Causes Of The Dust Bowl

As the years went by, farmers gained more advanced machines to harvest their crops. When the farmers gained new machines, they ended up over farming their land because the machines could harvest more crops in shorter time. In 1879, 10 million crops were harvested by a horse-drawn plow,  1899, 50 million crops were harvested by middle-aged machines, and 105 million crops were harvested by tractors in 1929  (Document D). Timothy Egan stated “Folkers plowed nearly his entire square mile,and then paid to rent nearby property and ripped up that grass as well” (Document C). However, the machines and over farming was not the only thing that caused the Dust Bowl.

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.

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

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.

The causes of the Dust Bowl were two fold. The first cause was the misuse of the land by farmers for generations. When American settlers moved into the land of Middle America they were approaching something that none of them was familiar with. The immense grasslands were unlike anything that they had ever seen before. As they started to try to tame the land they did what they thought was the most effective thing and removed all of the natural and native plants and animals to make way for something similar that they were familiar with. The prairie grasses gave way to wheat, barley, and corn. The wild herds of buffalo were replaced by cattle. This

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.

Up until the combine had been invented the prior generations used the land for grazing their livestock. But with high wheat prices during WWI and this new invention it “enticed farmers to plow up millions of acres of natural grass to plant wheat.” With the combine, farmers had the choice to run their operations around the clock.

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 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,

The Dust Bowl was definitely provoked by wrong and environmentally dangerous methods of farming. As the matter of fact, the Dust Bowl affected the vast territory of the Great Plains and part of Canada. Moreover, until the late 19th century these lands had not been used for cultivation but the cattle farming dominated in the region. Nevertheless, after droughts in the late 19th century, farmers started cultivating various plants, especially wheat in the Great Plains region. However, the methods of farming were absolutely erroneous and inapplicable in the geographic and climatic conditions of the Great Plains. Farmers used extensive methods of farming that led to the erosion of soil. They did not use such techniques as crop rotation, fallow fields, cover crops and other techniques which could have prevented fast and irrevocable soil erosion. The soil was exhausted after a couple of decades of extensive farming and the severe drought that struck the region accomplished the destructive impact of farmers on the environment. As the matter of fact, the land which was used to be farmland had turned into a desert as soil turned into dust. Hence, the Dustbowl emerged as the effect of the negative impact of farmers on the would-be fertile land of the Great Plains.

Many events occurred before the years of the Dust Bowl began. The farmers plowed up all of the ground to grow “cash crops” (Marrin 58). The plowing of the soil left no grass to hold down the topsoil, leaving it vulnerable for wind erosion. In 1930, the people of the Great Plains had the biggest shortage of water in the history. “Seventeen million people were affected” (Worster 11). In the early 1930’s, the temperatures went higher than they ever had before (Marrin 52). By 1932, most people had reached their breaking point. Before the dust storms began, there was a cutworm plague, a grasshopper plague, and a rabbit plague (Reis 51 and 52). Between all of the natural problems occurring, the land and people were both exhausted. They had no idea

“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

“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.

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