 Hello, my name is Jeff Hemingway, I'm the Soul Quality Specialist in South Dakota and today as you can actually see that we're after harvest out in the cornfield, we're actually going to be comparing the infiltration rates, that is the rate of which water goes in the soil between this cornfield and the adjacent cornfield that we have across the other side of the windbreak. Now the question that you're really asking is, why are we out in this cornfield? What differences would we actually have? Well, in this particular cornfield we actually have a no-till field, this no-till field has been no-till for 14 years in a corn bean wheat rotation, that wheat after wheat has actually had a cover crop on it so that the management here has been substantially different than the adjacent field. The adjacent field has had a corn soybean conventionally tilled and you'll see that a little bit later what that means as far as residue levels. We know that from a management standpoint that affects infiltration rate of water that actually goes in the soil that has a great deal to do with erosion and runoff, actually eventually production when we start talking about effective moisture on a particular site. So from my standpoint infiltration rates make a major difference as far as from a production standpoint and a standpoint from erosion, runoff and water quality issues associated with that. So let's do an infiltration. What we're going to use is actually an infiltration ring, 6 inches in diameter. We're going to drive that into the soil about 4 inches, have about 2 inches exposed, we're going to put an inch of water on that and see how fast that actually infiltrates. So it's a fairly simple process, we're just going to drive that in, 4 inches, we're going to use a piece of saran and we're going to put an inch of water within the ring itself and we're going to see how, we're going to time how fast that actually infiltrates. Okay, now that we've got an inch of water standing in there, let's look at my watch, ready, set, go. With the wheat residue that we have in the, of course the existing corn residue that we have here, we would expect that to actually infiltrate fairly rapidly into the soil and at this point, we've got 15, 20 seconds gone by and we have more than half the water that's actually infiltrated already into the soil itself and we're at about 30 seconds right now by my watch and as I can see that we're just, we're just about to the point where we've got all that water infiltrated, 35 and we'll call it at about 40 seconds we've infiltrated that water. So it's really fairly rapid in this particular situation, why is that? Well, we have some really good soil conditions here because of the interface between that crop residue that we have existing on that field and the really good aggregate stability that we have built up over the years of the snow till condition that we actually have here. Why don't we just look at that soil itself, we'll dig out that ring and talk a little bit more about what that structure actually looks like. To do that, we're just going to remove the ring, we're gingerly here and as we do that, you can actually look at the base of the ringing neck to see water and I don't know if you can actually see that but we have some fairly large wormholes, macropores at the base and because of that, that water's moved fairly rapidly through the soil here. We have some really good root structure, that water's moved through. Let's kind of press this out a little bit so that we can actually look at that residue and soil structure together and here you can actually see the roots from the past crops, really good root development, really good aggregate stability, granular structure, that interface between that residue and the soil is something that we really think is very desirable to actually move water down through that soil profile. So from our standpoint, this is what we're actually looking for in really good soil structure because moving that water down through that soil profile is actually going to increase productivity, reduce runoff and erosion and from an environmental standpoint, it's really going to be something that we're going to actually say that has some really good soil health. So this is what we're looking for and in a minute we're actually going to go across the windbreak, we were just talking about that a minute ago, we're going to look at a comparison to that field and see what that actually looks like. Alright, let's go. Okay, we've looked at the infiltration rate on the other side of the windbreak here, we've moved across the course onto the other side, this is this conventionally tilled field we were talking about, of course it was in corn this last year also as we were discussing, soybeans last year, corn this year, conventionally tilled and you can see that by just looking at that surface residue. Let's do the infiltration rate and talk a little bit more about that surface residue. Okay, so if you look at the surface residue conditions here compared to that no-tool field you can actually see some bare soil, of course you can see the corn stalks from the previous crop, what we're going to do is take that same infiltration ring, six inch ring, six inches in diameter, drive that in here and then we're going to also look at the infiltration rate of an inch of water. Okay, let's just do that and go from there. Now that we've driven that in again we're going to look at putting some cellophane down, again 444 mils equals one inch in the six inch ring. Okay, along with my watch what we've also done here of course because we think it's going to take a little bit longer. We've also set up my cell phone and we're actually going to look at that cell phone and do some timing there also. So let's get started with that. We're going to pull this out, start the phone and go from there. Ready? Get set. Go. As we start looking at infiltration rates because of lack of residue, because of the soil structure that we actually have on this particular site, we're going to guess that it's going to take quite a bit longer than it actually did to infiltrate water and that other on the other side of the field. Again we're at about 40 seconds here. From my standpoint I'm going to guess that it's going to take at least if not double the amount of time to infiltrate that water maybe three or four times as long because of the lack of macro pore development and structure associated with this particular soil site. Okay, we're just about at nine minutes and we still have well quite a bit of free water still in part of the ring. Again as I mentioned before it's going to take a while I think to actually infiltrate this water. We'll see. I'm going to guess at least another couple of minutes. Okay, I'm about ready to call this. We're at about 18 minutes and 40 seconds. We still have just a little bit of water left in that corner over here but again at about 18 minutes 30 seconds compared to what were we about 40 seconds on the other side looking at those two different kinds of management. Again this site is conventionally tilled corn, soybean rotation. Let's actually dig this ring out. Look at the soil structure that we actually have on this particular site a little bit more detail. That inch of water really didn't infiltrate through my four inches of soil. It's soaked into the first four inches but we don't see that coming through. We don't have the macro pores. We don't have that soil structure that we saw on the other side to be able to infiltrate that water. Let's just press this out see what we actually have. Again under tilled scenario we don't have that fine rip development as we saw it. We have a real lack of soil structure. Again this is soaked into the surface. We don't see that water actually moving through the soil profile. Now that we've finished up looking at the infiltration rate on this particular site what do we actually know? We know that it took over 18 minutes to infiltrate an inch of water on this particular site and less than a minute to infiltrate an inch of water on that diverse rotation that we had on the no-till field adjacent to this field. When conditions are compared and we start really looking at effective moisture that is moisture that actually hits that field and stays where it falls this field will actually have a substantial amount of runoff as compared to the no-till field. What does that mean from a soil structure standpoint from a production standpoint we're going to be more productive in our no-till systems than we are in these conventionally tilled systems over the long haul and as we know that we start moving to more intense and rainstorms climatologists are actually telling us that we need to be able to manage our moisture where it falls.