THE DUST BOWL, THE BIG DROUGHTS IN NORTH AMERICA

The Dust Bowl, The USA, 1930's

Today, The Grandma is relaxing at home. She has corrected the last exams of The Watsons and she has decided to read a little.

She has chosen an amazing theme, the Dust Bowl, the period of severe dust storms that greatly damaged the ecology and agriculture of the American and Canadian prairies during the 1930s.

On a day like today in 1935, the Dust Bowl heat wave reached its peak, sending temperatures to 43 °C in Chicago and 40 °C in Milwaukee.

This phenomenon explains how important is to know and respect nature and not alterating it. Nowadays, we listen to a lot of stories about climate change but, in fact, is something very old, as old as the direct influence of the human on nature.

The Dust Bowl was a period of severe dust storms that greatly damaged the ecology and agriculture of the American and Canadian prairies during the 1930s; severe drought and a failure to apply dryland farming methods to prevent the Aeolian processes (wind erosion) caused the phenomenon.

The drought came in three waves, 1934, 1936, and 1939–1940, but some regions of the High Plains experienced drought conditions for as many as eight years.

With insufficient understanding of the ecology of the plains, farmers had conducted extensive deep plowing of the virgin topsoil of the Great Plains during the previous decade; this had displaced the native, deep-rooted grasses that normally trapped soil and moisture even during periods of drought and high winds.

More information: Smithsonian

The rapid mechanization of farm equipment, especially small gasoline tractors, and widespread use of the combine harvester contributed to farmers' decisions to convert arid grassland, much of which received no more than 250 mm of precipitation per year to cultivated cropland.

During the drought of the 1930s, the unanchored soil turned to dust, which the prevailing winds blew away in huge clouds that sometimes blackened the sky. These choking billows of dust -named black blizzards or black rollers -travelled cross country, reaching as far as the East Coast and striking such cities as New York City and Washington, D.C. On the plains, they often reduced visibility to 1 m or less.

Associated Press reporter Robert E. Geiger happened to be in Boise City, Oklahoma, to witness the Black Sunday black blizzards of April 14, 1935; Edward Stanley, the Kansas City news editor of the Associated Press, coined the term Dust Bowl while rewriting Geiger's news story.

The Dust Bowl, The USA, 1930's

While the term the Dust Bowl was originally a reference to the geographical area affected by the dust, today it usually refers to the event itself, the term Dirty Thirties is also sometimes used.

The drought and erosion of the Dust Bowl affected 400,000 km2 that centered on the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma and touched adjacent sections of New Mexico, Colorado, and Kansas.

The Dust Bowl forced tens of thousands of poverty-stricken families to abandon their farms, unable to pay mortgages or grow crops, and losses reached $25 million per day by 1936 (equivalent to $460,000,000 in 2020). Many of these families, who were often known as Okies because so many of them came from Oklahoma, migrated to California and other states to find that the Great Depression had rendered economic conditions there little better than those they had left.

The Dust Bowl has been the subject of many cultural works, notably the novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939) by John Steinbeck, the folk music of Woody Guthrie, and photographs depicting the conditions of migrants by Dorothea Lange.

The Dust Bowl area lies principally west of the 100th meridian on the High Plains, characterized by plains which vary from rolling in the north to flat in the Llano Estacado. Elevation ranges from 760 m in the east to 1,800 m at the base of the Rocky Mountains. The area is semiarid, receiving less than 510 mm of rain annually; this rainfall supports the shortgrass prairie biome originally present in the area.

More information: History Collection

The region is also prone to extended drought, alternating with unusual wetness of equivalent duration. During wet years, the rich soil provides bountiful agricultural output, but crops fail during dry years. The region is also subject to high winds.

During early European and American exploration of the Great Plains, this region was thought unsuitable for European-style agriculture; explorers called it the Great American Desert.

The lack of surface water and timber made the region less attractive than other areas for pioneer settlement and agriculture.

The federal government encouraged settlement and development of the Plains for agriculture via the Homestead Act of 1862, offering settlers 65 ha plots.

With the end of the Civil War in 1865 and the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad in 1869, waves of new migrants and immigrants reached the Great Plains, and they greatly increased the acreage under cultivation.

The Dust Bowl, The USA, 1930's

An unusually wet period in the Great Plains mistakenly led settlers and the federal government to believe that rain follows the plow, a popular phrase among real estate promoters, and that the climate of the region had changed permanently.

While initial agricultural endeavours were primarily cattle ranching, the adverse effect of harsh winters on the cattle, beginning in 1886, a short drought in 1890, and general overgrazing, led many landowners to increase the amount of land under cultivation.

Recognizing the challenge of cultivating marginal arid land, the United States government expanded on the 65 ha offered under the Homestead Act -granting 260 ha to homesteaders in western Nebraska under the Kinkaid Act (1904) and 130 ha elsewhere in the Great Plains under the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909.

Waves of European settlers arrived in the plains at the beginning of the 20th century.

A return of unusually wet weather seemingly confirmed a previously held opinion that the formerly semiarid area could support large-scale agriculture. At the same time, technological improvements such as mechanized plowing and mechanized harvesting made it possible to operate larger properties without increasing labour costs.

The combined effects of the disruption of the Russian Revolution, which decreased the supply of wheat and other commodity crops, and World War I increased agricultural prices; this demand encouraged farmers to dramatically increase cultivation. For example, in the Llano Estacado of eastern New Mexico and north western Texas, the area of farmland was doubled between 1900 and 1920, and then tripled again between 1925 and 1930.

More information: The Balance

The agricultural methods favoured by farmers during this period created the conditions for large-scale erosion under certain environmental conditions.

The widespread conversion of the land by deep plowing and other soil preparation methods to enable agriculture eliminated the native grasses which held the soil in place and helped retain moisture during dry periods. Furthermore, cotton farmers left fields bare during winter months, when winds in the High Plains are highest, and burned the stubble as a means to control weeds prior to planting, thereby depriving the soil of organic nutrients and surface vegetation.

After fairly favourable climatic conditions in the 1920s with good rainfall and relatively moderate winters, which permitted increased settlement and cultivation in the Great Plains, the region entered an unusually dry era in the summer of 1930. During the next decade, the northern plains suffered four of their seven driest calendar years since 1895, Kansas four of its twelve driest, and the entire region south to West Texas lacked any period of above-normal rainfall until record rains hit in 1941.

When severe drought struck the Great Plains region in the 1930s, it resulted in erosion and loss of topsoil because of farming practices at the time. The drought dried the topsoil and over time it became friable, reduced to a powdery consistency in some places.

The Dust Bowl, The USA, 1930's

Without the indigenous grasses in place, the high winds that occur on the plains picked up the topsoil and created the massive dust storms that marked the Dust Bowl period.

The persistent dry weather caused crops to fail, leaving the plowed fields exposed to wind erosion. The fine soil of the Great Plains was easily eroded and carried east by strong continental winds.

On November 11, 1933, a very strong dust storm stripped topsoil from desiccated South Dakota farmlands in just one of a series of severe dust storms that year. 

Beginning on May 9, 1934, a strong, two-day dust storm removed massive amounts of Great Plains topsoil in one of the worst such storms of the Dust Bowl. The dust clouds blew all the way to Chicago, where they deposited 5500 tonnes of dust. Two days later, the same storm reached cities to the east, such as Cleveland, Buffalo, Boston, New York City, and Washington, D.C. That winter (1934–1935), red snow fell on New England.

On April 14, 1935, known as Black Sunday, 20 of the worst black blizzards occurred across the entire sweep of the Great Plains, from Canada south to Texas. The dust storms caused extensive damage and appeared to turn the day to night; witnesses reported that they could not see five feet in front of them at certain points.

Denver-based Associated Press reporter Robert E. Geiger happened to be in Boise City, Oklahoma, that day. His story about Black Sunday marked the first appearance of the term Dust Bowl; it was coined by Edward Stanley, Kansas City news editor of the Associated Press, while rewriting Geiger's news story.

More information: The Atlantic

The greatly expanded participation of government in land management and soil conservation was an important outcome from the disaster. Different groups took many different approaches to responding to the disaster. To identify areas that needed attention, groups such as the Soil Conservation Service generated detailed soil maps and took photos of the land from the sky.

To create shelterbelts to reduce soil erosion, groups such as the United States Forestry Service's Prairie States Forestry Project planted trees on private lands. Finally, groups like the Resettlement Administration, which later became the Farm Security Administration, encouraged small farm owners to resettle on other lands, if they lived in drier parts of the Plains.

During President Franklin D. Roosevelt's first 100 days in office in 1933, his administration quickly initiated programs to conserve soil and restore the ecological balance of the nation. Interior Secretary Harold L. Ickes established the Soil Erosion Service in August 1933 under Hugh Hammond Bennett.

In 1935, it was transferred and reorganized under the Department of Agriculture and renamed the Soil Conservation Service. It is now known as the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS).

As part of New Deal programs, Congress passed the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act in 1936, requiring landowners to share the allocated government subsidies with the labourers who worked on their farms.

Under the law, benefit payments were continued as measures for production control and income support, but they were now financed by direct Congressional appropriations and justified as soil conservation measures. The Act shifted the parity goal from price equality of agricultural commodities and the articles that farmers buy to income equality of farm and non-farm population.

Thus, the parity goal was to re-create the ratio between the purchasing power of the net income per person on farms from agriculture and that of the income of persons not on farms that prevailed during 1909–1914.

More information: Soap Boxie

As a young girl, I saw commitment in my grandmother,

who helped Grandpa homestead our farm on the Kansas prairie.

Somehow they outlasted the Dust Bowl, the Depression,

and the tornadoes that terrorize the Great Plains.

Sheri L. Dew