Shelterbelts
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During the Great Depression of the 1930s, a massive drought turned the Great Plains into a Dust Bowl by drying out the soil and blowing it away. During the "Dirty Thirties" a national shelterbelt project planted 220 million trees that helped stop the racing winds that dried and blew away the prairie soil. As Correspondent Curt Nickisch reports from South Dakota, shelterbelts are a standard for farmsteads across the Great Plains today.

It's snowing and blowing as it often does on the windswept winter prairie, but pull into the driveway of Russel Haicus' home in southeastern South Dakota overlooking the Missouri river and the wind stops. That wasn't the case when Haicus started raising cattle here in the mid-1950's.

RH: I used to be feeding the cattle myself and you'd get out there and some days you couldn't hardly make the cattle come out to eat. The wind was bone-chilling.

One of the first things that Haicus put on his new ranch was a shelterbelt, a wall of vegetation around his house and barn. It had eight rows of different species of trees and shrubs.

RH: The foliage and the branches are at different heights. So, you use shrubs to stop the stuff on the ground and cut the wind off in stages up depending on which species of tree you have out there.

Early pioneers on the Great Plains planted mainly cottonwood or elm trees to protect their homesteads, but those fast-growing deciduous trees were also short-lived. Contemporary shelterbelts almost always have evergreen trees. Twelve years ago Haicus planted a double row of cedars along the quarter mile gravel road that leads to his house.

RH: About the fifth year I could see where they were stopping the snow. Now of course there's nothing that gets over there.

In Vermillion, South Dakota, this is Curt Nickisch.

The Weather Notebook is a production of the Mt. Washington Observatory. Thanks today to producer Margaret Landsman.