 Hi, my name is Melanie Stock and I'm a PhD student in soil science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I'm studying wintertime manure management. And so we're specifically looking at liquid dairy manure. Most small farms apply manure to the landscape as a method of disposal year round. And so there's concerns about phosphorus losses in the runoff because when manure is applied to the field in the winter, the ground is frozen. So it can't be incorporated. And oftentimes it's applied right on top of snowpack. And so upon melt in the spring, there's concern about nutrient transport. And so what we are testing here are actually very basic farming practices that we know relatively little about. So we're testing the effect of tillage, no-till versus a conventional chisel plow, as well as just the timing of those applications. So end of November, early December applications are quite common for farmers. And then also towards the end of January. And so we're looking at how those just little differences can impact phosphorus losses in the runoff. It looks like we have 10 plots, but there's actually two plots per area of corn. So this is one pair of plots. And if we walk down further, it might be a little bit more obvious. But we're growing corn for silage, just like a typical dairy farm would likely grow. This summer has been our big installation year. So we had excavators out here, trenchers, edgers, bobcats, because we had a lot of instrumentation to install deep into the ground, as well as for collecting our runoff at the surface. The water gets funneled into the PVC pipe, and then it enters this box. And so there's six five-gallon buckets here, three per plot. And what happens is each of these buckets is on a triangle that has to be perfectly level. And so as this first bucket fills, one-twenty-fourth of the water, there's 24 of these little triangles cut, one-twenty-fourth enters the second bucket, and then so forth. So another one-twenty-fourth enters the third bucket. So we can track a 15 centimeter melt event, which is quite a large event. These aren't, right now we're refurbishing them. So there's another bridge that empties right in. But one of the very novel things that we're working on here is that this will allow us to calculate the total volume of the event. But we really want to know the flow rate. When does the event begin? When does it end? And how fast is the water moving? So I have here a load cell, which I placed under one of the feet of the triangle. And so it's just, all it is is just sensing a change in mass. And so that allows me to know the flow rate. It's actually measuring one-third of the total mass of the bucket. And so it's a relatively simple method. The word I've been working on is there's a bit of electronic noise in the data. And so we're working to kind of automate the correction for that. Each pair of plots will have a data logger. That's 10 data loggers to control our instrumentation. Our weather station has a data logger. And then we're actually looking at Arduino's to control these. Have you heard of Arduino's? They're these little circuit boards. They're about $25. And they were invented so that anyone can use them. For me, there's been a bit of a learning curve. You have to know how to program a little bit. But it'll read. You can program it to read this value.