Make Tax Allowances for Fertility Depletion

Why shouldn’t soil fertility be treated the same as other mineral resources?

Every full load of high protein legume hay takes off some fertility which the consumers of milk, meat or wool never adequately pay for.

 

The 85 percent of us living in the urban areas do not yet feel any obligation to help maintain the fertility resources coming to us gratis from the people in the rural areas.

How soon will we wake up to the obligation we owe to those who maintain reasonable levels of soil fertility so that we may be fed well?

We are set up in urban commercial businesses and industries of which the laws, economics and taxation procedures are so formulated under carefully lobbied legislation that our capital investments in them are self-perpetuating. Even for the minerals or rocks taken out of the limestone quarry, for example, the owner-investor may be allowed a depreciation, or depletion, figure as high as 15 percent of the income. For the owner-investor in an oil well, it may be a larger amount. The capital investment in these mineral businesses is soon recovered.

Soil Depletion Cuts Farm Capital

But for the mineral fertility taken out of the soil and delivered in the crops to the urban population without charge for it, there is as yet no economist or authority on taxation suggesting the justice of a depletion allowance to the landowner, or investor in that kind of real estate, for the perpetuation of his soil fertility capital in his farming business. His investment in the minerals in the soil for the food production for all of us is being liquidated gradually under the economic thinking (or the lack of it) which contends that the farmer is thereby taking a profit. On the contrary, he is compelled to throw his financial, and our national, security by installments into the bargain every time he makes a sale of his products. Those of us on the urban receiving end of that transaction get those installments gratis and flush them into the sea.

We are parties to the crime of soil fertility exploitation, but yet are crying against the rising costs of living. We are slow to see that such short sightedness in our economic, agricultural, and other policies toward the fertility resources in the soil are undermining seriously our national security. All this is the more serious with a growing pressure on the soil’s production potential by our own increasing population to say nothing of that by the rest of the world calling on us to share that potential with them.

Lime Helps Produce Protein

Liming our soils deserves consideration as an operation undergirding our future security in food, and particularly those foods of high protein content. We have long known that lime is needed for legumes. We are slow to see that need as one for the production of the protein, rather than the tonnage yield of the crop. It is lime via that route that gets us our meat, milk and eggs. Viewed in this light, one cannot escape the question whether we dare expect the farmer to continue liquidating his fertility assets under the false concept of taking a profit and at the same time ask him to purchase large amounts of calcium and magnesium to aggravate his rate of liquidation all the more.

Isn’t it about time that as a basic agricultural policy we design the required machinery of economics and taxation to guarantee the self-perpetuation of the farmer’s fertility capital which must feed all of us, both urban and rural?

Liberal applications of lime and fertilizers are needed if fertility levels are to be maintained under intensive farming practices.

 

Perhaps now that the fertility restoration by liming the soil is moving itself into the more exact category of soil chemistry for the nutrition of our plants, our animals and ourselves, should not the maintenance of the soil fertility and thereby of agricultural industry be interpreted by the same views in economics and taxation as those prevailing in other industries?

Perhaps we can bring about self perpetuation of our soil fertility capital under the agricultural business in the rural areas in the same manner as perpetuation prevails for monetary capital under all businesses in our urban centers. If that situation is consummated, then liming the soil for calcium’s sake will become big business by meeting the major needs in our soils; namely, lime and other fertility-restorating helps through which there can be guaranteed greater national food security for the future of all of us.