erosion is not, however. By the s, market forces (pushed by chemical
corporations and agronomists) had compelled virtually all farmers to buy
and apply petroleum-based fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides for their
soils. By the s, when world grain prices rose and rose, even supposedly
conservation-minded midwestern farmers had abandoned crop rotations
in favor of ‘‘continuous corn,’’ fertilized by nearly continuous doses of an-
hydrous ammonia. So much for conservation.
The great wave of ‘‘big ag’’ across the South since World War II—south-
ern farms are second in scale only to the West’s—may render hopelessly
quaint the Regionalists’ dream of a landscape of small proprietorships
managed by prudent, soil-conserving men and women. Quaint is not the
equivalent of wrong, however, and industrial gigantism in farming was by
no means inevitable. Big ag was engineered politically by representatives
of machinery manufacturers, chemical producers, fiber and food proces-
sors and shippers, and many institutional economists and agronomists.
Not least of the engineers was the U.S. Congress, which beginning in
created a commodity subsidy program that disproportionately rewarded
big producers. By the early s, Earl Butz, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture,
declaimed honestly, albeit undiplomatically, that all farmers ought to ‘‘Get
big or get out!’’
The Chapel Hillians and their allies had a better idea that, given suffi-
cient political weight, might have been realized. Now we can only try to
visualize alternative American (not merely southern) rural landscapes, as
they might appear today: a more substantial human, middle-class popula-
tion; less wind erosion; mixed, rotated crops; fewer requirements for arti-
ficial chemicals; and safer produce and meats—healthy land and healthy
people. Howard Odum died in , still hopeful despite many disappoint-
ments. And he had children who carried on with an optimism that, consid-
ering the odds against optimism, seems simply astounding.
tEugene Pleasants ‘‘Gene’’ Odum grew up during the s and s
in his father’s Chapel Hill mansion. A rather mediocre student, his first
idea of a vocation, he once said, was to be plumber. Young Gene was a shy
fellow living in a human beehive, so he retreated from company to crawl
spaces under houses, where he followed pipes and mapped water-supply
and refuse-disposal systems. ‘‘I was curious about networks,’’ he explained
much later, when he had grown into a gregarious, storytelling maturity.
Whether the plumbing tale was merely an arch take on his juvenile indif-
ference to school or not, it was symbolically prophetic. Almost three de-