What did the farmers do during the Dust Bowl?

Nineteen states in the heartland of the United States became a vast dust bowl. With no chance of making a living, farm families abandoned their homes and land, fleeing westward to become migrant laborers.

Where did farmers go during Dust Bowl?

Okie Migration

Many of them, poverty-stricken, traveled west looking for work. From 1935 to 1940, roughly 250,000 Oklahoma migrants moved to California. A third settled in the state's agriculturally rich San Joaquin Valley. These Dust Bowl refugees were called “Okies.”

How did farmers survive during the Dust Bowl?

Many of the farmers had to move as they could not survive. Crops would not grow and livestock were often choked to death by the dust. Many of the farmers and their families migrated to California where they had heard there were jobs.

What happened to farm animals during the Dust Bowl?

Animals in the fields had no place for refuge. Cattle became blinded during dust storms and ran around in circles, inhaling dust, until they fell and died, their lungs caked with dust and mud. Newborn calves suffocated.

Why did farmers leave their homes during the Dust Bowl?

When the drought and dust storms showed no signs of letting up, many people abandoned their land. Others would have stayed but were forced out when they lost their land in bank foreclosures.

Farmers Struggle During the Dust Bowl

Did the Dust Bowl destroy farms?

But by the end of 1934, roughly 35 million acres (14 million hectares) of farmland were ruined, and the topsoil covering 100 million acres (40 million hectares) had blown away [source: Dyer].

Why couldn't farmers pay their bills in the 1930s?

Farmers who had borrowed money to expand during the boom couldn't pay their debts. As farms became less valuable, land prices fell, too, and farms were often worth less than their owners owed to the bank. Farmers across the country lost their farms as banks foreclosed on mortgages.

Why did farmers dump milk during the Great Depression?

The theory was that if farmers could reduce the supply, demand would rise and prices would rise in response. In Iowa and Nebraska, a group known as the Farm Holiday movement built road blocks on the highways leading to the agricultural markets in Omaha, Sioux City and Des Moines. They dumped milk into ditches.

What was life like for farmers in the 1930s?

Farmers could produce much of their own food while city residents could not. Almost all farm families raised large gardens with vegetables and canned fruit from their orchards. They had milk and cream from their dairy cattle. Chickens supplied meat and eggs.

What caused farmers to go into debt?

It was difficult for farmers to get out of debt because they had to plant a lot of crops and so the price of their crops went down and this made them in debt. They had to take loans and sometimes the loans made them pay large interest rates which also put them in debt.

How much money are farmers losing daily during the Dust Bowl?

The Dust Bowl forced tens of thousands of poverty-stricken families, who were unable to pay mortgages or grow crops, to abandon their farms, and losses reached $25 million per day by 1936 (equivalent to $490 million in 2021).

Did the land ever recover from the Dust Bowl?

While some of the Dust Bowl land never recovered, the settled communities becoming ghost towns, many of the once-affected areas have become major food producers.

Could the Dust Bowl happen again?

Such conditions could be expected to occur naturally only rarely – about once a century. But with rising concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, dust bowl conditions are likely to become much more frequent events.

What occupation did Dust Bowl farmers turn to when they left their farms?

Many families left farm fields to move to Los Angeles or the San Francisco Bay area, where they found work in shipyards and aircraft factories that were gearing up to supply the war effort.

What was life like during the Dust Bowl?

Life during the Dust Bowl years was a challenge for those who remained on the Plains. They battled constantly to keep the dust out of their homes. Windows were taped and wet sheets hung to catch the dust. At the dinner table, cups, glasses, and plates were kept overturned until the meal was served.

Why didn't it rain during the Dust Bowl?

More dust bowl images

These changes in sea surface temperatures created shifts in the large-scale weather patterns and low level winds that reduced the normal supply of moisture from the Gulf of Mexico and inhibited rainfall throughout the Great Plains.

How long did the Dust Bowl go without rain?

The entire region, already a semi-arid climate to begin with, endured extreme drought for almost a decade. Over the 11-year span from 1930-1940, a large part of the region saw 15% to 25% less precipitation than normal.

What was the death toll of the Dust Bowl?

Around 7,000 people died during the Dust Bowl. Deaths were caused by starvation, accidents while traveling out of the Midwest, and from dust pneumonia. Most of the people who died during the Dust Bowl died from lung diseases, including dust pneumonia.

How did people make money during the Dust Bowl?

Farm Families and the Great Depression

Farmers could grow their own food in large gardens and raise livestock to provide meat. Chickens supplied both meat and eggs, while dairy cows produced milk and cream. Many women had sewing skills and began producing much of their family's clothing.

How many people did the Dust Bowl leave homeless?

The drought and dust storms left an estimated 500,000 people homeless, and an estimated 2.5 million people moved out of the Dust Bowl states. The people moved to Arizona, Washington and Oregon. Approximately 200,000 people moved to California.

Why can't farmers pay back loans?

Poor farmers are bound to take loans for agriculture purposes. Sometimes they successfully pay back the loans but there are also moments when they fail to do that in time because of crop failure. This is a very tough time for them. For the family to survive, they have to borrow more money.

Why farmers don t make money?

Rising input costs, shrinking production values and challenges to land access are just a few factors connected to declining farm operator livelihoods, the study suggests.

What was happening to farmers who couldn t pay their debts?

As a result local sheriffs seized many farms and some farmers who couldn't pay their debts were put in prison. These conditions led to the first major armed rebellion in the post-Revolutionary United States. Once again, Americans resisted high taxes and unresponsive government that was far away.

What were two problems that farmers faced in the early 1930's?

As the 1930s began, however, the farmers experienced prolonged drought which caused repeated devastation to annual harvests. Farm losses were compounded by infestations of cutworms, sawflies, and grasshoppers. Farmers struggled to maintain their farms and governments were slow to respond to the crisis.