iBIO-Lmcasttr Farming, Saturday, September 28,1985
WASHINGTON - Harold Hogue
has lived through one Dust Bowl.
He isn’t anxious to see another. But
he’s not confident that he won’t.
In 1935, the blinding storms that
uprooted the Great Plains
destroyed his wheat crop at
Dalhart, Texas.
Hogue stuck it out. With hard
work, he survived the Depression,
and today he farms 20 verdant
square miles of Texas grain. He
drives a Coupe de Ville, winters in
Palm Springs. His land is irrigated
with water pumped from wells;
natural gas powers the pumps.
Still, he is apprehensive.
“A lot of people say we’ll never
have another Dust Bowl,” he says.
But we can. “With the price of
natural gas, we could go back to
dryland farming soon. A lot of
farmers already are,” he says.
|1 Billion Loss
Eroding cropland may cost the
United States $1 billion a year in
polluted and sedimented rivers
and lakes. But soils are com
plicated, and the entent and causes
of erosion vary.
In 1977, the U.S. Soil Con
servation Service estimates, some
three billion tons of soil were
“lost” from cultivated fields, two
thirds from water and one-third
from wind. One-fifth of the eroded
cropland came from Texas.
The entry of American farmers
into the export business, spurred
by grain sales to the Soviet Union
in 1972, sent prices soaring and led
to a fivefold increase in the value
of U.S. farm exports by the end of
the decade.
It also aggravated the erosion
problem, as farmers plowed up an
additional 60 million acres, mnch
of it previously protected by grass.
Views on soil erosion depend on
where one lives, Boyd Gibbons
writes. There are, he explains,
upwards of 30,000 different soils in
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Threat of second dust
this country.
“Without soils there would be no
grass, no cows, no bread, no us,”
he writes. “When we think that
man runs the show on earth, we
might recall that earth is mostly
rock and life only a veneer on it,
sustained largely by a sheet of soils
derived from and covering the
rock.”
“Nature beats up the land
scape,” says Dick Arnold, director
of the SCS soil survey division.
“But man accelerates it. Soils are
important to survival. Let’s not
beat them up if we don’t have to. ’ ’
Varied Origins
Some soils are bom from rotted
bedrock, as in the Piedmont area
of the eastern United States.
Others evolve from rock moved in
from elsewhere by wind, water, or
glaciers.
“In many ways, soils are still a
mystery,” says Arnold. “We know
some basic physics and chemistry,
but we still have a lot to learn
about how soils form.”
Landscapes alternate between
cycles of erosion and stability.
Clay and organic particles can
travel hundreds of miles in a big
storm.
“Most people have no idea how
fast landscapes can change,” says
Ray Daniels, former SCS director
of soil survey investigations. “In
some cases man-made erosion
may be faster, in others slower,
than geologic erosion.”
Crop yields have been increasing
for years, despite erosion, and
scientists think technology, par
ticularly the tenfold increase in the
use of commercial fertilizer since
World War 11, has masked erosion
damage.
Gibbons notes that “soil con
servation is still dictated more by
economics than by good in
tentions.” Farmers are deep
plowing less to save money-on
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fuel, for example-and increased
mulch on their fields has reduced
runoff and erosion.
In 1983, the federal government
spent $1 billion on erosion control
and $2B billion on subsidies to
farmers, the subsidies up
dramatically from $7 billion two
years earlier.
The Reagan Administration and
Congress are targeting erosion
control efforts on areas deemed to
need them most. “The trick is to
crack the big-equipment syndrome
and get the farmer off that big
breaking plow,” says Peter Myers,
head of the SCS.
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Desert-like appearance of a farm in the Texas Panhandle, a productive cotton-growing
region, shows the ravages of a windstorm that lifted the silt and left the sand. Texas
accounts for 17 percent of the nation's land erosion, and many Texans fear a return of
the 1930's Dust Bowl. Some think it's already started. In 1977, the Soil Conservation
Service estimated, three billion tons of plowed soil were lost to wind and water.
“We’ve always gone at erosion
as a moral issue, but now we also
want to appeal to the farmer in
dollars and cents. We have to be
careful not to paint a distorted
picture. Soil erosion is not a today
problem; it’s a tomorrow problem,
but you have to work on it today.”
Great Potential Erosion
Bill Fryrear, head of the U.S.
Agriculture Department’s
Agricultural Research Service
station at Big Spring, Texas, thinks
the potential for erosion is greater
now than it was in the 1930’5,” he
told Gibbons, “we’re in for some
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real trouble. You’re in country now
that man in his infinite wisdom did
not improve upon.”
Another big plow-up of the
Middle West’s erodible soils is
inevitable if exports and prices
soar again, Gibbons concludes. He
writes:
“Those men on the plows
churning up High Plains range are
hoping for rain and a few bumper
wheat crops to pay off a gamble in
country where grass returns
slowly and drought holds the
cards.”