Word: plowed
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...land of the Great Plains cannot support commercial exploitation. With less than 20 inches of precipitation a year, the region is semiarid. These marginal soils, where they are not too rocky or saline, are often too sandy for farming or are packed with calcium and lime. When overturned by plow blades, valuable topsoil only a few inches thick becomes vulnerable to wind and rain erosion; once gone, it takes decades to replace. The sodbusters are either big operators who buy land and plow on a major scale, or small ranchers who break their own land for a quick cash...
Sodbusters buy rangeland at prices that are relatively low because of today's depressed livestock industry, plow and plant the acreage in wheat, then sell the cultivated land, sometimes to buyers unfamiliar with the region and the fragility of the range's topsoil. Since the mid-1970s, planted prairie tracts have shot up in value because of speculation in cropland as an inflation hedge and federal farm programs such as PIK (payment in kind...
...seasons began by breaking down time into usable units: a time to plow, a time to sow, a time to reap. Distinctly, intensely different periods of the year calibrated time and made it manageable. They enforced disciplines. Now, people often create their own units of usable time without such explicit reference to the external seasons. There are the business seasons and the school seasons. There are model years for cars and fiscal years for budgets. Those man-made schedules are wheels within the abiding great wheel, less noticed now, of the calendar...
More substantive complaints are directed not at the logistics, but the philosophy of seeking outside funding for student groups. Several undergraduate minority leaders argue that groups should not have to plow through the red tape but should instead receive a guarantee in favor of lump-sum funding Ting notes that whenever his group undertakes a project. "I worry all the time if it is economically feasible...
Miroslaw Macierzynski, 30, is a farmer in a village 45 miles south of Warsaw. On his twelve-acre farm he grows potatoes, wheat and fodder for his three milk cows and two plow horses. He would rather move to the city and get a job as a mason, but his wife Ewa thinks the country life is better for their two sons...