Harvest Public Media
Mary Chris Barth, a farmer from the panhandle of Oklahoma, stands on Conservation Reserve Program land. The program was created in the 1980s to control soil erosion.
Mary Chris Barth knows how important it is to control the soil in the panhandle of Oklahoma. She’s the child of parents that grew up in the Dust Bowl. When farmers started planting fence row to fence row in the 1970s and removing the native plants from the soil, she remembers farmers trying to control the dust. Barth, a former president of the Beaver County Farm Bureau and a farmer in the area, says some of the soil should have never been touched.