The Breadbasket Gets Grilled

But for some farmers, the drought is not all bad

Everybody talks about the weather," Mark Twain might have said, "but nobody does anything about it." For farmers, such talk is not idle chitchat, especially these days. In a parched field west of Twain's home town of Hannibal, a Missouri farmer was, of course, talking about the weather. The seven-week-long drought, after all, has desiccated as much as half the crops in the Midwest and South. "My corn was ruined by July 20," says Paul Wilson of Shelbyville. "There were too many days over 100DEG while the corn was trying to pollinate." Wilson's corn crop, mostly stunted if not destroyed, will probably be 20% of last fall's. The countryside is denuded. Says Farmer Don Fischer of Corder, Mo.: "You could see a cricket hop in the pastures around here. There's nothing."

Not quite nothing: while much of the nation's breadbasket has turned to toast, the news is decidedly mixed. According to the Government, the drought is not yet as bad, overall, as 1980's savage hot spell. And there is more palpable consolation for farmers: the shrunken harvests (perhaps 4.5 billion bu. of corn, vs. 8.4 billion bu. in 1982) have helped reduce enormous surpluses, thus pushing some recent cash prices higher than they had been in nearly a decade--74% above last year's dismal levels. And last week a bit of rain did fall from Topeka to Terre Haute, raising the hope that the U.S. soybean harvest may be closer to normal than predicted.

However, there are plenty of outright disasters. Secretary of Agriculture John Block, an Illinois farmer himself, returned to his home state last week to inspect the devastation. The drought there is thought to be the worst in 30 years. In downstate Bond County, where some 80% of the corn crop has been destroyed, Block's National Guard helicopter swooped down onto a field of sorry, 6-in.-high cornstalk stumps. "I can personally feel the pain," he said as he looked out over Farmer Richard Weiss's acreage, "because I have looked at my own fields. They're not this bad, but they're bad." Block owns a 3,000-acre corn and soybean farm near the Mississippi River.

Much of the worst damage is within a couple of hours' drive of the Mississippi, but there are ravaged zones all over. East in Indiana, a majority of the 1,173 farmers in desperately dry Newton County have lost more than half their crops to the drought. In west Texas, where it is always arid, farmers and ranchers are enduring the second year of drought; rainfall during the past year (4.83 in.) has been the skimpiest since 1892. There in Schleicher County, farmers during a decent season coaxed 26 bu. of wheat or one bale of cotton from each cultivated acre. This year, despite getting a bit more rain than the rest of the region, they expect their fields to yield only 6 bu. of wheat per acre, or a scant tenth of a bale of cotton.

Livestock is suffering too. In Iowa, cattle have forsaken barren pastures to nibble on tree leaves, and in west Texas some are even subsisting on cacti. With corn up to more than $3.50 per bu., many ranchers cannot afford to feed their herds at all. Says Doug Zabel, a Texas department of agriculture official: "Ranchers are having to sell their cattle off before they die, even their breeder stock, the foundation herds. It will take years to rebuild those." Nature's scorched-earth policy has struck as far away as Georgia: the state is the leading U.S. chicken and egg producer, but since July more than 1 million cooped-up broilers have died, broiled alive by the summer heat.

A little help may be on the way. After his farm tour, Secretary Block stopped in Chicago for a three-hour talk with more than 200 officials from 29 farm states. He declared farmers in Indiana eligible for emergency disaster-zone loans and encouraged other states to apply. Most of his listeners seemed mollified, but Democratic Governor Mark White of Texas pooh-poohed Block's encouraging words, saying that Texans need more than loans "to help relieve the suffering." Such as? "Rain and money."

Although $21.8 billion in federal money will go to farmers this year in the form of price supports and other payments, up from $11.7 billion last year, some farm leaders are, like Governor White, calling for more generous drought-relief measures. The special pleading is sure to grow louder: next week the Administration is expected to announce a still lower estimate for the drought-ravaged harvest of 1983. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.