I’ve been watching Carnivale, so naturally I’ve been thinking about the Dust Bowl. It seems as though it was the result of the farming practices of the newly settled land [historically speaking – within the previous 50 years or so] combined with a prolonged drought.
Question 1: Could we have a similar disaster today, or have farming methods (crop rotation, etc.) changed enough?
Question 2: The mutual causality of the Great Depression (people losing their farms, etc.) with the drought, and the lack of a social service net (government disaster grants, etc.) to ameliorate either of these worsened the disaster. If there were a prolonged drought leading to a similar de-soil-ation, would the social results – mass migration of people – be at all similar?
Nobody rotates crops anymore. The big agribusinesses just load up the fertilizer and keep on farming. A prolonged drought would have the same physical effect it had 80 years ago. As for the mass migration, have you looked at Miami lately? It’s already happened!
I don’t have a cite, silenus, but I’m going to argue with you. I live in an area where farming is a huge part of the economy. Crop rotation is the norm. A field that was planted in corn one year will be planted in soy beans the next. Fertilizer is a very expensive input. It doesn’t make economic sense to load up on fertilizer when there are other, less expensive practices that will provide the same yield.
I’ll run** Twicks**’ question past my soil scientist colleague tomorrow and report back.
Please do. My info is woefully outdated, since we sold the farm about 10 years ago, and rented it out for a long time before that. I just remember there being maybe two different crops grown on the land, max. If it wasn’t wheat, it was soybeans. The bottomland was kept in clover and the like as erosion control, But I don’t ever remember seeing any sort of crop variety from anywhere around that area (Palco, KS).
The Dust Bowl was solved when it became practical to pump water up from really, really deep. When that water runs out we will be in the same mess.
Buying property in western Oklahoma is not a good idea.
Thank you, that would be very cool.
Re: Crop rotation – agribusiness in this country isn’t exactly known for its concern about the long-term health of the soil; the use of petrochemicals is a matter of concern in that regard. I’m just wondering if whatever gestures are being made towards crop rotation would suffice – or whether the reliance on technofixes could boomerang in a way that could result in another Dust Bowl.
The first half of this decade in western Canada was a drought comparable in severity to the 30’s, and didn’t result in a dust bowl. Rotation or not, agricultural practices are worlds apart from then.
Tillage is also a big deal–before the Dust Bowl, farmers would deep-plow the Great Plains every year, which is horrible for soil in a semi-arid climate.
OK, here’s what my soil scientist colleague said.
** Freddy the Pig** is right. Tillage practices (including no-till planting) are much different now than they were in the Dust Bowl. You will not find huge expanses of fallow ground like you did in the '30s, just lying there exposed, waiting for the wind to come sweeping down the plains. Even when fields aren’t planted, the remnants of last year’s crop (corn stubble, for example) are left to hold the soil in place. Usually, no more than 30% of the soil is exposed in a field that is not in production. In periods of drought, you might get a lot of dust blowing around, but you’re not going to have massive amounts of soil moving in huge clouds.
So, never say never, but he thinks it’s highly unlikely that the Dust Bowl would happen again.
I recommend the book *The Worst Hard Time * for a good, but sad, Dust Bowl read.
The Dust Bowl had a number of factors contributing to it. First, tearing up the native grasses to plant wheat, along with non-soil conserving farming practices. Second, wheat prices got set artificially high during WWI and through the 20s, causing a sort of land rush and for farmers to be motivated to do the things in the first item. Third, during the time that there was a land rush/step up in wheat production, that area was having some wetter years, so the newbies thought it was always going to be that way. Fourth, the double whammy of the drought and the Depression combined with the mistakes made in the previous three for a perfect storm.
But the good that came out of it are the farming and soil conservation practices/districts that are still in use today.
I know a Geologist, who was trained up in Oklahoma. Went I moved here I asked him about it, because it was extremely dry that winter and spring. He said that soil management is far better than it was in the 30’s and that he thought another dust bowl was very unlikely. Our water is from the Ogallala aquifer, which can be depleted, because it is refilled only so fast.
A good history of the dustbowl is called -Never mind Arky beat me too it.
Thanks for the info, all – and the book recommendation. (I’ve put a hold on it at the library.)
An Arky, bannerrefugee – thanks for the recommendation on Egan’s book. Finished it over the weekend – fascinating stuff, I really enjoyed it. (Bizarrely enough, not a single person whom I told “I’m reading the most interesting book on the Dust Bowl” had any interest in hearing more about it.)
What was cool was finding out that some of the odd stuff from Carnivale – like the people going out to the fields en masse to club rabbits – was based on actual events.
You’re quite welcome…since you recommended *Blue Latitudes * to me, which I enjoyed immensely, it’s the least I can do…
(BTW, William Least Heat-Moon’s going to have another book out this fall called Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey, which sounds a bit like a reprise of Blue Highways. I’m crossing my fingers it won’t be a shark-jump).
it is an awesome read. i found the descriptions of how one fares in a dug out house to be quite unsettling.
…and, this is why the SDMB is such a great resource. Thx to all who offered useful suggestions.
Droughts do still happen, and a few drought years in a row could produce another dust bowl.