Hugh Hammond Bennett founded the Soil Conservation Service in the U. S. Department of Agriculture and thus became known as the father of soil conservation in the U. S. This paper examines the influence of Bennett's career as a soil scientist on his career in the Soil Conservation Service. It is occasionally overlooked that, discounting military service in World War I, Bennett had a nearly 30-year career as a soil scientist in USDA. His reputation among latter-day soil scientists has suffered somewhat for a number of reasons. There was interagency strife between the Soil Conservation Service and the Bureau of Soils. The soil survey group led by Charles Kellogg in the Bureau of Chemistry and Soils regarded the soil conservation surveys made by SCS as less scientifically rigorous than the soil surveys conducted by the Kellogg group. Some soil scientists thought the menace of soil erosion exaggerated. The last few decades have seen soil scientists focus more attention toward soil erosion as one form of land degradation. Bennett succeeded in making soil erosion a topic to be considered in soil surveys and in classifications for land use.

Bennett earned a bachelor of science degree with an emphasis in chemistry and geology from the University of North Carolina in June 1903. Bennett accepted a job in the bureau's laboratory in Washington, D.C., but agreed first to assist on the soil survey of Davidson County, Tennessee. The acceptance of that task, in Bennett's words, “fixed my life's work in soils.” The soil survey afforded him an opportunity to observe soil usage not only in his native South, but nationwide and internationally. The contrasts were great. In Davidson County, he observed one of the best examples of adjustment of agriculture to soils, where the limestone-derived soils have been in cultivation for more than a century. Farmers made use of crop rotations and green manuring to maintain the productivity of the soils. This situation sharply with what he saw in Louisa County, Virginia, where he compared eroded soils on cropland to similar soils under forest cover. Surveys afterward continually noted erosion. The Fairfield County, South Carolina, report included a section on “Rough Gullied Land.”

The soil survey, when Bennett joined it, had only recently created the concept of the soil type and soil series. Bennett recommended these classifications of soils as a means of making recommendations for land use. For example, the Orangeburg sandy loam of Lauderdale County, Mississippi, presented the paradox, as a number of soils do, of being both highly productive and highly erodible. Bennett recommended terracing for cropland on the gentler slopes but timber for the steeper slopes. Otherwise deep, gorge-like gullies, similar to ones he observed, would develop. In the Southeast Bennett continually noticed soils that, due to landscape position, would eventually be ruined if farmed with the methods of the day. Thus he eventually used the soil type as the basis for land classification for forestry. Since there was little timber productivity data, this classification was based more on unsuitability for cropland than on suitability for timberland. Bennett recommended such classification of forest land in his book the Soils and Agriculture of the Southern States (1921). He surmised that farming certain soil types was not only wasteful of the soils but also of human effort at farming.

In his work in the Bureau of Soils, Bennett had opportunities to work in U. S. territories and foreign countries, namely in Costa Rica and Panama (1909), Panama Canal Zone (1923-24), Alaska (1914), and Cuba (1925-1926). He served on the Guatemala-Honduras Boundary Commission (1919). He found tropical soil which he regarded as “peculiar” and “not in the least susceptible to erosion.” Thus, he was cognizant of the vast differences in erodibility of soils.

As Bennett's responsibilities in the Bureau of Soils expanded, he had opportunities to observe soils nationwide. His sense that soil erosion was a serious problem grew. On one level he educated on the dangers of soil erosion as in the USDA bulletin "Soil Erosion a National Menace". At the same time he tried to classify and map soil erosion problems. He identified areas where soil characteristics combined with the prevailing agricultural uses created what he regarded as soil erosion problem areas. He and the Bureau of Soils were involved in the study of Georgia Land Use Problems. Bennett regarded this report as the first real erosion surveys. Bennett took these experiences and lasting impressions with him to his new job as director of the Soil Erosion Service in the fall of 1933.