Hoppers

Already scourged by drought and low prices, western farmers were last week at grips with another enemy, a crawling, flying, leaping multitude of grasshoppers (Caloptenus spretus). For weeks they had been springing from the hot, dry soil of seven midwest states, big, hardy insects able to eat five times their own weight each day. By last week they had ravaged 100 counties, leaving 55,000 sq. mi. of farmland sear and blighted. By the millions they stripped North Dakota of its already shriveled wheat. They munched the head-high corn of Iowa and Nebraska down to the hard stalk. They left the orchards of South Dakota looking like a winter's skeleton. They gorged themselves on sugar beets in Utah, on barley in Colorado. They scourged the lush fringes of Minnesota and Kansas and appeared without warning around Muskegon, Mich. In their wake they left naked brown fields, heartbroken farmers and incredible yarns of clothes eaten off the line, fence posts, hoe handles and wagon tongues chewed to nothing.

In Washington Charles Lester Marlatt, chief of the Department of Agriculture's Bureau of Entomology was not surprised at the 'hopper plague. After last year's drought he had issued warning of its coming. Nature alone, he said, could stop it and nothing could be done to save this year's crops.

Nevertheless farmers and local officials joined to do what they could. In Nebraska appeared "bulker" machines with canvas sails which were driven through the fields scooping up the 'hoppers, dousing them in oil, dumping them in piles for burning. Here and there ingenious farmers rigged up big wire nets on their cars, charged them from storage batteries, went about electrocuting 'hoppers on the hop. Utah offered 1-c- per lb. bounty for 'hoppers dead or alive. Henry Paulson of Lamar, Colo. with a home-made scoop towed by his car, harvested 120 bu. of the insects from four ruined acres of barley. Others sacked the 'hoppers, drowned them in water, put them aside for chicken feed next winter. A Pierre, S. Dak. farmer, hearing that turkeys would devour the insects, turned his flock out into the fields. The birds returned with their feathers eaten off. At Buffalo, Neb. dead 'hoppers were packed in jars on the hope of selling them to fishermen as bait at 20-c- per lb.

Prayers and poison were other weapons used. At Jefferson, S. Dak. Rev. Joseph Barre led 1,200 believers out among the naked fields to appeal for divine relief. State officials recommended a mixture of bran, molasses and arsenic to spread before the attacking hordes or spray from airplanes. Many a farmer complained that his poultry ate the 'hoppers thus poisoned and were killed.*

So serious became the 'hopper situation, so plaintive the appeals to Washington that late in the week President Hoover instructed the Department of Agriculture to see what relief it could offer. Declared the President:

''While suffering within the areas is acute, the extent of the drought and [grasshopper] damage is comparatively minor to that which we confronted and surmounted last year. . . . The Red Cross is actively engaged in relief work. . . . National and local resources are available and the problem will be taken care of."

Department of Agriculture experts began to devise ways & means of wangling the $15,000,000 surplus from the 1931 drought appropriation for use in the 'hopper war.

*Last week Department of Agriculture chemists announced they were successfully experimenting with a new insecticide called rotenone which would not harm warm-blooded creatures. Derived from the roots of tropical plants, it is already in commercial production by two manufacturing companies.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.