Word: soiling
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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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...
Corn for Dixie. Man is master not only of the soil, but of the plants that grow in it, molding them plastically to suit human purposes. Until recently, the U.S. Southeast had never been good corn country. A few years ago the U.S. Department of Agriculture began breeding special hybrid corns to suit Southern conditions. In North Carolina, whose corn yields ran around 22 bushels an acre, the new "Dixie" hybrids, lavishly fertilized and planted thicker than ordinary corn, made 125 bushels...
...Malthusians is their belief that the productivity of the world's cultivated land is falling now and is sure to fall even more because of erosion and exhaustion. The enormous crops that the U.S. raised this year, they say, are a cruel illusion; they were achieved by "soil mining," and will be paid for inexorably in future crop failures...
This is not true everywhere, say the soil men, and it need not be true anywhere. And the situation is not as bad as Vogt & Co. say it is. Soil mining and erosion are still causing inestimable damage, but not so much as before. The U.S. Soil Conservation Service believes that U.S. soils are now getting better, on the whole; the downward trend has been reversed...
...doctrine of soil conservation has taken deep root in the South. Farmers plant less land to cotton, more to grass and legumes. They terrace their steeper fields skillfully, plow on the contour instead of up & down hill. On thousands of once sterile slopes, the miraculous vine, kudzu, clambers like Jack's beanstalk. It chokes devouring gullies with entangled soil. It buries fences, leaps into trees. Its big leaves, which stay green until Christmas, are as nourishing to cattle as excellent alfalfa. When plowed under, kudzu enriches the soil...