The Dust Bowl was a severe period of drought and dust storms throughout the 1930s. Why did the Dust Bowl happen? How severe was the damage?
The earliest explorers to the Great Plains region of North America determined that the area was unsuitable for agriculture. The territory even became known as "The Great American Desert" because the lack of trees and water made the region relatively unattractive for settlement. However, in the decades following the Civil War, farmers began to settle the region and cultivate the fields under the long-held, but mistaken, belief that "rain will follow the plow.
" In the first three decades of the 1900s, there were significant and continuous advances in farming technology, including better tractors, mechanized plowing, combines, and more. From 1900 to 1920, the amount of farmland in the plains region doubled, and from 1925 to 1930, the amount of cultivated land tripled! However, farmers of the era used practices which deprived the soil of its nutrients and increased the possibility of erosion.
The heavy plowing had eliminated the natural grasses of the prairie that held the soil in place and maintained moisture. Then, in 1930, a severe drought struck the Great Plains region, which lasted nearly the entire decade. The regions affected most by this drought were the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, western Kansas, and large portions of Colorado and New Mexico.
The more than one million acres that was affected became collectively known as "The Dust Bowl". As the drought grew worse, the topsoil turned to dust and blew away. The blowing dust generated enormous dust storms that reached as far east as Washington D.
C. ! The dust storms became known as "black blizzards".
During the decade of the 1930s, the Dust Bowl region received anywhere from 15-25% less precipitation than normal. For a region that only sees about twenty inches of rain a year, this means that some areas were receiving as little as fifteen inches of rain in one year (in some years, even less than that! ).
As the decade wore on, and the severity of the Dust Bowl increased, efforts were made to correct the conditions. The Civilian Conservation Corps planted more than 200 million trees from Texas to Canada in an attempt to block the wind and hold the soil in place. Farmers were also instructed in soil conservation techniques such as crop rotation, contour plowing, and terracing.
In some cases, the government even paid farmers a dollar an acre to practice one of these conservation techniques. By the end of the 1930s, they had succeeded in reducing the amount of blowing dust by 65%. By the time the rainfall returned to normal levels, nearly 75% of the topsoil had been blown away in some areas.
It would be years before the region recovered completely.
