Book

Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture

Also known as: Tree Crops, Smith's Tree Crops

J. Russell Smith's 1929 book — the most undercited foundational text in perennial agriculture and a primary influence on permaculture. Smith, an economic geographer at Wharton and Columbia, traveled the world watching civilizations collapse in slow motion under their own plows. In *Tree Crops* he argued that the only agriculture that lasts on civilizational timescales is **tree agriculture**, and that human civilization's repeating death pattern — forest → field → plow → desert — can only be broken by replacing annual grain crops with perennial tree crops bred for staple yield. The book catalogues nineteen chapters of species (chestnut, oak, honey locust, carob, mulberry, persimmon, walnut, pecan, mesquite) that already produce at staple grade somewhere in the world, proposes a national 'Institute of Mountain Agriculture' to breed them systematically, and closes with a call for 'a new patriotism' measured in topsoil bequeathed to grandchildren. Revised in 1953, kept selling through the back-to-the-land turn, and identified by Bill Mollison as a primary influence on permaculture. Now in the public domain; full text at Internet Archive.

Cultural

Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture is the book the permaculture and agroforestry movements are built on but rarely cite. Harcourt, Brace published it in 1929. It came out the year of the Wall Street crash, six years before the [[dust-bowl|Dust Bowl]] Smith had been predicting since the opening chapter. He revised and reissued it in 1953 with updated examples and a fresh introduction. It went out of print, came back into print through Island Press in 1988, and now lives free in the public domain at the Internet Archive.

The book’s argument is built from two scenes. The first is at the Great Wall of China around 1925, where Smith looked out over land that had been forested when the wall was built and was now “gashed and gutted” by centuries of erosion. The second is in Corsica, where [[chestnut|chestnut]] orchards had supported the same families for centuries on intact, unworn soil. Out of the contrast Smith built a thesis: civilizations that plow slopes die; civilizations that grow trees on slopes endure.

The book’s structure is unusually direct. Three chapters lay out the philosophy. Nineteen chapters catalogue specific tree species — what they yield, where they grow, how they have been used, what breeding work would make them staple crops. Two chapters lay out economics and policy. Two close with the institutional proposal and the moral argument.

Practical

Smith’s catalogue of tree crops, in the order he treats them:

Stock-food trees (feed for livestock, in place of grain): keawe/algaroba, carob, honey locust, mesquites, [[mulberry|mulberry]], persimmon, [[chestnut|chestnut]], oak
Human-food trees: [[chestnut|chestnut]], oak (acorns), walnut (Persian and Eastern Black), other walnuts, pecan, other hickories
Tropical tree crops in a closing chapter

For each species Smith answers: where does it already grow at staple scale? what is the yield of the best individual tree? what is known about propagation and grafting? what breeding work would turn it from a regional curiosity into a global crop?

This is the part of the book that has aged the best. Most of the species Smith named are still on the agroforestry research frontier ninety-seven years later. The chestnut and the hazel are now being bred systematically for the first time at the [[new-forest-farm|New Forest Farm]] scale (Mark Shepard, Wisconsin) and at the Savanna Institute. Honey locust and mesquite remain undeveloped at the scale Smith called for. Acorn-as-staple-food is in a small renaissance — see [[acorn-processing]] for the wiki’s coverage.

Most-quoted lines

“Forest — field — plow — desert.” — the four-word cycle, the book’s compressed thesis
“We in America… are destroying soil by field wash faster than any people that ever lived — ancient or modern, savage, civilized, or barbarian.” — Chapter I, written 1929
“The crop-yielding tree offers the best medium for extending agriculture to hills, to steep places, to rocky places.” — Chapter II, the design principle
“Plan or perish.” — Chapter 24 title

Where to read it

The book is in the public domain. Full text available free at:

Internet Archive (scanned by [[the-soil-and-health|Soil and Health]] Library, 2009): https://archive.org/details/TreeCrops-J.RussellSmith
Full text djvu: https://archive.org/stream/TreeCrops-J.RussellSmith/TreeCrops_djvu.txt
Table of contents at Journey to Forever: https://journeytoforever.org/farm_library/smith/treecropsToC.html

What links here, and how

Inbound connections from across the wiki, grouped by lens and by relationship. These appear automatically — every entity page declares what it links to, and that data populates here on the targets.

Practical

shares approach with

New Forest Farm the farm executes the program J. Russell Smith proposed in *Tree Crops* (1929) at commercial scale

Cultural

shares approach with

Farmers of Forty Centuries Smith adopted King's *permanent agriculture* phrase eighteen years after King; the two books form one continuous American argument for non-extractive agriculture
Manejo Ecológico do Solo near-contemporary argument from a different angle: Smith on perennial trees, Primavesi on tropical-soil biology
The Living Soil near-contemporary founding text from the American agroforestry tradition

voiced by

J. Russell Smith Smith's 1929 book, the foundational text of perennial-tree agriculture

contained in

Permanent agriculture the book whose subtitle introduced the term to Western agricultural literature

6 inbound links · 8 outbound

Cultural

Practical

Most-quoted lines

Where to read it

See also

What links here, and how