Farming the dust bowl: A first-hand account from Kansas

By Lawrence Svobida

Book Overview

This is the story of Lawrence Svobida, a Kansas wheat farmer who fought searing drought, wind, erosion, and economic hard times in the Dust Bowl. It is a vivid account by a farmer who pitted his physical strength, mental faculties, and financial resources against the environment as nature wreaked havoc across the southern Great Plains. Svobida's description of Dust Bowl agriculture is important not only because it accurately describes farming in that region but also because it is one of the few first-hand accounts that remain of the frightening and still haunting dust-laden decade of the 1930's.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0700602895
• ISBN13: 9780700602896
• Release Date: January 1986
• Publisher: University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, U.S.A.
• Length: 255 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.

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.