A farmer and his two sons during a dust storm in Cimarron County, Oklahoma, 1936, Photo: Arthur Rothstein The Dust Bowl, or the Dirty Thirties, was a period of severe dust storms causing major ecological and agricultural damage to American and Canadian prairie lands in the 1930s, particularly in 1934 and 1936. The phenomenon was caused by severe drought coupled with decades of extensive farming...

Switzerland’s 2014 “Agricultural Report” asserts that the fertility of Swiss agricultural lands is compromised in the long term, and that one of the major causes is water erosion. Yet, the problem of soil erosion is not recent. It has been studied for more than fifty years and included in agroenvironmental policy-making for more than twenty years. However, despite significant improvements, expe...

In Mediterranean environment intensive agricultural activities are often practiced in steep slopes, where sometimes climatic, geomorphologic and land use factors (e.g. the high rainfall intensity, the scarce vegetal coverage, especially on the occasion of the early rainfalls, the low organic matter content of soils, etc.) worsen the impacts of soil erosion. In such contexts agriculture may play...

Effects of Rainfall and Slope Components on Runoff Soil Erosion in Dry Lands (Case Study: Gachsaran Lands)

Chaparral lands of central Arizona are important for water production. They are also used as grazing lands for livestock and as habitat for wildlife. An understanding of the relation of grazing to runoff and erosion is thus essential to the development of management systems for sustained high yields. This paper reports the effects of grazing on runoff and erosion as determined on four experimen...