Where is dust bowl

In addition, a record wheat crop in sent crop prices even lower. These lower prices meant that farmers needed to cultivate more acreage, including poorer farmlands, or change crop varieties to produce enough grain to meet their required equipment and farm payments.

When drought began in the early s, it worsened these poor economic conditions. The depression and drought hit farmers on the Great Plains the hardest. Many of these farmers were forced to seek government assistance.

However, even with government help, many farmers could not maintain their operations and were forced to leave their land. Some voluntarily deeded their farms to creditors, others faced foreclosure by banks, and still others had to leave temporarily to search for work to provide for their families. In fact, at the peak of farm transfers in —34, nearly 1 in 10 farms changed possession, with half of those being involuntary from a combination of the depression and drought.

Farm family, Sargent, Nebraska, Photograph by Solomon D. A number of poor land management practices in the Great Plains region increased the vulnerability of the area before the s drought. Some of the land use patterns and methods of cultivation in the region can be traced back to the settlement of the Great Plains nearly years earlier.

Several expeditions had explored the region, but they were not studying the region for its agricultural potential, and, furthermore, their findings went into government reports that were not readily available to the general public Fite, Misleading information, however, was plentiful.

In addition to this inaccurate information, most settlers had little money and few other assets, and their farming experience was based on conditions in the more humid eastern United States, so the crops and cultivation practices they chose often were not suitable for the Great Plains.

But the earliest settlements occurred during a wet cycle, and the first crops flourished, so settlers were encouraged to continue practices that would later have to be abandoned. When droughts and harsh winters inevitably occurred, there was widespread economic hardship and human suffering, but the early settlers put these episodes behind them once the rains returned.

Although adverse conditions forced many settlers to return to the eastern United States, even more continued to come west.

The idea that the climate of the Great Plains was changing, particularly in response to human settlement, was popularly accepted in the last half of the 19th century. It was reflected in legislative acts such as the Timber Culture Act of , which was based on the belief that if settlers planted trees they would be encouraging rainfall, and it was not until the s that this idea was finally abandoned White, Low crop prices and high machinery costs discussed in the previous section meant that farmers needed to cultivate more land to produce enough to meet their required payments.

Since most of the best farming areas were already being used, poorer farmlands were increasingly used. Farming submarginal lands often had negative results, such as soil erosion and nutrient leaching. By using these areas, farmers were increasing the likelihood of crop failures, which increased their vulnerability to drought.

These economic conditions also created pressure on farmers to abandon soil conservation practices to reduce expenditures. Furthermore, during the s, many farmers switched from the lister to the more efficient one-way disc plow, which also greatly increased the risk of blowing soil.

Basically, reductions in soil conservation measures and the encroachment onto poorer lands made the farming community more vulnerable to wind erosion, soil moisture depletion, depleted soil nutrients, and drought. Many of these measures were initiated by the federal government, a relatively new practice.

Before the s drought, federal aid had generally been withheld in emergency situations in favor of individual and self-reliant approaches. This began to change with the development of the Great Depression in the late s and the inauguration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The programs had a variety of goals, all of which were aimed at the reduction of drought impacts and vulnerability:. President Roosevelt visiting a farmer who received a drought relief grant, Mandan, North Dakota, Photo by Arthur Rothstein.

As important as these programs may have been, the survival of a majority of the families and enterprises undoubtedly rested solely with their perseverance and integrity. Whether they stayed or moved into the drought regions or migrated to other areas in hopes of a better life, families encountered new hardships and obstacles that would require ingenuity, resilience, and humility.

Farmers plowed a lot of the new land on the prairie during World War I. The prairie needed its grass, or crops like wheat, to hold down the soil and dirt. When a drought started on the prairie in , there was no grass or crops to hold down the dirt. Dust storms blew all across the country, taking dirt from Colorado all the way east to Washington, DC. Animals died without enough crops to feed them, and the price of food went up again. Without any crops or animals to sell, the prairie farmers had no money to pay the banks back.

Guthrie, an Oklahoma native, left his home state with thousands of others looking for work during the Dust Bowl. Roosevelt Institute. About The Dust Bowl. English Department; University of Illinois. Dust Bowl Migration. University of California at Davis. The Great Okie Migration. Smithsonian American Art Museum. Okie Migrations. Oklahoma Historical Society. What we learned from the Dust Bowl: lessons in science, policy, and adaptation. Population and Environment. The Dust Bowl.

Library of Congress. Dust Bowl Ballads: Woody Guthrie. Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. Ken Burns; PBS. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. One monster dust storm reached the Atlantic Ocean. For five hours, a fog of prairie dirt enshrouded The Dust Bowl.

Herman Goertzen remembers chickens going to roost in the middle of the day because the dust storm made it so dark the chickens thought it was night. LeRoy Hankel remembers a wind blowing so hard that a truck was blown 30 to 40 feet down a street. Elroy Hoffman remembers winds blowing seeds out of the ground. Stan Jensen remembers how it was impossible to keep houses clean. Walter Schmitt remembers how the winds blew tumbleweeds into fences.