Windbreak

Between 1935 and 1942, workers planted more than two hundred and twenty million trees in a network of windbreaks running from North Dakota to Texas, a federal project designed specifically to interrupt the wind before it could strengthen into a dust storm.

The project had an official name that stuck for the rest of the century: the Shelter Belt.

The scientist most responsible for convincing Washington the trees could work was Raphael Zon, a forestry researcher who'd emigrated from Russia and studied the windbreak systems used on the same steppe country that had sent turkey red wheat and tumbleweed seed to the southern plains a generation earlier.

Zon had spent his career arguing that trees, planted correctly and in enough density, could blunt a prairie wind the way they blunted one on the other side of the world.

Many farmers doubted trees could survive in soil that had barely sustained wheat, and some resisted giving up cultivable acres for rows of skeletal saplings unlikely to outlast their first hard winter.

The government paid a dollar an acre to farmers willing to try anyway.

The Shelter Belt itself hasn't survived nearly as well as the story usually gets told.

In Nebraska, where the project was headquartered, fifty-seven percent of the original plantings have been cut back or lost altogether, cleared away by farmers trying to squeeze a few more rows of crops out of land that once had to make room for a windbreak.