Rebuilding valuable soil.

• Author: Brown, Lester R.
• Position: EYE ON ECOLOGY

THE 1930s Dust Bowl that threatened to turn America's Great Plains into a vast desert was a traumatic experience that led to revolutionary changes in the nation's agricultural practices, including the planting of tree shelterbelts (rows of trees planted beside fields) and strip-cropping (the planting of wheat on alternate strips with fallowed land each year). Strip-cropping permits soil moisture to accumulate on the fallowed strips, while the alternating planted strips reduce wind speed and, hence, erosion on the idled land.

In 1985, Congress, with strong support from the environmental community, created the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) to reduce soil erosion and control overproduction of basic commodities. By 1990, there were some 14,000,000 hectares (35,000,000 acres) of highly erodible land in permanent vegetative cover under 10-year contracts. Under this program, farmers were paid to plant fragile cropland to grass or trees. The retirement of 14,000,000 hectares under the CRP, together with the use of conservation practices on 37% of all cropland, reduced soil erosion from 3,100,000,000 tons to 1,900,000,000 during a 15-year stretch. This approach to controlling soil erosion offers a model for the rest of the world.

Terracing, a time-tested method for dealing with water erosion, is common in rice paddies throughout the mountainous regions of Asia. On less steeply sloping land, contour strip farming, as found in the American Midwest, works well. Another utensil in the soil conservation tool kit--and a relatively new one--is conservation tillage, which includes both no-till and minimum tillage. In addition to reducing erosion, this practice helps retain water, raises soil carbon content, and reduces the energy needed for crop cultivation. Instead of plowing land, discing or harrowing it to prepare the seedbed, and then using a mechanical cultivator to control weeds, farmers simply drill seeds directly through crop residues into undisturbed soil, controlling weeds with herbicides.

In the U.S., where farmers were required to implement a soil conservation plan on erodible cropland to be eligible for commodity price supports, the no-till area went from 7,000,000 hectares in 1990 to 25,000,000 in 2004. Now widely used in the production of corn and soybeans, no-till has spread throughout the Western Hemisphere, covering 24,000,000 hectares in 2004 in Brazil, 18,000,000 in Argentina, and 13,000,000 in Canada. Australia, with 9,000,000...