Soil Erosion Disaster: The Dust Bowl

The Dust Bowl was one of the worst ecological disasters in recorded history--and the impetus for soil conservation

I actually agree with Earl Butz about one thing: I sure don’t want to go back to the agriculture of the 1930s. If we think things are bad now, it could be worse. It was worse. Bad farming practices in the 1930s caused one of the worst ecological disasters in recorded history—the Dust Bowl.

The Great Plains don’t get much rain, especially in the shortgrass prairies of Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. The native prairie vegetation had deep root systems and was adapted to the region’s cyclical droughts, as were the vast herds of bison who moved with the seasons to find forage. Except for established communities in river valleys with a steady water source, the Native Americans followed the bison herds in a similar nomadic lifestyle. It wasn’t because they were “too primitive” to farm—it was because the climate was too harsh, dry, and unpredictable to support stable agriculture. But in the late nineteenth century, the US Army forced the Native American nations of the Great Plains onto reservations. To make sure they couldn’t continue their traditional lifestyle, they slaughtered the bison and opened the land to homesteaders. By the 1920s, over 30 million acres of shortgrass prairie had been plowed up for wheat fields.

Then came the drought. Farmers planted wheat in 1932, but there wasn’t enough rain for it to grow. The same thing happened in 1933 and 1934. Unable to pay their bills, many farmers lost their savings, machinery, and farms. And then the wind started to blow, forming “black blizzards” of soil particles that darkened the sky at midday. Livestock smothered to death, buried in sand dunes. Even when they wore masks and goggles, people contracted “dust pneumonia” from breathing the dirt, which was often fatal.

One preacher was delivering a passionate hellfire-and-brimstone sermon during a dust storm, when suddenly part of the church roof collapsed. He stopped preaching, looked at the hole, and said to his congregation, “My dear sinners, why waste further words to describe that awful place when you can get a better idea of it by simply sticking your heads out of doors.” That’s just one of the stories that Dayton Duncan, Ken Burns, and Julie Dunfey tell in their book, The Dust Bowl: An Illustrated History (2012), which I highly recommend.

Soil from the Plains caused a red fog in Boston in 1934, and the streetlights in New York City had to be turned on in the middle of the day. In 1935, soil scientist Hugh Hammond Bennett timed his testimony before the US House of Representatives pleading for soil conservation to coincide with a predicted dust storm. As Wellington Brink writes in his 1950 book Big Hugh: The Father of Soil Conservation: “The skies took on a copper color. The sun went into hiding. The air became heavy with grit….Here were tons and tons of fertile soils—farms from Kansas and Colorado and New Mexico—swirling in from a 2,000-mile journey to tell the committee that this man Bennett was right, tragically right, urging them to accept his assurance that enormous folly was on the land and in the air and that something must be done immediately to stem it.”

It was the Dust Bowl that launched the soil conservation movement of the 1930s. Soil conservationists laid the blame squarely on agricultural practices that were unsuited for the climate. The Native Americans had been right all along—the western Plains weren’t suited to plow-based farming. Ignoring that wisdom and destroying the stable grass-bison ecosystem caused the tremendous human suffering and ecological damage of the Dust Bowl.