The Dust Bowl Fought In The 1930's

In the 1930s few Americans faced harder times than those in the Southern Great Plains. The Dust Bowl drought of the 1930s was one of the worst environmental disasters of the Twentieth Century. The Dust Bowl, also known as the Dirty Thirties, was a period of severe dust storms that greatly damaged the lives of many people. It came in a yellowish-brown haze from the South and in rolling walls of black from the North. Simple acts of life were no longer simple. The Dust Bowl was caused by three main issues. Loss of short grass, the advancement in technology, and lack of rain were all problems that helped create the Dust Bowl. One cause for the Dust Bowl was the loss of short grass. The grasslands had been deeply plowed and planted. As the drought

Technological advances included the use of a tractor with a plow and a combine. The tractor made farming more prosperous and helped quicken the process. “With his new combine, Folkers could cut and thresh the grain in one swoop, using just a fraction of the labor...” (Egan). Tractors helped keep farmers afloat but also set them up for a downward spiral. The use of tractors made it easier for grass to be harvested. This increased the amount of grass that was harvested and caused there to be less grass on the plains. With less grass holding down the dirt, the dirt was then added to the dust storms. With extra dirt being brought into the storms, the storms were then more dense and powerful. In 1879, the average number of harvested crops in eight Great Plain states was 10 million acres. By 1929, the average number of harvested crops was 105 million acres. In 50 years, 95 million more acres were harvested. Farmers continued to plow and plant and eventually, nothing was able to grow and short grass continued to slowly

According to Randy Francis, John Wesley Powell, a great Western explorer, determined that 20 inches of rain annually was the minimum for successful farming on the Plains. The average rainfall in five of the towns affected by the Dust Bowl was 17.382 inches. Many towns like the five mentioned before faced multiple years of below average rainfall, making everything very dry. The grass was either dying or being rapidly harvested so nothing was covering the dirt to keep it from being swept away by the big winds. If more rain was present during the horrible times of the Dust Bowl, less dirt would have been added to the air and conditions would not have been so severe. In the fall of 1939, rain finally comes and the country is slowly pulled out of the Great