Holdrege Soil Series

The Holdrege soil series is Nebraska's official state soil. It sits on the level to gently rolling loess uplands of south-central Nebraska, where it formed in thick deposits of wind-blown silt laid down during and after the last ice age.

Holdrege is a mollisol — the soil order that forms under native grassland. Centuries of prairie grasses drove organic matter into the loess and built a thick, nearly black surface layer. That dark topsoil is what makes the soil so productive for corn and grain.

Below the surface, Holdrege soil has a clay-enriched argillic horizon where clays have accumulated over thousands of years. Beneath that, the profile transitions back to pale, unaltered loess — the original parent material that gives the soil its deep, silky texture.

Nebraska's soil scientists and the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service identified the Holdrege series as the soil that best represents the state's agricultural core — the deep loess plains of south-central Nebraska that anchor the state's grain economy.

The series is named for Holdrege, Nebraska, the county seat of Phelps County in the south-central part of the state. Naming soil series after nearby towns, lakes, or ridges is standard USDA practice.

The Holdrege soil was designated to recognize not just agricultural productivity, but the geological story behind it: loess deposited across the plains by ice-age winds, then transformed by thousands of years of grassland into one of the deepest, most workable soils in the Midwest.

The Holdrege profile tells a two-chapter story. The upper layers are dark and organic-rich, shaped by native grasses over thousands of years. The lower layers are pale loess — fine, silty, and porous — almost unchanged from when the wind dropped it here at the end of the ice age.

Holdrege soil covers the loess uplands and tablelands of south-central Nebraska — the broad, nearly flat country between the Platte River valley and the Kansas state line. It sits at low to moderate slopes, typically less than 3 percent, on loess deposits that can exceed 100 feet deep.

The soil is most concentrated in the counties stretching from Phelps and Kearney east through Clay, Fillmore, and Thayer. This is the heart of Nebraska's dryland and irrigated grain belt, where the Holdrege series underlies some of the most continuously farmed land in the state.

Corn is the primary crop on Holdrege soil. Nebraska ranks second in the country for corn production, and the south-central counties where Holdrege soil dominates contribute heavily to that total. Both dryland and center-pivot irrigated corn grow on this soil, with irrigated fields drawing from the High Plains Aquifer.

Soybeans have expanded across the Holdrege landscape over the past few decades as farmers rotate with corn. Winter wheat remains an important dryland crop in the drier western counties where Holdrege soil transitions toward the mixed-grass prairie.

Where farming gives way to pasture, Holdrege soil supports native grasses — big bluestem, little bluestem, sideoats grama, and western wheatgrass — the same plant community that built the soil's dark surface layer before European settlement.