The dust bowl was the caused by three main reasons. Loss of shortgrass, mechanization, and poor weather. These were not all due to man’s mistakes therefore America didn’t have a way to prevent the dustbowl from occurring.
For thousands of years shortgrass has covered fields and prairies throughout the United States of America. It is also home to the wildlife, especially 20 to 30 million buffalo. Farmers started arriving in America in the 1880’s. The reason they started coming was they heard the land was great for wheat and was a lot cheaper to farm on. Eventually so many more people started coming to the Southern Great Plains. For while there were no problems, after a while all the short grass was turning to top soil which could led to the dust bowl.
As time was gaining on this also was a great advancement in technology. Farmers were able to start harvesting a lot more crops. In 1879 they were able to harvest 10 million acres, in 1899 they were able to harvest 50 million acres, and in 1929 they were able to harvest 105 million acres. These numbers are crazy! This was all from the advancement in technology. What farmers were unaware about though was that it was causing more topsoil and all this started leading to the horrible disaster of the dust bowl.
As years were passing and farming was increasing the rain fall stayed kind of steady and wasn’t causing too many problems. In 1931 to 1940 the rainfall was below normal and this started causing a problems. Dustbowls were happening in many different cities.
The dustbowl known as the worst hard time was very hard to get through. It affected so many things. One of the main affects it had was called dust pneumonia. The dustbowls were taking lives away. These were some of America’s hardest times. Loss of shortgrass, mechanization, and poor weather were all the cause of the dustbowl and if only they could have been prevented.