![]() Eroding soil led to massive dust storms and economic devastation-especially in the Southern Plains. ![]() Without deep-rooted prairie grasses to hold the soil in place, it began to blow away. ![]() In desperation, farmers tore up even more grassland in an attempt to harvest a bumper crop and break even.Ĭrops began to fail with the onset of drought in 1931, exposing the bare, over-plowed farmland. But as the United States entered the Great Depression, wheat prices plummeted. Rising wheat prices in the 1910s and 1920s and increased demand for wheat from Europe during World War I encouraged farmers to plow up millions of acres of native grassland to plant wheat, corn and other row crops. A series of wet years during the period created a further misunderstanding of the region’s ecology and led to the intensive cultivation of increasingly marginal lands that couldn’t be reached by irrigation. This false belief was linked to Manifest Destiny-an attitude that Americans had a sacred duty to expand west. Many of these late 19th and early 20th-century settlers lived by the superstition “rain follows the plow.” Emigrants, land speculators, politicians and even some scientists believed that homesteading and agriculture would permanently affect the climate of the semi-arid Great Plains region, making it more conducive to farming. These acts led to a massive influx of new and inexperienced farmers across the Great Plains. The Homestead Act of 1862, which provided settlers with 160 acres of public land, was followed by the Kinkaid Act of 1904 and the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909. After the Civil War, a series of federal land acts coaxed pioneers westward by incentivizing farming in the Great Plains. The Dust Bowl was caused by several economic and agricultural factors, including federal land policies, changes in regional weather, farm economics and other cultural factors.
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