Page:Tree Crops; A Permanent Agriculture (1929).pdf/354

 way that annual payments build up a life insurance investment. Men regularly pay life insurance so that their widows and orphans may have an income in later years,—in very much later years we all hope as we do it. We regularly lay aside money to be used after we are dead. With this point of view in mind, I wish to point out that the hickories, for example, offer tens of thousands of farmers an opportunity that probably beats five per cent. bonds as a means of adding to the estate. Page 279 shows a suggested ultimate objective.

Wherever there is a piece of rough land naturally set to hickory and suitable for pasture, the hickory timber can be cut down. The stumps will often throw up suckers, which grow with much speed for a few years. Cattle will not eat them, and the suckers can soon be grafted. At the height of six or eight or ten feet, the new-set graft is safely out of the reach of pasturing animals. After it is grafted, a little care for a few seasons, such as tying in the grafts and painting the wounds, will see them safely healed over. Two or three prunings in the winter time suffice to completely establish the graft and give it a monopoly of the root. After this you can forget (unless you love trees) your investment of twenty-five or fifty cents. Then after five or ten years more or less, your graft will probably begin to pay one hundred per cent, or more on the cost every other year and will keep it up for several generations. Meanwhile the field has always been a good pasture and you have been going on with your farming, while Nature, slightly aided, has been turning your pasture into a valuable property. If the tree grower wishes to begin by starting with nursery trees, he can buy grafted trees of the following species to be used as human foods:


 * 1) Northern pecans and southern pecans—many varieties.
 * 2) Shagbark—several varieties.
 * 3) Hybrid hickories.