Custer weekly chronicle. [volume] (Custer City, S.D.) 1890-1931, 1890-10-18
FROG FARMING PAYS.
An Indiana Man Tells How the Trick 4,
Dobe--An Industry That Runs Itself.

Talk about youf mushrooms or
poultry, your beef or peaches. your
early vegetables or orange&" said Mr..
John M. Francis. Of Milton. Ind, you
tan raise all Of them you like. As for
me, III raise frogs.
Mr.. Francis Is an eccentric Indiana
| mau about GU years old, whose boast
il is that he has never missed a Demo-
cratic convention, State or national,
since he was old enough to vote.
why said he in pursuance Of his
| theme. II have a friend at home who
raises frogs by the thousand, aud you
can Just bet your last dollar it pays.
| I'm going into the business myself just
as soon as | can find a decent piece of
water for the purpose"
How do you do it?n
Il don't do it. / shall not do iteven
after I've started q frog farm. They
do it themselves. All you've got TO
do is to plant them and feed them.
| They'll do all the rest"
'.Plaut tbemp'
Eyes plant them Find a few acres
OF shallow water and turn q few thou
sand tadpolesl Dose there. Where do
you get the tadpoles? Any country
boy can tell you that. You can tell
frog spawn as far MS you can see it
pale. jelly-like stuff, like the white of
an egg. with thousands of black specks
In il. The specks are the eggs and the
misunderstanding stuff floats along the
shore of a pond-specks and all. After
a while the specks begin to wiggle. and
then they begin TO grow-live on the
white-of-egg stuff, | suppose - then
they are tadpolesj pollywogs, some of
the boys call them. You get them in
n scoop made of mosquito netting
early in~the spring, and put them in
your shallow water, right in the edge
Of it. The shallow water must be full
of grass and reeds, aud the little fell
lows will then grow fast enough. BY
the middle OF summer they are nearly
big enough for market, and IL you
feed them right they will be eight
and ten inches; yes, sometimes a foot
long, the next season. 1t is worth a
long journey and a good deal of mon
ey TO sec them fed. You take a lot of
grain. generally middlings, or some
thing Of that kind, 90 to your pond
and blow a horn. The frogs know
what that means, and they come jump
ing up like grasshoppers in August.
They get so tame YOU a handle them
Just as a woman does her pet chickens.
These big fellows don't sing, as the lit
tie marsh frog do, by the way, like the
tenor, In a boys choir when his voice
is about to change, but they have COED,
big basso-profundo voices-Fred Stein
voices-and they never get tired Of
singing so long as the sun keeps be-
low the horizon.
How do you catch themP"
Take a bright lantern and go right
in the middle Of them. They come
up and stare at the light by hundreds,
half-blinded by the glare. and you just
pick them up by the hand, stow them
away in damp grass and send them to
market, where they are worth any
where from 81 to So a dozen, according
to size. Oh, | tell ,;ou, there's lots of
money in frogs. | know of one man
who made $780, 600 in frogs legs just
after the war, but he was away down
East.
'Ot course there are other things
you can raise if you have a frog farm"
said Mr.. Francis. You can raise fish
in the deep water. putting up a fence
TO keep them away from the frogs, you
know. Then you can raise pond lities,
and that is one Of the most profitable
crops in the world. That is what I'm
going to Provinretown for. There is
a pond down on Cape Cod where blue
pond lilies grow. Not like the blue
Zanzibar lilies that you see in your
fountain basins in New York, but or
binary pond lilies, only that they are
blue instead Of white. They say these
lilies will not grow anywhere else, but
but | don't believe it. I'm going to
get some roots anyway and try it,
a. \ star.