Echoes of the Dust Bowl

A dirt storm rolled in to the TX panhandle last Sunday evening that brought back memories to a lot of old timers out here... Luckily, it didn't get too wound up...

The top two pics are from Sunday while the third one down is from the same town in 1935.



The bottom pic is from north of here up by Garden City, KS, back in the day.

When I was a kid in the 70s, there were two different old Case tractors 2/3s buried in sand dunes within a mile of one of Dad's fields... As I recall, one of them still had a one-way plow on behind it...



Dad said as a kid, when the dirt storms would get bad and wind would be really howling, the kids could play in the house with touching the stove pipe sticking up through the roof - and sparks of static electricity would jump off and snap at them...
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Howard

Wow Howard, awesome and scary at the same time. A little more drought and more wind and it could be the 1930's all over again.
Andrew

Wow Howard, awesome and scary at the same time. A little more drought and more wind and it could be the 1930's all over again.
Andrew

One of the things that has always bothered me was they blamed the dirt bowl on the farmers then they said it due to a major dought. The dust came from out of state also.
Wish someone would really search out the truth on the cause of the dust bowl. I can't see how a few farmers plowing in the wrong direction could cause a major disaster like this.
Walt

Poor cropping practices after breaking all that sod, imagine what the grassland prairie was like as recently as 125 years ago and then after extensive farming with no cover crops, no terracing, no minimum till and a major drought. There are several USDA yearbooks of agriculture from the time period that show pictures of the high plains in the early 1900's on up until WWII, its all in pictures at several museums around the country also.

The dust bowl started in year two (or was it three) of the drought. They had a poor year and what little ground cover was plowed under. The next year was even worse with the row crop barely even growing enough to provide ground cover - then it was plowed under too - basically creating 4"-7" (depending on your plow depth) of dry loose ground with nothing left in it to hold it togather. Then the winds picked it up.

Walt, it wasn't just "a few farmers plowing in the wrong direction". It was millions of acres of prairie broken up and aggressively farmed using eastern farming methods that were ill-suited for the arid High Plains. They were able to get away with it during wet years, but when the rains quit all hell broke loose. There farmers were not evil people (although 1920's greed certainly played a role), they just didn't know any better.

My guess is you're not someone who has ever farmed on the High Plains, otherwise you wouldn't be asking the question. Successful farmers in that part of the country take soil conservation seriously.

I was watching a documentary on it a year ago, when I talked to mom the next day, I ask her if she watched it. She said she didn't have to watch it, she lived through it. Couldn't go to school because the dust was so thick they couldn't see to get to and from school.

A lot of things have changed since then - so we
are not even close to any danger of it becoming
like it was.

For one huge thing, one-way plows were so common,
cheap, and effective weed control back then that
practically every farmer across the high-plains
used them. But they tend to bury all the trash
and leave the surface bare... The cumulative
effect of hundreds of thousands of acres in that
condition was a huge factor in those storms.

Nowadays, almost no farmers leave the soil
unprotected like that. Farmers spend a lot of
time strategizing over how to protect the soil.

Plus, half the country or more in this area is in
CRP and protected by checkerboard patterns of
thick grass.

I was in the local Dairy Queen on a main highway
as this hit - and one of the seasonal "snow birds"
migrating from up north to Phoenix for the winter
came in very wide-eyeed and frantic asking if this
was "normal" and if the storm was going to "damage
their vehicle" and if they needed to get it into a
garage.

So they can still be pretty attention-getting!!

Howard

they say the suspended dust in the air blocked sunlight and slowed evaporation which is regenerated as rain so it was a viscious circle of no rain more dust ect. convervation methods were not known and now several generations later they have been forgotten again as people don't want to mess with terraces, contours and grass waterways with big machinery

dust bowl and others what happened to the land that fed the people in the bible or the land that fed the roman armies thats the sahara now or the potato famine in europe .not long ago the national geographic had a real good article about soils in it and how people are rebuilding the soils.
thats one of my beliefs to be responsable to the land i might not be the richest farmer but the next person that gets this farm well have land with good structure not a sterilized medium suited to grow only certain crops.

Never going to happen again? They said Wall Street could never crash again too. Just what happened to Wall Street just a few short years ago? Biggest loss in a single day dollar wise?

Actually there are some conservationist (the college educated ones, not the tree hugger crowd) that are worried that it could indeed happen again.

Rick

Incredible photos... and scary - both the new and the old.

Actually one of the biggest contributer of the dust bowl was a wetter than normal decade prior to 1930 that had settlers coming in by the thousands.They broke new marginal ground and generaly farmed the way an Iowa corn farmer might . But when things got drier there was no moisture or anything else to stop the dirt. Imagine a stretch of farm ground from eastern colorado to witchita kansas that was plowed black with nothing to hold the soil. The dirt is blowing bad around here today as well but nothing like it could be without no-till and other conserving practices.Paul

I think I see some of my farm in that first pic.

Great photos, Howard, both new and old.

Thanks for posting.

Dean

I THOUGHT THAT YOU GUYS MIGHT LIKE THIS IT'S FROM THE HISTORY CHANNEL.
WALT
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August 24, 2012
10 Things You May Not Know About the Dust Bowl
By Christopher Klein





1

America’s worst drought since 1956 has hit farm states hard and sparked memories of the epic dry spell that helped produce the Dust Bowl. Explore 10 surprising facts about the environmental disaster that ravaged the southern Plains in the 1930s.

Corn crops wither in Missouri on August 20, 2012. (Kevin G. Hall/MCT via Getty Images)
1. One monster dust storm reached the Atlantic Ocean.
While “black blizzards” constantly menaced Plains states in the 1930s, a massive dust storm 2 miles high traveled 2,000 miles before hitting the East Coast on May 11, 1934. For five hours, a fog of prairie dirt enshrouded landmarks such as the Statue of Liberty and the U.S. Capitol, inside which lawmakers were debating a soil conservation bill. For East Coasters, the storm was a mere inconvenience—“Housewives kept busy,” read a New York Times subhead—compared to the tribulations endured by Dust Bowl residents.

2. The Dust Bowl was both a manmade and natural disaster.
Beginning with World War I, American wheat harvests flowed like gold as demand boomed. Lured by record wheat prices and promises by land developers that “rain follows the plow,” farmers powered by new gasoline tractors over-plowed and over-grazed the southern Plains. When the drought and Great Depression hit in the early 1930s, the wheat market collapsed. Once the oceans of wheat, which replaced the sea of prairie grass that anchored the topsoil into place, dried up, the land was defenseless against the winds that buffeted the Plains.

3. The ecosystem disruption unleashed plagues of jackrabbits and grasshoppers.
If the dust storms that turned daylight to darkness weren’t apocalyptic enough, seemingly biblical plagues of jackrabbits and grasshoppers descended on the Plains and destroyed whatever meager crops could grow. To combat the hundreds of thousands of jackrabbits that overran the Dust Bowl states in 1935, some towns staged “rabbit drives” in which townsmen corralled the jackrabbits in pens and smashed them to death with clubs and baseball bats. Thick clouds of grasshoppers—as large as 23,000 insects per acre, according to one estimate—also swept over farms and consumed everything in their wakes. “What the sun left, the grasshoppers took,” President Franklin D. Roosevelt said during a fireside chat. The National Guard was called out to crush grasshoppers with tractors and burn infested fields, while the Civilian Conservation Corps spread an insecticide of arsenic, molasses and bran.


A farmer and his sons make their way through a dust storm in Oklahoma in April 1936. (Library of Congress)
4. Proposed solutions were truly out-of-the-box.
There were few things desperate Dust Bowl residents didn’t try to make it rain. Some followed the old folklore of killing snakes and hanging them belly-up on fences. Others tried shock and awe. Farmers in one Texas town paid a self-professed rainmaker $500 to fire off rockets carrying an explosive mixture of dynamite and nitroglycerine to induce showers. Corporations also touted their products to the federal government as possible solutions. Sisalkraft proposed covering the farms with waterproof paper, while a New Jersey asphalt company suggested paving the Plains.

5. A newspaper reporter gave the Dust Bowl its name.
Associated Press reporter Robert Geiger opened his April 15, 1935, dispatch with this line: “Three little words achingly familiar on a Western farmer’s tongue, rule life in the dust bowl of the continent—if it rains.” “Dust bowl” was probably a throwaway line for Geiger, since two days later he referred to the disaster zone as the “dust belt.” Nevertheless, within weeks the term had entered the national lexicon.

6. Dust storms crackled with powerful static electricity.
So much static electricity built up between the ground and airborne dust that blue flames leapt from barbed wire fences and well-wishers shaking hands could generate a spark so powerful it could knock them to the ground. Since static electricity could short out engines and car radios, motorists driving through dust storms dragged chains from the back of their automobiles to ground their cars.

7. The swirling dust proved deadly.
Those who inhaled the airborne prairie dust suffered coughing spasms, shortness of breath, asthma, bronchitis and influenza. Much like miners, Dust Bowl residents exhibited signs of silicosis from breathing in the extremely fine silt particulates, which had high silica content. Dust pneumonia, called the “brown plague,” killed hundreds and was particularly lethal for infants, children and the elderly.


Dust bowl refugees from Oklahoma arrive in California in June 1935. (Library of Congress)
8. The federal government paid farmers to plow under fields and butcher livestock.
As part of Roosevelt’s New Deal, the federal government purchased starving livestock for at least $1 a head. Livestock healthy enough to be butchered could fetch as much as $16 a head, with the meat used to feed homeless people living in Hoovervilles. The Soil Conservation Service, established in 1935, paid farmers to leave fields idle, employ land management techniques such as crop rotation and replant native prairie grasses. The federal government also bought more than 10 million acres and converted them to grasslands, some managed today by the U.S. Forest Service.

9. Most farm families did not flee the Dust Bowl.
John Steinbeck’s story of migrating tenant farmers in his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1939 novel, “The Grapes of Wrath,” tends to obscure the fact that upwards of three-quarters of farmers in the Dust Bowl stayed put. Dust Bowl refugees did not flood California. Only 16,000 of the 1.2 million migrants to California during the 1930s came from the drought-stricken region. Most Dust Bowl refugees tended to move only to neighboring states.

10. Few “Okies” were actually from Oklahoma.
While farm families migrating to California during the 1930s, like the fictitious Joad family, were often derided as “Okies,” only one-fifth of them were actually from Oklahoma. (Plus, many of those Oklahoma migrants were from the eastern part of the state outside of the Dust Bowl.) “Okie” was a blanket term used to describe all agricultural migrants, no matter their home states. They were greeted with hostility and signs such as one in a California diner that read: “Okies and dogs not allowed inside.”

Howard, I'd like to expand on what all of you said below about the cause of dust bowl. I'd like to add that once the soil was dried out and blowing, the only way to "hold" the soil was to use a lister or similar implement to shape the soil into high ridges and deep valleys to keep the soil from blowing. Farmers who didn't have such implements available to them learned to use their moldboard plows to try to do the same thing. Plowing was generally done in such a way to create as smooth and level seedbed as possible, but under the circumstances, they used what they had. I actually have a sales brochure from the period that shows how to make ridges with your plow in an effort to hold the soil from wind erosion. That said, it was a vicious cycle in that the very attempt to work the ground to hold the soil, dried it out even more, and every time the soil was worked, the organic matter that holds soil together was depleted and soil was turned into powder. So one can imagine the frustration of the farmer who either watched his soil blow away, or go work the soil to try to hold it while knowing it was going to dry it out even more.

To add to this, in my area of the Dakotas, it was also common practice to have a portion of your acres in fallow every 3 to 4 years to give it a rest and get a handle on weeds. The only weed control at the time was tillage. So when the drought years set in, many acres were already exposed with no cover and susceptible to drying out.

By the 60s and 70s we were using rod-weeders, duck foot chisel plows and noble blades in an effort to cut weed roots but NOT turn the soil over as much as possible. This was still a very touch and go practice in a drought year. It wasn't until the heavy use of commercial fertilizers and herbicides were farmers able to continuous crop their fields without yield loss. This left much more cover on the soil and eventually led to the capability of successful no-till practices used on marginal soils today.

I find this topic fascinating and have to come back this evening when I have time to read it.

The article as I skimmed it suffered a tad from 'back yard itous' in that the worst drought ever in my area was 1988. Much of the USA was suffering from that drought as well, perhaps did not hit so hard in that part of Oklahoma for a change.

There is a drought cycle, the 1930s, the 1950s, the 1980s, the 2010s. About every 28 years. Some are really bad, some are just dry. Some only last 3 years, some are close to a decade. The cycle goes back before that. It is pretty predictable, really. We don't know if we saw the worst of this one, or that is yet to come.

We know it, happened before, will happen again.

Where I live, the wet years in between are much more damaging. But doesn't make as good a story, so you don't hear about it. The early 80s, the mid 90s, a little bit of the late 2000s tho that wet spell wasn't as bad. But I remember all the mud and unplanted acres and busted harvest equipment from those wet years, in my back yard.

Neat thread, enjoy it.

Paul

I was born in 1934; the dry years didn't end in our area until 1943. I remember the blowing dust and the hordes of grasshoppers that would come through and eat the siding off the house and also eat the fence posts as there wasn't enough green plant matter for them to eat.

When the wet years started in 1943, most of the drainage ditchs were full of blow dirt so everyone had to get out and clean the ditches. Don't want to have to go through dry years like that again.

Here is a graph of the relative drought for here in Oklahoma that I thought was pretty interesting. For a lot of this area in the OK strip and surrounding, 2011 was one of the worst droughts we"ve had in a long, long time:



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Howard

I agree 100%, SB!!! I used to farm a lot of irrigated ground, but got out 10-12 years ago.

I then later picked up a little 80 acres of dryland to mess around with & play with my old tractors.

When I took it over, it had been one-wayed clean that summer - and we never got a rain to bring up the wheat I planted that fall...

A rotary hoe wouldn't come close to holding the ground when it would start blowing, and I worked my way up to Graham-Hoeme chisel plow, a lister rig on 40 inch centers, and a deep ripper as the winter & spring winds came and went...

By the next spring, I was just shoving 12 inches of flour-like powder around out there trying to keep it from blowing...

Since then, I've always tried to keep plenty of trash up on the surface and have kept it from blowing like that since - mainly with Noble sweeps and chemical like you said...

But it is a very helpless feeling when you are in that situation and can't do anything about it.


Howard

Trust me I think it can happen again, In the last two years we have got less rain than the driest year during the dust bowl. I live in northeast New Mexico, third generation here, very close to the "center" of the dust bowl according to the history channel. Last year we didn't get any rain or moisture for over 11 months starting in Sept. ending in July. I remember my granddad always saying during the dust bowl there was nothing but dirt, no grass on the range land just dirt. This last summer when we actually started getting rain there were expanses in the range land that the grass died and did not return. So now you have what would normally be grass land a barren waste land. Something did eventually grow there and are now becoming a menace, Tumble weeds! Ranchers sold all the cattle off so there was nothing to keep them mowed down. With all of the cover now blown into the fence rows who knows? I can just see it now first the tumble weeds fill the fence then the dirt fallows and covers the fences, seen this as a child, a five wire fence covered in a matter of hours with the winds we get on the high plains. Things would already be blown away if we still farmed the way we used to. Luckily most farmland is now irrigated, but they are drawing our aquifer to depletion now.

That should dispel the notion that the thirties drought was somehow exceptional.

Tanker, the issue today is reliance on irrigation. Heavy irrigation on the plains has depleted the Ogallala aquifer, and it's just a matter of time before the irrigation wells will have to be shut down so people have water to drink. A lot of marginal land will revert to pasture or dryland farming when that happens and could result in Dust Bowl-like conditions.