THE GENIUS

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLVI, Issue 21380, 24 June 1939, Page 9

THE GENIUS

BY JAMES J. MONTAGUE

“I ain’t got nothin’ agin agricultural schools,” said Mr Jenkins, “except that even the smartest professors they got can’t out-guess nature, an’ you got to do that if you’re goin’ to make any money off a farm. My boy Jake was eddicated in one of ’em, an' for a while it looked like the money I spent on him would return many fold, as the Good Book says. But farmin’ is gettin’ more complicated, an’ he just couldn’t keep up the gait, smart as he was, an’ as full of schemes, some ol which had been learned him at school, an’ some that he picked up by hisself, or just thought out.

“Them beetles was playin’ hob with the farm when he come home for his second spring vacation, an’ I set him to work thinkin’ up some scheme to head ’em off. For a while he used the chemistry they had learned him, an’ mixed up all sorts of poisons which he soaked into the soil with a hose. It got a lot of ’em, but not enough. Then he experimented around with parasites that would eat the insect pests, but the eatln’ was on the other foot, so to speak, for the insect pests et the parasites along with the seeds an’ roots in the ground, an’ things went on just like they did before, the green stuff cornin’ up about two inches out of the ground, an’ then dyin’ because them beetles had cut it off down under the sod, an’ kept cuttin’ it off when it sprouted agin like growin’ things will.

"Well Jake he was determined to show me I hadn't wasted no money on his schoolin. He was out early in the mornin’ an’ late at night

workin’ at schemes, an’ mixin’ new kinds of poisons, but none of them seemed to be any good. Finally he come in one day an’ tells me that chickens was the answer.

"’Chickens!’, I says, ’why chickens will be wuss than the beetles. Anybody knows that if you turn chickens into a field they will root out the crops an’ leave the ground bare. Look at the hen coops they live in. Do you ever see anything there but bare ground?’

“ ‘That’s because they ain't nothin' else for them to eat outside of feedin' time.’ he says. ’Chickens will eat beetles in preference to anything else, an’ if they git plenty of beetles, which they sure will around here they’ll be satisfied an' let the crops

alone. Besides we’ll make money off the eggs.” “This sounded reasonable to me, so I give him some money to buy a lot of eggs an’ a incubator, an’ he went to work, tickled to death because he figgered he’d found a way to lick them insects. By the middle of summer he had about six hundred half-grown chickens, an’ turned ’em loose in the grain fields to seek what they might devour. “But still the beetles kept on ravagin’ an’ the crops kept dyin’, an’ Jake was pretty badly worried for a while. Then he comes in one day an' says: ‘I got the puzzle solved, Pa. The reason them chickens ain’t mor’n twenty-five per cent efficient is because they can’t dig deep enough with them short beaks. The beetles git down two or three inches to get at a root, and the cut worms often gits down Just as far. So all the chickens can do is to scratch the surface, an’ I’ve worked out a way to fix that up all right.’ “ ‘What ye goin’ to do?’ I asked him. “ ‘l'm going’ to extend the chicken’s beaks. I was born to the blacksmiths, an’ left him plans for little clips we could put on their beaks with long points on ’em that would let ’em dig plumb down to where the pests is an’ root 'em out by the thousands. I know it will work, because I tried diggin’ in the garden with one of the clips, an’ I dug up them worms an’ beetles an’ their eggs by the hundred. By day after to-morrow I’ll have every chicken in the coop equipped, an’ in a week after they won't be no beetles on the place, that is no healthy ones.’ “I told him to go ahead, an’ that I was proud of him, an’ for the next two or three days he was around the blacksmith shop, urgin’ the blacksmith to hurry along with the order, which he done. It was a funny lookin' sight to see them hens an’ roosters paradin’ out of the coop an' Into the fields with them long steel snouts on their noses. They was pretty awkward handlin' them at first, but they caught the trick of it

by an' by an’ the way they made the dirt fly would astonish you. They dug up beetles, too, plenty beetles, an’ et ’em as faso as they come up. Of course they also dug up a whole lot of seeds an’ roots that has prouted, so it looked as if we wasn’t goin’

to get much of a crop, but I figgered that by another season the bugs would see they didn’t have no chance an’ move somewhere else to do their devastatin’.

“At the end of a few months you couldn’t find a beetle on the place, not the egg of a beetle, nor the hide of one for that matter. Of course, the crop wasn’t much, but you can’t git everythin’ in a single year, an’ I was satisfiefid an’ pleased with the boy, an’ bought him a second hand car which he’d wanted for a long time, so he could hold his own with the other boys that was in stronger with te gals tan him because they could drive them to prayer meetin's an' dances an’ turkey raffles an’ the like.

“We was pretty impatient for plantin’ time, so we could plant the crops without no or. 7 losin’ ’em. Besides that the beetle diet had made the chickens fat, ' an’ they hadn’t et hardly any expensive chicken food, so I saw a year of prosperity ahead of us.

“Well, it ain’t safe to interfere with what the agricultural professors calls the balance of nature. Planting time come around, an’ we put the crops in an’ they come up beautiful, instead of thin an’ straggly like they done the year beforn. But a funny thing happened. Instead of the beetles stayin’ down in the ground, where they had to stay to git at the tender sprouts that was their regular diet, they come up to the surface, an’ hid under the shoots where the hens wasn’t expecting to find ’em. An’ when they found out they couldn’t get nothin’ fit for them to eat up there, they used their heads an’ decided they'd have to chance their diet or starve to death. An’ that is what they done. “By an’ by I begun to notice that the chickens was lookin’ sort of spindly, an’ it seemed as if their feathers was cornin’ off of ’em. I talked to all the chicken raisers in the neighbourhood about ’em, but none of ’em could figger it out. It wasn’t the pip or the roop or any of them chicken diseases so far as they could see. Then only day, when the flock was most bare of feathers, and standin’ around peekin’ an’ shiverin’, I picked up one an’ looked at it, an’ ee it was all covered with beetles. An’ in another week half the bunch was bald as apples an’ the rest was gittin’ that way fast. Then I set down an' thought it over, an’ the answer come pretty soon. “The chickens had took away one kind of supply the insects had for food, so the pesky things, bein’ hungry had thought out another way, combinin’ it with a plan to git revenge. They had et or was eatin’ all the feathers off them chickens,

an’ pretty soon the whole flock was just ruined. “And what became of Jake,” I asked.

“Oh, Jake, he's working down to the town in a garage. Pretty good job he’s got, only his boss tells me he does too blame much experimentin’ if he ain’t watched pretty close.”