"Complex" Means "No Good"

When shrimps learn to whistle, to borrow a proverb from Nikita Khrushchev, Soviet agriculture will provide enough food for Russia. Meanwhile, on an inspection tour of harvests in Central Asia, Khrushchev faced the perennial farm crisis all over again.

The agricultural situation, he said, was "complex and unusual." He blamed intense heat for a poor crop in the vast steppes of Siberia; he gave the same excuse for the virgin lands of northern Kazakhstan, where the harvest would be far below expectations. In the Ukraine, bread basket of the Soviet Union, the wheat crop was "somewhat worse than last year." but party officials hoped to meet their overall grain quota by producing more corn (used for cattle fodder) than last year. The only bright spot that Khrushchev reported was in Great Russia, where a "record" grain harvest was reaped; a record by how much. Nikita discreetly declined to say.

In contrast to Khrushchev's disappointing trip, a delegation of Russian agricultural experts touring the burgeoning U.S. countryside were having the time of their lives--sort of. The group, headed by Agriculture Minister Konstantin Pysin, had traveled from coast to coast during the past month, last week wound up in California's fabled San Joaquin Valley. The visitors ogled Fred DeBenedetti's mechanical tree shaker that tumbled walnuts to the ground, stared while other mechanized arms swept up the piles of nuts. When William Machado, a bean farmer, said that he had suffered no loss at all in harvesting his crop, the Russians--who could only judge by the chaotic conditions back home--simply did not believe him.

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