A dust storm rolls toward Tribune, Kansas. Several onlookers wait and watch in the yard. In 1933 Greeley county farmers abandoned 80 percent of the cropland they had already sown, according to the Kansas May Crop Report of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The Greeley County Republican newspaper blamed a year of dry weather, strong winds, a damaging freeze, the army cutworm, and the Hessian fly as causes of abandonment. Only 17,000 acres or twenty percent of the average wheat crop would be harvested that year.