What Has Happened to Our Soil?

DENIZENS of tenement and apartment houses towering above asphalt and concrete corridors of large cities seldom see it. Single-home urbanites with small lawns, front and back, pay little attention to it. To those who live in suburbia, it is a dirty nuisance when it is tracked into their homes.

It is different things to different people. Boys dig in it. Little girls make mud pies with it. Mothers abhor it. Washing-machine manufacturers make windfall profits because of it. Bulldozer operators make their living moving it. Farmers plow it, cultivate it, and plant it. It is used as a dumping ground for poisonous chemicals, rendering it useless for generations to come. Humankind was made from it. When we expire, we are buried in it.

Of all earth’s most precious resources, none are so much abused, misused, and taken for granted as is our soil. Defying all wisdom, it has been overplowed, overplanted, overfertilized, overpolluted.

It has been viewed as an unlimited resource, as plentiful as the sands of the seashore. Pioneers and settlers moving into new territories bought land cheap. They stripped it of its trees and much of its vegetation as they plowed straight furrows up and down the hills and planted their seed. Then the rains came, and the plowed furrows turned into watercourses that became great gullies scarring the land, taking the topsoil to the riverbeds and, in time, out to sea. When there was no more good land, they moved on, and with their stubborn genius for not learning from their mistakes, an endless cycle of ruined land was left in their wake. Meanwhile, the settlers kept coming, plowing topsoil too thin to plant. Within a generation the land was ruined.

Cattlemen let their teeming herds graze the uncultivated land to a barren waste. Next came the droughts. The eroding soil, the barren land, and the blowing winds brought on the great dust bowl of the 1930’s that destroyed vast areas of farmland across five states of Midwestern America. The dust blew in clouds thousands of feet in the air, from horizon to horizon. It came through the cracks around the doors and windows. It piled in high drifts in the streets and fields, covering sheds, tractors, and farm equipment.

Millions of acres of farmland were destroyed by soil erosion. Precious topsoil, just one inch (2.5 cm) of which experts say can take several hundred years to build, was now, in a matter of a few months, gone with the water and the wind.

Finally, man learned from his mistakes. National conservation systems were established to help the farmers save their land from erosion. Contour plowing was introduced. Deep furrows were cut that ran around the slope of the land instead of up and down the hills. This method enabled the water to collect in the troughs and soak into the ground rather than letting it run off and carry the topsoil with it. Conservation workers went up and down the land showing farmers the need for contour plowing and thereby saved millions of acres of topsoil from being lost.

Was this, however, the panacea needed to arrest this cancerous erosion of the earth’s soil? As the year 1986 draws to a close, some 50 years removed from the infamous dust-bowl era, does it find the stewards of God’s good earth caring for the land properly? What do the reports from around the world show?

Increasing Losses of Topsoil

In America alone, the loss of soil is today an even greater crisis. “Of our current 421 million acres [170 million ha] of productive farmlands,” writes the National Wildlife magazine of February/​March 1985, “97 million acres [39 million ha] are eroding at more than twice the ‘tolerance’ level​—the level at which soil can be replaced naturally. Another 89 million acres [36 million ha] are eroding at one to two times that tolerance level. In all, nearly 40 percent of our farmlands are losing soil. In Iowa, some topsoils that were once a foot [30 cm] deep today are only six inches [15 cm]. One tenth of the rich wheat-growing Palouse region of eastern Washington has lost all of its topsoil. In parts of northern Missouri, half the topsoil is gone, and the land is still eroding at some five times the rate of replacement.”

Not all soil erosion is caused by blowing winds as was the case in the dust-bowl era and as is the case in much of Africa today. In the United States particularly, most of the erosion comes from rain runoff. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, reports for the year 1977 show that an estimated 6.4 billion tons of topsoil were washed away from farmlands, ranges, forests, and construction sites. The greatest portion of this topsoil loss was speeded up by human activities. “Off-road vehicles have in a few years scoured more soil off parts of California than nature will replace in 1,000 years,” said one authority.

What about the lesson learned a half century ago​—time-tested contour plowing and windbreaks that prevent water runoff? In order to keep up with the demand from foreign markets for grain in the early 1970’s, particularly from the Soviet Union, American farmers were encouraged to plow from “fencerow to fencerow.” Straightaway they responded by maximizing their grain production, and throwing all caution to the winds, they bulldozed erosion terraces and rows of trees that served as windbreaks and held the soil in check. They plowed unusable land and up and down hills and abandoned crop rotation​—a proved method of soil retention. Four million acres (1.6 million ha) of dry rangeland that many experts considered too dry to farm were turned by the plow.

Indeed, the farmers realized a bumper crop of grain production and with it came a greater farm income. But, alas, offsetting the handsome profits were the lamentations that went up from the same farmers when they realized that their farms were eroding away, by many tons to the acre. Published reports say that the United States is now losing topsoil at the rate of six billion tons a year.

“The consequences of such actions could be enormous in the years ahead,” writes the National Wildlife magazine. “Ours is already a hungry world. If, as the experts believe, one-third of the earth’s cropland is eroding faster than nature can replace the soil, we are losing productivity. We may cultivate the same number of acres, but as the soil gets thinner, we will harvest less food from it.”

A World Crisis

According to a 1985 report from the Worldwatch Institute, the world is losing in excess of 25 billion tons of topsoil a year. Reports indicate that in the famine-ravaged country of Ethiopia, over one billion tons of topsoil are washed away from the country’s land each year. “An environmental nightmare unfolding before our eyes . . . , a result of the acts of millions of Ethiopians struggling for survival,” says a report by the U.S. Agency for International Development. It adds: “Scratching the surface of eroded land and eroding it further, cutting down the trees for warmth and fuel and leaving the country denuded.”

“Land hunger in the Andean countries​—Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, and Peru—​is evident in the push of unterraced farming up the mountainsides,” reports the Worldwatch Institute. “Even to the casual observer it is evident that much of the soil on the steeply sloping, freshly plowed mountainsides will soon be washed to the stream beds below, leaving only bare rock and hungry people.” Brazil shows a similar trend of widespread erosion.

A world away, China is plagued with severe topsoil loss​—five billion tons of it are washed into her rivers and streams each year. India is losing six billion tons of topsoil annually, affecting 370 million acres (150 million ha). “It is generally agreed that in Italy 2 million hectares [4.9 million a.] have been abandoned in the last ten years,” states a European report. “Similarly,” says Worldwatch, “some of the decline in the harvested area of cereals in Yugoslavia and Bulgaria over the past two decades reflects the movement from eroded, worn-out soils in farm areas with rugged terrain.” And as the rest of the world goes, so goes the Soviet Union​—soil erosion in epidemic proportions and it is worsening, admits the Soil Erosion Laboratory of the University of Moscow.

What Soil Loss Means for You

Whether you live in a bustling metropolis or on a farm, you will indeed pay the price for the loss of soil. “If we are interested in food prices at the end of the century,” says the Worldwatch Institute, “we should be looking at soil erosion rates today. The less soil we have, the more food will cost.”

As the earth’s inhabitants move steadily closer to five billion and the population pressure explodes on the land, the soil will inexorably disappear. In China, for example, where the loss of cropland is a mounting problem, “authorities are now trying to conserve land by encouraging cremation instead of interment in the traditional burial mounds seen throughout the countryside,” writes Lester R. Brown in the book State of the World​—1985. “In this crowded country the living compete with the dead for land.”

In countries where population is exploding with staggering soil loss, the results can be catastrophic. Nowhere is this more evident than in Africa, where grain production is on a drastic decline and famine is an ever-present threat. According to reports published in the book State of the World​—1985, Africa was essentially self-sufficient in food production as recently as 1970. In 1984, however, some 140 million people​—out of a total of 531 million—​were fed with grain from abroad.

Conditions are expected to worsen in the years to come. What has made the difference in just 14 years? “The decline is largely attributable to three well-established trends,” writes State of the World​—1985, “the fastest population growth of any continent in history, widespread soil erosion and desertification, and the failure by African governments to give agriculture the support that it needs.”

It is estimated that 1.5 billion people, or a third of the world’s population, live in countries where cropland and soil are rapidly dwindling. “It seems incredible that something as basic as the very soil on which we stand should be disappearing at such a rate that by the end of the century there will be 32 per cent less per person than there is at present,” writes New Scientist magazine. As our soil and cropland go with the wind and the rain, the world will find it increasingly harder to feed its exploding population.

Experts do not see a solution. The problem is worsening. Only Jehovah God can restore the earth to a land that will yield its full increase. That time is soon to come, and it will be, as his Word promises, a grand paradise from horizon to horizon, even to the ends of the earth.​—Psalm 72:1-8, 16.

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Strip-cropping for soil and water conservation

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U.S. National Archives

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U.S. National Archives

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U.S. National Archives