AT WAR WITH NATURE.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVI, Issue 246, 15 September 1936, Page 7

AT WAR WITH NATURE.

HAVOC OF AMERICAN DROUGHT.

RESTORATION OF NATURE

For the third time in six years there is drought in the American wheat belt. This year, as in 1950 and 1934, farmers in north-central and north-western States, as well as in many parts of the South, are forced to stand helplessly by while their crops wither under tho fierce sun, while their live stock die of starvation and thirst oil land which no longer holds pasture or water for their sustenance, wrote the New York correspondent of the London Times early in August. The drought has affected 550 counties in 10 States, and those that have suffered worst are the Dakotas. Minnesota, Montana, Wyoming, Missouri, Nebraska and Kansas. It was estimated in the middle of July that the drought had already cost the country £60,000,000. Many people, as they watch tho scenes of desolation in the wheat belt, which had always been looked upon as an inexhaustible granary, feel that Nature is taking her revenge lor the years of abuse which she iias suffered at the hands of her exploiters. As the market lor wheat increased the land was exploited more and more. Tiresome devices such as the rotation of crops were ignored. The soil, after producing bumper crops for many years, began to drp up. STARVATION OF EMPIRES.

In recent years it has been brought home to many Americans that much of the United States may become littlebetter than a desert. It is estimated that 100,000,000 acres of once excellent land may never he cultivated again. The great winds which swept the plains have removed the rich topsoil from a further 169.000,0G0 acres, which are now covered with, a fine dust that was once fertile earth. Another 789,000,000 acres have lost some of their topsoil and may soon lose it all. Some Americans already begin to look fearfully at the dusty hills of China which once were fertile farmlands, at Mesopotamia, where a great civilisation flourished only to die because the land on which it was built could no longer support it. Their anxieties are not lessened by the following lines from a report recently issued by the National Resources Committee:

Most of the territory occupied by the United States is not naturally suited for a permanent civilisation. By tho normal processes of our farming, our mining, and our lumbering we create a desert. Americans need to realise that all other national hopes and aspirations are secondary to the question whether we can continue to eat. . . . Any nation whose land naturally turns into a desert must either take measures to preserve the land or it will surely die. MR ROOSEVELT’S HOPES. The moral contained in the last sentence quoted above has not been lost on Mr Roosevelt’s Administration. In a moment of enthusiasm the President recently announced that his Government would put an end to drought. Mr Roosevelt and his advisers believe that it is possible to minimise its eil'ests and to restore the barren wheat and cotton lands to fertility and usefulness. In the President’s words: “The economy of the country must be changed.” Before conserving the soil for the future the Administration must provide for the farmers who have been ruined by tile present. In tlie regions which have suffered most severely it will be necessary to move a part of the population—in.extreme cases probably as much as a third of it. They are to remain farmers, hut instead of raising wheat with a few cattle, slice;), and pigs to supplement the family income the Government intends that they shall raise live stock and forage crops as their staple product.-' The Great Plains are watered by rivers, which have their sources in the mountains. The Government plans to link the fertile river-lands with the barren and exhausted rangelands behind them. Like his Swiss counterpart, the Middle-Western farmer will put his stock to pasture on the uplands in summer and keep them in tlicir stalls in winter. THE STUBBORN FARMER,

In the hope that the danger of overgrazing may he avoided in future . a number of grazing associations have already been formed whose members undertake that they will not put more livestock to pasture on the range than the land can reasonably support. Irrigation to restore tho fertility of the rano-e is being undertaken. Many of the 50,000 men from the drought regions who are now dependent on work relief have been set to building dams, in which the spring rains and the melting snow may be caught and retained, and over 1,000 are how under construction. The lakes which were drained in former years and put to wheat may soon return to their natural condition. Much of tho forset land which has been cleared will ho replanted with trees, and there are plans for a forest belt 100 miles wide across tho plains. The Federal Government hopes to restore tho natural conditions which individual'enterprise has blindly destroyed in the past. In that hope lies the danger to the whole scheme. The Western farmer remains an individualist, impatient of interference from Washington. He persists in believing that the recurrent droughts which have ruined him are visitations of Nature and that next year all will be well again. He will accept loans or grants, but is hard to persuade that tho radical changes in his everyday life which the Government proposes are for his own-good. The extent to which, under the Constitution, the Federal Government may interfere with agriculture is still undefined, alhough the invalidation by the Supreme Court of the Agricultural Adjustment Act seems to show that such powers of interference are extremely limited. With a grim alternative before it Mr Roosevelt’s Administration intends to carry through its programme as best it may. On its success may much of tho future of the United I States depend.