There was little else Eric Samuelson could do but stare at the clouds of dust plowing through his crop farm in Crookston earlier this month.
“Dirt from miles away was up in the air,” Samuelson said. “The visibility was poor; it was just an extreme weather event that really was unsettling.”
Samuelson is no stranger to the windy nature of the Red River Valley. The region, which includes the northwest corner of Minnesota and northeast North Dakota, is mostly flat.
It also doesn’t have many trees, which means there’s not much to slow the high-speed winds sweeping across the valley.
That’s an issue because it’s been a windy Spring, with wind speeds frequently clocking over 40 miles per hour. And on the week of May 11th, those wind gusts reached speeds close to 50 miles per hour on multiple days, according to Crookston weather data.
“When the dirt's blowing to that extreme.. It's just an eerie, sickening feeling in your stomach to watch,” Samuelson said.
Samuelson grows wheat, soybeans, sugar beets and edible beans. He’d recently planted some of those seeds, so seeing the wind blow as hard as it did made him worried some of those seeds had been swept away in the storm.
When the dust settled, he let out a sigh of relief when he saw there wasn’t much damage to his farm.
However, he says neighbors around him have had to replant some of the crop seeds that were gone with the wind.
And still, concerns remain about losing valuable nutrients in the soil that, once gone, are lost for good.
An essential, but fragile part of farming
The uppermost layer of soil, also called topsoil, is often the most productive for plant growth.
There’s a bunch of leftover organic matter, bacteria and other microorganisms from past plants that once grew there, all of which help plants retain water and provide them with vital nutrients for growth.
But it takes centuries for that topsoil to build up, and it’s also very vulnerable to wind.
“It's considered a non-renewable resource, just because it takes so long to build,” University of Minnesota Extension Educator Angie Peltier said. “And unfortunately, as we've seen, it can take next to no time to lose.”
The more topsoil that the land loses, the harder it is for the dirt to retain water for crops to use whenever rainfall is scarce, according to Peltier.
The Red River Valley had recently been quite dry, leaving the earth particularly vulnerable to the high-speed winds that blew through. Peltier said she’d been getting a lot of phone calls about lost soil, and it’ll be difficult to pinpoint how much was lost.
According to Peltier, Minnesota loses about 5.2 tons of topsoil per acre per year. Across the Midwest, topsoil erodes at a rate of about 1.9 millimeters per year.
There are ways, though, for farmers to prevent topsoil loss and protect their ground. Planting cover crops, for example, can serve as a buffer that breaks up the wind before it blows the dirt away. The crops’ roots also stabilize the soil, making it harder for the wind to take it away.
The Red River Valley had once been home to a huge glacier over 10,000 years ago, which then melted, giving way to a tall-grass prairie. Its fertile soil was great for farmers.
But the more wind events like this that occur on the land, Peltier said, the likelier it is for the land to become less productive.
“It was a shock when I first saw the sheer amount of wind erosion in the Red River Valley,” Peltier said. “But [the recent] soil storms were next level.”
