In the southeastern part of the United States much of the land has been cleared, farmed, and abandoned; has grown up to trees, and then been cleared again. Severe rainfall, rolling topography and steep slopes, together with easily erodible soil types, led to much erosion in the past, especially in the Piedmont and Mountain areas. Major changes in land use over the past generation, however, have helped to solve the erosion problem, and, at the same time, contributed to other problems of land productivity.
The changes in land use have differed in various parts of the Southeast, but, basically, a great deal of the land is no longer in crops. Some has been planted to pasture or to trees; other land has gone through a period of idleness before reverting naturally to trees. A study of twenty-three subregions of the area shows that in the period from 1924 to 1959, there was a decrease of 21 million acres of cropland in twenty of the subregions, and an increase of 3 million acres of cropland in three subregions. The 21 million acres amounted to 35 percent of the cropland of the whole Southeast in 1924, and 39 per cent of the cropland in the subregions where the reductions occurred.
A number of factors have affected these shifts in land use. Basically, changing agricultural technology has favored some areas and harmed others. The small, sloping and irregular fields of the Piedmont and mountain areas have not been suited to the use of modern machinery. Other areas of the United States have been able to grow cotton cheaper and more efficiently, and thereby have taken away from the Southeast its traditional crop. Some abandoned croplands have been within farms which were still operated, at least on a part-time basis; the abandoned cropland was replaced with pasture or trees. Other abandoned croplands, especially in the past decade, have made up whole farms.
Whatever the reasons for the abandonment of cropland, this trend has largely cured the soil erosion problem by allowing growth of vegetative cover on the erodible soils. However, this does not mean that the land has thereafter been used productively. In many instances, the timber stands came back too slowly, or too thinly, for the forest to be productive; and, in some cases, shrubs or brush which came in had little or no economic value. Reversion to a protective vegetative cover does protect the basic productivity of the soil, but it does not restore the basic potential productivity of the land. From the viewpoint of profitable and productive land use, the solving of the soil erosion problem is not enough. Further conservation programs, such as forestry management, must be instigated and carried out, before the land of the Southeast region can be utilized productively.
Adapted from Soil Conservation in Perspective, by R. Burnell Held and Marion Clawson.
A version of this article appeared in print in the September 1965 issue of Resources magazine.
