There were a couple times this winter when it was pretty easy to see soil erosion happening. During a couple blizzards, the air was filled with blowing snow and dirt -- snirt, as it's called in the Dakotas. On a trip I made from my farmstead to Bismarck after the storm, I saw road ditches were filled with snowdrifts laced with black streaks. Next to really bare fields, the drifts of snow were grey, not white. It was disappointing to see so much wind erosion happening after so…

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I thought the bare hills and the eroded draws along the Missouri River in South Dakota were just symbols of a tough country. But during a tour last week of the Mortenson Ranch near Hayes I learned that they are more than likely signs of an abused land. “This country was full of trees in the 1800s, until the government decided to put a family on every section,” says Clarence Mortenson, a Lakota from the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe and a fifth-generation rancher who has been working…

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Over the Memorial Day weekend, I took three of my grandkids to the Buffalo River State Park, which is near our farm. The twins are 4-years-old and their brother is 8. We had a grand time throwing rocks in the river, catching frogs off a sandbar and wading in the water. About the only downside to the day was the color of the water. It had rained pretty heavily the night before and the river was brown with silt. The Buffalo River runs through some good Red River Valley farmland. But the corn…

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Jay Bursch, a Glenn Ullin, N.D., amateur sunspot and aurora borealis watcher, sent me an interesting letter the other day. It details the number of auroras, or northern lights, he has documented by month since 1981. There are more 2,250. Bursch, who has been quoted by ABC News and several aurora borealis societies, thinks that di auroras, or northern lights, can tell us what’s driving climate change. Auroras are caused by sunspots and solar flares. The more solar flares, the theory…

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I lit a brush pile on our farmstead on fire the other day and spent a tense half hour beating down the flames that flickered through the dry grass surrounding the pile. Luckily, my son and I were able put contain the fire before it reached the shelterbelt and really took off. Fortunately, I had waited to start the fire until the soybean field around our farmstead had been harvested and the ground had been worked. If the fire had gotten away from us, at least it wouldn’t have spread…

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Harvest is going surprisingly well this year. Surprisingly, because most farmers in the eastern Dakotas are used to harvests of mud. Of pulling combines, trucks and carts, of combining corn in standing water and cob-high snow drifts, and of awaking up from a 3 a.m. nap in the sugarbeet lifter and having their  boot frozen to the cab floor. (That happened to my neighbor.) Fields across the Dakotas are dry and the row crops are coming off fast. Some farmers, like Roger Walkinshaw, of…

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You know the smell of freshly plowed fields? It makes Dan Forgey sick. Forgey, manager of Cronin Farms, Gettysburg, S.D., says he has come to understand that the classic scent of spring in the Dakotas is  really the odor of dying soil microbes. “It’s the last thing I want to smell.” Forgey is a long-time no-tiller who has recently started using cover crops to keep a living plants and roots and and in on the soil as long as possible. “The soil is…

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I’m jealous of some farmers. They are not good crop and livestock producers, but they also have a way with words.   Paul Anderson, Harvey, N.D., says he’s practicing SOS corn storage this year – storing on the stalk.   He has about 300 of his 400 acres of corn in the field and isn’t in any hurry to get it out. The corn is drying fine – down to about 18% moisture. Last year, SOS storage worked out well and he’s hoping it will do the same this winter. So far so good.   Though he’s had…

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My carbon footprint expanded big time last night.   I finally got around to mowing a three acre patch on my farmstead. I used to grow pumpkins there, but with the kids grown up and the grandkids too far away I was thinking of replanting it to trees. Only this year, the ground was too wet to do anything but watch the weeds grow.   The pennycress had gotten waist high and was as pretty and even as a carefully tended wheat field. But the waterhemp, lambsquarter and Canada thistle were…

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Miles and miles of ... no, not flood waters but fields drying out.   I even saw a tractor and a disk parked in a corn field southwest of Kindred, N.D., today. The soil is light and sandy in this part of eastern North Dakota, and it looked as if farmer had been knocking down cornstalks and airing out the top couple of inches of soil.   The fieldwork was the biggest surprise during my tour to see what the second crest on the Red River and the flooding on the Sheyenne looked like.   Locals…

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