Growing small grain and removing everything but the stubble for fifty years greatly reduced the organic matter.  Keep in mind that half the biomass production in a field happens below ground as roots.  And keep in mind that the charts don’t reveal the sad appearance the crops probably had once the organic matter declined significantly.  Nor do they show that the seed produced on those degenerated fields probably would no longer sprout well enough to be used as seedgrain, so new seed would have been imported into the system each season, bringing with it new supplies of plant nutrients.  Without importing that bushel or so of wheat seed on each acre each year, the curves would have been steeper and gone even lower.

Corn is the hardest of the cereals on soil humus.  The reason is, wheat is closely broadcast in fall and makes a thick grassy overwintering stand that forms biomass out of most of the solar energy striking the field from spring until early summer when the seed forms.  Leafy oats create a little more biomass than wheat.  Corn, on the other hand, is frost tender and can’t be planted early.  It is also not closely planted but is sown in widely-spaced rows.  Corn takes quite a while before it forms a leaf canopy that uses all available solar energy.  In farming lingo, corn is a “row crop.”

Vegetables are also row crops.  Many types don’t form dense canopies that soak up all solar energy for the entire growing season like a virgin prairie.  As with corn, the ground is tilled bare, so for much of the best part of the growing season little or no organic matter is produced.  Of all the crops that a person can grow, vegetables are the hardest on soil organic matter.  There is no way that vegetables can maintain soil humus, even if all their residues are religiously composted and returned.  Soil organic matter would decline markedly even in an experiment in which we raised some small animals exclusively on the vegetables and returned all of their manure and urine too.

When growing vegetables we have to restore organic matter beyond the amount the garden itself produces.  The curves showing humus decline at the University of Missouri give us a good hint as to how much organic matter we are going to lose from vegetable gardening.  Let’s make the most pessimistic possible estimate and suppose that vegetable gardening is twice as hard on soil as was growing corn and removing everything but the stubble and root systems.

With corn, about 40 percent of the entire organic matter reserve is depleted in the first ten years.  Let’s suppose that vegetables might remove almost all soil humus in ten years, or 10 percent each year for the first few years.  This number is a crude. and for most places in America, a wildly pessimistic guess.

However, 10 percent loss per year may understate losses in some places.  I have seen old row crop soils in California’s central valley that look like white-colored blowing dust.  Nor does a 10 percent per year estimate quite allow for the surprising durability I observe in the still black and rich-looking old vegetable seed fields of western Washington State’s Skaget Valley.  These cool-climate fields have suffered chemical farming for decades without having been completely destroyed—­yet.