 Thank you. All righty. Yeah, I also am a fishing guide on Devil's Lake. So if you want to come up and trade pheasant hunting for walleye fishing, I'm all up for that. So we're going to talk about soil salinity management today. And if I, where's the on? There we go. If I ramble and don't make sense, I apologize. I have twins that are two years old, so I haven't slept in two years. But they're at that really fun age right now where we're teaching them sounds. You know, what does a cow say? They're going to yell moo. What does a dog say? They're going to say woof woof. Here's one thing that we taught them. Let's see if this works. I don't know if you heard that, but I asked him, what does a bison say when he yells touchdown? The problem is an hour later was kickoff against SDSU this year. So that didn't turn out too well for our household. But we got lots of information out there on managing soil health. Our state specialist, Abby Wick, she's in Fargo. She has this website put together, ndsu.edu slash soil health. There's a number of extension videos on there on various soil health topics, as well as you can also Google ndsu Dave Fransen. He's our state soil specialist. And he has a lot of our extension circulars. And we have some good extension circulars on soil fertility and soil salinity, those sorts of things. So here's North Dakota. Some work was done back in 2010. And they estimated that about 5.9, 6 million acres of our state is adversely affected by soil salinity. We jumble all that together. That's essentially the state of Vermont. And that's what Vermont looks like over North Dakota. And as I came down yesterday, I was in Regent North Dakota at one point yesterday. Came through Moe Bridge and Chamberlain. And that was quite the road trip. There's a lot of white spots out there. You guys got some soil salinity issues out here, too. So a bunch of terms are thrown out. Soil salinity, alkalinity, sedicity, what do these words mean? With saline, we're talking about the white stuff. The common term up our way when I work with farmers, they call it the alkaline ground. Alkalinity should be referred to the pH, not the white stuff. So with alkaline ground, we're talking about high pH. With soil salinity, we're talking about salt. And we call it a saline soil. If it has an electrical conductance or EC of four desicemons per meter, or greater with the saturated paste test. A sodic soil has excessive sodium. And what happens is when we have too much sodium in our soil, we have this dispersion effect. The ions within the soil are going whichever direction, and the soil has difficulty creating soil structure. It's kind of like rush hour traffic in Chicago. Everybody is going whichever direction. It becomes chaotic. So this sodic soil doesn't necessarily have excessive salt, but has the sodium absorption ratio of 13 or more, and the pH is rather alkaline. 8.5 or more is common to see in these areas. Now the sodium absorption ratio test looks at calcium, magnesium, and sodium within the soil. Calcium and magnesium have a plus two charge. Our soils from the clays in the organic matter have a slight negative charge, and that's what creates the cation exchange. And so these plus two charges of the calcium and magnesium help hold that soil together. It flocculates it. It creates structure. It's a great thing. But with the sodium having a plus one charge, we get too much of that. And it throws off the ability of the calcium and magnesium, and that's what creates this dispersion effect. Then we also have saline and sodic soils, where we have a lot of salt. We got a lot of sodium, and the pH is probably high. So with sodicity, you usually don't see the white stuff. You've got to dig in the ground a little bit, and you see this what we call columnar structure. It has these little domes. They can be all sorts of different sizes, but you rarely see it at the surface. I have seen it brought to the surface through deep ripping. A couple of farmers out my way have ripped some of this stuff, and I got pictures of it being brought to the surface, and we're in a remediation process of this right now. So if you dig in your soil, you see the columnar structure. Probably got too much sodium. And we can remediate these areas by adding calcium. Gypsum is one of the preferred calcium amendments because it's more soluble than some other calcium sources out there. And if you're going to remediate these areas, a couple of things you need to know is your cation exchange capacity. Make sure the centrifuge type test is done, not the summation test, at least in North Dakota. The summation test has a tendency to overestimate what the CEC is. What your sodium absorption ratio is, how much calcium is in the gypsum, and also the soil bulk density. This publication, Dr. Frenzen put together, has the equations and that sort of stuff to figure out how much should be applied based on the soil characteristics. So we're going to change gears from sedicity, and we're going to talk about salinity the rest of the morning. And so we're talking about these white spots in our fields, and they're robinous of our yields. So a little bit ago, I talked about the soil salinity test with an EC of four or greater under saturated paste. Us researchers like doing this saturated paste test because it does a better job of reflecting what a plant would experience within the soil. When you send your stuff off to the lab, they usually use this one-to-one test. So that's one part soil, one part water. And there's a dilution effect there. Usually if you multiply that number by two, that gets you pretty close to what the saturated paste test is. So when you look at salt tolerances of different crops, they're usually reported as a saturated paste. Our soil salinity publication has some better guidelines to get closer to what that actual salinity is. So with the saturated paste, we have a chunk of soil, we add some water, mix it up a little bit, add some more water, mix it up, and we take it to about the consistency of DQ ice cream. And then we measure the salinity. And it's a really good test, but it takes a lot longer than the one-to-one test. And that's why the one-to-one test is usually ran in most soil testing labs. There's nothing wrong with it. Just be sure that there's that dilution effect there and adjust that accordingly. We have a number of farmers out our way that are now using the Varus machine and other ways of measuring soil salinity across the field, mapping out the salinity. And these have discs in the ground and measures the conductivity of the soil hooked up to a GPS that you can draw, maps up and figure out where those problematic areas are. And another product I use is this. I can just stick this in the ground and it'll tell me what the EC is. But you gotta have some saturated soil. If the soil's dry, I'm not gonna have a good result. We'll go over a little demonstration with that in a bit. And this is about 300 bucks. They have some probes that you can't, you don't stick into the ground, but you'd mix up in a Dixie cup, put it in the cup and it'll tell you what the EC is. And that's a pretty good test. That's similar to the one-to-one task. You can buy those off of Amazon for like 75 bucks. When I'm working with farmers, we do a lot of tailgate tests like that. So what salinity really does is it tricks the plant into thinking that a drought's going on. It holds on to the water so the plant has to work a lot harder for sucking up that moisture. And when it comes down to salinity management, it really comes down to water management because salts move with the water. This is a test site that we had over at Carrington. That's about dead center of North Dakota. And we had one of those June rains where it was big droplets and it came down hard for about 20 minutes, maybe a 10th of an inch in that time. And I went out shortly after the rain, took some pictures of the landscape and all these little wet spots, that's from the raindrop dissolving the salt. So it's in the soil solution and you can't see it. If I come back an hour later after we had some evaporation, the ground would be white again. And under this particular event, the raindrops came down so hard it actually kicked some of the salt up on the leaves of the kosher. So salts move with the water. Another thing that we have going on that's creating these saline areas is capillary rise. And that's the ability of a soil to wick up moisture. When we look at our stickier soils that are clay, they have smaller pores, so they have more capillary rise than what those sandy soils have that have larger pores. So when you go to McDonald's and you order a Coke, you get a big straw. Look at that level of the Coke within the straw. It moves it up a little bit above the bulk of that beverage. And so that's capillary rise. Now if you go order a cocktail, you get a lot smaller straw. And if you look at that, how much it raises your drink level versus the bulk of the drink, it's a lot higher versus that big McDonald's straw. So that cocktail straw is like a clay, that big McDonald's straw is more like a sand. So we have capillary rise that moves the salts up to the surface or moves the water to the surface and with that it moves salts. And so soil salinity, you really need five things. You need moisture, you need water soluble salts and we have a lot of that in our parent materials. With water soluble salts, we're talking about sodium sulfate, calcium sulfate, that's gypsum, magnesium sulfate, that's epsom salt, sodium chloride, that's standard table salt or halide. We need a recharge area. That's where water enters into the soil. We need a discharge area. That's where ground water becomes surface water. That's where the capillary rise is going on. That's where the evaporation is going on. That's where the white areas are in your field. And we also have to have the right climate. You need to have evaporation greater than infiltration and that's most of our areas. So one of the things we need to do with managing these areas is we need to dry the soils down and don't dry the soils up. When we till the ground, we turn it black, we encourage capillary rise. We encourage evaporation. And so that is really the conveyor belt that's bringing the salts to the surface. So when the ground is black in these white areas and you work it over, we have maximum evaporation. No till, we're not gonna necessarily fix the problem with no till. We need to attack this water management from a couple different ways. But with no till, we have mulch on the surface of the soil, so we reduce evaporation. So that's gonna at least slow the process down. So back to drying down the soil and not drying up. When it comes to drying down the soil with our cropping systems, we need deep-rooted high-water use crops. Cover crops planted after our small grains can extend that photosynthetic window as well as increase the water usage window. We also have options with perennial cropping, alfalfa, those salt-tolerant grasses are good things to plant. We'll talk about where to plant those in a little bit but those are things that are worth looking at. Drain tile, managing ditches, those are other effective methods of managing it. So there's lots of ways to do it, you just gotta manage the water. So this is what's going on with a saline seep. Our recharge area is up here, our discharge area where the white stuff is is down here. So water infiltrates, SS stands for soluble salt, so that's the gypsum, the magnesium sulfates, those sorts of things. They dissolve this and it translocates the salts, moves down within the soil, you hit an impermeable layer and we have this through flow or lateral movement. Now on these lower areas of the landscapes, that's where we find those finer textured soils. So there's more capillary rise going on in these discharge areas. So we have more capillary rise, more evaporation, it's bringing the salts and the water to the surface. The water evaporates, but the salts don't. So they get left behind, they accumulate over time and then they cause all these bad issues. So here's a typical saline seep in North Dakota. This is about halfway between Bismarck and Minot right off of Highway 83. Recharge area up here, white area down there is the discharge area. So with cooperative extension, we're supposed to be unbiased, right? So there's our unbiased, new John catchable tractor. Probably some, I came up with that term yesterday, I was trying to think of a good term for that tractor. Probably something you'd see on Augustine seed farm. So we have ditch effect salinization and again here we have a recharge area, we have a discharge area, except we have the road working as an impenetrable layer. So that water, when it's sitting in a ditch, ditches are meant to move water, they aren't meant to pond water. So if a ditch is ponding water, it moves those salts out to the surface or out to the side. And you see these white areas that run parallel with the road. So against the road, stuff doesn't look too well out a little bit. Stuff looks pretty nice. And so here's an aerial photo. This is one of my dad's fields. This would be about 30 miles from Canada and about 20 miles from Minnesota. Stuff looks pretty good here. This is 1997. Maybe we got a little bit of salt there. But we fast forward a few years to 2009. And then we got all this white stuff running pretty parallel within the road. And that's classic ditch effect salinization. If the white stuff is running parallel with the road, that's a ditch effect. So we also have wetland salinization. Here's my attempt at drawing a stick figure walleye. See the white tip on its tail? That's how you know it's a walleye, not a saga. So the water goes every which direction from a wetland, okay? And so these areas don't have an impermeable layer, but since they go every which direction, these white spots make these white halos that really mimic the shape of the wetland. So here's, this is somewhere between Devils Lake and my farm. We got this kidney-shaped area. It's a little darker, a little wetter, late 80s before the faucets got turned on, probably the most productive areas in our fields. Fast forward to 97, abnormally wet. You can actually see the wetland popping up a little bit more. Fast forward to 2009. And we have this white area that does a really good job of mimicking the shape of that water body. And that's because the water goes every which direction. So the first thing with managing, so that's how soil salinity is caused. So now we're gonna talk about managing these areas. And the first thing to do when it comes to managing these areas is to soil test. One of the things to keep in mind is the water's moving there. We aren't removing crop residue, so we aren't removing nutrients. And if we soil test that for fertility, there's probably a lot of nitrogen, a lot of phosphorus, because the phosphorus can move through erosional pathways. Nitrogen's gonna move with the water and we aren't removing crop residue there. So we're accumulating a bunch of nutrients in these areas. So at the very least, you plant something in there, not a bad idea to turn the fertilizer spreader off. But we need to know what that EC is so we can plant the right crop in the right area. So we can fix these with our cropping systems. When it comes to managing these areas, I like to think of a bullseye. In the middle where it's really white, that EC, eight or greater, that's where you wanna plant very salt-tolerant grasses. When you get to an EC of like six to eight, those are areas where salt-tolerant cover crops can come into play. When that EC is four to six, salt-tolerant Delfelfas are things I would look at. And when that EC is less than four, plant your normal crop. And so crop selection is really important. And we keep mudding in soybeans and North Dakota into these white spots, and it's important to keep in mind that soybeans hate salt. So we have an EC of 0.3, looks good. EC of 3.9, not so happy. EC of 8.1, 11.3, looks like the soybeans just tangled with Brock Lesnar. Barley does a pretty good job. It's pretty darn salt-tolerant. Doesn't use the moisture of soybeans, but at least it's growing and using some moisture there. EC of 11.6, we still have some stuff standing. And so here's a graph with crop response to salinity. On the Y-axis, we have the relative yield, 100% yield, 20% yield, 50% yield. So 100 bushel wheat crop would be up there. And EC of, on the X-axis, we have the EC, so you hit an EC of about nine. You're gonna reduce your yield by about 50%. And this is data that was collected from Dr. Fransen's publication. So we have different crops, dry beans, terrible choice. Corn uses a good chunk of moisture, but it's not that salt-tolerant. Soybeans, I wonder if that line should be moved a little bit to the left, but soybeans aren't a good choice. Alfalfa, not too good. You wanna plant the alfalfa in the border areas and it kinda acts like a dam. Sunflower's pretty salt-tolerant. Canola salt-tolerant. Sugar beet salt-tolerant. Wheat and barley, they're fairly salt-tolerant. Under extreme cases, when that EC is like an eight or more, we wanna plant those salt-tolerant perennial grasses. And ones to look at would include beardless wild rye, tall wheat grass, Russian wild rye, intermediate wheat grass, AC salt lander, things like that. Another thing to keep in mind, I've struggled a few times with managing these areas and some of my research plots is it's wet. That's why the salinity's there. Sometimes it's too wet and I've had to reseed a number of times. And so things like beardless wild rye and the AC salt lander, they work pretty well in those wet sites. Moderately tolerant areas, intermediate wheat grass, creeping foxtail, prairie cored grass. They'll take a good chunk of salt, but not as much as the previous crops that I mentioned. And so there's a lot of information out there with cover crops. A good place to look at is the Mandan ARS cover crop chart. And it kind of is lined up like the periodic table. You can click on one of these and it'll tell you some characteristics, seeding rate, all sorts of stuff like that. So the ones I got circled are things to consider with plant and cover crops in these saline areas. Barley, wheat, rye, triticale, canola, mustard, carrot, beet, safflower and sunflower. And so you click on one, let's say radish. And this is what pops up. Gives us a bunch of information, cool season annual. It's a deep-rooted crop, it's a high-water user, so this has some potential to manage saline areas. However, it has a poor salinity tolerance. And when you're looking, if you're buying cover crop mixes, I've seen a lot of radishes mixed in the commercial cover crop mixes sold as salt tolerant. And radishes and turnips, they use a lot of moisture, but they don't take the salt. So look out for some of those sorts of things. So here's a mix that I've had good luck with in some of these saline areas. And so we're talking the EC somewhere around six to eight. 35 pounds of barley, five pounds of sunflowers, maybe a pound of canola or safflower. I've tried sugar beets in this mix and the beets don't do well, they don't compete well with other crops. But planted as a monoculture, I think sugar beets have a good potential to help manage these saline areas. And with this mix, I've direct seeded it, I've broadcast seeded it, and it seems to work pretty well. And one of the things, I haven't been able to measure it and really figure out what's going on, but I've seen better emergence in my no-till plots than I have in my conventional till plots with the saline stuff. And some of the researchers at the various research centers up our way have seen similar things. And so what I think is going on, under the tillage, we're mixing that salt up within the bulk of the soil. Under the no-till, that salinity has a tendency to be most concentrated that upper inch or so. And so if you no-till, you put the seed in the ground, it sits right below that really hot area and it's in a little bit better environment so it can germinate and grow a little bit better. We've just seen better emergence in the no-till versus the conventional till. Now the other thing that you see a lot in these areas is foxtail barley. And I've seen my press wheels do this and then I go out on the back of the tractor and start digging in the ground. And I don't have to dig in the ground to see where my seed is because it's on the surface. And so where the foxtail barley becomes an issue, you know, prepare that seed bed as needed, but plant something as soon as possible so you can reduce that evaporation and you turn that conveyor belt off that brings the salts to the surface. So we have this North Dakota Agricultural Weather Network up in North Dakota. We got sites, at least one in every county, a number of counties have multiple and they also have this crop water use calculator. So I took data from Minot, averaged over the past 10 years or so and we're looking at May 10th to October 15th for water use. You can type in the crop, day it emerged, all this sort of stuff and it gives you predictions on how much water is gonna be used from the various crops. And in North Dakota for stuff that we grow, alfalfa is really our king water user. An average year, it'll use about 26 inches. Sugar beets, they use a lot of moisture, 22 inches or so and an average year out in Minot, our average rainfall is like 17 inches or so. So it uses a lot of moisture, it's fairly salt-tolerant, not as tall or as barley, but pretty darn close. Corn, high water user about 19 inches. Our grass is about 19 inches. Soybeans, 17 and a half or so. Sunflower, 16, dry beans, 15. Wheat, 15, barley about 14 inches. And so it comes into these crops, we aren't using up our moisture. And so when we have saturated soils, that's encouraging the capillary rise translocating those salts. And so when we look at our small greens where we harvest early, those are good candidate locations to plant cover crops and increase that water use window over a growing season. And so planting dates of cover crops have a huge impact on how much water you're gonna use in a year. The earlier you plant it, the better, the more water you're gonna use. So going back to the crop water use calculator, we plant for like the 5th of August and sugar beets between then and the 15th of October, that's just the date that I'm using for killing that stuff off. It's common to see our barley, our turnips, our radishes, our beets grow well into November. But sugar beets in that time frame is gonna use about three and a half inches. Corn about the same. Soybeans about the same. Sunflowers about two. Oh, excuse me, I'm reading how much. Okay, let's look at this one. So sugar beets are gonna use about five. Corn five, soybeans five. Sunflowers almost seven inches of moisture. Wheat, barley, they're gonna use seven, seven and a half inches of moisture. Now we back that planting date off to the 1st of September and our water use greatly decreases. So sugar beets went from five inches to about one and a half inches. Same thing with corn, soybeans. Sunflowers went from almost seven inches to an inch and three quarter. Wheat went from seven inches down to about two inches and the same thing with barley. So plant these cover crops in these saline areas as early as you can to increase the amount of water that you're gonna use so you can dry down the soil. So here's a quick example. We're looking at winter wheat, we harvest it timely. So we're gonna plant that cover crop right away. Because we had a grass, we're gonna plant sunflowers so we mix up the rotation a little bit. With just the winter wheat, we got about two inches of excess moisture. It's sit and fallow and that's the stuff that can turn white on us. But if we plant these sunflowers out there as a cover crop, we can dry down that soil and it's gonna keep the salt at bay. It's still in the soil profile but it's below the majority of the root zone. So managing these saline seeps, like I said, going back to that bullseye, we got the EC of like eight or more here, six to eight here, and four to six here where you plant the alfalfa. So we have the salt going here but because alfalfa roots so deep and it uses so much moisture, it has a damming effect. So it prevents the water from going over here to the salt. Also because it's written so deep, excuse me, it's sucking the water down here. This is using some good moisture and this is too, so that's speeding up the process. The problem with cover crops is you gotta go out and you gotta plant them every year. And so a lot of farmers I've been working with instead of doing this three-ringed bullseye method, they're starting to just look at two bullseyes. When the EC is six or more, they're plant salt-tolerant grasses. When the EC is four to six, they're looking at alfalfa. And the thing about alfalfa, I've been really surprised with how it grows. So that stuff can root 10, 12, maybe even 15 feet deep. I've planted alfalfa in central North Dakota the first week of June, come back the middle of July for a field day and done a soil pit and I'm about six feet tall and I'm looking up and soil surface is a couple feet above me yet. And I found alfalfa roots all the way at the bottom of the pit. I've been very surprised with some of these alfalfas, how fast they'll actually root. So instead of having to plant this stuff every year, you go out and you plant it and you let it sit there for three or five years and then you go back and you can farm it. Now another grower I'm looking at, I'm working with, he didn't wanna put one seed mix in, plant his grass, put another seed mix in, plant his alfalfa. He just wanted to fill his tender truck once or the hopper once. And so he mixed the alfalfa with the AC salt lander and tall wheatgrass and went out and seeded it. And so he's letting natural selection work out to decide can the alfalfa grow here or not or can the AC salt lander grow here or not? And so we planted that last spring and we just started collecting data on that. So again, with the bullseye, so you got your salt tolerant stuff here, you got the alfalfa here and I'm talking 40, 50 feet wide buffer strips of this. You plant your normal crop down in this area and then those years where you have the small grains, something you can plant the late season cover crop in, plant those cover crops in there so you can maximize the water. The more water you use, the faster these areas are gonna disappear. And so I have a couple of research sites. This is Bowbells, about 90 miles northwest of Minot. On the left is 2014 when we started managing it. We have a slough here, we have a road here and we can see that ditch effect salinization working on the road. So the black is really bad. Green is, we got some salt there but the pink, the orange, black, that's really bad. White is good. So what we did is we planted alfalfa here. I think it was actually 60 feet wide and then the rest of the area, I planted with beardless wild rye, tall wheat grass and AC salt lander. And so from 2014, we're here, to 2017, we're in here. We still have some salinity out there. There's some areas where the EC is five or more but we got no black, we got a lot more white than there so we're moving in the right direction. Up there, this is only, how big is this site? This is about two acres. Most of our saline seeps are one acre here, three acres there, something like that. We rarely have it across an entire field so with our big 60 foot drills and that's a little hard to manage but we can do it. And so in 2014, we increased our EC of zero to one by 10,000% so that's good. Our EC of five or more, we completely reduced. Four to three to four, we reduced it by 70%, four to five we reduced it by 81%. So over the course of three years, we've moved this in the right direction quite a bit but it's probably gonna be closer to five years before we can really plant something, some good cash crops out there. So we have another site, very similar, going on at the research center in Minot. Same thing going on here, we got a slough and we have a lot of salt here, not so much salt there. So where not so much salt stuff was in this blue and green area, I got a 60 or 80 foot wide strip of alfalfa planted. From that way to the Northwest, that's all AC salt land or tall wheat grass, that sort of stuff. And from 2013 to 2017, our white areas, we've greatly improved this area. I don't think next year but the year after, we're gonna start trying some production agriculture on there and monitor the salinity and cover crops, that sort of stuff afterwards. So our five plus, we reduce quite a bit and we increase the EC of the lower levels where we can get most of our crops to grow a lot better. So like I said, cropping systems can fix the saline areas. What I have here are two soils that I collected on the same day from the same spot at the research center. The one on the left hasn't had anything to grow. The one on the right, I've had barley planted in it. You can't see the white stuff right now because it's moist so it's dissolved in the soil solution. If we let it sit for a couple of days and it evaporates, it'll turn paper white. So the only difference between this is that this one had barley. Every couple of days, I take a cup of water, pour some on it, keep it saturated. We'll fire up the probe. And when I started, the EC of this was somewhere around four and a half. I don't know if you wanna zoom in on the number or not. Okay. But the EC here, I don't know if nobody can see it, is right around one. So we'd multiply this number by two because this is close to that one-to-one test. And our EC is about two. So we can grow most of our crops here. Gotta make sure if I take a swig of water, I know which one to not take a drink out of. But Graniboy said a little dirt never hurt anybody. And so the EC here is now, it's moving a little bit. 5.3, so we multiply that by two. It's somewhere 10 and a half, something like that. The only difference between these two is that we had something growing. Now just because you get something planted there, doesn't mean the EC's gonna disappear, or the salt's gonna disappear. It takes leaching events. You gotta have snow, you gotta have rain in order to leach those salts down. So, here's a site that we have in Carrington. Keep your eye on that tree because there's a couple other pictures referring to that. We got a big white area out there. And this is from 2009 when we first started managing this property. Here's 2012. Here's an aerial photo. We got a two-headed monster going on here. We have a recharge area here, discharge area here, but we got this chunk of white stuff going parallel along the road. So we have ditch effect salinization. What we ended up doing is we planted, we're evaluating salinity tolerances of different cover crops, different alfalfa's, that sort of thing. So we're using the moisture up here before it gets down there. And that's one of the key points with managing salinity. That white area, I know that's where the yield monitor drops to nothing and nothing's really growing out there, but you gotta manage the water up here before it gets down there. And so, this is July of 2010, right after we started managing this. 2012, that white area's gotten a lot smaller. This was a saline area somewhere around nine acres. I went and varished it before we started doing anything to it and the EC was 22, something like that. So, close to paper white. August 2012, we've shrunk that down quite a bit three years later. Here's May 2014, that's probably an eroded knob, but you can hardly see any salinity out there. I haven't seen where the numbers are right now. Two years ago, last time I saw it, we took that nine acres, nine acres, shrunk it down to about three acres and the highest that you see at that point was about eight. So when it comes to these wetland areas, you can plant alfalfa along it, around it to act as a border wall, so it's gonna prevent that lateral movement of the water. Grasses in those really saline areas. And the same thing with the ditch effect salinization. Along the road where it isn't so salty, plant the alfalfa where it's really salty, plant those salt-tolerant grasses. Maybe you wanna look at cover crops planting in those areas. Yes, sir. If you take forage off with that, does that help to remove some of the salt? A little, but it's gonna be minimal. Manage the water and you can manage the salt. So the biggest trick with managing these saline areas is to have the soil profile dry going into the winter. Most of our leaching happens during the spring snow melts. So if that soil profile is dry, it's gonna encourage the leaching and that downward movement and the translocation of the salts. With tillage, we... I'm hitting buttons faster than I can speak. With tillage, we break up the macro pores from our decayed plant roots so that slows down the leaching. We break up our soil structure so the water has a tendency to pond and not infiltrate. And so that slows down this remediation process. And drain tile absolutely works. It has its place. It can be pretty costly. Here's some work done by Eggvice. This is over by Grand Fork. Straight north of Fargo, about 60, 70 miles in the red is from 2002. Y axis, we have the EC, X axis. Those are just GPS locations. They went out to these same sites year after year and measured the salinity. So in 2002, they had the salinity up here. Over the course of nine years, they finally got the salinity down to a good level. So tile works, but just because there's a pipe in the ground doesn't mean the salt's gonna disappear. You still need those leaching events to leach that salt away. Miner's another thing that works. We did a little bit of work at Carrington on it. We put different levels of compost anywhere from 13 to 45 tons down. And we looked at germination, like I said, some of these areas have a tendency to flood out so we didn't have yield data, but we did stand counts. And we didn't see an improvement of our amendments with the germination of the plant. So we think we made that seed bed a little bit more habitable and improved the growth of the germination of those plants. But I don't have the control here because like nothing came up in there. So these different levels were adequate. Once you got to 45 tons, probably putting down too much nitrogen or phosphorus anyways, but we saw a good response with 10, 20 tons. So in summary, salinity is caused by excess water that brings salts into the root zone. Salinity management, it comes down to water management. If you manage your water, you'll manage the salts. Salts move up with the water and they're gonna move down with the water. We gotta think about the landscapes. I know we're worried about those white spots, but where it's that white, we have little options of what we can do there. If we can manage the water higher along that landscape, we can affect that lower wetter area more effectively. Tillage and crops are gonna manage water. However, evaporation, that's your conveyor belt that brings salts to the surface. We got all sorts of slews that get turned over in the fall up in North Dakota and you can just watch that white halo expand year after year because they got excessive evaporation. And crops are gonna utilize more water than tillage and have greater benefits from the soil. The thing about salinity management, it's a lot like planting a tree. The best day to do it was yesterday because if you don't manage that salinity today, it's probably gonna be worse tomorrow, worse the day after, and so on. And stay on top of your EC. Once you manage one of these areas and you have it relatively fixed and you start going back to your normal crop rotations, keep testing the salinity. Just because it isn't white doesn't mean there isn't a problem. And if you catch it before the salt comes back, you have a lot more options and a lot faster time frame to manage these areas. And that's it for today's video. Thank you so much for watching. I'll see you in the next video. Bye.