BECAUSE SOILS SEEM to be everywhere and because plants with their roots in the earth are all about us, we take soils and crops on them all for granted. But now that there is no more “new land” available, and food shortages are bringing our attention “back to the soil,” we are beginning to see that we cannot continue to take our soils for granted. We are even concerned about soil conservation.
Man, at the top of the pyramid of all the different life forms, has the help of many of these in reaching out over extensive areas of soil to collect his essential food elements. There are some dozen different chemical elements coming directly from the soil. Man himself travels far to eat the fruits of many different soils.
Then, too, he is omnivorous, that is, he eats most everything including vegetable, animal and even mineral, to increase the possibilities of giving his body the essential elements found in the soil. Four of these come from the air and water, compounded by sunshine. Thus plants send their roots searching through the soils, collecting and fabricating man’s foods. Animals search through the plants to collect and construct still further. And man himself selects from all these—both plants and animals—the bulk and concentrates he needs for energy, growth, reproduction, and other complicated body functions.
All these performances and body processes are too often taken for granted and with no recognition of the soil as a helper or a hindrance. We have seemingly been far removed from the soil. Nevertheless, the changing conditions in economics, in agricultural production, in the capacity of our soils to provide essentials, and in the nutritive quality of our foods all bring us to think more about the soil.
If we should follow the suggestions of one of the American poets who said, “go forth unto the open sky and list to Nature’s teachings,” we can see that the wild animals—quite different from man—do not take their soils for granted.
The bison or buffalo was a critical examiner of his feed according to the soil growing it. In fact, he gave his name to “buffalo grass,” the particular grass which the pioneers listed as his choice. Buffalo grass and the range of the buffalo did not extend very widely. The densest population of these brawny animals covered a limited climatic area of small extent from East to West though much more extensive from North to South.
The fertility of particular soils limited the territory over which the buffalo roamed. The climate, as it left more lime and other nutrients in the surface soil near the grass roots, controlled the buffalo range. Coincidentally, it is on these mineral-rich, less-leached soils under lower rainfall, or on these original buffalo soils, where our hard wheat of high protein and high mineral content grows today. It is also on these soils that cattle in large numbers literally raise themselves and the Herefords have made their reputation. It is these soils that produce, not tons per acre of woody vegetation, but short grass of extremely high nutritive quality.
The buffalo had sense enough to stay on his particular soils. He wasn’t lured eastward to soils leached by higher rainfall nor to bluestem, bunch grass and other native vegetations yielding much higher tonnages per acre. There were no mountains, big rivers, or other land barriers to obstruct his travel eastward toward more woody vegetation.
As a strictly herbivorous feeder, his sense of better feed from more fertile soil kept him on the “buffalo grass” area and thereby on the soil quality that through this plant made him brawny, big of bone, and consequently King of the Plains. The buffalo knew his soils. He did not take them for granted.
Because we have been taking our soils for granted there are many instances to show that the soils have been going down in fertility while we have thought they are as good as when our fathers or grandfathers farmed them. Some illustrations from Missouri’s many experienced cattle breeders may well serve.
A distinguished Hereford breeder, only recently deceased, accumulated a wealth of knowledge and sales experience with his choice breed during fifty years on the prairie soils of northeast Missouri. But to his disappointment in his later years he discovered that he had been oblivious to the fact that the soil of his extensive pastures had been going downward in supplies of minerals to give the former quality of feed. His calf crops were too low because the females were not reproducing regularly, regardless of attempts to provide better bulls.
Shy breeders were becoming more numerous. Good females were dropping out too early in their breeding life. Some with the best pedigrees were calving only in alternate years, and calves were coming at most any time instead of as one crop in the spring season, as Nature has most young animals come. Heifers were not the desirable thrifty animals, but of rounded backlines, tender pasterns, drooping heads, dull eyes, and other indications of low thrift even on pastures apparently lush in terms of abundant herbage.
On this farm the humus of the soil is no longer what it was fifty years ago when the breeding business in Herefords was coming up so well. The soil has weakened as the foundation on which both the breed and the breeder originally rose. It has grown old faster than the owner because it has given much of itself to the business but gotten none of the limestone, phosphate, green manures, and other fertilizer it should have had in return. It has been taken for granted too long. Now as it is passed on to the children—like so much other land—they may well say, “Yes, here is the farm, but what about the soil?”
Fortunately, this question has been answered by another and younger Hereford breeder who is succeeding today on the same soil type and using foundation stock purchased from the older breeder. This newer herd is under a breeder-farmer who will not take his soil for granted. Though much of the original surface soil on his farm had eroded away before he came into possession, he is rejuvenating the clay-points of subsoil and restoring the soil fertility on his farm by means of phosphates, limestone, and any possible fertilizers that will help make sod crops, to provide green manures, and give fertility features as supplements to contour cultivation on the dangerous slopes.
His herd of cattle, though started originally as a remnant of a declining one, is giving calf crops of almost 100 per cent. The calves all come within a limited period in the spring. The farm not only produces ample supply but also high quality feed. The soil under this rebuilding process has gone up to an alfalfa level while the Hereford herd has gone up to the blue ribbon level in the eyes of those who know cattle.
It is this breeder’s belief that attention to his soil fertility reduces the attention needed by the cattle. “No,” he will say, “we cannot take our soils for granted when they and their fertility are so basic to a type of agriculture that depends in a large measure on livestock.”
Our human foods, too, have been taken for granted. We have measured them in terms of bulk rather than quality grown into them by the soil. Processing foods has taken out much that the soil and Nature’s fabrication have put into them. Milk is measured by the volume or by the fat content. The former measures bulk and the latter mainly fuel value. Its measure in terms of growth quality for the young cannot be recorded by these measures. It must be scaled in terms of the soil.
The “town without a toothache” (Hereford, Texas) has suddenly become news, apparently because we had previously taken our soils for granted. We forget them as the basis of health. Likewise we had accepted bad teeth as though they were natural. Since bad teeth are but an exposed part of a bad skeleton we need to take seriously this demonstration that we all have been taking our bone troubles for granted.
We have failed to give attention to the soils from which must come the calcium and phosphorus needed to construct sound bones and good teeth. We forget that it is by means of soil fertility that Nature constructs the vitamins and other catalytic agencies that facilitate body growth and function. Human health too, depends on the soil, which, common as it is, is seemingly still too far removed from us to be so connected in our thinking.
Fertile virgin soils, plenty of land, and an abundance of humus and other fertility compounds were a natural inducement to mental lassitude. It bred indifference to erosion of the body of the soil, and exploitation of its stores of humus and fertility. But then the number of draftee rejections are so high in some soil areas, the national health pattern is beginning to delineate itself according to the soil’s pattern of essentials for nourishing both beast and man.
Soil conservation is now taking a national inventory of the disappearing hidden qualities by which soils sustain domestic animal life at profitable economic levels and human life at high planes of good health and therefore of efficient citizenry. Our own future—but more particularly our place in the international future, points out forcefully that when our national health as well as our national wealth lies in our hands we cannot long continue to take our soils for granted.