Soil in the United States: Dust Bowl, The Grapes of Wrath, The Plow That Broke the Plains, The River, Okie, National Cooperative Soil Survey

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Pages: 40. Chapters: Dust Bowl, The Grapes of Wrath, The Plow That Broke the Plains, The River, Okie, National Cooperative Soil Survey, San Joaquin, Serpentine soil, List of U.S. state soils, Frazier-Lemke Farm Bankruptcy Act, Black Dirt Region, Weedpatch Camp, List of state soil science associations, Dust Bowl Ballads, Cecil, 1938 USDA soil taxonomy, Last Man Club, Menfro, Bama, Paxton, Natchez silt loam, Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act of 1936, Kalkaska sand, Miami, Jory, Black Sunday, Antigo, Windsor, Do Re Mi, Houdek, Houston Black, Narragansett, Stuttgart, The Worst Hard Time, Tifton, Drummer, Myakka, Casa Grande, Orovada, Hilo, Port Silt Loam, Guelph soil, Seitz, Threebear, Tanana, Sodbuster, Downer, Scobey. Excerpt: 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 wind erosion. Deep plowing of the virgin topsoil of the Great Plains had displaced the natural deep-rooted 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. These immense dust storms-given names such as "Black Blizzards" and "Black Rollers"-often...