By Brandon Chew
Conventional farming practices have eroded much of the topsoil from a region of the Midwest known as the corn belt, according to a recent study.
The corn belt, which stretches from western Illinois to the Dakotas, produces billions of bushels of corn, soybeans and other grains annually.
The University of Massachusetts Amherst study used satellite imagery and data from soil samples collected from 28 locations. Most of the soil was collected from Iowa and Minnesota.
“The main result was that a third of the landscape of the cultivated area no longer has any A-horizon (soil),” said Evan Thaler, a geoscientist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who co-authored the study with scientists Issac Larsen and Qian Yu.