Hard rain's gonna fall! on selling conservation in Woodbury County, Iowa

Excerpt

I firmly believe that most farmers and ranchers and developers who fully understand the causes and cures of soil erosion will take action to prevent it. But we must do the selling. We must somehow rekindle the zeal and sense of purpose that [Hugh Hammond] Bennett brought to the program in its early years.

…we need to find more graphic ways to get our story across. -Peter Myers, chief of the Soil Conservation Service, from “Comments: From the Chief,” Soil and Water Conservation News, June 1982.

“In nature things move violently to their place, and calmly in their place.”-Francis Bacon.

The air was calm, the sky starlit overhead. Gary Walters was bicycling home from a late meeting in mid-May, when he heard a strange sound far off in the countryside east of town. The sound grew louder and more ominous, then disappeared. Walters, a soil conservationist with the Soil Conservation Service in Anthon, Iowa, was never sure of its source until the next morning. “When I found …