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Kingston,Mi | Early in my conservation service career I took a picture of lighter material that had blown out of a fall tillage field and into a roadside ditch. I cut away part of the drift and placed my 6 inch S.C.S. acreage measuring ruler in front of the cut for scale. I wasn't able to use the picture because the background would have given it away the owners identity. The responsible farm operation eventually lost the farm, new operators/owners were moving to more limited tillage and the original operators eventually dropped beets and any reason in their mind to do any fall tillage.
Ten years later when we were included in a special watershed improvement project to protect the Saginaw Bay, we had a set of dust traps built that were calibrated to provide tons per acre of soil lost to wind erosion. They caught dust at ground level and at least one other height. The trap had a small entrance and a large wind protected exit so that the rapid depressurization drop the blown material in the trap. The collected evidence was sufficient to start a filter strip program to control wind erosion and to some extent, water erosion in the Saginaw Bay watershed. The result is thousands of miles of 150 ft. wide buffers enrolled in C.R.P. and measurably cleaner water in the bay. The amount of dust collected from an aperture 1 inch wide by 2 inches tall after even a good blow is disappointing in volume when the trap is emptied but when calculated by a formula developed for wind erosion in Garden City Kansas during the Dust Bowl was a eye opening amount. We also collected snow from the windward side of deep drainage ditches to melt down and collect the dust. The ditch snow/dust collection provided good numbers for tons of dirt(it isn't soil any longer once it leaves the field) per mile of ditch moving to the bay through sprint melt off.
Both soil loss calculations figure the amount of soil in tons per acre dislodged from the original site and deposited somewhere else, whether its Dave's wheat field, the road, New York City or 10 feet away in the same field, it is still erosion. | |
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I thought we haven't had bad winds this winter .....(pic)
