Dust Bowl Dbq

Seemingly innocent, in the 1900s there began the worst manmade catastrophe to ever be recorded in history, the Dust Bowl. The Dust Bowl, also referred to as the “Dirty Thirties,” was a time of extremely disastrous dust storms that significantly affected the agriculture of the U.S. Promised cheap land, farmers engulfed the Southern Plains and began to plow the land to grow wheat, not taking into consideration the climate and soil or ecology of the land; and there was the biggest mistake made in the Dust Bowl. During the drought of the 1930s, the soil was turned into dust and the wind blew the dust in huge clouds, which would sometimes cause the sky to blacken, giving it the name “black blizzard.” Dust storms mostly affected areas of Texas,
Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, and Oklahoma. Severe erosion and drought affected 100,000,000 of land and caused extreme migration.
At the beginning of the dust bowl, there began “The Great Plowup,” a period in which the grasslands of the southern U.S.
plains were plowed extensively into wheat fields. At first, the economy was strong, but then in 1929 the stock market crashed. Farmers would move into the plains and plow the soil to plant wheat, leaving only dust to remain. Millions of acres were plowed. The farmers paid no attention to the drought; they just wanted to make cash. They lay idle, ignoring the drought that would bring terror last for eight years. What the farmers didn’t know was that they were cheated. Encouraged by cheap land, the farmers moved onto the Great Plains. Without knowing that the government was using them as a tool, farmers would come into the land and begin planting wheat and selling it, boosting the economy; but then due to the vast amount of producers, the prices would go into an all time low. With families moving into the Great Plains, population was extremely higher. Geoff Cunfer from Southern Minnesota State University states, “The population of the Great Plains – 450 counties stretching from Texas and New Mexico to the Dakotas and Montana – stood at only 800,000 in 1880; it was seven times that, at 5.6 million in 1930.” This caused more people to be affected by the dust storms than ever recorded in
history.
During the period when farmers began planting wheat, the Great Plains was deeply immersed with sod. To be able to plant crops, farmers had to break the sod by cutting it deep with modern farming equipment and machinery such as a plow. The plow would make the issue much worse, making it easier to break the sod; and the more sod broken, the more crops planted. The more crops planted, the more possibility for soil erosion there was. This would make it possible to plant crops and eventually lead to the term “sodbusters,” but be disastrous in the long run.
Dustbowl farmers were caught in an economic disaster and offered help by Hoover and Roosevelt administrations.