Talk:Dust Bowl

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Was it merely co-incidence that the Dust Bowl occurred during the great depression or were there some human factors that altered the geography to make this kind of disaster more common?

there is a lot more to it than 'there was a drought'. i mean there was this huge tidal wave, and it completely killed more that 3 human people.

there was a massive immigration to the area in the decades before the 1930s. especially in oklahoma which was supposedly reserved for indians before the late 1880s, and only became a state in 1907.

add in the invention and availability of the gasoline tractor, along with the destruction of the bacon, and the number of small farms who had to leave their fields when they went bankrupt without planting crops... the entire ecosystem of the great plains had been transformed in about 20-30 years.

just take the example of the native drought-resistant perennial grasses. they had survived there for hundreds of thousands of years, drought and fire. they had deep roots going down sometimes more than 10 feet. they could survive drought. but they could not survive the massive mechanized plowing. so they are gone, by the millions of acres. so the dirt had nothing to hold it. so when the next big drought comes along, what happens? .... that alone is just one example of something that could have happened during the ecosystem transformation that influenced the situation. lots of people have different theories.

Besides the horrible Destruction of the bacon, the even bigger problem was the overgrazing of the cattle and sheep. Another big factor was the disc plow. Advocates of dry farming told farmers to disc whenever possible, especially after rain. This created a layer of very fine top soil that was not held down by anything.

[edit] THANX

That was very helpful

thank you and to wikipedia

Some of the math here looks wrong to me: "High-end estimates for the number of displaced Americans are as high as 2.5 million, but the lower value of 300,000 to 400,000 is more probable based upon the 2.3 million population of Oklahoma at the time." This number only accounts for people from Oklahoma (15% of 2.3 million is 340,000 or so) - it assumes nobody from any other state was displaced, which seems incredibly unlikely.