Urban Sand Clears, but Sandstorms’ Impact on Herders Persists

Since 6 April, Damao Banner in Baotou City, Inner Mongolia, has been plagued by “blowing sand” almost every day. The worst was on the 10th, when a sandstorm lasted nearly five hours. Outside the window, the wind and sand blotted out the sun, and inside the house it was dim and lightless.

“We had to light the lamps even in broad daylight!” Brother Ma, who has been herding livestock in Damao Banner for decades, had rarely encountered such conditions. “I feel like this year has the most sandstorms—and the fiercest ones.”

On nearly 10,000 mu of grassland, Brother Ma’s family keeps over 400 sheep and more than 50 cattle. In ordinary circumstances, he would drive them out to graze and drink every day. But during a sandstorm, even people struggle to walk, so the animals eat fodder in their livestock sheds, and they have to wait until the next day for water.

Bordering Damao Banner is East Gobi Province, a major dust source area in Mongolia where the landscape is predominantly desert steppe. Yet Brother Ma pays little mind to the sand drifting in from his northern neighbours. What weighs on him far more is the state of his own grassland.

“If the grassland were in good shape, the sandstorms wouldn’t be so severe—the worst the wind could kick up would be just blowing dust.” But last year was a drought year, with little rain in summer and autumn and barely any snow over winter. The grassland has still not turned green this spring. One gust of wind and the few blades of grass that have managed to sprout are ripped out by the roots.

Grass roots anchor the soil and hold the sand in place. Once the grass is gone, the sand and soil beneath are stripped away.

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

In late March, I paid another visit to Dulan, a herder in East Ujimqin Banner, Xilingol League. The area had just weathered its third sandstorm of the spring. Along the path between his livestock sheds and the settlement, a wide stretch of hard, compacted bare ground had been exposed—so firm underfoot that it felt like concrete. If you drive across it without following the ruts, the jolting throws you side to side.

It looked nothing like what I saw last September. How could a single winter have reduced it to bare ground?

The answer lies just nearby. Right beside the bare patch stand a motorised well and a water trough, and the herds come here to drink every day. The constant trampling has left the ground extremely loose, almost entirely devoid of vegetation.

Unlike the partially preserved nomadic traditions of the collectivisation era—when herders and their animals moved with the seasons through the year—after the grass–livestock dual contract system was gradually implemented in the 1990s, wire mesh fencing carved out individual households’ grazing ranges, and sedentary pastoralism had become the norm across the grassland. Although Dulan’s family owns 6,000 mu of grassland and has rented another 4,000 mu from a neighbour, the routes and distances their livestock can roam have been greatly curtailed.

The picture suddenly made sense. The grassland degradation around the settlement and inside the fences, caused by excessive trampling—this must be what herders call the “hoof disaster”. When a sandstorm or a strong wind comes, the loose, fine sand on the surface of these grasslands scatters on the breeze, and over the years the land is worn down to bare, barren ground.

Some of the wind-blown sand slows down when it reaches taller grass, settling and piling up at the base of the plants. If you walk along the bare ground, you will notice that on stretches where the vegetation cover is better, each clump of grass roots is slightly raised by the accumulating sand—higher in the middle, tapering at the edges—so that together they look like a field of miniature sand dunes.

Dulan has put this to practical use. For the past five years, he has fenced off more than 100 mu of grassland near his house, keeping his livestock out to both block further sand encroachment and anchor part of the topsoil.

The topsoil that the grass roots cannot intercept becomes a new source of sand during sandstorms and strong winds, and further alters the grassland’s original vegetation and environment. In The Logic of the Grassland: A Sequel, Han Nianyong, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, calls this phenomenon “The Great Topsoil Migration”.

Through years of field research, Han Nianyong and his team found that topsoil migration has caused plant species once confined to the arid-zone grasslands of western Inner Mongolia to appear in the semi-arid eastern regions. Annual and biennial plants have proliferated explosively across wide areas; although vegetation cover has increased somewhat, forage quality and vegetation stability are declining…

This matches Dulan’s own observations. In the past, he could name over twenty different grass species on his land; now barely ten remain. The perennial standing-dead thatch layer—what survives the winter and lets livestock build up their condition on dry grass before the spring green-up—is dwindling too. Without that thatch layer to shield the ground, the grassland’s ability to absorb and permeate water has diminished, and the exposed area has grown enormously, leaving the land far more vulnerable when the spring winds and sand arrive.

In the memory of Dulan, a herder born in the 1980s, sandstorms were something he had rarely seen as a child. Back then the grassland was in good shape, but winters were bitterly cold and heavy with snow. What herders feared most was the “White disaster (snow disaster)”. On New Year’s Day 2001, a White disaster swept through the entire Sum and wiped out 80% of its livestock. Dulan’s family had no choice but to leave the pastoral area and move the whole household to the banner seat, where they lived for several years.

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

“Since 2000,” he said. Almost in tandem, the flowing surface water sources on his family’s grassland vanished.

Looking at the grassland that has yet to show its spring green-up, with its patchy bald spots of bare ground, it is hard to imagine that thirty years ago several rivers—Jirengol, the Xilin River, and others—converged here, making the land rich with grass and water. People say that in summer, driving cattle down to the riverbank to drink, you had to watch every moment lest an animal sink into the silt of a river bend. But once a reservoir was built upstream, the flow downstream dropped sharply. Dulan remembers clearly: the river ceased to flow altogether from 1999.

Without surface water, livestock must rely on motorised wells to pump groundwater. Yet as water-hungry industrial and agricultural development on the grassland has steadily increased, the water table has been affected too.

Brother Ma in Damao Banner recalled that copper mining in the 2000s consumed vast quantities of groundwater; even the shallower wells on herders’ land stopped yielding water. Only after the government intervened and the mine’s deep wells were shut down did the water table gradually recover. Another deep well in the village is dedicated exclusively to irrigating the fodder cropland, which has left the surrounding grasslands even drier.

Dulan remembers that 2015 was another drought year, and the following spring the sandstorms in East Ujimqin Banner were especially fierce. Sand stung people’s and animals’ eyes and coated their bodies. When livestock grazed, they swallowed the sand clinging to the grass along with the grass itself. At the worst of the blowing sand, a sheep lying on the ground could be buried in sand before you blinked—you had to grab its legs in time, haul it out of the drift, then keep brushing the sand off its fleece.

The cascading loss of flowing surface water sources and the overdraw of groundwater have made the grassland’s condition worse by the year, deepening its reliance on rainfall that is unevenly spread in time and space and unpredictable. When drought strikes, herders are left all the more exposed to sandstorms.

Brother Ma’s family, battered by last summer’s drought, had been hoping for early rain this year so the grassland could green up sooner. But the rain never came—only the sand. Since late March, wind and dust in Damao Banner have dragged on for nearly a month. Dulan’s grassland, by contrast, escaped drought last summer, and his family baled several thousand bundles of hay for supplementary feeding of the sheep and cattle. Yet this winter and spring almost not a drop of rain fell—a situation enough to drive anyone to despair.

III. Conclusion

Recently, weather conditions in cities around the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei region have improved, and the sandstorm that had “crossed the Yangtze” has retreated back north. Urban residents can set aside their masks for now, but for herders, whose lives and livelihoods are inseparable from the grassland, the sandstorm warning has hardly been lifted. They are still weathering the secondary disasters wrought by sand and wind.

How many more days of sand and dust will the herders on the grassland endure this spring? Will this year’s rains be good? Against the backdrop of climate change, all of it remains uncertain.

Foodthink “Livestock Farming” Special Feature

Foodthink has long covered the topic of livestock farming. Since 2018, we have published a series of articles about pastoral areas in Inner Mongolia, hoping to document herders’ real lives while exploring how they can live more sustainably in a changing environment. If you share these concerns and have first-hand materials, stories, or your own insights from the field, you are welcome to submit or get in touch with us.

Foodthink author

zeen

Someone who has yet to rise above the simple pleasures of a meat-heavy plate, with a keen interest in livestock farming.

Unless otherwise credited, all images are courtesy of the author

Edited by: Wang Hao