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Excerpt from The Next Green Revolution
From Chapter 3
Down to Earth Step #1: Conserving and Creating Healthy Soil
..soil is not usually lost in slabs or heaps of magnificent tonnage.
It is lost a little at a time over millions of acres by the careless acts
of millions of people. It cannot be saved by heroic feats of gigantic
technology, but only by millions of small acts and restraints..."
– Wendell Berry
In the spring of 1996 the amount of land in western Oklahoma_– 1.8
million acres – in a "condition to blow" reached a twenty
year high. A field is in this category when it doesn’t have adequate
growing cover or residue from a previous crop to protect the soil from
eroding with high winds. The immediate cause was a severe drought that
had begun the previous fall and had lasted through the winter. In contrast,
the previous year of 1995 had seen a twenty year low in the amount of
land in danger of serious wind erosion damage, with 158,890 acres liable
"to blow" in the incessant western wind.
In comparison to the almost two million acres threatened in 1996, the
1995 figure looks great. But is it? This statistic tells us that there
are at least 150,000 acres of land in western Oklahoma subject to serious
wind erosion damage each year. What do farmers do to combat it? In 1996,
they were out on their tractors practicing emergency tillage__ plowing
up strips to bring clods of dirt to the surface. These strips of clods
help break the force of the wind across a field and therefore, lessen
erosion.
I felt for these farmers. I had spent too many days myself on a tractor,
mouth covered with a rag, eyes protected by goggles, doing the same thing
when I was growing up. I remember wondering if it was worth it– it
seemed more symbolic than effective. Still we did it, anything to keep
our fields from blowing away. Here and there where tumbleweeds had got
hung up in a fence, accidental windbreaks formed. The dirt caught in the
weeds would make sand walls above the field. I remember dust storms during
the 1950s that buried fences and cars and led my mother to stuff window
cracks with rags and hang quilts over the door. One time when we visited
my grandparents we took scoop shovels and cleared out five inches of sand
that had seeped into their house from one such storm.
They lived in west Texas and of course, it wasn't and isn’t, just
Oklahoma with this problem. But in Oklahoma, blowing soil has a special
significance. We are Steinbeck’s Okies, "blowed out and tractored
out" of our farms during the infamous Dust Bowl. The blowing fields
of 1996 are a reminder of what I saw on a postcard in a store at the mall
the other day. Labeled Oklahoma 1935, it pictured a black tidal wave of
topsoil on the horizon that threatened to drown all in its path under
an ocean of fine dust.
What brought on the Dust Bowl? Some were farming land that turned out
to be too easily eroded and should never have been converted from grassland
to cropland by the "sodbusters" desperate to make a living.
Then came the terrible drought that withered crops and left fields bare
to the wind. Imagine a dust storm carrying 300 million tons of fertile
topsoil-- the equivalent of a foot of soil stripped from 150,000 acres--
about 470 square miles. The Dust Bowl wasn’t just a spectacular natural
disaster, worthy of big screen treatment, though it was certainly that.
It was a tragic loss of an essential gift, a gift that makes life on earth
possible: topsoil.
NOT JUST DIRT
Topsoil is a little like the air that we breathe, a constant that we
are largely unaware of. When farmer with his plow turns over the soil
in a field, or a gardener sticks a shovel in the ground and spades up
a mound of dirt, each is encountering topsoil. As its name implies it
is the top layer in a multi-layer cake, the bottom layer being bedrock.
But it is not just the icing on the cake-- it is the layer that makes
life on earth possible.
Topsoil consists of mineral particles, organic matter, water, air, and
living soil organisms. It is the layer of life-- the root zone of plants
where the water and nutrients that enable plans to grow are absorbed.
Beneath the top soil is the subsoil which generally has less organic matter
and is less penetrable to roots than topsoil, but is a storehouse for
minerals.
Topsoil depth varies from place to place. In the Nile River valley, built
by eons of flooding and deposits of sediment, it is tens of feet thick.
This luxurious topsoil was the fertile foundation for humanity’s
progress. Often however, topsoil is more precious. When settlers first
came onto the North American prairies, the topsoil depth averaged ten
inches, built up over the centuries and held in place by deep grass roots.
In the hundred years since the prairie sod was broken by the steel plow
and the land was converted to farming, on average about half the topsoil
has been eroded away. The creation of the breadbasket of America from
the virgin prairies has come at great cost in topsoil.
Topsoil is crucial to agriculture. This first step-- conserving and creating
healthy soil-- is the foundation of a sustainable agriculture. It is closely
linked to the next two steps-- conserve water and protect its quality,
and manage organic wastes so they don’t pollute. How well agriculture
manages soil, water, and organic wastes will determine its future health.
Conserving healthy soil by guarding it against erosion or other forces
that would degrade it is the most basic step. This step has as its corollary
actively building soil health, because soil used for agricultural purposes
today is not as healthy as it could be. It is both less diverse and less
active biologically. Without healthy topsoil, the world cannot begin to
feed its billions. While American popular culture discourse in recent
years has speculated on the fate of life on earth in case of alien invasion,
asteroid bombardment or rampaging killer viruses, the slow loss of quality
soil is more of a threat to life on the planet than any of the above.
Perhaps the relative lack of concern about this problem in the United
States has a historic cause. Ever since the first Europeans had landed
in North America, the vastness of the continent had led them to believe
that its natural resources__ including soil__ were inexhaustible. This
belief was held even by those who should have known better. In 1909 the
chief of the Bureau of Soils labeled soil "the one indestructible,
immutable asset that the nation possesses."
It wasn't indestructible or immutable, then or now. As there are today,
back then there were those who ignored the problems in agriculture as
well as those who tried to address them. Conservationist and president
Theodore Roosevelt recognized the danger and pronounced in his down-to-earth
manner: "When the soil is gone, men must go; and the process does
not take long." In the U.S. government’s Bureau of Soils, one
scientist in particular, Hugh Howard Bennett, spoke out and wrote on the
issue and began to study rates of erosion in test plots, including one
in Oklahoma. But it took a dramatic event like the Dust Bowl-- when the
soil loss was so easy to see-- to get people to really pay attention.
Soil erosion-- the removal of topsoil by wind or water-- is the most
dramatic way that topsoil can be degraded. During the terrible drought
of the 30's in the Great Plains, wind picked up soil from withered fields
and blew it literally across the country. The severity of the situation
caused the U.S. Congress in 1935 to begin considering a bill to create
the Soil Conservation Service (SCS), an agency of the federal government
that would address the nation’s soil erosion problems. Hugh Bennett
was scheduled to testify in favor of the plan on an April morning. Usually
concise and to the point, he instead gave detailed information about erosion
problems in state after state. As he warmed to his subject, the sky slowly
darkened with dust. Bennett, of course, knew what was coming. It was a
dust storm, carrying topsoil from prairies 2000 miles west. While the
dust obscured the great white buildings of official Washington, the Congress
was persuaded to pass a bill establishing the SCS, the first soil conservation
act by any government in history.
The Soil Conservation Service moved quickly to stop or reduce erosion.
The government bought some erodible farmland and paid farmers not to farm
other marginal acres. Billions of trees were set out in rows at the edges
of fields--shelter belts-- to break the wind. Blowing fields were seeded
to grass. Within two years the SCS was working with 50,000 farmers. The
work of the SCS, now renamed the Natural Resources Conservation Service
(NRCS) has continued to the present day, through a variety of programs.
In 1974, conservation practices had reduced soil erosion on the Great
Plains by 221 million tons annually.
Unfortunately, despite all these efforts, we still can't declare a victory
over soil erosion. Farmers must continually battle it, not just in the
old Dust Bowl of the Great Plains, but across the country and the world.
Erosion can be caused by wind or water, and can occur on the country’s
best farmland— Iowa, Illinois and Missouri top the list for water
erosion. It has been estimated that there are two bushels of soil lost
from Iowa farmland for every bushel of corn produced. Unlike the Dust
Bowl, which was an acute case of soil loss, erosion today is a chronic
problem, exacerbated on occasion by natural disasters such as floods or
drought, as in Oklahoma in 1996.
The Next Green Revolution: Essential Steps to a Healthy, Sustainable
Agriculture
by James E. Horne, PhD and Maura McDermott
copyright 2001 by Haworth Press, Inc.
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