Causes Of The Dust Bowl

“A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself. Forests are lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people”, stated Franklin Delano Roosevelt. (1) Have you ever heard of the Dust Bowl? The Dust Bowl took place in the 1930s. In the Great Plains of the United States. It covered parts of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Texas. The blowing dust caused hardships for many farmers making it difficult for them to work their farmland. Eventually, many of them packed what they could into their cars or trucks and headed west to California.

During the First World War, our farmers worked very hard to help to produce wheat for an ever-increasing demand. Many new inventions such as the disk plow and the steam tractor helped with this endeavor. The land was stripped of its root system that held the soil in place. The topsoil was ground down into the very fine sand. “On the Great Plains, extensive plowing while ignoring environmental risks set the stage for the dust bowl of the 1930’s”(Eric Foner published 2017 - 5th edition). The many lessons learned from the dust bowl years would change the farmer’s agricultural world forever.

In the years following the civil war farmers settled in the great plain regions of north america, although it had lack of trees and water. The fields were unsuitable for agriculture but farmers still began cultivating them. But in the 1930s a dreadful drought and dust storm struck the plains which became known as the Dust bowl. The Dust Bowl according to document C, was a natural disaster that could not be prevented because the weather can not be controlled. This means that there’s no one to blame for the storm but mother nature.

The Dust Bowl was an American travesty that not only affected the people living in the Midwest, but throughout the entire country in many ways. The Dust Bowl had a series of things that provoked it, along with the great depression that was going on at that time. It also caused many people to disperse all across the country in order for them to try and escape the deadly dust. Just to make everything worse, the current president at the time, Herbert Hoover, didn’t do much in order to help. The Dust Bowl caused a great deal of loss to many people, not only their loss of crops, but their loss of families and farm animals.

The Midwest suffered a terrible drought from 1934 to 1937. The terrible drought left the soil so dry that it turned into dust. Because the soil was now dust, farmers were unable to plant and grow crops. This was called The Dust Bowl. The Dust Bowl was located in many states including Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico.

The farmers could have prevented the Dust Bowl if they had not cut down all the trees and killed all the native greasses that were holding the soil together and acting as windbreaks. In the article “Dry Farming” by encyclopedia.com it says “. . .Great Plains farmers, aided by steel plows, uprooted most of the native prairie grass, which held moisture in the soil. Strong winds and extended droughts had not disturbed the land when the grasses covered it” (Dry Farming 1). Because the farmers cut all the native grasses and trees, the soil lost the anchors that were holding it together. These two things caused the soil to loosen and allowed the wind to go free, without anything to stop it.

For everyone, not just the poor, the Great Depression was horrible. The government had no money, and President Herbert Hoover was no help. He was the president of America during the first couple years of the Great Depression. He thought the government should be dependent on the people, and the population should support the government. That sort of leadership was only one cause of the Great Depression. Another cause is the dust bowl. The Dust Bowl happened because people on the plains took out all the trees and farmed the ground so much, much of it turned to topsoil. Since topsoil is loose and can be dry, it turned into dust.

During the 1930‟s and several years to follow, many people in the United States felt the struggles caused by the Great Depression. Families and individuals in the Plains, a term used when referring to the surrounding areas near Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado, Kansas, and Nebraska, were hit by the Dust Bowl, to make matters worse. Dozens of dust storms would obliterate these people‟s crops and agriculture – for some, the only source of income. Millions of acres of land became so full of dust that the soil was just not suitable for the growth of crops. This made life extremely difficult for people in this area because their homes, the only places they‟ve known for years, had become useless and torn down due to the excessive amounts of dust.

Effects like health, farming issues, and farm economics. The Dust Bowl took on humans, farms, and America. According to Cary Nelson, a professor at the University of Illinois, stated that "Approximately 35 million acres of formerly cultivated land…” were ruined for the making of crops and later 100 million acres in crops had their topsoil gone with the following of 125 million acres of land in crops lost their topsoil quickly (Nelson). The economy had a great impact with the ruins of millions of acres of land from the impact of the dust storms that brought coming around the states. “The Dust Bowl brought ecological, economical and human misery to America during a time when it was already suffering under the Great Depression” (Trimarchi).

The book, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s, written by Donald Worster, includes his commentary as a reflection on how capitalism destroyed the land in the 1930s and even currently. Worster argues that humans, specifically farmers, producers and consumers felt entitled to exploit the land without regulations for personal profit. As the capitalistic system destroyed the grassland of the Great Plains, in which loose topsoil was displaced during wind storms, many exodusters and Okies migrated west toward California. With Worster being a history professor at the University of Kansas, there is merit to his commentary. Although it is not a primary source, considering he wrote it after the Dust Bowl and does not have first-hand experience,

What caused the Dust Bowl? I stopped in my tracks, all my cattle were dead, lying on the ground. I took another step and was blinded. This is what the Dust Bowl was like for many people living in the southern plains. The Dust Bowl was a time period in the 1930’s when a strip of states were hit with countless dust storms that killed animals and people.

The “Dust Bowl” was the name given to the Great Plains region that was greatly affected by drought in the 1930’s during the Great Depression. The major contribution that led to the Dust Bowl was overproduction of crops however there were some natural causes. “Much of the soil there had been damaged by wind and rain. The soil in this area was subjected to

“The Dust Bowl was both a manmade and natural disaster” (Klein, 2012). “[The catastrophe] revealed the darker side of entrepreneurialism, its tendency to risk long-term social and ecological damage in the pursuit of short-term, private gain, (Worster, “Dust Bowl”). Like stated previously in the Library of Congress article the Dust Bowl was caused primarily by the overgrazing of cattle as well as dry farming by farmers. During the first world war wheat farmers need to fill in the demand of crops for the allied forces in Europe. While this worked for the period of time after the war ended the fields were plowed down to the bare minimum. With no wheat or grass to hold the soil together and nothing to protect the water and

The timeline of the dustbowl characterizes the fall of agriculture during the late 1920s, primarily the area in and surrounding the Great Plains. The Dust Bowl was created by a disruption in the areas natural balance. “With the crops and native vegetation gone, there was nothing to hold the topsoil to the ground” (“Dust Bowl and” 30). Agricultural expansion and dry farming techniques caused mass plowing and allowed little of the land to go fallow. With so little of the deeply rooted grass remaining in the Great Plains, all it took was an extended dry season to make the land grow dry and brittle. When most of the land had been enveloped by the grass dust storms weren’t even a yearly occurrence, but with the exponentiation of exposed land, the winds had the potential to erode entire acres. This manmade natural disaster consumed such a large amount of the South's agriculture that it had repercussions on the national level. The Dust Bowl was a “97-million-acre section

One major cause of that Dust Bowl was severe droughts during the 1930’s. The other cause was capitalism. Over-farming and grazing in order to achieve high profits killed of much of the plain’s grassland and when winds approached, nothing was there to hold the devastated soil on the ground.