One thing you could say about Everett White was that he never pulled any punches.

Dr. White was one of my soil science teachers at South Dakota State University. It was fitting that he taught soil science, since he seemed as old as the soils he classified. I swear he was born 60 years old, given his deeply lined craggy face topped off by a shock of white hair.

He was old school — probably Rome or Athens High. "I give mainly C's, y'see," he once said, "because C is average, and most people are average." If you were an agronomy or civil engineering major at SDSU from the 1960s into the early ’90s, you weren't going to graduate unless you passed Dr. White's class.

Armed with an agronomy degree — accompanied by a standard C in his class — I quickly became friends with Dr. White while working with SDSU specialists after graduation. I became part of his inner circle, chatting regularly with him about his research projects. The inner circle was Cheerio-size small, but it did give me insights I still remember.

One was a paper he wrote for an SDSU Extension publication in which he pontificated on weather and climate change. He gave examples of freezing and boiling temperatures, rampant drought and flooding, and whipping winds that prevailed for thousands of years before European settlers broke the prairie. My favorite anecdote was one about bison using a body of water as “a community sewage disposal pool.”

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“The point is,” he wrote, “South Dakota (you could insert Iowa or any Midwestern state) has caused misery for plants and animals for centuries.”

Dr. White was concerned about the article’s tone. “My wife thinks I’m being too negative,” he said. “What do you think?”

Drought in 2025?

I thought of Dr. White recently while driving across northeastern Iowa. Little precipitation had fallen in the last few months. Dust from the farmyard’s gravel circled where I parked. The most recent U.S. drought monitor showed the upper one-half of Iowa as abnormally dry or in a moderate drought. It’s akin to this time last year, when drought concerns inspired an April cover story of this magazine titled “How to cope with (so far) dry conditions.”

The story was accurate — for about two weeks before the April drought gave way to May monsoons that lasted in some areas of Iowa into July. Then, rains ceased in many areas of Iowa, setting up a quick and rain-free harvest.

Fortunately, genetic improvements have enabled crops to endure whipsaw weather. During drought, reduced tillage or no-till can conserve water. Tools such as nitrification inhibitors enable farmers to keep nitrogen in the soil and not in tile lines or the atmosphere.

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Decades later, I still remember the conclusion of Dr. White’s article: “Whether climate change is accelerating can be debated until doomsday. The point is we are facing an increasingly stressful climate. Farmers need to know this. We in research need to be doing the same thing.”

Decades later, Dr. White would be proud of the way farmers and researchers have responded to this challenge.