Animal traction and a different Dust Bowl

The panel disagrees over whether the technological plateau would make a Dust Bowl worse or help prevent it. Manure could improve soil, while intensive plowing followed by drought would remain a danger. Steam tractors would exist, but the scenario would probably retain more horses and other working animals. Those animals would supply manure and limit how much land less mechanized farmers could plow. More prosperous farmers with greater access to machinery could therefore overplow more extensively and suffer more severely. The proposed outcome concerns a different distribution of damage, without a definite prediction that the disaster disappears.