Word: soiling
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...beyond science and technology now," says Bill Richards, the Ohio farmer turned chief of the U.S. Soil Conservation Service, a branch of the Agriculture Department. "It is a cultural revolution." In the past year scs has named this new kind of farming "residue management," and its wide embrace includes techniques labeled no-till, ridge-till and mulch-till...
...central tenet is retiring the old moldboard plow, which laid the earth open to wind and water erosion. Instead farmers leave residue from the previous year's crops in place to hold soil and moisture, then scratch or chisel in seeds, which sprout through the decomposing residue. Crop rotation is used to break insect cycles. Weeds are targeted, controlled by new herbicides that quickly break down and vanish. In this rare and happy story that emerges from centuries of anguished agriculture practices and policies, there is the touch of God's hand soothing the earth and nudging it back...
...farms have lost half their topsoil as it sloughed off the hilltops into the gullies and beyond. Stand on a bridge in Vicksburg over the Mississippi River, the old saying goes, and every hour you can watch an Iowa farm go by in the current below. And as the soil moved, it took with it particles of chemical fertilizers and pesticides that polluted the aquifers below...
Little did she know that after her Radcliffe Choral Society concert at Brown University, she would return to a college shocked by the news that war had finally reached American soil...
...advising the Earth Summit negotiators, the world has lost 200 million hectares (500 million acres) of trees since 1972, an area roughly one-third the size of the continental U.S. The world's farmers, meanwhile, have lost nearly 500 million tons of topsoil, an amount equal to the tillable soil coverage of India and France combined. Lakes, rivers, even whole seas have been turned into sewers and industrial sumps. And tens of thousands of plant and animal species that shared the planet with us in 1972 have since disappeared...