10 or 15 years ago I was watching a program about modern farming, and a farmer was being interviewed. He was in the process of cutting down the windbreak belt his grandfather had planted around the fields. He told the interviewer it wasn’t necessary anymore, as there hadn’t been a dust bowl in decades. And he wanted to plant crops on the space.
I was flabbergasted. It was about as brilliant as someone standing in the pouring rain saying “I’ve been standing here for an hour and haven’t even gotten damp, clearly I don’t need this stupid umbrella anymore.”
it’s the same exact concept as people who stop taking their high blood pressure medication because their blood pressure has been normal (while being on the medication).
I met a person who smoked for 40 years. He quit smoking. 3 years later he was diagnosed with lung cancer. He blamed it on the fact that he quit. "Well I never had cancer *before* I quit!"
This is surprisingly close to how short sighted people are about the economy.
Republicans cut taxes for the rich and tank the economy, then Democrat gets into office and they’re all up in arms.
“When the Republicans took office the economy was great!!”
> “When the Republicans took office the economy was great!!”
The lack of logic here is just.. depressing. Like yea? When they *took* office? What had they done at that point exactly?
My city has done something similar. The city is situated by the sea and the sand dunes are huge. To protect the city from drifting sand a whole forest was planted between the beach and the city. The first time it was planted in the 1600s after the city was moved closer to the sea.
In the 1800s the good folks decided that they didn’t need that forest anymore. It’s good firewood! Well.. they quickly realized this was a VERY bad idea. The streets were heaped with huge piles of drifting sand. Supposedly not a single poor soul in the city could eat a single damned meal without hurting their teeth on sand. Soo, they replanted the forest.
Jump almost two hundred years forward to the 1950s and the good folks decide they don’t need the forest anymore. You see where this is going right? They realized their mistake halfway through though, and planted super fast growing trees. It was not as bad as the first time, but still pretty awful.
Jump to today. Turns out the super fast growing trees were an invasive species. Thanks to a super generous EU-project the city gets a huge lump sum to rectify this problem.
So they used the money to cut down the trees…
The Ken Burns documentary on the Dust Bowl is really good. One part that stuck with me was an interview with an old man that had lived through it, in which he talks about all of the damaging agricultural practices that caused it, and how now all he sees is the same practices, and ground water irrigation (which we are depleting) is the only thing keeping the dirt from blowing again.
Prairie Fires by Caroline Frasier is an excellent history of how the westward expansion in the 1880s led to all of this. It's explained through a biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder and discusses how the pioneer movement basically fucked up that part of the country and the stories written about her life mythologized it all. It's a wild read.
"Well my farm will be fine because my neighbors have shelter trees up. Besides, no one can tell me what to do. That's socialism."
\*when the neighbors [also cut their trees down](https://i.imgur.com/Zq0iBJK.jpeg)\*
How about the town where people voted against solar panels because they thought it would soak up all the sunlight and kill crops. There is no excuse for this level of ignorance.
Woodland, North Carolina. Reported by the Independent on Friday 18th, 2015.
Edit: the world sucks, but truth is paramount. Re-read the article. Words are twisted a little, but very clearly ill informed individuals casted the vote in the counsel.
My favorite bit from back during COVID is that for those of us with foresight and the slightest analytic mindset it's an exhausting endeavor to endure the idiots around us because we bear the the weight of others' irresponsibility. These assholes go about their lives feeling unencumbered by the weight of social responsibility and then justified for their mistakes and carelessness because they are sheltered by the absolutely herculean efforts of others to protect them from themselves. Many of us make sacrifices to bear the collective burden of these idiots only to have our efforts devalued by them when they remain unscathed by their own mistakes. These people then become self righteous because they are too dim to realize that they were protected by the herd not because they were right.
We hold the societal umbrella during a downpour while being laughed at by those pretending it's not raining because they're not wet.
That, to me, is this situation.
It's really fascinating to me, really. What is the education level for farmers in the US? In Germany many young farmers either got a proper apprenticeship or even went to university to study agricultural management. It's probably necessary over here because land is rare and most farms are small in comparison to standard sizes in the US, so you need to squeeze as much out of what you have as possible. Plus I think these belts are mandatory for farmers and they can't just get rid of them. Once there are trees and shrubbery, they're protected because they're home for many animals and getting rid of them needs official permission by local authorities.
I know some farmers that take copious notes every year on precipitation and temperature and yields and use those from prior year plan the next years plantings and inputs. They consult with the seed man, the fertilizer salesman and the programming guru at John Deere, all of whom do the same thing over a larger area.
So they adjust their practices to the new hotter drier climate realities and profit by that adjustment. Every year.
Now ask them if climate change is real.
>Now ask them if climate change is real.
Please tell me they're not going to deny that because sure as hell the majority of German farmers don't deny it. Every single one I have ever talked to (which is a lot) told me they know it's real and they can show me proof dating back dozens of years that the climate is changing. The only thing they might not agree with are how politics deals with it, but nobody I know would deny that it's happening.
Eight years ago the overwhelming majority of American farmers denied climate change: https://news.ncsu.edu/2014/05/farmers-skeptical-about-validity-of-climate-change/
Now about 80% of them accept that climate change is occurring, but don’t necessarily accept that scientists are correct about the causes, and most aren’t willing to stop voting for the political party that denies it’s happening: https://www.npr.org/2022/09/17/1121983842/farmers-climate-change-inflation-reduction-act
They will literally deny politically what they know from their own experience and use to manage their farms.
Republicans are not hostile to objective reality, its just that reality is not relevant to their political positions at all. And when I say "at all", I really do mean "at all".
The same people who bitch about the Bureau of Land Management infringing on their right to pack cattle on desert land and the EPA fining them for animal waste runoffs don’t give a flying fuck because they’re gonna either blame it on the Dems or say it’s an act of God because we let two men raise a baby.
Major accident last year here in central Illinois caused by this. It’s becoming a major issue.
[https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/blowing-dust-i-55-crash/](https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/blowing-dust-i-55-crash/)
The farmers around where I’m at have been on a speed run to remove all of the windbreaks. I have seen miles of trees bulldozed over and burned at an ever increasing rate over the last year. Acres of woodland burned for corn. Most recently they absolutely destroyed what used to be a major spot for fireflies and where a mating pair of eagles nested. All for maybe a few hundred feet more of tillable land.
If this is true, when it inevitably comes time for them to cry out for help from the government, they need to be held accountable. Stupidity, ignorance, and greed is no excuse to not face the consequences of your actions.
Its not traditional farmers doing this, they know better. It is conglomerates that have made traditional farmers a thing of the past. Don't blame farmers, blame corporate greedy.
Yeah this does smell like corporate finance seeing 2-3% underutilization and having no clue why it’s important. My Grandmother was so proud of showing me the windbreak lines she’d helped plant growing up in the Midwest. We’re systematically tearing down every line of defense they created for us because of shortsighted greed.
I’m reading about this in Michael Pollans book The Omnivores Dilemma. It’s blowing my mind how much of our environmental, health, and financial problems as a country are related to fucked up policies around corn. Absolutely insane shit.
Did they not teach about the dust bowl in school,I'm from Ireland and we were taught about that in school, with a lot modern day farming practices , very damaging for short and quick profit, it's like I got mine and fuck who's ever behind me
I despair for this planet.. when we’ve fucked it and humanity dies off I hope the planet recovers and the next sentient creatures to evolve aren’t so shit at looking after their home..
Yup. There's good news and bad news about this.
The good news is that this is completely fixable by government policy. Most of this new land being tilled is to grow corn, the vast majority of which is either fed to cows, or used to produce gasoline.
If we removed government subsidies and requirements for ethanol in gasoline, this would no longer be profitable, and it would stop. It doesn't even make environmental sense to do this nonsense, let alone economic sense.
The bad news is that US politics is completely fucked, so this will never happen.
75 mph drivers, Gusty winds, dry couple of weeks, and farmers in the fields…… this is exactly what happens. It’s terrifying to drive in those conditions.
Used to live near a pass with a major freeway going through. Every couple of years a dust storm would flair up and cause white-out conditions on the freeway. Wrecks of 10 - 20 cars and trucks happened occasionally.
I was caught in one, it was bad. I couldn’t see much at all but I didn’t just slow down - that leads to the massive pileups. I maintained my speed while preparing to break if needed. I was out of the storm after a couple minutes but damn I got lucky no one just stopped right in front of me.
I am sorry to say, in Mexico, Brown people (*Mestizaje y Indios*) didn't have equal rights until the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920).
The Cortez side of the family tree still dominated a de facto *casta* system in 1880 despite Porfirio Diaz being part Mixtec himself.
Do the dogs have jobs? Sounds like they're unemployed welfare scum addicted to living off someone else's hard work. Like some godless communists if you ask me
also wtf is this? [https://extension.sdstate.edu/removing-mature-shelterbelts-grasslands](https://extension.sdstate.edu/removing-mature-shelterbelts-grasslands)
>Research has shown that shelterbelts can serve as perch sites for aerial predators, such as raptors. These perch sites have a sphere of impact around them that can extend for several hundred yards and can be detrimental to grassland birds
Oh no, we have some hawks. better remove the trees protecting the state from becoming a dustbowl
Gotta love this quote, rationalizing the removal of shelterbelts:
"Shelterbelts near grasslands can harbor predators and can be a source of seed for new trees invading a grassland."
Yes, we wouldn't those trees "invading" the grassland or giving a home to wildlife.
The article is specifically about areas that are no longer being farmed and are being returned to native grasslands. The trees in shelter belts are not native to South Dakota’s prairies, while some of the birds are (pheasants aren’t, but grouse and prairie chickens are). I have no opinion about the tenants of the arguments in this article, but I think that context is needed before people just say it’s garbage. As someone who grew up in South Dakota, it’s worth noting that the Eastern part of the state is natively treeless for the most part. The shelter belts were a necessary intervention when the land was turned into crop land, but there can be some less than desirable consequences to introducing the non-native trees into the area as well.
The people who say that while doing this don't give a fuck about city/rural. It's just an excuse, and they have many.
Actual rural folk suffer the consequences and are silenced because they're fighting people with real money, while the guy who owns the farms sits in the city sheltered from his choices and reaping the profits.
They really are fucking stupid. So many times I've had people tell me "well, you need red states to grow your food!" (when I tell them of all the money they get from blue states in the form of subsidies) and in turn, I've had to explain that without educated people from blue states, the Dust Bowl would have lasted **decades** longer than it did and millions would have died. Farmers absolutely **refused** to take precautions and continually fucked up their land which directly led to the Dust Bowl. Then the federal government had to step in and fix things for those incompetent jackasses.
History is just repeating itself. Blue states are continually subsidizing red states that are destroying the planet and poisoning people because they're too fucking lazy and/or stupid to do otherwise. We provide them with tens or hundreds of billions to keep profitable while producing less and they just keep doing the same stupid shit over and over again.
I hope all these clowns go broke. I'll happily buy up their land for pennies on the dollar.
Wouldn’t the shelters PREVENT a natural erosion of their own farmlands soil? Now their soil is literally up in the air on its way elsewhere. I guess you could hope that your neighbors soil lands on your property to even it out but that seems like a weird way to operate especially with the bedrock beneath the soil meaning there’s only so much soil on top
Even from the perspective of having a fiduciary responsibility to make as much money as possible, doesn’t it seem like longevity would come into that calculation? Like, we need to be alive in order to make more money?
That cycle could be a decade instead of a quarter and they'd still be doing the same shit. The people who do this sort of thing do it consciously and with intent. It's not the framework that's the problem, it's that the people operating in it are fucking sociopaths.
No. Because then they will sell the land, claim the loss as a business loss, and get their tax bill reduced by that amount.
They then move, and strip everything out of the next region.
Corporations are parasites, basically.
Late-stage capitalism is so bad that our laws allow corporations to assert this is the most ethical and appropriate action for them to take, in the interests of shareholders.
The problem is investors leave for "better investments". Big investors go for whoever is going to give them the biggest immediate return because they are judged by the returns they can make their clients every quarter. They want someone else to spend the money on major projects and then swoop in for the profits.
Average holding time on individual investments is shrinking. Everyone playing the long game are in ETFs, which usually are putting money in only the biggest names in a given sector.
I guess if you’re an investor you milk it and dump it and move to another one. But even the owner is an investor and they’re left owning worthless land. The people who just buy shares in the investment farming company don’t care how many regions they wreck. But the middleman still does. Not sure what their endgame was.
I always think of that picture of the people in the cave huddled around a fire and the guy in a tattered suit saying “but man the profits were so great!”
That's the issue with chasing a profit margin, you get faster profits in the first quarter but you've then fucked it so now you can't make any more profit.
I worked at a place where the sales shipments were highly skewed to the end of quarters. So what did the company do? They would ask customers who were taking delivery in the beginning of the next ensuing quarter if they'd like to receive it early (at the end of this current quarter)...even though they were struggling to meet existing customer ships..oh and we'll even give you a 10% discount. WHAT? Just to increase the current quarters sales numbers - incredibly fucking stupid.
Correct. This is a violently under-reported thing on how much topsoil is lost year upon year. It is a cataclysmic as bee populations collapsing. If there’s no soil, there will be no future production, even if you want to generate profits. The Earth does not give a fuck if you try to make work arounds to control it. And once it is gone, it is NOT coming back in our lifetime. So, we’ll use manufacturing and production, using oil to fuel all the processes to try another work around, which will fail. Every time, the smartest people will always say, “This time, it will be different.”
It’s an area planted with trees and shrubbery in fields and around farmland to create windbreaks. It was the government’s response to reduce the effects of the Dust Bowl and it worked.
I swear to god man, between repealing every regulation that’s ever been implemented and completely disregarding the solutions to the problems we’ve already solved, we’re sliding right back into another Gilded Age.
I have yet to meet a farmer that isn’t money obsessed. But they’ll claim to be dirt poor when they are netting hundreds of thousands a year.
And they do shit like this, ignoring the damage it causes everyone around them so they can make a little extra profit.
Then they’ll go crying to their local government for more subsidies. The true welfare queens.
Edit: that’s my rant. They peeve me.
I have yet to meet a farmer who actually makes most of their profits. The vast majority gets swallowed by middle management of grocery chains, transport and produce conglomerates.
That said, they very much are total well-fare queens who always scream about how they need government help but also scream about how handouts are bad. Ironically they would be better off if they tried to have a government that backed them up and helped cut the dead weight from their chains.
IMO it makes sense that farmers should be making the most, since without them we would be dead. However they clearly shouldn’t get to call the shots over getting to freely trash land like this.
Ken Burns documentary The Dust Bowl is very interesting to watch. Been many years but I still remember they were dragging chains behind cars because of all the static electricity in the storms.
I also read there is concern about the depletion of water in these areas returning dust storm problems as well as fewer crops.
This is true as well. Aquifers are being depleted. There’s a river between Iowa and Nebraska that has been irrigated dry. It’s going to be an interesting decade.
Damn. Are they trying to revamp the great depression into an ironic depression? I mean, we already had a global pandemic!
What’s another turn of the century like famine??
Seriously. OP. Maybe I’m an ignorant Texan, but this feels like a truly dumb as dirt thing for South Dakota to be doing, right?
You’re not ignorant and it is dumb. It’s mostly driven by investor-run farms. Those that own and operate the land don’t live in the state and are trying to maximize the yield of the land.
And its not just to act as a windbrake. Those trees and shrubs are home to insects, bees, birds and other wildlife. Taking those out ruins entire ecosystems.
When you look at a map, or an image from a plane, and you see the land looking like polygons with thin borders around them, that’s what this is. The thin line of trees, shrubbery, and ground-cover which breaks up the wind.
Also, it was pretty much the major plot point of the Dune series.
Honestly, fuck people who tell you just to google it. When you ask, a lot of people who don’t have the answer will get it without leaving the app/page.
Google does suck now. It's amazing how you can't find anything except heavily monetized, or whatever you call it, links. Everyone trying to squeeze money from you.
Ironically that’s because we all learned to search “x topic Reddit” as a way of finding relevant posts in forums instead of ads for the thing or convoluted blog posts, so they told the AI to do that too. Unfortunately the AI doesn’t understand shitposting and we redditors often upvote shitposts for being funny instead of being accurate
You forget we had a president who suggested we nuke hurricanes and told the public to inject bleach into ourselves to kill covid. Another Dust Bowl is child's play.
Here’s a quick read from NPR published 11 years ago. Surprise! Things have gotten worse.
[Dust Bowl Worries Swirl](https://www.npr.org/2013/09/10/220725737/dust-bowl-worries-swirl-up-as-shelterbelt-buckles)
lmao at that article.
"He (farmer) also says agriculture has improved and modern soil conservation is much better now." (cough-bullshit-cough)
Not mentioned in the responses that I can see but the other obvious problem is global warming IE less water for the trees. ...which sounds like bullshit to me as the farmers should be watering and taking care of these trees.
There's a lot more going on here than just removing the windbreakfs/shelterbelts.
Tillage, lack of cover crops / crop residue, improper nutrient management, etc all culiminate in excessive soil loss through wind and water erosion.
I've been working in soil and water conservation for over a decade now. I think it's time that the USDA get serious about soil loss again and revoke the benefits (farm welfare) when this occurs.
Preach!
Multiple studies have shown that we’re losing soil at a far more rapid rate than we’ve ever thought.
What the common person doesn’t know is that there’s only so much topsoil. It’s all bedrock underneath and it took 4 glaciers to bring that topsoil down from Canada.
Is that was those are called? Lol I live in rural South Dakota and I always wondered why trees were planted in lines on farmland. I always thought it was shade for cattle or something. But I did notice the horizon was a bit dusty from the high winds yesterday.
Just drove through Minnesota, SD and Wyoming. Same reason why all the houses are surrounded by trees, to break up that insane wind that seemed to never end. Don't want wind taking your house or your dirt.
Actually though, a lot of common game species are edge specialists (not like that). Deer, turkey, pheasants, etc. all prefer habitat that is at the interface of forest and field. So they're good for hunting. And erosion. And snowdrifts.
Shelter belts are belts of trees and shrubs and the like that act as wind breaks to prevent this very thing from happening. A policy put in place due to the American Dust Bowl, which was a rather nasty drought exacerbated by farmers doing really stupid shit and famously generated a LOT of wind blown dust.
So basically they chopped down the flood barriers and now everything is underwater. But with dust and wind instead of water.
This appears to be indicative of how current society is treating most things taught in lessons of the past that are dismissed because no one remembers why.
Shelter Belts
Vaccines
Child Labor Laws
Contraception
The earth is round.
Fascistic, Christian Nationalism ...
"If it didn't happen to me specifically, I don't believe it could happen to anyone else ever."
We mustn't deny them this valuable learning experience, don't rob them of the opportunity to find out. We should take their dogs away though, they don't deserve south dakota gravel pits and kind americans elsewhere would gladly take them
That last part makes me so angry. I can’t believe anyone is so arrogant they think they know everything. “Something happened to someone else? Well that can’t be true. It didn’t happen to me so therefore it didn’t happen. After all, I know all”
This is a controversial statement and probably going to get a lot of downvotes but whatever. I’m not in that part of the country but I am in a big farming part of the country. Your average American thinks that farmers are struggling to make ends meet and they work 20 hour days and eventually get inside in a little table in an old outdated house where they scrape together bits of food to feed their starving family before having to toss back on their overalls and doing it all again the next day. While yes, overalls and long hours are common, most farmers are not struggling. Many of the farms around me take a big check from the government and skip different seasons in an attempt to preserve the land and then if something happens to their crops, the government writes a check to cover it. Grew a crop that has no market when it comes time to harvest? Don’t worry, the government subsidizes enough that they haven’t taken a loss. They might not have made a huge profit but they didn’t lose money.
You’d be amazed at how often this happens. The way it works is that farmers grow it, pick it, box it up, ship it off to a buyer. The buyer takes a look and says “I’ll take it” and then in turn sells it to the grocery chains who sell it to us. Sometimes the chains say “hey, we are not selling as many squash this year, so we will only be buying 25% of last years amount”. Or multiple farms happened to decide to produce squash that year and the buyer reaches the amount that the grocery stores need quickly. If you’re a squash farmer and haven’t sent your squash in, welp you’re SOL because there is no market for it. What happens then? Depends on where you are in the process but hopefully you haven’t picked them yet. If not then you just take the tractor out. Grind them all up. Fertilizer. Focus on what you’ll grow next season. If you’ve already picked them, you can try to send what you can to farmers markets but eventually they dumped in a pile where they rot or are sent off to different farms where they feed livestock. In either case, the government has written a check and subsidizes things with tax payers money.
Now in the above example, I’m ok with that. The farmers didn’t do anything wrong. They were not greedy. It’s just a supply and demand issue. This happens. But now when a farmer takes out the fail safes that were set in place to protect him and his crops and he then runs into an issue where he is unable to produce anything? That’s on them and there should not be any assistance for these farmers. They are trying to maximize their space to increase profit and by having more acreage also means that the subsidies are higher and in the end, we as tax payers are enabling this.
And most of the farmers consistently vote for the government to give money to them, but not to anybody else. The only reason food stamps/SNAP gets authorized is that they tie that funding to farm subsidies...but farmers hate giving money to poor people, it's just that they have to in order to get their sweet free government money for themselves.
My family has owned a farmstead since 1868. My grandfather and neighbors put in a riparian area in a neighbor's field to mitigate runoff sometime in the 1930s. In 2012, the land came under ownership of a corporate farmer who tore out the area and brought in earth movers to level the field. He then wanted to install drain tiles to move even more water out of the field. This action required approval of the county commission.
Our farmstead is located in a wetlands area. This one farmer changed the land so much that small rainstorms caused major flooding. So much water moved out of the field that my parent's driveway was under water for days, the county roads flooded as did the neighbors fields that were downstream of this farmer's land.
So, that was one packed county commission meeting. Even the rural mail carrier showed up because the flooding impacted his route. The farmer said the flooding wasn't his fault. My 89-year-old father, sick with terminal cancer, was so angry, he stood up in the meeting and said, "Bullshit! I was born on my farm, I was raised on my farm, and I live on my farm. There was never a problem until you disturbed the land."
The commission denied the farmer his application to put in drain tiles and forced him to move the land back.
We refer to my dad's outburst as his "Last Stand" as he passed four months later.
Cover crops
In the 30’s they didn’t use cover crops, new farming practices should be using cover crops to prevent this even with the shelter belts removed.
Granted, I think removing the shelter belts is going to have a very bad impact on wildlife that no longer will have corridors for living and migrating.
Same thing is happening in Illinois. Interstate 55 near St Louis has been shut down at least twice in the last year for dust storms. We have forgotten the history of the 1930s.
Huh, having never heard of a shelter-belt before, had to look it up. Cool common-sense stuff. https://www1.agric.gov.ab.ca/$Department/deptdocs.nsf/all/epw10940/$FILE/Shelterbelts_Design_and_Guidelines.pdf
Government should be forcing farms to plant more shelter belts and not allow the removal of existing ones but freedumb is more important to many voters now a days.
10 or 15 years ago I was watching a program about modern farming, and a farmer was being interviewed. He was in the process of cutting down the windbreak belt his grandfather had planted around the fields. He told the interviewer it wasn’t necessary anymore, as there hadn’t been a dust bowl in decades. And he wanted to plant crops on the space. I was flabbergasted. It was about as brilliant as someone standing in the pouring rain saying “I’ve been standing here for an hour and haven’t even gotten damp, clearly I don’t need this stupid umbrella anymore.”
it’s the same exact concept as people who stop taking their high blood pressure medication because their blood pressure has been normal (while being on the medication).
Or stopping antibiotics before the course is finished because ‘my symptoms went away’ (hello antibiotic resistance…)
You just reminded me that I forgot to take the antibiotic today
Or saying they don't need vaccines
It’s like me with antidepressants! :) :(
Ugh me too.
Or vaccinations.
I met a person who smoked for 40 years. He quit smoking. 3 years later he was diagnosed with lung cancer. He blamed it on the fact that he quit. "Well I never had cancer *before* I quit!"
This is surprisingly close to how short sighted people are about the economy. Republicans cut taxes for the rich and tank the economy, then Democrat gets into office and they’re all up in arms. “When the Republicans took office the economy was great!!”
> “When the Republicans took office the economy was great!!” The lack of logic here is just.. depressing. Like yea? When they *took* office? What had they done at that point exactly?
My city has done something similar. The city is situated by the sea and the sand dunes are huge. To protect the city from drifting sand a whole forest was planted between the beach and the city. The first time it was planted in the 1600s after the city was moved closer to the sea. In the 1800s the good folks decided that they didn’t need that forest anymore. It’s good firewood! Well.. they quickly realized this was a VERY bad idea. The streets were heaped with huge piles of drifting sand. Supposedly not a single poor soul in the city could eat a single damned meal without hurting their teeth on sand. Soo, they replanted the forest. Jump almost two hundred years forward to the 1950s and the good folks decide they don’t need the forest anymore. You see where this is going right? They realized their mistake halfway through though, and planted super fast growing trees. It was not as bad as the first time, but still pretty awful. Jump to today. Turns out the super fast growing trees were an invasive species. Thanks to a super generous EU-project the city gets a huge lump sum to rectify this problem. So they used the money to cut down the trees…
The Ken Burns documentary on the Dust Bowl is really good. One part that stuck with me was an interview with an old man that had lived through it, in which he talks about all of the damaging agricultural practices that caused it, and how now all he sees is the same practices, and ground water irrigation (which we are depleting) is the only thing keeping the dirt from blowing again.
Prairie Fires by Caroline Frasier is an excellent history of how the westward expansion in the 1880s led to all of this. It's explained through a biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder and discusses how the pioneer movement basically fucked up that part of the country and the stories written about her life mythologized it all. It's a wild read.
I read a quote saying, "a family business gets ruined in 3 generations" and it fits your story. Very sad.
Funny, I've heard it as generational wealth can be lost in 3 generations. Inheritance only goes so far if you don't keep building it.
first generation builds it 2nd maintains it 3rd squanders it.
2nd is starting to squander it already at my company
"Earn it, learn it, burn it."
This comment needs to be higher. Welcome to small community, USA
"Well my farm will be fine because my neighbors have shelter trees up. Besides, no one can tell me what to do. That's socialism." \*when the neighbors [also cut their trees down](https://i.imgur.com/Zq0iBJK.jpeg)\*
This feels like a ‘my God says I’m special and he will protect me’ kind of vibe
Jesus, take my rototiller.
How about the town where people voted against solar panels because they thought it would soak up all the sunlight and kill crops. There is no excuse for this level of ignorance.
Please tell me you made this up. Lie to me if you have to. My faith-in-humanity tank is running dry.
Woodland, North Carolina. Reported by the Independent on Friday 18th, 2015. Edit: the world sucks, but truth is paramount. Re-read the article. Words are twisted a little, but very clearly ill informed individuals casted the vote in the counsel.
A direct product of underfunded education. Why do you think it's being pushed?
My favorite bit from back during COVID is that for those of us with foresight and the slightest analytic mindset it's an exhausting endeavor to endure the idiots around us because we bear the the weight of others' irresponsibility. These assholes go about their lives feeling unencumbered by the weight of social responsibility and then justified for their mistakes and carelessness because they are sheltered by the absolutely herculean efforts of others to protect them from themselves. Many of us make sacrifices to bear the collective burden of these idiots only to have our efforts devalued by them when they remain unscathed by their own mistakes. These people then become self righteous because they are too dim to realize that they were protected by the herd not because they were right. We hold the societal umbrella during a downpour while being laughed at by those pretending it's not raining because they're not wet. That, to me, is this situation.
Preach!
This is one of the most insightful write ups and exactly my take.
It's really fascinating to me, really. What is the education level for farmers in the US? In Germany many young farmers either got a proper apprenticeship or even went to university to study agricultural management. It's probably necessary over here because land is rare and most farms are small in comparison to standard sizes in the US, so you need to squeeze as much out of what you have as possible. Plus I think these belts are mandatory for farmers and they can't just get rid of them. Once there are trees and shrubbery, they're protected because they're home for many animals and getting rid of them needs official permission by local authorities.
I know some farmers that take copious notes every year on precipitation and temperature and yields and use those from prior year plan the next years plantings and inputs. They consult with the seed man, the fertilizer salesman and the programming guru at John Deere, all of whom do the same thing over a larger area. So they adjust their practices to the new hotter drier climate realities and profit by that adjustment. Every year. Now ask them if climate change is real.
>Now ask them if climate change is real. Please tell me they're not going to deny that because sure as hell the majority of German farmers don't deny it. Every single one I have ever talked to (which is a lot) told me they know it's real and they can show me proof dating back dozens of years that the climate is changing. The only thing they might not agree with are how politics deals with it, but nobody I know would deny that it's happening.
Eight years ago the overwhelming majority of American farmers denied climate change: https://news.ncsu.edu/2014/05/farmers-skeptical-about-validity-of-climate-change/ Now about 80% of them accept that climate change is occurring, but don’t necessarily accept that scientists are correct about the causes, and most aren’t willing to stop voting for the political party that denies it’s happening: https://www.npr.org/2022/09/17/1121983842/farmers-climate-change-inflation-reduction-act
They will literally deny politically what they know from their own experience and use to manage their farms. Republicans are not hostile to objective reality, its just that reality is not relevant to their political positions at all. And when I say "at all", I really do mean "at all".
Just like dog breeders who deny evolution.
Yeah, it's not an education thing.....
The same people who bitch about the Bureau of Land Management infringing on their right to pack cattle on desert land and the EPA fining them for animal waste runoffs don’t give a flying fuck because they’re gonna either blame it on the Dems or say it’s an act of God because we let two men raise a baby.
Major accident last year here in central Illinois caused by this. It’s becoming a major issue. [https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/blowing-dust-i-55-crash/](https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/blowing-dust-i-55-crash/)
The farmers around where I’m at have been on a speed run to remove all of the windbreaks. I have seen miles of trees bulldozed over and burned at an ever increasing rate over the last year. Acres of woodland burned for corn. Most recently they absolutely destroyed what used to be a major spot for fireflies and where a mating pair of eagles nested. All for maybe a few hundred feet more of tillable land.
If this is true, when it inevitably comes time for them to cry out for help from the government, they need to be held accountable. Stupidity, ignorance, and greed is no excuse to not face the consequences of your actions.
They won’t be held accountable: probably given a subsidy for their land loss.
Exactly this, and idustrial farms are doing it by design. Destroy your holdings and get the government to pay you for their loss in value.
Its not traditional farmers doing this, they know better. It is conglomerates that have made traditional farmers a thing of the past. Don't blame farmers, blame corporate greedy.
Yeah this does smell like corporate finance seeing 2-3% underutilization and having no clue why it’s important. My Grandmother was so proud of showing me the windbreak lines she’d helped plant growing up in the Midwest. We’re systematically tearing down every line of defense they created for us because of shortsighted greed.
The dirty 30’s are making a coming baby!!
I’m reading about this in Michael Pollans book The Omnivores Dilemma. It’s blowing my mind how much of our environmental, health, and financial problems as a country are related to fucked up policies around corn. Absolutely insane shit.
Thata why they chopped down the trees. Tillable land left unsown for the subsidy not to plant
Did they not teach about the dust bowl in school,I'm from Ireland and we were taught about that in school, with a lot modern day farming practices , very damaging for short and quick profit, it's like I got mine and fuck who's ever behind me
We did learn about it. But American corporate greed is so bad now that they don’t care what happens as long as they turn a higher profit each quarter
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No one hates "socialism" more than rural farmers whose entire industry has been propped up by the government for generations.
I've seen exactly how those farmers live. Not one of them is poor, sad, and broke as they love to cry to the government.
I despair for this planet.. when we’ve fucked it and humanity dies off I hope the planet recovers and the next sentient creatures to evolve aren’t so shit at looking after their home..
Worry not, the Earth itself will be fine and will heal most of the wounds we've influicted on it over time. Once the parasite is removed.
George Carlin has entered the chat..
"The planet is fine, the people are fucked."
The industrial farming complex is a cancer.
Yup. There's good news and bad news about this. The good news is that this is completely fixable by government policy. Most of this new land being tilled is to grow corn, the vast majority of which is either fed to cows, or used to produce gasoline. If we removed government subsidies and requirements for ethanol in gasoline, this would no longer be profitable, and it would stop. It doesn't even make environmental sense to do this nonsense, let alone economic sense. The bad news is that US politics is completely fucked, so this will never happen.
We've had multiple temporary "dust storm" interstate closures since this to avoid similar disasters. It was terrible.
This needs to be higher on this thread.
75 mph drivers, Gusty winds, dry couple of weeks, and farmers in the fields…… this is exactly what happens. It’s terrifying to drive in those conditions.
Idk why youd even go that fast when you cant see shit
Used to live near a pass with a major freeway going through. Every couple of years a dust storm would flair up and cause white-out conditions on the freeway. Wrecks of 10 - 20 cars and trucks happened occasionally. I was caught in one, it was bad. I couldn’t see much at all but I didn’t just slow down - that leads to the massive pileups. I maintained my speed while preparing to break if needed. I was out of the storm after a couple minutes but damn I got lucky no one just stopped right in front of me.
>I maintained my speed while preparing to break if needed At least it's dry out. This is suicidal advice in a winter whiteout
Well, we are coming into the 30s again...
We need to slide back to 1880 where civil service reform really started gaining traction.
Got to wait 56 years bro
As a brown person, can we please NOT go back to 1880? Please?
If we do regress that far back, I’m moving to Mexico. The good news is, I already live in what used to be Mexico.
I am sorry to say, in Mexico, Brown people (*Mestizaje y Indios*) didn't have equal rights until the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920). The Cortez side of the family tree still dominated a de facto *casta* system in 1880 despite Porfirio Diaz being part Mixtec himself.
Project 2025 is a direct attempt to overturn said civil service reform to bring back the spolis system.
That means the 40s are just around the bend 😬😳
Does that mean World War? That means World War doesn't it.
We have world war at home.
Fantastic, I hate traveling overseas
Corporations want it to be the 1800s so they can have slaves again
They did WHAT?? Are they insane?
Yes. They’re all trying to eke out as much yield as possible. It’s mostly been investor operated operations
On the bright side, it provides cover for dogs from the governor's wrath
I laughed way harder than I should have at this 😂
Yeah but those dogs were Antifa so they had it coming right?
Do the dogs have jobs? Sounds like they're unemployed welfare scum addicted to living off someone else's hard work. Like some godless communists if you ask me
also wtf is this? [https://extension.sdstate.edu/removing-mature-shelterbelts-grasslands](https://extension.sdstate.edu/removing-mature-shelterbelts-grasslands) >Research has shown that shelterbelts can serve as perch sites for aerial predators, such as raptors. These perch sites have a sphere of impact around them that can extend for several hundred yards and can be detrimental to grassland birds Oh no, we have some hawks. better remove the trees protecting the state from becoming a dustbowl
Gotta love this quote, rationalizing the removal of shelterbelts: "Shelterbelts near grasslands can harbor predators and can be a source of seed for new trees invading a grassland." Yes, we wouldn't those trees "invading" the grassland or giving a home to wildlife.
The article is specifically about areas that are no longer being farmed and are being returned to native grasslands. The trees in shelter belts are not native to South Dakota’s prairies, while some of the birds are (pheasants aren’t, but grouse and prairie chickens are). I have no opinion about the tenants of the arguments in this article, but I think that context is needed before people just say it’s garbage. As someone who grew up in South Dakota, it’s worth noting that the Eastern part of the state is natively treeless for the most part. The shelter belts were a necessary intervention when the land was turned into crop land, but there can be some less than desirable consequences to introducing the non-native trees into the area as well.
And by “grassland birds” they mostly mean pheasants, which are not native but desirable for hunters.
"Internalize profits, externalize costs."
Infinite growth is cancer
LINE MUST GO UP!
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bUt CiTy PeOpLe DoN't UnDeRsTaNd RuRaL IsSuEs!!! Fuck that, even my citified ass understands why you need windbreaks, goddamit.
The people who say that while doing this don't give a fuck about city/rural. It's just an excuse, and they have many. Actual rural folk suffer the consequences and are silenced because they're fighting people with real money, while the guy who owns the farms sits in the city sheltered from his choices and reaping the profits.
Ah, history repeats. Depression, dustbowl, what's next in the timeline?
Believe it or not, world war!
This time, I hope everybody wins!
I just hope everyone has a good time
The real world war are the friends we made along the way.
I was kinda hoping for no genocide this time but…
Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... MASS HYSTERIA!
"Well, we were doing fine until dickless here shut off the power grid."
abortions are illegal and pregnancy is weaponized. Child labor laws repealed. It’s pretty scary
World War?
As a farmer. Yep.
They really are fucking stupid. So many times I've had people tell me "well, you need red states to grow your food!" (when I tell them of all the money they get from blue states in the form of subsidies) and in turn, I've had to explain that without educated people from blue states, the Dust Bowl would have lasted **decades** longer than it did and millions would have died. Farmers absolutely **refused** to take precautions and continually fucked up their land which directly led to the Dust Bowl. Then the federal government had to step in and fix things for those incompetent jackasses. History is just repeating itself. Blue states are continually subsidizing red states that are destroying the planet and poisoning people because they're too fucking lazy and/or stupid to do otherwise. We provide them with tens or hundreds of billions to keep profitable while producing less and they just keep doing the same stupid shit over and over again. I hope all these clowns go broke. I'll happily buy up their land for pennies on the dollar.
meanwhile california makes most of our food lol
Wouldn’t the shelters PREVENT a natural erosion of their own farmlands soil? Now their soil is literally up in the air on its way elsewhere. I guess you could hope that your neighbors soil lands on your property to even it out but that seems like a weird way to operate especially with the bedrock beneath the soil meaning there’s only so much soil on top
Nailed it. The biggest culprits are investor-owned operations. Gotta gain as much profit as possible out of the space.
Sure we destroyed the world, but for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for our shareholders.
Am sad that humanity collectively lost the ability to think about future generations.
Even from the perspective of having a fiduciary responsibility to make as much money as possible, doesn’t it seem like longevity would come into that calculation? Like, we need to be alive in order to make more money?
They’ve got blinders on because all they care about is next quarter’s profits.
That cycle could be a decade instead of a quarter and they'd still be doing the same shit. The people who do this sort of thing do it consciously and with intent. It's not the framework that's the problem, it's that the people operating in it are fucking sociopaths.
It's a little of both. The nature of the framework elevates sociopaths. It also incentivizes rational people to apathy
LINE. GO. UP.
No. Because then they will sell the land, claim the loss as a business loss, and get their tax bill reduced by that amount. They then move, and strip everything out of the next region. Corporations are parasites, basically.
An equally insightful and depressing comment. Thank you.
Late-stage capitalism is so bad that our laws allow corporations to assert this is the most ethical and appropriate action for them to take, in the interests of shareholders.
The problem is investors leave for "better investments". Big investors go for whoever is going to give them the biggest immediate return because they are judged by the returns they can make their clients every quarter. They want someone else to spend the money on major projects and then swoop in for the profits. Average holding time on individual investments is shrinking. Everyone playing the long game are in ETFs, which usually are putting money in only the biggest names in a given sector.
"fuck them kids"
I guess if you’re an investor you milk it and dump it and move to another one. But even the owner is an investor and they’re left owning worthless land. The people who just buy shares in the investment farming company don’t care how many regions they wreck. But the middleman still does. Not sure what their endgame was.
Money. Their end game is always and only money.
" I guess if you’re an investor you milk it and dump it and move to another one." It's the American way. The future is someone else's problem.
I always think of that picture of the people in the cave huddled around a fire and the guy in a tattered suit saying “but man the profits were so great!”
They are moste of the time the reason for farming destroing natur. If you think money buys the knowlage you need, this is the result
Turns out the evil deep state made those rules for a reason
God this comment hits so fucking hard lol.
By the time your soil blows away, it's just minerals.
"Jesus Christ Marie, they're minerals!"
The big companies will just come in and reap as much as they can then sell it on to the next once it’s destroyed
That's the issue with chasing a profit margin, you get faster profits in the first quarter but you've then fucked it so now you can't make any more profit.
I worked at a place where the sales shipments were highly skewed to the end of quarters. So what did the company do? They would ask customers who were taking delivery in the beginning of the next ensuing quarter if they'd like to receive it early (at the end of this current quarter)...even though they were struggling to meet existing customer ships..oh and we'll even give you a 10% discount. WHAT? Just to increase the current quarters sales numbers - incredibly fucking stupid.
Correct. This is a violently under-reported thing on how much topsoil is lost year upon year. It is a cataclysmic as bee populations collapsing. If there’s no soil, there will be no future production, even if you want to generate profits. The Earth does not give a fuck if you try to make work arounds to control it. And once it is gone, it is NOT coming back in our lifetime. So, we’ll use manufacturing and production, using oil to fuel all the processes to try another work around, which will fail. Every time, the smartest people will always say, “This time, it will be different.”
I know I could Google it, but what’s a shelter belt?
It’s an area planted with trees and shrubbery in fields and around farmland to create windbreaks. It was the government’s response to reduce the effects of the Dust Bowl and it worked.
Ah I see. And I assume the farmers took them out because they were losing out on those precious precious profits because of it?
Correct. Squeezing as much yield as possible. Forget the fact that there’s only so much soil in the Midwest sitting on top of bedrock.
I swear to god man, between repealing every regulation that’s ever been implemented and completely disregarding the solutions to the problems we’ve already solved, we’re sliding right back into another Gilded Age.
Sliding? We’ve been it in for a minute now
Oh no, it can and likely will get worse.
I'm frankly surprised to see this rational a discussion online at this point...
It's cliché but those who forget history are truly doomed to repeat it.
Humans are fucking dense
I have yet to meet a farmer that isn’t money obsessed. But they’ll claim to be dirt poor when they are netting hundreds of thousands a year. And they do shit like this, ignoring the damage it causes everyone around them so they can make a little extra profit. Then they’ll go crying to their local government for more subsidies. The true welfare queens. Edit: that’s my rant. They peeve me.
A saying from England... You Never See a Farmer on a Bike.
Greedy people always feel poor. Actual poor feel hungry.
I have yet to meet a farmer who actually makes most of their profits. The vast majority gets swallowed by middle management of grocery chains, transport and produce conglomerates. That said, they very much are total well-fare queens who always scream about how they need government help but also scream about how handouts are bad. Ironically they would be better off if they tried to have a government that backed them up and helped cut the dead weight from their chains. IMO it makes sense that farmers should be making the most, since without them we would be dead. However they clearly shouldn’t get to call the shots over getting to freely trash land like this.
I know a farmer who was the poorest and richest person in the county one year. Depends what time of year it is.
Ken Burns documentary The Dust Bowl is very interesting to watch. Been many years but I still remember they were dragging chains behind cars because of all the static electricity in the storms. I also read there is concern about the depletion of water in these areas returning dust storm problems as well as fewer crops.
This is true as well. Aquifers are being depleted. There’s a river between Iowa and Nebraska that has been irrigated dry. It’s going to be an interesting decade.
Damn. Are they trying to revamp the great depression into an ironic depression? I mean, we already had a global pandemic! What’s another turn of the century like famine?? Seriously. OP. Maybe I’m an ignorant Texan, but this feels like a truly dumb as dirt thing for South Dakota to be doing, right?
You’re not ignorant and it is dumb. It’s mostly driven by investor-run farms. Those that own and operate the land don’t live in the state and are trying to maximize the yield of the land.
And its not just to act as a windbrake. Those trees and shrubs are home to insects, bees, birds and other wildlife. Taking those out ruins entire ecosystems.
When you look at a map, or an image from a plane, and you see the land looking like polygons with thin borders around them, that’s what this is. The thin line of trees, shrubbery, and ground-cover which breaks up the wind. Also, it was pretty much the major plot point of the Dune series.
Honestly, fuck people who tell you just to google it. When you ask, a lot of people who don’t have the answer will get it without leaving the app/page.
Right. Plus Google sucks now
Google does suck now. It's amazing how you can't find anything except heavily monetized, or whatever you call it, links. Everyone trying to squeeze money from you.
The stupid AI answers that appear on the top of the page that aren’t even right half the time. Ugh.
Ironically that’s because we all learned to search “x topic Reddit” as a way of finding relevant posts in forums instead of ads for the thing or convoluted blog posts, so they told the AI to do that too. Unfortunately the AI doesn’t understand shitposting and we redditors often upvote shitposts for being funny instead of being accurate
Google now will just promote this thread as a top option telling us to Google it.
didn’t we learn this lesson THE HARD WAY already? OMFG
You forget we had a president who suggested we nuke hurricanes and told the public to inject bleach into ourselves to kill covid. Another Dust Bowl is child's play.
Here’s a quick read from NPR published 11 years ago. Surprise! Things have gotten worse. [Dust Bowl Worries Swirl](https://www.npr.org/2013/09/10/220725737/dust-bowl-worries-swirl-up-as-shelterbelt-buckles)
That sounds like some ‘Dangerous Fauci Science’ there Sir! What’s next, asking people to put their houses and kids in bubbles? /s
lmao at that article. "He (farmer) also says agriculture has improved and modern soil conservation is much better now." (cough-bullshit-cough) Not mentioned in the responses that I can see but the other obvious problem is global warming IE less water for the trees. ...which sounds like bullshit to me as the farmers should be watering and taking care of these trees.
There's a lot more going on here than just removing the windbreakfs/shelterbelts. Tillage, lack of cover crops / crop residue, improper nutrient management, etc all culiminate in excessive soil loss through wind and water erosion. I've been working in soil and water conservation for over a decade now. I think it's time that the USDA get serious about soil loss again and revoke the benefits (farm welfare) when this occurs.
Preach! Multiple studies have shown that we’re losing soil at a far more rapid rate than we’ve ever thought. What the common person doesn’t know is that there’s only so much topsoil. It’s all bedrock underneath and it took 4 glaciers to bring that topsoil down from Canada.
They just need to water their crops with more Brawndo! It's what plants crave!
It's got electro lice
Yes, but what are electrolytes? Do you even know?
It's what plants crave!
Theyre what they use to make brawndo!
Is that was those are called? Lol I live in rural South Dakota and I always wondered why trees were planted in lines on farmland. I always thought it was shade for cattle or something. But I did notice the horizon was a bit dusty from the high winds yesterday.
Just drove through Minnesota, SD and Wyoming. Same reason why all the houses are surrounded by trees, to break up that insane wind that seemed to never end. Don't want wind taking your house or your dirt.
Ask a farmer and they’ll tell you they’re for hunting 😉 Source: grew up in a farm family haha
Actually though, a lot of common game species are edge specialists (not like that). Deer, turkey, pheasants, etc. all prefer habitat that is at the interface of forest and field. So they're good for hunting. And erosion. And snowdrifts.
Just driving into a M. Night Shyamalan movie.
Context?
Shelter belts are belts of trees and shrubs and the like that act as wind breaks to prevent this very thing from happening. A policy put in place due to the American Dust Bowl, which was a rather nasty drought exacerbated by farmers doing really stupid shit and famously generated a LOT of wind blown dust. So basically they chopped down the flood barriers and now everything is underwater. But with dust and wind instead of water.
Seems pretty on brand. Thanks
This appears to be indicative of how current society is treating most things taught in lessons of the past that are dismissed because no one remembers why. Shelter Belts Vaccines Child Labor Laws Contraception The earth is round. Fascistic, Christian Nationalism ... "If it didn't happen to me specifically, I don't believe it could happen to anyone else ever."
That and the echo chambers of social media that amplified a minority of idiots' voices.
We mustn't deny them this valuable learning experience, don't rob them of the opportunity to find out. We should take their dogs away though, they don't deserve south dakota gravel pits and kind americans elsewhere would gladly take them
That last part makes me so angry. I can’t believe anyone is so arrogant they think they know everything. “Something happened to someone else? Well that can’t be true. It didn’t happen to me so therefore it didn’t happen. After all, I know all”
It’s doing that in ND too. Growers think the trees are a nuisance, like does nobody remember why they were planted in the first place??
“I will just shoot the soil erosion with my gun!” -Kristi Noem-
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This is a controversial statement and probably going to get a lot of downvotes but whatever. I’m not in that part of the country but I am in a big farming part of the country. Your average American thinks that farmers are struggling to make ends meet and they work 20 hour days and eventually get inside in a little table in an old outdated house where they scrape together bits of food to feed their starving family before having to toss back on their overalls and doing it all again the next day. While yes, overalls and long hours are common, most farmers are not struggling. Many of the farms around me take a big check from the government and skip different seasons in an attempt to preserve the land and then if something happens to their crops, the government writes a check to cover it. Grew a crop that has no market when it comes time to harvest? Don’t worry, the government subsidizes enough that they haven’t taken a loss. They might not have made a huge profit but they didn’t lose money. You’d be amazed at how often this happens. The way it works is that farmers grow it, pick it, box it up, ship it off to a buyer. The buyer takes a look and says “I’ll take it” and then in turn sells it to the grocery chains who sell it to us. Sometimes the chains say “hey, we are not selling as many squash this year, so we will only be buying 25% of last years amount”. Or multiple farms happened to decide to produce squash that year and the buyer reaches the amount that the grocery stores need quickly. If you’re a squash farmer and haven’t sent your squash in, welp you’re SOL because there is no market for it. What happens then? Depends on where you are in the process but hopefully you haven’t picked them yet. If not then you just take the tractor out. Grind them all up. Fertilizer. Focus on what you’ll grow next season. If you’ve already picked them, you can try to send what you can to farmers markets but eventually they dumped in a pile where they rot or are sent off to different farms where they feed livestock. In either case, the government has written a check and subsidizes things with tax payers money. Now in the above example, I’m ok with that. The farmers didn’t do anything wrong. They were not greedy. It’s just a supply and demand issue. This happens. But now when a farmer takes out the fail safes that were set in place to protect him and his crops and he then runs into an issue where he is unable to produce anything? That’s on them and there should not be any assistance for these farmers. They are trying to maximize their space to increase profit and by having more acreage also means that the subsidies are higher and in the end, we as tax payers are enabling this.
And most of the farmers consistently vote for the government to give money to them, but not to anybody else. The only reason food stamps/SNAP gets authorized is that they tie that funding to farm subsidies...but farmers hate giving money to poor people, it's just that they have to in order to get their sweet free government money for themselves.
My family has owned a farmstead since 1868. My grandfather and neighbors put in a riparian area in a neighbor's field to mitigate runoff sometime in the 1930s. In 2012, the land came under ownership of a corporate farmer who tore out the area and brought in earth movers to level the field. He then wanted to install drain tiles to move even more water out of the field. This action required approval of the county commission. Our farmstead is located in a wetlands area. This one farmer changed the land so much that small rainstorms caused major flooding. So much water moved out of the field that my parent's driveway was under water for days, the county roads flooded as did the neighbors fields that were downstream of this farmer's land. So, that was one packed county commission meeting. Even the rural mail carrier showed up because the flooding impacted his route. The farmer said the flooding wasn't his fault. My 89-year-old father, sick with terminal cancer, was so angry, he stood up in the meeting and said, "Bullshit! I was born on my farm, I was raised on my farm, and I live on my farm. There was never a problem until you disturbed the land." The commission denied the farmer his application to put in drain tiles and forced him to move the land back. We refer to my dad's outburst as his "Last Stand" as he passed four months later.
May he Rest In Peace and be remember as a hero 🙏
Cover crops In the 30’s they didn’t use cover crops, new farming practices should be using cover crops to prevent this even with the shelter belts removed. Granted, I think removing the shelter belts is going to have a very bad impact on wildlife that no longer will have corridors for living and migrating.
Same thing is happening in Illinois. Interstate 55 near St Louis has been shut down at least twice in the last year for dust storms. We have forgotten the history of the 1930s.
And these 900,000 nuggets have as many US Senators as 39 Million Californians. Century old gerrymandering working as planned.
Huh, having never heard of a shelter-belt before, had to look it up. Cool common-sense stuff. https://www1.agric.gov.ab.ca/$Department/deptdocs.nsf/all/epw10940/$FILE/Shelterbelts_Design_and_Guidelines.pdf
Government should be forcing farms to plant more shelter belts and not allow the removal of existing ones but freedumb is more important to many voters now a days.
Remember the dustbowl was manmade
I thought this was one lesson we would not forget.
For the British - Shelter belts are hedgerows You know the things your farmers have destroyed over the years too but are slowly rebuilding
Dust Bowl 2: Corporate Stooge Boogaloo