Read it Again: Week of Feb. 28, 2002

80 years ago this week. Fire at a barn at the state prison farm in London caused between $3,000 and $5,000 damage. It was put out by prisoners with a bucket brigade.

A flock of 70 hens on the farm of Cline Seyler of Vernon, Ohio, averaged 36 eggs per day during January, making an egg production of 15.9 eggs per hen for the month. Seyler used the Ohio State laying ration as a dry mash for the hens, keeping it before them all the time.

50 years ago this week. 50 years ago this week. Democracy has a growing bulwark – a bulwark that stretches across our country – and that is 4-H club work says the author of the first history of that work, The 4-H Story, just published. Author Franklin Reck based his book on many months of careful research, interviews with pioneers in the movement, data checking with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and state 4-H club leaders, and reading of all available records.

4-H club work, he says, is where boys and girls learn the great privileges and responsibilities of democracy: individual initiative; active citizenship, respect for others’ accomplishments; group cooperation, healthy competition; love of farm, home, and community; interchange of ideas from club to club across state lines. The 4-H story says the author “is too great a movement to be claimed by any one man.” It unfolds through the early 1900s when the country was ready, youth was ready, and the time was right for a great upsurge of rural power.

25 years ago this week. While Ohio farmers set a new record in 1976 by producing an average of 101 bushels per acre in their corn fields, corn hybrids tested in the Ohio Corn Performance Tests averaged 155 bushels per acre. The highest yield, 203.7 bushels per acre, was at the test location at Washington Court House. Producers submitted 397 hybrids for testing, conducted to provide a source of objective information from various locations in the state on the relative performance of hybrids currently available to Ohio farmers.