The Dust Bowl: A Man-Made Disaster
Ben Okafor

The Dust Bowl of the 1930s is usually described as a natural disaster, but I think it is better described as a disaster that people helped to create. The weather played a part, yet the choices made by farmers, banks, and the government turned a dry spell into a catastrophe.

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 farmed 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 blowing away.

Economics also mattered. Wheat was expensive during the First World War, and farmers borrowed money to buy land and equipment. When prices fell, they had to keep planting just to pay their debts, even when they could see that the soil was wearing out.

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.

In the end, the government had to step in. New conservation programs paid farmers to change their methods, and the land slowly began to heal. The lesson for us is that technology and markets can push people to use the land faster than it can recover, and that someone has to be watching for the warning signs.
