Pleasant Valley by Louis Broomfield

“Pleasant Valley”  by Pulitzer Prize author Louis Broomfield was first published in 1943 and again in 1945. It is one of many books relating to Soil and Water conservation that I have accumulated over the years and never took time to read. I came across it a few days ago while sorting out “stuff” to take to Et-Cetera and began reading. I was hardly able to lay it down. Though Broomfield and his Malabar Farm in Ohio were familiar from early day conservation discussions, I knew very little of the details of his “commitment”.  He was born in Mansfield, Ohio in 1896, went off to Cornell to study agriculture but transferred to Columbia where he studied journalism. He returned from duty in France following WWI and began his writing career in New York City. He took his family back to Paris in 1925 for a family vacation and stayed for 13 years in the community of American writers including Sinclair Lewis, Gertrude Stein, etc. His fiction and non-fiction writing was acclaimed as well as in the emerging film industry in Hollywood. With WWII imminent  the family returned to the United States where they purchased 1,000 acres of land in the area of his boyhood home.  With assistance from local SCS technicians and others, he developed Malabar into a model conservation farm. Broomfield recognized that the productive capability of much agriculture land had been destroyed by soil erosion and abusive farming practices. It was at about the same time that Hugh Hammond Bennett was leading the newly founded Soil Conservation Service in a National effort to combat soil erosion. Broomfield and Bennett had much in common through their love of the land and the importance of maintaining productive soil for our Country’s future. They not only recognized the importance of Soil but all of God’s given Natural Resources. Malabar Farm became an Ohio State Park following Broomfield’s death and today is a “Living history of sustainable land use”. The book was most enjoyable reading and confirmed my career choice of over 40 years devoted to sustainable land use.