Nebraska Soils Field Trip - Virginia Tech

4th IUSS Soil Classification Conference Field Tour Guidebook
Welcome to Nebraska
The University of Nebraska,
Virginia Tech, and the NRCS
National Soil Survey Center
are proud to host the 4 th Soil
Classification Conference of
the International Union of Soil
Scientists in Lincoln, Nebraska
USA, June 11-14, 2012.
Nebraska, located near the center of the United States, is in the great agricultural region known as the
Midwest or America’s Breadbasket. With 46,800 farms and ranches utilizing 45.5 million acres or about
92 percent of the state's total land area, agriculture is Nebraska's primary source of wealth and its
dominant industry. Approximately half of the land is used for ranching with cattle grazing on the
abundant rangeland prairies and pasture. Croplands, found predominantly in the central and eastern
parts of the state, produce abundant corn, soybean, wheat, and small grains.
Sustaining the health and productivity of the soil is important to the economy and people of Nebraska.
Nebraska soils are a product of the soil-forming factors acting upon three dominant types of soil parent
materials. Loess covers much of the state to varying thickness. The west-central part of the state is
covered with extensive deposits of eolian sand that serves as the parent material for one the largest
dune fields in North America called the Nebraska Sandhills. Livestock grazing there and in the northcentral
part of the state is home to many of the state’s ranches. In the eastern part of the state, most
soils have formed in clayey, Pleistocene till or in younger wind-blown loess originating from the Great
Plains as well as the Missouri River flood plain in extreme eastern Nebraska.
The University of Nebraska at Lincoln, founded in 1869, is the state’s Land Grant University and has one
of the nation’s largest and most successful agricultural colleges. The Institute of Agriculture and Natural
Resources includes the College of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources, the Agricultural Research
Division, the Cooperative Extension Division, and the Conservation and Survey Division.
The College of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources (CASNR) offers 28 academic programs to
students. University of Nebraska–Lincoln scientists have been some of the most-cited in the world in the
last 10 years in the area of agricultural research according to the IS1 Essential Science Indicators Report.
Scientists in the UNL Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources (IANR) alone published 1,028 papers,
which were cited 6,056 times from January 1994 through January 2004.
The goal of CASNR is to prepare students as leaders for a future in which demands on food, energy and
water systems will challenge sustainability. The areas of study are broad and span animal, plant, and
human health and well-being, earth systems analysis, agricultural production and processing, global
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