In the thirty years since the problem of soil erosion first gained widespread public attention in the United States, efforts to control it have become one of the federal government's largest natural resource programs. Over the three decades nearly eight billion dollars of public funds have been allocated to reduction or prevention of large-scale soil losses on privately owned land. Additional money has been spent on federally owned lands. Overall results of the of conservation programs, though well worth while, have fallen short of the hopes that many people held at the beginning.
This is due largely to limited response to the programs by landowners and farm operators. The physical problems of erosion control are seldom too difficult. The techniques for managing crops, soil, and water so that the natural forces of geologic erosion do not accelerate and get beyond control are well developed. Often there is a choice among methods. The real difficulties usually seem to lie in social and economic circumstances.
A series of studies undertaken in Iowa in recent years on problems of erosion control has produced information of general interest, for the social and economic environment is more uniform throughout the nation than soils, climate, topography, and patterns of land use. The severe erosion hazard which faces farm operators on the rolling hills of western Iowa calls for strong measures of erosion control if soil losses are to be held to a minimum on cropland. But all losses on many farms there remain relatively high although for the area as a whole they have been reduced somewhat in the past thirty years.
On a typical hilly farm in the area, a farmer must often accept a lower income if he makes a major effort to reduce soil losses. Furthermore, land values have risen to such a level in recent years that intensive cropping by new owners seems to be necessary if the land is to be paid for from farming operations. There are strong indications that the farms in the area are overvalued in relation to their income-producing capability under a system of farming which keeps soil losses low. Both farm income and land values rose rapidly in Iowa during the 1940's. When farm incomes were at their peak in 1948 average farm land values in the livestock-farming area of western Iowa were 220 per cent of the 1941 value.
Farm income started to slide in 1952 in Iowa, as in the nation, but Iowa farmland values continued to increase. Total net farm income of Iowa farm operators declined by 40 percent between 1952 and 1960. Meanwhile the average value of farmland in the state increased by 13 percent and in western Iowa by 6 percent. Changes in the income-producing capacity of the land can hardly be said to have produced such increases in value.
Valuations greatly in excess of the long-term agricultural productivity of land lead to excessively high fixed commitments which compete for funds needed for erosion control outlays. They also lead to exploitation of the investment in the farm in an effort to meet the annual payments of principal, interest, and taxes. A further difficulty arises because changes in land prices from 1949 to 1957 apparently had no relation to either the change in erosion between those years or the level of erosion in 1957.
To overcome these deterrents to erosion control is not a simple matter. An appraiser of land for purchase and tax purposes would have to distinguish between income which results from the true productive powers of the land itself and that which comes out of capital. He would also have to take into account future decreased yields and increased costs arising from soil erosion. In both instances he needs assistance that only economic research can provide. Such information is not now readily available.
There is a limit to the amount of soil erosion control that the individual alone can afford to do on his land. If additional efforts cannot be justified by the benefits he receives, the responsibility for their cost must be borne by the public body—a county, state or federal government—which is most representative of the principal beneficiaries. Some of the financial assistance provided by the Agricultural Conservation Program Service can be placed in this category. Payments which share the cost of draining cropland, for example, would be nothing more than subsidies to the landowner to increase productive capacity if the addition of this tillable land to his farm did not result in less intensive use of eroding land. Other payments, if carefully handled, can be used to cause farmers to adopt erosion-control practices.
The use of public funds, however, does not necessarily fill the gap between what the farmer can do and what society desires. If the public goal calls for a greater degree of erosion control than the farmer can afford, an estimate might be made of what it would cost him to prevent further soil loss. With this guidance, the public's share could be determined. One solution for financing some of the land-treatment measures considered to be in the public interest lies within the purview of the Watershed Protection and Flood Prevention Act. The legislation requires that at least half of the land in the watershed above retention reservoirs and other flood-prevention structures must be protected by appropriate conservation measures before federal assistance is provided. Some of these land-treatment measures conceivably can be financed with the assistance of cost-sharing arrangements of the Agricultural Conservation Program Service.
The watershed approach provides a framework within which to secure the cooperation of neighboring landowners in applying a more integrated system of erosion-control measures among farms. And because some state legislatures now give authority to counties to take part in watershed projects, this integration often can be reinforced. Even so, this may not be sufficient, considering the watershed act's requirement that the local sponsoring group must secure the cooperation of the owners of half of the critically situated land in the watershed.
One additional means of persuasion at the disposal of local government is the property tax. As an example, the taxes levied on cropland might be reduced if specified erosion-control practices were installed on lands subject to heavy soil losses. If this were done, however, some counties with heavily eroded land would eventually be forced to raise all tax rates and in some instances require state aid to make up lost tax revenues. On the other hand, the tax incentive to protect the productive capacity of the benefited property could result in its continuation on the tax rolls as producing property instead of gradually becoming worthless with a lien of unpaid taxes against it.
Adapted from Soil Erosion and Some Means for Its Control (Special Report No. 29, Iowa Agricultural and Home Economics Experiment Station), August 1962, by R. Burnell Held, of RFF; Melvin G. Blase, Economic Research Service, USDA; and John F. Timmons, Department of Economics and Sociology, Iowa State University.
A version of this article appeared in print in the February 1963 issue of Resources magazine.
