The Dust Bowl taught a hard lesson on environmental management. A new method, contour strip cropping, effectively protects the soil from erosion and helps keep sediment and farm chemicals from polluting the water.

In this farm in Red Rock Lake, Iowa, different crops are alternated in strips, some planted in spring, others in fall. This prevents all the soil from being tilled at one time, allowing the untilled strips of land to recover and trap soil, nutrients and pesticides from the tilled areas. Exhaustion of soil nutrients by repetitive plantings and poor crop rotation contributed to the Dust Bowl. (NRCS)