Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations - Kootenay Local Agricultural Society

Traveling through much of the South by canoe, Lyell watched the rivers
along the way, describing how dramatically accelerated soil erosion following
forest clearing and cultivation were obvious to anyone paying
attention. Special training in geology was not needed to read the signs of
catastrophic erosion. People he met along Georgia’s Alatamaha River told
him that the river had flowed clean even during floods until the land
upriver was cleared for planting. As late as 1841, local residents could determine
the source of floodwaters from individual storms because the deforested
branch of the river ran red with mud, while the still forested branch
flowed crystal clear even during big storms. By the time of Lyell’s visit the
formerly clear branch also flowed muddy after Native Americans were
driven out and the land was cleared for agriculture.
The toll of contemporary agricultural methods on soil and society was
no secret. The report of the commissioner of patents for 1849 attempted to
tally up the cost to the country.
One thousand millions of dollars, judiciously expended, will hardly
restore the one hundred million acres of partially exhausted lands in
the Union to that richness of mould, and strength of fertility for permanent
cropping, which they possessed in their primitive state. ...
Lands that, seventy years ago, produced from twenty-five to thirty-five
bushels of wheat in the State of New York, now yield only from six to
nine bushels per acre; and in all the old planting States, the results of
exhaustion are still more extensive and still more disastrous. 26
Since falling crop yields were apparent throughout the original states,
how to protect soil fertility presented a fundamental challenge. “There
appears to be no government that realizes its duty ‘to promote the public
welfare’ by ...impressing upon them the obligation which every cultivator
of the soil owes to posterity, not to leave the earth in a less fruitful condition
than he found it.” 27 Before the start of the Civil War, agricultural
periodicals throughout the country assailed the twin evils of soil erosion and
exhaustion. As the shortage of fresh land became acute, pleas to adopt soil
conservation and improvement techniques became increasingly common.
The immediate causes of soil exhaustion in the antebellum South were
not mysterious. Foremost among these were continuous planting without
crop rotation, inadequate provision for livestock to provide manure, and
improvident tilling straight up and down sloping hillsides that left bare soil
exposed to rainfall. But there were underlying social causes that drove these
destructive practices.
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