 The Legacy of the Dust Bowl Because of his role running an incubator/accelerator for startups focused on resiliency in the face of the changing climate, my husband recently took a tour of a local research farm called Pie Ranch. Pie Ranch practices regenerative agriculture, which is intended to restore and maintain healthy soil ecosystems on farmland. Some regenerative farmers don’t till the soil at all (it releases carbon into the atmosphere and dries out the soil), but at Pie Ranch they’ve discovered that shallow tilling every few years lets native plant roots survive and thrive, allowing grazing cows and roaming chickens to add natural fertilizer to the soil. These practices are very different than the farming protocols that contributed to conditions in the Dust Bowl in the 1930s, when massive storms of dried out soil, called “black blizzards,” blanketed the states in the Great Plains and even turned day to night in places as far away as Chicago and New York City. Unusually rainy years in the 1920s had encouraged people to take advantage of the cheap prairie land the US government was selling. Many believed the dry years were permanently over, buying into the erroneous real estate slogan that “rain follows the plow.” With a poor understanding of the ecology of the region, many farmers plowed deep with the help of new machines. They killed the roots of the native grasses that served to trap soil and hold water. So, when drought conditions returned in the 1930s, the ubiquitous winds blew the topsoil away, destroying ecosystems, livelihoods, and lives.  Photo by Dorothea Lange, 1938. https://www.loc.gov/resource/fsa.8b32349 The Dust Bowl affected 100 million acres, mainly in the panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas. Everyone who has read John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) knows that people were forced to emigrate to other parts of the country in search of work that was hard to find during the Great Depression. The federal government stepped in with programs to halt soil erosion and introduce conservation practices, but by the 1970s, big agricultural companies were using destructive methods that included draining aquifers for irrigation and the intensive use of pesticides and fertilizers.
We’ve been slow to learn from the lessons of the Dust Bowl. In the US, less than five percent of farms use cover cropping (a regenerative strategy), and we’re losing our soils ten times faster than they are replenished. We need more farmers farming like Pie Ranch, and we need it fast. Sources: Earthday.org National Drought Mitigation Center: https://drought.unl.edu/dustbowl/ Soil Health Institute Wikpedia: Dust Bowl Main image caption: A dust storm approaching Rolla, Kansas, May 6, 1935. (Image: Franklin D. Roosevelt Library Digital Archives) https://drought.unl.edu/dustbowl/
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |