A row of soybeans (Capitol News Illinois photo by Andrew Campbell)

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 more than 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, 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. 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 2023 in central Illinois on a portion of Interstate 55 resulted in a multi-car pileup that took the lives of eight people and injured dozens more.

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 have one full-time employee, which AISWCD Executive Director Eliot Clay called “wildly inadequate” as he said each district needs at least two staffers.

“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 United States 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 President Franklin D. Roosevelt to recommend legislation to state lawmakers that would enact districts in every state.

Illinois has 97 districts, nearly one district for every county. 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 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, 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. J.B. Pritzker in June allots $7.5 million to the state’s SWCDs – a $1 million cut from the previous year, although funding for operations remained level.

Funding had already been cut $4 million in fiscal year 2025.

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.

“Forty thousand dollars – 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 of Illinois Soil and Water Conservation Districts 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. “I won’t say it’s not 100 percent 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.

State Rep. Charlie Meier, R-Okawville, shows clover growing in a field on his Washington County farm. In 2009, Meier was awarded the State of Illinois Conservation Farm Family of the Year. (Capitol News Illinois file photo by Beth Hundsdorfer)

State Rep. Charles Meier, R-Okawville, farms 1,500 acres in southern Illinois with his family. His farm includes 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 said. “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 soil and water conservation district, including a recent call 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 is 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 the discs have taken tillage speeds from 4 mph to more than 10 mph, and that farmers in Illinois quickly amassed the 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

The National Weather Service’s Taylor 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 counter-intuitive 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.

jaubrey@capitolnewsillinois.com 

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.