Excerpt
Recently, I've been thinking a lot about the conservation gap. I mean the discrepancy between what we know we cold and should be doing and what we are actually doing to manage agriculture's effects on soil and water resources. More to the point, it's the discrepancy between what the best farmers are doing—the conservation showcase farmers—and what the rest are doing.
I started thinking about this dilemma when I was asked to speak about how far we've come and how far we still have to go to address nonpoint-source water pollution. I dug into the best statistics I could find about the soil and water conservation practices currently applied to agricultural land in the United States. What I found worries me.
Despite historic progress in reducing erosion risk between 1985 and 1995, data from the National Resources Inventory indicates that we have made no progress in further reducing the erosion risk since 1995-there is even some evidence of a slight increase in erosion risk between 1996 and 1997. Data compiled by the Conservation Technology Information Center shows that adoption of conservation tillage has flattened out at around 36 …
Footnotes
Craig Cox, executive director for the Soil and Water Conservation Society since 1998.
- Copyright 2003 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society
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