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Coping with Excess |
Back in the 1920s and ’30s, when Maxine Nickelson was growing up poor in Kansas, a number of ideas about farming techniques were grounded more in tradition than science. Farmers were raised on the old conceit that rain would follow the plow, which proved disastrous when a decade of high rainfall in the 1920s was followed by drought in the 1930s. And many farmers, as a matter of pride, planted their crops in neatly tailored, unbending rows. This practice of disregarding contours and hillsides often created furrows for rain and wind to wash away the soil’s nutrients. Fueled by such practices, erosion was silently scraping away the country’s farmlands.
But the folly of such practices wasn’t unanticipated by everyone. In 1928, Hugh Hammond Bennett, the original crusader for farmland conservation, published a report for the U.S. Department of Agriculture titled “Soil Erosion, A National Menace.” The report made an almost puritanical call for the nation to reform what it called “the evils of … land wastage” and stressed “the need for increased practical information.”
“What,” Bennett asked, “would be the feeling of this Nation should a foreign nation suddenly enter the United States and destroy 90,000 acres of land, as erosion has been allowed to do in a single county?”
Bennett, the son of North Carolina farmers and an employee at the USDA’s Bureau of Soils, argued in countless journal articles and speeches that soil erosion caused by farming practices—if left unchecked—would hinder the nation’s ability to produce food. By 1930, largely because of his undaunted dedication, Congress had authorized funding for a small group of experimental field stations that demonstrated how farmers could prevent soil erosion. But Bennett wanted more support and money.
Called to testify before the Senate Public Lands Committee, Bennett showed that then, like now, a little bit of drama goes a long way. On the morning of the hearing, he rechecked the weather reports calling for a major dust storm to roll into Washington, D.C., out of the Ohio Valley. As the hearing dragged on, the storm arrived on cue. Bennett asked the senators to move from the great mahogany table to gaze out the windows on the baleful storm. “Everything moved along quite nicely thereafter,” recalled Bennett years later.
The soil conservation act of 1935 created the Soil Conservation Service, and Bennett became its first chief (a position he held until he retired in 1951). The agency started up field offices throughout the country to help farmers develop plans to save soil. Young boys and men, hired by President Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps, would help farmers create terraces, replant trees for wildlife habitat and control gullies. By mid-1936, the service was overseeing 147 demonstration projects, 48 nurseries, 23 experiment stations and more than 10,000 full-time employees who were responsible for supervising the efforts of 23,000 Works Progress Administration workers.
“It was a good thing they did that, because farmers started changing their practices,” says Nickelson. “Farmers didn’t like being told what to do; they thought they were losing their right to do what they wanted with their land. But they didn’t have a choice, and I think all of them thought it was a good thing, too. Soil conservation made a big difference.”
The legislation was also, of course, a handy and legal way to bring farm families like Nickelson’s some desperately needed economic relief—in the form of financial aid to farmers who agreed to idle land—at a time when 40 percent of the American population still lived on farms. As Nickelson remembers, when the checks arrived in the mail, it was like Christmas. In subsequent farm legislation throughout the 1930s, Congress funneled more money to farmers who would replace soil-depleting crops like corn and wheat with cover crops like grasses or legumes. While the conservation benefits of these initial programs were modest, legislators hailed them—and the political capital they inspired—as a great success.
Then World War II hit, and farmers rushed to cash in on high prices for crops to feed troops and a hungry world market, tilling up acres of land that had been idled for conservation. After the war ended, conservation continued to rust in the corner of the nation’s toolshed. While Congress did a few things, such as creating soil banks that put some farmlands off limits for five- or 10-year stretches and paying farmers who let hunters onto their conservation acreage, for the next 30 years history pretty much wrote an empty chapter on conservation in agriculture.
The lean times for conservation intensified in the 1970s. Russians were facing food shortages, and the U.S. secretary of agriculture encouraged American farmers to “plant fence row to fence row.” Within a few years, a quarter of all farmers on the plains had tilled up grasslands they had idled for conservation so they could produce wheat for the Russians and reap the high prices caused by surging demand.
“The pressure was on to maximize production, and there was a push from lenders to encourage growth and expansion,” says Don Reeves, a farmer in Nebraska’s Platte River Valley, an area he calls “God’s favorite country.” “Con-servation was way down on anybody’s list. There was scarcely any attention paid to the impact on the environment."
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Nature picture credits (top to bottom, left to right): Photo © Francis Miller/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images (Farmers); Photo © Corbis (Dumping Potatoes).
