Some xiioughts on 

 Conservation 



By DeWiH C. Wing* 





y^T IS overcoat weather here, but 

 M spring is beginning to warm the 

 \J^ heart of every living thing in 

 this part of the country. Ten days ago I 

 heard the welcome music of frogs in a 

 swampy, wooded place near Gallege Park, 

 Md. Their orchestra needed heat. I was 

 there to attend a sheepmen's meeting at 

 the University of Maryland, where my 

 old University of Illinois classmate B. E. 

 Carmichael announced the results of a 

 useful and financially successful lamb 

 feeding trial. He had bought the lambs 

 in West Virginia, where I've seen some 

 excellent hilly, grass and hay land for 

 sheepraising. "ITiey were mostly good 

 iambs, of mixed breeding. 



Locally, the season is late. Spring was 

 a little early in central Illinois when John 

 McCarty and I sowed oats in Ford county 

 on March 6 many years ago. Last week- 

 end a group of us went down to Leonard- 

 town, Md., 54 miles southeast of Wash- 

 ington. On the way, I did not notice 

 that any spring field seeding had been 

 done. Tobacco seed doubtless was sprout- 

 ing — or maybe plants were growing — 

 in beds under cloth covers seen on several 

 tobacco farms beside the road. In cen- 

 tral Missouri I used to bum a brush pile 

 in the woods and sow tobacco seed in 

 the ashes, mixed with earth spaded out 

 of the spot, about the middle of Feb- 

 ruary. "Tobacco-growing neighbors told 

 me that I allowed too many of the plants 

 in my patch to bloom. Well, a healthy 

 tobacco plant in bloom is a feast for the 

 eyes. 



Farms and Farming 

 Numerous badly washed and worn 

 fields, farmed for several centuries, were 

 conspicuous along parts of the winding 

 road to Maryland's little town close to 

 Chesapeake Bay. In Maryland, as in 

 every state, there are many kinds of 

 farms, many kinds of farmers, many 

 kinds of farming, and many kinds of 

 weather. Poor farms and poor people 

 seem to go together in every farming 

 community, and the going, for both, 

 tends to change from bad to worse in 

 most instances. One of my friends says 

 that "the inefficient farmer is one of the 

 millstones about the neck of agriculture." 



* For many years Managing Editor of the old 

 Breeder's Gazette, DCW is now Director of 

 Farm Press Relations with the AAA at Wash- 

 ington. 



Inefficiency is of course a human char- 

 acteristic of every industry. Occupational 

 inefficiency among men seems to derive 

 from the fact that most of them must 

 work for other men, if they get work at 

 all. Men who have achieved the owner- 

 ship of real property tend to be efficient, 

 and to become increasingly efficient in 

 acquiring more property. 



Getting back to Maryland, between 

 Frederick and Hagerstown in that state 

 lies as fertile, prosperous and lovely a 

 valley as I have seen, and, for the most 

 part, it is well farmed. I have seen no 

 better farming in Lancaster G)., Pa. 

 Owners take care of their farms and live 

 in fair to good homes in this Maryland 

 valley, and if there are farms for sale in 

 it, some at least are probably farms that 

 profligate heirs have mortgaged up to 

 the limit and farmed by proxy for some 

 time. 



Floods Destroy 



You say in the February issue of the 

 RECORD that the recent flood 'dram- 

 atically emphasizes the importance of ter- 

 racing, strip cropping, reforestation, put- 

 ting more rolling land in grass, building 

 water reservoirs and thus reducing the 

 volume and speed of water runoff." 



In May, 1927, 1 was in and below New 

 Orleans to see the Mississippi flood of 

 that year at its worst stage. Flatboats 

 loaded with colored people saved from 

 drowning, parts of buildings and many 

 dead, swollen animals afloat in the mud- 

 dy river, snakes coiled round telephone 

 wires and buzzards in the air made an 

 unforgettable scene; but the scene, in 

 terms of soil destruction in many states, 

 was subtler and more significant. 



A 1,000-acre farm in Wayne Co., 111., 

 had lost a small fortune, in terms of top 

 soil, when I became financially interested 

 in the farm in 1915. Four-Mile Creek 

 and its little tributaries carried water and 

 soil off the farm, emptying them into the 

 Skillet Fork (a small stream), which dis- 

 charged its fertile burden into the Wa- 

 bash. From that Hoosier river, good soil 

 from the Wayne county farm passed into 

 the Ohio, then into the Mississippi and 

 finally came to rest in the Gulf of Mex- 

 ico. 



Much of the surface of land that I 

 farmed years ago in Missouri and Illi- 



nois lies on the floor of the gulf or in 

 the beds of rivers. Our annual national 

 loss of pay dirt, through water and wind 

 erosion, runs into a dollar value that 

 staggers the imagination. Fortunately, 

 something at last is being done on a na- 

 tion-wide scale to check this insidious 

 destruction of the nation at its roots, and 

 the results are justifying and payit>g for the 

 job. If 1 now owned any part of that southern 

 Illinois farm, I would be using some of the 

 AAA soil-building practices included in the 

 agricultural conservation program. I would 

 b« getting about four-fifths of the farm into 

 grass and hay for the production of beef cat- 

 tle bred and raised on the place. Wherever 

 there is much erosion by wind or water, the 

 nation needs an extension and systematic de- 

 velopment of a pastoral agriculture, marketing 

 meat, milk and wool made on grass and hay. 

 * • • 



In 1821 my Massachusetts grandfather with 

 his Virginia wife traveled westward in a 

 covered wagon until they found their "prom- 

 ised land" in the woods of a central state. He 

 and millions of other homeseekers and their 

 later followers settled where self-choice, or 

 advertising, or accident stopped them. They 

 spread out, through their numerous children, 

 and year after year ambitious young men and 

 their wives, seeking homes of their own, 

 bought farms somewhere or anywhere, and, 

 with an old faith in new land, they built 

 houses, bams and fences, plowed up prairies, 

 cleared off trees, brush and stones, drained 

 swamps, supported schools and churches and 

 reared children. They literally spent them- 

 selves in a successful or disastrous fight to 

 pay their debts with the fertility of their soil 

 and the labor of their hands. 



Mined the Soil 



At harvest time nearly 50 years ago, 42 

 self-binders drawn by teams aggregating more 

 than 200 horses could have been seen follow- 

 ing one another around a 640-acre wheat field 

 in North Dakota. Daring men, armed with 

 plows, had opened up a new empire for wheat, 

 to be followed later in war days by vast ex- 

 tensions of this cash crop into the old grass 

 lands of the northwest. Several producers of 

 the period were publicized as "wheat kings." 

 In other regions there were "corn kings." as 

 well as much older "cotton kings"' at>d '"to- 

 bacco kings." All of the "king"" crops, pro- 

 duced by large or small growers, exacted an- 

 nual tributes from the soil. 



"'Cattle kings'" and "sheep kings"' held sway 

 in the ranch and range lands of the Great 

 Plains and in the mountains, where big herds 

 and flocks, along with the small holdings of 

 other stockmen, overgrazed and steadily weak- 

 ened native sods that for centuries had blan- 

 keted and held the soil against destructive 

 winds. After the abused grass began to die 

 out in extensive areas, the furies of the wind 

 broke loose and produced "dust bowls," 

 "dust storms" and a natiotial problem. In 

 other parts of the country, flood waters, rich 



MARCH. 1938 



