Anybody watching The series about the Dustbowl?
 

Its on PBS or ETA Here its OETA

FANTASTIC

Really enjoyed that when it came out last year, ESP the first half of it. Good show.

Caught 3/4 of an hour of it, Deadliest Catch came on now....


Paul

Had no idea, will have to check out if we can get it on Dish Network. What night(s) is it on?

Very interesting show, some valuable information in that show.

It's on PBS right now

The various PBS channels carry it, was new last year.

E running it right now. It could be different times in different locations, you know how PBS is.

Here it is on started at 7:00pm. Will rerun again at 1:00am.

Here is the web site. You can possibly watch it online too.

http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/dustbowl/

Paul

If you can watch it when they talk about the kids dying, You got a tougher heart than I have Dang near started bawling

Its a 2 parter. The other Might be on tomorrow night, or maybe next week..

Saw it the first time round. Real tear jerker.

We are watching it for the second time. It is a really great film. It has a lot of meaning for my husband. His father was a prairie farmer's son and went on to become a world famous agronomist because of what his family endured in the 1930s.

What makes me angry is that the farmers just did not listen to the warnings. And then they had to be PAID to save themselves by changing their farming, seeding and plowing practices. The exact same thing is happening on the Canadian prairies today - not with plowing but with filling in the small "pothole swamps" that dot the entire area. Over 10 million have been filled in to make plowing easier. And dah. Now there are massive yearly droughts (these potholes were the storage system) coupled with massive runoff and flooding. We just don't learn. And as it was said in this Dust Bowl film - the farmer's answer to any trouble or problems or changes was "more". Prices drop, plant more. Prices good, plant more.

I've watched a good bit of it but am still confused. The film seems to concentrate on a very small area.

Didn't the 'dust bowl' include a whole bunch of states?

Also, did the farmers continue to plow the land every year even after the dust storms started?

I have to laugh when folks talk about how wholesome and pleasant life was on the farm back in the good old days. Most have never known about the dirty thirties.

There is a documentary on the life of Woody Guthrie. saddest story I've ever seen. He grew up then, in Oklahoma. followed the exodus to California, where the workers were cheated. Read the words to the song he wrote, " Dough Ray Me". That life story shows how things were for the common man in those days.

I didnt under stand that too. They mentioned storms comeing out of Canada, down the Dakotas, and across the states east. Dad lived in NE Kans, and he said it wasnt bad there and they farmed all through the 30s. 36 was the WORST year. More hot in the summer, and more cold in the winter. That was the worst year there for ice storms also.

What supprised me was that they said Arkansas had it bad. I would have thought, wikth so little farming done there compaired to the west, and all the trees, and hills, that the storms wouldnt have affected Ark too badly. IF any of you noticed them digging out around a Case row crop tractor. I have one like it, only on rubber that was my grandads.

I got a kick out of seeing all the old equipment being used. ALSO, the guy standing WAY HIGH up on a tractor the pic being taken from the rear of it with him pulling 6 horse discs. Tractor was BIG. Likely didnt know the discs was behind it lol.

Hard to imagine and really not that long ago. Maybe plowing up the prairie wasn't a good idea.

Wasn't MN involved too? I thought there was a reference to MN in this series.

Well, it was quite extensive.

I watched most of it when it aired originally. Caught some of it last night but we had company so couldn't focus on it. I found it really moving to see what they endured. Sure makes most people today look like a bunch of spoiled sissies! People will go on and on complaining about some little inconvenience like a traffic jam. The folks caught in the dust bowl were in a life and death struggle.

Husband and I grew up in OK in early 50's. He's from Tonkawa in N Ok near Ks line and I'm from S of OKC and we both remember remnants of the DB. He remembers fences where you could just barely see the tops of the fenceposts poking through the drifts of sand near Crescent OK and sand dunes in town in Crescent OK.

I remember my g'ma hanging wet towels and sheets over windows and doors and putting towels in the cracks under the doors when there was dust storms in the 50's. I remember a summer when the crickets were so bad in downtown Purcell OK that my g'pa carried me everywhere when we went to town because of the drifts and mounds of crickets all over the sidewalks and streets. I remember folks shoveling them up from the sidewalks and there being wheelbarrows full of crickets and there being an area where there was a pit where the crickets were dumped and soaked w kerosene and burnt.

His father's folks lost their place near Crescent OK in the DB and the family loaded up and went to CA and picked fruit all up and down the W coast as a family. They lived in box cars at one point. They truly were Okies just like the Joad's in Grapes of Wrath.

DH has the rifle that his dad and uncles used to help feed the family during the DB and it is a treasured thing to him.

The drought was bad all over.

Instead of rainstorms, there were just wind storm.

Trees, winter freeze, any rain, would keep an area real dry, but just windy.

That small area of Oklahoma panhandle, no trees, extra wind, extra dry, the soil is light there, so it just was a terrible thing.

Lot of the fine dust storms was dirt from other states or Canada, topography put the dust down there. Didnt matter what they were doing there, was not a local cause.

The abrasive sanding storms was local topsoil blowing off the plowed up local prairie.

Much more complex than they say or can show....

When the ground dries out and blows, you work it to pull a little moisture up, stops the dirt from blowing. Any idiot farmer knows that. So yes, you keep plowing.... It is a lot more complex a deal than a simple 4 hour show can show. There was a lot of 'praise the liberals' stuff going on in the show too, if you look deeper, a lot of bad govt policy started that type of farming.

I sure enjoyed it and think much of the series, but you need to apply a little common sense and filter out the politics some.....

Paul

Ill likely watch it everytime it shows. I swaw the first. I saw in the map that ARK wasnt included, as I thought it shouldnt have been.

I cant understand how they all wore long sleeve shirts and overhalls back then. I work them in NE kansas, all summer long, BUT I sure cant wear them here. Ill be shirtless around the farm from late spring through to late fall. I think it would physically kill me to wear them throughout the year.

Lots of folks back East, they say, is leavin' home every day,
Beatin' the hot old dusty way to the California line.
'Cross the desert sands they roll, gettin' out of that old dust bowl,
They think they're goin' to a sugar bowl, but here's what they find
Now, the police at the port of entry say,
"You're number fourteen thousand for today."
Oh, if you ain't got the do re mi, folks, you ain't got the do re mi,
Why, you better go back to beautiful Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Georgia, Tennessee.
California is a garden of Eden, a paradise to live in or see;
But believe it or not, you won't find it so hot
If you ain't got the do re mi.
You want to buy you a home or a farm, that can't deal nobody harm,
Or take your vacation by the mountains or sea.
Don't swap your old cow for a car, you better stay right where you are,
Better take this little tip from me.
'Cause I look through the want ads every day
But the headlines on the papers always say:
If you ain't got the do re mi, boys, you ain't got the do re mi,
Why, you better go back to beautiful Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Georgia, Tennessee.
California is a garden of Eden, a paradise to live in or see;
But believe it or not, you won't find it so hot
If you ain't got the do re mi.

California Growers exploited the displaced farmers by advertising for laborers, until there were 10 workers vying for a single job. The most desperate were hired for slave wages. If you had dough (money) you could survive and maybe prosper in that situation. But most were broke.

DH's mother's family was also Joad-poor & did the same thing. Had to leave OK for CA, where they picked fruit. Grandpa refused to leave as he was sickly, the last time they saw him alive was as they drove off for CA and grandpa was standing in the street waving goodbye. He died shortly thereafter, alone. :(

We talk about hard times now.....

Mom talked about the depression days up around here, it was dry but not like down there. The depression was a bigger around here tho, she talked of a sister that would come and cut the eye out of the potatoes for planting, could boil the rest of the potato for food....

Be something to leave a sick grandpa behind. Hard times.

Paul

My Mom and Grandparents lived through the dust bowl in Kansas down near the Oklahoma line. They were lucky to be living "down near the creek". Mom said "The wind would blow Oklahoma over them in the morning and back in the afternoon". Grandad farmed everything in long narrow strips, leaving grassland unturned between every plowed strip. The land didn't blow there but the house was always a mess from all the dirt....James

Though not a Dust Bowl refugee, my dad was orphaned at age 16 and picked fruit with them. After WWII those experiences inspired him to get a degree in agriculture on the GI Bill. I grew up in the rural San Joaquin Valley, CA. My best friend's parents had come out as kids with their families from Oklahoma. There were a lot of folks in the area who came from Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, etc. We were taught to never use the "O" word to refer to these people (or even say it at all) and it is still harsh to me to see it or hear it. My childhood was enriched by the accents and expressions of these folks. The Dust Bowl had a huge ripple effect in this country.
Haypoint, I grew up listening to Woody Guthrie. A lot of that Do Re Mi song applies today:

Oh, if you ain't got the do re mi, folks, you ain't got the do re mi,
Why, you better go back to beautiful Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Georgia, Tennessee.
California is a garden of Eden, a paradise to live in or see;
But believe it or not, you won't find it so hot
If you ain't got the do re mi.

Yes, I remember the "O" word being considered a 4 letter word too and taught to never use it back in the 50's.

But then I remember a song about those times that went: Dear Okie if you see Arkie tell him Texas has a job for him out in CA picking prunes.

Dh doesn't know when his dad's folks came back to Ok, but it was sometime before WWII. They never got their land back although they moved back to the same area. DH's g'pa was born in OK back when it was Indian Territory so they had deep roots in the area.

What politics? All that I saw was a bunch of thieves selling an idea that didn't work and bad decisions.

I can't imagine that any moisture pulled up by plowing would last more than a day or 2.

This was a New Deal, left-leaning view of things. That is ok, it was well done, it was good, it explored many things. But.... Well either you see it or not, and no big deal. I enjoyed the show, it was well done.

Wind events last 12-36 hours. A good cultivating pulls up moisture to last about 2 days as you say. Seems pretty evident you are answering your own question? Droughts like the decade of the dust bowl in that area are unusual, having a dry year now and then are normal. In a normal dry year, you control the dust with a little tillage. Moisture comes back someday. That is 'normal'. That decade was not 'normal' in that region, and so the normal, common, working practices failed. I don't see how that is a knock on the farmers of the area or makes them greedy. They worked hard and to the best of their ability to fulfill the requests of the govt in a time of war, and afterwards to follow the American dream.

I don't think it is quite fair of us 80 years later to say they were stupid or ill-willed.

Everyone worked with what they had and as folks asked them to and stuff was planned out to work for the future to the best of their knowledge.

An abnormal very long weather event happened, as well as economic issues and political issues across the globe.

It is easy to sit back with full bellies and tisk tisk over how foolish we think people were generations ago, but I totally disagree with that.

They moved forward and dealt with The problems. Took some time, and learning, and hard work, and suffering along the way.

But they persevered, and came out the better for it. We are the better for it.

I will not look back and look down upon those people in that era as if they were bad people.

Paul

I'm seeing an increase in wind at my house. I can't ever remember having nonstop wind like we have now. It's blown HARD for 72 hours without letting up or changing direction.

I wonder what changing the vegetation type over such a huge area has on rainfall patterns. When rainforests are cut down the rain stops because the water cycle is broken.

The late 70s were very windy as well here. We just forget over time, but I remember tying the planter covers down because they would blow away, and having difficulty standing it blew so hard. Had to fill the planter on one side of the grove so the seed didnt blow away.

These things go in cycles.

The dust bowl cycle it pretty predictable. It is just long enough so people forget. Early 1930s, mid 1950s, early 1970s,late 1980s, early 2010s.

Just happened the 1930 period was a tad worse, (the 1970s one was quite mild) and happened when some new farming started out on a new patch of ground. That was unfortunate, and we learned a little from that.

Some day irrigation won't work the way we do it, and we will need to learn new ways.

We will.

Just as we did back then.

They replaced the native grasses with a different grass in the dust bowl hot spot. That was a minor change, the trouble was the drought, worse than the same cycle before or since, and that they brought the wrong type of plow along with them. They needed to leave that ground rough and ragged when they tore it up, not a smooth plowing. Leave strips, or keep it planted to something, or.... Many things, that farmers themselves discovered, a handful of people didnt come from Washington behind their desks and know what to do. The solutions and fixes actually came from the local farmers themselves.... That is a poor message from the film, in my mind. The solutions and fixes came from the people themselves, the govt helped after the fact, but it was the local people that fixed their won problems in spite of the govt.

Now we know. Been through 3 more cycles of drought, and have not had the same problems. I think we learned.

We will for sure make mistakes in the future, and there will be suffering, but we will again learn, and adapt, and move on.

Those are the messages I took from that time, and the movie.

In the end, I don't mean to derail this thread, I too liked the series very much, and we can learn from the past, and draw on the strength of those people. I recommend viewing this to everyone, very well done, I am nitpicking it yes, but I really think highly of the series.

Paul

We watched it last time it was on and were very impressed. I've done a lot of reading on the Great Depression and the dust bowl days so I can't say I learned anything new, but I really appreciated the program. My grandparents were raising their families during this time frame. I find it interesting that my dad's family who were tenant farmers faired better in a lot of ways than mom's family who lived in town and had income. Mom said even tho they had money there was nothing in the stores to buy. Dad's family ate well because they grew all their own food.

I'm not sure the farmers have learned anything. Here the fence rows are gone and everything is planted to soy beans and corn. With last summers drought and the constant wind here, I was concerned we'd end up with another dust bowl. Wind erosion is a big issue here that seems to be ignored. There is an area of native prairie near where we live and the fields that are farmed around it are 3' lower due to wind erosion.

Someone has said the farmers figured out what to do to fix the problem.
I dont believwe that. I believe it was just as the film said, ASnd it was a former kid of a farmer who said it. They just kept doing harder what they had done before, and it produced less and less til it produced a desert.
Im in my mid 60s, and I can rememb er lots of OLD farmers when I was a kid. They NEVER tried anything new. They didnt plant milo, just the younger farmers. They didnt plant beans, or hay grazer. They didnt try terriceing or planting with the curve of the ground. Their furrows was straight as an arrow.

Like the film said. They only way they got those farmers to change was to pay them to do so. They would have held onto their livestock till they all starved or they ate them, which, to their benefit, they knew, IF they lost their herds, they likely couldnt replace them. The Gov bought them, butchered, and buried those that had to be.
I can still remember my aunt telling about them dumping milk, and eggs, hogs ect over the Pony Express Bridge in St Joe, to supposedly balance the mkt. They said they did so.
I would have thought that useing those commoditys to feed the poor would have been of more benefit, BUT I imagine the farmers would have had a storm IF they had had their stuff confiscated and givin nothing so that it could go to feed the poor. Everybody likely knew that IF that happened, the stuff would go to make somebody wealthy, and it wouldnt be them.