新中国建立以后,竺可桢同志被任命为中国科学院副院长。在科学院草创时期,他决心要在院内建立两个研究所:地质研究所主要为工业建设,查勘矿产资源,从事基础研究。地理研究所主要为农业发展进行工作。在地理研究所筹建前夕,他坚定而明确地提出他的方针。此后二十多年,他发起、推动、领导、支持与农业有关的工作,不遗余力。

When the Chinese Academy of China came into existence, Professor Chu Ko-chen was appointed as its vice president. In the midst of his numerous contemplations, were his painstaking efforts to establish an institute of geography to undertake investigations for the development of agriculture in China. As the president of the geographical Society of China, he was a warm advocate of geographicl work in this direction. As chairman of the Commission of Comprehensive Survey of Natural Resources, he organized and supervised a series of multidisciplinary expeditions to various regions of this country where the physical conditions were little known to the scientific world. As a scientist, he devoted himself with the limited time available to him to researches relevant to agriculture: crop-climate relationships, phenology and climatic changes. In charge of the team work of the physico-geographic regionalization, he persistently called the attention of all participants to focus on factors bearing significance to agricultural production broadly defined, to include crop cultivation, livestock raising and forestry. He is remembered for his able and effective coordination of the activities of nine working groups of scientists of different disciplines.He was a keen observer of the agricultural problems of every region of China. But it seems to me that he was most concerned with the situation of North China: the Loess Highlands, the middle and Lower Yellow River and the vast plain where is located the capital of China. Endorsed by him, the Institute of Geography sent in 1952 two field parties, one to the middle Yellow River region between Shanxi and Shanxi and another to the abandoned course of the Yellow on the plain to the north of the Huaihe. In the next year, his centre of interest had been shifted to the soil conservation of the Loess Highlands. According to his instruction, I had joined the work and in the ensueing years, he himself had once and again made field studies in Shanxi and Gansu. He held an over-all view, strongly supporting the coordination of various measures in a drainage area. His emphasis on soil conservation on the Loess Highlands did not detract from his recognition of the importance of agricultural problems on the North China Plain. His interest in the water conservancy of the Plain dates back at least to sixty years ago. In the preparation of the multiple purpose basin planning of the Yellow River in the middle fifties, he had gone through thick and thin to materialize the organization of a large working force to map the soils of the Plain on a scale of 1:200000. In early sixties, he headed the steering committee of multidisciplinary teams under the auspices of the Academy working on land amelioration schemes for some sectors of the North China Plain. The two regions under consideration are similar in a number of respects and linked by the middle and lower Yellow River. In the opinion of Professor Zhu, the proble-ms of both regions must be solved in concert. How sure is our control of the Yellow River may serve as the barometer of how successful is our agricultural development of the areas concerned.Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the lower reaches of the Yellow River has been safely kept within its embankments over a period of thirty four years. This is no doubt a great feat. But the sediment discharge from the Loess Highlands to the lower course averages 1.6 billion tons each year. Some 0.4 billion tons of this is annually deposited in the river channel. The river bed is raised about 10 cm each year. The danger of flooding is ever increasing. Over the North China Plain, the crop yield is lower than the national average and varies widely from year to year. The situation with the Loess H’g-hlands is even much worse. A more and more serious problem with both regions is the shortage of water for urban, industrial and agricultural uses, The gaps between supply and demand in food and water will be widened with the growth of population. In a perspective of the said three problems in