[EGreg]

This is because automation and outsourcing has created a race to the bottom. We work longer hours for less pay. Similar to how farmers before the Great Depression were disrupted by combines and the govt stepped in to pay them to not plant. They created the dust bowl by dessicating the land.

[EGreg]

What’s even worse is that today, worldwide ONE THIRD OF ARABLE LAND has been spoiled by farmers in a race to the bottom, it is a huge negative externality. Natural ecosystem can’t sustain the Red Queen spirals of capitalism.

https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/02/arable-l...

[jahewson]

Combine harvesters were not widely used on the Great Plains before or during the depression. It was the Homestead Act which opened up the native grassland to mom and pop farmers which resulted in the dustbowl when drought conditions occurred. These were good old fashioned horse and plough farmers.

[EGreg]

Wikipedia disagrees with you.

However, agriculture became increasingly mechanized with widespread use of the tractor, other heavy equipment, and superior techniques disseminated through County Agents, who were employed by state agricultural colleges and funded by the Federal government. The early 1920s saw a rapid expansion in the American agricultural economy largely due to new technologies and especially mechanization. Competition from Europe and Russia had disappeared due to the war and American agricultural goods were being shipped around the world.[47]

The new technologies, such as the combine harvester, meant that the most efficient farms were larger in size and, gradually, the small family farm that had long been the model were replaced by larger and more business-oriented firms. Despite this increase in farm size and capital intensity, the great majority of agricultural production continued to be undertaken by family-owned enterprises.

World War I had created an atmosphere of high prices for agricultural products as European nations demand for exports surged. Farmers had enjoyed a period of prosperity as U.S. farm production expanded rapidly to fill the gap left as European belligerents found themselves unable to produce enough food. When the war ended, supply increased rapidly as Europe's agricultural market rebounded. Overproduction led to plummeting prices which led to stagnant market conditions and living standards for farmers in the 1920s. Worse, hundreds of thousands of farmers had taken out mortgages and loans to buy out their neighbors' property, and now are unable to meet the financial burden. The cause was the collapse of land prices after the wartime bubble when farmers used high prices to buy up neighboring farms at high prices, saddling them with heavy debts. Farmers, however, blamed the decline of foreign markets, and the effects of the protective tariff.[48]

Farmers demanded relief as the agricultural depression grew steadily worse in the middle 1920s, while the rest of the economy flourished. Farmers had a powerful voice in Congress, and demanded federal subsidies, most notably the McNary–Haugen Farm Relief Bill. It was passed but vetoed by President Coolidge.[49] Coolidge instead supported the alternative program of Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover and Agriculture Secretary William M. Jardine to modernize farming, by bringing in more electricity, more efficient equipment, better seeds and breeds, more rural education, and better business practices.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_agriculture_in_the_...

The rapid mechanization of farm equipment, especially small gasoline tractors, and widespread use of the combine harvester contributed to farmers' decisions to convert arid grassland (much of which received no more than 10 inches (~250 mm) of precipitation per year) to cultivated cropland.[4]

During the drought of the 1930s, the unanchored soil turned to dust, which the prevailing winds blew away in huge clouds that sometimes blackened the sky.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl