A Tailgate Interview With the Man Bulldozing His Father's Windbreak

The cottonwoods along the creek have gone yellow, but on this October afternoon in 1975 the trees everyone in this corner of central Nebraska is talking about are the ones lying on their sides. Merle Hackberry has spent the week on a rented bulldozer, pushing over a mile of windbreak his father planted in the spring of 1936. It was twelve rows of red cedar, green ash, elm and a few hackberries. (Merle insists the hackberries are no relation.)

A word about Merle before he climbs down. He does not exist, and he has made his peace with this more gracefully than most of us manage with anything. He is assembled from the anonymous farmers whose reasons fill a June 1975 report by the General Accounting Office, which gives him a better paper trail than plenty of people who do exist. His reasons are theirs. Anything he says about his father comes from us, and we have kept it to a minimum. We arrived from fifty-one years downstream carrying a stack of footnotes. They impressed him somewhat less than we had hoped.

The trees came out of the Dust Bowl. Franklin Roosevelt's executive order of July 11, 1934, launched the federal shelterbelt project.¹ By 1942 the government had put more than 200 million seedlings into the ground on about 30,000 farms.² Most of the plantings were belts a mile long and ten to sixteen rows wide.³ Farmers were paid to plant the trees and paid to keep them cultivated.⁴

Forty years on, Congress's auditors at the GAO went back to count what was left. The report's title tells you how the count went: Action Needed to Discourage Removal of Trees That Shelter Cropland in the Great Plains.² The farmers they interviewed gave a fairly consistent set of reasons. They needed room for center-pivot irrigation. Their machinery had outgrown the old field layouts. They wanted more cropland. Some of the trees were old and failing. One Oklahoma farmer reportedly said that clearing a mile-long belt added about sixteen acres to production.²

Merle is sitting on the tailgate of his Ford, working a splinter out of his thumb with a pocketknife. Cedar smoke drifts across the stubble behind him.

You've been at this since Monday. What does a mile of windbreak look like once it's down?

Merle: Bigger. Standing up, you quit seeing it after a while. It's just the edge of the world. Lying down, it's... see that pile? That's maybe three hundred yards' worth. Cedar burns like it's mad at you. The ash I'll cut for the stove. The elm was half dead already. It about fell over when it heard the engine.

My wife says the place looks naked. I told her it looks like a field. She hasn't said a word about it since, which is how I know I lost.

So why now?

Merle: The pivot.

You ever seen one work? There's a well in the middle and a quarter mile of pipe up on wheeled towers, and the whole rig walks around in a circle like the hand on a clock, watering as it goes. Prettiest machine I ever bought. Also the dumbest, because it can't go around anything. It only knows the one shape. Dad's trees run a mile straight east and west, right through where the arm needs to go. In 1936 that's where the wind came across, and nobody had heard of a pivot.

The rest of the equipment's grown too. Dad farmed with a team and a two-row lister. I've got a twelve-row planter now, and every time I come up on those trees I'm turning it around like a church.

So I had three choices. Put in a little circle on one side of the belt and dryland the rest. Leave the trees and farm the way Dad did, which means you plant and pray, and some years the praying does most of the work. Or take them out.

Then you get the pencil out. A mile is fifty-two eighty. Twelve rows of trees runs about ninety feet across, but the crop's no good for a ways on either side, because the roots are out there drinking same as the corn. Call it a hundred and thirty feet you can't really farm. Multiply that out, divide by forty-three-five-sixty, and you get about sixteen acres. Sixteen acres I pay taxes on, and all it grows is pheasants.

Now, I'm not stupid. I was twelve in '36. I remember what the air looked like. But it's 1975 out here. What I'm really farming is a note at the bank on a well and a machine, and that machine only pays the note if it can go all the way around.

A Forest Service survey in 1946 found the belts doing better than anyone expected. It also warned that everything depended on cultivation.⁵ What happened to that part?

Merle: Life happened to it. The government paid Dad to cultivate them, and he did, as long as the check kept coming. Then there was the war. Then I came home, and then there was wheat to cut. Nobody cultivates a tree when there's wheat to cut.

Those elms have been dying since Eisenhower. Every storm, branches come down in the crop, and I'm out there with a chainsaw before I can get the combine through.

And twelve rows? The extension fella told me himself they planted them a good deal wider than they ever needed to be.⁶ So I'm taking out an old, sick belt that's too wide and sits right where the pivot has to go. Put it that way and it sounds less like greed, doesn't it?

The government that paid your father to plant those trees has now sent auditors to ask why you're pulling them out.

Merle: I saw the title in the paper. "Action Needed to Discourage Removal." Son, I'm about as discouraged as a man gets.

(He laughs, then stops laughing.)

Meanwhile the other half of Washington, Butz and them over at Agriculture, has spent the last four years telling us get big or get out.⁷ You can't farm big with a hedge in the middle of the field. I'm not trying to be ornery. I just think somebody over there ought to read the other fella's mail.

(For readers keeping score: the GAO reports to Congress. Earl Butz, agriculture secretary under Nixon and now Ford, reports to the White House. Merle's mail problem is real.)

Researchers will eventually put the yield boost on sheltered fields at 12 to 15 percent, on average.³ A Forest Service man will write in 1978 that some years, windbreaks make the difference between planting a crop and not planting one at all.⁸

Merle: You keep doing that. Telling me what fellas are going to write.

(He folds the knife.)

On average. Average is a farm nobody owns.

No, I'll be fair about it. I believe him. A dry year with a south wind for a week straight, those trees earned their keep, and I'd tell anybody that. But the pivot does part of the same job. It keeps the plants from drying out. I know it doesn't hold the dirt down. So I'm trading one kind of protection for another kind.

Some conservationists told the auditors that other practices, like leaving crop residue on the field, could substitute for windbreaks. The Agriculture Department said that depends on moisture and management.²

Merle: "Depends on moisture and management." Put that on my headstone. Everything does.

Does it bother you, taking out what he put in?

Merle: Some.

Say more?

Merle: (A long pause. He takes off his cap and looks into it, as if he'd left notes in there.)

He didn't talk about the trees much. He'd have taken them out too. That's what I keep telling myself, anyway. He planted them because the land needed it and somebody was paying him, and those are about the same reasons I'm pulling them.

I don't know. Ask me in ten years.

Here's something from the future you might not like. Economists in 2021 found that places with belts were slower to adopt sprinkler irrigation, because the trees were in the way, and it took farmers decades to adjust.⁹

Merle: So Dad's trees cost me the pivot for, what, ten years?

Huh.

That's backwards from how everybody tells it.

So what's the pivot going to be in the way of, for my boy? You're not going to tell me, are you.

Would it help if I did?

Merle: No. I'd still have the note.

Is anything staying?

Merle: The ones around the house. Dad put cedars north and west of the yard that same spring. Those stay. They're not in the pivot's way. The only thing they're in the way of is the wind, and they can keep that job as long as they want it.

Three years after this conversation, a research forester at the Forest Service's Shelterbelt Laboratory in Bottineau, North Dakota, tallied why belts like Merle's were coming down. His list was poor design and location, overmaturity and decadence, and land wanted for other uses.¹⁰ Nowhere on it is a farmer who stopped believing in the wind. The same forester noted that farmstead windbreaks, like the cedars around Merle's yard, could still do real work.¹⁰ In 2010, federal grants became available to maintain and restore shelterbelts in Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas.

Run the chain back and it's hard to find a fool anywhere in it. Roosevelt was answering the dust. Merle's father was answering the order and the check. Merle is answering a well, a machine and a note at the bank. The auditors are answering an inventory that came up short. Each of them made sense of the problem in front of them, and each answer became the ground the next person had to farm.

What protects you that someone else built? And what does it cost you to keep it standing?

Footnotes

1. National Archives Foundation, DocsTeach, "Plains Shelterbelt Project." https://docsteach.org/document/plains-shelterbelt-project/ ↩

2. U.S. General Accounting Office, "Action Needed to Discourage Removal of Trees That Shelter Cropland in the Great Plains," RED-75-375, June 1975. https://www.gao.gov/assets/red-75-375.pdf ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

3. James Brandle, "Shelterbelts," Encyclopedia of the Great Plains, University of Nebraska–Lincoln. https://plainshumanities.unl.edu/encyclopedia/doc/egp.pe.055.html ↩ ↩²

4. "Great Plains Shelterbelt," Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Plains_Shelterbelt ↩

5. Munns and Stoeckeler, "How Are the Great Plains Shelterbelts?" Journal of Forestry 44(4), 1946. https://academic.oup.com/jof/article/44/4/237/4707502 ↩

6. Nebraska Public Media, "FDR's Great Wall of Trees." https://nebraskapublicmedia.org/en/news/news-articles/fdrs-great-wall-of-trees-the-prairie-states-forestry-project/ ↩

7. Daily Yonder, "FDR's Big Break," July 10, 2015. https://dailyyonder.com/fdrs-big-break-shelterbelt/2015/07/10/ ↩

8. Van Deusen, "Shelterbelts on the Great Plains: What's Happening?" Journal of Forestry 76(3), 1978. https://academic.oup.com/jof/article-pdf/76/3/160/63780888/jof_76_3_160.pdf ↩

9. Land Economics 97(2), May 2021. https://le.uwpress.org/content/wple/97/2/321.full.pdf ↩

10. Van Deusen, Journal of Forestry 76(3), 1978, abstract. https://academic.oup.com/jof/article/76/3/160/4645494 ↩ ↩²