Replies to post #193772 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[DesertDrifter]

I can't wait to see it. I wonder how they will handle the issue of soil conservation when it comes to no-till and minimum-till farming that was made possible by herbicides. We fix one problem and create several more sometimes.

I remember as a kid the wonders of snirt... snowdrifts in winter that were half rich aeolian topsoil and half blizzard-blown snow. And hundreds of miles of beautiful shelter belt plantings of trees that were killed by the advent of 2,4,5T weedkiller that drifted from the fields they were planted adjacent to for protection. The wheat was always twice as tall on the leeward sides of the shelter belts where the soil collected.

And the huge aforestation project that was the Sand Hills of Nebraska, which was planting of millions of trees on land that was previously unforested...

Lots of interesting topics they could cover, and i hope they do. Any time one tries to turn perennial tallgrass prairie into annual grasses for food by breaking the sod and planting crops there are almost always unintended ecological consequences, in a addition to the massive amounts of food produced. And the New Deal remedies such as the Soil Bank program that turned the corner on conserving the soil resource.

[F6]

When the Great Plains Dried Up and Blew Away

The Dust Bowl
This film on PBS on Sunday and Monday (check local listings) looks at the destruction, including a storm in Ulysses, Kan., in 1935 [the "Black Sunday" storm ( http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324556304578120653895183658.html ; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sunday_(storm) )].

Arthur Rothstein's 1936 photo of a farmer and his sons in Oklahoma, in "The Dust Bowl."
November 16, 2012
http://tv.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/arts/television/the-dust-bowl-by-ken-burns-on-pbs.html


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Ken Burns' 'Dust Bowl' is far from dry history

November 13. 2012
http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/tv/2012/11/13/the-dust-bowl-and-ken-burns/1702991/

[fuagf]

Finally the rains came .. 8:35 The Dust Bowl

The Hardy Ones - With the dust storms still ravishing their land, their homes and their family, many of those affected had a tough decision to make; leave in search of a better life or stay and face the seemingly never-ending storms. By 1936, nearly a quarter of the people living in the southern Plains had begun to leave. Many headed for California, a land supposedly full of jobs and opportunity. Nevertheless, around 75 per cent of those enduring intense hardship decided to stay put and retain their land. (From the US) (Documentary Series) (Final) PG CC

http://www.sbs.com.au/schedule .. finished 15 mins ago .. thanks for the heads up back then ..

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Drought in the Dust Bowl Years


A dust storm approaching Rolla, Kansas, May 6, 1935.
(Image: Franklin D. Roosevelt Library Digital Archives)

http://drought.unl.edu/DroughtBasics/DustBowl/DroughtintheDustBowlYears.aspx

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Why the New Ken Burns Documentary on the Dust Bowl Has Lessons to Teach Us

By Bryan WalshNov. 18, 20123 Comments


April 1938: A dust bowl farmstead in Dallam County, Texas,
showing the desolation produced by the dust and wind
on the countryside adding to the problems of the depression
in the USA. (Photo by Three Lions/Getty Images)

Climate change .. http://topics.time.com/climate-change/ .. and the environment were the forgotten issues of the 2012 election—at least, before Superstorm Sandy put them square on the map. But even before that hurricane slashed through the Northeast, killing more than a hundred people and causing likely more than $50 billion in damages, the U.S. was already in the grips of a slow-motion ecological disaster. 2012 saw one of the biggest and most severe droughts in American history, with the Corn Belt in particular gripped by withering heat and aridity. Yields of corn and soybeans—the staple crops of the U.S. food system—shriveled, leading to higher food prices and a hit to the U.S. economy .. http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-11-11/u-dot-s-dot-drought-may-cut-gdp-by-one-percentage-point-deutsche-says .. that could be as much as 1% of GDP.

But while the 2012 drought .. http://topics.time.com/drought/ .. may have been the worst in a half-century, it has nothing on the great Dust Bowl .. http://topics.time.com/dust-bowl/ .. of the 1930s. That decade-long drought—exacerbated by poor farming techniques that left topsoil crumbling in the wind—changed the face of the U.S. and led to massive migrations out of farming states in the Midwest. As the master filmmaker Ken Burns shows in his new documentary The Dust Bowl .. http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/dustbowl/ .. —airing on PBS Sunday night and Monday night—it’s a man-made disaster that still has lessons for us today. (The 4-hour documentary will also be available as a DVD-check it out here.) “The Dust Bowl has never gotten the attention it deserves,” says Burns. “But we can see today with this year’s drought, or with climate change, that we can affect the environment, whether we want to acknowledge it or not.”

The Dust Bowl is vintage Burns, with the documentarian mixing archival photographs and footage with interviews of elderly Dust Bowl survivors. What stands out is that while the 1930s certainly saw a number of severely dry years, the sheer scale of the Dust Bowl had much more to do with farmer’s practices than with the weather, as well as the financial catastrophe of the Depression, which reduced demand for crops—all after farmers had spent the previous decade and half plowing more and more land. The result was a vicious circle, as Allen Best writes in the Denver Post .. http://www.denverpost.com/recommended/ci_22005922 :
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When demand drooped and prices flagged, the new dryland farmers plowed yet more to compensate for reduced revenue. Compounding the problem were the so-called suitcase farmers, from Denver and elsewhere, absentee landowners who plowed massive swathes of prairie sod. In these ways, millions and millions of acres of soil were rendered naked.
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In the end, 25% of the affected population in the affected southern Great Plains area would flee, an Okie exile that John Steinbeck would describe in The Grapes of Wrath. The Dust Bowl sped the Westward migration of the American population and its urbanization, as ruined farmers fled for the cities. Before the Dust Bowl, nearly 50% of Americans .. http://www.csrees.usda.gov/qlinks/extension.html .. lived in rural areas; today, that figure is closer to 17%. The disaster literally changed the face of the country.

Thankfully, the Dust Bowl also led to changes in how Americans farm, with more emphasis put on soil conservation that has been able to prevent the sort of ceaseless erosion that ruined whole states. The 2012 drought is actually a sign of just how resilient American agriculture has become. Despite one of the driest growing periods in decades, American farmers will actually produce far more corn and other crops this year than they did in a good year as recently as the 1980s. And farm incomes—thanks largely to government-subsidizes crop insurance—could actually hit a record high this year. Unlike during the Dust Bowl, the 2012 drought won’t see massive numbers of farmers driven off their land—though with only 2% of Americans now working in agriculture, there aren’t many farmers left to be driven off.

It’s difficult for climate scientists to connect dry years like 2012 to man-made climate change. (In fact, a study published in Nature .. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v491/n7424/full/nature11575.html .. last week argued that drought hasn’t actually increased over the past 60 years, even as carbon emissions have increased and global temperatures have risen.) But most climate models agree broadly that as the planet warms, dry areas—like much of the U.S. Midwest and West—are likely to get even drier, which could imperil the American breadbasket. That something that worries Burns. “Politicians aren’t taking climate change seriously, and it has the potential to be so devastating,” he says. “In The Dust Bowl, we can see for ourselves what happens when bad weather is compounded by man-made mistakes. Here’s hoping that we’re finally learning.

http://science.time.com/2012/11/18/why-the-new-ken-burns-documentary-on-the-dust-bowl-has-lessons-to-teach-us/

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A Parched Land, A Starving People

Drought has cast its shadow over the Horn of Africa. Three years of scant rainfall
in Ethiopia has left the land parched, killing livestock and resulting in the starvation
of thousands of people. Photographer Seamus Murphy documents the disaster.

http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,2036678,00.html#ixzz2OGSf6HpH