 All right, we're going to go ahead and get started. My name is Lindy Berg and I am the Towner County Extension Agent and I'm here with Naeem Kalwar who is our Extension Area Specialist for Soil Health out of the Langdon Research Extension Center. And what we wanted to do was give a demonstration update for the Towner County Sailing Sodic demonstration site south of town about six miles south of Kandu. We've been doing this since I think 2015. So I think it's due for a little update and so that's what we're doing today. Okay, so here is the first soil sample that we did back in 2016 in May. And as you can see, this area was from a visual standpoint, very saline area. We didn't really know a whole lot about what kind of sodicity we had here, but so we decided we wanted to do a demo plot for the Towner County crop improvement. And so we came out here to soil sample. And this was back when we had to soil sample by hand. I say we, but Naeem had to soil sample by hand. And so what we did is we made a three acre plot out of this. So the first acre we did, we applied gypsum as an amendment and then the second one we did beet lime and then the third one we didn't apply any amendments. We just planted the grass mix. So out of all three of these, we planted salt tolerant grass mix on top of the amendments. So the amendments we applied in 2016 and for gypsum, we have eight tons of gypsum and then we had 16 tons of lime applied. And then just for a side note for the differences because they're both salts, gypsum is a calcium sulfate and lime is a calcium carbonate. And we kind of talk about that a little bit more because a lot of people have that comment that they bring up, like we're applying salts, we're trying to get rid of salts. How does that work? So we'll kind of talk about that a little bit. Okay. So here's just some pictures of evolving our soil sampling into a truck, which Naeem was super excited about. You can see back in 2017, we were still doing it by hand. I keep saying we was doing it by hand. And then we got this pick up. So in 1819. And so this pickup with the soil probe, it goes down four feet. And then here's a picture or a video of the probe in action. I guess you could say, let me play this. All right. There we go. So these are the grasses that we planted the summer of 2017. And we'll talk about this a little bit too, a little later in the presentation. And well, I mean, right now, I guess, Naeem, you can talk about these grasses if you want to. We have a comparison chart that we'll talk about later in the presentation as far as forages and crops and where these grasses fit into that and their tolerability, I guess, with the saline sodic levels. But these are the grass types that we planted in those three acres. So do you have anything you want to add Naeem as far as why we chose these grasses? Obviously they're saline tolerant, but. The basic thing is that these grasses are, they're more salt tolerant than almost all of the annual crops that we could grow on these areas in North Dakota. So they will grow, they will provide the vegetation. So that's the major benefit of that. One thing I want to point out that at the time when we planted this mix, we included intermediate feed grass. Lately we have replaced that with the Western wheat grass. And Western wheat grass is much more salt tolerant than intermediate feed grass and it's deep rooted. So here is fall. So again, we planted this the summer of 2017. Here's the fall of 2017. So we're just starting to see some of the bunch grasses coming up. This is where you do need to be a little patient. It's easy to go out there and get very frustrated because you're like, why is nothing coming? But it does come, it just takes some time, like anything else with soils, it just takes time. So here's in 2018. So it has the different pots here where the gypsum was applied, the beat line, the control. And you can see that the grass is coming in very nicely. And then you can see what it looked like in 2018 when it was hate. So it was turned out very well. Even in that, I mean, to me, that was kind of a short amount of time that I was expecting. So here's 2019, early spring, again, what the grasses looked like in 2019. And you'll see in the soil samples in our results, we're soil sampling these every year. Try to do it about the same time every year. So here's July. Now, one thing you'll notice in July is we didn't really get to the weed control as much as we did in the previous years. So one thing that we'll talk about, too, is management of these grass areas, whether you decide to cut them or mow them or whatever you want to do. It's important to do that. OK, so here we have the soil analysis. I'll let Naeem kind of discuss this back from the 2016 sample that we took before the amendment application and then after. So in 2016, we basically took one composite sample, which was four feet deep, and you saw our picture using the handheld auger. And that sample essentially represented the whole demonstration site. At that time, we didn't separate the site into three different plots because we were essentially not sure about the sodicity. We could see the white cell crest. We knew that there's salinity issue, but we were not sure whether there would be sodicity combined with that or if there would be, whether there would be high enough for us to have a demonstration site because we wanted to apply these amendments to see what these amendments will do. So we took that sample. And if you look at the results, soil EC, and this is saturated soil EC, both SAR EC as well as PH are analyzed or saturated paste method. You can see that, yes, the site has a high EC of 5.85, save for sensitive crops like corn, soybean, but it's not that high compared to the sodicity levels, which are represented by SAR here. SAR is close to 25. That is way higher than the EC of 5.85. So I would rather label this site as more sodic than saline. If you look at, again, go back to the pictures, it was like a snow storm. Whereas it was a middle of summer and the salts were blowing. So you would think that the salt levels were very high, but it was the opposite. It was a sodicity, which was very high. Bear in mind that until 2016, the weather was very wet. There was a lot of precipitation we were getting, and that would mean that rainwater access and has created shallow groundwater depth and brought all these excess salts and sodium into the top soil. But we also need some water to force or push these salts back into the deeper depths. In my view, that was the reason we had lower salt levels compared to sodicity. Now in 17, we separated this site into three acres. On one acre, like Lindy mentioned, we applied gypsum, another acre, we applied beat lime, and then control, and then we planted the grass mix. This was the first year when we actually took separate soil samples, again four feet deep, from each plot. So you could say that the 2016 soil results don't really represent the individual plots. They may represent the entire site, but they don't really represent the individual results of these treatments. Now if you look at the 2017 results, salt levels are obviously very high compared to 2016. The sodicity level also went down. Again, if you look back at the weather trends, 17 was the first year when the weather started getting quite dry, and this site was almost bare. There was nothing growing because the perennial salt tolerant grass mix we planted. We planted it in 17 and around 18 it started getting established, but 17 is still, there was a lot of evaporation going on. In my view, the dry weather was the main reason. There could be many more reasons, but I think that the dry weather in 17 was the reason there were high levels of salts as well as sodicity. This is the same trend we see this year because of where last fall was very dry, spring has been very dry, and we see these white areas very prominent. Now if you look at the 2018 results, yes there were some fluctuation in the salt and sodicity levels, especially for example, you look at the soil sodicity or SAR levels of beat-lime and control plus. They went down a little bit. 18, we got a little bit more rain and overall precipitation compared to 17, but we were still not close to 16 for example. Also, I would like to attribute some of the lower salt levels to the grass mix because we planted this grass mix in 17, and by the time we went back to take samples in July of 2018, I think these grasses combined with weeds, we may not like weeds, but on sites like this, these weeds as long as we manage them, as long as we don't let them go to seed, and then create issues for us in the future, if you manage them by either mowing, grazing, or hinging, you reduce evaporation. And when you reduce evaporation, there would be less wicking up of ground water into the top soil, and that means less salts and sodium will come into the top soil. So I would think that I would like to give some credit to this grass mix there. I don't think we were seeing any effects of amendments, but the grasses were showing us some good effects. 19, if you look at the 19 results compared to 18, they're very similar, I would say, and so was the weather. Now, in 2019 fall, we got a lot of rainfall suddenly. Earlier part of the part of the ear was quite dry, very similar to 17 and 18, but it's starting around end of July until September. It was very wet, but because we took the samples in June, we didn't really saw that kind of effect on salt or sodicity levels. So levels were very similar to 18. And again, grasses were quite established, you know, keeping in view the high salt and sodicity level of that site. They were quite established. So we saw some benefits there. And I think we can probably point out to it, when we take these samples, it's in the two worst spots of each plot. So yeah. But that in mind, we didn't had, it took any GPS points, you know. So bear in mind that, and soils were very like, even if you are within a couple feet, you'll still get sometimes very different results. So that is true, Lindy. And if you look in our 2020 results, there again, the major differences I see here, that the salt levels actually decreased in beat liming control plots. Gypsum, they roughly remain the same. And then sodicity levels actually increased in gypsum plots. Beat lime, they were roughly the same, and control went down a little bit. Again, I would like to give some credit to these grasses. Somehow grasses stands were very good in control in beat lime plots compared to say gypsum plots. So if you have a better stand, that would mean that there would be less evaporation, plus better stand above the ground means there would be more root growth below the ground. And those roots, even if you have high sodicity levels, that means soil layers are very dense, your soil water infiltration is very slow, by virtue of having these plant roots, they can provide these channels for the rainwater to move through and that rainwater can then push the salts into the deeper depths. So this is I think is another clear positive effect we saw of these grasses growing, there potentially no annual crop will survive. Now, I'm just gonna quickly show you the average soil E, C, S, E, R, and P, H levels for the four feet depth for all three plots. So the year, which was 2017, when we started taking separate soil samples from each treatment or plot, if you just look at the E, C, and S, E, R analysis, along with say pH, roughly, there were some annual fluctuations, but if you look at the average of four years, they roughly look the same. I wanna point out one thing, sodicity makes the soil layers dense. High salinity levels compete with plant to restore water. In order to release the salts, we need low enough groundwater depth and we need decent water and good soil water infiltration. Since sodicity affects the soil water infiltration negatively, you could see that if we have high S, E, R levels and a certain soil depth, that correlates to high soil E, C levels as well, because when we have dense soil layers, water cannot really move. That means salts are also gonna accumulate instead of going into the deeper depths and that is evident from the first 12 inches of all three samples. All right, so this is something else I named it at the Langdon Research Center, the Barley and Oat Trial, which is very, very interesting. This was back in late planted, the trial on June 1st, last year 2020 and he applied 120 pounds of N per acre here and there's three different trials. There's a low saline sodic site, a medium saline sodic site and then a high saline sodic site, comparing those three with barley and oats. And so here's the varieties of the barley and the oats. So there's three replications, again, the low moderate, moderate to high and then the very high salinity with sodicity levels. Is there anything else you wanna add to that? No, I think you've explained it very good. So like Lindy said, we had three different levels of salinity and sodicity and we actually took composite samples from each replication or level. So the replication one represented low to moderate. When I say low to moderate, it would be low say when it comes to crops like barley and oats, moderate would be say sensitive crops like say corn, for example. So the surface, zero to six inch soil EC, which is against saturated paste EC, was 3.99 with a SAR of 7.12. And this could would be quite high for crops like soybean, but for barley and oats, we considered low to moderate. Six to 24 inch EC and SAR levels were much higher compared to the first six inches. And we planted this trial on June 1st and I took these pictures on June 11th. So on the left-hand side, on the screen, you see all four barley varieties, on the right-hand side it was oat varieties. And you could see that there is some germination there. And now in the next slide, you're gonna see that the surface, this slide, by the way, is from the same replication. And it's just, I took the picture on July 16th and you could see that there is very decent growth of barley and oat varieties, all four. One thing I wanna point out that it's very essential, what is the salt and sodacity level in the first six inches, because that's where we plant the seed in the first inch or two. And since in this replication, our salt and sodacity levels were low enough for barley and oats in the first six inches, we had very good germination. But the question which came to our mind was that, what's going on in the six to 24 inch depth? So we pulled up some plants and I realized that these plants were keeping your roots shallow in the first six inches in order to survive, not going into the high salt and sodacity levels in the six to 24 inch depth. And we got some very decent yields. So the bottom line is plants also try to adopt, but if your salt and sodacity levels are very high, even in the first six inches, like for example, what we're gonna see on the next slide. So right here, this is, we considered it moderately high salient and sodacity levels. But here, the difference is that even in the first six inches, EC is more than seven, close to eight. And with the SCR of 18, which is quite high and six to 24 inch EC and SCR levels are even higher than that. So here on June 11th, I didn't see any germination. And on July 16th, if you see, you could guess what happened to the stands and what happened to the yields. So in this replication, we lost 75% of barley yields across all varieties and 65% across the variety yield reduction for oats. And that's because of our surface salinity and sodacity levels were high. And the very last replication, which had very high levels of surface salinity and sodacity as well as the subsurface. Barley, all four varieties didn't even germinate until the end when we harvested the trial oats. There were some germination here and there. And I could say there was a variety ND heart which yielded five bushels per acre, which obviously is not economically feasible. But you could say that at these EC and SCR levels, that was, I was impressed. Let's put it this way. So this is, I asked Nagy and I was like, would we have anything as a visual that we can compare? Cause I'm a visual person, I like to see everything compared side by side. So I kind of put these together with this help of, you know, the forages and crops in there, what levels they can grow at basically. So, you know, for barley, where is the point where I can grow barley or I can't grow barley? What does the EC level need to be at? And so this is something we put together. So I guess, don't take this, this is not like an easy black and white situation, I guess I could say. So kind of take this, let's take it with the grain of salt. But we also have the graph of the irrigation water quality. So you're non-saline, saline, medium, high, very high. So what does that look like? What does your EC levels look like? And then when you're comparing your forages and then your crops. So I don't know, do you wanna add anything to this of, you know, how variable are? Some of them are even more than 14, I would say. Yes, yes. One-to-one EC, some of the perennial salt-tolerant grasses and this is what I've seen in publications can tolerate up to 26 EC, again, one-to-one. And so that is very high. I don't know off any annual crop which could tolerate that high level of salt. But like Lindy said, this is, you know, bear in mind that soils are different, salt types are different. Say for example, sodium chloride salt may cause toxicity to more toxicity to some crops compared to say, calcium sulfate, for example. So there are lots of factors which go in when it comes to salinity. So just use this as a rough guideline. These are not, like she said, this is not black and white. And then here, I just kind of added in what that trial was for the barley and oats. So you can just kind of see where the low, the moderate and the high and kind of where those are within this slide. So our takeaways for this first portion here is that although barley and oats are probably the most salt-tolerant crops, the salt-tolerant grasses that we talked about those can tolerate even higher level of salt. Planting the barley and oats may require more of an investment in pocos versus the grasses, and then resulting barley and oats yields may not justify that potentially. And then the grasses only require the seed purchasing, potentially 30, 35 in acre. Is that still pretty accurate name, that 30, 35? I mean, mostly prices are subject to change, but this is just again a rough guideline. But I would say that we should be okay as long as we use seven to eight pounds of grass seed per acre, we should be good around $35, $40 per acre at most. And then, you know, we kind of talk about how to utilize that grass to kind of maximize your production. And then poor barley and oats stands, of course in the initial years are not going to provide a good vegetative cover. And that's something that we want. And the grasses did very well. Even though we're applying the amendments, there will still be high groundwater level issues from the road ditches, which need to be taken care of. And a good grass stand will use up some of that excess moisture there. Do you want to talk about this a little bit as far as the different barley varieties? Yeah, we found that six year old barley varieties and we had tradition in that mix. It outperformed all three other three two-row barley varieties on low to moderate as well as moderate to high levels of salinity and sodicity. Very high levels, no barley varieties germinated, but tradition, which was a six year old, out yielded the other three two-row barley varieties. So it depends where you're planting your barley. If you're planting these barley crops on good land, then I would assume, and this is what I've heard from our research people that for example, Genesis will out yield tradition. But when you're looking at these troubled spots, if you just are focusing on yield, unless you're getting premium for your quality somewhere else, your six-row barley varieties are gonna do better on these kind of spots. And then also we found out barley was still, even if you planted two-row barley varieties, barley was still a much more salt-tolerant crop than say wheat under dry land field condition or the saline sodic condition. I would like to also emphasize one big learning lesson for me as well as quite a few people I would assume from this trial was that oats came out as if they're not more salt and tolerant than barley that they're equally tolerant. So if economics makes sense for you, oats would be another very good option. And then late-matureing varieties are more salt-tolerant than early-matureing varieties. And then here's why we are presenting this topic and you will see in our infiltration demo results. That feather, which say, some people say the cycle has started in 1992, some I've heard saying 1993, I wasn't here, but it just started somewhere there. It brought a lot of water close to the surface in shape of shallow groundwater depth, but we need more water right now to force the salt into the deeper depths. If we wanna apply the amendments, dry weather is not gonna help that either. And I'll give you an example. For example, the Langdon Endon station recorded close to 25 inches of rain in 2016 from April to October 17. It was close to 10 and a half or 11 for the same time period. So we went from 25 to 11 say, we need to remain somewhere in the middle. So say, I don't know exact number, but 18, 19 inches would be perfect. For example, that will provide enough moisture for the crops to grow as well as we have, we will have low enough groundwater depth. There would be enough water for the amendments to get dissolved and push or force the salts into deeper depths. Having said that intensity and quality also matters because if we got two inches in two hours, there would be mostly runoff. We don't want that. We want slow and steady rain with a decent interval, for example, not just getting rain every day. Then soils will become saturated and they will not infiltrate more water. And that's not gonna help us either. It will actually again, create runoff erosion and it'll just go into the ditch and then vick back when the soils are dry. So we need a combination of low enough groundwater depth and which we normally have right now because of the dry weather over groundwater depths have lowered, but we do not have enough quality water which can not only dissolve the soil amendments but it could then force the salts in the sodium into the deeper depths. Just to clarify when we apply amendments, for example, gypsum, which is calcium sulfate with two molecules of water, rainwater separates calcium from sulfate and that calcium will displace sodium from the soil clay in negative particles, humus negative particle charges and sodium comes into the soil water as a free ion or it could also convert into a salt and then it's water soluble, it could leach out. Right, so basically what we're saying is that when we add in the beginning, I said, we're adding salt to a salt problem but what happens is that sodium, you add that calcium it transforms that sodium into a salt that we're able to flush out basically. So just to clarify, calcium sulfate is also a salt. When we add that to take care of sodicity and sodicity is not caused by sodium which is present in the salt. So by applying a salt, we convert sodicity into a salinity issue. Right. And then we look up to the sky to get some more rain. Okay, so this is the second section of this presentation. We did an infiltration demo on November 5th and 6th and we wanted to see how the different soils will lower the salt and sodicity levels with and without amendments if extra water is added. So we wanted to simulate rainwater by adding water to our soil samples. So out of the 2020 soil samples, the leftover samples, we took that and we added 500 mils of water to each sample. And so the soil samples and the drained water were analyzed for EC, SAR, and pH through the saturated paste method. And then they were all analyzed for texture and I'll let Naim kind of explain that a little bit more. You can see the chart at the bottom where their color coded. You can see which ones are the gypsum sites, the beat line and the control. So essentially we took 2020 leftover samples which were first sent to the lab and we showed you the EC, SAR, and pH analysis earlier to you in this PowerPoint. So we got the leftover samples from the lab. We didn't use all four depths. We only wanted to use the zero to 12 and 12 to 24 inch soil depths of all three plots. And then we added 500 milliliter of DINase water to each sample. So DINase water means there are no salts, nothing is just pure water. And our whole objective by doing that was that we apply the amendments. However, we didn't really see a decrease in soil, SAR and for that matter, EC. There were some annual fluctuations but there was not a major decrease. And we believe that was because of the dry weather. We didn't had enough water for these amendments to get dissolved and create the desired chemical reaction. So we just took the leftover soil samples and we pounded this water on top of these samples. So before we go and show you the results we quickly wanna differentiate soil salinity from soil sodicity because these two are often confused together. A lot of people consider soil sodicity as a sodium, access sodium salt. So salinity is caused by sodium, sorry, excess water soluble salts and salts are a combination of chemical ions such as sodium chloride, which is stable salt. There are positively charged ions in the soils like say sodium, potassium, magnesium, calcium and there are negatively charged ions like chloride, sulfate, carbonate, bicarbonate. Any of these ions can attract each other with their positive and negative charges and they could form a salt. Some salts are more soluble than the others. For example, chloride based salts would be the most soluble salts followed by sulfate. Carbonate based salts would be the least soluble salts but salts are a combination of chemical ions. Sodicity is caused by sodium which is attracted soil clay or humus particles and those clay and humus particles start breaking away from the aggregates or soil chunks and that leads to dense soil layers. Now this is why sodicity is not caused by sodium which is present as a salt because if a sodium is attracted to a negatively charged ion its positive charge would be neutralized by that chemical ion and it cannot attract a clay or humus particle. It is true though that if we have high levels of water soluble salts that are sodium based there is a constant exchange going on between soil water and soil particle negative charges. Yes, more sodium ions can get saturated or attracted to soil clay and humus particles but as long as sodium is present as a salt it will not cause sodicity, it will cause salinity. So here are the results, the differences between soil EC. And you could see that we use three samples controlled gypsum and beat line and the soil depths we use were zero to 12 inch and 12 to 24 except one sample by adding that water and doing nothing else there was a decrease in soil EC which ranged from 60 to 90% that was very significant. So you could see the blue bars are represented by the soil EC before infiltration. So that's the actual soil EC of 2020 samples say for example for control gypsum and beat line plots for zero to 12 and 12 to 24 inch depths. The red one, red numbers represent soil EC after infiltration so we sent these samples after infiltrating the water to the lab and we got EC, SR and pH analyzed. And then on top of it we also got the water which drained from these samples analyzed for EC, SR and pH. And you could see that the initial EC 2020 say for example, I'm just gonna take an example of control zero to 12 inch depth, 6.7 and it got reduced to 2.67 and it's reflected by a very high EC in the water. Remember this water was deionized water, pure water. No salts were in that water before that. Now, if you look, the main decrease would be in the first 12 inches. It doesn't matter whether it was control plots or gypsum plots or beat line plots. And that's because the soil structure, soil amendments were there. And you will see in the slide of SR the major decrease was in the first 12 inches because amendments take time to move through the soil depths and we use depth separately. So gypsum samples, especially the first 12 inches had the highest decrease in EC levels followed by beat line and control. Now, there was one exception, these 12 to 24 inch depth beat line sample. There was hardly any reduction in soil EC. What was the reason? Let me guess. The main reason I could think of that that sample drained in 24 minutes, it drained 500 milliliter of water in 24 minutes compared to the next fastest sample which drained 500 milliliter of water in 255 minutes. And this could be an error caused by me, for example, because when I was putting the soil in that slender, if there was some air pocket or there was some gap from the side of the slender which led to that faster infiltration, I could only think of that kind of example. I don't really exactly have a scientific answer but this could be outlier. Now, if you look at the SAR before and after infiltration, this again proves one point that amendments are effective as long as we have enough water to dissolve those amendments. So the highest decrease in SAR for the samples was in gypsum samples. And that was followed by beat line control. Did have some decrease in SAR but it was mainly gypsum and beat line. And this was again significant. You could look at the numbers. For example, if I take gypsum, zero to 12 inch depth sample, the SAR level went from 44.42 to 7.26. This is a drastic, drastic decrease. If you look at the beat line again, the first 12 inches, 24.4 to six. So water can make a huge difference. Even in the second foot for the beat line as well as gypsum, this is significant. Control also had some decrease but it was not as significant as the other ones. But control at the same time didn't had very high levels in the first place. I also wanna point out, if you look at this graph and go back to EC Lindy, if we go back one more time, you will see the results are very similar. There's always a correlation between, if you decrease SAR, that means you lower sodacity and soil particle aggregation would start happening again. There would be good soil structure that will help infiltrate more water. And in this case, we didn't have any shortage of water because we pounded the water at the surface and you see there's a very strong correlation between sodacity and salinity. Because by virtue of making soil layers dense, sodacity actually makes soil salinity worse as well. So if you resolve that issue, salt issues will be resolved too as long as you have low enough groundwater depth and plenty of rainwater. PH, you could see changing PH is a very long-term process and that is evident here. Even though you may see some differences in the bars but if you look at the numbers, for example, and some actually PH increased a little bit which could be caused by some of the carbonates and other ions which result in higher PH but there was not a major difference in the soil PH compared to say EC and SAR. I think we were talking the other day too where I think a lot of people only look at the PH in a lot of circumstances and on this situation, you can't necessarily look at the PH because it doesn't represent exactly what's going on. You really need to look at the EC and SAR levels. So our takeaway from this last section is water is very important and I think we've pointed that out that there's a lot of variability of what's going on out there and the environment plays the biggest role and a lot of that we can't control. We definitely need that water there and quality water. There is no noticeable differences really in the PH and then out of the five, out of the six samples including the control, the EC levels lowered 60.62% to 90.01% and then the reduction in soil SAR levels branched between 39.64% to 83.65%. So I'm glad we did that demonstration because I think it visually shows a really good takeaway there. So if you have any questions, these are contacts. We also have a lot of resources, publications through NDSU extension, which name, I'm not sure who is on those publications with you, but you guys keep those updated almost yearly, if not every other year. So they're pretty up to date, right? Anything else that you would wanna add or? I would just say that if anybody has any questions, like you said, Lindy and my contact information is right there, as well as if you're in a different county, just contact your NR extension agent and we'll work together and we'll try to find the answers for you. All right, thanks. Thank you.