When soil blows across a road, the loss is visible. The quieter cost is the fertility travelling with it. University of Minnesota researchers Mehmet Ozturk and Anna Cates described two preliminary studies designed to measure both the movement of sediment and the value of nutrients carried away.
What the field measurements showed
In a Murray County, Minnesota comparison, estimated sediment movement was 449 ± 328 pounds per acre under strip tillage and 1,074 ± 1,148 pounds per acre under field cultivation. The wide variation matters: wind loss is driven by soil condition, residue, weather and a relatively small number of severe events, so the figures should not be treated as a universal rate.
A second project in Walsh County, North Dakota compared tilled and no-till ground following edible beans or wheat. Tillage did not create a clear difference in the limited observations, but the previous crop did. The lower-residue bean ground moved more soil than the wheat ground.
Nutrient loss turns erosion into an input cost
At one monitoring point, sediment movement reached the equivalent of about 160 pounds per day across a one-mile-wide strip. The researchers valued nutrients lost from November to April at roughly US$40 after edible beans and US$8 after wheat. Those early estimates exclude the longer-term cost of losing fine, productive particles and changes in field shape.
The practical response is to keep the surface rough, rooted and covered. Crop residue, cover crops and less aggressive tillage can all slow wind at ground level. The authors stress that the work is preliminary and should not be extrapolated across every soil or season.
Read the original research update
Wind erosion and nutrient loss: How much soil is moving and what could that cost farmers? was published by University of Minnesota Extension. Credit: Mehmet Ozturk and Anna Cates.