The Wind You Don’t Notice (And What It’s Taking from Your Soil)
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
Updated: 21 hours ago
The Days That Don’t Seem to Matter
There are days on the Plains—especially in dry spring conditions—when nothing seems to be happening.
A pickup moves down a county road, the sky pale and steady, the wind just strong enough to lean into. Fifteen, maybe twenty miles an hour. Not enough to stop you. Not enough to make the news. Just enough, though, to begin moving soil from fields that have been opened up to it.
It doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t leave much behind that you can point to in the moment.
But over time, it adds up.
Because on days like that, the land is moving—whether we notice it or not.
The Day We Do Remember
We’ve seen what happens when the wind makes itself known.
On May 12, 2022, a derecho swept across South Dakota, and in the middle of the afternoon the sky went dark—not dimmed but erased. Fields turned to dust, visibility dropped to zero, and people found themselves in situations that felt, in more than one account, like something out of the Dust Bowl.
Dan Mehlhaf, District Conservationist with USDA-NRCS in Yankton, lived through it.
“It reminded me of the Dust Bowl,” he said.
It was the kind of day that leaves an impression, and rightly so. We wrote about it at the time because it felt worth remembering.
But there’s a quieter side to that story—and it’s the part we tend to overlook.
What We Don’t See
When soil scientist Chris Coriel, National Erosion Specialist with USDA-NRCS in Fort Worth, Texas, was asked to look at that event, he examined not just the storm itself, but the conditions around it.
What he found was unsettling.
In the days leading up to the derecho, there were long stretches of steady wind—nothing dramatic, nothing that would make a person stop what they were doing. And yet, over those ordinary days, the total soil movement may well have exceeded what was lost during the storm itself.
No darkness at midday. No headlines. Just a steady, almost invisible loss.
Dan had seen that kind of thing firsthand even before the derecho.
During a stretch of strong spring winds, he went out to look at a field that was blowing and found he couldn’t even step out of his truck. The soil in the air made it impossible to stand there for long. When he returned a few days later, the wind had settled, but the evidence had not.
The ditch alongside the field was full—nearly 30 inches of soil that had come off that one piece of ground.
And what remained in the field told an even clearer story. The soil had been a silty clay loam; the kind of ground producers rely on. What was left behind was mostly sand. The finer particles—the silts and clays that hold water, nutrients, and life—had lifted and gone.
A soil test of what collected in that ditch showed high levels of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. By Dan’s estimate, it amounted to roughly $996 per acre in lost nutrients.
Not over time.
In a single stretch of wind.
Two Fields, One Difference
And yet, just across the road, there was another field.
Same soil. Same crop history. Same wind.
The difference was that after silage, that field had been planted to cereal rye. It stood green that spring, and it held.
It did not blow.
That contrast doesn’t settle every question, but it points to something fundamental. The wind responds to what’s in front of it—whether the soil is protected or exposed, anchored or loose.
A Better Question
Every year about this time, conversations around tillage and no-till surface again. People point to what they’ve seen, what they’ve tried, what has and hasn’t worked. The skepticism is understandable—no one farms in theory, and no one can afford to get it wrong.
But both the research and the field observations suggest the question may not be as simple as choosing one system over another.
A more useful question might be this:
When, exactly, is the soil most vulnerable?
Because erosion doesn’t happen evenly across a season. It concentrates in those windows when soil is disturbed and left exposed—before canopy, during dry periods, and under steady spring winds like the ones we’re seeing now.
Even systems that look acceptable on average can have moments where the risk is far higher than we realize.
That’s part of what Dan was getting at in our recent conversation. He noted that more strip-till rigs are showing up across the region, and most producers understand there’s a range within that practice. Some setups leave very little disturbance at the surface, while others leave more, depending on how they’re configured and run.
It’s not about drawing lines between good and bad.
But it does bring us back to a simple reality: the more the soil is disturbed and left exposed, the more vulnerable it becomes to the kind of steady winds that rarely get our attention.
What the Wind Teaches
This year, the conditions are lining up again.
Southeast South Dakota is in a D3 drought in places, with broader areas still dry. Subsoil moisture is limited, and while the winds haven’t reached the intensity of 2022, they don’t need to in order to move soil.
Which raises a question that goes beyond any one system or practice.
If we know that soil—and the nutrients tied to it—can leave under these conditions, sometimes without us noticing, what are we doing to protect it in those moments when it is most exposed?
I’ve spent enough time talking with farmers across the Plains to know this—most of us aren’t trying to do the wrong thing. But sometimes the land is showing us something we didn’t expect, and it’s worth paying attention.
We remember the day the sky went dark.
But the land changes just as surely on the days when nothing seems to be happening.
Are you paying attention?
Visit these “Growing Resilience Through Our Soils” information pages:
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