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After Setting Roots 90 Years Ago, NRCS Continues to Grow Its Conservation Legacy

By Shelby Callaway

It is said that you can't really know where you're going until you know where you have been. Since April 27, 2025, marks the 90th anniversary of the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), I’d like to take you back to the official beginning. 

 In 1935, the United States was in the middle of a man-made natural disaster now remembered as the Dust Bowl. High crop prices and a series of wet years in the 1920s led farmers to plow up native grasslands and plant crops on the usually arid Great Plains. By the 1930s, an unrelenting drought accompanied by merciless winds hit the area, particularly in the southern plains. As crops withered, the land, now bare of both crops and native vegetation to hold the soil, simply blew away. Huge dust clouds blew across the Great Plains, dumping midwestern soil on eastern cities and even on ships far out into the Atlantic Ocean.  An ongoing series of severe dust storms in the early 30s destroyed farms, killed people and livestock, and contributed to the economic ruin and displacement of thousands of people  who were forced to abandon their homes and farms.

In the midst of these storms, Hugh Hammond Bennett, the “father of soil conservation” led the US government’s nationwide effort to halt the “national menace” of unchecked erosion.  Bennett campaigned for a coordinated attack against soil erosion long before the Dust Bowl era, having seen the threat posed by water erosion early in his career as a soil surveyor for the USDA's Bureau of Soils. He observed firsthand how unchecked sheet and rill erosion slowly degraded fields and pastures, reducing the land’s ability to sustain agricultural productivity and support the rural communities who depended on it for their lives and livelihoods. Moreover, he recognized soil as a strategic natural resource and that its wastage on private lands harmed not just farmers but the wider public and the nation as a whole. As the nation’s foremost advocate for a country-wide plan of research and action to attack the "national menace" of excessive soil erosion, he led the temporary Soil Erosion Service from 1933-1935. 

On March 21, 1935, with the SES’s temporary funds set to expire soon, Bennett testified before Congress about the need for a permanent, national, interdisciplinary approach to combating excessive erosion. The same day, a major dust storm from the Midwest hit Washington, D.C., shrouding the capitol in a "clay colored veil."  The arrival of this well-timed dust storm drove home the wisdom of Bennett's urging, and Congress moved quickly to pass legislation for a permanent conservation agency. Just over a month later, on April 27, the President signed the Soil Conservation Act (PL 74-46) . The act created the Soil Conservation Service (SCS) at the United States Department of Agriculture and Hugh Hammond Bennett became its first Chief.

Since its creation as a permanent agency in 1935, the agency has developed wide-ranging technical solutions to help farmers and ranchers dramatically reduce soil erosion and to be good stewards of all our shared natural resources. Shortly after its founding, the agency expanded its scope beyond soil to include the conservation of water, wildlife, and a host of other natural resource concerns as the country’s lead voluntary conservation agency for private lands. To reflect this expansion, the agency was renamed the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) in 1994.

Today and into the future, we at NRCS are continuing Hugh Hammond Bennett’s legacy – helping people help the land – by implementing conservation practices to conserve air, water, soil, and habitat. In fact, many of the conservation activities the agency studied and refined in the days of Bennett such as terracing, cover and strip cropping, contour planting, grassed waterways and crop rotation, are practices that we still use today. 

By the way, if you’re interested in learning more about our conservation practices and how they work today, check out the Conservation at Work video series. These videos shine a spotlight on farmers, ranchers, and forestland owners from across the United States who tell us their own conservation stories, and how practices are helping them protect and improve resources and save time and money.  While many things have changed in the past 90 years, Bennett’s vision of a scientifically and technically rigorous, interdisciplinary agency that works with local partners to tailor conservation solutions to the land for the benefit of all Americans remains at the heart of this agency’s mission.

If you're interested in learning more about Hugh Hammond Bennett, watch the NRCS documentary: Hugh Hammond Bennett: The Story of America’s Private Lands Conservation Movement.

Source : usda.gov

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