170 HARNESSING THE EARTHWORM 



experts, carefully apportioned to our entire population, there 

 would be at all times an actual food shortage in the United States. 

 Our lend-lease food export program during World War II, and 

 immediately following the war, has graphically brought to the 

 attention of all our people the sad fact that there is not enough 

 food to go around unless we are willing to reduce radically our 

 standards of nutrition. 



From the above, and from even a casual survey of facts and 

 available figures, we can see that the problem of providing for 

 our own growing population, to say nothing of the population 

 pressure throughout the balance of the world, is immediate and 

 pressing and not something to be considered in the distant future. 

 Soil-conservation is not enough. In addition to conserving and 

 increasing the productivity of the soil we have, rebuilding and 

 conditioning our so-called "worn out" soils and sub-marginal 

 lands, we must build more soil on favorably located non-arable 

 land. We have some hundreds of millions of acres of such lands 

 on our new frontier. To exploit this new frontier, it is necessary 

 only to apply the knowledge which we have to the available ma- 

 terials which we have. So far as the knowledge is concerned, we 

 refer to the accumulated technical information of the entire world 

 of science. For our purpose, it is necessary merely to call atten- 

 tion to this field of knowledge, and we can now add to it the new 

 knowledge of atomic energy, the possibilities of which have not 

 yet been explored for constructive use. For source materials 

 with which to work, we briefly call attention to the mineral re- 

 sources of the earth itself. Throughout the incalculable ages of 

 the past, from the conception of primordial chaos down to the 

 present world of form and substance as we know it, the parent 

 mineral base of topsoil has been formed and deposited. In the 

 superficial layers of the earth, from the visible surface on down 

 to the bedrock, we have the inexhaustible parent mineral material 

 of topsoil available for soil-building. The other source-parent- 

 material of topsoil is vegetation and animal life, but primarily 



