Conquest of the Land Through Seven Thousand Years



Following a severe Chinese famine in 1920-21, Walter Lowdermilk (1888-1974) was hired to study the situation, and provide famine prevention recommendations.  He worked there from 1923 to 1927.  Floods and famines had been hammering the Yellow River (Hwang Ho) basin for 4,000 years, sweeping away millions of lives.  The basin is covered with a deep blanket of yellowish, nutrient-rich loess soil, dumped there by winds during the Ice Age. 

Because loess is light, it could easily be tilled using primitive digging stick technology.  This is why an early civilization began in the Yellow River region.  Loess is also easily erodible.  The long history of floods is related to the enormous loads of silt that the river regularly flushed down from the uplands following the summer rains.  As the silt-loaded flow arrived in regions with minimal slope, it slowed down, dumped the silt, clogged the river channel, and spread out across the land.  So, farmers built dikes along the both sides to confine the river channel.  The dikes eventually fail, the land is flooded, the dikes are repaired… the cycle endlessly repeats.

Lowdermilk travelled to the source of the silt, the Loess Plateau, a region one and a half times the size of California.  Prior to the expansion of agriculture and population, ancient forests held the upland loess in place.  After the forests were eliminated, rain runoff increased, erosion increased, and the era of catastrophic floods was born.  The Yellow River has long had a nickname: China’s Sorrow.

Up in the plateau, Lowdermilk discovered a surreal nightmare world of enormous erosion gullies up to 600 feet (183 m) deep.  It was at this point that he realized his life’s calling, soil conservation.  His utopian fantasy was to develop permanent agriculture, so that humankind could be fed in a manner that was ecologically harmless, perfectly sustainable, forever.

In the western U.S., the Dust Bowl began late in 1933.  During a period of above average precipitation (most of 1900 to 1930), a swarm of farmers and ranchers had stripped the natural vegetation from much of the shortgrass prairie.  Then came years of drought, which zapped the wheat, leaving the soil exposed.  When the monster winds arrived, some farms lost half of their topsoil in several hours.  In 1934, the skies in Washington D.C. were dark at noon.  Lowdermilk was hired by the new Soil Erosion Service at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

In 1938 and 1939, he was sent to Western Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, to make observations, and report on his findings.  During his research, he drove more than 25,000 miles (40,000 km), until World War Two terminated the project.  He learned how to read landscapes — agricultural archaeology.  He saw many devastated wastelands, some reduced to bare bedrock, which had once been prosperous densely populated regions.  This wasn’t about climate change.  Common causes were deforestation, overgrazing, soil salinization, planting on sloped land, and failure to maintain irrigation canals and hillside terraces.

His findings echoed those of George Perkins Marsh — the granddaddy of environmental history — who had visited Old World disaster areas 80 years earlier.  While Marsh went into great detail in his 300 page Man and Nature, Lowdermilk boiled the core story down to a booklet, Conquest of the Land Through Seven Thousand Years, available free online [HERE].  More than a million copies have been printed.  Importantly, Lowdermilk took a camera with him.  His photos are shocking testimonials to the unintended consequences of domestication and civilization.  The booklet can be read in one sitting.

The text bounces from disaster to disaster, providing a brief description of each.  In Tunisia, he observed the site of Cuicul, a magnificent city in Roman times, which had been entirely buried, except for three feet (1 m) of one column poking out of the soil.  It took 20 years of digging to expose the remarkable ruins.  Today, the land can support only a few inhabitants.  Likewise, the Minoan city of Jerash, a village of 3,000 people, was once home to 250,000.  Lebanon was once covered with 2,000 square miles (5,180 km²) of ancient cedar forests, now reduced to four small groves.  In Syria, he observed a million acres (404,685 ha) of manmade desert, dotted with a hundred dead villages.

I don’t want to spoil the vivid excitement of your reading experience by summarizing most of the subjects.  Keep in mind that the stories he tells are the result of good old-fashioned muscle-powered organic farming, and organic grass-fed herding.  The harms were the result of human actions inspired by ignorance or tradition, not the fickle whims of nature.  Compared to modern industrial agriculture, the early farmers and herders were childlike amateurs at ecocide.  We have, unfortunately, become champions.

Lowdermilk provided recommendations for reducing soil loss, but not eliminating it.  He had a blind faith that the wizards of science would eventually discover ways to make agriculture genuinely sustainable.  Following World War Two, U.S. agricultural policies were somewhat progressive, for a while.  Efforts were made to preserve small family farms.  Farmers were paid to cease crop production on erosion-prone locations, and protect the vulnerable soil with grass.  The government gave additional land to my uncle in North Dakota to reward him for planting shelterbelts of trees to reduce wind erosion. 

Then came the Richard Nixon administration.  In 1973, food prices spiked.  So, Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz ordered farmers to get big or get out, plant from fencerow to fencerow, and let the magic of the marketplace select the winners.  Subsidies ended, and shelterbelts vanished.  Huge grain surpluses were harvested, prices tanked, and legions of farms went belly up.

Almost all university grads (and professors) know absolutely nothing about George Perkins Marsh or Walter Lowdermilk.  Those two lads revealed that civilization has never been sustainable, and they deliberately gave their readers a loud dope slap — dudes, it’s still unsustainable.  Wake up!  When Marsh published in 1864, Earth was home to 1.4 billion.  When Lowdermilk released his first version in 1948, there were 2.4 billion.  Yesterday, it was 7.6 billion and still growing.  Oh-oh!  The two lads shared great wisdom with us, which we disregarded.  It’s hard to get concerned about threats that are not immediate, and readily visible.

In the twentieth century, the scale of global agriculture grew explosively.  All life requires nitrogen, but only in a special form that is produced by nitrogen-fixing bacteria.  Plants cannot utilize the nitrogen in the air.  In 1911, Germans began the commercial production of synthetic ammonia, which contained nitrogen in the plant-friendly form, bypassing the ancient dependence on soil bacteria, and ending agriculture’s addiction to livestock manure.  Potent synthetic fertilizer is primarily made from natural gas, a fossil fuel.

Synthetic fertilizer greatly increased the volume of nitrogen available for plant growth, sidestepping nature’s limits.  This accelerated food production, and shattered the glass ceiling on population size.  Nitrogen expert Vaclav Smil speculated that 40 percent of the people alive in 2000 would not exist without synthetic ammonia fertilizer.*  I wonder what percentage of humankind might survive in the post-petroleum world.  In his essay, The Oil We Eat, Richard Manning wrote, “Every single calorie we eat is backed by at least a calorie of oil, more like ten.”

Later, the crop-breeding projects of the Green Revolution more than doubled farm productivity between 1950 and 2000.  Consequently, population soared from 2.4 billion in 1950 to 6 billion in 2000.  The Green Revolution was all about full scale industrial agriculture — irrigation, large farms, powerful machinery, monoculture cropping, proprietary seeds, synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides.  To sum up the food story today, Paul Ehrlich wrote a five page summary [HERE].

Anyway, Lowdermilk gave me a sucker punch.  When he was in Palestine in the late 1930s, he observed a brutally abused ecosystem.  Much of the highlands had been stripped of soil, which had washed into the valleys, which continued to erode.  This was the land that, 3,000 years earlier, Moses had described as “a land flowing with milk and honey.”  Moses could have never imagined what his descendants would eventually do to the vibrant vitality of the Promised Land — by faithfully following the divine instructions to be fruitful, multiply, and subdue the Earth.  Oy!  Lowdermilk suggested an eleventh commandment, along the lines of live sustainably or go extinct.

This inspired me to contemplate the condition of our planet 3,000 years from now.  My imagination sputtered, gasped, and suffered a total meltdown.  Having read hundreds of books on environmental history, and observed 65 years of modern trends, my ability to engage in soaring flights of magical thinking is dead and gone.  I’ll be happy if I can help a hundred people break the trance before I cross to the other side.

Lowdermilk, Walter Clay, Conquest of the Land Through Seven Thousand Years, 1948, Reprint, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Washington D.C., 1999.

*In 2001, when there were six billion humans, Smil wrote about the Haber-Bosch process for making synthetic ammonia.  “Without this synthesis about two-fifths of the world’s population would not be around — and the dependence will only increase as the global count moves from 6 to 9 or 10 billion people.”  Enriching the Earth, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2001, page xv.

Douglas Helms wrote Walter Lowdermilk’s Journey, an interesting five page paper describing the highlights of Lowdermilk’s professional life.

Topsoil and Civilization

Outside the entrance of the glorious Hall of Western History are the marble lions, colorful banners, and huge stone columns.  Step inside, and the popular exhibits include ancient Egypt, classical Greece, the Roman Empire, the Renaissance, Gutenberg, Magellan, Columbus, Galileo, and so on.  If we cut a hole in the fence, and sneak around to the rear of the building, we find the dumpsters, derelicts, mangy dogs, and environmental history.

The Darwin of environmental history was George Perkins Marsh, who published Man and Nature in 1864 (free download).  Few educated people today have ever heard of this visionary.  Inspired by Marsh, Walter Lowdermilk, of the Soil Conservation Service, grabbed his camera and visited the sites of old civilizations in 1938 and 1939.  He created a provocative 44-page report, Conquest of the Land Through Seven Thousand Years (free download).  The government distributed over a million copies of it.

Lowdermilk helped inspire Tom Dale of the Soil Conservation Service, and Vernon Gill Carter of the National Wildlife Federation, to write Topsoil and Civilization, published in 1955 (free download).  Both organizations cooperated in the production of this book.  Following the horror show of the Dust Bowl, they were on a mission from God to promote soil conservation.

Dust Bowl photo gallery:  Washington D.C. dust storm 1935.  Approaching dust storm.  Dust Bowl farm yard.  The aftermath.

The book’s introduction gets directly to the point, “The very achievements of civilized man have been the most important factors in the downfall of civilizations.”  Civilized man had the tools and intelligence needed “to domesticate or destroy a great part of the plant and animal life around him.”  He excelled at exploiting nature.  “His chief troubles came from his delusions that his temporary mastership was permanent.  He thought of himself as ‘master of the world,’ while failing to understand fully the laws of nature.”

Readers are taken on a thrilling tour of the civilizations of antiquity.  We learn how they developed new and innovative strategies for self-destruction.  Stops include Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Mediterranean basin, Greece, China, India, and others.  No society collapses because of a single reason, but declining soil health is always prominent among the usual suspects — no food, no civ.

The civilization of Egypt was the oddball.  It thrived longest because of the unique characteristics of the Nile Valley.  Then, in the twentieth century, they strangled the golden goose by building dams, which ended the annual applications of fertile silt, led to soil destruction, and shifted the system into self-destruct mode.

Mesopotamia (Iraq) was home to a series of civilizations that depended on irrigation.  Creating and maintaining irrigation canals required an immense amount of manual labor, which legions of slaves were unhappy to provide.  At the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, deforestation and overgrazing led to growing soil erosion, which flowed downstream, regularly clogging the canals.  Eroded soils have filled in 130 miles (209 km) of the Persian Gulf.  Today, the population in this region is only a quarter of what it was 4,000 years ago.

Over the centuries, the region of Mesopotamia was conquered and lost many, many times.  For the most part, replenishing soil fertility with manure and other fertilizers was a fairly recent invention.  In the old days, an effective solution to soil depletion was to expand into less spoiled lands, and kill anyone who objected.  Throughout the book, the number of wars is stunning.  The tradition of farming is a bloody one.  It always damages the soil, sooner or later, which makes long-term stability impossible, and guarantees conflict.

Rome, Greece, and other Mediterranean civilizations were all burnouts, trashed by a combination of heavy winter rains, sloping lands, overgrazing, deforestation, soil depletion, and malaria.  The legendary cedars of Lebanon once covered more than a million acres (404,000 ha).  Today, just four tiny groves survive.  “Deforestation and the scavenger goats brought on most of the erosion which turned Lebanon into a well-rained-on desert.”  Much of once-lush Palestine, “land of milk and honey,” has been reduced to a rocky desert.

Adria was an island in the Adriatic Sea, near the mouth of the Po River in Italy.  Eroding soils from upstream eventually connected the island to the mainland.  Today, Adria is a farm town, 15 miles (24 km) from the sea, and its ancient streets are buried under 15 feet (4.5 m) of eroded soil.  In Syria, the palaces of Antioch were buried under 28 feet (8.5 m) of silt.  In North Africa, the ruins of Utica were 30 feet (9 m) below.

Even now, in the twenty-first century, there are dreamers who purport that China provides a glowing example of sustainable agriculture — 4,000 years of farmers living in perfect harmony with the land.  Chapter 11 provides a silver bullet cure for these fantastic illusions.  “Erosion continues to ruin much of the land, reducing China, as a whole, to the status of a poor country with poor and undernourished people, mainly because the land has been misused for so long.”

The authors aim floodlights on the fundamental defects of civilization, and then heroically reveal the brilliant solution, soil conservation.  Their kinky fantasy was permanent agriculture, which could feed a gradually growing crowd for the next 10,000 years — a billion well-fed Americans enjoying a continuously improving standard of living.  Their vision went far beyond conservation, which merely slowed the destruction.  Their vision was about harmless perpetual growth, fully developing all resources, bringing prosperity to one and all, forever.  Oy!

At the same time, they were excruciatingly aware that humankind was ravaging the land.  “The fact is that there has probably been more man-induced erosion over the world as a whole during the past century than during any preceding thousand-year period.  There are many reasons for the recent rapid acceleration of erosion, but the principal reasons are that the world has more people and the people are more civilized and hence are capable of destroying the land faster.”  The book is more than a little bit bipolar.

For readers who enjoy the delights of mind-altering experiences, I recommend reading Topsoil and Civilization, a discourse on soil mining.  Also read its shadow, a discourse on forest mining, A Forest Journey, by John Perlin.  Your belief system will go into convulsions, and then a beautiful healing process begins.

You will suddenly understand that the stuff you were taught about the wonders of civilization was an incredibly delusional fairy tale.  The real story is one of thousands of years of accelerating population growth, ruthless greed, countless wars, enormous suffering, and catastrophic ecocide.  Suddenly, the pain of baffling contradictions is cured, the world snaps into sharp focus, and the pain of being fully present in reality begins — useful pain that can inspire learning and change.  Live well.

Soil erosion photo gallery: Gulley erosion.  Alabama cotton field.  Iowa sheepwreck.  Iowa sheet erosion.      

Carter, Vernon Gill and Dale, Tom, Topsoil and Civilization, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1974.  [First ed. 1955]

Other reviews of books on soil and agriculture: Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, Against the Grain, Farmers of Forty Centuries, and Pillar of Sand.

New Roots for Agriculture

Wes Jackson was born in Kansas farm country, in a place where his grandfather homesteaded.  The land of his birth was being destroyed by agriculture, and this drove him crazy.  Wes and his wife Dana created The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas.  Their mission was to create sustainable agriculture, a noble 100-year project that he describes in New Roots for Agriculture.  This book is a great primer on farming — short, smart, and easy to read.

Our education system excels at graduating scholars who are blissfully ignorant about the food they eat.  Opponents of our truly horrid system for the mass production of meat, milk, and eggs often fail to recognize that our system for producing tofu, bean sprouts, and spinach is seriously defective as well.  Almost everything we eat has ecological costs far in excess of the price we are charged, and blissful ignorance keeps us marching down the wrong path.

Jackson has profound admiration for the Amish and Mennonites — America’s finest farmers — because they are religious about farming with exceptional care.  But their soil is not safe from normal hard rains, it washes away, too.  It’s heartbreaking.  No matter how hard you try, it fails.  It’s impossible to win when your primary tool is a plow (and no-till has its own serious drawbacks).

Jackson doesn’t restrict his scorn to modern stuff — agribusiness, pesticides, GM crops, the Green Revolution.  He condemns agriculture in its entirety.  It was a disaster 10,000 years ago, and it’s far, far worse today.  He has referred to it as an “accident,” but one that can be repaired.  We would be in far better shape today if we had continued dining on healthy wild foods, instead of shifting to growing crops on tilled fields.  He sees till agriculture as “a global disease” that is especially severe in the US, and “unless this disease is checked, the human race will wilt like any crop.”

Agriculture is a huge monster with a thousand heads, but it’s most terrible offense may be soil destruction, because it is largely irreparable.  Terrestrial life requires soil, and agriculture is tirelessly sending our finest soils to the bottom of the ocean.  It’s bad, and every farmer knows this.  Unfortunately, the system is designed to reward productivity, not ecosystem health.  Soil worshippers quickly go bankrupt.  Jackson is telling us nothing new, but he is shining a bright light on things that everyone should be thinking about at every mealtime.

There are a few exceptions to the rule.  In Japan and portions of northern Europe, agriculture has been relatively benign, because of unusual combinations of soil types, topography, and climate patterns — not superior farming techniques.  But almost everywhere else, it is a destructive process.  Note that neither of the two exceptions comes close to feeding their own populations.

Looking out his office window, Jackson can observe both heaven and hell — prairie and wheat field.  The prairie is beautifully adapted to the ecosystem, and suffers no erosion problems.  It actually builds healthy new soil.  The wheat field produces more calories per acre, but it is a soil mining operation, an extractive enterprise with no long term future.  Jackson’s core principle is that “no interest or value should be put above the health of the land.”  Let’s make that our planetary motto.

He believes that truly sustainable agriculture is possible.  Annual plants, like corn, wheat, and soy, need to be started from seed each year, which requires annual tilling, and results in significant soil erosion.  Perennial plants survive for a number of years.  Jackson recommends that we switch to perennials for grain production, because this would more closely resemble a prairie, and cause less erosion. 

In his plan, fields would contain a blend of different species of seed-bearing plants, not a monoculture of genetically identical plants.  The system would improve soil quality, maintain its own fertility, conserve water, have few problems with pests and diseases, require lower energy inputs, be more drought tolerant, and produce as much grain as conventional agriculture.  Because yields are highest in the first year, and then taper off, the prairie would have to be plowed and replanted periodically.  He estimates a five to ten year replant cycle.

It’s a radical idea that is much easier said than done.  To enable mechanical harvesting, the mix of species would have to ripen at the same time.  The mix would have to be fine-tuned for every microclimate and soil scenario.  The Land Institute is decades away from having a finished product, and there are no guarantees that it will ever reliably work as intended.  The Soviets had a similar idea back in the 1920’s.  They did decades of research, and then abandoned the project.  They claimed tremendous successes, but refused to show them to outsiders.

Jackson has some concerns about his vision.  The accident of agriculture began when we believed that we could cleverly control and manipulate nature.  And now, he’s attempting to correct the problem by using the same approach — controlling and manipulating nature.  That bothers him.  Sustainable agriculture must live in peace with the ecosystem, not replace the natural ecosystem with a chemical-soaked, soil-mining food factory.

This book was written over 30 years ago, when gas was 30 cents a gallon, and people thinking about Peak Oil numbered in the dozens.  In that era of innocence, you could still dream about plowing up the whole farm every five to ten years, and harvesting prairie-like grain fields with gas guzzling farm equipment.  Because Jackson’s plan requires the use of industrial machinery, it isn’t genuinely sustainable.  It can’t be harmlessly performed for the next 2,000 years, because it is dependent upon the existence of industrial civilization.

If you’re going to dream huge, magnificent, revolutionary dreams for a 100 year project, why not throw in radical population reduction, too?  An unsustainable population is, of course, completely unsustainable.  A much smaller herd would cause much less harm, and nothing is impossible when you’re dreaming. 

And why not dream of a cuisine where grains are not the foundation of the diet?  In another book, Jackson wrote that grains are core to the human evolutionary heritage.  Are they?  Many cultures throughout human history have done just fine with no grain foods at all.  Indeed, cultures that major in domesticated grains have a strong tendency to be over-crowded, belligerent, and suicidal.  Please help yourself to the nuts, berries, and grasshoppers. 

As I was reading, I kept thinking about Richard Manning’s vision of returning corn country to tall grass prairie, ripping out the fences, moving in the buffalos, elk, and wolves, and turning our bakeries into steak houses.  God was in fine form when she created prairie ecosystems, they were an absolutely brilliant design.  Ripping these perfect ecosystems to pieces with moldboard plows, planting grain fields, and exterminating the thriving community of wildness was the opposite of intelligent.

In his 1987 book, Altars of Unhewn Stone, Jackson described a 6,400 acre prairie ranch in the Flint Hills of Kansas that had never been plowed.  It supported 1,700 cattle during the grazing season, and it was mostly managed by a single cowboy.  Fertilizer was never used.  The use of fossil fuel was tiny.  Overgrazing was carefully avoided, and soil erosion was at normal levels for a healthy prairie.  If we replaced the cattle with buffalo, and gave them free range, would this be better for the land than perennial grains?  Could buffalo hunting be harmlessly performed for the next 2,000 years?

Jackson, Wes, New Roots for Agriculture, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1985. 

Tree Crops

Joseph Russell Smith (1874-1966) was a geography professor who grew up in the chestnut forests of Virginia.  His book Tree Crops was originally published in 1929.  Smith wrote it because he was horrified by the soil destruction caused by regularly tilling cropland — and hillside tilling drove him completely out of his mind, because it permanently destroyed good land at a much faster rate.  Everyone knew this, but they kept doing it anyway, because they were cursed with a short-term mindset.

Tilling was a common practice in those days (and it’s still popular today).  Farmers tilled because their daddies tilled, and their grandpas tilled, and their great-grandpas tilled in the old country.  It was a powerful dirty habit that was nearly impossible to quit, until the land died — and it provided no long-term benefits!  With great exasperation, Smith exclaimed: “Corn, the killer of continents, is one of the worst enemies of the human future!”

Old World crops like wheat, barley, rye, and oats provided a dense ground cover that slowed the rate of soil erosion a bit.  New World crops like corn, potatoes, cotton, and tobacco were row crops that left the tilled soil exposed, and more vulnerable to erosion.  In America, thunderstorms were common, producing downpours that were rare in Europe.  Heavy rains filled the streams with lost topsoil.  In the Cotton Belt, Smith saw erosion gullies that were 150 feet deep.  Oklahoma was ruined with stunning speed.  We were destroying land that could have fed millions.  An Old World saying sums it up: “After the man the desert.”  In the legends of our ancient wild ancestors, the First Commandment is: “Thou shalt not till.”

Joseph was a brilliant visionary, and one day he received an illuminating revelation.  If you wanted to stop the destruction of soils caused by tilling, quit tilling!  Live in a different way!  Create a cuisine that majors in nutritious soil-friendly foods.  Smith envisioned two-story farms: tree crops on the sloped land, and pastures for livestock below, both perennial.  Farmers could abandon tilling forever, and pass the land on to future generations in a healthier condition.  Imagine that.

Farmers scratched their heads when they heard this idea, and were more than a little perplexed and befuddled.  Agroforestry wasn’t a mainstream tradition in European American agriculture.  The required knowledgebase didn’t exist, so Smith researched it and wrote it down.  His book is mostly a scrapbook of correspondence.  Smith sent letters to hundreds of experts on tree crops, and then assembled their responses into a book.  He created an amazing collection of information, including recommendations for agroforestry in other climates and continents.

Hogs won’t touch corn if there are acorns to eat, and oaks can produce more calories per acre than grain, when done right.  A top quality pecan tree can drop nearly a ton of nuts per year.  Hickory nuts can be smashed and boiled to produce hickory oil.  Pistachios fetch a high price and have a long shelf life.  Many types of pines produce nuts.  The honey locust is a drought hearty US native that will grow where corn or cotton grows, and animals love the beans.  The sugar maple produces sugar.  Persimmons are enjoyed by man and beast.  Pigs and chickens love mulberries.  And don’t forget walnuts, beechnuts, almonds, cherry pits, soapnuts, holly, ginko, pawpaw, horse chestnut, osage orange, privet, wattle, wild plums, and choke cherries.  The list goes on and on.

Trees can produce high quality foods, and they can be grown on slopes too steep to plow.  Once the trees are established, little labor is needed until harvest time.  Tree crops can be much more productive than mere pastures or forests.  They typically suffer less from dry spells than field crops.  Over time, they can actually build new topsoil.  Like any crop, trees are vulnerable to pests, diseases, fire, and extreme weather.  Like any crop, tree crops are not 100 percent dependable, year after year, so monocultures are not a wise choice.  The Second Commandment is: “Thou shalt encourage diversity.”

Smith witnessed the blight epidemic that wiped out virtually all of the American chestnuts, rapidly killing millions of trees.  He personally lost 25 acres of chestnuts.  The blight fungus came to America on chestnut trees imported from Asia.  Knowing this, it’s shocking that Smith advocated travelling the world in search of better varieties of trees, to bring home and experiment with.  Hey, Japanese walnuts!  And the USDA helped him!  The Third Commandment is: “Thou shalt leave Japanese organisms in Japan.”

Smith was a tree-loving zealot who was on a mission from God, and he promoted his great ideas with great enthusiasm.  But the world did not leap to attention, change its ways, and promptly end soil erosion as we know it.  Farmers are almost as conservative as popes, and they are not fans of radical change — especially ideas that tie up land for decades before producing the first penny.  Joseph was heartbroken: “The longer I live, the more amazed I become at the lack of constructive imagination, the lack of sheer curiosity, the desire to know.”  It’s not easy being a brilliant visionary.

Smith's grand vision was reasonable, rational, and ecologically far superior to growing organic crops on tilled fields.  Tree crops remain an important subject for the dreams of those who do not robotically march in lockstep with the status quo hordes.  Planting America’s hills with tree crops would be an immense task, creating many jobs, and providing benefits for generations.  Why don’t we do it?  The Fourth Commandment is “Thou shalt live in a manner that is beneficial to the generations yet-to-be-born.”

Smith, Joseph Russell, Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture, Island Press, Covelo, California, 1987.  Originally published in 1929.  Free download of the scanned book is [HERE].