Word: cornes
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...year era of the great steel plow, central instrument of American abundance and strength, is ending in an astonishing revolution now sweeping through Maryland and on to the Illinois bottomlands and the high hills of Oregon where corn, soybeans, wheat and cotton are grown. The upheaval in the long, quiet reaches of U.S. farmland has gone largely unnoticed in the din of presidential politics, the cries of rage from the torn inner cities, and the turmoil abroad. But it may mean as much to this country as all the other changes taking place around the world -- or even more...
Roger Sarver, 46, is part of the revolution. Farming 1,000 acres of rented land near Bowling Green, Ohio, he was making little economic headway, burdened with the overhead from a task force of monstrous machines with which he planted and harvested corn and soybeans. Then he went down to Columbus to hear Jim Kinsella, a Lexington, Ill., farmer who also runs a research and training center for no-till farming...
...like I was in church," recalls Sarver. "Suddenly I was aware that he was talking about me." Kinsella was standing before men who were struggling to survive. "Every year do you just keep taking your corn check and turning it over to the implement dealer?" Kinsella asked. Sarver was born again. On a bus home from Kinsella's school he began to figure how he would convert to no-till farming field by field. He did not have enough money to phase in the new methods so he went cold turkey, sold his seven-bottom plow and the larger...
...hooked behind teams of oxen and horses and then to crude steam engines. In 1894 Nebraskan Sterling Morton, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, decreed that the great seal of the Department of Agriculture would no longer have a shock of wheat in the center; it would have a shock of corn -- and a plow...
...next years, out beyond the burgeoning urban areas where suburbanites were grilling marbled steaks and roasting sweet corn to perfection, farmers were in economic distress, and they began to experiment with residue management. Surpluses forced millions of acres to lie idle. Plowing was no longer so sacrosanct. Though 60,000 moldboard plows were manufactured in the nation in 1970, the plow was fading. Last year only 6,300 moldboard plows were sold. Today John Deere does not even manufacture the plowshares and bottoms for the few thousand completed plows it sells. Its new world is about tractor- pulled machines called...