And the Winner Is...The 1949 Soil Conservation Essay Contest

First prize for the fertilizer industry-sponsored soil conservation essay contest was a 1949 Buick Super 4-Door Sedan

How would you like to win a brand-new car—by writing an 800-word-essay on the topic of soil conservation? First prize is a Buick Super 4-Door Sedan; second prize is a Chevrolet De Luxe 4-Door Sedan, third prize is $750 cash, and fourth prize is $250 cash, courtesy of the National Grange and the American Plant Food Council. Unfortunately, before you rush for your manual typewriter, I have to let you know that the deadline is long past—it was June 15, 1949.

Those were the actual prizes for the youth soil essay contest advertised in the January 1949 issue of Plant Food Journal. Over 20,000 young men and women mailed in their essays on the topic of “Conservation of Our Soil Resources,” and, after due deliberation, the judges awarded the Buick to Wilfred M. Schutz, a 19-year-old farm boy from Eustis, Nebraska. “Young Schutz, who would be a whiz in college, doesn’t plan to attend,” the magazine informed its readers. “He graduated from the eighth grade with the highest average in the county. He was also valedictorian and president of his senior high school class. He believes that too many young folks are leaving the farms now. ‘I’m going to stay here and take over when dad retires,’” Schutz told the magazine. “This is the life I like the best.”

Keeping in mind that this contest was sponsored by the fertilizer industry, it’s intriguing that they picked Schutz to be the winner. “Schutz is the first to tell you that commercial fertilizer and manure will not replace each other,” Plant Food Journal reported in the October 1949 issue. “He emphasizes that they supplement each other. You should add plenty of barnyard manure to soil.” Schutz, the magazine noted, “likes to read Louis Bromfield’s books and articles, although he doesn’t agree with him one hundred percent.”

“In spite of the fact that commercial fertilizers have been an important aid to the farmer in maintaining soil fertility, there is a tendency to rely on them too completely,” Schutz wrote in his prize-winning essay. “A good tilth can be maintained only by plowing under, from time to time, a liberal supply of barnyard manure as well as any crop residue that remains on the land….A good farmer should not overlook the opportunity of renewing his soil fertility by means of crop rotations, especially a rotation that includes legumes….Our nation and the world must realize now that a high standard of living, and a healthy economic status cannot be maintained if our oldest and most important natural resources is allowed to deteriorate.”

Natalie Snyder, the eighteen-year-old girl from Pittstown, New Jersey who won the Chevy De Luxe, concurred. “It is our duty, as the young of Today and the citizens of Tomorrow, to become acquainted with these values and learn to use them wisely, for when ignorance of proper soil conservation methods is completely overcome, both the farm and the nation will be better places in which to dwell, and will be the foundation for a finer world for ourselves and our posterity,” she wrote in the second-place essay.

The essay contest was shortly before a watershed moment in fertilizer history—the Delaney Hearings of 1950-1952, when the fertilizer industry and most agricultural scientists would take a hardline stance against organic farming. But in the late 1940s, they still emphasized that even chemical fertilizers couldn’t keep soils fertile without adequate organic matter. It was probably the last time in history that somebody could win a car by writing an essay that recommended using both chemical and organic fertilizers.