Business & Finance: Eggs Into Electricity

A garden and a sow

A smokehouse and a cow

Twenty-four hens and a rooster

And you’ll have more than you uster.

Four summers ago Harvey Crowley Couch, public utilitarian and champion hog-caller of Pine Bluff, Ark. chanted that remedy for rural Depression up & down the land. Last week at Prattsville (pop.: 114) he summoned a meeting of farmers and their wives to announce a far-flung scheme for bringing electricity into 15,000 isolated Arkansas farm homes. He proposed that his company, Arkansas Power & Light, invest about $600 per home in transmission lines and equipment, while each farmer was to put $200 into lamps, irons, washing machines, water pumps. How were the farmers to raise the money? Why, said Mr. Couch, let each farmer’s wife add 20 good hens to her flock. The onetime RFC director had been studying hens. Eggs from five good hens, said he, would pay for the lighting. Two hens could lay enough to cover the cost of running the iron; another two could pay for the washing; three for the water pumping. Eggs from the rest would easily cover interest and amortization on five-year loans which the power company would make to farmers to buy equipment.