4.  The impending exhaustion of our neglected but vital resources, especially the soil fertility.

5.  Other life forms paying with their death penalty by taking the blame, as illustrated by our foster mother, the cow.

The cow, as one of our livestock forms, may well serve in this discussion as the scapegoat for man’s folly in aiming to increase the productivity of his land resources without giving consideration to how she and all the other life forms, including man himself, are paying for his folly in not fitting into nature when he believes he is managing and controlling all.

Man Today Assumes the Natural Resources for his Exploitation and Use; But Forgets Their Contributions Through Other Life Forms

Man is of necessity the apex of evolutionary forces. He is also the most complex physiological unit of different life processes. Consequently, he makes the most demands for, and covers most land area in finding the means of satisfying his nutritional requirements. The cow, only one step lower in the evolutionary scale, must also cover much land area in collecting her feed essentials. Primitive man, living closer to nature, and in fuller respect of the cow’s instincts for wisely selecting her necessary nourishment, put the cow ahead of the plow. She went ahead and he followed. By her choice of grazing, she was assaying the fertility of the soil according as this grew vegetation which was truly building her a healthy body, reproducing her offspring and thereby multiplying her species. Primitive man followed the cow to outline the agricultural areas of the early world. He was not oblivious to her contribution of essentials for herself in the contributions by plants. She was synthesizing them into still more complicated organic compounds. All of these were supporting primitive man and making possible the many intricate and unknown physiological processes by which he, as a reasoning animal, may have dominion over the rest of them. Primitive man was fitting himself into nature rather than fighting her as his ruler.

But he moved into regions of less proteins, where no life forms duplicating his complex physiology, or that of the cow, had ever been known to survive. Did the Pilgrim fathers find any human life form surviving in New England, unless a fish as fertilizer under each hill of corn was used to grow this starchy crop? Did they find cows or other herbivorous feeders scattered in good numbers throughout Virginia and the south to suggest that the soils were growing forage crops giving much of the proteins and these complete enough for fecund animal reproduction? Modern man overran large territories. He expanded his domain. He gloated in the control of it and in his new-won freedom, but he was dragging the cow along in spite of her protest.

The cow, transplanted under such circumstances to the eastern United States, has been in extensive revolt there. She refuses to subscribe to the economics of cheap gains and cheap gallons. She objects to being confined by fences, in spite of tortures by the yokes and barbed wires on going thru them. She goes out on the railroad right of way or highways to be killed by speeding trains, autos, and other death-dealing transports.

In the south, she insists on coming out of the Piney Woods to graze along the very edges of the pavement so persistently that her mangled carcasses on the highway shoulders are not an unusual sight for the motor traveller in the Coastal Plains areas. She is refusing to conceive and to freshen according to our planned schedules. She takes to mastitis on slightest provocation. She is putting bacteria into her milk more commonly. She is not nursing her own calves successfully enough to escape calling in foreign nurse cows. She is taking all kinds of baffling “diseases,” ailments and irregularities in her health. She is moving in that direction so badly that killing her to save other cows, and even humans, is threatening her own bovine species with extinction.

The cow, too, enjoyed expansion of her domain and of her freedom on being taken west. That was her bonanza when she arrived in the midcontinent. There the bison had mapped out the soils in his assay of them according as they were regularly helping little buffaloes become big ones and big ones make many more little ones every spring.

Moved to the urban pavements now to the extent of more than 90% of our population while but 10% and less of it retains contact with the soil, according to a late census, it is difficult to appreciate the dangerous length to which man’s life lines are stretched. Many of them are breaking. Many are being shortened and even cut off. Are we surprised that man, so far removed from the source of his food, and from the experience of his hands working directly in the creation of it, should be a ready victim of crowd psychology, or of communistic promises for collecting a living rather than earning it?

Do the violent swings in election results and the mounting numbers of such swingers not suggest that we are no longer living by democratic principles which classify each of us as independent in our political philosophy, but rather, as we are running hither and yon, take to any kind of belief offering more for less? Can our dwindling natural resources per person as a result of exploitation and increasing population be lessening our faiths in our individual future securities?

Insufficient is our Knowledge of the Physiology of Different Agricultural Plants and Livestock Dominating the Location According as the Soil Fertility Supports Them and Their Output of Created Values

That any and every soil should provide balanced fertility for any plant which we might choose, seems to be taken for granted. Shall we expect alfalfa, which is famous as a protein supplement, to make its excellent feed values on the same soil where Korean lespedeza accepts broom sedge (Andropogon virginicus) as its nurse crop? We turn our crops out in a seeding operation in the spring time and expect them to “rustle” for themselves. At harvest time we go out with combine or picker to round them up and measure the yield, much as the pioneer Ozarker turned the sow out into the woods in the spring and then in the colder fall weather, when sow-belly as supplement to cornpone was needed, took his gun to round up the sow and litter to see the size of the pig crop.

Our knowledge of plant requirements as soil fertility is insufficient to know on what soil to put each crop for the highest yields in both quantity and quality. Nor do we know just how to feed each crop to make it good feed for the cow, even if with the use of nitrogen we are making hundred bushel corn crops very common occurrences. We call it a crop rotation when we have in succession on the same soil even a 50-bushel corn crop creating 225 pounds of incomplete protein in the grain and then a red clover crop that fails in yielding two tons of forage representing nearly 500 pounds of much more complete protein, and equal to making up the protein deficiencies in corn by serving as a protein supplement for it.

Crop juggling to get various rotations and juggling out the “tried and true” while juggling in the “new,” have been popular agronomic pass-times. We have juggled in the substitutes with no thought of their fertility demands on the soil. Yet we claim high feeding values for the cow from certain crops as if these qualities in the harvest were guaranteed by the pedigree, regardless of what the plant might find in the soil to live up to the claims for it by the seedsman. When reputable crops failed, we searched the world for substitutes. When the substitutes made equal or more bulk they were accepted as of equal value to the cow, compelled to consume them in her struggle to survive. In spite of the deaths from bleeding disasters by cows fed on sweet clover substituting as a legume for red clover, and many other sad disasters for her, our juggling of crops continues to bring in those of less and less feed values on soils under declining fertility levels. Shall we not defend the cow against such ignorance of crop differences in their values as feeds when we do not realize that much crop bulk per acre is no guarantee of correspondingly much true feed value for the dumb beasts unless the fertility of the soil guarantees it?

More recently we have heard much about juggling the cow from one pasture to another through the season in so called “pasture-systems.” assuming the cow to be little more than a mowing machine. Can it be good nutrition if she is compelled to take nothing but a non-legume on one soil for two or three months; then nothing but a protein-rich legume in the next phase of this system; and then some other crop, and so on, with no chance to balance her diet daily as she does remarkably skillfully to make more cow, more calf, more milk, and more money for her owner in pastures of mixed herbages on fertile soils? Should we not defend the cow against systems placing her as a live, physiological unit on the level as low as a mechanical grass cutter?

For man, the truly complete proteins must supply him with atleast eight specific amino acids. For the white rat of common experimental use, the completeness of the proteins demands ten different amino acids. For the pig and the chicken these specific requirements have not yet been so completely worked out, but for them the proteins and amino acids of animal origin are still a major safety factor. For the cow the requirements are simpler. She solves her own protein problem if given ample range over young herbage of variety and the cooperative, synthetic helps of the microbial flora in her paunch and intestinal tract. That the synthetic services of the latter transcend those in the intestines of the pig and chicken, is suggested when these last two animals have always taken to the cow’s droppings long before the nutritionists believed some vitamin B₁₂, or the so-called “dung factor” (cobalt), passed from the cow for the benefits recognized by the pig or the chicken following her. Our knowledge of just what the soil pattern is by which our livestock is well fed, especially in respect to the proteins, is still much of an unknown. It leaves much to the cow’s own selection if she is to be healthy and reproduce readily and regularly.

Our Industrial Rather Than Biological Direction of Agriculture Under Technologies Upset the Balance of Nature

While we commonly boast of our technological knowledge and skills in manufacturing implements, machines, and household gadgets, contributing much to our high standard of living; while that high standard is now about as common out in the country, where things grow, as it is on paved streets, where as the Indian pointed out “Nothing will grow”; and while one man in agriculture can now produce many times more bushels of corn, wheat, oats, etc. than one man produced a quarter century ago; nevertheless, agriculture cannot be viewed wholly as if it were an industry. It may apply industrial principles to the transformation of the products it grows. But the creation of those agricultural products is not man’s, but nature’s production. Life processes in their complexity and their interdependencies are not yet extensively comprehended, much less, are they submitting themselves to man’s complete control.

While some phases of agriculture may be guided by principles used in industry, nevertheless agriculture cannot take its necessary raw materials for granted as available in ordered quantities and at regular costs. Agriculture deals with living, perishable things. These are involved in numerous and uncontrollable interrelations with other living and perishable matters. The growing of calves calls for living cows, and living bulls to create them; healthy milk from healthy cows to nurse them; grass, hay, grains, carbohydrates, proteins, vitamins, trace elements, antibiotics, and a host of possible unknowns to feed and grow them. Calf production is not a case of control of this process by the herdsman. Instead he soon realizes that he is merely an observer and attendant of a business the cow herself is managing and controlling. It is not an industry on her part. She seldom indulges in what even suggests mass production. Quite otherwise, it is biology first. Living cows and calves are always biological processes first and foremost. They may eventually become the raw materials, on their death, for industrial processing in the slaughter house. From that point onward the cow ceases to manage the meat-producing business, and contributes the raw materials for the meat-packaging industry.

Up to this moment much of agriculture, emphasizing the industrial viewpoint and the economics of it, has been slowly upsetting the balance of nature. While those imbalances in many cases represent deficiencies initially unrecognized, they eventually magnify themselves into disasters. Under so much emphasis on industry, with increased output and consumption of resources at a greater rate, the balance of nature is also moving into serious threatening upsets.

Our criterion of agricultural production has been that of weight or volume per acre, per cow or per other producing unit. More weight or volume delivered per animal per unit of time has been considered the economic requisite in animal production. More bushels or tons per acre are praised as agronomic accomplishments. In searching for crops for maximum mass output per acre while taking our soil fertility for granted and exploiting it, we have brought in those crop plants producing mainly carbohydrates, or photosynthetic bulk, but a lowered concentration within that vegetative mass of the proteins, vitamins, inorganic requisites and other nutrient essentials. Production of much vegetative mass, but less of seed per unit of that weight, encouraged the belief that a grain-producing agriculture is poor economy and a grass agriculture should be substituted for it.

Hybrid corn has been an excellent illustration when the crude protein concentration of that pre-hybrid grain as a mean of 10.3% some 30 years ago, has dropped to a low of half that during the last three or four decades in the United States. These figures tell us nothing about the nutritional quality of the protein, particularly the deficiency of certain amino acids to the point of demanding protein supplements to corn even for fattening services by this grain. Here, literally, a new plant species was brought in, pushing out an older one as either the vegetative production went up or the soil fertility went down. Nature’s balance is being upset slowly but decisively.

In our increasing carbohydrate production—which is also a case of decreasing protein synthesis—naturally the animal-plant balance is upset. Animal fattening and all the speculation connected with buying low and selling high has become the major phase of what we call animal husbandry. Hybrid corn and the soils under it, even if put to other crops, have not been the regions for growing calves even though they are the areas for fattening them. They are the regions for hogs, made up as their bodies are largely of fats, or of converted carbohydrates. They are the regions where animal diseases prevail, and those diseases apt to be considered contagious rather than degenerative or deficiency ailments, because so many animals are so often in contact.

The cow-plant species balance of nature is so badly upset that we are now pushing animal populations to smaller figures, even if the cow population is at this moment relatively high. It is slowly dawning on us that fattened animals are not healthy animals, at least not in a condition which is healthy for the species. One needs only see the fattening geese in Strasburg, France, where American corn is fed them until fatty degeneration of the liver makes that organ the desired delicacy of the slaughtered goose while the rest of her body is scarcely considered for food purposes, to make us realize that fattening our castrated cattle does not improve their health or the chances for survival of the species. Can agriculture as a biological procedure, long maintain itself when nature’s balances are so seriously upset that they eliminate the animals that give us our major foods in the proteins?

Other illustrations of imbalance may be cited, like our campaign on what we call “weeds” coming in as competitors to other crops. Are we not “fighting” weeds because we fail to have enough fertility by which the desired crop would dominate the area so thoroughly that the weeds would not be competitors? Shall we not consider weeds as plants making so much woody bulk on so little fertility that they survive where crops demanding much fertility for little but highly nutritious bulk cannot dominate them? In our fight on weeds with herbicides, we are scattering the deadly carbon-ring compounds in chlorinated and sulfonated arrangements so profusely that not only plants, but microbes, animals and even man are confronted with dangers to health and even with death. Such upsets in Nature’s balances are the result of the changed combinations of fertility of the soil not generally considered as the determiner of agriculture itself. Once we upset them, then, like Humpty Dumpty, they cannot be put back together again.

Our efforts to increase productivity of the land have slowly come to consider the soil as the point where the major effort must be applied to serve. Unfortunately, so much soil has already been exhausted before we come to the realization of the soil as the starting point of the assembly lines of agricultural production. National propaganda for soil conservation that started with gullies, has finally arrived at consideration of conservation and restoration of soil fertility where gullies start.

The need to put fertility back into the soil was first appreciated in the south, where bird guano from South America was one of the early fertilizers. Clearing of piney woods by the colonial pioneer in the south gave rainfall, fresh air, blue sky, and sunshine, but no significant fertility for extended crop production. There was soil organic matter originating in pine needles, but this didn’t release much fertility on cultivation. Nor did the soils of the south have much mineral reserves of fertility to improve the land by “resting” it. No unweathered minerals are washed in by the rivers, if the delta is excluded. No windblown additions of high fertility come in as is true for Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, and other states with “loessial” soils. No unweathered subsoils are turned up by the plow or are within root-reach. The soil fertility was already seriously exhausted from the soils of the south when the Creator managed the place and could do no better than create pine wood, and little or no protein to support even a timber squirrel.

Because of that climatic setting, attention went to feeding the crop plants with fertilizer intensively and extensively. That was necessary on those nearly lateritic soils, which are not only low in fertility but so low also in their adsorption and exchange capacities that they would not even become seriously sour or acid. They will not hold much applied, soluble fertilizers, and let much go out in drainage waters for loss of economic returns from this salvage effort. With no serious acidity, the needs by the crops for calcium and magnesium were neglected, save for the calcium applied in ordinary super phosphate and possibly some magnesium used unwittingly for the correction of fertilizer acidity.

Other elements, particularly the trace elements, may also be highly exhausted in the soils. Their use for citrus crop improvement, and on peat soils, raises the point seriously whether we must not view our soils more and more as being feedlots for our crops if these plants are to synthesize feed values rising above those represented by pine needles. Must we not see more and more soil fertility exhaustion giving us crops that may be supplying only bulk but not necessarily proteins, vitamins, mineral elements and all that is truly animal feed?

Can this vision of the soil help us believe that carbohydrate crops of starch, oils, and cellulosic fiber dominate the ecological pattern, because of these deficiencies in soils highly weathered under much rainfall and high temperatures? Even cotton seed protein will not supplement corn for pigs or chickens, but will for the cow where the paunch seems to overcome the handicap of this protein supplement for animals not symbioti-cally propagating a similar internal bacterial flora.

Now that we have taken thirty million acres out of growing horse feed and turned them over to cattle; that sheep at the maximum of numbers in 1942 are now at the lowest since we began counting them; and that hogs are also less now than formerly but yet cattle have not increased to the extent that decrease of horses would suggest; isn’t it time for someone to rise in defense of the cow as the symbol of our livestock on the decline? Is not the declining soil as declining feed quality possibly causally conneted with livestock troubles? Cannot increasing livestock troubles and failing health be due to failing quality of feed and that due to failing soils? Can our crop juggling and disregard of exhaustion of fertility have finally brought the nutritional values of forages and feeds so low that what we call cattle “diseases” is no more than failing cow physiology because she can stand up under those deficiencies no longer?

One needs only to take a long range view of what is happening at the marketplace and im commerce to see signs and suggestions over the long range. Beef has risen in price to tell us that the supply is short in relation to demand, but is taken even at the unusually high prices. Producers of hogs are talking about shifting this former mortgage lifter by means of fat to more of a protein producer by means of its lean muscle.

Can beef that once grew itself in the western U.S. now be dwindling there where high protein wheat is rapidly becoming soft, starchy wheat because of soil fertility exhaustion? Why are hogs being pushed westward and away from grain to more grazing on alfalfa in the plan for their growing more muscle cheaply in place of excessive fat? Have not beef cattle markets travelled westward so rapidly across the United States to locate themselves in Kansas City, St. Joseph, and Springfield, Missouri, and Omaha, Nebraska, because that is where the beef was making itself as the cow selecting the soils determined it more than any diversified farming plans of ours would have it? Isn’t it out on the range where the less weathered soils and high protein forage really grow the cattle while on the highly weathered soils of the East we only fatten them?

When our pastures fail in their fertility required for the nutritious forages they still produce many plants we call “weeds.” We say “The weeds took the pasture” and then start a “war on weeds.” We fail to realize that the plants we call “weeds” are merely those which can make much bulk on the low fertility where the desired forage could not. Weeds grow prominently in the pasture because they are not making enough feed values to tempt a cow to eat them. In place of defending the cow’s judgment of the low nutritional value of the so-called “weeds” and her report thereby of the soil fertility in the pasture that needs rejuvenation, we fight the weeds with mowing machinery and more recently with the dangerous and deadly poisons. Isn’t it time that such judgment of the forage and of the soil fertility by the cow that transcends our own be defended?

When in the state of Missouri the calf crop at weaning time was only 60% of the conceptions before artificial insemination was used, and now is of no larger percentage figure when artificial insemination is such a common practice, has the scattering of noble pedigrees by this artificial technique done anything to increase the species? Is the increasing legislation against disease, and are the increasing indictments of sales barns not suggesting that the animals are not protecting themselves as they once did? If we keep on killing sick cows to protect those we have not yet examined or detected, will our cow population increase, and can the producer take the shock of the loss of his herd that suddenly shows positive to some possibly questionable test when on the proceeding inspection a clean bill of health was given?

Epilogue

Only by considering all life forms in balance, and by viewing the ecological patterns of microbes, plants and animals in relation to the soil fertility that creates them, can we wisely direct our agriculture, and modify our environment or improve upon it for greater productivity. The cow as man’s foster mother has brought him out of his primitivity and helped him design his technologies for his high standards of living. By means of those he has taken to exploiting his environment with the disregard of the cow, and against her continued protests. She has outlined the ecological patterns for herself and delineated the soils on which she and man could primitively survive. Displaced as she is, she is no longer able to defend herself and is slowly going down in defeat. She is being killed because she gets sick, and is being turned upon by man for whom she has been foster mother. Are you as a jury going to decide against her, or are you not going to vote for her acquittal and for fertile soils under her and thereby under you and the generations you procreate? You as the jury must decide.