Ninety years ago this month, in the depths of the Great Depression, Congress created a new agency within the U.S. Department of Agriculture to safeguard rural prosperity for future generations: The Soil Conservation Service.

For families like mine, this anniversary marks a turning point when our country learned a hard but important lesson. My family lost our farm in the Dust Bowl: a brutal decade in which the combination of poor land management and drought robbed much of the Great Plains of its topsoil.

For nine decades now, rural Americans have counted on conservation programs from the Department of Agriculture to help them boost soil health and ensure their lands are productive for generations to come. But now, in a moment when many rural Americans are again facing severe economic uncertainty, these programs are threatened.

As a child, I listened to my grandmother’s stories about stuffing towels into the door frame of her family’s Western Nebraska farmhouse during the Dust Bowl in a futile attempt to keep the blowing soil from coming inside. She told me........

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