foothills of the Alps and along the Isère river is sprinkled with walnut trees. They are now planting these trees in the midst of the best vineyards. In a field of wheat often-times you will find rows of little walnut trees. There are some orchards of Persian walnuts in this locality but I think no orchard has over five acres. They have come to grief along a line that is common to most people, that of overcrowding. It takes a great deal of nerve to plant a nut tree sixty or seventy feet from the next—it looks as if it were wasting the land—and they have planted them so close that the tops of the trees and the foliage form a flat level green surface, and the sun shines on a very small part of each tree instead of all round and over it as it should.

The other walnut district is one more suggestive to me. I doubt if even those who have trees to sell are justified in advising the farmers to plant solid fields of walnuts, but we can recommend a row of them around fence rows and round the barn. I traveled a good many miles through the western part of France, from Lyons to Bordeaux, and I have seen thousands of trees, but I have not seen any orchards. They put one tree by itself and they raise wheat close up to it. The fertilization and cultivation help the walnut and make it produce a better crop. Those well-fed trees with plenty of sun, air and plant food are distinctly superior to the other trees. A good walnut tree rents for as much as an acre of ground. It is the product that is received without labor that appeals to me, and as the trees produce well, there is sometimes seven or eight dollars worth of profit to each tree, and the landlord is in the position to command most of the seven or eight dollars because he furnishes the trees. If a 50-acre farm with fifty nut trees stood on one side of the road and one of equal area without any trees on the other side, the one with the trees would rent for twice as much. A good tree will occasionally produce three or four hundred pounds of nuts, especially a fine tree out by itself. Once in a while we find a grove of them but more often there are six, seven, eight or more trees scattered round the house. The combined result of that industry produces millions of dollars worth of nuts.

If there are any questions, I shall be glad to answer.

Mr. Evans: Can the pecan be used as a forage crop for pigs?

Professor Smith: I don't think we are willing to let him have them.

Mr. Evans: Would a pig eat them?

Professor Smith: Observations show that the pig will eat them if you give him a chance; he will eat with great gusto the hickory nuts and a grown hog will also crack black walnuts; the pecan he simply grinds up. I suggested the pig as a way out of the problem of overproduction; the pig wants the products when we don't.

Mr. Storrs: I come from a country where we grow the pig on corn, and it is hard for me to believe that he will get fat on acorns and chestnuts.

Mr. Lee: I also would like to ask whether a hog will get fat on acorns. I had an experience this fall; a man on my farm had some pigs and he kept them in a pen and fed them corn. I was going to begin to feed my hogs, but I had a woods and I said let them eat the acorns. At the end of a month they had eaten the acorns but they were not as fat as they had been at the beginning. They had worked so hard to get the acorns that they had worked off all the fat.

Professor Smith: There are two hundred thousand hogs on the job in the federal forests today. The Portugese pig in the spring is a lamentable looking object. The method is to keep him alive until acorns get ripe and they count on a pig multiplying himself one hundred to two hundred per cent in the short season from the beginning of September to the first of the year. They keep him ordinarily eighteen months; they carry the spring or fall pigs through one winter, and at the beginning of the fattening season a pig that weighs fifty or sixty pounds is counted on, in the short time when acorns can be picked up, to jump up to one hundred and fifty or two hundred pounds. There is much evidence on both sides of the Atlantic to the effect that acorns fatten hogs if the supply is good.