Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America - Hardcover

Stoll, Steven

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0809064316 ISBN 13: 9780809064311

Publisher: Hill and Wang, 2002

Synopsis

A major history of early Americans' ideas about conservation

Fifty years after the American Revolution, the yeoman farmers who made up a large part of the new country's voters faced a crisis. The very soil of American farms seemed to be failing, and agricultural prosperity, upon which the Republic was founded, was threatened. Steven Stoll's passionate and brilliantly argued book explores the tempestuous debates that erupted between "improvers," who believed in practices that sustained and bettered the soil of existing farms, and "emigrants," who thought it was wiser and more "American" to move westward as the soil gave out. Stoll examines the dozens of journals, from New York to Virginia, that gave voice to the improvers' cause. He also focuses especially on two groups of farmers, in Pennsylvania and South Carolina. He analyzes the similarities and differences in their farming habits in order to illustrate larger regional concerns about the "new husbandry" in free and slave states.

Farming has always been the human activity that most disrupts nature, for good or ill. The decisions these early Americans made about how to farm not only expressed their political and social faith, but also influenced American attitudes about the environment for decades to come. Larding the Lean Earth is a signal work of environmental history and an original contribution to the study of antebellum America.

About this title

About the Author:

Steven Stoll, an assistant professor of history at Yale University, is the author of The Fruits of Natural Advantage: Making the Industrial Countryside in California. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Larding the Lean Earth
One Let us boldly face the fact. Our country is nearly ruined. --John Taylor (1819)  
The times are changed; the face of the country is changed; the quality of the soil has changed; and if we will live as well, and become as rich and respectable as our fathers, we must cultivate their virtues; but abandon their system of farming. -- The Farmer's Manual (1819)  
The changes, which these causes have wrought in the physical geography of Vermont, within a single generation, are too striking to have escaped the attention of any observing person, and every middle-aged man who revisits his birth-place after a few years absence, looks upon another landscape than that which formed the theatre of his youthful toils and pleasures. --George Perkins Marsh (1847) FORMING THE FURROW SLICE Agriculture is an act intimate with the rest of nature. Like the apparent separateness of species in an ecosystem, the boundaries of any farm belie a deeper connectedness. Agroecology is akin to the study of similar triangles, in which the smaller figure shares the proportions of the larger. Take water's path through the biosphere. Small-scale transpiration from roots to leaves involves the entire hydrology of a region, the shape and altitude of its watersheds, the granulation and retention of its soils, and, finally, its climate. Porous borders between human-managed and wild nature appear at every turn. Farms cut out of forests retain all sorts of buried seeds waiting for fire or drought before they can germinate. Deer like to graze the young shoots at edges and corners between clearings and canopies. With all of these relationships unfolding at the same time, where should we stand for a view of cultivation as a subset of the natural relationships in any environment? The most vital place lies between what farmers could control and what they could not, between plants and animals on the one hand and geology and climate on the other. Soil. As the first and most immovable resource of agriculture, soil was the country. Families carried their corn and hogs long distances, but soil was what they found where they set down and sometimes what they confronted. They might take from it or add to it by treating its fertile nutrients as a rotating fund, but they could change its essential characteristics--emerging from moisture, elevation, and the entire biota--only within tight margins. As a subject for interpretation, soil is rich in material. It formed the living tissue between economy and ecology, the plane that unified food production with events in thegreater environment. Early in the nineteenth century, soil became the focal point for a conception of nature as strictly limited. The only fertile soil is topsoil, a layer of black loam just two feet deep where all cultivation takes place. All the plants known to dry land grow in topsoil, so it creates most of our food and oxygen. It is the flash point for everything on Earth and unifies, in one body, the three great spheres of life--the gases of the atmosphere, the minerals of the lithosphere, and the organisms of the biosphere. Topsoil is ever being renewed. Pause at any road cut to observe a narrative of biochemical reactions and constant weathering. At your feet are deep deposits of parent rock that blend into higher levels made up of granular minerals, including silicate clays, iron and aluminum oxides, gypsum, or calcium. This makes up subsoil. Just above, in a stratum black in color, soft to the touch, and dense with life, is topsoil. Roots braid through it, and worms and insects tunnel around in it, making it spacious and pliable. Microorganisms consume its dead plants and animals, break them down to basic nutrients, and in this way turn tissue back into plant food. A single gram of it might contain billions of bacteria, a single square foot might host a multitude of bugs and fungi. Topsoil holds most of the available water in any ecosystem. Without this reservoir, moisture finds the nearest watercourse; land dries out; climate changes. It is a filter and a container, a mass of integrated micro and macro matter, and a living substance that cannot be understood by reduction. Its final form contains so many members and symbiotic relationships that it constitutes, in the words of the soil scientist Nyle Brady, the "genesis of a natural body distinct from the parent materials from which the body was formed."1 Soil is the tablecloth under the banquet of civilization: no matter what people build on it, when it moves all the food and finery go crashing. It is the skin of the Earth and is so completely associated with cultivation that it takes a name descriptive of the very act of opening land: the furrow slice. Farmers gave it names that reflected their work in it, part of a nearly forgotten language of husbandry. There is no better word than tilth to illustrate agriculture as a soil practice. In its earliest, Old English form, with a first recorded usage dated to 1023, tilth referred to any labor applied to land for subsistence. Since work indicates thething being worked upon, tilth soon described farmland under cultivation and the condition of that land. Worked land was land in tilth, or simply tilth. Even more graphically, tilth described the feel of a prepared surface, the depth of it over the top of a boot, the way it fell away from the leading edge--the crumb. Fragrant and deep, with the consistency of butter or stiff dough, tilth defies description as dirt. Why all this attention? Because land includes so much out of human control--the bedrock, the blue sky--and tilth names the one part of land most directly a farmer's burden and responsibility. Tilth implies the plow, maker of the slice. The plow is an implement used to open the ground by turning it over to form long trenches called furrows. It is a frame with a blade or stick that cuts while being pushed or pulled. There seems to be no recorded reference to the plow in English before 1100, but soon thereafter it began to leave its imprint. It has been sulh and ploh and ar, as in arable. Its spelling could not be pinned down before the sixteenth century, with some writing it pleuche or plwch or pliff. Plough or plow has been in use only since about 1700. It can be combined with a hundred words for various meanings, all related to clay and clod: plough-feast, -harness, -mark, -rein, -servant, -team, -wheal, -woman. In some regions of England plough-boys collected plough-penny on Plough-Monday, when a tenant was bound to plough for his lord. Like tilth, land took the name of the action upon it, as in "they stepped out of the yard and walked through the fresh plow." The plow is at once the symbol of domestication and the world's most feared ecological wrecking ball. It unearths micro environments, destroys nests and burrows, throws open moisture. Whether they accept the charge or not, plow-people become the caretakers of soils. They become the roots and the sod and sometimes even the rain. They become the holders of the fertile layer not only because they depend on it but because they can destroy it. Here is a contract with nature that has not always been honored: rip the earth but be there to stop the bleeding. If agriculture is a controlled disturbance, then churned-up ground is its worst upheaval, carrying the constant threat of fertility lost to crops and the weather. When they took the trees and broke the ground on a steep slope, when they cut furrows in a wet country or in a dryand windy one, farmers brought on a dreaded reaction. Erosion is the ground giving way, and since that ground feeds counties, countries, and continents, erosion suggests a squandered future, a foolish settlement. Tillage makes soil vulnerable to a rate of weathering by wind and water thousands of times faster than the processes that create soil. Erosion takes the ground in two general ways: gullies and sheets. In the first process, water removes soil by creating small channels or rills that become larger gullies as they widen and deepen geometrically until they consume vast areas. With vegetation removed and the surface broken on a slope of greater than five or ten degrees, rain can bring down a hillside within a few years. Even the raindrops themselves do damage. They strike exposed dirt, loosen it, and destroy its delicate granulation. The smaller particles are then easily transported by running water. Badlands result, with pedestal-like formations and no surface for cultivation whatsoever. In the second process, wind and water sweep and skim the surface for years. Fertility falls, crops are flooded or blown away, or their roots are exposed, or they are covered with dust. Barren expanses result, with subsoil laid open. One Vermont farmer reported the case of the Tinmouth plains, apparently a region of loose soil over hardpan. A rich "muck" ran away down the watercourse within a generation, silt for harbors, leaving him at a loss: Twenty-five years ago, I ploughed fields on the Tinmouth plains, which had then a covering of six inches or more of this muck, and they had then been cropped some ten or twelve years; these fields have now not one particle of muck or mold! What has become of it? For the first five to ten years, as I am informed, no fields produced finer crops of wheat than these; the muck has now all disappeared; nothing but the granite sand remains, hardening as we descend, till at one foot or less we get into a perfect hard-pan ... . Where once the sickle paid its annual visits, it is known no longer.2 A soil with little structure, its heavy roots and covering vegetation removed, will slide away, leaving nothing but naked rock. Exhaustion is another kind of erosion. Although dirt might not fall off the farm, its nutrients can be removed by plants until nothing but poverty grass will grow. As the New York f...

About this edition

• Publisher: Hill and Wang
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0809064316
• ISBN 13: 9780809064311
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320