Why the Plains Blew Away
Ava Martinez

When my grandmother talks about her parents' farm in western Kansas, she always mentions the dust. She says that her mother kept wet towels over the windows and that the family ate supper with dish towels over their plates. Those stories made me want to understand how an entire region could turn into a desert in just a few years.

The simple answer is drought, but drought alone does not explain the Dust Bowl. The plains had survived dry years before. What changed in the early twentieth century was the way people used the land. Farmers replaced the tough prairie sod with wheat fields, and wheat does not hold the soil the way the old grasses did. When the rain stopped, there was nothing left to keep the ground from lifting into the sky.

Machines made the problem worse. A farmer with a tractor could break more ground in a week than his father could break in a season with horses. That seemed like progress at the time, and for a while it was profitable. But the faster the plows moved, the more of the plains lay bare and waiting for the wind.

The human cost was enormous. Families watched their crops fail year after year, and many of them eventually loaded what they could carry into their cars and headed west. My great-grandparents stayed, but they lost two of their three fields and never fully recovered.

What gives me hope is that people learned from the disaster. Farmers began planting shelterbelts of trees and plowing in ways that kept the soil in place. The Dust Bowl shows that a mistake made by a whole society can also be corrected by that society, if people are willing to change how they work.
