Droughts Then And Now

Weekend Edition Saturday:

In the '30s and '40s, Charles Hildenbrand used horses, replaced today by tractors, combines and planters with high-tech gadgets and computers. So is it even fair to compare this summer's drought to the devastating droughts in the 1950s, or even the Dust Bowl years?
"Certainly from a geographical footprint, it's right up there with the '50s and '30s at over 60 percent," says climatologist Mark Svoboda of the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
"But the '30s and '50s were multiyear droughts," he says, "and this drought, so far for the majority of the country, is not a multiyear drought yet."
In those exceptionally dry years of the 1930s, farmers and ranchers plowed up the Great Plains to plant wheat. They ended up losing not just their crops but their top soil, too, as winds blew it into giant dust clouds that darkened the skies for hundreds of miles.
That spurred the creation of the Soil Conservation Service, which paid farmers to not farm some land and to replant the native prairie grasses to keep soil in place. Svoboda says the USDA agency also encouraged farmers to change their tillage practices.
"Instead of tilling the soil over, they use what they call no-till drilling or low-till ... which doesn't disturb the soil. It plants directly into a residue-covered soil that retains a lot of soil moisture in that upper part of the profile," he says.
In addition to being better able to preserve what little moisture is in the soil, hybrid crops send roots deeper to find moisture.

One thing we don't need is a multiyear drought.  Prices will get plenty high as it is, without throwing in another bad year.