Word: crop
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...That street-fighter turned into a powerful administrator. From 1977 to 2000, Basu served as West Bengal's chief minister - the longest-serving state leader in Indian history. He presided over sweeping land reforms, lifting millions of farmers out of poverty. "Transforming one-crop land to multicrop land and providing land to the landless was his greatest contribution," says Mohammed Salim, a colleague of Basu's in government. By the 1980s, West Bengal had gone from a famine-plagued state dependent on food subsidies to a surplus grain producer. "But that's where it all ended," says Rajat Roychowdhury...
...rearview mirror warned Story that the outside temperature had dropped to 33°F (0.5°C), just one degree above freezing - and it was only 8:30 p.m. That meant he was in a race to start dozens of irrigation pumps, whose warm water would protect his crop both by insulating the bases of the trees and conducting the moisture up to the fruit and foliage via the roots...
...returns to above freezing in the morning. By 10:30 p.m. on Jan. 10, there was nothing left but hope and luck, and tall, soft-spoken Kyle headed home for a few hours of shut-eye - sleep disturbed by the knowledge that the family had already incurred 1% crop damage. But for the eighth morning in the past 10, he was up before dawn driving through the groves...
...country to rot. But not all of Yemen's problems are Saleh's doing. The country faces a severe water shortage, in large part because of the national addiction to khat, a shrub whose young leaves contain a compound with effects similar to those of amphetamines. (The crop accounts for roughly a third of the country's water usage.) Moreover, Yemen's production of oil - which constitutes 90% of its exports - is limited and could end by 2017, according to the World Bank...
Norrbotten is so isolated that in the 19th century, if the harvest was bad, people starved. The starving years were all the crueler for their unpredictability. For instance, 1800, 1812, 1821, 1836 and 1856 were years of total crop failure and extreme suffering. But in 1801, 1822, 1828, 1844 and 1863, the land spilled forth such abundance that the same people who had gone hungry in previous winters were able to gorge themselves for months. (See the top 10 scientific discoveries...