The Chairman: The original idea of roadside trees was constructive in its nature but failed to include the idea that, with the increase of orchard trees, or trees of any one species, we increase the insect pests because we disturb the balance of nature; and by disturbing the balance of nature we give advantage to insects which then remain on neglected trees to prove a menace to our own orchards. It we have various towns setting out roadside trees and detailing the children to look after them, asking the children to report on them, I believe the thing can be made a success and that the taxes of many a small town can be paid from the nut trees along the roadside, provided you have one boy or one girl for each tree, their services to be given free and the profit from the tree to be given to the town.
Mr. Corsan: How about the cattle? Let them keep grazing around?
Prof. Smith: I think we sometimes let our feelings make us say things that our brains would scarcely approve. I believe Mr. Littlepage's charge against the tree on the roadside is not necessarily substantiated. I don't know just how he is going to take care of his trees, but if it requires a vehicle carrying spray, I submit that a roadside tree is about as well fixed as one in his field. If it requires a man with a stick or a hoe or a ladder, the tree on the roadside is in about as eligible a location as one in the field. If care implies the idea of turning over the soil, the roadside is handicapped, but nature has got along without having the soil upturned. My point is this; there is on nearly every farm in the East a little patch of land somewhere, a little row between a road and stream where a few trees can grow, and if fertilization is required, a few barrels of manure can go there as well as anywhere else. The fact that a tree is put in a place that is not ploughed doesn't mean that it is beyond all care. My point is that with care we can get trees in fence rows without tillage and that, in addition to Dr. Deming's formal and carefully cultivated plot, there is about every farm a place where a man can stick a few trees and give them such care as can be given without tillage.
Mr. Littlepage: I agree heartily with Prof. Smith's theory, but having had some experience, I find those things that he describes are not done; there is just that difference, always, between theory and fact. I read a beautiful book once, written by a woman, entitled, "There is No Death," and I found on inquiry that she had already buried four husbands. (Laughter.) I was much interested in reading, once upon a time, Rousseau's beautiful story of domestic life and I found that while he was writing it, his children were in an orphan asylum. A fellow teaching in the high school in Terre Haute, Indiana, married one of the beautiful attractive young ladies of that town. Shortly after they were married he was busy writing and turned and told her that he didn't love her any more and he wished she'd go home. She was heartbroken and left and it turned out later that he was writing a book on how to get to Heaven. (Laughter.) There's just the difference between theory and fact. This is a beautiful theory. I used to be the strongest advocate of it, but all you've got to do is to go on a farm and try it. The trees won't get big enough to amount to anything in our lifetime, because these things you say you will do to them you don't do; at least, that has been my experience, and I would like to ask anyone to point to any section in the United States today, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific, where this theory is carried out successfully; and yet I know it has been advocated for fifty years.