Editor's note: Vernon "Dusty" Shull is not a real person. He died in 1971, which would make this interview difficult even without the additional complication that he never existed. But the Soil Conservation Service deployed thousands of field agents into the Southern Plains beginning in 1935, and the documentary record tells us a great deal about their daily work: farm contracts, agency reports, oral histories, contemporary journalism, and Gary Libecap's economic analysis of the small-farm externality problem that made voluntary conservation a losing proposition for the people who needed it most. Everything Shull describes here is documented. The techniques, the resistance, the pay structures, the dust. The voice is invented. The problem he couldn't solve is not.
The man we're calling Vernon "Dusty" Shull lost his own 320-acre wheat operation in the Texas Panhandle in the spring of 1934. Three consecutive crop failures. A mortgage holder who'd run out of patience. By August, he'd been hired by Hugh Bennett's Soil Erosion Service (soon to become the Soil Conservation Service) because he could talk to farmers without sounding like he'd learned everything from a book. He was assigned to the Oklahoma Panhandle and the southeastern corner of Colorado, the dead center of the Dust Bowl, where 850 million tons of topsoil blew away in 1935 alone.1
He was forty years old. His job was to walk onto other men's farms and tell them to change how they'd been doing everything.
You lost your own place a year before you started this work. Did farmers know that about you?
Dusty: Oh, I made sure they did. First thing out of my mouth. You pull up to a man's house in a government car and he's already got his back up before you've shut the door. So I'd say, had a place outside Dumas, lost it same as you're about to. That bought me maybe five minutes. Sometimes ten.
What happened in those five or ten minutes?
Dusty: I'd try to get him walking his own fields with me. Not talking about Washington, not talking about Hugh Bennett, not talking about policy. Just: look at this furrow. See how it runs straight downslope? Every time the wind picks up, that furrow's a channel. You're losing an inch of topsoil a season and you can't see it going because it leaves a little at a time and then one day it's all gone at once.
Contour plowing, running your furrows across the slope instead of down it, that's not some government invention. Thomas Jefferson was doing it at Monticello.2 But out here everybody got used to straight rows because they're faster, and when wheat was a dollar a bushel nobody cared about an inch of dirt.
And that worked? The walking-the-fields approach?
Dusty: Sometimes. Maybe a third of the time. The ones who'd say yes were usually the ones who'd already figured it out themselves and just needed someone to show them the specifics. Contour plowing, you need a slope between two and ten percent for it to really hold.3 Flatter than that, you're talking strip cropping, alternating your wheat with grass or alfalfa so the roots hold the soil between rows.4 Steeper and you need terracing on top of everything else.
Every field was different. That was the whole job, really. Knowing which combination fit which piece of ground.
What about the other two-thirds?
Dusty: Two kinds of no. There was the no that meant I can't afford to. And the no that meant you're wrong about my land.
Tell me about the second one first.
Dusty: Had a fellow in Cimarron County tell me, and I swear on my mother's grave this is what he said: "You just can't seriously hurt this land."5 This was 1935. April. You couldn't see fifty yards. His cattle were so far gone the government was buying them at fourteen, twenty dollars a head just to put them down.6 And he's telling me the land is fine.
I used to get angry about that. I don't anymore. He'd put everything into that ground. His whole life was a bet that the land would hold. Admitting it wouldn't was admitting he'd lost the bet, and admitting he'd lost the bet meant admitting his life had been wrong. You try that sometime. See how quick you come around.
And the ones who couldn't afford to?
Dusty: (long pause)
That was harder. Because they were right. We had five-year conservation contracts we could offer. Government would pay you to put in grassed waterways, do strip cropping under rotation, plant trees for windbreaks.7 Real money. But the contract meant taking land out of full production, and if your kids are hungry...
There was a farmer's wife up in Nebraska, I heard about this secondhand, she said her children would cry for something to eat and she couldn't give it to them.8 You're going to walk onto that place and tell them to plant alfalfa instead of wheat?
You did, though.
Dusty: I did. I'd show them the demonstration plots where contour farming was pulling five, ten percent better yields even in drought conditions.9 I'd talk about the Graham-Hoeme chisel plow, which was, honestly, a revelation. You could do stubble-mulch tillage, leave three-quarters of the stubble on the surface, and it held the soil like nothing else.10 One farmer told me later that plow saved the whole country from blowing away. I think he might've been right.
But there was a problem even with the farmers who said yes.
The neighbor problem.
Dusty: The neighbor problem. Yeah.
Say I've got a farmer who does everything right. Contour plowing, strip fallow, windbreaks along the west side. Beautiful work. And his neighbor to the southwest hasn't done a damn thing. Wind comes up, and it always comes from the southwest down here, and every grain of dust from that untouched quarter-section blows right across my farmer's conservation work.11 You can't contour-plow your way out of your neighbor's topsoil landing on your field.
So voluntary compliance was the problem.
Dusty: I wouldn't have said it that way at the time. I believed in what we were doing. I still do. But yeah. You needed everybody to move at once, and you couldn't make anybody move at all. The small operators especially. A man farming 160 acres, the wind benefit of his strip fallow mostly lands on his neighbor's property downwind. He's paying the cost and somebody else is getting the benefit.12 Why would he do that? Out of goodness? People are good, but they're not stupid.
Did you ever think the government should just mandate it?
Dusty: (laughs) You ever tried to mandate anything to an Oklahoma farmer in 1935? Bennett understood that. I understood that. You'd lose the whole program the day you made it compulsory. So we did it the hard way. One kitchen table at a time. And some tables you never got invited to.
What kept you going?
Dusty: I'll tell you a small thing. There was a stretch along a road near Kenton, Oklahoma. Flat, exposed, wind tore through there like nothing I'd seen. We got windbreaks planted along that road. Young trees, barely anything.
I drove past maybe two years later and they'd taken. They were holding. The dust still blew but it piled up against the trees instead of crossing the road.
It was a very small thing. But the land was doing what we asked it to. The land was willing. It was always the people that were the problem. No. That's not fair. It was the situation that was the problem. The people were just in it.
Vernon Shull's assignment ended in 1937, when the SCS shifted from emergency field deployment to the soil conservation district model: local boards, elected by landowners, that administered conservation programs county by county. The techniques he and thousands of other agents had introduced reduced soil loss across the Southern Plains by 65 percent by 1938, even though the drought hadn't broken.13 When another severe drought hit the Plains in the 1950s, some farmers recognized the pattern early enough to act before the dust started again.14 Others didn't.
The land, as Shull might have noted, was still willing. The design of the program, who it reached, who it couldn't, and whose neighbor it depended on, was still the question.
Footnotes
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Libecap, Gary D. "Small Farms, Externalities, and The Dust Bowl of the 1930s." Yale Law School / NBER Working Paper 10055. https://law.yale.edu/sites/default/files/documents/pdf/libecap.pdf ↩
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EBSCO Research Starters. "Soil Conservation Service Is Established." https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/soil-conservation-service-established ↩
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Encyclopedia.com. "Contour Plowing." https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/contour-plowing ↩
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Wessels Living History Farm. "Contour Plowing." https://livinghistoryfarm.org/farming-in-the-1930s/crops/contour-plowing/ ↩
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National History Day Paper. "The Soil Conservation Service: Debate and Diplomacy in the Dust Bowl." https://nhd.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Paper-Project-Example-2-Soil-Conservation-Service.pdf ↩
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PBS American Experience. "Timeline: The Dust Bowl." https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/dust-bowl-surviving-dust-bowl/ ↩
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Encyclopedia.com. "Soil Conservation Service (SCS)." https://www.encyclopedia.com/economics/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/soil-conservation-service-scs ↩
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Wessels Living History Farm. (Harvey Pickrel oral history) https://livinghistoryfarm.org/farming-in-the-1930s/crops/contour-plowing/ ↩
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Wikipedia. "Contour plowing." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contour_plowing ↩
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Farm Progress. "Dust Bowl memories forever linger for landowner." https://www.farmprogress.com/management/dust-bowl-memories-forever-linger-for-landowner ↩
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Libecap, Yale/NBER. https://law.yale.edu/sites/default/files/documents/pdf/libecap.pdf ↩
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Ibid. ↩
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Wikipedia. "Contour plowing." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contour_plowing ↩
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Smith, Rebecca. "Saving the Dust Bowl: 'Big Hugh' Bennett's Triumph over Tragedy." Washington History Project. https://www.washingtonhistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/dust-bowl-paper.pdf ↩