A VISION FOR OUR AMERICAN HILLS
We have large areas of hilly land where the climate is good. We have such an area of great beauty with excellent climate and good soils, reaching from Maine to Alabama, from Alabama through Kentucky and Tennessee to central Ohio, from central Ohio through southern Indiana and Illinois into Missouri and Arkansas. Again such an area appears on the foothills of the Rockies and the mountains of the Pacific Coast. Then too there are hilly bits of land in nearly all sections of our country. When we develop an agriculture that fits this land, it will become an almost endless vista of green, crop-yielding trees. We will have small plowed fields on the level hilltops. The level valleys will also be plowed, but the slopes will be productive through crop trees and protected by them—a permanent form of agriculture.
SOME CROPS FOR THE HILLS
Chestnuts and acorns can, like corn, furnish carbohydrates for men or animals. To many it may seem ridiculous to suggest that we moderns should eat acorns, and I hasten to state that the chief objective of this book is to urge new foods for animals rather than for men. Food for animals is the chief objective of the American farmer. Our millions of four-footed brethren who neigh and bray and squeal and bleat and butt
the acorn-bearing oak. The people said that the farmer did not get the greatest possible crop of wheat or the greatest possible crop of olives or figs, but that he got about a 75 per cent, crop of each, making a total of 150 per cent. It is like the ship which fills three-fourths of her tonnage capacity with pig iron and five-sixths of her cubic capacity with light wood manufactures.
The two-story type of agriculture has another advantage. It divides the seasonal risks which everywhere beset the farmer. If frost kills the almond, it probably will not injure the wheat. If drought injures the wheat, the almond may come through with a bumper crop.
In some cases the landlord rents the ground crops out to a tenant for a share and keeps all of the tree crops for himself, the tenant having conributed no labor in their production.
