From dirt poor to common ground – Iowa Capital Dispatch

I was raised on Dust Bowl stories.

My grandmother told stories of growing up in Chandler, Oklahoma, until her family was displaced to the fruit plantations of California, where her father became a Baptist tent preacher, famous for his apocalyptic sermons that he delivered under the shade of orange trees.

In her diary, Grandma Velma describes Dust Bowl economics in personal stories of sneaking off with her brother, Oral, to smoke hand-rolled cigarettes while wearing shoes patched with cardboard.

Every Christmas, Grandma packed oranges into our stockings, one for each of her nine children, several dozen grandchildren, and at least half a dozen “took ins.”

A good orange is hard to find in North Dakota. But every winter I seek one out because oranges are heirlooms of my grandmother’s survival.

Grandma’s Dust Bowl stories have been returning to me this winter, where I work for the Walsh County Three Rivers Soil Conservation District in northeastern North Dakota.

The stories have me reconsidering the definition of “dirt poor.”

Merriam-Webster notes that “dirt-poor” came into common use in 1937. Although the term means “suffering extreme poverty,” I contend that it can better serve us as a question: what happens to a farming and ranching community when it becomes “dirt poor,” with depleted and impoverished soil?

Perhaps it is only coincidence that 1937 was also the year that the first soil conservation district was established with the Brown Creek Soil and Water Conservation District in North Carolina. The district where I work was established in 1938.

In “A Sand County Almanac” (1949), Aldo Leopold wrote that soil districts were “a beautiful piece of social machinery.” But he warned that we had only fulfilled half of our original obligation, explaining that SCDs were not merely to provide cost-share funding, education and outreach, and on-the-ground support. Crucially, SCDs were also implemented to establish local rules for land-use that would be enforceable by law.

As Leopold observed:

When one asks why no rules have been written, one is told that the community is not yet ready to support them; education must precede rules. But the education actually in progress makes no mention of obligations to land over and above those dictated by self-interest. The net result is that we have more education but less soil, fewer healthy woods, and as many floods as in 1937.

As a former professor, I believe strongly in the power of education. But as a conservationist, I believe even more strongly in the power of a community to work toward common ground solutions.

The first step is recognizing that the public has the power to change the story we are currently writing on the land. Soil health is not a private matter. Like water, soil must be protected and preserved for the common good.

Without enforceable soil health ordinances, this winter has seen yet another year where topsoil has filled up our ditches, drifted into mounds in fields, and smeared along our roadways.

In the absence of enforceable ordinances, countless fields bear the marks of freshly installed drain tile: ground pocked by the iron tracks of excavators; trenches dug for thousands of feet of perforated tubes; a pump station, much like a basement sump pump, peeking above ground at the edge of the field, its below-ground system plunged 10 to 15 feet into the earth.

Drain tile is an industrial solution to a host of filtration problems caused by the abuses of industrial agriculture. Designed to pump excess water from soggy and flooded fields that often lack cover crops or living roots, drain tile promises the industrial farmer several nifty conveniences: shortening the time it takes to drain oversaturated ground and increasing the capacity for tillable acres through the chance to drain wetlands.

The cost of this convenience is difficult to measure, and we cannot afford to measure it in economic terms alone. The prevalence of drain tile in the Red River Valley is producing much more than a trickle: millions of gallons of water have been pumped from fields sprayed with fertilizer and pesticides into ditches, which flow into tributaries, which flow into the Red River, crossing state boundaries between Minnesota and North Dakota before flowing north into Canada.

The prevalence of drain tile in the Red River Valley offers another way of understanding trickle-down economics. The origins of this trickle-down theory can be traced to the 1890s, when “horse-and-sparrow” economics took hold, with the belief that by overfeeding oats to a horse, a few lucky sparrows would benefit from the expelled excess.

Our work here in Walsh County seeks to reverse this logic, where we collaborate with farmers, ranchers, and conservation organizations to come up with comprehensive solutions to complex problems related to soil health, water quality, habitat restoration, human nutrition, and rural community development.

Charismatic species, such as the mallard duck, western meadowlark, and sharp-tailed grouse, are our ambassadors in this effort. Or, as our partner the ND Meadowlark Initiative teaches us: what is good for the meadowlark is also good for working ranchland.

Moreover, cropland can benefit from implementing full-season, multispecies cover crops that can rest highly erodible soil, sequester carbon, provide seasonal habitat for nesting birds and pollinating insects, offer grasslands for grazing in partnership with local ranchers, and begin to reverse the losses in topsoil and microbial activity crucial to soil health.

If you would like to learn more about our efforts, tune in to our podcast “Common Ground: A Prairie Podcast,” also available on Spotify. We received a generous grant from the ND Natural Resources Trust that has enabled us to travel across North Dakota to interview a range of guests, including Pulitzer Prize winning journalists, award-winning artists, folks from The Land Institute, Audubon Great Plains, Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, North American Grouse Partnership, Ducks Unlimited, North Dakota Meadowlark Initiative, the United Prairie Foundation, and local farmers and ranchers.

Our podcast recognizes the prairie as a literal common ground with deep roots and an abundance of species. Although the prairie’s most enduring lesson might be patience, we also recognize this is a time of urgency: only 20% of prairies remain in the U.S., and of those, over 90% are unprotected by law.