Word: farming
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...well-watered San Joaquin Valley, where vast orchards and fields seemed magically alive with grapes, potatoes, peaches, cotton. Those were the bad years, and the Okies-300,000 of them-were hungry for work. Desolate, they moved from harvest to harvest-scrounging food for emaciated children, bedding down in farm shacks or U.S. Government emergency camps, harried by highway patrolmen and sheriffs' deputies-to become a symbol in fact and fiction of the desperate injustices wrought by drought and Depression...
...everywhere, there were big men among the Okies who seized opportunity in the midst of discouragement. Burly (6 ft. 3 in., 300 Ibs.), booming Hollis B. Roberts was one. Wiped out after five struggling years in the Texas dust bowl, Roberts sold his runty cattle, his house and farm equipment, bought a 1929 Chevy on credit, and with $75 in his jeans, started out for California. In Yuma, Ariz, he joined other stranded Okies who had run out of cash, cadged a job pitching hay at $2.70 a day. In return for milking his landlord's cows every morning...
Water & Power. Little by little, Hollis Roberts added to his acreage until he quit his oilfield job for the farm full time. "If you want to start over, we'll start over," said his wife Manon. "If your heart's set on farming, you go right ahead." Every month he sent his Texas banker a $22 installment to pay off his Chevy loan. The cotton-gin owners liked him and staked him, and Roberts surged ahead. Today Cotton Rancher Roberts, with 7,000 acres, half owned, half leased, lives with his wife and two daughters...
...class of government managers and engineers was blown from desks and dachas to the four corners of the Siberian steppes, Khrushchev roared off for his old corn-belt stamping grounds to deal with Soviet Russia's biggest worry: the farm problem...
...must grow cabbage as my grandmother did," he lectured cloth-capped peasants. He admitted that his plans for planting corn ("sausage on the stalk") had not panned out so well everywhere. "If you cannot catch the bird of paradise," he advised, "better take a wet hen." Bidding for the farm vote, he promised the collectivists lower taxes and an end to compulsory delivery to the state from their private plots, then crowed: "Within the next few years, we shall catch up with the U.S. in per-capita production of meat, milk and butter...