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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.
“They would call us out of school to try to control the erosion, and you couldn t see the front of the tractor. They had the highway shut down while we worked the fields, and they used front end loaders to clean the highways,” Barth says.