earth." Some of the farm was in Bermuda grass. When I was there in early September, Mr. Lombard had a small field of cowpeas in some of the sand. The pigs harvested these as they did all the crops which grew on the trees. He reported keeping forty hogs all the time. Acorns, he said, kept his hogs fat for five months in winter, and mulberries did it for three months in summer.
II. THE VISION OF THE HILL FARMS
I venture to enlarge Mr. Lombard's vision. I see a million hills green with crop-yielding trees and a million neat farm homes snuggled in the hills.[1] These beautiful tree farms hold the hills from Boston to Austin, from Atlanta to Des Moines. The hills of my vision have farming that fits them and replaces the poor pasture, the gullies, and the abandoned lands that characterize today so large a part of these hills.
These ideal farms have their level and gently sloping land
- ↑ My friend, Dr. Deming, sees this farm (in part) thus:
"I am going to ask you to look forward a quarter of a century or so and visit with me in imagination an ideal farm not too far from Hartford (Connecticut), owned by a farmer of unusual vision.
"We find the public road skirting his land bordered on both sides with high-headed Stabler black walnut trees, beneath whose pendant feathery foliage we get unobstructed views of the fair surrounding fields. These trees yield annual crops of nuts which have the peculiar merit for a black walnut of shedding their kernels in unbroken halves when the nuts are cracked. The kernels readily fetch from eighty cents to a dollar a pound in the market and the cracking helps give winter occupation to the farmer's hands, which, by the way, he employs the year around.
"The drive leading to the farmer's house is bordered with grafted Japanese heartnut trees with their huge semi-tropical leaves and luxuriant growth. Their nuts find a ready market uncracked or fetch a larger return for the labor of cracking out the easily removed kernels.
"In favored places near the house and barn are a few English walnut trees whose dark green, fragrant foliage has an exotic charm and which furnish nuts enough for home use with an occasional surplus for market.
"Around the ample kitchen garden is a sheltering hedge. Half of this hedge is composed of European filberts in interpollinating varieties that yield good annual crops of nuts. The other half of the hedge is of chinkapins loaded in September with clusters of burs, each with its small, round, sweet nut, the joy of children. The chinkapins show the chestnut blight in places but nevertheless keep on bearing year after year."
