By JADE AUBREY
Capitol News Illinois
jaubrey@capitolnewsillinois.com
SPRINGFIELD —– Three main factors contribute to the formation of Midwest dust storms: strong winds, dry soil in farm fields and large amounts of loose soil.
That’s according to Andy Taylor, the Science and Operations officer at the National Weather Service’s office in Lincoln. He said these are key ingredients that meteorologists, farmers and experts in the agricultural community have found cause dust storms when they converge.
On May 16, Chicago saw its first major dust storm since the Dust Bowl, which stretched from Texas to New York in the early 1930s and deposited 300 million tons of soil across the nation – 12 million tons of which settled in the Chicago region, according to the Bill of Rights Institute. The storm in May dropped visibility in the city to near zero as wind gusts blew over 60 mph at times, according to the National Weather Service.
Taylor said the atmospheric environment that day was more characteristic of the dry environments in the High Plains or Southwest U.S., not the Midwest. As rain began to fall near Bloomington, it quickly evaporated and cooled the atmosphere, creating strong pockets of wind that began to move North. And as winds sped up, the storm began to pick up and move dry and loose soil from fields it passed over, which created the dust storm.
“The type of dust storm event that we had that affected the Chicago area, I wouldn’t necessarily take that occurrence as saying we’re going to see an increase in those type of events from this point on,” he said. “Although, anytime you see all those ingredients come together, we certainly could see that again.”
Soil conservation funding ‘deprioritized’
While there were no deaths due to the storm in Chicago, a major dust storm that occurred in central Illinois on a portion of I-55 resulted in a multi-car pileup that took the lives of eight people and injured dozens more in May 2023.
That dust storm also dropped visibility to zero on the stretch of the interstate between Farmersville and Divernon, and was again caused by dry, loose soil being picked up and moved by winds.
Although Taylor said dust storms are not new to Illinois – as his office has documented events back to the 80s – most of the storms don’t move across vast expanses of the state. Instead, he said they often occur in more localized areas, like the storm near Divernon in 2023.
“When we’re seeing the right weather-related factors coming together and the ground is fairly dry, which matches up with loose soil so we know we’re going to be more prone to blowing dust, we coordinate with partners in the agricultural community to determine when we might anticipate those blowing dusts events,” Taylor said.
The Association of Illinois Soil and Water Conservation Districts has been lobbying for increased funding for additional district employees. This year’s state budget allows for each district to staff one full-time employee, which AISWCD Executive Director Eliot Clay called “wildly inadequate” as he said each district needs at least two.
“I really, honestly think conservation funding has been deprioritized,” he said.
What do soil and water conservation districts do?
Soil and water conservation districts began to crop up across the U.S. in the late 1930s as a response to the Dust Bowl and Congress’ subsequent declaration of soil and water conservation as a national priority. According to the Association of Illinois Soil and Water Conservation Districts, that declaration prompted then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt to recommend legislation to state lawmakers that would enact districts in every state.
Illinois has 97 districts, or nearly one district for every county in the state. Employees of the districts are responsible for a variety of tasks – including assessing farmland, educating farmers about conservation practices and connecting farmers with grants from the state and federal government. These all play a key role in the association’s mission of protecting Illinois’ natural resources.
“Unlike a group like the Department of Natural Resources or the EPA or even the Department of Agriculture, SWCDs are not a regulatory body,” Clay said. “We are not going out there and enforcing rules and laws on people, we’re just trying to help farmers do better. And that’s the reason why a lot of farmers rely on SWCDs, is because they do not see us as like, the ‘government’ coming in and telling them, ‘this is how you’re going to do your operation.’”
Soil conservation funding stagnates
The fiscal year 2026 budget signed by Gov. JB Pritzker last week allots $7.5 million to the state’s SWCDs – which Clay said is the same amount the association received in the previous fiscal year. However, he said that number was a $1 million cut from the FY24 budget allocation.
Read more: Pritzker signs $55.1B state budget reliant on $700M of new taxes | New taxes on sports bets, nicotine products as Democrats pass $55.2B budget
Of that $7.5 million, $3 million will go to cost-share grants, which act as reimbursements to farmers for the costs of implementing both state and federal conservation policies, such as cover crops. The remaining $4.5 million will go to administrative costs.
Clay said the breakdown of that $4.5 million provides $40,000 to each Soil and Water Conservation district – meaning that every district will have enough funds to pay one full-time employee. He called the salary “wildly inadequate” for the district employees, most of whom have college degrees.
“$40,000 – and that’s supposed to include benefits, so their take-home is less than that – is barely enough, I mean I would say it’s not enough even for one person” Clay said. “And it’s hard to keep people and incentivize people to come to work when there’s not the kind of money there that there should be.”
In addition, Clay said each district needs two full-time employees to be fully-staffed – one to make on-site visits to farms and one to coordinate schedules, receive phone calls and emails, and staff the office.
He said in recent years, the association was told by both the Department of Agriculture and the governor’s office that if they wanted more funding, they would have to advocate for the money to individual lawmakers outside of budget negotiations.
“I don’t know of any other agency or subsect of an agency that has to, on their own, go to the Capitol and get money,” he said. “That’s very peculiar to me and is something I’ve been trying to wrap my head around, and I have not gotten a good explanation from anybody.”
The governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Over the past two years, Clay said the association unsuccessfully lobbied for $10.5 million in annual funding.
“The bigger question I’m left with after being the executive director over the past six months and witnessing it from this angle is, what does the legislature and the administration value?” Clay said. “It really gets to bigger questions about how the state has dealt with conservation funding in general for the last 20-plus years.”
Soil conservation efforts and farming practices
Kevin Brooks, a commercial agriculture educator at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, said the agriculture community has identified practices farmers can use to reduce the amount of dry, loose topsoil in their fields.
“Measuring the humidity level as a cause is not the issue,” Brooks said in an interview with Capitol News Illinois. “I won’t say it’s not 100% not about the weather, but this is primarily about tillage.”
One suggestion he made was for farmers to till their fields less frequently and instead resort to strip-tilling or using no-till strategies whenever possible to reduce the amount of loose topsoil in fields.
Strip-till is a tilling practice where only narrow rows of a field where seeds will be planted are tilled, leaving the rest of the field untouched. While there are many short- and long-term benefits to strip-tilling, no-till practices often don’t seem to benefit farmers right away but do often have long-term advantages, Brooks said.
Rep. Charles Meier, R-Okawville, farms 1,500 acres in southern Illinois with his family, including corn, wheat, beans, hay, and beef cattle. He said most crops are already minimally tilled by farmers.
“I’m 66 years old and we never no-tilled when I was a kid,” he told Capitol News Illinois. “All of our conventional soybeans are no-tilled now, all of our wheat is done by minimal-till, and our corn is all by minimal-till now.”
He said he’s in frequent contact with his SWCD, including a call on Monday with his district’s employee, and criticized Democratic leadership’s funding priorities, such as subsidies for renewable energy.
“They’re not funding the nuts and bolts of Illinois conservation,” Meier said. “I’m not against wind and solar but they don’t pay for themselves and they’re making us taxpayers pay for them.”
Another main practice Brooks recommended farmers employ was planting cover crops, which are crops planted after harvest not for their produce, but for their benefits to the soil. Cover crops can be planted after a fall harvest for a variety of benefits, including to preserve topsoil through the winter, increase organic matter in the soil and dry the field earlier in the spring.
Brooks also attributed recent dust storms to the invention of high-speed discs – a tillage attachment with many more disks than normal tillage attachments, which tills at faster rates. He said these disks have taken tillage speeds from around 4 mph to over 10, and that farmers in Illinois quickly amassed these machines during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, due to the pandemic relief funds they received.
“In theory, they’re supposed to be a kind of conservation because they don’t go into the ground very deep,” Brooks said. “But they literally turn the top several inches of a farm field into powder.”
Dust storm driving tips
Andy Taylor, from the National Weather Service, recommended safety tips for drivers who find themselves caught in a dust storm.
“If you’re caught in dust with extremely low visibility, the advice is to pull completely off the road, turn off your heads and take your foot off the brake,” he said. “Which may sound kind of counterintuitive in a way, but the reason for doing that is because if you have your lights on, people coming into the dust may think you’re moving. They may see your taillights and think ‘Oh look, someone I can follow’ and that may exacerbate accidents and pileups.”
He also advised drivers who know there is risk of a potential dust storm to travel ahead of the storm or to delay travel until later in the day, if possible.
Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.
