Where the Real Gold Is Mined

By Hugh Sidey

In the middle of the U.S. the greatest harvest in all history is rolling in. Washington, obsessed with Jimmy Carter's polls and Teddy Kennedy's plans, has hardly noticed, a lamentable failure in understanding the nation's soul.

American strength rests on this miracle of food. Without it Carter might be hoeing peanut plants for the Queen and Kennedy might be a barkeep in Ireland. While we falter in other global competition, this season the U.S. harvest of corn, soybeans, wheat and other grains will humble even mythology. The Soviets know. With tensions high over the troops in Cuba, Secretary of Agriculture Bob Bergland was not sure Moscow's grain negotiators would even show up a few days ago to review purchases. They did, and signaled that they would buy 25 million metric tons of grain, a new high. Burly, dark-haired Boris Gordeev, Deputy Minister of Foreign Trade, leaned across a table and told about the hot dry weather that had pinched Soviet production (by as much as 20%, American experts estimate). That may be the only confession of weakness we will get from the Soviets in the next years--but it could be everything.

From the Appalachians to the Rockies, the combines are churning through our land. Some of these $100,000 monsters can spew out $118,000 worth of soybeans in a day. The U.S. crops--the result of near perfect weather, rich land, technology and extraordinary enterprise--will be worth $61 billion this year (up 17% over last year's record of $52 billion).

The achievement stuns one's senses. The corn would fill 2 million jumbo hopper cars that would stretch 13 times across the U.S. Those 320,000 machines at work in the fields now, if lined up wheel to wheel, could harvest the state of Iowa in a day. (This harvest by 5 million farm workers would have taken, before machines, 31 million people using 61 million horses and mules.)

Bergland, the stoic Norwegian, even gets a little poetic when he contemplates the fall drama. "American gold," he calls the soybeans, which sell for $6.57 per bu. and which we export at the rate of 1 billion bu. a year. "A storybook," the Secretary says of this. The Soviet leaders study it line by line.

"How often do you change your tractor tires?" Aleksei Kosygin, the Premier, asked Farmer Bergland on his last Kremlin visit. "About every 4,000 hours," he answered. "Engines?" asked the cool-eyed Soviet, a fellow normally associated with missiles and megatons, not farm machinery. "Every 10,000 to 15,000 hours," replied Bergland. The old Russian thought a few seconds and then gave his people a short lecture about the disadvantages of the Soviet policy of replacement by the calendar, not actual need.

"If we are going to talk peace," says Agricultural Historian Wayne Rasmussen, "a sufficient supply of food is one of the best assurances."

Nor are we at the outer limits of this miracle. Corn now grows with leaves that stick up like pineapples so stalks can be closer together. They have discovered a perennial variety in Mexico, and there are distant dreams of having crops regenerate like lawns. Geneticists are marching ahead with plans to make corn return nitrogen to the soil, which would save 13 million tons of fertilizer made from natural gas and the energy it takes to apply it.

Last week an editor on the prairie was talking about the gold bullion panic as he drove along the fields. As far as one could see, the ripe soybeans and corn were bathed in soft sunlight suffused by the fall haze. The land was pale gold. Looking around with a discerning eye, he said: "It means more than the metal stuff. If only we could get that through our heads."

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