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In recent years, dust storms have returned, driven mainly by drought. But Shook — and others — say farmers are making the problem worse by taking land where grass used to grow and plowing it up, exposing vulnerable soil.
"The first soil storm that I saw was in 2013. That was about the height of all the grassland conversion that was happening in this area," he says.
This is where federal policy enters the picture. Most of that grassland was there in the first place because of a taxpayer-funded program. The U.S. Department of Agriculture rents land from farmers across the country and pays them to grow grass, trees and wildflowers in order to protect the soil and also provide habitat for wildlife.It's called the Conservation Reserve Program, or CRP. Ten years ago, there was more land in the CRP than in the entire state of New York. In North Dakota, CRP land covered 5,000 square miles.
But CRP agreements only last 10 years, and when farming got more profitable about a decade ago, farmers in North Dakota pulled more than half of that land out of the CRP to grow crops like corn and soybeans. Across the country, farmers decided not to re-enroll 15.8 million acres of farmland in the CRP when those contracts expired between 2007 and 2014.
The Dust Bowl forced tens of thousands of farmers to migrate and gave us the term "Okies." Are we in for a repeat?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by edIII on Friday June 09 2017, @01:21AM (1 child)
Good point. The real solution would be to have bought the land, eminent domain, whatever is necessary to prohibit them completely from bad farming practices. Subsidies just create people that will become reliant on the government to survive, which means we can't ever stop the subsidies. Don't start them in the first place.
Clearly, we need to be better stewards for the environment. We can't do that by giving choice to the farmers. Choice? That's just fucking code word for Money-Rules-ALL. Avarice seems to be everywhere, or it's just pure desperation to survive. Pick.
That fucking jackass in the WH is destroying all the national monuments, and those Repugnican parasites are doing everything they can to open up land for profit. Some lands need to kept native simply to keep our ecologies functioning properly. It's ridiculous that money prevails, we get hurt, and then we look around wondering what could've been done about it. We knew, it just wasn't easy to do, and it made *less money*.
Lock all this land up permanently with eminent domain. You can still build a ranch and have buildings on the property, but common sense regs that prevent you from clear cutting, and other stupid activity is prevented.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 1) by justinb_76 on Friday June 09 2017, @12:09PM
"That fucking jackass in the WH is destroying all the national monuments"
wait, wut???? last I heard, it was a bunch of anti-White racist revisionist history fucktards that were tearing down monuments...
(pardon me, but I'm still a bit miffed over the complete and utter lack of any mention of the 50th anniversary of the attack on the USS Liberty yesterday, not that anyone cares)
oh, and before the inevitable 'go back to Stormfront, troll' - get with the times ya geezer, dontcha know all the cool kids go to Daily Stormer for the forums, The Right Stuff for podcasts, and Red Ice for video