Another Dust Bowl . . . Or Just Blowing Smoke?
August 9, 2002
CHURCHVILLE, VA—American farmers are destroying the topsoil and can no longer produce healthy food, claims George Pyle, writing for the Kansas Land Institute in the Los Angeles Times. Pyle warns that we must go back to traditional farming before we create another Dust Bowl. But if traditional farming was so wonderful, how come we had the Dust Bowl in the first place?
In the 1930s, when the original Dust Bowl crisis hit America, all farming was organic and low-intensity. That’s what Pyle recommends for our future. But the dust clouds roiled, literally, from the prairies all the way to the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington—where gritty-eyed senators hurriedly created the U.S. Soil Conservation Service.
“The Grapes of Wrath” chronicled the thousands of gaunt, sunburned families, fleeing the Great Plains in rickety Model T’s. Pyle is trying to pretend a crisis by erroneously citing U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that wind and water “are carrying away 2 billion tons of soil per year, or 5.6 tons per cultivated acre.” But the USDA number is an estimate of soil moved, not lost. Most of it is moved to another part of the same or neighboring field.
Better evidence on soil erosion comes from Dr. Stanley Trimble of UCLA. Dr. Trimble dug out the 1938 government soil survey on the famously erodable Coon Creek Basin in southern Wisconsin—and re-surveyed Coon Creek in the 1970s, and again in the 1990s. He found it’s now losing only 6 percent as much soil as it did during the Dust Bowl days. Coon Creek farmers are building topsoil, not losing it. Dr. Trimble says alarmists like Pyle “owe us the physical evidence.”
So far, no dust clouds, no streams choked with sediment, and no detectable differences in food quality exist. In fact, the Soil and Water Conservation Society of America calls modern farming “the most sustainable in history,” thanks to high-yield seeds, chemical fertilizers, integrated pest management, and a new farming system called conservation tillage.
Pyle warns that our crops are becoming “chemically-dependent.” Big news, George, nature made them that way. The original Dust Bowl occurred because farmers weren’t replacing the nitrogen, phosphorus and potash that all growing plants take from the soil. In plain words, they weren’t using enough fertilizer. The Great Plains suffered severe droughts before the 1930s and has had them since, but we’ve had only one Dust Bowl.
That’s because, in the 1930s, farmers depleted the last of the soil nutrients built up by eons of manure from billions of wild bison, antelopes, grasshoppers, and birds.
When the Plains were first plowed in the 1870s, the corn stalks grew nine feet tall. But after 50 years of low-input farming, the soil nutrients were gone. Plowing had vaporized the organic matter needed to nourish soil bacteria and store moisture.
The Dust Bowl taught us that low-input farming was unsustainable. We began mining natural deposits of phosphate and potash, and capturing millions of tons of nitrogen (the most critical plant nutrient) from the air.
Without nitrogen from the air, our crops would need the manure from another 1 billion cattle. But growing the forage for another 1 billion cows would leave our nation no land for food crops or national forests. Conservation tillage throws away the traditional plow; and, instead, uses herbicides to control weeds. It keeps the crop stalks on the soil surface, cutting soil erosion by 65 to 95 percent. It can double the amount of moisture retained in the soil, and double the number of earthworms and soil microbes. Amazingly, because it uses herbicides, it is on the Land Institute’s hate list.
A peak population of 9 billion people in 2050 is likely to require more than twice as much farm output for the high-quality diets they will demand. We’re already farming nearly half the land on the planet not covered by deserts or glaciers. If we want to save room on the planet for wildlife, we can’t waste high-quality farmland on low-intensity farming.
The Land Institute’s low-input farming would not only crowd out the wildlife, but would push us back into the same system that wore out the farms and created the Dust Bowl in the first place.
This article was published by Knight Ridder Tribune
Dennis T. Avery is based in Churchville, Va., and is director of global food issues for the Hudson Institute of Indianapolis.
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