Posted on 08/22/2002 2:11:52 PM PDT by Leisler
WASHINGTON -- American farmers are destroying the topsoil and can no longer produce healthy food, claims George Pyle, writing for the Kansas Land Institute recently. Pyle warns that we must go back to traditional farming before we create another Dust Bowl. But if traditional farming was so wonderful, how come we had the Dust Bowl in the first place? In the 1930s, when the original Dust Bowl crisis hit America, all farming was organic and low-intensity. That's what Pyle recommends for our future. But the dust clouds roiled, literally, from the prairies all the way to the U.S. Capitol in Washington where gritty-eyed senators hurriedly created the U.S. Soil Conservation Service. "The Grapes of Wrath" chronicled the thousands of gaunt, sunburned families fleeing the Great Plains in rickety Model T's. Pyle is trying to pretend a crisis by erroneously citing U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that wind and water "are carrying away 2 billion tons of soil per year, or 5.6 tons per cultivated acre." But the USDA number is an estimate of soil moved, not lost. Most of it is moved to another part of the same or neighboring field. Better evidence on soil erosion comes from Dr. Stanley Trimble of UCLA. Trimble dug out the 1938 government soil survey on the famously erodable Coon Creek Basin in southern Wisconsin and resurveyed Coon Creek in the 1970s, and again in the 1990s. He found it's now losing only 6 percent as much soil as it did during the Dust Bowl days. Coon Creek farmers are building topsoil, not losing it. Trimble says alarmists like Pyle "owe us the physical evidence." So far, no dust clouds, no streams choked with sediment, and no detectable differences in food quality exist. In fact, the Soil and Water Conservation Society of America calls modern farming "the most sustainable in history," thanks to high-yield seeds, chemical fertilizers, integrated pest management and a new farming system called conservation tillage. Pyle warns that our crops are becoming "chemically dependent." Big news, George, nature made them that way. The original Dust Bowl occurred because farmers weren't replacing the nitrogen, phosphorus and potash that all growing plants take from the soil. In plain words, they weren't using enough fertilizer. The Great Plains suffered severe droughts before the 1930s and has had them since, but we've had only one Dust Bowl. That's because, in the 1930s, farmers depleted the last of the soil nutrients built up by eons of manure from billions of wild bison, antelopes, grasshoppers and birds. When the Plains were first plowed in the 1870s, the corn stalks grew 9 feet tall. But after 50 years of low-input farming, the soil nutrients were gone. Plowing had vaporized the organic matter needed to nourish soil bacteria and store moisture. The Dust Bowl taught us that low-input farming was unsustainable. We began mining natural deposits of phosphate and potash, and capturing millions of tons of nitrogen (the most critical plant nutrient) from the air. Without nitrogen from the air, our crops would need the manure from another 1 billion cattle. But growing the forage for another 1 billion cows would leave our nation no land for food crops or national forests. Conservation tillage throws away the traditional plow and, instead, uses herbicides to control weeds. It keeps the crop stalks on the soil surface, cutting soil erosion by 65 to 95 percent. It can double the amount of moisture retained in the soil, and double the number of earthworms and soil microbes. Amazingly, because it uses herbicides, it is on the Land Institute's hate list. A peak population of 9 billion people in 2050 is likely to require more than twice as much farm output for the high-quality diets they will demand. We're already farming nearly half the land on the planet not covered by deserts or glaciers. If we want to save room on the planet for wildlife, we can't waste high-quality farmland on low-intensity farming. The Land Institute's low-input farming would not only crowd out the wildlife, but would push us back into the same system that wore out the farms and created the Dust Bowl in the first place. (Editor's note: George Pyle's column on farming, written for the Los Angeles Times, appeared in this space in The Spokesman-Review on Aug. 4.)
Yikes, that would be crowded.
What a load of crap!
I read a article on how the gov determined how much top soil was "lost" in the entire continent. Get this. One study, of a part of one field. Period. From that area, they "extrapolated" for the entire country.
They have no frigg'n idea.
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Ploughing, yes; but not 'manure', or any other element of 'organic' farming.
The problem with "organic" farming is that it prevents the use of low- and no-till methods that greatly reduce the amount of ploughing needed and hence, reduce erosion. Elimination of so called "GM" crops further compounds the problem.
Ploughing, yes; but not 'manure', or any other element of 'organic' farming.
The claim here is that the problem with organic farming was the lack of chemical fertilizers. Manure is a good fertilizer, but it doesn't replace everything that the crops take out. Farm it long enough that way and nothing you plant will grow, and it's the lack of vegetation that leaves the land susceptible to a dustbowl.
So claims the article. IANAF, so I can't claim firsthand knowledge, but it sounds reasonable to me. Tell me if it's not.
I would say that I'm shocked but I'm too old to be stunned by the evironutballs anymore. Global warming, hole in the ozone, we're going to run out of resources in 20 years (sliding scale from what ever year we're in), Ted Danson predicting that the oceans would die (two years ago), etc. etc. etc.
Sheesh...
"are carrying away 2 billion tons of soil per year, or 5.6 tons per cultivated acre."
This comes out to about 0.5 inches of soil per square foot per year. If that tally DIDN'T come from a sample population of at least hundreds of plots, then it is essentially meaningless. In some areas there could be 3 or 4 different soil types just in one acre, all with different erosional characteristics. Even without replacement (which is always happening at the soil\regolith*\bedrock interface) there would probably be 300-400 years of soil on average in the plains...
*Regolith = degraded bedrock
Having said that, I've been told for years that the first major contributor to the Dust Bowl was the new method (at that time) of ploughing "ditch to ditch". In other words, farmers began taking out hedge rows, trees and every other natural or man-planted barrier to the winds which never stop in that country. They did this so that they could get in every row of crop possible, and while I'm not sure I remember this correctly, they were taught this method of maximizing profit by agents of the Department of Agriculture and other so-called "government farm agencies".
I do know this for sure. When I was a lad farmers had begun replanting trees and hedgerows, and the worst effects of the Dust Bowl had subsided, eventually stopping completely. Sadly, driving through that country again today - the central tier of farm states from Texas to North Dakota - you can see evidence that ploughing "ditch to ditch" has come back with the move to corporate farming.
Taking away the barriers which stop the wind erosion endemic to that part of the country, while breaking up every inch of ground no one actually lives on, creates the conditions of the Dust Bowl. I'm sure there are other factors as well, but to the people who would - or should - know the best, the farmers themselves, it's major cause was as I've said here.
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