How much did the Dust Bowl exacerbate the Depression?
You’ve got it backwards. For the most part, the Depression exacerbated the Dust Bowl, not the other way around.
The grass was the only thing keeping the soil in place in the semi-arid high plains region. Once that had been plowed up, the land stayed in place so long as the land was being cultivated and irrigated, but when agricultural prices crashed and credit dried up during the Depression people left the land en masse. When the land was simply abandoned, it dried up and blew away.
The drought that coincided with the economic problems certainly made things worse, but there probably would have seen some desertification in the region even without it. Some scientists now think that the soil blown into the atmosphere may have even extended and exacerbated the drought. The Dust Bowl was very much a human-caused disaster.
The Dust Bowl certainly exacerbated the suffering of many of the people living through the depression, especially people in the high plains. But it wasn’t an especially significant factor in keeping the national and global economic depression going-- the depressed agricultural prices were one of the key problems, and if anything the destruction of all that farmland helped that particular issue.
(If you’re interested, Timothy Egan’s The Worst Hard Time is a very interesting and very sad account of the Dust Bowl and the people who lived through it. I highly recommend it.)
Its also good to remember that the “Dust Bowl” farmers were mainly in small, family farms-they had neither the financial resources or the political power to get any help. Once they lost a crop, that was it-they had to leave. As “The Grapes Of Wrath” relates, most of these people went to California to find work-and their entry into the labor market there depressed wages even further. So the Dust Bowl had effects far beyond Texas and Oklahoma, I’d say.
Why is this in Great Debates?
Why is the title of the thread using both the wrong word, and a mis-spelled word, all in one?
I’m not positive this has a purely factual answer, but I think it’s worth a try. Moving to General Questions from Great Debates.
You must have missed Ken Burn’s documentary last month.
The dust bowl area had had much of its grassland – the natural ground cover – plowed up and turned to wheat farming. The 20s were a wet period, and people got rich, but in the early 30s, drought hit. Wheat didn’t grow well and once it died, nothing held the soil in place. Wheat prices collapsed with the Depression, too, making it uneconomic to grow it even if you tried; farms were abandoned, especially those owned by absentee landlords, for whom it was cheaper to walk away from than to try to grow anything. Without ground cover, the soil – never very deep to begin with – was blown away. High-wind storms came over the plains, lifting the soil and created dust storms that destroyed everything.
The Depression and fall in farm prices was a factor, but the drought was also one. If there had been no Depression, the Dust Bowl might not have happened (though the drought would have caused problems), but if there had been no Dust Bowl, the Depression would have been just as bad.
Kansas was hard hit by the Dust Bowl too, you know? 
There’s nothing wrong with using effect as a verb here, as the question was if the Dust Bowl was a cause of the Depression.
PBS just ran an interesting report on the Dust Bowl.
It turns out that it wasn’t just the fact that the area was being farmed that caused the soil to blow away, but it was being farmed in the wrong way. The Farmers were tilling the soil in a way that allowed the wind to blow the top soil away. The Dept. of AG finally sent a soil scientist out there and he showed the farmers how to till the soil in a way that didn’t cause it to blow away.
Worth watching!
Warning!!! This is an incredibly depressing book. It really was the worst hard time.
Well, if the OP had meant to say “was the Dust Bowl the cause of the Depression?”, but had also meant to use the word “affects”, then it would be both a misspelled word and an incorrect word at the same time 
1st-I saw part of Ken’s doc recently, piqued the OP.
2nd-Thank you grammar Nazis.
Remember: Rain follows the plow!
It even went as far north as South Dakota, but here it was known as ‘The Dirty Thirties’.
BTW the reason those areas were plowed-up so quickly and put to production is that the Russian Revolution and resulting chaos caused wheat prices in Europe to skyrocket-- for people who got in at the right time, they could make a fortune buying dirt-cheap land, doing the bare minimum work to get a crop, and shipping it to Europe. So you can trace the blame back to Lenin, if you like.
Those “get rich quick” farmers were the ones who abandoned their land when the prices dropped, causing the (relatively) long-time farm owners in the area to suffer the results of their negligence.
Technology (the tractor, mainly) made it possible to put a lot of land into production. Wheat prices held for a while, but eventually supply started to outpace demand, and prices dropped. The wet times were drawing to a close, so this decreased yield a little. Technology was improving, though, so farmers were able to grow even more wheat (to try to keep income up, despite falling prices and yields) and this drove prices even lower…to collapse in fact, and that is just when the drought really kicked in. Wheat prices should have risen, but the whole economy was also in collapse, so nobody could afford to buy.
Yes, the dust bowl exacerbated the depression. You had a large number of people who had essentially zero income, so they were not buying anything, so the jobs that used to make stuff My mom told of digging tin cans out of the dump to be flattened and used to repair the roof, held in with salvaged and straightened nails.
The doc mentioned that only 2 states were spared the Dust Bowl. Does anyone know which 2 it was? (NOT trivia, I genuinely don’t know)
I saw the documentary, and I don’t recall such a comment. I assume it must have referred to states that weren’t affected by the dust itself. If it were talking about all present US states, not just those that existed at the time, it probably would have to be Alaska and Hawaii.
Col-They were indeed refering to avoiding the blowing dust, also meant 46 of 48.
My husband lived in ND at the time and they had no crops,had open range for their animals. My mother in-law said she had to put rags in the key holes of her doors or the sand would pile up on the floor. One could barely see out of doors at times,it scoured the paint off the buildings! They ate just cooked wheat from the grainery.I have gone through an area where the wind was blowing the dirt off the field and that was nothing like the depression period, so I did get an idea,seeing a black cloud of dust for just a few minuets,what it must have been like.