It has been estimated that over 20 billion tons of arable soil are removed from farming areas annually by wind and/or rain erosion and swept into rivers, lakes, and seas. This type of erosion is not only damaging to the arable soil in the physical sense and in terms of its depleting it with respect to certain chemicals and organic matter necessary to support plant life, but it also presents a problem when the soil has been planted. The blown wind tends to abrade the emerging plants and causes great damage to them particularly in areas that are dry.
Moreover, it has been known that removal of the fertilizers from the soil to lakes, rivers and the like has had tremendous adverse effects on aquatic life in that the organic and inorganic matter deposited often causes extreme damage to fish and aquatic plants.
The problem is made even more severe in fairly arid areas where there is extensive moisture loss from the planted soils.
Many efforts have been made to minimize both the erosion of the soil and the moisture loss from the soil involving a variety of compositions known to form barrier layers on the soil and ameliorate the soil erosion and evaporation problem. The difficulty however has been that the cost of utilizing such products is prohibitive, it being clear that the addition of hundreds of dollars of costs per acre to eliminate this problem is a prohibitive cost the farmers who can barely now afford the other costs involved in surviving the economics problem in farming.
Moreover, the products presently used present the problem in some cases of being damaging to the soil either in terms of leaving residual materials behind such as fluoride which are toxic to plant life or in having effects on the soil, such as hardening, making it therefore difficult to reuse the soil for revegetation.
Heretofore there has not been any suitable transient low-cost soil erosion and evaporation material that can be applied to agriculture areas which is also environmentally sound; that is to say, that it is biologically compatible with the soils and the crops. In addition, it is required not only to have a low-cost material but one that can be applied with relative ease and simplicity; preferably with existing apparatus in agricultural use such as conventional sprayers.