Word: cornbelt
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...would pump away a sweltering midsummer week in Iowa, when beaches and lakes and Laker beckon? Just about anyone, according to TIME'S Midwest Bureau Chief Benjamin Gate, who monitored the cornbelt caravan, part of it on a borrowed ten-speed Gitane bike. The Ragbrai army, he reports, comes from all over the U.S. and from every way of life and income bracket. On the road, its members fall into five loose categories...
Perfect Weather. A big factor in checking the blight was the unusually dry weather in July and August that deprived the fungus of life-giving moisture. The cornbelt states of Illinois, Nebraska and Iowa, which were badly plagued in 1970, escaped with only light damage this summer. "The weather was perfect," says Wyne Englehardt, who grows corn and wheat on a 4,000-acre farm near Oakley, Kans. Many farmers in Southern states where leaf disease broke out in 1970 planted blight-resistant seeds this year. Thus the spores could not accumulate and be blown North to infect fields there...
...ordinarily welcome summer rains because they hasten the ripening of lucrative crops. This season's rainfall has been unusually heavy, accompanied by high humidity and winds from the hurricane-laden skies of the South. Last week farmers discovered to their dismay that the combination threatened calamity to the cornbelt states of Illinois, Indiana and Iowa, endangering the nation's biggest cash crop...