 Thank you for joining our second session of the North Dakota Reclamation Webinar Series. Today we're going to be talking about pipeline rec- reclamation, just a few housekeeping items before we start. I'm Miranda Meehan, I'm a livestock environmental stewardship specialist with NDSU Extension and I also do some research within the area of reclamation. And I'm part of the North Dakota Reclamation Conference Planning Committee as well as Natalie West who is also one of our panelists, Brenda Schladweiler with BKS Environmental, one of our other panelists, Poby Stroll with Dickinson State, Carl Rockman with the North Dakota Department of Environmental Quality. Our next webinar is going to be March 17th and we are going to be talking about innovative approaches to reclamation. Today we'll be joined by Erin DeGioia with Pilgrim Construction Company and then Nicholas Burkheimer who is a master's student at North Dakota State University and Nicholas is going to be our first speaker this morning. Nicholas is a graduate student in the natural resource management program who is currently working on his master's degree in soil science under the direction of Dr. Tom DeSutter. He has spent the last two years, two summers in Williston, North Dakota working at the Williston Research Extension Center to determine efficient pipeline reclamation strategies for farmers in the Botkin Free Forks region and following the completion of his master's he plans to continue to apply and expand his reclamation knowledge to help develop the best strategies for producers and oil and natural gas companies alike. Awesome, Brenda. Thank you so much for that introduction. So with that let's just hop right into it. So today my colleague Erin and I are going to be talking about pipeline reclamation and assessing pathways to restoring disturbed soil properties. So what I think is a really important thing to start this conversation with is what happens to our soil whenever we get into a pipeline reclamation setting. So I love starting this topic off by exploring it with a model soil. So here we have our model soil profile that you'd commonly see in the Botkin region. Note that we have our shallow organic matter rich a-horizon which is what's so critical to agricultural production within the region. It's loaded with organic matter, nutrients, and it's relatively porous so that plants can easily move through it and are able to access those nutrients in water. Below that, however, we have our subsoil, our B and C horizons, which are enriched with clays, salts, and carbonates. All of these have properties within a pipeline reclamation setting that can lead to reduced soil fertility. Salt causes osmotic stresses on plants which cause them to wilt. This increased soil pH which reduces the availability of certain plant nutrients to plants. And then clays, since they are the smallest soil particle, they end up being more easily compacted. So when we're dealing with the reclamation setting or we have all this heavy machinery, we end up getting a lot of soil compaction whenever we get clays introduced into the topsoil horizons. So now whenever we get into our disturbance, as we know we take our topsoil, we scrape that off the right of way and it's stored adjacent to the right of way. So it's excavated from the pipeline trench until the pipeline is installed. And then we repack subsoil on top of the pipeline trench and we respread our topsoil over the right of way area until we, and then ultimately we get into our reclamation phase. Now what happens here is that we take our undisturbed profile and we end up with a lot of soil mixing like you see here. Now as you can see, our topsoil layer is a lot less dark than it was originally. Our organic matter has been diluted now that we've introduced clay salts and carbonates from the subsoil into the topsoil. So not only is it harder for plants to get at that critical organic matter, but there's also these other factors at play in the topsoil that lead to decreased fertility like we see here. It's very important to know that this doesn't have to be the case within every reclamation setting. If before we go in for a construction project and we're able to map out the topsoil and see how that varies in depth over the course of our project and that we're able to take extra care and caution in scraping our topsoil, storing it properly, and then respreading it, we're able to mitigate the amount of soil mixing that we have within the right of way setting. It's important to note that this isn't our only big problem. I'm going to introduce the topic of soil compaction here. Aaron's going to talk about that a little bit more, but I think this is a really good time to start talking about this. So a big way that we measure soil compaction in these settings is to look at soil penetration resistance, which is measured in the amount of pressure and pounds per square inch it takes to break the soil and thus continue to move through the soil profile. Now once you hit a PSI of about 300, plants really aren't able to break through the soil anymore, and thus they stop being able to expand and they stop being able to grow. Now what we're seeing here is penetration resistance data taken down to 20 inches at a pipeline right of way and well-established on our research site. You can see the orange line for our undisturbed. That hits about 300 PSI, but then it goes back down again and it doesn't quite break 300 PSI, so we're still seeing a pretty full soil profile that our plants are able to grow in. However, on the right of way with the roadway in the pipeline, we're breaking that at about three inches. So when you think about that, we're technically only have about three inches of that top soil that we're working with in terms of what plants are able to access. So that's an idea of how you can measure it and feel it again with a cone penetrometer is what we used here. But let's see what that actually looks like. So these pictures were taken at our research site by Samantha Crote, and you can see our three big areas that we have. I want you to first look at the very top above the compacted layer. You can see that the soil looks relatively loose and everything is kind of formed in soil aggregates, which make it really easy for plants to move between those aggregates and for water to be able to be transferred in there. Next the native soil structure, we have this strong prismatic structure. It's able to support our soil profile as well as you can imagine water and nutrients moving across the edges of that very easily. But in the middle, everything just looks smushed. Everything has been kind of compacted into one solid mass where we lose that pore space and we're not able to break that. What you're looking at here that compacted layer, that's the exposed subsoil that we had in our right of way. So all of our respread topsoil was put on top of that, but then where we had our heavy vehicle traffic, that's where we see the most of our soil compaction. At a close look, you can see here our root growth is essentially stopping right there at that level, and then we really aren't able to get much fertility out of that. As you can see in this picture, where we compare our undisturbed roadway and pipeline sites, our undisturbed sites do relatively well. The roadway just is not able to establish at all. And the pipeline, it's doing better, but we're still seeing that effect of that reduced fertility. So if we get into what our barriers to a proper reclamation are, we know that we need to restore our soil and nutrients to the topsoil. We need to alleviate soil compaction, and we need to consider what methods we're going to be using what's efficient. First off, we need to consider what methods we're able to implement where we don't have to keep going to a site and keep applying reclamation amendments. And we also need to consider how important the effect of time is. There have been studies that have been shown with ample time, ample rainfall, you're able to get back to your undisturbed or your pre-reclam or your pre-pipeline installation levels of fertility within the first couple of years. So if things return naturally, that could be something that, you know, maybe we don't have to go through this big reclamation process. But there's also something to think about is what do farmers have at their disposal? So a lot of these goals that we're looking at, especially with managing soil nutrients and getting those to a sustainable place, we've been seeing a lot of that within the field of agriculture recently as it is. We've been having issues with conventional tillage has been leading to reduced fertility. Over time, certain unsustainable cropping systems have led to decreased fertility. So farmers are trying to consider, OK, how can we have more sustainable cropping systems? So now we're going to start looking at what are some more sustainable crops we've been seeing implemented recently that maybe we can apply in these settings to restore these soil properties without interrupting the farmers operations. And the first one is field pay. It's a dry land cash crop. And to tell you what dry land means dry land means it's an agro ecosystem where we don't apply water outside from precipitation. So no irrigation, no center pivots. It's all just coming from rain. Now, the reason why peas are pretty successful is that they have a pretty low water requirement. They're not very big and they're able to succeed in these regions without having a ton of water, which is also important because you think about compacted settings. There may not be as much of an ability to transmit soil water. Additionally, and probably most importantly, is that they can fix atmospheric nitrogen. They form symbiotic relationships with resomatous bacteria on their roots and they're able to take atmospheric nitrogen and convert it to a form that's plant available, which helps us start to rebuild those soil nutrients that we lost with our organic matter dilution. Additionally, the pea residue. So everything that you see in this picture, that's not the pea pod, the stems and the leaves and the flowers. When those are returned to the soil, they have a chemical properties or sorry, a chemical makeup such that they are very easily returned to the soil and mineralized into a plant usable form. So we're getting those nutrients back into the soil very quickly, as opposed to having those stored up in like a weak stubble or a corn stubble that's not going to mineralize as well over time. Now that kind of solves our nutrient problems. Looking more at compaction issues, we can turn to something like safflower, which again is a dry land oil seed crop. What's important about this is that it has a taproot system. So as opposed to having numerous fruits which kind of spread through the soil to look for water and nutrients, it invests heavily in one strong root that kind of goes straight down. Think of it like a carrot or a radish root. And so what that helps safflower able to do is that it's more resistant to compaction. It can break through those layers. It can also access soil nutrients and soil water that other plants maybe wouldn't be able to access, which helps it be a little more drought resistant, which again is great in regions like this. Those are cash crops we're looking at. Now we can consider a cover crop mix. Now a cover crop mix isn't really a cash crop. It's a cropping strategy that's meant to manage soil nutrients and soil water. What it is, it's a mix of crops that are able to grow well so we can see stuff like barley or sorghum. It has crops like radishes that can fight compaction with those strong taproots. And then those nitrogen-fixing crops like peas and veggies, which are able to fix that atmospheric nitrogen, have that easily mineralizable residue and then return all those nutrients to the soil. Additionally, by having a crop planted over the soil, you're going to reduce the amount of evaporation and water loss that you're going to have so you can store water for future plants. It's important, remember, that for most cover crops at the end of the season, you're not going to be harvesting it. You're going to be terminating the crops and returning that residue to the soil and then kind of relying on the next year. So it's sort of like a long-term strategy of like, okay, we're not going to make money this year, but by having this management strategy, we're going to have really good yields next year. So remember that when we plant these, the farmer's not making money. So if these quite don't quite pan out, it might not be the best idea, but if these can get us back to a initial undisturbed setting quickly, that'd be fantastic. So now what we're going to do is we're going to look at our experiment where we take, where we look at these three crops, integrate them into cropping sequences and test the orders of planting them to see what effect they have on pipeline reclamation. So for our study, we had a six-year reclamation study at the Williston Research Extension Center. It started in 2015 when a three-foot diameter water pipeline was installed under about six acres of agricultural land and we identified three main undisturbance regimes. We had our traditional no-till undisturbed agro-ecosystem at the site. We had the roadway which you can see here on the right behind the truck and then we had our pipeline trench. And so on these, we planted these five different cropping sequences. Look at the first four years and you'll see what these cropping sequences entail. For treatment one, we had continuous Durham. This is our no-action treatment. Going back to that idea of, well, what if we don't do anything and things can restore themselves over time? In treatments two and three, we tested the different orders of planting peas in barley, sorry, peas in sapphire with barley and Durham in between. Again, to see what happens whenever we can put that end back in the soil and if sapphire can fight that soil compaction. And then additionally, finally, for treatments four and five, we have our cover crop mix planted at Durham and then we tested different timings of planting those. In the years 2019 and 2020, we did our response testing. So we planted all plots in Durham in 2019 and all plots in sapphire in 2020 to kind of gauge the response and see across all plots, how did these sequences do? What ended up being the best? What ended up not working or what ended up dead working? So now what I think is important again, when we think about reclamation, we get back to talking about baselines and what happened. So let's assess what our baseline was in this study. You can see initially in 2015, we saw significant losses in Durham, the peas and the cover crop mix between the disturbed and the undisturbed sites. The greatest losses of which were on peas, which were experiencing between 75 and 85% yield losses between the disturbed and the undisturbed sites. They did not take well to this disturbance action. And a lot of that is due to the soil mixing as well as the compacted environment on the roadway. What I find interesting is that the least yield reduction we saw initially was Durham. Durham was able to produce significantly greater yields on the pipeline than the roadway. It was still less than the undisturbed, but when we're thinking about yield losses that are this significant, if year one we can already start to see, okay, this isn't doing so bad, that might be a decent strategy long-term. What this kind of tells us is that initially, compaction is more of an issue than soil mixing is for Durham productivity-wise. The cover crop mix was doing pretty much the same across disturbance sites. A lot of that you can equate to, again, we have a wide variety of crops. Some of those will do better than others. And so we're able to, they're able to find niches where they're able to take off and do well. So that's kind of our initial thoughts. Roadway and the cover crop mixes were doing, roadway, Durham and the cover crop mixes were doing at a similar level. Durham on the pipeline was the best and peas overall were the worst. Now let's take a look over the whole study to get kind of a bird's-eye view as to what was happening. So the data that you're seeing here is that we're taking the yields from each treatment within each year on the pipeline and comparing those to the undisturbed to see what's happening over time. Now I want you to start by following the red line. That's our no-action continuous cropping sequence of Durham. You can see year one, we're seeing reduced yields and it gets kind of better year two. By years three and four in 2017 and 2018, we're getting back up to the level of the undisturbed if not passing it, but then we drop down again. What's happening in 2017 and 2018 is that water becomes a big factor. In 2017 at the site, we had a significant drought. And in 2018, we had massive rain effects. So what we end up is our two kind of boundary conditions for water. We have no water and we have too much water. And what that does is that those kind of end up nullifying the effects at least with this treatment of our disturbance sites. And so that's kind of the effect that you're seeing there. What I think is most important is that you look at 2019 and 2020, we're hovering around that 80% mark, which we found that overall between the roadway and the pipeline, compared to the undisturbed, they were producing approximately 80% of the yields on the disturbed sites to the undisturbed in the last two years of our study. So what that tells us is that our no-action response is that we're gonna get back to that 80%. Not that, we're doing nothing, but can we do better? You can see here by the end of the study, our cover crop sequences ended up approaching about that same point. Yes, there are some points in the study where they're doing fantastically. Actually what you're seeing here, those big peaks are when we planted the cover crop mix. But following that, they still did pretty well. They were still looking at about 100% or about online of where the undisturbed was. But by the end of the study, the nutrients that were added back to the soil from the cover crop mix had kind of leveled out. And things that kind of resettled down to a similar level to the Durham plots. What I think is interesting is you look at our two green lines. The aqua, the more aqua marine line, that is our first year of pea planting, which as you can see did a fissure year one. But by the end, it ended up producing on the same level as if not a greater level than the undisturbed. And then our first year of barley planting into peas, which did well here one, and then just could not catch up after that. What we think is happening here is again, it's an early effect of that pea residue. You're seeing that while we did have badgie pea yields, we did put N2 back in the soil mill and we did add that crop residue, which was able to be easily mineralized and get the soil back to a level of productivity. You can even see that by year two, our aqua marine first year pea planting, that's getting into a point where we're getting back to that 80% level that we're getting by the end of the experiment. So we're starting to get to that reclamation level already. Now, when you look at the barley, if you think about barley, it's more of a nutrient exporter of a crop. It's gonna take up those soil nutrients and remove them from the system. And then the residue that it leaves over is gonna mineralize gradually over time and it's gonna kind of offset the soil nutrient supplies. So kind of what we think that we're seeing here is that that initial trying to mess with things in that order, ultimately just ended up producing fertility over time in this setting, unfortunately. Whereas if we take that loss year one with our pea planting over time, we're gonna start to see big returns. It's a very similar story to the roadway. What I think is really interesting is if you look at years 2019 and 2020, we didn't get back to that, none of our treatments got back to the full reclamation site. This kind of tells us that, okay, maybe safflower wasn't as good as brick and compaction as we thought it was. We didn't get back to 100%. We're getting above 90%, which is great, but we never got back to that full reclamation status, kind of telling us that there might still be some work that needs to be done here over time. I think what's also interesting now, so that's kind of the big story of the roadway, a lot of similar things to the pipeline, but we still have some problems to deal with. Now, I think a great way to kind of end this is that we look at our final results from our final year when we planted safflower. You can see that the only treatment that was able to fully homogenize between all disturbances was the first year pea planting into barley. The letters that you're seeing, by the way, in those columns, represent significant differences between disturbances within each treatment. So those three A's that you're seeing down for the pea to barley, that means that none of those yields were significantly different from each other, representing a full reclamation. Now, where we are seeing differences, significant differences between the undisturbed and both disturbed sites, are first year barley planting into pea and first year Durham planting into the cover crop sequence. This kind of tells us that whenever you're getting this sort of reclamation strategy, you don't want to wait. You want to get right in there and you want to start planting your amendments immediately. Even when we had those second year plantings of these crops that were able to be able to help us out, things were kind of thrown off initially by that barley and Durham planting so that we couldn't get back to that level ultimately. What I think is interesting, too, is that if you look at our control treatment, remember in year one when we had our pipeline was doing significantly better than the roadway? Well, now that's flip flop, the roadway's doing better than the pipeline. Something to think about, too, is that pipeline settling, I think, is an interesting issue to think about here. In 2018, we had a subsidence occur on the pipeline where we ended up about having a meter wide section subsiding about two to three feet in certain parts. But overall, the soil just kind of slumped in on itself. You can think about the roadway setting. You have that compaction level that you're going to be feeling with throughout the course of your reclamation. The pipeline is a more dynamic system and that is going to be settling over time. So you do have those effects of trying to reclaim soil nutrients, trying to get those back to a good level, but you're still dealing with this kind of more dynamic system as a pair of those of the roadway. And that's kind of what we can equate to what's happening here, is that the roadway nutrient cycling might be a little bit more back in place, but the pipeline physical soil properties really just kind of settled out there at the very end. So to kind of wrap up this portion of my talk, I think the biggest takeaway is, is that we do have methods for using certain crops to reclaim lost yields in a pipeline reclamation setting. And that it's really important to initially get those planted in as soon as possible. You might take an initial yield loss, but that's going to be made up with over time. And also I think the last important takeaway is that in this setting, you can get back to a reasonable level of yield over time without applying any treatment. So that's also another manufacturer that you need to consider. So I'd like to thank Miranda now for inviting me on to talk and I'd love to pass it on to Erin now, who's going to take us into a really deep and fascinating talk about soil compaction and what that looks like and I'll leave that in this system. And so as Erin is getting the slides up, Erin is a director of environmental solutions for Pilgrim Construction. He has over 20 years of consulting experience. He is a licensed professional soils classifier in both North Dakota and Colorado. He received his bachelor's and master's from Kansas State University. And Erin has helped reclaim over a million acres of drastically disturbed land in the US and is one of the leading soil science consultants in the reclamation field. He has been asked to be part of many innovative reclamation projects, including thousands of miles of pipeline right-of-ways. And so he has a unique understanding of reclamation vegetation and stormwater techniques that increase reclamation success and ultimately decrease soil erosion. Erin's reclamation and stormwater practices have been designed to be constructable, effective and need minimal maintenance. And with that, I'll turn it over to Erin. Thank you, Miranda. Thank you, Nick, for the great intro into what I'm about ready to talk to. Nick and I discussed this about a week ago and we're amazed at how close what I see in practice. He's finding it in the field at the same time, but one of the main components of any reclamation program, as Nick alluded to, is this compaction effect. We're constructing these right-of-ways and oftentimes not ideal conditions, as you can see in the picture, and causing this soil compaction. But the question is not if we're causing it or not causing it, we kind of know we are. It's how do we fix it? And to start to begin to understand that, we have to understand the factors that are affecting compaction. And those are being soil type, soil moisture, vehicle weight type. Everyone considers that a dozer is the worst machine to be out there. Well, when you look at a whole pipeline construction process, there are many factors out there. Those including the stringing trucks, which are probably the worst, but also just vehicle traffic, the small trucks that continually run up and down the pipeline right away. So all those factors play into this. And also we have to think about what happens after construction's ended. I've talked to many farmers that the first thing they wanna do is go put manure on the site, get the honey wagon out, start driving it over. If you look at the weight of a manure spreader or a honey wagon per axle, it's much worse than some of the biggest equipment that's used on the right way. So being able to hold that off until later on when the soil has more structural strength is the better way to do that. So not just looking at construction only, but also farmers trying to help themselves and help the reclamation process can sometimes hurt themselves. And they have to understand that this is a process and that it takes time. And starting with some situations over the others is not always going to work in the favor of everyone. But managing construction compaction, looking at when we're operating, looking at what vehicles are out there at certain times, weather conditions is critical. And that needs to be based on the soil type, soil structure, soil textural classes at the same time. All soils can compact. Some are just easier to compact. Others are easier to decompact. So all that matters. So compaction, decompaction. We have to remember that 80% of any compaction occurs on the first pass of the equipment. So it's not so much the repeated traffic, but it's getting, it's that traffic at the wrong time is going to put that compaction into the system. And once it's in there, now we have to deal with it. So anyone saying, well, we only drove on it once. So it's probably not compacted. That's probably an incorrect statement. And we still need to be worried about compaction on the sites. Some severity of compaction increases with increased traffic. Yeah, the first pass is the worst, but continual passes have impacts too. Increased equipment size. And this is not just the total weight of the piece of equipment, but the axle weight of that or the PSI that's being applied to the soil surface is going to dictate how deep the compaction goes, but also how much compaction is there. Soil moisture, as I said before, we would love to stop construction every time it rains. But that's really not feasible in these situations. So we have to understand when that soil moisture is going to occur, how deep, how significant that is in terms of compaction. And then as always, if you are not worried about site-specific conditions and looking at this by a track by track parcel by parcel basis, you will not know what's going on on your piece of property or you're right away at any point in time. So without site-specific information, you can't find the causation, the depth and what the reclamation plan needs to be to extract that compaction out of the soil. And it must be measured on every parcel just because one parcel has compaction doesn't mean the other one's going to have the same compaction in the same places. Construction changes, even though it's the same process, based on soil moisture, soil type, the equipment used and when that equipment's used in that moisture regime. And then moderate compaction, this statement's very important, but moderate compaction below 16 inches is more severe or more problematic than severe compaction in the upper 16 inches. People question why I say this all the time. And the reason is, is that normal agricultural equipment that we can use after the construction and get to 16, 18 inches and break up that compaction, roots are more active in that top 16 inches so we can break up that compaction, begin to rebuild that soil, profile the soil structure. Once you're below 16 inches, you have to bring in a whole different set of equipment that most landowners, most construction companies do not have. And then you have to find those deep-rooted crops like Nick pointed out, the safflows, the turnips, the radishes to go down and keep that soil stabilized until structure can be redeveloped. So always be concerned, not only about the severity of it, but where it is in that soil profile on that. Here's a couple of pictures I have of right-aways. They all are, both of these pictures are compacted soil right-aways, but they're illustrating that compaction in different manners. On this one, we're looking at, we have a lower right-away so that soil is compressed. It's a little bit lower. We are getting ponding water, ruining crops, having trouble growing crops in that, but it's more of excessive water because of all the drainage and no output for that water. On the second picture here, you're looking at an alfalfa field that you can see right where the right-away is because on this field, it's droughty. It's too, the crop cannot get any moisture in here. There's no depression of the right-away, so it's even, and on this right-away, I love to tell the story. I went out, I dug a pit on right-away, and I was literally chipping the soil out of the hole I was trying to do, and trying is probably the best word there. Well, then I have to go take my off-right-away sample, expecting hard soil again, stepped on the shovel, and I literally fell over on my face. That shovel went clear to depth with one press. I just went tumbling, but that's the severity of compaction that we have here, is one you could not hardly get it out of the ground. The other one was just mellow and nice, kind of like what you'd expect from an alfalfa field. And these are pictures of the plant growth there, very similar to what Nicholas was showing earlier, where on the right-hand side, you see that alfalfa plant just sending lateral feeder roots out. It hits that compaction at six, eight inches, and just can't go any further. So it just starts sending roots out to the sides. On the off-right-away, which is on the left-hand side there, you see that nice deep straight tap root with some feeder roots leading off of there. But that's the difference where the off-right-away alfalfa plant was able to go to get that deep moisture, where the compacted right-of-way, that plant has to survive on the top six inches of soil. It has nothing else. So it is either flooded or it's dry, and there's no happy medium through there. So I just like showing that picture to show those signs of compaction. And any farmer, any person right-of-way agent can go out and see this. And this is a sure sign without a penetrometer, without grabbing bulk density measurements, you can look at the root systems to determine where compaction is and how deep or how severe it is on there. So again, we had very similar, I kind of laughed when I saw Nicholas's presentation, very similar graph here using the constant-rate cone penetrometer. They're great machines for determining compaction. They don't tell you exactly everything. Bulk density is a much more accurate predictor, in my opinion, but it's much more intense to gather, to get good data from, and then to be able to make management decisions. A good compaction cone penetrometer or constant-rate cone penetrometer can give you valuable information relatively inexpensively and consistently. But on this one, kind of what I wanna show here is that, again, we have our 300 line here that Nick was showing you earlier, but I've also put on 180 PSI line on here. The 180 PSI line is where you start, you can start to see different plants be susceptible to compaction. Sometimes they have less impacts depending on the root growth strategies of that plant, but we're gonna play with that 180 line here. And you can see on the spoil side of the, right away, that's where they store all the top soil, subsoil on there. We begin to see soil compaction at five inch depth goes down to 13, 15 inches, and then comes back in line with the off right away, which is the green line, which is always under 180 until you get about 25 inches below the soil surface. But then you start looking at the center line, which is hardly ever goes above the 180 PSI line. Why is that? Well, they dug that up, they've loosened it, they've taken all the compaction out, and now it's nice and loose and friable. Usually we don't see too much compaction there, as Nick was saying. A lot of times when you do see yield impacts on the center line, it's going to be, as Nick mentioned, the nutrient cycling, those nutrient issues. But then you look at the traffic side. This is where it gets hammered throughout the right away. And we start seeing high compaction readings after 15 inches all the way to depths. And people ask, why are the soil side and the compaction side different? Well, the main reason for this is you've got to remember, approximately six to nine inches of soil were removed from the soil profile, and that's where they drove. So this is really at approximately six to nine inches below the soil surface of where they drove, where on the spoil side, this compaction likely was introduced during movement of soil back onto the right away. So it starts at six and goes to about 11, 12 inches below the soil surface from where they drove. So all you have to remember where you're at on the right away. This compaction here on the spoil side is much easier to deal with once top soil is already placed, then this compaction below from the traffic side on that. And again, just this graph is just showing these differences here. So how do we manage this in a right away situation? This traffic side shows a perfect example of why we would want to deep rip that section of the right away and really the entire right away before putting top soil back on so that we can remove this compaction with normal agricultural equipment before we put top soil back on, put top soil and then see if we need to remove that compaction from putting top soil back on. So we have to worry about this as we go through there. And again, this compaction in the spoil side, the blue line is starting to repair itself. It's being able to, the root system of a normal system can take care of that. Where this on the traffic side would need some help, deep compaction, deep ripping and then a deep rooted, tap rooted crop afterwards. So now I wanna talk about decompaction tools and non-decompaction tools. Everyone thinks of a deep ripper, but also they sometimes consider a disk, a decompaction tool. Yes, a disk loosens up to top four, six inches of soil, but it's also putting that compaction back in there. And then you've got two different styles of rippers here. This is a 36 inch parabolic ripper that we've used and that was the piece of equipment we had to bring in to remove that compaction from the right away we've seen before. It's hooked onto a quad track and costs a fortune to do. Therefore, if we can use something like this, deep ripper here, before we put top soil back on, remove that compaction, put top soil back on, get the crops growing again, you're going to be far better ahead. But even if we have top soil on, we can do it. It just costs more money on that point. What is effective deep decompaction looks like? Well, first of all, we've got to lift and shatter that soil. So we want to see a wave going as we decompact. Compaction done right will not display large clods of soil. You should not be seeing a lot of soil mixing, a lot of soil being turned over. If you are, it's likely because the piece of equipment is being ran too fast. You want to run compaction equipment at one and a half to two miles an hour. Doesn't make a lot of operators happy, but that's where we get the most effective. All we're doing on the right-hand side here is bringing up clods, but then we have to bring in a disc, add more compaction, break those clods apart, and really we are not being successful. Where you see over here, much larger piece of equipment, there is no turning over on the soil. It's just lifting and shattering that soil. We also want to make sure that we don't have too wet of soil conditions. You look at the picture on the right here again, that deep ripper is not doing anything. It is slicing instead of lifting the soil. This is, you know, they're going too early. They're probably putting more compaction in there than what they're actually alleviating at this point. The other important factor to look at on the picture of the right is the deep ripper is not wider than the tractor. So without that ripper being wider than your wheelbase, you're not, you're putting compaction back in through that dual wheel there. So you want to make sure that your ripper is bigger, wider than your tractor, so that you're ripping outside of your wheelbase and you're not continually kind of alleviating compaction than on the next pass back, you're putting it back in there. And this might be for both of you actually, you can get both of your perspectives, thoughts on other variables and evaluating soil compaction rather than the penetrometer data, such as bulk density, water infiltration, et cetera. And I know Erin touched on that a little bit, but maybe you guys want to elaborate a little more. Sure, Erin, do you want to start us off on this? Yeah, I'll start. You know, there's a lot of different methods that you can use out there. The comb penetrometer, the new innovations in those devices to be able to get PSI readings every centimeter or two centimeters is just amazing. So you can get such detailed information. Yeah, it's got to be interpreted correctly because you got to know how dry the soil was, you know, all the factors that affected dryness of the soil, stoniness of the soil, multiple other parameters, but for speed, efficiency, and if looked at with a reference site next to it, you can get some valuable information there. Bulk Density's the gold standard, in my opinion, but most of my clients don't have the time or money to go out and collect the bulk density documentation. What's your opinion, Nick? I absolutely agree with you on the penetrometer resistance side in that it is a very complicated measure when you get down into the nitty gritty. However, when you want to get these measurements quickly and efficiently, you're going to be able to get a good idea of where your compaction is in your field. I'll put it in the measliest amount of effort. I do think it's interesting to look at, let's say infiltration. We did do an infiltration study using a Cornell rain simulator one summer and it was taking about an hour per sample to go in and get a proper reading about how much penetration we were getting. It's great to think about water penetration in that way and see how it's moving through your soil profile, but if you have the time for it, that's great. If not, it might not be worth it. And going back to bulk density, I think it's important that it becomes more difficult, especially whenever we have soil strength as high as we get out west, it becomes difficult with the depth to get a good bulk density sample. So you're not necessarily going to be able to get that through a compact layer or even lower than that. We struggle with that in our experiment to get a good bulk density. But again, going back to what you said, there's pros and cons for each one. It's just that penetration resistance is the quickest way to do it and get decent results. So would you consider early mowing early season to stimulate more growth of the cover crop or from my personal bias, maybe here is the consider possibly grazing that cover crop later in the sometime during that growing season, end of growing season, maybe speed up that nutrient breakdown while still leaving a little bit of residue on that site as well? For sure. So when I think about the early season, again, I'm just thinking about the early season aspect of not as familiar with grazing aspects of cover crops, but with the early season mowing, one thing that I think is important to note is that cover crops aren't always a shoe in for ensuing, aren't always, sorry, they're not always going to result in increased yields following it. You may have too much nutrient cycling to the point where you get to a point where there's excess carbon or there's excess nitrogen. You may be removing too much water from the soil. That's a big problem with cover crops. And so when I think about really stimulating that cover crop residue that we're getting, you think that we could start to maybe edge in on that situation. And again, it all comes down to a site to site considerations. If you do have those sites where it's like, and we really lost a ton of organic matter, we got to rebuild that, or maybe water is not as much of an issue in your site, that could absolutely be something that you could use in order to really get that organic matter built quickly. But it's important to take those factors, such as putting in too many nutrients back into the soil or using up too much soil water, those must be taken into consideration as well. The other thing I'd like to mention on the cover crop is don't always think that above ground biomass is your primary focus on here. In the reclamation sequence, the below ground biomass is much more important than the above ground biomass on a cover crop strategy, in my opinion. And these cover crops are designed, I mean, if you get the right cover crop next, like Nicholas did, you can have tremendous impacts with very little vegetative growth. I've seen some amazing things from them. Thank you. So just before we go to the next question, for those of you interested, that Tom put a link for more information on the penetrometer in the chat box. So looking at, we have some more questions rolling in. So how would compaction alter someone's decision, desired native vegetation community? Are there alternatives to mechanical methods, such as biological? And this is open to either of you. Sure, so from what I've seen in the literature, a lot of what you give with these disturb sites is you're welcoming an invasive species. As soon as you get that soil mixing, and as you alter the soil environment, not only do you are hampering the ability for native vegetation to grow properly, but you could be creating an environment that's ripe for an invasive species to come in. That's kind of a real broad interpretation of it, but in terms of what can happen with your vegetation community, that's a very serious issue that we get. Not to mention the fact that you might even have, there's a potential for invasive BCC to come in with the rec, with the reclamation or installation itself. Yeah, and keeping those invasive species out is critical. That's going to be, most of the times they are not well suited to form soil structure. Again, I go back to my soil scientist in me, is that I'm looking at what's going to help us build up soil structure as fast as possible. And those are those deep rooted crops, those crops with a fibrous root system. A lot of times these noxious invasive species come in and just kind of do everything that you don't want them to do. They use soil moisture, they don't have good roots, and so on and so forth. Erin, I'm going to send this one year away since you're a certified soil classifier. Are NRCS soil survey data sufficient for determining soil characteristics on a parcel by parcel basis along the right-of-way? Absolutely not. Especially in North Dakota, I've looked at so many miles of pipeline right-of-way up there. The NRCS data is awesome. It's good for getting your head wrapped around on what problems you're going to have, but it's not detailed enough to be able to tell you what impacts you're going to likely have on this section of the right-of-way or this parcel. There are, in North Dakota, the soils are so complex. It is throughout the United States, but just in North Dakota, you can have a very saline sodic soil right next to a wonderful mollusal. The impacts from construction are going to be completely different. And if you do not take the right topsoil, I'm a firm believer in you've got to take topsoil or you're never going to have successful reclamation, if you take the right amount of topsoil on those saline sodic sites, you can be successful. If you take a little bit too much, you're in big trouble and have to start from pretty awful situation. You led very well into our next question. So is salinity sodicity severe due to compaction or have you had observed any issues where that's complicated your compaction? The saline sodic situation, I've seen it from both perspectives as Nick was talking earlier, the mixing of the soil profile. So you're getting that saline sodic subsoil mixed in with your topsoil causing huge issue. But I've also seen that when we get that compaction in and it's near those areas, we'll raise that saline sodic profile up closer to the soil surface and then actually start impacting this soil. So they both have their place and that's why it's so important to do site-specific analysis instead of broad-based analysis is that you have to understand what that pipeline construction methodology is going to do to your right away. Nick, I know you probably saw some of this on your research too. We didn't see as much saline or sodic issues at our site, but it was a lot of the carbonates. I thought it was really interesting. We would have sites where we put in probes for soil water measuring and then all around the lip of them, it would just come white because we had such a level of vapor transpiration ringing of all the carbonates. But we did especially on our roadway sites, we saw a lot of those sites with high calcium carbonate values. And you can think of it too, that's just kind of, I just kind of thought of this. If you do end up incorporating those from the subsoil and then they're over the compacted layer, it's gonna be much more difficult to wash them down with the effects of water. It's like Tom always says, you control salts through water movement. So if you can't necessarily flush them through the compacted layer as well, that's gonna be more of a pervasive issue. Tom also just texted me to remind us of something that if we have decreased porosity within the soil which we get from compacted layers, it will lead to a higher rise of capillary water which would end up drawing up salts. Thank you Tom for your insight as always. Yes, thank you. And as Nicholas just alluded to, Tom is the go-to guy in anything related to brine and salts in the soil at NDSU at least. And if you missed last year, he gave a wonderful keynote at our reclamation conference on some of our brine spill remediation work that we're doing here in North Dakota. So as we kind of wrap up, questions are kind of slowing down. Erin and Nick, if you wanna give us kind of your take home from today, one thing you want folks that are on to walk away with and remember as they move forward with the reclamation process. I think the most important thing to take away is that, well, we did cover a lot of broad issues today. It's important that site for site, everyone's gonna be different. Every right-of-way has its own needs, every right-of-way has its own deficiencies. So it's important to identify what those needs are as well as the needs of what the land order wants to accomplish out of this. As we talked about, we have a variety of methods that might not be as efficient for all people. And we even might have methods we can just say we don't do anything and we get back to a decent spot over time. But I think the most important things are is that we come armed with this knowledge and with that ability to cooperate and then we're able to achieve the best reclamation possible for each situation. Yeah, I agree with Nick. It's site-specific. Do your site-specific work. That's going to save you the most money throughout the life of your project. And also don't skip the steps. Soil compaction, like we said, with the new constant rate co-penetrometers on the market, these are efficient, effective tools. And you're going to cost, if you don't decide to skip compaction relief on the traffic side before you put topsoil on, you're going to save $10, but you're going to charge yourself about $40 to $50 on the back end of it. Four to five times is what it costs to run a deeper river. And so concentrate on the steps and don't skip them. And be site-specific are my goals. Okay, we've had a couple more questions come in. First one is, have you used straw for a wheat or corn stubble to help reuse compaction? We commonly do this in remediation work in the six-inch to three-foot zone. I have not used that technique. I've seen some straw pellets, people looking at that technique as a deeper goal. The problem we have with using those techniques is we've got such large areas to reclaim and getting it incorporated is the hard part on that that I've seen. Other one that we have is, how would you comment on the dilemma between potential issues of mixing topsoil, subsoil versus compaction from leaving topsoil in place? The person got the sense that compaction can be a bigger issue, but it's fixable unlike soil mixing. I think one thing to remember is that a lot of our soil mixing issues can be solved with sufficient water movement over time. Stuff like, again, our carbonates and our salts can ultimately be washed out. It is gonna take time to rebuild the soil organic matter, but soil mixing is something that we can fight over time in a way that's not a severe soil compaction. Again, it's gonna come from a site-to-site basis. Let's say if you have a big issue with the calcareous subsoil or sodic subsoil and you really don't want that getting in your topsoil, then you're definitely gonna wanna avoid that more than a compaction situation. But I would say that through proper management, it probably is easier to deal with the soil mixing issue over time as opposed to dealing with a deeper soil compaction issue that Aaron talked about. Yeah, and just quickly, I don't think you can have, you can take one or the other. If you've got to address both of them. You've got to remove topsoil, strip topsoil. You may mix some soil, but guess what? It's a natural system that will come back, and you've got to remove compaction from your system. If you choose to do one or the other, you're gonna fail on the other. So it's either do both or might as well not do either. They are, it's a process. Thank you, Aaron and Nicholas for joining us today. I think that we're kind of ready to wrap things up. For those of you that are still on next week, we will have, we're gonna be focusing on innovative reclamation techniques, some Sam Croat with Stealth Energy and Harold Rose with Summit Midstream will be joining us and same time, and you can register for the same spot, but your registration link from today should work as well to join us. If you missed anything or have questions, the recording will be on the North Dakota Reclamation website and feel free to reach out to either Aaron or Nicholas for additional information. So thanks again for joining us today.