Word: plows
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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After 150 years, John Deere's steel plow is fading into history...
...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...
...knows," a young Harry Truman wrote to his future wife Bess, "maybe I'll be like Cincinnatus and be elected constable someday." The ideal of the noble citizen reluctantly laying down his plow to spend a few years cleaning up his government is deeply appealing to most Americans, especially now during this open season on professional politicians. Such sentiments account for the burst of enthusiasm greeting Ross Perot and for the best-sellerdom that inevitably awaits David McCullough's loving and richly detailed megabiography of Truman...