A modern-day Dust Bowl

[n2doc]

By Holly Bailey,

BAKERSFIELD, Calif. — Bob Taylor was barely 2 years old when his parents packed as many belongings as they could into their rickety old car and headed west from New Mexico toward California.

It was 1936, the height of the Dust Bowl, when the worst drought the country had ever seen forced tens of thousands of families to abandon their parched farmlands and head west in the hope of finding jobs and a more stable life.

Taylor’s parents were farm laborers, cotton pickers from Oklahoma and Texas who had slowly inched their way west chasing the crops that had somehow managed to survive the lack of rain. But then came the terrible dust storms, choking black blizzards of dirt fueled by the loose soil of eroded farmlands that swept across the plains, turning the days as dark as night. They were monsters that suffocated the life out of anything the drought hadn’t managed to kill — crops, animals and even people, who began to die from the dust that filled their lungs.

Taylor was too young to remember how bad it was. But he grew up hearing the stories from his parents, of how the land that had once been so rich and lush and healthy had slowly turned cracked and brittle and unwelcoming of life. How a drought that initially seemed like nothing more than a passing dry spell gradually unfolded into a disaster that destroyed the livelihoods of millions of people and deeply scarred the land in ways that never really healed.


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http://news.yahoo.com/california-drought-dust-bowl-040440797.html

[tularetom]

1. It was a dust bowl before massive government spending built irrigation systems

that brought water to the fields and created agricultural wealth in the region.

But it always depended on winter snowfall in the adjacent mountains. There is virtually no rainfall in the valley during the growing season, so snowmelt, conveyed to the fields by government funded irrigation canals, or groundwater pumped from underground basins, are the only sources of water available to the farms. In recent years the snowpack has been inadequate to supply enough water, so ag interests have tapped heavily into the groundwater basins by drilling hundreds of new wells. Consequently the underground storage is rapidly becoming depleted.

The Central Valley was a dust bowl for millennia. It will become a dust bowl again unless it's farms and cities learn and practice water conservation.

[PoliticAverse]

2. If you decide to do a massive amount of farming in a desert eventually water will be an issue. n/t