Ideas - Could the Dust Bowl of the 30s happen again?

Episode Date: May 5, 2026

The Dirty Thirties might seem like the distant past but according to IDEAS contributor and professor Evan Fraser now is the time to dust off the lessons about what worked to save farmers and agriculture. The confluence of drought, scorching temperatures and terrifying storms was devastating for farm families forced to abandon their land. Fraser argues the Dust Bowl should serve as a warning of compounding crises that lie ahead. But he adds it can also be a guide to solutions that could help us muddle through as the world lurches into another chapter of environmental, political and economic upheaval.Guests in this episode:Evan Fraser is a geography professor and director of Arrell Food Institute at the University of Guelph.Pamela Riney-Kehrberg is a distinguished professor of history at Iowa State University.Robert McLeman is a professor of geography and environmental studies at Wilfrid Laurier University.

Prime Minister Mark Carney has finally secured a majority for this liberal government. What are his plans and how does it all affect you? The Power and Politics podcast answers these questions and more six days a week. We have you covered from all angles. Our reporter roundtable joins us every Friday and you can get caught up with the weekly wrap every Saturday. Follow and listen to Power and Politics wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. Some call it Ruination Day, April the 14th, the day

Abraham Lincoln was shot in 1865, the day the Titanic struck an iceberg in 1912, and the day in 1935, when the noontime sun was blotted out by a towering cloud of dust that blasted and blanketed the great plains of the United States. We looked in the north and thought it was a blue northern coming. Such a huge black cloud just looked like smoke out of a train stack or something. It was black Sunday, a dust storm of seemingly biblical proportions. It was described by some as a Land tsunami or a dust blizzard, the most infamous episode of the 1930s dust bowl that changed life in the breadbaskets of the U.S. and Canada irrevocably. The dust was so thick that if you held your hand out in front of your face, accounts suggest you couldn't see your hand. And it was a 200-mile wide, 50-mile deep wall of dust traveling at between 40 and 50 miles per hour, bringing absolute devastation in it.

its wake. And so you'd have been caught in that dust storm for many hours, unable to breathe, unable to see, unable to venture outside. And the terror must have been amazing as well as the sort of physical disorientation. The dust bowl, or the dirty 30s, as it became known in Canada, has become something of a preoccupation for ideas contributor Evan Fraser. Just this idea that these dust storms came again and again. And the idea of living, through this moment when the environment was absolutely rejecting human agency, human behavior, human action. And so there was a sense that the environment had gotten bad, but that the farming practice had created a system that was very vulnerable or sensitive to that drought. And then the

third element, of course, is the Great Depression and that people had no economy to fall back on. So it was that, quote, perfect storm of events that created a perfect storm in the literal sense that undermine rural life and livelihoods across Canada and the U.S. Evan Fraser is a professor of geography and the director of the Aero Food Institute at the University of Guelph. And he's the author of Empires of Food, Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations. I've spent my career looking at food systems, and I'm deeply worried that the modern food system, the system that feeds all of us, starts sharing many of the characteristics. of the 1930s. And the idea that a bad economic circumstance could happen at the same time as

some very bad environmental events, such as droughts and storms and floods and whatnot, could combine at a time of uncertain geopolitics and unsettled international relations. And I think one of the key historical analogies to help inform the modern day is indeed the 1930s where we see the Great Depression, the rise of fascism in Europe, and then a very, very severe climate-driven drought. that all combine to make life very hard for a tremendous amount of North America's population. Here is Evan Fraser's documentary Dust Bowl Blues. On the 14th day of April of 1935, there struck the worst of dust storms that ever filled the sky. Woody Guthrie was 22 when he saw the midday sun go black.

It was the spring of 1935 on the Texas Panhandle. Born in Oklahoma, the future Dust Bowl troubadour moved to the lone star state in the late 1920s, just as the economy was cratering. Six years later, he witnessed environmental devastation unseen in the United States before as Black Sunday's windstorms whipped the American Midwest. It fell across our state. city like a curtain of black roll down. And we lit the lamp and it was just so dark in there that we couldn't see one another.

We just, and we just choked and smothered. And my husband was out after the cow. And he stumbled up against the bar fence and he followed the fence until they come to the house. It's the way he was able to get to the house. And we had to tie wet regs over our mouth. and just to keep from smother, we dip close in buckets of water and tied over our mouth down in the summer. And that one lasted was so fierce for about two hours.

The blowing dust hit Oklahoma first and then moved south and southeast across the Great Plains, bringing total darkness and a deluge of dirt. The dust was so thick that you could see nothing at all. I just absolutely couldn't see through it at all. Just dark as it could possibly be. and was that way for about 14 hours of a blow and studied that way. It seemed like no let up at all.

It was as strong as it could be. You couldn't walk in it. Drought and dust storms weren't uncommon, but the Dust Bowl was something else again, what the author Tim Egan called the worst hard time. It extended from the Texas Panhandle up into the Canadian prairies. It refers to a period of drought that lasted from roughly 1930 to 1940. accompanied by very high temperatures, and this collided with existing environmental conditions on the

Great Plains. My name is Pamela Rine Kerberg. I'm a distinguished professor of history at Iowa State University. I have written a number of books, two of them about the dust bowl. The Great Plains tend to have light, sandy soil. It's the windiest part of North America. You add together the drought, the high winds, the incredible baking sun, and you ended up with these enormous rolling clouds of dirt. Some days it would be horrible clouds. Other days, it would be a haze in the air, but it was a huge erosion event. It's important because, you know, the Great Plains haven't changed significantly. We are always, you know, depending on the weather, waiting for the next.

dust bowl conditions to sweep over the Great Plains. And even in some parts of Alberta and Saskatch, when the droughts actually started to occur in the mid to late 20s, my name is Robert McCleman. I'm a professor of geography and environmental studies at Wilfred Laurier University. I've been studying the dust bowl and particularly the human dimensions or the human impacts of the dust bowl for going on 20 plus years now. Precipitation year after year was below the long-term average. for a good decade or so.

And the long-term average is quite low to begin with out on the plains and the Canadian prairies. If you can imagine a big semicircle that stretches from the border between Alberta and Montana in the southwestern part of Alberta, going up towards Edmonton and then looping back down to just west of Winnipeg. It was just exceedingly dry. We had those dust storms that were famous in the United States. Oh, yes. We've seen some real tough times through the years. In fact, back in the dirty 30s, what we called them, there was only three crops in 10 years.

And it was just years like this that took the crops, wind, dust, and grasshoppers, what have you. And to be out there in a small family farm in this really harsh, arid landscape where the wind is blowing your soil away from you right before your eyes in the midst of this environmental catastrophe, watching your fence. family go hungry, watching your livestock die, watching your crops just die in the field. It must have just been an awful experience. I have an academic connection to all of this, but it's also a personal connection. One set of my grandparents lived in far southwestern Kansas during the 1930s, and I grew up on their stories of what it was like being young in the middle of all of this Dust Bowl craziness. My grandparents talked about what it was like to live with the grit.

My grandmother, she told me that every morning she had to have the laundry on the line by 5 o'clock in the morning so that she would have time for it to get dry before the dirt storms came up, before the winds came up. And if the winds came up, then she was going to have to do the laundry all over again. So there was a day in, day out unpleasantness. that went with living through all of this. There was no getting away from it. What was it like after a storm had gone through? What was it like in terms of effect on the landscape or people's health or their livestock's health?

After a major storm had gone through, the problems were enormous. Blow dirt is very, very fine. It's basically like talcum powder. So there is no way to keep it out of your house. there is no way to keep it out of your car. There is no way to avoid this stuff. People were left trying to dig out for days. Now, if you're a farmer, you may discover that all of your crops in the field have been razored off at ground level by this really fine stuff being blown into the growing wheat.

You could have your whole garden cut down. I've seen photographs taken in the 1930s of farmhouses and barns surrounded by what look like huge snowdrifts. And they're not snowdrifts. It's dirt. And your fences may have had dirt blown over them. What would happen is that tumbleweets would break off. They would blow up against the fences. Then the dirt would come in and back of those.

and you'd end up with your fences disappearing below the dirt, which meant that your animals could walk out of the fields and end up heaven nowhere. It could be very, very damaging to animals. One farmer who I interviewed about his experiences got really concerned about this really fine bowl that he had, who became sick and died, and he didn't know why. So he decided to do an autopsy on this animal

and looked inside and discovered inches of dirt in his stomach because he'd been eating dirty feet. And we had cattle, and we killed them. They was out in there. We would cut their lungs open and it looked just like a mud pack or something. It just really showed it with the mud. Another woman I interviewed, she and her husband were desperately poor. And they thought, okay, you know, we'll try and feed ourselves. So they'd gotten a bunch of chicks.

And they had the chicks out in the pasture and a dirt storm came up. And they didn't see it coming. And it was followed immediately by a light rain. And it pasted all of the chicks down in the pasture. And, you know, they had to go chick by chick and very carefully wash them and get them up out of the dirt. But they missed a whole bunch of them, but the coyotes didn't. And she said to me, that was a lot of them. the last straw. That was the day they decided to go ahead and do what they've been thinking about,

which was go to Oregon, because they just couldn't figure out how they were going to make a living. And now that was what could happen to your farm. What could happen inside your house was equally dramatic. You have all this dirt coming in. And I had people described to me being inside their homes and they'd light the lamps and they could barely see the lamp inside their house. If they had babies and small children, they would take wet sheets and put them over cribs to try and keep the dirt out of the baby's crib. And we wet blankets and hung over the windows. And it seems so fine.

Our house is sealed, but that just come through somehow, even those stuckel houses by all around the doors and the windows, the dust of these old piles of high. People would try and cook meals and they would have to do all their cooking with the lid on. They told me they'd eaten so much dirt. And just think about that grittiness getting into your food. And they'd set the table for dinner. And the tablecloth would go over the plates, the glasses, the utensils. Because if you put the tablecloth under, then you would get dirt. on your plates, your glasses, your utensils, and you would eat even more dirt.

I've written a lot about the dust bowl. I've always myself seen it as the natural environment, the sandy soils, the high winds, a bad drought, but also the economic crisis that push people to the edge and the unsustainable farming practices or the great plow up of the great plains that it occurred in the teens and the 20s. How close do you think that all those elements are to the truth from your reading of what happened in the 30s. There's a real range among historians of how they assign blame for what happened during the 1930s. The camp I'm in is that the plow up during World War I and the plowing at the 1920s certainly didn't help. But without that incredible drought, without those incredibly high

temperatures, the dust bowl doesn't happen. And probably some of the best evidence I've seen for this is the fact that some of the areas that blew the worst had never been plowed. They'd always been grazing land. I mean, it was a thousand-year drought. I mean, you get that depth of drought over that many years and those incredibly high temperatures, you're going to have dust bowl conditions. And in a sense, it doesn't matter what farmers have done. There's going to be land that's going to blow no matter how hard people work to try and keep it.

on the ground. And that's just it. An unholy combination of environmental, agricultural, and economic crises compounding each other was simply too much for millions of people to contend with. And there was nowhere to turn. You can pick up and move. But if you go to California, there are tens of thousands of other people also picking up and going to California looking for work. The same in Washington the same in Oregon. Now, this woman who I interviewed said that they loved, well, she loved being in Oregon because it was green. You know, they had no money. They were doing menial farm labor, earning very, very little, but at least it was green. And she cried and cried when her husband decided they had to go back to Kansas. But I think, you know, she missed that green for the rest of her life.

But yeah, I mean, this is a crisis where you have environmental troubles layered with economic troubles, which means there is no place to go. You can go from the farm to the town, which is going to change what kind of government aid you are eligible for, but you can't get away from the dirt. And you're not going to get away from really bad unemployment and really bad deflation. if you say go to another state, there were a number of laws in place where states were trying to protect themselves from migrants. And the law said that if you hadn't lived in an area for a year, you were ineligible for aid. So there's no good solution for a family caught in the middle of all of this. And there were also a lot of reports of, for example, women who were left with their children by their husbands who left them behind. And in many cases, these families were living in situations that today we would associate with refugee camps in developing countries.

People living in tents and shacks at the side of the road in the Great Plains or in drainage ditches, people scavenging on garbage dumps in order to find stuff to eat or to resell. And in some cases, you know, people literally starving to death and dying of nutrition-related illnesses in the worst hit parts of the Great Plains. There was this one family in Oklahoma who told me a story of how their father would go out at night and hunt skunks in order to support the family. And he would do that by going out at night with his dog. The dog would chase skunks into a hole and then their father would fish a length of barbed wire into the hole and drag the skunk out. and kill it with his bare hands. And you can imagine, you know, just how painful that would have been because skunks are full of teeth and claws as well as bad smells.

And so their father would come home cut and bleeding and smelling like he'd literally wrestled a skunk. And he would use the skunk fur and sell it so it would be used for trimming ladies' clothing. And that was their source of income when the farm collapsed. These types of stories, when you hear them, it's hard to believe that it actually happened within living memory, but it did. For so many people caught up in the Dust Bowl, anywhere but the Great Plains looked like greener pastures, especially the western states. So if they had the means, they packed up and went.

Farmers on the Canadian prairies were on the move, too. They moved north, they moved to British Columbia, they moved back to Ontario if they came from there. And in many cases, the governments of Alberta and Saskatchewan actually tried to help people relocate from those areas because they simply weren't viable for family farming during the 1930s. So if you were to take a line and just sort of draw it from Moose Jaw in southern Saskatchewan, due south all the way to Amarillo, Texas.

Essentially, all of the states and provinces that touched that line lost population during the 1930s. People just moved out by the, in the American case, the hundreds of thousands, and in the Canadian case, the tens of thousands. And in many cases, they were just simply family farmers. who they couldn't make a go of it and they just left. This is a documentary titled Dust Bowl Blues by Ideas contributor and University of Guelph Professor Evan Fraser. This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayad.

Prime Minister Mark Carney has finally secured a majority for this liberal government. What are his plans and how does it all affect you? The Power and Politics podcast answers these questions and more, six days a week. We have you covered from all. angles. Our reporter roundtable joins us every Friday, and you can get caught up with the weekly rap every Saturday. Follow and listen to Power and Politics wherever you get your podcasts. The Dust Bowl remains North America's worst, most disruptive environmental disaster. Coupled with the Great Depression, it made the 1930s a profoundly painful decade for millions

of people, full of upheaval and uprooting. and life-threatening poverty. After 90 years of agricultural, technological, and economic advances, the dust bowl might seem like the distant past, but Evan Fraser sees it as all too relevant today and full of lessons that we should heed. We've had pretty good, stable environments.

It's been easy to produce food. And now I'm worried that we're moving into a period of history where those things aren't true anymore. And we've already, since the pandemic, come off of five bruising years of food price inflation where food insecurity in Canada is at a record high, food bank use has never been higher. And I worry that we're now moving into a period of time due to both climactic change but also geopolitical uncertainty where we will see significant food price inflation in the next 10 years. If we do the work now to prepare, then we will be

okay. But part of my interest in the dust bowl was to help encourage Canadians to get ahead of this curve. And so this is a moment where I think Canada can assess, regroup, support communities, and build the government policies so that we can muddle through because I think the next 10 years could be really challenging for a lot of people. Indeed, Evan Fraser argues that game-changing innovations would arise from the Dust Bowl to make agriculture and rural life more sustainable. But not before the mass migration of Oakees, as impoverished farm families fleeing the Dust Bowl were called. Among them, a young Woody Guthrie.

I just blowed in and I got them dust bowl blues. I just blow down and I got them dust bowl blues. I just blow down and I'll blow back out again. Like so many other North Americans, Woody Guthrie hit the rails and became a refugee in his own country. And Oki, traveling rough across the U.S. to eke out an existence in California. Along the way, he wrote music, and he sang. The resulting two-volume album, Dust Bowl Ballads,

is widely considered to be the world's first concept album, and it recounts his experiences with songs like Dirty Old Dust, Dust Namonia Blues, and Dust Bowl Blues. I've seen the dust so black that I couldn't see a thing, and the wind's so cold, boy, and early cut your water off. The Dust Bowl left an indelible mark on North America. Many of the abiding cultural touchstones from the time depict desperate people heading west, like the Jod family in the film The Grapes of Wrath, based on John Steinbeck's classic novel.

You people got a lot of nerve. What do you mean? Cross in the desert, it's jalopy like this. You've been to cross? Sure, plenty, but never know wreck like that. If we break down, maybe somebody give us a hand. Well, maybe, but I'd hate to be doing it. Makes more nerve than I got. Take no nerve, do something. Ain't nothing else you can do. Real life scenes of Dust Bowl migration were no less dramatic, as Wilford-Lurier Professor Robert McCleman tells it.

You see, whole caravans of families moving westward along Route 66 out of Oklahoma, out of North Texas, going towards California, with all of their possessions strapped to the roof of the vehicles, to the trucks, to the cars, including their mattresses, which they would take down at night and sleep at the side of the road, Sometimes the dogs that they brought with them would ride on the hood or the running boards or run alongside the car. The same thing in Saskatchewan.

We would see whole families literally putting their houses on wagons and drawing the wagons northward with horses to get up to the parklands. In today's parlance, they'd be called environmental refugees or internally displaced people. Woody Guthrie called them Dust Bowl refugees. I'm a dust bowl refugee, just a dust bowl refugee. Images of exhausted, anxious migrant farm workers from the Great Plains were seared into the popular consciousness by the works of photographers like Dorothea Lange. Farm Security Administration sent photographers out to document what was going on,

the nature of the hardship. And so there are images in the U.S. Library of Congress, archives of women and children literally starving at the side of the road. And California wasn't exactly rolling out the red carpet for Oki's. Migrants out of the Southern Great Plains were treated very badly by resident Californians. There are examples of, you know, movie theaters putting up signs saying no dogs or okeys allowed inside. There was even a period in 1936 with a Los Angeles Sheriff's Department put up a blockade at the California-Arizona border.

And essentially they shook down any vehicle that had license plates from Oklahoma or Texas and tried to discourage them from entering the state of California. It was completely unconstitutional and illegal. But folks in California did not want these migrants to come. The Dust Bowl is synonymous with the biggest environmentally driven migration in North American history. but I learned from Iowa University historian Pamela Rine Kerberg that millions of people chose to stay and tough it out on their farms. In southwestern Kansas, which is fairly typical, 75% of the total population in those 16 really seriously affected dust bowl communities chose to stay. Tenant farmers were more likely to migrate out.

Young people were more likely to migrate out. Most of the people who stuck it out also had relations who were living in the area and people that they could turn to for help. My grandparents lived in a town called Liberal Kansas. They both managed to get jobs. Their parents lived on farms that were facing really hard times. And so they were sending money home. That web of relationships was incredibly important to people. who are trying to get through hard times. In the Canadian case, as much as those who left, and many of them, you know, would start again in the parkland area of Saskatchewan and Alberta, you know, going up towards the Battlefords and so on.

But a lot of folks stayed, and the things that they did to survive sound like things out of a horror movie. So children going out and gathering thistles with their bare hands to bring them home and feed to the cattle because there was no fodder for them. One family told me that they collected, gophers or ground squirrels, and brought them home and gutted them, and then they stored them

by canning or pickling so that they would have something to eat in the wintertime. It is hard today to imagine how difficult life would have been in this impossible landscape of global political turmoil, economic crises, and environmental collapse. But while Europe in the 1930s was lurching towards fascism and total war, real solutions emerged from the Dust Bowl maelstrom, Solutions that built modern America, keeping its society remarkably stable and affluent. Thanks in part to its response to the Dust Bowl, the United States ended up with, for a time, a world-leading infrastructure, a social safety net, the cleanest environment, and a scientific engine that churned out one technological innovation after another. It started with government.

When you begin to get these incredible storms blowing up and the people in Washington, D.C., figure out what's going on, they turn to the United States Department. of agriculture and say, what can we do? Now, there are some people who say, oh, we've just got to send everybody someplace else. That's not going to work because, well, I can't even imagine removal of people from the land on that scale working at all anyway. But there's such unemployment across the United States. They don't want thousands upon thousands of unemployed farmers streaming into cities looking for work. And so they have to instead look at the land and say, okay, How do we keep people on the land? I pledge myself to feel for the American people.

The New Deal is incredibly important in helping people muddle through. The jobs programs were very important because they meant that you could put food on the table. Not great wages, but enough to get by. There were commodity programs. people could get basic food stuffs from the government. There was something called the Works Progress Administration that created jobs in rural communities, building rural infrastructure. There's the Agricultural Adjustment Act.

Now, that helps big farmers more than small farmers because they paid out benefits based on the size of the farm. But there's also the Farm Security Administration, which made loans to people who are considered to be poor but salvageable, which is kind of a weird word, but salvageable farmers, you know, they had the wherewithal somehow with a little bit of help to keep going. A young person in town whose parents were on relief might qualify for the National Youth Administration, which paid high school aged and college-aged young people to do various jobs and make it possible for them to stay in school. Free fodder was given out to farmers where migrant

worker camps set up to house people. who were displaced and were moving around through the different rural areas. One of the things that the USDA does is develop the soil conservation service. And they pay farmers to take conservation measures. And so they pay farmers to plant cover crops. They pay people to put in shelter belts, to put small ponds on their farms so that they can keep growing a garden. They encourage people to plant drought-resistant crops. And the response is remarkable. People are quite interested in trying these new ideas, but what the government also does is pay people to try these ideas. That is very important to these farmers because, of course, they're not growing anything. And having the government pay them to carry out conservation measures, also pay them to take land out of production. All of that makes it possible.

for people to stay on the land. And here in Canada, we had some parallel organizations as well. So in Saskatchewan and Alberta, for example, the provincial governments who were extremely cash-strapped at the time initiated a variety of programs to try and encourage people to stop farming in the driest areas of southeastern Alberta and southwestern Saskatchewan. So in Alberta, they created something called the special areas

where they tried to deliberately convert the land back to grazing and grassland from farming. And the federal government created something called the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration. And so in 1935, the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Act was passed at Ottawa to provide for systems of farm practice, tree culture, water supply, land utilization and land settlement that afford greater economic security to prairie farmers. And so what they did again was to try and invest in soil, measures, planting shelter belts to prevent soil erosion, you know, trying to encourage more effective use of the land, so areas that were better suited to grazing to it, to convert them

back to grazing and so on. But along with all these agricultural and policy innovations, there was also no substitute for old-fashioned grit. It ends up really reinforcing a lot of behaviors that are pretty old. And what I mean by that is when you look at how people managed at the household level. The 1930s really rewarded those who remembered hard times, those who had grown up on farms, and asked them to use again all of these skills that had perhaps languished since they'd moved to town. And there's a real revival in just making do and doing without. When I was doing my PhD research out on the Great Plains, I spent a lot of time in Sequoia County, Oklahoma with a retired newspaper man named Dick Mayo.

And when I asked Mr. Mayo, you know, what was the key difference between the folks who stayed in Oklahoma and those who left? He said stubbornness and cussedness. In other words, you know, the folks who stayed probably if they were thinking of their own best interest, should have left. But just because it was in their core that this was where they were going to make their living, no matter what happened, that's why they stayed. What sort of shape were those farms in as the world entered World War II? I mean, were they in any shape to go back to wheat production? Strangely enough, many of those farms were ready to go back to wheat production. Once it started to rain again, then they were able to get a crop. And I'm thinking of my

step-grandfather who farmed in northeast Colorado. During the Dust Bowl years, his neighbors, one by one left. And the bank went into cooperation with him to keep the land from blowing. And he was allowed to use that land without paying rent for the duration of the 1930s. So by the time it got to be the beginning of World War II and the rain came back, he was ready to jump right back in. You know, you would think that there would have been a lot of acreage that was simply destroyed, but it wasn't. that was because there were enough farmers who stayed, who tended the land, who tried to make sure that the blowing was contained as possible. The communities where farm families left, though, did not bounce back in the same way. Well, what happened, of course, in 1939 was the outbreak of war in Europe.

And so there was this economic transition to mobilize for the war effort. Commodity prices go up again. There's employment. And so there was this sudden economic transition. transformation away from the hard times of the 30s towards essentially this military-driven change in the economy. And of course, food production systems as well. There was this ramping up of agricultural production. And after World War II, the mechanization and the commercialization of agriculture just accelerated. So what that meant was the places where farms were abandoned

and the small communities that lost their rural middle class, they never really recover. You can across southern Saskatchewan today for miles and miles and not see a living soul other than the wildlife. But at the roadside, you'll see markers of, you know, there was a school here, there was a community here. You'll see the remnants of an elevator in places. So many of these small towns never recovered. Better times and mechanization might have made life easier and more predictable for farmers on the Great Plains and Canadian prairies. But they didn't necessarily make agriculture more sustainable or resilient? Lessons learned in hard times aren't always remembered.

A lot of conservation lessons that were very, very important in the 1930s that get pushed aside in World War II because wheat has to win the war. It becomes much more important to feed lots of people than it is to maintain conservation measures. Also, one of the lessons that is. that farmers learn is that farmers did not have enough rain for their crops. But if they had a deep enough well, they always had enough water for their animals. What they hadn't really realized in that moment was there was a huge aquifer under the Southern Plains. It's called the Okalala Aquifer.

If you could just get to that water, then you would be capable of not just keeping your cattle watered, but keeping your crops watered. And in the 1950s, when drought comes again, farmers think, aha, I'm going to tap into that water. You have farmers who have discovered that they not only have water under their land, but also natural gas. and they use that natural gas in order to power central pivot irrigation. It's been going on since the 1950s. The problem is that it has been drawn down really significantly in a number of places. And the farther down you get, the more saline the water gets, and the more expensive it gets to pull it to the surface.

So there are places on the planes where the pumps of run dry. So I mean, there's no more water left to use. There have also been farmers who have responded to various kinds of market pressures and have put in crops like corn that require much more water. That has caused the aquifer to fall even more quickly. Wheat can be raised in fairly dry conditions. Corn cannot. And because so much meat packing has moved to the southern plains, you have a large number of farmers now growing corn where it could not previews. profitably be grown because they have access to irrigation.

And they're feeding that to cattle that are being held adjacent to these meatpacking plants. And so the agriculture, well, it requires more water. That's not healthy for the state of the aquifer. Fast forward to today. We are now living in economically uncertain times, facing an increasingly destabilized climate. The 2020s have exposed major weaknesses in our food system, from supply chain vulnerability going back to the pandemic, to climate change susceptibility and the affordability crisis

that's made one in four Canadians food insecure. So it seems like a good time to dust off the lessons about what work to save farmers and agriculture during the dirty 30s. And to ask a necessary but terrifying question. Could the dust bowl happen again? I am absolutely certain the dust bowl could happen again. The Great Plains haven't changed. The soil is still very thin and sandy.

The wind still blows like crazy. All it takes is another drought. Whenever it gets really dry out there, they start worrying. I'm sure they're talking about it now. It has been a very dry winter in parts of the Great Plains. In northern Colorado, there have been highways shut down because of dust storms in the last few weeks. So, yeah, it can happen again. It just takes the, I guess, wrong combination of environmental factors and the dirt starts blowing.

So we've got more corn, which is more water demanding than wheat, and greater reliance on intensive livestock, which is a notoriously thirsty form of agriculture. We've got less groundwater, and we're probably moving into a period of time. with increased likelihood of severe droughts, all those things add up to your prediction that we could indeed face a return to dust bowl-like conditions. Have I got that right? I would say yes. We don't even need those conditions to have another dust bowl, just because the Great Plains have not changed. But you add all of that on top of the kind of agricultural change that's taken place since the 1950s.

And it's a recipe for really serious problems in the event of severe drought. So academics like you and me sometimes use the phrase the polycrisis to talk about these moments when you've got a major environmental catastrophe linked with a major economic catastrophe, linked perhaps with political instability. We talk about today, the 2020s as being a polycrisis. Do you think that that sort of analysis applies equally to the 1930s? Absolutely. It was a polycrisis in the 1930s because you had this incredible confluence of amazingly difficult ecological conditions on the Great Plains. The inability of local governments, state governments, provincial governments to provide the type of support that we sort of take for granted today when there's an ecological crisis, magnified by the economic hardship caused by the Great Depression. And then you have this technological transformation where the family farm where you'd have a little bit of livestock and some crops and often be working with horses or draft animals is transitioning to a mechanized form of production that gives advantage to those folks who can mobilize capital and invest that into their farm.

This poly crisis really was sort of a coming together of all the worst things that could possibly happen to a farm family on the Great Plains in the 1930s. And in many parts of the world where there are still large rural populations, this sort of poly crisis is reemerging right now. Could the dust bowl, could that happen again, do you think? The climological conditions can certainly happen again, and they have. But the change here in North America is that the Great Plains are no longer a rural place in terms of the population. They're an urban place. I mean, the province of Saskatchewan in 1936 had a population of about. 922,000 people. The population dropped by 100,000 over the next 10 years. And it wasn't until,

you know, the late 1950s that it ever got back to those 1930s levels. And again, those were primarily people who moved into urban centers in Saskatchew, not into the rural area. So we're missing that large rural population base that would be subject to one of these great environmental migrations. What do you think out of what you've learned from these migrations might be applicable to today, especially where climate change is making farming less viable. You know, we live in a world today where there is a lot of instability in our global food systems where we get a lot of price shocks and when there's conflicts in places like Ukraine or in the Middle East right now, it has impacts on food prices. And that reverberates down

through the social and economic systems in all countries today because of our global food system. And so rural folks who in many countries today, often like in the 1930s in North America, are living on that margin of, you know, can I feed my family tomorrow, can I afford to, you know, to pay off the farm loans and so on. When you think about South Asia, parts of Southeast Asia, parts of sub-Saharan Africa, where that population dynamic is today what it was back in the 1930s. In other words, relatively few urban centers and very large subsistency. based rural populations who are struggling to make a living, who are very much subject to the vagaries of markets and prices that they don't have any influence over, who are not using mechanization,

but where outside capital is starting to move into the agricultural system. So we hear about land grabs where outside corporate interests will come in and start buying up farmland in low-income countries and converting it to commercialized agriculture. agriculture and displacing people. And the reality of climate change is that precipitation is becoming less predictable. Average temperatures are getting higher. We're seeing more severe droughts. And so again, we're starting to see this confluence of factors in many parts of Africa and Asia where, you know, rural people are at risk and where migration is starting to occur as people adapt, the same confluence of factors that we had here in Western Canada back in the 1930s.

Now, Pam, farmers have always been at the mercy of weather. I would argue that climate change is making that vulnerability greater. You add to that, geopolitical problems, wars in the Middle East and the Ukraine, making fertilizer prices very expensive, the possible likelihood of a recession coming along. What does all this presage for farming and agriculture at the global level, do you think? I think this is a difficult time. And, you know, one of the things that we're seeing throughout the United States, actually throughout the war, world is rural depopulation, a reduction in the number of people who are willing to put up with the uncertainties of being farmers. It's always been a really precarious business to be in. But I would

say right now it is particularly precarious and is going to involve a lot of thought so that we can all continue to be fed. My feeling for Western Canada is that the agricultural system is remarkably adaptable. And so when we think about, for example, the crop varieties that farmers out on the prairies grow today, they are far more drought-resistant varieties of wheat and barley and other crops. If you're close to a major river system like the Old Man River or the Saskatchewan River in Canada, you might be able to draw surface water out and irrigate that way. We've done a lot of really amazing technological innovations to make agriculture less drought sensitive. At the same time, there is a threshold. There still needs to be soil moisture. And if you look at the paleo-climitological

record of the Great Plains, historically, it's not unusual for there to be droughts of 10, 20, 50 years on the Great Plains. So if one of those were to come back, that would really test our adaptive capacity in agriculture. But for me, I think the bigger worry is for the urban centers on, especially on the Canadian prairies, cities like Edmonton and Regina that are on these river systems where the water comes from a combination of melt water from the Rockies and then snow melt at the end of the winter time. These cities, they don't have a lot of water, quite frankly. And so I think my fear would be urban droughts. And especially where I see governments today talking about how they want to build data centers and things like that out on the prairies, taking advantage of natural gas and so on to

generate the electricity. Data centers also use tremendous amounts of water. You have to be more careful with your water supplies, especially for your cities, because, you know, if they run out, there's no alternative. Let's talk about the 2020s. A lot of governments, including my own government in Canada, are developing new farming policies, putting a renewed emphasis on these issues. So do you think there's any lessons that you can extract from the Dust Bowl, the polycrisis of the 1930s?

What role should governments take on in the 2020s? to have a food system where families can earn a livelihood, where consumers can be certain that they will have, you know, regular supplies of food at the grocery stores and so on, governments have a role to play. Prior to the 1930s, it was pretty much a laissez-faire agricultural system in Western North America. You tried to farm, you tried to sell your product, and if you could make a go of it, great. If you couldn't, maybe you would move on and try something else. And so in Canada, in the United States, we put into place these institutional mechanisms to provide income security for rural communities, to provide stable market opportunities for agricultural producers. And we put into place, you know, things like long-term weather forecasting and crop insurance programs and income support programs for low-income people in rural communities. We just sort of assume that that's always been the case.

but those were outcomes of the 1930s. And so it's a reminder for politicians today that government has a role and institutions have a role to play in making sure that rural Canada, that rural United States, people who live there have the same quality of life and opportunities as folks who live in urban areas

because if we don't, there is this potential for suffering and hardship and we want there to be a healthy and vibrant rural Canada. I think it's really important for government to work with farmers in partnership. They shouldn't talk down to farmers. I think this is a time when policymakers need to listen to farmers, speak with farmers in their own language, and work with them. In the 1930s, it was working with that the government did. Nobody was forced to undertake these measures, but the government made it possible for people who were teetering on the economic edge

to take part in these programs, and they asked for farmers' input. When it came to deciding how much land in a county was going to be put into conservation measures or be taken out of production, that was a discussion with farmers. And I think that's why there was such significant buy-in. This was done with the express intent of helping people maintain their farms. If you just preach at people and tell them, oh, you're doing this wrong, you have to change. And you don't listen to them. You're not going to get the kind of buy-in that you need. All of this has to be done in partnership.

Three lessons from the Dust Bowl experience stand out to me. First, we've moved into a... a period when economic tumult and a destabilized climate could create conditions like what we saw in North America in the 1930s. This could create another worst hard time. Second, as worried as I am that another dust bowl in some part of the world is all too likely, we can probably get ahead of this problem through strong government policy. Government policy that creates incentives to protect the environment and conserve the soil, but also policies and programs to support people struggling to get by in marginal areas.

The final lesson is that the primary line of defense against hard times is communities with grit, communities that band together to help dig people out figuratively and literally of crises and disasters, and communities that come together in solidarity and camaraderie to make life joyful. So the Dust Bowl experience shows me that government does have an indispensable role in protecting farmland and keeping low-income folks from falling into poverty traps. and it's community that lies at the heart of our ability to adapt and thrive in uncertain times. And Woody Guthrie would have agreed.

When the sun comes shining, then I was strolling, and the wheat fields waving, the dust clouds rolling, the voice coming chanting, and the fog was lifting. This land was made for you and me. Woody Guthrie, with this land is your world. Yourland, closing out our documentary, Dust Bowl Blues by ideas contributor Evan Fraser, a professor of geography and the director of the Arrow Food Institute at the University of Guel. Special thanks to Iowa Public Radio, CBC Kitchener, Teneal Bonagore, the Aral Food Institute,

and my name is Pamela Rinekeberg. I'm a distinguished professor of history at Iowa State University. My name is Robert McCleman. I'm a professor of geography and environmental studies at Wilfred Laurier University. You also heard audio from the National Film Board of Canada and the Library of Congress. This episode was produced by Chris Wadskow. Our website is cbc.ca.com. You can find us on the CBC News app and wherever you get your podcasts. Technical production, Emily Carvezio and Danielle Duval.

Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso, senior producer Nikola Lukshic. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyed. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.