Apparent farm solvency conceals ongoing topsoil loss to erosion

Evidence

Everything on this farm spells money in the bank. The farmstead abounds in fresh paint, steel, and concrete. A date on the barn commemorates the founding fathers. The roof bristles with lightning rods, the weathercock is proud with new gilt. Even the pigs look solvent. … In the creek-bottom pasture, flood trash is lodged high in the bushes. The creek banks are raw; chunks of Illinois have sloughed off and moved seaward. Patches of giant ragweed mark where freshets have thrown down the silt they could not carry. Just who is solvent? For how long? — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 425

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the reading purpose’s disturbance-history thread: reading current landscape (flood trash, raw banks) to reconstruct ongoing land-use damage invisible in farm ledgers. — connects to: Abuse of land stems from regarding it as owned commodity rather than community — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Other…, 10; Fences made continuous grazing lethal to Silphium where buffalo pasturing had been tolerable — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Other…, 181; Wild Mexican rivers provide the base datum for judging erosion damage — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Other…, 701 (+6 more)
• SEED: The juxtaposition of gilt weathercock and sloughing creek bank is an essay on accounting for natural capital — whose books record soil moving seaward?

Broader Connections

• The erosion crisis migrated from farmland to suburban construction by 1965 #responds-to (0.85) — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 825
• Tilled agricultural soil lacks the self-organized web of forest soil #expands (0.80) — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 844
• Construction-site sediment can run 40,000 times farmland erosion rates #complicates (0.75) — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 823