Word: soiling
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...result is that within only a few generations, the American soil has bloomed as almost no one believed it could. Even though the U.S. farm population has continued to shrink from one out of every seven job holders to one in only 25 just since World War II-U.S. farmers are still able to produce a harvest out of all proportion to the nation's food needs. Whenever such surpluses hit the market, they obviously caused prices to shoot downward, often to the point of cruel losses to the men who grew the food. To this almost unique...
...prices. But like any other set of rules that artificially tether free markets for a long time, Washington's agricultural policy has promoted distortions. Western farmers, for example, have been paid by the Government to irrigate formerly unusable land that the very next year was placed in a soil conservation program and thus, for still a further price, was held out of production. Subsidies to milk producers are paid on the basis of the butterfat content in their cows' milk, which naturally has encouraged dairy farmers to produce, through the breeding and feeding of cattle, ever richer milk...
...Apollo 17 Astronaut Harrison Schmitt poked around a lunar crater last December, he suddenly shouted, "Hey, there is orange soil! It's all over!" Schmitt's excitement was shared by scientists back on earth. Because the soil looked remarkably fresh and the crater resembled volcanic vents on earth, they speculated that volcanic activity might well have occurred on the moon as recently as 200,000 or 300,000 years ago. That would have upset the widely held view that the moon has been largely dormant for more than 3 billion years. Said NASA Geochemist Robin Brett...
Last week the highly publicized orange soil produced some unexpected disappointment. Using "atomic clock" dating techniques. Dr. Oliver Schaeffer and his lunar-analysis team at the State University of New York at Stony Brook determined that the material was 3.71 billion years old, within the age range of other moon samples that have been brought back to earth. How could scientists have been so far off the mark in their first estimates? Conceding that it was all a "big surprise," Schaeffer theorized that the long-buried soil might have been dug up recently by a meteoroid impact, thus giving...
Greek folklore has it that when God made the earth, he picked out all the stones from the soil, threw them in a pile and called it Greece. For centuries this poverty-plagued country has been the poor stepchild of one foreign power after another, rarely able to pay its bills or manage its economic destiny without the aid of wealthier neighbors. All that is changing now, as the progeny of Herodotus and Homer ride high on one of Europe's least expected booms. Per capita income has climbed to $ 1,200 a year, spurred by an economic growth...