Yeah...so if there was no suitable farmland, why were there plows?
To get rid of that nasty, interfering grassland prairie fucking up the soil. Why are there
ever plows?
Your version is tangential to every history book I've read. Have you ever been to Oklohoma,
Don't fucking condescend to me. I grew up in the Midwest. I'm a geologist, I teach geology, geography and environmental science, and, more pertinently, I did a crapload of my Ph.D. field work, many years, in Kansas and Oklahoma (and I can at least spell "Oklahoma" correctly). I lived in Texas, and I have traveled the region of the Dust Bowl many times. That good enough for your standards? Or is it just "tangential to every history book"
you've read?[/QUOTE]
the parts that are barren rock? There used to be farms there.
Exactly. When the government heavily promoted homesteading, and for a while, there was sufficient rainfall. Prior to that, the region was largely Indian land. Oklahoma didn't even become a state until 1907.
There used to be fertile hunting grounds before the farms.
Of course there were. Prairies supported a huge population of grazing animals (buffalo) and smaller game. They were a natural part of that environment. To make the farms viable, it was first important to kill as many of those beasts as possible, and that was done.
It is very clear that improper farming practices were a direct antecedent to all the land blowing away.
Which is pretty much what I said. You missed my point. The farming in western Oklahoma and adjacent portions of Kansas, Colorado and Texas was promoted, heavily, by governmental policies. And, as I said, they got lucky for 20-30 years, with somewhat above average precipitation in most years. But having got rid of the grass cover, the soil was exposed horribly to weather when the 1930s drought arrived, and there wasn't any way to protect it. And one of the many fallouts to this catastrophe was the promotion of contour plowing and other practices designed to retard soil erosion, which has had some beneficial aspects.
Still, much land was plain ruined, and will never be returned to farming practices. And what has been is now heavily dependent on irrigation. If you fly over this region you pass a wide stretch of circular fields, irrigated by big radial watering apparatuses. These are drawing water from major underground aquifers far faster that that water can be recharged by natural processes. Now, we are essentially mining fossil water in these areas, and depleting it. Plus, in hot dry-land areas, irrigation brings all manner of other problems, like concentration of salt evaporite minerals near the surface and in the soil.
Clarified?
The story I got growing up blamed it all on those stupid farmers and weathermen, with not much backstory about why and how that prairie got plowed under in the first place. It wasn't until I had to put two and two together on my own that I realized you can't convert an area to farmland by dictate. Mother nature doesn't pay much attention to proclamations.
