TECHNOLOGY ON THE LAND 



Byron T. Shaw 



Dr. Nolan in his excellent paper comes to the conclusion that "re- 

 search and technologic development have to a large extent eliminated 

 from the conservation movement concern over the adequacy of our 

 resource base." My comments on his paper will be confined to those 

 relating to soil and the products of the soil, including forests. Dr. 

 Nolan has explained that he designedly has touched on soils and 

 forests very lightly. 



I shall begin where Dr. Nolan did — the 1908 Governors' Confer- 

 ence called by Theodore Roosevelt. I shall not go into the statements 

 made at that conference for Dr. Nolan has treated the subject ade- 

 quately; rather I shall examine the facts available to the conferees 

 which formed the basis of their conclusions. 



The Department of Agriculture began keeping statistics on crop 

 production and land use about 1865. By 1908 there was a record of 

 some forty years. Crop yields per acre of our principal crops re- 

 mained unchanged throughout this period. But there had been many 



BYRON T. SHAW is Administrator of the Agricultural Research Serv- 

 ice, United States Department of Agriculture. An agronomist by profession, he 

 was head of soil management and irrigation investigations at Beltsville before 

 moving up tp his present post. He has been both a high school and college 

 teacher and formerly was Professor of Agronomy at Ohio State University. He 

 was editor of the book Soil Physical Conditions and Plant Growth. He was 

 born at Paradise, Utah, in 1907; took his B.S. at Utah State Agricultural Col- 

 lege, and his doctorate at Ohio State. 



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