Disaster in the Heartland: The American Dust Bowl

The Dust Bowl happened on April 18, 1935. This Dust Bowl in the 1930s was one of the worst environmental disasters. The Dust Bowl was a ten-year drought and the heatwave destroyed many Midwest crops. There were tons of topsoil that were blown off barren fields and carried in storm clouds for hundreds of miles. There had been weeks of dust storms, but the cloud that appeared on the horizon that Sunday was the worst winds were clocked at 60 mph. Then it hit.

The cause of the Dust Bowl was a mixture of natural drought and poor farming. There were several droughts and failure to apply dryland farming methods to prevent processes wind erosion caused the phenomenon. Wind erosion and terrible dust storms that hit the Plains in the 1930s.

There were several economic and agricultural factors, including federal land policies, changes in regional. Dust Bowl disaster, agencies enacted land-use rules to reduce soil erosion and prevent further such catastrophic dust storms in the United States.

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The Dust Bowl was a period of severe dust storms that were damaged and agriculture of the American and Canadian prairies during the 1930s. The Dust Bowl was the worst drought in History. The state of California enacted a law that made it illegal to bring poor people into the state. Between 1934 and 1942, the federal government planted around 220 million trees from Canada.

Because farmers worked hard to produce record crops and livestock.1930s prices dropped so low that many farmers went bankrupt and lost their farms. Prices fell they tried to produce even more to pay their debts, taxes, and living expenses.

Farmers went bankrupt and lost their farms. In some cases, the price of a bushel of corn fell to just eight or ten cents. Families and made the difficult journey to California where they hoped to find work. Some families had to move to California because the drought had kept so many growers from planting crops. Many families packed their belongings, piled them on their cars, and moved.

Westward, fleeing the dust and desert of the Midwest for Washington, Oregon, and California. Many hoped to become hired hands on California farms, learning how to grow fruits and vegetables while living on the farms where they worked. There they were called "Okies," a nickname for people from Oklahoma because many of the Dust Bowl migrants. An Okie is a resident, native, or cultural descendant of Oklahoma. The Dust Bowl was the name given to the drought-stricken Southern Plains region of the United States, which suffered severe dust storms during a dry period in the 1930s. Okies and other plains migrants caught the sympathy of people across the country