Amber Tsunamis of Grain

The greatest harvest spectacle the world has ever seen is rushing toward its finish this week. Half a million thundering combines with dust devils spiraling like proud sentinels above their clattering jaws are cutting through 140 million acres of U.S. corn and soybean fields, night and day, lifting a golden bounty that will break every record in the books.

Official estimates from the U.S. Department of Agriculture put the corn crop at 9.6 billion bushels, up a staggering 52% over last year's flood-ravaged crop of 6.3 billion. As the sun rose day after day in mild, cloudless skies only to be followed by soft, moon-washed nights, the private estimates have climbed even higher, to 10 billion bushels, about 500 million beyond the old record set in 1992. Add to this overflow 2.5 billion bushels of soybeans -- almost 240 million more than the historic crop of 1979. And when cotton, rice and a hefty 2.3 billion bushels of wheat are counted, it is no wonder that usually taciturn agronomists and economists turn lyrical over the continuing capacity of this nation to astound itself with the production of staples. "It is just truly remarkable that farmers could bounce back from the floods and replenish the coffers like this," says Keith Collins, the USDA's chief economist. The exuberant poet-farmer Michael Carey of Farragut, Iowa, says it this way:

One year

after water stole

what we had planted,

all that was lost returns

and more,

comes flooding in.

It falls now; it spreads;

it breaks, suddenly,

into a hard rain,

into fragments of sunlight

over us.

The sheer bulk of the harvest rolling into the towering prairie elevators and barges along the great rivers is not the entire story. The yield per acre of land has been phenomenal. Early government estimates were for 33.5 bushels per acre of soybeans. That went up to 40.5 bushels per acre before the harvest began. "That is the distinguishing feature," claims economist Collins. "I've never seen an estimate move so far above the trend line. Statistically, it is one chance in a hundred." The average for corn leaped from 127 bushels to 134 bushels per acre.

The choreographer of this production miracle, which stretches from the foothills of the Alleghenies to the high plains of the West, combined a bit of capitalism with salubrious weather. Like their corporate brethren, farmers have learned and leaned. It took only 600,000 farmers to plant, nurture and collect most of this crop, compared with more than 1 million only 20 years ago. These survivors, almost all of them educated landowners plugged in by computers to the latest technologies of soil, fertilizers and cultivation, were ready and waiting. The terrible floods of last year had left many of them convinced that the sand-covered bottomlands -- some abandoned in discouragement -- would cut into the yield.