What Caused the Dust Bowl? There’s no question that drought was a key cause of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. But the soil had been enduring sustained damage long before that due to then-current farming practices. In 1862, the Homestead Act was passed, providing settlers with 160 acres of land to farm.

Contributing Factors Due to low crop prices and high machinery costs, more submarginal lands were put into production. Farmers also started to abandon soil conservation practices. These events laid the groundwork for the severe soil erosion that would cause the Dust Bowl.

The massive dust storms caused farmers to lose their livelihoods and their homes. Deflation from the Depression aggravated the plight of Dust Bowl farmers. Prices for the crops they could grow fell below subsistence levels. In 1932, the federal government sent aid to the drought-affected states.

Abnormal sea surface temperatures (SST) in the Pacific and the Atlantic Ocean played a strong role in the 1930s dust bowl drought. During the 1930s, this low level jet stream weakened, carrying less moisture, and shifted further south. The Great Plains land dried up and dust storms blew across the U.S.

7,000 people

The Dust Bowl is a distant memory, but the odds of such a drought happening again are increasing. Other helpful techniques include planting more drought-resistant strains of corn and wheat; leaving crop residue on the fields to cover the soil; and planting trees to break the wind.

But for years, farmers had plowed the soil too fine, and they contributed to the creation of the Dust Bowl. The process pulverized hard dirt into small clods. In the early 30s, many farmers would come back into a plowed field with a set of disc harrows that would break the clods into fine soil particles.

Migrants Were Feared as a Health Threat 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.

Migration Out of the Plains during the Depression. During the Dust Bowl years, the weather destroyed nearly all the crops farmers tried to grow on the Great Plains. Many once-proud farmers packed up their families and moved to California hoping to find work as day laborers on huge farms.

The storms, years of drought, and the Great Depression devastated the lives of residents living in those Dust Bowl states. Three hundred thousand of the stricken people packed up their belongings and drove to California. The great Dust Bowl migration transformed and reshaped California for years to come.

California was hit hard by the economic collapse of the 1930s. Businesses failed, workers lost their jobs, and families fell into poverty. In spite of the general gloom of the decade, Californians continued to build and celebrate their Golden State.

The Dust Bowl exodus was the largest migration in American history. By 1940, 2.5 million people had moved out of the Plains states; of those, 200,000 moved to California.

In the end the Okie spirit and determination triumphed for the migrants who had arrived in California with nothing. “Many of them quickly moved out of farm work into better-paying jobs in the oil industry and, when World War II broke out, in the burgeoning Southern California defense plants.

The Dust Bowl exodus was the largest migration in American history within a short period of time. Between 1930 and 1940, approximately 3.5 million people moved out of the Plains states; of those, it is unknown how many moved to California. In just over a year, over 86,000 people migrated to California.

Okies, Dust Bowl Migrants from Oklahoma & the Plains. As the “double whammy” of drought and depression deepened on the Great Plains, more and more farmers gave up or were forced off of their land. Fewer farmers could farm more land.

While Mills Home eventually moved in that direction, during the Great Depression orphanages were contending with constrained resources and overwhelming numbers of needy children. Those circumstances meant crowded residential cottages, separation of the children by sex, and grouping by age in the housing arrangements.

9 million savings accounts

Another phenomenon that compounded the nation’s economic woes during the Great Depression was a wave of banking panics or “bank runs,” during which large numbers of anxious people withdrew their deposits in cash, forcing banks to liquidate loans and often leading to bank failure.

1933 is generally regarded as the worst year of the Depression: One-quarter of America’s workers–more than 15 million people–was out of work. As the optimism of the 1920s gave way to fear and desperation, Americans looked to the federal government for relief.