Splendor in the Soil

By Hugh Sidey

Rod and Ronald Reagan's old Iowa neighbors have been quietly at work this summer putting together some more good luck to hand to the President in the fall. Unless there is unprecedented capriciousness on the part of nature in the next few days, the heavy ears of corn will mature by the trillions. They will either set a new record for yield, more than 127 bu. per acre, or come so close it hardly matters. And the soybeans, with almost human cunning, are making quite a show of their last 6 in. of growth. Forecasters expect them to disgorge a torrent of protein and set their own record, more than 39 bu. per acre.

In the gently rolling land of Adair County, which helped nurture the great agriculturists of the Wallace family (Henry A. was Secretary of Agriculture for F.D.R.), some of the farmers already have had three cuttings of hay, and they may get a fourth. Two cuttings used to be considered profligate abundance. While the Soviets wage a losing war against hot summer winds, thin soil and a crippling social system--and while their Polish subjects line up at the doors of half-empty food markets--the U.S. in its summer idyll barely notices its own miracle of weather, machines and people that makes all else possible.

This season in Adair County has been a ballet of breathtaking intricacy, timing and beauty. In late May and early June, when the plowed land lay naked and vulnerable, there were no pelting rains to rip out seed and carry off precious topsoil. Then, every week with uncanny regularity, gentle showers brushed the new shoots. The temperature never went over 100DEG F, and every evening cool air formed in the swales and spread protectively over the young plants. The moisture choked the grasshopper hatch. Tornadoes and hail, which can claw the land raw in seconds, never materialized. Out of 25 summer thunderstorms, only one was manly enough to ruffle the oats and alfalfa of Adair County.

If God ordered it done, then surely he assigned the spirit of Iowa's own artist, Grant Wood, to stage the spectacle. The palette was filled with greens, from the dark of soybeans to the lighter grasslands, and the fields were etched by deep shadows and white gravel roads. Their borders were sprinkled with wild roses and ring-necked pheasants whose vivid fall plumage is just beginning to erupt. The dense stands of hybrid corn, with stalks 10-ft. high, are so well nourished with fertilizers that they look like flawless cut carpet laid meticulously from fence to fence. Not in local memories, which go back nearly 80 years, is there such a picture of natural harmony.

Yet even in Adair County, Iowa, with the struggles over the MX missile and stock market jitters only muffled sounds on a far, bright horizon, there is the shadow of troubles ahead. Those fields that now are offering up such bounty are so intensively farmed, in their owners' mad race against high costs, that the topsoil is washing away at an alarming rate. When the Adair prairies were broken some 150 years ago, the topsoil was 12-to 14-in. thick. Today it averages 6 to 8 in. And from a small plane in those glistening skies the fields show telltale fingers of light green to yellow, where the loam has cascaded down the gullies and ditches and headed off to the Gulf of Mexico.

Then there are interest rates. Damnable, infuriating, debilitating, intractable and killing. If interest rates were something one plowed or planted or sprayed, those ingenious Iowans would best them. But interest rates are as inexorable as the seasons. In the fields, around the town squares, suntanned men and women who used to worry first about rainfall and cutworms turn instantly to the problem of interest rates.

One gets the feeling down along Grand River Valley that many of the farmers and merchants are entering a critical economic season. If interest rates break by the end of the year, there will be renewed hope and even some profit from the long labor of growing. But if interest rates do not yield to Reagan's schemes, there is the fear in Adair County that agriculture will begin to weaken and falter, even in the midst of its greatest triumph.

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