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The dust bowl was a very tedious time to live in. It was also a time when money could be made very quickly and can be lost just as fast as it was gained. The problems of the dustbowl were caused by a cascade of events. The biggest of these events would undoubtedly be because of drought. There was no rain, no moisture and that meant that no farmer in the plains could plant any crop there to make a profit for his or her family.
The drought, being the single most devastating effect on planting crops in the Great Plains, proved to be a force of devastation for many years. Moreover, since there was little rain it was virtually impossible to plant anything that could survive the harvesting season during the dustbowl. If you have no rain and no moisture
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They were not a force to be reckoned with. In the movie The Dust Bowl by Ken Burns, it states that the storms reached a height of 10,000 feet high. The movie also states that, the results of the dust storm was horrifying such as feet of sand, people being buried alive, animals along with crop dying because of these storms.
The drought along with the dust storms as stated already made it impossible to plant crops, it also made it very difficult to provide food for the farmers and their families. If you could not plant anything, you did not have food for animals and you did not have food for families or children that needed it desperately. There was a sudden urgency of concern once farmers could not feed their family and members of those families started to starve.
A lack of food would seem to be the bottom line where families finally understood that there was nothing in the Great Plains except for hardship and death of crops along with livestock. In the Ken Burns documentary it states “convinced that the storms were a freak accident, that the rains would soon return, residents could not imagine that they had entered a battle that would last a decade.” This was the mind set of many farms during that time, that the storms was an accident and that it would not last, however, they were proved to be wrong and the issues
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They would think that, more lands would be more profit gained. The very fact that every inch of land could be bought along with lack of conservation for that bought land, it is easy to see how the land of the Great Plains became, in a way, a new desert or wasteland.
This was a very serious problem, because the success of crops when the land did get some rain or moisture, would be heavily affected on how neighboring farmers would treat their land. If one farmer abused his or her land, it would cause problems for other farmers as well.
The lack of rain was another big issue during this time, some farmers would argue that it was the root cause for everything. No rain meant farmers could not make a profit, or obtain food and everything just rooted and expanded onto this problem. It does show that nature played a role into the dustbowl, but it was no the main reason for it.
The over farming for crops, the bad management of those crops made it for what it was, for a long time. It was as if a hole was dug, and it was becoming bigger by every year with no one knowing how to fix the hole. Some issues were nature, but a lot was from the actions of the farmers
The farmers had torn out millions of miles of prairie grass so that they could farm there. Without the grass, dust began to kick up and storm around the air causing dust storms.
The Dust Bowl was the name given to the Great Plains area in the 1930s. Much of the region was an agricultural area and relied on it for most of their economy. Combined with The Great Depression and the dust storms, farmers in the Great Plains area were severely hurt. These farmers were seeking opportunity elsewhere near the Pacific where they were mistreated by the others already there. The mistreatment is a form of disenfranchisement, by excluding and segregating a group of people from the rest of society. The disenfranchisement of the Oklahoma farmers during the 1930s was caused by a combination of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression which led to the farmers being forced to move west where they were mistreated because there were not enough jobs.
The Dust Bowl occurred for many reasons, most all our fault. “Some of the reasons that the Dust Bowl occurred were over-farming, livestock overgrazing, drought and poor farming practices.” (Dust Bowl facts and summary) Because of this negative experience it now teached us to be careful and now we know what to do to prevent this.“When drought struck from 1934 to 1937, the soil lacked the stronger root system of grass as an anchor.”("Dust Bowl Facts and summary") That's really bad for the farmers because then the wind can easily pick up the dirt off the
The dust bowl was the worst environmental disaster in the U.S history. Farming practices changed as a result of the Dust bowl. Farmers changed how they plow / take care of their field.There are also many conservation programs and measures implemented as a result and many farmers have fixed drought problems so their soil does not get to dry.
The Dust Bowl occurred during the Great Depression, which made it even worse! The Dust Bowl forced farmers out of business. Prices for the crops the farmers grew took a major dip. The total assistance is estimated at $1 billion for the Dust Bowl, according to Dust Bowl effects. The 2012 drought also forced farmers to panic. Due to the drought, food prices went up and farm spending was reduced. The farmers were not bringing in the money as they once were, since people didn't want to buy their products. According to 2012 drought costs, the drought cost taxpayers a record $14 billion!
Unfortunately, the circumstances in the Great Plains all came to a head, resulting in a horrific ten years for citizens of the Great Plains. The Dust Bowl caused government and people to look at farming practices and evaluate their output. These policies resulted in overproduction of crops, causing the prices to fall. The conclusion of World War I and countries that stopped importing foods added to the pain the farmers were already feeling.
Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Colorado and Kansas were all victims. They suffered for hours on end of dust blowing through the air into their eyes, mouths and noses. Life could not survive the dustbowl either. Trees were once planted in hopes of collecting the dust, but instead the trees sucked all the water out of the ground. Making the dust even worse. Many tried to leave and find land elsewhere but nobody wanted them there because of low amounts of money.
The Dust Bowl was a treacherous storm, which occurred in the 1930's, that affected the midwestern people, for example the farmers, and which taught us new technologies and methods of farming. As John Steinbeck wrote in his 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath: "And then the dispossessed were drawn west- from Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico; from Nevada and Arkansas, families, tribes, dusted out. Carloads, caravans, homeless and hungry; twenty thousand and fifty thousand and a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand. They streamed over the mountains, hungry and restless - restless as ants, scurrying to find work to do - to lift, to push, to pull, to pick, to cut - anything, any burden to bear, for food. The kids are hungry. We got no place to live. Like ants scurrying for work, for food, and most of all for land." The early thirties opened with prosperity and growth. At the time the Midwest was full of agricultural growth. The Panhandle of the Oklahoma and Texas region was marked contrast to the long soup lines of the Eastern United States.
In the book Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s the author, Donald Worster, makes the argument that the Dust Bowl was a mostly a direct result of farmer’s methods and misuse of the fragile plains environment. However, there were many other largely contributing factors to the Dust Bowl. While the farmer’s methods played a role, other factors such as economic decline, unusually high temperatures, an extended drought accompanied by and economic depression, and the resulting wind erosion were all factors that help explain The Dust Bowl.
The Dust Bowl was "the darkest moment in the twentieth-century life of the southern plains," (pg. 4) as described by Donald Worster in his book "The Dust Bowl." It was a time of drought, famine, and poverty that existed in the 1930's. It's cause, as Worster presents in a very thorough manner, was a chain of events that was perpetuated by the basic capitalistic society's "need" for expansion and consumption. Considered by some as one of the worst ecological catastrophes in the history of man, Worster argues that the Dust Bowl was created not by nature's work, but by an American culture that was working exactly the way it was planned. In essence, the Dust Bowl was the effect of a society, which deliberately set out to take all it could from the earth while giving next to nothing back.
The opening chapter paints a vivid picture of the situation facing the drought-stricken farmers of Oklahoma. Dust is described a covering everything, smothering the life out of anything that wants to grow. The dust is symbolic of the erosion of the lives of the people. The dust is synonymous with "deadness". The land is ruined ^way of life (farming) gone, people ^uprooted and forced to leave. Secondly, the dust stands for ^profiteering banks in the background that squeeze the life out the land by forcing the people off the land. The soil, the people (farmers) have been drained of life and are exploited:
When the crops were plentiful, the harvest would bring money and food and supplies for the next year's crop. Rain had an enormous impact on the farmers. Too much or too little could be devastating to their crops or the food supply of farm animals, and they affected the farmers who were dependent them....
on their territory, they soon realized their crops could not grown properly. The land they
To begin with, the “Dust Bowl” was one of the causes of economic fallout which resulted in the Great Depression. Because the “Dust Bowl” destroyed crops which were used to sell and make profit, the government had to give up a lot of money in order to try and help the people and land affected by the “Dust Bowl”. The “Dust Bowl” refers to a time during the 1930’s where the Great Plains region was drastically devastated by drought. All of the areas (Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico) all had little to no rainfall, light soil, and high winds, which were not a very suitable combination. The drought lasted from 1934 to 1937, most of the soil during the drought lacked the better root system of grass.
However, the storms, floods, fire and drought that are already playing havoc with agriculture are likely to have a significant negative impact, along with the longer term flooding of coastal areas.