Rural America Struggles with Poverty

Start - Up Why did commodity prices fall after 1919, even though the Great Depression was years away?

Rural America and Poverty Farmers had been suffering even before Great Depression. Falling commodity prices and accumulating debt had made it a struggle for farmers to keep their heads above water. Many failed to stay afloat and sank so deep that they lost their farms. Then the bottom fell out of the economy and the depression added more woes. Crop prices fell even further, and new debts were added to old debts. To make matters even worse, the Great Plains was suffering through a choking drought, and ecological disaster that lasted for years.

Causes of the Dust Bowl Farmers plowed under much of the natural grasses in order to plant oceans of winter wheat. Overgrazing on land that was left over from over planting New technologies, like the tractor pulled disk plows pulverized the soil, making it more vulnerable to wind erosion. 1932, loose topsoil caused by over farming and grazing and physical geographic factors of drought and high winds resulted in disaster on the Great Plains. The winds kicked up towering dust storms that began to blow east.

After effects Storms killed cattle and birds, blanketed rivers, suffocated fish Dirt seeped into houses, covering everything with a thick coat of grime. Dust clouds blew east as far as the Atlantic Coast, dumping acres of dirt on Boston, New York, and Washington D.C. These dust storms displaced twice as much dirt as Americans had scooped out to build the Panama Canal. One of the irreversible effects of this massive migration—some 2.5 million people left the Plains states alone—was that rural states lost population while states with large cities gained population. It was one of the largest migrations in the nation’s history, once again changing the nation’s demographic patterns.