CHAPTER XXIII
TREE CROPS AND FARM MANAGEMENT
I. A TREE FARMER'S FARM
R. O. Lombard, gun in hand, crept softly through the thick forest in a Georgia swamp. He was hunting for wild turkeys. He heard a cracking sound. Peering around a clump of bushes he spied some hogs crunching acorns beneath a water oak. They were miles from any house. They were fat, ready for the shambles, and it was all of their own doing. The hogs had fattened themselves on swamp produce.
As Mr. Lombard quietly watched the hogs, a thought struck him. "If they can feed themselves out here on the swamp, why can't they do it on my farm? Here they pick up a living in the fall when acorns are ripe. If I were to raise other tree crops on my farm, why could they not pick up their living the rest of the year too?"
For the rest of his life Mr. Lombard (now unfortunately no longer living) had fun working out the idea of tree-crop farming, where pigs harvest the crops. When I saw him, he had two hundred everbearing mulberries, two hundred hog plums, two hundred wild cherries, three varietics of red haws, and mock oranges.[1]
- ↑ This plant is found growing in South Carolina to Florida and Texas. It begins to bloom in February and lasts until April. The small fruit which ripens in late summer is retained throughout the winter." (Letter. P. J. Berckman's Company, Augusta, Georgia, August 21, 1915.)
Mr. Lombard thought them very fine winter hog feed. He also had a few trees of cudrania.
"The name of the plant which you desire is cudrania tribola, No. 352, introduced by Professor Wilson of the United States Department of Agriculture.
"We do not think this tree has been used to any extent by the people here
