Word: sayed
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...danger; but their alarm is so loud that it may have the effect of deafening the world to its opportunities. To the real agricultural scientists, close to the soil and its sciences, such pessimism sounds silly or worse. Every main article of the Neo-Malthusian creed, they say, is either false or distorted or unprovable. They are sure that the modern world has both the soil and the scientific knowledge to feed, and feed well, twice as many people as are living today. By the time population has increased that much, man may (and probably will) have discovered new ways...
First is the notion that "soil cannot be stretched," that each acre has a certain production capacity (Vogt calls it "biotic potential") which cannot be boosted without dire peril. This is the same fallacy that expresses itself in the old saying, "There are only so many slices in the cake." Some businessmen say this when they decide that their markets cannot be expanded and, therefore, should be divided among them in quotas set by their cartel. Some labor unions decide that there are only so many jobs to be divided, and therefore oppose labor-saving devices...
...soil scientists say that it simply is not true that land is static. Virgin soils vary widely in fertility and character, but once under cultivation they are subject to the will of modern...
...soil men laugh at the Neo-Malthusian doctrine that man must adapt himself to soil, and live with it as helplessly as wildlife. Man is not the servant of the soil, they say. He is its master...
Another thing they laugh at is the familiar phrase, "irreplaceable topsoil." Topsoil should certainly be cherished and protected, the soil men say, but it is not irreplaceable. In 1937, a U.S. Government experiment station skinned ten inches of soil off half an acre of virgin Ohio grassland, leaving nothing but the yellow subsoil. Corn planted on an untreated strip of this poor stuff produced no crop at all. But other strips were nursed along with fertilizer and crop rotations. During the sixth season, the best strip of man-made topsoil produced 86 bushels of corn an acre, more than twice...