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Show i Farm Conservation Report ft Don'i Wait Until the Well Runs . Don't Wait Until h the Well Runs Dry After the topsoil is gone, it ': Is too late to begin thinking l) about saving the soil, says Joe ? wilken, chairman of the Du-5- chesne County Agricultural Con-;t Con-;t servation Committee. He p6ints ?j out that waiting for crop yields j to drop and gullies to appear before carrying out conservation S practices is about like calling ;V the fire department after the i house has burned to the ground. n Some land has not been scr-iously scr-iously damaged by erosion or depletion, but now is the time i to keep it that way. Keep yields ) high, and the land will help to bear the expense .of keeping . up the fertility. But let the topsoil . get away and with it the soil fer-i fer-i tility, and the expense of re-building re-building is expensive and the damaged land is not in condition, I to help bear the cost. Conservation farming every year is the most economical and v ,most effective farming, says the county chairman. It is like locking lock-ing the barn door before the horse is stolen. Conservation farming year in and year out will help the land carry its own conservation costs. Farm Depression Unnecessary "Farmers do not have to go through the wringer again," Clinton P. Anderson told a group in Philadelphia in one of his last speeches as Secretary of Agriculture. He pointed out, however, that "we must maintain both domestic domes-tic and foreign policies that will prevent it. . . we should not wait for trouble to strike before we take the required action. Under favorable circumstances, farmers farm-ers can probably look forward to a gradual price decline per-- per-- haps a decline of a third in the next few years." American agriculture should benefit directly from the European Euro-pean recovery program in two ways, Mr. Anderson said. (1) During .the life of the program, it will help to provide stable markets and yet allow farmers to shift their pattern of production pro-duction in definite steps in order to meet more normal postwar post-war demands; and (2) it should help to rebuild a more permanent perma-nent European market, which has customarily taken 60 to 75 per cent of all U. S. agricultural exports. While food shortages in the world can be expected for a long time to come, Mr. Anderson stated that eventual solution of the world food problem calls for the development and conservation conser-vation of natural resources, spreading the knowledge of both agricultural and industrial technology, tech-nology, providing for free-flowing word trade, monetary stabilization, stabi-lization, and both national and international arrangements for using farm products that would otherwise become surplus. . Regarding the years "after ERP," the former Secretary said: "American agriculture needs the export marketsv'that can be developed through world-economic world-economic recovery, but by far its largest market, in time of world food crisis as well as in more normal times, is the home market mar-ket made up of employed people. "National policy must recognize recog-nize the necessity of encouraging encourag-ing industrial activity and full employment. . . Clearly, then, farm policy and programs must (a) fight delaying actions in periods per-iods of price decline so as to maintain balance with industrial prices in fairness to farmers, and (b) provide price stoppers in relation re-lation to non-farm prices. . . national na-tional policy should seek to maintain a floor under consumption consump-tion and in other ways provide for stable markets." New Process Yields Fine Paper From Straw Fine paper from wheat straw i up to now usually wasted or a burned on U. S. farms is the promise of a new process developed de-veloped by the Department of Agriculture's laboratory at Peoria, Pe-oria, Illinois. Paper from straw is not new; the process, which reduces the chemical cost and gives significantly higher pulp yields, is. Next come mill-scale trials, which domestic paper companies will watch with interest. Dutch paper engineers, to whom the process was suggested, are using1 it successfully on a commercial scale in Holland, where straw is the main raw material for paper. About 25 mills in the Midwest produce annually 500,000 tons of strawboard for the container industry from wheat straw. But the cost of obtaining clean straw has previously been a stumbling block to using straw for. fine papers in this country. For years, however, European countries have produced fine papers, such as book and writing, writ-ing, from wheat and rye straw. England used a considerable amount of straw for fine paper during the recent war, and most of the South American Republics Repub-lics make their papers from straw. Paper and paper beard are in short supply. Tin's is due to short supplies of pulpvood; pulp-wood pulp-wood species are being used faster fas-ter than grown; and Canada is drastically limiting pulpwood exports ex-ports to the United States. Last year 95 million tons of wheat straw was grown, and the straw burned and wasted would have been enough to produce 20 million mil-lion tons of cellulose plup, this country's entire requirement. |