Word: grasslands
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...darkness of a South African summer morning last week, thousands of Johannesburg policemen-the whites armed with Sten guns and rifles, the blacks with clubs and spears-filed out of their barracks and drove in 300 trucks to a narrow strip of grassland that separates the white suburb of Westdene from the crowded Negro slum of Sophiatown. The cops marched quietly into the sleeping warren. Every 20 yards a policeman took up station. "We mustn't waken these bloody Kaffirs," warned one officer. "We'll shock them well enough after daylight...
Through the old dust-bowl region-spreading outward from the area where the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles hang together-hundreds of soil-conservation districts had been formed; farmers had "windstripped" their fields by alternating bands of cropland with long panels of soil-anchoring grassland. They had planted tree windbreaks, built broad terraces to catch snow and water, and planted crops on long-range rotation schedules...
Another thing they laugh at is the familiar phrase, "irreplaceable topsoil." Topsoil should certainly be cherished and protected, the soil men say, but it is not irreplaceable. In 1937, a U.S. Government experiment station skinned ten inches of soil off half an acre of virgin Ohio grassland, leaving nothing but the yellow subsoil. Corn planted on an untreated strip of this poor stuff produced no crop at all. But other strips were nursed along with fertilizer and crop rotations. During the sixth season, the best strip of man-made topsoil produced 86 bushels of corn an acre, more than twice...
What the World Can Do. The chernozems and other temperate grassland soils are mostly in use already; all they ever needed was simple plowing & planting. But there are still large areas of unused forest soils (podsols) which can be made productive by up-to-date methods as soon as transportation makes them accessible and a market appears for their produce...
Gifts & Signatures. Lobengula was the last South African native king to fight for his independence. He ruled a territory as large as Finland, bounded by the Zambezi and the Limpopo Rivers. But even in this large and lonely expanse of grassland he could feel the presence of Portuguese, Germans, British and Boers. These white people sent emissaries to his court bearing gifts of champagne, brandy and sovereigns. Afterwards, they always asked Lobengula if he would kindly sign a piece of paper called a "concession." which permitted them to dig in the ground like children, and to open little stores. Lobengula...