On the day after "Black Sunday," April 14, 1935, when the worst dust storm struck Oklahoma, a reporter referred to the besieged area as "the dust bowl of the continent." The name stuck and has been used ever since to describe the tragic combination of land degradation and weather extremes in the southern Great Plains. Seventy years later, many experts still consider America's Dust Bowl the classic example of how misuse and overuse of the land, aggravated by drought, can turn productive soil into dust -- a process today called desertification. The U.S. national response to the Dust Bowl also has become the classic success story of how government and citizens working together can reverse the process and prevent it from happening again.

From Dust to Dust

The area in the United States known as the Great Plains is a vast, dry prairie that was a sea of grass when the first European settlers arrived. In fact, geographically, the Great Plains extends 4,000 kilometers from northern Canada to New Mexico and Texas; and stretches eastward about 640 kilometers from the Rocky Mountains to eastern South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma. Wind and drought are common on this flat, semi-arid land, where serious dry spells occur in roughly 20-year cycles. During the 1800s, the area was labeled on maps as the "Great American Desert." One officer on a 19th century military expedition to the region declared it "almost wholly unfit for cultivation, and of course uninhabitable by a people depending upon agriculture for their subsistence."

Yet, in the ensuing century, settlers poured into the region, lured by free land, vast open spaces, and the hope of new lives. In particular, in the early 20th century, ample rainfall, high grain prices during World War I, and the promises of advertisers promoting settlement in the area lured more and more farmers to the southern Great Plains. Bringing with them crops and farming practices better suited to the humid conditions of the eastern U.S., these farmers plowed millions of hectares of native grasslands to plant wheat. By the 1920s, the new gasoline-powered tractor made it possible for a farmer to cultivate 20 hectares a day -- compared to a little more than one hectare with a horse and plow. When wheat prices dropped, farmers simply planted more. And when all the best land was in use, they moved on to marginal lands, increasing the likelihood of crop failure and soil erosion.

Then, in 1931 came one of the worst droughts ever to strike the region. Substantial rains would not resume for nearly ten years.

As the wheat withered and with no native grasses left to hold the fine earth in place, topsoil that had taken centuries to build up was soon gone with the wind. The dust churned into gigantic dark clouds that reached miles into the sky, blotting out the sun for days.

"The winds unleashed their fury with a force beyond my wildest imagination," said Kansas wheat farmer Lawrence Svobida, interviewed for the Public Broadcasting System program, Surviving the Dust Bowl. "It blew continuously for a hundred hours and it seemed as if the whole surface of the earth would be blown away. As far as my eyes could see, my fields were completely bare."

A Mass Exodus

By the mid-1930s, the Dust Bowl's devastation had engulfed 40.5 million hectares in the panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas, western Kansas, and eastern Colorado and New Mexico. This environmental disaster triggered a social upheaval that led to one of the largest migrations of people in American history. With the nation already in the grip of the Great Depression, prices plummeted for a bumper wheat crop in 1931, just before the drought began. Financially overextended and unable to harvest another crop as the drought worsened, many farmers lost their land when banks foreclosed. Tenant farmers were driven from their homes as larger farms failed. With the national unemployment rate at 30 percent, there were no other jobs to be found. Food was in increasingly short supply, and famine was a very real threat.

Faced with such desperate circumstances, thousands of families piled their meager belongings into cars and trucks and headed west, hoping for a better life. By 1940, 2.5 million people had left the Midwest, reducing the population of some rural areas by as much as 40 percent. Two hundred thousand of those people headed to California.

With its mild climate, long growing season, and great diversity of crops, California seemed like the promised land. In fact, it was anything but. For those who did make it to California, there were too few jobs and too little pay. Like the fictional Joad family in John Steinbeck's novel about the Dust Bowl, The Grapes of Wrath, many families were forced to live in squalid roadside camps or to follow the crops as migrant workers, working for pennies a day or sometimes just for food.

Government to the Rescue

As the Depression gripped the nation, the newly elected president, Franklin Roosevelt, promised a New Deal to rescue the nation from its economic woes. Within months of his inauguration in 1933, dozens of new agencies and programs were established to put people to work and tackle the problems that had led to economic collapse. In addition, for the first time, the federal government took a strong hand in efforts to prevent the soil erosion and agricultural abuses that had led to the devastating desertification of the Great Plains and to reduce the region's vulnerability to future droughts -- a conservation legacy that continues to this day. Hugh Hammond Bennett, of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and a leader in the soil conservation crusade, declared that "no nation or race within historic time has been so wasteful of its agricultural lands as we of the United States." When the Soil Erosion Service was created in 1933 as a temporary agency under the National Industrial Recovery Act, Bennett became its director. Using equipment and seeds supplied by the government and labor provided by men enrolled in federal job programs such as the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and the Works Progress Administration (WPA) that were part of the New Deal effort to put unemployed men to work, the Soil Erosion Service was able to build support among farmers and show them how to reduce erosion on their land. The agency taught such techniques as terracing -- creating a staircase of wide flat rows along a hillside to hold water -- and contour plowing -- plowing across a slope, instead of up and down, so that the soil forms ridges that help slow the flow of rain water.

The Soil Conservation Service (SCS) within the Department of Agriculture was established as a permanent entity in 1935, and still exists today under a different name, the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). SCS continued to rely on the CCC and the WPA to provide labor for demonstration projects to promote new farming methods. As noted, contour plowing of fields and contour furrows on grassland improved water retention and prevented runoff. Stripcropping, in which close-growing crops, such as wheat or alfalfa, were alternated with wider-spaced crops like corn, also helped to slow down water flow and control wind erosion, especially when strips were planted perpendicular to prevailing winds. Conservation tillage that left crop residues on the surface of fallow land anchored loose soil and helped increase nutrient content. Planting patches of trees surrounded by lower shrubs created effective windbreaks on the flat, open land.

The most novel approach -- and the key to the SCS's long-term success -- came in 1937 when President Roosevelt persuaded the states to adopt standard legislation creating soil conservation districts. Through these districts, local involvement became the centerpiece of the soil conservation movement, with the federal agency serving in an advisory capacity. Because the districts were managed by locally elected officials, farmers had a direct role in determining how to deal with conservation problems in their own regions. Working with the districts, SCS was able to extend its technical assistance to areas beyond the demonstration projects.

One of the most important preventive measures undertaken by SCS was identification of the most vulnerable lands. "They emphasized use of the soil survey to figure out which lands were most likely to have a wind erosion problem and encouraged the farmer to put that land in pasture and plant crops on land that might have better soil retention," explains NRCS historian Douglas Helms. In addition, to make the best use of all their land and better withstand fluctuations in weather and prices, farmers were encouraged to diversify by dividing their operations into a combination of farming and ranching.

A Lasting Legacy

Nearly 70 years after the Soil Conservation Service was founded, its successor agency, the Natural Resources Conservation Service, remains a strong force in American agriculture.

Today, the agency works with farmers and some 3,000 soil conservation districts nationwide on a wide range of additional issues, including control of polluted runoff from fields and manure storage facilities, timber management, and improvement of wildlife habitat.

Drought and winds still plague the Great Plains, but with the safeguards now in place, it is unlikely that the area will ever experience another desertification disaster on the scale of the Dust Bowl. In the 1930s, President Roosevelt summed up the Dust Bowl disaster when he said, "A nation that destroys its soil, destroys itself." Through the programs set in motion, the United States has demonstrated over the course of time that government and citizens, working together, can reverse the ravages of desertification.