SOIL EROSION

Evening Post, Volume CXXII, Issue 70, 19 September 1936, Page 8

SOIL EROSION

AMERICAN TRAGEDY COUNTRY WARNED (From "The Post's" Representative.) NEW YORK, August 12. Many years .ago the United States produced a thousand million bushels of wheat, in a single year and had a substantial surplus for export. During the present year wheat is being imported from Canada. The change is one of many phases of the shrinkage of natural resources at the hand of man that led a commission, set up by President Roosevelt, to warn the country that the public estate would entirely disappear in another hundred years unless nation-wide conservation steps were taken, within the next two decades. ■

The following are some of the conclusions of the presidential commission:—Forest resources are'reduced by half—by three-fourths, if full-grown timber alone is considered: one billion acres of land has lost, by erosion or wind, from one- to. three-fourths of the top soil; one hundred million acres of the finest agricultural land will never again be tilled; a dust desert is forming east of the Rockies on the Great Plains, where firm grass 'once stood; three billion tons of solid material are washed out of fields and pastures every year by water erosion; to load and; haul away this incomprehensible bulk of rich farm soil would require a train of freight cars 475.000 miles long—enough to girdle the earth nineteen times. RESTORING BALANCE. The .President acted quickly on receipt of the commission's report. Today forty-six States have obeyed his injunction that generations of plundering the' public estate must cease; organisations have been set up to cooperate with the Federal Government to assist Nature- in restoring the balance. Slopes of more than 20 per cent, will be afforested rather than ploughed; those from. 10 to 20 per cent, will be grassed". Crops will be rotated and diversified; ploughing up and down hill, against the natural contour of the land, will be discontinued. Fields will not be left bare after the harvest, but will be sown to grass or grain. *

In 1813, Jefferson wrote of his farm in Virginia:—"Our country is hilly, and we have been: in the habit of ploughing in straight rows, whether up or down hill, and our soil was all rapidly running into the rivers. We now plough Jiorizontally, following the curvature of the hills and hollows, on dead level. Every furrow thus acts as a reservoir to receive and retain the water, all of which goes to the benefit of the growing plant instead of running off into the stream," The discovery that Jefferson made a century and a quarter ago is the basis of the Roosevelt doctrine, which upsets the boast of Americans that they conquered a continent, and declares that they merely plundered it.