How did the US repair the Oklahoma Dust Bowl?

In a recent episode of The History Guy on youtube he discussed not just the infamous Dust Bowl of the 1930's but also what steps were taken to repair it.



Obviously, things have healed since then - at least to some extent. But I'm interested in what you think of this from a permaculture perspective.

What do you think of their methods to repair the damage?
Was this an example of how "desertification" takes place? and/or Does what happened afterward apply to the "greening the desert" movement?
What steps should/shouldn't they have done in this instance?
In particular, I'm curious what you think of as far as tapping the aquifer as part of the solution.

Oklahoma was just a small portion of the Dust Bowl:


source

The Dust Bowl was a period of severe dust storms that greatly damaged the ecology and agriculture of the American and Canadian prairies during the 1930s; severe drought and a failure to apply dryland farming methods to prevent the aeolian processes (wind erosion) caused the phenomenon. The drought came in three waves: 1934, 1936, and 1939–1940, but some regions of the High Plains experienced drought conditions for as many as eight years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl

President Roosevelt ordered the Civilian Conservation Corps to plant the Great Plains Shelterbelt, a huge belt of more than 200 million trees from Canada to Abilene, Texas to break the wind, hold water in the soil, and hold the soil itself in place. The administration also began to educate farmers on soil conservation and anti-erosion techniques, including crop rotation, strip farming, contour plowing, terracing, and other improved farming practices. In 1937, the federal government began an aggressive campaign to encourage farmers in the Dust Bowl to adopt planting and plowing methods that conserved the soil. The government paid reluctant farmers a dollar an acre to practice the new methods. By 1938, the massive conservation effort had reduced the amount of blowing soil by 65%.

I would like to know if any of our forum members have information on how their grandparents, great-grandparents, and or others helped to repair this damage?

I have never lived in any of those areas and have never heard any stories about how the repair was done.

In  this video Geoff Lawton shows how some of the earthworks made back then to fix this problem in Arizona are still functioning.

Also recalled Ken Burns dust bowl series. Hearing the people who lived through it as children explain it is jaw dropping:

Part 1:
Part 2:

Well your query sent me down the rabbit hole Anne! Suffice it to say my grandfather worked for the Soil Conservation Service in the dust bowl area and he came up with machinery modifications for seeding grass seed which is very fine and small; wrote many papers including one about leaving stubble in crop fields; worked on methods to stabilize the sand dunes which blew and grew during the 30s; and much more.

Sadly, repair is a myth. Adaptation, mitigation, suffering continues.
Follow the history of the bison that coevolved with the grasslands. Their hoof print is the ideal puddle size for germinating native grasses that are adapted to the desert conditions.
I suppose someone could invent a product, let's call the line HOOFERS, that could simulate the depth and contours of the bison print then drive all over the Great Bison Belt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_bison_belt. They would have to put native grass seed in the depressions right before the rain to get things started.
Or, we could get rid of the barbed wire and make a real effort to repopulate the Great Bison Belt with real live Bison!

Thank you, Denise

That is wonderful to know you had a grandfather that helped!  

Amy, I feel you are on the right track with the Buffalo or Bison.

Not long ago I was reading an article about the extinction of the buffalo or bison.

Their extinction was probably one of the underlying reasons for the dust bowl happening.

At one time, buffalo were disappearing in record numbers, but the kind efforts of one Texas woman helped them return from the verge of extinction.

https://www.wideopencountry.com/mary-ann-goodnight/

This is not the article that I read though it is about the woman, Mary Ann Goodnight, the wife of the owner of the Goodnight Ranch in Texas and the founder of the Goodnight-Loving Trail upon which many herds of cattle traveled.

Charles Goodnight Bison Herd

https://allaboutbison.com/bison-in-history/texas-history/charles-goodnight-bison-herd/

Thank you for suggesting the Goodnights, Anne. I just reserved Charles Goodnight: Cowman and Plainsman, by J. Evetts Haley. I'll be taking a field trip to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caprock_Canyons_State_Park_and_Trailway this winter!

Amy Gardener wrote:Sadly, repair is a myth. Adaptation, mitigation, suffering continues.
Follow the history of the bison that coevolved with the grasslands. Their hoof print is the ideal puddle size for germinating native grasses that are adapted to the desert conditions.
I suppose someone could invent a product, let's call the line HOOFERS, that could simulate the depth and contours of the bison print then drive all over the Great Bison Belt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_bison_belt. They would have to put native grass seed in the depressions right before the rain to get things started.
Or, we could get rid of the barbed wire and make a real effort to repopulate the Great Bison Belt with real live Bison!

If you can teach the product to leave bison shit everywhere it goes, you may be onto something.  Otherwise, I think the real thing is the way to go.

Wow, some great and interesting comments, all!

I liked what Amy said, "Sadly, repair is a myth. Adaptation, mitigation, suffering continues. "  I think that helps me identify what was bugging me about the original video.  Seems like the bureaucracy or whoever wants to say, "Fixed!", but in reality more of a band-aid -- kicking the can down the road whilst storing up future problems.

Andrés Bernal wrote:In  this video

Geoff Lawton shows how some of the earthworks made back then to fix this problem in Arizona are still functioning.

Especially thanks for that video!  I think that may have at least partially answered my questions about tapping into the aquifer as in the original vid.

I recently read the book The Worst Hard Times by Timothy Egan. I recommend it. The original plains were about 14" of thick grass roots evolved over several millions of years. If you dug down below this in the hottest driest years, there was cool, moist soil. The grass, the buffalo, the aquifer, the weather patterns all formed this perfect landscape where life thrived. It is unique in all of earth's history.

My grandparents farmed during this time in Nebraska. They eventually gave up and my grandpa ran for country clerk and they moved to the 'city' of Oshkosh, with running water and electricity. The farming practices improved to include crop rotation and wind belts, until irrigation pivots came to be, then it all was up for grabs. Currently there are some farmers who practice dryland farming, and in droughts, those crops often fare better. My brother lives in the area still. Everyone knows reliance on the Ogallala aquifer is not sustainable. The Green Revolution of the 50s and 60s devastated the family farm due to the necessity of external inputs, and constant debt. It's a vicious circle few are able to get out of.

My nephew learned about drylands farming and other soil building practices like living mulches, so there is some progress, albeit small.

Andrés Bernal wrote:In  this video

Geoff Lawton shows how some of the earthworks made back then to fix this problem in Arizona are still functioning.

I've seen other videos on this area before, with Mollison and others, and I've never really talked about my opinion on them, I think. But what with the discussion on the dust bowl here, I thought it'd be a good time to throw my 2 cents in. I live in this area, know a lot about the local plants and animals (not an expert, but I pay attention, basically), so I'm gonna talk about what I know.

First, I feel rather bad for how Tucson gets portrayed in this video. Because while as a city it definitely still has problems with how water is handled, it's actually got less control than is sort of implied, and what control it does have, it's heading in good directions at least.

Tucson is in a state that is controlled by a lot of wealthy folks who do not give a crud about conservation, of water or much else. So even though Lawton showed that shot of a lush golf course in Tucson,  Tucson itself has no control of that. Golf course water usage can't be curtailed by the cities - it's a state regulation, so Tucson has no say in how much water the golf courses in or near it can use.

Tucson IS using too much pumped out water. That's definitely a problem. But it also has a very active water conservation scene in this city - I think more active than almost anywhere in the state. So it has been making changes to try and incentivize both lowering water usage AND refilling the aquifer, up to and including water harvesting infrastructure for roadworks and commercial buildings. Brad Lancaster (the author of Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands) lives in the city and is one of many that have pushed for water conservation reforms to the city building code and more.

They also have been trying to work a lot more with reclaimed water so that the water used isn't lost forever. So in Tucson is a place called the Sweetwater Wetlands that is an artificially constructed wetland using reclaimed water (https://tucsonaudubon.org/go-birding/get-started-with-birding/great-places-to-bird/sweetwater-wetlands/ ). Salinity issues exist, and are partially addressed by native plants that thrive in higher salinity environments to make it easier for other plants to grow as well (like saltbushes).

And in the same river that Lawton stood in, as of 2019, the Santa Cruz River Heritage Project has been pumping water back into the river, from reclaimed water, to flow near the edge of Tucson and OUT of Tucson. I do not know what salinity issues there may be, but it's spawned a lot of growth in that area, so it's been at least somewhat of a success, so far.  (https://www.tucsonaz.gov/files/water/docs/SCRHP_article_World_Water.pdf )

I am not saying that Tucson is great - its water usage is not sustainable. I just felt bad that the city that has such a strong water conservation gig going mostly had the focus on golf courses and pavement, you know?

But that said, this was not the main issue with this video.
The big problem I have with this video is the very reason the video exists: the swales.

There was a lot of talk about how lush they made the area, how rich the soil, how full of plant life, etc...

And most of that's true. The soil there is MUCH better than the rest of the surrounding area. A lot of water collected there; a lot of plants can grow there.

But...well, I'm just gonna use an example to show why I really, really dislike how these swales are talked about.

The Santa Cruz river bed - the dry one that Lawton was standing in for part of the video? Lawton implies that it's dry due to a number of factors.

That is not true, however. That river went dry pretty much due to one action taken by a group of businessmen in 1910 - 19 wells dug to collect water around the springs that were the source of this river. The water was sent via canal to various buyers in the valley. It took them 5 years to use up the water so completely that the springs went dry, and so did the river. So this river has been dry since 1915.

This is what happens here in the desert, though. We have LIMITED WATER. There is not a single water source here that is kept full of water from rainfall alone. All of the year-round flowing water near here is, and was, from underground springs - and there IS no year round source of running water in this valley. The Santa Cruz river was IT.

So the vast majority of the water that the plants and animals use in the desert comes from rainfall, instead. It comes mostly, and sometimes only, for three months in a row in the middle of the summer. Most of the rainstorms will drop rain in small areas, and then the water gets distributed throughout the desert via the arroyos that are dry whenever it is not raining.

Arroyos are an integral part of this desert. They are one of the reasons that the desert has the level of growth it does - which is, as I understand it, higher than almost any desert in the world. They may not be running with water all year round, but for the desert, they are as much a source of life as a regular stream or river would be in a non-desert environment.

So blocking an arroyo, especially a large one, is about as beneficial to the environment as, say...digging 19 wells and draining a spring dry. Which is why the swales - which blocked arroyos - are actually rather awful.

Because BOTH the swales AND the wells draining the springs put extra water SOMEWHERE. They made more plants grow SOMEWHERE.

But they only managed it by taking that water AWAY from everything downstream that used to depend on it. This is not, IMO, a good thing.

If I have water fall on my property and I dig in basins so it is more likely to collect in specific spots, or more likely to collect and soak in than evaporate off the surface? That's good for me and the plants and animals on my property. That's a pretty natural occurrence that I'm just helping along. Same for if there is water that falls ON my property, and I make sure it doesn't run OFF of it.

But there is no such things as making this entire desert lush and looking like that basin behind the swales, not without screwing over other parts of the environment. We do not have enough water in the desert to DO that. The more extreme we make our water collection, in terms of blocking flowing water for our use, the more we take away from elsewhere.

Like, just as an example, that amaranth he points out? It looks like Palmer's Amaranth. It grows freaking everywhere - richness of the soil is not in anyway a necessity for them to grow that thick and tall. Water is the determining factor.

They grow that tall and big along numerous arroyos near my house that only have water for maybe 2-3 weeks a YEAR and the crappiest soil imaginable.  They grow in bigger patches when there is more available water, and in smaller patches - including just a few plants - where there is less water. And they are ONLY that lush for a short period of the year. Same for the grass - edges of many, many roads, where there is just a little more water, look just as lush and full of grass and amaranth during the monsoon season as the middle of his swale.

So you can have that swale with a lot of concentrated amaranth...or you could have NOT had that swale and the amaranth would have grown in much smaller patches along miles of arroyo downstream, to be used by a lot more animals, and slightly improved the soil everywhere a little bit, instead of one big patch of 'rich' soil. You could have added bits of stone and other things to slow down the water just a bit, so that the edges of the arroyos had more growth and less erosion, if one wanted to encourage a greener desert.

But the only way to have that dream that Lawton talks about, planting citrus and figs and 'maybe dates,' is if you essentially grab the water in your area, PLUS block water flow from some arroyo.

Oh...and you irrigate.

You're not having pretty much any fruit tree growing here without irrigation of some kind. I don't care HOW rich the soil is - the humidity is too low and the rainfall is too low for the majority of the year...maybe I'm wrong, but I'm guessing that even with extremely rich soil and a bit of shade, a citrus tree is going to struggle with high temperatures, humidity sometimes in the single digits, and not a single extra drop of water for, say, 7-8 months straight.

So...yeah, I know I'm going off a bit here. I find it hard not to, honestly, because I keep seeing videos like this, and then I hear folks get caught up in the idea of 'greening the desert' as something we can do in our area as though it will not have any impact on the rest of the environment around us.

That is not how it works. We CAN have more lush areas in the desert. But to get them to the extent suggested in the video? In the end, we'd have a small bunch of really lush, green areas, and a much drier, deader desert all around them. Which is not a good trade off.

Thank you so much, Shauna- it's a tough but thoughtful position to take, and I share a lot of the same sentiments.  

shauna carr wrote:
So blocking an arroyo, especially a large one, is about as beneficial to the environment as, say...digging 19 wells and draining a spring dry. Which is why the swales - which blocked arroyos - are actually rather awful.

It isn't just a problem in the desert.  My state has among the highest densities of small impoundments in the country.  Farmers and landowners dam arroyos (we call them draws) for all sorts of reasons- capture sediment and runoff, water livestock, recreational fishing.  Independently they're fine, cumulatively- hundreds in a watershed- they have measurable, negative impacts.  They alter stream flow patterns and habitat for native species.  They starve stream channels of sediment, causing them to downcut, disconnecting the channels from riparian forests and off-channel wetlands.  They're vectors for introduced species, whether aquatic plants brought in on boats and trailers, or crayfish, worms, minnows, and other critters used as bait.  There are lots of native species in decline in the midwest and southeastern US in part due to what many consider benign land use practices.  


The desert is green.   It isn't green year-round, but it's far from barren.  To me the idea of "greening the desert" assumes there's nothing of inherent value there, which couldn't be further from the truth.  Deserts need protected- but they don't need improved.  Deserts don't need to be optimized.  Desert ecosystems solved every single problem on how to perpetuate themselves eons before our species ever walked the earth, but there's a vein of permaculture which views deserts as waste places to be colonized and populated by a whole host of novel species.  Greening a desert with species from elsewhere, species they're familiar with,  so an alien landscape can be transformed into something they're more comfortable with.  Remaking the places they've settled to mimic the places they've came from.  Biotic homogenization.  There might be twenty five or fifty native species using that arroyo and the water it provides.  They will all be jeopardized for more citrus, more figs, in the name of sustainability and environmental awareness.  


Everyone who ever cut an acre of forest to plant corn thought they were improving upon nature, too.  Everyone who ever ditched a wetland for cotton or tobacco thought they were making the best use of waste space.  For that matter, everyone who ever knocked down a great big Bur Oak to build a 5000 square foot McMansion saw it as an improvement to the landscape.  The movement to green the desert is motivated by exactly the same sentiment as farmers plowing Oklahoma and Texas in the 1930s- make the best use of marginal, unproductive land.  At best it's a difference of degree, not of kind.  The folks greening the desert today may not make the same mistakes as people a century ago.  They may make entirely new mistakes for future generations to deal with.  

In my part of the world, we talk about Breaking the Prairie.  The physical act of plowing virgin sod to plant wheat and grains, but also the collapse of that ecosystem- the soil loss, the conversion to trees due to fire suppression, the loss of formerly abundant species.   One could argue early settlers actually Greened the Prairie- with fescue, brought along from Europe.  Fescue isn't great for livestock- it can even be toxic- but it's familiar, and looks pretty through winter.  They were wildly successful, and the environmental cost was enormous.

 I don't mean to sound negative close-minded, I just think we should be clear-eyed about the decisions we make and the impacts they have.  Because we believe we walk an enlightened path, we may not think as critically about our own positions and practices.  But I think we need to be thoughtful, and careful, as a discipline.  If we're not thoughtful, and careful, we can break our last wild places.  

Shauna if I understand you correctly, you say that swales concentrate the water in one location and deprive the surrounding area. Arroyos allow water to travel over a wider area. Except that water captured by a swale doesn't stay put, it keeps travelling underground at a much slower rate. That water spreads in every direction downhill and is protected from evaporation and wind. Meanwhile, an arroyo concentrates water to a narrow band which erodes the top soil, exposing roots to the sun, and then when it finally peters out, then it is a thin layer of moisture that evaporates without seeping into the ground. Because it doesn't soak down, it pulls salt up and leads to increased salinity and alkalinity. Arroyos are scars of a blasted and dysfunctional environment. A desert left to its own devices will grow scrub trees and bushes around an arroyo so thickly that it catches mulch and debris which forms an effective swale or check dam. As the captured sediment builds, the arroyo or back cut is slowly healed over time. Bill Mollison said that the deserts of the southwest were actually much more vegetated with much more streams and he predicted that the saguaro cactus would start to die out due to a lack of understory to shade the ground. Beavers also help with this process (and yes there are still beavers in the hills and mountains of the southwest) and do it quicker. The Navajo, Anasazi, and Apache all did these sorts of earth and stone works to make their agriculture work.

From my personal experience, the draws and valleys of my southwest Colorado are dotted with earth dams erected during the dust bowl. There is drastically more green around these dams and even down stream. I can only see positive effects here.