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Book Review
| On The Great Plains: Agriculture and Environment. By Geoff Cunfer. Forward by Dan L. Flores. College Station: Texas A & M Press, 2005. xii+292 pp. Eight photographs, 144 maps, 49 tables, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. $55.00 cloth; $28.00 paper.
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| For Geoff Cunfer, land use is the definitive missing link for understanding the Great Plains. While he enhances his story with nineteenth- and early twentieth-century case studies from South Dakota, Montana, Kansas, New Mexico, and Texas, his primary contribution is text and maps using countywide agricultural census data between 1880 and 2000 encompassing all the Plains states. |
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Cunfer finds evidence that contradicts gloom-and-doom views. He identifies three historic periods on the Plains: (1) a period of about fifty years, beginning in the 1870s, when farmers learned which land could be plowed for crops and which was suitable only for cattle grazing; (2) between 1920 and 2000, nearly a century of remarkable agricultural sustainability; and (3) technological innovations, like tractors and irrigation, fed this sustainability in hard times. He adds, "the 265 million acres of unplowed land in the Great Plains represents an enormous stockpile of relatively undisturbed native land cover" (p. 36). This compares to 120 million acres where long-term sustainable farming took hold through the twentieth century. |
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Cunfer breaks down his analysis into chapters on plowing for crops, grazing by cattle, crop diversity, the implications of mechanization, the role of droughts, notably the Dust Bowl, the rise of irrigation from the Ogallala Aquifer, and finally the impact of natural and artificial fertilizers. |
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