Word: topsoil
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Christmas trees. When yellow grit from Nebraska sifted through the White House doors during the Dust Bowl years, F.D.R. became an avid student of the causes of the drought and possible defenses against the blowing topsoil. Lyndon Johnson used to tell how he won Roosevelt's approval for a dam on the lower Colorado River by enticing the President with pictures of various other dams, a subject dear to Roosevelt's heart...
Just as good earth and climate around Epernay, France, provide nature's ideal spot for nurturing champagne grapes, the Midwest's long growing season, heavy spring or summer rains and rich, two-foot-deep topsoil are perfect for grain cultivation. Kansas and Oklahoma are wheat country. Just north in the hardy soil of Illinois and Iowa lie the great corn belt and vast fields of soybeans. Farther north, in the Dakotas and Minnesota, grow wheat, soybeans, sugar beets. Here is the richest farm land east of Eden, where the biblical seven years of bountiful harvests are usually followed...
...chips to fire boilers in its municipally owned power plant. But doubts are rising about such large-scale woodburning. Huge chippers that swallow entire trees are used for harvesting; since they leave no small limbs to rot and replenish the forest, the practice can amount to mining the thin topsoil. "In 50 years," says one observer, "New England could look like Lebanon." President Nick Muller of Colby-Sawyer College in New London, N.H., has another sort of woodburning in mind. He wants to build a $1.75 million central heating plant fueled by sawdust from nearby sawmills. Sawdust is cheap, burns...
...Eastern snob, assumes nothing else interesting has ever happened in Bloomington. The traveler is wrong. Bloomington, Ill., is the county seat of McLean County. If you are talking corn and soybeans, McLean County is the capital of the world. If you are talking heartland, you are standing on it: topsoil two, three, five feet deep, divided on the plot map into square-mile sections still owned by descendants of German and Scotch-Irish immigrants who cleared and settled their way across Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Indiana, out onto the prairie. If you are talking history in McLean County, you are talking...
...price for to day's farmer/investor to use as a tax write-off. The Osage orange hedges, planted a hundred years ago against the chilling wind, are being torn out, because machinery these days needs more room just to turn around. The wind sweeps down, carrying off the topsoil, buffeting the farmer who can, thanks to progress, plant 300 acres in two days all alone with $100,000 worth of machinery...