Dinner on the Ground

Farmer O. H. Thrasher and his 4,000 turkeys were in great demand last week around Torrington, Wyo. Because turkeys dote on grasshoppers, Farmer Thrasher's neighbors gladly waived normal objections to strayed or visiting flocks, begged the honor of his birds' attendance at dinner on the ground. So hearty was the welcome, so vast the offered meal, that Farmer Thrasher got up a rolling roost, trucked his capacious hens and gobblers from ranch to ranch.

But all the turkeys in Christendom could not have consumed the grasshoppers available in the U. S. last week. Westward from Michigan, Wisconsin and Illinois to Washington, Oregon and California, northward from Texas to the Dakotas, the 'hopper wave was at its crest in 24 States. In New Mexico and the Texas Panhandle the probable crop damage was estimated at $30,000,000. In the Dakotas, the visitation was the worst in a long roll of such visitations (topped, since the 1880s by the Great Swarm of 1937). Iowa was not so badly off, because spring rains had killed the eggs deposited in the ground by last year's females. But matters might have been worse: a good year for crops is a good year for weeds, and grasshoppers do not have to concentrate on crops alone.

Concentrating on the 'hoppers, however, were WPA, CCC, State highway crews, and of course the farmers. The U. S. Bureau of Entomology and Plant Quarantine already has spent $2,500,000, and provided gratis 188,700 tons of deadly delicacy beloved by grasshoppers, a mixture of bran and sodium arsenite. The Bureau will ship enough more to spread 40,000,000 acres with poison bait by season's end. So that the grasshoppers will take readily to the fare, it is mixed with sawdust and water or molasses, flung over infested fields from buckets, or spread from barrels by whirling disks which the farmers rig on the rear axles of old automobiles and tow over the fields.

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