Between 1910 and 1930, American farmers transformed roughly 13 million hectares of prairie land into farmland, primarily for growing wheat, corn, and other crops. This shift involved clearing native grasses that had helped hold the soil in place, a process that was driven by rising wheat prices in the 1910s and 1920s, as well as strong European demand during World War I. The use of modern farming equipment, such as gasoline-powered tractors and single-disk plows, made it easier and faster to convert land. These tools, especially the disk plow, cut deep into the soil, destroying the root systems of native grasses like buffalo grass and leaving the land vulnerable to wind erosion. The environmental impact of this large-scale farming became dramatically clear on May 9, 1934, when a massive dust storm swept across the Great Plains. The storm carried an estimated 350 million tons of soil eastward, darkening the skies over New York City and even reaching ships 300 miles offshore. On May 11, the East Coast was hit by the storm’s full force, with the New York Times reporting that an enormous dust cloud had traveled over 1,500 miles, plunging the city into darkness for five hours. In Chicago alone, 12 million tons of dust were deposited, amounting to about four inches of dust per person. Crews on ships off the coast collected dust from their decks, unaware that the soil came from areas like Oklahoma and Kansas. The situation worsened as the Great Depression took hold, causing wheat prices to plummet. Desperate to make a living, many farmers plowed even more prairie land in the hope of producing a larger harvest. This only made the environmental damage worse, as the exposed soil was easily picked up by the wind. On April 14, 1935, a particularly severe storm, later called "Black Sunday," highlighted the crisis in the Great Plains. A journalist coined the term "Dust Bowl" to describe the region's devastated landscape. By 1935, the Dust Bowl had spread over 100 million acres, though by 1940, this area had been reduced to 22 million acres due to conservation efforts. By that year, nearly a billion tons of fertile soil had been lost from the Great Plains. In response to the crisis, the federal government introduced the New Deal, which included the creation of the Soil Erosion Service and the Prairie States Forestry Project in 1935. These initiatives later became the Natural Resources Conservation Service. New farming techniques were promoted to help restore the land, such as crop rotation, strip cropping, contour plowing, and the use of cover crops. Farmers were even financially incentivized to adopt these methods, receiving a dollar per acre to encourage change. However, recovery was slow, as topsoil, the most fertile layer of soil, takes centuries to form naturally. Today, the soil on former Dust Bowl lands is still thinner than it was before the widespread use of deep-disk plows in the early 20th century.