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The Great Plains experienced an influx of settlers in the late 1850s–1900. Periodic drought was hard on both settlers and the soil and caused severe wind erosion. The period known as the Dirty Thirties, 1931–1939, produced many severe windstorms, and the resulting dusty sky over Washington, DC helped Hugh Hammond Bennett gain political support for the Soil Conservation Act of 1937 that started the USDA Soil Conservation Service (SCS). Austin W. Zingg and William S. Chepil began wind erosion studies at a USDA laboratory at Kansas State University in 1947. Neil P. Woodruff and Francis H. Siddoway published the first widely used model for wind erosion in 1965, called the Wind Erosion Equation (WEQ). The WEQ was solved using a series of charts and lookup tables. Subsequent improvements to WEQ included monthly magnitudes of the total wind, a computer version of WEQ programmed in FORTRAN …