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For the Armchair Farmer...

Farm Show magazine features the latest agricultural equipment offerings, ranging from the eminently practical to the merely curious. Among the latter, we found a radio controlled tractor scheduled for production in 1985. The first commercially available model that can be controlled completely by radio and laser automatic pilot, the truck-like vehicle allows its owner—with the aid of a small TV screen—to plow, disk, plant, spray, and cultivate from the comfort of his or her farm office. The cost of such indolence can be high, however: $100,000 for a relatively small 100-HP tractor.

Sweeping It Under the Rug Hasn't Helped

When government regulations forced manufacturers to clean up the air in the immediate vicinity of their factories, companies began pumping sulfur emissions high into the clouds, distributing contamination over a wider geographical area. To comply with existing environmental legislation, chemical firms stopped dumping their residues directly into the river and began bottling them and burying them in the ground, often dangerously close to important groundwater sources. The result of this type of "cleanup," according to the Conservation Foundation's new "State of the Environment" report, is that pollutants have simply been shifted from one part of the environment to another. The report calls for a concerted effort to control contamination across the board, rather than allowing hazardous material to be exported to areas where the regulations don't apply.

Au Clair de Lune

A study reported in Science magazine doesn't go as far as to recommend planting crops by the moon, but it does indicate that lunar influence on the weather-and hence on agriculture-may be greater than we think. Previously, only the sun has been implicated in periodic atmospheric changes that produce longterm weather patterns, but researchers studying tree-ring samples taken on the Great Plains have discovered an 18.6-year drought cycle that may be linked to cycles of the moon. The scientists' findings suggest that a conjunction of solar and lunar cycles might even have been responsible for the dust bowl of the '30's.