Agriculture: Blighted Corn

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Midwestern farmers ordinarily welcome summer rains because they hasten the ripening of lucrative crops. This season's rainfall has been unusually heavy, accompanied by high humidity and winds from the hurricane-laden skies of the South. Last week farmers discovered to their dismay that the combination threatened calamity to the cornbelt states of Illinois, Indiana and Iowa, endangering the nation's biggest cash crop.

Corn in the three states, which produce more than half of the nation's supply, is being attacked by a virulent fungus disease. It eats through the tender leaves of young plants, causes weakened stalks to collapse and, at worst, turns ears of corn into blackened rot. Called Southern-corn leaf blight, the fungus has long been confined to the South because its wind-borne spores do not survive the dryness of northern summers. Last year a new and more deadly mutant strain of the leaf blight appeared, and this year it spread north from Florida and Georgia. Farmers use chemical sprays to protect sweet table corn from the fungus, but spraying weekly and after every rain is too costly for the growers of corn raised for animal feed.

The rapid spread of the blight caught the Government by surprise, partly because federal crop checkers found it hard to detect: healthy-looking stalks and leaves often concealed young ears that were rotting. As late as Aug. 4, federal crop forecasters were predicting a 1970 crop of 4.7 billion bushels, up 3% from last year. Last week Agriculture Department experts unofficially lowered that estimate by 10%, but plant pathologists elsewhere fear that the crop loss may run higher. Preliminary field reports indicated that 30% to 40% losses are likely in the Southeast, and that the yield in Illinois, the

No. 1 corn-growing state, may be down as much as 25%. Normally, corn accounts for a quarter of Illinois farmers' cash income.

As the week began, alarming early estimates that half the U.S. corn crop might be wiped out fired a frantic trading rush on the Chicago Board of Trade, the nation's largest commodity market. A 122-year-old record fell when 193 million bushels of corn changed hands in one day. Corn futures jumped their 80-per-bushel daily limit, and so did the price of wheat, oats and soybeans. Though the trading frenzy subsided along with prices at week's end, the blight lifted the price of May corn futures by 240 per bushel last week, to $1.63. Wholesalers marked up the price of starch by 12% and corn syrup by 8%.

The swift price rise lined the pockets of many speculators; one corn-pit operative made $500,000 in paper profits. Many farmers face severe financial reverses. Sadly surveying the infestation of the 600 acres of corn that he and his son are raising in Indiana's Gibson County, Melvin Pflug, 52, estimates that only half of it will be worth harvesting. "We'll be lucky if we have enough corn to pay our fertilizer bill," he said.