Word: corns
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...wealth of the tall grass prairie was its undoing," writes Author John Madson, of Godfrey, Ill., in Where the Sky Began, his evocative story of the fecund heartland. Nearly a year's production of corn lies unused in bins and warehouses. A quarter of a year of soybeans is stored up. The Western plains are piled with a year's worth of surplus wheat. The harvest of the new wheat crop is almost finished, and it is a whopper: 2.2 billion bu. Providence seems to be pushing us toward some rendezvous with disaster. The Corn Belt is like John Bunyan...
...Illinois, as they take last year's crop out of elevators and silos to make way for the new harvest, they are building corn mountains on the ground in a desperate rush against nature's inexorable deadlines. Melvin Bell of Deer Creek stands these days and watches as his old corn is sprayed in a giant stream 40 ft. into the air to shower down and create another glowing peak that can be seen for miles across the tableland. "They say McDonald's has the Golden Arches," he chuckles. "We do better." Storing corn outdoors is risky. Bell lays down...
...land in the U.S. can grow so much corn as this area of central Illinois. Herman Warsaw, the national corn-growing champ from Saybrook, took a 30-acre plot of ground that produced 38 bu. per acre in 1941 and tended it so exquisitely that last year it yielded 370 bu. per acre. The Government cuts down acreage, and farmers, fighting honorably for position in capitalism's markets, devise new fertilizers and hybrids and with God's help do better and better on less and less land...
...need new markets," insists Ed Laskowski, who farms in Carlock. He wants to see the Federal Government launch a more aggressive export policy and help develop more acceptance in the U.S. for corn sweeteners and gasohol. Meanwhile, like his neighbors, Laskowski is readying his combine with mounting excitement, replacing chains and belts, building up the snapping rolls on the combine's headers, which grab and chew up the cornstalks and separate the ears. When the weather is good, Ed will work into the night; his wife Judy will sometimes climb up in the cab with him, and they will nibble...
...quality of its schools and public services? Not yet, he insists. Adversity brought determination, and Mount Ayr shows a better spirit now than a year ago. Yet half of the county's people could now be below the Government's poverty line. "We can't continue to produce corn and soybeans like this," says Smith. "The Government can't be the final buyer of all the produce." Farmers know this too, but they are so swept up in the choreography of the harvest that they cannot dwell on the clouds of melancholy that dim the summer sunlight...