Remix clone Hacker News

> The Americans learned that the hard way in the 1930s.

Grasses, not trees, maintained and protected the soil for what became the US Dust Bowl.

The "Great American Desert" was essentially treeless. As your [2] links points out, European agricultural methods "[exposed] the bare, over-plowed farmland. Without deep-rooted prairie grasses to hold the soil in place, it began to blow away."

▲

dataviz1000 a day ago | parent [-]

> "Like all the others, he had allowed the advertisers to multiply his wants; he had learned to equate happiness with possessions, and prosperity with money to spend in a shop. Like all the others, he had abandoned any idea of subsistence farming to think exclusively in terms of a cash crop; and he had gone on thinking in those terms, even when the crop no longer gave him any cash. Then, like all the others, he had got into debt with the banks. And finally, like all the others, he had learned that what the experts had been saying for a generation was perfectly true : in a semi-arid country it is grass that holds down the soil; tear up the grass, the soil will go. In due course, it had gone.

The man from Kansas was now a peon and a pariah; and the experience was making a worse man of him."

-- Aldous Huxley, "After Many a Year Dies the Swan" -- 1939

They were warned what would happen. Yes, it was the grasses that keep the soil in place.

However, as the article you referenced says,

> "As part of Roosevelt’s New Deal, Congress established the Soil Erosion Service and the Prairie States Forestry Project in 1935. These programs put local farmers to work planting trees as windbreaks on farms across the Great Plains. The Soil Erosion Service, now called the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) developed and promoted new farming techniques to combat the problem of soil erosion." [2]

A bunch of people didn't understand this in Haiti and now they are severely doomed and suffering. Probably not something you want to be incorrect about on the global scale.

Although, it is the grasses that hold the top soil in place, it can be mitigated by planting trees.

	▲	eesmith a day ago \| parent [-]
		> They were warned what would happen. They also believed in "rain follows the plow." > windbreaks on farms Sure, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Plains_Shelterbelt . But that was only one of many techniques developed. https://archive.org/details/bighughfatherofs0000well/page/11... mentions "if subject to wind erosion, it calls for stubble-mulch farming, wind strips and windbreaks." (That's a biography about Hugh Hammond Bennett, who led the Soil Erosion Service ... but not the Shelterbelt!) In general (a few paragraphs earlier): 'Modern soil conservation is based on sound land use and the treatment of land with those adaptable, practical measures that keep it permanently productive while in use,” he explains. “It means terracing land that needs terracing; and it means contouring, strip cropping, and stubble-mulching the land as needed, along with supporting practices of crop rotations, cover crops, etc., wherever needed. It means gully control, stabilizing water outlets, building farm ponds, locating farm roads and fences on the contour, and planting steep, erodible lands to grass or trees.“' Earlier at https://archive.org/details/bighughfatherofs0000well/page/96... you can read about the then-novel idea of contouring; "Tillage is proceeding across the slopes, rather than up and down hill. It is being done on the contour on 15,362 acres. Farmers are finding that it not only serves as a brake on running water but also reduces the cost of mule-power and tractor-power." Oh, interesting. In 'Predicting and Controlling Wind Erosion', Lyles (1985) writes "Despite the credit the Prairie States Forestry Project has received in ending the Dust Bowl, windbreak plantings under the Project did not begin on a large scale until 1936", and says "the cardinal principle of wind erosion control is maintaining vegetative materials on the soil. ... this practice of conserving or maintaining vegetation on the surface has evolved into various forms of tillage management, which currently go under the generic name of conservation tillage and have become a major technique for erosion control." (See https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3742385.pdf ) This suggests again that trees and windbreaks in general are not the primary solution to the regions affected by the Dust Bowl, but rather grasses, including crops.