The Big Dry

Leon Malard sat at his small kitchen table, covered with a blue plastic cloth, and with strong, thick fingers stroked the stubble on his chin. His black hair was cropped to its roots, his glasses coated at the edges with the grit from a morning of tilling in his stunted cornfield, which hugs a bluff above the Missouri River between Bismarck and Cannon Ball, N. Dak.

The 93 degrees F wind scoured the boards of his tiny home, gusting and swirling up to 30 m.p.h., drying, loosening, lofting, trying again to blow him away. The big prairie sun, without a wisp of cloud to soften it, hammered the land as far as a squinted eye could see, which is a long way out there.

Malard is dead center in the biggest and most cantankerous drought North America has had in 50 years, stretching from California to Georgia, from the Canadian prairies to the Texas plains, withering, parching and shrinking land, crops, rivers, lakes, animals and people. Federal emergencies have been declared in 30 states. Grain farmers in the upper Midwest may lose nearly three-quarters of their crops. There is more trouble to come if the rains don't. On Friday dark storm clouds scudded across the skies over parts of Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota, but the squalls soon gave way to the familiar empty, mocking skies.

The forecast is devastating for farmers who were just recovering from a decade of low prices and high interest rates. Silos full of surplus grain from past harvests will protect grocery shoppers from noticing much more than a modest increase in most food prices. With thousands of undernourished cattle and hogs being driven to the slaughterhouse, meat prices may even go down. But trading in the commodity pits of Chicago has been frantic, a new pot of gold for plungers who bet on feast or famine. This cursed drought has brought them a bonanza. Soybeans, for instance, are now selling at about $10 per bu., nearly double the price of just six months ago. God must be a Democrat, somebody muttered near the White House. He surely is showing Ronald Reagan and George Bush, as he did all those who went before them, that the only workable farm policy ever devised was left in the Garden of Eden along with some other innocence.

Nobody knows for certain how much this is costing the nation. Economist Arlen Leholm of North Dakota State University ventures that his state alone will lose $2.7 billion in crops, lower federal farm subsidies and reduced farm spending. The U.S. Soil Conservation Service's William Fecke estimates that in Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas the precious topsoil of 750,000 acres of farm and grazing land has been blown away by the angry wind, an additional 7 million acres is damaged and 12 million more threatened. "If the wind keeps up," Fecke says, "we may see chunks of the Northern Plains blowing to New England."