Drummer Soil Series

The Drummer soil series is Illinois's official state soil. It sits on nearly flat glacial lake beds and low-lying uplands across central and eastern Illinois, where water drains slowly and organic matter builds up year after year.

Drummer soil is defined by its surface — a black, silty layer so rich in organic matter that it almost looks like coal. That surface can extend 18 inches or more below the ground, deeper than almost any other prairie soil in the Midwest.

Below the black topsoil, the soil turns dark gray and eventually gray — the color of a waterlogged, oxygen-poor environment. Before farmers installed drainage tiles in the late 1800s, much of this land flooded regularly. Now it produces record corn yields.

Drummer soil was first studied and described in Ford County, Illinois, and named for Drummer Township in that county. Ford County sits in the heart of the Illinois Corn Belt, and the Drummer series is the defining soil of that landscape.

The Illinois General Assembly designated the Drummer series as the official state soil in 2001. Soil scientists from the University of Illinois and the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service supported the designation, pointing to the series's unmatched agricultural productivity and its role in making Illinois one of the top corn-producing states in the country.

The Drummer series was chosen not because it covers the most land in Illinois — several series are more extensive — but because it best represents the deep, dark prairie soils that define the state's agricultural identity and have shaped its economy for more than 150 years.

If you dug a hole in a Drummer soil field, you would first hit jet-black dirt that goes down much farther than you might expect — often more than a foot and a half. That is the prairie heritage of this soil: centuries of tallgrass roots dying and decomposing in waterlogged ground, building organic matter faster than it could break down.

Below the dark topsoil, the color shifts abruptly to dark gray and then gray — the signature of a poorly drained soil that spent much of its history saturated with water. These gleyed horizons have almost no free oxygen, which is why organic matter survived instead of decomposing.

Drummer soil covers millions of acres across central and eastern Illinois. It sits on the flat glacial lake beds and low-lying glaciated uplands of the Grand Prairie — the nearly level landscape that runs from the Indiana border west through the heart of the state.

The series is most concentrated in the counties where Illinois agriculture is most productive: Champaign, Ford, Iroquois, Livingston, McLean, and the surrounding Corn Belt counties. Ford County, where the series was first named, contains some of the densest concentrations.

Drummer soil is found in small areas of Indiana and Iowa as well, but the largest and most significant expanses are in Illinois. The soil's distribution closely matches the map of the state's best corn yields.

Drummer soil grows corn. That is its defining use and its claim to importance. Central Illinois counties built on Drummer and similar soils regularly produce corn yields above 200 bushels per acre — among the highest in the world. The depth of the organic-rich surface and the soil's ability to hold nutrients make it one of the most productive agricultural soils on earth.

Soybeans are the second major crop. Corn-soybean rotation has been standard practice on Drummer soil since the mid-twentieth century, and the two crops together define the Illinois farm economy. Illinois is consistently among the top two or three states in both corn and soybean production, and Drummer soil is a major reason.

Before European settlement, this land was tallgrass prairie — big bluestem, Indian grass, switchgrass, and hundreds of other plant species growing eight to twelve feet tall. None of that prairie remains in any significant area. The drainage tiles installed across central Illinois in the 1800s transformed one of the wettest landscapes in the Midwest into some of the flattest, driest farmland on the continent.