Page:Tree Crops; A Permanent Agriculture (1929).pdf/327



R. O. Lombard, gun in hand, crept softly through the thick forest in a Georgia swamp. He was hunting for wild turkeys. He heard a cracking sound. Peering around a clump of bushes he spied some hogs crunching acorns beneath a water oak. They were miles from any house. They were fat, ready for the shambles, and it was all of their own doing. The hogs had fattened themselves on swamp produce.

As Mr. Lombard quietly watched the hogs, a thought struck him. "If they can feed themselves out here on the swamp, why can't they do it on my farm? Here they pick up a living in the fall when acorns are ripe. If I were to raise other tree crops on my farm, why could they not pick up their living the rest of the year too?"

For the rest of his life Mr. Lombard (now unfortunately no longer living) had fun working out the idea of tree-crop farming, where pigs harvest the crops. When I saw him, he had two hundred everbearing mulberries, two hundred hog plums, two hundred wild cherries, three varietics of red haws, and mock oranges.