 Hi, everybody. My name is Meredith Miller. I am a dryland research agronomist here at the Williston Research Extension Center, and today I'm going to talk to you about the Pipeline Reclamation Project that we've been working on here for the last five years or so. This will actually be the first part of three videos. So today, this first video I'll be talking about some of the background on the project, the methods that we've been using, and some of our preliminary yield results. Our second video will be Nick Burkheimer. He's a soil science graduate student and he'll be talking a little bit more about the compaction and subsidence issues and some of the other soils issues that we've had. And then the third video will be Dr. Tom DeSutter from the Soil Science Department at NDSU talking a little more about compaction and a root biomass study that Nick's been working on. So, you know, this is western North Dakota. We've got lots of oil development out here, and all of that development causes a lot of issues with soil disturbance. Things like compaction, subsidence, the soil mixing, all cause problems, and in croplands can lead to reduced yields and soil fertility issues. So we wanted to learn the best practices for reclaiming that soil. So when we had a pipeline installed here in 2015, it was installed right through here. Those orange flags over there is where the pipeline is. We wanted to design a long-term experiment to see how we could best restore those yields. So we designed a study with three different treatment areas, three different disturbance areas. There's the undisturbed, the stuff right here next to me. There's the pipeline, the furthest orange flags over there, where the pipeline was installed obviously, where there's the most issues with soil mixing, where the top soil and the subsoil are getting mixed together, which leads to reduced soil fertility and increased leaching material. And then there's the roadway, the closer orange flags over there, where the top soil was scraped off, and all of the heavy equipment traffic was at. So that area is really compacted. It's lost a lot of its soil structure, and so that area, it's going to have problems with the water infiltrating and roots penetrating down. And then so that we could, you know, best see how to restore the soil, we looked at a series of five different annual crops, and two perennial crop covers, LFL fun and grass mix, to see if any of those looked promising for restoring soil health. Last year, we planted everything to straight Durham to see if our crops made any differences in yield, and this year everything is planted to safflower. We chose to do safflower because it has a nice deep tap rot, and the roots penetrate extremely deep in non-compacted soil. So depending on how things look this year, it should show that our compaction has been broke up a little bit. We also designed the study to have three different sub-treatments, ways that we treated the soil to see if that has an impact on the compaction as well. We've got the no-till, which we just left alone. We didn't do any treatments. We have a ripping sub-plot where we came through and we lifted up the top 18 inches of the soil and then dropped it again, which broke up the compaction and broke up the structure and created pathways for the water and roots to hopefully penetrate down deeper to further break it up. And then our third treatment that we used was ripping plus manure, where we worked in some manure while we were ripping, to add more nutrients and organic matter. We collect a ton of data out here every year. We collect biomass. We collect soil moisture readings every week. We collect emergence data, how many plants came up in a row. We collect heights to see if there's a difference in the undisturbed plots versus the roadway plots versus the pipeline plots. And then at the end of the year when we harvest, we also collect yield and look to see if there's any differences in protein and oil content and test weight to see how quality the seed is. We also collect imagery each week using a drone, which looks at greenness, if there's big open spaces, how healthy everything looks. And then we also collect soil data such as bulk density, nutrient analysis, and then we also use this pentatrometer that Nick will talk more about to show how how the compaction looks across the field. Some preliminary yield results for our first four years of the study where we had different crops planted in different areas. There really wasn't a lot of difference. This undisturbed stuff where there wasn't any truck traffic, where the soil wasn't mixed was consistently the best. And then the roadway stuff where there was the most traffic and the most compaction on that soil consistently had the lowest yields. But then when we start looking at our different treatments, the ripping versus ripping with manure versus no-tail, the ripping with manure and the ripping both seem to be consistently higher yields as well. So at this point, it's looking at how you treat the soil is going to have a bigger impact on your yields and improving your soil health than what you're planting. But that's still very preliminary data that our awesome graduate student Nick is working on digging through for us. So we'll have more information about that coming out in the next few months while he continues to dig into that. If you have any more questions or you'd like to come to or it, feel free to contact me here at the WREC. Thanks. And Nick will have a second video here coming up too.