The Causes Of The Dust Bowl

Lots of adults and children lost their lives during the 1930s. On April 18,1935, a gigantic, black cloud piled up on the western horizon it was called the Dust Bowl. What caused the Dust Bowl?  The Dust Bowl was caused by mechanization, drought, and a significant loss of grass.

In the 1930’s America had a lot of hard times and one of them was the Dust Bowl.The Dust Bowl was part of the great depression in America.A lot of farms, cities, and families were hit by the Dust Bowl and it affected their life. The Dust Bowl started on Thursday, April 18, 1935 and it happened in the western states of the U.S. and it went to the southern Great Plains. What reasons made the Dust Bowl occur? There were three main causes for the storms and the Dust Bowl that was created: destruction of Prairie Grass, mechanization, and lack of rainfall.

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

For Dust Bowl residents, life was almost unbearable. The Dust Bowl was given its name after a huge dust storm in 1914 by Robert E. Geiger. The name “Dust Bowl” is very fitting because of the multiple dust storms that blew through the Great Plains during the 1930s. This also shows that everyone viewed the Great Plains as a dusty and treacherous place to live. In addition, “About 40 big storms swept through the Dust Bowl in 1935, with dust often reducing visibility to less than a mile” (Lookingbill 1). This

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

The dust bowl ran for approximately 10 years, from 1931 to 1939. It devastated crops and farmers alike, forced children to wear dust masks to and from school, and caused a nationwide epidemic as more and more people found that they couldn’t keep paying for foods and other essentials.

A few people that lived through it and that are still living today, even talked in interviews. The Dust Bowl has been stated to be one of the most depressing times that negatively affected people living through it in a personal way. “The Dust Storms began in 1932 and would eventually cover more than 75% of the country and severely affect all of the prairie states”. (30 Dust Bowl Facts: US History For Kids**)The dust bowl lasted for almost a decade, but eventually as the years passed, the dust bowl finally stopped in spring in the the year 1939. It’s a smart idea to remember the dust bowl and to try to not make the same mistake again, that would cause The Dust Bowl to happen

The dust bowl was an outcome of various problems that were accumulated during the years. The

The Dust Bowl was one of the worst economic and tragic events of the 20th century. The Dust Bowl negatively affected people who lived there in a personal way. Some of them included how badly it had affected the children living in that time, how it had affected families health, and how badly it affected the economy causing a mass corruption.

Though most everyone has heard of the Dust Bowl, many people don’t actually know what it is. “When rain stopped falling in the Midwest, farm fields began to dry up” (The Dust Bowl). Much of the nation’s crops couldn’t grow, causing major economic struggle. "The Homestead Act of 1862, which provided settlers with 160 acres of public land, was followed by the Kinkaid Act of 1904 and the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909” (Dust Bowl). This caused many inexperienced farmers to jump on this easy start of a career. Because of this, farmers in the Midwest had practiced atrocious land management for years. This included over plowing the land and using the same crops year after year. In this way, lots of fertile soil had gotten lost. This helped windstorms gather topsoil from the land, and whip it into huge clouds; dust storms. Hot, dry, and windy, almost the entire middle section of the United States was directly affected. The states affected were South

The Dust Bowl negatively affected people who lived there in a personal way. The dust bowl was one of the worst natural disasters in the U.S.

Rays of golden sunlight were piercing the blue sky. Today was a hot day. There had been no rain in the last month. A young child was playing in the field while his father was harvesting the crops. The boy was playing among the newly harvested golden vegetables. There were a lot more vegetables than he remembered from years past. The boy knew they were going to sell most of this harvest. Where are the other plants that he remembered? Why was corn the only thing growing? Why is it in straight lines instead of winding around the property like it normally did? He pondered these questions on the way to school. Today, unlike normal, his teacher let him out of school early. Though he thought nothing of it at the time the sky was turning dark. It

One of the main causes of the Dust Bowl was the poor techniques that farmers used to plant and harvest their crops. Most of the Roaring Twenties consisted of a continual cycle of debt for the American farmers as their production prices

Natural disasters can cause massive damage, but few realize that many barely last a few days. If so much can be done in such a minute amount of time, imagine what a decade would do. The dust bowl was a weather event that lasted for the entirety of an eight-year drought and lingered for multiple years after. The result: Economic devastation for the agriculture of the area. The dust bowl was a large contributor to agriculture’s role in the great depression and defines how we approach environmental protection today.

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