Excerpt
MODERN soil conservation is 50 years old this year. Most historians agree on 1933 as the birth date when the U.S. Department of the Interior authorized the nation's first large-scale demonstration project on the 93,000-acre Coon Creek watershed in southwestern Wisconsin.
The area in parts of three Wisconsin counties (Vernon, Monroe, and LaCrosse) was chosen for the project because it had serious problems on the steep slopes that were typical of about 13 million acres in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, and Iowa. The lessons about conservation that were learned in that area a half century ago soon spread to the hilly farming country throughout the Upper Mississippi Valley and then across the nation.
Before initiating the conservation project in 1933, the Department of the Interior gathered baseline information on farming and cropping methods, type of terrain, and estimated soil losses in southwestern Wisconsin. The area was described in the Department's report as one where small streams have worn narrow, deep valleys into the terrain with small valleys or coulees cut into the bills from the main valleys. The …
Footnotes
Douglas Sorenson, 2114 Henry Avenue, Eau Claire, Wisconsin 54701, is a free-lance writer.
- Copyright 1983 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society
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