Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations - Kootenay Local Agricultural Society

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conservation, crop diversification, stabilizing farm income, and creating
flexible farm credit. As much as anything, this last element, which allowed
farmers to carry more debt, changed American farming. Within a decade,
farm debt more than doubled while farm income rose by just a third.
Despite a continual rise in government subsidies, more than four out of
every ten American farms disappeared between 1933 and 1968. Corporate
factory farms better able to finance increasingly expensive farm machinery
and agrochemicals began to dominate American agriculture by the end of
the 1960s.
Although different in detail from Rome and the South, the economics
of large corporate farms similarly discounted concern about soil erosion.
Corporations are, by nature, temporary land owners. ...A tenant on
corporate land has no assurance whatsoever of staying on the farm
more than a year. ...A high proportion of corporate land tends to
cause instability in land tenure and to foster erosion, unless the majority
of corporations can be induced to adopt definite soil conservation
programs on their land. Heavy mortgage indebtedness exerts a specific
financial pressure upon the soil by forcing the farmer to squeeze out of
his soil whatever he can to meet his financial obligations. 11
The growth of mechanized industrial agriculture promoted rapid soil loss
as farmers spent their natural capital to service loans for machinery and
fertilizers.
Records at Woburn Experimental Farm, established about twenty-five
miles north of London in 1876 by England’s Royal Agricultural Society,
inadvertently documented the effects of changing agricultural practices on
soil erosion. The first half century of crop yield experiments recorded little
erosion. After the Second World War, the introduction of herbicides
and heavy farm machinery changed that.
The first report of soil erosion problems came after a storm on May 21,
1950, when intense rainfall carved four-inch-deep, three-foot-wide gullies
into bare fields, burying sugar beet plots beneath piles of dirt and
unearthed potatoes. Serious erosion in the 1960s sharply reduced the
organic nitrogen content on experimental plots. By the 1980s the farm
served to validate soil erosion models, as more than a dozen erosional
events occurred each year, especially on the farm’s steepest slopes. Yet the
detailed diaries kept by farm staff from 1882 to 1947 had focused on the
subtleties of crop performance, cultivation techniques, soil pH, and crop
damage from varmints, with no mention of erosion before the introduc-
dust blow