Page:Tree Crops; A Permanent Agriculture (1929).pdf/179

 The late Freeman Thorpe of Hubert, Minnesota, after some years of experimentation and actually measuring the acorns from test trees, was confident that the Minnesota black oak would average one hundred bushels of acorns per year on sandy land of low fertility—land that would make not more than thirty bushels of corn. He also thought that he could harvest the nuts as cheaply as he could harvest corn. Perhaps Colonel Thorpe was over-enthusiastic. He was a man with a flame in him, and he loved his trees. However, we can cut his production estimate in two, and double the cost of harvesting and still have a sound business proposition and an astonishing production for chance seedling trees. And that is virtually all the labor there is to producing the acorn crop.

The late R. O. Lombard, of Augusta, Georgia, had worked out a series of tree crops for an almost automatic production of pork. He experimented with oaks, deliberately planting them for acorn production. As a result of years of experimentation he was sure that on the sandy soils of the coast plain of Georgia the water oak was much more productive per acre of hog meat than was corn.

Through the kindness of Mr. Raphael Zon, and other members of the staff of Bureau of Forestry, forest rangers gathered acorn-production data. They report yields of two bushels per tree, of two hundred pounds per tree, of three hundred pounds per tree, of four hundred pounds per tree, even of six hundred pounds of acorns per tree. These figures seem to