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Most of the soil conservation at that point was more east of the Great
Plains, particularly in the Piedmont area, North Carolina, and in the south.
There were warnings about soil erosion occurring, well in a modern sense,
during the whole progressive era, 1900 to 1910. And during the 1920's, Hugh
Hammond Bennett, a North Carolinian, was warning and writing circulars for the
USDA on soil erosion as a national menace. Most people were thinking about soil
erosion as a result of rainfall, or water erosion. They had no huge large
scale experience certainly before World War I of plowing up something on the
scale of the Great Plains. There is a tradition going back into the 19th
Century of people concerned about unstable agriculture, the effects of
commercialization on the land as well as on community. Series of people going
all the way back to Thomas Jefferson, if you like. It had not amounted to a
major national movement on quite the scale as say forest conservation,
watershed protection.
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