The “Other” Atlantic Article
Chasing Topsoil With the ASCS
Editor’s note:
Not all pages of the current Atlantic
Monthly are taken up by the interview with
budget director David Stockman. Over
shadowed by the flap with Stockman is
another article of equal interest to people in
Boiling Springs; erosion of our topsoil and
impoverishment of our farmers. It’s the
latter article we reprint below, shortened for
space. Here, for your enjoyment, is the
’’other” Atlantic article.
I N TAZEWELL COUNTY, Illinois, about
eight weeks before the corn came in, I
climbed a barbed-wire-topped fence
with Leroy Holtsclaw and Owen In
gram, and crashed into a jun^ of corn
stalks to see what they ar6 doing to
keep the Corn Belt from sliding away
down the Mississippi River. The corn
was seven feet tall to its tassels, and
pollen rained on our heads as we bullied
our way through the densely packed ,
stalks, spreading a thick yellow haze
through motionless air that felt five or
ten degrees warmer than the air out
side the field. Ingram, the U.S. Soil
Conservation Service’s man in Tazewell
County, and Holtsclaw, his boss, the
supervisor of a fourteen-county area in
central Illinois, were much more adept
than I at picking a path through the
growth, and I fell behind them a few
times, feeling a vague sense of panic at
the prospect of being irretrievably lost
no more than ten yards from my guides.
I blindly followed the sound of the rus
tling corn and caught up with them
only when they stopped to have a
look at something they conridered sig
nificant, which, fortunately, was fairly
often.
We were on a sixteen-acre field of
fabled Illinois topsoil-the kind respon
sible for 16 percent of the nation’s corn
crop, 17 percent of the nation’s soy
beans, and nearly a tenth of all U.S.
farm exports—and our tour was di
vided into two parts. First, the problem,
. which was in evidence on the western
three fourths of the field. Ingram
squatted to point out a rivulet between
corn plants, a small but well-defined
channel carved in the soil by moving
water. A little farther on, he stopped to
examine a grounded cornstalk, toppled
by wind after water had washed the soil
from around its roots. These were signs
of rill erosion, one of the two major
types of water erosion that plague the
Corn Belt. (Wind erosion is not much of
a problem here.) The other major type,
sheet erosion, in which soil is washed
away in very thin and fairly uniform
layers, was not visible, but it was hap
pening just the same, Ingram assured
me. The field sloped from southeast to
northwest, losing eight or nine feet in
altitude every hundred feet, and, as we
walked down the slope, the ground
squishing audibly beneath our shoes,
the soil grew progressively wetter, the
rivulets larger, the felled stalks more
plentiful. Some of the soil that was
washing off this field would end up in
the Gulf of Mexico at the mouth of the
Mississippi, traveling via Lick Creek, to
the north, and the Illinois River, to the
west, carrying polluting agricultural
chemicals as it went; some would fill in
watercourses along the way, causing
floods in low-lying roadways and
croplands during and after heavy rains.
The rest we found in a sad, barren
expanse on the western edge of the
field, near the inlet to a drainage lake;
here only a few nitrogen-starved corn
plants, stunted and yellow, poked up
bravely through a cover of soggy black
muck. I pushed my middle finger to its
second knuckle into the muck. Accord
ing to the best estimating method
available, Ingram said, each of the
twelve acres in this part of the field was
losing soil at the rate of about thirty-
two tons per year.
Having seen the problem, we turned
to the east for the solution. Immediate
ly adjacent to this twelve-acre plot-
indistinguishable from it, in fact, from
anything more than a few yards away—
was a four-acre plot that was losing
about six tons of soil per acre each year,
much closer to the rate that conserva
tionists think can be permitted without
long-term damage. 'This plot was not
soggy, and its rivulets were less con
spicuous—an indication that much of
the water from the last rain had perco
lated into the soil instead of running
off. Weeds, principally dandelions and
orchard grass, were much more plenti
ful among the corn plants here, but
they didn’t seem to be disturbing the
crop too much; although they could
compete with the corn for water and
nutrients, Ingram said, they could not
reach high enough to compete for sun
light. Here and there we encountered a
bald spot, a place where field mice had
got to the seed, but the plant popula
tion, as measured earlier in the season,
was not much lower here than in the
other plot—about 19,600 plants per acre
as opposed to about 21,000, a reduction
of approximately 7 percent—and Owen
Ingram guessed that the water damage
we had seen in the first plot would elim
inate even that margin of difference.
The larger section, however, had been
cultivated in the traditional manner;
after the last harvest, the earth had
been turned over with a moldboard
plow, which had buried the field’s
weeds and the residue of the previous
crop, replacing them with a handsome,
flat layer of dark soil from below; then
the ground had been disked three times
(a less vigorous form of plowing) and
planted.
The smaller plot, on the other hand,
had been cultivated according to a
method called “zero tillage," or “no
till,” which is to say it hadn’t really
been cultivated at all; the vegetation on
the ground had been left there to pro
tect the soil from erosion, and the corn
had been planted right through it, by a
machine that cuts only narrow slits for
the deposit of seeds. Owen Ingram had
no way of knowing for sure how the
yields of the two plots would compare
at harvest t;.'ne, but for the moment all
looked good, and he was happy.
Ingram had fiown over the field the
day before, he saio, and had challenged
his dying companions, one of them a
farmer, to distinguish the zero-tilled
section from the conventionally tilled
one. “I couldn’t even tell them apart,”
Ingram said, “and I knew where the
line was.” If the yields of the two plots
did turn out to be comparable, even
roughly so, Ingram would be harangu
ing farmers about it all winter. For
although zero tillage and other, less
extreme forms of “conservation tillage”
undercut some of the farmer’s moat
deeply rooted prejudices—for example,
the notion that a weedy, unworked field
means a sloppy, nonworking farmer—
they seem to be the best hope of solving
an erosion problem that conservation
ists see as an impending national disas
ter. Thus, to put it in the simplest terms
possible, the government wants farm
ers to stop plowing their land.
“Farmers he told me,t are
an independent lot. I think that’s one oi
the reasons they farm. And the greatest
innovation ever to hit farming was
hybrid corn. What did it take to make
hybrid corn an accepted practice—
teen years? It cost nothing but a little
seed! Didn’t change anything else! . . .
And it took fifteen years to become an
accepted practice. Anything else we do
is far more drastic than that, and yet
we’re gettin’ acceptance on this zero till
at a pretty darn rapid rate.”
— Michael Lenehan
mm
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