Speech

FRIENDS OF THE LAND Address by Chester C. Davis President, Federal Reserve Bank of St, Louis Before the Annual Meeting of Friends of the Land Jefferson Hotel, St. Louis, Ko. Thursday morning, October 18, 1945. Digitized for FRASER http://fraser.stlouisfed.org/ Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis FRIENDS OF TIS LAND It is my good fortune to be called on to welcome you all to the second Conservation Forum and Annual meeting of Friends o± the Land held in St. Louis. This is an appropriate meeting place; St. Louis is. the heart of a great diversified farm, It was founded by traffic in products of the land and streams of the vast western empire for which it was the portal, it grew because its citizens found work to do processing and handling raw materials that came from the ground, and serving the population the land supported. We are meeting here at the junction of two of the. world's greatest waterways that drain the spring and winter wheat belts before flowing into the greatest cotton- producing area in the world. A century and a half ago, St. Louis became the hub of the land and water trails th&t opened up the Great West. Then a prairie sea of grass and trees s tret cried boundlessly to the west and north and south. Grass brushed the stirrups of pioneers and surveyors as they rode through a kingdom of unplowed range. Later the empire builders laid their rails on prairie sod from here to the setting sun. Then the land was green and the rivers clean and nature, was in balance with the eleme nt s. But the grass and trees, like the bufTalo end other wild life they fed and sheltered gave wxy before the settler, his plow and his ax. The few hills of corn the Pilgrims plcnted and fertilized with fish spread to 108 million acres. Corn and wheat and cotton have erased the pioneer trails and made a nation passing great, but in the process the v.eaith of our land has been going dov/n to the sea in mud. Digitized for FRASER http://fraser.stlouisfed.org/ Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis I suppose all of us hold in our minds some pictures, some things we ourselves have seen, that point up and dramatize to us the mishandling and destruction of the land, In 1930 1 drove out west of Des Moines to see the home farm we had gold after the death of my father 25 years before, I remembered it as a pleasant farm in rolling country, with black loom plowlands and fine woodlots, and a great variety of fruit trees and berry shrubs about the place. I drove past the farm without recognizing it, and turned back to find it. The black land was gone, the plowed slopes vo/re yellow and gullied, the yard v/eedgrown, the house a derelict. Tvhat we had called !,tho woods*1 had been cleared, and the land row-cropped to d^ath. That happened in 25 years of "square farming in a round country", of up-and-down hill plowing. When the Friends of the Land met in St. Louis in 1942 we organized a tour to visit one county that has within a few miles of each other two contrasting areas - one neighborhood a scene of desolation and total abandonment of hundreds of farms, the other a community of organized restoration and conservation. The blighted area contained one solid block of at least 150,000 acres which had been entirely abandoned. Tho county agent told me that at the turn of the century the population had averaged one farm family to less than 100 acres, according to court house records. Plowing for corn and wheat during the first world war finished this land for- economic use until the long and costly process of restoration has been applied. I run glad such auto tours are possible again. There is nothing a conservation society, a Friends of the Land chapter can do that is so productive of understanding; there is no community that Digitized for FRASER http://fraser.stlouisfed.org/ Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis hasn't its object lessons* The Soil Conservation Service tells us that at least 3 billion tons of solid soil materials are washed out of the .fields r ad pastures of the United States each year by water erosion alone. Some enterprising mind has figured out that to DOVO such a bulk of soil on rails would take a train of freigirb cars 475,000 miles long ~ long enough to girdle the planet 18 times at the Equator. With this ercsion we* lose annually about six times as much mineral plant food - nitrogen, calcium, phosphorous, potash, magnesium, sulphur, etc. - as farm crops take i:r>-L-. the soil in a year. Ho are depleting our mineral reserves at a rapid rate, ana without those minerals in the right supply wo cannot have healthy plants or healthy people. That is a vitally important angle tc our soil problem. The farms are giving up to the cities in the process of land mining which is what most farming is, a minerol wealth which the fanner does not figure in his costs. Ee is depleting his reserves year by year, but he can't charge it against his taxes. It occurs to me that this is one good reason why ve en the pavements owe it to ourselves os well as to our farmer neighbors to take m'~re than just o passive interest in the protection and restoration of the land. I believe we con se*., ond define other interests which city people have - the very people in this room have - in the critical challenge to befriend the land. Unless cover is restored ;:n the hills and unless cultivated land is handled differently on 'the slopes and in the valleys that drain into the waterways ef tne groat iviissi ssippi basin, recurring floods are Digitized for FRASER http://fraser.stlouisfed.org/ Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis -4 - going; to wreak increasing dum?og>- in spite of the miracles of engineering construction we attempt cr per torn. That is important; it moans some thing to nil of us. Here's another interest - if this country v/ili only do what it knows how to do to restore hill covers and to farm practice-lly for soil conservation, we will be doing more than can be done in any other way to multiply and perpetuate wild life in the streens and fields of our land. There are other sides and angles, but they can wait, if these already suggested don't strike deep into your interest, nothing else will. 1 am ready t- assume that we are ail m:ore :r less aware of these things - of the need for s:;il a--a water conservetion, ana the relation to human health, to flood control; to wild life. The question is, how much are we interested? is our interest passivv., the tco-bed- but-what-can-I-do variety? Or are wo willing to search our hearts and minds to se;? if there isn't s u.ietaing wo can do about it? Is there a place for the Friends of the ]>nJ, ana, if so, do you belong in it? Is a common interest in the preservation of the soil and all that it implies strong enough cement i'cr a local and s national organization that has no other interest or purpose? Y/ith your permission, I would like to tell you something about the Friends of the Land. The Friends of the Lsnd as a .formal body is five years old. It is young, it is small, its few thousand members are widely scattered. But it is growing, interest in it is increasing, and it is learning to walk and make its way in the world. The reason, as one of its founders puts it, is this: "when people come together to work for the land, the mother of us all, to try to protect it ana save it for the use of human beings, for ourselves and the present as wo 11 rs for posterity and Digitized for FRASER http://fraser.stlouisfed.org/ Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis - 5 - the future ***, there they find some common denominator that brings them closer together than any other work on the face of the Earth." Friends of the Land is a non-profit, non-political society* It is strictly an amateur; no officer or director or staff executive is paid a sslary by the organization. It was founded and has developed as a result of the devoted and unselfish work of a lsr/re number of men and women - I wish I could name them sll - Louis Bromfield, Russell Lord, Dr. Forman, Jane Francke, Ollie Fink, Dr. Holzor, Ku^h Bennett, Albrecht of Missouri, Ed Condon - even to name these do-js injustice to .many others I haven't mentioned. Some people complain to me that the Friends of the Land society isn't "practical"• The answer, of course, is thct Friends of the Land will be just as "practicrl" as we make it. If s connection with the organization stimulates a community to study local conditions and spread the li-ht through out its territory, then Friends of the Land will be. justified by a practical result. If it reaches many of the non-farming population, which is about four-fifths of our total, with the vital message of conservation, it is "prac tical". If it nourishes and spreads the reach of its m?\"&zine "The Land" to its full potential usefulness, then fr^m my standpoint it has justified it self even though it fails to accomplish another single thinn;. After all, the question of whet is practical rnj whot is not depends pretty i.uch on the point of view. When o y::un^ man in Ohio tried to ret his neighbor to plow rnd cultivate on the contour, that prrc- ticol individual made the clrssic answer: "Youn.5 man, you can't tell me anything about farming; I've worn out three farms already." The corn belt farmer who forms his rolling slopes with square fields Loy think he is entirely practical, but less tnrn r ;;*enerr tion of thet kind Digitized for FRASER http://fraser.stlouisfed.org/ Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis - 6 - of farming has destroyed the majur values of many a farm. "What is the attitude of Friends of the Land toward other conservation organizations and societies, and what are our relationships? If anyone feels that in order to join Friends of the Land, he must give up some other conservation membership, I would prefer that he do not join us, Vvhile I intend to raise the question at our regular meeting tomorrow, I am confident that Friends of the Land will endorse and support the move ment of which Jay Darling has bjeri dreaming, to establish an independent clearing house, a common nerve cantor, for oil conservation interests» We believe that care of the land, is the bod rock on which all conservation rests, and that the job is big enough - perhaps too big - for all of us working together. There are a few thoughts I want to leave for the local Chapter which I hope will grow out of tnis meeting. To reach its moximuir usefulness a community organization must bo big enough and alert enough to generate its own current so that it will nnt need to depend on power from the outside. Look about you - everywhere you can sue the right way and the wrong way to handle the land. There is enough t<< be seen Yiere to be done hbre, and 9 there is enough leadership no re so that you will not need to turn elsewhere for programs and object lessons. You will -ict even need to bring on the outside "Traveling circus" to make your meetings entertaining and inspiring - Bromfield and Bennett and Fern an and Lord and Franck- an:; Fink cannot stretch everywhere. From here you can help spread the understanding that flood control is a two-phased j/b. One belongs to the engineer, to n^ndle floods when they come. The other falls to men on the land, to friends of the land, who alane can keep waters in th- courses where they belong. Digitized for FRASER http://fraser.stlouisfed.org/ Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis - 7 - I realise that nearly every aan end woman gathered here has a direct or indirect interest in the ownership of a piece of land. The truth and importance of these things are well-known tr you. Friends of the Lend brings you no new philosophy. Perhaps it can help add to the light and force that are already here. It is what we do £'?r ourselves that counts most; the values roost worthwhile will not be brought to us from the outside. Let me in cnolusi an then.!: tira, St. Louis Chamber of Commerce, the Farmers Club, the Belleville granges, the Gvrden and Womenr s Clubs, the many who have w:rkcd to arr-no., this 00- -tiag. Let no in an official role bring you the greetings and the best wishes of the lecol chapters all over the Country. For those :;f us who hold t^uipcc^ry posts as officers in the national organisation, lot me tell you that we rmed the help, the force, and the leadership which you in this regirn can give. There is plenty of work to be done if we know how to do it. 0000co Digitized for FRASER http://fraser.stlouisfed.org/ Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis

Chester C. Davis (1945, October 17). Speech. Speeches, Federal Reserve. https://whenthefedspeaks.com/doc/speech_19451018_davis

@misc{wtfs_speech_19451018_davis,
  author = {Chester C. Davis},
  title = {Speech},
  year = {1945},
  month = {Oct},
  howpublished = {Speeches, Federal Reserve},
  url = {https://whenthefedspeaks.com/doc/speech_19451018_davis},
  note = {Retrieved via When the Fed Speaks corpus}
}