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Origins of The Dust Bowl
Welcome to the great plow up, where crops grow good and money flows endlessly. That’s what they said about the Oklahoma regions during the initial discovery of the plains. During the great plow-up, people would take their furrow plows and plow up the dirt to plant cash crops like wheat and corn. The government was handing out land to people who would plow and plant on it. People rushed to plant their crops and make money. People were getting rich off of this free land. Due to the government providing all of this free land. The population in Oklahoma and surrounding territories began to proliferate.
On July 28, 1914, WWI started. The government was trying to get more food for the men in the military, so, they increased the price of cash crops. They raised the wheat prices from $.78 per bushel (1913) to $2.12 per bushel (1917). That made farmers plant more crops to make more money. This change in price also caused more people to buy more land. This caused people to have to work a lot harder to keep up with all the land they had.
Due to the harder work that came with all the land, Charles John Angell, Sr. invented the one-way disc plow. This work by flipping the soil over to loosen it up. This allowed more land to be plowed up faster and more effectively (for planting in bulk) but caused the soil to get caught in the wind easier. Flipped soil also couldnt hold water that well.
After WWI ended, wheat prices began to drop. This caused farmers to make less money. So to combat this, farmers planted more wheat to make up for the drop in price. This made the price drop even lower which started a cycle of more and more plowed land and lower and lower wheat prices. This also had an effect on the land due to the turning of soil all across the plains.
After all these years of land getting plowed all across the plains, the dirt started to get really dry due to the lack of water-holding ability. Since the dirt was loose and dry, it started getting picked up by the wind. The wind would pick up the dirt and gather it into a giant cloud of dust that would cover the plains. This would happen all across the plains of the central United States. This marked the beginning of the Dust Bowl.
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