Brown and Van Sant: "Appreciating Poor Soils"
Can agricultural historians help develop a holistic vision of sustainable land use planning, based on the history of the intended New Deal? Tad Brown and Levi Van Sant suggest that an ambitious but thwarted New Deal soils programs might offer some hope for more effective government land planning in the present, given sufficient public resolve.
Tad Brown, University of Cambridge; Levi Van Sant, George Mason University.
We welcome essays that apply the stories and methodologies of our allied fields to the issues that currently affect our daily lives. If you are interested in contributing, please contact Adrienne Petty at ampetty@wm.edu or Drew Swanson at dswanson@georgiasouthern.edu. This post should be cited as: Tad Brown and Levi Van Sant, “Appreciating Poor Soils,” The Short Rows, 17 January 2023. https://www.aghistorysociety.org/ahs-blog/brown-and-van-sant-appreciating-poor-soils
Revetment in New Mexico, photo taken by Russell Lee via Farm Security Administration
open access, Wikimedia Commons license
“After generations of unconcern, this country seems now to be aware that soil erosion is a direct or contributing cause of land decline,” wrote two employees of the Soil Conservation Services in 1938.[1] The decline observed was physical in nature. Historians have detailed how soil loss led to the infamous Dust Bowl of the southern plains and the famous gullies in southern states.[2] Soil conservation in the 1930s attracted nationwide commentary and surveys at home and abroad, with federal support from the New Deal. Farmers were told to retire crop acreage in exchange for compensation. The United States wanted, needed, to value the properties of its soils.
We propose that soil conservation in the New Deal holds important lessons for the present. There are significant differences, of course, between the early 20th and 21st centuries, but the similarities between these historical moments are striking: skyrocketing economic inequality; crises of faith in political institutions; and fears of environmental collapse. Here we focus on how soil came to be understood during the New Deal, as well as how this knowledge was applied by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), to argue that an updated approach to the federal soil survey is needed to address our current anthropogenic climate crisis.
What occurred in the New Deal was that agrarian intellectuals subsumed soil within the greater category of “land.” Through this framing, soils were understood mainly as the physical product of geological parent material, rather than (as today we understand it to be) compositions of air, water, minerals, organic matter, and living organisms. To be clear, the New Deal conception of soil as so-many classifiable types derived from the underlying landmass was helpful for addressing the catastrophe of erosion. Soil conservation took the shape of terraces, strips, and contours. Absent steps like these, officials warned, land degradation would continue its downward course. Stopping it was the immediate priority. But today, given the need for democratic programs to sequester carbon and deal with the myriad changes due to climate instability, an abiotic treatment of soil deserves critical scrutiny.[3]
Directors of U.S. farm policy in 1938, from left: M. L. Wilson, Undersecretary of Agriculture; Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace; and Howard R. Tolley, Administrator of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration
Photo by Harris & Ewing, Library of Congress Catalog: 1938. Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67462381
In the 1930s, New Deal officers wrote plenty of books, circulars, essays, and briefs attesting to a shared belief that the study of history puts things in perspective. There are also developments from that historical period, however, that have persisted through “generations of unconcern” about soil, well beyond the 1930s. The conceptualization of soil itself is one such aspect, as well as the infrastructure put in place to ensure its conservation. The New Deal programs integrated environmental awareness and political economic response. Yet as Jess Gilbert argues, the agrarian New Deal never became the long-term federal land use planning that was intended.[4] One of the agrarian intellectuals featured in Gilbert’s history is Milburn Lincoln Wilson – president of the Agricultural History Society in 1938. It was Wilson who suggested that the Extension Service carry out the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, sending federal employees into farmers’ fields to investigate the number of acres in crop production. Wilson and his peers “all believed that poor land caused poor people.”[5] This refrain has become a platitude of sorts, repeated as self-evident at the time and ever since. If poor soils impoverished rural people, what made soils “poor”? What processes created these so-called “poor soils”?
Important details get lost in the acronym-heavy history of the New Deal. Including this: The Farm Security Administration dropped the land use and land purchase program of the Resettlement Administration when subsuming it in 1937. A year later, the USDA underwent a huge reorganization and split the programs between agencies. So, while the intended New Deal was meant to consolidate existing programs through federal land-use planning, this did not happen. Perhaps the most interesting detail about this history is that the Resettlement Administration had acquired land-use consultants from the National Resources Board (NRB). The NRB was created by executive order in 1934 with a primary purpose of advising the President on long-term planning.[6] It was these NRB consultants who became the specialists in charge of cooperative land-use planning.
The consultants’ perspectives had been published in the 1934 Report of the Land Planning Committee, “the first attempt in our national history to make an inventory” of the country’s natural resources.’[7] What happened next was production of a mountain of land classification maps by the Soil Conservation Service. As soil surveys existed for only half of the country, and adequate topographic maps for just half of that, the Report stressed the importance of a fuller inventory. Reading through the Report reveals how the land-use planners collapsed soil within the category of “Land”, whereas “Water” and “Minerals” received their own sections. Land classification was also ranked according to agricultural productivity, with “acreage of land in the United States falling within each of five grades of productivity.”[8] The Bureau of Chemistry and Soils prepared the rubric of graded criteria based on rainfall, topography, temperature, and soil type. The results of the graded rubric came with a caveat that without a complete soil survey, the data was “of the most tentative character” and “necessarily inaccurate.”[9] Nonetheless, the limited indices had real-world effects. Land consultants on the Report advised the retirement of poor lands (grades 4 or worse), as well as “blocking up delinquent tax areas” to prevent future cultivation.[10] The concept of poor soil was itself an impoverished take on the status of agricultural lands: Poor soil was naturalized as that which did not turn a profit.
Map, ‘Distribution of the Great Soil Groups’
Marbut, Curtis Fletcher. "ATLAS OF AMERICAN AGRICULTURE: PART III SOILS OF THE UNITED STATES." (1935). USDA
Treating the soil as land made technical sense in the New Deal context. Yet the NRB planners also had a long-term perspective that differed from the then-current state of emergency. Their thinking on the matter was to anticipate the future and ready the nation for changes ahead. Since land-use planning required a base map for the entire United States, federal funding would be needed for the US Geological Survey to complete the task. The initial proposal was for a ten-year completion. These survey maps were compiled from aerial photographs, occurring at a scale detached from landholding, where farmers made actual decisions.[11] This point was not lost on the authors of the Report. “The Board feels that the making of ownership maps or mosaics, showing individual farms and other tracts of land with their acreage and the names of the owners, would not be a part of the primary mapping program” but should be considered at a later date.[12]
Nowadays, ecologists and economists—and the field of Ecological Economics—are interested in longitudinal data on soil health and how to finance soil carbon sequestration programs. We believe that historians might contribute to these efforts by asking what historical soil samples already exist. Can any connections be made between current programs and the field tests or laboratory results from last century? Baselines would surely help with evaluating changes over time. Where might historical soil data be uncovered? Perhaps the local libraries, agricultural society letters, or private farm logs have parcel-level reports that can be compared against recent findings? Then again, maybe not. Even a failure to locate archival sources that contain on-farm soil reports would be instructional as a caution to policymakers about the need preserve records moving forward.
The New Deal architects were attuned to the public interest of private land use. First thing first, stop out-of-control erosion. The plan, after that, was intended to proceed with longer-term thinking. But the National Resources Board was discontinued in 1943. What happened next is beyond the scope of this blogpost but is still of great concern. Soil scientists now know that soil can also be appreciated, literally, through human action, which is a concept that agrarian intellectuals of the 1930s had yet to fully comprehend. Soil organic matter can be accrued in crop fields and pastures by working with nature.[13] If farmers were compensated for helping stop soil erosion during the Great Depression, does it not make sense that farmers could, just as readily, be compensated for accumulating soil organic matter? How would such changes be measured? What type of social organization would they require?
The New Deal history offers unrealized plans for a paradigmatic shift—from coping with soil loss to promoting soil growth. For instance, the USDA could extend what the Board forecast, in 1934, as a future program, and create a soil map based on actual soil samples from sea to shining sea, rather than derive assumptions from geological parent material.[14] After all, if the best time to capture a comprehensive soil baseline was a hundred years ago, the next best time is now.
Notes
This research was funded in whole, or in part, by the Wellcome Trust [Grant no. 217968/Z/19/Z].
[1] Hugh H. Bennett and W.C. Lowdermilk, “General Aspects of the Soil-Erosion Problem,” USDA Yearbook of 1938, pp. 581- 608, quote on 608.
[2] Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Paul S. Sutter, Let Us Now Praise Famous Gullies: Providence Canyon and the Soils of the South (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2018).
[3] Ritwick Gosh, “Undoing the Bad Legacies of the New Deal: The Case of Agriculture,” Public Administration Review, July 16,2019, located at https://www.publicadministrationreview.com/2019/07/16/gnd18/.
[4] Jess Gilbert, Planning Democracy: Agrarian Intellectuals and the Intended New Deal (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), p. 21.
[5] Gilbert, Planning Democracy, p. 88.
[6] Charles E. Merriam, “The National Resources Planning Board; A Chapter in American Planning Experience,” The American Political Science Review 38, 6 (December 1944): pp. 1075-1088.
[7] National Resources Board, A Report on National Planning and Public Works in Relation to Natural Resources and Including Land Use and Water Resources with Findings and Recommendations (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1934), iii. Hereafter cited as NRB.
[8] NRB, 126.
[9] NRB, 127.
[10] NRB, 3.
[11] On this point, see Michael R. Coughlan, Donald R. Nelson, Michael Lonneman, and Ashley E. Block, “Historical Land Use Dynamics in the Highly Degraded Landscape of the Calhoun Critical Zone Observatory,” Land 6, 32 (2017), doi:10.3390/land6020032.
[12] NRB, 453.
[13] Carl F. Jordan, Evolution from a Thermodynamic Perspective: Implications for Species Conservation and Agricultural Sustainability (New York: Springer, 2022).
[14] Historically, cooperative soil surveys in the United States have supported a class-based agenda of improvement with clear racialized effects. See Levi Van Sant, “‘The Long-Time Requirements of the Nation’: The US Cooperative Soil Survey and the Political Ecologies of Improvement,” Antipode 53, 3 (2021): pp. 686-704.