Dust Bowl Dbq

According to the Great Plain Drought Area Committee Report (Doc. D), in 1879, 10 million acres of crop were harvested. 20 years later, in 1899, 50 million acres of crops were harvested, 5 times more crops than in 1879. In 1929, that number more than doubled to a 105 million acres of crops that were harvested. How did happen? Farming technology advanced rapidly from 1879 to 1929. In “The Worst Hard Time” by Timothy Egan (Doc. C), Egan wrote, “A tractor did the work of ten horses. With his new combine, Folkers could cut and thresh the grain in one swoop, using just a fraction of the labor.” The new farming technology made farming faster and it required less labor. Farmers had this new technology and used it to plow more land. Millions of acres were being plowed and farmed on and with the dry soil and no grass to keep it on the ground the dust became airborne and started grouping together and creating terrible storms.

As the years went by, farmers gained more advanced machines to harvest their crops. When the farmers gained new machines, they ended up over farming their land because the machines could harvest more crops in shorter time. In 1879, 10 million crops were harvested by a horse-drawn plow,  1899, 50 million crops were harvested by middle-aged machines, and 105 million crops were harvested by tractors in 1929  (Document D). Timothy Egan stated “Folkers plowed nearly his entire square mile,and then paid to rent nearby property and ripped up that grass as well” (Document C). However, the machines and over farming was not the only thing that caused the Dust Bowl.

The Dust Bowl, battering the Midwest for nearly a decade with high winds, bad farming techniques, and drought, became a pivotal point in American history. The wind storm that seemed relentless beginning in the early 1930’s until its spell ended in 1939, affected the lives of tens of thousands of Americans and the broader agriculture industry. The catastrophic effects of the Dust Bowl took place most prominently around the Great Plains, otherwise known as the farming belt, including states such as Oklahoma, Texas, and Kansas, which were hit extraordinarily hard. Millions of farming acres destroyed by poor farming techniques was a major contributor to what is considered to be one of the worst man-made environmental disasters in American history. This period resulted in almost a decade of unstable farming and economic despair. Thousands of families sought government assistance in order to survive. Luckily, government aid to farmers and new agriculture programs that were introduced to help save the nation’s agriculture industry benefited families and helped the Great Plains recover from the Dust Bowl. Furthermore, the poor conditions in the farm belt were also compounded by the Great Depression as it was in full swing as the Dust Bowl began to worsen. In addition, World War I was also underway which caused a high demand for agricultural products, such as wheat, corn, and potatoes to be at its peak, which lured many people to the farm belt with the false expectation that farming

For Dust Bowl residents, life was almost unbearable. The Dust Bowl was given its name after a huge dust storm in 1914 by Robert E. Geiger. The name “Dust Bowl” is very fitting because of the multiple dust storms that blew through the Great Plains during the 1930s. This also shows that everyone viewed the Great Plains as a dusty and treacherous place to live. In addition, “About 40 big storms swept through the Dust Bowl in 1935, with dust often reducing visibility to less than a mile” (Lookingbill 1). This

The Dust Bowl was one of the worst economic and tragic events of the 20th century. The Dust Bowl negatively affected people who lived there in a personal way. Some of them included how badly it had affected the children living in that time, how it had affected families health, and how badly it affected the economy causing a mass corruption.

Though most everyone has heard of the Dust Bowl, many people don’t actually know what it is. “When rain stopped falling in the Midwest, farm fields began to dry up” (The Dust Bowl). Much of the nation’s crops couldn’t grow, causing major economic struggle. "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” (Dust Bowl). This caused many inexperienced farmers to jump on this easy start of a career. Because of this, farmers in the Midwest had practiced atrocious land management for years. This included over plowing the land and using the same crops year after year. In this way, lots of fertile soil had gotten lost. This helped windstorms gather topsoil from the land, and whip it into huge clouds; dust storms. Hot, dry, and windy, almost the entire middle section of the United States was directly affected. The states affected were South

During the Great Depression farmers had to produce more wheat in order to turn a profit. They expanded their fields, and dug up natural drought resistant grasses, leaving the top soil vulnerable to wind erosion. Plow based farming also played a big role in making the top soil vulnerable to wind erosion. The severe drought taking place at the same time made things worse. Wind kicked up

The Dust Bowl negatively affected people who lived there in a personal way. The dust bowl was one of the worst natural disasters in the U.S.

The new technology used in American agriculture made it overall more productive and widespread while creating mixed results for the farmers. The advancement in machines like reapers, threshers, and mowers to harvest grains produced contrasting outcomes. An obvious benefit was some of the ease brought to the farmers. The human labor involved in harvesting grain by hand with a scythe or by a simple, one horse-powered machine was far greater than harvesting with a big, multi-horse powered machine. The devices made work simpler, faster, and more efficient for the farmers by relying on animal energy and technology (Document D). With promises of larger crops with less exertion, the new machines became very desirable to farmers in order to stay in competition with their peers; however, buying these machines also pushed many of them into unfortunate financial situations. Not only was the actual

The timeline of the dustbowl characterizes the fall of agriculture during the late 1920s, primarily the area in and surrounding the Great Plains. The Dust Bowl was created by a disruption in the areas natural balance. “With the crops and native vegetation gone, there was nothing to hold the topsoil to the ground” (“Dust Bowl and” 30). Agricultural expansion and dry farming techniques caused mass plowing and allowed little of the land to go fallow. With so little of the deeply rooted grass remaining in the Great Plains, all it took was an extended dry season to make the land grow dry and brittle. When most of the land had been enveloped by the grass dust storms weren’t even a yearly occurrence, but with the exponentiation of exposed land, the winds had the potential to erode entire acres. This manmade natural disaster consumed such a large amount of the South's agriculture that it had repercussions on the national level. The Dust Bowl was a “97-million-acre section

4. Because farmers could only afford one machine most times, most farmers specialized in what crop the machine worked best with.

With many farmers having such high yields, there was an abundance of crops so the prices fell and a farmer had to plant more in order to have enough money to support their families. The Enlarged Homestead Act guaranteed 320 acres of land to farmers who were willing to take land that were considered to be marginal and could not be irrigated well. They plowed up the virgin soil and planted acres and acres of golden wheat, leaving the land vulnerable to the elements after the yearly harvest. The farmers also implemented the use of fossil fuel ran machinery that made it easier to plow up hundreds of acres in a short period of time, which exposed even more soil than what would have been open to the elements had the farming been done by an animal pulled plow. The massive influx of farmers because of that act caused major soil erosion which was made worse by the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.

The farmers in America had a very difficult time when the Great Depression occurred. “People who grew up during the Depression said, ‘No one had any money. We were all in the same boat.’ Neighbors helped each other through hard times, sickness, and accidents” (Bill Ganzel). Because no other profession gave enough money at the time, buying much of a farmer’s produce was not in their price range. Farmers would have to either lower their prices or make no profit at all. Though a wide variety of issues made a farmer’s job difficult in the 1930s, the problems mainly all arose as a result of tenant farmers (people who rented land to farm). Tractors became available, though expensive, and many landowners would buy one which ended up causing problems (Bill Ganzel). Due to the lack of money, affording a tractor for each tenant farmer on a landowner’s

As a result of The Dust Bowl, many farms were affected and destroyed leaving hundreds of families with any crops. During the game

Farmers were paid close to a dollar an acre for the areas to which they applied the new farming techniques. The land that was acquired from the displaced farmers were re-seeded into grass to prevent further wind erosion. Lorene White said, “My dad was stubborn. The government would try to help. He would just refuse. He didn’t want to disgrace the family by receiving help” (Surviving the Dust Bowl). In 1941, rain poured down on the region, dust storms ceased, crops thrived, economic prosperity returned, and the historic Dust Bowl was over. Contour planting became another solution to the erosion problem; they plowed furrows that followed the slop of the land instead of in a straight line