Morgantown, West Virginia

Mr. Pease: Before I go into any detail about the construction of the
pasteurizer, I am going to review the bacillus that causes the trouble
very briefly. Most of you will know more about it than I do, but some of
you may know less.

When the farmer takes the hulls from the black walnuts he generally
spreads his hulled crop to dry almost anywhere. Rats will go over them,
and these rats or mice infect the hulled walnuts with an organism called
_Bacillus coli_ that is on the outside of the shell. They go from there
to the cracking plant, go through the cracker which thoroughly mixes up
the infected nuts with the clean ones. They go from there to the
separator, which does a better job at spreading the bacteria. Then they
go on the market. If they are shipped from one state to another they are
subject to inspection by Federal authorities. If they find this
organism in the kernels, they may at their discretion heave the whole
shipment into the river. They don't always do it. They haven't worked
out yet a definite scheme to follow. In other words, they will not tell
us, "If your kernels have a certain number of these _B. coli_ in them we
will let them by." As it reads, there should be not one organism there,
and I can assure you that's almost impossible to get if a rat has
crawled over those things.

Now, to get rid of poison ivy the best way is not to get it, and it's
just the same with this organism. The place to get rid of it would be
for the farmer to store the nuts to dry where the rats and mice cannot
get to them and for the cracking plants to do the same. Unfortunately,
this isn't done and sometimes isn't practicable. The next place to hit
them would be before they are tumbled, that is, before the black powder
on the outside of the shells is shaken off in a tumbler, or immediately
after that to disinfect the shell without hurting the kernel.

That is where we should have started at West Virginia, but we didn't. We
began at the other end after the thing was through and began studying
pasteurization. The Government had recommended, I believe, temperatures
of up to 300 deg.F. for pasteurization. We found out right away--that is, I
didn't, Dr. Colmer and Harvey Erickson, who are now--one of them--in
Baton Rouge and the other one in Seattle, and they would know about it.
They found out that after temperatures of over