The Dust-Bowl Disaster of the 1930s (complete information)

Large numbers of settlers began to arrive in the Great Plains in the 1880s. Each homesteader was deeded 64 hectares (160 acres) by the United States government, and amount judged to be more than enough for a family farm; 64 hectares was fully adequate in the eastern United States, but then area had a much higher annual rainfall than the Great Plains.

The settlers plowed up the thick turf, with its long grasses and extensive root systems, and replaced it with com and short rooted cereal grains, reserving some of the land for pasture. Harvests were bountiful, and the fature seemed bright. But the 1890s brought the first drought, and many settlers were forced to sell out and move away. In time, however, the rains returned and hopes rose once more.

Then, the year 1910 brought another drought and with it the first huge dark clouds of dust. The plains states have the highest prevailing wind velocity of any part of the country. The winds tear at exposed, dry soil, lifting the fine silt particles high into the air, tumbling the larger particles into smoothering drifts.

More farmers left in 1910 and 1911, but many were encouraged to stay and even expand their holdings by two important developments: the advent of gasoline-powered tractors and harvest combines, and the soaring wheat prices caused by the disruption of European farming during World War I.

Drought, Dust and Disaster

The 1920s were years of increasingly heavy investment in raising wheat and cattle. Ranches and farm ranges were extended farther and farther into arid lands. The next drought began in 1931; it was to last through 1934. By the summer of 1933, millions of hectares of brown, shrivelled plants stood unharvested.

Water holes dried up, cattle died, and thousands of people began a sad exodus to California, a tragedy made notorious by John Steinbeck’s classic novel. The Grapes of Wrath. rqqieaKEiM sdl pnhsins si fioaqot teol sril lo fcoM nieisd iqqia>iasiM

The spring of 1934 brought yet another crop failure and the first major dust storm. On April 14, large regions of Kansas and Colorado acquired an apocalyptic atmosphere as total darkness descended in the middle of the day. Dead birds and rabbits littered the fields.

A month later, on the single day of May 11, a violent windstorm swept an estimated 350 million tons of rich organic silt high into the upper atmosphere, where it was caught by the high winds of the jet stream. New York City’s skies darkened and dust settled on ships hundreds of miles at sea. On that day Chicago received fallout of 12 million tons of dust, some 4 tons per person! Attempts of Conservation

Out of the dust-bowl disaster was born, in 1953, the United States Soil Conservation Service. Without question, this agency has done much to retard soil erosion and, in some areas, has even reversed the trend.

Millions of hectares of land most vulnerable to erosion have been returned to pasture. Practices such as following; strip-cropping, the practice of alternating rows of cash crops with rows of sod-forming crops, such as hay: and leaving stubble and other crop residues behind at harvest to hold moisture and retard wind erosion during winter have been promoted.

Terracing and contour cultivation of slopes and the planting of windbreaks of trees between fields have reduced wind erosion. Ranchers have been encouraged to limit herd densities to reduce over grazing.

More Trouble in the Future

Drought hit the plains again in the 1950s, and, although dust- bowl conditions did not develop, damage was severe. However rains soon returned, and reasonably good yields were obtained again. But a new dust bowl may be in the making. As reserves of wheat of feed a hungry world have dwindled and prices have risen, the pressure to plant wheat has increased.

In 1973 and 1974, 4 million hectares of pastures, woodlands, and idle fields were plowed and planted for the first time. Over half of these lands have been badly treated, and their annual loss of topsoil has averaged 27 tons per hectare. No more than 12 tons per hectare per year is regarded by government soil experts as a tolerable loss for cultivated land.

In the Southern Great Plains, the 1974 losses on 27,000 hectares of newly planted land ranged from 34 to 314 tons per hectare! In the early 1980s, as grain prices rose and beef prices fell, strip-cropping and following were being eliminated, and dry range-land was being planted to wheat. The cutbacks that began in the mid-1980s were related to economic conditions rather than being based on environmental concerns.

Water Supplies

The supply of fresh water upon which most terrestrial life depends is provided by the hydrologic cycle. Evaporated water soon condenses and falls to earth as rain, sleet, or snow.

One-fourth of it falls on land. However, precipitated water is but 0.0007 percent of all the water on earth. When precipitated water seeps into the ground, it enters vast aquifers (from the Latin aqua, “water,” and ferre, “to carry”), underground systems of porous, water-bearing rock. The flow of water in an aquifer can be as slow as a few inches per year.

A continent’s aquifers contain about 30 times as much water as all of its lakes, rivers, and streams. . Eventually, precipitated water makes its way into the lower levels of aquifers and from there into the springs, rivers, and lakes. The existence of these sources of fresh water also depends on the hydrologic cycle.

Meeting Water Demand. The amount of the world’s water supply is fixed; we cannot control the amount of precipitation, although to some extent we can channel the water once it falls to earth. The total amount of precipitation and its distribution throughout the year differ greatly around the world. These two factors are the key to the adequacy of the water supply for any region.

The world’s water supply has been calcualted as 13.63 x 10²⁰ 1 (3.59 x 10²⁰ gallons) a day. Of this amount, the United States receives a sizable share, some 16.24 x 10¹² 1 (4.3 x 10¹² gallons) a day in rainfall and another 24.59 x 10^u 1 (6.5 x 10″ gallons) a day available from lakes and rivers.

This is about 50 times the country’s average yearly demand and thus, in total, would seem to be far more than adequate. Yet water shortage occasionally occurs in several parts of the country.

One reason is that some high population densities have developed in regions with very low rainfall, necessitating the piping in of water from great distances. Another is that irrigation, which typically uses more well water than is replaced by precipitation or uses water brought from distant sources, forms the basis of agriculture in several regions.

Wastefulness Versus Conservation. A major reason for shortages in densely populated areas is that people use highly purified drinking water inappropriately-for such needs as washing cars, floors, side- walls^ nd dogs; watering lawns; and the like.

The average United States household uses about 680 1 (180 gallons) a day! Thus, most threatened water shortages in the United States are more accurately threats to a tradition of wastefulness. In an experiment, waste water from bathing and laundry was stored and used for flushing toilets; total consumption was reduced by 39 percent. Traditionally, industry has also used far more water than necessary.

This is demonstrated by the fact that when the Kaiser Steel Company of California decided to recycle water, it cut its use from 246,000 1 (65,000 gallons) per ton of steel to some 5,300 1 (1,400 gallons) per ton.

Worldwide, total water use is actually less than a third of the amount annually available. But demand is increasing and is expected to exceed 50 percent of availability by the year 2000.

It is thus obvious that more stringent conservation efforts are necessary. In addition, the cost of piping massive amounts of water from distant sources will eventually exceed what the public is able or willing to pay.

This may impose local limits on population expansion in some areas. Los Angles, California, for example, has an annual rainfall of 38 cm (15 inches), enough to support only a small city. In 1920, an aqueduct 483 km (300 miles) long was built, bringing water to the city from Owens Canyon, high in the Sierra Nevada range.

In the 1930s, increased demand for water led to construction of a second aqueduct, 322 km (200 miles) long, from the Colorado River to Los Angles.

In the 1960s, the Feather River, a tributary of the Sacramento River, which was already supplying water to San Francisco, was tapped to meet Los Angles’ ever-growing demand for water. Diverting water from its normal course has been destructive of natural ecosystems and has severely limited crop productivity ii l regions such as Owens Canyon. Each of these developments was marked by bitter legal battles fought by the angry resident of the areas deprived of water by the projects.

City officials in Los Angles are now seeking additional sources of water from the low-population wilderness areas in the northernmost part of the state.

They hope to divert the Eel and Klamath river, the last free-flowing rivers in the state, into the Sacramento River system to provide additional water to both the Los Angeles and the San Francisco area. Rivers are usually diverted by damming them. Dams have their own environmental impact.

Problem Accompanying Irrigation

Irrigation is an ancient practice, probably dating from the time that humans first switched from hunter-gatherer cultures to ones based on agriculture. In lands where rainfall is sparse or irregular, crops need watering if they are to thrive.

Two sources are available; surface waters; consisting of lakes and rivers; and groundwater, or well water. With either source, problems have usually accompanied the prolonged practice of irrigation.

Soil Salinization

Eventually, salinization of the soil occurs in any irrigated area that is warm and dry and is poorly drained. Irrigated farms downstream from the Aswan High Dam are being ruined by salt residues, and many are no longer cultivated. Many of the fertile farms of California’s hot and arid Imperial Valley have also been abandoned because of sanlinization. Irrigation water from the Colorado River, which is not unusually salty, deposits 3 million tons of salt in the valley’s soil each year.

The problem has been attacked in many parts of the valley by the construction of miles of costly drainage ditches into which the accumulated salts are flushed periodically. This salt-laden water is returned to the Colorado River, increasing its salinity by 30 percent in the last _ 20 years. In response to complaints of Mexican farmers, much of this water in now being desalinized at considerable expense before being returned to the river. The salt is being discharged into the Bay of California.

Deplication of Groundwater

Many areas of the Great Plains in the United States obtain up to 75 percent of their water from wells. For many years, the amount of water drawn from wells had no appreciable impact on the level of the water table, the depth below which the ground is saturated with water.

However, with the expansion of irrigation agriculture since the 1950s, this has changed. In southern Texas, which by the 1980s was growing 25 percent of the cotton produced in the United States, the number of water wells multiplied 15-foki, from 2,000 in 1946 to 30,000 in 1966. During that period, the water table dropped 120 m (400 feet) in regions of Arizona that used well water for extensive irrigation. As a result, some 128,000 hectares (540 square miles of cropland had to be abandoned.

The high plains of western Texas and Arizona draw upon the Ogallala Aquifer for their water. This mammoth underground supply represents water that has underlain the south-western United States since the putting of the tats of the great glaciers to cover much of the country, thousands of years ago.

Because it is not replenished by precipitation, this water supply, like deposits of fossil fuel, must be regarded as a nonrenewable resource.

California’s San Joaquin Valley also makes extensive use of well water to maintain its high productivity; by the early 1980s, it was producing an annual overdraft of 246 million 1 (65 million gallons).

Many years of overdrafts have resulted in serious soil subsidence, or settling, in the San Joaquin Valley; some areas have sunk by as much as 10 m (33 feet), but other examples can be found elsewhere in California as well. Such extensive subsidence compacts the soil, rendering it incapable of absorbing the amount of water it originally contained even if irrigation were halted.

On a nationwide basis, the United State withdraws twice as much water from its aquifers each year as is restored by the hydrologic cycle.

Land stosidence has been particularly destructive to some residential and industrial areas. Some homes near Houston, Texas, for example, have such to a point at which they are often flooded by ocean tides. Moreover, coastal areas are experiencing extensive saltwater intrusion into the land, which ruins its wells and destroys its capability of reporting almost all types of lifelong adapted to it.

The wisdom of irrigation is now being seriously questioned. Farms are using water at an unprecedented rate, four times the amount used by cities.

Although the water used in irrigation is only 60 percent that used in industry, most industrial water can be recycled; irrigation water, however, is lost. This makes growing food by irrigation methods very expensive. According to one estimate, it requires 10,000 to 50,000 tons of water to raise each ton of food produced by an irrigated farm in an acid region.

Destruction of Forests

Few human depredations can match what has been done and is still being done to the world’s forests. In the nineteenth century, when there were no federal or state agencies overseeing the use of public lands, it was common for small American lumber companies to obtain lumber rights over a region, clear-cut all its marketable trees, and leave behind a denuded area whose topsoil was soon eroded by rains.

The slash- consisting of cut-away branches and foliage-left behind after the logs were dragged out soon became tinder dry and was easily ignited into roaring fires by lightning. The fires that resulted from ignition of dried slash between 1850 and 1900 were of an unprecedented magnitude.

The great Peshtigo, Wisconsin, fire in October 1871, which was fed by dired slash, burned over 400,000 hectares (1 million acres) of forest and claimed between 1,200 and 1,500 lives. In Wisconsin alone, there were 2,500 fires from 1880 to 1890, burning an average of 200,000 hectares (half a million acres) each year.

Modem Conservation in the United States. Government agencies, such as the United States Forest Service, and private citizens groups, such as the Sierra Club, now exert moderately effective control over American forests. One practice aimed at preventing soil erosion is the selective cutting of only some of the marketable trees from any one stand.

Those allowed to remain provide the seeds for new growth. Such a system ensures a sustained yield, the forests being cut selectively about every 10 years. The technique is expensive, however, and works well only with hardwoods. Such as beech and maple, whose seedlings can grow in shade?

Another method of forest conservation, called monoculture, involves clear-cutting stands of trees of about the same age and then reseeding or replanting the area with one or a few species. This tree-farming technique permits harvesting such giants as the Douglas fir, whose selective cutting is impractical because of the damage caused to other trees when the firs are felled.

Moreover, their seedlings do not grow in shade. Clear-cutting is controversial, however, in part because of the erosion and loss of soil nutrients that invariably follow when trees are cut from slopes. Monoculture also makes tree more susceptible to disease and insect pest epidemics than are natural populations in which individuals of the same species and age are widely dispersed.

Despite all regulations, the United States still cuts down more trees than it regrows. Current projections are that the country will experience a 265m³ million (9.3-billion-cubic-foot) annual deficit by 2010, with demand exceeding supply by 50 percent. Forest conservation needs to be intensified, not only to meet demands for wood and wood products, but because forests constitute an important part of the world’s ecosystems.

Worldwide Destruction of Forests. Close to half of all the world’s trees have been cut down since 1950. Two-thirds of Latin America’s forests and half of Africa’s have been depleted. During the 1970s alone, Thailand lost one-fourth of its trees, and the Philippines one-seventh.

One reason for the destruction is slash-and-bum agriculture, and ancient practice which has been increasing as world populations have grown.

It involves cutting down all the trees in a chosen area, burning them, and raising crops for a year or two in the ash-enriched soil. Overall, there is a net loss of between 1 and 2 percent of the world’s forests each year. This rate is greater than could be compensated for by even the best efforts at reforestation.

A growing need for firewood, which for 75 percent of the world is the only fuel used for heating and cooking, is one reason for so much destruction. For example, over 90 percent of all wood cut in Africa is burned for fuel. The worldwide shortage of firewood is a far greater energy crisis than the soil shortage. By the year 2000, firewood needs
are expected to exceed supply by 25 percent.

Where firewood shortages have developed, the substitution of dired animal manure as fuel has reduced African food production by 20 million tons of grain a year. In Nepal, the floods caused by denuding slopes of their trees for use as firewood cost millions of dollars in damage and kill thousands of Nepalese and Indians each year.