No one alive today can really describe the Dust Bowl years. For most of us, it’s a historical footnote. In the 1970s, Canadian writer Barry Broadfoot met with prairie farmers and published their testimonies in Ten Lost Years: 1929-1939.
One farmer summed up the Dust Bowl this way: “Millions of acres just blowing away from all through the American midwest states and over towards the Dakotas and Minnesota, Wisconsin, up into Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta.”
“I am absolutely certain the dust bowl could happen again,” Professor Pamela Riney-Kehrberg of Iowa State University warned in May 2026. “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,” she told CBC Radio’s Ideas program.
Mistreating the land
The similarities to our current crisis are alarming.
“You mistreat the land, take away its essential goodness and this will happen. It’s been happening all down through history.” a farmer told Broadfoot.
The decade leading up to the disaster gave no warning of what was to come. Wheat farming boomed, selling for up to $2.00 a bushel – a fortune back then. Greed drove the ploughs straight across the grasslands.
“Wheat was king, and everybody just forgot that we were mining the land,” another prairie farmer said in Ten Lost Years.
Despite warnings from early colonizers, a few years of heavy rainfall convinced the Canadian government to throw open the plains for homesteading and farming. Settlers poured in.
“There was a lot of land-taking in the early 1900s, Americans and immigrants,” a homesteader confided to Broadfoot, “and my Dad was as much a grabber as the next. Just grab, grab, grab.”
Then came a prolonged hot and dry period. The water table dropped and the wells dried up. Too late, people realized that trying to farm these semi-arid plains – wild buffalo grazing lands – was hubris.
“The Palliser Triangle shouldn’t have ever been broken to the plough. We know that now,” a former wheat farmer said.
“Here’s how it was,” another farmer explained. “The wind blew all the time, from the four corners of the world.” The loose soil was no match for the force of the wind. “Blowing the goddamned country right out from under our feet and nothing we could do about it.”
For years, the rains didn’t come. “A hot sucking wind. So this wind just blew and blew, and we had dust storms and times when we kept the lanterns lit all day.”
“Where we all made the mistake was the idea that Canada, the prairies, would sell high-price wheat forever,” recalled another wheat farmer. “When that fell to the bottom, when wheat was fifty cents, even less, everything went kerplunk. It turned out that what we were was a one-economy country, and that was wheat.”
Repeating history
Conservation measures such as planting trees as windbreaks arrived late and took years to have an impact. By the 1970s, farmers were already chopping down the trees to make room for bigger and faster agricultural harvesting machines.
“Lessons learned in hard times aren’t always remembered,” Professor Riney-Kehrberg noted, “A lot of conservation lessons that were very very important in the 1930s, they get pushed aside in World War II because it becomes much more important to feed lots of people than it is to maintain conservation measures.”
Tapping the Ogallala Aquifer gave a huge boost to prairie agriculture, but even this seemingly endless water source is being drained down to its bitter dregs.
Just as they did a century ago, too many cling to the belief that they can take all they want from the land, giving nothing back, and it will continue to nourish them forever.
