Dust Bowl

A depression discussion at work included the dust bowl and got me thinking about the FACTS.
So I will tell you what I have heard/ read/ seen on tv/ learned in school; and you correct me where I am wrong.
You can also add anything I missed.

While the dust bowl is made out to be the entire U.S. and Canada plains the hardest and longest hit area was around the Oklahoma panhandle.
This would include SW Kansas; SE Colorado; NE New Mexico; and northern part of the Texas panhandle.

At first the land was opened to homesteading.
It was during the wet years so farmers had large crops.
Because of this they plowed up more and more acres of prairie grass.
Some homesteaders even thought the depression may not hit their local area because of the large harvest.

Then the rain stopped.
Since farmers had given up moldboard plowing for easier methods of plowing they made the situation worse.
Even though there was no rain to speak of they plowed and planted a crop thinking this year would be better.
This went on for close to 10 years.

They tried several ways to prevent the dust.
Even planted trees threw a government works project.
Most likely a waste of time because the area does not get enough rain for trees to grow long term.

Near the end they went back to moldboard plowing and contouring the land.
I do not know if this was even proved successful because the rain started again.

Today we prevent another dust bowl with wells and irrigation.
This will last as long as the wells do not run dry.
But if and when they do look out because we could have another dust bowl era.

You are mostly right.

Drought sucks, plain and simple, and while irrigation can counteract a lack of rain, it is like you said dependent upon the source of irrigation water. Wells or irrigation channels dry up, and the irrigation land is in the same boat as dry land.

Now, as for the dust and wind erosion, it depends on tillage and seeding practices. Up here in Alberta, minimum tillage and no-tillage are quite popular. It conserves moisture in the seedbed, plus the stubble from the previous year holds the soil from blowing away, as well as provides a wind break for the new crop until it is well established.

So in essence, I could see a long term drought happening, but not another dust bowl.

They however did NOT go back to moldboard plowing. Excessive moldboarding was the root cause of the poor soil structure that enabled it to be lifted by the winds. After the dust bowl there was a large adoption of disk tillers/one way seeders, chisel plows and sub soiling to replace moldboard plowing. They figured out real quick it was better to leave a decent percentage of your stubble mixed into and laying on top of the first few inches of soil to help retain moisture and prevent erosion. That region of the country was where a big chunk of the pioneering work on conservation tillage took place.

You are mostly right, but as mentioned you have the tillage a bit wrong.

They had some form of multi or light tillage which worked well for their dry soils. When the wet years came they switched to heavier plowing, which makes a better crop in wet times.

There were some grain shortages going on in the world, and prices went up, and any non farmer could buy a tractor and plow and some dust acres and make a mint in a year, the grain economics were on an upward spiral and land costs didn?t catch up.....

Then the dry years returned and it took real work and real knowledge to make those dry acres produce; the farmers of the day were overwhelmed and didn?t know and the plow was the wrong thing for the times and everyone was used to a money tree, now it was back to a soup bone and so the ecconomics went to heck everyone was under water and couldn?t afford to try anything new or better the money was all gone.




We are suffering the opposite up here now, years of flooding and wet and water. The flood bowl doesn?t quit sound right, have to come up with a name.

Paul

I read in a history of the bowl that there was a practice introduced to "capture" moisture by plowing ground after any rain. Apparently this actually kept the soil churned up and added to the loss when it got windy.

Moldboard plowing worked during period before Dust Bowl because of higher than average rainfall.
Bolshevik Revolution that created the Soviet Union lowered wheat production,because nothing screws
up farming like government involvement. Higher grain prices from that and Europe rebuilding after WWI
made "suitcase " farming profitable.

My mother grew up in the dust bowl of Texas.She could tell you some really bad stories from that time. Many commuted suicide over it.

Three aspects to Dust Bowl. Economic- possibly high wheat prices attracted people to farming in the south Plains area. Also the Great Depression was happening in the general economy. A drought happened in the 1930's at the same time folks were trying to crop grasslands that should not have been cropped, there was not enough annual rainfall to produce wheat crops. Farm bankruptcy's galore from crop failures. Ag practices, widespread tilling of land with disk plows that destroyed all ground cover that protected the land from wind erosion. Once plowed wind erosion became so bad that 75 % of topsoil was blown away in some locations. In 1932 there were 14 major dust storms originating from the south central Plains areas. This was the start of a downturn in use of disk and moldboard plowing as a common farm practice. Chisel plowing started as a tillage practice after the Dust Bowl ended in 1938.

Speaking of the depression, I'm sure most of us have read "The Grapes of Wrath" (John Steinbeck) ... but if you haven't, make sure you get a copy and read it before your bucket list expires. Great story and told only as Steinbeck could tell a story. Another great Steinbeck book from the same era is "In Dubious Battle". Both have movie versions, the most recent in 2016 (In Dubious Battle) which was loosely tied to Steinbeck's original book. Unfortunately, movies never come close to the book version of any story.

If you are interested in the dust bowl, you have to read "The Worst Hard Time", by Timothy Egan. Excellent book, with lots of detail that this group would appreciate.

Some of the stories you read about the dust being so bad just Everywhere that peoples lungs would get full of MUD! You would die of having lungs full of top soil.

The main causes of the dust bowl were the economic conditions combined with the farming practices of the day. During and after the Great War, wheat prices skyrocketed which resulted in a lot of marginal land being put into production. When prices collapsed with the onset of the Depression and much of that land was abandoned. Meanwhile, farming practices of the day didn't comprehend the importance of conserving soil moisture. These practices worked when rain was plentiful, but were disastrous when drought came.

Drought is often blamed for the Dust Bowl, but drought is in fact a normal condition than can be anticipated and planned for. We now know that most of the Great Plains doesn't get enough moisture to reliably produce a crop every year. When I was growing up in eastern Colorado, we would raise a crop of wheat only every other year. Land was "summer fallowed" in the off years, tilled just enough to keep the weeds down and prepare a seed bed. Today, using "no till" chemical (herbicide) fallow, that same land produces two crops in three years. Fallow is followed by wheat, then corn. Yields are much higher, too.

Moldboard plows aren't normally used for dryland farming on the plains, and haven't since Dust Bowl.

I don't think it's fair to say the tree planting efforts were a disaster. There are plenty of trees still standing on the Great Plains that were planted back in the thirties and forties. Most are gone, though, cut down to enlarge fields or allow sprinkler irrigation. I doubt they had much of an effect, but they couldn't have hurt.

The Ogallala Aquifer is being depleted by irrigation at an alarming rate. Sooner or later the irrigation will have to end; even if the government doesn't stop it it will become prohibitively expensive. But what will the small towns of the plains do then? You can't have light industry without a reliable water supply, so the towns will wither and die.

I also recommend Timothy Egan's book. It has a lot of eyewitness accounts of the Dust Bowl.

Order the film 'The Dust Bowl' by Ken Burns. Almost all movie film shot at the time of actual dust storms & government photos plus interviews of the people that went thru it all.