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Show teoo QDU 0 yGOB Erosion robs this country of enough soli to cover the state of Iowa with a layer an inch thick each year, and this often comes from the best land, says the USDA. That's an annual loss of 5.5 billion tons of soil, a persistent per-sistent statistic despite the efforts to bring It down. Farmers, ranchers, and conservation specialists of USDA agencies have stepped step-ped up their efforts to check the huge losses. Conservationists emphasize empha-size that the stakes in protecting pro-tecting farm topsoils have risen sharply. With so many more mouths to feed than In the past, abroad as well as in the U.S., failure to better protect the topsoil eventually would mean hunger for millions. mil-lions. Soils being taken by ero-. ero-. sion generally are the richest rich-est in nutrients and organic matter and have the most favorable conditions for plant growth. This constitutes consti-tutes a significant drain on the productive potential of land where our food Is produced. pro-duced. A Farm Pond Harvest magazine story said that enough soil goes Into the Mississippi River in one year to build an Island a mile long, a quarter of a mile wide and 200 feet high. Such an island would contain the equivalent of 808 rail cars of phosphorous, 21,121 carloads car-loads of potassium, 291,511 carloads of calcium and 67,-270 67,-270 carloads of magnesium. Soil losses are like bags of money floating down the nation's rivers. Figured at 1979 prices, USDA soil conservation specialists estimate es-timate that putting all of the lost nitrogen and phosphorus phosphor-us and one -fourth of the lost potassium back Into the dam -aged land would add to $18 billion in just one year. Dollars are just part of the problem. This past summer's sum-mer's long stretch of 100 degree plus temperatures in . some areas stirred memories memo-ries of the dust clouds that engulfed Great Plains states nearly half a century ago. Food production was reduced. re-duced. The drought plied dunes at the sides of buildings build-ings and" highways, muddied drinking water, made food on the table gritty and killed kill-ed the dreams of some farm and ranch families. At todays erosion rate food supplies will be seriously threatened In about 100 years. In Iowa, for example, half of the original topsoil, six to eight inches - has been lost from sloping, unprotected un-protected land during the century the state has been farmed. Fortunately the country has the know how to bring soil erosion under control. Terraces, conservation tillage, contour stripcrop-ping, stripcrop-ping, grassed waterways and other conservation practices help save the land. Many of the country's farmers and rachers are aware of this and are taking appropriate actions. However, on land that has no conservation measures, erosion continues. It has been said many tiroes, and it is true, that nature cannot replenish the topsoil as fast as we can destroy it. |