The “Dust Bowl” is a term used both to describe the drought and dust storms of the 1930’s, and the Great Plains area in which it occurred. While the drought itself was an unavoidable natural disaster, its effects were greatly exacerbated by human activities, namely irresponsible agricultural practices.
This is clear in the Dust Bowl’s conditions. After all, as awful as a decade-long series of droughts and high winds might be, it doesn’t account for the “black blizzards,” as they were called, storms that picked up Great Plains topsoil and carried it as far as New York. Dust storms, it’s true, were and are a thing, but never to this magnitude. That’s because, among other things, there’s just not enough loose topsoil to throw around. It’s estimated that as many as three million tons of topsoil blew off of the Great Plains during the infamous “Black Sunday” storm, and that was only one occurence.
So why was there so much topsoil? That’s where human error and farming practices come into play. You see, one of the benefits of the native grasses that grew in the Plains is that they had deep roots that held the soil in place. But when settlers came and cultivated the land, they dug up those grasses in favor of other crops, like wheat. Increased demand for those other crops during World War I encouraged farmers to plow more land that had once been grassland, so that they could plant more, and when the prices for the crops they now had surpluses of dropped again, they plowed even more so that they could plant enough to make a profit. As a result, when the droughts hit and the crops died, there were no native grasses to stop the soil from blowing away.
At some point, all of the best farmland was in use, and when the farmers kept on cultivating land, they had to move to poorer growing space. Unfortunately, “farming submarginal lands often had negative results, such as soil erosion and nutrient leaching.” (National Drought Mitigation Center) Other practices, such as using the new one-way disc plow, which increased the risk of blowing soil, and the abandonment of soil conservation measures in the interest of saving time and money, also greatly contributed to the environmental damage done prior to the droughts of the Dust Bowl. This damage, in turn, provided the means — that is to say, the dry, nutrient-depleted, loose dirt in abundance — for the catastrophic effects of what would otherwise have been little more than a severe dry spell.
