Word: farmers
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...hosts surely needed the cheering up. America's 2.4 million farmers are struggling to survive the worst slump since the Depression, caught in a vise of rising costs and falling prices. Though they are expected to chalk up near record crops of wheat (73.8 million metric tons) and corn (208 million metric tons) this year, the silo-busting harvests will only push low prices even lower. Since 1975, as farm expenses have nearly doubled (from $75.9 billion to $141.5 billion), net farm income has fallen. Profits, which declined from $32.7 billion in 1979 to $22.9 billion last year...
...Fernando Ed, 35, paced in the balmy California night air and totted up the rewards of being a successful farmer. They included two Porsches, a Datsun, three four-wheel-drive pickup trucks, a redwood home perched on a hilltop in Northern California, a three-bedroom house with an outdoor Jacuzzi near the beach in Los Angeles and a custom-built vacation hideaway in Hawaii. Then he opened up a plastic bag and pinched out a sample of the crop that has made his fortune of nearly $1 million: marijuana...
...even tip off planters to impending law-enforcement raids. In many states, the penalties meted out for growing grass often amount to little more than a wrist slap anyway. Even with stiffer sentencing, enforcement would remain difficult. Growers have become adept at hiding pot patches from airborne police. One farmer in Kentucky is growing plants on flatbeds that he can wheel into the barn at the first buzz of a light plane. Other growers protect their crops with armed guards, attack dogs, pit traps studded with sharpened sticks and trip wires attached to crossbows. Farmers say the measures are taken...
Robberies are also on the rise, and fear has been increasing among the country's 170,000 whites (reduced by emigration from 212,000 27 months ago) in the wake of the killing two months ago of Farmer Brian Dawe. He was hit by a burst of gunfire while quietly watching television with his wife and three children at his remote farmhouse...
...Administration is not entirely to blame for the situation. The divisions in the N.A.A.C.P. reflect the weakness of the civil rights movement in general. Many of the groups that were led by pioneers of the movement-Martin Luther King's S.C.L.C., Stokely Carmichael's S.N.C.C., James Farmer's CORE-either exist no longer or are ineffective splinter groups. Despite its size and visibility, the N.A.A.C.P. is losing out as a focus of black organizational efforts to such specialized groups as the National Association of Black Accountants and the National Association of Minority County Officials...