The surprise was not so much the difficulty – planting large trees can often be difficult – it was the level of difficulty. I had arrived with a tree to find the tree that my tree was replacing already gone. All it took, they told me, was a yank from the mini-excavator, and it was out and on the truck. That should have given me a clue, but I missed it completely. “Quick dig and I’m out of here,” I thought. Three inches down, and it was clear that was not going to be the case.
Barely beneath the surface, we hit a hard-pack of rocky clay. The only thing worse would have been concrete. The shovel went no further. Neither did the spade. And with only three inches of soil dug out, we needed to excavate sixteen more.
My mind began to drift. How does anything grow in this, I thought? Yet, as I looked at the rest of the landscape and even the neighborhood – the trees, the shrubs, and the lawns – they all seemed to be growing in it just fine; although, “growing in it” probably isn’t entirely accurate. Save for a few thin roots it had managed to thread through the dense subsoil, it appeared the old tree, still very healthy but too big for the space, had been rooted entirely in three inches of topsoil as was probably the rest of the landscape, and even the whole street.
I realize it was a testament to the dogged determination of plants to grow, but even more a testament to the value of topsoil. I recalled what someone once told me. Topsoil is a complex mix of minerals, air, and water combined with decaying vegetation and countless microorganisms stirred up in an endless string of chemical equations that provides a bed into which plants can grow and prosper. It is the “skin of the Earth” he told me. Without it, life as we know it could not be sustained.
It is estimated that only 1/32 of the Earth’s total land mass is capable of producing food, and, lying on the top of that small fraction of land, is a thin, life-giving layer of topsoil. The difference between it and the layers below it is that topsoil is an organic component made up of dead carbon-based organisms in the midst of being consumed by live carbon-based organisms, most of them too small to be seen with anything but an electron microscope. It is a layer that is busy with activity.
When left bare of vegetation, topsoil is easily swept away by wind and rain. As we eat our bread, and dip our Doritos, we have no thoughts of how fragile and precious this natural resource is. Unless perhaps you are of my parents’ generation, and remember the day 350 million tons of topsoil from Kansas, Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, New Mexico, and the Dakotas, parched by drought and loosened by years of careless farming practices, blew across the Midwest and East. The cloud of soil turned day into night and dropped like snow onto the steps of the United States Congress where, ironically, one of the nation’s top soil scientists, Hugh Bennett, was testifying before a Congressional committee about a menace that threatened the well-being of the nation: soil erosion.
One year later, Congress passed the Soil Conservation Act of 1935. Representative John Nichols of Oklahoma said that in uprooting its topsoil, the United States was “living in a fool’s paradise, with respect to its most basic asset.” Signed by FDR, it created the Soil Conservation Service to combat the erosion that was endemic not only to the Mid-Plain states but extended to other states including Ohio.
I remembered that was what Louie Bromfield found in 1939 when he purchased the farms that would become Malabar Farm. He discovered lands that were badly ravaged by the destructive agricultural practices of the time, which he described as “a whorish, greedy, ignorant agriculture.” In partnership with the experts from the Soil Conservation Service and other like-minded farmers, Bromfield set out to not only restore the land, but to maximize its productivity using methods that replenished the topsoil rather than destroying it.
Today, if you were to visit Malabar Farm, you would see that he was successful in repairing the damage, and now pictures of gullies large enough to bury a car are not much more than of historical interest. Programs put into place to promote less destructive farming practices and sound land development strategies have slowed soil erosion to more sustainable levels. This legacy of the Soil Conservation Act of 1935 demonstrates that government can lead the way in finding solutions to our problems through the promotion of science and innovation.
So as we rolled the tree into its hole, I realized there was reason for hope after the mid-term elections. Difficult does not mean impossible. All that’s needed is a will, a way, and one heck of a dust storm.
