51 National Erosion Specialist Shares Mind-Blowing Truth about Soil Loss

We sat down to chat with Chris Coreil, now the National Erosion Specialist based at the NRCS’s Central National Technology Support Center in Fort Worth, TX. Chris is originally from Louisiana where he was state agronomist for ten years before going to Fort Worth. On May 12, 2022, a derecho wind hit eastern South Dakota and west central Minnesota (see May 12 derecho summary below. Note that a derecho (pronounced similar to "deh-REY-cho") is a widespread, long-lived windstorm where damage is typically directed along a relatively straight swath (see description in derecho link for more below. The May 12th derecho as Chris describes “the event really occurred during about a 10 to 15 minute period, immediately following that tremendous wind event, which, had sustained winds of maybe 60 miles per hour, gusts, around a hundred miles per hour. Right after that event, rain occurred. You could clearly see that and again, settled a lot of the dust and, prevented, erosion from occurring at quite an intense level for the rest of the day.” After the derecho, Chris was contacted by NRCS in South Dakota to help quantify and explain what happened during this event, and what could be done to prevent some of the damage in the future. Chris used a wind erosion model called SWEEP to estimate the erosion of bare tilled soils in that 15-minute window on the day of the derecho. While the derecho was a spectacular 15-minute event, Chris talked about modeling for the 12-hour day of May 7th where wind held steady between 20 and 30 mph, yet the amount of erosion on one day exceeded that of the derecho. While the numbers for bare ground were eye-popping, Chris did point out that if the ground were covered by residue or a cover crop, the soil loss would be considerably lower. We will leave the numbers to the podcast. We next turned to the ways in which the soil health principles can be used to mitigate soil loss through wind – Chris does a nice job of explaining these interactions to lay people. We finally reflected on the fact that while there is a long way to go, we have made much progress in the last 10-15 years – adoption rates of cover crops may be the best indicator. If you want to understand more about the effects of a derecho or wind erosion on bare soils, and how to reduce the damage, this podcast is for you. References: Description of a Derecho: https://www.weather.gov/lmk/derecho May 12 derecho summary: https://www.weather.gov/abr/StormsummaryMay122022