The debate over the causes of the Dust Bowl (in the United States—it is the “Dirty Thirties” in Canadian memory) often focuses on the varying importance of the very dry weather as contra-distinct from the material and economic pressures on farmers who were using ecologically destructive equipment. But really, a pertinent question is just why it happened despite the presence of and understanding of techniques of farming that would have ameliorated the worst effects of agricultural development on the plains? The answer to ‘why it happened’ is that many organizations, such as banks, railroads, and equipment manufacturers, promoted products and methods that were extremely destructive. And that those products and methods, despite being discredited by mounting evidence to the contrary were used by a majority of farmers during the early 20th century due to advertising and information promulgated by organizations such as the Dry Farming Congress, an alliance of many corporate and banking interests. The result would be hundreds and thousands of farmers using destructive machinery and out-dated soil destroying methods decades after the governments of both Canada and the United States had learned of their counter-productivity. This article serves to suggest an alternative causality in the debate over the cause of the Dust Bowl, and does not diminish the importance of mechanized capitalism’s expansion and greed or the numerous dry years of the late 1920s and 1930s as causal. Indeed, the destruction that resulted from the drought was made possible by the rhetoric and “information” of the profit-driven manufacturers, railroads, and banks that popularized the message of the companies and individuals promoting equipment that would break up the soil and cause it to blow. The sale of unnecessary and destructive farm equipment was common throughout western Canada and the United States. It was those people, often well-intentioned, but driven by profit motive, that provided misleading information that competed with the accurate information that did exist.
The expansion of settlers onto the central plains of the United States and of Canada exposed thousands of prospective farmers to conditions very different than those of the wetter and warmer east. In the central Canadian plains, the weather combination of aridity (less than fifteen inches of precipitation yearly), cold, and wind, drove the government to fund ways to explore methods to combat these problems. For example, the Canadian government, through its staff at its Experimental Farms in central Canada (Indian Head, Saskatchewan and Brandon, Manitoba) learned many successful methods of how to fight soil destruction. The staff experimented with trees, crop rotations, alternative crops, and experimented with (and discarded) much of the machinery promoted by dry farming advocates. In the second year of its existence, 1887, the Superintendent of the Indian Head Experimental Farm, Angus Mackay, writes of stinging sand in the face, blown from fields on the Farm and neighboring operations. The soil destruction surprised the researchers, who expected to confront low moisture as the primary obstacle to plains agriculture. In other words, it is quite clear that the process of combating agricultural destruction caused by soil loss was not new to anyone by the1930s but had been a constant threat to the farmers of the American and Canadian plains since settlement. And so, even in 1888, the Experimental Farms in Canada fought soil blowing by planting as well as distributing trees to local farmers. After only ten years, the government began experimenting with crop rotations. The Experimental Farm and after 1905, the Forest Nursery Station, also located in Indian Head, planted and distributed what would become hundreds of millions of trees to the area’s farmers. They recommended tree growth for many years as a means to protect growing plants from the wind, as well as to protect fields from blowing sand. Additionally, the Farm at Indian Head worked for forty years modifying summer fallow, which was the chief method of moisture conservation in the arid plains. The staff at the Farm recommended leaving a third of the land lay fallow every year and also suggested clearing the fallow land of weeds through cultivation. Over twenty years, this cultivation was found to be one of the causes of soil destruction, as it was the breaking of soil into dust that contributed most to the blowing of sand. By 1910 over forty percent of farmers on the plains complained of soil drifting; and the Experimental Farms could document the substantial loss of phosphoric acid and nitrogen, as well as the loss of valuable mycorrhizae.