dust bowl

Anyone else watch Dust Bowl on t.v? Finally some quality television. Incredibly tough people. Found myself welling up a few times.

I don't watch much on the old tv, but that was one of the best shows I've seen in a LONG time.

I just finished watching the second half of it. Didn't know about it or I'd have seen it all. A really good show portraying what makes us all Americans. Can't imagine what todays generation would do under those circumstances, but it wouldn't be pretty. I remember my dad telling about dust storms in the 30's that darkened skies as far eat as Ohio.

It sure caught my attention that when it finally ended in 1939 or so the cycle started again, war/higher wheat prices/more ground plowed up/ drought/new dust bowl starting in the early 50s. They mentioned how there were laws at the time to make people leave stubble in the fields to help avoid erosion, now here they are baling up every cornstalk for cattle feed and leaving the fields practically bare, hmmmmm?

Paul MI,
You can look up The Dust Bowl on the pbs.org website and watch the first episode too (as long as you have DSL internet...if dial-up, I do not think it would download fast enough).

I watched the first episode on my computer today.. and will catch the second half in a couple days. Awesome documentary.

Really good show. Makes me question the total corn /soybean fencerow to fencerow to fencerow etc. approach to modern farming. Hopefully modern farming tillage systems can help save the soil and prevent another. Really feel those people were a lot tougher than today.
Phil

Thanks, I'll try it in between turkey and stupidity this week.

Yes this show was excellent. My mother in law called and asked if I had watched. I called my dad tonight too so he could watch it. I always heard about it but didn't know it was so intense and everlasting.
I told my wife it's like the wide open ocean there. You would think that having tree lines every so often may help.
I may buy the book off their website.
pbs.org/dustbowl

We watched it-both halves.Very well done.I saw some parellels between then and now.I hope we have learned a thing or two.

Flying over the country I see a lot of bare, dry, plowed fields. Makes you wonder if conditions were right that something similar could happen again.

High School librarian was a teenager during the DB and talked about it in our history class. She even made food from simple recipes they used at the time because they had almost nothing to work with. It got our attention even though we were typical teenagers.

last year in east texas we were drier than in the dust bowl

Guys, Just found out tonight that one of the two ladies interviewed from Clayton NM is a relative of My MIL.
For those of us who "Have" and "Still do farm" in the High Plains understand that could happen again, But since the farming Practices have changes to a stubble cover ie, Minimum-till/No-till, or Strip-till probably not. But the danger is still there if the ground get uncovered by disk or fire.
Back in the 80s I farmed a dryland 320 half-section that had a 20 ft high blow hill at what would have been the center of the section if it was still farmed with the a joining 320 half section. I worked a bunch to get it pulled down on my Half but the old fence would cause problems. also I couldn't be sure, had no clue what old plows, or spike tooth harrows might turn up and ruin a tire. I did get about half of it pulled down and leveled out. it made a world of difference in farming it!
Later,
John A.

I Live about 15 miles from a lot of the old timers that live in Elkhart KS. And their stories will chill you to the bone.
My Dad started farming in the late 30's near Garden City Ks and the stories he told of tough times we can only Imagine.
One morning in Garden City Ks I woke up to go to school. I wanted to go back to sleep but Mom told me it was time for school.
My Grade school was across the street in Garden City Ks. And when I looked out the front door I couldNOT see the school.
And this was in Garden City - 125 miles away from Boise city (which they said was the center of the drought) and 1951 -15 years after the bad stuff.
Dad had a job in town at a mfr. and we farmed also --- He always took his vacation to cut wheat. Never could imagine the stories would tell about the Dust Bowl!!!!

Be sure and support the local PBS stations for their quality programming. Took a long time to come up with something worth watching once.

Does anyone know if it will be rebroadcast?
If so when might that be?
Thanks, Roy

Ken, I too remember the second dust bowl in the early 50s. Some days the sun was almost obscured, and a thick film of fine dust covered everything, inside and outside the house. Food was always gritty. And this was in western Louisiana.

It is nice to watch a quality show that doesn't have more minutes of commercials than it does show.

Here is a relatively modern one.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Melbourne_dust_storm

1940"s , in the country. we had a dust blackout,immediately followed by a cyclone which took the roof off our house then it rained like he!!. rather spooky in 3pm darkness.

Ok so I am wierd, but we don't have TV. But if I did , Sounds like a show I would not want to miss.My mother was a teenager in south Sask. in the 30's. She gave me so many first hand account stories that I almost feel that I were there. Had such a lasting impresion on her life, It kind of warped the way she saw things. Everthing in our lives was messured again the dust bowl, hard times and WW2. And in my life to some degree, it still is.Things your mamas teaches you tend to sick in your mind, long after their gone.

For those who missed it (or don't have TV), Sweetfeet posted a link to PBS where you can watch the whole thing streaming on your computer. I'll try to repost the link here.
Dust Bowl part 1

Excellant show, as are all of Ken Burn"s works.
One thing that struck home for me is all the blow-back from farmers about the Government coming in and telling them how to adopt soil conservation practices. Same exact rhetoric we hear today about "big government" interfearing with peoples lives. "The more things change, the more they stay the same."

Go to PBS.org/dustbowl you can order the dvd or books and it's on blue ray. You can also view parts of it on their website.
pbs.org/dustbowl

Watched it Sunday night and last night. Incredible piece of history.

PBS will slant everything to make the Gov't look to be the 'hero' and regular working folks the Idiot.Basically lack of rain caused the Dust Bowl and doubt very seriously that the Gov't made it start raining again.If the drought hadn't ended no one or no Gov't Program would have helped.

My dad was a little boy during these years in Indiana (heat and drought). He would not even consider fall plowing when it started to get popular in the early 70s.

"Basically lack of rain caused the Dust Bowl"

NO.

There has been exactly one Dust Bowl. There have been many droughts before and since, but only one Dust Bowl.

Wrong there have been similar occurances all over the World.

JF> One thing that struck home for me is all the blow-back from farmers about the Government coming in and telling them how to adopt soil conservation practices. Same exact rhetoric we hear today about "big government" interfearing with peoples lives.

I very much enjoyed the show, watched both segments at least twice as they were rebroadcast several times on the various local PBS stations.

However, the politics of the show did come through - they tried to hide it, but it always favored folks who would vote one way, and even spilled out into extremism when they talked about the good communists.... Hummm.

You have to understand the govt openned up this land, encouraged people to farm it, set programs up to farm it harder and fence row to fence row, the govt encouraged the farming practices, then paid the farmers to do one thing or another that made no sense, but when you are broken down and desitiute you just have to follow along.

Eventually the govt hit upon some programs that worked (which returned to the farming practices that the local farmers were already doing before the govt got involved!), _AND_ the drought recovered finally, making it appear the govt walked in and saved the day....

This show presented things a bit one-sided, that farmers were stupid and stubborn, and the abundant govt came marching in and saved the day..... That might not be quite the way it really was?

The farmers were fed up with the govt, and their silliness and how things were being mis-handled.

For some reason the show did not choose to show that side of things. If we want to call it a slant, or politics, or whatever.....

Aside from that tho, and it was a small part, I really enjoyed the history of the show.

If you google in on the maps of the panhandle of Oklahoma, you can see the same towns, the many irrigation circles there, and see the history today.

I was surprised by 2 things I didn't realize - the actual 'dust bowl' was a much, much smaller region than I thought, only a couple 100 mile circle - while the drought happened all across the country, the really bad dust bowl piece was much smaller than I thought.

And, I didn't realize that drought lasted nine years, again while it came and went over much of the country, for it to last so very long in one location is just devistating, thought it was a 3 or 4 year run, not 9. Wow.

My one fear of the film is just your comment - that it gets taken wrongly, that politics are shown in a rather slanted light.

We had droughts in early 1930's, mid 1950's, late 1980's, and again now in early 2010's. This seems to be a repeatable, easy to see cycle that has been going on for a century now, and we can learn from and plan for. Some are a little worse, some a little shorter, but sure seems to be an obvious, long-term pattern coming from nature.

I hope people can think for themselves, and see the politics of the issues more clearly than this film presented.

The history was very good, and something everyone should see. Very moving.

--->Paul

Yes. It was very good. Really tough people. I wonder how many of us could make it 4 or 5 years on little or no income, much less survive 10.

Did I hear correct in that the high plains aquifer is about half full now?

Certainly is a concern. Our best guess is we are pulling water out faster than it is going back in.

As it covers several states, and is fed from different rainfall areas, different water table lake and river areas, it's not an easy, simple thing to figure out exactly.

You can inventory a bank and coulnt exactly how many dollars are sitting in the vault, and look up how many dollars are invloved in loans, how many involved in deposits. And even banking there are a lot of questions on the health of any one bank....

A water aquafer is much more difficult to get exact counts on those numbers as there is so much varriation over millions of acres.

We are kinda guessing.

But, it is a real concern. Their projection of 20 more years before it runs out might be a bit inacurate, but still and all, there is reason to be concerned about it.

The theory of the auquafer is that glacial melt put a lot of water in the underground resivoir a long time ago, and that the natural re-supply it gets now from rainfall is much less.

Politics tends to overshadow science on things like this, we likely have a problem there that isn't quite as bad, nor quite as good, as different sides project.

--->Paul

TF, desertification of previously arable land is almost exclusively a man-made phenomenum. As for the Great American Dust Bowl, its causes are well-known and not up for debate. And when I say "well-known", I mean not only by scientists but also by the farmers and ranchers who make a living on the plains today.

Paul, Your points are well taken regarding the fact that "The Government" encouraged folks to settle the Great Plains and break the soil (and in a rather massive and convincing way, with the Homesteading Act).
However "The Government" also researched the problem with the faulty farming practices which were prevelant at the time, and which whey themselves encouraged, and came up with practices that would amelerate the widespread wind erosion, ie fallowing, windbreaks, terracing etc. These were relatively unkown practices at the time. I can fully understand the concerns of farmers at the time in that "Yea, right, now here is "The Government" trying to sell us on another stupid idea", after leading us down this path of financial and social ruin. If I were alive at the time, I would have felt the same way. However, the conservation practices did in fact work, when accompanied (as you aply pointed out) with the return of ample rainfall.
I reckon my point is that not everything coming down the pike from "The Government" is bad mojo, both then and now. It is up to our individual intellect and experiences (and an open mind) to decern which is right.

There are very few absolutes in this world. The attitude that:

" the government is always wrong"

is just as flawed as,

"the government is always right".

It is our job as citizens to strike a balance and hopefully elect people that have a sense of reality between the two extremes.

I do find it interesting that the people that state that they want very few laws, are generally the staunchest supporters of "Law and Order"!

I have relatives that have older wells on there land that have dries up in the last ten years.

Climate has changed dramatically if you believe what scientists say,once artic circle was the tropics.Ever heard of the Ice Age? Climate and weather have always changed no reason to think it'll stay the same as it is now.

What is your point? Are you suggesting that High Plains farmers change their farming practices in hopes that next year the earth will shift on its axis and turn eastern Colorado into a tropical rain forest?

I just pulled some stats off the USDA's NASS database for Yuma County, Colorado. Here are the dryland corn acreage yields since 1965:

1965: 18.8 bu/ac
1970: 32.0 bu/ac
1975: 17.0 bu/ac
1980: 32.5 bu/ac
1985: 36.0 bu/ac
1990: 48.5 bu/ac
1995: 32.0 bu/ac
2000: 34.0 bu/ac
2005: 26.0 bu/ac
2010: 87.3 bu/ac
2011: 58.8 bu/ac

What happened between 1965 and 2011 to cause non-irrigated corn yields to triple? Did three times as much rain fall in 2011 as 1965? No, but farming practices changed radically to make the most of the limited rainfall. And those figures above don't reflect the fact that dryland farmers were getting one crop every two years 30 years ago, but now get two crops every three years.

Need I mention that much of the research into no-till farming that made this all possible was funded by the US taxpayer?