HARVEL, Ill. — To the untrained eye, Richard Lyons’ farm looks messy. There are no uniform rows of green against a bare canvas of brown soil. Instead, soybean sprouts, 6 inches tall, spring up through patches of decaying corn stalks and blades of dead cereal rye.

But that’s exactly the way Lyons planned it.

The techniques on display at his 300-acre family farm have been honed over a half-century of experience, 32 years of which were also spent in college classrooms teaching the state’s farmers. He says they’ve kept his soil fertile, his crop yields high.

And, he says, walking his central Illinois farm on a warm and windy Wednesday in May, they could prevent what happened on the interstate a week earlier.

“That’s good, healthy soil,” Lyons, 77, said, grabbing a handful of dark brown dirt. “This stuff doesn’t blow.”

Illinois’ farming practices have come into sharper focus since May 1, when a massive cloud of soil, blown from nearby fields by winds topping 40 mph, blanketed a busy stretch of Interstate 55 south of Springfield, causing a 84-car pileup that killed eight people, injured at least three dozen others, and shook residents of the tiny, close-knit communities that dot the region.

[ Deadly I-55 dust storm: The ‘hellish’ minutes scores of drivers spent battling a 200-foot wall of farm soil ]

In an ensuing debate reminiscent of the 1930s Dust Bowl, agricultural conservation advocates such as Lyons say last month’s dust storm was more than just a freak act of nature. Rather, they argue, it’s a painful reminder of how the state has failed at encouraging the types of planting methods that could stop fertile soil from being carried off fields by high winds or washed into waterways by rain storms.

“As farmers, we know what we can control and what we can’t,” said Kris Reynolds, a fifth-generation farmer near the crash site in Montgomery County and Midwest regional director for the nonprofit American Farmland Trust. “We can’t control when it rains, how much it rains and how hard the wind blows. But we can control our farming practices.”

[ The I-55 dust storm crash took lives, shattered families. Here are some of their stories. ]

There are a host of challenges standing in the way of bringing those practices to more of the state’s 27 million acres of farmland.

Farmers, already besieged by razor-thin profit margins and increasingly volatile weather patterns because of climate change, can be hesitant to sink money into expensive and time-consuming practices knowing that even the slightest dip in crop yields — even for one growing season — could leave them at risk of losing generational farmlands along with their livelihoods.

Meanwhile, state and federal agencies best positioned to help farmers take on those challenges have for years struggled with scarce resources, leaving a handful of nonprofits to try to fill in the gaps.

All this has put Illinois behind its peers in adopting soil conservation practices and susceptible to another deadly dust storm.

“We can’t expect farmers to do all of this alone,” said Liz Moran Stelk, executive director of the nonprofit Illinois Stewardship Alliance. “We have programs since the Dust Bowl that are supposed to invest in protecting soil and water, and they have not been prioritized.”

It had been a great planting season.

In years past, April rainfall kept farmers out of their fields for long stretches, meaning they typically couldn’t finish planting corn and soybean (by far the state’s two dominant crops) until Memorial Day.

But this April was dry, with average rainfall totals between 1 and 3 inches below normal. That allowed many farmers to wrap up planting before May 1.

The downside, though, was that the lack of rain and cool temperatures and low humidity dried out the soil and slowed plants’ emergence from the ground, leaving bare fields susceptible to erosion.

Then, on May 1, the winds picked up, hovering in the 35 to 45 mph range with peak gusts of 54 mph recorded later that afternoon.

About five country blocks east of the crash site, Serena Basham’s 1.5-acre farm is surrounded by vast fields kept largely bare between the fall harvest and spring planting seasons. And so, she said, it’s fairly common to see soil from those fields blowing in the air on windy days.

Nothing, though, prepared her for that Monday morning.

Basham, 34, was working in her greenhouse at the time. She looked up from her plants, expecting that the noise she heard was raindrops hitting the glass.

Her eyes rounded at the sight of the dust cloud darkening the sky.

“It seemed like a scene out of a post-apocalyptic movie,” she remembered.

Basham rushed to her house, fearing the force of the blowing dirt would shatter the greenhouse glass.

“I was just crying dust out of my tear ducts and coughing up dust for the next several days,” she said.

Farther south, Travis Rovey, 37, had just stopped for lunch when he heard a radio report about the dust storm and crash. Even where they were, 30 miles south of the accident site, they could see the haze in the distance. The dust intensified as he got closer to his home near Girard, west of the interstate.

“Our livelihoods come from this soil,” Rovey said. “To see something like that is very traumatizing.”

As news of the dust storm and crash spread, so, too, did the rumors.

Rovey said he saw social media posts “running us farmers pretty much into the dirt.” Some people claimed the dust storm was caused by farmers who were on their tractors “plowing” fields that morning, and that those same farmers refused to stop adding dirt to the blinding storm, even as cars and trucks were slamming into each other.

“I can tell you without a doubt there was nobody working the ground,” said Sangamon County Auditor Andy Goleman, whose family farm is a few miles northeast of the crash site. “All that ground had been planted.”

Instead, Goleman and others put the blame squarely on Mother Nature.

“That was such a rare event,” Rovey said. “You had kind of the perfect storm that day.”

Rita Johnson records the aftermath of the May 1 dust storm and pileup on Interstate 55, south of Springfield, that killed eight people.

It’s true that dust storms of the size that engulfed I-55 are more common in drier parts of the country. A study last month in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society tracked 232 deaths nationally from “windblown dust events” from 2007 to 2017; nearly half were concentrated in four states: Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas.

But Illinois, with roughly 75% of its land area devoted to farms, is not immune.

In 2017, two people were killed in separate crashes after a dust storm blew across central Illinois, forcing authorities to close stretches of Interstate 72, just west of Springfield, and Illinois 104 south of Springfield, near I-55.

This April, police in Divernon closed part of 104, a few miles north of the I-55 crash site, when a 2-mile-wide dust cloud rolled through the area. No one was injured.

Rachael Unverferth isn’t interested in blame. Her grandmother, Shirley Harper, 88, is dead, one of eight people killed in the pileup.

“What happened, happened,” she said. “What do we do going forward so no one has to go through this?”

Some have questioned whether the National Weather Service could work with state and local authorities to track dust storms in the future and alert motorists to potential hazards via digital signs installed at key points along the interstate, starting with the stretch of I-55 where the crash occurred. The road there gradually dips 35 feet, leading some to speculate that it acted like a funnel that channeled the blowing dirt across the interstate that day.

The National Weather Service can broadcast “blowing dust” warnings on cellphones, TVs and radios to specific areas. But by the time its St. Louis office overseeing the area where the crash occurred learned of the dust storm, the interstate had already been shut down, NWS meteorologist Kevin Deitsch said.

The office issued a warning the next day upon learning police were considering again shutting down the interstate amid more dust.

The weather service’s local office did tell authorities in the area about that capability in case another dust storm materializes, Deitsch said.

Eyewitness reports are key to identifying dust storms. Satellites used by the weather service often can’t tell how airborne dirt is affecting visibility, he said, especially when conditions can vary by field.

“It’s one of those things that’s hard to forecast on our end just because of how localized in nature this was,” Deitsch said.

Still, the Illinois National Weather Service offices are more focused now on using satellites to detect dust and communicate with authorities about visibility concerns, said NWS Lincoln meteorologist Ed Shimon.

Dust storms most often occur in a small window during the early spring planting season, when a combination of dryness, tilling and strong winds might come together, he said. Going forward, National Weather Service offices could issue public advisories flagging the “perfect storm” of dry, windy conditions to farmers, he said.

“We certainly can get ahead of these with proper analysis of climate conditions,” Shimon said.

Of course, better detection won’t stop a dust storm from forming in the first place.

In the 1930s, Great Plains farmers plowed millions of acres of prairie grasses to meet growing demand for wheat. But when a severe drought hit, strong winds blew the land away in massive dust clouds that darkened skies across 19 states.

The resulting ecological disaster known as the Dust Bowl spurred changes meant to prevent a similar catastrophe. Millions of trees were planted as windbreaks (only to be removed decades later amid federal encouragement to plant every acre of land). Farmers were encouraged to rotate crops and try different plowing methods.

Last month’s crash has similarly led to renewed calls for Illinois’ farmers to reexamine what they plant in the ground, and how they plant it.

Simply put, farm fields that are regularly tilled and left bare, without plant roots to hold soil in place, are at greater risk of that topsoil being swept away by high winds or rain.

The conventional approach to tillage sees farmers turning soil over at least once in the fall and again in the spring. Any residue from the crops that once grew there are chopped up and mixed with the soil. Weeds are uprooted. Soil is warmed and aerated.

Other methods vary depending on how much of the soil is disturbed and how much crop residue is left on the ground. Less disturbance generally leads to less risk of soil erosion.

There’s one-pass tillage, which, as the name suggests, means their tractors drag a specially designed tool that allows them to till the soil only once. There’s strip-tilling, which turns over the row of soil where seeds are planted and leaves the rest of the field undisturbed and covered by residue from the previous crop.

“None of us practice recreational tillage,” said Mark Reichert, 63, a fourth-generation farmer in Auburn and an Illinois Farm Bureau board member. “If it doesn’t need it, we’re not going to go out and do it again. We’re charged with a task of taking care of God’s creation. They’re not making this anymore, so we don’t want it to blow away.”

Reichert said he uses one-pass tilling on much of 2,000 acres he farms. Over in Harvel, Lyons said he strip-tills his corn. For soybean he doesn’t till his field at all, planting seeds into the previous crop residue.

In 2006, more acres of farmland in Illinois were planted using a no-till method than with conventional tillage, according to an Illinois Department of Agriculture survey. At the time, a third of fields were no-till.

By 2018, the last year for the survey, that number dropped to 24%.

In that same time span, the state report showed a rise in the number of surveyed Illinois farms that exceeded “tolerable soil loss levels,” defined as 3 to 5 tons per acre, per year.

Lyons is also one of the few Illinois farmers who plants a cover crop (another post-Dust Bowl practice).

After the harvest, instead of keeping his fields bare, he plants cereal rye into corn stalk residue. Into soybean stubble, he plants barley, rape, radish and Austrian winter pea. They’re not harvested, though. Instead, he uses an herbicide to kill them in the spring, either shortly before or after planting.

Those cover crops further armor the soil against the elements, they add biodiversity to what in Illinois is normally a two-crop rotation of corn and soybean, and they keep a living root in the soil all-year round — three of the four principles of soil health (the fourth is to reduce disturbance).

In 2018, the state agriculture survey reported only 2% of farm fields surveyed used cover crops.

Illinois trailed every neighboring state in the acres of farmland that planted cover crops as part of a federal Natural Resources Conservation Services assistance program.

In fiscal year 2022, for example, nearly 33,000 acres in Illinois planted cover crops as part of that federal program, agency data show. In Iowa, that number exceeded 565,000.

“We haven’t advanced, hardly at all,” Lyons said, standing in his field among the residue of corn and barley and newly emerged soybeans. “But we can.”

So, why aren’t these practices done more in Illinois?

Some farmers are simply reluctant to change tried-and-true methods. Others might feel a cultural pressure to keep their fields looking neat: straight rows of plants, uniformly spaced, with no mess of weeds or crop residue between them.

Stelk, with the Illinois Stewardship Alliance, illustrated that power of perception by repeating an analogy once shared with her by a longtime conservationist. Basketball players rarely shoot free throws underhanded, he told her, because they’re worried about how it’ll make them look, even though that technique is backed by physics and statistics as being more successful.

“So,” he told her, “sometimes cover crops are the underhanded free throw of agriculture.”

For Travis Rovey, the decision comes down to the type of soil, and the expense of change. He and his father farm a combined 2,300 acres in central Illinois, roughly half of which is rented.

They use conventional tillage on nearly all of it.

“Some of that heavy black soil, we’ve got to cultivate it to get that soil to warm up in the spring,” he said. “If we’ve got a lot of residue, it might be the tail end of May or early June before we get that ground to warm up.”

After the crash, he said he planned to try more minimal-till practices on some family-owned acres, in “baby steps,” given the financial investment that’ll require.

“We’ve got to be profitable so we can do it again next year,” he said. “If you had to spend half a million dollars to try a practice like strip tilling and it didn’t have a return on investment, you could go backward in a heck of a hurry.”

That’s where conservationists think the state and federal government have fallen short. Farmers want to make these changes, they say, but programs and agencies tasked with providing financial and technical assistance are often unable to meet that demand.

“Farmers in Illinois are applying for federal assistance to adopt the kind of practices that would have prevented the dust storm and kept nutrient pollution out of our waterways,” Stelk said. “But the programs don’t have resources to get to the farmers who are asking for it.”

Reynolds’ organization, the American Farmland Trust, has lobbied U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin’s office to boost federal dollars for the Environmental Quality Incentive Program, which was designed to help the nation’s farmers and ranchers take on conservation practices.

From 2009 to 2019, the AFT found, Illinois ranked 37th in program funding, well behind peer states with less farmland. The AFT also raised alarms about a backlog of nearly 1,100 program applications out of Illinois, which total more than $30 million in projects.

Then there is the state’s network of Soil and Water Conservation Districts, 97 county-based and volunteer-led agencies on the front lines of preventing soil erosion. For years, that agency — formed in the wake of the Dust Bowl — has been without a dedicated source of state dollars, a line item in the Department of Agriculture budget, stymied by funding uncertainty.

During Illinois’ budget impasse from 2015 to 2017, those districts went without funding, Reynolds said.

“In 2023, they’re still trying to climb out of that hole,” he said, “still trying to get more resource professionals in those counties to help farmers where they’re at.”

The state did reverse a planned $4 million cut to districts’ budget this year and earmarked an additional $4 million for conservation efforts.

And lawmakers passed a bill this session that, among other things, encourages the expansion of an incentive program, championed by Reynolds’ organization, that gives farmers a $5-per-acre discount on their insurance premiums for every acre of land on which they plant a cover crop.

That incentive program started in Iowa six years ago and spread to Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin. This year, the Illinois program quickly hit its maximum of 160,000 acres.

Two federal lawmakers from Illinois are among the sponsors of a bill filed last month in the U.S. House that would replicate that program on a national level.

While that program is voluntary, any effort to regulate changes to farming practices will undoubtedly face resistance.

“We know what we need to do to make this different without somebody mandating how we farm,” Rovey said. “The farmer will solve this problem. It might take us a few years, but we’ll figure out how to make this happen.”

Back in Harvel, the future of those state and federal incentives will do little to change what Richard Lyons does on his farm.

On a Wednesday in May, Lyons keeps his eyes on the ground as he walks through his field, his boots crunching with each step over the decomposing corn stalks. He stops to examine a newly sprouted soybean plant for signs of hail damage, to point out a coyote den (thankfully empty) and, a few feet away, tiny holes made by earthworms.

This small plot of land has been in his family for nearly 150 years, he says, since his great-grandfather came over from Ireland and traded railroad work for farming.

“I’m tied to the land,” he said, a smile breaking over his gray bearded face.

It’s one of the reasons why he devoted 32 years of his life to teaching the next generation of farmers, and why he continues to be a passionate advocate for conservation.

“I really feel a moral conviction about preserving these farms that were given to me,” he said.

He signed a contract with Archer Daniels Midland to plant cover crops for the next three years. He’ll be 80 by then, perhaps time to retire. His land will eventually pass to his grandchildren who, thus far, have shown no aspirations to farm.

“It’s OK,” he said. “As long as they’re happy.”

In the meantime, he’s working with a state senator on guiding where solar farms are set up, so they don’t take up productive farmland. And recently, he signed up to plant a single row of Norway spruce, a half-mile long, as a windbreak on his farm.

He might not see them reach maturity, he said, another smile creeping across his face, but his grandmother lived to be 102, “so I’ve got a chance.”

jbullington@chicagotribune.com

jsheridan@chicagotribune.com