president was to be elected for a year. I do not know much about the
condition prior to President Linton. He was elected at Battle Creek at
the same time I was elected vice president. There were extenuating
circumstances justifying the re-election of President Linton. I feel
that similar conditions do not prevail justifying my re-election as
president of this association. It is not going to make any difference to
me whether I am president or just simply a soldier in the ranks. I want
to see this association the success it ought to be and I feel, in view
of the wonderful work that has been done in this association and for its
best interests at all times by Mr. Jones, that it is due him that the
presidency should be passed to him at this time. He is going to the next
convention of the National Association of Nurserymen, he and Doctor
Morris, Mr. Olcott and Mr. Weber, to get before that convention of
nurserymen something more of the history of this association and its
ambitions and desires. I know he could appear before that convention in
a much more advantageous way for the benefit of this association if he
were president of it. I feel that Mr. Jones ought to be elected
president of this association here tonight.
MR. OLCOTT: Mr. President, the presidents of this association have been
elected for two years and I think it has become an established custom.
THE PRESIDENT: Mr. Bixby referred to that tonight. I didn't understand
it that way. I supposed I was elected last year at Lancaster for one
year.
MR. O'CONNOR: Mr. President, I took that matter up with Mr. Littlepage
and he told me it was customary to elect the president for one year at a
time and to re-elect him for the second year if he proved all right. So
far I think every member of this association has been well satisfied
with the service you have given us and we want you to continue on for
another year.
THE PRESIDENT: Pat, I thought you were my friend.
MR. SPENCER: I move the secretary cast the ballot of the association in
favor of the officers nominated by the committee on nominations.
MR. O'CONNOR: I second the motion.
(Upon the motion being put to a vote of the members, it was declared
duly CARRIED, the secretary cast one ballot for the persons nominated,
and they were declared duly elected.)
THE PRESIDENT: All right, ladies and gentlemen. Here we are with our
coats off and sleeves rolled up for another year; but I want to give you
all fair warning that if we don't have that thousand memberships at that
next convention, this child is going to drop out. (Laughter.)
The next in the order of business is the selection of a place for the
next convention. You heard the telegram this morning from Mr.
Littlepage and the telegram from the Washington Chamber of Commerce.
Personally, I would like to have you come to Rochester again because we
sure enough have enjoyed the sessions with you all here this time. There
is no finer city in the world than Rochester, N. Y., and we would like
to have you come back here. I want you to come here.
MR. O'CONNOR: Mr. President, I feel it is quite an honor that we are
asked to the capital city of the United States to hold our meeting. It
shows we were appreciated there some few years ago. I move you we have
the next meeting in Washington.
MR. OLCOTT: I second the motion.
(The motion being duly put to a vote of the members, it was carried.)
THE SECRETARY: Now, Mr. President, we should decide upon a date.
THE PRESIDENT: I think that is true. In Lancaster, last year, it was
held later than this. I believe the ordinary time has been considerably
later than this, about a month.
MR. O'CONNOR: Mr. Chairman, Mr. Littlepage asked me to say, after the
convention city had been selected, that it would be best to make it
about the last week in September as that would show the pecans and
walnuts at about the right time.
MR. BIXBY: I move that the time of the next convention be fixed at
September 26th, 27th and 28th, 1923.
MR. O'CONNOR: I second the motion.
(The motion being put to a vote of the members, it was declared
CARRIED.)
There being no further business to come before the Convention, it
thereupon adjourned.
PROCEEDINGS OF THE TREE PLANTING CEREMONIES AT HIGHLAND PARK, ROCHESTER,
N. Y.
_September 9th, 1922, 11 A. M._
PRESIDENT MCGLENNON: This occasion represents the custom of the
association of planting a nut tree in one of the parks of the community,
in which the annual convention is held. We had expected to have some
black walnut seedlings grown from nuts presented to ex-President Linton
by the superintendent at Mount Vernon, Washington's old home. I am not
sure but I have quite a vivid remembrance that the trees from which
these nuts were gathered were fruiting in Washington's time. However it
would be a very delightful time if we could have such trees to plant in
memory of that great character. But I am sorry to say that we have been
disappointed in not receiving the trees from Mr. Linton. He expressed
them from Saginaw the day before yesterday and we have made diligent
effort to locate them in this city this morning but have been unable to
get any trace of them. Anticipating such a happening Mrs. Ellwanger, who
had on exhibition at the convention some Persian walnuts grown in pots,
at our request very kindly consented to let us use one of those trees.
If we had had a little more time to consider it undoubtedly Mr. Dunbar
would have arranged to have this tree planted on the land that was given
to the city by George Ellwanger, Mrs. Ellwanger's father-in-law, and
Patrick Barry of the world famed nursery of Ellwanger & Barry. We are
going to plant one of these Persian walnut trees here (the planting is
now going on) and there is a greater likelihood that this tree will live
than the black walnut, as that tree had to be dug and transported. We
feel reasonably sure that this tree will live to commemorate our meeting
in Rochester this year.
We are also going to plant an Arkansas hickory, that Mr. Dunbar has had
dug from the park nursery, a short distance from where the walnut is
planted. I think this, too, is an appropriate tree to plant because of
the success of the hickory in this community. Mr. Dunbar tells me that
practically all of the varieties of hickory of North America are planted
on this park slope. We took great pleasure in driving through here the
other day and listening to an explanation of their history by Mr.
Dunbar.
We are honored today by the presence of the Dean of the New York State
School of Forestry, Dean Mann, who has consented to address us. It gives
me great pleasure to introduce to you Dean Mann.
DEAN MANN: President McGlennon, ladies and gentlemen:
I assure you it gives me great pleasure to be here because as a forester
and tree lover by profession I am also a tree lover by nature. I can
conceive of no more worthy, more beautiful nor attractive memorial than
a tree dedicated to the Father of our Country, something which will grow
in size, in beauty and in productivity as the years roll by. As
foresters would remind you, ladies and gentlemen, the Father of our
Country served his apprenticeship long before he became a land owner and
patriarch on those broad Virginia acres. The Father of our Country
started out in life as a forester and surveyor. You may remember that he
piloted, or was to be one of the pilots of Braddock's expedition, having
gained his knowledge of the woods through his early life as a young
surveyor in the forests of Virginia.
There are in New York state approximately fourteen million acres better
suited to tree crop production than to field crop production. Here in
the northeastern corner of the United States, where our great centers of
population are found, we have in the state of Maine seventy per cent
suited to tree crop production but unsuited to tillage; we have similar
conditions in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Throughout this
northeastern section of the country we have a tree soil domain which
will grow trees and which can't be plowed with profit. All who are
interested in the production of trees for whatever purpose should
realize that this nation cannot permanently prosper unless every acre of
its land is put to its best permanent use.
I think that you will agree with me that it requires no prophetic eye to
see the day not far distant when we will have, stretching from the
Island of Manhattan up to where Albany now stands, one vast series of
teeming cities with suburb touching suburb. The problem then will be how
to feed this multitude. Developments in Russia show that, no matter how
idealistic one's theory of government may be, food, in the last
analysis, is the thing which makes or breaks a nation.
Those of you who have studied some of the interpreters of early
Scripture will remember, perhaps, that the Garden of Eden was in reality
an oasis of trees in the great valley of Mesopotamia, and even today
"garden" in the oriental term means a group of trees. It has been proven
by experience in these different tropical realms that where tree
production is biggest and nuts and other products are grown under
intensive cultivation, an acre will produce more food than where grazing
is practiced. I spent a very pleasant year in California and saw some of
the operations of the California nut growers, where they are growing
English walnuts on a most extensive scale. I believe I will be making no
false statement when I say that those areas in southern California which
are growing nuts produce more in fats, proteins and calories for the
maintenance of the health and strength of the human race than do the
acres which are given up to the growing of animal crops.
So I applaud the idea of planting a tree in the memory of the Father of
his Country. I believe I belong to your group, at least through
interest, because I have been doing a little experimenting of my own in
my back yard at Syracuse where I have an English walnut which I planted
in 1915 which is this year producing for the first time. I am going to
take those nuts and see what can be done with them in perpetuating that
particular variety, because it is hardy, fast growing, and early to
mature.
The New York State College of Forestry has a platform as broad as the
entire state. We are interested in every kind of land which is not
suited to agriculture, fish, game, recreation, conservation of water,
and I pledge to you the sympathy and the support of the New York State
College of Forestry. We have three experiment stations; one in Oneida
county, one in Onandaga county, and another in Cattaraugus, with a
fourth in St. Lawrence, if you wish to call it such. We would be
delighted to receive from you any slip or any sort of fruit which you
wish us to try out at these experiment stations. I believe that the time
will come when some combined system of forestry and horticulture can be
maintained which will aim at the production of food stuffs from trees,
with lumber, perhaps, as a by-product. That works out in the old country
and the day is not far off when it can be practiced here.
I congratulate the members of this association on having completed what
was, from all accounts, a most successful meeting. I regret that I
couldn't have been here earlier and met the other members of your body.
I congratulate you; I wish you God speed, and I again tender the support
of the College of Forestry.
* * * * *
PRESIDENT MCGLENNON: We certainly have received great encouragement from
Dean Mann's remarks, which to me, and I believe to all present, were
most interesting and instructive.
I want to hear just a few words from our esteemed friend, Mr. John
Dunbar, Assistant Superintendent of Parks.
MR. DUNBAR: I think it is a very happy and fortunate circumstance that
Mr. Mann is here this morning representing the College of Forestry of
Syracuse. Every word that Mr. Mann has said is absolutely true. The
forestry question of this country is indeed a very serious question.
Every man, and every woman, should give most serious thought to it, and
I hope the words Dean Mann has spoken to us here this morning will go in
to all our hearts very deeply.
Of course the Park Department is studying trees from the ornamental and
arboricultural point of view. We think, however, that arboriculture,
horticulture and forestry, as the Dean said, are very, very closely
allied and should surely work together. I think his idea is a very
excellent one; that there should be a very close connection or union
between forestry, horticulture, nut culture, and all kinds of fruit
culture. I hope that day is not far distant.
PRESIDENT MCGLENNON: Ladies and gentlemen, the treasurer of our
association is a man who is intensely interested in nut culture. He has
done wonderful things for its advancement and especially for the
advancement of the interests of the Northern Nut Growers Association.
MR. BIXBY: While Dean Mann was speaking the thought came to me, how
could we better co-operate with the Department of Forestry? I think the
work of the Nut Growers Association, which is particularly interested in
the use of nut trees for orchards, and that of the Department of
Forestry, which looks upon them particularly as producers of timber,
could be very closely allied. The thought came to me, could not we right
here work out some practical suggestion whereby we two could co-operate?
I would like to ask Dean Mann what nut trees they are planting for
forest purposes.
DEAN MANN: We have done very little. We have, at our experiment station
at Chittenango, done some work with the English walnuts. This
particularly hardy specimen that I have in my own back yard--I have two,
one of them is growing very slowly--are from our experiment station. We
have really had so much to do in the way of popular education in New
York State in the timber products, that we are merely, as they say in
the South, fixing to begin with other things. That is the only species
with which we have made an actual start. There is this however: what can
foresters, horticulturists and nut enthusiasts do to supply the place of
the American chestnut? I really came here as a seeker after truth on
this particular phase. You men probably know more about it than I. What
can we produce? Is there any hybrid which can be introduced into this
country which will take the place of the American chestnut?
MR. BIXBY: In reply to that I would say that I have hundreds of
seedlings of the Chinese chestnut on which the blight has been working
for years and has not destroyed them. I would be very glad to send them
to the College of Forestry and let you try them.
DEAN MANN: They will be planted with extreme care and a barbed wire put
around them.
MR. BIXBY: There is another thing, the rough shell Japanese walnut,
so-called, which is really a butternut hybrid. I have planted it and it
is growing at a tremendous rate, even faster than the Japanese walnut. I
expect to get a lot of those nuts this year and I wondered how the
College of Forestry would like to try some of them.
DEAN MANN: I would be delighted.
MR. BIXBY: Then there is one other nut the big shell bark hickory which
is a native of the Mississippi Valley, which has been planted in
Pennsylvania and up in Lockport, New York. It grows finely, it bears
early, and I think that it might be worth trying.
DEAN MANN: We have adopted this platform: "Anything which will interest
the people of New York State." We must, as a state institution, limit
our horizon very largely to the state of New York. We do slip over
occasionally, but anything which will interest the people of New York
State in trees of any kind, for any purpose, is a step towards forest
conservation. Take your city dweller in New York City, get him
interested in a shade tree in front of his apartment house, or in a
group of shade trees in the adjoining park, and you have converted that
man along the line of King Forest. So we will be very glad to take any
seeds you have and give them excellent care.
NUTS THE NATURAL AND ADEQUATE SOURCE OF PROTEIN AND FATS
_By_
JOHN HARVEY KELLOGG, M. D., F. A. C. S.,
_Medical Director of the Battle Creek Sanitarium_
In the writer's opinion, the most important thing which can be done to
promote the nut growing industry is to make clear to men and women
everywhere the necessity for returning to natural and biologic living.
Since he left his primitive state, in his wanderings up and down the
face of the earth to escape destruction by terrific terrestrial
convulsions and cataclysmic changes in climate and temperatures, chilled
during long glacial periods, parched and blistered by tropic heats,
starved and wasted by drouth and famine, man has been driven by ages of
hardships and emergencies to adopt every imaginable expedient to survive
immediate destruction, and in so doing has acquired so great a number of
unnatural tastes, appetites and habits, perversions and abnormalities in
customs and modes of life, that it is the marvel of marvels that he
still survives.
Man no longer seeks his food among the natural products of field and
forest and prepares it at his own hearthstone, but finds it ready to
eat, prepared in immense factories, slaughter-houses, mills, and
bakeries and displayed in palatial emporiums. No longer led by a natural
instinct, as were his remote forebears, in the selection of his
foodstuffs, he finds his dietetic guidance in the advertising columns of
the morning paper, and eats not what Nature prepared for his sustenance,
but what his grocer, his butcher and his baker find most for their
pecuniary interest to purvey to him. The average man no longer himself
plants and tills and harvests the foods which enter into his bill of
fare, that is, "earns his bread by the sweat of his brow," but accepts
whatever is passed on to him by a long line of producers and purveyors
who do his sweating for him, depriving him of the opportunity of earning
both appetite and good digestion by honest toil. So he resorts to
condiments and ragouts, palate-tickling and tongue-tickling sauces and
nerve-rousing stimulants, as a means of securing the unearned felicity
of gustatory enjoyment.
At the World's Eugenics Congress held in New York last fall, Professor
Davenport expressed the opinion that the human race will ultimately
perish, and Major Darwin, son of Charles Darwin, one of the world's
leading economists, gave expression to similar views. We are evidently
traveling a downhill road and the tide of degeneracy is rising so fast
it will certainly sweep us on to race extinction unless we return to
sane and biologic living. We are primates, not carnivores like the dog,
nor omnivores like the hog. The primates are fruit and nut eaters in
whatever part of the world they are found. All the primates adhere to
the family bill of fare. The gorilla, reigning king of beasts in the
forests of the Congo, his somewhat lesser relative, the chimpanzee,
which tenants a wide area of the Dark Continent, the orang-utan of
Borneo, and the gibbon of tropical Asia, diversified as they are in form
and habitat, are all equally circumspect in their adherence to the diet
of nuts and fruits, tender shoots and soft grains, foods which Nature
has prescribed as the primate's bill of fare.
A return to natural eating would doubtless do, to say the least, as much
as any one thing toward checking the downward race movement, and no one
who has ever studied the economics of diet will question that the only
way in which the earth's dense populations of the future can be fed will
be by the elimination of the flesh-pots and a resumption of the natural
dietary. This is clear when we recall the fact that the Agricultural
Experiment Stations have demonstrated that 33 pounds of digestible
foodstuffs are required to make one pound of beef. When an animal is
fattened, the creature uses a large part of the food which it consumes
for its own purposes. The eater of flesh does not get back the original
corn and other foods given to the animal but only a small fraction of
it; and hence dense populations can only indulge in beef eating by
importing meats from other countries not yet fully occupied. Evidently,
the present rapid increase of the earth's population will soon bring us
to a point where this enormous waste must cease. Flesh eating will have
to be abandoned for economic reasons. Even the milk supply will
necessarily be limited, for we are compelled to feed the cow 5 pounds of
digestible foodstuffs to obtain 1 pound of water-free food in the form
of milk.
Those pessimistic economists who predict that by the year 2000 the
American Continent will be so densely populated that means will have to
be adopted to limit the increase of population because of the scarcity
of foodstuffs, are evidently not aware of the activities of the Nut
Growers Association and of the marvelous efficiency of nut trees as
producers of protein and fats, the two elements of our foodstuffs which
are most costly because hardest to produce.
I am creditably informed that one acre of land supporting 35 black
walnut trees in full bearing, will produce not less than 350 pounds of
walnut meats, each pound of which has a nutritive value in protein and
fats fully four times that of an equal weight of beef or an equivalent
of 1400 pounds of meat. To produce a steer weighing 1600 pounds,
requires two acres and two years. Two acres and two years will produce
1400 pounds of nut meats, the equivalent of 5600 pounds of beef or more
than 9 times the amount of nutritive material in the form of protein and
fat produced by beef raising.
Of course, the question might be raised whether nuts as a source of food
are equal in value to meats, which supply the same sort of food
material, namely, protein and fats. If the anthropologists are right,
this is a question which need not worry us, for, according to Professor
Keith, the eminent English anatomist and a leading paleontologist, and
Professor Elliot, of Oxford, nuts were the chief staple of our hardy
ancestors of prehistoric times. Professor Elliot, indeed, tells us in
his work, "Prehistoric Man," that the first representatives of the human
race who appeared in the Eocene Period were fruit and nut eaters, and
were abundantly supplied with this sort of nutriment. This eminent
author says,--
"On the bushes by the rivers and along the shore there were all sorts of
fruits and nuts. For the subsistence of our lemur-monkey-man in the
early stages of evolution, what fruits would seem _a priori_ most
suitable?
"I think that one would select the banana and bread-fruit. Ancestral
forms of both were flourishing in the Eocene. Many other fruits with
which man has been afterwards continually (perhaps one might venture to
say _most intimately_) associated, occur at this period. These are, most
of them, found in so many places that one is apt to think they were then
of world-wide distribution.
"In the temperate brushwood and on the river-sides, acorns, hazel-nut,
hawthorne, sloe, cherry and plum might be found. Here and there, he
might alight upon a walnut or an almond; figs also of one kind or
another seem to have been common. Palm trees existed, and some of them
were of enormous size."
If, in modern times, nuts have come to be used as a luxury rather than
as a staple article of diet, it must be because we have neglected to
cultivate this choicest of food products which Nature is ready to
provide with a lavish hand when invited to do so by our co-operation.
But as the public become better informed respecting the high food value
of nuts and especially in view of the steadily rising cost of flesh
meats, the nut is certain to gain higher appreciation, and the writer
has no doubt that some time in the future nuts will become a leading
constituent of the national bill of fare and will displace the flesh
meats which today are held in high esteem but which in the broader light
of the next century will be regarded as objectionable and inferior
foods, and will give place to the products of the various varieties of
nut trees which will be recognized as the choicest of all foods.
In nutritive value the nut far exceeds all other food substances; for
example, the average number of food units per pound furnished by half a
dozen of the more common varieties of nuts is 3231 calories while the
average of the same number of varieties of cereals is 1654 calories,
half the value of nuts. The average food value of the best vegetables is
300 calories per pound and of the best fresh fruits grown in this
country, 278 calories. The average value of the six principal flesh
foods is 810 calories per pound or one-fourth that of nuts.