Randy Olson, Melissa Farlow Photography

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  • You can see the building thunderhead in the background at this Imperial NE feedlot where workers are in the middle of a corn rodeo as many huge machines try to put up feed and corn and get it covered before the storm. Imperial has around 53,000 head of cows and the mountain in this photo is all CORN... about 24 million USD of corn in 2015 prices. 5.25 million bushels (around $3.80 a bushel in 2015).
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  • The Rohe family shucks sweet corn on their family farm.
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  • The Rohe family picks sweet corn on their family farm.
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  • An elderly couple with their prize-winning field corn.
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  • Tractors pack down a giant mound of corn at a feedlot near Imperial, Nebraska, before storm clouds roll in.
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  • Tractors pack down a giant mound of corn at a feedlot near Imperial, Nebraska, before storm clouds roll in.
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  • A brother and two sisters weed a corn patch in the garden at the family homestead.
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  • Family gathers around the table at the homestead for a summer lunch with corn and tomatoes from the garden.
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  • Men with bucket and ladder walk to the garden to pick apples. The family grows corn, tomatoes, beans and potatoes on their land, Several generations of the family lived in the West Virginia holler until an encroaching mountaintop removal mine forced them to leave.
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  • A grandmother and her granddaughter collect grasshoppers in a Oaxaca cornfield. Fried, the insects make a tasty dinner dish.
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  • Caudill family members rest on the front porch and yard when they gather on weekends to work in the garden and maintain their homestead. <br />
<br />
It took several years and a lot of money and determination, but kin of the Caudill family fought to keep their family homestead on Mud River from being taken over by the St. Louis-based Arch Coal Company. Nearly swindled out of their homestead, they battled all the way to the West Virginia Supreme Court where they finally won their case.<br />
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For 100 years, Miller’s wife and family owned the 75-acre tract that includes a farmhouse, built in 1920, several small barns and a garden. John Caudill, a coal miner who was blinded in a mining accident in the 1930s, and his wife, Lydia Caudill, raised 10 children in the home. <br />
<br />
Arch Coal wanted to tear down the family’s ancestral home because it stood in the way of the company’s plans to expand its 12,000-acre Hobet 21 mountaintop removal complex. Hobet 21 produced about 5.2 million tons of coal, making it among the largest surface mines in the state. Mines like Hobet yield one ton of coal for every 16 tons of terrain that is displaced.<br />
Under Hobet’s plans, statements from Arch submitted in court say that “ a valley fill and an impoundment pond would destroy the inundate the farmhouse and outbuilding and bury the immediate surrounding land under the valley fill.” A lower court agreed with the company, but in the end, the family won.<br />
The mining operations have expanded to surround the Caudill property.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6773_996228.jpg
  • A farmer stands with his child in a cornfield.
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  • A dry wheat field between two feedlots.
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  • A harvester works a wheat field between two feedlots.
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  • A harvester works a wheat field between two feedlots.
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  • Beef Empire Days ranch riding competition in Garden City, Ks., which is at the heart of the American breadbasket where farmers grow corn, wheat and sorghum and raise cattle. Over the last sixty years, two technologies have transformed production from rain fed-oriented agriculture to high-intensity irrigated agriculture, a change that transformed the local economy. Instead of relying on rain, Garden City farmers now use low-cost groundwater pumps and a technique called "center-pivot irrigation" to essentially mine for water locked deep underground. Garden City's current bounty is possible because beneath these farmer's fields is a vast reservoir of water, called the Ogallala Aquifer. This vast stretch of groundwater touches eight states, from South Dakota and Wyoming to New Mexico and Texas and so, because the semi-arid climate of the High Plains doesn't receive enough rainfall to support intensive agriculture, farmers pump this trapped water above ground to irrigate their fields.
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  • Homeward-bound farm families loaded with food and possessions, crowd into the flatbed of a pickup truck taxi as the open-air market in Xilitla draws to and end. In one of the largest ethnic Huastec Indian towns, each Sunday morning the narrow cobbled streets fill with stalls selling locally grown coffee, sugarcane, incense and corn tamales from the market.
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