Word: cropped
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Half an hour later, Charles Baker Shuman was standing in a jungle of cornstalks that towered four feet above his 5-ft. 11½-in. frame, and would tickle a 20/20 elephant eye. Beyond the corn, a new crop of tomatoes was ripening; the cattle were fattening nicely; the flower garden was a colorplate right out of Burpee's seed catalogue. For Farmer Shuman, walking the rich brown soil and caressing its bounty last weekend, God was in his heaven-even if all, as usual, was far from right with the world...
...Tide of Plenty. That lesson has never been more conclusively demonstrated than in the summer of 1965. This month and next, despite three decades of heroic federal efforts to limit the land's insistent bounty, farmers from ocean to ocean and border to border will harvest the largest crop in the nation's history-1.4 billion bu. of wheat, up 7% from last year; 4.1 billion bu. of corn, up 15% ; 961 million bu. of oats, up 9% ; 624 million bu. of grain sorghum, up 27% ; 120 million tons of hay, up 3% ; 864 million bu. of soybeans...
...decades. In the past 50 years, agriculture has advanced faster and farther in the U.S. than in any other country in the entire previous history of the world. Today, one man-hour of farm labor yields more than five times as much food as it did in 1920. Crop production is 70% higher per acre; output per breeding animal has doubled. The productivity of the U.S. farm worker has shot up 7.7% since the 1950s, compared with only a 2.8% rise for industrial workers. The farm worker who fed twelve people in 1945 feeds 32 today...
Shuman's disappointment was even keener because he felt that Johnson was throwing away a rare opportunity to move toward a freer market. His reasoning: the record 1965 crop was already a virtual certainty, and only proved again that the present control system was unworkable in reducing production. Thus, he figured, Johnson could afford to experiment with fewer controls and if it did not work out, could not be held accountable at the polls for not having made an honest effort to solve the farm problem...
...sale was one more sign of the sorry state of Communist agriculture. This year, the Soviets said, it was a case of too much rain in Central Russia and too little in the Caucasus and Kazakhstan's much-touted "virgin lands." The result will be a 1965 wheat crop of 2 billion bu., compared with a 1958-62 average of 2.5 billion bu. To meet growing demands within both Russia and the satellite countries, the Soviets have bought 330 million bu. of wheat in the world market since June, including 80 million bu. from Argentina...