Fatal I-55 dust storm crash puts focus on Illinois farmers: ‘We haven’t advanced … but we can’
Richard Lyons points out an earthworm hole in the soil of his farm field on May 10, 2023. Lyons, 77, urged Illinois lawmakers to pass legislation that would provide financial incentives to farmers who adopt practices such as cover crops and reduced tillage that could prevent soil erosion.
Illinois’ farming practices have come into sharper focus since May 1, when a massive cloud of soil, blown from nearby fields by winds topping 40 mph, blanketed a busy stretch of Interstate 55 south of Springfield, causing a 84-car pileup that killed eight people, injured at least three dozen others, and shook residents of the tiny, close-knit communities that dot the region.
All this has put Illinois behind its peers in adopting soil conservation practices and susceptible to another deadly dust storm. The downside, though, was that the lack of rain and cool temperatures and low humidity dried out the soil and slowed plants’ emergence from the ground, leaving bare fields susceptible to erosion.
“I was just crying dust out of my tear ducts and coughing up dust for the next several days,” she said. “I can tell you without a doubt there was nobody working the ground,” said Sangamon County Auditor Andy Goleman, whose family farm is a few miles northeast of the crash site. “All that ground had been planted.”“That was such a rare event,” Rovey said. “You had kind of the perfect storm that day.”
The National Weather Service can broadcast “blowing dust” warnings on cellphones, TVs and radios to specific areas. But by the time its St. Louis office overseeing the area where the crash occurred learned of the dust storm, the interstate had already been shut down, NWS meteorologist Kevin Deitsch said.
“It’s one of those things that’s hard to forecast on our end just because of how localized in nature this was,” Deitsch said. The resulting ecological disaster known as the Dust Bowl spurred changes meant to prevent a similar catastrophe. Millions of trees were planted as windbreaks . Farmers were encouraged to rotate crops and try different plowing methods.
Other methods vary depending on how much of the soil is disturbed and how much crop residue is left on the ground. Less disturbance generally leads to less risk of soil erosion. Reichert said he uses one-pass tilling on much of 2,000 acres he farms. Over in Harvel, Lyons said he strip-tills his corn. For soybean he doesn’t till his field at all, planting seeds into the previous crop residue.
“We haven’t advanced, hardly at all,” Lyons said, standing in his field among the residue of corn and barley and newly emerged soybeans. “But we can.” “We’ve got to be profitable so we can do it again next year,” he said. “If you had to spend half a million dollars to try a practice like strip tilling and it didn’t have a return on investment, you could go backward in a heck of a hurry.”
Then there is the state’s network of Soil and Water Conservation Districts, 97 county-based and volunteer-led agencies on the front lines of preventing soil erosion. For years, that agency — formed in the wake of the Dust Bowl — has been without a dedicated source of state dollars, a line item in the Department of Agriculture budget, stymied by funding uncertainty.
And lawmakers passed a bill this session that, among other things, encourages the expansion of an incentive program, championed by Reynolds’ organization, that gives farmers a $5-per-acre discount on their insurance premiums for every acre of land on which they plant a cover crop.
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