Amber Waves by Catherine Zabinski

Author:Catherine Zabinski [Zabinski, Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SCI000000 Science / General
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2020-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

After World War I, both Europe and the United States were struggling. Europe focused on rebuilding its cities and farms, leaving the United States with a surplus of grain. American farmers’ incomes dropped, the beginning of the downward spiral into the Great Depression. The financial breakdown that led to the economic crisis was accompanied in the United States by an ecological crisis, starting in the wheat fields of the midsection of North America.

The grasslands that stretched from central Canada to Mexico had covered over half a million square miles (320 million acres) before Europeans arrived. Rainfall and temperatures vary across this region, so in the wetter northern areas, the grasses grew well over a person’s head, but only about knee high in the drier sites. The southern plains, encompassing parts of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico, are the driest, hottest, and windiest part of these lands. The soils there are held in place by the tenacious roots of the grasses and forbs that have learned to thrive amid the uncertain weather and the large grazers. Native Americans had used this land long before Europeans arrived, most recently as hunting grounds for the large herds of bison that started to decline in the nineteenth century and then were hunted to near extinction by agents of the US government, in another example of using food as a weapon.

The lands from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains changed hands from the Spanish to the French and then in 1803 to the US government as part of the Louisiana Purchase. After bison were exterminated and Native peoples sent to reservations, the settlers’ use of the southern plains alternated between cattle grazing and row crops. Ranchers overstocked the lands, reducing the quality of the range for cattle and leaving them vulnerable to droughts and hard winters. When the ranching industry crashed, homesteaders would move in, plowing up land to plant crops. Then when harvests were bad, the homesteaders didn’t have a cushion to survive the slim years, and ranchers bought up the abandoned homesteads. But railroads, banks, and land speculators had financial incentives to increase settlement in the drier parts of the West, and with that they helped promote a dry-farming movement, proposed by a farmer from South Dakota. Hardy Webster Campbell (no relation to Thomas Campbell) argued that “the vast prairies of the semi-arid belt are not simply for the grazing of a few scattered herds, but for the support of vast numbers of smaller herds and flocks and thousands of ideal farm homes interspersed with numerous flourishing towns and cities.”7 Progressive Agriculture: Tillage, Not Weather, Controls Yield, the title of Campbell’s later work, reflects his recommendations for dry farming, encouraging settlers to make the arid regions of the nation’s midsection their home site. At that time, while Allied troops were fighting on European soil and the US government was offering a good price for wheat, homesteading the drier southern plains seemed like a real option. Homestead size increased to 160-acre lots, and farmers supported the war effort by plowing up every inch for wheat fields.

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