Word: droughts
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Harvest 1977 has been a time of paradox for American farmers: a season of too much and too little. In the Northwest and parts of the Midwest and central California, many grain growers were staggering under the effects of the worst drought in decades (see map page 18). Yet in most of the rich cornfields of the Central U.S. and the sweeping grain belt of the Great Plains, the rain came when it was needed. The land responded generously-and now Jimmy Carter's Administration is grappling with the problem of what to do with the immense bounty...
...most mammoth blaze along the West Coast is in the Los Padres National Forest, just east of California's lovely Big Sur. Roaring on for two weeks, the inferno has consumed 92,200 acres, feeding on miles and miles of vegetation turned bone-dry by a two-year drought. A Forest Service official says the energy ignited in every 1,000 acres of the compacted underbrush is equivalent to that of the "bomb dropped on Hiroshima...
Though the dry spell has made two out of every three Western communities eligible for federal emergency drought funds, it has barely hurt California agriculture (except for wheat and cattle farms), which uses up to 85% of the water in the nation's leading agricultural state. This year's farm output is expected to be normal-around $8.9 billion-despite a second straight year of drought...
California has long employed all manner of drought technology, which enables its farms to flourish. It has built a strong $10 billion system of dams, canals, reservoirs and other tributaries. More important, it has pioneered in new agritech-nologies that carefully ration water. Many California farms use irrigation-scheduling programs, which parcel out the least amount of water necessary to produce optimum yields. So-called SWAP technicians, who rely on computers to analyze soil, water, atmosphere and plant conditions weekly or semiweekly, can tell a farmer how much moisture to use for up to 60 days...
While these technologies beat praying for rain, they may not be enough to save the crops if the drought continues another year. Says Chuck Shoemaker of the California water department: "It's a little like rolling dice or cutting cards. The odds were very long against having two years in a row like this. They're just the same against three years...