Word: agronomists
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...armchair agronomist, Ray Anderson's talents range far afield from reporting. His farm page is a bursting bin of unmetered verse, sound information on crops and controls, self-snapped pictures, Falstaffian musings on the "gorgeous gorging" of apple-mulberry pie at Center Junction. Before gasoline rationing slowed his pace he averaged 38,000 miles a year, perhaps half of them over unpaved pikes and stubbly fields...
...simple device which shows farmers the moisture content of their grains and forage, enabling them to judge proper time for harvest and storage. (Many a barn is set alight by spontaneous combustion of hay, stored too wet.) With the new gadget, invented by Ohio Agronomist Robert Q. Parks, the farmer can test his crops quickly in the field by adding water-hungry calcium carbide to plant tissue, which then loses weight in proportion to its moisture content...
Particularly he was told not to miss "the Popenoe place," called the Casa del Capuchino. This was a 300-year-old Spanish house, in ruins since the destruction of Antigua by earthquake in 1773, which had lately been restored by United Fruit Co.'s famed agronomist Dr. Wilson ("Pop") Popenoe and his wife. Guest of Dr. Popenoe for two weeks, Author Adamic decided the house warranted a book. A further incentive arose from his enthusiastic agreement with United Fruit Co.'s Managing Director Samuel Zemurray, who had said of the natives: "They've got something, those people...
...last spring, the disgruntled directors motored to Pacific Portland Cement Co.'s nearby plant to arrange for reconditioning the track surface with new soil and oystershells. Instead of this stock remedy, the company's chief agronomist, white-thatched, red-faced James Wilkes Jones, advised treating the soil itself. Upon examination he found that it consisted of nonporous and nonabsorbent substances. To rectify this, to get a soil that was ''friable, moist and mellow," he had ten tons of secret minerals churned into the soil by a special harrow and hopper-spreader. By September, after two months...
...cattle. Farmers tramped their dusty fields watching their dwarfed stand of gram shrivel and perish. A baking sun raised temperatures to 90°, to 100°. And still no rain fell. Water was carted for miles for livestock. Towns rationed their water supplies. In Nebraska the State University agronomist gloomily predicted that many fields would not yield over 5 bu. of wheat per acre (normal average. 15 to 20 bu.). In Minnesota they mocked Washington's crop predictions as gross overestimates. Farmers planting corn raised clouds of dust like columns of marching troops. Then came the wind, great gusty...