 So, welcome everyone to the third NDSU soil health webinar, I'm named Calver and with me are Dr. Abhivik and Scott Swenson. So last two webinars, we have had mostly focused on dealing with vet fields, we compared different tillage practices, Dr. Arnday presented that topic and then Abhi talked about dealing with vet fields by using cover crops. Today, we would want to focus on a very important topic of vend erosion. You know, early on during this year, I was talking to one of my very good friends who is a farmer and he mentioned to me, which was very striking, he said to me that Naeem, some farmers still think that when their soil blows, that goes to their neighbor's field and then they get it back when it blows from their neighbor's fields. So essentially they consider that there's no vend erosion, that's not a loss. So he told me to make sure to communicate this very clearly that not only we lose that top soil, but it goes at times several hundred miles away. So that is a very important topic and you know, weather in North Dakota is quite windy. I personally cannot think of anyone better than Dr. David Frenzen to talk about this. He not only has a lot of experience and great insight, but he has pictures which are quite chilling. I wanted to use the word very good pictures, but then I realized I shouldn't use the word good because when you would see those pictures, it will have a chilling effect on you. And his topic is phosphorus export from North Dakota, but when we would play his pre-recorded presentation, you would realize what he's basically talking about is a loss of top soil and how much roughly phosphorus went with that. This is a presentation that I put together for the governor's historical society about 10 years ago, roughly. I'm Dave Frenzen. I'm a professor of soil science and extension soil specialist, mostly soil fertility, but also some soil health things. I work with Neem, Calvary, Abby Wick, Kayleigh Gash, Chris Augustine, and others with some soil health topics. So about 10 years ago, the society gave me a column on the history of fertilizer application in North Dakota. And I heard the word governor and I said yes, and I hung up the phone and thought, what in the world did I do? I'm going to talk for half hour 45 minutes on a graph of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potash since 1950 to present. That'll take all of two minutes. So I started to think about it and I started to think about one of the stories that I've heard from older farmers about the buffalo bones. So I decided to dig in and find out what I needed to know about that. So one of the things that a person needs to understand going into this is that when settlers came to North Dakota, this was a vast prairie. Very few trees around, maybe some of the major streams and rivers in the state had trees alongside of them, but for the most part, very deep prairie soils. A lot of them, less than 10,000 years old, east of the Missouri River and then there were older soils, more fragile soils, West River, but they had relatively high levels of available nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. The native calcium, magnesium, micronutrient levels were very high. It was what the bank of nutrients that had been gathered by plants in a prairie, graze prairie situation for at least 10,000 years, if not longer. So I know when you go to certain art studios and see those nice little pictures, those paintings of the early pioneers going through the tall grass and with the wagons and everything, occasionally you see a buffalo skull by the side of the trail, but this is really what it looked like. There are just bones everywhere. This is a picture from 1887 from some place in North Dakota, and this is really common. And I think some people are surprised by that because the general understanding is that the natives used all the parts of the buffalo. And that is all true, that natives used all the parts of the buffalo, but they didn't know how many kind of family really use as a shovel, a scapula or any other thing. So their bones just scattered all over the place. Some of these bones, of course, was from the Great Slaughter, the reservations, but just naturally the buffalo would die, the wolves, the coyotes and everything else would eat them. Bones would be left behind. The herds would walk over them and crush some, but you have hundreds of years of bones laying out there in the prairie. So that is kind of what it looked like. So here's some recollections of people that I had to deal with this. This is from a young farm hand in Richland County, A.G. Divid from 1882, complained in a letter. He said the bones had to be removed from the path of the plows because the plows, once they hit them, they stopped and just made a mess. But many, many people made money trading them, selling them to traders. Here's another person, Carl M. Sagan, from who farmed between Grafton and Park River. He noted that first the bones were a nuisance. That was when they first settled between 1880 and 1884, and then a bone market opened up in Park River in 1885 and they received $13 a ton, which is big money back then. So the settlers and others, because not all the landlids claimed that they would go out in the prairie, gather bones, and then take them to a place where they would be sold, piled up, and then shipped generally to the east to use for various things. This is a picture of a pile of bones near Fort Totten in the 1880s. Here's an advertisement in 1885 from the Grafton News and Times. Notice to farmers, I'll pay cash for buffalo bones, bring them in by the ton of the 100. I'll give 50 pounds by the best wine for one ton of buffalo bones. This month only or a $40 sewing machine for 40 tons. I want 5,000 tons this month. Actually, that's kind of cheap compared to other prices I've seen up to $20 a ton for bones from time to time. Here's some Metis Indians with a two-wheel Red River carts hauling bones near Minawakon. Here's some more stories. Sometimes little towns, when they had their centennials here about 30, 40 years ago, would get recollections from people that were still alive at the time, and these are some of them. This is from 1880 in Colm, North Dakota. For several years, or especially hard, due to crop failures and low prices, Buffalo Ballondale exchanged for food and flour. Ellondale was the nearest town at the time and was 42 miles from their farm. This is from the same area. Mr. Kruger broke up about 10 acres of land the first year, but the year was a drought year and he didn't even get his seed back. Mr. Kruger, with nothing else to do after seeding, started picking up buffalo bones, and the bones were sold eventually in Ellondale and received about $12 a ton. He would go out one day and home the next with a wagon load of bones camping out overnight and sold about $70 worth of bones during the early part of the summer in 1889, and this helped the Kruger family quite a bit as they had no other income. And another recollection from Lair, North Dakota in 1890, they planted their first flax crop and collected buffalo bones, took them to Ellondale and received $2 a wagon load. So this is just common. This is a part of the way that early settlers were able to survive during the first two, three years that they were on the property. Here's a menace Indian caravan arriving at Devil's Lake at the St. Paul Manitoba in Minneapolis River Road Station in 1885 and prices for bones went as high as $20 a ton that year. Each wagon contained about 1,200 pounds of bones. And here's a settler wagons with bones arriving at Minot on July 3, 1889. And here's a pile of bones in Minot about the same time in 1889. These are loaded up into in the railroad car, so it was all hand labor, unloaded it, got paid for it, and then people would load the, load the bones into boxcars mostly. This happened all, all along the Northern Prairies. This is an illustration in Montana, the one on the top and down below is one in North Dakota getting ready to load up into the Northern Pacific. And Saskatchewan, you can find references in Saskatchewan, Manitoba, piled by a railway siding and these on the bottom is near Illondale in 1888. Another advertisement, wanted dry buffalo bones. A person seems to be buying everything from scrap iron to bones and hoofs. Bone black, fertilizers, etc. So that's what they were sending them to make in St. Louis, Missouri. This is not a fertilizer manufacturer. This is for industrial uses outside of, outside of Detroit in 1892, a pile of buffalo bone skulls. So if that looks familiar, if you've ever seen the movie Revenant, there's a picture from a dream scene after the, after the star, the lead actor gets mauled by a bear outside of Lemons, South Dakota. He has this dream and looks pretty familiar, doesn't it? Anyway, so a typical fresh bone meal guaranteed analysis about 3% nitrogen, 15% phosphate, 315-0 in fertilizer vernacular. So after a time, most of the nitrogen is probably going to leach into the soil, but the phosphorus would have been, would have been taken up. We don't have any records from North Dakota on how much was shipped out of here because the Northern Pacific place where this, these records are stored had a fire and burned, but we have records from Kansas who had, we think about similar numbers of bones on their prairies. They had an earlier trade. That area was, was settled earlier than, than North Dakota. So from 1872 to 74, the Santa Fe Railroad, others, they shipped over 3.2 million tons of bones to the east. So we, we, we think that about the same number of bones were, were taken east from here also. And if that was a case that contained 15% could do the math, about 480,000 tons of P205 were shipped out of North Dakota east and removed from the ecosystem. And to compare, that's about two years of phosphate fertilizer application at today's present rates, which are at historic highs. So that's really interesting. That, that would take up another 10 minutes of that 45 minute talk. And so, but then I started thinking about probably what I thought might have been at least as much of a phosphate export as buffalo bones. And that was when we lost our topsoil, which in some areas of the state is still ongoing when it gets dry. This is a picture of a dust storm aftermath in McKenzie County back in the 30s. So remember the first, the first slide I showed you was the prairie was this bank of nutrients have been built up over thousands and thousands of years. Topsoil is very thick. I'll show you some evidence for that in a minute. The people that came here were, for the most part, pretty smaller people. And they, they conducted agriculture the way they were taught to conduct agriculture, the only way that you could conduct agriculture. And this is a farmer or a farm hand on one of the premier tractors of the day with one of the premier implements of the day in the Red River Valley somewhere between 1910 and 1915. The fields had to be plowed and then worked and then worked and then worked four or five, six times in order to get them the consistency of flour. Because many of you have seen those old planters, they don't have any weight to them. So in order to get the, get the seed at the right depth, you had to have it just as loose as flour. And this is fine from where they, they came from. I mean, some of these people came from Norway or Germany or anywhere else in Europe and the Eastern United States surrounded by trees and, you know, anywhere where a stiff wind is about 10 miles an hour. And this, this worked really well. I mean, they had to fight water erosion, certainly, but, but wind erosion is something that most of them didn't ever have to deal with. And of course, the natives that lived out here, they, how, how could they tell them anything about the wind? Because to them, this is, this is wrong side up, you know, the roots, you know, the grass roots are up instead of down. So they, they would never have have plowed, plowed any soil. The agriculture that was conducted along the Missouri River, for example, the Mandans and other tribes along the Missouri, conducted farming pretty much like the Egyptians did. They waited for the, for the spring flood, recede, deposited silk along the river banks and the flood plains. And then they go in with their sticks and they put the seeds in the ground, their corn and their squash and, and their beans and, and sunflowers, whatever else. And that's how they did it. They never turned the, turned the field over. So this was, this was the first time. So letters to the East always talked about how windy it was that people couldn't believe how windy it was all the time. And references of people farming or have plowed, have plowed, talk about the soil blowing. I mean, the soil, the soil always blew. But there really wasn't any concern in anybody for quite some time, even though there were some losses. And then in the late 20s, 28, maybe 29, certainly the weather started to turn dry. This is corn growing up by Minot, North Dakota about 1929, 1930. So things started to get dry, crop failures. And again, they're working the ground five, six times and getting at the consistency of flower and the rain didn't come and the wind started to blow. So my colleague, Tom DeSutter, he has an office next to me, teaches and does research at NDSU. He, he does hospice, volunteer hospice work as a service to the community. And he was working with one retired farmer and got his family's permission to use this information. So this is Orville Stenerson from Dodge North, the 30s. 1932 was a good year, but 1933 was a bad year, 34 was dry with lots of dust. 1935 was a good year with rains, I suppose everything is relative. 1936 was a very bad year, the worst. Lots of dust and grasshoppers, they had three loads of hay compared to 20 to 30 in a good year. Dust black in the sky, they had to turn on oil lamps to see it noon inside. They sold all their livestock. They kept only a dairy cow. They had to use Russian thistle for forage. That's all they had. There was any wheat that year at all. 1937 was better than 36, but still bad. So this made a tremendous impression on this young man at that time. After that slide, I was given a form of this talk up by Gilby, North Dakota, here several years ago when a retired farmer just stood up in the back of the room, started talking and this is a part of what he said. He spoke for about five or ten minutes, but these are some ideas that I took away from him. I'm out of nowhere and sometimes lasts for days. In some storms, we lost feet of soil. We stuffed papers and rag. The inside of the house was still dusty and hard to see. After the storm, we had to dig out the fences because the stock had walked over them. So these were nasty times. We hear about the dust bowl from Texas and Oklahoma and Kansas, but it hit North Dakota just as hard. So by the mid-30s, the USDA had finally figured out that wind erosion was a huge problem in the Great Plains. So that black area in the center of the country, that's us. That's part of us. So here's some photographs from that period of time. This is in Evans County, just east of Bismarck. That's a fence and apparently this is very common. Notice the person's tie. In the mid-30s, the USDA started hearing some feedback from North Dakota on how horrible it was. So they sent out a representative out to the area. His name was Russell. And so he took several photographs that are now Library of Congress. This is a photograph of Williston in 1937 in the background. Nothing but scrub and see how the soil is just, those are dunes, those are little dunes. Here's a horse pasture, quote unquote, during the dust storm near Williston, 1937, another Russell image. My personal image, one of the images that I bought myself, it's a dust storm in Huron, South Dakota, taken November 12th in 1933. And it's 1155 in the morning. And the street lights are on. You can barely see that vehicle there, but it's as dark as night. This is a huge dust wall coming down on the Watertown, South Dakota in the 30s sometime. This is another daytime picture. This is from Watertown on May 9th, 1934, 3 p.m. on a course. This is a huge dust storm coming in on Gregory, South Dakota, which is just south up here, what, 60 miles maybe in 1934. This is the aftermath of one of those Gregory, South Dakota dust storm and then Farmstead, abandoned machinery, maybe the old family car, maybe the new family car, everything just covered with what used to be topsoil. This is a person, there's actually a video trying to walk against the wind. In 1936 on a field, you can barely, you can just hardly imagine it's a field, but it's a field. And walking into the wind, it's a hurricane force. This is the aftermath again, soil drifting over a hog house in 1935, South Dakota. So, the farmers didn't have any money, didn't have any crops, their fields were ruined in many, many places. The soil was just, some of you have heard of or know or have seen Mick Care, when he was on TV or listened to him on the farm radio. He grew up in the cloud, North Dakota, which is just on the western edge of the Cheyenne grasslands. Well, the Cheyenne grasslands, every quarter section there was farmed. And Mick told me that he and his dad would go out there sometimes and, and ride around and he'd point, you know, over here and say that, you know, Johnson's lived over here and Smith's lived over here and there was a house in every quarter section and everybody farmed and it was a very prosperous area. And then it got dry and those sensitive sandy soils started to blow. And after several years, everybody moved away. So a lot of these areas were just deserted that farmers just moved away. So the people that, the people that remained, of course, there wasn't anything to feed the stock with. So the government had a program where you bring in a cow or pig or whatever horse and, and you would get a certain amount of money, I think $10 for a steer, maybe $10 for a horse. You drop them off, the government to shoot them, put them in a pit, and most of them had dust ammonia anyway, so they were going to die one way or the other. So it was a very, very tough time, tough, tough, tough. One of the things that, that the farmers do a lot now, many of them still think that way, despite educational programs, but, but they think that after a dust storm, the only soil that moved was what was in the ditch. And some of them joke about trading soil with the neighbor, but they forget that the, the dust storm is a three-dimensional beast that has height as well as, as left and right. So here is a clipping from 1934 from the Bismarck Tribune on commenting on a dust storm that happened in late April. The whole thing, but the dust storms occurred on April 21st, 22nd. The velocity of wind was greater on the 21st, but the volume was greater on the 22nd. And the 22nd was remarkable because it was on a Sunday and travel plane was hazardous and difficult, which is tough because of travel. And several AVs were at all levels up to 14,000 feet. So there's height with these dust storms. So they didn't have satellites back then, but we have satellites now. And, and so we can look at some of these dust events and, and we can see how vast they are. This is Luce region, also a very windy, very eroded area in the United States. And those dust plumes over 100 miles long. And how much of that went in the ditch? How much of that was traded with the neighbors? A little, but most of it blew away. And the same is true with any dust storm that we see in this area also. So the USDA assessed what, what happened during the 30s in North Dakota. Almost 600, 600,000 acres had really serious erosion. They really needed methods to ensure continued product acres are so severely eroded that further, further was economically unfeasible. So we have millions of acres of range in the state. And part of it is because the top soil blew away and that's all it's good for. And then we have the grasslands and that used to be farmed and now it's not. So some of that land is probably come back into crops, but a lot of it has just been lost forever for, for crop production and, and sustains marginal livestock production. So the USDA made a nice little map here in 1936 about the soil losses during the first part of the 30s. The black indicates areas were moderate wind erosion, which it kind of had to chuck like that is 25 to 75% top soil loss. They've denoted it as, as moderate and dotted is slight wind erosion and 25% top soil loss. And then in the Southwest part of the state, the oblique is a total of wind and water erosion, 70, 75% top soil loss. So that's, that's the first half of the 30s with the other half still to go. So in 1933, a memo to the Secretary of Agriculture said that it was estimated that top soil losses reduced annual productivity 15 to 25%. And when the soil was fully stripped, fields became unproductive or barren. So here we started with a prairie soil in that grazed environment. And that soil organic matter present at the time was thousands of years of soil and plant and microorganism activity in many, many places that at all disappeared and certainly have been sorely reduced. If you look back at the records or initial wheat yields in the state were really high, particularly in the Eastern part of the state. It was cited by a historian, Hyrum Drocky that works at or worked at Minnesota State University, Minnesota Moorhead for many years, 30 bushels and acre, 1890 near Jamestown and near 50 bushels and acre in some years in Walsh County. There's many years where people are going to be happy with yields like that today. And back then they were using marginally adapted varieties. They were using planning equipment that was just one step above what the Egyptians used 3,000 years ago. You know, there wasn't any fertilizer. They didn't have much trouble with weeds back then. The weeds that were imported from Europe didn't have a chance to be established, but it's just it's remarkable that with the crude technologies at a time they were getting yields and in some years we would still be happy with today. All that would only be possible if all of those nutrients that were needed for those excellent crops were provided from the soil because there was no fertilizer applied. Today if we put in a field of fallow it's rare really that we see over 100 pounds of end per acre coming off our fallow soil because our soils have been degraded so much. So the soil that blew away people ask well where in the world it go? Well it went everywhere. Oceanographers and people that study the oceans and the sediments between them they they core down into the into the ocean and read it like tree rings years of deposits and some of that is dust some of this what washes into the ocean to create those deltas but a lot of it is just dust from wherever the dust falls everywhere the circles the globe most of it goes many many miles away. Some of the some of the dust forms that were happening in the Great Plains affected small and larger cities those records from Chicago for example of having to bring out plows to clear the streets after some events they were finding inches of inches sediments in Central Park in New York and so they're one group of researchers that during that period of time would go out and and take samples of that and then compare it to what what was left on the prairies and some people went out in Central Park and took some samples and what they found is that the soil that they were taken out of the dust was had 19 times more phosphate than what was left in the prairies from where they thought it came from 10 times more organic matter nine times more nitrogen 45 times more potassium so all the good stuff all the good stuff ended up somewhere else and certainly and not in the neighbor's field. Here's another example how this in kilograms per hectare over on the left but if you look at the 1.2 1.4 that's equivalent fiber call somewhere around 25 bushels nacre so so we're averaging somewhere around 25 bushels nacre back in 1880 1890 all the way in 1910 and then it started to decline the weather was still decent but the top soil had started to leave and then the 30s when it got dry of course it yielded during the war effort the rains came back and and yields increased some but notice they never came back to where they were on 1900 consistently and where they were in 1900 until people started for non-fertilizer so my estimates of top soil lost and I think this is conservative is about 12 inches off the hill tops eight inches off the slopes six inches of top soil lost in North Dakota from about 30 million acres of cropland and the total weight of that is around 30 billion tons it would have been typical then and now to phosphate in acre slice six inches of soil and if that is the case then the total phosphate lost during the 30s would have been about 30 million tons or about a some phosphate application at today's present historically high rates so after the 30s it was all fixed people understood what needed to be done and the many women and of course not you know we've all seen problems so so there were a big erosion events in the 40s particularly in the 50s there were some in the 70s and then if people are as old as I am who can't forget those lovely years of 80 87 to about 1990 when townships had to use their trucks to take the take the soil off of streets and many towns and cities in North Dakota with all the wind and all the drought so here's a picture from a field edge in nine 1950s and ground forks and that's not snow that's soil and we continue to lose erosion and have soils damaged about 13 percent of our cropland was damaged in 1977 about 2.1 million acres lost about an inch of soil in 1980 again another event in 1982 and it continues and continues and there's more alarmed about continual soil loss and I think the reason is because they mask the effects with the tillage they don't have any check for a reference or they ignore the obvious there are a lot of since since it's gotten wet a lot of these stone piles these rock piles particularly in the eastern part of the state but also places around Missouri River have been places around Missouri River have been used as quarries to shore up ditches and culverts and stream banks and things but there's still plenty of them out there and if you look real close you can see that some of these are on pedestals that they're they're not the surface of the present soil they they're they indicate the present the surface of the soil as it was when the rock piles first were built and so they they kind of stand up on these little things anywhere from six inches 12 inches maybe higher than that but I think this is the the the big thing that happens you have cultivation and erosion you have hidden soil losses and the soil profile just gets never over so at the beginning what we're looking at here is kind of how soil scientists think of the soil we're always we always think of the soil as if we're standing in a pit soil science soil scientists are always in the pits we're always depressed right so so anyway we're looking at it from the side here and we see what we call horizons the a horizon in a prairie soil very very dark very black color for the most part in the western part of the the state that tends to be a little bit more dark brown and black but still very very dark and and the very big beginning pretty thick two three feet many cases and then the B horizon underneath that that's the zone where the roots and the chemistry have been working where there's maybe clays that have moved from the surface soils down to the subsoils and increase air from where it used to be or there have been lime that's deposited from deeper depths or salts that have been brought up some kind of chemical biological change has taken place and then the C below that is the original parent material where there hasn't been a lot of change typically pretty low organic matter in that area highest organic matter in the a a little bit less than the in the B background noise in the C so consider your your broken up the prairie for the first time you have two feet of about seven percent organic matter soil you turn it over it looks really black some blows away but goodness you know there's enough there for about a thousand years so who cares and so your plowing and working and the wind blows and the wind blows and wind blows and wind blows and after about 30 40 years or something like that you're looking back in your tractor and it still looks black to you instead of about two feet of black you've got maybe the depth of the plow black maybe eight inches block still looks black to you it's not as deep as it was but you don't know the difference and then as this keeps eroding you start to plow into the B and instead of seven and a half percent organic matter soil all of a sudden you get six and then you have five and then you have four and then you have three and a half but you're looking back to the tractor after you get done plowing or working the ground that still looks black to you and you keep on going and keep on going and it keeps eroding and keeps eroding and the B gets blended in with the A and all of a sudden you're starting to work into the C and so you have this dark zone that still looks black to you as far as you know it's the same black as your great grandfather had in 1880 but it surely isn't but to you you know there's really no difference there's no point of reference and you're working into the C and you have three and a half and then three and then two and a half and that's how it works you're looking in the back of the tractor it still looks black to you but it's not so a graduate student of Dave Hopkins another colleague of mine they revisited some soil survey sites that were characterized in 1960 by the SCS which is now the NRCS and what they found is is this this is this is one one site in western walsh county in 1958 when it was first characterized on the plow layer was about six inches thick that they had two B horizons that they characterized the K means that it has some lime accumulated in them and it went down to 34 inches and then the C horizon the relatively untouched unadulterated parent material the depth from the surface to the to that was about 34 inches when Dave and Brandon came back in in 2014 and ran a transect across the same area to capture the same soil that was characterized in 1958 they found that the distance from the surface to the sea horizon was only 15 inches so they lost 19 inches of top soil during that period of time and the farmer had no idea still look back to them on the right you'll see a serious eroded soil near Buffalo North Dakota on a what's you know mapped a barn soil and you can see that abrupt dark and then white and and that means that that you're pretty well farming farming C horizon there that the dark up on top is just a blend with a poor poor memory of what the top soil used to be right on top of the C horizon sometimes if you get down into the pits and start looking around you can find some evidence of what the soil used to look like many many many years ago these are old worm channels or sometime gopher holes a russian name form is crotovinas they fill up with the organic matter from up above it just kind of washes into it over time and here's a either a wormhole or a root channel from deeper in the soil and look how black it is compared to the soil up around it just there's no comparison between the two the black in there is probably six seven percent and the organic matter above it is probably somewhere around three so anyway it's a little bit of a look in the past the way the soil used to look here's some additional evidence and you can find some for yourself if you a lot of these old soil surveys are scanned now and you can find them on the internet this is one from divide county in 1900 the divide soil series was described as having 16 inches of very black top soil and divide soil series you can find some of course in divide county but you can also find it west river i've you know there's there's some mapped west river and today it doesn't have really any black top soil the best you could say is it has a light gray top soil and so the the losses on those soils are at least a foot because it's not very black anymore or casket with us a wheatland soil i've worked in the soil survey in 1903 described it as having two feet of top soil with organic matter is six point nine percent and today it has around two percent organic matter and it's lost everything it's lost everything and then they also describe Miami loam which is probably something close to a Bearden and described as having three feet of seven percent organic matter soil and a Bearden today is most often about six inches of four plus some of these Bearden soils is probably two and a half feet and the Fargo soil series in 1903 was described as having two feet of very black top soil and today it's around six inches of four and a half to five five and a half percent top soil so the losses on these soils have just been incredible so the top soil again contains about a ton of phosphate and North Dakota's probably lost an additional six inches of top soil from Griswold crop acres since 1940 and if that's the case i think it's true and probably conservative we've lost another 12 and a half million tons of phosphate and 40 million tons of nitrogen and that's equivalent of 75 years of nitrogen and phosphate application that farmers apply today at present rates and in many areas of the state it still happens if you want to see a dust storm come the first time it dries out this spring in the Red River Valley especially the northern valley and and just kind of drive around and hopefully in an old car because your other car will be pitted with all the sand in the in the soil that's blowing around but but this is very common so this as soon as the soil dries out because there are very few fields in this area that are no-till, strip-till, more of them have cover crops than they used to but still it's a very heavily cultivated area so after math of a late nineties the the storm uh in the in the valley that's a the aftermath soil filling the ditch several feet in depth these are other pictures of soil filling the ditches and then look at that cloud above it i mean all that fine stuff all that good stuff is just blowing blowing away probably hundreds of miles certainly not in the neighborhood of course stuff gets in a ditch the really good fine stuff that's that's what goes away so there was a lot of work about roughing up the soil but that only lasts for about one dust storm and then it's all gone and and then you got to deal with the aftermath so most of the time you get more than one event a season people laugh at snirt but it's not funny it's just an indication to be the soil in the ditch is supposed to be white and if it's not things in the field need to be fixed for loaves to to use no till and strip till on as his sugar beets are just scared to death that that we don't have the equipment to go through residue with these things but that that's not true this isn't the 1930s we we have you can go to farm shows and and for any kind of field situation you can find farm machinery that can that can go through and plant uh in a reasonable manner through any any kind of residue that you can think of people try to use some residue and use some what they call conservation tillage but just just slows the inevitable you're still going to lose soil look along the tree then you can see dust blowing across the field most of our most of our tree belts in the state are reached maturity and are on the other side and starting to die off some people think it's spray but i think in most cases that the tree is they don't last 2 000 years a normal normal lifespan of a cottonwood is probably 50 60 years something like that some of these other trees are grown in the shoulder belts the ashes and others you know about 50 60 years and they start to go away so this is just reasonable they need to be renovated um and not just torn out and and forgot about they're there for a reason uh they really helped before there was no till now the people in the west are in no till and the tree rows aren't quite so important anymore but it still slows the wind quite a little bit it's a picture of sugar beets growing in in in no till out in montana of course it'll have the moisture problems that we do here in the east so maybe no till is not the right thing to do but certainly something like strip till certainly could be and has been shown to be very effective this is some strip till corn growing down in rutherland and i took 250 bushel corn off of these plots here a few years ago extremely productive very long-term no till over 40 years piled for 20 years um high clay soils just like there are in the valley strip till strip till corn 250 bushels that is hard to have any conventional field that would beat a farm like this so my campus plots it's no till beats strip till beats um never found a difference in yield between the conventional till and the and the strip this is strip till beats again strip till is good for for row crops and particularly those that are warm season but even even sugar beets works pretty well and if nothing else at least put a cover crop in there i know this last year you know we're speaking here in spring of 2020 that fall was not really conducive to plant a cover crop but if that was put into a person's schedule and most years you be able to put some in and at least offer some protection from wind erosion even water erosion in most years so to kind of wrap things up despite historic high fertilizer nutrients levels of phosphate on many North Dakota farms are still low and we probably have at least 200 years of no soil loss and continued phosphate application to catch up to where we were in 1890 the soil loss helps answer these questions because i get these questions from time to time from people that are in conventional tillage why don't my soil phosphate values improve you know all because they seem to blow away every year why is my soil pH increasing it's because the subsoil and most of our soils is very high in lime and pH and you keep digging up more subsoil and putting it mixing it with the topsoil so of course your pH is increasing and why do i have more soil crusting it's because your organic matter is very low and your good stuff blows away and with lower organic matter you have a greater problem with soil crusting and you're mixing in your sea horizon which has hardly any structure to it at all and with your topsoil so all of those questions ran was blowing away the only remedy for continued soil degradation is no till or modified no till such as strip till so to summarize North Dakota has a long history of phosphate export first on purpose with the buffalo bones and but the second as an unintended consequence soil fertility is intimately related to soil conservation and the only way to restore soils is through a long term no till commitment so thank you for viewing this presentation this is my contact information below you're welcome to come to you happy to talk with you or visit with you over an electronic device thank you so I have a chat question here and the question is how much sulfur could we credit from a 7% organic matter of soil if you add 7% we would normally give 100 pound of nitrogen credit and I think you'd be very safe crediting 10 pounds of sulfur from that as well but a 10 to 1 ratio is about typical so I'll ask you a question Dave um with the with the organic matter percentages um what numbers are we trying to get back up to and I know this varies by soil type but what what numbers do you think we would need to be at to to see some reduced crusting issues or better fertilizer releases and some of these these soils that have been eroded well we're seeing crusting and and say something like a Fargo soil that has an organic matter of five five and a half percent I I think those soils once you get up to about seven percent you're probably in pretty good shape I know you we've worked down at Rutland with Joe Brooker for a while and you know what neighbors seem to have a little crusting problem down there with their three and a half percent organic matter of soil but his seven percent organic matter of soil I've never seen that be a problem for him so I think once you get about seven if you're in the western part of the state I think once you get up to maybe five percent or so then maybe even less than that then the the crusting problem tends to go away also the residue in the surface prevents that from happening because the soil doesn't dry like a brick like it does if it's bare so it always has a little bit more moisture in in a in a drier environment or after heavy rain that's a that's an advantage there's another question I get from the producers that some of them don't like the trees because they say that you know around the shelter bells you know there's more snow and then those areas dry out um it takes a longer time for those areas to dry out so actually some of the some of the people don't like the trees and they would not want to replant and they want to get rid of the existing trees yeah I I I understand that that the people see him as a little bit of a nuisance but uh older older farmers um they comment that how horrible it was and the trees really made a huge difference I I challenge people to think about that uh to ask themselves what their field how productive their field really would have been if those tree rows had not been there you know I I am very reluctant to do any any research to compare yields next to a tree row what yields out in the middle of the field because you're assuming that those fields in the the soils in the middle of the field are just as productive if they wouldn't have been when those if the tree rows had not been there but that's not true would have been much reduced in productivity and probably required more fertilizer as well if the tree rows had never been there and so I I just I challenge people to to um take a deep breath maybe think about I know it's hard to imagine you know with planters that are you know God knows up to 100 feet wide but um you know if if you've got 80% of the field that that's ready and 20% isn't um you know do you really have to put one crop into one field can't you put a later crop and the what's going to be next to the tree row I don't know just something to think about you're not going to have to worry about that every year of course we've we've worked without a lot of times during from 92 to present but um just a different way to think about it and I guess I wouldn't be so I was I wouldn't be so depressed watching tree rows come out if the farmers that were taken about were going to no till and fixing their tillage while they were doing it but most of them don't I mean they they take out the tree row and they continue to take the chisel plow out and make it as black as they can it just it they had they need to do one or the other or else suffer the consequence or else suffer like the soils around Grafton are and gradually turn white you know and lose all their top soil after a period of time I I'll never forget a we had a group of farmers visit from Kazakhstan a number of years ago and and they were sugar beet farmers and they were talking about how much nitrogen of course through an interpreter and how much nitrogen they required to to have their beets and they were talking about using over 200 pounds of nitrogen per acre and I just I just kind of smiled I told them that if we use 200 pounds of nitrogen per acre we that we have beats the size of pumpkins and sugar down to 14 percent and after after huddling for a few minutes they said that's we we have the same sugar content in the same yields that you do we just have to use that much and the reason they have to use that much is because those soils have been farmed for a thousand years and and goodness you know their soil is just it was depleted 900 years ago and so with the loss of all the organic matter and having to farm things that are one to one and a half percent of organic matter which is pretty much what the roots are they have to increase their fertilizer rate 50 percent you know as so I suppose that at some point you know that if we lost all our top soil we'd still be able to farm it for some in some manner but the but it's going to take a lot more fertilizer to do it and the productivity of the ground is going to be less in a lot of areas so yeah you know so if you take out the tree row you know for goodness sake think about change in tillage and cropping systems but putting in back tree rows you know and designing it so that it would match modern equipment that I think that's the best plan there's another question in the chat box yeah I see that it says a form of of DP DP um dissolved phosphorus yeah there you go it was a water quality concern what's your sense percentage during a long termination versus wind erosion loss of peace so when I brought this up to the when I brought the wind erosion in the wind blowing it into the water systems into the people we had a couple pretty good size meetings in Crookston earlier last year a winter of last year and they had never thought of that before but I think it's a big I think it's a real deal Mick here pointed this out when we were talking about is you know the farms down at the Cheyenne grasslands but if you if you drive on 18 and you come down into the Cheyenne valley and then come back up the other other side there are there are bluffs on the west side of the side of the road those bluffs were not there before 1930 those bluffs if you core into those bluffs you'll find trees underneath it those bluffs cover the trees that were there in 1930 so you know the the wind it's deposited you know not only in those trees but in the in the rivers themselves but I think there's general consensus that most of the phosphate in the Red River is coming from stream bank stream bank erosion for one thing and then the other thing is the when the when the plants growing in that riparian area rot in the spring of the year during the during the thaw the organic phosphate is dissolved if you look at little water ponds and ditches and in in areas where water sits in the springtime it kind of has the color of kind of a weak tea and that tea contains the dissolved phosphate from those plant parts and in those north some work by Don Clayton at University of Manitoba it shows that very clearly the wind is not zero but we don't know how much it is it's really hard to measure wind in a specific place so Dave I have one more question for you so if you're feeling pretty hopeless about soil erosion and you want to get started with some new practices what would be what would be your you know first five steps maybe to implementing some of these practices to reduce erosion I I think certainly incorporating some cover crop into into the program it it seems to be a better plan if it's after a small grain and and certainly you know the the poor man's cover crop is always always you know leaving the volunteers grow it used to be that if anybody saw anything green after a barley crop or after a wheat crop that you know goodness you know send somebody out there right away and turn it black but why not let it grow for a little bit you know that you take the take the wheat crop in August early September you know that even even a person could go out and and work the ground if they needed to late in the month you know usually a time to do that so that would be the first step the second step would be to go to your some of your cafe talks and learn from others that are in various stages of transition because that each of those cafe talks that I've been to anyway there's people that have been in no till and successfully for a very long time on a variety of different soils people just starting out and people have been in it for a few years and so you can get some tips from them each each farm is unique each each person has their own economic constraints and soil constraints and so there is there is no recipe you can't just go into the soil health cookbook and find find something that's going to work for everybody so what about the trees is there any still a bit of room for trees along with managing other issues yeah I think so there's there's a program at least I'm pretty sure there's a program the North Dakota forestry division usually has a program where they can cost share they can go in and and they have a chopper and they can kind of clean out all the junk that a lot of times is in there and and stimulate the growth of whatever is there and if and and they can help with with putting new tree rows in a lot of people who take advantage of this are people that are or homeowners out in the or landowners out in the in the country and they use it to plant trees around their houses and renovate that but but you can certainly use it to renovate tree rows or in a farm field I'm not sure that that was a basic intent but person could take advantage of that certainly you mentioned about the correction workshop I thought it was a very good program but we should follow up on that because that was just the first of I think many workshops we should have the the best management practices for the Red River base and I had a chance to review that about two months ago so Dave Muller who's the kind of the spearhead on the writing of that is in the in the midst of the kind of the final version but I was impressed with what they put together okay so the question is on what spring like we're having the cover crop from fall seeding is inhibiting many growers from getting into the field I I find that surprising uh only only issue there usually if you have a if you have a cover crop that's easier to have some traffic ability I wouldn't have thought that we would have a spring or a fall that would that would mean that we would have such tremendous crop growth that it would it would inhibit drying the other fields at all and it would be interesting to see if there were neighboring fields that people were able to plant but the cover crop would not I I can't I don't know maybe it's true but it's it's hard for me to imagine that I just wrote an article on the in the crop and pest report about the treacherous nature of our fields this year the the fields particularly in the center in the eastern part of this the state are just really horrible to work with because people are people are getting stuck several times in a in a field co-host has asked you to start my video okay all right so I'll start my video and you can see the top of my head all right so there we are in my shiny shiny glasses so the fields for everybody that's just taken forever for them to dry up just forever you know it doesn't matter if you're conventional or no till on the east it's just taking forever for these things to dry out I've been working with a couple of collaborators to try to get some plots in and of course that's not their main concern but even on some sandier soils up on the hills last week was a total bust you know the the farmer tried to put on ammonia and they worked on a small three-corner field he had and then he started in a sandy field north of his house and and went over the hill and buried the tractor and took him the afternoon to pull the pull a tractor in the in the anhydrous applicator out it's just been horrible and then custom applicator is getting stuck three four times in the field it looks dry on top and then it's not it's just the the field is soft underneath there for a variety of reasons that I hope I've answered questions when the crop and pest report comes out so I find it really difficult to imagine that cover crops is the reason why it's inhibiting many growers just the we had from the central part of the state to the eastern part of the state I looked this up this morning before I wrote my crop and pest we had 10 inches of rain from the first of September until like yesterday and it doesn't count the rain that we we had in the last 24 hours and that's and that's a period of time where either isn't any crop growing in the in the field or the crop is nearing maturity and isn't using much water so it's it's basically 10 inches of water with really nothing happening and that's a lot and it's moving in weird places it's going sideways and discontinuing people from from tilling and doing their normal operation and what we had 170 degree days since what September and and hardly any sun and when it is sunny it seems like it's 45 degrees it's just been a horrible 12 months just horrible and so I don't know I guess I it's hard for me to blame a cover crop for that in regard to in regard to ammonia isn't that counterproductive this year wouldn't this be better off planting and spreading fertilizer on top? In in in some sandy loam type fields you know it dries it it dries and covers up and this farmer is the only he takes my suggestion and actually has disc covers on his ammonia applicator so it doesn't leave trenches it always covers it up but but no I think in some soils ammonia even in the spring like this just works fine as long as a tractor doesn't bury itself the surface is dry it's the it's the boils underneath there that are happening for various reasons that are causing people headaches. There's a comment in the chat box about some conifer tree shelter. Oh yeah yeah um yeah I see that conifer tree shelter belts work well they're narrow and effective I think everybody is pretty aware of some of the old tree belt type systems where they'd start out with something like a lilac and then graduate to an intermediate size tree and then a larger tree and then on the other side you do the same thing on the opposite you know go into an intermediate I don't think they need to be 60 feet wide. You have to be careful of conifers because they don't like salts very much so if you do have a field that has some salts I'm not sure the conifers are really the thing to do but if if you're in an area that has some fairly low salts maybe under one EC then then getting some of those established that would that would work just fine and they are are narrow and they are thick and they last. Going back to that uh comment or question about uh cover crops might be a reason for not having good traffic ability here at this station we have some some of these are the areas where we are driving at least I'm driving without having any issues some field most of the fields were not tilled because it was a very wet fall but actually the fields which were not tilled last fall are better in terms of traffic ability compared to where somebody tried to tell the vet fields so even there there is a little bit of difference but the the grasses are still brown but they provide a thick mat to drive over them yeah that's why I find it um you know I'm not going to say it's not true because you know maybe it is but I think overall looking at fields that have cover crop on them and not to have cover crop on them the ability to dry and to do field drive and do field work in fields that have cover crops is overwhelming compared to fields that are just left block that's just been my experience I would say one thing though that for example if somebody had cereal rye for example or these perennial grasses I think they turn green in the spring um annual crop cover crops will basically die um the but the perennial ones or the cereal rye which they can still use some water and they could dry out the fields quicker compared to the annual cover crops yeah they do that's that's one of the reasons why we suggest that people use them I don't think the rye right now is all that tall how tall is abby do you know or name you know you go ahead abby I don't have any rye here so I've only been getting pictures since I've been stuck at home but I you know it's it's not more than a couple inches tall right now but um but once it does start getting warmer and it's going to really help I think dry some of these these soils out um but I think a lot of the the cover crop and water usage comes down to what are you putting in the mix and and say you see the oh let's see he's saying that this field of cover crop rye won't hold a four-wheeler it's in the valley um yeah I can see I can see some issues with that um so okay so for example if you so say you have some cereal rye gets in a little bit late in the fall doesn't get much growth this spring um has minimal growth you can pretty much imagine that what's on the surface is probably what's underneath as far as roots um but I think too soon as we can't expect cover crops to work complete miracles um you know it's it's they they can do a great job but I think we have to um also keep in perspective what they can do when fields like this are all wet I mean it's it's when it's wet it's wet um no matter what tillage system you're in no matter how much how many cover crops you're using um but I think it comes down to two how much moisture could you use the year before um so say it's prevent plant field going into this year and you put all warm seasons in there and you didn't have any cool seasons in the mix using moisture at those other times of the year um or there's something that over winter so I think it's there's there's really kind of an art to selecting the the cover crops you want in there especially in a full season or if you're seeing something after wheat harvest um then you definitely are going to be stacking with cool seasons and possibly one that will over winter to to help use some moisture um but I you know I've I've walked in very wet fields um where rye's been in it hasn't been growing enough yet and and I make it across it walking but I wouldn't be driving across it um just because my expectations of that field are are such that that I know if it can carry me or not and then you know the tillage practices that are used and how long they've been used in the dictate what you can do in the spring on those fields yeah so I'd be interested to know when the cover crop rye was put in you know we we have some rye up a gardener and the place is a swamp all last year I mean the corn didn't even make a hundred bushels and um and some of the some of the corn didn't come up very good we lost a rep out of it I know um and the rye itself it suffered all year the the the water table's almost to the surface the in the most entire year and if you would have been able to put a and the rye I haven't been up there yet this spring but I I doubt if the rye is all that big and it's had much chance to use much water at all and and and sometimes the reason to put in persons putting the cover crop in there is because they anticipate a wet mess anyway and then they're they're right and it is a wet mess and but the cover crop you know hasn't gotten any size and we haven't had the whether that's needed for the for the cover crop to take up much water at all and it hasn't really developed much of a root system and so things we normally see with with putting the putting the rye out there have been even a hold of soil together and make it so it's not a soup none of those things happen yeah I remember when you're digging around in the spring and and a lot of rye on different fields and it was the top two inches were being dried out by the rye but because that's where the roots were um but like you're saying Dave they didn't have any opportunity to go deeper because it's either already saturated below and they weren't going to go into that um just because of the plant you know it's it's not going to go into saturated soils like that and and develop if they have all the water they need at the surface um and it was kind of it was disappointing for that farmer too because they had seeded all this rye and it was drying out the surface really well because that's where the roots were and it didn't have much growth and it wasn't going much deeper because it was saturated and that could be the same situation now um you know and there wouldn't be any reason for a plant to put down deeper roots into the saturated soil that has what is what it needs at the surface so that could be some of the the frustration and it and it can't really I mean rye isn't rice you know it most of our most of our crops do not root down in the saturated soil they just can't you know there's no oxygen they need oxygen to live rice seems to be able to get by with that but and and some crops do you know some plants do of course because there's there's plants that grow in in ponds but our crop crop plants are not made like that so if you just have the roots at the surface it's not going to do much to dry things out until it does dry out and then the roots can get a little bit deeper and then it can help out um I've thought all winter that this is a crappy year to talk to people about cover crops and I'm learning that right now being reminded of that right now because um everything that could go is going wrong so Dave what do you think about like if people want to throw in some some oats as a cover crop with their soybean to use some of this extra moisture this spring you know I think that's a I think that's just a slam dunk idea if they have iron deficiency chlorosis problems at all I think that's really really a good idea really a good idea so I see another one in the chat box from Ross so disease moving from the right to the all from wheat stubble I don't know we really haven't seen a disease problem in growing rye in a wheat stubble have we not really not that I've seen trying to think I asked Andrew Friskop this past year about somebody had barley as a full season cover crop on prevent plant and they wanted to put barley in again this year and that was that was a potential for disease and issues but maybe because rye is going to come off early um yeah I don't know this might be the wrong mix for disease question uh that'd be a that'd be an email to Andrew Friskop our our plant pathologist in small grains when I think of rye I think maybe about ergot but uh you know it has to be but I don't know the scab I don't even know if scab hits rye I have no idea coming back to planting oats um as a companion crops so I mean I I think it's a very good idea because couple couple different reasons uh oats are salt tolerant too so uh that they would they would kind of one thing we have observed that when we planted a perennial salt tolerant grass mix and threw in some alfalfa seed normally alfalfa won't do well on those areas and it would take alfalfa two or three years but the grass is kind of like nurture alfalfa so I see the same potential here and then um it takes sort of being a little bit of time to close the rows and when people roll soil blows so the oats crop can actually reduce minimize the blowing of topsoil too once the rows are closed then then soybeans can also but between the the rolling of the fields and by the time the rows are actually closed there's quite a bit of soil which blows away I tried to drive the pickup yesterday morning to go to that site where we are planning to plant barley and um oats and I just the front tires of the pickup went into the field and I got stuck and um I got lucky that I was able to get out of that field on my own you know the fields are just weird I mean they look like they're going to be okay and then they're just soft underneath it's so I realized I was thinking that I'm much more heavier than the pickup but I realized that the pickup was heavier than me because I was walking and I was fine but the pickup got stuck I mentioned something in the and I don't know if this is a thing or not but it just it just hit me but um geologists talk about when you have clays and small particles in in soil and sediment and they're thinking about building buildings and things and what to put down there um now once there's a certain amount of water and they're it they call it a they call it a gel kind like jello in under normal circumstances the jello is fairly firm but then when there's a vibration or then it all turns to liquid and down you go and so especially in areas that have earthquakes and that kind of thing they have to especially build the foundation so that it's not susceptible to the gel liquefaction fortunately we don't have earthquakes in North Dakota or we'd all sink and we'd all die but um but that would happen here and maybe that's happened in the field too I mean walking around there's not much vibration but you drive a truck or something like that over um and um and the soils would just kind of turn to liquid because of the vibration I don't know but it's a it's a thought oh it seems to me that oh you're running out of the question so well thank you very much everyone and then um just as a reminder that we'll be back on Thursday with the fourth webinar Dr. Marisol Birdie would be talking about cover crops based on your cropping system how to select the mix which works for you um not just a general recipe and then we'll have two more next week so 11 o'clock