Dust Bowl And Calamity

The Dust Bowl was the name given to the drought-stricken Southern Plains region of the United States, which endures harsh dust storms all along a dry period in the 1930s. As fasting winds and choking dust clear the area from Texas to Nebraska, people and animals were killed and crops failed across the whole region. The Dust Bowl became worse causing the crushing economic collision of the Great Depression and drove many farming families on a desperate migration in search of work and better living conditions.
What Caused the Dust Bowl?
The Dust Bowl was bring about by various economic and agricultural factors, containing federal land policies, changes in adjustment weather, farm economics and other cultural factors. After the Civil War, a series of federal land acts coaxed pioneers westward by incentivizing farming in the Great Plains.
The Homestead Act of 1862, which provided settlers with 160 acres of public land, was followed by the Kinkaid Act of 1904 and the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909. These acts led to a massive influx of new and inexperienced farmers across the Great Plains.
Many of these late nineteenth and early twentieth century settlers lived by the superstition “rain follows the plow.” Emigrants, land speculators, politicians and even some scientists believed that homesteading and agriculture would forever change the climate of the semi-arid Great Plains region, making it more favorable for farming.
This fake assumption was linked to glaring Destiny—an attitude that Americans had a sacred duty to expand west. A succession of wet years during the period created further misinterpretation of the region’s ecology and led to the accelerated cultivation of increasingly minor lands that couldn’t be reached by irrigation.
Climbing wheat prices in the 1910s and 1920s and expanded demand for wheat from Europe during World War I encouraged farmers to plow up millions of acres of native grassland to plant wheat, corn and other row crops. When United States entered the Great Depression, wheat prices collapsed. Farmers rip up even more grassland in an attempt to harvest a bumper crop and break even.
Crops began to fail with the onset of drought in 1931, exposing the bare, over-plowed farmland. Without deep-rooted prairie grasses to hold the soil in place, it began to blow away. Destroyed soil led to colossal dust storms and economic destruction—especially in the Southern Plains.

By – Abhishek Singh
Content – www.history.com