Of all the things I observe as I drive about this region studying farmlands and residences and old buildings, the one that disturbs me most is the loss of soil from the fields into the streams and rivers. Soil loss and the things that cause it have become a signature issue with me. I think I key on this one thing as I begin to read a farm scene or drive down an road more than any other factor. If there is one thing I would point to as symbolic of the decline in farming it is the problem of soil loss.
What both amazes and confounds me at the same time is that unlike so many other factors that affect our farms, much soil loss can usually be prevented by thoughtful tillage. Soil loss tells me more about farming and farmers' attitudes than crops or equipment or the complexities of agri-economics. Growing up, I was taught quite simply and directly that we ought to take care of our farm and not let ditches develop in our fields that would wash away our soil. Our fields were never large enough for serious contour farming, but we protected them by careful preservation of our fencerows and edges. We never plowed right to the stream edge or the road edge. We always left a thick barrier of weeds and brush to close the field at the soil level.
When the great rains came in the solstice storm of 1990 and the Franklin County area received about 12-15" of rain, I drove the roads looking at the fields and the erosion. Rainfall of that amount is unusual and can be expected to produce not only flooding but field erosion. In some areas, however, it seemed afterwards that some fields were virtually untouched--the soil was still in place and the fields were not gutted. In other areas, large gullies had developed and tons of soil had been ripped out of the fields. The difference in nearly every case was in how the edges of the fields had been cared for.
I observed one place where the soil in the county road was nearly three feet deep where it had been washed there from the adjacent field. Earlier in the fall the old lane that bordered this field had been bulldozed and the border vegetation scraped away. All through the county that fall bulldozers had been at work in the fields in a frenzy of clearing. From the plateau I could see plumes of smoke across the county as the brush piles from this clearing were burned. Vigorous fencerows need maintenance or they will encroach too far upon fields, but bulldozers in the fence row are not maintenance. They are destruction. In several places farmers and other land owners bulldozed their protective stream edges and leveled their bank vegetation from the field all the way into their stream bottoms. The folly of this excessive use of power equipment was manifest in these fields two months later when the storm hit.
In other fields, close by Winchester, at the height of the storm, the flow of water down the long unprotected slopes of the fields generated foot-high standing waves of turbulence as the widening gully focused the water that was rushing violently toward Boiling Fork Creek. In two of the fields, the furrows ran directly down slope, and mud from the fields washed over the highway. There was not a grass strip or contour anywhere to protect these fields. The natural edges had been stripped out, the edge that was left was groomed as "lawn" and in the natural waterways within the fields, there were no grassed liners to protect the fields.
Each year in Franklin County, tons upon tons of our farm soil end up in Tims Ford lake, and each year it costs the county taxpayers thousands of dollars in additional road maintenance to clean up the roadside ditches that have been overrun with soil from the adjacent fields. Our policies and our informal "political" relations tolerate intrusion of tillage into the right-of-way border beyond all reasonable care. In mile after mile of field that I observe and photograph, the tilled edge is usually right at the top of the bank at the road edge. In every rain these fields erode into the ditch.
If the erosion stopped in the ditches and could be recovered there, perhaps the problem would not be of such concern to me. But the erosion does not stop in the ditch--the water that carries the soil to the ditch is headed for the streams, the river, the lakes and it carries this soil into the water system. After heavy rains, Tims Ford lake is brown for days with the silt load that enters from the tributary streams. The head of Woods Reservoir where the Elk River enters is a mud flat reaching for hundreds of yards. It is a bit of a trick to work a powerboat up the lake into the river. The "color" of these lakes after storms is prime Franklin County farm soil washed away forever.
I do not mean by the conjunction of rivers and farms in this way to suggest that the problem, then, is simple--if you fix the farms you fix the rivers. Few environmental problems are in any sense simple. The parameters of farming are both volitional [choices about tillage] and economic. Farmers have a lot of choice about how they steer their plow racks as they come down the last pass near the road; they don't have much choice in the set of economic circumstances that control everything from fuel prices to market prices. Farming is part of a larger web of land usage and societal choices that reach far beyond individual farms or single watersheds. This web may now have reached a complexity that will never be untangled.
Yet there are things that can be done, relatively simple things, that would both improve the quality of fields and protect our waters from siltation. The simplest and easiest is to leave an edge of weeds or grass between the field and the road. The motives that pressure farmers to cut the very last furrow possible are more often aesthetic and domestic than agricultural. In large fields, grass strips can be left unplowed in the known watercourses in those fields. In other fields, the remedy is no more complex than rotating the line of plowing ninety degrees so that the furrows do not all run down hill. Elsewhere the preservation of fencerows, even if they are bush hogged down to fencetop level, will protect field soils.
Often when environmentalists speak of rivers their conceptual boundaries seem to follow the blue lines on the road maps: they talk about rivers, but they do not talk much about roads or fields. And my experience has been that such environmentalists often talk to each other, but seldom to farmers. Yet soil erosion and watershed integrity are not two different problems--they are parts of the same problem. We cannot separate the health of the rivers from the health of the farms. I go to meetings where there are lots of environmentalists and to places where there are lots of farmers, but seldom do I see these two groups working at the same table. And I almost never see the environmentalists in the fields with the farmers.
There is a fundamental conceptual disorder in our vision of environmental management. The fragmentation of the landscape is mirrored in the fragmentation of our agencies and organizations that manage the land. This is nothing new. We have known this for decades. But if we are to produce effective grassroots environmental reform, we may need to give some attention quite literally to the grass roots of the farm fields. Pragmatic watershed management must recognize the needs of the users and involve all those users in the agenda of management. It might be a start for the environmentalists to begin holding some of their meetings in barns rather than in conference centers.