The Dust Bowl is a natural disaster that devastated the Midwest in the 1930s.

It was
the worst drought in North America. Unsustainable farming practices worsened the
droughts effect. It killed the crops that kept the soil in place. When winds blew, they
raised enormous clouds of dust. It deposited mounds of dirt on everything, even
covering houses. Dust suffocated livestock and caused pneumonia in children. At its
worst, the storm blew dust to Washington, D.C. The drought and dust destroyed a
large part of U.S. agricultural production. The Dust Bowl made the Great Depression
even worse. There were four waves of droughts, one right after another. They
occurred in 1930-1931, 1934, 1936, and 1939-1940. But it felt like one long drought.
The affected regions could not recover before the next one hit. The last drought didn't
end until 1940.

The lessons learned from the Dust Bowl are as important today as they were in the
1930s. As the world’s population continues to grow, so does the demand for food and
fiber. For example, we expect that food production will need to double by 2050 to
keep up with these demands. As a result of the Dust Bowl, many Midwest farmers
decided to abandon their farms and relocate. The Dust Bowl exodus was an
unparalleled migration considering its short period. During the 1930s some 3.5
million people left the Great Plains. Many moved to California where they hoped to
fair better and begin anew. It was not uncommon to see automobiles piled high with
belongings making their way across New Mexico and Arizona.

According to the Encyclopedia Brittanica, 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 2,500 feet
(760 m) in the east to 6,000 feet (1,800 m) at the base of the Rocky Mountains. As
stated in the Balance website, that summarizes the events that happened from
1930-1941. The year 1930-1931 is the first drought ravaged 23 states in the
Mississippi and Ohio river valleys. It reached as far east as the mid-Atlantic region
and hit eight Southern states. Deflation during the Depression drove cotton prices
down from 16.79 cents per pound in 1929 to 5.66 cents a pound in 1931. The drought
reduced cotton yields from six bales an acre to two bales an acre during the same
period. It cost farmers more to plant cotton than they could get selling it. Between
30% and 50% of Arkansas crops failed. Farmers could not produce enough food to eat.
President Herbert Hoover refused to help. He believed it would make people weak.
The Red Cross supplied $5 million to plant seeds. The only crop that would grow was
turnips. As the drought continued, Congress appropriated $45 million for seed and
$20 million for food rations. In 1932, there were 14 dust storms. In 1933, that
increased to 48 storms. In the year 1934, the third drought created the hottest year on
record until 2014. There were 29 consecutive days with temperatures above 100
degrees Fahrenheit. Almost 80% of the country recorded bone-dry conditions. On
April 15, 1934, the worst dust storm occurred. It was later named Black Sunday.
Several weeks later, President Franklin D. Roosevelt passed the Soil Conservation Act.
It taught farmers how to plant in a more sustainable way. It continued on 1936, the
drought returned with the hottest summer on record. In June, eight states experienced
temperatures at 110 F or greater. They were Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana,
Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, and Tennessee. In July, the heat wave hit 12 more
states. They were Iowa, Kansas with 121 degrees, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota,
New Jersey, North Dakota with 121 degrees, Oklahoma with 120 degrees,
Pennsylvania, South Dakota with 120 degrees, West Virginia, and Wisconsin. All of
these states broke or tied their record temperatures. In August, Texas saw 120 F
record-breaking temperatures. It was also the deadliest heat wave in U.S. history,
killing 1,693 people. Another 3,500 people drowned while trying to cool off. Around
the year 1939 - 1940, the heat and drought returned. Louisiana experienced 115
consecutive days of 90 F days between June 9 and September 29, 1939. That was a
record for the Southeast. By 1941, rainfall levels had returned to near-normal levels.
The rains helped to end the Dust Bowl and Great Depression.

Nature is beautiful and we are the stewards. The unsustainable farming practices
worsened the droughts effects. As stated by Trimarchi, the seeds of the Dust Bowl
may have been sowed during the early 1920s. A post-World War I recession led
farmers to try new mechanized farming techniques as a way to increase profits. Many
bought plows and other farming equipment, and between 1925 and 1930 more than 5
million acres of previously unfarmed land was plowed. With the help of mechanized
farming, farmers produced record crops during the 1931 season. However,
overproduction of wheat coupled with the Great Depression led to severely reduced
market prices. What happened could be explained the concept of Law of Supply and
Demand. That when there is overproduction, the price would decrease. She added that
the wheat market was flooded, and people were too poor to buy. Farmers were unable
to earn back their production costs and expanded their fields in an effort to turn a
profit, they covered the prairie with wheat in place of the natural drought-resistant
grasses and left any unused fields bare. But plow-based farming in this region
cultivated an unexpected yield: the loss of fertile topsoil that literally blew away in the
winds, leaving the land vulnerable to drought and inhospitable for growing crops. In a
brutal twist of fate, the rains stopped. By 1932, 14 dust storms, known as black
blizzards were reported, and in just one year, the number increased to nearly 40.
All forms of life are important. The government send aid to the drought affected states.
But, as the dust storms worsened, it forced farmers out of business. They lost both
their livelihoods and their homes. Deflation from the Depression aggravated the plight
of Dust Bowl farmers. Prices for the crops they could grow fell below subsistence
levels. In 1933, farmers slaughtered 6 million pigs to reduce supply and boost prices.
The public protested the waste of food. In response, the federal government created
the Surplus Relief Corporation. That made sure excess farm output went to feed the
poor. After that, Congress appropriated the first funds earmarked for drought relief.

By 1934, farmers had sold 10% of all their farms. Half of those sales were caused by
the depression and drought. By 1937, more than one out of five farmers were on
federal emergency relief. Families migrated to California or cities to find work that
had disappeared by the time they got there. Many ended up living as homeless. Others
lived in shantytowns called “Hoovervilles" named after then-President Herbert
Hoover. By 1936, 21% of all rural families in the Great Plains received federal
emergency relief. In some counties, it was as high as 90%.
In 1937, the Works Progress Administration reported that drought was the main
reason for relief in the Dust Bowl region. More than two-thirds were farmers. Total
assistance was estimated at $1 billion in 1930s dollars.

Everything changes. After the dust bowl, the government encouraged farmers to:
terrace, use contour farming techniques , use irrigation, use stubble mulching, use
crop rotation, and plant shelter belts. What happened, became a lesson to some of the
farmers. President Franklin D. Roosevelt established a number of measures to help
alleviate the plight of poor and displaced farmers. He also addressed the
environmental degradation that had led to the Dust Bowl in the first place. Congress
established the Soil Erosion Service and the Prairie States Forestry Project in 1935.
These programs put local farmers to work planting trees as windbreaks on farms
across the Great Plains. The Soil Erosion Service, now called the Natural Resources
Conservation Service (NRCS) implemented new farming techniques to combat the
problem of soil erosion.

Ours is a finite Earth. Dust inhalation was probably the most dangerous aspect. The
dust was so fine that it was almost impossible not to inhale. Many people, especially
children, died from dust pneumonia, a lung condition resulting from inhaling
excessive dust. According the article of West, the disaster gives way to hope
More than a quarter million people fled the Dust Bowl during the
1930s—environmental refugees who no longer had the reason or courage to stay.
Three times that number remained on the land and continued to battle the dust and to
search the sky for signs of rain. In 1936, the people got their first glimmer of hope.
Hugh Bennett, an agricultural expert, persuaded Congress to finance a federal
program to pay farmers to use new farming techniques that would conserve topsoil
and gradually restore the land. By 1937, the Soil Conservation Service had been
established, and by the following year, soil loss had been reduced by 65 percent.
Nevertheless, the drought continued until the autumn of 1939, when rains finally
returned to the parched and damaged prairie.

Everything is connected to everything else. Among the most important damages that
took place was the loss of large amounts of topsoil, which eventually blew east, being
lost to the Atlantic Ocean. Large swaths of farmland were rendered useless for
productive reasons, and many people lost their farms, being forced to move away to
find jobs elsewhere. In the famous novel of John Steinbeck, “The Grapes of Wrath,”
tells the story of one of these Dust Bowl families that lost their land. Besides this,
there was the loss of large amounts of crops, that failed to grow to maturity because
they were rendered unusable, or died, as a result of being smothered by large amounts
of dust. Some cattle and people also died due to overexposure to the excessive
amounts of dust.

Nature knows best. "The Worst Hard Time," written by Egan, he states that, “The high
plains never fully recovered from the Dust Bowl. The land came through the 1930s
deeply scarred and forever changed, but in places, it healed. After more than sixty-five
years, some of the land is still sterile and drifting. But in the heart of the old Dust
Bowl now are three national grasslands run by the Forest Service. The land is green in
the spring and burns in the summer, as it did in the past, and antelope come through
and graze, wandering among replanted buffalo grass and the old footings of
farmsteads long abandoned.”

There were many lessons learned, and they were learned not just by farmers in that
region of the country, but also by the government. The farmers were motivated to
learn what caused it, and stop it from happening again, and the government decided to
set up new regulations and agencies to deal with the Dust Bowl problem, and make
sure that practices were put in place to keep this blighted event from happening again.
Unfortunately, like so many times in our human and U.S. history, the changes were
retroactive and reactionary, rather than proactive and preventative. Farmers, with the
aid of our government, through farmer education programs, were taught practices that
helped with soil conservation and prevented erosion. Among these practices were strip
farming, where alternating strips of planted and fallow land were grown, and in
certain directions, to help prevent wind erosion; crop rotation, to change up the crops
being grown on pieces of land, and to make sure pieces of land had fallow seasons;
contour plowing, especially on land that is slightly rolling, to keep the soil from going
downhill, and to make sure the plowing was done in the direction of the contour lines
of the land; terracing, to make sure that land on rolling terrain would have stepped,
level surfaces on which to grow crops, as well as to keep the soil from going downhill.
These practices, along with other farming practices, such as occasionally wetting the
soil to keep it from becoming dry, and mulching the crop stubble to work as a
covering to open soil, have helped to reduce the possibility of another major dust
storm, like as occurred during the Dust Bowl era.

The government also took steps based on the lessons learned from this catastrophe.
They took marginal land that should never have been plowed over, and returned it to a
natural state of prairie grassland. They made an effort to plant more than 200 million
trees, from the Canadian border to Texas, near Abilene, in a swath 100 miles wide, as
a means to work as a wind break, to hold in water moisture in the ground, and to help
hold the soil in place. They also took efforts to feed people who no longer had food to
eat, and to buy back and slaughter animals that farmers couldn’t afford to keep. They
created agencies for tackling issues like this, such as one that is now known as the
Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) which facilitated the education of
farmers of these new practices that assisted with soil conservation and prevention of
soil erosion, like as talked about in the last paragraph. They also created laws that
helped to control market prices to stop motivating farmers from plowing over land
that they shouldn’t.