 So I'm interested in agronomy and looking at the effect of tiling for that purpose. So as we know, in our region, in the Red River Valley, going all the way into Canada, we often have these wet conditions, especially in the spring. And then when we plant, we sometimes get rain events where we have saturated conditions. So as you can see on the picture on the right, when there is water standing in between the rows, that will affect the plant's growth. So but also looking at the springtime, when we have a lot of snow this year, of course we have limited snow, but we often see the large areas that get inundated. And if you look here, kind of on the bottom, you see the crop was planted, but then with heavy rain, you get large areas that are drowned out. Now, as Tom was already showing that a tile will reduce water, but if you get a two or three inch rainfall, we still need to have some water removed. Farming is trying to get into the field, and if you are trying to get into the field when it is muddy, it typically does not work. The other thing that I've noticed as an agronomist that the time frame of planting is very narrow. We want to get it done as early as possible, and then we get a little bit impatient and we go into the field when it is actually maybe not quite ready, and we see that sometimes we are, you know, having planted conditions that are less than ideal. So early in the season, very critical with wet conditions. And then in the bottom picture, the crop is planted, you get a rain, plant is very small, doesn't use a lot of water yet, and it can just drown out. So great losses. So typically when we are looking at a crop that is standing in water, it starts to yellow. Not enough oxygen, as Tom was talking about. The only crop that I have been working with in the past is rice, and there we want to have water standing. But not in our region. We have only wild rice, but only a few conditions. So typically our main crops do not like the rice or the water except for the rice. So one of the things that we know is that if the water logging conditions last longer, we typically also see that the reduction in yield is larger. We have a reduction if we have plants standing in water, but of course for the benefit of reaching our maximum yields, we also want to have early planted. So if we go from the 1st of May and we delay planting, we see a reduction in our percent yield potential for corn. So a lot of farmers, they have been trying to manage water. So the picture on the right top where I took a picture of a grower that was moving water from the top of the field by pumping it out, that is water management. And later today, we're going to talk also about subsurface water management by using a pump unit. So today our focus is really on putting that perforated tile into the ground and oftentimes a good time to tile is at the end of the season when the crop is removed, but even in the springtime it can be tiled. So Tom kind of already alluded to this, but I want to kind of talk a little bit more about the middle picture where you see the little cartoon with the corn with very shallow roots. So what happens if the root level or the level of the water table is very high and interferes with root development, there is no oxygen for the roots to penetrate deep into the ground and we get this shallow plant. So if you look at the opportunity of a plant to maximize yield, you have to also kind of maximize the underground. So you have to have a good root system in order to maximize your yield. So root growth when it is restricted will have an effect on your yield level. So also access water into the top of the soil will give you some issues with losing of nitrogen, which is very important in crop production. So here we have a couple of quick pictures of, you know, fields and you see there some of the kind of the yellows and the browns. Those are drown out areas. And then if you take the yields with the combine, you can see that the yields are very poor in the red areas in the map from the combine. But those areas are actually larger than what you would see on the left picture, just the drown out areas. So we often see this halo effect. So where the crop still looks OK, but actually the yields are very low. So drainage is very important for crop production. So here's another example and here the areas that were drowned out are the lower areas in the yielding in the yellows. So we know from experience from looking at yield maps that tile has a big effect. Now, I'm always surprised when I talk with my growers that use dry bean production system. And we have done some questions and asked them how many percent of your beans are tiled. They said, oh, about 9%. And then I said, oh, how many of the farmers totally have an issue with water, excess water? We said, oh, well, maybe that particular year that we surveyed. Twenty eight percent of the acres had excess water. So if you have excess water, so one of the ways to do that is with tile. Now, I'm going to compare quickly the two methods of water management. A lot of the growers in our region, of course, do surface drainage, which is important. We need to get some of the water removed. But if you look at this is a long term study, the data is a little bit older, but I think it drives home what we're talking about. So here we have an undrained field and we have bushels per acre. And then you have the surface drainage. When you do the surface drains, all of a sudden you have 50% more yield. So water management is very important. I want to draw your attention to the column that says CV. CV means variability from year to year. So when it is undrained, one year you have a drought, no issue. Next year you have a drown out, no crop. So your yields go up and down. If you surface drain, at least the variability goes down. But then when you do subsurface drainage, that is removing the excess moisture within the soil, all of a sudden we see that the yields have increased greatly. So from undrained to subsurface, that is the subsurface aspect. But look at the CV. The variability from year to year has stabilized. So we see less variability from year to year. Now, if you combine the two, yes, we can pick up some yield. But if you look at the numbers, subsurface is definitely the dominant. So you go from 60 to 116, or from 60 to 90 for its surface. You add a 5 if you do the combination. So the dominant one is subsurface or tile drainage. Now, another way of looking at it is now on a research plot, looking at excess moisture and creating it. So now we depend on with irrigation to create the conditions that I showed you earlier, where there is water standing in between the rows. So if you look at this, now I'm going to show you the trial data. So there are two bars. Natural means regular rainfall. And the red bar means that it is with sprinkler irrigation. So the two left bars, this is soybean yield. And that is in bushels per acre. You can see the first variety if you have excess moisture adopt yields. The second variety drops yield. The third one is kind of stable. And then if you look overall, that is over 16, 17 varieties, we see that there is a difference in yield. And actually, that yield loss is 19%. And that's only water excess during that one period just prior to bloom. So we can see that we can give up a lot of yield if we are looking at excess moisture. Now in North Dakota and going all the way into Manitoba, we have some issues with salt. So salts are those that are dissolvable. So we look at salts in our region and we have quite a few different types of salts. So when we talk about salt saline versus sodic, the basically is that it is dissolved salts that I want to talk about. If you think about table salt, you can put some in a glass of water, shake it, and it will dissolve. So those are the saline salts. Sodic is where the sodicity that an a sodium is attached to clay particles. So it is accumulation of sodium. I'm gonna give you here an example. On the left top picture, you will see a field which has just that white crust on top. That is the dissolved salt that was in the water. It came to the top to the surface, water evaporated, and it left the salt as a deposit on the soil. On the right picture, you can see there is a wide bar which is kind of a constricting layer due to the sodium attached to clay particles. So I'm mostly talking today about the salinity as the one that is the dissolvable salt. If you just look at the picture left on the top, you can see that this field was planted. So I'm always asking, okay, if you're in farming, we want to get a return on our money. So what good of investment is it to planting into a saline area where you get zero yield. There's a lot of expenses, but no return. So putting it into context, and this map actually goes all the way into Manitoba, but this one is the Red River Valley of the North in the red in this graph. And then you can see the percent of the area that has a potential for salinity. Now potential means that in our subsoil, there is the parent material that has some salts in it. So during such a condition, you will get that salt moving to the surface and it can then affect our agronomy. So I think just to kind of show a picture of the effect of salts. So if you have here a picture on the right of a pot with soybeans, no salt added, it looks healthy. You go to the left, that one is basically table salt and you look at the plant and said, oh, they don't look that bad. But if you compare them, what they could have been on the right, you see they are stunted. However, with salinity it is often so that the plant still looks somewhat okay and you don't notice that it could have been better. So I'm saying that we are losing a lot of yield potential if we have salt areas. And of course with salt areas, it is not only during the season, but also just during germination. Soybeans, dry beans are very sensitive to salts. They don't even germinate when you have salt issues. So salt has also an influence on the expression of iron chlorosis in soybean, which is the inability of taking up iron and one of the factors is salt. So is it a big issue? Well, I get some data from egg vies that shows here the soil samples with salinity. So all the soil samples that came into the lab and they look at salinity. And if it is above that one, we can expect some negative effects in the field. Now just look at the area in the Red River Valley, the Northern Valley 39%, Southern Valley, 20% of the samples come in with high salt levels. So looking at those numbers goes all the way up to Canada, high salt levels in our fields. So you plant a crop on the salty area, in the middle by the beans in the corn and the sunflowers are growing. See, very sensitive crop doesn't grow. Barley, a little bit less sensitive, you see a crop, but still there is a plant reduction as well as yield reduction in those crops. Dry edible beans, I've talked about a little earlier. So in this case, we see here a big field in the middle with edible beans that was tiled and it was 2,000 plus pounds. And you see some of the areas where there's also some salinity and not tiled and those barely gave 200 pounds per acre. So the effect of tiled can be tremendous on some of our crop production. So, you know, we can say, yeah, but I can use some salt tolerant crops. Well, maybe alfalfa, some of them are some tolerant or as showed Barley, but still there is an issue. So most of the times we use the term electrical conductivity. So basically what the AGVISE is reporting is one decimals, decimals per meter or millimoles. That's the same kind of number. So what I want you to pay attention to that is one. So I'm gonna show you a couple of slides now with the salinity issue. So here's a soybean plant on the left with high low salinity 0.4. The plant height is 16 inches. When we have one millimole, here is the red and we have the plant is even less than half in size. So less in half in size, also less in productivity. So in our region, we have seen that the number of samples that are coming in since the late 90s has increasing and I'm just picking here on Grand Forks and just look at the trend line. We go from 20% of the samples that came in to about 40% of the samples that have higher levels than that one. And why is that important? So let's look at a few pictures here. This is a field in corn where you see the corn in the background growing nicely and you see some patches where there's no corn growing at all. So where the red crosses are were some of the areas that were samples. So we're gonna look at some of those sampling sites from the left is number one and then you go all the way to the right. So the next slide is going on the bottom, the sample size is sizing where we have the samples from one to 10. And then on the left, you see the level of salinity. So the areas where there's no crop growing, the salinity was like three plus. So even corn didn't grow at all. So the top line is in 2002, the salinity. So if you see the salinity in this part of the field is above two, hardly any crop growing. So when tile was put in, now there is an opportunity for the water to push that salt down and to create lower salinity in the top soil so which can then cause the plants to grow. So if you kind of look at this level from 2002 it is slowly going down from 2002 all the way to 2018. So the next graph I'm gonna show it where two and five are. And then in this graph at this site two and five from 2002 to 18. Now you see the graph bounces a little bit around but the critical level is that one. So if you can see it took a few years for the salt to push down and then at a certain moment we are reaching when the salt concentration is below the one and you can expect some yield increases. So if you are thinking about salty areas we can reduce the salinity by removing that salt over time. So a couple of pictures, early there is still some crop issues 2004, five, six and 2008. Now we have really recovered some of the ability of that ground to actually produce a crop. So we can take some of the salinity down with pipes. Just gonna show you in this segment later I come back a little bit more on data but in this segment I'm gonna show you just a few slides about yield increases. So this one is Canadian data and that is if you have tile drainage the increase in percent of various crops. Now this is a ballpark figure that is only for a certain given amount of time. What it tells me is that we will see responses of tile in many of our crops. It depends on when excess moisture occurs how that level is. But as you can see here, various crops respond differently to tile. This is some data from Crookston. We are comparing here the node drains. We call that 100% yield. And then when we did have tile drainage we have the yields of wheat, soybean and sugar over a number of years. And if you look at that yield over that period of time we can see that there is an increase in yield. So again, that is more local data yield increase. So I'm very confident that tile over time works if we have wet conditions and the dry conditions there is no negative effect of drainage. So just kind of looking at some of the advantages. So we really get a more consistent yield if we have tile and cash is king. So we and farming need to make sure that we have enough cash flow every year. So we can't afford those years where we have a drastic reduction in yield. Also with tile we tend to get into the field with earlier planting. And one of the aspects that we need to think about is the infield in season. So if you have planted your crop you need still to do wheat control insecticides, fungicide. So if you have saturated conditions we often see that there's an issue with it. So then think about the effects of going into the feed when you have good carrying capacity in the fall, the harvesting or you make ruts if you have wet conditions. What is the negative aspect of ruts very high? So timely harvest quality of the product. So also long-term if you get higher yields in a field you get higher APH meaning your level of insurance is more consistent and higher which benefits you hopefully in the future too. So there are some external benefits too because if we think about rainfall we can have more loss of nitrates when it gets into the gas phase with tile that is less. We also can have a little bit more crop residue in the field which also then increases the organic matter into the field, there is a value to that. Maybe we can have more residue and I've been proving that in my trial plots that we can have more residue which also then reduces the loss due to blowing snow and also the cost of cleaning the ditches. So we can be more efficient in our equipment, et cetera. So in other words, some of those have big influences on our bottom line but it also has an influence on the timeliness of all the applications, better crop quality. I've seen sometimes when a farm could not get into the crop like for instance, being you had to wait the quality of the beans is drastically lower at that time. So efficiently, less hassle, less compaction and the last one that I love to share with you I've had some of our growers saying, hey now that I have tile I can sleep at night. So in summary, I will see that there is a cropping increase but we also need to look at it from a farming aspect there is less production risk. So there can be also other benefits to tiling and in the end, we can also look at the increase in the land value as productivity has increased, the land value increases and tile can be depreciated as well. So that's it for today's video. Thank you so much for watching. We'll see you in the next video. Bye.