New roots for American agriculture

Excerpt

SOIL Conservation Service officials recently set the annual average loss of soil on cropland nationwide at 5 tons per acre (22). A 1977 U.S. General Accounting Office report put the average annual loss at 15 to 16 tons per acre (4). An even earlier study, done at Iowa State University in 1972, estimated average annual soil loss to be about 12 tons per acre (6). Despite the disparity in these estimates, each makes one point clear: Soil loss continues at an unacceptable rate in nearly all of the areas tilled for agricultural purposes in the United States.

This failure on the part of conventional agriculture to develop a sustainable basis leads us to advocate development of a mixed-perennial, grain-producing agriculture on sloping soils. Such an agriculture would more reflect natural ecosystems, substituting for soil-wasting, petroleum-intensive annual monocultures. While these perennial mixtures would be derived from plants possessing little promise now for meeting human needs, there is every reason to think the scientific community has the know-how to develop a sustainable agriculture of this sort simply because of the advances in biology over the past half century.

We see five important reasons why this nation …