When the federal government started pouring millions of dollars into soil conservation in the early 1930s, the devastation of the Dust Bowl was a fresh, painful memory. Millions of acres of farmland had been swept up by the wind, depleting soils and forcing entire communities out of their land on the Great Plains as dust blackened the skies across the country.
These farm programs, designed to return depleted soils to production and prevent further erosion, had the aim of keeping rural America productive. They kept the land, and the farmers on the land, in place.
But as the decades wore on, and as the agriculture industry intertwined further with conservation agencies, farmers slipped out of focus, according to Joshua Nygren, professor of history at the University of Central Missouri. Production and profit became imperative, the cost of keeping up with conservation policy grew, and millions of farming families left their land.
Nygren’s book, “The State of Conservation: Rural America and the Conservation-Industrial Complex since 1920,” explores how federal policies played a role in farm consolidation at the turn of the century.
He joined KBIA’s Jana Rose Schleis to discuss farm conservation history and how lessons from the past can help address modern farming challenges.
This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Jana Rose Schleis: You're a historian, so I'm going to ask you to take us back to the 1930s. That is when the federal government started spending millions on soil conservation. What inspired that spending and what kinds of promises did those initial programs make?
Joshua Nygren: This is the Great Depression and there was this understanding that a strong rural America was necessary not only for the recovery of farming communities and rural communities, but it was essential to the national recovery.
So that was part of the goal, is this understanding that part of the problems and the crises facing rural America were economic, they were environmental, but they were also social. Conservation was designed to also address all three components.
JRS: Within a few decades, your book describes a shift in that policy. What happened?
JN: World War II presents a new national priority… and production was a key component. After the war, it was as if that idea of social sustainability had never existed, and really conservation becomes focused on economic and environmental sustainability.
JRS: What did losing that social equity priority mean for rural communities across the Midwest?
JN: For some people, the change came quickly, and for others it took a while. Sometimes people would hold out for a generation or two before it caught up to them.
But what it typically looked like is increased investment in machinery and then later in chemicals. Often to pay for those investments, people had to expand. They either had to buy out their neighbors who couldn't or didn't want to expand, or they had to rent land.
Whether it was investing for production purposes, that is producing for the market, or for protection, caring for the land, it largely looked the same. You either had to buy new equipment, later buy new chemicals, or hire someone who had them, and all of that required more liquid capital, more access to money that many people didn't have.
JRS: It seems that the policies that came out of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl era — the country’s responding to a crisis — they were more holistic. What can we learn from those original farm conservation policies?
JN: A lot of people at the time suggested that had we had some of the programs that were created in the 1930s, the economic turmoil, the environmental turmoil, the social turmoil of the Great Depression may have been lessened. So I think that perhaps one of the lessons from that period that we can take away today is, we don't have to wait until it seems like the sky is falling in order to do something constructive to prevent that from happening, and to take care of everyone.
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The Next Harvest: Seeking Solid Ground airs Wednesdays on KBIA and can be found at KBIA.org. The series is reported and produced by Jana Rose Schleis and Caspar Dowdy. The Next Harvest: Seeking Solid Ground is supported by the Pulitzer Center. |
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