NOTICE TO QUIT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 286, 15 December 1944, Page 10

NOTICE TO QUIT

OIL OVER THE CITY has awakened Sydney to the fact that the few inches of Australia on which men can live are blowing away. Australian dust has reached various parts of the North Island, even having serious effects on our electric supply system. PP PPIEBPLPPPPLP LLP IPP IPA

N May 12, 1934, three billion tons of top soil was blown two thousand miles across the United States. Men on the streets of New York tasted grit from the plains of Kansas. Dust blotted out the sun over Washington. New Englanders found their floors and furniture faintly red with the wealth of the prairies. The decks of ships in mid-Atlantic grew dirty with deposits from the heart of the Continent. Americans, horrified and frightened, began to recast their way of life of 150 years. Flooding out over a virtually virgin continent, their great-grandfathers, grandfathers, and fathers had acted as if the land was illimitable and inexhaustible. But in 1907 "the frontier" came to an end in spectacular fashion. For in that year the native reserve called by the Indians Oklahoma, "The Beautiful Land,’ was thrown open, the last unoccupied area. Through the night before proclamation, intending settlers took their stations side by side, and in places several ranks deep, all round the boundary, and when day dawned advanced on foot, on horse, or in buggy until the new State was completely pegged out in its first day of existence. Yet only 30 years later "Okies" meant all over America vagrants, families whose farms had blown away. "The Beautiful Land" had become the "dust bowl." In many other States fire and water have wrought damage 4s great as wind’s. Altogether in the United States’ brief period of nationhood, fifty million acres of North America have become uncultivable, much of it forever, through excessive erosion and cropping. Another

fifty million are on the verge of abandonment. One hundred million more, once arable, have become fit only for grazing. ms Something Has Been Done The "Great Duster" of ’34 proved actually gain to the United States in that it dramatised this loss of two hundred million acres-an area four and ahalf times that occpied in New Zealand or Japan, and sixteen times that which supports Java’s fifty million farmers.

Congress hastened to pass a Soil. Conservation Act, and the Department of Agriculture, under Henry Wallace, himself a practical and scientific farmer, as well as a far-sighted economist, hastened to mobilise country people to make it effective. To-day, 10 years after, they have achieved only 10% of the total work that will be needed to prevent the remainder of arable America from dissolving into the air or streaming into the

sea. But progress is claimed to be actually much greater than these figures indicate. For the essential techniques for stabilising the top soil seem to have been discovered. And, what is more, they have proved themselves to be not merely effective for this long-term purpose but immediate money-makers as well, so that farmers have every incentive to apply them. Contour Cultivation Fifty-nine major techniques are in use. The most important, and certainly the most spectacular, is that called "Contour Cultivation" — an innovation which the Soil Conservation Service chief claims "will one day rank in importance with the discovery of the wheel and the use of fire." As photos and farm maps show, it has changed the face of large areas already. The biggest work in it is getting your present fences down. After that you simply fit a long U-tube containing water along the bonnet of your tractor with a glass section in front of the steering wheel and mark out your strips by ploughing so that the water level stays constant. With contour cultivation goes "strip cropping" and "terracing." The latter consists in getting a bulldozer to build up gently sloping mounds so many yards or chains apart along your hill slopes. Each mound, of course, snakes along the contour and has grass-paved waterways at its ends to discharge harmlessly the water which the ridge holds up during a storm-or more correctly, the excess of such water, for most of it soaks into the ridge itself. The ridges are made sufficiently broad-based not to give way under their saturation with water and have sides sloping. gently enough to make their ploughing possible. Billions of Natural Little Dams "Strip cropping" consists in alternating dense crops such as wheat with cleantilled crops such as peas, or, alternatively, in running ribbons of tall plants

OIL OVER THE CITY J scared Americans ten years ago into changes in agriculture. Their progress in soil conservation to date is here reviewed for "The Listener" by A.M.R. RIPE PRP PP PLOAALEPBOPPPOAL PALL P RPL

across your pasture. In the former case soil-laden water from the bare-earth crop is stayed and filtered of its load by the close-growing crop in the strip below. In the latter case your grass has the force of the wind upon it broken by the taller strips. The single. simple purpose which underlies all these practices cannot be better stated than in Henry Wallace’s own words. "In the uplands where floods form, nature throws across practically every foot of land an interlacing system of tiny dams. A dead leaf, a blade of grass, or a root tangle can stop a raindrop from running, hold it back; and floods are made up of raindrops infinitely multiplied. Learning from nature we cease to leave fields smooth and bare, inviting erosion. Instead we roughen the surface, turn the earth itself and the plants themselves into impediments to run-off, protectors of the soil. By the simple device of ploughing on the contour, instead of up and down the hill, each furrow, each harrow s¢ratch, becomes in effect a small dam or terrace. On steeper slopes somewhat more elaborate methods may be needed, but the principle of all of them is simple; make running water walk or creep, store a far greater part of it in that greatest of all reservoirs-the soil; and do this by making the soil and its crops provide, as impediments: to run-off, billions of natural little dams." Co-operation is Needed Contour ploughing itself has been developed in various specialised ways, as, for example, with an implement which interrupts the furrows every few feet so that a ploughed field becomes thousands of identical pools in wet weather. But the roots of which Wallace spoke as nature’s original dams are themselves utilised. On steeper slopes on the farm itself it means fencing them round, putting logs or brush across their bottoms to stay the silt, and planting scrub and

trees. It also means sowing the stormwater hollows where gullies may develop with a mat of close grass and leaving it there undisturbed. The retarding and filtering action of grass .is so much valued, indeed, that run-off drains are made wide and their bottoms painstakingly turfed by hand. These projects have involved considerable modification of farmers’ traditional individualism. Each must pay his own transformation costs — which, ranging from 5 cents to 25 dollars, average 5 dollars an acre. The government provides only expert help, and, if necessary, loans. Pe very often the change-over to conservation practices cannot be made by one farmer unless his neighbours also agree to mend their ways and remodel their farm lay-out. Such co-op-eration was at first difficult to obtain, but is apparently becoming common as its advantages are seen to be overwhelming. Altogether 33 million acres of odd corners upon existing farms — gullies, steep slopes, windbreaks-are scheduled for retirement as well as 40 million acres in large blocks. The latter will, however, grow forests for the future. And the odd corners, left to run wild, will bring beck beneficial wild life and, in many cases, make a duck-pond possible. This is still 90 per cent project, But two and a-half million farmers signed up "in Conservation Districts, eight million acres of Dust Bowl reclaimed, and 20 per cent increased production in the transformed areas seems a good start. e If. the results of our New Zealand water-erosion came to the city as spec tacularly as the dust of wind-erosion; if, for. example, mud. from the Kaimanawas or Alpine foothills flooded Queen Street and Colombo Street and silted up the Octagon and Parliament. grounds, then we too might awaken to the hand in our national pocket. As it is we shall have to learn from Australian dust and American example,