HARRY A. CURTIS 83 



little economics that determines the course of events, and the public 

 be damned. May I illustrate my point here? The companies mining 

 phosphate in Tennessee tear up many thousand acres of good farming 

 land and leave the earth and topsoil piled in big windrows. Rainwater 

 then courses down the gullies and soon cuts them so deep that there 

 is no longer enough earth in the windrows to fill the gullies. The land 

 is thereby ruined for agricultural use. Now the little economics says 

 that it would cost, say, $500 per acre to level up the land immediately 

 after mining, and the leveled land would then be worth, say, $200 per 

 acre. The mining companies naturally say that they cannot afford to 

 level the land. Actually this is not so, for when the TVA started min- 

 ing phosphate in Tennessee I arranged to have five cents per ton of 

 crude ore mined set aside to restore the land to normal agricultural 

 use. This very small assessment per ton has proved over the years to 

 be ample to restore the land. Here then is a clear case in which the 

 state of Tennessee should have intervened in the interest of the big 

 economy, but did not take action. 



The alternative to government intervention, and in most cases the 

 only feasible course of action, is to find ways of making it attractive 

 to profit-seeking companies to exploit a natural resource without 

 waste. May I again illustrate my point? Down in Florida the pebble 

 phosphate mining companies are wasting about one-half of all the 

 phosphate they mine, not only wasting half but so mixing the dis- 

 carded part with the sand and clay overburden removed that it will 

 probably never be feasible to recover it. It would cost very little to 

 segregate in the mining operation the relatively low-grade phosphate 

 lying in the so-called "leached zone," the part that is now discarded. 

 But the mining companies will not do so as long as they regard the 

 leached zone material as worthless. The TVA succeeded in develop- 

 ing an economically feasible process for treatment of the leached zone 

 material and is now building a million dollar pilot plant in an effort 

 to convince the Florida companies that the material is worth saving. 



Speaking of phosphate. Dr. Nolan mentions that the Phosphoria 

 formation of the Rocky Mountain region contains "billions of tons of 

 phosphate." There is indeed a lot of high-grade ore that can be mined 

 economically, but a considerable portion of the total is of such low 

 grade that it cannot be processed economically. Another considerable 



