COMMITTEE ON APPROPRIATIONS

CLARENCE CANNON, Missouri, Chairman

HON. BEN F. JENSEN, REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF IOWA

DR. GEORGE BROWNING, ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR, EXPERIMENT STATION, IOWA

JOE O'HARA, STATE SOIL CONSERVATION SERVICE, IOWA SOIL TILTH LABORATORY, AMES, IOWA

Mr. WHITTEN. Gentlemen, we are pleased to have with us today our friend and colleague, Congressman Ben F. Jensen, of Iowa. Mr. Jensen is the ranking Republican on the Appropriations Committee. If I may say so for the record, the Department of Agriculture never had a better friend within the Congress.

Mr. Jensen, we are always glad to hear from you and we will be glad to have you introduce your associates.

Mr. JENSEN. Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, it is a privilege to come before your committee today and to bring with me two of my very good friends of long standing who are professionals in the field of soil conservation.

Dr. George Browning is the associate director of the Iowa Agricultural Experiment Station in Iowa. At the present time he is president of the Soil Conservation Society of America, which is quite an honor. In order to get that recognition, of course, he had to have a great record and much experience in this field of soil conservation. Also, I have with me this Irishman, a great friend of mine from my home district, Joe O'Hara. I believe he is next to the oldest soil conservation commissioner in the State of Iowa.

How many years?

Mr. O'HARA. Twenty-one years.

Mr. JENSEN. He has spent most of that time in the preservation of this precious topsoil of ours. He is the president of the Soil Conservation Commission of the State of Iowa at this time. I deem it an honor to introduce both of these gentlemen.

Dr. Browning and Joe O'Hara are here in the interest of getting a soil tilth laboratory located at Ames, Iowa. We are greatly interested in soil conservation in all its different ramifications.

The soil tilth problem is something so far reaching and so important to the conservation of our precious soil that these gentlemen have

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come here to try their best to tell the committee why they feel a soil tilth laboratory should be established in Ames, Iowa.

Basically, the soil tilth problem is comparable in every area. There are basic ideas which govern this program, which we are hoping we can get established.

I shall not take any more of the time away from these gentlemen. I do want to introduce Dr. George Browning, associate director of the Iowa Agricultural Experiment Station, at this time.

Dr. BROWNING. Thank you, Mr. Jensen.

Mr. WHITTEN. You may proceed, Dr. Browning.

STATEMENT OF DR. GEORGE BROWNING

Dr. BROWNING. Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, I am glad to have this opportunity to give you a little information about soil tilth and the soil tilth laboratory.

I might say before I start, that I started in soil conservation work soon after I got out of school-in about 1932-and worked in developing farm plans, and I was very much interested in research.

Then I spent about 20 years working in this general area of soil tilth. It is a rather difficult thing to describe, but you can see it better. I like to look at this in this way, and I shall take only a momentMother Nature, with her grasses and forests over a period of time, built up this loose, granular condition. You can pick it up and it runs through your fingers, absorbs water, does not crust over, and this is good tilth. It is necessary to get air and water in for plant growth and to get water in. Water will not run off, and if it does not run off we will not get silt, and so on.

On the other hand, you get cloddy and poor soil tilth, it spills over, water does not get into the soil. On the flatland where drainage is a problem, we have the same problem. You are trying to move water through the soil and you want to get it into the drain tiles. On the other hand, you want to get it in so it does not run off.

These are the basic principles we must maintain. We have cultivated the soil; the organic mattter breaks down. How far can we go until this begins to effect erosion, and so on? I thought a word about this was important.

Another thing in connection with this, in 1948 the Secretary of Agriculture appointed a committee at the request of Congress to make a study of the facility needs in soil and water research. There was one member from the State agricultural experiment stations. I guess because of the background and interest there, they asked me to represent the State experiment station.

Mr. WHITTEN. Do you have reference to 1948 or 1958?

Dr. BROWNING. 1958. The Senate document was published, and in 1959 the material we brought together after having 14 public hearings, and 300 different individuals and groups making reports, and information from public and private agencies, this was published as a Senate document, No. 59.

Mr. WHITTEN. This subcommittee initiated that study. We asked the Department to survey the country and see what regional laboratories were needed and give us the benefit of their advice as to how to proceed. Instead, the Department asked all of you people what you would like to have.

We could not get the then Secretary of Agriculture to make any determination, so he brought it in a bushel basket and dumped it in our laps, with no findings or recommendations. What happened in your State happened in every other State.

We knew better than to print it. Our friends on the other side did print it. In the printing this laboratory you are interested in was listed about 44th in priority.

Dr. BROWNING. That is right.

Mr. WHITTEN. I mention that so you might have some appreciation of the problem we have.

Dr. BROWNING. I realize.

Mr. WHITTEN. We asked for a study throughout the Nation. We got a compilation of what everybody would like to have.

I say that so you might know that this committee certainly is familiar with this. But we did not get what we asked the Department to give us.

Mr. HORAN. Mr. Chairman, if you will yield for another observation.

Mr. WHITTEN. I yield to the gentleman from Washington.

Mr. HORAN. There has been any amount of politics on that priority list, too.

Mr.WHITTEN. I don't question that in the least.

Dr. BROWNING. I might say in this connection, the members on the Committee were asked to provide this information and we were asked not to make a priority ourselves, but somebody else did.

Mr. WHITTEN. This is not to take issue. I have been chairman of this subcommittee for a good, long time. My office often says that anytime anybody comes to see me about money I try to make them feel sorry for me. I do because we are up against all this and don't have any money to meet it.

Proceed.

Dr. BROWNING. One of the items listed was soil tilth. We felt this was one of the very important areas.

While at several places there is a little work being done in this area, in the general application of it, there is not a concentrated effort at any one place where we can really get at the principles which go into why we have good tilth or why we do not have good tilth.

We believe that time is important and we need some of these basic principles which best could be done with a team of soil chemists, physicists, engineers, and so on working with special equipment available today.

Sure, this has to be field tested and applied elsewhere, but we think we need these basic principles in order to move along this way.

We feel it would be desirable to have a tilth laboratory of this type to provide this basic kind of information, and we think there would be an advantage to have it on a campus such as at Iowa State where already the department-I started in this work 20 years ago and did some work on this-which has two or three persons working on phases of this, and people in engineering working on this

Mr. WHITTEN. Your Congressman, Ben Jensen, talked the Democratic Congress into going along and putting the Animal Disease Laboratory at Ames. We are well aware of what Ames means to the country.

Dr. BROWNING. We are well aware of that. Thank you.

areas.

We mentioned as we looked at the areas there are several specialized We feel we should take advantage of the people at the university. There are libraries and special kinds of equipment there, chemists and physicists, and many of these things tie in, whether it is for this laboratory or others. As a principle it is desirable to have these so there can be interchange.

The other thing is that key, well-trained people are important. There are students there doing graduate work, getting ready themselves to be scientists in whatever area they may be, and facilities like that for part-time and summer employment gives them firsthand opportunity to get some experience.

We feel this is a rather important function from the standpoint of any overall program. This was another reason we felt specialized facilities are important so we can take advantage of them.

After Senate Document 59 was out, the North Central Experiment Station directors looked at these recommendations and went on record as favoring the soil tilth laboratory at Iowa.

They felt if there would be others, other places where they had specific interests would be desirable places, so they suggested Ames, Iowa, as a logical place, and the Agricultural Research Service of the USDA also is on record favoring the North Central States.

As Joe will mention later, the Iowa Soil Conservation District Commissioners are in favor of Iowa.

Iowa is part of the Corn Belt. A rather large percentage of the cultivated land which is producing our food now and will produce food for us in the future is here, and with their machinery and other problems we feel we need to look ahead at these things.

Sometimes we see these critical problems that we work on, but sometimes we do not plan long enough ahead for these prime areas, so we feel this is one of the reasons having it in a prime agricultural area is logical.

These are some of the reasons we feel as we do.

Mr. WHITTEN. Thank you, Dr. Browning.

Do you have a statement, Mr. O'Hara ?

Mr. O'HARA. Yes, sir.

Mr. WHITTEN. We will be glad to hear from you.

STATEMENT OF MR. JOE O'HARA

Mr. O'HARA. Needless to say, it is a pleasure for me to appear before you as an ordinary farmer in southwest Iowa.

As Mr. Jensen has told you, it has been my privilege to work with soil conservation work for the past 22 years. I have been mighty proud of the way soil and water conservation work has spread countrywide, and we have gotten recognition of it from all segments of our economy, both town and country.

Iowa has long been a leader in soil conservation work. We have soil conservation districts in all counties of the State. We have received applications under the Small Watershed Act for more than 50 watersheds and these represent about 1,200,000 acres. We have made great progress in conserving our water and soil resources but every day we meet new problems as well as the unanswered old ones. We are con