Can cows and trees work together to help combat climate change?
Silvopasture creates healthier soil, increases biodiversity, and has the potential to increase carbon sequestration
The Dust Bowl of the 1930s was one of the most significant environmental disasters in United States history, not only devastating the Great Plains and rendering millions of acres of land infertile but also displacing, bankrupting and even killing farmers and their families.
One major cause of the Dust Bowl was overgrazing by cattle — but as we know now, with better management, those same cattle might actually have protected the soil by grazing on it.
How could this be? And what lessons can we learn from the Dust Bowl about cattle, soil health and sustainable farming practices?
In the early 20th century, the Great Plains of the central and western U.S. were transformed by agriculture.
“There was a lot of anxieties about growing population, about how we can feed people efficiently. How can we make more with less? Urban populations are skyrocketing at this time, and it just doesn’t seem feasible,” explains Dr. Nicole Welk-Joerger, an agricultural historian, researcher and deputy director of the Center for 21st Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Driven by the growing demand for cash crops and a need to produce food more efficiently to feed a growing population, farmers plowed millions of acres of grassland to plant those crops — especially wheat.
As demand soared and business boomed, farmers began devoting more and more of their land solely to growing wheat. Some farmers also raised cattle, but that venture was not quite as profitable at the time, so they prioritized the wheat — and the farmers even fenced off their wheat fields to keep their cattle from grazing there. This emphasis on farming only one crop is known as monoculture.
What these farmers didn’t know was that the region’s native grasses, with their strong, interconnected root systems, had played a pivotal role in holding the topsoil in place during earlier periods of drought. Extensively plowing to plant more wheat was destroying most of these grasses, and the remaining grasses were being dangerously overgrazed by cattle who were penned in one place rather than being allowed to roam naturally.
Invisibly and inexorably, all this damage created a ticking time bomb — and when the severe droughts of the 1930s hit, that bomb exploded. The region’s strong winds simply blew away the dry topsoil, creating towering dust storms that enveloped every crop and pasture, every house and barn, and every animal and human in a thick and choking dust.
These “black blizzards” continued for a decade.
Interestingly, cattle could have played a role in preventing the Dust Bowl — if they had been managed in a way that aligned with the region’s natural ecosystems.
“If farmers hadn’t married into the monoculture standpoint — if farmers had kept their animals grazing and kept their cattle operations next to their crop operations — the Dust Bowl might not have been as severe,” Welk-Joerger said.
In fact, the native grasslands of the Great Plains were once home to vast herds of bison that played an essential role in maintaining the health of the ecosystem. Those bison would move around continuously, grazing heavily in one area before eventually moving on, which allowed the grasses they had grazed to grow back even stronger.
Rotational grazing, in which cattle are regularly moved from one pasture to another to prevent overgrazing, mimics the movement of wild herds like bison. This practice promotes healthy root systems while also supporting plant diversity and improving the soil’s ability to retain moisture. It also provides better forage for the cattle, creating a cycle of productivity and sustainability.
Cattle could have fulfilled a similar ecological role on the Great Plains in the years preceding the Dust Bowl if the farmers there had understood the issues with their chosen growing strategies and the potential solutions to those problems. Unfortunately, however, they didn’t — but during those terrible years, U.S. government agencies such as the Soil Conservation Service and the Farm Security Administration spread the word about sustainable farming techniques like rotational grazing, crop rotation, contour plowing and terracing, and reduced tillage. These solutions — implemented with the help of workers from the Civilian Conservation Corps, a Depression-era project that provided much-needed jobs for young men — finally helped end the Dust Bowl and provided a better road forward for agriculture in the region.
Today’s farmers, within the Great Plains and elsewhere, are carrying these lessons forward, increasingly achieving both high productivity and improved sustainability. Researchers are even learning that well-managed cattle can sequester carbon in the soil, making them valuable in the fight against climate change.
The Dust Bowl was a stark reminder of the delicate balance between agriculture and the environment. The more we understand this balance, and the more we work with the earth’s natural processes rather than against them, the better we can address today’s climate crisis and build a stronger agriculture industry for the future.
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