Driving Albrecht's Maps: Climate, Soil, and the Albrecht Papers

After spending weeks looking at Albrecht's soil and climate maps, it was fun to drive across them. The red line is the route I took from Michigan to Kansas.

I never expected that I would be the one editing the last few volumes of the Albrecht Papers. But one of my major work projects for Acres U.S.A. this year has been to sort through and scan the photocopies of articles that William Albrecht gave to Charles Walters back in the 1970s. It’s been an interesting and educational experience, and Acres U.S.A. will be releasing Volumes 9–12 of the Albrecht Papers later this year.

Albrecht loved maps. He had nearly a dozen maps of how different factors varied across the United States—rainfall, soil type, protein content of wheat, even radio reception. He showed slides of these maps whenever he gave a presentation and he reproduced them profusely in his published articles. While editing his papers, I’ve spent a lot of time looking at those maps. So I was excited when Acres asked me to speak at a conference in Hiawatha, Kansas. It was eleven-hour drive to get there from my home in Michigan, and most of the drive was through Illinois and Missouri. I didn’t have time to go down to Columbia, but I was still driving through the landscapes that shaped Albrecht’s theories of climate, soil development, and nutrition.

This is the modern soil order map. It's more detailed than Albrecht's version, but the general trends are the same.

As a soil scientist, Albrecht was especially fascinated with soil types. On this trip I drove across two of the most fertile soil orders in the United States—the grayish-brownish alfisols in southern Michigan, northern Indiana, and eastern Missouri and the dark-brown mollisols in Illinois, western Missouri, and Kansas. Back in Albrecht’s day, the alfisols were called “gray-brown podzolic soils” and the mollisols were called “chernozems.” Alfisols form under hardwood forests; mollisols under tallgrass prairie.

One of the US rainfall maps that Albrecht used in his presentations. My drive to Kansas was all in the 30 to 40 inch rainfall area.

When I arrived in eastern Kansas, it looked fairly similar to the landscapes I’d driven through in Missouri and Illinois. As Albrecht’s precipitation map shows, the average rainfall in every region I drove through is between 30 and 40 inches. The temperature in eastern Kansas is warmer than Michigan—the farmer we visited, Jack Geiger, talked about planting oats in February, which we can’t do because the ground is still frozen.

The air is much drier in even eastern Kansas than my home in southwest Michigan, as this relative humidity map shows.

But Kansas felt different. It was far less humid than my home in Michigan, where a haze of water vapor hangs in the air on hot summer days. Albrecht didn’t usually talk about atmospheric humidity, but I wonder if it affects soil development. Another major difference that Albrecht didn’t map was the wind. It’s way windier in Kansas than Michigan. We only worry about water erosion; Jack Geiger explained that he has to protect his soil against wind erosion as well. Albrecht did mention wind as a soil formation agent, but he didn’t include any wind maps. Maybe that’s just because they weren’t available in the 1940s.

One major climactic difference between Michigan and Kansas is the wind. Wind speed data is much easier to come by now than it was in Albrecht's day, which might be why he didn't have a wind map.

Looking at—and driving—these maps got me thinking about how the politicization of “climate change” has made it difficult to even use the word “climate” in the sense that Albrecht did. Technically, an increase in temperature doesn’t automatically mean that the climate is changing, because climate is also shaped by rainfall, soil type, humidity, wind, and other factors. The Plains are always going to have a different climate than Michigan, even if both get slightly warmer.

The average temperature is a bit warmer in Kansas than Michigan, mostly because it's further south. Unfortunately, NOAA isn't allowed to update this map anymore because the word "climate" is too political.

There’s a strong tendency today to blame every crop failure, every drought, every severe storm, every wildfire on climate change. But when those same types of natural disasters hit the same regions a hundred years ago, people like Albrecht didn’t blame the climate. They blamed climactically inappropriate farming methods, cropping systems, and settlement patterns. More importantly, they worked to adapt those systems to the climate—a strategy that’s even more important today.