 Hello, my name is Tom Scheer, I'm an NDSU Extension Agricultural Engineer specializing in irrigation, drainage and water quality. You know together with my colleague, Dr. Hans Kandel, we have been doing tile drainage design workshops for about 20 years. And most of them have been here in the valley, which you can see behind me. It's mostly pattern tile where they're in parallel units using drain tile like this where we, four inches is pretty common, although there's other sizes. And it's buried at about three to three and a half feet. And we've been doing the design work on how to get that and almost every system installed here in the valley as is a response to precipitation events, whether there's snow melt in the spring or rainfall later on. But Kelly asked me to talk about some of the surprises we run into. And that's where you're getting water into the tile system that's not part of the normal precipitation and responds differently. So we don't usually have that problem here in the valley, which you can see behind me. I'm standing on Hans's research plots, which is pattern tiled. But if you get farther west where you're in the Catoa region, where we have to transition from this old lake bed up into the beach ridge area, that's where we start running into some extraneous water problems. And to give you an example, I got some surprises that we've run into. The first one I'm going to start up in Manitoba. A colleague of mine up there was called in on a project where it was a flat field like you see behind me. It looked perfectly flat. The soil looked uniform. The installer did his due diligence, looked at all the soils, looked at how to install the system, and then put in a drain tile because the farmer was having trouble getting in to plant and to harvest. Well, they turned on, because it's flat, they had to use a lift station, and when they turned the lift station on, it ran continuously 24-7, 365. And after several months of this, the local municipality got concerned because they thought that flowing water in the wintertime was going to freeze up all the culverts in the area and contribute to local flooding. So my colleague was called in to look at the situation, and they monitored the site, took soil samples, did some deep-boring, and then mapped it with an electromagnetic device that can go down quite a few feet. And what they found is underneath that field is a shallow vein of sand and gravel underneath that wasn't very thick, but it was like the fingers on a hand going out on their field. And the installer happened to put the lift station right in the middle of the wrist. And so in effect what they were doing is the main, it wasn't the tile up above, it was the main down below, the deeper part, that was actually tapped into that area and was pulling out a lot of excess water. So that's one surprise. The second surprise is out here to the west, a little west of Castleton, west of the ethanol plant. We monitored eight sites in the Red River Valley for four years measuring the flow and water quality of tile drainage, and this site out there never did flow as expected. It was always much, much less than we expected, even with large rainfall events, although some of the field was affected, most of it wasn't, it was kind of scattered. And in the flood of 2009, we found out that that was a major flow path for water coming across country during the spring floods, and in fact that spring, we found gravel out in that field about two or three hundred feet out away from the road where it had overtopped the road. So we finally surmised that there were probably rivulets of gravel and sand and gravel underneath the soil that was draining away the water, and so it was helping with the tile, but it just wasn't handling some of the spots. Our next surprise was south of here, a farmer had a low spot in the field. He had some topography down north of Lisbon, in which he had this low spot and was always interfering with his farming operation, and it was always wet, so he tiled it. And then, just like the experience up in Canada, they turned on the pump and it ran continuously. It ran for months, and it wasn't a lot of flow, but it was enough to, again, run throughout the year. And when they investigated, they found out that in the upper part of the field, there's a soil with a lot of sand and gravel, and there was a recharge site, and there were some perched water tables. And so it was draining down, bilateral flow, down towards that low spot. And before they tiled, it probably reached some kind of equilibrium, but after they tiled, they lowered the water table and then this water started draining down, and that's why it was continuously running. Our next surprise was a little farther south than that, along the Cheyenne River. There's a sandy area there, near the river, that, again, is always wet in the spring and the fall and poses problems, so they tiled it. And then they put in an outlet which drained directly down into the Cheyenne River. Well, when they put in the outlet pipe, it was a perforated 15-inch pipe that carried the outflow down into the river, and they had lift station up on top, but what happened is the flow coming out of there was continuous. It's just like the other ones. So we're getting water from somewhere else, and it wasn't coming from the pump because that was shut off. It wasn't the laterals in the field that were only three to three and a half feet down. What it was is the aquifer, when they had cut through the bank, they cut through a clay barrier that had held back the aquifer, and the aquifer was flowing down and getting into the outlet, the perforated outlet pipe, and draining out part of the aquifer. And so the State Water Commission became very concerned because that aquifer is also used for irrigating that land because it's a sandy soil. So the last surprise I want to talk about is in the Oaks, Milner, Weinmeere, Brampton area. This is a backwater area where the glaciers had outwash. And so you have layers of clay, layers of sand, layers of silt, all kind of mixed together. Kind of think of it like a big, unruly stack of pancakes. And I have a graphic which kind of shows a cross-section of part of the Oaks, and you can see where you have these different layers kind of fixed, interleaved in there. So again, water always takes the easiest path, so some fields have been tiled down there where they started running because when you lowered the water table, you changed the equilibrium, and water in these sandvays probably started coming from some surrounding areas contributing to the flow. So a lot more water was coming out than what you would expect from just rain and snow. The other thing is, in a lot of these fields, because you got this silt and clay and sand intermixed, there's some areas of the field where you could probably put the tile a hundred feet apart. And then others where you have to go 25 feet apart because the silt holds the water and the clay. And that's where my recommendation to take home from all this talk is that when you're in this transition area outside the valley, you really have to do some field research. The first place to talk to is local knowledge. If somebody's been working that field for a long period of time, they can tell you where the wet spots are, and you can probably figure out why they might be wet in those areas. Then look at the Shirani topography. Water always moves downhill, so if there's a gravel pit a mile away that's on a higher elevation, you can bet that when you get rain, it penetrates and then it's going to move by gravity down to the low spots. And the third thing is to just do a real good check of the soils in the area. And again, that you can visit with local knowledge or you can look at the soil surveys to get some idea of where to start. But those are my recommendations and some of the surprises that we've run into with tile drainage.