Word: graining
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...navy, though the world's third largest, is equally antiquated: its two nuclear-powered submarines carry no missiles. In a major conflict, little advantage could be gained from hundreds of bomb shelters carved out all over China on Mao's command to "dig tunnels deep, store grain everywhere, and never seek hegemony." China's ability to fight off even a limited Soviet thrust is questionable. Indeed, if China buys modern weapons from Europe, or possibly the U.S., the 190 divisions of the People's Liberation Army may have to wait a long time to be outfitted...
...food supply is produced by corporate farmers and by contract. The American Agriculture Marketing Association predicts that by 1985 corporations will control 75 per cent of our food supply in one of these two ways. And even the USDA admitted in a 1973 report that only cash grain and forage crops, and range livestock will be controlled by independent family farmers in 1985. Pat Benedict, a wheat farmer, is the exception, not the rule...
...refused to buy part of his crop when he judged the price to be right, but told him to wait several weeks while they worked out storage and transport snarls. Benedict got nine other growers together to put up $1.5 million, buy an elevator and incorporate it as Northern Grain...
While these investments have made him a genuine corporate executive, Benedict looks on them merely as extensions of his farm. Says he: "I just wanted to sell grain and beets exactly when it best suited my own operation. The market is so crazy these days that if you can't get access to the price you want the moment it is offered, you might as well give up. Eliminate uncertainties, that's the golden rule. You eliminate uncertainties in production through technology and very careful management. You eliminate uncertainties in price by controlling the marketing as much...
...philosophy comes from, of all people, David Garst, 52, the ruler of a family agribusiness empire big enough to make him a prairie Rockefeller. Based in Coon Rapids, Iowa, the business includes 8,000 acres on which the Garsts raise seed corn and breeding cattle, as well as a grain-elevator and storage operation, machinery manufacturing, the preparation and sale of agricultural chemicals, five banks and an insurance company. The Garst assets, which are divided among David, one brother, three sisters and their children, probably total more than $50 million. But as a supplier to farmers, Garst sees agriculture from...