Word: soils
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...yardsticks of common sense, the promise of a bumper harvest ought to measure up as an unmixed blessing. But in the U.S. of 1957, the soil's abundance has become a costly national problem that turns values topsy-turvy, makes good crop weather seem a national calamity and drought a boon. In a year of bountiful crops, the Agriculture Department will spend a record $5 billion, largely in an effort to cope with surpluses. Instead of going to markets, countless tons of the wheat, corn and cotton harvested last week will swell the $5.5 billion worth of farm surpluses...
...keep high price supports from boosting surpluses, the Government imposes acreage allotments on farmers who ask for supports.* Last year, in a further effort to hold down surpluses, Congress passed a soil-bank program to pay farm ers for taking acreage out of production. But the technological explosion makes such curbs futile. Last year, with strict acreage and marketing controls in effect, millions of acres in the soil bank and a severe drought pinching the Southwest, technology-armed U.S. farmers matched the biggest total harvest they had ever known. On land diverted from corn and wheat under acreage allotments, farmers...
...will have to pay a penalty of 18½? per Ib. for growing cotton without an allotment. But even if the penalty amounts to $800,000 as it may, Farmer Harris will feel no pain. A fair-to-middling crop will likely yield him $1,200,000, plus his soil bank payments, or a profit of $600,000. Harris also has a 2,000-acre cotton patch near Fresno and a 1,000-acre field near Phoenix, both eligible for full price supports...
Taxpayers' Loss. Washington officials admitted last week that cotton-picking Jack Harris was not alone in picking the soil bank clean. So many other big-acreage cotton farmers are growing penalty cotton that the Agriculture Department long ago gave up any attempt to count them. Rather than cutting cotton surpluses through the soil bank, Harris had made the cotton surplus considerably worse. The 9,000 to 13,500 bales of cotton that he will grow on his new farm will take away the market for an equivalent amount of other cotton grown in compliance with the rules. This other...
Jews on Madagascar. The British too began their period of desperate farce. Survivors of an early Commando raid on the French coast on June 25 could not regain foothold on British soil for some hours because the heroes could not establish their identity with the authorities at Folkestone harbor...