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IL TEXTURE BY FEEL You can figure out a soil’s texture: take a handful of soil, add water, mix it up, and make a ball of mud in your hand. You don’t want to add too much water—if it feels like Play-doh, it’s just about right. Then, you can press the mud ball into a ribbon, just like you see in the picture. If you can make nice long ribbons like these, then you would be able to tell that your soil had a lot of clay in it. If your soil feels gritty and won’t really make a ribbon, then you could guess that your soil has a lot of sand in it.
if yes, does the soil form a ribbon? No? Yes? Place the ball of soil between your thumb and forefinger, gently push the soil with your thumb, squeezing it upward into a ribbon. Form a ribbon of uniform thickness and width. Allow the ribbon to emerge and extend over your forefinger, until it breaks from its own weight.
If no, then the soil is a LOAMY SAND. If yes, does the soil make a . . . weak ribbon (less than one inch long before it breaks) medium ribbon (1-2 inches long before it breaks) strong ribbon (over two inches long before it breaks Weak Ribbon. Rub soil between fingers to feel for grittiness. Very gritty . . . then you have a SANDY LOAM. Very smooth . . . then you have a SILT LOAM. Neither gritty or smooth . . . then you a LOAM. Medium Ribbon. Rub soil between fingers to feel for grittiness. Very gritty . . . then you have a SANDY CLAY LOAM. Very smooth . . . then you have a SILTY CLAY LOAM. Neither gritty or smooth . . . then you a CLAY LOAM. .
Strong Ribbon. Rub soil between fingers to feel for grittiness. Very gritty . . . then you have a SANDY CLAY. Very smooth . . . then you have a CLAY. Neither gritty or smooth . . . then you a SILTY CLAY
The appearance of soil samples with texture that are a-sandy, b and c-moderately sandy, d-medium, e-moderately clayey, f-clayey.
Dust Bowl From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia A farmer and his two sons during a dust storm in Cimarron County, Oklahoma, 1936. Photo: Arthur Rothstein. The Dust Bowl, or the Dirty Thirties, was a period of severe dust storms causing major ecological and agricultural damage to American and Canadian prairie lands from 1930 to 1936 (in some areas until 1940). The phenomenon was caused by severe drought coupled with decades of extensive farming without crop rotation, fallow fields, cover crops or other techniques to prevent erosion.[1] Deep plowing of the virgin topsoil of the Great Plains had displaced the natural deep-rooted grasses that normally kept the soil in place and trapped moisture even during periods of drought and high winds. During the drought of the 1930s, without natural anchors to keep the soil in place, it dried, turned to dust, and blew away eastward and southward in large dark clouds. At times the clouds blackened the sky reaching all the way to East Coast cities such as New York and Washington, D.C. Much of the soil ended up deposited in the Atlantic Ocean, carried by prevailing winds, which were in part created by the dry and bare soil conditions. These immense dust storms—given names such as "Black Blizzards" and "Black Rollers"—often reduced visibility to a few feet (around a meter). The Dust Bowl affected 100,000,000 acres (400,000 km2), centered on the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, and adjacent parts of New Mexico, Colorado, and Kansas.[2] Millions of acres of farmland became useless, and hundreds of thousands of people were forced to leave their homes; many of these families (often known as "Okies", since so many came from Oklahoma) migrated to California and other states, where they found economic conditions little better during the Great Depression than those they had left. Owning no land, many became migrant workers who traveled from farm to farm to pick fruit and other crops at starvation wages. Author John Steinbeck later wrote The Grapes of Wrath, which won the Pulitzer Prize, and Of Mice and Men, about such people.
