In 1935, the United States began planting 220 million trees from Texas to Canada to stop the Dust Bowl, creating 18,600 miles of living windbreaks by 1942

In the 1930s, giant dust storms swept across the American Great Plains. Farmland topsoil blew away in thick black clouds. Some of it reached as far as Washington, D.C. This disaster is now called the Dust Bowl. To fight it, the federal government did something big: it planted a living wall of trees across the middle of the country. According to research by Sarah Karle, Laura Weakly, and Gary Bentrup, hosted by the US Forest Service, nearly 220 million tree seedlings were planted. That effort led to 18,600 miles of tree rows called shelterbelts on 240,000 acres on 30,000 farms.

Here is the story of that project, and why researchers are now digging through 90-year-old paperwork to bring it back to life.

Why FDR bet on trees during the Great Depression
By 1935, drought and dust had already forced many Great Plains families off their land. President Franklin D. Roosevelt considered soil conservation on private farms a public responsibility. According to the same US Forest Service research paper, this idea was controversial at the time. Most New Deal programs applied only to public land or public buildings and did not provide federal funding for conservation work on private land. Many politicians and foresters were uneasy about paying to plant trees on private farms using unproven methods.


The History Nebraska historical marker on the project says the government pushed forward anyway. Between 1935 and 1942, the U.S. Forest Service, Works Progress Administration, and the Civilian Conservation Corps planted windbreaks throughout the Great Plains. The program was called the Prairie States Forestry Project. The marker text says Nebraskans played a leading role, planting almost 4,170 miles of windbreaks on 6,944 farms and 51,621 acres. It also identifies one early belt at the John Schleusener farm in Antelope County as the first windbreak established under the project in Nebraska, planted in April 1935.

How big was this, really
According to this US Forest Service research paper, the project covered an area 100 miles wide stretching from the Texas Panhandle to the Canadian border. Inside that zone, the Forest Service worked directly with individual farmers called “cooperators.” Each landowner filled out an application with the boundaries of the farm and the desired shelterbelt location. Farmers planted rows of cottonwood, Russian olive, and honey locust trees, sometimes ten rows deep. The same paper says the project was based in Lincoln, Nebraska, and run by Forest Service employee Paul Roberts. Just the paperwork for Nebraska includes 150 county maps, 1,000 township maps, and more than 6,000 planting records.

Did it actually work
In windbreak science, a basic rule is that trees reduce wind speed and soil loss for approximately 10 times their height. According to the research paper from the US Forest Service, 18,600 miles of trees in the project could have protected up to 1,000 square miles of farmland from erosion with a conservative shelterbelt height of 30 feet. The same paper cites a 2019 remote-sensing study that compared original 1930s planting locations to 2010 aerial photos in Antelope County, Nebraska. That study found that 38 percent of the original shelterbelts were fully intact, 40 percent were partially intact, and 22 percent were gone altogether.

According to the University of Nebraska–Lincoln news on a separate, ongoing study, researchers Sarah Thomas Karle and David Karle found their early look at Antelope County also revealed many of the original shelterbelts are still there, although many were later removed to make room for larger farm equipment and irrigation systems.

Why a 90-year-old project needs a digital second life
Here’s the twist: thousands of the original paper records were mostly unarchived at the USDA National Agroforestry Centre on the University of Nebraska campus. A team of researchers is now digitizing these old planting forms, letters, and black-and-white photographs, the US Forest Service research paper notes. The name of the landowner, location, and species of tree planted identify each record. So a farming family today might search for the name of a great-grandparent and pull up the actual application he or she filled out decades ago, and old photos of the trees they planted.

Why this Depression-era experiment still matters
Some researchers consider the Prairie States Forestry Project an early model for large-scale climate action because it showed how a coordinated federal program could work with private landowners to transform a region in just a few years, according to the US Forest Service study. The project also created thousands of jobs for unemployed workers through the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration, solving an economic crisis and an environmental one at the same time, as the University of Nebraska–Lincoln news report notes. That report also says that researchers Sarah Thomas Karle and David Karle, who led the first comprehensive analysis of the project in more than 40 years, argue that Roosevelt’s administration saw the Dust Bowl as a long-term problem that required sustained investment, not a quick fix.

Nearly a century later, as the US faces new versions of drought and soil loss, this old wall of trees still has something to teach.