Ep 60 Dust Bowl pt 2

The Curious Cousins discuss the Dust Bowl and its effects on Oklahoma. They talk about their Thanksgiving plans and shopping preferences. They also touch on the question of whether better farming practices during the Great Depression could have prevented the Dust Bowl. They discuss the long-term economic impact of the Dust Bowl, including soil erosion, decline in agricultural land values, and population declines. They mention the challenges farmers faced in switching to more appropriate crops and the lack of availability of credit. Overall, the Dust Bowl had a significant impact on the agricultural land and economy of Oklahoma. Hi, I'm Jess, and I'm Tiff, and we're your Curious Cousins, where we talk about everything kooky and spooky in the state of Oklahoma. Welcome to Episode 60. Welcome. How are you? Better than you, I think. I don't feel bad. My voice is just, I don't know, it just feels like I have some weird drainage, and I don't feel bad. My throat doesn't hurt, my nose isn't stuffy, but I woke up and I didn't have a voice. She also got pink eye over the weekend. I did get pink eye over the weekend, which could have been from children, or it could have been, I guess, from my allergies. I don't really know. I don't know. So, yeah. So, yay. Happy Thanksgiving, Anna. Yeah. Happy Thanksgiving. Yay. I hope everyone is enjoying a trip to fan hangover. Enjoying time with family, or friends, or whoever you're spending it with. Getting to eat your favorite feast-y, like, food. Definitely. I know. I'm excited. I'm ready. Because by the time, while we're recording this, we're still, like, three days out from Thanksgiving. So, but by the time you all hear this, you'll be stuffed and maybe doing some Black Friday shopping. Yes. I'm excited for that. I'm excited for some small Saturday shopping, too. Yeah. I just, I mean, I'm a browser, so I love to go into little stores and just look around. I have to be in the mood. I don't have to be in the mood. Or maybe I'm always in the mood to shop. I'm definitely not, like, a go-out-and-shop person. Now, if I'm, like, online, yeah, I can do that all day. Well, now, apparently, I'm coughing. So, well, it'll be fine. So, welcome back to part two of our coverage of the Dust Bowl. Welcome back. Yes. And so, in the last episode, Jess and I covered, you know, the geographical location of the actual Dust Bowl, and come to find out, it affected a lot of our state. However, the main effect, like, the pictures that you see, like, the historical pictures really only happened in about three counties in our state. The panhandle. Now, I mean, those are some of our bigger counties, too. No, they are. So, but, bigger count, like, size-wise, not really population-wise. They're probably small population-wise. But, so, she covered that, and then she also covered, you know, what it meant, and what the dust storms were, and what Black Sunday was. And just the effect of these droughts had in correlation with our, with the Great Depression. Right. And I had a thought today. My sons love to listen to podcasts, but, of course, they're only allowed to listen to a few, and ours is one of them. And so, they had asked me a really interesting question regarding if farmers wouldn't have farmed as much, or if they would have followed better farming practices during the Great Depression, do you think that the Dust Bowl would have been as big a deal? And I was trying to think, you know, rewinding back, you know, 15 years' worth of agricultural knowledge that I got from school, thinking that if they would have been practicing, like, crop rotations, or, you know, not always, like, pulling up the, what is it? The native grasses. Yeah, the native grasses. That kind of have the topsoil. That possibly, I think we still would have had a drought, because, you know, it comes in cycles, but I don't know that it would have been as bad. Right. We probably wouldn't have had the Dust Bowl, per se, maybe. I mean, I think there would have still been some soil erosion. I think the winds would have still been high, but I don't think it would have been as bad as it was. No, I agree. I don't think it would have been as bad either. So, that was just an interesting question my boys had kind of just picked up along the way. Well, because we had kind of talked about, you know, the government was like, here's more land, plant more seed, and, you know, the more seed they planted, well, okay, let me go back. Then the Great Depression happened, the stock market fell, and that's what caused the kind of, you know, the price of seed to go down. Yeah. You know, it was great for consumers, but it was terrible for the farmers, which we talked about. Right. You know, in the farmer's mind, which I probably would have thought the same thing if I was in their shoes, like, oh, the more I plant, the more money I'll get for the seed. Right. But there was just such a surplus of it. Yes. I just wonder if they didn't understand, like, supply and demand. Maybe not. Like we do now. And that was probably just a lesson that we all had to learn because, you know, you have to think during the 20s, we were just abundant in everything. Right. Well, and also, you have to think of where these farmers were coming from. Right. Like, some of these farmers were migrant farmers coming from, you know, the East Coast and, you know, wherever else. And their crops, the way they handle that is probably a little different than how you would handle crops in the South Central area where they were. The climate and the landscape is definitely different. Right. Different kinds of soil. Yes. And there's all these factors. And I think it's like, well, we know how to farm. We know what works for us. And, you know, I don't know. But. Shoulda, coulda, woulda. Right. I mean, hindsight is definitely 2020. And, of course, we're looking through it. Like, we often say we look through it through a 2023 lens. So we're going to start part two. Right. And are you starting with a long-term economic impact? I am. On our country and Oklahoma? I am. Okay. So in many regions, more than 75% of the topsoil was blown away by the end of the 1930s. The land degradation varied widely. By 1940, counties that had experienced the most erosion had a greater decline in agricultural land values. The pre-acre value of farmland declined by 28% in high erosion counties and 17% in medium erosion counties relative to land value changes in low erosion counties. Makes sense. Makes sense. There's nowhere to plant food. There's nowhere for animals to eat. Right. Right. So even over long-term, areas of the Dust Bowl with the highest soil erosion found that crops or even revenue per acre rose and some never completely recovered. The economy adjusted predominantly through large relative population declines in more eroded counties, both during the 1930s and through the 1950s. So the economic effects persisted in part because of farmers' failure to switch to more appropriate crops for highly eroded areas. Because the amount... Oh. You looked like you were going to say something. Oh. Well, I was because I was thinking, do you think also that that could have... I might be interrupting this and you might be saying it as well, but do you think that they necessarily may have not been able to afford to make the changes? Because was that going to require them to now buy a different type of seed that maybe they didn't have the funds to do or... I mean, it could have. Or different tools to plant. I mean, I have a background in agriculture, but I know that some seeds can only be planted by some types of equipment and some by others. So I just wondered if it wasn't that they were really refusing to do it. It's just they didn't have the means to be able to do it. I think it's probably a mixture of things. I think they probably didn't have... It didn't really go into deep detail about that. Okay. But I think that would be a good guess or assumption, I guess we could call it. Because, I don't know, I think some were just stubborn and they knew what they knew. And I mean, doing new crops are scary. Well, and you have to think, too, that in the back of your mind, what does wheat make? It makes flour. Everyone has to have flour. So as a farmer, if you're like, well, I'm just not going to plant flour anymore, but then you're like... And maybe you're thinking, but then how are people going to be able to make bread? How are they going to be able to make beer? I guess it was during prohibition, so I didn't really have to worry about that. But how are they just going to be able to make biscuits? And wheat is such an integral part of our diet. I'm sure that they thought in their minds, that's insane. People have to be able to eat. And maybe that did go through their minds. Because the amount of topsoil had been reduced, it would have been more productive to shift from crops and wheat to animals and hay. During the Depression and through at least the 1950s, there were limited relative adjustments of farmland away from activities that became less productive in more eroded counties. Some of the failure to shift to more productive agricultural methods may be related to ignorance about the benefits of changing land use, which you kind of mentioned. And a second explanation is a lack of availability. Well, yeah, if you're out in the middle of nowhere, what's the chances that a government official is going to find your homestead? And what's the chance that you're going to be able to get the supplies that you need shipped to your location? Yeah. And, well, I mean, I guess I should have read further in my notes when we were talking earlier. But you were right in a sense. There was a lack of availability of credit caused by the high rate of failure of banks. Oh, absolutely. Mainly in the plains states. And because banks failed in the Dust Bowl region at a higher rate than elsewhere, farmers could not get the credit they needed to obtain capital to shift crop production. So there's your answer. I mean, you have to think, like, we really weren't able to pull ourselves out of this Depression until well into the 1940s. Yeah. So in addition, profit margins in either animals or hay were still minimal, and farmers at first had little incentives to change their crops. So that's kind of another reason that they were so hesitant to change. Because even if they wanted to, they weren't going to be able to. Right. So a cookie fact. A 2023 study in the Journal of Economic History found that while the Dust Bowl had a large and enduring impact on agricultural land, it had modest impacts on average wage incomes, which I thought was interesting. Very interesting. It is difficult to determine the direct costs of the Dust Bowl because it is so enmeshed with the Great Depression. The cost in the 1930s is estimated to have been $153 million. Today that cost would be closer to $2 billion. Wow. The biggest economic downfall from the Dust Bowl was the cost of migration. Hmm. So thousands of people left the region, and while many returned, a lot didn't. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It also resulted in depressed wages in the areas where the migrant pickers eventually found work. The threat of dust storms is still existent, and today an environmental scientist warned that unless there's a major reform in farming techniques, the threat of another Dust Bowl is enemous. You can see it in western Oklahoma. It's starting to get that way again, I believe, and you're right. If we don't intervene, we're going to do it all over again. Right. The last thing I want to say for this part of it, the impact of the Dust Bowl changed the United States forever. It really has, and it literally altered the landscape as well as the way man interacts with the land and nature. Those are just some of the long-term things that came from it. Oh, interesting. I wanted to cover the influence on arts and culture at the time, because in the 1930s, people like to think that our world came to a standstill, but it really didn't. This was at the height of the talkies coming out, and films were still being made. Film, going to watch a movie, was actually a cheap way for entertainment, and it was also a way that many people got the news, because the first 10, 15, 20 minutes was always going to be a newsreel. The federal government hired many photographers and musicians and authors to document this time period, both during the Great Depression and also the Dust Bowl. The Farm Security Administration is credited with hiring the famous Depression-era photographer Dorothea Lange, who was credited with such works as The Destitute Pea Pickers in California and The Mother of Seven Children photograph and Migrant Mother photograph. Oh, that one I'm familiar with. Yes. Really, probably, if you looked at them all, you'd recognize them all. These photos expressed the struggles of people caught by the Dust Bowl and raised awareness in other parts of the country of its reach and human cost. Of course, we can't talk about the Dust Bowl without talking about John Steinbeck. Right, right. It's funny you bring him up. My dad actually asked me about that after listening to last week's episode. It's interesting, though, because there's a controversy. Yes. He borrowed closely from filled notes taken by Farm Security Administration worker and author, Sonora Babb. Oh. He borrowed her notes and wrote a very famous novel called The Grapes of Wrath. Right. It was published in 1939. I mean, this blows my mind, but the movie was released in 1940. Oh, wow. I didn't know it was that quick. Yes. Most of us know that The Grapes of Wrath is wildly inaccurate. The Joad family was located near Salisbury, which actually was hundreds of miles away from the Dust Bowl region. This is why I think us as Oklahomans don't understand the geographical region of the Dust Bowl. Most migrants heading into California were not farmers. They were, in fact, from small towns or cities, businessmen and workers. This stereotype in the book and movie followed Oklahomans for decades. Still. I think today. Here's a kooky fact, though. Even though state officials were extremely vocal about their displeasure of how Oklahoma was depicted in the novel, it flew off bookshelves in Oklahoma. It was a bestseller for years, being second to Gone with the Wind. Oh, my goodness. Here's another kooky fact. Sonora Babb herself also wrote a novel called Whose Names are Unknown about the lives of migrant workers that she based on her own research. However, due to Steinbeck's novel's popularity, hers was shelved. Oh, no. It wasn't published until 2004. Oh, my gosh. Talk about writing the tails of people's tailcoats or whatever that saying is. Exactly. Another very famous person, and actually Oklahoman as well, is singer Woody Guthrie. Right. He's from Okemah. He put out an entire album in 1940 called Dust Bowl Ballads, songs depicting the struggles of both the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. Woody would later be nicknamed the Dust Bowl Troubadour. Interesting. Migrants also influenced musical culture wherever they went. Oklahoma migrants in particular were rural Southwesterners who carried their traditional country music to California. Their honky-tonk. Exactly. Today, the Bakersfield Sound describes this blend which developed after the migrants brought country music to the city of Bakersfield. Interesting. Their new music inspired a proliferation of country dance halls as far south as Los Angeles. Oh, wow. Bakersfield Sound is a sub-genre of country music developed in the mid to late 1950s in and around Bakersfield, California. Bakersfield is defined by its influence of rock and roll and honky-tonk style country, like you said, and its heavy use of electric instrumentation and backbeats. Think Merle Haggard. Right. He is probably the most famous. Oh, yeah. This time period proved to be one of those timeless history spots that we see. Many TV shows were produced in the 20th and 21st century that depicted lives in the Dust Bowl or stories or soap operas, dramas and that thing. From 2003 to 2005, HBO had a TV series called Carnivale that was set during the Dust Bowl. In 2012, PBS had a four-part docuseries, The Dust Bowl, that was directed by Ken Burns. Oh. The 2014 science fiction film Interstellar features a ravaged 21st century America that is again scoured by dust storms. Along with inspiration from the 1930s crisis, director Christopher Nolan features interviews from the 2012 PBS documentary. In 2017, Americana recording artist Grant Malloy Smith released the album Dust Bowl, American Stories, inspired by the history of the Dust Bowl. In a review, the music magazine No Depression wrote that the album's lyrics and music are as potent as Woody Guthrie, as intense as John Trundle, and dusted with the trials and tribulations of the character Tom Joad from The Grapes of Wrath. Oh. Well, going back to The Grapes of Wrath, I know at my high school, I don't know if it's still like this, but when me and my, at least my older brother, I don't know if my younger brother had to read it, but in our junior year, it was required, we didn't read Grapes of Wrath. And then, of course, we read the book and then you're discussing it, but then we would watch the movie. Right, yeah. And my dad, just the other night, actually, I think it was yesterday, to be honest, he was like, when was the last time you watched Grapes of Wrath? And I was like, high school. I remember watching it too, and it was not as, it wasn't appealing to me at the time period. So, but you know, it's a banned book now. Oh, is it? Yes, it's a banned book. So, I don't know that high school students are reading it in our state. If they are, please correct me, but I do know it is on the banned book list. Nice. I just know it wasn't when we were in high school. No, it wasn't. No, it wasn't, because I know that in my eighth grade American History class, we watched parts of it and we read parts of it, and then later on, I think in 11th grade is when we read it again. Yeah. So, I also wanted to talk about changes in agriculture that was made. And you kind of, you highlighted a lot of it already. Oh, I'm sorry. No, that's okay. No, that's okay. So, between 1900 and 1930, agriculture was the dominant economic activity, not only in the state of Oklahoma, but pretty much in our entire nation. Yeah. Nearly five million acres of prairie land in western Oklahoma and the Panhandle were converted into wheat fields. Here's a cookie fact. Doing this made Oklahoma the third most producing state for wheat behind Kansas and North Dakota. Wheat are recorded as producing 60 million bushels a year. Still or back then? Back then. And I wonder still. I think that's probably pretty accurate if it's not higher. I know wheat is probably in our top three. It was at one time in our top three agriculture. Yeah. Like wheat and cotton are some of our big ones. I believe. It may be soybeans now, but it may be corn. I think it was corn, but it may be soybeans now. Weather conditions and great prices allowed farmers to prosper during the 1910s and 20s. This time period was referred to as the Great Plow Up. Oh. Agricultural land and revenue boomed during World War I, but fell during the Great Depression in the 1930s, which you've already hit on. Tractors and harvesting implements allowed for the rapid spread of wheat production. However, these farming techniques and drought conditions caused the Dust Bowl. It was referred to as wheating the land to death. I mean, basically. Yeah, exactly. That's so accurate. By 1935, 33 million acres or 51,500 square miles was void of plant life, replaced with mountains of powdery dust. Oh, gosh. It is estimated that 850 million tons of soil was lost during the storms of 1935. I think you had hit on that in the last part, in the last episode. The agricultural land most affected by the Dust Bowl was 16 million acres or 6.5 million hectares of land in the Oklahoma and Texas Panhandles. These 20 counties that the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Soil Conservation Service identified as the worst wind-eroded region. Farmers started practicing listing or creating small dams to collect water in, planting shelter belts, as mentioned before, covert crop fields and drier areas into grasslands for grazing, increased the variety of crops being grown to avoid monocropping, corn and sorghum were introduced along with alfalfa, yet these types of crops did require more water. I will tell you that the main reason why you want to rotate crops is because certain crops like wheat will strip the soil of the minerals it needs to grow but leave other minerals behind. When you go back, if you plant wheat for three years and then you take that same field and you decide you're going to plant sorghum or alfalfa or corn or whatever on that land, now you're taking a crop that doesn't need the same minerals that wheat does and so it will start to take the minerals that are in the soil and it allows the soil to build up the minerals that the wheat stripped from it. So you're just supposed to rotate the crops and a lot of people rotate the crops probably every year, but I know you could go a few years and then do it, but a lot of people do do it every year. I know some people will have multiple fields and one will lay fallow and then the next year it will be used and then another one. Right, exactly. To help avoid a crisis such as this in the future, during the 1950s, the Ogallala Aquifer was tapped into. With water in supply, new methods of watering were introduced. The center pivot sprinkling was used instead of ditch irrigation. However, this practice isn't perfect either. It requires energy to run the pumps to sprinkle the water, either gasoline or electricity, and so there's a whole new problem that we have. It almost completely depleted the aquifer by the 1990s. This is the aquifer that a lot of western Oklahoma uses. We're fortunate that we live in eastern Oklahoma where water runs a plenty, typically. It's hard for me and that's something that my students are about to learn about is aquifers in the next coming weeks. It will be interesting that I can bring this little tidbit of information. Two national grasslands were created in response to the Dust Bowl. The Black Kettle National Grassland, which also laps over into the Texas Panhandle, and Roger Mills County is far western Oklahoma, and the Rita Blanca National Grassland, which is in the southwest corner of the Panhandle. Most of the site, though, for that one also resides on the Texas side. Nice. All right. What do you want to talk about? All right. The last little bit here, I know I don't have much, just a little smidge. I just want to talk about the change in population. Oh, yeah. While migration from and between the southern Great Plains states was greater than migration in other regions in the 1930s, the number of migrants from these areas had only slightly increased from the 1920s. The Dust Bowl and Great Depression, thus, did not trigger a mass exodus of southern migrants, but simply encouraged these migrants to keep moving where in other areas the Great Depression limited mobility. Let me just read that whole thing. I was like, oh, for once, it's not me. That's what you get for thinking that. The Dust Bowl and Great Depression, thus, did not trigger a mass exodus of southern migrants, but simply encouraged these migrants to keep moving where in other areas the Great Depression limited mobility due to economic issues, decreasing migration. While the population of the Great Plains did fall during the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, the drop was not caused by extreme numbers of migrants leaving the Great Plains. But by a lack of migrants moving from outside the Great Plains into the region. That's really all I got. That's it. That's the Dust Bowl. That's the Cliff Notes version of the Dust Bowl. I thought it was interesting. That was interesting. I learned a lot more than I thought I was going to learn. We kind of talked about it last episode. There are so many aspects of it that I never considered or thought about or learned about when I did learn about the Dust Bowl. I found it really interesting, to be honest. I did, too. That's great. Good job. Thanks. You did really great yourself. Thanks. If you guys, again, have any questions or comments or maybe you have loved ones that you wanted to talk to about the Dust Bowl, send us, DM us or send us an email. Tell us the conversations you might have had over Thanksgiving. We would love to hear it. Jess and I will probably update you on some of the ones that we may have. I think we're going to try and talk to our grandma, see if she remembers anything. Other than that, I know that Small Saturday is coming. I have a couple of small businesses that I'd like to shout out. First and foremost, Perviance Metal Art out of Moorland, Oklahoma. Please go and check them out. They have really unique, great creative fire pits. You can customize them. Exactly. Really anything that you could possibly think of in the metalworks department. It's a family-run business, Cody Perviance. He does a phenomenal job. They're so awesome. Yes, I own one of his fire pits. You do. I will be the future owner of a metal gnome. That's the way she won it. They have really cool things. Maybe if you mention that you heard us, you might get a little bit of a discount. I don't know for sure. If you mention that you heard it on Curious Cousins, they might top some money off. Make sure. You can check them out for sure on Facebook and Instagram. Exactly. Are they on TikTok? Yes, they are on TikTok as well. Those are at least three platforms that you can definitely find them on. Did I say Instagram? Yes. Okay. Yes. Another one that I wanted to shout out was Sew It Well. Sew S-E-W. It is managed by a woman. It's woman-run. It is by Harley. It is run by Harley Silvis out of Owasso, Oklahoma. What she does is she hand-sews and embroiders onto sweaters and hats. Right now, she's doing stockings. She also does... I have a teacher bag that she hand-lettered and hand-sewed. You just ordered a sweatshirt for your great-niece. I did. My great-niece just got one from there. I highly recommend you guys check them out. Also, let her know that you heard it on Curious Cousins. The last one that I wanted to talk about was Shirts and Giggles out of Norman. They have really punny shirts, especially for the holidays. It is run by one of my sorority sisters and her husband. Definitely, check them out if you just would like a really punny holiday shirt. They had a really cute turkey. It had a cowboy hat on and boots. It said, howdy. It's a giant turkey. I don't know. It sounds ridiculous, but it was so cute. They have a lot of really cute shirts and things. Definitely, if you want to check all three of those out, and if you have your own small business that you would like for us to shout out, let us know. We'd be happy to do it. Absolutely. Make sure that you find us on all of the socials, minus TikTok. Jess, we have to get into TikTok. I think that's where it's at. Maybe. We'll see. I don't know. We can't even get our mics to work, right? Does anybody really watch us on TikTok? Make sure that you're following us on Facebook and Instagram and the app formerly known as Twitter. Then rate, follow, and review us on your favorite streaming device. I just thought of something. Be sure you guys check out all the little things around that are happening, like the Silberg of Light. I haven't seen if Olver Holster was going to have their breakfast with Santa. I hope they do. Tulsa Spirit Tours always usually does something Christmas-related. Just make sure you're checking out all the fun things. The holiday shoot in Sepulpa. Oh, my gosh. If you guys have not made a trip to Tulsa, if you live anywhere in the state, you've got to block out a day or two to come to Tulsa, catch the Filbrook, catch the Sepulpa holiday shoot. I wanted to go to that last year, and I didn't go. Collinsville up here. Yeah, I heard they were doing something. They're doing something very similar as well. Check out your own community, because a lot of communities are about to have the Light Up the Christmas tree this week. Yeah. Anyway, I just wanted to mention that really quick before we halt. Mary's Gardens are about to light up. Guthrie Green is about to light up. I'm sure the Gathering Place will have something. I'm excited because we will be in Oklahoma City at the Thunder Game on Saturday, and I think after the game we'll be able to walk through the Myriad Gardens. I'm excited about that. So, yeah. Oh, if you have any questions, comments, concerns, shows. We did get a recommendation for a show. I know. I saw that. I was like, ooh. I think I've heard of that. Oh, yeah. I think it might be in some of our books. Sweet. I hope. I say that. We're not telling you what it is. No. We're not telling you what it is. But you can always catch us at CuriousCousinsOKGmail.com. Great. And Jess, tell them what to keep it. Keep it kooky and spooky. Bye.