‘Dust in the wind’ is history this Kansan avoids
Staff writer
Lewis Unruh brushes aside leafy stems in his soybean field near Peabody and plunges a shovel into the soil.
He lifts a dark clump from the earth, rubs it between fingers worn from a lifetime of farming, peers at tiny roots and a wormhole in the dirt, and raises it to his face to sniff the heavy, sweet scent.
“Looks good enough to grow, doesn’t it?” he says. “Nice and crumbly.”
Though he wouldn’t put it this way, the 71-year-old farmer is looking at a change in Kansas history.
When his grandfather tilled this land, drought baked the soil, and winds seized it during the Dust Bowl, thrusting topsoil into the air to make fearsome “black blizzards” as the farmers watched helplessly.
The threat remains.
“Just this spring, they shut down I-70 a couple times in western Kansas because of blowing dirt,” Unruh said. “We’ve had examples of a few fields blowing.”
Sporadic rainstorms provide relief but also take a toll on the land. They gather water in small rivulets and then bigger channels that carve gashes in the fields on the rolling western edge of the Flint Hills.
One ran behind his childhood home, Unruh said.
“My mom says you could hide a wagon in that gully,” Unruh said.
He recalled swimming in it as a kid. But the gullies injure the land and divide a farm.
“There’s an example just across the road here that still doesn’t grow anything,” he said.
Unruh’s father, Charles, “could see things weren’t going in the right direction,” Lewis Unruh said, and he attacked the gullies first.
Charles Unruh joined a small group of farmers who sculpted their fields into shallow terraces, piling up 18-inch ridges to slow runoff and gently funnel rainwater onto grassy areas.
Gradually, the gullies healed. They worked so well that Charles Unruh left much of his own farming to his sons and worked to help other farmers make 375 miles of terraces around the area, according to his logs, later tallied by his wife.
Lewis, who was driving his family’s tractor by age 10, carried on the terracing. By 1996 he stopped turning over the land, joining a move to no-till farming. Then he added cover crops, planting rye and other plants to protect the soil and provide nutrients for wheat, soybeans, and corn he sows through cover foliage.
For those efforts, Lewis Unruh won the American Soil Association’s Conservation Legacy Midwest Region Award this year. He is modest, almost embarrassed about it.
“There are other people doing just as much, maybe even more than we are,” he said. “You hate to attract attention to yourself because there’s other people doing it, and if I screw up, they say, ‘He won this award, and look at this mess!’ That’s one of my biggest fears.”
Unruh is a towering man, softspoken. He lives with his wife, Carrie, in the small house on 70th Rd. where Lewis grew up.
To inspect his 2,500 acres, he drives a 33-year-old pickup truck.
“Too flashy things aren’t necessarily an interest to me,” he said.
His son Jason now works the farm with him, and they have formed County Line Farms.
According to 2022 data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 330 Marion County farms — about 38% of the county’s total — practice no-till techniques. Another 162 use reduced till or other conservation methods. On 89 farms, producers plant cover crops.
Matt Meyerhoff, head of the Marion office of the U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service, said he could not discuss conservation with the Record because “all information to the media must come from the national public affairs office” since 2025.
Terracing, as Lewis and his father did, were early tactics to conserve the soil. Now, “cover crops are taking hold” in part through government subsidies, according to Daryl Donohue, director of Kansas Association of Conservation Districts Area 5, which includes Marion County.
“No-till farming has really taken off, because it means fewer trips across the field for fuel consumption and less soil compaction,” he said.
Still, there are farmers who resist.
“They say this is the way it’s always been done, or they don’t want to get involved in a government program,” Donohue said. “It’s strictly voluntary. Healthy soil is the main thing we are striving for.”
Unruh sees his work as keeping alive the legacy of Kansas farming started by his ancestors, pacifist Mennonites who left Ukrainian Russia to avoid military conscription and were lured by rail agents to settle in this area in 1874.
“God has given us this resource to steward, and we need to take as good care of it as we can for future generations,” Unruh said. “It’s our responsibility to take care of it.”
He is not a man to make grand claims about his efforts. The yield of a field includes too many variables, such as when and how much rain falls and how hot is it. But one hot summer day he stuck a thermometer in the ground of one of his no-tilled cover-cropped fields and recorded a temperature of 85. At a traditionally-tilled field nearby, the ground temperature was 105 degrees.
“That affects the biology, the microorganisms in the soil, evaporation rates,” he said. “Without a side-by-side test, I don’t know how the yield is actually different. But I would think ours would be better.”
He delights at demonstrations he has watched at meetings where proponents of no-till simulate a rainstorm over trays of tilled and no-tilled earth and collect runoff. The trays duplicating conventionally-tilled fields emit bottles of dirty water silted with topsoil, while the no-tilled trays have less runoff, carry away much less soil, and soak more deeply.
“The guys, their jaws drop open the first time they see that,” Unruh said. “It really does work. That’s our valuable topsoil, and once it washes away, we never get it back.”
Conserving and protecting the soil is a long process, he said, but with the work that he and others do, he said, “we don’t worry about dust blowing again.”