Word: corns
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...small patch of prairie last week, Greenfield, Iowa, graduated its 100th high school class. From a fragile start, the procession has gone through 99 years of corn crops, Presidents, wars, droughts, babies and blizzards. Six girls formed the senior class of 1883. They stood up for their diplomas in the Greenfield opera house on a June night. Greenfield was still tentative then, with wooden buildings, dirt streets and the scuffed look of any human habitation that dares stand before the scouring west wind. "A land without echoes or shadow," wrote John Madson in his evocative new book, Where...
...reform program begun two years ago. It is planting time at El Canadá, but the cooperative has been unable to obtain credit to buy seed and fertilizer. The fields are fallow, the oxen idle. No one has yet received a day's pay. Unless the tomato and corn crops are planted in the next week or two, there will be no harvest this year...
...just go back to dry-land farming." To the farmers of the Great Plains, those words summon up visions of The Grapes of Wrath. Dry-land farming means larger farms with lower yields, fewer workers and probably higher prices in the supermarkets. Cattlemen know that less water means less corn and therefore smaller herds. Grubb calls such farming the "Russian roulette" of agriculture. Over a ten-year period, he says, dry-land farming will yield two strong harvests, four average ones and four "busts...
Conservation may forestall the end. Farmers can simply use less water. They are already converting from profitable but water-thirsty corn to water-thrifty crops such as wheat, sorghum and cotton. James Mitchell, a cotton farmer from Wolfforth, Texas, has installed an experimental center-pivot sprinkler that, instead of spraying outward, gently drops water directly into the planted furrows, thereby reducing evaporation. Sophisticated laser-guided land graders can now almost perfectly flatten the terrain so that water is not wasted in runoff. Electrodes planted in the fields can measure soil wetness and determine exactly when water is needed. Today, these...
Asked to make sense of Pharaoh's dreams about fat and lean cows and plump and withered ears of corn, Joseph took them as signs of coming events. The Book of Genesis records his forecast: "Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt. And there shall arise after them seven years of famine." Pharaoh was so pleased to get a fix on the future that he made Joseph the ruler of Egypt. If Joseph materialized now, politics would make it hard for him to get his old job back, but with his proven...