TAKEAWAYS
- Make sure your fields have a minimum of 30% residue cover or watch your soil investment blow away
- Any improvement in erosion management, even if it's incremental, is better than doing nothing
- If you're not using cover crops on your farm, it's time to investigate the practice
The extremely high winds of mid-March came again this year to much of the Great Plains, and near my Oklahoma home they arrived almost exactly on the 1-year anniversary of devastating wind-driven wildfires and dust that raked much of my state and southern Kansas in 2025.
I remember the 2025 gales well because my wife and I are still finding dust in our home deposited there by relentless southwest winds blowing across a neighbor’s recently “worked up” cornfield a quarter mile away.
This year, although that same field had at least had a minimum of residue showing, maybe 30% coverage at most, and the winds were out of the north, so we weren’t directly downwind of the dust that blew for nearly 3 days.
Last year I watched as the soon-to-be planted cornfield blew a brownout over a fenceline dividing the bare soil from an adjacent pasture of winter wheat — depositing a sand bar of transplanted soil nearly 50 feet onto the pasture. As it settled among the emerging small-grain plants, it held fast and is still visibly present today.
It was a classic illustration of the folly of leaving valuable topsoil unprotected at a time when drought-prone land is perennially scoured by fast-moving cold fronts. I noticed, but across the road it’s still business as usual.
The row-crop ground is regularly being deposited downwind on the adjacent pastures of a grazier who stewards his land with growing plants and/or generous amounts of residue.
Oklahoma and Kansas are not alone in similar examples. Much has been written about visibility-blocking wind erosion contributing to fatal highway pileups northward into the Great Plains.
These are storms far more expansive than my little gripe from an 80-acre corn patch wedged between a well-managed grazing operation and land slowly being victimized by Eastern Red Cedar succession.
Large or small, anytime there’s dust rising from fields it’s indicative of certain long-term loss of a natural resource upon which everyone who eats depends.
As I travel the state that hosted the first USDA agricultural windbreak planted to combat soil erosion of the late 1930s (many of which have been destroyed to plant fencerow-to-fencerow), I’m reminded of the words of Franklin Roosevelt addressing effects of the Dust Bowl: “The nation that destroys its soil, destroys itself.”
