Black Blizzards" and "Black Rollers"

Crop rotation is the practice of growing a series of dissimilar types of crops in the same area in sequential seasons for various benefits such as to avoid the build up of pathogens and pests that often occurs when one species is continuously cropped. A traditional element of crop rotation is the replenishment of nitrogen through the use of green manure in sequence with cereals and other crops Crop rotation can also improve soil structure and fertility by alternating deep-rooted and shallow-rooted plants.

The Dust Bowl or the Dirty Thirties was a period of severe dust storms causing major ecological and agricultural damage to American and Canadian prairie lands from 1930 to 1936 (in some areas until 1940). The phenomenon was caused by severe drought coupled with decades of extensive farming without crop rotation, fallow fields, cover crops or other techniques to prevent erosion. Deep plowing of the virgin topsoil of the Great Plains had displaced the natural grasses that normally kept the soil in place and trapped moisture even during periods of drought and high winds.

During the drought of the 1930s, without natural anchors to keep the soil in place, it dried, turned to dust, and blew away eastward and southward in large dark clouds. At times the clouds blackened the sky reaching all the way to East Coast cities such as New York and Washington, D.C. Much of the soil ended up deposited in the Atlantic Ocean, carried by prevailing winds which were in part created by the dry and bare soil conditions itself. These immense dust storms—given names such as "Black Blizzards" and "Black Rollers"—often reduced visibility to a few feet (around a meter). The Dust Bowl affected 100,000,000 acres (400,000 km2), centered on the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, and adjacent parts of New Mexico, Colorado, and Kansas.

This was a man-made disaster. It was the uprooting of hardy plains grasses that could withstand drought by the planting of the cash crop of the day, wheat. Hordes of immigrant farmers who were given huge plots of land by the government to settle, combined with a crop that was water hungry and then a hundred-year drought added up to an environmental disaster.

Millions of acres of farmland became useless, and hundreds of thousands of people were forced to leave their homes; many of these families (often known as "Okies", since so many of them [though not all of them] came from Oklahoma) traveled to California and other states, where they found economic conditions little http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifbetter than those they had left. Owning no land, many traveled from farm to farm picking fruit and other crops at starvation wages. Author John Steinbeck later wrote The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men about such people.

Not until a particularly big black blizzard made it to Chicago, New York and then Boston did the media finally give the decade of hell proper news coverage to the rest of Americans.

Surviving the Dust Bowl, 1931-1939

Joel Salatin, Polyface Farms - Folks This Ain't Normal