Rain Follows the Plow

The trick was to make a small amount of water to stretch as far as possible on the High Plains, but the cash crops that were available at the time were water thirsty corn and wheat, better suited to the humid farmlands to the east and out in California. The struggle in the nineteenth century was about a mysterious aquifer that was too deep to access for farming with period technology, and above ground rivers and streams were very sparse, and the rivers that did exist were quickly acquired by the first wave of settlers, who claimed exclusive riparian rights to the water. These water rights have origins in English common law and are a way for allocating water among those who have ownership of land along a body of water's path.

All landowners along its route have the right to make reasonable use of it as it flows through their property. In times of drought or limited usage, to satisfy all the users on a body of water allotments can be fixed in proportion to the lands frontage area adjacent to the water source. The United States recognizes two types of water rights with the western states following the principle of prior appropriation--a legal doctrine that sets that the first person to exploit a quantity of water from a water source for "beneficial use" has the right to continued use of that water. Later users can access the remaining water only if they do not affect the water usage of the first user. Prior appropriation became the water doctrine of the Western United States, filtering through state courts as a way for industries to increase water available to them in agriculture and industry.

Take for example the 1855 California Supreme court case of Irwin v. Phillips between Matthew Irwin, a farmer who diverted a stream for irrigation purposes, and Robert Phillips who later started a mining operation nearby and tried to modify the stream back to its current flow to make use of the water. The case went before the California Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of Irwin as the first water user and the prior appropriation legal doctrine as a means to settle water disputes in the western states. Under the Riparian Law, water is a public good and cannot be owned by the government, state, or private individual, it is included as part of the land over which it falls from the sky and then travels along the earth's surface.

The High Plains required technological innovation and brand new farming practices. Larger tracts of land were required to implement the dry farming practices that were needed. Large 640-acre section tracts were needed, and machinery would need to be invented to help the plains farmers with land tracts that were one square mile and therefore outside the realm of hand tools for cultivation. The hard soil of the plains was aided by the invention of John Deere's mass-produced Moldboard Plow. It was shaped in a V with a sharp chisel that cut into the hard earth. Moldboards were attached to either end of the v chisel and were shaped like a section of a hollow tube that was designed to turn over the nutrient-rich topsoil that was locked in the packed native grasses, and which was held together by many feet of root structure. The plow terraformed the two million-year-old landscape preparing it for what we now recognize as modern America, how it lives as well as what it eats. Attached to a horse, it began cutting up the soil on an unprecedented scale and started the experimentation of what dryland farming could achieve on an enlarged scale.

Railroad connections with the eastern United States opened up various industries to the plains, bringing products like prefabricated housing and barbed wire fencing to scale up and subdivide the land that resembled an open ocean of rolling grassland. In 1862, the Homestead Act offered anyone free farmland who would commit to five years of hard labor on their property and survive the arid plains' climate. A slew of products was sold to these farmers as magic bullet solutions to their toils and anguish, aiding the process of proving this land to claim ownership of it from the government.

Many were merely snake oil peddlers who bounced around the open plains like tumbleweeds, but a few inventions were as transformative to the landscape for better or worse as the Moldboard Plow. The McCormick family formerly resided on a small farm in Raphine, Virginia alongside a community of sewing machine inventors who named the town after the Greek nymph Rhapso from the Greek verb to sew. In the late 1810s, the father Robert McCormick began work on a complicated farm implement known as a mechanical reaper and filed a patent to claim the design as his invention. He worked for the next 28 years to perfect a horse-drawn iteration of the machine but was not able to produce a reliable version. Near the end of Robert's life, his son Cyrus continued work on the mechanical reaper and began to include features that are on a modern day reaper that cut and bundled the wheat for processing. Shortly after, Cyrus and brother Leander relocated to Chicago and founded McCormick Harvesting Machine Company in 1847 and aided in the explosion of wheat harvesting on the high plains. The new machine was displayed in Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace at London's Great Exhibition of 1851. In 1848, his factory struggled with limited production, with just 500 units produced, but with orders, production exploded by the late 1850s, with 30,000 units purchased. The innovation to

McCormick's production operation was that the manufacturing company released models yearly, like car companies that worked out design flaws and added features, that aided in the mythology of the name McCormick on the High Plains landscape. Another innovation was helping farmers obtain the credit necessary to purchase the expensive machinery--a business approach that is commonplace today in larger vertically integrated business operations. By 1902, financier JP Morgan merged multiple grain reaper companies, McCormick Harvester, Deering Harvester, Milwaukee Harvester, Plano Harvester, and Warder, Bushnell, & Glessner into International Harvester Corp. IH Corp operated throughout the 20th century, becoming CASE IH in 1985.

Later CASE IH was acquired by CNH Industrial NV in 1999. CNH Industrial NV is a transnational capital goods giant that vertically integrated multiple brands such as Case IH, Steyr, New Holland, Iveco, and Astra in the global agricultural and construction industries, providing equipment and financing for machinery and land through global dealer networks. CNH Industrial NV and Fiat Industrial S.P.A. Integrated in 2013 into CNH Global, a near 30 billion dollar company that vertically combines equipment and financing of multiple pieces of industrial equipment ranging from agricultural and construction equipment to commercial trucks and trailers, buses and municipal vehicles, as well as Marine Powertrains.

This mechanization had a rapid and profound effect on the High Plains. These mechanized tools, combined with the relatively late addition of the Santa Fe railroad construction at the turn of the twentieth century provided a transportation network that facilitated the mechanization of the Plains. Growth was much slower than the rest of the nation, with the first taste of prosperity happening in the 1950s from the extraction of natural gas and petroleum and the development of high-performance pumps that could finally exploit the Ogallala. The success was intermittent, with such dependencies on market forces of the prices of commodities a boom and bust cycle persisted.

The frontier mindset has never left the region despite a consumer desire for needing the best of what the region can produce, not accepting any substitutes, and needing it now. Displays at the supermarket would suggest that scarcity is a distant memory. History will show that these moments of unlimited growth and prosperity are a human folly of short-term thinking. Humanity exists perpetually in the present, with the assumption our entire lives are in the present moment in time without the ability to see the complexities of how we live and the strains they place on others. Maybe we don't want to see. We want to go and see our perfectly packaged meat on the supermarket shelf stacked to the brim for a convenient handout, we want to lightly tread clinical, commercial floors to see that our eyes filled with aisles of boxes and packages of convenient grains and grain derivatives in store displays. We have zero clue about our risks, we don't want to feel or see them. We don't want to think of those risks. Agriculture is one of humans' endeavors that despite the best of intentions is subject to the apathy of nature, of drought, and of scarcity. We are subject to endure the consequences of our overreach. Prosperity is a temporary human construct. Our outright refusal of addressing the concept of a paucity of water and arable land and instead treating the world as constant holiday deficit spending resources is risky.

On the plains, at least the madness has tricked many of the risk takers out on the land to attempt tame and exploit her. The first wave of those deceived by their human shortsightedness started arriving near the 1850s.

The shock troops of an American religious invention, these settlers were true believers of the new state theology, Manifest Destiny, that was rooted in the great expanse of pure, raw land, that was seen as a fresh start to build a version of heaven on earth. A belief in the potentialities of an earthly utopia. any found out painfully and privately the true meaning of the word utopia, from Greek as a place that does not exist. An American state theocratic invention pushed waves and waves of settlers on the plains as environmental cannon fodder for the cause of national expansion. The flow of humanity onto the plains was expendable.

Many of the settlers were programmed with this prime directive as the root reasoning of their decision making, that their entrepreneurial endeavors drove them onto the plains like lemmings, with the more cynical being the ones who extended credit and sold products to their fears and insecurities. The first generations of farmers were subjected to an onslaught of the plains harshness. They were the first waves of infantry that sacrificed themselves to the plains experiment. Drought and heat forced hundreds to flee back east in 1859-1860. No rain fell in the summer, nor snow in the winter. As little as one bushel of wheat could be produced in 8 acres of farmland, or the equivalent of the calories needed for one person for about one month.

The settlers who survived this drought only did so through charity coming from the east. Adaptations to growing through the mid-century droughts saw settlers shift from corn to winter and Russian wheat that were adapted to harsh climates and brought by the Russian and German immigrants who attempted life out in this landscape. Dryland farming techniques were learned and adapted from these immigrants. American plains settlers learned during this time to let the fields lie fallow to build moisture in the soil so that moisture could sufficiently build up to support a seasonal crop.

Congress had used the Homestead Act as an incentive to drive the settling force to the region, and then declared that they would give free farmland to a settler who committed to five years of survival to prove the property. Originally seen as a way for settlers to flee the urban plight of the eastern cities for a fresh start, immigrants did not have the initial asking price of $1.25 per acre as a residency fee to qualify for the program. Despite the best intentions, the government program became exploited by speculators who risked on undesirable plots of land on extended lines of credit. The five years of homesteading on the Plains were known as the period of starvation. Plains historian Walter Prescott Webb wrote, "the government is willing to bet the homesteader one hundred and sixty acres of land that he'll starve to death on it in less than five years." In 1912 the government passed a revision to a three-year Homestead Act, admitting that the point of starvation out on the plains was far less than five years. By the end of the nineteenth century, many collapsed under massive debts, were forced to abandon their land, or starved trying to withstand the five-year proving period.

Congress in 1877 attempted a piece of legislation called the Desert Land Act, which discounted a 640-acre tract of land to a landowner who would spend the money necessary to irrigate their land. The method of choice by farmers who attempted the practice for government subsidy was furrow irrigation, a series of ditches that were dug in between rows of crops that could divert water from those who were in proximity to rivers or streams. Because of the lack of surface water, rampant fraud persisted as a farmer only needed to just dig the ditches and pretend that they were attempting to irrigate the land.

After the dust settled after the first wave of settlement failure, a climate anomaly for roughly a decade (1878-1887) provided exceptionally heavy rains on the plains from Panhandle Texas northward to Canada. A new generation of farmers without past knowledge of failures on the unforgiving landscape made the venture to attempt what the previous generation had failed doing, with the seemingly permanent change of the climate in favor of the new settlers. New settlers believed they could alter the forces of nature by merely plowing the earth. A popular slogan of the time, "rain follows the plow" became commonplace. A cadre of government officials, private interests conducted a public relations crusade in favor of resettlement of the plains, stating enthusiastically that the climate had permanently changed. It was imperative to resettle. The power that ordinary but mythologically powerful American settlement had to terraform the plains and western climate by merely their plow tilling the earth was an update to the Manifest Destiny gospel.

A pseudoscientific hypothesis began circulating by refutable scientists of the day that the increased rainfall was because of human intervention tilling the earth, allowing trapped water to circulate and create additional rainfall. This theory gained clout as widespread fact when endorsed by agencies like the Smithsonian Institution, the American Association for the advancement of science, and the US Geological survey all endorsed the idea as scientific fact. The prevailing idea was that when the soil was broken by the plow, the tilled earth absorbed the rainfall like a fresh sponge. Then the soil evaporated a little moisture back into the atmosphere each day, receiving it back at night like a heavy dew.

When detractors of this theory warned that the lands of the West were historically arid, proponents of the theory and real estate speculators waged a culture war promoting the optimistic new view. The additional view of the times was that not only did plowing facilitate rainfall, but that the wires and electrical currents of the new telegraph and railroad construction projects modified natural electrical qualities to increase rainfall. Civil war veterans would also speak anecdotally of artillery fire on the battlefield, that large-scale battles that turned up the earth as cannon balls tore up the landscape would experience a significant rainfall afterward. "If Sherman would use more cannon to clear the plains of Indians it might have the added benefit of bringing the rain" (1092). More rainfall, explained properly or not, gave a renewed optimism toward plains crop and real estate speculation. During the anomaly years, waves of new homesteads were applied for. Agricultural historian Gilbert Fite remarked that the new arrivals to the plains were undeterred of the severity of the landscape even when they rode past the deserted claim shanties that littered the landscape that the previous generation of settlers had been forced to abandon as recent as 3-4 years before their arrival.

Advertisement fueled the speculation and settlement, promising cheap land, riches, and permanent prosperity. By the end of the Plains rain anomaly, the Western Kansas population had spiked nearly four times, from 38,000 to 139,000 people, just as the rains stopped. The winter of 1887 was so disastrous that 80 percent of all cattle either starved or froze to death. Scorching heat and drought crippled the plains for consecutive summers from 1887-1890 with fields of wheat only producing at a rate of 2.5 bushels per acre or 100 lbs of bread flour per acre in a year. An acre of land could just feed one person for 2 months at that output. The crisis was made worse because the previous optimism pushed general overexpansion of the land, pushed by heavy debt loads on which many had to default.

The optimism died with the burning crops, with the settlers having to move eastward back home to their relatives, busted and wiser for the experience. Many who were fortunate to leave did so, but many were too poor to leave were unable to get away, and many starved to death. This massive bust of people's lives and the defaults that they left behind caused the economic panics of 1893 and 1896, of which colossal wheat failures led to a run on gold at the United States Treasury by European investors. The entire decade of the 1890s saw the end of the Gilded Age, with damage to every sector of the American economy and unemployment rates as high as 20 percent. Many during this period lived on less than one dollar a day.

"The fabled American homesteading dream broke down on the sun-beaten devil's anvil of the plains. By losing their capacity to be self-sustaining, starving farmers felt betrayed, and, paradoxically, they believed they had betrayed the American dream by their failure. Government farm agents had encouraged farmers to stay on the land despite the return of drought and economic pressures to abandon the land. Farmers themselves believed it was unpatriotic (and possibly even sinful) to desert their homesteads" (1149).

By 1901 the government conceded the dryland farming experiment was a failure that had resulted, "in a class of people broken in spirit as well as in fortune." It would take another attempt by farmers to tame the plains in the 1920s, the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s, and a new type of credit economy to be developed in the aftermath of the 1930's Great Depression to transform the Great Plains into the environment that we see today. The Ogallala was also the key to making the plains consistently fertile. However, the aquifer was not consistent over its vast expanse. Hand dug wells were ineffective in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In counties in Western Kansas, it was common for settlers to have to dig by hand wells and not find water for more than 200 ft.

A settler attempting to dig a well would have to dig through hundreds of feet of dense-packed soils, heavy clays, and broken gravely rock. The soil was geological aftermath of the erosion of the Rocky Mountains, in the process creating the rich soil that attracted the farmers to risk the erratic climate. The farmers needed a new set of tools to get at the water for sustained prosperity. Rivers during this time dried up, and the western states like Colorado and Wyoming had farmers and ranchers dam water closer to their sources of winter melts. Dried up rivers on the western plains dried up the only accesses to water. By 1902 Kansas and Colorado began a dispute over Colorado taking too much water from the Arkansas river that has since been heard by the United States Supreme Court seven times between 1902-2009.

Kansas v. Colorado, 185 U.S. 125 (1902)

Kansas v. Colorado, 206 U.S. 46 (1907)

Colorado v. Kansas, 320 U.S. 383 (1943)

Kansas v. Colorado, 514 U.S. 673 (1995)

Kansas v. Colorado, 533 U.S. 1 (2001)

Kansas v. Colorado, 543 U.S. 86 (2004)

Kansas v. Colorado, 556 U.S. 98 (2009)

Water equity as a legal definition has been established between Kansas and Colorado concerning economic terms, but not with the realities of the dispute on an environmental or even a commercial reality. The landscape of the plains was disrupted by diversions of water flow forever and the plains will suffer for it.

People believed during this time that the mysterious aquifer under their feet was vast and could provide an unlimited source of water if it could be exploited. There was talk of underflow from the rocky mountains water melt that surged under the plains. That it was a matter of time before technology could be developed to extract the free resource. This myth spread from the early twentieth century from promotion to promotion, fueling the development of the wind-powered pump house at first, then the utilization of a steam-powered engine to power larger scale pump houses at the beginning of the 20th century. The costs to irrigate such large tracts of land were not viable in the economic conditions and debt structures of the period, with the growth of the early pumping technology significantly limited.

Albrechts Dilemma, or the necessity to degrade soil to produce crops to feed people, was put into overdrive during the beginning of the twentieth century, transforming the high plains from an intermittent dryland farming area surrounded by arid grassland into a high yield chemically dependent, mechanized operation. Policymakers', scientists', and farmers' misunderstanding of the long-term processes that were at play in creating a stasis in the plains ecosystem were responsible for its rapid degradation, culminating in the ultimate national disaster, the Dust Bowl that severely affected areas in panhandle Texas, Oklahoma, western Kansas, eastern New Mexico, and eastern Colorado. It also affected areas of Wyoming, the Dakotas, and Nebraska.

The Dust Bowl started as part of a drought that occurred in the early 1930s from a drought that severely affected 24 states, with Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) scores of -6 or greater. PDSI is a developed data tool that attempts to forecast climate-related disasters through a combination of datasets measuring accumulated precipitation, soil moisture, evapotranspiration, and represents precipitation and temperature anomalies. This data is taken and can be placed on a map in a relative scale rating from -10 or excessively dry from normal, 0 or normal, or +10 or excessively wet from normal. Drought affected more than half of the continental United States but crippled the plains due to a combination of man-made industrial interventions combined with a lack of understanding of how the Plains ecosystem created a stasis in such a harsh environment.

A number of the old rules of land stewardship were broken. Farmers completely eliminated the complex network of short and tall grass biomes that existed on the plains for hundreds of thousands of years before European settlement. They were replaced with narrowly specialized versions of monocultural food crops like corn, wheat, milo, and sorghum that has followed human civilization through periods of growth and collapse for the last 10,000 years.

The Machine Age created monstrous beasts of burden that could manipulate lands at a rate never seen before. These combinations of factors led to the quickness and severity of the Dustbowl climate event. It was a well-documented portion of American history in the Photographs of Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Arthur Rothstein as well as John Steinbeck's seminal American realist novel The Grapes of Wrath, set to turn 80 years old next year. This climate event has been well cataloged and archived by the Ken Burns documentary produced in 2012, and is present in the American mythology. But what about that other Dust Bowl that was in the 1950s? Humanity had taken a technological mulligan from that catastrophe.

Wes Jackson, " To maintain the ever-normal granary, the agricultural human's pull historically has been toward the monoculture of annuals. Nature's pull is toward a polyculture of perennials." (Wes Jackson, New Roots for Agriculture 1980 pg 114.) (GREAT QUOTE)