For decades, farmers had unknowingly not utilized the concepts of fallow fields and crop rotation, cover crops to manage soil fertility and quality, or other techniques to prevent erosion. The deep plowing of the topsoil had killed the natural vegetation that normally kept the soil in place and trapped moisture even during dry periods and high winds. Wheat crops, in high demand during World War I, further exhausted the topsoil and overgrazing stripped the western plains of virtually all other cover.

As a result, during the drought of the 1930s, the soil dried and turned to dust, soon blowing in large dark clouds. Given names like "Black Blizzards" and "Black Rollers," these rolling clouds often reduced visibility to a few feet.

The region most affected – the Great Plains, included more than 100 million acres, centered in Oklahoma, the Texas Panhandle, Kansas, and parts of Colorado and New Mexico. These millions of acres of farmland became useless and soon, hundreds of thousands of people were forced to leave their homes.

A resident of Oklahoma would say of the devastation, later published in Reader's Digest:

"In the dust-covered desolation of our No Man's Land here, wearing our shade hats, with handkerchiefs tied over our faces and vaseline in our nostrils, we have been trying to rescue our home from the wind-blown dust which penetrates wherever air can go. It is almost a hopeless task, for there is rarely a day when at some time the dust clouds do not roll over. 'Visibility' approaches zero and everything is covered again with a silt-like deposit which may vary in depth from a film to actual ripples on the kitchen floor."