Dust Bowl

The Dust Bowl (1930–1940) was a period of severe dust storms and arid weather conditions that greatly damaged the agriculture and ecology of the High Plains and North American prairies. In the United States, it primarily affected farmland in western Kansas, the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles, southeast Colorado, and northeast New Mexico. The phenomenon was caused by a combination of natural factors, including severe drought, and human behavior, including the destruction of natural topsoil by settlers who did not use dryland farming methods to prevent wind erosion. The drought came in three waves: 1934, 1936, and 1939–1940, but some regions of the High Plains experienced drought conditions for as long as eight years. It exacerbated an already existing agricultural recession. The Dust Bowl has been the subject of many cultural works, including John Steinbeck's 1937 novel Of Mice and Men and 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath; the Dust Bowl Ballads of Woody Guthrie; and Dorothea Lange's photographs depicting the conditions of migrants, particularly Migrant Mother, taken in 1936.

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