Dust Bowl Research Papers

According to the Great Plain Drought Area Committee Report (Doc. D), in 1879, 10 million acres of crop were harvested. 20 years later, in 1899, 50 million acres of crops were harvested, 5 times more crops than in 1879. In 1929, that number more than doubled to a 105 million acres of crops that were harvested. How did happen? Farming technology advanced rapidly from 1879 to 1929. In “The Worst Hard Time” by Timothy Egan (Doc. C), Egan wrote, “A tractor did the work of ten horses. With his new combine, Folkers could cut and thresh the grain in one swoop, using just a fraction of the labor.” The new farming technology made farming faster and it required less labor. Farmers had this new technology and used it to plow more land. Millions of acres were being plowed and farmed on and with the dry soil and no grass to keep it on the ground the dust became airborne and started grouping together and creating terrible storms.

The Dust Bowl, battering the Midwest for nearly a decade with high winds, bad farming techniques, and drought, became a pivotal point in American history. The wind storm that seemed relentless beginning in the early 1930’s until its spell ended in 1939, affected the lives of tens of thousands of Americans and the broader agriculture industry. The catastrophic effects of the Dust Bowl took place most prominently around the Great Plains, otherwise known as the farming belt, including states such as Oklahoma, Texas, and Kansas, which were hit extraordinarily hard. Millions of farming acres destroyed by poor farming techniques was a major contributor to what is considered to be one of the worst man-made environmental disasters in American history. This period resulted in almost a decade of unstable farming and economic despair. Thousands of families sought government assistance in order to survive. Luckily, government aid to farmers and new agriculture programs that were introduced to help save the nation’s agriculture industry benefited families and helped the Great Plains recover from the Dust Bowl. Furthermore, the poor conditions in the farm belt were also compounded by the Great Depression as it was in full swing as the Dust Bowl began to worsen. In addition, World War I was also underway which caused a high demand for agricultural products, such as wheat, corn, and potatoes to be at its peak, which lured many people to the farm belt with the false expectation that farming

The Dust Bowl was "the darkest moment in the twentieth-century life of the southern plains," (pg. 4) as described by Donald Worster in his book "The Dust Bowl." It was a time of drought, famine, and poverty that existed in the 1930's. It's cause, as Worster presents in a very thorough manner, was a chain of events that was perpetuated by the basic capitalistic society's "need" for expansion and consumption. Considered by some as one of the worst ecological catastrophes in the history of man, Worster argues that the Dust Bowl was created not by nature's work, but by an American culture that was working exactly the way it was planned. In essence, the Dust Bowl was the effect of a society, which deliberately set out to

Dorothea Lange became a well-known photographer with pictures of the Dust Bowl. According to Garland 2003 her photography obtained government relief for Dust Bowl migrants because she “visually demonstrated the hunger, poverty, hardship, and the plight of the migrants.”

The Dust Bowl a tragic event that occurred during the 1930's primarily in the southern plains states. It hurt the lives of many people, and it was preventable. This event is relevant to what we are studying in class.

“We watched as the storm swallowed the light. The sky turned from blue to black, night descended in an instant and the dust was on us…Dust lay two feet deep in ripply waves across the parlor floor, dust blanketed the cookstove, the icebox, the kitchen chairs, everything deep in dust.” -Karen Hesse’s Diary, April, 1935 (Dust Bowl Diary Entries). In the 1930s, a phenomenon called the Dust Bowl swept the people of the Great Plains off their feet. This paper defines the Dust Bowl and its impact on the US economy and American citizens.

In the period 1865-1900, technology, government policy, and economic conditions all changed American agriculture a great deal. New farming machinery had a large role in the late 19th century, giving farmers the opportunity to produce many more crops than they had ever been able to previously. The railroads had an enormous influence on agriculture. They were able to charge the farmers large fees, expenses that farmers barely had enough to cover, in order to transport their goods throughout the expansive country. The booming industry also changed American agriculture, creating monopolies and gaining incredible wealth with which the farmers simply could not compete. Economically, the monetary policy along with the steadily dropping prices of

Following the Civil War, a second industrial revolution in America brought many changes to the nation’s agriculture sector. The new technologies that were created transformed how farmers worked and the way in which the sector functioned. Agriculture expanded and became more industrial. Meanwhile government policies, or lack of them for a while, and hard economic conditions put difficult strains on farmers and their occupation. These changes in technology, economic conditions, and government policy from 1865 to 1900 transformed and improved agriculture while leaving farmers in hardship.

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 dust bowl was given the name dirty thirties for a good reason. It was a terrible time to be a Oklahoman citizen because there was giant menacing dust storms that covered homes in dust, a terrible drought that left oklahoma looking like a desert in some places, and no jobs which caused lots of people to leave Oklahoma.

In what was one of the most fertile areas of the United States, one of the Nation’s worst agricultural disasters occurred. No rain came so crops did not grow, leaving the soil exposed to the high winds that hit the area in the 1930s. Stretching over a 150,000 square mile area and encompassing parts of five states—these being Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico—the Dust Bowl was a time where over 100 million acres of topsoil were stripped from fertile fields leaving nothing but barren lands and piles of dust everywhere (Ganzel). While things were done to alleviate the problem, one must question whether or not anyone has learned from this disaster. If not, one must look into the possibility that the United States may be struck

The dust bowl is another name for the southern plains of the United States which suffered from severe dust storm during the 1930s. As high winds stormed through Texas, Nebraska, and other states many people died and millions of dollars were suffered in damage. During this period of time, the United States was suffering the effects of the Great Depression and this dust storms worsened the actual economic status of the United States. Many people were forced to leave their homes and move to other states in search of a better way of living. The dust bowl was caused by many reasons but the biggest reason is the excessive use of land

For the farmers, the combined years of drought, price caps set by the federal government to maintain low prices during World War I, and artificial inflation of the value of major farming corporations had led to a scenario that can only be dubbed the perfect storm of the farming industry. Many farmers found themselves out of work by 1925 with millions being forced off their properties as the banks reposed land bought on credit much the same as the stocks that caused the market crash of 1929.

During the US Great Depression in the 1930s, a huge problem for farmers in the Southern Plains region of the US was something called the Dust Bowl, a decade of

This article is mainly about a dust bowl that made farming very hard on farmers ruining their soil and making farmers have to move and abandon their houses. The main effect on farming was “Between 1930 and 1940, the southwestern Great Plains region of the United States suffered a severe drought.” The dust bowl made it hard to farm because without water you can't really grow plants. The last effect was “These problems came from the need to purchase expensive machinery as farming technology was changing, and from falling prices for food.” This made it harder for farmers to make money and keep up to update with farming equipment.