The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food by Dan Barber Page B
Authors: Dan Barber
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experiment.
And the wheat kept growing. When Europe ran out of wheat during World War I, the American government stepped in, guaranteeing wheat prices. The Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909 followed, doubling the amount of free land to 320 acres per settler, and thewave of settlement became a tsunami. In 1917, a record forty-five million acres of wheat was harvested; by1919, it was seventy-five million acres. Much of the gain came from plowing marginal land—areas of North Dakota and the southern Plains where soils were thinner and there was less water for irrigation—but for the time being, it didn’t matter.
Historian Donald Worster argues that by the time the war effort ended, the Midwest’s grain economy had become inseparable from the industrial economy. “The War integrated the plains farmers more thoroughly than ever before into the national economy—into its networks of banks, railroads, mills, implement manufacturers, energy companies—and, moreover, integrated them into an international market system.” The grasslands were remade. There was no turning back.
So the plows kept plowing until the rain suddenly stopped.The soil, naked, anchorless, and now dry, turned to dust and, in 1930, started to blow. Dust coated everything, consuming surfaces, bed linens, and attic floors (which routinely collapsed under the accumulation). It buried fence posts, cars, and tractors in enormous drifts. And this was only the light stuff. The heavier soil clumps ripped fences apart and whacked down telephone poles as they blew across the landscape. During the worst of these storms, visibility was zero, and vegetables and fruits died from the storms’ electrical charge. The drought ushered in a biblical infestation of insects, which devoured any wheat that survived, and a plague of jackrabbits emerging from their habitats in search of food.
Klaas remembers his aunts telling him about the Dust Bowl. The storms were so severe that the family would set the dinner table with the plates upside down. By the time they served dinner, the table linen would be imprinted with rings of dust. The family lived with the hardship until the farm itself went under.
Over the course of the next decade, our country’s midsection heaved hundreds of thousands of years’ worth of incomparably rich soil into the air.Some regions lost more than 75 percent of their topsoil. The decade came to be known as the Dirty Thirties, and it marks one of the worst environmental disasters in our history. In his book
The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl
,
Timothy Egan describes one of the dust storms:
A cloud ten thousand feet high from ground to top appeared. . . . The sky lost its customary white, and it turned brownish then gray. . . . Nobody knew what to call it. It was not a rain cloud. . . . It was not a twister. It was thick like coarse animal hair; it was alive. People close to it described a feeling of being in a blizzard—a black blizzard, they called it—with an edge like steel wool.
One of the largest of the storms hit in the spring of 1935—Black Sunday. It didn’t die in the prairie but moved east, gathering strength as it went.
The following Friday, a scientist named Hugh Bennett stood on the floor of the U.S. Senate, arguing for the creation of a permanent Soil Conservation Service. Even though photos of Black Sunday had appeared in newspapers around the country the same morning, most senators believed they had already done enough for the people of the prairie. Just as Bennett was wrapping up his plea, an aide appeared at the podium and whispered in his ear. “
Keep it up,”
he said. “
It’s coming
.” Bennett kept talking. A few minutes later, he stopped talking. The chamber turned dark. A giant copper dust cloud blew through Washington for an hour.
“This, gentlemen, is what I’m talking about.” Bennett said, pointing to the windows. “There goes Oklahoma.” Eight
And the wheat kept growing. When Europe ran out of wheat during World War I, the American government stepped in, guaranteeing wheat prices. The Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909 followed, doubling the amount of free land to 320 acres per settler, and thewave of settlement became a tsunami. In 1917, a record forty-five million acres of wheat was harvested; by1919, it was seventy-five million acres. Much of the gain came from plowing marginal land—areas of North Dakota and the southern Plains where soils were thinner and there was less water for irrigation—but for the time being, it didn’t matter.
Historian Donald Worster argues that by the time the war effort ended, the Midwest’s grain economy had become inseparable from the industrial economy. “The War integrated the plains farmers more thoroughly than ever before into the national economy—into its networks of banks, railroads, mills, implement manufacturers, energy companies—and, moreover, integrated them into an international market system.” The grasslands were remade. There was no turning back.
So the plows kept plowing until the rain suddenly stopped.The soil, naked, anchorless, and now dry, turned to dust and, in 1930, started to blow. Dust coated everything, consuming surfaces, bed linens, and attic floors (which routinely collapsed under the accumulation). It buried fence posts, cars, and tractors in enormous drifts. And this was only the light stuff. The heavier soil clumps ripped fences apart and whacked down telephone poles as they blew across the landscape. During the worst of these storms, visibility was zero, and vegetables and fruits died from the storms’ electrical charge. The drought ushered in a biblical infestation of insects, which devoured any wheat that survived, and a plague of jackrabbits emerging from their habitats in search of food.
Klaas remembers his aunts telling him about the Dust Bowl. The storms were so severe that the family would set the dinner table with the plates upside down. By the time they served dinner, the table linen would be imprinted with rings of dust. The family lived with the hardship until the farm itself went under.
Over the course of the next decade, our country’s midsection heaved hundreds of thousands of years’ worth of incomparably rich soil into the air.Some regions lost more than 75 percent of their topsoil. The decade came to be known as the Dirty Thirties, and it marks one of the worst environmental disasters in our history. In his book
The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl
,
Timothy Egan describes one of the dust storms:
A cloud ten thousand feet high from ground to top appeared. . . . The sky lost its customary white, and it turned brownish then gray. . . . Nobody knew what to call it. It was not a rain cloud. . . . It was not a twister. It was thick like coarse animal hair; it was alive. People close to it described a feeling of being in a blizzard—a black blizzard, they called it—with an edge like steel wool.
One of the largest of the storms hit in the spring of 1935—Black Sunday. It didn’t die in the prairie but moved east, gathering strength as it went.
The following Friday, a scientist named Hugh Bennett stood on the floor of the U.S. Senate, arguing for the creation of a permanent Soil Conservation Service. Even though photos of Black Sunday had appeared in newspapers around the country the same morning, most senators believed they had already done enough for the people of the prairie. Just as Bennett was wrapping up his plea, an aide appeared at the podium and whispered in his ear. “
Keep it up,”
he said. “
It’s coming
.” Bennett kept talking. A few minutes later, he stopped talking. The chamber turned dark. A giant copper dust cloud blew through Washington for an hour.
“This, gentlemen, is what I’m talking about.” Bennett said, pointing to the windows. “There goes Oklahoma.” Eight
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