Word: farmers
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They may also have to help out Nebraska's first-term Governor Charles Thone, 58, a colorless conservative who barely campaigned for this month's primaries and who claims this race is his last. Thone, apparently underestimating the backlash among the state's financially strapped farmers, drew only 62% of the G.O.P. vote against two challengers. Farmer Stan DeBoer, a founder of the American Agriculture Movement, captured 31% of the Republican votes, criticizing Thone for his support of Reagan's farm and economic policies. On the Democratic side, a political novice, Robert Kerrey, 38, swept...
...Brookfield, the chairman of the board of selectmen is Dairy Farmer Charles Keeler. His phone is still listed. Standing in his barnyard, a seasonal bog, he says, "You can plow snow, but not mud. There's not much you can do about mud except wait for it to go away. The only thing to do is add gravel-18 inches is a pretty good surface-but mud season occurs before the town gravel pit melts...
...above the Wilders' house, on Bear Hill Road, Farmer Gaylen Brown is setting out to collect, from 1,000 buckets, the last of the maple sap. He pauses to bulldoze a passer-by out of the bottomless depths across from his house. The Browns have farmed these 175 acres for almost 70 years. His daughter Theresa, 19, and son Willis, 20, are the fourth generation of Browns on the place. "Mud season's not so bad as it used to be," says Brown. "We used to have to hitch up the horses to the wagon and draw...
...When the water goes," says W.E. Medlock, a stoic, third-generation farmer from Lubbock, Texas, who has lost 47 of his 73 wells in ten years, "we'll just go back to dry-land farming." To the farmers of the Great Plains, those words summon up visions of The Grapes of Wrath. Dry-land farming means larger farms with lower yields, fewer workers and probably higher prices in the supermarkets. Cattlemen know that less water means less corn and therefore smaller herds. Grubb calls such farming the "Russian roulette" of agriculture. Over a ten-year period, he says...
Conservation may forestall the end. Farmers can simply use less water. They are already converting from profitable but water-thirsty corn to water-thrifty crops such as wheat, sorghum and cotton. James Mitchell, a cotton farmer from Wolfforth, Texas, has installed an experimental center-pivot sprinkler that, instead of spraying outward, gently drops water directly into the planted furrows, thereby reducing evaporation. Sophisticated laser-guided land graders can now almost perfectly flatten the terrain so that water is not wasted in runoff. Electrodes planted in the fields can measure soil wetness and determine exactly when water is needed. Today, these...