Approaching Another Dust Bowl?

The Environmental Working Group's Senior Advisor, Don Carr, at Big Picture Agriculture:

Consider:

1) According to our recent report, Plowed Under, nearly 24 million acres of U.S. grasslands, shrub land and wetlands were plowed under between 2008 and 2011. About 19 million of those acres have been planted to just three crops, corn, soybeans and winter wheat – some of the main building blocks in our industrial food system — due in part to federal policies like farm subsidies that support only a handful of commodity crops.
2) In intensively-farmed Iowa, EWG found that Iowa State University researchers had determined that some Iowa farms are losing precious topsoil up to 12 times faster than the government estimates. When storms hit vulnerable or poorly protected land, fields sometimes lose more soil in a single day than is considered sustainable for the whole year, or even decades.
3) The recent drought that ravaged most of the country’s farmland spurred a dust storm in October that stretched across Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma. It was so big that it could be seen from space.

At least we've learned something from history, and may be able to do a better job this time around.  The whole post is worth a read, and the part about the Ogallala is scary.