 Okay, our next speaker is dr. Wesley Porter. He's an extension irrigation specialist He has a very unique extension appointment across two states But he's going to talk about current irrigation issues and options for improvement in Alabama and Georgia Just picking up good enough out there. All right, so it's kept sad. I'm split between I think I've met a lot of y'all before I know a lot of people in here, but split between two states And so I'm based out of Tifton, Georgia But I've covered the entirety you can ask anybody in here. I've Spent time from all the way and all the way in eastern Georgia And I've been all the way out to the far Western part of the state in Alabama out to the D's and some other regions I spent some time up near Belmana, so Can't accuse me of not traveling across the state and trying to get around a few people might think I haven't been out There place just give me a call. I'll head out that way if you've got any issues, but I'm Since what did a good job of just kind of covering some of the soil moisture sensors data That's kind of tied to those implications and all that stuff with that I want to take a different approach and you can see the title of my presentations current irrigation issues and options So I focused a lot of the a lot of my presentations on the issues before I step into it We have any lawyers or politicians in the room. I Hope not because I don't be held responsible for anything. I'm about to say or any information. I'm about to present So I kind of like I said it took a different approach and really divulged into it. So First let's just quick background, you know, there's many similarities between the two states, you know But there might be some huge differences in crop productions and crop production practices, you know regions first off You know in Georgia predominantly if we look in the southern part of state That's where all of our ag is pretty much our row crop ag if you look at it from that standpoint It's produced, you know, we get well below Atlanta, you know in our coastal plains region and all that That's where we start seeing everything produced, you know in Alabama. We're a little bit different there We have production that part of the state you get back in the northern part of the state We have a lot of production up there, too You know once we get farther north of Birmingham up the Tennessee Valley region up around Montgomery and all that So he's kind of split there where Georgia you get up in the mountains We don't do hardly any row crop ag up there, you know, you'll find some poultry farms. We'll find some pecan trees You know, etc. Etc. Well agricultural production So we do have some similarities there, but Georgia, you know, we do a lot of cotton there We're number two in the nation and cotton Number one in peanuts, you know, we have those crops in Alabama, but it may be lagging a little behind on some of the acreages Maybe that's some of the demographics that's happening there where the crop production regions are and everything else Water source definitely different, you know, that's one of the biggest things. I think the issues have run into When I come from Georgia over to Alabama, you know, I'm based in Tifton, Georgia You know down in kind of southern part of the state where, you know, historically, we've had very easy access to water You know easy access to shallow aquifers and all that And then I come over here to Alabama, you know, and I'm gonna show some maps It'll show some of the stuff that I'm talking about in the southeastern part of Alabama That may be true kind of move out of that region You know, we have some challenge you have to face, you know, those who use it farm, you know that And finding that water source that you need is kind of hard to do So, um, you know, what what do we do about that then irrigated acres of course There's a huge difference in irrigated acres and I'm gonna show some maps between the two states I didn't directly compare the two that was not my point here So I kind of took approach went through one state and then we'll go through the other and talk about options. So um In southeast of Georgia's most advanced states when it comes to irrigation management, you know, at least in the southeast You know swat's coming from kind of the midwest Nebraska is one of the premier irrigation research Institutions there. They have a lot of stuff that comes out of there. They do a lot of work But that's driven by need Basically, I don't think he divulged into it at all But they have limited water in certain areas where they know they might only have four inches of water for the whole season or six Or eight inches of water That's what you have. You've got to do something to manage that little bit of water You have you've got to get it on at the proper times and the proper rates. There's no wasting the water There's no running a pivot continuously, you know, none of that they know going into the season I have eight inches of water. When do I put it on So we're a little different than that in the southeast and Georgia I think progressed a lot faster than some of the other states here Due to some of the Basically some of the issues that have been pressed there, you know, we've had water source We've had it there and we've kind of went through the development stage And also we have legislation that starts hitting and we've got to make some changes So there's a lot of technologies focused on irrigation management that have come out of george and been developed there We've got a lot of online scheduling tools Some variable irrigation, soil moisture sensor systems, some scheduling apps, you know, etc, etc The list goes on. I didn't didn't go in and name particular ones, but they're out there and they're available And there's always traditionally we've had more easy access to water in most of the state. It's been easy to get No permitting is there You've got to go through kind of extensive process to get a permit to do either a well or surface water Once you get that permit, you know, depending on what region you're in you can get the water fairly easily And you know, if you look around at our consultants, it's not a kind of nice thing that we have A lot of the consultants in george, especially the southern part and southwestern part of the state offer irrigation scheduling or irrigation management as one of their services So, um That's another thing that kind of helps push that, you know, if you can pay, you know Somebody to come in and help you do a good job managing your irrigation You know, it kind of makes you want to do that a little more rather than just blindly going about it. So Center pivot irrigation system So I just want to kind of show you between the two states You know what it looks like and this is what i'm talking about the heavy concentration that we have in southwest georgia I mean, we have some sporadically, you know throughout But we don't have large production ag up in these regions And again, this is center pivot. So, you know, some of these may be turf Some may be some Other types of production we get farther north a little bit of cropland, but very very little Most of us in here and again We get in the um This aquifer here and we're very very heavily, you know, we're looking at water tables are very high So we're heavily laden with wells and irrigation systems here So we do have a irrigation research part Strategically place it down there. I do a lot of my research there. There's a lot of good resources came out of here It's been operating for about 15 or 20 years Try to place it in as close to the center areas we could we did have a producer that donated the land for it There so that's kind of partly the location, but the rest of it is more political and we want it in where all this irrigation is occurring So what is our irrigated acres and what are you slug like this is lagging behind some We don't have it completely up to date Working on some of that stuff. I'm working on getting a new survey out and everything else But irrigated acres in 2005, you know, this is in thousands of acres Again heavy concentration down here, you know, very very little to none of this part of the state So we look at water use. What is it like million gallons per day? You know, we're talking pretty significant somewhere from 20 to 40 million gallons per day in these dark green areas again the same region Here and it's kind of spread across where our center pivot systems were So in 1970 and we're looking a long time ago But even still in 1970 we had 144,000 acres of irrigated land. That was 87 center pivots Now we're over a million acres almost at 1.2 million acres 13,000 center pivots. So rapid rapid expansion and we're starting to see that in alabama too So permitted withdrawals we kind of saw a picture of this earlier for Alabama or no for nebraska had showed this so we're definitely not as thick as what nebraska is And we're sporadic up and down but these are all permitted withdrawals for irrigation within the state A lot of these like said we have Some poultry farms pecan orchards all that stuff in the northern part of the state You've got groundwater sources surface water sources. So Again, you got that concentration of black right here out of the florid and aquifer We're drawing water out of it and then you might have a lot of surface water up and down whether it's creeks basins reservoirs and all that throughout the state So here's the political stuff that I don't normally like to talk about and you know I try to stay away from it most of my talks, but again Technical stuff's covered. So we're talking about water issues. So Why are we where we're at and where do we need to be going and what may happen? You know and either stayed out in back and so The water wars basically stuff started in 1956 the core of engineers constructed beef for dam crated lake linear Dam's on the chattahoochee river. So why is that important lake linear? Here's Atlanta. Here's lake linear Chattahoochee river dumps out So, okay Why aren't we talking about something in the northern part of the state? Well, we're down here Where all our irrigated acres are And we'll kind of work on and look at that in a second So 89 let's move ahead They released a report which recommended that a portion of the water being used for Hydro power should be reallocated for the water supply in the Atlanta region. Of course, we have a rapid city expansion Growing everyone knows how large Atlanta is. We're only, you know, 90 miles from it right now. It's the big city of the region Of course, it's high water use people need water there just like they do for ag and who typically gets priority I mean, are we going to make people go without water or we're going to make crops Of course, we know who's going to win that battle, especially when a high concentration of the population lands in cities like that. So Move on to 89 the core formally set minimum flow for the dam at lake seminal So this is the lake dumping into florida And you'll see why it's important to minute at 5,000 cubic feet per second Draft water control plan for the Appalachicola chattahoochee flint river basin So we're starting to look at it. We're starting to pull the chattahoochee into this Starting to talk about why it's important to alabama at the same time I'm not just covering georgia even though I'm on the georgia portion of my talk So 1990 alabama filed a lawsuit challenging the core's real allocation plan Basically, they say that the reallocation of the water would favor georgia's interest. They're saying all the chattahoochee Water's getting pushed towards georgia not towards alabama and they're not getting enough so they're violating some Laws and causing environmental impacts and everything else in the way they're allocating it So let's we look really quick to see What's that what that really means and here into that law these are just erroneous data here just a couple of points in the Lawyers We look just through 2012 until 2014. We know we had a very very bad drought in 2012, right? Everybody remember that when it kind of dried out, you know, we're in kind of a bad shape So during that bad drought no matter how bad it was we stopped at 5,000. Here's your 5,000 level No matter what's going on upstream 5,000 cubic feet per second has to keep flowing out to get down to florida So most of the time we're good, you know, we're well above that And we're fine This is when the issue started ensuing here when you can't withdraw any more water because Law states this much has to come out. So you have access no longer So what does it matter? Why aren't we looking at it from all the way up in the beginning of Atlanta moving our way down? We're starting the watershed up here and it's flowing down through the flint river basin basically And the a cf basin comes out and flows all the way down See the chattahoochee over here on the border Um coming down through the counties into lake seminal and this is basically the georgia border and this we're flowing out Or we're looking at that outlet flow here. It's coming out of the dam of the lake right here flowing into florida So where do we stand right now? This is where the big issues are starting because the court case has been taken up But october 2013 governor rick scott and the state attorney general filed a suit in us supreme court So it's getting serious now. It's no longer just between states. We're going to supreme court level We're getting very very serious that stuff's really starting to happen and hurting claiming georgia withdraws too much water from the chattahoochee river System north of lake linear to serve the growing atlanta region So it's getting pointed towards atlanta, but who ends up taking the issues. We'll see that in a second georgia governor nathan deal Reiterated determination to defend georgia's water rights from a frivolous lawsuit. So at that point they said oh, this is never going to make it It's not going anywhere as frivolous. We're you know, they're just blowing smoke, you know, whatever else But however recently they decided to take it up So now it's gotten serious the frivolous all of a sudden said the supreme court said, you know, we're going to take it We're going to look at it and they've appointed people to overlook this case. So here's official documents You know wall street journal page of it just a quick headline saying, you know florida suge georgia over water use Um, here's the front page of the um supreme court documents saying state of florida versus the state of georgia So, you know, it's running and it's going so what's the lawsuit from florida where it comes in so lake seminal here Said the dam of lake seminal is here Appalachicola river flows down into apalachicola bay. So is anybody here ever eaten any apalachicola oysters? Yeah, okay, so that's the problem right there Um, basically the orstroman and some of the other aquatic life down here is being said that there's not enough water flowing into that bay To keep producing the levels of oysters they've had so when you start seeing some of that all some fingers start getting pointed And so if you notice prices of those oysters may have went up or been harder to get and everything else This is why right here There's some other issues that happen, but that's basically what the lawsuit stemming from Upstream user georgia is using too much water such a downstream use of florida receiving too little so it negatively affects aquatic life problems the bay of freshwater flows Need to maintain its ecological balance and keep the oysters happy and thriving There's more than just oysters that are going into this. That's just kind of the big name thing We see there's endangered species of certain mussels turtles and a lot of other things in this water system It's just you see high priority areas that kind of show up during the time so What does georgia do georgia decides to try to be proactive and pass a few bills to try to protect themselves And this past year they passed senate bill 213 and so It passes the it's an extension or a revamp of the flint river drought protection act It's just clarifying some legislative intent revising definitions and expanding some of the programs So there's some of the sponsors the committees and all that, you know, it's not as important as what it does So updated the flint river drought protection act, which was passed back in the early 2000 So this was implemented before during some of the other low drought times. We're drawing a lot of water out And um, so what are we doing to update and get it where it's at now? We're establishing acceptable basin stream flows Okay, so we're actually going in and saying within all the rivers in the basin, you know, the major tributaries and everything else We're establishing those flows and we're you know, we're putting definition on them and say this is what they are Um claire conduct and participate in studies. So that's kind of vague and you know, what does that mean? I guess that means that they're looking at people like me and some other researchers and people in the room here that do some research Uh nrcs and other people whatever to try to look and see what's going on what we can do to you know do better than that You know, whatever else um clarifies auction procedures and droughts. So what does that mean? Have y'all heard of the the irrigation land auctions anybody in here on what happened during some of that? A couple of people so basically you could go up An auction off acres so you could go in and bid and say all right this year I'm gonna bid out. I'll let you pay me $50 an acre of my irrigated land and I will not irrigate it this year And what's that worth to you to not irrigate land, you know for a year to get paid to do that? So that's what it did They take it out of irrigation for the drought period. So you don't touch it You you can plant it dry land, but you better not turn that system on and there are serious consequences. So They tried that it didn't really work that well I'm not going to divulge into the issues with it, but it's uh to say it was more on the honor system on what land you Bid it off and how you handled it. So you can imagine how that happened Yeah, so They uh, they're trying to clarify that a little better to prevent some of those issues from happening So I'm going to go into this a little bit more self certification of application efficiency for irrigation systems And it clarified it also clarified stream augmentation flows and I'm going to go in that too Uh a little bit more and downstream user can't withdraw water and drought periods. That's what that means And so um based on where you're at In that watershed it tells you how much you can withdraw whether any at all to keep that stream at that level So they're running some pretty intense models to look at this and determine what flows What can be withdrawn from where based on tributaries, etc, etc so One thing to implement is the aquifer storage and recovery project So, um, it tested there's a test system being installed at the model wildlife management area in baker county on the Right near the chicken stall hatching creek Costing about 5.1 million dollars. So you're like, what is aquifer storage and recovery? I wouldn't have known what it was, you know a few years ago So now I kind of know and whether or not it's a valid solution or not I'm leaving that up to the Georgia EPD But um, it's a well installed in the shallow florida and aquifer Provide a recharge flow during high flow To an aquifer storage recovery or asr Well installed across the deeper clayburn or clayton aquifers What are remaining storage in the clayburn clayton aquifers until it's withdrawn or recover Deep deeper aquifers during the low flow to augment stream flow in the nearby system That's a lot of words. Don't really tell you what's going on, right? Here's a good picture that shows what's going on So we got the florida and aquifer across most of georgia Now I didn't put a map on here to show how much it stretches But it basically goes from a few counties in alabama all the way over to eastern georgia Across kind of the coastal plains what you consider that region And based on where you're at you might have a 15 foot water table all the way down to a couple hundred foot water table But it's very easy to access So just imagine this layer right here on average is around 50 to 100 foot thick These layers to get down to here. We're looking at 700 800 feet in certain regions and not very You know high high yielding wells in certain regions. So the issue is As if you can't withdraw from this one you're drilling down 700 feet And you're really really pushing the costs of that well up So basically what they're trying to say we can do is we're going to pump water They're in high flow, you know when we're good, we're going to store it down in these two aquifers We're going to let it sit there, you know in the minute that we start seeing drought periods and the water flow is drawing down We're going to pump out of these and pump back into the stream So that our stream level stay at that base rate You know, it's a lot of pumping water here pumping water there, you know doing this that and another so basically what it is Except whether it's good or not That's what's implemented or they're trying to work on implementing some of that to help So also application efficiencies. What are we doing from the farm side? So, you know, these are these are from the stream augmentation side and all that What are we doing from the farm side to try to help with that? Um Past the bill I helped write part of this section here It says, um center pivots So basically what we're doing is telling producers that by 2020 it's a self check But by 2020 you've got to meet this region if you fall within this district you meet this read you have to meet this So center pivots must be at least 80 efficient solid sets traveling guns 65 efficient And this is from the pump to the ground. It's a self certification. So keep that in mind We wrote a checklist have to go through the checklist They self-certify this somebody doesn't come off and check on it So that's all right right now. It's all right until EPD decides uh, they're in big trouble or whatever somebody gets mad and they're coming out of your farm to check That's when you're in trouble. So on the honor system You might want to keep in mind if you have to do this self check try to show that you've implemented it and did a decent job of it, so When we move away from georgia, there's our issues. That's what we're dealing with in georgia right now All the legislative fun stuff, right? Yeah stuff. I didn't like I said, I don't like to deal with and don't like to do So typically alabama, you know, if we look at our irrigated acres, we've lagged behind a little bit You know, I think one thing is hard to reach water source Um, typically no history infrastructure for irrigation. So if we're not looking at um, having it there, you know from 1970 You know where people have been doing it for a long time. Maybe it's just not something that we're going to do You know and we're not been drilling those wells or do anything That's from recent legislations helping to increase acres And the following information will go through a few slides that I got from Cameron Handyside from UAH and the earth system Science Center. So if you've seen any of his stuff They basically went through and did some surveys to show the irrigation intensification in alabama Based on some of the recent legislation to see how we're pushing it. So see how it's actually helping it going so It's part of alabama's efforts to both promote irrigation and protect water resources detailed information About agricultural water users and their locations a must So USDA irrigation reports, you know, sometimes they're reliable. Sometimes there's not So they tried a couple of different methods. I'm gonna breeze through them really quick for time's sake You know, I looked at NDVI to see if we could actually identify some areas. It's limestone county alabama You know, see if you could see and it's hard for y'all to see but basically green is crops Red is potentially irrigated crops. So somehow they're breaking NDVI into two levels and saying if it's so high We know we think that's irrigated. It's not so high. It's not that didn't work out too well They use feature recognition. So basically I looked at Satellite images and said, you know, anywhere we see something that looks like a circle This is an irrigate a center pivot irrigation system. So based on the 2000 accents to survey Say 37,000 of them there are 37,000 acres based on what they found 10,000 acres So again, they're way off on this. So we got to find a better method Um, we do have very high resolution ortho aerial photos. They come out every two years from usda Local art gis models are connected to the n a p gis server. So what did they do? They paid a couple of poor guys to sit there on a computer screen and draw circles And so these guys went across the entire state of alabama and drew circles anywhere They thought there might be an irrigation system. So um two they made them do it separately Like they couldn't look at each other's results because sometimes it, you know, it works out really well And sometimes there might be a system might not be a system. So here's some potential Stuff here, you know, what looks like irrigation systems and what may or may not be So to cut to the chase basically red was researcher one yellow researcher two So they went through said everything that they both agreed on that was definitely a pivot and there's issues here like, um You see a causeway on this pond and it's in a circular shape And so somebody said well, there must be a you know, a half pivot or something going on there And I come to find out there's nothing there either that causeway There's something else going on here or that's just you know Some funny image or something else going on there all the same way over here In some case the evidence for center pivot strong, but it's still not conclusive So it looks like there may be you know center pivots here when they really weren't but there was one here You know, et cetera, et cetera because here if I looked at this map I see something going on the center of both of these fields. I don't see the tower anywhere But there's something going on there. I don't really see tracks, but they assumed, you know Maybe there is one there, but there was not so went through they combined them They ground through some stuff got the final results. And so this is what the map looked like Again, like I talked about southeast Alabama where you might have access to more Easier water sources. You see a higher population of it. So Irrigated acres 2006 versus 2013 I don't have a whole lot of time So I'm not gonna spend too much time on them You can kind of see in certain counties where we've went from pretty low acres just throughout the state and increased a lot So I'll give you a minute just to kind of absorb that you go from white That's around a thousand acres green is around 10,000 here green. I think is From 10,000 to 15,000. So it's still your high mark So, um, what are they doing and what are they looking at and I stayed out of they looked at it by watershed I looked at it kind of by county used a supplemental irrigation map And said, you know, how much this was during the drought period. So this might look kind of high I think this was during the 2012 drought But how much additional irrigation was required to reduce the crop during that time If you can see the scale bar down here on the bottom It's from zero all the way up to reds 14 additional inches the validly producing irrigated crop They applied this to this map and seen an average demand over 50 years there So this is what it looks like you look anywhere from all this is acre feet So we just have some areas in the state that are requiring some extremely high again based on this map Withdrawals of water for irrigation. So what that basically means and what they're looking into on the simplistic level is Are these watersheds going to be able to sustain this, you know in the long run And what are we going to have to do to make these watersheds sustain this And how much water can each one of them take, you know, whether we build reservoirs or what do we do So what are some options for improvements and I try to go through pretty quick If any of y'all have heard most of my talks, this is mainly what I What I cover in them is more some of the stuff. So what it's talking about and everything else So irrigation intensification if improperly managed can lead to major issues in the near future We all kind of know that you're going to run out of water legislation is going to be passed You know A lot of other things Can be set in that we don't want to happen. So we want to be good up front We're putting in infrastructure that we ideally is going to be there for a long time Do a better job planning and then we don't have to worry about it in the future So bmp should be implemented to ensure irrigation resources resources are not myths managed So um what to consider really quick irrigation type efficiency of system So water holding capacity crop growth stage utilization of sensors more precise estimation of soil moisture And then split apply weekly rates as possible. So don't dump it all out at one time basically Really quick we've seen you know, this is kind of not pretty easy to find but what is our efficiency All this means is on a basic level if I apply an inch of water with one of these systems I need to apply that inch by one of these percentages to see the amount that i'm actually getting to my crop And you can see as we get down to lower pressure closer to the crop We can we get a higher efficiency and of course drips got a very high efficiency there And that's just the point of this slide It's what talked about we looked at crop growth stage sensitivity water stress. It changes as we go out This is cotton. This is peanut corn looks the same way it goes a little bit higher But we go through the maturity stage kind of level off and we get a maturity and then start dropping off After full maturity down to irrigation termination. So We're not going to talk about that I've got just a couple of minutes one thing I do want to talk about irrigation scheduling But it's just a technique to determine how much water and when to apply it So USDA irrigation survey that was done a few years ago. How do people schedule it 80% on visual observations I mean 80% of people are looking at my crop and saying all right my crops wilted. I need to irrigate That's you're done too far behind that point six to 35 fill the soil This is the best one. I mean if anybody's ever heard my talk I love talking about this one irrigate when neighbors irrigate that is the worst way To irrigate I mean I don't care if you're just turning it on twice what you're doing better than this Because no matter what I've had a lot of people tell me There can be two different crops. He's growing a different crop than his neighbor and anytime he turns this system on his neighbors Is going to turn it on or if he's not irrigating his neighbors not irrigating. There's an obvious major problem there So, you know kind of go by your own methods. Look at your own crop Know what's going on. Let's not cheat on our test. How about that? Don't look at the neighbor's paper in this case Because he may not be doing it right Personal calendar schedule That was me. I was a jerk in school if I knew somebody was cheating on me I'd purposely put the wrong answers down and let them turn their testing and go change it. So You know, I want people to do, you know, do their own thing if they won't help ask for it. Don't cheat on it Use a few other methods to keep up with it. So Um eight percent or less So this is a low number that would be nice if we could get this up And I know we're getting some sensors out there. We've got a lot in South Georgia We're getting some in Alabama. We just got to learn how to manage these I think that's the thing we got to learn how to use the data and manage it Hopefully we're getting there, but these are scheduling servers computer models or sensors So that's just methods. That's straight up. So why precision irrigation? You know, we don't really realize the benefit. That's what I was talking about You know, there's a lot of issues of variable rate irrigation or variable rate fertilization, lime seed, etc We don't manage water. So we're trying to get where we can manage water really well So when we're starting doing some of these other technologies, we're actually realizing the benefits of them and getting the most out of them Um, you know water is expensive. We're having regulatory actions and all that That are being implemented. I'm going to try to finish up with these couple of slides I think about just on time for a question or two. I've got two, uh, two results slides here. This is from 2013 I'm just throwing this up here. I'm not promoting this, uh, technology or anything I mean, it's free and available. It's an app that was developed at University of Georgia in collaboration with University of Florida that we use But all it does is just follows that water use curve that I had a few minutes ago that I showed It just follows that for cotton so that we know approximate amounts of water and when to apply when to apply them And how much so checkbook method. That's just being very concerned. We're applying a lot of water We don't ever want to stress that crop We applied in this year now This was a bad year for it. So that's why I got 2014 out there. We had almost 30 inches of rain in this year No, I wouldn't recommend any irrigation when you got 30 inches of rainfall, you know, just none You don't need any either way checkbook. We still even with that we still applied almost 13 inches of uh Irrigation there cotton out required three inches This is a crop um crop water stress index Irrigator pro and then rain fed so all these are pretty low compared to checkbook. Let's go over here and look at our yield We actually hurt ourselves In this year by over irrigating, you know using that checkbook method and just trying to be conservative make sure we weren't stressed We actually lowered yield by about 100 to 130 pounds per acre By using that so let's get out of a wet year. Let's look at a little bit drier year A year like this past year what rained a lot up front and then stopped 11 inches of rain. So that's more of a typical year, right? We're around 11 12 15 inches of rain if we're lucky throughout the production season So Had a couple different trials out. Here's the tifton campus. We had a couple fields there Um checkbook we applied 16 inches of water basically 17 inches That put us at right at 1600 pounds per acre of land yield Cotton out 10 inches. So we're at total at 21. This is where a total 28 basically inches of water on it Cotton out. Yeah, we reduced that by 20 pounds per acre, but we cut our water use and basically have so If we're going and throwing the pumping costs and all that which i'm not going to get to today You're doing pretty good following this app in the amount. So at our irrigation research park checkbook cotton app and then primed acclimation of the app We had conservation and conventional so checkbook 15 inches So pretty much on par with this cotton app nine inches in both and then the primed acclimation nine inches So for some reason this one was much lower this year But the primed acclimation where we basically held the water off for a little while did really really well It has responded, you know 100 120 130 pounds higher than this one With basically we total these up almost half the amount of water the same way here 100 They're not quite 100 there So one of the slides I showed you is that we can do a much better job at irrigating, you know and managing our irrigation If we follow some some regime as opposed to just blindly turning the water on so Really quick if you want to look at just to kind of drive the point home a lot of fields in the southern part of the state Especially georgia. I know it's prevalent in alabama, too There's a 228 28 acre field and this is one center pivot covers this field You can see the pivot line right here You can see the bridges where it's walking across the swamps and where it's walking across the ditches and everything else Nine crops this is looking all these ditches swamps everything else 84 acres or 37 of that field 84 acres times 12 inches of irrigation. So that's going back and looking at approximately what we applied, you know somewhere around the average of these Is um at a number we've come up with about 12 dollars per acre inch you apply It's 12 000 that you just dumped on this area And all these areas in that year on this one field So that's that's my push for variable rate irrigation right there Even if you don't want to put the sensors out there My push is let's use it for all and often situations like this at least to start with And then we can progress from there if you're not comfortable yet That's also about 30 million gallons per year of water So the point with this one is the issues that we're seeing in georgia Hey if we can push variable rate down there at 6000 pivots in just that region That's a lawsuit specifically focused and all we can say look by having pivots down here We can save this much water per just that's just per 84 acres so With that amount of time and Y'all have any questions Oh come on. You can't still be asleep Lunch should be wearing off by now So so local dealers I don't it just depends on um what part of the state you're in here service I know we've got a few dealers in here. I'm not you can you can talk to a few of them I mean anybody that carries them. I don't want to point anybody out. We're in here, but Irrigation companies first off Secondly a lot of your some of your equipment companies and services and stuff like that will also offer them I mean if you just got you know, just general questions about what you want to do Feel free to give me a call give one of your regional extension agents a call And work through them and we can make recommendations maybe on sensor types give you I don't do very well with cost because cost changes a lot and everything else But um and then I'll get in trouble with some of the companies. They said well west said that this This sensor costs this much now, but you know just some local dealers start asking around and you know Like I said contact me or one of your agents and we can get you in contact with a dealer that has some of the stuff You can get you started so Any more questions Close um the one in georgia was developed in georgia There's some of those methods developed in alabama, but if we look at them in all aspects They're going to be very very close our climates are pretty close You know, we'll see a little bit of a difference when we move up to the northern part of alabama But we could still if you just needed a blind guide to go by That checkbook method gives you something better than blindly going out there and just doing you know Just estimating what you think without looking at any guide at all So our regions aren't that different. It's not like going from Nebraska To georgia, Nebraska to alabama. So Any more questions? It is so the one thing that uh that the cotton app is lacking that irrigator pro you can do with you know irrigator pro you can Put in information from soil moisture sensors to kind of verify that or to make it a little more accurate It's kind of the step one of irrigator pro is where our cotton app is at right now Taps local weather data looks at that graph that I showed on cotton And so it looks at um, how much rainfall you got basically how much solar radiation wind speed, etc Estimates et for crop growth stage And um the one issue in alabama is it doesn't know what or there's weather stations It's not integrated into the weather network here or the way the system's set up. We can't get it integrated You can still use it. You can go in and change rainfall You can change et you can change some of that stuff on your own And adjust those to where you think they should be and it'll still tell you how much you need to irrigate So it kind of is free. I mean to search smart irrigation apps if you wanted to play with it We had I think right at 200 users this year where we beta tested in georgia. So a lot of people are starting to use it