Page:Tree Crops; A Permanent Agriculture (1929).pdf/22

 blers of last vestiges. The hamlets are shriveled or gone: Only gullies remain—a wide and sickening expanse of gullies, more sickening to look upon than the ruins of fire.

Forest—field—plow—desert—that is the cycle of the hills under most plow agricultures—a cycle not limited to China. China has a deadly expanse of it, but so have Syria. Greece, Italy. Guatemala, and the United States. Indeed we Americans, though new upon our land, are destroying soil by field wash faster than any people that ever lived—ancient or modern, savage, civilized, or barbarian. We have the machines to help us to destroy as well as to create.

We also have other factors of destruction, new to the white race and very potent. We have tilled crops—corn, cotton, and tobacco. Europe did not have these crops. The European grains, wheat, barley, rye, and oats, cover all of the ground and hold the soil with their roots. When a man plows corn, cotton, or tobacco, he is loosening the earth and destroying such hold as the plant roots may have won in it. Plowing corn is the most efficient known way for destroying the farm that is not made of level land.

We in America have another factor of destruction that is almost new to the white race—the thunder storm. South Europe has a rainless summer. North Europe has a light rainfall that comes in gentle showers. The United States has the rippling torrent that follows the downpour of the thunder storm. When the American heavens open and pour two inches of rain in an hour into a hilly corn field, there may result as much erosion as results from two hundred inches of gentle British or German rain falling on the wheat and grass.

I asked county agents in a number of counties in the hill country of North Carolina the following question: "What is your estimate of number of cultivated crops secured on steep land after clearing and before abandonment of cultivation?" The answers from ten counties were as follows: "5; 20; 12; 10; 5 to 10; 10 or 12; 10 or more; 12; 5, extremely