Urgent Necessity For National Awakening

In the interests of conservation, we have not yet determined for our extensive soil types at what degree of slope farming should cease and the growing of timber should begin. In general, slopes of more than about twelve or fifteen percent declivity should be used only for grass or trees. A number of types, such as the extensive Susquehanna clay of the Gulf coastal plain, are so susceptible to erosion on all sloping areas, no matter how gently sloping, they should never be cleared of timber. On the other hand, a few soils of high capacity for absorbing water can be safely plowed on slopes as steep as twenty or twenty-five percent. Land of the latter type is far more extensive in the tropics than in the temperate zone.

In the United States we may generally class all land that slopes as much as twenty-five feet in one hundred feet as forest and grazing land. Even deep, open sand was found to be severely gullied on steeply sloping cotton fields of East Texas. Usually land with less than fifteen inches of soil over rock should never be cleared if there is any slope at all, as it will almost surely wash away, regardless of terracing or other obstructions that may be provided for protection against erosion. If this general rule had been applied in the mountainous areas of the country, several million acres now ruined, or severely impoverished might be clothed with forests of far greater value than all the crops that have been grown or ever will be grown on the cleared areas.

Although terracing has been practiced in Southeastern United States for more than half a century, and has saved thousands of farms, even in sections where erosion is exceptionally severe, this best of all known artificial methods of protecting cultivated fields has only recently extended as far west as Central Texas. It is almost never practiced north of the southern parts of Virginia and Tennessee, nor west of the Mississippi River, save in Texas. Nevertheless, probably ninety percent of all the cultivated land of the Nation having a slope greater than three feet in a hundred should be terraced wherever there is enough rainfall to cause surface run. The terraces serve not only to hold the soil, but also to store winter and spring rain for the use of crops in dry summers.

There is urgent necessity for a national awakening to the importance of combating the destructiveness of this sinister form of land wastage. Reforestation is one of the synonyms of soil conservation, and, accordingly, public-spirited men and women in all walks of life should give support to those engaged in worthy efforts of forest protection and reforestation on the watersheds and on all those types of soil which are unsafe for cultivation or even for pastoral use by reason of steep slope, shallow soil or other deficiency.