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Dirty Thirties: The Dust Bowl

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The Dust Bowl was known as the Dirty Thirties, it was a period of severe dust storms that greatly damaged the ecology and agriculture of the US and Canadian prairies during the 1930s; severe droughts and a failure to apply dryland farming methods to prevent wind erosion caused by the phenomenon. The drought and erosion the Dust Bowl affected was 100,000,000 acres. The Dust Bowl forced tens of thousands of families to abandon their house and their farms. The panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma touched a little parts of New Mexico, Colorado, and Kansas. There is a little rainfall, light soil and high winds. The driest region of the plains, Southeastern Colorado, Southwest Kansas were the places that got directly affected by the dust bowl.
The Dust Bowl of the 1930s lasted about the decade. It mainly impacted on the Southern plains. The northern plains were not as bad affected, but they had lots of droughts, windblown dust and agricultural declines. The drought hit the great plains, roughly …show more content…

American farmers overplanted and poorly managed their crop rotations, and between 1930 and 1936, when severe drought conditions prevailed across much of America’s Plains, Dust Bowls were created. Soil turned to dust and large dark clouds could be seen across the horizon in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, and New Mexico. The next nine years, there was massive clouds of dust and dry soil swept across the nation, from Texas to Washington, DC, blackening skies, ruining farmland and leaving millions homeless. It was the worst environmental disaster in US history, resulting from years of unsustainable agriculture that eroded lands and destroyed native grasslands that held soils in place. The plowing began during years of rain, and early harvests were good. High wheat prices, buoyed by demand and government guarantees during the First World War, encouraged ever more land to be turned

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