The Drought In The Dust Bowl

The “dirty 30s” was not the time to be a farmer. The Great Plains were very unpredictable when it came to weather and natural disasters. Farmers were constantly battling against mother nature’s tragedies. Because machinery was not very advanced farmers and ranch hands spent numerous laboring hours in their dying fields. Crop prices also plunged to an ultimate low during this time. The conditions that laborers had to work in tending to their crops were ridiculous. This caused many farmers to leave their homes and search for better lands. During the drought in the 1930s, many farmers had to work extremely hard with unrefined machinery to maintain their unfortunately low priced crop, leading to a turning point in agriculture. When the Dust Bowl hit people automatically panicked. It was a time of multiple dust storms which created a big impact on agriculture. It lasted about a decade. Little did people know it was partly man made. The Dust Bowl was created by severe drought and many years of farmers not rotating their crops (Teisch). Crop rotation means planting different crops on the same piece of land to improve soil fertility and help control insects and diseases. For example, if a farmer grew corn one year and the next he grew beans, he would be rotating his crops. Few farmers used crop rotation

Nineteen states in the United States became a vast dust bowl (Ganzel). Many homes became uninhabitable because of how terrible the dust storms were. Massive drifts of dirt buried pastures, grazing lands, and barnyards, piled up in front of homestead doors, came through window cracks, and sifted down from ceilings (Dust). “Some 850 million tons of topsoil blew away in 1935 alone. ‘Unless something is done,’ a government report predicted ‘the western plains will be as arid as the Arabian Desert.’” (The Dust). The drought caused tons of problems for the United States at this point in