Page:Tree Crops; A Permanent Agriculture (1929).pdf/270

 grafted trees of bearing age within fifty miles, is the greatest single center.

Before the last quarter of the nineteenth century all attempts at propagation were limited to planting seed, a practice that notoriously results in fruit unlike the planted seed (Figs. 88 and 90). Then came the conquest of the technique of grafting and budding. This was acquired for pecans before it was for other nuts. Promptly thereafter the pecan industry started almost like a conflagration. Rundown cotton plantations were cheap and crops of cowpeas, velvet beans, and peanuts quickly restored the soil. Some of the early pecan plantations were carried at almost no cost by hogging down crops of legumes and corn and oats.

Grafted and budded pecans were planted by the ten thousands during the first fifteen or twenty years of this century. Some of them were planted by near-swindlers who worked something like this:

(1) Get the record performances of individual trees such as I have quoted.

(2) Take a lead pencil and figure on a basis of the biggest yield that ever happened on the best tree on record.

(3) Let the prospectus show a similar yield for each of twenty trees to be planted on an acre of ground.

(4) Have it happen every year, beginning very early.

(5) Sell the nuts at a pleasing imaginary price.

The figures are indeed impressive if one does not see the following fallacies. The trees do not bear as early in orchards as on paper, or as often, or as much, and it is quite impossible