 Hi everyone, my name is Naeem Calver and I'm extension soil health specialist for NDSU out of Langdon Research Extension Center. I'll talk about briefly regarding some soil health challenges related to soil salinity and sodacity over producers are facing not just in Northeast North Dakota but throughout the state. These are some of the common questions which we received during the 2020 Cafe Talks and it all boiled down to four main questions and they are here. Number one is how to deal with different concentration of salts or salinity, managing sodacity including the use of soil or man-mins like beeline and gypsum, drain tile, vertus allscope when infiltration is improved or ventile is added. So what I'll do, I'll try to answer each question by giving you some background and some suggestion how to deal with these problems. If we look at the background of soil salinity as well as soil sodacity these issues are not really new to North Dakota. Here is a picture of a very old NDSU Extension publication which was reprinted in 1967 and the title for that presentation is Salt Defected Problem Soils in North Dakota and that presentation mentions that in 1967 or even before that there were about 1 million acres affected by high levels of water soluble salts so that means saline acres and 2 million acres which were affected by soil sodacity. So again just to re-emphasize that these problems are not really new to us. The recent citations which was done in 2010 mentions about 5.8 million acres which were affected by high levels of water soluble salts or soil salinity and this this citation doesn't talk about soil sodacity. Now if we look at 5.8 million acres or if we just round it off to say 6 million acres that's about 15% of our total crop land in North Dakota which is about 39 million acres. So we're talking about a big chunk of land of our crop land. Here are some dollar amounts for planting a spring week canola corn and soybean and these are provided to us by NDSU projected crop budgets for Northeast North Dakota. Now these are 2019 numbers but I think that these would be very close 2020 crop budgets. I just wanted to use this these numbers as a reference to show it to you that how much money we are spending just at the time of planting these four crops. So a spring week costs us about 111 bucks just at the time of planting canola 154 bucks corn 187 and soybeans $82 per acre. That is fine if we have soils which would support these crops but if you look at this picture which is of a headland which is slightly east of Langdon and the farmer planted canola there the average planting cost of canola per acre was $154 or $155. So on this hand that headland that that money producers spent on seed fertilizer and fuel that is a net loss. We won't be able to get any profit rather we lost money there. Another example of a poor soybean headland even though the cost of planting soybean is slightly less than canola but still that $82 basically are down the drain. So what we are trying to say here that if we reduce these losses that will also turn into a profit as well as the land will improve. Now we see if we look at the most significant negative effect of water soluble salts or soil salinity is that excess water soluble salts compete with plant roots for water. Plant roots are trained to pull the water molecules towards them whereas if there are high levels of salts in the soil water they would try to keep the water in the soil and the result is drought is stressed plants. So that's the most significant impact of soil salinity on plants. So soil salinity directly affects plants or crops. How should we deal with these high levels of salts or concentrations? Number one thing is to know the level of water soluble salts or soil salinity. Luckily we do see some visual symptoms of soil salinity like in shape of white salt caress but sometimes we don't see that but the problem is there but that doesn't tell us that how high are the salt levels which crop we should plant. So the best thing is to take soil sample and for that we'll have to zone the problem areas and by zoning I mean for example some areas may support some crop growth. Some areas may not support any annual crop growth but weeds may grow like Kosher or Foxdale barley. Some areas even those obnoxious weeds won't grow so we have to zone them and take separate samples three to four feet deep in 12 inch increments. So we go a little bit deeper when we are sampling saline sodic soils compared to save and we are analyzing the soils for fertility like 0 to 6 in 6 to 24. The reason being that because salts if they are high say in the third foot they could still come and the first two feet of soil of it either a shallow groundwater depth or that the capillary water they can vick towards the top soil and also just to simplify we just separate the depths in 12 inch increments. So we'll take separate sample from each zone and we take several cores and just to make a composite sample which is representative of that zone and then we'll give each sample ID send them to the lab and ask for electrical conductivity which is the test to assess soil salinity that we want lab to analyze that sample for electrical conductivity because there's one to one which normally gives us a lower value where as there's another method which is saturated paste extract method that gives us at least twice the value for the EC if we use that method compared to one to one. So method is also very important and then based on soil EC we should establish a suitable vegetative cover and by that we will reduce evaporation and then a plant roots will use up some water and soil health will start improving and then we should also have a plan to lower groundwater depths and improve soil water infiltration because for example if we have a very shallow groundwater depth say one or two feet below the surface salt will leach and then they'll just remain there and then they'll wick back in the top soil. Here's an example there we just created five different zones so for example if you look at the red triangle there's some white area if you're worried about that white area then take cores however many depending upon the size of the area three four five but don't mix the soil from the gray areas because gray area seems like they are producing good crops if you've mixed good area with the bad area you'll get average you won't get a clear picture of what's going on in that white area and then once you do that you will make that sample representative of that red triangle. Separating the depth is also very important it gives us a clear picture that what's going on in the first 12 inches compared to say in the second third or fourth feet of soil and here in this picture we have four buckets so we are separating depths from each core so for example if we took one sample will be left with four depths or four subsamples for that main sample and then when they are setting the samples to the lab we not only have to tell them about the test but the methods as well so electrical conductivity is the test for the soluble soils. Sodium adsorption ratio for example is a common method to assess soil sodicity, soil pH and personally I prefer the saturated paste extract method because that method gives us results which are very close to the field conditions. I would like to also mention a very important soil property which is cation exchange capacity or CEC. There are again two methods to analyze this property one is summation or addition method which will give us artificially high values especially when we have high salt levels and maybe the examples from these problem areas oftentimes we have high salt levels. The other one is the sodium saturation and ammonium extraction method. This is the method which will give us the true soil CEC and it's very important to get the true soil CEC especially if we have a sodicity issue and we want to calculate the rates of soil amendments like gypsum. Higher will be the CEC, higher will be the amendment rate will get even though that may not be needed. If we look at this soil result, this result here shows us two different CEC values for the same sample and lies with the same lab. So the first CEC is through the summation or addition method and that is 50.6 milli equivalent per 100 gram and then the same lab analyzes the same sample for CEC through sodium saturation method. The result is 16.8 milli equivalent per 100 gram. So the summation or addition method give us roughly three times higher CEC number. So that is not the number you would like to use when you are calculating the rates of the amendments. You want to use the true CEC. So in order to avoid the confusion it's always better to just tell the lab what you want and if you just quickly look at the issue of water soluble salts. So EC which is mentioned as millimoles per centimeter through one to one method is 3.43 whereas the saturated CEC is 6.5. So I just wanted to quickly show you that these results can greatly vary depending upon the method used to analyze these soil properties. This is a table which I borrowed from our newest publication which is the revision of the old managing saline soils in North Dakota which we revised in last October and this basically table shows us the salt tolerance levels of different crops. So if we look at our annual cash crops barley oats and sugar beets are the most salt tolerant annual crops. If we cannot grow these crops then we have exhausted our options for planting annual crops. So for example by the way these EC values are measured as one-to-one method. So for example we'll lose 50% of barley yield and the soil EC one-to-one EC is gets to six millimoles per centimeter. So if we have I won't even go to that level I would say our EC levels of one-to-one are four or five then I would just not plant the annual crop because saving the money which will be spending on seed fertilizer and fuel just at the time of planting to me that would be a saving and then on top of it there would be a porous 10 so that means there would be more evaporation and waking up of soil water which will again increase the levels of water soluble salts in the top soil. So we are not going to be helping the soil either. Here is a table again from the same publication which shows us the salt tolerant levels of perennial grasses. Not all perennial grasses are salt tolerant but if you look the grasses I really like are tall wheat grass, slagner wheat grass, vester wheat grass, green wheat grass, the varieties AC salt blender and Russian wild rye. They are very salt tolerant and they will grow or nothing else will grow. Just as a heads up that AC salt blender is a mix of bunch and quick grass so if you're close to a native pasture you should avoid that. If you have the option to kill it with roundup it'll be killed and that's a very good salt tolerant crop. These grasses also will provide okay to good quality hay depending upon the time of the cut so you could hay them or you could get them grazed so they can also provide you with some income. Just as an example here's a picture of a Roland and REC tile project site which was tiled in July of 2014 and I took the picture in April 2015 and just to be fair salts and sodicity problem don't just go away in one or two years even if we tile so I'm not trying to see here that tiling didn't do anything but you could look at the picture and see how bad this site is so we applied the soil amendments a long-term research trial we're learning new things from it but we applied the amendments in July and August of 2015 and then I planted and the salt tolerant perennial mix in September of 2015 and here is how the site looked 13 months later and if you could talk to people around Langdon they would tell you that this site is very problematic and I'm not trying to say that just by having this grass growing we have fully reclaimed this site but it's better than what it used to be. Another example this producer slightly west of Langdon planted salt tolerant alfalfa in 2012 on three acres because he has livestock as well as he plants crops nothing grew so we took some soil samples and he replanted the perennial grass mixed with alfalfa and here here's how the stand looked in 2017 and you could see that he didn't apply any amendments even though there was probably a little bit of need but he just planted the grass mix along with alfalfa and you could see that the grass is growing everywhere but the alfalfa is growing wherever the salt levels are lower the conditions are conducive for alfalfa so but he got something out of that land now if I quickly share with you some soil results and what I want you to focus on our soil EC levels so we took some samples in 12 14 and 17 from the areas where there was no alfalfa that as well as areas where there was good alfalfa so wherever there was good alfalfa you could see that the EC levels and these are by the way saturated p-saxaric EC levels the elf or the EC levels wherever there was good alfalfa growth were less than two and that wherever there was no alfalfa the EC levels were five or more so even though it's not a replicated trial the replicated research trial but I would say that this is something which is very telling to me that for example as soon as the saturated p-saxaric EC gets to about three and a half or four I would question planting alfalfa on its own now when we plant alfalfa a bit perennial salt tolerant grasses that's a different story because we have learned that these grasses somehow nurture alfalfa so if we look at the yields a yields of the producer fields so we planted a mix of salt tolerant perennial grasses along with some alfalfa seed in 2012 it was basically a replanting and three acres grasses took about one to two years to establish alfalfa established after three years and we have seen the same thing going on at the Rlingdon research center extensionist strips alfalfa took three years to get established so something is good is going on these grasses seem to be very complementary towards alfalfa for example they're kind of like are nurturing alfalfa so somehow alfalfa seed remains dormant and then the grass it germinates here and there and then the grass is germinate and they develop roots they reduce evaporation roots create channels for the water to move improve soil water infiltration salts leech out a bit from the top six inches for example and then alfalfa settling starts getting germinating and what after germinating plants are more tolerant to salts for example compared to say for example at the time of germination so and then that increases the quality of the heat to an alfalfa as a tamper would plant it again will help it's creating these channels for the water and air to move through the soil layers so in 2014 the producer got three twelve hundred pound hay bales fifteen four hay bales sixteen five hay bales seventeen and eighteen he got five hay bales despite drier weather Langdon REC we have our own share of problem spots we have planted the same grass mix on different areas but this is an example of one field which is about 15 acres we were also losing a lot of money but planting annual crops there so in 2014 we planted these 15 acres into that perennial salt tottering grass mix by using eight pounds of all five grasses per acre seeding rate and in 15 we got about 30 hay bales out of these 15 acres and I'm not 100% sure whether each hay bales was 1500 pounds but it was close to it they were very heavy so roughly these grasses produce close to 3,000 pounds of biomass per acre in 2015 16 was the two-way vet for us to hay and after that we have been mowing these grasses because we do not have a lot of life stock around Langdon unless somebody needs help now second question managing sodicity and then beat lime in gypsum so I'm just gonna quickly differentiate sodicity versus solidity if you look at the bottom of the slide there is an example of a salt table salt sodium chloride so sodium and chloride both are chemical ion with positive and negative charges when they come together they've been attracted to there with their positive and negative charges they form a salt together on their own they're just chemical ions and sodicities caused by sodium which is attracted to the negative charges of soil particles like clay and humus sand and silk doesn't have any negative charges so that's where the sodicities cause sodium plus clay is not a combination of both chemical ions it's a combination of chemical ions getting attracted to a soil particle so as long as sodium remains as a salt it will cause salinity will compete with plankton water but it will not cause sodicity effects like dispersion or breaking down of soil aggregates it is also true that if we have high levels of sodium based salts in the soil water there's a constant exchange going on between the soil water and the soil exchange sites for ions so more iron sodium ions can get absorbed or attracted to the negative charge of soil particles but as long as sodium remains a salt it will not cause dispersion or sodicity effects it will cause salinity and effects so here's a here's a picture rough diagram of a soil aggregate and there are tiny soil clay particles which are providing negative charges or surfaces which are attracting positively charged ions and you could see even too many of these negative charges or surfaces attract ions like sodium that leads to the formation of sodium plus clay and then sodium plus clay starts breaking away from these aggregates and this is what happens the soil aggregates break down and then become very small in size and soil is kind of like in dense layer these particles settle in dense layer the pore size shrinks the water either sits there or will run off and there will be very poor soil water infiltration permeability poor seed bed for planting crops poor seed germination there would be all sorts of problems I'm just going to quickly show you an example of a typical sodic soil results so these are three soil samples and four feet deep and if you just look at the SAR numbers by the way and ESU research suggests that if SR is five or more and if the soil EC is less than two then we will have some sort of dispersion and swelling especially when it comes to shrinking and expanding type of soils which we mostly have in North Dakota so if we look at the numbers there are like 37 30 16 27 these are very high levels we are talking about and I want to quickly also mention if you just look at the individual calcium levels compared to say sodium you will see that sodium levels are way too high compared to calcium so units are the same for example Millicron per liter so we won't focus on that if you look at the numbers for section six zero to 12 inch depth calcium level is 20.53 and sodium levels are 167.36 and that's not what we want to see which we want to see the opposite trend so roughly it's a very important that calcium should be the dominant ion or cation in our soil chemistry we want to see roughly calcium even two three times more than magnesium and when it comes to sodium I don't know I'm just throwing a rough number four or five times more if you have the calcium is a dominant ion in your soil chemistry we will not have dispersion we may still have salt issue but we will not have dispersion or sodacity or even high magnesium levels compared to calcium sometimes can lead to dispersion so we will not have any dispersion any breaking down of soil aggregates so how should we deal with sodacity again we'll come back to the same principles we mostly use for soil salinity zone the problem areas take three to four feet composite soil samples and separate the depths in 12 inch increments ask the lab to test their samples for sodium resolution ratio by clearly indicating the method which in this case I personally prefer a saturated pasteuric method and based on soil acid are apply calcium amendments amendments which would add calcium to the soil so remember from the previous slide if we would not have lower calcium levels compared to sodium we will not have the sodacity effect so if we now know there's low calcium levels compared to sodium the basic purpose of these amendment is that you apply them you spread them mix them in into the soil and then with water they get dissolved and the calcium gets released from for example sodium gypsum which is calcium sulfate and it goes and replaces sodium from the soil particle exchange site and it promotes so particle aggregation or flocculation which is the opposite of dispersion and then we also have to practice salinity management guidelines for example lowering the groundwater depths and improving soil water infiltration which will happen when we apply the soil amendments because that would be the chemical aggregation of soil particles there are amendments which supply or add calcium to the soil directly like gypsum which is calcium sulfate line which is calcium carbonate or calcium chloride salt line by the way has very low solubility and it's only effective so pH is lower than five and there are some amendments like elemental sulfur sulfuric acid which create indirect effects and help remediate sodicity I personally would not prefer elemental sulfur because it's very expensive even the wholesale rate and then elemental sulfur needs can work into sulfate and then sulfuric acid to do that so it's a long chain of reaction it takes longer time and it's more costly here's an example of gypsum which is being produced in the western part of our state and it's in powder farm powder farm gypsum by the way it would be better as an amendment compared to palleted farm it will get dissolved quicker so it will produce results quicker and it would be cheaper here is the example of beat line produced by American crystal sugar and we we applied these products at the Langdon REC tiling project sites if we look at the pros and cons of gypsum versus beat line they both are our direct sources of calcium and they could be cost effective depending upon your location so if your land is somewhere in the east close to Greaton or Grand Forks it's all about transportation costs so it would be very cheap for you to apply beat line and then if your land is around Washburn and Bismarck you'll be very cheap for you to haul or get the gypsum hauled and bring it to your land if you're around Carrington or somewhere in the Benson County then you're kind of like in the middle so the cost would be the same the bottom line is it's all about your location because it's all about transportation cost and the differences are that gypsum is way more soluble than beat line and that would mean that it will take less water and time to get dissolved in remediate the land and it will not affect your soil pH beat line on the other hand will increase your soil pH and obviously it's way less soluble than gypsum even though beat line increases soil pH but due to the buffering capacity of the soils the pH may come back in two to three years now drain tile there has been a lot of focus on that and drain tile will work as long as we have access well water I'm excluding the landscape for now I'm just focusing on the basic things from the soils perspective so we got to have access all water and then we got to have good soil water infiltration and that would mean no dispersion no breaking down of soil aggregates it's not suitable even if we have access all water but we have poor soil water infiltration and that would be basically due to moderate to severe dispersion and we got to solve that problem first before we tile the land because if we don't we will not get good drainage despite investing money on tiling and here's a picture of our Langdon REC tiling project site which was taken on July 17 2014 and the tiling depth is four feet below the surface so the four feet of soil sitting on top of the tile need to have good soil water infiltration so that when it rains the water can access water can gravitational water can move through the soil layers and tiles can collect it and remove it can tiling work without soil testing now what I mean by soil testing I'm not talking about soil textural analysis which mostly tiling companies do in order to check the soil texture class and then they decide what's what should be the spacing between the tiles and what should be the diameter of the pipe for their shit they should have a sock over the tile or no what I'm talking about is analyzing the problem is spots for soil salt levels soil sodacity levels and maybe CEC and the reason for that is that we will tile the areas where we have shallow groundwater tips over groundwater is a high and salts and and sodium so if we have persistent shallow groundwater depths close to the surface during most of the growing season for some time we're bound to have some excess salt issues and excess sodium or magnesium issues compared to calcium so it's essential to have these areas tested and it would be a tiny cost compared to investing money on tiling so this is a prime example this site was tiled I think in 2010 or 11 I wasn't here at that time and it was tiled from the headland the edge of the headland the roadside ditch it goes I think 125 feet on the south and it goes all the way up to the third electric pole you see on the east side and then there is a ditch which goes to there's a southeast and then water drains there and it has a slope a very good slope starting from the west towards the east where the trees are so it should it has perfect condition tiles that feather and it was considered as a saline spot so there was nothing there which could have prevented getting these the site reclaimed from salinity only and unfortunately it wasn't checked for sodacity so finally in 2013 we took some samples and we realized this site was actually 13 oh sorry it was actually sodic and then we started thinking about applying the amendment this picture by the way I took in 2014 so then we realized the site was sodic we wanted to apply the amendments but we didn't have the full funding so what we did the site had distinct gradients for example east was the worst followed by the vest and center was kind of like better than the other two sides so we created small plots for small plots on the east side for small plots in the center for small plots on the vest and then we hauled beat lime on our own we bought some gypsum elemental sulfur and then we had four treatments on each side east center and west on one treatment we didn't apply anything on one we applied beat lime one gypsum and one elemental sulfur we did that in October of 2014 now this picture is from 2015 and amendments again do not just to start producing results in one or two years depending upon the moisture condition and evapotranspiration but 2018 we observed that there we did the small plot research those plots has started supporting the annual crops because a producer plants the crops over this area last year it seemed from a distance if you're driving on the highway which is highway 17 you probably would say that oh this site has fully reclaimed but then you I actually walked through their spots and I realized that the crop was doing very good there we did a small plot research but there were still some baldy spots in between but I want to emphasize that we applied these amendments in October of 2014 and we started seeing some good growth in 2018 and so there was four years and last year those plots were doing good five years so it takes some time depending upon again the moisture conditions and I want to quickly point out something so we took some soil samples from the east center and west side in 2013 and then 15 so if you just focus on the soil sodicity results of the east side first zero to six inch depth SAR was 13.77 in two years that SAR of 13 increased to 53 so the site actually got worse the six to 24 inch depth SAR increased from 10 to 46 so leaving these areas despite tiling the site was tiled and it's not the fault of tiles it's just the imbalance between calcium versus sodium in this example salt levels also been doubled because then you had poor soil water infiltration then what salts are just gonna sit there and and again there would be if there is more evaporation that can lead to more vicking up of soil water so salt levels also increased but it was a sodicity which which increased dramatically and that's not good because then you will basically need to apply more amendments and the last question is where do salt gov and infiltration is improved or when tile is added so the picture on the left is Chris Augustine's picture and that was taken during our 2014 soil halt tour in Langdon we had two soil pits and one of the pits was in a alfalfa strip so when you when you improve your soil water infiltration which in this case alfalfa roots did the salts will go into the deeper depths of the soil on the picture and in the picture on the right this is a word pumping a station which is pumping the water out of the tiling project site if we add tile and if good infiltration in the salts get dissolved and leach with the axis water then the salts will go wherever the axis water is draining wherever you are draining it down the road or wherever so that's the difference when you improve infiltration the salts will move downwards when you add the tile whatever would come into the water will go wherever the axis water is draining so that's all I have for this presentation and with that if there would be any questions I can take those now I hope you guys enjoyed the presentation and I hope I was able to bring these points across I'm not against tiling I want to emphasize on that bit but we are what we are learning from our tiling project that you know even the salt issues in 16 we reduce salt levels drastically compared to 14 which was a year when we tiled the site but 17 and 18 the weather was dry here so salt levels actually increased in 17 and 18 compared to 16 despite the site being tiled so and that was because of the vicking up of soil water and plant roots can intercept the vicking up the water tiles only collect the free gravitational water so there's a question I think couple so have you seeded grasses into alfalfa after alfalfa has been especially established no we it was basically the grass mix and we just included the alfalfa at the time when we were planting the grasses so grasses and alfalfa were planted at the same time what is the best size of best size of gypsum if pale okay type if palleted okay I just don't understand the word size it would be the quantity I think you maybe wanted to Brian if you wanted to clarify your question you could again either unmute or so number one I want to say something palleted gypsum there are a couple things you should consider in your mind number one thing which we look at when we are applying gypsum is purity because that would effect your rate so for example your recommendation for a hundred percent pure gypsum is five tons now you are getting a gypsum which is 80% pure you will have to increase the quantity so always look at the purity first and then the cost now palleted will produce the same results but pallets will take some time to get dissolved so as an amendment powder form is better remember that gypsum the calcium which will be released from the system has to react with soil clay particles which are tiny we cannot see them with our eyes so the finer form would be better that product will have more surface area and when companies sell these products they palletized gypsum there's a cost involved to that I understand that you probably are asking this because it's easy for you to spread it so if that's the case I I just don't know what is the answer you have to decide how much more you are paying for the palleted gypsum but the purity should be the number one consideration for you because that would effect your rate whether it's powder or whether it's palleted and then if I could you could actually spread powder farm gypsum or beat lime for that matter with the very crude manure spreader you could do that if you want to go sophisticated then you have to have the spreaders with spinners so and if you were asking about the quantity I won't be able to tell you the quantity my number one suggestion would be take a soil sample and I would also want to clarify that I hear these comments once in a while that can we just apply one to two tons of gypsum well if you do not have the need if your soil calcium levels are way higher than say magnesium and sodium then you do not need gypsum and if you still apply gypsum is also a salt so you're basically adding salt to your soil so first determine the need then it would be a question of how high your sodicity level and how high is your CEC so the formula would determine that I'm not gonna say these formulas are set in this stone and they give you the perfect picture sometimes you could get away by applying a little bit less sometimes you may have to apply more but they're good guidelines so I won't be able to tell you about the quantity soil sampling would be the best way Abby I think you want to talk mention something have you ever used that gypsum requirement app that Tom DeSutter put together I'm guessing you had part we're involved in that too I haven't used it much but there is if you go in the App Store there's a gypsum it's called the gypsum requirement North Dakota State University app and that may be a another place to kind of play around with rates and figure out what what you need but it looks like you have to have soil bulk density information CEC gypsum purity and also SAR or ESP yep so it will boil down to sampling bulk density sampling is slightly difficult but if you have the actual bulk density of the site that's wonderful but otherwise that app actually assumes some bulk density but you've got to have exchangeable sodium percentage or ESP or SAR they're the same you only need one of the tests and they're exchangeable and so the app lets you pick one of those so you've got to have those either SAR or ESP and then CEC and then always utilize true CEC because I've done some calculation for the sake of fun which may not be fun for you because even if your SAR remains the same and if you increase your CEC that would increase the rate of say gypsum per acre and you in reality you don't need that so the general CEC you see on their soil test that is that is that should not be the number you should be using to calculate the rates of the amendments the true CEC measured through sodium saturation that that and I think too we've done some work you know on main campus with the percent sodium you can get like in the bottom right hand corner of your ag vice soil test and how that correlates with SAR so SAR is you know takes a while in the lab to do so if you need kind of a quick estimate of something to at least just get a starting point if you look at the bottom right hand corner with the percent sodium that should be pretty well correlated to SAR so so maybe you know when you get down to the calculating and the ordering of the line you may want to use SAR or have that test run but I think you can get a pretty quick quick value also from the percent sodium and plugging that into this into this app too there is a there's a equation which is in Tom DeSerter's publication and that's in one of our publication to soil testing problematic areas so if you wanted to convert the percent sodium number say in SAR you just put that number in that equation and it'll come it'll basically give you a SR number so then you can utilize that so any studies being done there the tile water is going and what is it is doing to these areas water sources so we do take water samples from our the pump which is pumping out the water that goes into a drainage that goes into a relenged in water and to be honest with you there there have been no issues so far and the reason being that all of these salts or contaminants get very diluted when they are coming out of the water but if you let the water sit for a long time say in a pond then there would be probably over time you know some of the salts may settle down and then accumulate there but if just the water is flowing then there would be no issues so far have you have anything on that i don't are where we have tile installed in some of our studies that it hasn't run the tiling hasn't actually been running probably this year it has and we've collected samples from that i just haven't seen the data but and that would that's in a high clay soil where we're seeing where we're just not seeing it run but yeah i don't have a whole lot to add to that naeem i wish i did yeah so the second comment is also very important i've had producers that wanted to drain the tiling to a live stock now that's a totally different thing because i know there are some elements like say sulfur for example you want to be careful about that so yes we haven't had an issue with this site but each site is different so yes you do not without testing the water you know i would not advise just reusing that water for livestock consumption even for human consumption basic point is each site is different so whatever is coming out of the water is basically coming out of that soil or the site or the field get get one sample tested um the best time to take a water sample is when it rains a little bit at least half an inch and then you take the fresh samples when we take samples from here we take samples from downstream upstream and from the pumping station and it's a painful process i'll tell you this much i send these samples because we send them to department of health and they're like dissolve phosphorus we have to filter the water and then we have to have some acids in them to preserve the sample put them with ice packs send them through overnight delivery but we get it done talking about pp it all depends upon your soil and what objective you have if you have soil without any salt or sodicity issue no problem areas essentially then um you could plant anything everything will grow there you so you have no limitation and then what is your objective do you have livestock or you just want to improve soil water infiltration add some nitrogen so here in Cavalier County we do not have a lot of livestock 17 was the year when one person farmers soybeans got hailed and he just wanted to have a cover crop mix but he wanted to be it to be very cost effective so it was a three-day mix of chickling wedge and then turnips and i think it was forage barley 14-15 bucks and he had phenomenal growth because he planted in the last week of july but if you have a saline spot then we are talking about a different mixture forage barley forage oats would be more salt tolerant beets are more salt tolerant but they don't do well in a mix so it all depends upon your site and then your objective abby you want to add something to that yeah i think a lot when i consider what to plant on pp i also look at weed pressure and so if you have a field that has um has quite a bit of weed pressure and you feel like you need to have a herbicide pass throughout the you know sometime in the in during the summer to control those broadleaf weeds you could just seed something like like cereal rye or oats or just barley or a mix of those if you want but having just the grass there so you have an option to go over and spray with a with a herbicide maybe useful um if you have fields that are less that have lower weed pressures and you feel like you can get the field clean and then come in how with with a diverse mix then i'd say go for it and start thinking about what what Naima's time out the objectives and what you want to do and and what your price point is um you can do a lot of things with a fairly cheap mix and fairly low rates um so as he's saying talk a lot of guys talk about turnips and radish by field that's not diverse enough and and that's true uh david i think um you know turnips and radish can be good because they're small seed and they can just be broadcast on the surface but i think you want some kind of uh small grain in there especially if you're going to corn the following year so what happens when you have species like turnips and radish that that are non-micor isle so they don't form that association on their root with the fun with the fungal hyphae the corn needs for phosphorus uptake the next year you kind of lose that priming effect in the soil and so so you can see phosphorus deficiency in corn the following year um i think you know in radish and turnips too when they when they decompose um over the winter if it's an open winter and we don't have a lot of snowcatch you're not going to have a much residue uh to protect that soil from erosion either so um so throwing in some kind of grass would be a good idea oh it's barley um you can seed cereal right early in the season and it will stay very low and um until it vernalizes over the winter it won't you won't get a lot of growth on it or will you get decent growth but it won't be the tall rye that you imagine it won't certainly won't head out so um so i think those are really good options include with turnips and radish and and honestly with with turnips unless they're going to graze it i don't typically recommend turnips because they're a higher likelihood of over over wintering than radish and so if they say go to soybean on that field the next year they may get a bunch of turnips on their cutter bar so um so i would stay away from turnips unless they're their intent is to graze it and just use radish and some kind of um some kind of grass i think would be fine yeah i think we have a prevent plant um link on the NDSU soil health webpage so it's right on the home page and there's all kinds of prevent plant information from um from insurance companies um from guidance on mixes some videos from the soil health minute where we looked at at diverse mixes versus single species um and if you are going to graze we have some information on grazing as well if that if those dates change for prevent plant like they did last year the good questions i think you know i think it too when we're when we're looking at a prevent plant situation it's it's not i don't want to say a free year but it's a year where you can really get some diversity in there you can get some different routes in there you can um you know it gives you an opportunity to do a lot more with a mix than you could traditionally after after wheat harvest or something like that so i think it's a good opportunity to really maximize your efforts um in building your soils i would also add that um you know prevent plant a bit the proven plant acres whatever you're going to plant you're going to get the best out of it most of the time we have a short growing season especially here around Langdon and if you are planting a cover crop mix after august 10th or 15th to be honest with you most years we will not get growth more than six inches for example the producer the example i gave it to you he planted that mix in the last week of july and i don't know it was the girl like two two and a half feet tall and he actually was worried in the fall he was worried he said there's so much biomass would i be able to plant the crop next year everything turned out to be fine because he had a legume in it so the carbon to nitrogen ratio was ideal and everything broke down during the winter but i'm just telling you just a difference of four or five weeks can make a huge difference so i understand that may not be an ideal situation for you you may want to plant a regular annual crop but if you're a proven plant acres that's a great opportunity for you to add diversity and you will get very good growth from that cover crop mix so i'm seeing here too david responded again he doesn't have a lot of produce producers with a lot of cattle but he's just trying to find something more effective than turnip and radish used rapeseed in the past but they took it out with a lot of guys planting corn the following year which makes sense rapeseed can over winter and it flowers and grows very early in the spring so it can be challenging to manage but yeah i think something more effective yeah i agree with you i think that doing simply more than turnip and radish would be especially if they don't have livestock i'd pull the turnip from that mix i'd use some radish i'd for a legume if you want to put something in there to fix nitrogen ahead of corn i would go with a pea or a fava bean or something like that we don't get a lot of i mean we'll get growth out of clovers but i'm not very impressed with clovers for the cost of seeds so doing something like like peas maybe a radish throwing in some kind of grass in there because we know the other thing we know too is that we talk about radish are always fixing compaction right and we talk about being a compaction buster but but in talking with air day and things that i've seen in the field as well that you get a lot more benefit out of a fibrous root of a grass for relieving compaction than you do that radish so so having the combination of the fibrous root and there as well with some kind of small grain would be good we've got common vetch works well in south dakota too uh stays here braver than i am i stay away from vetches in general um i don't know why i'm just kind of a scaredy cat but i i've yeah if i do use a vetch it is common vetch as opposed to the harry vetch um i've just seen harry vetch take over so many fields and and i'm just not psyched about it so yeah stacey said she doesn't use harry vetch at all um you've probably heard it called scary vetch too so um so yeah i think you could throw in a common vetch if you want i've just had really good luck with peas and i've i've seen a lot of great things out of peas but make sure you're inoculated if you're going to use a leg you monoculate it so that you get the full benefit in that field uh we have had good luck with chickling vetch i haven't tried the common and the only reason we went for chickling vetch because the far producer wanted to lower the cost of the seed and i just literally went through the cost sheet and i realized that harry vetch was like $2 60 70 cents per pound whereas chickling vetch was 70 80 cents per pound so we replaced it we got the good growth and he hasn't complained um at all about chickling vetch becoming a problem for the crops later i also want to throw in something um somebody made a comment i think david that they don't have a live stock so that producer doesn't have any live stock i asked him later we didn't really keep a record in 2018 i think he planted canola there and i asked him did you see any benefits of you know he just basically let all the biomass going back into the soil he said that he didn't cut back on the fertility of canola he applied the regular fertilizer rates but he said he got his best ever canola crop from that field where he had the cover crop trivet mix 14 to 15 dollars per acre but planted in end of july and he said that cover crop mix did something um and again i'm not trying to say we don't have any soil data to prove and fertility takes time to mineralize and everything but that cover crop did something to that field 10 or 12 higher yields with same inputs so nine when you mentioned canola reminded me that um that also because of disease transfer and some of these full season cover crops to say canola crop the following year you really want to watch what you put in there and probably not include things like brassicas brassicas especially yep club root is a big issue here uh so we would basically they say no brassica at all there is uh another comment stacy with the harry vetch in 2008 and it's still there yeah i'm not surprised stacy every time i see harry vetch in the field if it comes in in a little bit of seed it's like oh gosh i just not one of my favorites and i think you know for the pp stuff i think we nine men are talking about it before we started this webinar we'll be doing some um additional webinars or just conversations question and answer type things on that coming up so um and joe likely will be part of that also our weed specialist so i think keep your eye out for that and and um yeah we'll just kind of figure out when to start that because i know i agree a lot of people are thinking about pp and and it's just it's it's not worth it in some cases to mud things then and have a mess so um david i um i'll quickly give you my viewpoint on that and then i'll let abby share hers so that producer um the example i gave you 2017 so in the fall we were and i have some pictures and i'm six feet tall and i'm telling you that you cannot see me below my vest like it was uh i think two and a half feet tall biomass and he got worried so i talked to another neighbor who had livestock but there was a water issue so he couldn't bring his livestock so then he was literally worried so i wanted to help him so there is a tool uh which is called um it's k-line agriculture and they have they call it trash cutter um so basically that tool chops up and you could you could utilize it even when you have wheat is stubble for example so it chopped everything on top of that field and it was about 500 acres we are talking about there was nothing in this spring but the key is you got to have you know good c in ratio if it is all brown the residue is not going to break down but this was lush green and there was nothing and i'll tell you one more thing you guys i think have more warmer weather in the south than us so you you should have more microbial activity compared to say uh that field is around austin brock which is 10 miles east of langdon and we have our own pocket when Dave friends and he gives the fertilizer recommendation he has east and west of north dakota and then langdon so we have a totally different climate here a little bit more colder so i would say if your cn ratio david is right um and if you chop chopped it up or something i don't know whether how much of a difference shopping up made but basically it's all about soil contact and there was nothing in the spring so he did that in 2017 fall in 18 it was all gone so if you chopped it up and he didn't kill the soil so that um you could watch it on the youtube it's called trash cutter the name did trash cutter i don't really like the name but um k-line agriculture's trash cutter if you chopped it up and if your cn ratio is one to you know 10 like you know below 30 then you should be good in my view in a normal year yeah i think you know as you're saying to um you know the spray and then till i think i would just express that a lot of these cover crops i mean everything rots better in the ground where the microbes are and so working up any kind of cover crop um not only do you lose the moisture usage of that cover crop but then you lose any structure that it builds and then you're putting all that organic material on the surface and it's a lot harder to decompose the material on the surface than it is by leaving it in the soil where things can work on it and decompose it so i do have growers that that have sprayed out cover crops in the fall because they're concerned about moisture that it's drying soil out too much and they they feel like they won't have enough the next spring and i think that's fine you know if you do go out and spray it and that's their major concern is that they're on sandy soil they're they're concerned about moisture the following spring is you know say they burn up a lot of moisture this summer we don't get any um going into next spring uh i think that that's okay i certainly wouldn't go in and till it um because it will affect the decomposition of the of the cover crop um but i don't know i i think it's best to just not not add that cost of spraying it out let it go um let it decompose in the soil and and and see what you have the next year so you're saying guys are worried that if they don't till they will be too wet the next spring hard to change your mind yeah i i should put out there we have some data that we collected from a full season cover crop and we had these plots where we had full season cover crops and we had plots where we had just kept the soil tilled all summer and bear and it was interesting because where you had the cover crops you saw this really nice i'm trying to do this in the camera but you saw it's really nice just gradual decline in soil moisture with depth because you have these roots going down to four feet and we had all that moisture usage with depth and then on the on the ones where we just had bare soil and let it evaporate you had kind of drying at the surface and then there's this bulge of moisture right underneath that and then it was it had to climb with depth because it couldn't move down in the soil um and so i think you know if they if they i would just have people that you know if you have a full season cover crop field there's some way to show how that moisture usage is more uniform with depth when you have something growing like you do having a crop growing um you know tillage all it does is dry out the surface and um and i think i think we need to make sure that we keep all those core those pores that are that are from you know intact from the surface all the way down in the profile we need to keep those intact and not make them you know something that the water has to move all around through these disjointed pores to get deeper but yeah it's it's tough to change to change that because because there's a lot of fear um but we're seeing it's successful in a lot of fields and i think we just have to come up with more scenarios or more pictures or more cases where it is working to give people the confidence to to leave it out there i would also say if we do the tillage so the pores which have been made during a growing season in the root channels will basically be closing down those channels so as your channels are say six inches deep and if you're tilled even the two three inches deep you're basically closing those down so you're going to be negatively affecting the infiltration say in the spring when there's melt going on i try to convince my wife not to till last fall leave the mulch and you know we have our disagreements you know and two days before she observed something so there were some gardens in our neighborhood they tilled it in the fall and two days later after her argument she said to me you know i've been around that garden it's like mucky you know you cannot even look at it and our garden is dry i could walk over it and i was just smiling because i basically i told her the same thing not do it it just it takes sometimes some courage to try these things and i understand that you know um you know erin day which which was our first webinar the presentation he talks about the same thing we want to dry out the soils faster so that we could plant early and there's nothing wrong with that but his data shows that if you do that that soils essentially you'll lose i think it was 15 percent of the yields because of that and so basically we'll be defeating the whole purpose we want to get out in the fields early so that we could plant early so that we could have better yields but if you're losing your yields because of that to be honest with you i'll wait so like abby said we we just got to have some um good examples and one thing david i would suggest to you that if you wanted to tell them the same thing how about if you tell them that they could do whatever they want on their you know main acres but how about leave a small field and try to do something different small area 10 20 acres and then compare it you know that that would be the best thing to do because then the stakes are not that high and if you get good results then you know that may help change their minds too it seems like some of these things are easier to try to on your worst acres that you don't have very high expectations for anyways um so i don't know you could yeah i agree with that wouldn't i even say you need to have something so you can so they can experience the the changes that occur with these practices but yeah it's tough it's hard to it's hard to show some of these things until you're actually in the equipment on the field experiencing the structure and um and the roots of the of a full season cover crop any other thoughts or questions oh here we go hypothetical here if i have a producer that is having a tough spring with a high moisture is it worth trying to convince him to have a cover crop mix and include winter ride eat up some of the moisture the following spring and then crimp or even spray the next spring and plant through that i know it's another big step for guys that don't have any experience with cover crops and can't stand to see their fields go up and go into winter being covered i would i would include cereal rye on that i would um i definitely would if you can get that cereal rye establish and kind of sell them on the idea of planting green so you're using all this moisture with your cover crops and if you want you know something in there to help manage the moisture next spring when you have the residue then shoot go for it have some rye in there or if they're i i would i would do it i think that if they're going to soybean the following year and intending to go to soybean the next year on that field um i would include cereal rye in it and and have that carry over um just make sure they're not going to go to wheat on that field or corn um because that adds a whole another management well it'd be difficult to grow wheat on cereal rye then corn adds a whole another step of management but but yeah that's what i would do or you know i some growers i work with that they want the full season cover crop mix and then they'll actually come in in the fall and seed um cereal rye into that full season mix to have a really good standard rye the next spring so two-step process a little tart tougher to convince to do that but um but yeah that's what i would do especially if they multiple years of high moisture what what do you have to lose by trying it you know we tried everything else and it's not working so we you know give it a shot see what happens but i think yeah typically that planting green of having a winter annual some kind of you know cereal rye winter winter wheat or something like that over winter and planting into the next year feels like the easiest sell to anyone so i'd say go for it let us know how it turns out if that's the excess moisture issue i think planting green would be the best because we want to kill the rye if we think that it's going to use some water which you want to want your ag kill crop to use but abby you have successful experiments where you planted green and then came back and then killed the rye correct yeah yeah if we have enough moisture there um especially in a higher clay soil that has high moisture issues repeatedly um then that's a great approach to on a sandier soil we're terminating the rye early to make sure it doesn't use up too much moisture in that seed bed um but yeah i mean rye is such a great tool and you can start i mean we've seen benefits starting around 40 pounds is usually where i see farmers start it if they're seeding it 40 pounds seems to be a good starting place and some of them have have stayed at 40 they've dropped down to 20 some have gone up to 100 you know just then they can get a feel for it but i think i feel like 40 is just kind of a good a good place to start um and say uh david saying a lot of people in panic mode and want a solution i want to change your conventional way it's a lot of producers experience too much moisture but are not convinced that the plants will eat up as much moisture as what tillage can do um boy yeah plants are pretty amazing i mean we use them as crops to move moisture and so you know if you can actually have a denser stand of plants out there i i just i mean imagine what what kind of moisture you can use and so it's a lot of yeah like you said just a lot of changing kind of the thought process and and that's names in my job too so we can we can kind of work on that and see what we can what we can produce i'm kind of bummed i'm bummed i won't have the soil health minute this summer um that won't be on tv this summer but but it doesn't mean that we can't get some good video and and whatever else too of some of these cover crop uh fields abby i i just have a quick question um um winter rye i i think the difference between cereal rye and winter rye would be that winter rye oh sorry cereal rye is easy to kill correct um so cereal rye and winter rye are actually the same thing um and actually marisol cringes every time i call it cereal rye but that's what everybody's kind of calling it okay it really is just the difference the only the main differences between the rye plants are winter rye cereal rye and just rye are like winter weeds or whatever else you know i mean so so that's one you know it's a cereal form of it and then there's the rye grass and rye grass is what we ask people to avoid because it can become a weed um so so yeah the rye grass is more of the forage the the winter rye cereal rye or just rye is for that grain so um so yeah marisol tells me i if you talk to sieves where her breeds the stuff he calls it winter rye marisol calls it cereal rye just because because she wants to make sure that people know what we're talking about but it really is just a it's just rye um the other thing i would say on the same question of drying the soil quicker with the tillage i think again erin day's presentation has some um good slides about you know how soils warm up comparing chisel plow and then uh some other tillage implement let's see so nathan says he seeded rye on a lot of pp acres last year it may not get appointed this year either but my neighbors may not either i have something actively growing now my neighbors do not so nathan i know a lot of farmers that are in the same situation and they are really glad they have the rye out there because those are fields they're not going to have to deal with and honestly they're going to take it to to harvest and sell the seed and and so um so yeah i mean it's it's just it's kind of nice to have those checked off the list and you've got something growing and using moisture and um you know we've we've heard from some people that well the the soil is still really wet under the rye and it's like well it's wet everywhere and but at least that acre seeded it's going to manage weeds and so that's awesome i that's good that you did that on your pp acres and now it's it's growing and i'd be curious to see um now that it's vernalized um what kind of what kind of yields you get off of it or how it how it establishes and and i'm guessing you're going to take it to harvest um unless it dries it out enough that you can get soybean in there or something but but i think there's that's great i like that i know a farmer with over 500 acres like that this year and he's just really happy that he doesn't have to deal with those acres