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In many parts of the country, such as the Northeast, there was never much erosion, and most of this has been checked. The cotton-growing South, notorious for its stripped and deserted farms, has had a real agricultural rebirth. There are still obstinate farmers who cling to land-wrecking practices (and will surely pay for it), but the face of the South has changed. If Jeeter Lester were to shamble back to Tobacco Road, he'd never know the place.
The doctrine of soil conservation has taken deep root in the South. Farmers plant less land to cotton, more to grass and legumes. They terrace their steeper fields skillfully, plow on the contour instead of up & down hill. On thousands of once sterile slopes, the miraculous vine, kudzu, clambers like Jack's beanstalk. It chokes devouring gullies with entangled soil. It buries fences, leaps into trees. Its big leaves, which stay green until Christmas, are as nourishing to cattle as excellent alfalfa. When plowed under, kudzu enriches the soil.
In progressive North Carolina, farmers are delighted with their new agriculture. Once abandoned farms have been turned into terraced grain fields. Said Farmer L. O. Page, who goes in for strip cropping: ''Every time it rained, I used to lie awake nights wondering what part of the farm would be washed away in the morning. These nights I sleep like a kitten. I know those meadow strips will catch and hold the water."
Plenty of Planet. About soil conservation in the rest of the world, U.S. soil men have little conclusive information. They know that many once fertile regions are in terrible shape, but they also know that a constant stream of admiring foreign visitors, from Latin America, India, China, the Near East, has come to learn U.S. methods. Last week even Soviet Russia paid the U.S. an unadmitted compliment. Crying loudly (in five pages of Pravda and five of Izvestia) that heedless and greedy capitalism cannot protect its soil, the Russians announced a conservation program (hardly started yet) that is almost an exact copy of what U.S. conservation has already achieved.
How quickly the practice of conservation will spread throughout the world, U.S. soil men cannot say. But they do say that the obstacles are economic and social, not technical. Science can stop most kinds of soil deterioration and will surely lick the rest. For the Neo-Malthusian scare-dogma that the world's soil must inevitably lose its productiveness, the soil men have a one-word answer: bunkum.
Bunkum, too, say the soil men, is the notion that the world has little new soil to cultivate. There is plenty of new soil. Some can be worked by old familiar methods; some will require the methods recently developed. Enormous areas, especially in the tropics, will almost certainly yield, sooner or later, to scientific agriculture.
What the World Can Do. The chernozems and other temperate grassland soils are mostly in use already; all they ever needed was simple plowing & planting. But there are still large areas of unused forest soils (podsols) which can be made productive by up-to-date methods as soon as transportation makes them accessible and a market appears for their produce.