In the 1930s, the Dust Bowl devastated America but Franklin D. Roosevelt's massive tree-planting project is still protecting US farmland nearly 90 years later

The Dust Bowl of the 1930s is remembered as one of the darkest environmental chapters in US history. Years of severe drought, combined with intensive farming practices, stripped away fertile topsoil across the Great Plains. Powerful winds then carried that loose soil for hundreds of miles, burying farms, destroying crops and forcing thousands of families to leave their homes.

But the disaster also inspired one of the most ambitious conservation projects the United States has ever undertaken.