Word: wormed
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Ecuador for its segment of Inter-American highway $1,000,000, an additional $150,000 to fight a cocoa worm...
Defense. Apple-Knocker Byrd's crack about "juggling" the books seemed a good crack to some people, even if his worries about the dim future seemed pretty dim. One worm Byrd pounced on: throughout normal peacetime years, Army & Navy were doled out about $700,000,000 annually. These normal expenditures were this year transferred to emergency defense by Mr. Roosevelt...
Oliver branched out to public parks and cemeteries, eventually to $10,000-and-up jobs for cinema stars in Hollywood, whither his fame had traveled. The worm wizard moved to California, set up a ten-acre experimental farm in Los Angeles County. It was guarded by tall board fences topped with barbed wire. When Depression set in after 1929, Oliver at last told his secret, for the benefit of hard-pressed farmers. By that time he had rolled up a tidy fortune...
...still a big worm operator. Earthworms are hermaphrodites; all healthy adults lay eggs by the score, and Oliver gathers them by the million, from layers of damp burlap in his culture beds. Packed in damp peat moss, they can be shipped any distance. Thirty days after being unpacked and put in the soil, the eggs hatch; 90 days later they become adults laying eggs of their own. Earthworms make a wonderfully nourishing and relatively cheap food for poultry, hatchery fish, market frogs, terrapin. Everybody knows that chickens like worms. Dr. Oliver has devised what he calls an "intensive range" poultry...
...species of earthworms. For feeding chickens, frogs, etc., he produced a meaty hybrid ten inches long. Another hybrid, short and thick, yields a colorless, odorless, volatile oil useful in medicine. A medium-sized hybrid, very tough and vigorous, can be used to recolonize soils whose worm populations have been killed off by strong fertilizers or poison sprays. Oliver calls it his "soilution worm." In California and elsewhere there are several hundred farmers who have planted great batches of eggs, raised earthworm armies in their soil. Some years back, practically all of those farmers were staggering on the brink of bankruptcy...