Personally I believe that within 25 years, 50 at the latest, our people will be absolutely forced to accept a diet of nuts in place of our present proportion of meat. As I see it, the time is coming when increased population and shortage of available land will make prime, beef nearly as scarce as turkey and venison are today. Not only so, but I think knowledge will slowly but surely lead men to change their diet from choice. My children will live to see the time when the acre nut orchard on the average farm will be considered just as useful and as much of a necessity, and far more profitable, than the present chicken yard. In that day I think the nut industry will rank in food importance second only to that of corn, and I believe that the greatest change will be found here in New England, for I believe that nut culture is to change history, and readjust population and industry to some extent. Frankly, I expect my children to live to see the time when the hickory nut in New England will rank far above the walnut industry in California or in France. I think this nut culture will, in time, bring a greater income to the New England States than all its fruits and grain combined today. Out in the wild woods on some New England hillside there are growing today strains or varieties of nuts which will do far more for this section than the Baldwin apple, or the Bartlett pear have ever done. They will be found, tamed and propagated.
You may, if you like, call me a dreamer, or what is the same thing, a "nut." I can stand that, for have I not in my short span of life seen dreams come true. Suppose the wandering hunter, or the farmer's boy, who discovered the Baldwin apple in the woods of Massachusetts, had gone back to his home and stated that the time would come when this beautiful red fruit would grow wherever it found a suitable climate, that it would revolutionize horticulture, bring millions of dollars to New England, and find its way throughout the world wherever the sails of commerce are blown. They might have hung him as a witch or dreamer, and yet, his dream would be no more improbable than what I say of nut culture in New England. I have seen the telephone, the flying machine, the gasoline engine, all grow from the vain dream of a crazy inventor to public necessities, and as surely as fate the nut industry is to bring back to the old hillsides of New England much of the profit and the glory of old days.