Rural life during the Great Depression
The countryside
Farmers had already been struggling before the Great Depression. During the 1920s, the modernisation of farming, including the use of new fertilisers and farm machinery, had led to overproduction. This meant that the prices farmers could get for their produce began to fall.
Many farmers had bought shares or taken out bank loans to pay for the modernisation of their farms. When the Wall Street Crash happened, the value of their shares was reduced and the bank closures left them with huge debts. As a result, many farmers went bankrupt and had to sell off their land, or it was taken from them by their bank when they could not pay their debts.
Farms were often bought up by large industrial farming businesses, and many farm owners now found themselves employed as poorly paid farm labourers. Some unemployed farmers travelled the countryside looking for work.
African American farmers were usually Farmers who had to pay to use land by giving a proportion of their produce to the owner. which meant they paid their rent with the value of a share of the crops that they grew. As prices for farm produce fell, they found it more and more difficult to pay their rent and still have some produce left to sell for themselves. Landowners also paid them less for their produce in order to force them off their land.
Okies and Arkies
The Okies were farmers from the state of Oklahoma who had lost their farms. However, this became a general name given to any rural workers who migrated across the USA to California looking for work. This also included the Arkies (from the state of Arkansas), people from Midwestern states (eg Iowa, Missouri and Nebraska), and people from New Mexico and Texas in the South. They lived in poorly built A spontaneous settlement. It is an illegal occupation of an area, where people often have to live without basic infrastructure, such as water, sewage, electricity and rubbish collection. that had no sanitation.
Dust Bowl
At the same time as the Great Depression, there was an environmental disaster in the farming land of the Midwestern states. This resulted in people having to leave the affected areas to find work and new places to live.
In the 1920s, farmers in these states had tried to grow as much as they could on their farms, but this meant they had drained the soil of nutrients. Then in the early 1930s there was a drought, followed by heavy rain at harvest time in 1935. Crops failed to grow and even grass began to die off. The remaining land became known as the The name given to a large area of land in the US where over-farming in the 1920s had initially led to soil being impossible to farm. The soil was then blown away by heavy dust storms in the 1930s. as it was impossible to farm and powerful dust storms blew what was left of the soil away.