Who Killed The Finest Soybean Soil In The World?

By: Chris Bennett

As Randy Dowdy walked along muddy turnrows under pounding January rains, he knew part of the topsoil from the farm that birthed the highest soybean yields in world history was gone. Staring across the wreckage of scoured fields, his record-breaking 171.7 bu. soybeans and 521 bu. corn from fall harvest faded far into the past.

Two months after the deluge, on a vital chunk of Dowdy’s south Georgia farmland in Brooks County, the topsoil has either been stripped or flipped, and replaced or mixed with fresh dirt. In agriculture, dirt is death and soil is life. Compounding the topsoil loss, 100 acres of wetlands caught much of the slurry as it spilled off Dowdy’s farmland. In essence, the wetlands were covered with a fertilizer blanket, according to Dowdy, with implications pointing toward a regulatory nightmare.