What Happened The Last Time Ag Destroyed Topsoil?

Over the course of this year, I’ve chatted with some of the most respected regenerative farmers in the world.

When I sit down with the likes of Blake Alexandre and Carrie Richards, I always ask the same question:

“What does ‘regenerative’ mean to a regenerative farmer?”

At the onset, I imagined I would hear a wide variety of interpretations.

But without fail, I hear the same thing over and over.

The leaders of the movement say, “Regenerative farming isn’t about cows, pigs, chickens, or trees. It’s about soil and making more of it.”

In Blake Alexandre’s words, it’s about “the livestock under our feet, not roaming the landscape.”

With all of the destruction taking place on American farmland, regenerative practices are in the limelight. They’re the “cool and groovy” in agriculture. Consumers are aware of terms like “pasture-raised” and what that means for both soil management and nutrient density.

But the fight for healthy soil isn’t new to the US. Nearly a century ago, we were dealing with soil loss on a much larger scale.

Like the modern-day regenerative movement, widespread soil management rescued us from a nasty fate.

Soil Loss During The Great Depression

The United States was in rough shape in the 1930s.

The Great Depression was raging through communities, leaving financial ruin in its wake.

Outside of the city, however, another catastrophe was taking place.

Agricultural regions on the Great Plains between Texas, Colorado, the Dakotas, Kansas, and Oklahoma were bombarded with heat waves and prolonged drought.

These areas are accustomed to hot and dry summers, but the 1930s proved insurmountable because of farming practices implemented a decade prior.

In the 1910s and 1920s, farmers ripped into the Great Plains’ virgin grasslands to cultivate commercial crops like wheat and corn on a massive scale. They plowed the topsoil to erase deep-rooting native grasses and unlock soil fertility for edible production.

The first generation of farmers thought they had a gold mine. They reaped huge harvests and established new economic hubs.

But when the second generation of farmers took over, the picture changed. Years of uprooting and exposing topsoil dried out the ground, and ranchers had to dig wells deeper and deeper to find enough water to sustain crops and livestock.

Depleted soil created weak crops, and that’s when the pests took advantage. Waves of grasshoppers took to preying on nutrient-deficient plants, killing fields at a time.

When the crops were destroyed, the swarms moved on. In their wake, the soil was exposed to the drying sun and turned to dust.

Then, the winds came. A single storm in May of 1934 sent more than 350 million tons of soil airborne.

The Dust Bowl became an era known around the world. Boats sailing in the Atlantic Ocean had soil from Kansan farms covering their decks. Families throughout the Plains attempted to carry on their lives while walking through and inhaling volumes of dust.

Restoring Soil Health Post-Dust Bowl

As communities throughout the middle of the US wiped layers of dirt from their clothes and skin, leaders became aware of the longer-term consequences of poor farming practices.

Oklahoma Representative John Conover Nichols argued that destructive farming was akin to “living in a fool’s paradise, with respect to the security of its most basic asset.”

Dust storms were detrimental to human health on a local scale, but the causal farming practices and land management were detrimental to the nation’s ability to feed itself.

On April 27th, 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Soil Conservation Act into law “to provide for the protection of land resources against soil erosion.”

The Act established the Soil Conservation Service and employed thousands under federal contracts to combat soil erosion, preserve natural resources, control floods, prevent impairment of reservoirs, and maintain the navigability of rivers and harbors.

Wheat was classified as a threat to soil health and nutrient density, and engineers shaped waterways and landscapes to maximize water-harvesting potential.

A year later, the Act paid a reward to farmers who planted grasses, trees, and legumes to build soil health instead of plowing for commercial crops.

Three years after Roosevelt signed the Soil Conservation Act, soil erosion dropped 65%.

The Modern Soil Movement

After World War II, the US dissolved many of the federal programs created under Roosevelt’s tenure.

Several of the dams and reservoirs built by the Public Works Administration still exist, but the conversation about soil management slowly faded into the background.

Now, the US faces a similar threat to our food system.

We lose soil 12x faster than we build it, and modern crops often have less than half of the nutrients as the same crops five decades ago. The modern farmer has to decide between financing an additional 1000-acre plot to earn a modest living or shutting down their operation altogether. The Colorado River, once viewed as “the Amazon of the US”, is overdrawn and no longer reaches the ocean.

That’s a lot of negative signals, but they’re signals that we’ve seen before. We’ve also seen that we can solve the problem by taking action.

It took the 1930s-era farmer three years to cut soil erosion by 65%. With modern tools, technology, and regenerative practices, there’s no debate that we can accomplish more today.

We’ve already shown proof that regenerative ranching is carbon negative. We need adoption, and that falls on consumers and producers.

As a consumer, demand more from your food.

As a producer, demand more from your practices.

Do you know a farm that we should feature?

We’re here to talk about regenerative agriculture from the farmer’s perspective.

Reply back with your favorite spot so we can check it out!

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