Farm to Family Connection - Commentary

FARM TO FAMILY COMMENTARY
---Select commentary from a weekly column by Curt Arens published in the Cedar County News, Hartington, NE

June 2009

All the Dirt on Dirt

Dear Friends,
This year celebrates a special anniversary that will most likely go unnoticed by most folks. Except for a few soil scientists, Natural Resource District directors and state historians, no one will hail the fact that 110 years ago the concept of surveying the soil to foster conservation, became a reality.

Surveying began in 1899, with soil mapping taking place in the mega-agricultural states like Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maryland, Utah and New Mexico, through the USDA Division of Soils.

Nebraska wasn’t far behind, with mapping initiated in 1903 in four counties surrounding the Stanton area. Six years later, the University of Nebraska jumped on board and the legislature appropriated $1000 for the Conservation and Soil Survey. The state survey has been funded by our legislature ever since.

Early state director of these efforts, George Condra, was a big fan of the project. He told the legislature that Nebraska needed to survey its soil resources because, in Condra’s words, Nebraska has "the best soil in the world."

Of course, during the drought of the Dirty Thirties, we gave most of our soil to South Dakota. And that is exactly why the soil survey was so important. Understanding the properties of different soil types within our landscape helped us figure out how to conserve and protect our soil resources and organic matter.

It is said that no politician in Washington, D.C. took the Dust Bowl seriously until one fateful day when a huge cloud of dust actually blew into our nation’s capital city while Congress was in session. It wasn’t long after that event, when Congress finally appropriated money to reverse the effects of prolonged soil erosion and drought. The Soil Erosion Service, later called the Soil Conservation Service (SCS), was established.

Early soil surveys were pretty vague. They didn’t have aerial photos of the land, so they weren’t that "user friendly." In Nebraska, the modern soil surveys progressed rapidly. With a separate division handling the administration of the surveys, all efforts were focused squarely on the task at hand.

When the NRDs came into existence, there was a new partner in protecting soil and water resources that had a handle on localized concerns. Then, State Senator Jules Burbach introduced a bill in 1975 that funded an accelerated program to complete the surveys.

In June 1995, Burbach’s initial support of completing the survey came to a close when mapping was finished in Cherry County. Today, the survey is in what surveyors are calling the "third phase." They have produced digital maps and computerized the file data, with maps now available from across the U.S. online. The data and aerial maps have become so sophisticated, that Internet users can manipulate the maps to research very small parcels.

Today’s tools are aerial photography and computers, but in the old days, back in 1899, soil scientists were armed with only a compass, a sighting tool called an "alidade" and a small board about 18 inches square, called a plane table. Although aerial photographs were used as base maps as early as 1926, most scientists continued to use the time-honored tools for decades, until all parts of the country could be photographed from the air.

We honor soil scientists this year, along with the 110th anniversary of the nation’s first soil surveying, for the role these mapping projects have played in conserving and protecting Nebraska’s soil, the same dirt that Condra once called "the best soil in the world."

"Farm to Family" is available in syndication. If your newspaper or publication would like to carry Curt's "Farm to Family" column on a regular basis, please contact Curt Arens at bowview@gpcom.net for details.