343, reports that "148,000 acres of chestnuts in the reporter's district in Spain yielded, 1910, 2,534 pounds of chestnuts to the acre."
The average yield of corn in seven mountain counties of North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky for 1919 was 1,124 pounds per acre; for 1924 it was 1,145 pounds. For the same counties the yield of oats per acre was, 1919, 363 pounds; 1924, 524 pounds. Mr. Raphael Zon of the Bureau of Forestry tells me that the 1,600,000 acres of chestnut orchards of Italy (good, bad, and indifferent) yield on the average about 1,000 pounds of nuts per acre. The American Consul at Marseilles, France, reported in 1912, for the 190,000 acres in his district, a yield of 1,320 pounds to the acre, worth 0.8 cents per pound, or $10.46 per acre.
Professor Grand, Professor of Agriculture at Grenoble, said in 1913 that matured chestnut trees 70 years old, 25 to 30 meters apart, 12 to a hectare or 4 to an acre, would bear an average crop of 150 to 200 kilos per tree. This is 1,320 to 1,760 pounds per acre. He insisted on this as an average, and said that the yield at times would be 4,000 to 5,000 kilos of nuts per hectare in a year of big crop (3,520 to 4,400 pounds per acre).
A big tall tree near the village of Pedicroce in Corsica had a girth of 4.60 meters, a spread of 60 feet; it stood on a terrace with nothing on three sides of it, and beside it was alfalfa, on which its roots could feed. The owner stoutly held that it yielded 1,000 liters of nuts on the average, that the tree varied in production but little from year to year, and that he gathered nuts himself and therefore was sure of his facts.
The yields of corn in Appalachia and of chestnuts on the European mountainsides are about the same in quantity, but the corn yield can be made only occasionally and for a short period of time before erosion destroys the field. In contrast to this, the chestnut yields on and on and holds in place the ground it feeds on.
Mr. Pierri, a wealthy proprietor and merchant of the Corsican
