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Show :hr ALL DUNN ; by Rov Dunn HOWDY, FOLKS! Right off, anybody would think that an Okie would know all about agriculture ag-riculture and stuff like that. Stuff like how to make a tree grow, and grass, and flowers and gardens. But it ain't so. Not in my case, and I'm an j Okie. Shucks, I couldn't even make green mould grow on top of a bucket of swill. If I get a baby animal, it usually curls up and expires before reaching reach-ing adulthood, no matter how well I take care of it and follow fol-low the advice of the experts. It gets the hoof and mouth dis- ease or the Chinese rot. For other folks, chickens lay eggs. i For me, they never get old enough to fall in love, much ! less lay an egg. When my young'ns was little, lit-tle, 'way back before V.N. (Vietnam) I decided to live close to the earth and raise most of our vittles and grow our own meat. We could save a lot of money this way and the occasional paycheck would stretch farther. It never worked. work-ed. While Audrey and I worked our hearts out on the big, big garden, the two calves for whih we had paid one hundred dollars each, waxed big, fat and strong. And when we had paid out twenty dollars for pasture rent and untold dollars for grain to fatten them out, one was sold at an auction for sixty-seven dollars. We hired the other butchered and by the time the meat was stored in the freezer we had went in debt for, it had cost us 57c per pound. At that time, meat could be bought, cut, wrapped and quick-frozen for 36c per pound. While our calves was growing grow-ing by leaps and bounds and making us money, hand over fist, I bought two dozen hens to furnish eggs for the table. I spent a day at hard labor, and $25 to build a run for them, for chickens must have a nice place to live if you expect ex-pect them to lay eggs. They didn't lay more than two dozen eggs, all told, when their feathers feath-ers began to fall out. My neighbor, neigh-bor, who was a chicken expert, told me that these chickens had "had it" before I bought them and that is why they was taken to the auction in the first place. We had stewed w rtir-- 1 .'M-t-in.i-uiif.ini-!- Roy Lynn Tanner, son of Mr. and Mrs. John W. Tanner, who has returned home from the Andes Mission, will be welcomed home Sunday at 6:45 in Third Ward services. chicken for quite a spell after that. That empty chicken coop started bugging me, so I bought a hundred baby chicks in spite of the hatchery man's sage advice that it wasn't a profitable profit-able venture for me. I also had to buy a brooder to keep them warm by night, and shoo them out in the run to keep them coo! by day. Only the best Checker Board Chick Chow was fed to them and chemicals in their water to drink. Every day the chow was put in the feeders feed-ers and all those which was standing around with a droopy head and a snotty nose were thumped on the head and placed plac-ed in the feed bucket. A funeral fun-eral service was held for them every morning at nine-thirty. We wound up with six scrawny fryers. There was something wrong with them, too. Their eyes was too, close together and they sorta listed to the starboard and walked in a circle when they started to go somewhere. I don't think they could see very good either, 'cause they was always runin' into each other, then they'd get in a fight. Them chickens wasn't in no condition to be fightin', so we just up and give 'em away. But I don't think that guy was any too anxious to take 'em. I guess he thought he was doing me a favor. Maybe he was. But I really had it made when I stocked that chicken coop with rabbits. Those bunnies bun-nies multiplied like rabbits. Only thing was, the mamma rabbits killed their babies. I don't know why, they just killed them. I looked up a rabbit rab-bit expert and he told me that something was lacking in their diet. It was printed right on the sack of "Rabbit Chow" that these pellets contained every thing that a rabbit needed to maintain good health. I reckon they forgot to add a few baby rabbits to those pellets. Anyway, we decided to go out of the rabbit business and butchered what was left. After they were stored away in the freezer (which we were still making payments on), we suddenly sud-denly remembered that none of us would eat fried rabbit. Or stewed, or baked, or roasted, or broiled, or fricasseed. We just didn't like rabbit. Audrey and those kids were awfully narrow-minded. So I gave the frozen rabbits to a neighbor who was glad to get them, I think. Dad-gum-it, right here on this little 'ole lot which we live on in SpringviUe, we have several little fruit trees which look like the locusts of Egypt have been chewin' on. I have had summit meetings with Bob Hassle who is the county agent and I have done what he told me, but still the leaves that are left, are curling up. While I'm tryin' to straighten out those leaves, the bugs sneak up on the blind side oi me and start chewin' off the plants in our liT ole garden right off even with the ground I think I must have enough chemicals, bug dust, liquid and powdered fertilizer, in bottles cans and bags, to start a smal store. And still, brown spots appear in the lawn while the bugs get fat on the poison anc the trees suck up the iron sulfate sul-fate which I have put arounc their roots, and their leaves turn yellow. I'm sure that somewhere ir the Bible it tells of how thai "Old Serpent" which is th Devil, was trying to tempt th Master by offering him monej on whose surface was a likeness like-ness of Ceasar. The Lord is quoted as saying, say-ing, "That which is Ceasar's give to Ceasar." And so it is that I feel aboul agriculture and the raising ol livestock. "That which belongs to the farmer, leave to the farmer earn thy money elsewhere anc buy his goods and thy heart shall be filled with gladness.' AMEN. SEE Y.ALL LATER. |