Wednesday, December 4, 2013

Great Plains Conservation

We are watching Michael Forsberg on NET1 this evening  where Great Plains is being shown along with Forsberg being interviewed. We have seen it before but it is a great educational production of man's abuse of the land and efforts to bring back wildlife and productivity of the region. Michael and his family live in Lincoln. His wife is from Utica, and he presented a program here is Seward last spring that we thoroughly enjoyed. The picture shown here is of Michael in the Kansas Flint Hills where he is about to film fish in a spring fed stream. He actually joins the fish by being submerged with his camera. 
Here he shows an extreme example of soil erosion that occurred during the Dust Bowl days of the '30's. While we in Seward County, Nebraska were never faced with the dust storms that took place at that time, we did have serious wind and water erosion. On one occasion, I remember waking up to a red covering of dust that had blown in overnight from Oklahoma. Our most damaging soil erosion occurred because of rainfall and the agricultural cultural practices. In my early days with the Soil Conservation Service, conservation farming on the contour with terrace systems was very revolutionary. It was a matter of Soil Stewardship and tied to the Scriptures of "The Earth is the Lord's and the Fullness Thereof." We almost felt like "Missionaries" in those early days .

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