Word: crop
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Repeatedly over the 160 years since Nick's family first tilled the land, the river had reached out to destroy the crops. But each time, the family had returned to replant and prosper. This was different. The river, recalls Crystal, "was like something possessed." For weeks now, the Mississippi has occupied their five-bedroom home, its undercurrents "shaking the house apart, ripping away the studs from the siding and Sheetrock," as Nick describes it. Unlike past flash floods, which were over in days, the waters may not recede for four months, and the family may not be able to replant...
...home damage dollar figure they're using in Missouri? "I'm not at liberty to discuss it," says Eric Evans, training officer for the Missouri State Emergency Management Agency. "Not that it's secret. But it's never scientific either, and no one has a scientific number." Estimating crop damage is more accurate because the Department of Agriculture employs aerial observation...
Piling up the bags has been good therapy for people eager to do something to combat the floods while keeping their minds off their losses. "All we can do is sandbag," said John Boerding, 50, who figured that more than half his 2,000-acre crop of soybeans, corn and wheat in St. Charles County had already been destroyed by late last week, and was worried that his home would sink as well. "What else can we do? Most people in this area don't even have flood insurance." But even if there are no outbreaks of disease because...
...there always seems to be a but -- much of the drowned farmland is normally among the most fertile acreage on earth, and prospective crop losses are spectacular: $1.5 billion worth of soybeans in Illinois; $1 billion of corn in Iowa. "There is still time to recover," says Victor Lespinasse, a Dean Witter grain analyst in Chicago. "But none of us is ever going to forget how the rains came in the summer for the first time, out of nowhere. And we will never feel the same about our place on earth." He is referring to the flood's menacing peculiarity...
...Somalia the paradox returns. There is no such thing as just feeding the hungry, if what's keeping them from eating is not crop failure but vandalism and thuggery. One has first to destroy the vandals and the thugs. In a country racked by civil war, what starts with feeding ends with killing. There is no immaculate intervention...