70 Forces Driving More
the Louisiana Territory, using the fifteen million dollars he received
to finance conquests in Europe.^ The Spanish sold Florida for five
million dollars. The United States and Great Britain amicably divided
the northwestern part of the United States and Canada. Texas and
the Southwest were seized from Mexico. And Alaska was bought from
Russia for less than two cents per acre, bumping up the size of the
United States an additional one-fifth.
As settlers moved westward, their utilitarian mindset descended
on the Great Plains, home to the nation’s richest soils. The steel plow
defeated the deep root resistance put up by prairie grass. Mechanized
grain harvesters incentivized farmers to expand their operations. Two
years after World War I, the number of tractors on farms had tripled
to almost a quarter of a million. Prairie land was quickly being plowed
under and planted.
In the 9 0 s, when severe levels of soil erosion became too widespread
to be ignored, most farmers were adamant that nature was to blame,
not farming practices.^ In the end, farmers were rewarded financially
through taxpayer-funded programs to change how they farmed. In the
mid- 9 0 s, government conservation programs began paying farmers
to plant erodible land with trees and vegetation under ten- to fifteen-
year contracts.
In recent years, as prices at the farm went up, substantial amounts of
land put into conservation were brought back into production—their
owners determining that higher profits were more important than
reducing erosion.^ But not all farmers value land the same way. Some
have stopped plowing in favor of less invasive no-till practices. Others
bolt on additional tires or use tractors with tracks to reduce compaction.
Some contour their fields and install underground drainage tile to carry
away excess water.
While such farming techniques are important, they are not universal.
Overall, they have not reversed the impacts of modern farming practices.
As Professor David Montgomery points out, “Few places [in the world]
produce soil fast enough to sustain industrial agriculture over human
time scales, let alone over geologic time.”^ The United States is not one
of them, where soil is being depleted eighteen times faster than nature
can build it back.