WHEN Columbus and the explorers that followed him first saw the American continent, there was nothing about the soil to distinguish those variations in appearance and behaviour now designated as soil types. Even after the European trespass had been well under way for several generations, it would have been impossible to determine whether most of the virgin soils were chiefly clay, or silt, or sand. The whole face of the earth lay under, and mingled with, a mass of organic matter so manifest as to defy the best effort of man to discover the characteristic distribution of the soil's mineral constituents. Nowhere, or almost nowhere, could soils have been classified into categories more specific than the broad general groups now known as the forest grassland, desert, and intermediate. Soil types as we now know them have become gradually discernible as the black disguise of organic matter has disappeared. As soils have become unproductive through the uncompensated removal of organic matter, it has become possible for us to classify them into an intricate system of groups and sub-groups with quite different characteristic appearance and behaviour.
No attempt will be made to clarify the highly technical matter of soil classification. For such information the reader can now be directed to an extremely readable book on the subject, written by a man whose acquaintance with the subject is probably unmatched in the United States. Charles E. Kellogg, Chief of the Soil Survey, United States Department of Agriculture, published late in 1941 his The Soils That Support Us. In my opinion there is no easier source from which the layman can obtain correct information on the subject at hand. After reading Mr. Kellogg's book, the reader who wishes more detailed information about the characteristic soil types of a given area of the United States, will find much helpful data in Soils and Men, the Yearbook of the United States Department of Agriculture for 1938. Still further detail for limited areas may be had by consulting a soil map, if one of the district has been issued.
Our concern here is to determine how the soils we have damaged can be rehabilitated without our having to await the repetition of the natural processes by which they were originally created. Soil creation is, in Nature, long-drawn out. People now threatened by famine view with apprehension the supposed necessity for throwing our present depleted soils back into forest or grassland and waiting several generations for the time when a new set of soils may be cleared. Just how the intervening generations can subsist in the interim is not at all clear. There is ample justification for the gloom displayed by many of our foremost students of soils. The present chapter is intended to mitigate the fears engendered by such cheerless forebodings.
The development of pessimism amongst soil scientists is understandable if one studies the history of thought on the subject of maintenance of fertility as it has progressed in the past thirty years. This period has witnessed the most active efforts the world has yet known, chiefly in the United States, to restore soil to its original ability to produce. A number of ideas helped to initiate this wave of national interest in soil improvement. There is the established fact that rural population had been steadily declining while urban has been increasing. The prediction has been freely made that in a few decades the world's population may be too great for the food-producing capacity of our soils. There has been the increasing conviction, too, that the science of chemistry might hold the secret of permanent fertility for the soil. Such influences helped to initiate government-sponsored agencies whose purpose was to inform farmers generally of the need for definite practices leading to soil improvement. Universally, the practices recommended involved cash expenditure at one point or another. Moreover, it soon became evident that the maintenance of fertility in those soils which still produced fair crops is much easier to implement than the restoration of productive ability in soils which have lost all their original black smudge.
For many years there was no means by which the government of the United States could assist farmers financially. In order for a farmer to do what was recommended, he must have either cash or credit. Multitudes of farmers who were greatly in need of assistance had neither. The result was that, without so intending, we developed a more or less stratified series of agricultural classes, with distinct tendencies to specialization, thus producing several " project " classes. Some general farmers became beef-cattle feeders; some became dairymen, some poultrymen, and so on. Many in each class retained a minimum of general farming practices while fully equipping themselves with the necessary mechanical accoutrements of their speciality. Because of their progress in this direction, many farmers became more and more dependent upon other farmers and the urban population for necessities they formerly had provided for themselves. Thus a commercialized, not to say industrialized, type of farming was developed by those farmers who originally were able to follow the instructions of the local agricultural advisers.
While this grading up of a financially fortunate group of farmers was in progress, an equally effective degeneration was taking place among those at the other end of the scale. Men whose land, prior to the launching of the government's agricultural programme, had lost most of its organic matter were already so hard put to it financially that they could not adopt the most important recommendations of their advisers. They were willing enough, but few of them had enough cash to enable their families to live comfortably; they could spare none for soil improvement.
Belated recognition of the necessary relation of soil degeneration to lack of cash for soil improvement resulted ultimately in the establishment of legal provisions for aiding distressed farmers in the rehabilitation of their lands. In America a number of agencies are now in a position to assist such farmers, and they can now obtain loans for many projects for which money was formerly not obtainable. In desperately needy situations grants in aid can be made. In fact, so liberalized are the Congressional acts and the regulations for their administration that every conceivable condition of agricultural distress can be relieved through one of several agencies, provided it is capable of being relieved by money at all.
It was not, and is not now, the intention of the government to expand the present programmes to include all farmers whose land requires rehabilitation. So vast an undertaking would require more cash than the richest government in the world could scrape together by taxation. The hope is that private lending agencies in the localities concerned will take over the job for their communities. In fact, in certain areas this is being done in a small way. However, in the sections of the country where the need for soil improvements is most acute, the local banks, quite naturally, are in much the same poverty-stricken condition as their farmer customers. There is not, therefore, any very obvious solution for this paramount problem of soil rehabilitation.
There are, too, other aspects of the matter that must be considered. It must be admitted that the cost of production per acre is necessarily increased by any measure which requires the establishment of terraces or other means of controlling run-off water. Terraces are engineering projects, the cost of which on poverty-stricken acres may easily amount to more than the previous value of the land per acre. The construction of them might double the farmer's investment in his land without making a real start toward increasing its productiveness. And it must be remembered that, where the need for terraces is supposedly imperative, their construction must precede other conditioning of the soil. This subsequent conditioning usually requires applications of lime, the growing of legumes, the application of basic fertilizers, the addition in some instances of the so-called " trace elements," and such other expensive operations as the rearrangement of fences, protecting, by grassing or otherwise, the outlets for water, and so on.
My foregoing paragraph includes much material for which footnotes might be in order. It will perhaps be more direct and helpful to refer the reader to the many United States government bulletins which give lucid explanations of the various steps in the conventional soil-improvement programmes. A recent series carries titles which make use of the expression " Soil Defense," and a special bulletin is devoted to each important section of the country. For full information on the measures which are officially considered necessary in order to restore our badly eroded land to high production, the following bulletins, issued by the Soil Conservation Service of the United States Department of Agriculture, are recommended:
| Farmers' Bulletin No. | Title |
|---|---|
| 1789 | Terracing for Soil and Water Conservation. |
| 1813 | Prevention and Control of Gullies. |
| 1795 | Conserving Corn Belt Soil. |
| 1809 | Soil Defense in the South. |
| 1810 | Soil Defense in the Northeast. |
| 1767 | Soil Defense in the Piedmont. |
It is obvious that, at best, our conventional programmes of soil improvement necessarily involve a cash outlay in almost all cases The basic assumption that plant foods removed by crops must be replaced makes a virtue of the use of fertilizers, and fertilizers cost money. Then there is lime, which in most situations is considered a prerequisite to the growing of legumes; and lime, too, is expensive to buy, and even more expensive to apply. Quite a list of recommendations could be compiled, one or more of which would be " must " requirements for every plan for soil improvement. And without exception there would be a necessary cash outlay involved.
As previously indicated, those American farmers who have really received benefits from the past thirty years of intensive county agent work and the agricultural extension programme in general have been helped because they were able to help themselves to some extent. They have spent a fair portion of their profits, too, in annual outlays for fertilizers, lime, legume seed, inoculating media, and so forth. As a result, the cost per acre of managing the land has increased considerably. This does not necessarily mean an increase in the cost per unit of the product. Rather, it is more likely to mean just the opposite. Hence, because of increased yields, these men have seemed to be justified in " ploughing back the profits " in the manner described. The land has become more productive as a result, and is, therefore, more valuable land.
If we assume the continuance of the present agenda, it is apparent that those farmers who have been the chief beneficiaries of the extension programme will continue to profit thereby, for they are best able to adopt any new recommendation requiring a cash outlay. Because this is so apparent, little thought is being given to ameliorating their situation. Under the present conventional way of doing things, these men are in the most favoured position of any; so it would be considered foolish to worry about them when there are so many others in really serious economic difficulties. Nobody is worrying, therefore, about the present-day leaders among dirt farmers who seem so firmly entrenched.
It can now be said with absolute assurance that the supposedly safe position of our most progressive farmers is really destined to become the most precarious. The difficulty is the high overhead these men have developed. They have learned to make a profit on potatoes at 50 cents a bushel, for instance; they will be unable to come out whole, however, on potatoes sold at one half as much. Progressive farmers are geared to high production of a comparatively high-cost product. When their neighbours, who have formerly been too poor to comply with the ordinary requirements for soil improvement, find they can produce twice as many bushels per acre as most farmers grow — and can do it without any of the customary cash costs—the market for such crops will react downward in terms of price to the increased production. It is just this event that is going to prove the undoing of men who now are our very best farmers. In all probability the event will come almost unheralded, for the present agenda will probably continue to be taught for many years beyond the time when the first farmers begin to change over from ploughing to discing. No important change in market prices will occur until there is sufficient volume of the new low-cost product to justify price reductions. The final result may be a debacle for those at present in the most favoured position.
Just how such men—at present the respected leaders of Farm Bureau activities, Grange work, and in many instances the chief support of agricultural " propaganda " of the government—will be able to clear their mortgages and emerge solvent from such an economic trap is not at all clear. It is difficult to understand how they will become aware of their plight until it is too late; for up to the time of writing this book (early 1943) no surface indications have appeared that any change in agenda is in prospect. There is evidence, however, that scientists of the government are quietly being prepared for what amounts to a ploughless agriculture. The " house organ " of the Soil Conservation Service, Soil Conservation, has for two years been carrying articles showing the advantages of surface incorporation of organic matter. At least one committee in Congress has been made aware that a change is impending. A two-day meeting of scientific men and machinery manufacturers was held in Chicago late in 1941 at which the possibilities of designing implements for surface incorporation were discussed. The newly established soil and fertilizer investigations of the Bureau of Plant Industry presumably are to set up hurriedly the alleged experimental basis upon which the new agenda will be justified. All this is being done, presumably, without arrangements for rescuing the advance guard of the present regime when the new Blitzkrieg of low-cost crops reaches the demoralized markets.
It may not be clear to the reader just how great the danger is. The average layman may not recognize the fact that there is no crying need for new machinery with which to effect the change from ploughing to surface incorporation. That is just the point. Only one thing is necessary in order to prepare for immediate realization of the benefits of the new regime. That need is the education of farmers to the error of ploughing, and to the fact that a properly used disc harrow can completely prepare the land for crops. When farmers have been informed that they can actually mix tremendous quantities of organic matter into the soil with a disc harrow; that they can do it safely, without the backfire that always accompanies the ploughing in of such materials; that they can then produce far better and bigger crops than they have ever seen or dared to hope for—then the majority of them will begin to check the new information by private experimentation. Thereafter, it will not be long before soil types and all of the expensive treatments that go with them will cease to be of importance. If the men who are now the backbone of commercial agriculture prove to be among the cost. tardy ones to acquire the new information, it will be at their great Much of this chapter may have seemed a digression from, rather than a discussion of, the subject of soil classification. The reason is that we are discussing practical rather than academic matters. There cannot be the slightest doubt that, when soils have been robbed of their natural mantle of organic matter, they emerge as divergent and dissimilar masses of minerals. Quite naturally, these dissimilar areas of sand, clay, silt, or what not, behave differently when planted with various crops. Possibly, too, these same soils, when reclothed with plenty of well-mixed organic matter, will yield differently, because of the fact that they are of slightly different soil type. However, a difference of a few bushels per acre, when the average production is one hundred bushels per acre or more, is a less serious matter than when the differential is based on averages running between ten and twenty-five bushels per acre.
It is no credit to us, considering our mastery of machinery, that orientals produce four to ten times greater crops than we do on land which in some instances is inferior to ours. But they are doing it, and partly at least because they have grasped the true requirements of soil management. We should produce as much on lands now producing from ten to fifteen bushels of corn, for example, particularly in the humid areas of our American maize belt.
With the exception of some bizarre types of soil like the ground-water podzols, which carry their organic matter " concealed " by several inches of overlying sand, and perhaps other abnormal types of soil with which I am unacquainted, we in the United States ought to be able to excel any other people of the world in production per acre on most of the land that has been in crops in our country for generations. We have long been superior in production per man, because of our use of machinery. When we have begun to do by machinery what heretofore we have thought must be done by insects and worms of the soil surface (the intimate intermixing of organic matter with the surface layers) we shall find ourselves automatically leading the world in production per acre as well. It is impossible now to foresee the economic changes which will necessarily follow this basic change in our relations with the soil either in Great Britain or in the United States. That they will be vast is certain.
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