Really, I do. The Soil Conservation Service has classified the area I live in as Highly Erodible Land. Unfortunately, most of the townies that move out here (sorry, that might not be PC), (not really, sorry, that is) don’t have a clue about living in HEL. The wind blows out here. A lot. And at a pretty good clip. So, combine small pastures with lots of horses (it’s mostly horses around here) and soon you have a dust bowl. Add wind. Can you say “DUST CLOUDS”?
“At the close of the [First World] War, prices of cotton and of wheat collapsed, and with them, many thousands of rural families were shaken from their positions on the agricultural ladder. Farm owners lost the equities in their farms and became tenants; tenants were reduced to laborers, and farm laborers did what they could. This process, begun in the depression of the early twenties, was accelerated by the Depression of the early thirties. Then came drought and grasshoppers, and whole sections of the rural population already loosened by the accumulating forces of successive depressions were finally dislodged by a catastrophe of Nature.” Paul Taylor, Author of American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion describing the economic forces behind the Dust Bowl migration in a 1938 speech.
What part of “Don’t overgraze” did you not understand?
