The Great Plains of the United States and Canada turn from farmland to dust in this government-sponsored short, made under the Resettlement Administration to explain how decades of uncontrolled plowing stripped the prairie of the grass that held it together. Writer-director Pare Lorentz builds the film almost entirely from stock and location footage: tractors cutting sod, wheat fields under harvest, then the black wind storms that bury fences and cars in the 1930s. Virgil Thomson's score works folk tunes, popular songs, and hymns into the soundtrack, and baritone Thomas Hardie Chalmers narrates in a plain, declarative voice that reads almost like scripture. The film was budgeted at a few thousand dollars and ran well past it; Lorentz covered much of the overage himself and had reimbursements denied for receipts scrawled on scrap paper. Made to justify New Deal farm policy, it argues its case through images rather than statistics, letting drought-cracked earth and empty homesteads carry the point that the land was farmed past what it could bear.