The Birmingham age-herald., 1911-05-21

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 Fighting the Bugs
 | Are you interested in bugs? We have a department devoted to them which ls studying all sorts of insects for the good | Of the people. With other things it is working on the gypsy moth and the lbrowntail moth, which are now ravaging the trees of a large part of New England. These moths were brought in from abroad by scientist for the purpose Of study. He allowed a pair or so to get loose, and the result Is they have multi piled by millions and are destroying the trees over an area of 10000 square miles. | We heard that there were parasites which l would exterminate this pest, and pr. L. o. Howard, the chief of the bureau of en- tomology, has been sent to Europe three times to find them. One of his trips was l to the Crimea, and it was there he dis covered the moths greatest enemy. We have imported it. Congress has given us an appropriation to wipe out that pest. Another interesting investigation,' continued Secretary Wilson, "relates to the fever tick which has ruined the cattle in parts of the south to the extent of something like forty million dollars lyear We looked everywhere to get some thing to fight it, but failed. At last wo Idiscovered that the tick bred on the
 
 selves to the plants and crawling up thens were able to get on such cattle as fed in the pastures. We found that they had to reach the cattle very soon or they dieo. With this knowledge we got the farmers to divide their fields in the middle and put the stock on one side. In a short time the ticks which had crawled up the grass died of starvation. We now had all the cattle dipped in bath, which destroyed the ticks on them and moved them across to the other side of the field. Within a few days all the ticks within the new va cant pasture had died the same way, and that land was clear. By these means we have already driven this pest out of be- tween ninety and one hundred million acres of pasture lands. The total area is about 145,000 square miles. It is equal to three and one-half states the size of | Ohio."
 Teaching the Boys to Farm "Tell me something about the work you are doing for the farmers boys, MT. Sec retary," I said
 That is big story'' replied MT. Will son. With the assistance of the states we are establishing schools for the teacn- | ing of farming, and improved agriculture | is being taught in the public schools. We are also doing great deal of practical work with the boys on the farms You may have heard something of the boy corn rasers of the United States They are numbered by the tens of thou sands. The movement began in the great corn patch of the Mississippi valley and at the St. Louis exposition there were about 5000 separate exhibits of corn raised | In the older corn regions by as many thousand individual boys. These boys had each one acre of land, which he plant ed and cultivated after rules laid down by this department. Prizes were given in each district to the boy who produced the | most and best corn, and the results were a yield which was double. treble and in some cases even five or six times that which was gotten before. Corn Versus Cotton 1 That was some years ago. continued | the Secretary. "It was before the boil weevil had begun to bite deep into the cotton crop of the south. As you know cotton has long been the one crop of that section. The planters have raised almost nothing else. They have imported their hogs and their hominy, have bought mules and other live stock of the north and have even brought in the stuff to feed them. We wanted to make the south self-supporting, to diversity the crops and to show what corn would do for the land. This has been accomplished largely through the boys. We shall soon have 100000 boy farmers who will each have an lacre or more to cultivate after our meth ods. We had more than 40,00O last year, and we have already doubled that num- l Der. We have thousands of southern farmers who are experimenting with corn and thousands who are already raising it for the money they can make from the crop. As a result of few years work we have increased the corn there until the south is now producing one-third of all raised in the union, and it's crop will soon equal that of the great corn patch of the central Mississippi valley The south is bound to be as much a land of corn as 1t has been and is land of cotton"
 Stories of Boy Farmers
 'Tell me more about the boys, MT. Sec retary."
 "I could talk all day about that" re. piled the gray-haired chief of the Agri- cultural Department. We had Il of the little fellows here last fall. We gave them diplomas and free trip to Washington, as competitive prizes for raising the most and best corn on one acre. They took land in states that have been producing on, the average from 15 to 20 bushels per acre and farmed it. They worked under our direction, and the result is they have raised up to as high as 22S bushels per acre, and one of them has produced 119 Dusnels on an acre at cost of s cents a bushel We have thousands of boys who have harvested from the one acre they farmed double as much as their fathers grew on any acre adjoining, and some who have produced five times as much.
 The Meanest Man in the South | Take. for instance, the case of one bright southern boy the Secretary of Agriculture continued. "His father had no faith in what he called book farming
 and, besides, he was almost as mean as they make them. His boy had asked for the use of an acre, and the father refused, telling him he would not have anything to do with such foolishness. The boy per sisted however, and the father finally pointed to rough hillside over-grown with brush and spotted with stumps and
 stones, and told him if he would grub that acre and move off the stones he could have 1t. The boy went to work and