Today's intersection: range fires increase as windbreaks age out

The grassland fire danger index will be in the extreme category again Wednesday and Thursday for Republican counties throughout the High Plains where desertification driven by overgrazing and poor land management practices has turned parts of the region into scorched earth.

Ag producers have destroyed shelter belts to plant industrial crops that deplete aquifers and now drought is blowing toxin-laden silt into downwind states. In Kansas alone recent wildfires blazed across some 400,000 acres during what meteorologists are now calling a derecho that traversed some 1500 miles beginning on the Front Range in Colorado. Record high winds fanned fires some forty miles wide consuming power lines, fences and domestic livestock.

Bob Atchison, coordinator of the Kansas Forest Service’s rural forestry program, said the Great Plains Initiative 2 is a continuation of an inventory of windbreaks in Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas that first began in 2008 and is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service. The most recent inventory of windbreaks in the Great Plains – completed in 2019 – indicates windbreaks throughout the region are deteriorating. To illustrate the importance of windbreaks, Atchison pointed to the fact that Kansas has 2.5 million acres of cropland where the soils are particularly susceptible to erosion, many of these in southwest and south-central Kansas. [Kansas State University Agricultural Experiment Station and Cooperative Extension Service]

The forestry division of the New Mexico Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department is now taking orders for native seedlings delivered in the Spring to plant for reforestation, erosion control, windbreaks, streambank restoration, and wildlife habitat improvement.

Learn more at Reuters.