Gloomy Soil-Saver

Few people are gloomier, professionally and perennially, than the men who run the U.S. Soil Conservation Service. Guests at Princeton's Bicentennial Conference on Engineering and Human Affairs last week heard a habitual prophet of doom: Dr. Hugh H. Bennett, 65, chief U.S. conservationist. In his best doomsday voice Dr. Bennett talked about soil and its abuse. Every decade, he said, there are 200,000,000 more people in the world and less soil from which to feed them. A vast acreage is being ruined each year. Something must be done for the soil.

But something has already been done, and Dr. Bennett did it. Soon after he joined the Department of Agriculture as a young chemist in 1903, he was sent to Louisa County, Virginia, to see why its soil was so poor. His shocking discovery: the soil was not just poor; most of it was gone, washed down roaring gullies or spirited away by stealthy "sheet erosion." And it was not only the backward South that was threatened with soil destruction. U.S. farmers everywhere, ignoring erosion by water and wind and over-cropping, were squandering the nation's most vital asset.

Land Doctors. Bennett became a soil crusader. Year by year more people, and more important people, listened to his prophecies of disaster. In 1933, Secretary of the Interior Ickes made him head of a newly created bureau: the Soil Erosion Service. Two years later Franklin Roosevelt summoned Bennett to the White House, made him head of the brand-new Soil Conservation Service.

By this time a great idea had taken shape in Bennett's mind. Farmers would, he was sure, use science voluntarily if properly approached. He proposed that they be persuaded to band together in "soil conservation districts," each choosing its officers in a democratic election, and running its own affairs. Bennett's experts would help the districts as "land doctors." In their kits they had a dazzling array of medicines. For gullies, they described cheap, home-made dams and new plants, such as kudzu vine, to hold the sliding soil. For hilly fields they prescribed novel methods of contour plowing, strip planting, terracing. For run-down soils, they recommended cover crops and suitable fertilizers. They would survey and test a whole district, then tell farmers how to make soil more productive.

Balance Sheet. The idea swept the country. At present there are nearly 1,700 districts, containing two-thirds of the nation's farms. In the growing season of 1947, 100,000,000 acres will be cultivated scientifically to save the soil.

Nevertheless, at Princeton last week Bennett was still gloomy. Erosion, he said, had ruined one-fifth of the nation's tillable land, had damaged a third of the remainder, and was threatening another third. Something must be done.

But every airplane passenger could see how much had already been done. The graceful contour strips and terraces of well-run U.S. farms were a lasting monument to Bennett. And the Bennett gospel was spreading fast to distant parts of the world.

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