Making Soil and Water Conservation Sustainable 379to the locations of the measures, as these interfered with other activities. It was not
a lack of interest that prevented them from maintaining or repairing the structures
and earthen dams, but rather that the measures had been constructed with heavy
equipment to which they had no access, and over which they had no control.
Conflict over budgeting and approach continued to hamper the SCS. Their
approach was vigorously opposed by the extension service, whose agents at county
level and in land-grant colleges had a good knowledge of the diversity of local
conditions. The SCS applied terracing technology widely, whilst local agents argued
for locally adapted and appropriate technologies, but the dissenting voices were
ignored. Sauer was one of the few who indicated that construction without mainte-
nance did more harm than good: ‘the present erosion crisis is the result primarily of
the introduction of terracing, originally thought of as protection against erosion’
(Sauer, 1934, in Trimble, 1985).
Transfer to Africa
The pattern of intervention was repeated by colonial authorities in Africa. Erosion
was first recognized as a problem as early as the 1870s, although it was not until
the early part of the 20th century that concern grew over farming as practised by
both indigenous people and colonial farmers. At first, farmers were encouraged to
adopt soil conservation practices through publicity bulletins extolling the virtues
of contour ploughing and grass strips, by establishing demonstration plots, and via
local legislation (Stocking, 1985; Gichuki, 1991), but few farmers adopted the
technologies, even though groups were taken to demonstration farms to see the
benefits of the new farming practices.
New grazing management systems of enforced enclosure of grazing lands,
developed in Texas, were also implemented. Again potent images of erosion spurred
these efforts. In Kenya, Huxley (1960) described ‘gullies 15–20 feet deep ... in
places, the landscape seems as dead as the moon’s’ in the west, and elsewhere the
‘land is gashed ... scraped bare, pounded into dust by the hoofs of little cattle and
greedy goats’. It was clear to officials that local people were to blame. They sought
technical guidance from the US, and brought back recommendations for large-
scale conservation intervention. There were occasional dissenting voices. Writing
in 1930, Sampson drew attention to indigenous methods of cultivation designed
to check erosion, particularly mounding and ridge-and-furrowing systems on the
contour. He indicated that local farmers ‘fully realize the losses caused by erosion
and consequent soil exhaustion, and their methods are well worth studying not
only for themselves, but as a guide to those who seek to improve on them’ (Samp-
son, 1930), but these sentiments were rare.
When these new soil conservation efforts proved to be too costly to sustain,
particularly where mechanization was required, administrators increased the use of
local labour rather than adapt the technologies (Anderson, 1984). They also put
together the components of good conservation practice into farm plans. These
were laid out on a blueprint chart showing what every field was to grow for 10 years,