Beat The GMAT a GMAT & MBA community

The years between 1930 and 1936 are often referred to as the Dust Bowl era due to severe dust storms that caused major ecological and agricultural damage to 100,000,000 acres of farmland in the American south and Midwest. During these years, hundreds of thousands of farmers fled their homes, often following famous transnational highway Route 66 to California in search of employment and better living conditions, both of which proved elusive. By 1940, 2.5 million people had moved out of the plains states; of those, 200,000 moved to California.

The fact that dust storms destroyed so much farmland often leads to the assumption that farmers were forced to leave land that had become agriculturally useless, which in turn leads to the conclusion that farmers, although they were loath to go, left their farms voluntarily. Another factor, however, is often overlooked: the Farm Security Administration (FSA) seized operative farms from farmers who, because of dire economic circumstances during the Great Depression, could no longer pay taxes on their land. The FSA set up subsistence homestead communities, in which groups of displaced farmers and their families lived together and worked a common piece of land under the supervision of FSA agricultural experts. The Dust Bowl was largely a man-made disaster, caused by farmers' deep plowing of the virgin topsoil of the Great Plains, which killed the natural grasses that normally kept soil in place and moisture trapped even during periods of drought and high winds. Thus, part of the reason why the FSA refused to allow farmers to remain on their land was the fear that, without guidance from agricultural experts, farmers would return to the farming practices that were responsible for the Dust Bowl.

One purpose of the subsistence homestead communities was to educate farmers on soil conservation and anti-erosion techniques, including crop rotation, strip farming, contour plowing, terracing, and other sustainable farming practices. Critics strongly opposed the FSA's subsistence communities, equating them to Soviet experiments in collectivized agriculture, and the FSA ultimately failed in its original goals because farmers wanted to return to their land, not to work a piece of government-owned property. After the bipartisan Conservative Coalition, which included southern Democrats gained control of Congress in 1937, the FSA was transformed into a program designed to help poor farmers buy back their land, and continues to operate as the Farmers' Home Administration



The primary purpose of the passage is to

(A) Explain why farmers from the Great Plains region left their farms during the Dust Bowl era.
(B) Describe the environmental and man-made causes underlying the Dust Bowl.
(C) Describe the subsistence homestead communities created by the FSA.
(D) Discuss the ramifications of the forced eviction of farmers during the Dust Bowl.
(E) Explain why the Conservative Coalition opposed the FSA

Please give reasons ..I selected A thinking that passage gives us an additional information on the role played by FSA in the removal of farmers from their farms.

OA D