Grasslands are a very delicate ecosystem. In the regions where the dust storms and soil erosion became the most severe during the Dust Bowl, there were few rivers and nearly no trees. If one were to drive through the Great Plains, one might say it is a wasteland. One might dismiss the grassland as land that should be put to better use. As Timothy Egan pointed out in his book, The Worst Hard Time, Robert Marcy, who was exploring the area for Jefferson, compared it to the African Sahara desert.

But, as in every ecosystem, birds, prairie dogs, coyotes, birds of prey, grazing herbivores, insects, and the plants are part of a large process, each dependent on the existence of the other for survival. The conditions that led to the Dust Bowl were driven by a need to market and sell land. Once the land was sold or claimed, those who had their few acres needed to do what their ancestors had done, they needed to grow things, and support a family from their land. By 1921 tractors were pulling the plows, carving dense sod and turning over the roots of the grass. When the drought came, there was nothing to hold the soil in place, so it blew away. The ecosystem was dead. Grazing herbivores had been replaced by the plow.

In 1935 a man named Rexford Tugwell, who was head of the Resettlement Administration, helped an ambitious young filmmaker, Pare Lorenz make a film dramatizing what had happened to the grasslands, called The Plow that Broke the Plains. Many looked at it as propedganda. The film, although banned in some communities, was seen by 10 million people in 1937.

The full version of The Plow That Broke the Plains can be viewed here.

Although many New Deal agencies took up the task of restoring the plains, in 1940, the Great Plains Committee, which had been created to study the problems in the region, issued a report called The Northern Plains. The report concluded that, "The problem of land-use adjustment on an enduring basis in the Great Plains, in the Northern Plains and Southern Plains alike, still remains the most difficult agricultural problem of its kind in the United States."

photo by Jack Delano, Farm land in Texas panhandle near Amarillo, Texas,  March 1943