 Hi everyone, my name is Nick Burkheimer. I'm a soil science graduate student at North Dakota State and welcome to the second part of our three-part series about our pipeline reclamation project here in Williston, North Dakota. So you just heard Meredith talk about the background of our project, the different treatments we've been using, and some of the basic issues that you encounter when you have a pipeline installed on your land. I'm going to go a little more in-depth about the soils issues that we have as well as discuss some of the tools that we use to kind of bring this data together and determine what we got going on here. So first to give you a brief recap, the pipeline behind us was installed in 2015. It's about 36 centimeters in diameter and runs for a quarter-mile down the agricultural field. So we encountered some issues with soil properties when that was installed, and I'm going to talk about that a little more right now. So the first issue that you really have is that when the pipeline trenches dug you get a lot of soil mixing between your top soil and your subsoil. Now when this happens, you can think that your really organic matter-rich top soil layer, a lot of that organic matter can get lost when it's mixed with the subsoil, which makes your top soil less fertile. Also, if you have something like leached salts in your subsoil, that can be mixed with your top soil layer, thus adding salinity to your top soil. So that's overall going to reduce your fertility. Now the biggest thing that you can do to prevent this issue from compounding too much on your land is to make sure that the company that's installing your pipeline understands the soil you have. Make sure that they're properly separating your top soil and your subsoil and storing them during the construction process and then replacing them correctly so that your soil profile is maintained. Now even if that's done correctly, another issue that we can encounter is subsidence. Now whenever the soil is replaced, it's not going to be exactly the same as when it was originally undisturbed. There's going to be some extra pockets of air in there, sometimes a little extra porosity maybe. So over time that can resettle and the soil above your pipeline can settle and kind of slump. That happened to us in 2018 when after a significant rain event of a couple inches in a day, we ended up getting this massive subsidence which runs for about three quarters of the way down this project. Our subsidence is about five feet wide and up to three feet deep, which really hinders our ability to access all the crops that we have growing back here. So for that, when that's something like that occurs, you need to contact the company that did install your pipeline originally and they'll have to come through and they can bring in some fill dirt to be able to get that re-smooth and re-graded for you. Now outside of the pipeline trench, adjacent to that you have your roadway running where all the construction equipment goes. Now a nice thing that happens during the construction process is that the company is going to remove all of your top soil and store that adjacent to the construction site. So that's not going to be disturbed during the process, but all that heavy machinery going over the subsoil is really going to compact that and reduce your pore space on that surface. So you're going to end up with a really thick compacted layer once that top soil is re-spread. Now when you think about it, that thick layer of really dense soil is going to reduce your ability for plants to be able to break through and grow further and access those deep nutrients and deep water. And it's also going to reduce your ability for water to be able to go down and transmit that far into the soil. So those are some big issues that we're going to see on the roadway adjacent to it. So we get a lot of compaction there. Now I've been talking about compaction a bit and you can think of it on a project this big or even if you have your own pipeline project, it's going to be really tough to take all these soil samples to find out what your bulk density is. Now what we use in this project is we use this dynamic cone pentatometer. So what this does, it's really easy to operate and you can use it all from your phone. And what it does is that it pushes this rod here with a constant force into the soil and then it records how much the soil is resisting that rod being pushed up. And what this does is it gives you an idea as you go through your soil profile how compacted your soil is and the resistance to the soil structure basically breaking. It's a really good metric for you to see how your plant roots are going to operate in the soil profile. And as you go down, it also gives you the penetration resistance at each depth. So you can actually see where your penetration resistance is highest and where you need to break up that compaction. So those are a lot of the tools that we use. Now let's talk a little bit about what we've been doing on this project to make sure that we are trying to reclaim this and get the soil properties back to where we want them to be. So as Meredith talked about in the first video, we've had five cropping sequences as well as three sub-treatments that we've applied to this project. So the cropping sequences, the five annual ones that we've had have included crops that have a strong tap root and crops that have cover crops incorporated so that we're really trying to break up that compaction with those strong roots and those crops. We've also incorporated alfalfa, which also has a very deep strong root system and perennial grass, which also, as I found with my research, definitely has a very strong root structure, which can break through those compacted layers. Additionally, we've also applied a ripping and a ripping with manure strategy. If you think about when I talked about what that soil mixing can get over the pipeline and you lose that organic matter, you need to find a way to replenish those nutrients in the soil. And potentially, adding manure to that can get those nutrients back where you need them to so that you can reclaim that productivity. So now we've completed the fifth year of this study. We're in our second year of monocropping, where we plant the same crop over everything, except for the alfalfa and the perennial grass. And now we're starting to see what the results are. Have we noticed any yield differences compared to our treatments or sub-treatments? Now, the big thing that we found is that with our main cropping systems, we found no significant differences in yields across any of our treatments or any of our disturbances. So what that means is that whether we had safflower growing previously or cover crops or just Durham wheat continuously, that didn't lead to any significant differences in yields. What did is if we added a ripping treatment or a ripping with manure treatment, that had significantly higher yields than if we went with the no-till process. So if you can think about that in terms of the compaction we've talked about in the nutrients, what we've done is that by breaking up those compacted layers and putting those nutrients back into the soil, we've been able to reclaim some of the lost yields that we've experienced over our different disturbances. Now that's all I've got for you and that concludes the second part of our Pipeline video series. Next up is Dr. Tom DeSutter who will be talking about the below-ground response of plants to these adverse soil conditions. Thank you.