The Nation’s Corn Belt Has Lost a Third of Its Topsoil

Sorry-not-sorry for anoth­er depress­ing envi­ron­men­tal dis­as­ter head­line. At least I did­n’t write that one. You can thank Becca Dzombak over at Smithsonian Magazine for it and for fol­low­ing up on the sci­en­tif­ic study that pro­duced the find­ings. This arti­cle and study are aggra­vat­ing to read because they prop­er­ly iden­ti­fy the root caus­es and that peo­ple just don’t change. We’ve known for fifty-plus years that sus­tain­able prac­tices would be bet­ter for the long term, but due to short term cap­i­tal­ist pres­sure farm­ers pump year­ly yields until collapse.

Aggressive plow­ing and mono­cul­ture plant­i­ng led to unprece­dent­ed top­soil loss dur­ing the Dust Bowl. In 1935, in the wake of stag­ger­ing soil and eco­nom­ic loss, Congress cre­at­ed the Soil Conservation Service (now known as the National Resource Conservation Service) to encour­age more sus­tain­able farm­ing. The orga­ni­za­tion encour­aged no-till plant­i­ng, which con­serves top­soil by not churn­ing it up as intense­ly as con­ven­tion­al till­ing, and cover crops, which help hold soil in place and replen­ish its nutri­ents, in the mid- to late-1900s. Today, such sus­tain­able prac­tices are begin­ning to spread as aware­ness of soil spreads too, but fewer than a quar­ter of fields nation­al­ly are farmed with no-till practices.