Saving Civilization
By Kate Yegerlehner
Recently Dad and I took a tiny first step in a big project…cleaning and sorting through decades of
accumulated things residing in Grandma’s unfinished basement. While I cleaned some old toys, he
began sorting through a couple of the many boxes filled with old farm records, some things of historical
interest, and assorted papers and pamphlets. One of the little treasures he found was Agriculture
Information Bulletin No. 99 put out by the USDA Soil Conservation Service, entitled Conquest of the Land
through 7,000 Years.
Written by Dr. W. C. Lowdermilk, a former Assistant Chief of Soil Conservation, the booklet
contains the results of his investigative travels in 1938-39 to England, Holland, France, Italy, Algeria,
Tunisia, Tripoli, Egypt, Palestine, Trans-Jordan, Lebanon, Cyprus, Syria and Iraq. He had also spent
several years in China prior to that. The purpose of his tours and research was to study soil erosion and
land use in areas that had been cultivated for agriculture for hundreds or even thousands of years in
hopes of gaining insights that might help solve those very problems in the relatively young United
States. Dr. Lowdermilk gave many lectures after his travels, which were compiled in distributable form
in 1942. This booklet was issued in 1953.
Dr. Lowdermilk’s findings were rather fascinating. He begins by acknowledging that in essence a
people’s freedom is no greater than their ability to produce food. He had just lived through World War I
and seen the manipulation of rebellious nations through rationing. Additionally, witnessing the effects
of famines in China, he concluded that when things get rough, we “will sell our liberty and more for
food… Food comes from the earth. The land with its waters gives us nourishment. The earth rewards
richly the knowing and diligent but punishes inexorably the ignorant and slothful. This partnership of
land and farmer is the rock foundation of our complex social structure.”
He noted that in the Near East, at least 11 empires had risen and fallen within a 7,000 year time
period. They visited abandoned cities covered over by desert sands and regions that once sustained
millions more people than could be found living there in the 1930’s. The two main principles he found
to have catastrophic effects on the land’s agricultural ability to support a population were erosion and
silting in of waterways (e.g. irrigation canals or reservoirs). Sometimes this occurred as a result of
overgrazing in the higher elevations and hill country, and other times the slopes were tilled for growing
crops without protecting the surface from water erosion. Once the soil was eroded down to the rocky
surface on sloped land, it could no longer produce. Rains that fell subsequently created huge gullies.
Dr. Lowdermilk was surprised to find these rain-washed gullies even in arid climates such as Sinai.
In China, the Yellow River channel has for centuries been filling up with silt eroded from and
carried down from the highlands. The people kept building the dikes higher and higher, and when
Lowdermilk worked there in the 1920’s the river was 40-50 feet above the plain of the river delta!
Terracing was one practice some cultures employed to protect the precious soils on the slopes.
Some have been in use for thousands of years, and the soil is still in place. Interestingly, they found
strong evidence that the climate (or rainfall) in places like North Africa had not changed so drastically as
to inhibit the land’s ability to produce. In Tunisia, for example, ruins of olive presses were found by
“early travelers”, yet no olive trees were in sight. In the late 1800’s olive trees were planted again and
once more supported thriving industries. In another city they learned of a grove of olive trees that was
said to have been in existence since Roman times. Not surprisingly, the land the trees were growing on
had earthen banks formed for collecting extra rainwater running down from higher up the hill. In
Lebanon, home of the renowned “Cedars of Lebanon”, few trees were found during Dr. Lowdermilk’s
tour, except in a couple of fenced-in places which offered protection from overgrazing.
After offering some insights from Italy and France, Lowdermilk then describes the way the Dutch
had undertaken to farm the ocean floor. I couldn’t resist sharing the protocol Holland employed to find
worthy stewards of their valuable land. “Out of 30 applications for each farm, one applicant is selected
on the basis of character, the past record of his family, and his freedom from debt. The successful
applicant is put on probation for a period of 6 years. If he farms the land in accordance with the best
interests of the land and of the country, he will be permitted to continue for another period. If he fails
to do so, he must get off and give another farmer applicant a chance.”
After a brief look at how the war had forced England to till up sloping pasture lands to grow food
for their population because of the blockades, Dr. Lowdermilk then turns to his home country, ardently
beseeching his readers to grasp how important it is to grasp what he is saying. In essence, our
civilization is at the mercy of our agricultural practices. Many have failed before us, and we can choose
to learn from those mistakes or ignore them and reap what we sow.
Very little of the land in our nation carries a negligible risk for erosion. Many of our major rivers
run brown, not clear as they once did, and that is because of the soil they are carrying along. This
booklet describes an experiment done over 5 years at the Statesville, NC erosion experiment station.
Eight percent sloping land that had no cropping would lose its approximately 7 inches of topsoil in 18
years due to erosion. 29% of the rainfall was immediately lost in runoff. When the land was
continuously cropped in cotton, 10 % of rainfall was lost and 7 inches of soil would be gone in 44 years.
Crop rotations brought the erosion rate down to where it would take 109 years to erode 7 inches of soil
but still lost 9% of rainfall. All of these loss rates are much faster than the rate of soil formation. But
when the land was in grass, less than 1% of rainfall was lost and it would take 96,000 years to erode 7
inches of soil. In woodlands, if the undergrowth was burned annually 3.5% of rainfall ran off and it
would only take 1,800 years to erode the 7 inches of soil. In the absence of fire, the forest litter kept the
rainfall loss to less than 1/3 of 1 percent, and erosion of 7 inches of soil would take 500,000 years!
The suggested solutions for protecting sloping soils from erosion were twofold. First was
increasing the soil’s ability to take in and hold rainwater through crop litter on the surface, soil
improvement, crop rotations, and strip cropping on the contour. Second was to manage unabsorbed
rainfall in a system of channels and terraces that will limit erosion.
In the Statesville erosion experiment, the protective effect of grass and forest growth against
soil loss was impressive to say the least. It makes one feel good about being a grassfarmer! Yet this is
not to say that we don’t still have to keep our guard up. Another piece to the puzzle of dying
civilizations and desertification has to do with some of Allan Savory’s discoveries over the last half
century about where environments fall on the brittleness scale. Basically this results from the pattern of
rainfall as well as the amount, which dictates the process of decay for dead plant material at the soil
surface. In a nonbrittle environment it is sort of difficult to create and maintain bare ground if rest is
employed, because plant succession will happen naturally without stimulation. As the environment
trends toward the brittle end of the scale, fully resting the land will result in eventual desertification.
The degree of animal impact on the soils and plant life is crucial to maintaining soil cover. Savory’s
book, Holistic Management, is a great resource that covers these principles in depth. The take-home
message for this article is that in a brittle environment, graziers must be careful not to overgraze or
undergraze, because both can result in exposed soil surfaces susceptible to erosion.
Whether we are grassfarmers or cultivators of the land, we must pay attention to this finite and
somewhat fragile resource of soil. In effort to grow a few more bushels of corn or soybeans, neighbors
around us have plowed up grass watersheds and drainage areas, sprayed and killed and tilled everything
right up to the ditches, and converted sloping pastures to annual cultivated crops. I can’t fathom how
this seems like a responsible long-range plan. It makes me wonder, in what ways am I blinded to my
own short-sighted choices?
As Lowdermilk stood amidst the ruins of ancient Babylon, he thought about the words of the
mighty King Nebuchadnezzar: “That which no king before had done, I did…A wall like a mountain that
cannot be moved, I built…great canals I dug and lined them with burnt brick laid in bitumen and brought
abundant waters to all the people…I paved the streets of Babylon with stone from the
mountains…magnificent palaces and temples I have built…Huge cedars from Mount Lebanon I have cut
down…with radiant gold I overlaid them and with jewels I adorned them.” Which led him to then
consider the words of Hebrew prophets, warning that as a result of its wickedness Babylon would
become “A desolation, a dry land, and a wilderness, a land wherein no man dwelleth...”
It has been said that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Though
we may have made many mistakes in the past, nature—like her Creator—is very forgiving. Jesus told
the woman caught in the act of adultery he did not condemn her…but then said to “Go and sin no
more.” We can’t keep doing the same destructive things to our land that have always been done and
expect different results. That’s the definition of insanity. As farmers and ranchers, we have an
incredible opportunity to feed people and steward a portion of this beautiful Earth. I want to do my
part to make it healthier, more fertile, and more productive when my time is up than it was when I
started. How about you? Our nation and countrymen are counting on us, whether they (or we) know it
or not.