Word: soils
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Erosion & Mosquitoes. To keep the valley's best soil from being continually washed into the river by the area's heavy rains, TVA has coaxed the farmers into using a variety of conservation practices: planting trees, contour plowing, diversifying crops, enriching their land with TVA-developed fertilizers. One byproduct of the reforestation has been the cre ation of a $500 million private forest-products industry. TVA has also fought mosquitoes to lick the valley's malaria, which in 1934 had infected more than 30% of the people living along the river in northern Alabama. Since...
...scattered southwestern cotton fields, the slow, soft green of spring is sprouting against a strange background: glittering gridirons of broad black stripes. Paper-thin strips of polyethylene plastic stretch across the fields, warming the soil, conserving water, choking out weeds, protecting the land against the erosion of wind and rain. And if the coddled cotton crop that is even now poking tentatively into view grows close to its rich promise, its payoff may be the beginning of an agricultural revolution...
...first large-scale tryout of mechanized plasticulture. A tractor huffs across the field trailing a 20-in. band of black film from a big roll. Two disks cut furrows under the film's edges, rubber wheels press the edges down, and another pair of disks covers them with soil. Planting is done by hollow cone-shaped spikes that punch holes in the film 8 in. apart and insert slugs of moist vermiculite (puffed-up mica) that contain a cottonseed and carefully calculated doses of fertilizer, insecticide and fungicide. Snuggled in the warmth and moisture under the film, the seeds...
...system produced by centuries of successive conquests, rebellions, confiscations and punitive legislation.'' The system involved the absentee and irresponsible landlord, the rack-renting agent, and a tenantry driven onto smaller and smaller patches of land, until whole families existed on one or even half an acre of soil...
...presence of U.S.-built Bomarc anti-aircraft missiles on Canadian soil was the subject that originally triggered the election. Asked about Bomarcs while testifying before the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee last Feb. 13, McNamara made a general defense of the weapons, no matter where they were based*: "At the very least they would cause the Soviets to target missiles against them and thereby increase their missile requirements, or draw missiles onto these Bomarc targets that would otherwise be available for other targets...