Soil Conservation To Include Clean-up of Ground Squirrels WASHINGTON, March 5.—(U.P.)— Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace, opened a new kind of battle today against the ubiquitous gopher and all his cousins, his uncles and aunts, which even now are beginning to thumb their purplish noses at fed- eral authority. Instead of giving cash bounties for their scalps, Wallace announced that he would pay western farmers under his soil conservation program 15 cents, cash, for every acre of land from which they cleared 90 percent of the pocket gophers residing there. He offered six cents an acre for 90 percent of the ground squirrels and seven and a half cents for the same percentage of prairie dogs and it looked like the bookkeeping might get pretty complicated before the war progressed much further. One of the troubles seems to be that a gopher doesn't seem to give a gosh darn about whose farm he honey combs with his intricate system of subways. A gopher will travel under- ground from one acre to another, it develops, without consideration what- ever for the agriculture department. These beasts, which have red eyes, short ears, big claws and pouches in their cheeks, are beginning to wake up from their winter's sleep—hungry and full of pep. The same goes for their relatives, the ground squirrels and the prairie dogs. They all like to bore tunnels under farms, coming up at intervals to eat whatever is at hand and then going back underground to dig more holes. There are billions of 'em and they're liable to do millions of dollars damage unless they're killed. The agriculture department had some little difficulty figuring how much to pay for the slaughter. The bureau of biological survey finally set the figure at 15 cents an acre for gophers because they're the thickest —and smartest. A gopher is such an efficient engineer that he can escape, through a tunnel of his own digging, all but the most persistent pursuers. They aren't so many ground squir- els or prairie dogs per acre and they're not such good diggers; hence the bounty on them is smaller. The biological expert also establish- ed that 90 percent minimum, on the theory that if a farmer kills that many of his subterranean enemies, the remaining ten percent won't do much harm. The difficulty here has to do with deciding when 90 percent of the beasts on any particular acre are dead. If only eight percent, say, are killed, there'll be no fifteen cents forthcoming from the federal govern- ment. Ninety percent, or nothing, the agricultural department said.