Carving Out a New Dust Bowl

Sodbusting is changing the face of Great Plains farming

Earlier this month 500-h.p. diesel tractors, brand-named Big Bud 525 and Steiger Panther, pushed 60-ft.-wide chisel plows into the gentle prairie around the hamlet of Winnett, Mont., quickly transforming what once was Wayne Bratten's 28,000-acre ranch into a raw wound of overturned earth. Eastern Colorado Wheat Farmer Emmett Linnebur became a part owner of the Crow Rock Ranch near Miles City, Mont., and used a fleet of ten supertractors to tear into 50,000 of its acres for wheat planting. In recent years, tractors have bulldozed some 6.4 million acres of marginal grasslands in Montana and Colorado and an estimated 27 million acres scattered across the rest of the U.S.

While this frenzy of rangeland transformation has made money for some, for others it has raised the specter of an environmental calamity. Explains Steve Meyer, executive vice president of the Montana association of conservation districts: "When you remove the vegetation on rangelands, you're depleting a resource. If steps aren't taken, we face the possibility of another Dust Bowl."

Critics of sodbusting, as the increasingly common practice of slicing grazing lands into wheat farms is called, say that most of the marginal land of the Great Plains cannot support commercial exploitation. With less than 20 inches of precipitation a year, the region is semiarid. These marginal soils, where they are not too rocky or saline, are often too sandy for farming or are packed with calcium and lime. When overturned by plow blades, valuable topsoil only a few inches thick becomes vulnerable to wind and rain erosion; once gone, it takes decades to replace. The sodbusters are either big operators who buy land and plow on a major scale, or small ranchers who break their own land for a quick cash fix. "I want to make a buck," concedes John Greytak, 53, a former Datsun dealer and present grain operator who since 1974 has broken 250,000 acres of grazing land, mostly in Montana, and stores some 30% of his wheat production in giant bins (for which the Government pays him 26.5¢ per bu. each year). Robert W. Thomas has put more than 20,000 acres of northern Colorado rangeland under the plow since 1979 and claims to have made at least $1 million on the recent sale of a 9,480-acre tract of prairie land that he planted in wheat.

Sodbusters buy rangeland at prices that are relatively low because of today's depressed livestock industry, plow and plant the acreage in wheat, then sell the cultivated land, sometimes to buyers unfamiliar with the region and the fragility of the range's topsoil. Since the mid-1970s, planted prairie tracts have shot up in value because of speculation in cropland as an inflation hedge and federal farm programs such as PIK (payment in kind).