Word: topsoil
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Almost daily Cope finds room in his column for his favorite gospel-the coming of a Southland rich with new topsoil, year-round pastureland and milk-fed beef. The foundation of the Cope gospel is the fast-growing vine, kudzu;*he organized Georgia's Kudzu Club (20,000 members), and has plugged the vine so long that friends call him "the Kudzu Kid." It was betting on the horses that introduced Cope (and Georgia) to another important crop. On his way to drop a little money at the 1945 Kentucky Derby, Cope spotted a grass called Kentucky 31 fescue...
...Planet? The Neo-Malthusians admit that he was wrong. But they claim that new and frightening threats have developed recently. The present-day world, they say, has no fresh lands (or almost none) to cultivate. Its old lands, "plundered" by reckless exploitation, are losing fertility as their "irreplaceable topsoil" washes down the rivers. Farmlands cannot maintain their present production. The world's population is still increasing rapidly, and modern medicine, by cutting the death rate from infectious diseases, is sure to quicken this increase. The falling food-production curve, cry the Neo-Malthusians, will soon cross the rising population...
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...
Ultimate Choice. None of the speakers believes that mankind's future can be assured by merely lecturing farmers on how to be kind to topsoil. Warren S. Thompson, of the Scripps Foundation for Research in Population Problems, argues that the human race must eventually control its own numbers, or be controlled-by hunger, war and pestilence...
...Cortes' time, the Indians planted their crops in 16 inches of topsoil. Now they count themselves lucky if they plant in six. Corn, grown year after year on the same plots, has sapped the goodness from the soil. In the current Harper's Magazine, William Vogt, chief of the conservation section of the Pan American Union, warns that "unless there is a profound modification in its treatment of the land, the greater part of Mexico will be a desert within 100 years." (The peril, warned Vogt, hangs over all Latin America...