Farming the Dust Bowl (P)

By Lawrence Svobida

Book Overview

This is a powerful original account of one man's efforts to raise wheat on his farm in Meade County, Kansas, during the 1930s. Lawrence Svobida tells of farmers "fighting in the front-line trenches, putting in crop after crop, year after year, only to see each crop in turn destroyed by the elements." Although not a writer by trade, Svobida undertook to record what he saw and experienced "to help the reader to understand what is taking place in the Great Plains region, and how serious it is." He wrote of the need for better farming methods--the only way, he felt, the destruction could be halted or confined. Well before the principles of an ecological movement were widely embraced, Svobida urged a public acceptance of the "sovereign rights of the states and the nation to regulate the use of land by owners . . .so that it may be conserved as a national resource."

This graphic account of farm life in the Dust Bowl--perhaps the only autobiographical record of Dust Bowl agriculture in existence--was first published in 1941. This new edition contains an introduction by the historian R. Douglas Hurt that not only objectively sets the scene during and after the Dust Bowl, but also places the book properly in the growing body of contemporary literature on agriculture and land use. The volume is an important contribution to American agricultural history in general, and the the history of the Depression and of the Great Plains in particular.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0700602909
• ISBN13: 9780700602902
• Release Date: April 1986
• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.73 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

One Man's Struggle

Svobida makes no bones about being objective; his book reads like my late uncles and grandpas used to talk: blunt, pithy, and with a point to make. He must have been a man of incredible stamina, to read his accounts of his hours spent in the fields. And it's that huge, raw, stamina--bluntly expressed and without fanfare--that brings the pathos to the book. Even his seemingly inexhaustible energy was no match for the "Dirty Thirties" in western Kansas. He arrived on the scene, as full of optimism as Caroline Henderson (in Letters from the Dust Bowl) but, after making only one crop in six years, finally had to admit defeat. Thus, his entire outlook and narrative is tainted by that--understandable, but it limits the book's overall point. Nonetheless, his story is sadly common enough, and nobody can accuse him from trying everything he knew how to coax a wheat crop out of the ground. That's what books like The Worst Hard Time have to understand: that most farmers in the Great Plains were not "suitcase farmers," not out to make a quick buck. They were honest, hardworking folks, caught in a bad time in a bad place using bad farming methods. What worked in Ohio or even Nebraska just wasn't enough here. A good read.

Important resource

This slim book isn't exactly an excellent read, but remains important for its facts and figures that add much to understanding a disastrous period in US ag farming. Especially the lessons learned. Wanting a little more data after I'd read The Worst Hard Time (absolutely great) by Timothy Egan, Lawrence Svobida's book filled the bill. Too bad he repressed nearly every bit of personal detail about himself, because he was obviously an intriguing, bull-headed, original young thinker.

Unique

Having searched for a first hand account of what it was like to attempt to farm during the dust bowl I was very pleased to find this work. Svobida provides a year by year account of his attempts to do that and I enjoyed learning from his trials and tribulations. The book is unique, as to this point, it is the only work I've found that gives the details of how farmers attempted to prevail during the dust bowl years. Increased an already high admiration for those who lived in and trhough the dust bowl.