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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) by Snotnose on Thursday June 08 2017, @09:19PM (12 children)
Sign a 10 year agreement then, when it expires and you want to farm your land again find out they've changed the agreement here.
I understand losing soil is A Bad Thing, but I'm not seeing how farmers deciding to farm is the problem.
I came. I saw. I forgot why I came.
(Score: 5, Informative) by t-3 on Thursday June 08 2017, @09:41PM (11 children)
Because conventional agricultural practices are environmentally horrible. Intensive monocultures, which damage the soil and are causing problems for lots of native insects and animals by taking away food sources and habitat, lots of exposed soil which leads to erosion , tons of fertilizer that tends to wash or blow away and end up polluting the water and isn't readily bioavailable when it doesn't, regular plowing, which combined with monocultures and chemical inputs results in massively reduced soil ecology, and pesticides/herbicides that are decimating native pollinators (fuck honeybees, the little flies and solitary native bees do waaay more pollinating and there's not much attention being paid to the disastrous effect pesticides are having on them).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @11:05PM (2 children)
Native bees like to pollinate native weeds.
Apply all the poison you like, and you still won't kill the pollinator for corn and wheat. Hint: it isn't a critter.
(Score: 2) by t-3 on Thursday June 08 2017, @11:11PM
Yeah, corn and wheat are pollinated by wind, but a healthy environment doesn't contain only 2 species...
(Score: 3, Informative) by t-3 on Thursday June 08 2017, @11:19PM
Plus, there are tons of predatory insects losing their habitats as well. We wouldn't need to apply so many chemicals if predators were around to regulate the populations of "pests".
(Score: 3, Disagree) by Snotnose on Thursday June 08 2017, @11:19PM (3 children)
Understood. So the government gives the farmers $$$ to not grow crops when farmers can't sell crops, but 10 years later when farmers can sell crops so they grow crops tells me the program was bone headed to start with. Spent a lot of money for short term solutions, fark the real solution.
I came. I saw. I forgot why I came.
(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
(Score: 2, Disagree) by Snotnose on Friday June 09 2017, @02:39AM
How exactly does this get modded disagree? We need insight into who is modding us so we can hold their feet to the fire.
I came. I saw. I forgot why I came.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday June 09 2017, @04:22AM (3 children)
Ironic, isn't it, that some folks claim that turning us all into vegetarians would save the environment...
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Friday June 09 2017, @05:27PM (2 children)
What t-3 wrote applies to crops are grown to feed livestock just as much as it does to crops that humans eat directly. In the United States,
-- https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/corn/background/ [usda.gov]
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday June 09 2017, @05:37PM (1 child)
Except that for most of their lives, these livestock eat range grass (which needs it, as it evolved to be grazed); grain is used only for finishing and supplements.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Friday June 09 2017, @06:53PM
You appear to be suggesting that the use of crops as animal feed is incidental? Alfalfa
(not a grain) is mainly grown for livestock:
-- https://www.ars.usda.gov/northeast-area/beltsville-md/beltsville-agricultural-research-center/soybean-genomics-improvement-laboratory/people/gary-bauchan/alfalfa/ [usda.gov]
-- https://www.agweb.com/article/is-85-million-acres-the-new-normal-for-soybeans-naa-debra-beachy/ [agweb.com]
-- http://www.wisoybean.org/news/soybean_facts.php [wisoybean.org]
"Most of" 90 million acres, most of 26 million acres, most of 85 million acres--altogether they're not incidental in a country that has ~408 million acres under cultivation.
Is the quote below incorrect?
-- http://www.cbsnews.com/news/why-greener-beef-will-mean-less-grass-more-feedlots/ [cbsnews.com]
The paragraph before that one said that in the world as a whole, cattle are typically raised entirely on grass. If the bit I quoted is correct, doing that in the U.S. would mean drastically less beef would be produced there.
I gather that, in the U.S., chickens and pigs are raised mainly indoors and that sheep, goats and horses aren't eaten very much.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @09:29PM (1 child)
Build a wall around it and make the farmers pay for it. #MAGA #PUTINRULES
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @10:03PM
That's not wind! Those are running NIGGERS STEALING OUR SOIL!!!
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday June 08 2017, @09:42PM
Yeah. Because if this can happen on stuff that really are inherited legacies from Obama (he didn't get increases to CRP,) under Mr. Make America Imperial Again will happily run the environment into the ground if it pleases his billionaire buddies.
This sig for rent.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @09:44PM
I.T. for everybody! Bleach them shirts white and make 'em all Knowledge Workers!
MAGA! MAGA! MAGA!
Oh right. Don't forget the brownface! I.T. is white collar for brownskins only!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @10:13PM (1 child)
They pay them billions so that they can spend less time worrying about farming and thus have more time to watch Fox News and loudly express their desire to get the Government off of their backs and to stop giving out money to those welfare queens and other undesirable "coastal elites".
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @10:19PM
Welfare queens don't own land. The founding fathers of this country intended the ruling elite to be white male landowners. White male landowning farmers are owed rent for being white male landowners.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 09 2017, @02:22PM
If they had wanted to do something more practical, they could simply have instituted something like a tax break for approved measures, such as fallowing land, pasture cropping, strip farming between windbreaks and so on. Motivate the right behaviour, in other words, rather than trying to get some kind of lock out.
The policy in place was basically a chance to tempt farmers with a big fat chunk of cash in return for a lock. Unfortunately, it relied upon farmers being willing to do so at current prices - and giving them a free hand to do whatever the hell when the policy died. The policy wasn't defined in terms of current prices, but as a lump sum.
Ooops.
The law of unintended consequences bites again. Hard.
(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]