The Man Who Walks Dirt Until the Dirt Walks Away

Duane Windmeyer is not a real person, but his soil survey area is real, and so is everything he describes about what's happening to it.

He is a composite, assembled from the institutional vocabulary of the NRCS Soil and Plant Science Division, from the Land Capability Classification system published as Agriculture Handbook No. 210, from the annual October 1 soils refresh, and from the specific soil series mapped across Beaver and Harper Counties, Oklahoma.¹² He has been walking the same stretch of southern Great Plains for twenty years. His answers, in what follows, do what the land does.

We are sitting, hypothetically, at a metal table outside the Beaver County field office. The wind is steady at 25 mph, which Duane does not remark on. It is March 2026. The Ranger Road Fire burned 283,283 acres of his survey area three weeks ago.

How do you explain to someone what you actually do for a living?

Duane: I walk dirt. That's the short version. The longer version involves Roman numerals, which is never a good sign. The USDA has this classification system, eight classes, been around since the sixties. Class I is your best land, no real limitations, grow whatever you want. Class VIII, you're looking at rock or active sand dunes or something that will never produce a crop regardless of what you throw at it. My job is to go out, look at the soil profile, measure the A-horizon, which is your topsoil, your organic layer, the part that holds water and feeds roots, and I assign a number. I've been doing this since 2006 in the same survey area. Beaver County, Harper County, a little bit into Clark County, Kansas. Every year the database refreshes October 1.³ Every year I walk the same sections. People think soil doesn't change. That was the whole premise. Inherent properties. Texture, mineralogy, slope. Slow variables. I was trained on slow variables. The A-horizon on a Richfield silt loam took something like eight thousand years to build. I've watched it leave in ten.

When you reclassify a piece of land, say from Class II to Class III, what actually happens?

Duane: The land doesn't get a letter. Nobody calls the rancher. What happens is I change a value in the SSURGO database.⁴ The map unit keeps its polygon. The subclass code, that little letter after the Roman numeral, usually stays the same. Out here it's almost always e. Erosion. Wind erosion, specifically. So a IIe goes to IIIe. Moderate limitation becomes severe limitation. In practice that means the range of crops the system says this land can support just narrowed. The management requirements just got more expensive. And the farmer already knew. They knew before I did. I'm the person who makes it official. I update the number so the database matches what the wind already did.

When did the trajectory become clear to you?

Duane: 2012. We'd had the 2011 drought, which at the time we thought was the benchmark. Hottest, driest on record for the region. I went out that fall to do my survey sections and I was measuring A-horizon depths three inches shallower than my 2008 readings. Three inches on a Richfield. That's centuries of accumulation. One wind season. I pulled the KSSL archive samples. Lincoln has pedons from before 1940, before the Dust Bowl stripped these same soils.⁵ The comparison was...

Well. I wrote up my field notes. Changed the numbers.

The compound heat-drought study published last week found heat triggering drought rather than co-occurring. Does that match what you're seeing?⁶

Duane: Yes. The heat comes first now. Desiccates the surface before the plants can even respond. Aggregates break apart. Soil structure that took decades to form just pulverizes. By the time the drought peaks, the surface is bare and unconsolidated. I write e whether the wind took the soil slowly over five years or whether a heat pulse killed the crust in two weeks and the wind took it in one afternoon. Same letter.

What can't the classification system hold?

Duane: A soil that took twenty years to go from IIe to IIIe and one that took three years get the same entry. Same box. The system was built for a world where the land moved slower than the survey cycle.⁷ That's not the world I work in anymore.

The Ranger Road Fire. 283,000 acres of your survey area, three weeks ago.

Duane: Vegetative cover goes to zero. Overnight. The Wind Erosion Equation has a V factor, that's your residue, your grass, your crust.⁸ Fire resets V. On a Pratt loamy fine sand that was already a IVe, there's no management prescription for that. I'll go out this fall. I'll measure what's left.

What will you enter in the database?

Duane: The number. Whatever the number is.

Is there a classification for—

Duane: e.

The October 1, 2026 Annual Soils Refresh will update the SSURGO database for Beaver County, Oklahoma. This interview was conducted in March. The interval between the measurement and the record is six months. The land does not wait.

Footnotes

1. USDA Agriculture Handbook No. 210, Land Capability Classification: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GOVPUB-A-PURL-gpo20777/pdf/GOVPUB-A-PURL-gpo20777.pdf ↩

2. Quandt et al., "A Standardized Land Capability Classification System," Soil and Water Conservation Society: https://jornada.nmsu.edu/files/bibliography/20-027.pdf ↩

3. USDA NRCS Annual Soils Refresh: https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/conservation-basics/natural-resource-concerns/soil/annual-soils-refresh ↩

4. USDA NRCS SSURGO Database: https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/resources/data-and-reports/soil-survey-geographic-database-ssurgo ↩

5. USDA NRCS Kellogg Soil Survey Laboratory: https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/conservation-basics/natural-resource-concerns/soil/kellogg-soil-survey-laboratory-kssl ↩

6. Euronews, March 9, 2026, on compound heat-drought study in Science Advances: https://www.euronews.com/2026/03/09/dangerous-droughts-triggered-by-heatwaves-are-accelerating-at-an-alarming-rate-study-shows ↩

7. USDA NRCS Soil Survey Manual 2017, Chapter 8: https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/sites/default/files/2022-09/SSM-ch8.pdf ↩

8. NRCS Wind Erosion Equation variables, Soil Survey Manual: https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/sites/default/files/2022-09/SSM-ch8.pdf ↩