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.