Black and white photos and films from the 1930s show drifts of dirt overwhelming fences, tractors and even farm houses throughout the Great Plains.
Nearly anyone with family who lived through it has heard the stories.
Pamela Riney-Kehrberg’s grandparents lived in southwest Kansas and recalled how nothing escaped the dust.
“One of the things my grandmother told me was that she would go out and put the clothes on the line every morning before the sun came up so that hopefully, the clothes would have a chance to dry before dawn came and the winds came up and everything — just all her work got destroyed,” Riney-Kehrberg said.
At the height of the fierce dust storms in the mid-1930s, more than 1.2 billion tons of soil blew away.
THIS SPRING marks the 90th anniversary of the federal agency that was born out of that ecological disaster, what’s now known as the Natural Resources Conservation Service. Yet after nine decades, the NRCS is facing an uncertain future.
The agency has lost as much as 20% of its workforce, with estimated job losses reportedly surpassing 2,400 employees, since President Trump took office. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees NRCS, is also considering plans to consolidate NRCS county offices and its programs with other agencies.
Meanwhile, Trump’s budget recommendations for the next fiscal year include trimming $754 million from NRCS private lands conservation operations and another $16 million from watershed operations.
Cuts come to the agency
According to the most recent data from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, there were 11,623 employees at NRCS in September of last year. Following this year’s layoffs, deferred buyouts and retirements, that number now hovers closer to 9,200, according to several media reports. A USDA spokesperson would not confirm the exact employee losses, saying the deferred resignation program was recently closed and officials are finalizing numbers.
“We have a solemn responsibility to be good stewards of Americans’ hard-earned taxpayer dollars and to ensure that every dollar is being spent as effectively as possible to serve the people,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
Yet Jamey Wood — who spent much of his career at NRCS — worries not much will be gained by cutting employees.
“They may become more efficient in some little pockets, because they’re going to have to focus on the most critical things and get some critical things done,” he said. “But the morale is just in the dumps, you know, from the uncertainty.”
A LONG-TIME NRCS district conservationist in Oklahoma, then the state’s acting conservationist, Wood even worked for the agency on a contract basis after his retirement. That ended earlier this year when he was laid off. Wood knows there were already waiting lists at many NRCS offices.
“Producers are requesting conservation plans so they can do better conservation work, so they can participate in conservation programs, so they can get financial assistance to help them do conservation,” he said. “And now, and this is my estimate, you’re going to lose basically a generation of conservation planners.”
Kalee Olson, policy manager at the Center of Rural Affairs in Lyons, Nebraska, said the strength of NRCS has been its local ties with farmers and ranchers.
With fewer employees and potentially longer wait times, she wonders whether farmers will choose to let some projects go.
“Let’s just say we have a producer who’s interested in trying cover crops for the first time,” Olson said. “If there’s a longer wait list, so to speak, of getting support from NRCS, that producer might just opt to forego cover crops for that given year.”
Olson said NRCS workers are resilient, and she expects they’ll make every effort to help farmers and ranchers.
“I do think NRCS has really proved themselves to be nimble, and they really do work hard for producers across the state,” she said. “So I don’t doubt that they’re up for the challenge, but there’s just only so many things that any of us can achieve in a day.”
