Howard, I'd like to expand on what all of you said below about the cause of dust bowl. I'd like to add that once the soil was dried out and blowing, the only way to "hold" the soil was to use a lister or similar implement to shape the soil into high ridges and deep valleys to keep the soil from blowing. Farmers who didn't have such implements available to them learned to use their moldboard plows to try to do the same thing. Plowing was generally done in such a way to create as smooth and level seedbed as possible, but under the circumstances, they used what they had. I actually have a sales brochure from the period that shows how to make ridges with your plow in an effort to hold the soil from wind erosion. That said, it was a vicious cycle in that the very attempt to work the ground to hold the soil, dried it out even more, and every time the soil was worked, the organic matter that holds soil together was depleted and soil was turned into powder. So one can imagine the frustration of the farmer who either watched his soil blow away, or go work the soil to try to hold it while knowing it was going to dry it out even more.
To add to this, in my area of the Dakotas, it was also common practice to have a portion of your acres in fallow every 3 to 4 years to give it a rest and get a handle on weeds. The only weed control at the time was tillage. So when the drought years set in, many acres were already exposed with no cover and susceptible to drying out.
By the 60s and 70s we were using rod-weeders, duck foot chisel plows and noble blades in an effort to cut weed roots but NOT turn the soil over as much as possible. This was still a very touch and go practice in a drought year. It wasn't until the heavy use of commercial fertilizers and herbicides were farmers able to continuous crop their fields without yield loss. This left much more cover on the soil and eventually led to the capability of successful no-till practices used on marginal soils today.
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