A WEEK ago I was on the Gautrain, speeding through that section around Midrand where everything opens up and you can, it seems, see right across to the Witwatersrandridge in the west.
Except you couldn’t. The sky was a muddy colour, far, far worse than any dry-season sky I have seen in my 25-plus years in Joburg. The words ‘Dust Bowl’ popped into my head, and I realised I really didn’t know much about it and what caused it.
So I found me a book called Dust Bowl: the Southern Plains in the 1930s, by environmental historian and professor Donald Worster, filled with resonances for any thoughtful South African.
The Dust Bowl was a human creation. For millennia, the Great Plains had been held together by a range of prairie grasses, some as low as groundcovers, some hip- or shoulder-high. The flat region covering parts of Kansas, Oklahoma, West Texas, Colorado and New Mexico supported abundant wildlife, including bison, and humans (the Plains Indians, as these Native Americans were once called – until they were forced off the land).
The railroads opened up the area for settlement, and homesteaders moved in, denuding the land of the native grasses (a task made easier by the advent of tractor ploughs and later combine harvesters) and replacing them with annual grain crops in bare soil.
Strip the natural vegetation whose roots and mycorrhizal network hold the soil in place and monocrop with annuals: just what we’ve done on vast swathes of South Africa.
And then… drought: some regions had as many as eight drought years in the 1930s. The arid, unanchored soil became dust swept up into churning winds that created vicious, deadly dust storms, like Black Sunday in April 1935:
“ ‘As [the storm] approached, its face was a dark, rolling bank,’ Gunn recalled in a 1984 interview. […] ‘… the sunlight was completely shut out. I literally touched my nose with my hand and could not see my hand.’” (nDepth, http://ndepth.newsok.com/dustbowl)
I saw pale shadows of these storms in the Free State in January this year. I see mini-storms of this ilk daily, whipping up off mine dumps and stripped land close to where I live, as the seasons turn and the Highveld waits for rain. (More this year than last year, please! But what happens if the rains are poor?)
“…land degradation reduces soil fertility leading to lower yields, and increases in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In Africa, the impacts are substantial: 65% of arable land, 30% of grazing land and 20% of forests are already damaged.” (No Ordinary Matter: Conserving, Restoring and Enhancing Africa’s Soils, December 2014) Some 40% of our cropland is degraded (and as I recently noted, just 13% of South Africa’s land is arable).
What is South Africa actively doing to prevent further loss of the tiny skin of precious topsoil that supports plant life and agriculture? Because current conditions are a foretaste of what’s coming: climate models indicate parts of southern Africa could become drier, and that we’ll get rain more often in the form of big, flooding storms which can strip topsoil as effectively as the Dust Bowl winds.
We should be taking steps now to conserve what we have, to reverse erosion and keep soil in place – as the government of China set out to do on the Loess Plateau.
The Loess or Huangtu Plateau is an area the size of France along the Yellow River – it’s yellow, thanks to the load of loess silt the river carries. This is the heartland of ancient Han, Qin and Tang civilisations, farmed for at least 9 500 years, the soil tilled and grazed without an understanding of the impact – erosion, desertification and desperate poverty. It’s been described as total ecological destruction.
In the 1990s, the World Bank and Chinese government started a project to rehabilitate the region – see John D Liu’s documentary, The Lessons of the Loess Plateau (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjLV_aVRUmQ). It took planning, policy initiatives (for example, banning planting on steep slopes), engineering (to silt up gullies and make them fertile fields, and to terrace slopes for planting with perennials like apple trees) and a thoughtful approach to social factors.
The result is pretty wonderful, and suggests that rehabilitation of large areas is possible: “While we have been filming we have watched as once denuded hillsides came alive with grasses, bushes and trees. Birds and insects are returning to the area. The humidity is changing as the soil absorbs moisture and the plants exchange gases in respiration. The entire dynamic of the plateau has changed.”
We need this sort of long-range thinking, planning, and (critically) doing here in South Africa to prepare for the years ahead. The quality and conservation of our soil should be part of the national conversation, more than rhino poaching (there’ll be no rhinos without healthy soil). Is conventional monoculture farming right for us – or should we be considering options like no-till, silvo-agriculture and silvo-pastoral (combining trees with crops and pasture), conservation agriculture?
We as both consumers and voters should understand the issues and the terminology. We should demand more detailed, thoughtfuland informed policies from our political party of choice (see some suggestions in this report http://www.sagreenfund.org.za/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Sustainable-Farming-in-SA-A-Field-Report.pdf ). And we should insist on products that create a demand for agricultural methods aimed at saving our soil and ensuring food security for us and our children.
*Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own. Follow her on Twitter.
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