They show that the identity of these farmers is created and maintained through competing systems of tillage and the ideologies that support them, which also shape the agricultural landscape. A soil erosion tax is one viable approach.Ībstract In this article, the authors examine the ideological tensions of organic and chemical farmers in the High Plains. Any pragmatic agricultural reform needs to restructure the market so that short-run competition and sustainability are in harmony, incorporating the distant social costs of ecological harm into present decision making. This essay makes an argument for the implementation of a soil erosion tax, as a kind of land use tax in order to internalize the negative externalities of farming in a unilateral manner. Farmers have been caught in a highly competitive market where ecological considerations are secondary to short run growth. Agricultural producers have resented mandatory conservation policies. This essay will show that despite the intentions of various policy makers, beginning in the New Deal era, US agricultural policy has always remained an economic tool for farmers, with conservation policy playing a greater role only when planned scarcity was economically advantageous for farmers in the short run. Today, soil erosion and land degradation under agricultural land is less obviously catastrophic than in the dust bowl years, but remains a pernicious threat. The result was an ecological catastrophe of unprecedented soil erosion.

The dust bowl was a market failure due to excessive speculative growth in farming on the Great Plains leading up to the 1930s. This research utilizes a historical case study approach, applying lessons from the dust bowl and the resulting policy response to the context of modern US agricultural policy reform.

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