 My name is Laurie Chahachik. I'm a professor of soil science at NDSU working in soil management, soil fertility, soil chemistry. What we're going to talk about today is something that is of interest to a lot of growers, particularly in the eastern part of the state, and that is evaluating our soils for the suitability for drainage. Tile drainage has been increasing throughout a lot of parts of North Dakota because we've got issues where we've had too much water, we've got water standing on the soil, it doesn't run off, our landscapes are pretty flat, so we end up with times problems with areas of field flooding out or standing water and then we also get stuck with our equipment and that becomes a problem. Now the reason we drain soils is to reduce the amount of excess water in the soil profile and part of the problem is that we have a fairly flat landscape. I think we all know what a landscape is, that's the curvature of the earth at the hills and valleys and this sort of thing, but one thing we don't always see is there's another landscape and that's what we would call the hydrological landscape or the subsurface water table landscape. Water does move from higher areas to lower areas, but a lot of times when we see a wet area in the field it's not drying out, it may not be drainage, it may be that that water is actually the top of the water table. Now an area where tile drainage is very useful and that is to remove excess water. We've got some problem soils, we've got three different types of soils that we find. We've got saline soils, these are soils that are affected with salts and this is usually shown by white crust on the surface when they're dry. We've got other soils that are sodic soils, these are affected with sodium in this, the high amount of sodium causes the soils dispersed, so either they're very greasy and slick when wet or they're hard like concrete when they're dry. They do not allow water to move through there. Saline soils well because the salinity keeps the soil structure intact, keeps it flocculated, we call it flocculation, and so water can move through the salt affected with salt, but sodium we can't. We've got another type of salts and these are affected with both sodium and salts. Many times we can drain the sodium, the saline sodic soils fairly readily, but once you drain it and remove the salts then they harden up again and it affects our drainage. One of the things that we would like to do before we put in a tile drain, there are some other issues out here in the soils, but before we put in tile drains it would be nice to know what these soils are like and if there are some things in the salt profile between where the tile drain is and the soil surface and many times we don't see these from the soil surface. Oftentimes we have these areas and fields that are wet and they stay wet all year long. Again like I mentioned it's probably the water table. Sometimes it could be a sodium layer underneath the surface. We do get plants growing on these soils sometimes, but the water just won't drain through them and we have worked with some examples like that at the Langdon Research Extension Center where water will pond on the surface but it will not go through even with tile drainage in there. Another problem that we have in some of the areas particularly particularly along the edges of the the Red River Valley and that is we've got soils that are layered. We've got and these layers are caused by the level of the water in the lake either rising or dropping over many many years. When the lakes were high we would have deposits of clay because clay particles are very small and water flows in drainage water from the melting glaciers would flow in. The the sands would drop out therefore we've got the sandhills in southeastern North Dakota and the Cheyenne Delta but then we also have these clays that would get suspended and go out into the lake and over time they would settle out. So you've got zones that are real sandy. Again if the lake dropped and a lot of water came in fast then it would bring in sand. So we've got layers of sand and clay and and sometimes if we put a tile line underneath those layers of clay we are not able to move water through those clay layers especially if they're sodic and there's some sodic soils in the valley here there's some series like X-Line is one of the series that a lot of times has these zones in there and they're very sodic so when they wet up the the the the sodium causes the soils to swell and it just seals them off. I've seen a tiled field with soils like this after a four inch rain with the the discharge pumps pumping madly but a week later there's still water standing on the soil surface because the water could not move through that those those clay layers to form or to to to get to the tiled line and get drained and the water was pumped was coming out from somewhere else underneath those clay layers. We do have a tool that's really kind of nice it's called a WebSol survey it's a website that's located with the USC NRCS website where you can go in there and find on the main page find tab or a menu that says soils click on the soils you'll come up with the soils page you'll get some other information there and there's a green button there says WebSol survey you click on that thing and you log into the WebSol survey the nice thing about this is there's a tremendous amount of all kinds of information WebSol survey. Next thing you do you find your area your field that you're interested in and there's a number of different menu items there I like to use where the item where you can enter in your section Township and Range for the field in North Dakota and when you do that it will bring up that section and then you can move to another part of the menu where you can click on a tab that that allows you to draw a box around that field or we call it the area of interest that area of interest will will delineate the area that you're interested in and it will bring up a soils map of that area now embedded in the soils map is all kinds of information about those soils and there are some other tabs at the top one of them is whether there's several one of them is called the soil data explorer where you can get into and look at a lot of different properties of these soils and under there there's another set of tabs and what you might want to look at is soil properties and qualities you get another menu and there's a whole bunch of different chemical and physical properties that you can log into the one thing you're most likely or the most useful is something called the sodium adsorption value sodium adsorption value gives you a an indication of of the sodicity of these soils and the nice thing about this is you can look at different layers in the soil I like to go foot by foot by foot or you can take a whole profile four foot profile and look at what the SAR is and what it does it brings up a map of that field uh showing us SAR you can also go into the interpretive data that comes with it there are tables several tables and and there are tables in there they'll show you the suitability for drainage which are are ranked on a scale of zero to one if if your soils are closer to zero they're very suitable for drainage if they're closer to one then they might have some serious limitations and and and so these will give you an idea of whether you're you're going to have a problem with these fields one nice thing is is that you can sort of get an idea of the suitability of these soils and we're in the process of revising a publication SF 1617 uh called evaluating soils for suitability for tile drainage there are some tables in there listing the soil type soil series that we know are sodic and those that may be sodic and this also gives you an indication of potential problems most of the time tile installers will look at the texture and they may look at the depth but they don't look at some of these chemical properties and so they may it may seem that these soils are suitable for drainage but these properties you can't see in there the chemical properties are going to influence how well or how useful the drainage will be so uh from from from this data then you've got some reason to or some basis to make a decision whether it's worth spending money to to reduce or to to drain your soils the other thing is i'm going to leave you that draining saline soils is not a problem uh and and we can we can look at those things too but it's really the sodium that causes the problem sodium and unseen layers of uh different textures within that soil profile if you have a saw that looks like a problem get a soil scientist out there pull a few cores and take a look at the profile you can even run some soil tests run some salinity and sodium tests on them it will give you an idea to confirm whether you've got it or not the one thing you've got to remember is that soil surveys are generalized and there may be areas as large as five acres within that area within a soil type there may be a different soil type and and some of these inclusions that as we call them could have sodium in them or they may not and so if you are able to sort of identify uh you know the soil is what is out there or there's a lot of variability out there then you can just look at some other thing and find some other considerations on how to manage these soils uh i've given you some ideas on on some tools to use that are available uh the the web source survey is a very powerful tool because all sorts of things that you can use it for uh suitability for tree plantings building sites there's a lot of data in there and and uh all of this is based on soils that have been collected around the state over time and analyzed in detail to look at what their actual physical and chemical characteristics are and then they're linked to the various soil uh soil series within the surveys and and and you can get a generalization of of how uh soils will be productive or how useful they will be or if you're going to have some limitations on your use thank you