Dust Bowl Research Paper

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The Dust Bowl was a man-made disaster. It was a combination of new technology allowing more land to be farmed and the demand for wheat in World War 1. The 1920’s had good rainfall and everyone forgot that the plains were semiarid and suffered drought on a regular basis. The farmer changed also from a simple person wanting to take care of his family to seeing the farm as a get rich program. Leading up the 1930’s there was a carefree expansion of the great plains in the 1920s. The plains were extensively plowed and put to wheat-turned into highly mechanized factory farms that produced unprecedented harvests. The land in the early 20th century was seen as a commodity. The land was to be used to make money, to get rich by exploiting it. Worster…show more content…
31). Just a year later Ann Marie says in her area the harvest of 1934 was only 12 million bushels when 170 million bushels is the norm (Low, 1984, p. 101). The federal government did a survey in 1936 to determine the worst hit counties. North Dakota was tied for second with 23 counties with South Dakota had the most at 41. The Dust Bowl was the result of over farming and the plowing of the Great Plains. There has always been dust blown in the wind and when it started no one was worried. What they did not expect was how severe it would be or how many years it would repeat. Cary McWilliams said that the Jords of the Nation were “the victims of grab and greed as much as dust and tractors” (Worster, 1979, p. 59). Their distress is the end product of a process of social disintegration set in motion as early as 1900. Their problem is distinctly a man made problem. Their tragedy is part of a greater tragedy,-the wasteful and senseless exploitation of a rich domain,-the insane scramble of conflicting group interest which frustrated the promise of the frontier and (within a decade) converted a pioneer territory into a sink of…show more content…
The massive effort to feed the War and the world left no one time to think about what might happen. It helped to push the effort to plow up the plains and plant ever more crops. Was anyone who could have understood what was going? In our modern world, it is easy to look back and say “shame on you!” but could it really have been easy to put all the information together. Remember communication was minimal, knowledge of environmental conservation was new, and no one could point out the problems with the need being so

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