Amber Tsunamis of Grain

By Hugh Sidey

The greatest harvest spectacle the world has ever seen is rushing toward its finish this week. Half a million thundering combines with dust devils spiraling like proud sentinels above their clattering jaws are cutting through 140 million acres of U.S. corn and soybean fields, night and day, lifting a golden bounty that will break every record in the books.

Official estimates from the U.S. Department of Agriculture put the corn crop at 9.6 billion bushels, up a staggering 52% over last year's flood-ravaged crop of 6.3 billion. As the sun rose day after day in mild, cloudless skies only to be followed by soft, moon-washed nights, the private estimates have climbed even higher, to 10 billion bushels, about 500 million beyond the old record set in 1992. Add to this overflow 2.5 billion bushels of soybeans -- almost 240 million more than the historic crop of 1979. And when cotton, rice and a hefty 2.3 billion bushels of wheat are counted, it is no wonder that usually taciturn agronomists and economists turn lyrical over the continuing capacity of this nation to astound itself with the production of staples. "It is just truly remarkable that farmers could bounce back from the floods and replenish the coffers like this," says Keith Collins, the USDA's chief economist. The exuberant poet-farmer Michael Carey of Farragut, Iowa, says it this way:

One year

after water stole

what we had planted,

all that was lost returns

and more,

comes flooding in.

It falls now; it spreads;

it breaks, suddenly,

into a hard rain,

into fragments of sunlight

over us.

The sheer bulk of the harvest rolling into the towering prairie elevators and barges along the great rivers is not the entire story. The yield per acre of land has been phenomenal. Early government estimates were for 33.5 bushels per acre of soybeans. That went up to 40.5 bushels per acre before the harvest began. "That is the distinguishing feature," claims economist Collins. "I've never seen an estimate move so far above the trend line. Statistically, it is one chance in a hundred." The average for corn leaped from 127 bushels to 134 bushels per acre.

The choreographer of this production miracle, which stretches from the foothills of the Alleghenies to the high plains of the West, combined a bit of capitalism with salubrious weather. Like their corporate brethren, farmers have learned and leaned. It took only 600,000 farmers to plant, nurture and collect most of this crop, compared with more than 1 million only 20 years ago. These survivors, almost all of them educated landowners plugged in by computers to the latest technologies of soil, fertilizers and cultivation, were ready and waiting. The terrible floods of last year had left many of them convinced that the sand-covered bottomlands -- some abandoned in discouragement -- would cut into the yield.

Many farmers held their breath as the spring thaws came to a land still saturated with water. Last April, Blake Hurst, 37, who farms 2,500 acres with his father and two brothers near Westboro, Missouri, stood in a soggy snow flurry and looked down on the family's land in the Tarkio River valley, more than a third of which had been covered with water 15 months ago. Bulldozers growled and snorted, pushing dirt back into breaches in the series of levees that have protected the Hurst holdings for three generations. "What is it going to be this year?" Hurst wondered apprehensively. Though long-range weather reports were favorable for the summer, he was too wounded to have faith. His income had been chopped in half by the unceasing rain of the year before; he and his wife Julie got by only because of a nursery operation that she had started in plastic greenhouses. But last week, as his trucks filled with corn and soybeans lumbered off to storage bins, Hurst could pause with Julie and exult, "I love the harvest season."

The weather profile this season was near perfect. After the thaw there were dry, mild days so the farmers could plant almost without interruption, most of them using the no-till method, where the seeds were drilled or chiseled into matted stubble left from the year before; this residue forms a weed-retardant layer and a sponge for moisture. The right rains came at the right time. Only in isolated corners of the country were there scorching winds or floods.

Early on, Peter Wenstrand, of Essex, Iowa, who is head of the National Corn Growers Association, began to feel a special excitement. His crops had grown at visibly record rates. "I'd never seen Iowa so green in June," he says. In late July the corn pollinated in textbook order, and still there were none of the legendary 100 degrees days that pound crops at crucial moments of development. By August, Blake Hurst, nearby in Missouri, was beginning to be a believer. The family decided to cut some green corn for silage. The stalks and ears of corn were so thick and heavy that the 15-ton John Deere combine clogged up and lurched to a halt time and time again.

Meanwhile, soybean growers in Mississippi, relative newcomers to the bean culture, experimented with Northern plant varieties requiring less growing time and thus less exposure to the worst summer heat. The plants took hold like natives, and there too it was apparent that as the weather smiled, the yields mounted. The soybean experts in the Midwest tinkered with denser plantings, reducing the distance between rows by as much as 30 inches to cut down on the herbicides necessary to kill the weeds. That worked beautifully, as the profusion of bean plants popped out quickly and sheltered the ground around them, crowding out the weeds. When blooms appeared, cool weather encouraged more pods, and they in turn filled with big, healthy beans. All of this was followed by dryer weather, setting the perfect stage for the final act of maturing and providing the firm footing in the fields needed for the monstrous harvest machines.

There was yet one other dividend from the smiling Providence. The grain bins that in earlier years of bumper crops had all been stuffed with surplus were largely empty because of exceptionally high worldwide demand for grain and the poor crop last year. There appears now to be adequate storage capacity for this year's harvest. Here and there, while trucks, barges and trains maneuver into position, it has been necessary to build minimountains of corn on rail sidings and streets, though the 1986 scenes of corn piled on tennis courts and around village squares are not expected.

There is a temporary downside to such production. Corn slid below $2 per bushel the other day for the first time in two years. Soybeans at $5.40 per bushel are a dollar off a year ago. The effect is rippling through the U.S. food chain. Hogs are $35 per hundredweight -- a 14-year low -- and live cattle, which used to bring $85 per hundredweight just 18 months ago, are now at $65. "There's some hardship out there," says the USDA's Collins, particularly among those farmers who suffered the most from the floods. Wheat prices were a solid $3.25 to $3.65 per bushel, in one of the vexing contradictions of this business of producing food. The reason is that the global pipeline for wheat has been alarmingly empty for several years.

A devastating four-year drought in Australia, the world's fourth largest wheat exporter, has taken a big toll on the 45,000 farmers of this crop -- a reminder that nobody can claim nature's grace for very long. In that country's state of New South Wales, the 6,177-acre wheat farm of Ed Colless is nothing but parched brown dust beneath a brassy sun; he has not bothered to plant. "None of my neighbors planted either -- it's just a waste of seed and money," he says. The Barwon River, which flows past Colless's property, is dry for the first time since 1965. "The cattle go down there trying desperately to get water and sink in the silt," he says. "I had 150 breeding cattle, but I no longer have any idea how many are left."

Back in America, however, farmers face the opposite problem of oversupply. The government will cushion the blow of falling prices by paying farmers, say, 65 cents per bushel of corn when it slips below the target price of $2.75. And earlier this month the USDA required farmers to take 7.5% of their corn acreage out of production next year to prop up the prices of the crop in 1995. But in the short term, exports are the remedy. Already this year South Korea has increased its U.S. corn imports fivefold, and so far this year Japanese imports of U.S. corn have increased 20%. As for soybeans, experts say the lower prices may result in more uses of the bean crop: there's already soy ink (which the Federal Government is insisting must be used in printing all its publications), soy diesel fuel and soy milk (sales of which are growing 20% a year).

Ultimately, when subsidies, exports and ingenuity are taken into account, the income of farmers is expected to grow from $17.5 billion in 1993 to $23 billion this year. And it looks as if these cash-happy farmers are on a spending spree: U.S. sales of big (100-horsepower and over) tractors jumped 73% in September, compared with a year ago.

The ultimate irony of this great harvest drama lies beyond the shores of the U.S. Lester Brown, head of the Worldwatch Institute, suggested earlier this year that unless there were dramatic changes in population growth and food supply, the world soon would not be able to feed itself. "Food security will replace military security as the principal concern of many nations over the next 40 years," he said. The American harvest miracle -- and even last week's announcement by the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines that a new, higher-yielding strain of rice would boost world production 20% to 25% -- have yet to transform Brown into an optimist. The ratio of food to population is the lowest in 20 years, he says, and "it will take at least five years for the new rice plant to have any effect. In other crops, the research with fertilizers and new seeds seems to have plateaued."

By 2030, Brown calculates, India will need to import 44 million tons of grain annually to help feed its 1.5 billion people. By the same year, an increasingly industrialized China will need to purchase 200 million tons of grain abroad for its 1.6 billion people, as much as is now exported by all the world's countries. The result will be a spike in food prices that will trigger "wholesale social disintegration" in Africa, Latin America and other poor regions. "China's scarcity will become the world's scarcity," Brown predicts.

Many agriculture experts challenge Brown's conclusions, noting that grain and meat production have been keeping pace with population growth for decades. But most do agree that not enough private or public money has been spent on research in food production or biotechnology. Vocal among them is Dennis Avery, director of the Center for Global Food Issues at the Hudson Institute in Indianapolis, Indiana. "The real question for today is whether American agriculture can fulfill its potential as one of America's premier growth industries in a world about to triple its demands on farming resources," he declares. "Few farmers have yet looked at the opportunity. They are still fixated on saving their crumbling subsidies in Washington." His answer: eliminating price supports and trade barriers and, above all, increasing the U.S. farm yield even further. That American grain, Avery says, is what can feed the livestock of prospering nations as they move to improve their diets. "The market for American farming has been and will be meat, milk and eggs, and the feeds with which to produce them." If American agriculture fails to seize this opportunity, says Avery, then in 50 years, 40 million sq. mi. of the globe's remaining wildlife habitat may be plowed up in a desperate race against hunger.

With reporting by Tom Curry/New York and Roff Smith/Adelaide