During the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, the single most popular and widespread crop on the Great Plains was wheat. Farmers had heavily expanded wheat planting across the region in the 1910s and 1920s, plowing up native prairie grasses to cash in on high grain prices, which left the soil exposed when drought hit.

Key Dust Bowl crops

  • Wheat was the dominant cash crop and the one most associated with the Dust Bowl, both economically and environmentally.
  • Other important field crops in the wider region included corn, cotton, and sorghum, but these varied by state and were not as uniformly widespread across the core Dust Bowl area as wheat.

Why wheat mattered so much

  • Farmers planted wheat on millions of acres of former grassland, so when drought and wind arrived, these wheat fields turned into prime sources of blowing dust.
  • The economic crash in wheat prices during the Depression hit farm families especially hard, since many were highly dependent on that single crop for income.

How this shaped the disaster

  • The combination of monoculture wheat farming and poor soil conservation practices removed protective ground cover that had long stabilized Great Plains soils.
  • When multi-year drought struck, crop failures were massive, dust storms intensified, and many families were forced to abandon their farms and migrate, especially from Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico.

TL;DR: When asking “what were the most popular crops during the Dust Bowl,” the clear headliner is wheat, with corn, cotton, and sorghum also grown in parts of the region, but on a smaller or more local scale compared to wheat’s overwhelming dominance.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.