At the end of 1931, the Agriculture College of Oklahoma did a survey of all the land that had been torn up in their state during the wheat bonanza. They were astonished by what they found: of sixteen million acres in cultivation in the state, thirteen million were seriously eroded. And this was before the drought had calcified most of the ground. The erosion was due to a pair of perennial weather conditions on the plains: wind and brief, powerful rain or hailstorms. But it was a third element—something new to the prairie ecosystem—that was really to blame, the college agriculture experts
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