Nesting ducks face many challenges. CRP, since its initiation, has helped solve a portion of those problems on U.S. prairies. Photograph by BillMarchel.com

After 20 years, the Conservation Reserve Program has become an institution on America's prairies. I'm beginning to accumulate quite a bit of gray hair at my temples, and even I have trouble remembering what the heartland was like between the end of the federal Soil Bank program in the 1960s and the first multiple-year contracts under CRP.

About all I can recall now are images: Traveling across Iowa in the first soft days of April sometime in the mid-1970s, I remember the shrinking snow banks in the road ditches, not white but dark gray from the prairie topsoil that had blown off the fall-plowed fields to the north of the road. It was to be a recurring theme over the next decade.

I was in southwestern Kansas for the pheasant opener several years later, driving the back way over the high plains to meet some folks in the little town of Ulysses. As I cruised the county roads, I was surprised to note the almost total absence of fences -- farmers in that part of the world had conceded the business of raising livestock to the big feedlots and were specializing in growing grain. And, when I did see a fence, it was centered in a berm of dirt, the top six inches of the posts just showing, the strands of wire buried. These were topsoil drifts, like Dorothea Lange photos of the Dust Bowl.

I think it was the summer of 1980 that U.S. Highway 54 across southern Kansas was closed for a day because of blowing dust. I went out that afternoon with a camera. I've got a picture somewhere of the Waldeck, Kansas, grain elevator. The picture shows the top 30 feet of the building with the red hazard light blinking exposed -- a wall of dust obscures the remaining 150 feet below.

When locals say it's "blowing" on the high plains, they aren't talking about the wind, which is a constant companion in that part of the world; they're talking about the soil. I watched the country "blow" that day, the fingers of silt creeping across the fields and the pavement of the highway while the finer, powder-dry dust rose into the sky.

This change in the agricultural landscape had a predictable effect on the wild things that try to make a living in farm country. Roadside pheasant counts in Iowa dropped by 50 percent from 1965 to 1975 and trends farther west were comparable. The same problems emerged for cottontails, bobwhite quail, prairie chickens, sharp-tailed grouseÉand ducks.

Exceptionally wet years helped sustain mallard numbers in the early and mid-1970s while upland bird populations were dropping with the amount of permanent cover, but greenheads failed to respond to several good water years in the first half of the 1980s because the amount of available nesting habitat had continued to decline.