Word: farmers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...been expanding ever since he joined his father Edwin, now 67 and retired, as a full-time farmer in 1951 after two years at Moorhead (Minn.) State University. The Benedict family, originally from France (the first known ancestor came to colonial America after a stopover in England in the early 1700s), has been farming since Pat's great-grandfather moved to Minnesota from Wisconsin shortly after the Civil War. During the Depression the homestead shrank from 1,000 acres to 400 and father Edwin had to hunt partridges to help feed the family. But post-World War II prosperity enabled...
...harvest time when beets must be ground up quickly before they rot. Recalls Pat: "We were at the mercy of people a thousand miles away who just were not concerned with our needs." So Benedict, as a director of the Red River Valley Sugarbeet Growers Association, organized 1,600 farmers to put up $20 million in cash, borrow another $47 million and buy out the company. Now they run the mills, sell sugar directly to industrial users and have access to a company computer that provides each farmer-investor with a detailed analysis of his beet fields for the past...
...wife Fran, 43, is somewhat in the background; the Benedict family is a decided patriarchy. A farmer's daughter, she worked as a stewardess for Braniff Airlines and met Pat during a layover in Fargo, N. Dak.; a sister of Pat's who worked at the hotel where Fran stayed introduced them. Fran is the secretary of Benedict Farms and does the bookkeeping. During planting and harvesting seasons she also runs the farm's communications network, relaying messages by private FM radio band between Pat's pickup truck, the other machines in the fields and the outside world?meanwhile whipping...
Iowa's David Garst, one of the biggest U.S. farmer-businessmen (see box), argues that a young farmer can still get started if he is willing to rent land at first, buy used instead of. new machinery, and take a part-time job off the farm to supplement his income in the early years. But that requires a devotion to back-breaking labor and to the rural life that even many youths raised on farms no longer display...
Researchers are talking about having computers monitor the internal workings of cattle, so that farmers could calculate better how to fatten them. The computers could read radio-telemetry signals on body temperature, heartbeat and respiration rates from transmitters swallowed by the cows or carried on backpacks. Already, an electronic entrepreneur named Marvin Marshall tours the dairylands of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Ohio in a Ford Econoline van packed with IBM computer equipment. In two hours he will analyze a farmer's dairy cows and whip out a formula for feed calculated to permit each beast to produce the maximum amount...