310 The Farm Woodlot 



Some are just losing the humus from the surface soil, 

 some are in the last stages of rock and gravel. The rapidity 

 of the erosion depends largely on the nature of the soil. 

 The clay soils of the Mississippi and the foothills of the 

 southern Appalachian mountains lend themselves readily 

 to this process and become lost to cultivation by this 

 means in a few years. The farmer has robbed himself 

 of millions of acres of valuable woodland in attempting 

 to bring under cultivation mountain land not suited to 

 that purpose; and it now lies worse than a worthless 

 waste. 



In France, when the government of the Republic ordered 

 the cutting of the forests that had been conserved for 

 years under the rule of the monarchy, thousands of square 

 miles on the steep slopes of the Alps were eroded to a barren 

 waste in just this way. The ground became so gullied 

 and so completely robbed of all its fertility that it was im- 

 possible to establish any growth on it by ordinary means. 

 Everything was washed out of the ground as soon as 

 planted. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been 

 spent, and hundreds more must yet be spent in the 

 future in the building of dams and the digging of ditches 

 to hold the floods till vegetation of some kind has secured 

 a foothold. 



Sections of Greece, a large part of Asia Minor, Arabia, 

 Palestine and all northern Africa and nearly all of 

 China have come to their present desert condition from 

 former fertility and luxurious vegetation through just 

 such process of erosion. It is bound to come to us if we 

 persist in clearing the forests from the hillsides. Nor is 

 the damage from erosion confined to the hillside districts. 



