Dust Bowl Research Paper

In the 1930s, before the Dust Bowl, the Great Depression occurred. Life was harsh since many people didn’t have jobs, however, the Dust Bowl made the situation worse. In the Great Plains, while the United States was in the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl occurred because of the bad weather and soil erosion. Dust storms would occur because of the soil not being fertile enough plus the strong winds blowing across the soil which led to many people moving to the West. The Dust Bowl had many causes and effects that led up to the event and there were many significant changes that impacted the United States like restoring the Great Plains and preventing another Dust Bowl.

During the Dust Bowl, there were many causes and effects that led to the Dust

Poor farming conditions was a major cause of the Dust Bowl, for example, farmers didn’t use a farming method called crop rotation and as a result, the nutrients in the soil didn’t have time to replenish. Also, they burned the grass down which killed many nutrients in the soil. Farmers destroyed the grass because they needed space so they could plant crops. The states of Great Plains, “....southeastern Colorado, southwestern Kansas, western Oklahoma, and northern Texas—were affected by extreme dust storms and came to be known as the Dust Bowl” (“The Black Sunday Dust Storm: April 14, 1935” 2). During the Dust Bowl, people were affected because of the dust storms. They had to use handkerchiefs to cover their faces from dust to avoid breathing in sand and dirt. Anne Marie, a girl who lived and wrote a diary

About 800,000 people that lived in the Great Plains moved to the West in the 1930s because of the dust storms in the Dust Bowl. Westerners thought that the people moving to the West from the Great Plains were all from Oklahoma and so they called those people, “Okies” (“The Black Sunday Dust Storm: April 14, 1935”). One government service that helped restore the Great Plains and prevent the Dust Bowl was called the Soil Conservation Service (SCS). The SCS was made by Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) on April 1935 after passing the Soil Conservation Act and it was originally the Soil Erosion Service. It was created to prevent soil erosion from happening. In 1934, it was estimated that over 260 million acres of farmland had been damaged because of erosion and water and around 50 million acres of land were no longer fertile to grow crops. Because of that, the Soil Conservation Service, “used carefully planned conservation methods and wiser farming techniques to restore prairie grasses, develop crop-rotation practices, and enable farmers to live off the land without ruining it” (“Dust Bowl Devastates the Great Plains” 3). The SCS worked with landowners, talked about conservation and helped the landowners with soil conservation, and “In exchange for the landowner's agreement to cooperate for a five-year period