Decades of Destruction
The effect of reaching this last agricultural frontier was not generally realized at the time. But by 1914, when World War I commenced, it was becoming apparent.
Jacks and Whyte estimated that more food-producing soil was lost to the world by erosion alone in the twenty years between 1914 and 1934 than in the whole of the previous historical period! (Vanishing Lands, p. 219)
"During World War I, some fifty million acres of agricultural lands in Europe, exclusive, went out of cultivation. Consequently, 40 million acres of grasslands in the United States were thrown into cultivation for the first time. This land — most of it in the area of western Texas and Oklahoma, extending into the bordering parts of Colorado, Kansas, and Nebraska — NEVER WAS FITTED FOR INTENSIVE CULTIVATION.
"In the madness of the 'wheat rush' these lands were ripped open by the plow and wheat was cultivated on them by a process which is better described as 'mining' than agriculture. . ." (Man and the Soil, p. 49, emphasis ours)
On many of these huge farms there were no permanent residents. Men came in the fall or spring, plowed and seeded the soil, and went away. They returned in the summer, gathered the crop and went away again. After the harvest, the bare soil lay unprotected, as dry winds swept across it and the fierce sun baked it and robbed it of moisture and fertility.
Because of the richness of the soil, "Catastrophe did not come for several years. . . . When finally the one-crop-system of spoilation had exhausted the organic matter, the land was ready for the great dust storms". (Ibid., p. 49)
In portions of the U.S. Plains States, Arizona, and California there are deserts where 50-100 years ago lush grasses reached up to the horses' bellies or higher, and bumper wheat crops were a yearly occurrence.
America Not Alone
The entire world joined the U.S. in this orgy of destruction. Jacks and Whyte state that deterioration of soil due to the unprecedented economic expansion of the nineteenth century was worldwide (Vanishing Lands, p. 219).
When the soil deteriorates, the effect is the same as a reduction in the amount of land. So while population greatly increased, the earth suffered a severe loss in ability to feed its inhabitants!
According to Jacks and Whyte, Africa ranks even ahead of North America in the extent and severity of depletion. General Smuts of South Africa once stated, "Erosion is the biggest problem confronting the country, bigger than any politics."
Although the data is fragmentary, virtually every nation in Central and South America suffers these problems to some extent. In many areas, such as the wheat lands of Chile and the pampas of Argentina, they are severe. Overgrazing and plowing up grasslands to grow wheat have taken a heavy toll in destroying the choicest agricultural lands on the continent. The Amazon Basin and other tropical areas — though of less value agriculturally — also show excessive erosion.
The story of topsoil depletion in the great Australian wheat lands and the grazing lands that border the great central desert sounds like a replay of what happened in the American West. Deforestation of mountains has also created a flood and siltation problem.
In the grazing country of New Zealand, there has been extensive deforestation to provide pastureland, which, in turn, has been heavily overgrazed. Many steep slopes that should have been left to permanent forest were cleared to accommodate more sheep and cattle.
Nor is it just the newer countries which are destroying their soil. Soil depletion is very extensive and acute in the great wheat-producing black lands of Russia and in the vast Eurasian grasslands. In India, too, this cancer has been spreading with startling rapidity as the population has increased.
Looking at the world's soils and natural resources in the large, they are in general and with few exceptions characterized by similar degenerative processes. Ward Shepard, writing in Food or Famine, classifies these as follows:
"1) In humid regions, water erosion is destroying sloping lands by virtue of poor methods of tillage and by overgrazing of pastures.
"2) The cultivable grasslands — the prairie soils of the Americas, Australia, Africa, and Russia — are being depleted by one-crop farming, notably wheat, and by wind and water erosion.
"3) Semi-arid grasslands in the Americas, Eurasia, Africa, and Australia have been severely devegetated by overgrazing, with intense wind and water erosion that in many regions is producing or threatening to produce true desert conditions.
"4) The bulk of the world's forests are being destructively exploited, not over 12 or 15 percent of the total forest area being under scientific management.
"5) In all these countries, poor tillage, overgrazing, and deforestation are wasting vast quantities of surface water by permitting it to rush into stream channels and out to sea instead of being absorbed into the soil by well-kept vegetative cover. This wastage causes desiccation of the land, the disruption of rivers and valleys, and an increasing menace to immense potential sources of hydroelectric energy."
The earth's total forest and grassland cover has already been depleted well below the safety margin for maintaining a healthy climate.
Assessing the Erosion Problem
"Erosion has modified the surface of the earth more than the combined activities of all the earthquakes, volcanoes, tornadoes, and tidal waves since the beginning of history, yet its processes are so gradual that we . . . have been prone to ignore it," Burges says in Soil Erosion Control, pp. 3-4.
And ignore it men did!
It was not until the emergence of the United States Soil Conservation Service in 1933 that man "began to grasp the ominous magnitude and menace of manmade erosion as a world phenomenon" (Food or Famine, p. 8).
The seriousness of the situation was driven home by a series of calamities in the "form of searing droughts, stupendous floods, and continent-darkening dust storms that impressed on men's minds, to the four corners of the earth, the fury of the swiftly spreading revolt of nature against man's crude efforts of mastery" (ibid. p. 9).
And what did the Soil Conservation Service find when they made their first survey? They found that man-made erosion was in progress on more than one billion acres of land — more than half of the total acreage in the continental United States!
They found that already over 100 million acres of our best cropland had been irremediably ruined for further cultivation!
In addition, "An even more destructive and critically dangerous erosion has swept over the western grasslands of the Great Plains and intermountain plateaus after fifty or seventy-five years of over-grazing by livestock and futile and mistaken efforts to subdue these lands to the plow . . . Nowhere in America and almost nowhere in the world is the stupendous breakdown of great land masses and river systems more advanced, and in few parts of the world has man been more decisively defeated by nature than in the grasslands.
"In the third great category of land — forest land — America has met the same decisive defeat at nature's hands" (ibid. p. 9).
In spite of conservation efforts over the past 35 years, conservative government estimates indicate that right now nearly two-thirds of the 1.5 billion acres of privately owned rural land in the U.S. (about three-fourths of the total land area) needs conservation treatment!
Estimated Annual Loss
The U.S. Soil Conservation Service has calculated that "In a normal production year, erosion by wind and water removes 21 times as much plant food from the soil as is removed in the crops sold off this land."
Man-made erosion from America's farms and grasslands alone is moving over three billion tons of soil every year down into our rivers and reservoirs and out to sea. It would take a train of freight cars long enough to encircle the earth at the equator 18 times, to haul away such an enormous quantity of earth!
That is a loss of one ton of topsoil for every man, woman and child on earth.
This is the rich topsoil that contains, in minerals and humus, the great reserves of plant food standing between man and famine!
On the basis of 1,000 tons of topsoil to cover one acre seven inches deep, the equivalent of 10,000 one hundred-acre farms are lost in the U.S. to water erosion down the Mississippi alone every year (Soil Conservation, p. 9). That is about two million tons per day!
"All of the rivers of the earth probably are carrying to the sea about forty times as much sediment as that carried by the Mississippi" (The Illustrated Library of the Natural Sciences, art. "Erosion").
What wind erosion can do was demonstrated by the unprecedented duster of May 11, 1934. It carried away an estimated 300 million tons of topsoil from western Kansas and parts of neighboring states. On the same basis as mentioned above, this one duster took the equivalent of 3,000 one-hundred-acre farms out of crop production!
All these figures, of course, must be taken only as estimates.
Erosion takes away the prime materials of the soil. Therefore, some experts believe the loss is far greater than is apparent from mere consideration of its actual weight or total quantity (Gustafson, Conservation of the Soil, p. 25).
What is removed by erosion is the best part of the topsoil, the surface portion which contains health-producing microbes, humus and finished plant food. The one ton of topsoil that each person on earth loses each year contains enough plant food to provide that person's sustenance for years. This all means, of course, that soil conservation and proper agricultural methods could make the whole earth fabulously rich.
The Loss of Water
The tale of wastage does not end with erosion. It also includes the mass of surface water which is lost as it sweeps the eroded soil seaward. Under normal conditions rainwater goes into the soil to nourish plants and to slowly feed wells, springs, ponds, creeks, and rivers. Man-made loss of surface water is desiccating the earth. It is wasting and preventing human use of a substantial percentage of the total rainfall.
The full fury of the destructive process is seen in our great river systems. With their channels clogged and ever rising by the deposit of our wasted soils, our rivers are becoming more and more incapable of safely carrying away the increasing quantities of wasted surface water. More than 8,000 of the 12,711 small watersheds identified in the U.S. mainland — or 65 percent — have conservation problems needing a solution (USDA Bulletin 263).
Yet our engineers still think that man can conquer nature. They dream of restoring our broken-down river systems by simply erecting gigantic flood-detention and silt-detention dams. What a pitifully naïve approach to the problem!
"All the river barriers, in the form of dams and dikes, that man can construct to repair the consequences of his own folly in raping the earth are puny compared with the cosmic forces of destruction he has unleashed over the land.
"The engineers ignore the fact that nature herself, violently reconstructing entire watersheds in an effort to cope with the surplus runoff, has carved over 200 million gullies in the United States". (Food or Famine, p. 11)
Further, because of nature's unconquerable power, "an estimated 2000 irrigation dams in the United States are now useless impoundments of silt, sand, and gravel". (from a speech "Can the World be Saved ?" by Dr. Cole)
When will man learn that it is foolish to fight nature? When will he get in harmony with the God-given laws governing nature? And when will he see that foolish farming practices extract a terrible penalty in human health?
What Poor Soil Means to You
Plants must depend upon the available supply of minerals in the soil in which they are growing for the elements essential to their growth. Man and the animals he eats depend in turn upon the plants for these nutrients.
In other words, you are physically, emotionally and mentally what you eat! If you eat foods which lack nutritional value, your body pays the penalty.
Plants and animals raised on eroded and depleted soil are inferior producers of foods. And such foods result in sick, degenerate and disease-prone human beings. It's just that simple — and that sure.
"The most serious loss resulting from . . . soil exhaustion," warns Mickey, "is not quantitative, but qualitative. It has to do with the quality of life the soil supports" (Man and the Soil, p. 33).
For example, both the birthrate and the virility of the population declined because of soil depletion in all parts of the Roman Empire except Egypt. It is recorded that the Romans marveled at the birthrate in Egypt, whose soil was fertilized each year by the Nile (Simkhovitch, Rome's Fall Reconsidered, p. 112).
Soil lacking in calcium and phosphorus lacks the elements of proper bone growth of both animals and humans. Soils lacking in organically produced nitrates and other minerals produce vegetation lacking in the proteins essential to the building and repair of body tissues. It has long been known that animals raised on the world's choice limestone soils like those around Lexington, Kentucky and Florida's uplands, for example, have stronger bones, sounder flesh, greater endurance, and longer lives than animals raised on soils less rich in bone and muscle-building minerals. That is why breeders of race horses in the U.S. have practically taken over the Kentucky bluegrass region and much of Florida's limestone land.
The same applies equally to humans. The baby won't have good bones if fed a formula made of milk from a cow whose feed came from a soil deficient in calcium and phosphorus. And the adult won't build muscle and good red blood by eating a steak from a steer fed on grasses and grain from leached and eroded soils devoid of protein-building minerals and iron.
"Much remains to be done in the study of the relationship of the soil to the mineral and vitamin requirements of human diet, but much has been done. And what is known points unequivocally to the fact that deficient soils produce deficient men" (Man and the Soil, p. 3-4).
This is why the growing problem of soil depletion is so important to you!
Only the Foundation
It needs to be emphasized that the erosion and soil depletion problems discussed in this article are only part of the gigantic agricultural crisis which is now looming up.
Chemically unbalanced fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, pollution, the inferior products of "scientific agriculture," upset weather, and an economic stranglehold on the food producers —these and other important factors are adding up to produce the greatest agriculture crisis in history. Watch for future articles which will discuss these important subjects — and give their solutions.