The Dust Bowl by Ken Burns

Author:Ken Burns
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781452119151
Publisher: Chronicle Books LLC
Published: 2012-12-09T05:25:57+00:00

[Plate 160]

In a barren field stripped of most vegetation, soil scientist H. Howard Finnell contemplates the daunting challenge of “Operation Dust Bowl.”

Under typical farming methods, he concluded, nearly 80 percent of a year’s rainfall never soaked deeply enough into the subsoil to benefit the crops. As a result, wheat farmers could expect only four good harvests out of every ten, even during normal weather conditions. “I realize that agriculture is something of a gamble from the time a man plants his seed until he brings a crop to harvest,” he wrote, “but I can see no necessity for this kind of gambling… The economics of soil conservation are based not on one year, or even ten years, but in the long run—on many years, even centuries.”

In his experiments—some based on suggestions by old-timers with long experience on the Plains—Finnell had discovered techniques to double the odds of a good crop by capturing as much moisture as possible: using terraces and plowing along the land’s contour to minimize runoff; keeping, rather than stripping, plant residues on the surface after a harvest; planting different crops, depending on subsoil conditions; and making deeper rows with the plow called a lister, rather than pulverizing the soil with the more popular one-way plow.

“We do not want a changed climate,” Finnell wrote. “All that is needed to reach a solution of many of the drouth problems is to make a better use of the rain that is received. Moisture conservation is the answer.”

In the space of a decade, Finnell had published fifty-nine reports of his findings, but few farmers paid much attention to his recommendations. It was the 1920s, times were good, and they were more interested in finding additional grassland to plow.

But Finnell’s work did catch the eye of Hugh Bennett, the head of the newly created Soil Conservation Service, who quickly hired him and put him in charge of one of the agency’s largest and hardest hit regions in the nation: nearly 100 million acres of the southern Plains—an area four times the size of Ohio. Finnell’s first task was to set up some demonstration projects north of Dalhart, where he hoped to prove to skeptical farmers that his techniques were worth following. He persuaded a handful of owners to sign three-year contracts agreeing to cooperate; the government would pay for the work, and any improvements made during that time would belong to the landowner.

It was called “Operation Dust Bowl” and a lot was riding on the results. In 1935, an estimated 850 million tons of topsoil were being swept off the naked fields of the Plains, where 4 million acres, in 101 counties, were blowing. Predictions called for a million more acres to do the same thing in 1936. One report said the Dust Bowl was expanding eastward at 30 miles a year, and predicted that even cities on the East Coast might ultimately be buried in dust, like some ancient civilizations. “Unless something is done,” another report concluded, “the western plains will be as arid as the Arabian desert.

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