Climate lies explained in 1 chart
(media.kotakuinaction2.win)
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Having grown up in territory that got hit by the dustbowl and growing up hearing about what went down from people who actually lived it, I wouldnt put it up to tractors. At least, not by themselves. Tractors had already been a staple of farming for almost 80 years in these parts by the time the dustbowl happened.
The cycle basically went like this:
Farmers in the area were growing more crops because they could make absolutely hilarious amounts of money selling it in Europe after WW1. This continued until about the 1920's, when Europe started to rebound.
Farmers made all kinds of loans, bought land and equipment, and made promises off of the idea that the prices would stay high.
Europe started to rebound and the early pangs of what would become the Great Depression started to emerge, and prices fell.
Farmers drastically increased their acreage and planting to compensate for the decreased cost of food. This included tilling new land, plowing fields that should have been left fallow, and pushing fields to their limits.
This causes further price drops due to excess product, causing farmers to get into a cycle of making the above point worse. When they finally ran out of fields and room to expand, farmers started cutting down trees to make the fields even bigger.
As it turns out, those trees were windbreaks, and had been there because it kept large wind gust from blowing onto the fields. Then a drought hit, the land turned extremely dry, and then windy season hit. This caused all of that dry soil, now without windbreaks, to be blow up, and create the dust storms. Then the dust storms became a self-sustaining machine where the soil remained dry, so it caused storms, which further dried the soil. It took a wet year before it finally fixed the situation. And people started to replant the cut trees and return to the old size fields.
That's why I didn't say that. I think there was an impact on the topsoil being too disturbed by the over-use of tractors, and part of that was the result of a massive oversupply of tractors to farmers who tilled the absolute ape-shit out of their fields after the government fucking promoted it, and tried to push tractors on farmers.
I don't disagree with anything else that you said, the tractors are all part of that. What did they buy with the money? Why cut down the trees? How were they able to till so much land? The tractors were all part of that.
Not saying that's the only reason, but I think the oversupply of tractors contributed among all the other stimuli. And for dust specifically, without grasslands and windbreakers, all the soil that got tilled by those tractors went fucking everywhere.