facts. This is a reproach to station staffs and also a really interesting piece of human psychology. The mulberry tree warrants careful testing.
THE NEED OF SCIENTIFIC TESTING AND EXPERIMENT
As nearly as I can Iearn through trusted correspondents in several southern states, there has been little change in the mulberry situation between 1913 and 1927. The neglect of the mulberry as a crop in the face of such evidence seems to require some explanation. However, this psychological and economic phenomenon becomes easier to understand when one recalls the slavish dependence of the southern farmer on the one crop of cotton. By tens of thousands they have resisted the temptations of clover and cowpeas and soy beans and vetch. They still buy hay for the mule. Nor have they planted pecan trees in their door yards. They grow no fruit, and some do not even have anything worth the name of garden.[1] So the mulberry is after all in good company with the things they haven't done. Occasionally one finds a man who has tried mulberries and does not like them because of caterpillars, but in the main I have found enthusiasm among those pioneer farmers who were trying out the crop.
- ↑ "It is, still true that in the principal cotton sections, particularly the black belts, anything that can really be called a garden is quite scarce.
"You are also undoubtedly correct in saying that there are still not only thousands but tens of thousands of cotton farms which make practically no hay and depend almost entirely upon buying hay if any is used, and this in spite of the fact that there has been a tremendous increase in the acreage in alfalfa, soy bean, cowpea, and other hays in the past few years. You could even go further and say that thousands of such farms have no milk cows, practically no poultry and no hogs.
"A real home orchard is yet a comparative scarcity in the Cotton Belt." (Letter from J. A. Evans Chief, Office of Coöperative Extension Work, U. S. Department of Agriculture. Sent. 7, 1927.)
Director of Research and Experiment Station at Tuskegee Institute, Tuske, Alabama, wrote (November 2. 1927), "The small amount of analytical data that I have been able to find on the mulberry shows it to be higher in carbohydrates than pumpkins, being fourteen per cent. carbohydrates, a rather convincing evidence that it is really worth while as a fattening food." He also told of their own use of it in growing their own pork supply.
