In November, I had a chance to imagine myself in the shoes of my forefathers as I witnessed the worst man-made ecological disaster in American history.

The Dust Bowl is a two episode film that aired Nov. 18 and 19 on PBS. It chronicles the lives of many farm families that moved to the Great Plains with high hopes and dreams of prosperity.

In the 1920s the combination of high grain prices, free land and ideal weather for growing wheat seemed to be an irresistible promise of easy money. During the 1920s, millions of acres of grasslands across the Plains were converted into wheat fields at an unprecedented rate. This was a classic tale of Americans pushing too hard and nature pushing back.

The dirty 30s were a result of drought, lack of crop diversity, highly erodible soil, early farming practices and millions of acres of bare land. This decade-long natural disaster of Biblical proportion reduced the lucky families to poverty while many died of dust pneumonia, suffocation and suicide. One dust storm alone ruined a quarter of the wheat in Oklahoma, half of the wheat in Kansas and all of the wheat in Nebraska.

Now, 2011 and 2012 is rivaling some of the driest two years on record for south-central Kansas, yet we have still been able to produce good wheat crops and have very little erosion in comparison to the Dust Bowl.

Since the early 1930s, soil conservation policy has mainly focused on preventing soil erosion. Our conservation experts would now like to focus their policies on increasing soil organic matter (SOM) and more broadly improving soil health. Organic matter serves as a reservoir of nutrients and water in the soil. Increasing SOM allows for less fertilizer, less compaction, less irrigation and higher yields. Native grass prairies that were plowed up for the purpose of farming have lost over half of the SOM because tillage increases the decomposition of SOM. The use of no-till has helped to stabilize SOM, but experts want to build it back to their original state.

Research shows that the fastest way to increase SOM on farms is to eliminate tillage and use cover crops, also known as green manure. Some examples of cover crops could be a sorghum-sudan crop planted between two wheat crops or a mix of oats, barley, peas, triticale, radish and turnips planted after corn. This cover crop is grown between cash crops and is killed to provide a mulch layer. This mulch layer reduces evaporation and feeds the microorganisms in the soil. Increasing SOM is a slow process and progress is measured over decades.

The farmers in the ’30s were resilient and persisted through some unimaginable hardships. They had to improve their techniques to survive. The farmers of the 21st century have to be just as innovative to survive a time of skyrocketing land, fertilizer, seed and equipment prices. In the end, agriculture producers today are very similar to the producers of the 1930s; we want future generations to have the opportunity to farm, we want to stay profitable and we want to leave the land better than we found it.

Cody Barilla is the Kansas State University Research and Extension Agriculture Agent for Reno County.