The Dust Bowl

The Dust Bowl, also known as the "Dirty Thirties" started in the 1930s, around the same time as the Great Depression. The events that lead up to the Dust Bowl started in the late 1800s, where large quantities of inexperienced farmers migrated to the west with support from the "Homestead Act" to farm new land. The problem began when these farmers began relentlessly exploiting the same land over and over, which caused the dirt to become more and more unstable and much more dry. This only worsened during the Great Depression, where food prices dropped and farmers were forced to work the land even harder in order to obtain more goods. When a long drought combined with strong winds hit the majority of the Southern United States, dirt began flying off into the air, creating dark brown clouds that swept through the United States. The Dust Bowl only worsened the Great Depression because it lead to complete economic devastation. By 1934, about 35 million acres of land were deemed useless for farming, along with 125 million acres rapidly losing their topsoil. This explains why the 1930s was one of the worsed decades in American history in terms of profit and economic success.