 Well, this is a history of phosphate export and wind erosion in North Dakota and the region. The reason why I put this thing together was about six years ago I received a call from the Governor's Historical Society in North Dakota, and they wanted me to do a presentation on the last hundred years of fertilizer application in the state. And so I heard the word governor and said, yes, hung up the phone, and then I thought what in the world did I just do? I'm going to put up a chart that's going to show fertilizer use starting probably around 1950 and for 45 minutes. But then I began to think about the history of the state, and I took a little bit different tack, and what you see here is the results of that and then edits from that point forward. So North Dakota soil before settler crop production was a very rich prairie soil. Our soils are relatively young, east of the Missouri River, less than 10,000 years old, and they're much older and more fragile west of the Missouri River. The soils to the east are the result of the perimeters left behind when the glaciers retreated at the end of the last ice age. On the west of the Missouri River are residual soils that date 65 million years and older. But the topsoil in all of this area, because of the prairie grasses and forbs that protected it, disassembled the minerals that were in the soil and moved them to the top of the soil and then as the plants died and re-grew and died and re-grew, over the years that topsoil contained really high levels of available nitrogen and phosphorus and potassium and calcium magnesium, all the nutrients that are needed to sustain our crop growth in the state. When early settlers came to the area, they came from Europe and Eastern United States and really all parts of the globe, and some of them knew how to farm and some of them really just had a vague idea, and a lot of them didn't have a lot of money, but one of the things they found when they settled was this enormous stretch of buffalo bones and other animal bones. Some of the bones were there because of the great extermination that happened in the northern prairie in the 1870s, early 1880s, but some of them were just natural, the natural deaths of the bison and the native hunts. It's true that the natives used all the parts of the buffalo, but it is not true that the natives used all the parts of all the buffalo. There's only so many scapula shoulder bones that a family would need, and over a hunt that family might kill five, six buffalo and dry the meat for later on. So there were a lot of bones on the prairie, just naturally and from hunts and from the massacre. So there were businesses that popped up where if you brought the bones to a railroad terminal, the agents there would buy the bones, give you cash for them, and then you could use that cash to buy other things. So this was a big business for a very short period of time. The picture here is a pile of bones near Fort Tot in North Dakota in the 1880s. Here's some of the Indians hauling bones in the Red River carts in the eastern part of North Dakota. If you go back in the centennial records of a lot of these little towns in North Dakota, you'll find little blurbs like this from people that were still alive in the, that remembered this period of time. And here are just three for an example. Here's 1880 from Cullum. The first few years were especially hard due to crop failures and low prices. Buffalo bones were picked and hauled to Ellendale in exchange for food and flour. Ellendale was the nearest town at the time and was 42 miles from the farm. Mr. Kruger brought up about 10 acres of land the first year. 1889 was a drought year and he didn't even get his seed back. So Mr. Kruger having nothing else to do after seeding started picking buffalo bones. The bones were sold at Edgeley and Ellendale. And here he received about $12 a ton. He would go out one day, come home the next with a wagon load of bones camping out overnight. He sold about $70 worth of bones during the early part of summer in 1889. And this helped the Kruger family quite a bit as they had no other income. And then near Lair, North Dakota, 1890, they planted their first flax crop and collected buffalo bones. They took them to Ellendale and received $2 per wagon load. So this was a nice business and it kept some new pioneers, some new settlers on the prairies where otherwise they may have starved or had to move on. So this lasted no more than 10 years. Although buffalo bones could still be found way up into the 20s. Here are some people loading buffalo bones near Crem, North Dakota, which is north of Bismarck Aways. And here's some more piles of bones from North Dakota. This happened all across the prairies. There's a whole line of bones lined up for shipment in Saskatchewan. And the picture on the bottom, are bones loaded onto a train car in Ellendale around 1888. This is a pile of buffalo skulls. And at one of the destinations where the bones ended up, this is outside the Michigan Carbon Works outside of Rougeville, Michigan. And just gives you a scope of how many bones were sent to places out in the east. So a typical fresh bone meal guaranteed analysis is 315-0, which means 3% nitrogen, 15% phosphate, and 0% potash. So after some time sitting on the prairie, most of the nitrogen has probably returned to the soil. But the phosphorus is very, held very tightly in the bones and is an integral part of the structure of the bones. And so it would have been shipped away. We had the records from 1872 and 74 from the southern buffalo herd. The Santa Fe Railroad and others in Kansas shipped over 3.2 million tons of bones to the east from that state. But our officials in North Dakota were destroyed by a fire. But it's reasonable that the tonnage shipped east was at least as great as in Kansas. The pile just shown in that foretaught and photograph represented 150 boxcars of bones, each boxcar holding the bones of approximately 850 animals. People estimate about 9.5 million buffalo in the northern herd, about 10 animals per ton of bone. Most of the skeletons were shipped east. If we assume, and I think rightly so, that around 3.2 million tons of bones were shipped from North Dakota containing 15% phosphate, then about 480,000 pounds of P205 was shipped out and moved east and removed from the ecosystem. And just for comparison, that's about two years of phosphate application at present rates, which are at historic highs right now. So that's really interesting, and I figured, well, that's a different tack. It's only going to take up about 10 minutes of that presentation in Bismarck, so what else is going on? And then I started to think about the huge losses of phosphate from the huge loss of the soil. These were events that were devastating to ag production and also devastating to the natural fertility of the soil from, we always think of the 1930s, but we'll give evidence that it happens even today. When people came from the east to farm, this land had never been plowed. The natives believed and still do to this day that the soil is sacred, and they wouldn't have thought to put a plow to it. All of the Indian agriculture in the state was done Egyptian style along the Missouri River and maybe some streams in the state where the spring floods would bring silt and then the natives would plant their corn or squash or sunflowers, and the plow, they didn't have a plow. But the farmers that settled here, they weren't stupid people. They used the top technology of the day. Here's a farmer in the Red River Valley that has a brand new tractor, steam tractor with the gangs of discs behind, and the procedure was to plow in the fall if you could and the spring if you couldn't, and then work the land and work the land and work the land of the consistency of plow, flower, and then seed in it because the seeders of that time were not the big heavy seeders with nice openers and closers on the end to seal the seed in. It required a fluffy seed belt, so this is what you did. If you're from Ohio or you're from Virginia or you're someplace in Europe, this is how you prepared the field. Most of these farmers were on places in the planet that were a 10-mile-an-hour breeze, was pretty stiff breeze, and now they came into an environment that was totally different, but they still had the same tools that they used other places. Another thing you see from this image taken in 1910s to 1915 is there's not a tree anywhere. The only trees on this landscape were near the streams and the rivers. So there's some documents that say that as soon as the land was plowed, the soil started to blow, but these were isolated events, and although they were not insignificant, they didn't reach the magnitude of the losses that were experienced in the 30s. In the late 20s, the climate started to become more dry, and this is a cornfield up near Minot that prematurely died due to drought in the early part of these days, 1929, 1930. My colleague, Thomas Sutter, is an excellent soil scientist, but he also does a lot of volunteer work, and he volunteers as a hospice, and one of his charges was Orville Stenerson from Dodge, North Dakota, in the western part of the state, and Mr. Stenerson gave Tom the permission to record some of his recollections from those days when Tom asked him about it. He said 1932 was a good year, 1933 was a bad year, 1934 was dry with lots of dust, 1935 was a good year with rains, 1936 was a very bad year, the worst, lots of dust, the grasshoppers, only three loads of hay were taken off their farm compared to 20 to 30 in a good year. The dust blackens the sky, they had to turn on oil lamps to see it noon. They sold all their livestock, kept only a dairy cow, they had to feed it Russian thistle because that's all they had, and it got sick, they had no wheat that year. 1937 was better than 1936, but still bad. At this point in the presentation, I was giving it in Gilby, or near Gilby, a few years ago, and an older gentleman stood up at the back and he started to talk, and he talked for 15, 20 minutes. He was a boy during this period of time, and he recollected that these dust storms just came out of nowhere and would last for days. They'd huddle in their houses and try to seal up the doors and windows the best they could, but the dust still came in and it was hard to see across the room. When the dust finally settled, they went outside the house and their first job was to dig out the fences because the fences have become clogged with soil like snowdrifts in the livestock, the ones that survived had walked over the top of them and were somewhere else, so they dug out the fences to try to get the livestock back into the pens. The gentleman said that in some of these events, they lost feet of soil, that they were just awful, and the trees that began to be planted in the 1940s, 1950s, they really helped a lot. So by the early part of 1930s, the USDA had discovered that this whole area from North Dakota down into Texas was some of the windiest areas in the country and put out alarms that something had to change. This is an image from Emond's County, southeast of Bismarck, where a fence is built on top of a fence and note the gentleman's tithe at the left. It's going straight out, so the wind continues to blow. In the northern plains, the dryness and the soil blowing didn't hit just North Dakota, but it hit parts of Minnesota and also South Dakota very hard as well. Here's a farmer near Appleton, Minnesota in the mid-1930s. Notice how that soil was just like flour. Mr. Russell was a FSA employee of the USDA and he was sent out to the West to try to document what was going on. And this is 1937 when a lot of the dust was already lost. This is a dust storm from Williston. You can see the water tower in the background from Williston. These are horses and a pasture, if you could call it that, near Williston in 1937. This is the aftermath of a dust storm in the mid-1930s in Swift County, Minnesota. The following are some pictures from South Dakota. This is a picture from Huron, South Dakota, November 12, 1933. Taken at 11.55 a.m., the street lights had to be turned on because without it you couldn't see anything. It was like night. You can barely make out the silhouette of a car in the middle of the photograph. This is one of South Dakota's black blizzards in 1934. This is from Gregory, South Dakota in the south-central part of the state with that huge wall of dust bearing down on the town. These things were enormous and lasted a long time. This is the aftermath of one of those storms from south-central, South Dakota. A lot of the farm implements buried, family probably moved out. This is in May 1936, a farmer trying to walk against the wind with all the dust blowing around. This is the aftermath of the South Dakota storm with the dirt drifts overwhelming a hog building on the farm. The livestock either died from these farms or they were shipped away to destroyed for government check. The animals would get their lungs filled with dirt and dye and dust pneumonia was common in the plains. Small children and older adults were particularly vulnerable to this. I'm always concerned when I talk to farmers about this that they really don't understand what happens to the soil that blows off the farm. There's a general feeling that either goes to the neighbors so we trade soil or it goes into the ditch. But this clipping from 1934, this clipping from 1934 describes what really happens when there are dust storms. This is from the Bismarck Tribune. While frequent dust storms have visited North Dakota this spring, 1934, those on 11 days weren't special mention. The most severe of these storms occurred on April 21st, 22nd and the velocity of the wind was greater on the 21st but the volume and density of the dust was greater on the 22nd. The latter storm caused the most comment because of the fact that the 22nd was a Sunday and travel both by automobile and by plane was hazardous and difficult. Several aviators reported that dust was encountered at all levels up to 14,000 feet. So these dust storms are three-dimensional. They're just not soil blowing into the ditch. They have a height to them as well as a length and a breadth. There were no satellite images back in the 30s but there are today and this is a satellite image from the Palouse region up in Washington State and those plumes from that dust travel the scale of that map as over 100 miles. So not very much of that dust ends up in the ditch. Most of it gets blown very far away. Evidence for this is in the Sahara which is an extreme example but the dust from those storms commonly goes thousands of miles into the Atlantic. An assessment of the wind erosion from the 30s by USDA was that toward the late 1930s 573,000 acres had severe erosion and required methods to ensure continued production but at that point 9.1 million acres in North Dakota were so severely eroded that further use for crop or livestock production is economically unfeasible. We have large areas of national grasslands in the state. We have large areas of range. A lot of these areas used to be cropped prior to the 1930s and now they're used for more substance livestock production. This is a map from the mid-1930s describing what had happened to that point that the black on the image is moderate wind erosion with 25-75% topsoil loss. The gray dotted areas are slight wind erosion with 25% topsoil loss and then the oblique slashes in the southwest part of the state are a combination of wind and water on those hillier landscapes along the Little Missouri. So even in 1933 the USDA sent a memo to Hugh Bennett in the Soil Erosion Service. In 1933 it was estimated that topsoil losses reduced annual production from 15-25%. And when the soil was fully stripped fields become unproductive and barren. So here we were starting out the farming of these soils. Somewhere about 130 years ago with this huge bank of nutrients and in a very short period of time this was all blowing away. Records of initial wheat yields in the Richard soils of the eastern North Dakota were really high even by today's standards. Forty bushels an acre were sighted by High Room Jrockies a historian at Minnesota State Moorhead near Kindred and 30 bushels an acre in 1890 near Jamestown. The average wheat yields in the state with this last year, 2016 is an exception, oftentimes don't get much above 40 bushels an acre. So here we have farmers seeding with probably not very adapted varieties of wheat using planting methods that maybe only one step above what the Egyptians used 4,000 years ago and here they were growing wheat yields that are pretty similar to what we did today. These yields are only possible if the rates of nitrogen released in the soil were at least 100 pounds of nitrogen per acre with substantial phosphorus and other nutrients available there as well. Today even on fallow soils it's really rare to find an accumulation of 100 pounds of nitrogen per acre after an entire year. The dust was very thick on eastern cities. I mentioned that the soil didn't end up in the ditch. Most of it went offsite hundreds and thousands of miles away. Chicago documented millions of tons of dust settling on the city and after some of these storms. And in Central Park in New York a person could go out with a cup and scoop up cups of soil from the prairies after these events. So some scientists did that. They picked up soil and they analyzed it and they compared it to what was left on the prairies after these storms and they found that there were 19 times more phosphate, P205 in the dust than what was on the prairies. 10 times more organic matter, 9 times more nitrogen and 45 times more potassium. This is a chart of North Dakota and Russian wheat yields from around 1880 to the early 1990s. So we'll just talk about the North Dakota ones. There are little white boxes up on top and this is in kilograms per hectare and we'll just reference that 1.4 over on the left. That's around 22, 23 bushels an acre roughly. The record shows that when these farms were broken up without any addition of fertilizer and with pretty primitive planting and harvesting methods they were achieving regularly 20 to 25 bushels of wheat per acre average for the state. This decline starting around 1910, the moisture was still there I hope that you can appreciate so far from the presentation that we've already started to lose some soil and the nitrogen that was in the soil was already starting to mineralize and decline. Once we hit the 30s with the very dry years one would expect that the yields would decline but with the exception of a couple of the war years when rainfall was plentiful that we never achieved the level of production from when the prairies were first broken up until we started to put on fertilizers in the 1950s. So I made an estimate of topsoil loss from the data plowing in the late 1930s and I think this is slightly conservative but gives you an idea of what was lost. About 12 inches of topsoil from the hill tops and about 8 inches from the slopes. An average of around 6 inches of topsoil loss from the data plowing to the late 1930s from about 30 million acres of crop land and the total weight of that is around 30 billion tons of soil. A soil generally contains around a ton of phosphate in the top 6 inches. So if that were true and I think it was true the total amount of phosphate lost during that period of time would have been 30 million tons. And that's the equivalent of 150 years of phosphate application at today's present rates. So I want to thank after living through all of that soil loss and all of those really hard times that things would have changed quite a little bit after that but the records showed in the Great Plains, North Dakota include that there were very large occasions of land damage from wind erosion in the 1950s in the 1960s in the 1970s in the 1980s and call attention to 88-89 the last long multi-year drought that North Dakota had and during that period of time after windstorms, township trucks had to be used in order to clear the streets of towns within the state because of all the soil that had blown onto them. So wind erosion occurred after that. Here's a picture of the aftermath of a storm in the Grand Forks in the 1950s and that's not snow, that's soil. So wind erosion damage by year in the Great Plains in North Dakota in 1955 just less than half a million acres 1977, 3.6 million acres in North Dakota alone about 13% of the crop land 1980, about an inch of soil lost from 2.1 million acres and in 1982 there was a loss of 1.6 gigatons west of the Mississippi and that's equivalent to about two inches of topsoil from 2.4 million acres. So a continual loss, a big question in a lot of people's minds are why aren't growers and landowners more alarmed about their continual soil loss? And there's two reasons for that one is that they mask the effects with tillage and two, they really don't have any check in the field to see what it used to look like or they ignore the obvious. One of the ignore the obvious things is a site that you don't see quite so much in the eastern part of the state because our wet years, a lot of these rock piles the rocks were removed for shoring up ditches and culverts but once in a while you do see this that the rocks are sitting on top of a pedestal the rocks were put on the landscape many years ago and then the soil eroded from around those rock piles and leaving the rocks on the pedestal the pedestals weren't there when the rocks were put in the pedestals are there because the rocks protected that soil they were on from erosion but farmers see that but they don't really see it. More common is this that we have simultaneous cultivation and erosion and the losses are hidden because when the farmer comes in and tills the field when the farmer gets down the field still looks blocked to them. So on the left hand side is a depiction of a of a soil. The soil sign is like myself we always look at the soil as if we're in a soil pit let's say we've dug a ditch and we've climbed in and we're looking at the soil on that A we call it an A horizon is the hopefully black layer up on top where the plants grow and dark organic matter accumulates the layer below what we call the B horizon is an area where maybe clay is accumulated lime is accumulated, salts accumulate the soil has been changed to some extent by plants and physical processes and then the layer after that below that is the C horizon which is relatively undisturbed usually the parent material where the soil developed the wind acts on the soil and there's erosion and the farmer works the soil and works the soil and it still looks black to them after a period of time but there comes a point when the black layer up on top is not as thick as the tool that's used to plow or tizzle the field by the farmer and so some of the B horizon begins to be mixed in with the A and the soil is less black than it used to be but to the farmer it still looks as black as ever and that loss and tillage continues and continues until the B is all mixed up and what's left of the A and the farmer begins to till into the C horizon and dilute it even more so during this period of time large amounts of topsoil are lost and the farmer really has no idea because the tillage mixes what's underneath with what's on top and when they get done with the field and look at it it still looks black but it's not as black as it used to be my colleague Dave Hopkins and one of his grad students a couple years ago went back to some sites where the soil conservation service had characterized the soils in about 1960 and here are a couple things they found the soil in western walsh county was characterized in 1958 and then they found that the distance from the surface that AP horizon the dark layer to the C horizon the stuff underneath was a little bit more than 34 inches when Dave and Brandon went back in in 2014 what they found is that distance from the surface to the C was 15 inches so that indicates that that site had lost 19 inches of topsoil during that past 40 some years on the right hand side is a very seriously eroded soil near Buffalo, North Dakota there's really no A horizon that's a mapped as a barn soil which normally has a fairly thick black layer up on top but this doesn't it's just discolored but it's certainly not black so the topsoil is all gone when soil scientists get down into a soil pit we can see a glimpse into the past these old wormholes and worm channels gopher holes can be very black and that's the organic matter that sifted in a couple hundred years ago before the prairies were plowed and we can see those colors and they contrast with the colors that are up on top some additional evidence comes from the descriptions of soils and old soil surveys in divide county Northwest North Dakota 1900 the divide soil series which is still a soil series today was described as having 16 inches of very black topsoil if you look at the divide soil today and I have done work on those it has no black topsoil it's just a light gray topsoil so the estimated loss between 1900 and today is at least a foot in Cass County published a soil survey in 1903 and they characterize a Wheatland soil which I found shocking because I've worked with Wheatland soils in the past few years but it described that Wheatland soil is having two feet of topsoil with organic matter of 6.9% the Wheatland soils I've worked with north of the Wheatland Exit along old Route 10 today have about 2% organic matter and I estimate that the loss from those soils since it was plowed the survey is at least 2 feet and then the Miami loam is also described in that same survey which is probably what we call a Bearden today it describes 3 feet of 7% plus organic matter and today a Bearden anywhere is around 6 inches at 4% organic matter so we probably lost some of these soils somewhere around 2.5 feet and a Fargo soil in 1903 is described as having 2 feet of topsoil where today in fact this summer I sampled a Fargo west of town and it had about 6 inches of topsoil again our topsoil contains about a ton of phosphate per acre and I think a good estimate is we've probably lost an additional 6 inches of topsoil from 20 million of cropped acres since 1940 and if that's true we would have lost an additional 10 tons of phosphate and 40 million tons of nitrogen and that's equivalent of an additional 75 years of nitrogen and phosphorus application at present rates and the loss continues last year for example we had several events that we had soil blown off of certain fields these images are from 1990s dust storms in the Red River Valley one of the things that growers try to do in order to reduce the wind erosion is to roughen up the surface and certainly if the event only lasts a few hours that this can be effective and slowing down the rate of wind erosion doesn't stop it but it slows it but at some point that surface roughness is eroded away and the soil just blows residue is one of the things that farmers can keep on the field in order to slow this it seems like whenever there's residue that remains in the field that a lot of farmers can't stand to see it and burning is common people make fun of snirt in the ditch but it's not funny at all the soil that we see in the snow in the ditch is just a small part of what was lost from the field and an ongoing reminder that we continue to lose topsoil and nutrients as time goes by I add because this is not the 1930s in the 1930s there was no technology to help farmers grow crops and keep the wind from blowing the soil away but today if you go to any farm show there are any number of different tools that can be used in order to plant any kind of seed in any kind of residue and be able to cultivate it and produce a crop into very high residue conditions some people have moved toward some kind of conservation tillage where more residue is left on the soil and this slows the process down but it doesn't help the endgame the end is still topsoil loss in this photograph for example we have quite a bit of residue on the surface but if you look in the background you can see a lot of soil blowing back near the trees and so it doesn't stop the process it just slows it the end result will be the same the only way to stop it is to keep the residue in the field and I show a lot of beets in this picture because it seems like beet farmers are probably the most resistant to using these technologies for ancient fear of not being able to get into the field and get the crop will come up but strip till modified no till these things will work this is a very high clay soil near Rutland in southeast North Dakota where the farmer has been no till and strip till for 30-40 years the field is tiled and so the wetness issue is not a real big problem with the farmer and the corn grills just fine these are some plots from campus we're growing sugar beets and corn and soybean rotation over a period of years and the yields from these plots strip till no till conventional till were all similar in all 10 years that I grew this so it is possible to do at least a modified no till strip till for example and keep residue in the field near zero here's another picture of some strip till with some beets growing in wheat stubble and if nothing else using a cover crop in order to keep the soil covered makes a big difference this last spring I was working southeast of Armenia and the farmer to the west had planted rye and then planted sugar beets in it when we had strong winds in the spring the soil on those fields didn't blow at all the field north of there that was unprotected with no cover crop blew constantly soil was lost out of that day after day during this last spring so despite the historic high rates of fertilizer nutrients levels of phosphorus on many North Dakota farms are still low we probably have at least 200 years of no soil loss and continued phosphate application to catch up to where we were in 1890 our soil loss helps to answer these questions and I get them every spring the soil phosphate values improve and the answer is you put it on and it blows away why is my soil pH increasing and the answer is the top soil depth is very shallow and you're probably tilling into that sea horizon where there is free lime quite a bit so you're bringing that lime from the sea horizon up to the surface and it also answers that same question down at the bottom we have more soil crusting an exposed sea horizon has very low levels of organic matter and is very susceptible to crusting and this tillage that brings that subsoil up to the surface certainly increases the amount of soil crusting seedling loss that we have in some springs so the only remedy for this is no tiller, modified no till such as strip till to summarize North Dakota has a long history of phosphate export first on purpose with the export of the buffalo bones and then second is an unintended consequence for the wind erosion mostly from the state soil fertility I hope from this presentation you're aware that it's intimately related to soil conservation and the only way to restore soils to a more productive state is through a long term no till commitment so thank you for viewing our presentation my contact information is down below and you can certainly contact me at any time, thank you