Prepared for a talk at the 50th Anniversary of the Coon Valley Demonstration Project, Coon Valley, Wisconsin, August 13, 1983. The town of Coon Valley hosted a celebration yesterday to mark the 50th year of one of America's conservation success stories.
Coon Valley is located in the Coon Creek watershed in southwestern Wisconsin.
The picturesque valley with fields of stripcropping winding around the hillsides, offers a startling transformation from the 1930s' scene of rectangular fields with straight rows that induced soil erosion. In 1933 a new federal agency, the Soil Erosion Service, selected Coon Creek as the first watershed in which to demonstrate the values of soil conservation measures. Under the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, soil erosion control was included as one means of public employment. The announcement caught the attention of a soil scientist in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Hugh H. Bennett. For years Bennett had been making speeches and writing articles to alert Americans to the need to do something about soil erosion.