Word: musts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...successful farmer today must understand enough engineering and science to participate in a technological upheaval that is changing the very shape of the land and the nature of his crops. Says Lawrence Rappaport, chairman of the department of vegetable crops at the University of California at Davis: "Agriculture is now in perpetual revolution, and there is no end in sight." People flying over the West and Midwest see an unusual pattern on the terrain below: not the familiar farm land with checkerboard squares, but large polka dots, the result of costly ($50,000 each) center-pivot irrigation machines that automatically...
...sure, epicures complain rightly that the bland taste of American fruits and vegetables cannot compare with the flavor of much produce delivered to European tables. In the U.S., food must be refrigerated, preserved and shipped across continental distances, and the varieties suitable to mechanical planting and harvesting often are not as tasty as those cultivated lovingly by hand (some people cannot discover any taste at all in cloned strawberries). But agricultural mass production has a benefit more important to most people: it keeps costs down. High as retail food prices have gone, food accounts for only 23% of all private...
...industry as vertical integration. Like other growers, he resented having to take his beets for milling to the nearby American Crystal Sugar Co. plant. One reason: the company's officers, then based in Denver, insisted on shutting down the mills on weekends, even during 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...
...kids should choose to leave the farm, where is the next generation of Pat Benedicts to come from? That is perhaps the most important question in American agriculture. High interest rates, soaring prices for land, machinery, fertilizer and pesticides, and the very fact that farmers must operate on a large scale to be fairly confident of regular profit, make it difficult for operators of small- and medium-sized farms to expand and even tougher for young farmers to get started...
...really are and that there must be some kind of overall pattern for the world. I think when you get right down to it there's a closeness to God that farmers feel." But will Sons Mike, 19, and Gary, 18, share his beliefs? Says their mother Viola: "All I can tell you is what I hear them say: 'Mom and Dad don't get to go anywhere. The farm is their whole life...