The Road to Fertility

Prophets of agricultural doom are fond of saying that U.S. farms are rapidly losing their fertility and will some day turn into sterile wastelands. This is not happening in one long-cultivated U.S. region. C.L.W. Swanson. chief soil scientist of the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, says that the farmland of New England, which was not naturally fertile when the Pilgrims landed, has been made fertile by proper farming methods, and is growing more productive all the time.

The virgin soil under a long-established forest is not always good. Often it is "podzolic"; i.e., it has a top layer (called the "A-horizon") that is rich in humus. Below it is a "B-horizon" from which nearly all plant food has been leached by water percolating from the surface.

When the settlers cleared New England forests 300 years ago. the A-horizon (topsoil) that they found was only two to three inches thick (Iowa topsoil formed under permanent grass is often 18 inches thick). Below this was sterile subsoil, and when the plow mixed the two together, the blend was low in nearly everything that a good soil should have. It was not the lavish virgin soil of popular fancy.

Such soil could not support extractive agriculture, which takes nutrients out of the soil and does not replace them. Many New England lands that were treated in this way soon went back to forest. But since the development of scientific farming, most New England land that remained in farms has been cultivated intensively and intelligently. Chemical fertilizers, manure and cover crops have improved the poor virgin soil. Each year New England's farmers put more plant food into their lands than they take out. The result: a thriving agriculture that grows high-value crops on "manmade" soil. Maine's potato farms produce 11 times as much an acre as they did 80 years ago. In the 1950 census, Connecticut led all the states in income per acre of land in farms: Connecticut, $95.31; Iowa, $27.73; South Carolina, $17.96.

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