By Ken Root

The terminology used by our ancestors showed their intentions: They "broke out" the prairie with a plow. They turned grasslands into fields and opened up the potential wealth that could be reaped from the land with little appreciation for the ravages to follow.

The progression of agriculture was almost derailed because of the destructive forces of nature on the fragile soil. Erosion has permanently ruined millions of acres that modern man exposed to wind and water without nature's barrier of vegetation.

In the worst decade, the 1930s, the combination of plowing and drought produced dust storms that permanently eliminated thousands of farm families from the Plains. Amazingly, a hard rain that packed the soil would cause the fastest erosion as wind speed near the ground could increase and pick up the light weight, silty soil and take it high into the sky.

Why did farmers plow the land in the first place? Did they not know the results of erosion? My ancestors told me that they never thought of the consequences and that they had no choice. The land was "mined" by most of the early farmers because it was their only source of income. Land was also cheap. If you lived on it for seven years, it was free. There was also a lot more just to the west of their current farm.

My home farm in Oklahoma was broken out in the 1890s and literally the entire 160 acres was plowed by the homesteader. It had sandy hills underlain with red clay and rich black soil in the creek bottom. The settlers preferred farming the hills where the soil drained easily and was lighter. There were few trees with mostly native bluestem and other species of prairie grass.

Within a few years the hills washed down onto the bottoms. The creek was named "Wild Horse" because it ran so violently with every thunderstorm. Man destroyed, in a few decades, what nature had taken thousands of years to create. In the 1920s, the farmers enjoyed prosperity with cotton and corn, but in the 1930s, the Dust Bowl disaster took most of them out of business. The bare land was rescued by tickle grass and blackjack oaks to the point that you could not walk through the brush.

The scars still remain as the topsoil is so thin that my mother said, "Most of our farm couldn't raise a fuss." The red clay stained the runoff water in the ponds and the black soil of the bottom land was nowhere to be seen. Farmers realized that they could fare better by sprigging Bermuda grass in the bottoms and leaving the hillsides to restore themselves. The creek was quieted by flood control lakes and a sad sense of peace returned to the area.

The county put in a new bridge across Wild Horse creek a few years ago. The bulldozer and backhoe cut deep to prepare the supports for the concrete structure. Standing on the edge of the forms, I looked at the soil profile they'd sliced through and followed the sand down almost eight feet before seeing the first black topsoil hidden forever under the burden dumped on it by the plows of the last century.

We appear to learn only by necessity as farmers began to work with nature using simple soil conservation methods and now have moved to no-till planting. The plow is gone from most areas of the country but its memory lingers. Farmers took great pride in plowing straight furrows and evenly turning the field as the first tillage operation to prepare for a new crop. Now it is done in one pass with the aid of herbicides to control weeds. The rows may follow the contour of terraces today.

What have we learned from all this? That poor folks have poor ways? That you take from the land for your current needs with no thought of the future? I hope we see that our initial entry into any new era or environment can come as a destructive force that may never be mitigated. We think we understand much more today, but we must be ever vigilant.

Luckily, much of the Midwest is not as fragile and erodible as the light and thin soils of the western Plains where the wind blows most of the time. Still we need to know that agriculture seems to develop technology in reverse order. We build the atomic bomb first. The plow and DDT (insecticide) are my two examples. Nothing is wrong with either one if utilized with knowledge and planning, but, if applied in excess of their fit with the environment, they have devastating and long lasting results.

Farming is an art and a science. Those who combine their skills to produce a crop should appreciate their impact as much as their production. Still, farmers face the struggle to stay in business and their profit margins have become thinner than the topsoil that their ancestors left them. There's new land available, but now it's south, in Brazil and Argentina, where the farms are broken out with even more force but with a greater realization of the results of erosion. Still these countries are paralleling our history with a developing country mindset that puts people above the resources and the government acts as a promoter of economic expansion at any cost.

So as you see the no-till planter running this spring, think of how this mindset might have been applied to the virgin prairie. Realize, too, that farmers are dealing with their economic reality and the world demand for food is growing. We can only hope that good decisions by farmers and good policies by governments won't place as great a handicap on future generations who till the soil.

Editor's note: Ken Root is a farm anchor at WHO Radio in Des Moines, Iowa. He is a 28-year veteran of agricultural broadcasting and writing. He can be reached by e-mail at: kenroot@clearchannel.com or by writing to him at the Journal at P.O. Box 760, Dodge City, KS 67801.

Date: 1/27/05

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