Half of this already has reached the stage of gullying. Oklahoma has no monopoly on erosion. The problem is equally bad in numerous other localities, as in the middle-Missouri River country, throughout the Valley of East Tennessee, the Ohio Valley and southwestern Wisconsin. I have just returned from the Palouse wheat belt of the Northwest, where a soil-erosion experiment station is to be established in order to find ways to save the splendid grain lands of that fertile region before they have washed too deeply. The evil effects of erosion are cumulative.
Destructive washing speeds up as the soil is cut into deeper and deeper.
Already over 17 million acres of formerly tilled land have been destroyed in this country or so badly washed that farmers can not afford to reclaim it. Ninety thousand acres of such land were found in a single county. The damage of this more destructive type of washing is insignificant in comparison with the insidious wastage of unceasing sheet erosion. Until recently, we scarcely gave a passing thought to the cost of erosion. We looked on it as a necessary evil, a natural process, impossible of control.