(Host) News of the new documentary by Ken Burns and company
about the Dust Bowl, scheduled to air soon on PBS, has reminded former
Vermont Secretary of Agriculture Roger Allbee that some of its effects
were even felt here in the Green Mountains.
(Allbee) Surrounded
by the lush, green landscape of Vermont in the spring and summer, it’s
hard to imagine what the Dust Bowl was like.
The Green Mountains
sloping down to the green river valleys is in stark contrast to images
of barren land with no grass or trees, but what took place in 1935 on
that so called "black Sunday" in the region known as the Great Plains
had a long term impact on Vermont and other states that continues to
this day.
When early white settlers began migrating across the
country in the middle 1800’s looking for cheap and productive land,
native grass six feet tall is said to have covered the Great Plains from
the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains and from Canada to Texas.
The American Indians knew the value of the native grass and the herds of
roaming American Bison that fed upon it. What was unknown to the early
settlers was that grass and trees of the Plains nourished and held the
soil in place.
The steel plow and the demand for wheat changed
all that. By 1930 much of the Plains had been plowed up as wheat
cropping expanded westward. While natural prairie grasses could survive
drought, the wheat could not. It took nature a thousand years to build
an inch of topsoil on these Plains, but only a minute for one good blow
to sweep it away, and it did that over and over again in the drought of
the 1930’s. It’s been called one of the worst man-made disasters to ever
hit the United States. In just nine years, i t destroyed farmland,
blackened skies, and left millions homeless. Some 3 million abandoned
their farms on the Great Plains and half of them migrated to other
states, mainly in the West. By 1940 it was estimated that Western Kansas
had lost twice the amount of dirt removed in building the Panama Canal.
The Dust Bowl got its name after the Black Sunday on April 14,
1935 when more than 100 million acres of topsoil was lost to the wind.
The resulting dust storm reached all the way to Washington, D.C. There
was black rain in New York, and the snowfall in Vermont was brown.
This
man made crisis gave impetus to the soil conservation movement in the
United States. In 1935, Congress declared soil erosion a national
menace. Farming techniques such as strip cropping, terracing, crop
rotation, contour plowing, and cover crops were advocated. Farmers in
Vermont and across the country were provided the tools for conserving
the soil through local conservation districts. They did this by working
with the U.S. Soil Conservation Service, now called the National
Resource and Conservation Service, or NRCS.
As we look over our
lush working landscape today , we should remember that current farm
tillage practices were brought about by society’s concern for
environmental quality and reflect a new focus on land conservation and
environmental stewardship that were direct results of the Dust Bowl.