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Dust Bowl
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In the 1930s, the Dust Bowl was not the only disaster gripping the country. The 1929 stock market crash had unleashed major economic turmoil. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal was designed to bring the country out of the Depression. The people of the Dust Bowl now began relying on relief checks and food handouts from the government.
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The Dust Bowl drought was a natural disaster that severely affected much of the United States during the 1930s. The drought came in three waves, 1934, 1936, and 1939-40, but some regions of the High Plains experienced drought conditions for as many as eight years. The "dust bowl" effect was caused by sustained drought conditions compounded by years of land management practices that left topsoil susceptible to the forces of the wind. The soil, depleted of moisture, was lifted by the wind into great clouds of dust and sand which were so thick they concealed the sun for several days at a time. They were referred to as" black blizzards".
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Currently, the states that were part of the historic Dust Bowl are experiencing severe droughts. Oklahoma’s drought began in June of 2001, while in the northern plains the drought began several years ago. In eastern Montana, where the drought began four years ago, more than a thousand wheat farmers have given up farming. This spring, farmers in the community of Syracuse, Kansas, crowded into their school gym to pray for rain. Agriculture officials report that most of Colorado will not even have a wheat crop this year; and the state has had four times the normal number of wildfires just since January. Wyoming and New Mexico are being hard hit by drought as well; and New Mexico is ... experiencing more wildfires than normal.
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The Dust Bowl finally ended in 1941 with the arrival of drenching rains on the southern and central plains and with the advent of World War II. The rains restored crops and settled the dust. The war diverted public and government attention from the plains. In a telling move, the FSA photography corps was reconstituted as the Office of War Information, the propaganda wing of the government's war effort. The narrative of World War II replaced the Dust Bowl narrative in the public's attention. Congress diverted funding away from the Great Plains and toward mobilization.
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The groundwork for the Dust Bowl was laid during the First World War, when demand for food began to rise rapidly. As a result, farmers in states like Colorado, Kansas, Texas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma accelerated their farming practices to meet the demand. Crops were planted without rotation, and the ground was heavily tilled and worked to yield a higher crop volume. By the mid-1920s, many of these farming efforts were paying off, in the sense that huge crops were being generated, but the ground paid a hidden toll which only became apparent in the 1930s.
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In the aftermath of the Dust Bowl, it was clear that many factors contributed to the severe impact of this drought. A better understanding of the interactions between the natural elements (climate, plants, and soil) and human-related elements (agricultural practices, economics, and social conditions)of the Great Plains was needed. Lessons were learned, and because of this drought, farmers adopted new cultivation methods to help control soil erosion in dry land ecosystems. Subsequent droughts in this region have had less impact due to these cultivation practices.
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Dust Bowl