Word: lande
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Meantime, Seaboard failed to invest in upgrading its sewage-pretreatment facility. As a result, its waste began to overwhelm the city's municipal treatment plant. The city normally placed its treated sludge on soybean cropland, but by the second summer, city officials were in search of more land. As Sparks recalls, "We had so much sludge accumulation that...we had to go out in the middle of the summer, buy a crop [for $36,000] and plow it under because our storage capacity was exceeded...
...thought we were at the point that we could retire. And, of course, the rhetoric from Seaboard is, 'Well, my goodness, your land, your home, it's worth more than you ever dreamed because of us coming in next to you...' Our kids couldn't sell this if they needed the money to bury us with. It's just devaluated to nothing as far as the market's concerned...
...story is much the same for Vancy Elliott and her husband Delmer, who live about three miles from Guymon and whose land abuts a Seaboard hog farm. "We have to put flytraps out in the summer," says Elliott. "But we even have flies occasionally in the winter now, and we've never had that before. Rats and mice are a real problem because they have so many pigs that are dying...
Many people in rural America, just getting by, still depend on hunting for meat to fill the freezer. But mostly the country buys its meat in cling-wrap packages at Safeway and Winn-Dixie. "We've lost our connection to the land and the outside world," says Jerry DeBin, Alabama's coordinator of conservation education. "Most people don't even notice which way the wind is blowing today. The squirrel or deer may be eating more today because a change in the weather is coming, but we don't pay attention to these things anymore...
...Shepards live for hunting. Karolyn's family has been here in this valley since the 1700s. Her father was born in the farmhouse in 1908 and worked the land and enjoyed its venison steaks, sausages, chilis, stews, until he died in the house 88 years later. Now Glenn and his older brother, Daryl, off at college at the moment, are being reared as hunters. When Karolyn says, "This is our heritage," she speaks literally...