Hi Guys,
I was talking with a friend of mine and he explained to me that the depression of the late 1920’s and 30’s was due to overfarming in the midwest. The overfarming turned the area into a “dustbowl.” Then he explained that since the US economy was based on grain… CRASH!! No more grain, no more economy.
Does anyone have any comments about this?
Thanks,
Christian
Well (but don’t take my advice as a final say), if the Dustbowl was created by over farming, than it could be directed towards the over consumption in the US-after all a ‘roaring’ economy requires a lot of resources. But, our economy was not stricly grain based, we did 30% of the manufacturing of the world-though we probably did have a lot of trade that was connected to grain.
The dust bowls happened until after the Great Depression began. Furthermore, the dust bowls were a result of socialist experiments in the Dakotas that led to overfarming so… a double win for capitalism. 
The Dustbowl began in 1931… after the crash of 1929. Nice! Good catch.
Thanks for the link. I was listening to the audio version of that book. It’s nice to have the charts and tables now.
You have to ask why there was over production of wheat. If farmers lose profit because of too much wheat then they should have produced less wheat and grew more of something else in higher demand - like say corn or soy beans.
However, if gov’t buys all the wheat off the farmers and/or fixed the price artifically high (no matter what the demand or surplus) then the farmers get no feedback signal to change their ways. They will continue to overproduce that which is in surplus. The gov’t did this. The gov’t didn’t want the price to fall so they’d just buy it and store it while the farmers created more. The gov’t also bought millions of pigs & destroyed them. Hoover did lots of insane things (destruction of wealth) all to prevent prices from falling. This was all 1929-1933.
If I recall correctly the dustbowl occured in the late 30’s.