 My name is Lindy Burke, I am the Towner County NDSU Extension Agent. I am here with Naeem Cowar, our soil specialist of the Langdon Research Extension Center. Water is the key to remediate unproductive areas. Most unproductive areas have moderate to high levels of water soluble salts. Apart from salt issues, these areas either have excess sodium that causes sodicity or magnesium levels that are high compared to calcium causing excess swelling of soils. These issues affect plants and soils resulting in unproductive areas and net revenue losses. Wet weather created shallow groundwater depths and has brought excess salts and sodium into the topsoil. However, recent dry weather is not helping these issues. We need quality water in sufficient quantities to force excess salts into deeper soil depths to remediate salinity and to dissolve soil amendments such as gypsum to remediate sodicity. In the fall of 2016, Towner County Extension initiated a demonstration on a saline and sodic area. Based on soil sampling and testing, this unproductive area was separated into three acres. On one acre, gypsum was applied, the second acre received beat lime, and the third acre did not receive any amendments. After spreading and incorporating amendments, a mix of perennial salt tolerant grasses were planted on all three acres. However, due to the drier weather in 2017, 18, 19, and 20, soil salinity and sodicity levels mostly remained unchanged. That was due to the lack of quality water to push the excess salt into the deeper soil depths and dissolve soil amendments to remove excess sodium from the topsoil. In order to see if more rain could have helped, a soil water infiltration demonstration was performed on the actual soil samples of the gypsum, beat lime, and control plots for 0 to 12 inch and 12 to 24 inch soil depths. In this demonstration, soil electrical conductivity, or EC, was used to measure salinity, whereas sodium absorption ratio was used to assess sodicity. Except one sample, there was a big drop in soil EC after infiltration. Decrease in EC ranged between 60 to 90%. One sample that only had an EC decrease of 4.89 or 5% was from beat lime plot for the depth of 12 to 24 inches. The lowest decrease in EC could be that this sample infiltrated water in 24 minutes, which was the fastest. This fastest infiltration happened in 255 minutes. Decrease in AR ranged between 39 and 83%. Highest decrease was in gypsum samples followed by beat lime and control samples. There was not much change in soil pH after infiltration compared to before infiltration. The takeaways from this demonstration is that there were no noticeable differences in pH. Five out of the six samples, including control EC levels, were lowered 60.62% to 90.01%, and the reduction in soil SAR levels ranged between 39.64% to 83.65%. Again, wet weather created shallow groundwater depths and brought excess salt and sodium into the top soil. However, recent dry weather is not helping these issues. In order to remediate these areas, we need quality water in sufficient quantities.