Are You Ready for a Modern-Day Dust Bowl on Top of Everything Else? by Robert Wheeler for The Organic Prepper
The Great Depression seems to be repeating itself and we might also be facing a modern-day Dust Bowl.
The Dust Bowl was the name given to the Southern Plains region of the United States during the 1930s. A ten-year drought as well as several economic and agricultural factors attributed to the devastating high winds and dust. The 1930s drought exposed topsoil from over-farming and intense farming practices.
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The Homestead Act of 1862, which provided settlers with 160 acres of public land, was followed by the Kinkaid Act of 1904 and the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909. These acts led to a massive influx of new and inexperienced farmers across the Great Plains.
Many of these late nineteenth and early twentieth century settlers lived by the superstition “rain follows the plow.” Emigrants, land speculators, politicians and even some scientists believed that homesteading and agriculture would permanently affect the climate of the semi-arid Great Plains region, making it more conducive to farming.
History repeats itself as the nation’s Corn Belt loses precious topsoil
With property loss and food insecurity on the rise, the United States is coming to resemble the 1930s Great Depression. Minus, of course, the more cohesive culture that existed at the time. But there is about to be another similarity between 2021 and those dark years of economic collapse – a modern-day Dust Bowl.
Now, not even one hundred years later, we see history repeat itself. Centuries of over-farming are now taking a toll on the soil in many states, including Iowa. The nation’s Corn Belt, which stretches from Ohio to Nebraska, has already lost nearly 1/3 of its topsoil.
When added to our current supply chain issues and agricultural misallocations, this is a recipe for disaster. For more information about the dire situation we’re facing, check out this upcoming docuseries that features several writers from this website.
Recent study estimates 35% of the region’s topsoil is gone
An excerpt from Smithsonian Magazine article The Nation’s Corn Belt Has Lost a Third of Its Topsoil stated:
The baseline for soil in Iowa is visible on land owned by Jon Judson, a sustainable farmer, and conservation advocate. His farm hosts a rare plot of original prairie grasses and wildflowers. Under the prairie, the soil is thick and dark, with feet of organic matter built up and plenty of moisture. The next field over is a recovering conventional field like Watkins’ farm, and the effect of years of conventional practices is obvious. The soil is pale and compacted, with only a few inches of organic carbon, much less soil moisture, and a lot more clay.
Scientists and farmers know that agricultural soil erosion has been a problem for decades, but quantifying soil loss from a hundred years of farming and across multiple states has proven difficult. Now a study led by geomorphologist Evan Thaler and published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in February attempts to answer the elusive question of how much topsoil has been eroded in the Corn Belt, which stretches roughly from Ohio to Nebraska and produces 75 percent of the nation’s corn. The study estimated that about 35 percent of the region has lost its topsoil completely, leaving carbon-poor lower soil layers to do the work of supporting crops.
“I think it’s probably an underestimate,” says Thaler, a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst. “There are areas where there’s probably a centimeter of topsoil left.”
