put to raising bass and bream, and in some cases the only supply 

 of water has been drainage from the surrounding slopes. You 

 don't need a watery land to have fish, Alabama has proved. All 

 you need is a subsoil that will hold what water there is. 



The rate at which fish grow in Alabama's well-managed farm 

 ponds seems incredible to most observers. Week-old bass fry have 

 grown to one pound in six months. Baby bream have reached 

 six ounces in a year. This is four times as fast as the rate of 

 growth in the state's lakes and streams. 



This triumph of management has attracted an army of 

 anglers ranging from the city man with expensive tackle to the 

 barefoot cane-pole clan. There are ponds in open fields, ponds 

 by the roadside, and beautiful fifteen-acre expanses deep in the 

 piney woods. 



Lamar Blow, auto dealer at Union Springs, took me out to the 

 first Alabama pond managed according to the findings of H. S. 

 Swingle, the man behind the fish. There are four hundred such 

 ponds in Bullock County where Union Springs is located, and 

 four hundred in neighboring Montgomery County. 



Most of these are open to the public for a small fee, but Blow's 

 pond is privately managed for a limited membership. This pond, 

 the prototype of all Alabama's fish ponds, destroys most conven- 

 tional notions of what constitutes good fishing water. The banks 

 are steep and weedless. Those who associate good bass fishing 

 with water lilies would be disappointed to find not a lily pad, 

 spatterdock, or lotus anywhere. 



Yet the water, instead of being clear, is a murky green. Blow 

 thrusts his arm up to the elbow in the water and waves his hand 

 from the wrist. You can barely see the fingers. 



"Pretty good," he murmurs. "Could use another application 

 of fertilizer." 



Blow explains how H. S. Swingle of the state experiment 

 station at Auburn worked out these mysteries. Swingle found 

 that fish depend on the fertility of the land just as crops do. 

 A pond in fertile land produces many large fish. A pond in 

 worn-out soil raises a small crop of runts. 



So Swingle decided to apply fertilizer directly to ponds. He 



