Dust Bowl

In 1934, weather conditions and farming practices in the Great Plains combined to produce an ecological disaster called the Dust Bowl. The Plains stretched from South Dakota to Texas , and included several states, among them Kansas , Nebraska , and Oklahoma . An intense, long-term drought (a period of below-average rainfall), high heat, and farming practices that exposed the soil caused two immense storms of dust that blew across the nation. Virtually all aspects of life on the Plains struggled in the resulting conditions.

The southern plains had once been natural grazing lands covered in prairie grasses, particularly buffalo grass. The plants not only provided a diet to buffalo, sheep, and cattle, but also served as a protective anchor for the land. Catching moisture in their roots, plants prevented winds from blowing the soil away. As long as the grasses were present, the soil could recover from the effects of strong prairie winds.

In the late nineteenth century, humans began settling in the grasslands. The large grazing lands quickly turned into small individual farms. Wherever people established themselves, the grasses were plowed under, and crops were planted instead. The combination of improvements in farming technology and the high demand for wheat caused large plots of land to be devoted to growing wheat. Though the fields were planted, the roots of the crops were not as moist and strong as buffalo grass. Rainfall had been relatively frequent in the decades when farming had become so vast in the Plains. People did not have reason to suspect that the farmed crops would be challenged by drought and wind.

In 1931, a long-term drought began, and when the winds started blowing in 1934, the farmers’ fields could not hold. The drought powdered the soil, which allowed the wind to pick up the dust and spread it. Over the course of the next few years, local dust storms combined into large regional storms. Eventually, two great storms developed in the spring of 1934, large enough to cause a great natural disaster. Strong winds stripped the land of its topsoil and carried the dirt over hundreds of miles.

An estimated 650 million tons of soil blew away, leaving farms devastated. The wind carried off most of the crops, too, and layers of dirt covered what remained. Soil caked the grazing pastures of livestock, which they then tried to eat. Mud balls formed in their stomachs as a result, and many animals died. Like snow, the dust blanketed everything, burying fences, penetrating automobile engines, and causing “dust pneumonia” among the people. The Dust Bowl covered 300,000 square miles of territory located in Kansas, Texas, western Oklahoma, eastern Colorado , and New Mexico . Dust-filled skies dumped the soil as far east as Chicago, Illinois , and darkened skies along the entire eastern seaboard. It was a great disaster that demanded government attention.

The Dust Bowl happened during the Great Depression (1929–41) in the United States. It was a time of economic recession, when people were already experiencing enormous difficulties in finding steady work to provide food and shelter for their families. President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945; served 1933–45) took office in 1933 and worked quickly to establish relief programs for the entire nation.

When the Dust Bowl storms occurred, Roosevelt and Congress established other programs to provide relief to the farmers. The Soil Conservation Service was created to supply technical assistance and leadership in the development of soil conservation techniques. The Department of Agriculture encouraged strip crops, contour plowing, and terracing as new methods of wind control for farmers to use. Farmers received monetary incentives to reduce farmed acreage and to employ wind control practices. The government also planted a hundred-mile-wide belt of trees from Canada to Texas in hopes of creating a wind break. It also purchased more than eight million cattle to cut down on grazing needs in the region. Most importantly, it worked to return the region to grassland, shrinking the Dust Bowl area from 8.727 million acres in 1938 to 1.2 million in 1939 as grasses took root.