Word: cornes
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...middle of the U.S., in the heart of Illinois, in the depths of Herb Steffen's 220 acres of ripe corn, everything seems plainly abundant. The sunny September sky is as wide and weightless as the fields' earthen smells are dark and sweet. Bugs buzz in and out of earshot and the perfectly golden stalks rustle in the breezes, but the quiet, like everything else, still seems pure and plentiful...
This week and last, in Illinois and elsewhere, the harvest intruded on that lush prairie silence. Sitting in a cab 9 ft. above ground, Steffen steered his rumbling 1970 John Deere combine up and down the quarter-mile-long rows. Each ear of corn was picked, shucked and stripped of its hard kernels, and its denuded cob spat back into the field. Steffen, whose 420-acre farm is near Cropsey (pop. 90), thinks he is harvesting his best crops ever: perhaps 25,000 bu. of corn, 9,000 of soybeans. But that is not really good news. "If it goes...
...appears, too good for their own good. Three straight years of bumper crops have created enormous surpluses and pushed prices for the major crops lower than they have been in at least a decade, often below the cost of production. The year's expected harvests of corn (8.3 billion bu.), wheat (2.8 billion bu.) and soybeans (2.3 billion bu.) will be the largest in history, and yet U.S. farm income will be the smallest in real dollars since Depression-ravaged...
Other farmers face much more risk, but they too can avoid flat-out failure by falling into Government safety nets. Steffen, for instance, took out a $19,500 federal loan last spring, using his corn crop as collateral. Back then the collateral was appraised by Washington at $3.15 per bu.; today Steffen's local grain elevator is paying just $1.99 for corn. Steffen may default on the loan, effectively selling his corn to the U.S. Government for a dollar more than anyone else would pay for it. Tens of thousands of farmers are expected to do the same this...
...Jill Supermarket in 1979, has watched sales droop 15%. Says Vernon Waterman of the farm-implement business he runs with his wife Margaret: "I'm surviving on service, but losing money every day. I'm barely in business, and it won't get any better until corn and soybean prices get better...