My first reaction to today's minimum-till, chemical farming was that the gray fields of dead weeds were ugly.

On the other hand, the most ugly sights that Great Plains people ever witnessed were the dust storms and the rain-washed fields of the 1930s Dust Bowl.

Standing at the side of my father, we personally witnessed the rolling clouds of dust that the wind blew across our neighborhood, partially obliterating the sun as it scoured the finely tilled soil from all of the fields. We also saw the ditches, some of them three feet deep, where the soil was washed away by an occasional heavy rain.

We had plowed our fields, then harrowed them, to create the smooth seedbeds that we mistakenly thought were necessary for proper farming.

Soon after that, in 1943, an almost forgotten farm agent named Edward H. Faulkner startled the agricultural world with a book titled "Plowman's Folly." His book opened a new era in farming with this key sentence: "The fact is that no one has ever advanced a scientific reason for plowing."

So much for John Deere and his invention of the self-scouring moldboard plow.

Using the disk harrow, Faulkner proved conclusively that impoverished soil, erosion, and lower yields could be blamed on the plow, which turned natural fertilizers deep into the soil. His advice startled a skeptical agricultural world, which was slow to react.

However, during the six decades since the University of Oklahoma Press printed Faulkner's book in 1943, we have seen gradual improvements in the soil's health -- and we've rarely seen those rolling clouds of dust.

What we don't see any more is the plow, or the one-way disk that replaced it.

In their place, we have seen Kansas farm-manufacturing companies build tillage equipment that worked the soil in a more protective manner. We have seen thousands of miles of terraces built to hold the moisture and the soil on the land, and we have witnessed the birth of minimum-tillage and trash farming -- which leave a protective covering of vegetable matter on the soil's surface.

These days, everyone is familiar with Roundup and similar chemicals that kill the weeds without disturbing the soil -- at the same time preventing the subsoil moisture from blowing away with the hot winds. Despite the organic, non-chemical movement, most Kansas crops are grown with herbicides, insecticides and other chemicals.

This transition has been slow and fraught with problems. Today's farmers are familiar with all of the skills that are involved with this new agriculture. So, most years, they harvest decent crops (and often bumper crops) in spite of the ever-threatening vagaries of Great Plains nature.

Several other developments have helped, such as the genetic development of drought and disease tolerant varieties of wheat, milo, soybeans, and corn. All of today's farmers also fertilize their fields.

During the process, we have lost many of those "golden fields of wheat" that were so famous. During a recent 100-mile drive, I saw mostly wheat fields of reddish-brown, the influence of the Jagger variety across the Kansas landscape.

The upshot of these changes has been much larger farms and a lot less tillers of the soil. Farm equipment also has changed dramatically and is more expensive. We now see farmers haul their wheat to market with the aid of grain carts and semi-trailer trucks that haul nearly 1,000 bushels of grain.

That's a far cry from conditions a century ago. In 1909, many farms totaled only 160 acres. Such a farmer raised perhaps 40 acres of wheat that might yield around 25 bushels per acre (sometimes less). So his entire year's crop would amount to only one load in today's semi truck.

The latest farming methods no longer appear ugly to me because they make sense. I do decry the loss of farm population, but that partially has been caused by the low prices ... and perhaps higher production contributed to lower prices.

I am sure of this: If these tools and methods had been available to my father, he probably wouldn't have lost his farm in the wake of the Dust Bowl. The Lord knows that he worked hard enough to succeed.

Darrel Miller lives near Downs in rural Osborne County and is a retired weekly newspaper editor.