Word: cropped
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...Dallas Times Herald, puts the blame for the rise of onion fraud partly on the Carter Administration: "It started in 1977 when we Georgians descended on Washington and were overheard whispering at embassy receptions, state dinners and Cabinet meetings about suppliers, shipments and prospects for the year's crop. This attracted the attention of gossip columnists and other riffraff. Soon Vidalias were appearing on the shelves of the Georgetown Safeway, the supermarket of the elite where you're embarrassed to shop if you're not wearing tennis togs or jodhpurs, depending on the season...
...Kansas, large brown patches of stubble-studded earth interrupt shimmering golden carpets of ripening winter wheat. In Nebraska, idle center-pivot sprinklers stand like outsize scarecrows over many once verdant cornfields. In California, more than half of the acreage normally devoted to rice lies uncultivated. The cause of the crop cutback is not drought or disaster but a new federal program that rewards farmers, partly in cash and partly in grain and cotton, for taking large tracts of land out of production. Called payment in kind (PIK), the program aims to invigorate the wilted farm economy by reducing bin-busting...
...prompted farmers to remove from production 82.3 million acres of wheat, corn, sorghum, cotton, barley, oats and rice, amounting to 36% of all eligible crop land. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that farmers planted only 60.1 million acres of one major crop, corn, down 27% from last year and the lowest level since 1878. Even with the acreage reductions, however, the nation's winter-wheat crop, planted last September and now in the midst of being harvested, is estimated at 1.94 billion bu., the third best crop ever and down only 8% from last year. Farmers...
...effect. Bush fires have scorched the arid ground in Ghana and Liberia; in Brazil hot winds from the east have made the desiccated ground still dryer. Some 2 million people are seriously undernourished in South Africa; 3 million in Ethiopia are totally dependent on emergency supplies. In India, where crops throughout 75% of the land have been ruined by a dry spell that in one state has lasted five years, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi has had to spend $600 million in precious foreign-exchange reserves for food imports this year alone. Indonesia, which finally achieved self-sufficiency in rice last...
Loans, federal subsidies such as deficiency and disaster payments, and price supports for crops help sodbusters as well as other agricultural producers. Entrepreneurs apply for price supports and, as required by federal law, take 15% to 20% of their cropland out of production. In effect, range plowers break prairie land that may have little agricultural value and collect money for keeping it out of cultivation. Says Bernie Spanogle, district forest ranger at the Pawnee National Grassland in Colorado: "People are farming the federal crop programs, not the land...