Back to What's New
Reprinted with permission from the University of Illinois College of ACES

And the Sky Was Black With Earth: Soil Conservationists Reach a Crucial Millennial Milestone

The dust storms that rolled across the Great Plains in the spring of 1935 were monsters. They swallowed entire towns, plunging them into dust-filled darkness.

"In Kansas, visibility was sometimes down to less than 300 yards at midday," writes Wellington Brink in his book Big Hugh. "People lost their way in black blizzards within a hundred yards of home." Planes struggled to fly at 20,000 feet to find air that was "clean of flying particles of sand and dirt."

Meanwhile, in Washington D.C., that spring, Hugh Hammond Bennett was in Room 333 of the Senate Office Building to promote a research program on soil conservation. Unknown to the senators present, Bennett had timed his meeting according to weather reports.

Bennett did not rush as he laid out his case for conservation research. He hoped that if he waited long enough, Mother Nature would come through.

According to Brink's account, one of the senators suddenly noted, "It's getting dark. Perhaps a rainstorm is brewing."

"Maybe it's dust," said another.

Sure enough, Brink says, as the senators gathered at the window, "the dust storm for which Hugh Bennett had been waiting rolled in like a vast steel-town pall, thick and repulsive. The sun went into hiding. The air became heavy with grit. Government's most spectacular showman had laid the stage well."

Bennett had known that a huge dust storm from the West was on the move. And here it was in the capital city "swirling in from a 2,000-mile journey." Bennett rested his case.

From Dust Bowl to Mud Bowl
Bennett went on to become the first director of the Soil Erosion Service--an agency created in the aftermath of the Dust Bowl. And now, as we reach the end of the century and the millennium, the time is right to evaluate the results of 70 years of soil conservation work that began during the Dust Bowl era. It is an especially appropriate time because soil conservationists in Illinois have reached a significant millennial milestone.

It's called "T by 2000."

In Illinois, the major culprit behind erosion is not wind but water. Soil is pulverized by rain and then washed away by run-off--a scenario that earned the Midwest the name "the Mud Bowl." To deal with its Mud Bowl mess, Illinois established several goals in 1982 for reducing soil erosion. The ultimate aim was to reduce erosion to tolerable levels, or "T levels," on all soils in the state by the year 2000. When erosion is kept at or below the soil-loss tolerance level, soil is being replenished as quickly as it is being eroded.

So with the year 2000 upon us, Terry Donohue is continually being asked, Have we reached T on all soils? Did we succeed in reducing erosion to tolerable levels?

"2000 is not a drop-dead date for reducing erosion to tolerable levels," cautioned Donohue, supervisor of the Office of Soil and Water Conservation with the Illinois Department of Agriculture. "What's important is that we've seen steady progress."

This may sound like a prelude to bad news, but it's not. Although roughly 3 million acres of cropland in Illinois still suffer from erosion that exceeds tolerable levels, changes in farming since the 1970's have led to dramatic savings in soil.

To be specific, erosion has been brought within tolerable levels on about 5-1/2 million additional Illinois acres since the state erosion-control plan went into effect 17 years ago--not a bad record for a program that was purely voluntary and operated during a tough time in the farm economy, Donohue said.

In 1982, about 14.7 million acres, or 59 percent of the cropland in Illinois, was within T levels. In 1998, roughly 20 million acres, or 86 percent of the cropland, was within T.

The no-till revolution
Without a doubt, the driving force behind the dramatic reduction in soil erosion has been conservation tillage. With conservation tillage, producers reduce the amount of plowing they do, leaving the ground covered with residue from the previous crop. This residue buffers the soil from rain and run-off.

No-till, a system pioneered by University of Illinois specialists such as George McKibben, takes conservation tillage to its most ambitious level. With no-till, farmers set aside the plow entirely.

Today, conservation tillage is a major management practice, with 37 percent of the crops planted in this system nationally in 1998. But the troubling news, both nationally and statewide, is that the numbers for no-till have suddenly begun to stagnate, Donohue said. For no-till corn, the numbers are actually dropping.

The reason for the reversal in no-till trends is no mystery. Some farmers believe that corn yields are taking a hit with no-till because the heavy residue keeps the soil cooler and moister in early spring. (No-till soybeans haven't been affected because soybeans are not as sensitive as corn to moisture and temperature differences.)

To reverse the downward trend, U of I researchers are studying an alternative to traditional no-till corn that might provide a solution. Wayne Pedersen, U of I plant pathologist, has demonstrated that "strip-till" creates a planting zone that is five to nine degrees warmer than regular no-till.

With strip-till, most of the residue remains on the soil surface, the same as with any no-till system. The big difference is that producers till a narrow strip of soil where the seeds are planted--solving the problem of cool, wet seedbeds.

"With strip-till, we might just get back on track," Donohue noted.

What's next?
However, reviving no-till corn is only one task facing conservationists and producers as they cross into a new millennium. According to Donohue, the state has set its target on other erosion culprits, such as streambank erosion. Powerful currents of water in streams and lakes can pound the banks, causing them to crumble like miniature avalanches of dirt.

These eroding banks make direct deposits of soil into our water.

Another priority, Donohue said, is to do more to stem "gully erosion" caused by concentrated flows of run-off water that cut deep gashes into the land. About 16 to 20 percent of the farm fields in Illinois still need some type of practice to handle concentrated flow, Donohue noted.

But although much remains to be done in mastering erosion, there is no denying the progress that has been made since the 20th Century began, both in management practices and in attitudes.

In 1900, for instance, a Bureau of Soils bulletin revealed a dramatically different view of soil. It said, "The soil is the one indestructible, immutable asset that the Nation possesses. It is the one resource that cannot be exhausted; that cannot be used up."

When Hugh Hammond Bennett read that bulletin, he shot back, "I didn't know so much costly misinformation could be put into a single brief sentence."

Illinois soil is certainly resilient, but the lesson from this century is that even something as seemingly invincible as soil requires our care and stewardship.

"The soil we have to work with here in Illinois is so forgiving that we can't comprehend what we've done to it," said one farmer involved in the U of I's soil-quality initiative. "You can just abuse it and abuse it, and it just keeps right on giving. But it can't go on forever--there is a limit. I have no idea what the limit is, and I don't pretend to know. But everything has a limit."