Word: plowing
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After 150 years, John Deere's steel plow is fading into history...
...1930s farmers had made plowing an art form and were competing in county fairs. Herb Plambeck, an enterprising farm reporter and colleague of Ronald Reagan's at Des Moines' station WHO, brought the contestants together in a national match that thrust plowing into power politics. In 1948 Harry Truman headed for Dexter, Iowa, where 100,000 people had come to witness the meet. Truman gave the 80th Congress hell, delightedly kicked some newly turned clods of earth as if they were Republicans, and came away with a huge grin, convinced that the reception he got from the dirt farmers meant...
...next years, out beyond the burgeoning urban areas where suburbanites were grilling marbled steaks and roasting sweet corn to perfection, farmers were in economic distress, and they began to experiment with residue management. Surpluses forced millions of acres to lie idle. Plowing was no longer so sacrosanct. Though 60,000 moldboard plows were manufactured in the nation in 1970, the plow was fading. Last year only 6,300 moldboard plows were sold. Today John Deere does not even manufacture the plowshares and bottoms for the few thousand completed plows it sells. Its new world is about tractor- pulled machines called...
...romance of the plow will endure in memory. It is too great a legend to lose. Besides, some land will still need plowing. Down Highway 70 below Bowling Green near tiny Frenchtown, Bill Goettemoeller's family feeds 1,000 head of cattle, and it is necessary to plow in the manure and straw from the feedlots, though even the Goettemoellers plow only about half as much land as they used...
...love of plowing is in the Goettemoeller genes. Old Lou, the patriarch now dead, started plowing with horses and was a national champion in 1956 and '57. One of his small hand plows decorates the mailbox of his son Bill, 55, who was a national winner along with his brother Jim. Every spring when the weather mellows, Bill feels the pull of the land and the urge to put his hand to a plow. "There is nothing I'd rather do than plow," he says. "My father used to say, 'A good plowman is a good farmer...