Be Thrifty with Nut Trees
Reading edition
By Carl Weschcke, Minnesota
There has been too much accent put on the profit to be made on nut production. No matter how much income a man may receive, if he has not learned to save out of that income he will never be better off for having received it. Now, nut trees offer a particularly practical way of saving out of income. If one has a large family to feed the saving may amount to a hundred dollars or more a year. When this fine food, contained in the kernels of nuts, is used right in your own family, and supplies the family's entire requirements of nuts, you will find that you have made very substantial savings in your family food budget.
First of all, it is different from income from the sale of nuts because when you sell nuts they must be sold in the competitive market, and usually to the wholesaler if you have a considerable amount to dispose of. Therefore you save the profit made by the wholesaler and the retailer by using your nut crop rather than selling it. This is really being thrifty. If you have a large crop of nuts you will find that you can easily increase the uses in combination with other foods so that less other food has to be purchased in order to meet the family needs. And with the higher prices of ordinary foods you can easily visualize what a tremendous saving this might be.
Nuts are a fine luxury food, but in a way they can quickly become a necessary food by being used as a replacement for meat. I don't like to use the term "substitute for meat" as it implies that nuts are inferior to meat, and nothing could be further from the truth. Nuts are more NUTricious than any meat, pound for pound, and what meat can you store away that will keep as sweet and edible as a nut for so long a time!
Plant nut trees to save your income not to increase it. You will never have to pay a tax on that saving.