The midland journal. (Rising Sun, Md.) 1885-1947, 1936-08-07
JEST A-WHITTLIN' AN A.
THINKIN'
A state Farmer Section Feature
BY PETE GETTYs


that work with us in gettin' out The
State Farmer Section in the drought
stricken area has been pretty hard
hit this month";" says the boss the
ether day. "An' it costs heap of
money for them to get out one of
these State Farmer Sections. For
this reason, we're jest goin' to call off
the entire August issue and give
their pocketbooks a little breathin'
spell After all it's pretty warm to
be readin' a magazine these days
anyway"
Naturally, l fggered that's give
me little vacation, too. But it jest
didn't work out that way. So your
regular correspondents sort of pinch
Farmer staff this month, and here l
am An if the heats gettin under
your hide like it is mine these days,
you'll kind of go easy on Teller and
see if we can't do much better job
for you with a real, sure enough,
bang-up State Farmer Section for the
month of September. An it's sur
prism how soon that next issue'll be
waitin for you in your copy of The
Midland Journal.
So here it is for August:
Along comes a Teller who's direc-
tor of Food Research Institute at
Stanford University, and tells us the
sure-fire remedy for our agricultural
ills
You know how, when there's a
rundown neighborhood in the city,
where the very poorest folks live in
novels, half starved, they call that
'slums''-an' along comes the
Mayor, or some big upiift scheme,
and tears away these cheap, no good
houses an makes a park or some
thin, all pretty and nice.
This professor calls his scheme:
Squeezing the slums out of agricul-
ture" An his idea advocates moth
in less than the junking for good of
a million American farms-250 mil
lion acres of land out of the total of
little over billion acres.
Good idea all right-for a lot of
farm failures-poor corn-poor to-
bacco-poor erything-planted on
poor land, no good for anything-an'
failure is bound to follow-but how
you goin to work it? A feller's old
shack of a house leaks and is about
to fall down, an of course, he knows
it ought to be torn down-but it's
the best house he's got, an he's got
to live somewhere. An after all,
most of the old worn out farms are
lived on by fellows who don't know
anything but that kind of a place
don't expect much and don't get
much-and if they were ON Ken
lucky blue grass estate, the placed
soon look like widow woman lived
there, and the barn roof'd be patched
with old auto licenses an the win
dows stuffed with old straw pillows
SO there you are.
With the hopper grassers eatin'
up everything and stoppin' trains an
cuttin' all kinds of shines, looks like
the Dept. of Agriculture could rig
up some kind of fan contraption an
suck 'em up in big tanks an render
dry EN- out and grind EN- up and
make fertilizer or something. May
be a filler for axle grease, or brew
em into grasshopper cocktails.
Progress" somebody said, sis
just substituting one nuisance for
another''-an' maybe if we get rid of
the grasshoppers something else will
hop up worse to plague us some
more.
But here's somethin' they call
"phenology'-no, not "phrenology"
feelin' curves and knots on your
head to find what you are thinkin'
about-but "phenology''-an' every
housewife is phenologist, who
knows just about all the normal
dates on which all the different
homegrown fruits an vegetables
show up in the local markets, and
notes whether each is early or late in
any particular year. Fishermen are
Psychologists if they're concerned
with the time when shad begin run
min in tide-water rivers; an it is a