City Dust Fades, Yet Herders Still Bear the Brunt

Since 6 April, Damao Banner in Baotou City, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, has been hit by almost daily sandstorms. The worst hit was on the 10th, when a storm persisted for nearly five hours, obscuring the sun with blowing sand and leaving the interior of houses in gloom.

“We had to switch the lights on even in daylight!” Brother Ma, who has managed pastures in Damao Banner for decades, seldom experiences conditions like these. “I believe this year has seen the most frequent and severe sandstorms.”

Across a pasture spanning nearly ten thousand mu, Brother Ma’s family grazes more than 400 sheep and over 50 head of cattle. Under normal circumstances, he would drive the herd out to the open grassland daily to feed and drink. Yet when a sandstorm strikes, movement becomes treacherous even for people. The livestock remain in their pens to feed on stored fodder, and they must wait until the following day to get water.

Damao Banner borders Dornogovi Province in Mongolia, a major dust source dominated by desert steppe. Yet Brother Ma is less troubled by the sand blowing over from his northern neighbour; what weighs more heavily on his mind is the state of his own grazing land.

“If the pastures were in good shape, sandstorms wouldn’t be so severe; even the strongest winds would merely raise a bit of dust.” Last year, however, was a dry one. Rainfall was scarce across summer and autumn, and snow cover through winter was minimal. The grasslands have still not turned green. When a strong wind blows, whatever sparse grass has managed to sprout is ripped up by the roots.

Grass roots play a vital role in holding soil in place and stabilising the sand. Once the vegetation is gone, the loose sandy soil beneath it is swiftly swept away.

I. Sand and Grass: “The Great Topsoil Displacement”

Towards the end of March, when I visited Dulan, a herder in East Ujimqin Banner, Xilin Gol League, the area had just weathered its third sandstorm of the spring. Along the path between his livestock enclosure and his permanent homestead, a large expanse of hard-packed bare ground had emerged, solid beneath the feet. When driving over it, failing to follow the established tyre tracks meant being jostled about violently.

This scene bore little resemblance to what I had witnessed back in September of the previous year. How had it been stripped bare in the span of a single winter?

The answer, it turned out, lay right beside the bare patch. A mechanised well and water troughs stood nearby, where the livestock came to drink every day. Constant trampling had churned the ground until it was loose, leaving little room for any vegetation to take hold.

This stood in stark contrast to the nomadic traditions partially preserved during the collectivisation era, where herders and their livestock would pack up and migrate across the seasons. Following the gradual roll-out of the “dual contract system for grassland and livestock” in the 1990s, wire fences were erected to demarcate individual household grazing plots, and settled pastoralism became the new norm across the grasslands. Even though Dulan’s family holds rights to 6,000 mu of pasture and rents a further 4,000 mu from neighbours, the range and routes available to the herds have been drastically curtailed.

It suddenly dawned on me. The pasture degradation seen around homesteads and inside fenced boundaries, caused by relentless trampling, must be what herders refer to as a “hoof disaster”. When sandstorms or high winds strike, the loose, sandy topsoil of these degraded areas is whisked away. Year after year, this process leaves behind nothing but bare, lifeless ground.

Some of the wind-blown sand loses momentum when it encounters vegetation, settling and accumulating around the grass roots. If you walk along this expanse of bare ground, you will notice that across the better-vegetated grassland, each tussock rests on a slight mound formed by the trapped sand. Higher in the centre and sloping gently outwards, these mounds link together to resemble a chain of miniature dunes.

Dulan has capitalised on this natural process. For the past five years, he has fenced off more than 100 mu of pastureland near his home, excluding livestock from the area. This measure both shields the ground from further windblown sand and helps to stabilise the topsoil.

Topsoil not intercepted by the grass roots becomes a new source of sand during dust storms and high winds, further altering the pasture’s original vegetation and environment. Han Nianyong, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, refers to this phenomenon as ‘mass topsoil transport’ in *The Logic of Grasslands: Sequel*.

Through years of field research, Han and his team have found that this topsoil displacement is causing plant species once exclusive to the arid grasslands of western Inner Mongolia to appear in the semi-arid east. Annual and biennial plants are emerging explosively across vast areas. Although overall vegetation cover has increased, forage quality and vegetation stability are declining…

This aligns closely with Dolan’s own observations. His pasture once supported more than twenty varieties of identifiable grass; now only about ten remain. The layer of perennial dead grass, which survives the winter and allows livestock to ‘build fat’ before the pasture greens up in spring, is growing ever thinner. Without this protective cover, the pasture’s capacity to absorb and permeate water diminishes. Bare ground covers a much larger area, leaving the land highly vulnerable when spring gales and sandstorms strike.

In the memories of Dulan, a herder born in the 1980s, sandstorms were a rare sight in his childhood. Though the pastures were thriving, winters were bitterly cold and heavy with snow, so herders dreaded the “white disaster”—severe snowfall—far more. A white disaster on New Year’s Day in 2001 wiped out 80% of the livestock across the entire sumu. Dulan’s family was left with no choice but to leave the pastoral region and move to the banner town, where they lived for several years.

“When did the sandstorms start?” I asked Dulan.

“They first appeared in 2000.” Almost coinciding with the sandstorms was the disappearance of flowing water sources on his family’s pasture.

Gazing over pastures yet to turn green and the patchy, balding bare ground, it is hard to believe that thirty years ago, several rivers—including the Jeren’gaole and Xilin—converged here, making the area abundant in grass and water. Herders recall that in summer, driving cattle to the river for water required constant vigilance to prevent them from wallowing into the muddy bends. Following the construction of upstream reservoirs, downstream flow plummeted. Dulan remembers clearly that by 1999, the river had dried up completely.

Without surface water, livestock can only be watered by pumping groundwater through mechanised boreholes. Yet, as water-intensive industrial and agricultural development expands across the grasslands, groundwater levels have been steadily affected.

Ma, a herder in Damaruan Banner, notes that copper mining in the 2000s depleted vast quantities of groundwater, leaving the shallower wells on herding families’ land dry. Groundwater levels only began to slowly recover after government intervention led to the closure of the mine’s deep wells. Another deep well in the local community is used exclusively to irrigate fodder fields, which has further dried out the surrounding pastures for neighbouring herders.

Dulun remembers that 2015 was another dry year, which made the sandstorms in East Ujimqin Banner the following spring particularly severe: sand coated people and animals alike, and livestock swallowed it along with the grass. During the worst gales, sheep would become buried in sand just from resting on the pasture. Herders had to quickly grab them by the legs, haul them out of the drifts, and then spend time brushing the sand from their coats.

The compounding effects of dwindling surface water and over-extracted groundwater have steadily degraded pasture conditions. The land has become increasingly reliant on rainfall that is both unevenly distributed and highly unpredictable. Consequently, when droughts strike, herders find themselves far more vulnerable to sandstorms.

Ma’s family, which was heavily hit by drought last summer, had been hoping for early rains this year to encourage the pastures to break into green sooner. Instead of rain, the dust arrived first; since late March, high winds and dusty conditions in Damaruan Banner have persisted for nearly a month. Meanwhile, Dulun’s pastures escaped the drought last year, allowing him to harvest thousands of bales of hay for supplementary livestock feed. Yet, this winter and spring have seen almost no rainfall, leaving him deeply concerned.

III. Conclusion

Recently, weather conditions around cities in the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei region have improved, and the dust that had briefly “crossed the Yangtze River” has retreated north. City dwellers can finally take off their masks for the moment, but for herders whose livelihoods are inextricably tied to the grasslands, the sandstorm alert is far from over. They continue to grapple with the secondary disasters brought by dust and high winds.

How many more dust events will herders on the grasslands face this spring? Will rainfall improve this year? Against the backdrop of climate change, all of this remains an open question.

Foodthink’s “Animal Husbandry” Series

Foodthink has long been dedicated to covering topics surrounding animal husbandry. Since 2018, we have published a series of articles focusing on pastoral regions in Inner Mongolia, aiming to document the genuine lives of herders while exploring how they might sustain their livelihoods in an increasingly volatile environment. If you share an interest in these subjects and have on-the-ground materials, local stories, or your own insights, we welcome your submissions and encourage you to get in touch.

Foodthink Author

zeen

A person who hasn’t yet outgrown the simple pleasure of eating meat, with a sustained interest in animal husbandry.

Unless otherwise stated, all images are provided by the author

Editor: Wang Hao