Evening star., 1933-12-17
SCIENTISTS DISCOVERIES
CONTINUE DESPITE CUTS
Economies to Producers and Consumers
In Many Cases Far Exceed Cost
of Research.

matters, certainly not to be compared
with the invention of radio, telegraphy,
or motion pictures, or the airplane;
but the processes by which all these
things have come are the processes OF
science the results are all socially USE
full, and the differences In effect are
differences Of degree rather than of
kind The important thing. it seems
| to me, is that science has been and will
continue to be mans best tool in the
construction of a more satisfactory CIV
ilization; and that the scientific activi-
ties Of government, because they ac-
crue to all the people, ought to be
vastly expanded rather than curtailed
am not forgetting the howls of de-
rision that go up every time the De-
partment of Agriculture announces
some improved method of fighting the
boil weevil, or any other plant pest or
disease. In view of the emergency
compaignS to reduce production, any
effort to control a crop pest-which
also reduces production-seems to many
people the height of absurdity. At any
rate, it is meat for the paragraphers.
Actually, of course, the difficulty is
that an insect is not a very selective
operator He invades alike the fields
of the just and the unjust. The de-
struction caused by the grasshopper in
the Northwest is a case in point. In
farming areas out there, richly endowed
as to soil, the grasshopper has come
along to reduce the most energetic of
farmers to penury. The depression, OF
course, has been unbearable for hun
dreds of thousands of farmers, but when
to depression is added the IuthleSsness
of hordes of insects, stripping fields
| hci in1nncCi-
BILE, then you have an argument for
pest control that no one can deny.
For four years now the graSshoppe-
has taken its cut of everything grown
in certain sections of the Northwest;
one year operating most ruthlessly in
South Dakota, the next year in Ne
braska, its damage depending in large
measure upon the temperature and
rainfall. The prospect for 1884 is
especially gloomy. A migratory species
of hopper, apparently much the same
as the old Rocky Mountain grasshopper
of the 70's, is entrenched in extensive
areas of the Dakotas, Montana, Mime
sofa, Wyoming and parts of Nebraska,
Wisconsin and Idaho. If temperature
and railfall are to its taste. the hop
pers will be in position to have things
all their own way next Spring and
Summer.
Insects Can Destroy Crops.
There is way to control them. 1t
consists in spreading poison bait
arsenic mixed with bran-wherever the
hoppers are emerging. But it takes
money to buy the bran and the poison.
Years of depression have long since ex-
hausted the funds of the farmers out
there. as we'll as Of the States and
counties. If the job is to be done, ap-
parently it will be up to the Federal
Government to supply the funds with
which to buy the poison bait; the farm
ers themselves will be quick enough to
provide the labor for spreading 1t.
Curiously enough, the use of poison
bait can constitute a measure of surplus
relief-using as much as 10000 tons.
perhaps, Of bran that comes from
wheat.
destroy whole crop. The emergency
adjustment programs seek a balance
between supply and demand, not the
obliteration of supply. An insect may
ruin one grower and leave untouched
his neighbor. Insofar as human in
genuity can defeat the insects purposes,
farmers on both sides of the road must
be helped, both for the sake of those
of us who want to keep on eating and
for the sake OF the farmer VINO wants
TO keep on producing.
The point generally overlooked is that
there is profit in sacrificing efficiency
farmer desires-and the rest OF us
ought to encourage him in desiring
to produce as much as the market re-
quires at the lowest possible cost for
each unit that he produces. He may
we'll economic on land and labor, out
not in the use of improved practices
which science makes possible. Col
lectively farmers have now no choice
but to control the total volume Of
production. Individually, they must in
crease efficiency to the greatest extent
possible. Reducing the cost of producing
a bushel of wheat does not mean in
creasing the total volume of wheat
produced-provided farmers collectively
control that volume.
Without collective control of produc-
tion. it was true that the effect of much
agricultural research, and of the use
of farm machinery, tended to increase
our surp1uses. It is no longer true, and
it is about time the old fears were laid
away In moth balls,
(Copyrisht, 1889