Word: soiling
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...today's fast-buck standards, farming is a sucker bet. The risks greatly outweigh the rewards, unless, like Bauer, you count looking up from your chores to watch a flight of geese or down at some of the richest soil in the world. According to Sally's accounting, the year Rhodes hung around was so-so: the family netted $19,000 on a gross income...
...measure he found what he wanted. Florida accounts for around 40% of the sugarcane grown in the U.S., and producers there have been using West Indian cutters for more than 45 years. Mechanical harvesting would be much less expensive, but there are substantial areas in the state where the soil is too fragile to bear the ravages of machinery. So the brunt of cost consciousness falls on the cutters, who invariably take their lumps. They are routinely cheated of some time spent in the fields. They are expected to cut and stack one ton of cane an hour. Those...
...most of the roughly 8,000 families that heeded the government's call between 1970 and 1974, the dream turned into a bitter disappointment. The soil, unlike the rich sod in the Western U.S., was so poor that crop yields began to deteriorate badly after three or four years. Most settlers eventually gave up and left...
...instance, was supposed to be a model settlement village with gravel roads, schools and health clinics. But when a surge of migrants traveled down BR-364 to Machadinho in 1985, orderly development became a pell- mell land grab. Settlers encountered the familiar scourges of the rain forest: poor soil and inescapable mosquito-borne disease. Decio Fujizaki, a settler who came west four years ago, has just contracted malaria for the umpteenth time. Says he: "I always wanted my own plot of land. If only it wasn't for this wretched disease...
Instead of model settlements, the Polonoroeste project has produced impoverished itinerants. Settlers grow rice, corn, coffee and manioc for a few years until the meager soil is exhausted, then move deeper into the forest to clear new land. The farming and burning thus become a perpetual cycle of depredation. Thousands of pioneers give up on farming altogether and migrate to the Amazon's new cities to find work. For many the net effect of the attempt to colonize Rondonia has been a shift from urban slums to Amazonian slums. Says Donald Sawyer, a demographer from the University of Minas Gerais...