INFLUENCE OF MAN ON SOIL FERTILITY — JACKS 331 



became clear to all. As in our first agricultural revolution, the 

 farmers did not like having to change their traditional ways, but they 

 could not stand up to the harsh economics of the time, any more than 

 our open-field farmers could resist the powers of enclosure. When 

 the second World War came, food production was enormously in- 

 creased, as it had been in the first war, but this time fairly adequate 

 precautions were taken to protect the land from erosion, and soil 

 fertility was not used up — indeed, it was increased by the greatly 

 expanded use of fertilizers and other applications of science and 

 technology. Since the war, crop yields have continued to rise, and 

 now average about 35 percent above prewar. Farmers have had 

 money to spend and to spare, and some of it has found profitable in- 

 vestment in soil fertility. Boom conditions, however, do not last for- 

 ever. America is now producing more from its land than it can dis- 

 pose of. What that portends for the future I do not know, but it 

 suggests that American economy and soil are still far from a bal- 

 anced equilibrium. The soil -conservation stage has a long way to go. 



USSR 



Data on the progress of agriculture in the Soviet Union are un- 

 reliable, but there is no evidence whatever of such great advances 

 in yields and intensity of production as have recently occurred in 

 North America. In Russia the towns do not provide surplus capital 

 to fertilize the land; on the contrary, the land is starved of capital 

 to feed the expansion of industry, as happened in the United States 

 until a few decades ago. Russia is still in the soil-exhausting phase 

 of economic development — indeed, in some respects it is still in the 

 shifting-cultivation phase. If the industrial revolution is carried 

 through successfully in Russia, however, the land should ultimately 

 get some of the surplus wealth of industry in the form of capital 

 investment and applied science, and the normal effects of industrial- 

 ization on soil fertility should then appear. Russian soil science is 

 remarkable in two ways. It is 25 years ahead of the rest of the world 

 in its conceptions and 25 years behind in its application. The limit- 

 ing factor to greater productivity is not lack of knowledge of the 

 soil, but lack of capital as a fertilizer. To this might be added the 

 apparent absence of all incentive to the collective farmer to improve 

 the land. The present trend in Russia is toward the supersession 

 of the collective farm by the state-owned, factory-operated farm. 

 Collective land ownership, during the short time it has operated, has 

 failed to increase soil fertility. It is quite possible that state owner- 

 ship, which is in some ways analogous to the large-scale individual 

 ownership which played such an important part in promoting soil 

 fertility in England, may have similar effects in Russia. To the 



