With plant cover removed, the rate of weathering is accelerated far beyond the rate of creation. In fact, the genesis of fine particles and organic matter into soils happens so slowly that the end product must be considered non-renewable. One survey of a southern district in the 1930s found earthworks abandoned and pine stands growing on land not cultivated since 1887. Under the crowns, on high ground, the researchers found fifty years of topsoil one-sixteenth of an inch deep. In human time it can be lost forever.
Subsoils are the bones of the earth.
They have no living organisms, no rotting plant food, and they hold little water. All these are lost with topsoils, and people always follow. Farming needed to hold rural society in place against the rampant changes and reversals that characterized the post-1812 economy by promoting a conservative regard for land. They tended to frame improvement as a matter of self-interested restraint centered on the stewardship of soil. But in no way did they speak with one voice and they defy classification as a unified movement.