Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations - Kootenay Local Agricultural Society

Figure 19. Dust storm approaching Stratford, Texas, April 18, 1935 (NOAA,
George E. Marsh Album; available at www.photolib.noaa.gov/historic/c&gs/
theb1365.htm).
environmental refugees, unwelcome until they reached California’s new,
labor-hungry fields at the edge of the continent.
The problem of soil erosion was not restricted to the Dust Bowl. In 1935
the Department of Agriculture estimated the amount of ruined and abandoned
farmland at up to fifty million acres. Two to three times that much
land was losing an inch of topsoil every four to twenty years. Two hundred
thousand acres of abandoned Iowa farmland was eroded beyond redemption.
The next year the new Soil Conservation Service reported that more
than three-quarters of Missouri had lost at least a quarter of its original
topsoil, more than twenty billion tons of dirt since the state was first cultivated.
Only four of their original sixteen inches of topsoil remained on
some fields. The U.S. Bureau of Agricultural Engineering reported that it
was common for southeastern farms to lose more than six inches of soil in
a single generation. In the aftermath of the Dust Bowl, which cost over a
billion dollars in federal relief, the federal government began to see soil
conservation as an issue of national survival.
State and federal commissions traced the severity of the 1930s dust storms
to a tremendously increased acreage under cultivation, much of which was
dust blow 153