Word: cropland
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...Hawaii of swaying palms and hips that Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain and Jack London described so affectionately. More than 75% of the island is gloriously uninhabited and is likely to remain so. Only 2,650 acres are zoned for resort use, while 242,408 acres are reserved for cropland. Sugar cane is Maui's premier crop, yielding some 200,000 tons of sugar a year, the world's highest per-acre yield; the third biggest crop is pineapple. The second most valuable crop? Pakalalo, a.k.a. marijuana. Grown illicitly, of course, in rain forests and cane fields that...
...tough flat-sided skin that is ideal for both picking by machine and packing for shipment without bruising; it has become the standard tomato for canning. Now agrono mists are close to developing a tomato resistant to the salt that settles in irrigated fields or is blown onto cropland by sea breezes. One researcher quips: "I don't think we'll ever be satisfied until we've got a tomato that can be grown on the moon and whistles Yankee Doodle Dandy. "In general, the greatest problems concerning agricultural technology seem to be whether farmers can keep up with...
...lowest 20% receives 5%. In the rural areas, this is reflected in the concentration of land ownership. According to a survey by the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization, the wealthiest 20% of the land owners in most developing countries own between 50% and 60% of the cropland. The roughly 100 million small farms in the developing world-those less than 5 hectares-are concentrated on only 20% of the cropland. It is little wonder that national economic growth itself has had less than optimum effect on the fertility patterns of the vast mass of the population...
...trend toward monopolization of the nation's grocery markets by a few chains is matched by the domination of cropland by a few large, diversified companies, such as Tenneco, Bank of America, Dow Chemical, and Coca Cola. In California, 77 per cent of the agricultural land is controlled by 7 per cent of the growers, who employ 79 per cent of the state's farmworkers...
...there is a middle way, one now being tested in Suffolk County on the eastern end of Long Island. Famous for the Hamptons, a string of summer resort communities along the Atlantic Ocean beaches, Suffolk has 40,000 acres of cropland that has made it the most productive farm county in New York State. The land is also perfect for developers-pancake flat and on the edge of the sprawling metropolitan area formed by New York City and its neighboring Nassau County suburbs. To keep the developers from obliterating Suffolk's rural character, the citizens of the county have...