Word: topsoil
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...here it was, during the drought and depression years of the '30s, that dry winds seared hopes and dreams while piling the topsoil into dunes of dust. This was the Great Dust Bowl of the north, where thin-coated sheep could be bought for just $2 apiece and craggy-ribbed cows for only $12. "We couldn't raise a thing, not even weeds-not a thing," recalled North Dakota's U.S. Representative Otto Krueger, a dry-land farmer from Fessenden. "I remember it got so bad, with so many people moving out, that one year I counted...
...powerhouse of this prosperity is the layer of productive topsoil three feet thick that covers the warm lowlands around the busy port of Guayaquil (pop. 262,000). But because picturesque Quito (pop. 212,000), some 9,000 ft. up in the Andes, is the seat of government, it happily shares the fruits of the boom. Once slurred as the city of "100 churches and one bathtub," the capital now boasts new hotels, nightclubs, theaters. Around Quito, however, in the eroded Andean valleys that are overpopulated with 60% illiterate Indians, the economy is still sluggish. The Panama-hat industry, once...
...feel cut in on the mysteries of nuclear physics and biochemistry. Few of us will ever find uranium in our vegetable gardens, but we can all have razor blades treated with duridium, shoe polish with lanolor, warfarin for killing rodents, irium in our toothpaste. We can even make topsoil in the backyard with fluffium. As a wag put it not long ago, all we need now is bullium...
...rich, alluvial topsoil of Algeria's Cheliff River valley has long provided France with one of her richest colonial gardens, but the bedrock that lies under the valley's rich farms is full of treachery. One night last week it was torn and wrenched with such mighty subterranean convulsions that in just twelve seconds much of the valley was a waste of flood water, its principal town Orleansville a desolation of rubble and wreckage...
Canal Zone Governor John S. Seybold hopes to head off a slide. After a look at the cracks. Seybold ordered crews to strip off topsoil for a better view of the fissures and to start a road to the hilltop for operations to come. Probable next step: test borings to map the crevices exactly. In the end, it may be necessary to remove the threatening slab. This week two representatives of the Morrison-Knudsen construction company, world's greatest earth mover (TIME. May 3), flew down to have a look at Contractor's Hill...