ThirdOfFive |
07-22-2022 04:18 PM |
Quote:
Originally Posted by jimjamuser
(Post 2118027)
I wouldn't call it deforestation, per se. More like wall-to-wall or field-to-field crops. And even crops right up to the highway. I was in Nebraska in the 1960s and there was a Federal program called Soil Bank which was designed to prevent the topsoil from blowing away as it did around 1929 partly causing the Great Depression. The Soil Bank idea was for the farmer to basically leave the harder-to-till parts of their land untouched like in gullies and near the roads. This allowed these parts of the farmer's land to remain in trees and heavy brush and thus hold the topsoil - it made for great areas for wildlife. The farmers got PAID to NOT plant these rough areas under the Soil Bank plan.
Nebraska in the 60s had large numbers of both whitetail and mule deer populations. it was not unusual to see as many as 20 or 30 pheasants crossing a highway back then. Today that has all changed. At some point, the Soil Bank was eliminated because people began to care less about the environment as factory farming took over and profits were the driving factor. The pheasant population dropped due to less bush cover and possibly the over-fertilization was bad for their eggs.
Incidentally, Nebraska has plenty of trees. It and Kansas are not all grasslands.
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"Incidentally, Nebraska has plenty of trees. It and Kansas are not all grasslands."
True. We get Email ads from Nebraska tourism touting the fishing and camping. Looks a lot like northern MN. But the reality is that the majority of the land is farmland.
As I understand it the dust bowl was really a confluence of events. I had relatives who farmed in a couple of the prairie states affected and recall them talking about it. Very little rain, super-hot temps, etc., but the major cause in the estimation of many was the switch from family to corporate farming, and the then-S.O.P. of the corporations to plow perfectly straight rows, up and over hills, through valleys, etc. over several sections of land at a time. It saved time (and I suppose labor costs) but what it DIDN'T do was impede the wind in any way. It blew straight down those rows, picking up dust as it went, until what happened was--well, the dust bowl. It wasn't until the advent of contour plowing, where the farmers plowed around the contours of the hills and valleys instead of arrow-straight rows that ran sometimes for miles, that things got better. There were other programs as well, as mentioned (soil bank). But it was no one thing that caused it--or ended it.
Hopefully we've gotten smarter.
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