The primary cause of the Dust Bowl was farmers' lack of ecological understanding. Because of this, they had continuously deep plowed topsoil of the Great Plains to plant corn or cotton. Combined with strong winds, the disrupted soil blew up around the people, houses, and crops, creating blackouts that prevented people from leaving their houses and destroying crops before they could mature and be harvested. As a result crops in these years were incredibly poor, which greatly hurt the small farmers who relied on the land, especially facing the Great Depression.
Many of these famers had acquired bank loans to either get their land or help during tough financial times. To pay it back, the banks got a share of their crops each year. Because they could not produce much during these years, many Great Plains farmers defaulted on debts, giving the bank control of the land. New tractor technology made it more profitable to have large mechanized farms instead of small independent one. This incentivized banks to kick farmers off. These famers joined the ranks of the unemployed at the time, and many moved west in an attempt to find solid paying jobs, further worsening the depression in different parts of the country.
You would think that the farmers would have learned from their mistakes during the Great Depression, but of course they didn't. The Soil Conservation Service was created to anchor the loose plains soil. Also, the government purchased 11.3 million acres to keep it out of production. By 1941 the land could be farmed again, but with WWII grain prices rose again and the farmers repeated their mistakes. By the 1950s drought threatened another dustbowl.
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I like how you intertwined a very non political topic like the Dust Bowl storms with how they affected farmers and played into the greater economic scheme, or the Great Depression. It is also interesting to note that another factor that could have contributed to the dust bowl storms was that the farmers were producing such large amounts of crops during the 1910's, especially when there was a large demand for US crops from Europe during WWI. So, when they were producing lots of crops they were more concerned with quantity over quality and therefore didn't treat the land correctly and plowed into the topsoil.
ReplyDeleteGreat post! It makes so much sense to see how the increase in technology coupled with the harsh effects of the dust storms on the crops made the banks able to get rid of the small farmers so that they could make more profits with larger farms. I wonder if the farmers had had a better ecological understanding of how the soil worked and how a dust storm could happen if they would have been able to prevent their crops from being destroyed. I also wonder if there had been no dustbowl if the depression would have lessened since it was so affected by the loss in agricultural production and the loss of bank loan money since the farmers could not pay.
ReplyDeletefor more information on farmers during the depression - http://www.livinghistoryfarm.org/farminginthe30s/life_01.html
I feel like this is a topic that needs to be talked about more in class. I learned learned a lot from this post and didn't know that the people were one of the causes of the dustbowl. Do you think that if the government came in during the time of the dustbowl could they have stopped it from getting worse? Or was this something that just could not be stopped
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