378 Modern Agricultural Reforms
based entirely on the observations and experiences of ‘progressive’ farmers, later came
to advocate technologies solely developed on research stations.
By the early 20th century, agricultural extension agencies and county agents
‘built terraces for farmers and instructed them in terrace making and maintenance’
(Hall, 1949). In the Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, North and South Carolina and
Virginia regions, some 50,000ha were terraced in 1915; this had grown to
283,000ha by 1929. One pioneer county agent, J. F. Hart, laid out 98km of broad
base terraces in 1914 alone.
By far the greatest boost to modern conservation ideology occurred when the
Dust Bowl disaster struck the southern and southwestern states of Oklahoma,
Arkansas, Kansas, Colorado, Texas and New Mexico during the 1930s. In the pre-
vious two decades, farmers had been encouraged to move westwards by favourable
homestead policies and the high price of wheat (Worster, 1979). In the 1910s,
30,000 farmers each year registered new land holdings in these states, and in 1919
alone, some 4.5 million ha of grassland were ploughed up to grow wheat. By the
time the dust storms began, much of the land had been farmed only for a genera-
tion. Eventually some 50 million hectares of farmland were said to be severely
affected by erosion. Dust and earth blanketed houses and crops, and there were
potent images of destruction, the landscape having become ‘a vast desert, with ...
shifting dunes of sand’ where there had once been crops (Worster, 1979).
These images of erosion linked farmers’ cropping and grazing practices to
increased frequency of droughts. The message was clear. Farmers caused land deg-
radation which could lead to national ruin. At the time, several influential writers
suggested that whole civilizations had collapsed through neglect of the soil (Ben-
nett, 1939; Jacks and Whyte, 1939). The Head of the US Soil Conservation Serv-
ice, Hugh H. Bennett, spoke of environmental catastrophe by indicating that ‘the
ultimate consequence of unchecked soil erosion, when it sweeps over whole coun-
tries as it is doing today, must be national extinction’ (in Beinart, 1984). Over a
relatively short period, policy makers came to treat the problem as so serious that
widespread social and institutional action had to be taken.
As a result a federal Soil Conservation Service (formerly the Soil Erosion Service)
was established in 1935 as a separate body to the existing extension service. Its agents
conducted a national inventory of erosion, so that they could ‘help the farmer do
things correctly’ (in Trimble, 1985). From the start, erosion was seen as a problem
arising out of bad farming practices that had to be corrected. However, to demon-
strate the efficacy of the approach, the SCS needed large amounts of land to practise
the new large-scale engineering measures. As few agreements came from private
farmers, they selected Navajo reservations on which to experiment (Kelly, 1985).
The SCS constructed physical measures and enforced compulsory destocking
of sheep and goats. College graduates did the technical work, and local Navajos
worked as labourers, but the project provoked an intense negative reaction, not
only to soil conservation but also to all government programmes. Anthropologists
discovered that the local people were not against soil conservation, but were
opposed to the way it was being implemented (Kelly, 1985). They took exception