Bitter Harvest

By Hugh Sidey

As the 1986 harvest begins, the twin plagues of drought and overabundance have dealt yet another blow to America's stricken farmers. In the following pages, TIME's Hugh Sidey looks at the ravaged Southeast and the surfeit in his native Midwest; a moving letter from a North Carolina farmwife reveals the personal anguish of a lifetime of work that ends in bankruptcy; and a worldwide assessment of the farm dilemma shows why it is proving so intractable.

Michael Carey, 32, is an Iowa farmer and poet ("The thing about farming is there is nothing between you and the world") who one day soon will fold his beloved notebook of verse and go down to his cornfields to meet his neighbor Jim Anderzhon. Anderzhon will be there in his John Deere 6620 SideHill combine. Carey cannot afford a combine of his own, so he hires his neighbor's machine. The two will talk the quiet talk of farmers for a few minutes, looking at the breathtaking beauty of abundance. Then, in the huge stillness of dawn along the Nishnabotna River, Anderzhon will climb into the combine's high cab and turn the starter key, shattering the stillness with 145 steel- throated horses.

"Start your engines, gentlemen," Carey could pen to an army of Anderzhons deployed from the Oregon plateau to the piedmont of the Carolinas. The visceral roar of the nation's 640,000 combines, were they all gathered in one spot for the harvest assault, would dwarf the sound of Patton's tanks pushing toward Bastogne. Yet the only violence would be to cornstalks and soybean plants, and in that death is life. "The thing about farming," writes Carey "is it's so easy, half of it is learning to kill."

The American harvest is the gargantuan creation of strong men and women, hard work, ingenuity. But this year's harvest is bittersweet. In the drought- stricken Southeast, there is not enough: fields are burned, stunted. Almost everywhere else, too much: glut, a beautiful curse costing $25.5 billion for price supports and subsidies. Wherever one looks, American agriculture, the very rock on which the nation stands, is in some kind of trouble.

Since 1980, farmers have struggled against shrinking markets, debts, tumbling land values and overproduction. Farmers in the Southeast have been robbed of their thin cash flow by capricious weather. Elsewhere, America's gigantic agricultural machine heaps up more grain and fiber than the world can digest. U.S. taxpayers foot the bill.

In these tawny September days, irony builds within irony. Personal suffering among farmers is most intense in the Southeast, where they have lost $2 billion in crops and livestock. The rains needed for the red clay failed to fall three out of the past six years. In July the unrelenting heat went to 105 degrees, then 107 degrees. Mockery came in the past few weeks when the heavens relented, bringing floods followed by crabgrass. Southern fields look green, but the corn leaves are twisted in knots, the peanut crop has shriveled.

Day after day through the summer, Earl Simpson, of Monroe, N.C., got up with the sun and peered through the mist around his farm, vainly praying for rain. Ninety percent of his corn was lost. The wheat will come in about 30% of usual; soybeans will make a miserable 15%. "We can't go much longer unless something changes," Simpson says. Then he pauses and his face grows tender and sad. "They say the best product off a farm is the children." Earl's two sons, who farm with him, look down. Simpson will join the combine cavalcade, crops or not, to clean up his fields, and because the seasons speak to him in mysterious ways that the rest of us never know. He also understands that greater problems lie west and north of him, where the plague is abundance: bin-busting, price-depressing, spirit-crushing profligacy.

"The wealth of the tall grass prairie was its undoing," writes Author John Madson, of Godfrey, Ill., in Where the Sky Began, his evocative story of the fecund heartland. Nearly a year's production of corn lies unused in bins and warehouses. A quarter of a year of soybeans is stored up. The Western plains are piled with a year's worth of surplus wheat. The harvest of the new wheat crop is almost finished, and it is a whopper: 2.2 billion bu. Providence seems to be pushing us toward some rendezvous with disaster. The Corn Belt is like John Bunyan's idyllic Beulah -- or a dark Gehenna. Corn is king in the U.S., a $25 billion business that occupies one-quarter of the nation's cropland. This year's crop will be 8.3 billion bu., the second highest in history. In the corn country, half of a farmer's income is from Government payments for his unneeded grain.

The first problem is where to put it. All across "corndom," as Author E.J. Kahn Jr. likes to call it, there is a frantic search for storage space. In Dubuque they will use caves. On the Missouri River, they will tie up barges and stuff them. The Behlen Mfg. Co., in Columbus, Neb., which makes metal bins, has increased its work force from 350 to 750. Marion Havens, of Greenfield, Iowa, who assembles bins, is working triple his usual pace, rooting a new one every fourth day in some field. They point toward the blue sky like truncated missiles. If only we could fire them toward the Soviet Union, we might help everybody.

In Illinois, as they take last year's crop out of elevators and silos to make way for the new harvest, they are building corn mountains on the ground in a desperate rush against nature's inexorable deadlines. Melvin Bell of Deer Creek stands these days and watches as his old corn is sprayed in a giant stream 40 ft. into the air to shower down and create another glowing peak that can be seen for miles across the tableland. "They say McDonald's has the Golden Arches," he chuckles. "We do better." Storing corn outdoors is risky. Bell lays down a sheet of porous polypropylene, adds gravel and lime, concrete containment walls, aeration tubes and fans. When he is finished, he will cover the corn with plastic held down by old tires. He does not want to keep the corn that way longer than a few months. If he does,"hot spots" will develop where some corn decomposes, then insects will attack. While he is steward of those half-million bushels, he will probe and test constantly. His nose may be his best insurance. "I can smell bad corn," he says.

No land in the U.S. can grow so much corn as this area of central Illinois. Herman Warsaw, the national corn-growing champ from Saybrook, took a 30-acre plot of ground that produced 38 bu. per acre in 1941 and tended it so exquisitely that last year it yielded 370 bu. per acre. The Government cuts down acreage, and farmers, fighting honorably for position in capitalism's markets, devise new fertilizers and hybrids and with God's help do better and better on less and less land.

"We need new markets," insists Ed Laskowski, who farms in Carlock. He wants to see the Federal Government launch a more aggressive export policy and help develop more acceptance in the U.S. for corn sweeteners and gasohol. Meanwhile, like his neighbors, Laskowski is readying his combine with mounting excitement, replacing chains and belts, building up the snapping rolls on the combine's headers, which grab and chew up the cornstalks and separate the ears. When the weather is good, Ed will work into the night; his wife Judy will sometimes climb up in the cab with him, and they will nibble her cookies and talk and laugh and watch the moon caress the land.

Farmers are not the only ones who understand the joys of the harvest festival. A whole rural culture extracts its lifeblood from the ritual of renewal, no place more than Iowa, the most agricultural of American states. Teachers, merchants, veterinarians and mechanics from the small towns link the farmers and help orchestrate community life. For the moment, some of the small towns are in more distress than the farmers. The Government provides no subsidy for grocers and drygoods merchants. Publisher Alan Smith, of Mount Ayr, Iowa, (pop. 1,900) used to run two-thirds of a page of delinquent taxes in his Record-News every year. Now he runs six or eight pages. How long before his Ringgold County must yield on the quality of its schools and public services? Not yet, he insists. Adversity brought determination, and Mount Ayr shows a better spirit now than a year ago. Yet half of the county's people could now be below the Government's poverty line. "We can't continue to produce corn and soybeans like this," says Smith. "The Government can't be the final buyer of all the produce." Farmers know this too, but they are so swept up in the choreography of the harvest that they cannot dwell on the clouds of melancholy that dim the summer sunlight.

Back in the clear, cold winter, when he had time for his verses, Farmer- Poet Carey looked at his world and wondered and wrote: "There is such a sadness on the land, Chicken Little. Chicken Little, the sky has fallen."