Father Goose

When Cartoonist Al Capp invented the Shmoo, an animal which enabled man to live without working, everybody thought it was merely a Cappital joke. But in New Mexico's rich Mesilla Valley last week, Farmer Deane Stahmann was running a Shmoo-like business which promised to revolutionize the agriculture of the valley. Farmer Stahmann was just the man to do it. He had inherited some land, and by leveling and irrigating more, transformed desert-like land into a 4,000-acre cotton farm. It helped make the Mesilla Valley one of the important U.S. cotton-producing areas. By pioneering with the planting of pecan trees between the cotton rows, Farmer Stahmann had brought a new commercial crop to the valley and made himself the U.S. pecan king. Farmer Stahmann's latest agricultural experiment was with geese.

Hoe Hands. Troubled by the fact that his cotton plants had to be constantly hoed to keep them from being choked by wild grass, Stahmann built up a flock of 25,000 geese and found that they cleaned out the weeds just as well as Mexican hoe hands, who were hard to hire. Not only did the geese find their own food and enrich the soil with fertilizer, but when the cotton crop was harvested they could be sold. But they were not popular. Reason: high price.

An engineer-trained farmer, Stahmann runs his farm like a factory. When he took up pecans, for example, he cut down the labor needed for tree-shaking with a tree-shaking machine, something like a reducing vibrator. For his geese, Stahmann began a scientific test of the market, priced them low (i.e., only 20-c- profit per bird), found that housewives snapped them up as bargains. He set up batteries of incubators and brooders, invested $80,000 in an eviscerating and quick-freeze plant. His geese are now laying at the rate of 80,000 eggs a month, and Stahmann is hatching goslings at the rate of 2,000 a day. When he reaches capacity production he expects to be quick-freezing 2,500 oven-ready geese daily, for a net profit of some $125,000a year--provided that housewives take to geese as they have to chicken.

Lend-Geese Plan. Stahmann is selling eggs and goslings to farmers all over the valley, encouraging them to start goose farms of their own. Since he has not enough cotton acreage to "run" all the geese he can slaughter, Stahmann has set up another plan. He sells five-week-old geese to other farmers at a low price, to use as hoe hands in their own cotton patches. After the geese have fattened for twelve weeks he buys them back at around the original price, for slaughter. As a result of all this goose-swapping, the farmers get free weeding and free fertilizer, Stahmann free fattening.

Stahmann is looking beyond the mere marketing of frozen geese, is already figuring out new commercial uses for feathers and down (e.g., a goosedown powder puff), expects to sell a lot of down for army bedrolls. Eventually he thinks he may make more out of the feathers than the geese.

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