No Dust Bowl disaster

Delta Force

Banned
How would the 20th century have unfolded if the Dust Bowl disaster never took place?

The Dust Bowl developed as a result of several natural and human created conditions building up over the decades. Which ones would be avoided or fail to occur?
 

Driftless

Donor
The Dust Bowl developed as a result of several natural and human created conditions building up over the decades. Which ones would be avoided or fail to occur?

The farmers would likely need some set of market conditions that promoted dry land crop methods at an earlier date. I don't know where that economic push would come from in the earlier years of the 20th Century.
 
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we have several issues to deal with here

1. A lack of understanding of the climate cycle in the Great Plains (there is basically a 30 year wet-dry-inbetween cycle)

2. Commercial and institutional encouragement of farming on land that is marginal in the in between cycle and dry steppe or desert in the dry cycle

3. An actual belief at the time of settlement that 'rain follows the plow"

4. Bumper crop years during the wet period that happened to occur when demand was artificially high (due to World War I) followed by a decade of drier years followed by the dry years. Debts incurred during World War I required conditions to remain unchanged, not only climate but market conditions. They didn't

5. Some of the steps taken during the Roosevelt Administration were specifically to address some of the financial issues (paying farmers not to plant for example) and other farm subsidies, which were put into place to stabilize prices. But they required bad things to happen to demonstrate need for such. (at least enough to clear Congress anyway)

6. While there were some theories about better land use practices, like wind breaks for example, when you have to plant every acre to the maximum extent possible to clear enough money from depressed prices to avoid financial catastrophe, better land use practices were viewed as a luxury

And that is just to start with.....
 

Driftless

Donor
6. While there were some theories about better land use practices, like wind breaks for example, when you have to plant every acre to the maximum extent possible to clear enough money from depressed prices to avoid financial catastrophe, better land use practices were viewed as a luxury

And that is just to start with.....

Yup, And when the real problems hit, desperate people doubled-down on what had worked earlier and things got worse. It's a side of human nature I guess.
 
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Yup, And when the real problems hit, desperate people doubled-down on what had worked earlier and things got worse. It's a side of human nature I guess.

When my grandfather & his brothers adapted their methods 1910 1930 they were dissed by their peers for not doing real farming. By 1935 most of those peers were no longer farming but grandad & CO were still in business, and ended the depression better off than in the 1920s.
 

Driftless

Donor
One short-form explanation of what contributed to the problem: There was a coincidence of several years of good weather for growing wheat and the extreme demand for wheat during WW1. It was a bonanza for farmers who could plant even on marginal land.

The end of the war came, demand decreased to normal levels and then the normal drought cycle arrived, and a lot of farmers got caught in the crunch. Too many assumed the boom phase would continue.

Then it all went to Hell....
 
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