On March 18, 1935, a man named George R. Phillips pushed an Austrian pine into the dirt on the H.E. Curtis farm near Willow, Oklahoma, in Greer County. Phillips was the state's first state forester, which tells you something about how recently Oklahoma had gotten around to the concept of forests. The pine was the first tree in the first shelterbelt of what Franklin Roosevelt, the previous July, had decided would be a wall of timber running from Canada to Texas. A hundred miles wide. To stop the soil from blowing away.
By the time the war killed the program in 1942, CCC and WPA crews had put 220 million trees into the ground on 30,000 farms across six states. Red cedar, green ash, species chosen by Forest Service researchers working out of Lincoln, Nebraska. Survivability ran about 70 percent, which anyone who has tried to keep a tree alive on the high plains will recognize as miraculous. Nebraska alone got more than 4,000 miles of windbreaks across nearly 7,000 farms.
By the 1950s the shelterbelts had done what they were supposed to do. Rows of trees forty feet tall breaking the wind across wheat country, holding topsoil, sheltering cattle, making crops grow better in the lee. The Dust Bowl retreated into cautionary history. The trees became furniture. As ordinary as fence posts, and about as noticed.
Then the Soviets had a bad harvest.
In 1972 the Soviet Union bought 30 million tons of American grain in a single purchase. Wheat prices doubled. Corn tripled. Earl Butz, Nixon's Secretary of Agriculture, abolished the programs that paid corn farmers to leave land fallow and told them to plant "fencerow to fencerow." Get big or get out. Every acre was suddenly worth real money, and those shelterbelts were sitting on acres.
What happened next was not complicated. A farmer looks at a mature shelterbelt occupying several acres of land that corn futures say should be in production. As one NRCS official told NPR in 2013:
"They look at that and say, 'There's several acres out here because of the windbreak, and I need to put those into production,' so they may do away with the windbreak."
The chainsaw was only part of it. The center-pivot irrigation system, which spread across the plains in the 1960s and '70s, draws quarter-mile circles across a field. Trees do not bend to accommodate a pivot arm. In Kansas, where researchers tracked the connection county by county, center-pivot adoption and shelterbelt destruction moved together across the same ground. A farmer who wanted to irrigate had to choose between the trees and the machine. The machine that made the plains productive again was physically incompatible with the trees that had saved them.
A 1975 GAO report surveying sixteen counties in Kansas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma found average removal rates of 9 percent, with the worst losses in Oklahoma. That figure only ran through 1974. The boom was just warming up. No verified national total for the peak removal years exists in the public record. We counted the trees going in. We did not count them coming out.
What does survive is a 2010 mapping project by the USDA's National Agroforestry Center, which digitized Nebraska's original plantings and compared them to aerial photography. Statewide, about 79 percent of sites had at least partial windbreaks remaining. In Antelope County, in the northeast, the picture sharpened: 38 percent intact, 40 percent partial, 22 percent gone entirely. The trees Phillips planted in Greer County are now ninety-one years old. Many shelterbelts across Kansas are, as the state forester acknowledged, old and declining, invaded by short-lived species, no longer doing what they were planted to do.
Now the pitch is carbon. The vocabulary has changed from stopping dust to sequestering greenhouse gases, but the arithmetic is familiar. In April 2025, the current administration canceled the $3.1 billion Climate-Smart Commodities program, which had specifically funded agroforestry and windbreak projects across 141 planned initiatives. CRP's continuous signup for windbreaks and buffers remains open as of early 2026, for now.
So we are asking farmers to plant trees on productive land again. A tree takes decades to mature. A farm bill lasts five years. An executive order lasts until the next president. Corn futures pay this afternoon. Roosevelt's shelterbelts survived the worst ecological disaster in American history. They could not survive the price of grain.