Conversations from the Hall of Fame

William E. Larson, soil scientist, interviewed 2001

(Time: ~10:08 minutes)

I was raised in a rural area there in Nebraska. I started out to be a high school Ag teacher but, because I was broke and had to have a job, I worked for a professor of soil science who in many ways was kind of a father to me. And he kept encouraging me to switch my major from ag education to soil science. I evolved into it and this professor Dr. H. F. Rhodes at University of Nebraska, never dictated to me, but he kept encouraging me to get into science and get more basic. 

As I indicated I started out in high school ag teaching but that isn't very technical in terms of the basic sciences: math, chemistry, physics. So Dr. Rhodes kept encouraging me and I often think maybe it was partly my admiration for him and partly my liking of the work.

And about my senior year he started telling me that I had to go to graduate school. I wasn't too sure at that time what graduate school was but then I stayed on at the University of Nebraska and got a master's degree in soil science in 1946. 

Then I went to Iowa State University got a doctorate and there too I had some wonderful professors notably Dr. W. H. Pierre who again was more like a father than a professor, very wonderful man and a great scientist.

When I first started in soil science work we were mostly concerned with crop production. Now we are as much or more concerned with answering environmental problems not just how do you produce more corn but what's the environmental and long-term results of this work.

Ethanol and Soil 

In the 1970s when the energy crisis came, there was a lot of interest in converting plant residues into alcohol or energy products, ethanol. We did a big survey, a computer type survey, using some national databases to estimate how much residue could be safely, corn stalks and wheat straw, could be removed from the farm without endangering the soil. That was widely accepted and widely used and amazingly a similar study is being done today because of the energy problem. Although now, of course, they have much better databases than we had. 

We started this at Minnesota but within ARS we talked to our colleagues at Kansas, South Carolina, Oregon and a few other places so that it was really a national study and really a great cooperative effort by a number of locations within ARS. It's one of the nice things about ARS that you can cover the country with people of similar interests and the same administrative structure.

Soil Erosion: Long-Term Damage

In 1977, Congress passed the RCA Act, the Resources Conservation Act, Soil, Water and Related Resources Conservation Act. And Congress was asking the question, how much damage is soil erosion really doing to future crop productivity. And people kept calling me up from Washington here, saying, what's a ton of soil worth? Up until then we'd expressed erosion in terms of how many tons of soil was removed from a location but we never really faced up to questioning what that was really doing to long-term productivity. 

Congress was interested in knowing how much are we damaging future productivity. So again we developed a simple model using national databases and made some estimates that since have been confirmed by more comprehensive models and this was widely used by the Soil Conservation Service and ARS and the USDA. And it's always rewarding to know that your data is being used and used immediately to help solve or help answer national concerns. 

Conservation Tillage

Well I was also highly involved in the original work on conservation tillage where you leave the residues on the surface essentially. In the last decade or so according to the surveys, that the Soil Conservation Service or Natural Resources Conservation Service has made, erosion has been reduced roughly by one half. Much of that is due to conservation tillage. So I don't take but small responsibility for that but still it shows that our work is being used and is being appreciated. 

Safety of Biosolids

In the '70s we got involved in uses of biosolids. Biosolids is a nice word for sewage sludge and the like, on land. One of the concerns was how much metals that are contained in the sewage sludge, when you put that on the land, how much of that gets into the plant and is it significant in terms of human health and animal health. So we came up with some guidelines and our guidelines were quickly accepted essentially without change by the EPA as national guidelines. Again it's an example of where the research was badly needed it was done rather promptly and was accepted very promptly. 

My field allowed me to work with the greatest people on earth. People in soil and crops are a great, great group. I want to pay particular tribute to some of my teachers and college mentors, I like to call them, and mentors within ARS. I worked with some wonderful people in ARS after getting out of graduate school and I could go on and name them but the list might get a little long and I would sure leave someone out.

Most Critical Need

I've traveled a lot over the world and while some of the economists say world food production is sufficient it probably is if you look at it on a gross level but if you look at it country by country, for example I've traveled and worked in the country of Uganda, starvation and malnutrition are rampant. The World Health Organization estimates that 35-40 thousand children die every night from lack of food or bad nutrition. 

So one of my real concerns is, why can't we as Americans or from the developed countries do a better job of helping those people produce their own food. I think it's unrealistic to think we're going to produce it and ship it over there. They don't have the money to pay the shipping and all and we not only need to look at total food production but the quality of that food. There's some advances, not in my field, but as you probably know there's this gentleman that developed what they call golden rice where he's incorporated a gene that allows vitamin A to be produced in rice. 

Well that would be a tremendous advancement if we could get this in all these countries. So we need to develop better ways world wide, produce more food, better quality food and at the same time protect the environment, protect the soil, protect our water, protect wildlife habitats, genetic diversity and all of these other things. 

In the past, as I indicated we have looked at crop production and kind of ignored all of these environmental concerns. Now we know they are there and we must, somehow, do something about it.