 Okay, good afternoon. I think we're ready to get started here. My name is Kip Balkum. I'm a research agronomist with ARS located at the soil dynamics lab here in Auburn. I'm going to moderate the session this afternoon. I'm going to go ahead and get started here pretty quick. We had a little bit of technical difficulties but we're going to do a little bit different type presentation here as far as over the video conferencing. So it's my pleasure to introduce Dr. Swat or Mark from University of Nebraska and he's going to talk about irrigation scheduling and key aspects. Now I'll turn it over to him. Thank you so much for the introduction and I hope you guys can hit me out okay. First of all I apologize for not being able to be there in person but I hope this will work. Is it okay? Can everybody hear me or? Yes, we are fine. In Nebraska we are involved in many aspects of irrigation engineering and in practical application, evapotranspiration, crop production, crop physiology, soil science and dating thrashians. And today I'm going to present some of the irrigation management fundamentals with respect to a network that I have established about a decade ago and talk about what we have done and where we are at at this point of the network was established some of the progress and impact data and I'm going to mention some of the background research projects that feed that that water management network. Without much background we all know that irrigated agriculture has been a fundamental component of any given civilization going back to 10,000 BC to the Sumerians when irrigation or irrigated agriculture first started on land. Right now, last minus 2 million acres we have 800 million acres of irrigated land in the world and China and India are leading that with 158 to 154 million acres and in our country we have 55 to 57 or 58 million acres irrigated land. When we focus to high things, right now this is the US total, the blue squares and then in high things we have about 23 to 24 million acres of irrigated land. In the grass right now we have 8.3 million acres. This map shows the irrigation well or actively operated irrigation well. Each red dot represents one irrigation well in the state. So right now we are at about 122,000 irrigation wells. All those irrigation activities bring about significant challenges in terms of how to best manage water resources to optimize drought productivity at the same time meeting the increasing demand on increasing efficiency but also meeting the crop for the requirements for optimum yield. About 10, 11 years ago I did see a need as soon as I came to the grass about 12 years ago a need of an organized network where we get together with farmers, crop consultants, natural resources districts, department of natural resources, NRCS, irrigation districts and university faculty to talk about some of the major challenges and see how we can work together to overcome or address some of those agricultural water management related issues. So when I established this network with a few extension educators at the time the main idea was to implement or enhance technology used in irrigated agriculture for optimum productivity. Since then this network became the largest and most comprehensive agricultural water management network in the United States. These are some of the specific goals. I want to transfer high-quality research-based information, scientific information to the producers, crop consultants and everybody else associated with all the professionals associated with irrigated agriculture and rain-fed agriculture as well. Foster adoption of tools and technologies and one of the biggest challenges was communication between all the disciplines that I just mentioned. Natural resources districts, NRCS, department of natural resources, university personnel, irrigation districts, crop consultants, growers. If we don't have a good link or communication channel between all of us there is not a single entity who can solve or address the water management issues. So these are very complex and require a wide range of disciplines, background expertise to be able to solve those. Another specific goal was to orient part of the network towards youth or next generation producers so that we can have because they are going to take over one day in the new future and they are going to practice all those agriculture related water management operations. And also quantify the short and long-term impact of what we do in our network and these are the partners in the network. Now, as I present this, it gives us in mind some of the technologies that I'm presenting now. We did this 10, 11 years ago. So initially, I have done extensive research on major potential type sensors including watermark sensors. These are economical, durable, accurate, simple tool to implement in any culture. So we started with watermark sensors to monitor soil material potential and then we developed methodologies to convert material potential to inches of water per foot either depleted or available for different soil types. These tools are easy to use, easy to interpret. They can be read using manual meters or loggers where we can load the data on an other basis. All these pictures are from some of our farmer or farm demonstration projects initially about 11 years ago. The good thing about this setup is we can monitor precipitation with this rain gauge, soil moisture, soil temperature, all at the same time. Different loggers are available today. Now, we initiated this watermark sensor initially but in the meantime for the last decade or more, I have been trying to search or research for newer tools and technologies that exist on the market and then test them in our research field. And once I identify another durable, better economical, easy to use tool or sensors to monitor soil moisture, then I talk about this in my extension programs in the network and we implement it into the network. Over the years, I have done significant amount of research to understand how different technologies in terms of soil moisture monitoring work, what they do, what they cannot do, how will they operate in our soil and climatic conditions, crop management conditions, including capacitance sensors. These are some of my research fields where I have, for example, John Deere Field Connect sensors. I have 36 of them installed in this particular field. And then in other fields, I installed about 476 soil moisture sensors, soil temperature sensors and electrical conductivity sensors in my pivot field. To better understand some of the fundamentals of variable rate technology, how do we, what it is, what are some of the fundamentals, how do we gather the data from the field, how do we make a decision and then feed that information to the pivot controller to make a decision on the go to apply different amount of water to different parts of the field. Now, the reason I mention all those components is because my network is not only irrigation management network. It is, you know, everything I know in my scientific background or research background, I talk to my growers or partners in the network, including variable rate irrigation, including evapotranspiration, climate change, impact on all the resources, productivity, craft ideology and many other topics. So this is, this variable rate technology is one of them. So the idea in this NSF funded research is to develop a system where we monitor soil moisture in the field, in locations, in different locations, you know, however location needed for, based on the spatial variability we have in the field, it can be 10 or 5 or 20 or more. So depending on this, we monitor soil moisture in the field and then as the pivot makes the circle, so we gather the data from different parts of the field, feed that into the pivot controller, make a decision and apply the rate or change the application rate as we go. So this is our eight years on this project. It took us about eight years to get this point and National Science Foundation funded us for several years. The idea, let me go back, the idea is, you know, I have been doing irrigation engineering research, evapotranspiration research for basically, since I was 15 years old, started working with professors' fields or at summer house in different research projects. Honestly, I think even at this point, we don't know much about variable rate irrigation, what it is, what are the fundamentals, how do you, where do you install the sensors in the field, how many, what location, how do you gather data, make real time management decision and change the application rate. Another big impact or unknown at this point, at this to me, is at what level of spatial variability that variable rate irrigation becomes economical and also at what spatial and temporal variability in the field justify buying a spatial variable machine. Another unknown is if you vary the irrigation amount and then, you know, people assume they are doing irrigation or variable rate irrigation and that's good, but if you use a variable rate irrigation but six-rate nitrogen management, how good that process be? Is this going to enhance our spatial variability or is it going to make it better? So those are some of the fundamentally unknown processes in this variable rate technology, but I have a live program in my business program that I talk to my farmers in the, in the network about. So the point is over the years I do research with different soil moisture technologies, install them in my research field and test them against either grime sampling or this nitron, nitron probe, which is the most accurate way of major soil moisture, but it is radiation-based, it is not practically used in the production field. These are some of the pictures from different research settings, different types of technologies. I also do extensive research on wireless soil moisture monitoring in my research field and then I talk about them in my, in my network to my network participants or partners. So this is, I don't know, Brenda, if my colleagues can see the cursor, but this is the soil moisture monitoring place in the field. This is the transmitter right here and then this is the receiver. This receiver can be up to a couple miles or I'm sorry, up to 10 miles away from that field, in this case it's right here in the same field, but this receiver can be 10 miles away from the field and we can monitor soil moisture wirelessly and then we can feed all the information data to a website application where user can log in and monitor soil moisture real time. The good thing about this technology is, and I talk about this in my programs, if there are four farms, for example, if those, those, those order section fields belong to four different people, they can utilize or share one system and utilize this as a partner so they don't have to individually buy different components of the, of the wireless network. All they need is a receiver in the middle and then this receiver can, can receive the information from soil moisture monitoring places from many different places. So in this case, this becomes extremely, extremely economical too, if, if you can share the receiver. So this is the brain of the, of my, of my network soil moisture monitoring for irrigation management decisions. I developed this table about 10 years ago. On the left-hand side, this is the metipotential values from either watermark sensor or any other type of sensor that measures metipotential, soil metipotential and, and what it means, those values or readings from the sensor mean for two, four, six, eight different soil types we have in the state. So for example, 100 kilopascal reading is associated with a 0.8 inch per foot division for this soil type, but it's 1.1 inch per foot division for this soil type. At the end of the table, at the bottom of the table, there are two critical values. The first one is water holding capacity for each soil type and then at the very bottom is the suggested trigger point for, for irrigation management using those metipotential sensors. So for example, in case of seedloom soil, if the, and being full of sensors every foot up to four feet, if the top two sensors are reading on average between 75 and 80 for this soil type, and this is the time to, to turn the system on. Of course, this value is going to change with the soil type in sanded soil. For example, we cannot read that from due to very, very low water holding capacity and this number of trigger points will go down to 25 to 30 kilopastial or centroid. Now, if for, for example, we take the average of top two sensors, if that number is between certain range with trigger irrigation, after tassel stage, we take the average of top three sensors and then, and then trigger irrigation that way. After tassel stage, we have enough root density in the, in the soil profile that we have to account for when we determine irrigation timing. This chart came from one of my research fields, just to demonstrate, as the crop is uptick water and, and or water evaporates from soil surface, metipotential is going to increase. And then as rain or irrigation event is going to decrease close to zero, zero value is saturated or near saturation soil. And, and as the number increases, soil gets drier. So we try to maintain for a system soil, metipotential range between 90 and 110 kilopastial or centroid for optimum productivity. Now, all those trigger points that I mentioned at the bottom of the table came from my extensive years of research that provided the, the maximum corn or soybean yield when you trigger irrigation at those levels. Another tool that being incorporated into our network is to, to monitor potential evapotranspiration using etymometers or ET gauge. And, you know, I have done extensive research as to where those tools or, or etymometers should be installed in the field. What happens if you put it in the middle of the field versus side of the field? How will that impact the performance? Then we provide crop coefficients, which is an indication of how big essentially the crop is or at what stage that crop is. So each stage has different crop coefficients. So we provide those to our growers in a table format or, or charts or now apps. We have, we have apps, several apps that our farmers are utilizing in the, in the state. So for different cropping systems, corn, soybean, alfalfa and so on, different growth stages. And then we provide them the crop coefficients. So they take this potential ET, multiply with the crop coefficients and they can calculate daily crop order use. And that information can be used for irrigation management and we teach them how to, how to accomplish that. So my first task was to establish a team. So in my first team, I had several extension educators, four of them. And then I had five farmers initially and then one natural resource of this as a partner. So I will teach our team how to put the centers together, how they work, how do we read them, how do we interpret the numbers and so on. And then we will go out to the field and then to five farmers and then visit each farmer once or twice a week, install the centers and teach them on-site how to install the centers, how to read them, how to troubleshoot them, how to use the information for irrigation management. So for the first year, we had only five farmers, but we were in constant communication almost every other day or several times a week. These are one-on-one interactions and then we did the same thing for the ET gauge, how to use them, how to field them and how to field them with water, how to troubleshoot them, how to incorporate this into irrigation management. So the first year it was extensive travel to different parts of the state. I'm going to start sharing some impact data. These are a number of farmers we have or partners we had in my network over the years. In 2005, we had only a few, but every single year it did grow substantially. And as of two weeks ago, we have over 1,300 farmers or partners in my network, which I think is fascinating. Now, our farmer partners represent 1.78 million acres of land in Nebraska. So it's a big, big network. Every year, I have to mention this, every year we do extensive communication or survey or phone calls or get together in the coffee shops or in the town hall, and then we get feedback as to what our farmers did and what kind of impact they can provide so we can evaluate our network. We do this every year. So based on extensive data we see from our partners, the reason I say partner is because this became more than just a number of farms in our network. We have established, I will say, great personal communication and in many cases, friendship too. So this is more than just a number of farms in our network. I know many of them by name. I've been to houses or places or farms that adopt those 1,300 people throughout the state. I've been to each single county over the years in at least maybe 100 or 200 fields in each county. So I used to travel 25,000, 30,000 miles every summer to manage this network. So this slide is very critical because based on the real numbers we receive from our partners, every year you can see on average we are reducing irrigation water withdrawal by 2, 2.2 inches per growing season. This is a very big number. This is a very big number. And then if you multiply this with 1.7 million acres, that's a huge amount of water. But there is another point, important point in this slide. Over time as our partners learn more about the tools and technologies and be more confident in terms of using them in the field, then you can see the impact in terms of reduction in water withdrawal increases over time. So as they have more confidence in the technology, then they can be more effective. So this is the total reduction in water withdrawal with irrigation. This is cumulative over the last nine, ten years. Just to give you an idea, the largest lake we have in Nebraska is Lake McConna, which has 1.7 million acre feet capacity. If you take 2012, for example, once a dry year, you can see the total reduction in water withdrawal was about 310,000 acre feet. So this is about 20% of the capacity, total capacity of Lake McConna in one year alone. So this is, the impact is very, very big. As I mentioned, every year we get feedback from our growers on many different topics. You know, the after-year age group and why they decided to be part of our network, why they decided to stay in the network, what kind of property produce, what kind of irrigation management they have, surface irrigation, pivot irrigation, subsurface drip or other, what kind of field type they use to pump water, how much energy they invest into their operations, and also some social impact data as well. What do they see as the impact or the most value in this network, how it can be improved? And so many different questions and they provide very good feedback to us. In the last nine plus years, ten years, the total, and these are very conservative numbers, total energy saving due to reduction in irrigation water withdrawal has up to about 80 million dollars. As I mentioned, we have a website and several years ago, we developed smartphone app. It is used extensively and I'm not going to go into too much detail on the specifics of the app but it basically allows, in fact, encourages the grover to enter some of the sensor data, real feedback from the field, answer to the app and then this app will calculate how much water they have in the soil profile and what is the suggested irrigation trigger point date and how much water they suggest them to apply. Based on the soil motion information they enter to this app. Our website is about 10 years old now but we provide essentially everything we know about this management tool to our farmers online. Each partner, 1200 plus of them have access to this. They have their own username, password. These are, as I mentioned, these are not just a number of people in our network. We know exactly where they are. I've been to at least 1000 of those sites myself personally, interactive with our farmers, with their families. That's why, you know, that became more than a partnership. It's a friendship too. So we know exactly where they are. We know the elastics, longitude of each field and they provide ET gauge information, some soil motion information online and we share this with everybody. The idea is, for example, if I go back to this map, let's say this person is our network partner but there is another person right here who is not. Well, this person who is not our partner or not participating in the network can utilize his or her neighbor's data information to manage their own field. So that was the idea to share everything online and it has been working great. We didn't have any problems so far. So we provide ET information or evapotranspiration, some soil moisture, but crop coefficients, crop order use on a weekly basis on our network website. Now, there are several things that I have to mention about impact. Ten years ago, we have 23 natural resources districts in our state and I visited every single one of them and I told them as best as I knew that this network is going to grow because there is a big potential for better managing our world resources in the state. So can you guys cost share to the best of your resources? Some of the tools and technologies we utilize in the network. So far, I have been fortunate enough to bring 18 of those 23 NRDs to cost share soil moisture sensors. It doesn't matter what kind of sensor. It can be watermark sensor. It can be chemical scientific. It can be life or it can be John Deere field connect. It can be any type of soil moisture sensor. It can be any type of evapotranspiration, measurement gauge or ET gauge. So some of the NRDs cost share goes up to 70% of the total cost. So this is a big big accomplishment on our team's part and I will skip those. Now, we try to get together at least twice a year with our partners in different parts of the state and talk about how the network is progressing. Are there significant concerns about our tools and technologies that we implement into the network? And then so we have direct feedback from our partners and which part of the network is working okay, which part needs improvement, which part doesn't work and we need to do something else. So we talk about those. As I mentioned, 1200 farmers in our network, but the challenge continues because based on the information that was published by USDA last month in November in Nebraska, we have 7391 farmers who are using some kind of technology for irrigation management, which is great, which is all-time high since 1983. You can see that in 2008. The second highest number, 2013, the highest number. So our network is having significant impact. But if you look at on the hand-feel method that is used by farmers, it is still about 7000. So there are 7000 farms in our state alone that use hand-feel method for irrigation management. Even though we increase that number significantly, we have a long ways to go to educate and work together with those people to enable them to stop using the hand-feel method and develop some kind of technology for management. I had to mention we are number one irrigated state in the United States, but number two in terms of farmers using technology for irrigation management, California being the first for very obvious reasons. In turn, Brenda, you can stop me at any time if I'm exceeding my time, but I will try to finalize in the next 10 minutes or so. As I mentioned, we get together with our farmers in the indoor as well as outdoor in my research field and talk about many different things. Not only irrigation management, but we talk about crop growth. This is alfalfa, for example, plant physiology in terms of water relationships, climate relationships, climate change impact on water resources, agricultural productivity, evapotranspiration, many different topics. We visit with them in the field. Now, this was a brief summary of the network, but there is an extensive research behind that network that I use that to help farmers to better manage their resources in the field. So everything I tell them comes from the research field and my research field and scientific programs. I do extensive research and some of the topics that I talk to them about is, you know, subsurface drip irrigation. And also, I have a large evapotranspiration measurement network in the States. I have 12 towers that I operate on different surfaces, vegetation surfaces, including subsurface drip irrigated corn. During the season, we focus on growing season, but after season or after harvest, transportation components may stop, but evaporation never stops. So our towers run every single hour, nonstop for 12 months, and some of them have been running since 2004 every hour. So we measure evaporated losses or evaporation losses during the non-growing or dormant season as well. Another field, as an engineer, I cannot only know about corn or soybean or alfalfa. I must know everything or the most that I can know for other crop existence as well, including irrigated grassland. So I have a tower that operates over the irrigated grassland. We have 23 million acres of grassland or prairies or a similar type of crop existence. And then another tower that is side-by-side irrigated versus rain-fed grassland, same type of grassland, so that we can get consumptive water use for grassland. Another tower right here on rain-fed winter wheat, irrigated winter wheat. In fact, this is one of the first fields that is irrigated using soft surface drip irrigation. So this is the first field that I irrigated with soft surface drip winter wheat. So there aren't many fields in the United States that are irrigated, I mean winter wheat that are irrigated using soft surface drip. If we are going to do water resource management, we have to know about other crop existence, other plant systems too. So I have another tower that operates over riparian vegetation with cottonwood and fragmites and peach leaf willows. So we monitor consumptive water use for the riparian corridor as well. So you can see that in the picture, we did this research with the vegetation for five years and then we cleared all the vegetation, bring it to a nice natural sand bar, and then monitored evaporated losses without vegetation so that we can see the impact of vegetation on water use. We instrument each side extensively. Another tower for soft surface drip irrigated soybean field and then during the season, soybean evaporation from residue, soybean evaporation from residue, standard pivoting against the alfalfa field. I have a 130 acre switchgrass field where we monitor input versus output. There is a discussion about said elastic ethanol from switchgrass and it is being done, but nobody is looking into how much resource of this switchgrass uses from the environment to produce X amount of or gallon elastic ethanol. So we are looking at those dynamics. I have another field with seed corn and cover crop rotation field. This is our fourth year of research. We look into many different variables, the impact of cover crop on soil quality and water use and crop coefficients and runoff, instantiation, organic matter content, 20 plus nutrients and micronutrients. It is a very, very extensive research. Dr. Mark? Yes. I believe we're going to stop there in interest of time. I apologize. I know we started just a little bit late, but we want to try to stay on track here if we can and we certainly appreciate your time, but I do have, if anybody's got a quick question or two, we'll certainly take those before we move on. Well, we certainly appreciate your presentation and I guess we're going to sign off on this end. Okay. Thank you so much. Thank you very much.