Harvest Moon

Last week's full moon was the harvest moon, round and rich as the nation's produce has been this year. Across the plains, wheat farmers threshed bumper crops. Potato growers from Maine to Idaho were unearthing what should be a record yield—about 314 million hundredweight for the year. The hops of Oregon's Willamette Valley are in the sacks. The agribusiness entrepreneurs of California's San Joaquin Valley have had another good year in cotton. The peaches of Comus, Md., have rarely been juicier. Helminthosporium maydis—the wind-borne spore of Southern corn blight—has appeared in the richest corn fields of the American breadbasket, and the damage has been serious. Yet the U.S. will still have the third best corn crop in its history.

Life in cities and suburbs, where 70% of the nation's people now dwell, has disconnected most Americans from such rural satisfactions. But for all the eutrophication of lakes, the alarms about mercury in livestock and DDT on the vine, the land is still capable of yielding an astonishing bounty. For those whose food does not come entirely from cans and packages, it also provides a deep seasonal delight of harvest.