Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations - Kootenay Local Agricultural Society

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The late nineteenth-century advent of widespread lending encouraged
Oklahoma’s new farmers to borrow liberally and pay off the interest on
their loans by mining soil in aggressive production for export markets. Just
over two decades after the Oklahoma land rush, farmers plowed up forty
million acres of virgin prairie to cash in on high grain prices during the
First World War. In the above-average rainfall of the early 1900s, millions
of acres of prairie became amber fields of grain. Relatively few paused to
consider what would happen should high winds accompany the next
inevitable drought.
In 1902 the twenty-second annual report of the U.S. Geological Survey
concluded that the semiarid High Plains from Nebraska to Texas were
fatally vulnerable to rapid erosion if plowed: “The High Plains, in short,
are held by their sod.” With rainfall too low to support crops consistently,
grazing was the only long-term use for which the “hopelessly nonagricultural”
region was well suited. 1 Once stripped of sod, the loess soil would
not stay put under the high winds and pounding rains of the open prairie.
The survey’s findings were no match for land speculation and the high
crop prices during the First World War. A century later, talk of returning
the region to large-scale grazing as a buffalo commons echoes the survey’s
far-sighted advice.
Half of the potential farmland in the United States was under cultivation
at the end of the nineteenth century. Even conservative textbooks held
that static crop yields despite significant technological advances meant soil
fertility was declining. Soil erosion was recognized as one of the most fundamental
and important resource conservation problems facing the
nation. Harvard University geology professor Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
even warned that the rapid pace of soil destruction threatened to undermine
civilization.
Protecting society’s fundamental interest in the soil was not just the government’s
job, Shaler held, it was one of its primary purposes. “Soil is a
kind of placenta that enables living beings to feed on the earth. In it the
substances utterly unfit to nourish plants in the state in which they exist in
the rocks are brought to the soluble shape whence they may be lifted into
life. All this process depends on the adjustment of the rate of rock decay to
that of ...renewing soil.” Shaler recognized that agricultural practices
mined soil fertility by eroding soil faster than it formed. “The true
aim ...of a conservative agriculture ...is to bring about and keep the
balance between the processes of rock decay and erosion. ...With rare
exceptions, the fields of all countries have been made to bear their crops
dust blow