Page:Tree Crops; A Permanent Agriculture (1929).pdf/46

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CHAPTER III

THE PLAN—AN INSTITUTE OF MOUNTAIN AGRICULTURE

A Chance for Imagination and a Million—Also a Chance for Any Creative Intellect Plus a Back Yard

Here is a chance for a man of wealth to have some fun and at the same time to make a world reputation that will last and will increase for generations because of the great service he will have rendered to the world by creating crop trees and a tree-crop agriculture.

Perhaps you think that the creation of a tree-crop agriculture should be the work of state agricultural experiment stations and the United States Department of Agriculture. Theoretically that is true. It is also true that they cannot do it. They cannot get the money for such work. This is a democracy. We are governed by politicians. A politician is a vote getter and not often also a man of vision. Look around you and see if this is not true.

THE GOVERNMENT WILL NOT DO IT

For years I worked on the theory that a tree-crop agriculture would be created if I let people, including the state experiment station staffs, know about it. I disseminated the idea a dozen years ago to the extent of millions of copies in widely read magazines,[1] but at the end of a dozen years I find that

  1. See page 295 for twenty-three titles.