January 24, 1936
So to manage physical use of land in the United States that we will not only maintain soil fertility, but will hand on to the next generation a country with better productive power and a greater permanency of land use than the one we inherited from the previous generation—that is the broad objective.
We have got to go a long way to catch up with the mistakes of the past, so as to make the United States, as a whole, as productive as it was a hundred years ago.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, Excerpt from a Press Conference Release on Land Use Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/208982