A dust storm, also known as a haboob, forms when strong, straight-line winds meet soil residue sitting among crops, collecting the dust there, rising it from the ground and bringing it together to form a wall-like cloud. While they aren’t necessarily common, they aren’t unheard of either in the Midwest. Where it is unheard of, though, is in Chicago.
On May 16, a dust storm formed in Central Illinois around Bloomington-Normal and blew its way to the Windy City. Chicago saw a rare dust storm warning.
Mike Kelley is a farmer in McLean County, with his 4,000-acre family farm based out of Lexington from as far south at LeRoy and as far north as Colfax. He was in the field working during the storm, but he didn’t really think much of it.
“We were side dressing corn, I think my son had some trucking to do that day, my son-in-law was hauling, and I had just switched with my son and had not really paid attention to the news. I knew I got an emergency [notification] on the phone,” said Kelley. “All of a sudden, I noticed, ‘Boy, it is really getting dusty,’ and then it just kept coming.”
Kelly said he was thankful for the auto steer function on his tractor. It helped him have mostly an uninterrupted stint in the field. He joked his daughters and wife had a harder time after they left home to walk in downtown Lexington.
“One of my daughters when she got home, her front door had not been latched well and so the door came open,” Kelley laughed. “She had a rooster in her house and her little dog was gone and she had a nice layer of dust over the whole house.”
Dave Stutzman also farms outside of Lexington. He has land on both sides of Interstate 55. Stutzman was side-dressing his corn with nitrogen when the dust arrived. Stutzman said it was like a big fog that swallowed nearby wind turbines in a haze of particles. His thoughts were mostly about public reaction to the storm.
“Every time something like that happens it is somewhat sad, because you know people are going to think that it’s all farmers’ fault,” he said. “I’m a farmer so I’m identified with, I guess, the perception that its farmers’ fault.”
Kelley and Stutzman said farmers did not cause the May 16 dust storm and previous ones. The soil beneath their feet hardly moved.
It’s also easy and wrong to jump to the conclusion climate change is causing more frequent dust storms. Yes, it’s possible changes in the earth’s atmosphere and warming climate could cause patterns people today are not used to. Scientists, though, have not proved that case.
Trent Ford is the Illinois state climatologist with the Prairie Research Institute at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Dust storms might seem more abundant recently than they were in years past, though Illinois has an up and down history of these events.
“It has been a bit more frequent of an issue in the last few years relative to the previous maybe 10 years,” Ford said.
Over a longer period, though, it is hard to tell. Ford said Illinois has spotty data on dust storms. Temperature records are far more robust over the last eight decades. He said there is enough data to suggest the state may face a period of more frequent storms.
“What we see is these periods of time, maybe 5 to 10 years, where we have a higher frequency of dust storms, and as you can imagine they coincide with periods of when we are a bit dryer in the spring and early summer especially,” Ford said.
The most notable example is the dust bowl era of the 1930s, a drought period which brought severe dust storms across the Great Plains.
Ford said there is clear evidence climate change is the cause of some more severe and more frequent weather events and patterns in Illinois and other parts of the country. That is not the case for dust storms, he said.
“We don’t really have great evidence to say dust storms are getting more frequent and they’re getting more frequent because of climate change. Neither of those things have a lot of evidence behind it for Illinois,” said Ford.
What Ford and other researchers look at is the ingredients of a dust storm — wind speed and dry soil — and examine how those might be changing.
“If we want to link climate change to dust storms in Illinois, we should either be seeing overall windier conditions … Overall, all the data we have, all the evidence we have points to no significant change in wind speeds over the last 40, 50 years that we have good wind data from,” Ford said.
The other connection to dust storms could be with dryer soils, especially in springtime.
“And that’s also something we’re not seeing. We’re not getting dryer in the spring. In fact spring is getting wetter overall across the state of Illinois,” said Ford.
Ford said a lack of understanding of a weather event does not necessarily mean one can blame climate change. Ford said researchers understand what conditions create a storm and how, but don’t understand and can’t predict how likely they are to form.
“What is the difference between what happened a couple Fridays ago [May 16] when we had the big dust storm, and the day before where we were equally as dry and equally as windy, but we didn’t get the dust storm?” said Ford.
Ford isn’t the only person who doesn’t understand how to predict a dust storm. Many farmers utilize farming practices like cover crops and no-till farming to help protect their soil and reduce the risk of dust storms — Mike Kelley and Dave Stutzman included.
Nick Frillman is local food systems and small farms educator at the University of Illinois Extension, serving Livingston, McLean and Woodford counties. Frillman uses data gathered by Extension to help farmers conserve their soil. He works with local farmers on practices like cover crops and no-till farming. Farmers typically plant cover crops in the offseason, after harvest and before spring planting.
“They can, first and foremost, prevent soil erosion by protecting that soil surface and keeping our soil covered, especially during heavy rain, snow events,” Frillman said. “They can also improve soil fertility through processes like nitrogen fixation … one of the three cover crop families, legumes, can take atmospheric nitrogen just hanging out in the air we breathe, which is completely unavailable to plants, and then suck that down into the plant and put it into the roots of those legume cover crops for use by the next cash crop.”
Cover crops such as cereal rye also suppress weeds and hold soil aggregates together, clumps of sand, silt and clay bound by bacteria and fungi. Those help soil keep better texture or tilth.
Trent Ford said there is a relationship between cover crops and dust storms, and they do help to reduce the chances of one occurring.
“When there isn’t any kind of cover on those soils, vegetation cover so any kind of actively growing crops or vegetation, that increases, significantly increases, the risk of that soil becoming airborne and having wind erosion which can lead to dust storms under the right conditions,” he said.
Frillman said his data shows that around 7% of corn and 17% of soybean fields in the state have cover crops. The main barrier to using a cover crop is financial, though researchers are trying to develop cover crops that are themselves saleable.
“You do have to pay for basically the establishment, so seed, fuel and time, wear and tear on machinery … but in the long run, given all those benefits to the next crop, they may see a return on investment [ROI] in terms of bushel per acre,” Frillman said.
In comparison, farmers use no-till farming on roughly 25% of fields they intend to plant in corn the next spring and nearly 50% of soybean acreage.
“Seeds are directly sewn into the residue of the previous crop or sometimes even into a cover crop,” said Frillman.
Frillman said no-till is increasing faster than cover crops.
“Probably, again, to keep that wind erosion down, because [farmers] know how good their black dirt is that they pay $15,000+ an acre for now or $300 cash rent if you’re renting,” Frillman said. “They don’t want to see it blow over to the next county or farther.”
Stutzman said he is confident they reduce the risk of dust storms.
“I think it is undeniable that it helps … the field that I was in had corn planted in it and there was no soil moving, no dust blowing from our field in the [May 16] dust storm,” he said. “Undeniably, all of the dust comes from tillage.”
The practices are voluntary. Organizations like Prairie Rivers Network [PRN] want more farmers to participate.
“It’s remarkable that we have turned a state that was prairie into a state where you can have dust bowls, but it is also the logical consequence of farming in this way,” he says. “With so many acres of the most precious resource for farming, soil…we let it wash into the creek, into the stream,” said PRN Water Director Robert Hirschfeld.
Hirschfeld and PRN suggest cover crops, no-till farming, and other practices should be enforced, not just encouraged.
“Other major industries in America we regulate. We pass laws, create rules that require them to clean up their pollution or to limit the amount of pollution they’re putting in the water or the air,” Hirschfeld said. “We simply haven’t done that for agriculture. We have exempted it from all of these laws, and we treat it as a special case.”
Hirschfeld said the failure to hold agriculture accountable has led to the rise in problems such as dust storms. He mentioned one effort that is currently in effect is the Illinois Nutrient Reduction Strategy, which aims to reduce nutrient run off by 45%. To do so would require nearly all 22 million crops in the state to use cover crops.
Hirschfeld said an ideal solution would be “a little bit of everything.” While land should be prioritized for conservation, farming land should be more regulated and be reconsidered for safe farming, Hirschfeld said.
Stutzman said he was not willing to say tillage should stop entirely. Cover crops and no-till work for him and Kelley, but not for all farmers. Farmers can’t plant some crops, such as potatoes, without tilling.
Dust storms, like the one that rolled through from Central Illinois up to Chicago, create pause and it is natural to wonder what the exact cause was. Stutzman said it is undeniable that the dust in a dust storm comes from the fields of someone’s farm.
Regardless, he said it is not beneficial to look for blame.
“I don’t know any farmers that are out there trying to destroy their soil, I don’t know any farmers trying to cause dust storms, I don’t know any farmer that doesn’t want to keep their land for the next generation and the next generation,” he said. “But having said that I think we can all do better, and we all need to do better. With the tools we have today, there’s no reason that we can’t leave more residue on top of the soil and cut back on the bare, exposed soil that can blow.”
Stutzman said every farmer can work to be a better steward of their soil, even if they don’t want to tend their land the same way he does.
