With a booming voice and physical presence, Hugh Hammond Bennett was a memorable figure in the soil conservation movement. “Big Hugh” wasn’t a part of the Washington establishment. He was a farmer with calloused hands and sunbaked skin who spoke the right language for communicating with farmers.
His crusading helped give rise to the Soil Conservation Service, which became the Natural Resource Conservation Service we know today. The NRCS is celebrating its 90-year anniversary, although budget slashing and employee buyouts in Washington are putting a slight damper on the party.
Source: NRCS
The federal agency shared a documentary recently as part of the celebration that describes the bureaucratic inertia and denials that helped enable the Dust Bowl, one of the worst ecological disasters in U.S. history. To understand where we came from, let’s look at what Bennett saw.
As the documentary explains, generous farm policies and a series of wet years created a land boom on the Great Plains. New machinery meant easier and faster farming. Soils that were covered in grass for thousands of years were exposed to the elements for the first time. Between late 1800s and 1930, an estimated 100 million acres of land was plowed.
Hammond’s family farmed cotton in Anson County, N.C., and one day when they were working hard putting in terraces, Bennett asked his father why they were doing it. “Boy, it’s to keep the land from washing away!” he said.
After college, Bennett went to the NRCS and spent time digging in soil and classifying soil types. He was sent to Louisa County, Va., where crop yields were falling and nobody had answers.
Bennett came across a field that had both cropland and forest and he noticed the forest soil was teeming with life, while the cropland was dry and friable. “He realized at that moment that how we treat the soil will determine our long-term productivity. He was into sustainability before we knew what it was,” said David White, who served as NRCS Chief from 2009-12.
In 1928, Bennett — at the time a soil scientist for the government — and W.R. Chapline, a grazing inspector, published a Department of Agriculture circular, “Soil Erosion: A National Menace.” It was his hope the writing would stir up action, but it was slow in coming.
The stock market crashed in 1929, wheat prices plummeted and farmers plowed up more land in hopes of recouping their losses, the documentary recalls. More than 150,000 families left the Great Plains between 1930 and 1935, leaving mostly abandoned fields with bare soil. Then drought came in 1930, kicking off the Dust Bowl era that put a nail in the coffin.
In 1933, the U.S. Department of Interior set up the Soil Erosion Service, which eventually became the Soil Conservation Service, and Bennett was asked by President Roosevelt to lead it. Everything Bennett predicted in 1905 had come true.
“Unless immediate steps are taken to retore grass for millions of acres of sun-scarred, wind eroded land, we could have on our hands a new man-made Sahara, where formerly there was rich, grazed lands,” Bennett said in one address.
Infamously, on March 22, 1935, when lawmakers were debating the creation of the Soil Conservation Service, a dust storm 10,000 feet high and traveling 35 mph, reached Washington D.C. and darkened the skies. The SCS was created by the end of the year.
This eventually led to the rise of watershed programs, contour strips, terraces, grass waterways and other methods in use today to keep the soil in place, as well as soil conservation districts across the U.S. to bring the message home – the first one being the Brown Creek Soil Conservation District in Anson County, Bennett’s childhood home.
The late Bill Richards, chief of the NRCS during the early 1990s and a No-Till Innovator and Living Legend, was interviewed in the documentary about Bennett and noted, “He had to be a real innovator, and he had to be a man with a vision. And he was there at a time when our land was really in big trouble.”
Of the NRCS’ mission and the importance of soil stewardship, he said, “You leave things better than you found it, no matter what that is. And that is sustainability.”
Unlike many other fear mongers in the farm industry, I am not one who believes another Dust Bowl is just around the corner. If you look around, there is progress everywhere: More than 100 million acres seeing some form of no-till management and we’ve seen major reductions in intensive tillage. We’ve also seen double-digit increases in cover cropped acres.
Precision technology and science has given us new ways to farm more sustainably and efficiently without punishing the soil.
Our enemy, of course, is apathy, and there’s still a long way to go in guaranteeing soil resources stay out of danger. Allan Savory, a livestock farmer and Rhodesian politician who founded the Savory Institute, gave a momentous Ted Talk years ago about the desertification of our landscapes.
The NRCS will continue to play a key role in the evolution of our farm industry, and it’s incumbent on Washington leaders to finish their cost-cutting and reorganization to point the agency toward its critical future mission. We must reduce paperwork and administrative hassles an enable agents to return to the field, advocating for conservation to those who need the message just as Bennett did.
I was thrilled to see Bennett’s 1928 creed was available on the web and I plan to read it.
One statement that Bennett made decades ago still holds true today:
“If we are bold in our thinking, courageous in accepting new ideas, and willing to work with instead of against our land, we shall find in conservation farming an avenue to the greatest food production the world has ever known.”
