Hope's Edge_ The Next Diet for a Small Planet - Frances Moore Lappe [49]
Ironically, our tax laws actually entice farmers to mine groundwater. In Texas, Kansas, and New Mexico, landowners get a depletion allowance on the groundwater to compensate for the fact that their pumping costs rise as their groundwater mining lowers the water table. Moreover, the costs of buying the equipment and sinking the well are tax-deductible. Irrigation increases the value of the land enormously, but when the land is sold the profits from the sale are taxed according to the capital gains provisions; that is, only 40 percent of the difference between the original cost of the farm and its sale price is taxed as ordinary income. The rest is not taxed at all.
Few of us—and certainly not those whose wealth depends on the mining of nonrenewable resources—can face the fact that soon we will suffer for this waste of water. Donald Worster, author of Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930’s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), interviewed a landowner in Haskell County, Kansas, where $27.4 million in corn for feed is produced on about 100,000 acres of land irrigated with groundwater. He asked one of the groundwater-made millionaires, “What happens when the irrigation water runs out?”
“I don’t think that in our time it can,” the woman replied. “And if it does, we’ll get more from someplace else. The Lord never intended us to do without water.”35
The Soil in Our Steaks
Most of us think of soil as a renewable resource. After all, in parts of Europe and Asia, haven’t crops been grown on the same land for thousands of years? It’s true, soil should be a renewable resource; but in the United States, we have not allowed it to be.
We are losing two bushels of topsoil for every bushel of corn harvested on Iowa’s sloping soils, warned Iowa state conservation official William Brune in 1976.36 Few listened. “It can take 100 to 500 years to create an inch of topsoil,” but under current farming practices in Iowa, an inch of topsoil “can wash away in a single heavy rainstorm,” Brune said after the spring rains in 1980. On many slopes in Iowa we have only six inches of topsoil left.37
Few would argue with Brune. Few would dispute that our topsoil loss is a national catastrophe, or that in the last two decades we have backpedaled on protecting our topsoil, or that in some places erosion is as bad as or worse than during the Dust Bowl era. Few dispute that excessive erosion is reducing the soil’s productive capacity, making chemical fertilizers ever more necessary while their cost soars. The only dispute is how many billions of dollars topsoil erosion is costing Americans and how soon the impact will be felt in higher food prices and the end of farming on land that could have been abundant for years to come.
Since we began tilling the fields in our prime farming states we have lost one-third of our topsoil.38 Each year we lose nearly 4 billion tons of topsoil from cropland, range, pasture, and forest land just because of rain-related water erosion.39 That 4 billion tons could put two inches of topsoil on all of the cropland in Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey.40 Adding wind erosion, estimated at 3 billion tons, we hit a total erosion figure of nearly 7 billion tons a year.41
Robin Hur is a mathematician and Harvard Business School graduate who has spent the last year documenting the resource cost of livestock production for his forthcoming book. “How much of our topsoil erosion is associated with crops destined for livestock and overgrazing of range-land?” I asked him. “Most of it—about 5.9 billion tons,” he calculates, including erosion associated with exported feed grains. This is true not only because feed crops cover half of our harvested acres, but because these crops, especially corn and soybeans, are among