When we talk of conservation on the High Plains we are not just talking about using water wisely.  Conservation comes in many forms.  As the Great Dust Bowl wore on, conservation became a necessary means to returning any sort of economic or ecological activity to the High Plains.  The soil had been plowed in such a way that made the grasslands uninhabitable; it caused deaths and even heartbreak over lost land.  

When the miles-high dust storms created a crisis of epic proportions, Hugh Bennett, known as the father of soil conservation, stepped in.  Bennett was responsible for putting a large part of our country literally back together.

For Hugh Bennett, conservation and efficiency were not at odds.  He grew up on a plantation owned by his father in North Carolina where he witnessed what would now be considered conservation practices; on the plantation they were considered efficiency practices.  One of those practices was terracing, which was designed to keep the soil from flying away.

In 1933 Bennett was appointed head of the newly formed Soil Erosion Service, an agency supported by the CCC and the Dept. of the Interior.  Bennett carried out over 40 demonstration projects to help famers learn soil conservation and restoration practices.  The CCC carried out much of the work at the demonstration sites, planting trees, building erosion control structures, and planting cover crops.  In 1935, when the dust storms had become severe and devastating, Bennett convinced Congress to create the Soil Conservation Service.  

Still, after two years, not enough farmers were cooperating to make the conservation projects effective.  So to further enable cooperation on a local level, Bennett initiated the Soil Conservation Districts, which organized farmers and ranchers into local districts.   The CCC arranged meetings between neighboring farmers and ranchers, to teach them how to manage and plant their land in a way that could prevent more wind erosion.  They were meant to consider their land management collectively, not individually.  Bennett knew that if even one farmer or rancher in a district were not applying the conservation methods, then all the efforts would go back dust.

Today, over seventy-five years later, there are still hundreds of good people working together in Conservation Districts. Many ranchers and farmers are working to restore their piece of the Great Plains to make it ecologically healthy, and economically sustainable.  Although ranching is far from profitable for most ranchers, many take on the task of restoration on with a sense of duty to the landscape, working within the bounds of the ecosystem to prevent another Dust Bowl.  

above photos:

CCC workers planting willow sprouts, ca. 1935, Central Plains, courtesy of the National Archives

CCC Enrollees building fences to control grazing at camp SCS-Ida-10, Weiser, Idaho, courtesy of the National Archives

Grasslands are a very delicate ecosystem. In the regions where the dust storms and soil erosion became the most severe during the Dust Bowl, there were few rivers and nearly no trees. If one were to drive through the Great Plains, one might say it is a wasteland. One might dismiss the grassland as land that should be put to better use. As Timothy Egan pointed out in his book, The Worst Hard Time, Robert Marcy, who was exploring the area for Jefferson, compared it to the African Sahara desert.

But, as in every ecosystem, birds, prairie dogs, coyotes, birds of prey, grazing herbivores, insects, and the plants are part of a large process, each dependent on the existence of the other for survival. The conditions that led to the Dust Bowl were driven by a need to market and sell land. Once the land was sold or claimed, those who had their few acres needed to do what their ancestors had done, they needed to grow things, and support a family from their land. By 1921 tractors were pulling the plows, carving dense sod and turning over the roots of the grass. When the drought came, there was nothing to hold the soil in place, so it blew away. The ecosystem was dead. Grazing herbivores had been replaced by the plow.

In 1935 a man named Rexford Tugwell, who was head of the Resettlement Administration, helped an ambitious young filmmaker, Pare Lorenz make a film dramatizing what had happened to the grasslands, called The Plow that Broke the Plains. Many looked at it as propedganda. The film, although banned in some communities, was seen by 10 million people in 1937.

The full version of The Plow That Broke the Plains can be viewed here.

Although many New Deal agencies took up the task of restoring the plains, in 1940, the Great Plains Committee, which had been created to study the problems in the region, issued a report called The Northern Plains. The report concluded that, "The problem of land-use adjustment on an enduring basis in the Great Plains, in the Northern Plains and Southern Plains alike, still remains the most difficult agricultural problem of its kind in the United States."

photo by Jack Delano, Farm land in Texas panhandle near Amarillo, Texas,  March 1943