Word: harvests
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...Start your engines, gentlemen," Carey could pen to an army of Anderzhons deployed from the Oregon plateau to the piedmont of the Carolinas. The visceral roar of the nation's 640,000 combines, were they all gathered in one spot for the harvest assault, would dwarf the sound of Patton's tanks pushing toward Bastogne. Yet the only violence would be to cornstalks and soybean plants, and in that death is life. "The thing about farming," writes Carey "is it's so easy, half of it is learning to kill...
...American harvest is the gargantuan creation of strong men and women, hard work, ingenuity. But this year's harvest is bittersweet. In the drought- stricken Southeast, there is not enough: fields are burned, stunted. Almost everywhere else, too much: glut, a beautiful curse costing $25.5 billion for price supports and subsidies. Wherever one looks, American agriculture, the very rock on which the nation stands, is in some kind of trouble...
...Where the Sky Began, his evocative story of the fecund heartland. Nearly a year's production of corn lies unused in bins and warehouses. A quarter of a year of soybeans is stored up. The Western plains are piled with a year's worth of surplus wheat. The harvest of the new wheat crop is almost finished, and it is a whopper: 2.2 billion bu. Providence seems to be pushing us toward some rendezvous with disaster. The Corn Belt is like John Bunyan's idyllic Beulah -- or a dark Gehenna. Corn is king in the U.S., a $25 billion business...
...Illinois, as they take last year's crop out of elevators and silos to make way for the new harvest, they are building corn mountains on the ground in a desperate rush against nature's inexorable deadlines. Melvin Bell of Deer Creek stands these days and watches as his old corn is sprayed in a giant stream 40 ft. into the air to shower down and create another glowing peak that can be seen for miles across the tableland. "They say McDonald's has the Golden Arches," he chuckles. "We do better." Storing corn outdoors is risky. Bell lays down...
Farmers are not the only ones who understand the joys of the harvest festival. A whole rural culture extracts its lifeblood from the ritual of renewal, no place more than Iowa, the most agricultural of American states. Teachers, merchants, veterinarians and mechanics from the small towns link the farmers and help orchestrate community life. For the moment, some of the small towns are in more distress than the farmers. The Government provides no subsidy for grocers and drygoods merchants. Publisher Alan Smith, of Mount Ayr, Iowa, (pop. 1,900) used to run two-thirds of a page of delinquent taxes...