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Nuts offer a double opportunity for the improvement of our food situation. They can enable us to increase both the quantity and the quality of our food supply. During our frontier period of abundance, nuts were neglected in America both dietetically and agriculturally; but their use as food is increasing rapidly now, and their culture is receiving attention which promises a widespread industry in a short time.

The value of nuts as a means to increase the quantity of our food supply is forcibly suggested by the established practice of French farmers who expect a good English (Persian) walnut tree to yield one hundred fifty pounds of nuts per year on the average. (See p. 210.) These have food value greater than that of one hundred fifty pounds (live weight) of sheep, which is the total produce of a whole acre of good pasture for a year even in such good pasture countries as England or the United States. Good bluegrass pastures in the United States produce about one hundred fifty pounds of beef per acre, but by liberal use of fertilizer and legumes, the yield can be pushed above that.

Careful study of the ingenious table (p. 203), especially of the last column, indicates the high possibility of nuts as food producers, if the problem of food scarcity should ever present itself to us as even partly so acute as it has already presented itself to most of the world. The United States is still a frontier, a resource frontier. The nut trees appear to be veritable engines of food production waiting for us as the nation matures, and we steadily destroy our plow land (grain land).