THE FARM LANDSCAPE 301 



that originated the idea of land capability, of analyzing it and using 

 it according to its capabilities. 



I write for an audience of about 350,000 people a week. The 

 greatest point of ignorance that comes through to me from these 

 people is their ignorance of land capability. They say, "Here is all 

 this land. Use it." And they believe you can use it any way you 

 want to. We know that is not true. That is part of the educational 

 job in this whole picture. Mr. Sears talked about the steady tend- 

 ency toward bigger land units. I believe we have got to get back 

 to an ethical and moral attitude toward land use and say "this is where 

 we have to go, not because science and technology and government 

 subsidies say we are going there, but because it is right." There is a 

 lot of big machinery used in agriculture today because it is subsidized 

 and not because it is efficient on the land. We have to say this is 

 where American agriculture should go in order to build a better 

 America, and then we will be able to plan for the right kind of family 

 farms and keep them. And we were talking about soil districts. I 

 drive 40,000 miles a year through them and sometimes I will drive 

 all day with the stink of the defoliant in my nostrils or along drain- 

 age ditches, where dead fish float on the surface killed by herbicides 

 and insecticides. 



These are tremendous problems in natural beauty. I would like 

 to make a tiny comment on Dr. Darling's statement. It seems to 

 me that the education of our children in good taste, and this is the 

 thing you were talking about, is tremendously important. You 

 cannot do away with the slum landscape when you have slum- 

 minded people. Maybe the ones that are here now are too old to 

 change, but we certainly have to change their children. 



Dr. E. W. MUELLER. I appreciate the comments that have been 

 made here calling for new approaches which will achieve some of the 

 goals that we have for beauty in rural America. 



But I suggest that we also take a good, hard look at the structure 

 that we now already have. Where we are not doing a good job, 

 let's strengthen those structures. 



For example, the soil conservation districts reach the private land- 

 owner, and reaching the private land-owner, they can do a lot to help 

 beautify private land but the landowner needs technical advice to be 

 able to do a wise job and a good job in planning his land use. There- 

 fore, any effort to charge a user fee for these technical services that 

 are made available at present without cost would be a step in a back- 



