Born of the Dust Bowl

oday federal farmland policies raise the specter of overregulation, but the condition of the American soil has been a matter of political interest since the founding of the country. "Since the achievement of our independence, he is the greatest patriot who stops the most gullies," Patrick Henry said shortly after the American Revolution in 1776.

The federal government has taken a formal interest in soil conservation ever since President Lincoln set up the Agriculture Department in the 1860s, but it was during the Great Depression, with its famed dust storms, that Americans made a connection between poor, eroded land and poverty.

In 1933, under the National Industrial Recovery Act, the Roosevelt Administration agreed to spend $5 million to create a Soil Erosion Service in the Interior Department. The agency's first projects involved employing poor young men to help farmers plant trees and take other actions to protect their blowing soil. But officials soon realized that long-term soil protection involved teaching farmers how to do the job for themselves. In 1935, Roosevelt moved the agency to the Agriculture Department and renamed it the Soil Conservation Service.

The day the Senate Public Lands Committee held a hearing on the 1935 act creating the Soil Conservation Service a great dust storm from the Great Plains blew eastward all the way to Washington. "The Senators suspended the hearing for a moment and moved to the windows of the Senate Office Building," Douglas Helms, historian of the Natural Resources Conservation Service (as SCS was renamed in 1994), has written.

Most conservation problems cross property lines, so in 1937, Congress passed the Standard State Soil Conservation Districts Law, which encouraged state legislatures to create local conservation districts. Today such districts cover nearly every acre of land in the country. The act also inadvertently created a permanent constituency for conservation. The local districts formed the National Association of Conservation Districts, which can assemble a grass roots lobbying effort at a moment's notice.

In the 1950s, as farmland across the nation was turned into suburbs, conservation districts became the de facto land use planning agencies in many parts of the country. The SCS became their expert adviser. In the late 1960s, the agency began responding to environmentalists' demands that it take non-agricultural purposes into consideration. The tension between the agency's original mission to make land more productive and broader goals such as cleaning the air or maintaining wildlife habitat appears to be a permanent challenge.