THE LARGER PATTERN of man’s distribution over the earth is premised on the pattern of the soil and by the soil’s creative potential.
Man is human and sociable in his behaviors only when he is well fed. When he is hungry his behavior confirms the truth in the Russian proverb: “An empty stomach knows no laws.”
Man’s height above other animals, is a dangerous loftiness. He stands at the top of the biotic pyramid. The other life forms below him are (a) animals, (b) plants, and (c) microbes. Then, below the microbes and supporting the entire pyramid there is the soil. The soil is not merely the site or the foundation, but it is the contributor of the creative means of all life forms in the pyramid of successive biotic dependencies on each other.
Man is only beginning to realize the hazard to himself, located in that high place. He has now overrun the earth in his exploitation. His technologies have lengthened his life lines, reaching from the hazardous areas back to the less hazardous ones. He has pushed out on the fringes of fertility and on to deficiencies in nutrition that are disastrous if he is limited to those fringe areas. Now that some of those life lines are shortening, he is worshipping economics and politics rather than conceding to the natural laws that are in final control. But man’s loftiness becomes more hazardous as the basic forces extending various hungers are becoming more powerful in their dictates.
The seashores and the droughty, windswept land provided the first nutritional security. Primitive man stayed near the seashore. He migrated inland to significant extents, but survived there only in semi-arid regions. Semi-arid soils are high in fertility. They are such because they have not been seriously leached or washed out.
On droughty, windswept land, moreover, the wind brings in unweathered minerals from everywhere to increase the chances that our soil contains all the essential elements for compounding foods and feeds of the highest nutritional order. Particles of silt size, or windblown, unweathered dust, represent speedy mineral decomposition to make available their elemental contents. Soils that are windblown are nutritional security of high order in quality, if not in quantity, because of the fertility.
Food of quality is first and economics is second in determining man’s location (with survival) on the earth.
The seashore with its complete array of the essential inorganic elements in solution, or in protein compounds of sea animals as human food, and the semi-arid land areas with limited tonnage yields of many crops, permitted man to wander freely. They allowed him to multiply in the new areas without their starving him out through nutritional shortages. Egypt and other parts of the semi-arid and arid Orient, the Missions of our pre-Colonial Spanish Southwest, and other dry areas, record ancient civilizations as possible illustrations of this principle.
From the Orient the expansions and migrations of peoples moved westward around the shores of the Mediterranean. There it could have been both the sea and the soils under lower rainfall that provided the foods which were then — and still are — more than just carbonaceous bulk and calories of energy.
It was from there that lucerne, or alfalfa, expanded to make good forage and to be the basic nitrogen-fixing legume in southern Europe. Today this nitrogen-rich feed is the major means of providing the manure pile on which food production of the southern European farm is so highly dependent. Those areas of winter rainfalls, threatening summer shortage of water for crops, but of mineral-rich soils to grow alfalfa naturally, have grown nutritious foods. An agriculture that retained there much of its seeming primitivity to the point of derision when we speak of “the slow, old-fashioned European peasant out on the land” has not been a hazard. Instead, it has been security of the human species according to the soil fertility under the course which those migrations followed. Other illustrations of similar character may be familiar enough to you for additional citations.
Fortunately for the nomad, the cow went ahead of the plow. Grazing flocks and herds may have determined the direction rather than man himself. The animals led the way to new areas of grazing. Man followed them to pitch his tent where his herds had been the advance soil chemists. The herds went ahead assaying the nutritional qualities of the herbage and thereby approving the fertility of the soil for his nutrition as well as their own. For assaying the feeds, the cow’s criterion, or that used by the sheep, is not tons of hay or bushels of grain. Nor is it the feed’s qualities for the speedy laying of body fat on a castrated male. Instead, the criterion by which animals judge their feeds is its provision of proteins and all that comes along with them.
Animals seem to recognize nutritional shortages, not only in proteins as the crude forms designated only by nitrogen presence, but they seem to suggest also the shortages in any of the nearly two dozen amino acids of which the proteins are composed. By their choices and behaviors the animals reflect the deficiencies in the many other compounds depending for their syntheses by plants and by animals on the long list of inorganic elements originally in the minerals of the soil.
Therefore, man’s expansion over land areas chosen under guidance of the biochemical services of his flocks and herds was not hazardous, but secure. It was a movement to lands found equal to the needs for his good nutrition, and thereby his reproduction, because it was so judged by animals almost duplicating his food requirements in those for themselves.
For modern man, the plow went ahead of the cow. His technological aids to help him go farther into the more humid soils pushed him into the interior of larger land masses and continents. It was a case in reverse of that of the primitive farmer.
At the same time some technological aids, such as medical science, food preservation, conversion processes and extensive transportation, moved agriculture away from its concern about production of good nutrition, toward more and more concern about speculation and sharp trading. Sections of the population began to make their living at the expense of other sections of it. A larger and larger share of it was less secure with less of the food and shelter requirements provided so directly by the work of their own hands. Cities began to develop. Man pushed himself more and more out on the areas so limited in soil fertility that they permit little more than a single salable crop.
With that expansion of population came more purchase and importation of necessities and less of one’s own production of them in place. Under these economic compulsions, the single crop agriculture became an extensive and mechanical one on the less fertile soils compelling such with its associated troublesome social consequences.
Today, high population per unit of land area and the declining fertility of the soils are emphasizing the difficulties in maintaining life lines for our active support. Now we have taken to talking about soil conservation. We are soon to be taken with a more inclusive concern about human ecology, under the simpler, but more forceful term of conservation, with all that it can entail.
Man’s expanded knowledge in the sciences and the resulting technologies may have goaded him on in his expansion, in his over-running of territory, and in his exploitation of natural resources to the point of matching sections of population against others in warfare of atomic caliber. Now those same sciences are being challenged to bring order out of the chaos they have wrought.
Soil conservation dare not be a cry suggesting urban condemnation of the rural neglect of this resource, suddenly appreciated as the supplier of food and nutrition. It must be a universal effort by all. All shared in the exploitation. Now all must share in the restoration.
Chemical tests of the soil and analyses of the crops are pointing to the increasing failure of the crops to deliver the more significant nutritional values. This is the fact in spite of increasing tonnages of vegetative mass and bushels per acre about which boast and bombast are so common. Unwittingly in our crop juggling to maintain high yields per acre, we have brought in those exotic crops maintaining delivery of carbohydrate foods but failing more and more to create the protein foods and all the inorganic essentials of mineral origin coming to us by way of the plants.
The suitcase wheat farmer of the Dust Bowl; those rushing to take over land in every newly irrigated region; the adventurer following Horace Greeley’s admonition to “Go West Young Man”; the novice sugar cane farmers that responded to the revised version of that journalist’s slogan suggesting “Go South Young Man”; the cotton farmers of the South now shifting to diversified farming where the “Piney Woods” and palmetto brush starve native cattle while filling their bellies; the tenant farmers under sudden economic shifts; and many other pathetic human cases making appeal to public sentiment, all tell us that we have seen ourselves losing individual grip on that one true security, namely, real food from fertile soil.
Such a loss is the major of all hazards to a stable society. Technologies of exploitation, of rapid movements of peoples, and of long hauls of products coupled with the economics of speculation rather than those of production, have given us the fringes of human ecology that are already seriously frayed out.
The climatic pattern of our country has had much discussion as a matter of external comfort, namely, how warm, or how cold, and how wet or how dry. Escapes from the costs of better shelter, and of more fuels for longer winter seasons have moved peoples to warmer climates. Various aspects of climate have entered into the ecological pattern of humans without their recognition of the great fact that climate controls Man’s inner comfort, namely, the freedom from, or the torment by, hidden hungers according to the fertility of the soil which the climate develops in the particular setting in question.
It is in terms of the rainfall coupled with temperature that these two factors, combined, give us the climate and determine the human ecology by way of the soils. Peoples are well nourished; they present few problems which they do not solve readily themselves, when the climatic combination gives soil construction or the fertility for production of proteins as well as carbohydrates in our foods. Peoples are poorly nourished and present themselves as problems to the rest of society in climates that tend toward soil destruction or soils permitting production of carbohydrates generously but proteins too niggardly to keep folks healthy and free of hidden hungers. We have emphasized the temperate zone; we have complained much about limited rainfalls; but we fail to appreciate the food security in terms of those soils that once grew the bison, grow the high protein wheat now, and make the good beef proteins we enjoy.
Those are the fertile soils illustrated by the Midwest. In that area of the Mid-continent we have soils that feed us rather than soils that fail us. It represents a distinct part in our national soil fertility pattern. It is there that we find the maximum of soil construction and the minimum of soil destruction in terms of the production of food of the high order that truly feeds rather than only fills and fools us.
Proteins are not created from the elements by animals. Livestock only assembles them from the components of proteins created from the essential elements by plants and microbes. Life flows by means of proteins. Proteins reproduce themselves. Carbohydrates and fats do not. Proteins represent true growth, not merely increase in weight, as may be true for the watermelon, for example, or a fattening animal.
Only very slowly are we coming to see that the ecological pattern of the human species in the United States would mark itself out according to the fertility pattern of soils as the climate makes it. That pattern would exhibit itself more readily were we not shipping proteins from the Mid-continent meat centers to the rest of the country, or milk from there to distances scarcely believable. All this protein transport and meat price squabble is still viewed as economics and business. It is not yet visualized as a struggle by the human species on less fertile soils to get proteins that can be grown only on soils more fertile.
As we go to the west of the Mid-continent, the agriculture dwindles and the population becomes sparse. It is not always well with the folks on arid sands which Nature has not yet developed into soils.
To the east of the Mid-continent under increasing annual rainfalls, there are the corn and the hogs where once the forests primeval were dense. Fuel foods in the carbohydrates and in the fats — spelling deficiencies in health in extra body fats — grow abundantly. They grow where high rainfalls for soil destruction made much clay, and washed it severely with carbonic acid to remove the fertility and leave acidity of the soil in its place.
Here the human species struggles for its proteins, while consuming carbohydrate products from plants that grow profusely. That is where bulk production for sale is the criterion of agriculture. But hidden hungers and insufficient health are reasons for more and more hospitals until soon we shall have one-half of the crowd in bed and the other half caring for them.
In the southeastern United States we condemn the single-crop agriculture of cotton farming, and propagandize diversification. There the racial problems have been a constant menace and sharp color lines have persisted. Politics have been blamed as causative by some, but have been considered the remedial hopes by others. Underneath these social troubles there has been the poor soil that could grow only poor foods in terms of proteins and all the essential nutritional compounds coming with these essentials on fertile soils.
A glimpse of the soil map of the United States will show that the soils and not the people give us our East and our West. Soil also divides the East into the North and the South.
The soil map puts the beef cattle market in Kansas City as the beef protein center, with production of it to the West. The soil map puts the pork market in Chicago with the animal fat production nearby and east thereof. Only soils of a particular fertility level according to a specific degree of development under less drastic climatic forces of the moderate rainfalls in the temperate zone give the nutrition and the higher security for larger numbers of the human species. On those soils, peoples are assets to themselves and to others, instead of liabilities.
Let us now use our own United States, with its Midwest as a standard, or as a help, in looking at the soil map of the world, and our international problems.
Where in the rest of the world do you find soils similar to our protein belt in our Midwest? In the Union of the Socialistic Soviet Republics. Not in Great Britain, which along with Russia was recently one of the triumvirate in world power.
However, on further study of the soil map with Britain’s present plight in mind, you see our Midwest soils duplicated in Canada, South Africa, India, and Australia. There you can see the wheat-producing and meat-producing soils of her outlying colonies as the basis for the past strength of the British Empire.
Now we begin to recognize other aspects in the ecological pattern, interpreting some of the behaviors of the human species in recent world turmoils. Soils in North China suggest reasons for Japan’s stealthy infiltration there. Soils in South America, making it extensive cattle country, suggest reasons for a naval battle between the Graf Spee and British Men-of-War in that vicinity in World War II.
The soils of the world that produce proteins mark out the so-called Powers of the World and have been more basic in control of human behaviors in war as well as in peace than most of us have been ready to believe. When the so-called “those who have not” are in strife with the so-called “those who have” we may well characterize those two groups more specifically as those who have not soils fertile enough to produce proteins and those who have fertile soils supplying them with proteins.
Serious symptoms call for drastic treatments to bring about recovery. As yet, no depletion allowances in income taxes, for example, are made for soils, when similar allowances are as high as 25 percent annually for some other mineral properties. For taxation purposes it is claimed that soils do not depreciate.
And yet, for nutritional purposes, one generation of farming may be mining the soil enough to almost liquidate the health of the family if the economics of trying to pay for the farm doesn’t liquidate both the soil and the family completely before then. During all these past years while the soil fertility has been thrown into the bargain by the farmer in making a sale of his products, his economics have been the equivalent of liquidating his capital while everybody was calling it profit or pay.
In consequence of such economics without a soil foundation, a distorted ecology of the human species has come about with fewer rural people owning poorer land and poorer food security. We have a bad economics aggravating itself into a worse one with increasing urban people owning no soil and no food security at all. Increasing populations and dwindling soil resources combined are bringing a greater consciousness of the basic truth that rural welfare is too closely connected with food production for any of us in the urban group to neglect the rural segment in the ecological pattern.
The issue must be faced squarely. An increasing number of people on shrinking soil acreage of which the fertility is declining even more speedily, will mean a quarrel for food. It will be a quarrel bringing on wars unless the larger ecological pattern premised on soil fertility serves to guide the thinking and the planning to prevent such. Shrewd bargaining by our individual selves, or by sections of the country under leadership of politicians in state capitols and in our National Capitol, or by our representatives under the United Nations, does not make more productive soil per person, nor does it feed us better. We are coming face to face with the necessity of accepting one of two alternatives, or possibly both, (a) either give more restorative attention to our soils so they can feed more of us properly, or (b) limit our population accordingly.
