snip ...

In June, J.D. Vance flew to Butte, MT, and then was taken by an SUV motorcade to a sprawling cattle operation outside of Yellowstone National Park. There he met the owner of the Beaverhead Ranch, a man you may have heard of: Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch bought the ranch from Billionaire Koch Brother Charles Koch for $200 million. There, Murdoch grazes cattle on 340,000 acres of land, two-thirds of which is public. Murdoch paid the government $25,000 last year to graze his cattle on the public land. That is 95% below market rates. There are more examples.

So a handful of wealthy ranchers are raising a lot of beef on Uncle Sam's dime. At least that increases the nation's meat supply, right? Yes, although there is plenty of private land they could use as well for grazing, only then they would have to pay market rates. However, because grazing fees are so low, they have too many head of cattle on the land, which is leading to erosion and degradation of the land. Overgrazing is part of what caused the great dust bowls of the 1930s, when large pieces of land in the Great Plains became useless and ranchers there were forced to move.

#8 Parts of Kansas, Oklahoma and the panhandle of Texas can be found on the seabed of the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Virginia/Maryland.

That's how powerful the Dust Bowl was.