Potato Bug Economics

This has been an expensive summer. There's the fuel prices, the payments on the new round baler, all that. And then there's the potato bug eradication fees. The kids, and their visiting cousins and friends, have squeezed more than thirty bucks out of me since the beginning of June. I pay 25 cents for an adult or a group of babies (aka larvae) or a bunch of eggs and 5 cents for a lone baby. Jackson counts his own. Cliffy tabulates for the two of them and Harley usually finds eleventeen or four-seven-one hundred, so he gets a small handful of pennies and nickels and is happy. The potatoes are the hands-down success story of the garden; the mere mention of money or potato bugs sends them out there at a dead run.

They're just little kids, and I understand that I'm paying more than the going rate, but it seems to me I have a critical mission with these kids; if they don't grow up thinking of tending plants and animals as a profitable enterprise, they'll not very likely to want to farm when they grow up. This raises the question, of course, whether I should be having ideas about what my kids will do when they grow up, or whether I should try to give them good solid life skills to take out in the world in whatever professions call to them. The thing is, that I'm pretty sure that the world is going to need farmers in a rather huge way in a few years. There are more farmers leaving the profession than entering it and, unlike a great many professions--law, for example--it's not the sort of thing you can pick up in just a few years of higher education. I may be a little alarmist about this, but it seems to me that if I want to raise kids who won't be worrying about where their next meal is coming from, the best way to do that is to teach them to grow their own food and to want to keep the farm going so they'll have a place to grow it.

I'm not sure what would happen if I didn't have their help with the potato bugs. Certainly, we would lose some plants. Maybe we'd even lose the whole crop. There's about forty-five feet of double-wide potato hill out there, enough to feed us for the whole year if we get decent yield. Potatoes aren't especially expensive, but I would definitely go through at least $200 of them next year if I had to buy them. So the kids might actually be a bargain.

Sometimes, like this morning, I ask the kids if they would like to use some of their money to buy a toy. I open up amazon.com and run searches for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, remote-controlled robots, or Legos. They ooh and aah and point to say what they want, but they never want to spend their money. They say, "Twenty dollars, for that LITTLE TOY?! What can I get for four dollars?" Then they say they want to keep their money and they think ahead to the pumpkins they planted, and how the financial outlook for the Fall is rather good. They can get the robot if they sell ten pumpkins. And they'll have some money left over for seeds in the Spring.