Global weirding and the scrambling of terroir | Grist

While it is not very likely that many American food producers will adopt terms such as global weirding and climatic destabilization into their daily vocabulary, more and more farmers and ranchers I speak with are groping for ways to deal with all the uncertainty they face for their crops and livestock.

[Back before the Hummer, remember how fabulous the weather always was?]: The Dust Bowl of the 1930s

The most visible evidence of how dry the 1930s became was the dust storm. Tons of topsoil were blown off barren fields and carried in storm clouds for hundreds of miles. Technically, the driest region of the Plains – southeastern Colorado, southwest Kansas and the panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas – became known as the Dust Bowl, and many dust storms started there. But the entire region, and eventually the entire country, was affected.

The Dust Bowl got its name after Black Sunday, April 14, 1935. More and more dust storms had been blowing up in the years leading up to that day. In 1932, 14 dust storms were recorded on the Plains. In 1933, there were 38 storms. By 1934, it was estimated that 100 million acres of farmland had lost all or most of the topsoil to the winds. By April 1935, there had been weeks of dust storms, but the cloud that appeared on the horizon that Sunday was the worst. Winds were clocked at 60 mph. Then it hit.