With 15 states and nearly a third of the U.S.'s population under its purview, our Chicago-based Midwest bureau is never short of stories. But last week, with the embargo of Soviet grain sales sending shock waves through the Great Plains and a herd of presidential hopefuls campaigning in Iowa before the state's party caucuses, the bureau's correspondents found their list of assignments unusually heavy. Says Benjamin Cate, who has been Midwest's chief since 1975: "It was our busiest week with breaking stories since our cover on the Big Freeze of the winter of 1977. And it was just as frantic and even more complicated than any election-week reporting."

Cate was already out in snow-choked Des Moines with the G.O.P. candidates who had come to Iowa when TIME'S editors in New York scheduled the cover story on the grain embargo. Filling in for Cate in Chicago, Correspondent Madeleine Nash marshaled stringers (part-time correspondents) to assess reaction to the embargo in the farm states and tapped her own agriculture sources. Patricia Delaney reported on the hectic commodities trading at the Chicago Board of Trade, while David Jackson interviewed experts on the gasohol program. Barry Hillenbrand, who had been following Ted Kennedy's efforts to explain his candidacy to Iowa's voters, broke away to join Agriculture Secretary Bob Bergland as he tried to explain the Administration's grain-sales policy to the state's farmers. During his 2 1/2 years in the bureau, Hillenbrand, previously a foreign correspondent, has reported many agriculture stories and developed a fondness for the men who farm. "They are some of the few Americans who really put the country ahead of making a buck," he says. "Many support the embargo; though, like Manhattan cab drivers, they never stop complaining about their lot."

Besides being one of our largest domestic news bureaus, in terms of the population and territory it covers (from North Dakota and Minnesota south to Oklahoma), the Midwest bureau is also the oldest. It was established in 1929 and counts as the first cover it reported a 1930 piece on Mobster Al Capone. Nowadays the big stories that occupy the bureau can range from projects involving long-term reporting, like our November 1978 cover on "The New U.S. Farmer" to this week's fast-breaking examination of "Grain As a Weapon." Such high-pressure assignments can be tough, but, as Nash explains, they also have their compensations. Says she: "It's like the man who when asked why he climbed mountains replied: 'Because it feels so good when I stop.' "

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