often glutted. Sometimes peaches are not worth the picking. Apples and oranges occasionally rot on the ground, as do beans, peas, and all the truck crops. In contrast to this the mulberry is in the class with corn. We have not had much trouble in the past twenty years about a glut in the corn market, or in that of meat, its great derivative. A stable market is a fact of great importance in considering any crop. The fact that the mulberry has no harvesting costs and needs no special machinery minimizes the risk in experimenting. We need to get the facts on the feeding value of the mulberry from state experiment stations. However, any landowner can try it now. Commercial nurseries have the trees ready.
For the actual use of the mulberry as a farm crop see Chapter XXIII.
The farm yard, the rocky slope, the gullied hill, the sandy waste invite you to try this automatic crop for which there is a world market at a stable price, and probably a very good price when one considers cost of production.
OLD WORLD EXPERIENCE WITH THE MULBERRY
Perhaps some one thinks that I should mention the silk worm. That classic, domesticated insect makes the mulberry leaf worth its hundreds of millions of dollars yearly and thus renders its great service to humanity by enabling hundreds of thousands of hard-worked orientals to eke out a hungry existence. We have the climatic and soil resources for the mulberry trees, but the silk crop is not for us—not in this next hundred years. It requires labor, human labor, lots of it, and in this we have no present prospect of competing: with China, Japan, and other very populous countries.[1]
Nor is there much likelihood that in this century we shall put on a tariff that would drive us to such a crop. But if we do ever want to feed silk worms, we have the resources, be-
- ↑ See Smith, J. Russell, Industrial and Commercial Geography. Henry Holt and Company.
