What are the most important facts about the Dust Bowl?

Answer 1

The Dust Bowl was the result of a series of dust storms in the central United States and Canada from 1933 to 1939.

For a wonderful, gripping, sad, and page-turning account of what happened during the Dust Bowl era, read The Worst Hard Time.

Answer 2

The dust bowl the occurred in prairie states which included Kansan and Oklahoma. The prairies were covered with prairie plants, mostly grass. This formed a natural sod which was rather deep. The sod kept the soil in place during times of low rainfall. When farmers came to this area they plowed up the sod exposing the soil. For this reason they were called 'sod busters'. In the 30s a large drought occurred. When winds blew, soil was picked up and blew about. More and more soil was picked up and blown about. This time was called the dirty 30s. Sometimes people would get the soil blown in their eyes and never saw again. The dirt was blown as far as Washington DC. Washington finally came up with the Soil Conservation Act. Farming practices were changed to preserve the soil.

Answer 3

The dust bowl was caused by a great plow up of land which was caused by rising wheat prices which was $2.00 a bushel which currently has not been surpassed to date. The dust in the sky was caused by poor farming technicues and the fact that after wheat prices dropped the farmers abandonded their fields and left never to return again. This left the fields of grass now flipped upside down which left it susceptible to wind ,which picked it up in the air and carried it hundreds of miles.

Answer 4

The dust bowl refers to a series of dust storms that hit Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and North and South Dakota from 1933 until 1939. Due to over-farming and lack of rainfall, wind storms blew the top soil off, creating massive clouds of dust, killing people and animals as well as making in impossible to farm. One in 1935 reached Chicago lasting for days. People had to abandon their farms. Many went to California. John Steinbeck's novel, Grapes of Wrath, tell the story of a family of "Okies" who went west due the dust. The solution was to plant cover crops and trees and limit agriculture. Small scale dust storms can still occur in dry years.

Answer 5

The Dust Bowl, or the Dirty Thirties, was a period of severe dust storms causing major ecological and agricultural damage to American and Canadian prairie lands from 1930 to 1936 (in some areas until 1940).

Answer 6

It happened during the Great Depression of the 1930's.

It was caused by over farming the land.

The Dust Bowl happened in an area of American that was once called the Great American Desert on maps.

The dust from the Dust Bowl storms actually darkened the skies in New York City and Boston.

You can read more about the Dust Bowl at

http://history.knoji.com/facts-about-the-dust-bowl/

Answer 7

The Dust Bowl, or the Dirty Thirties, was a period of severe dust storms causing major ecological and agricultural damage to American and Canadian prairie lands in the 1930s, particularly in 1934 and 1936. The phenomenon was caused by severe drought coupled with decades of extensive farming without crop rotation, fallow fields, cover crops or other techniques to prevent wind erosion.[1] Deep plowing of the virgin topsoil of the Great Plains had displaced the natural deep-rooted grasses that normally kept the soil in place and trapped moisture even during periods of drought and high winds.

During the drought of the 1930s, without natural anchors to keep the soil in place, it dried, turned to dust, and blew away eastward and southward in large dark clouds. At times, the clouds blackened the sky, reaching all the way to East Coast cities such as New York and Washington, D.C. Much of the soil ended up deposited in the Atlantic Ocean, carried by prevailing winds, which were in part created by the dry and bare soil conditions. These immense dust storms-given names such as "black blizzards" and "black rollers"-often reduced visibility to a few feet (a meter or less). The Dust Bowl affected 100,000,000 acres (400,000 km2), centered on the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, and adjacent parts of New Mexico, Colorado, and Kansas.[2]

Millions of acres of farmland were damaged, and hundreds of thousands of people were forced to leave their homes; many of these families (often known as "Okies", since so many came from Oklahoma) migrated to California and other states, where they found economic conditions little better during the Great Depression than those they had left. Owning no land, many became migrant workers who traveled from farm to farm to pick fruit and other crops at starvation wages. Author John Steinbeck later wrote The Grapes of Wrath, which won the Pulitzer Prize, and Of Mice and Men, about such people.

Answer 8

The Dust Bowl took place in the 1930s and lasted close to a decade. Crops were devastated and blew away, and children had to wear masks over their faces as they walked to and from school. Women put rugs against the bottoms of their doors and hung wet sheets over the windows and still the dust sifted indoors. One of the main causes of the Dust Bowl was a severe drought.

Answer 9

Dust from the farms in the area blew all around, and killed elderly people and children because of suffocation.

Answer 10

The farmers didn't leave any room for the native grasses and they farmed too much because of the new farm technoledgy!