Dust Bowl Research Paper

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A question that has been posed for a long time is; Will there be another Dust Bowl? Now that has been honed down to; Will it happen this century? This is an interesting question? The first dust bowl was devastating to the United States of America. It was awful to the farmers and citizens of the Southwest. Dust storms were abundant and along with the changing climate in the region, farming came to a screeching halt. The dust bowl affected other things such as the US’s economy also. It was one of the main reasons for the Great Depression. If another one was to hit it could have much of the same effects, but prevention methods were put in place to keep that ever looming threat at bay. Farmers also have changed their farming methods so as to decrease…show more content…
During, and especially in the wake of, farmers were finding new methods of farming to have the Dust Bowl never happen again. The farmers needed to find ways of farming that limited wind erosion, one of the main causes of the Dust Bowl, and needed to trap in as much water as they could so as to prepare in the case of another drought, and that they did. One of the ways farmers helped their crops was irrigation. Irrigation is the getting of water directly to your crops. There is two ways of irrigation, canals and pumping the water directly from the ground(Irrigation.pdf). Another form of conservation or prevention farming was shelterbelts. Now shelterbelts weren’t necessarily a form of farming, shelterbelts were just trees and bushes planted around a farming area to prevent wind erosion(Shelterbelts.pdf), but it worked all the same. The last form of prevention farming that will be talked about in this dissertation is strip cropping. Strip cropping is the process of leaving strips of a plant planted, say corn, and when the corn is staying there it will reduce runoff by blocking the water(Strip Cropping.pdf) and it will give the soil a magnitude of nutrients when the leftover corn dies(Strip…show more content…
Many things went into the creating the Dust Bowl; first, bad farming that left soil ripe for wind erosion(Dust Bowl: Could it Happen Again?), second, record high temperatures were recorded during the Dust Bowl(Dust Bowl: Could it Happen Again?), and lastly, a lot of droughts happened for a long time, spanning a long distance, and happened in rapid concession(Dust Bowl: Could it Happen Again?). The last two paragraphs alone are a clear rebuttal to the first need, the precipitation in the Midwest area of the United States is expected to grow for the next century(Union of Concerned Scientist), and while temperatures are rising that is largely due to carbon emissions(Midwest Impacts & Adaptation) and with oil predicted to run out in 2040(When Will Oil Run Out?) even that might change. Nick Wiltgen said “Considering the Dust Bowl was a combination of human action with natural conditions, I think it will be a long time before we see another one It would take a fairly dramatic shift in the way land is managed in this country or an extraordinarily severe and prolonged drought.” The circumstances are unlikely to occur

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