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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: 2, Interesting) by CZB on Friday June 09 2017, @02:41PM (1 child)
Hi, I'm one of those farmers who has land in the CRP program, and cropland I till up in big dusty clouds. Like any industry, when you get into into the details it gets complicated.
Popular articles about farming are frustrating because journalists rarely understand the situation they are reporting on. Its like when a computer doesn't work right and my dad doesn't understand why computers can't have diagnostic functions built in that tell you what the problem actually is (usually slow internet or badly coded websites), I try to tell him how complicated programming is and how backwards compatibility demands and the profit margin of global corporations dictate hardware design, but he just wants it to work. Any of us with technology knowledge know that computers could be designed and programmed better, but the market doesn't support that. Its much the same with farming. I hope to find a local market pool like a pro hobbyist might make a living from custom Arduino shields, but I can't influence Intel, Apple or the global grain market.
The dust bowl conditions where your soil blows away and you have to migrate to California just doesn't happen with current tools and methods. But erosion is a problem a farmer has to manage, along with all the other problems you hear about in popular culture like fertilizer runoff, insecticide killing the bees, etc. Plus all the problems that doesn't make it into mainstream news, like the falling numbers test, diseases, changes to inport/export markets.
The main thing with farming is money. We know about methods and tools that are better for the soil/environment, but how to afford them and how much risk to take in transitioning is the issue. We do what works. I want to get into no-till regenerative methods, the farmers who have successfully done it see big improvements to their soil quality. But the unsuccessful ones go bankrupt. I'm the fifth generation of this farm and I don't want to be the one to sink it.
The CRP program is better than nothing, but, like most government programs, contains a lot of stupid stuff. Its all about a checklist of criteria, not actually providing wildlife habitat. They make you kill whatever they told you to plant last time, and plant what they currently think is a better mix of plants, but its all based on some experts recommendations, filtered through several layers of bureaucracy with little regard for the location of the field or what the local wildlife like to eat.
There are two main markets for farm products, the easy one which is global wholesale but the prices are low. Below my cost of production really, which is why I'm looking at the other; retailing directly to consumers, and the ones who pay the most want natural organic buzzwords.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Friday June 09 2017, @05:43PM
In case I wasn't the only one ignorant of what a Falling Number test is, Wikipedia has an article about it. It detects whether grain has sprouted, which can be a problem in bread-making.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falling_Number [wikipedia.org]