Word: cropped
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Burdened by some $300,000 in debt brought on by rising costs and falling crop prices, L.D. Hill saw no other way out. His 705-acre Georgia farm had been foreclosed, and was to be auctioned off. Minutes before the sale was to begin one morning last winter, Hill shot himself to death, evidently hoping that his life insurance would enable his wife Annabel to save the property. But his life insurance money did not go nearly far enough to save the property, and the auction sale was rescheduled for last week. Help came from an unexpected source: New York...
...California vintners, late summer is usually a time for crushing grapes after the harvest. But at several of the state's wineries, some of this year's crop may rot rather than become a hearty vintage. A strike by the Distillery, Wine & Allied Workers' International Union that began on Aug. 18 and soon curtailed production at six locations spread to three new sites last week, as workers began picketing the Charles Krug plant in Napa Valley, the Gibson winery in the Central Valley and Almaden in San Jose. Union leaders are threatening to strike at E. & J. Gallo, the industry...
...these tawny September days, irony builds within irony. Personal suffering among farmers is most intense in the Southeast, where they have lost $2 billion in crops and livestock. The rains needed for the red clay failed to fall three out of the past six years. In July the unrelenting heat went to 105 degrees, then 107 degrees. Mockery came in the past few weeks when the heavens relented, bringing floods followed by crabgrass. Southern fields look green, but the corn leaves are twisted in knots, the peanut crop has shriveled...
...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's idyllic Beulah -- or a dark Gehenna. Corn is king in the U.S., a $25 billion business that occupies one-quarter...
...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...