Soil Conservation Is

Soil Conservation Is

The Business Of

Everybody

Continued from last week

The average thickness of our topsoil now in this county is five inches. About 300 years age when the colonists first explored this country, it is said that the topsoil averaged about nine inches in depth. In other wprds, we have lost nearly one-haft of our topsoil in three centuries. As further evidence of tfhe decline of our agricultural i£sources, at the time our country was settled, we are told that a squirrel could climb a tree in New England and hop from limb to limb and go all the way to the Gulf of Mexico without once setting foot to the ground. That’s how densely the land in these Uni, ted States was once covered with trees. This vegetation and root structure checked the rains and kept the soil from washing. But then our forefathers seeing the inexhaustible areas of land and the endless forests of trees, began to re-arrange things. As more and more people came to this country we cleared more and more land.

Trees were cut, piled and burned. The land was farmed as long as it was productive without fertilizers, without any semblance of conservation, and when the land wore out we moved farther west and opened up new lands. This western movement continued until our country was populated from coast to coast. All the land was taken. We settled down.settled down to taking all we could from the soil and putting back very little if anything. Now we have less than three acres of cropland per person. This three acres of cropland per person is being steadily , reduced in two ways......one, by our heavy population increase which increases the number of persons who must'Share this fixed area of avail* able cropland by over seven thousand people every day, and second, by still further loss of this soil through erosion or improper treatment. I