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by Rebecca Clarren
It was the 1930s, and rural people clung to the land as if it were a part of them, as integral as bone or sinew. But the land betrayed them—or they betrayed it, depending on the telling of history.
In the black-and-white portraits of the time, dismay is palpable, grooves of anxiety worn deep around the eyes. In scattered fields throughout the country, farmers took the stitching out of the soil and turned the earth upside down, so the old saying goes. Decades of bad farming practices had eroded topsoil that had accumulated for centuries; then came years of drought, and the land simply gave up. As farmers looked out over acres of what once was wheat, corn or sugarbeet, dust rose to meet their gaze.
“The dust storms, they just come in boiling like angry clouds,” remembers Maxine Nickelson, 81, who lives near Oakley, Kansas, less than 10 miles from the farm where she grew up during the Dust Bowl. “The dust piles would get so high they’d cover up the fence posts along the roads. Yeah, it was bad. We had to use a scoop shovel to take dirt out of the house. The people were very discouraged. They thought something was turning against them. There was little rain. Daddy had to sell all the cattle because there was no feed. We also had a grasshopper plague. There would be so many flying, they would darken the sun. It was really, really hard times.”
Times have changed. Now, when the wind blows at The Nature Conservancy’s 17,000-acre Smoky Valley Ranch, 15 miles south of where Nickelson grew up, it whispers through a thriving shortgrass prairie. For the most part, the dust is still. Land that once was plowed under and farmed—or “broke out,” as farmers say—has been reseeded with buffalo and gamma grasses. Such native plants have extensive root systems that can withstand the extreme weather on the plains. While a nine-year drought has been dragging the region by the heels, farmers—and the landscape—aren’t facing anything near the desperation of the 1930s.
That the country hasn’t seen another Dust Bowl is testament to advances in farming equipment and cultivation practices and other shifts in farming techniques. But perhaps the most significant changes have stemmed from the farming community’s embrace of conservation, largely spurred by the federal Farm Bill’s huge pool of financial incentives rewarding farmers for efforts to sustain soil, water and wildlife habitats.
A piece of legislation reauthorized every five or six years, the Farm Bill is mostly known for its commodity-support programs, which subsidize production of more than two dozen crops, including wheat, rice and cotton. Few people realize that the legislation is also the largest single source of federal funding for conservation on private land in the United States: $20 billion in the past five years alone.
For nearly 15 years, The Nature Con-servancy has been working with Con-gress to steer funding from the Farm Bill toward landscapes with high conservation value. The last Farm Bill, passed by Congress in 2002, provided record funding for the environment. This year, Con-gress is expected to reauthorize a new Farm Bill, though it’s a sure bet that this time there will be less money available. With a historic budget deficit, maintaining existing conservation funds won’t be easy. Even so, the Conservancy is working with other conservation and agricultural groups to seed America’s farm future with an environmental ethos.
“The Farm Bill is such a powerful tool to help fight some of the threats to agricultural lands and to help farmers and ranchers continue their traditional lifestyles,” says Adrienne Wojciechowski, a federal policy advisor with the Conservancy. “Farming and conservation have a lot of mutual goals, and we want to see those lifestyles and economies continue while protecting our natural resources at the same time.”
Nature picture credits (top to bottom, left to right): Photo © Associated Press (Dust Bowl); Photo © Chris Helzer/TNC (Corn Field); Photo © Corbis (President Roosevelt); Photo © Michael Forsberg (Farm)
