The wild hickory, wild pecan and wild black walnut trees, offer the best field for profitable work along this line.  We have topworked a great many hickories to pecan, but we do not expect permanent satisfactory results.  The experience of the pecan on the hickory is not very satisfactory.  The hickory is a dense, hard wood, that has a short growing season, and matures its nuts early; the pecan is of the coarser, faster growing wood, whose nuts grow until late in the fall.  This inconsistency of the growing habits of the two trees prevents the pecan top on the hickory from producing normal crops of nuts.  The pecan topworked to the pecan, however, is a perfect success and there is no reason why the wild hickories of all descriptions cannot be successfully and profitably topworked to the better varieties of the good shagbark hickories.  I believe that there are great opportunities in the state of New York for successful nut culture by utilizing the wild black walnut trees and the hickories.  I have seen hundreds of English walnut trees growing around Rochester, some of them bearing perfectly wonderful crops of walnuts.  I am surprised that the people in this section have not availed themselves more of the opportunities along this line.  If the farmers in this section would take up nut growing as a side proposition and set five or ten acres of nut trees on each farm, they would soon find that these nut trees would be producing them more than all the balance of their farms.  We hear a great deal today about the back to the farm movement, but my opinion is that for everyone who is going to the farm, ten are leaving it, and the reason for this is that the heavy operating expense of the annual crops, such as corn, wheat and potatoes, etc., lay such a heavy toll on the farmer that farming is not profitable.  The requirements of time, labor and money in producing these crops are so great that it discourages many farmers.  I have made the statement to some of the farmers in my part of the country that they must produce alfalfa or go broke.  I believe that alfalfa and tree crops will be two of the greatest factors in the rehabilitation of the farm, especially the nut trees, for the reason that nut trees do not require the same high degree of care, spraying, pruning, as do apple and peach trees, nor are the products as perishable.  A crop of nuts can be harvested and stacked up in barrels, and boxes, in the smoke house, the barn or in a flat car and go to the market tomorrow, next week or next month.

Recurring to the advantage of topworking, however, it meets the objection that is often raised by those who say they have not time to wait for the nut trees to grow.  Of course, this is a perfectly foolish statement; they are going to wait anyhow; it is simply a question as to whether they wait for something or nothing, and trees grow into maturity in a surprisingly short time.  A few years ago, when I was setting out an orchard of nut trees, a neighbor of mine came