 Good morning everyone, my name is Naeem Calver and I am extension soil health specialist out of Langdon. With me is Dr. Abhivik who is our state soil health specialist and is Scott Swenson who is helping us with Zoom. Welcome to the NDSU Zoom soil health webinar series. This webinar series, the way we have designed it, it will have six featured speakers and they will cover a wide range of soil health topics on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 11 o'clock for three weeks starting today. And you can join these webinars through your smart phones or computers or flip phones, whichever, you know, works for you at 11 o'clock again Tuesdays and Thursdays. Each webinar, the way things will work will have one pre-recorded presentation and then we'll follow it up with question and answer. Now you most probably would be muted but you could unmute yourself. Would it prefer that during the you could, if it is a too much of a burning question, you could just put it in the chat box and then we'll try to answer that between me, Abby and Scott but otherwise we could just ask the questions, say at the end or for that matter if you wanted to discuss something. So for today, our featured speaker is Dr. Aaron Day. You know last fall was, it posed a lot of challenges when it comes to residue harvesting crops or leaving the roots in the field and we have been receiving a lot of questions about that. So Dr. Aaron Day, who is our assistant professor for soil physics in the Department of Natural Resource Sciences out of Fargo, so we have his pre-recorded Zoom presentation and his title is Challenges with Residue, Tillage and Ruts Following a Vet Harvest. It's a slightly longish presentation but it will have very useful information about 55 minutes so we could hear that and then we could follow that up with questions or answers or just to discuss different things. So with that, I'm going to take this out and I'm going to play Dr. Day's presentation. Okay. Hello everyone. My name is Aaron Day. I'm a soil scientist at North Dakota State University. I am their soil physicist, which is a fancy way of saying that I study how things move, whether that be water, heat, nutrients or the soil itself. But today what I thought would be useful to talk about is a topic that we've hit at numerous events throughout the winter this year, particularly talking about and anticipating challenges with residue management, soil tillage and with ruts, particularly in the context of following a wet harvest like what we endured during the fall of 2019. And for potentially a number of folks who are still trying to get 2019's crop out of the field. So this video right here is going to be on that topic and because everyone has their own unique situation that they are that you're dealing with on your farm or on your clients' farms, I want to hit a few different scenarios. So one of the scenarios is perhaps everything got harvested and completed. All your fall activities just fine. So going into the spring it's going to be fairly business as usual for you. So we're just going to check mark that and say those folks are good or at least know what to anticipate this coming year. Perhaps you'll get some interesting or useful tidbits from this talk right here but for if you fall into this category or if some of your fields fall in this category then we're going to consider those fields as good for right now at least and focus on some other situations that are perhaps quite prevalent throughout the region this particular spring because of our wet fall that we had. So the few scenarios that we will focus on a lot here is you got harvested during the fall and you're able to do it with no ruts but you didn't get any of your fall preparations done. Any of your fall field activities after that harvest was there. So got in before the wet conditions or even after the ground throw but perhaps you're dealing with especially if you're used to tillage you're dealing with going into the spring with much higher residue levels than perhaps you're used to in the past for so how to manage that. Perhaps you're still waiting the harvest at 2019 crops still on the field so time will tell depending on what our spring hopes for us. I know that even folks who were harvesting in the winter by time February hit there was people that were finding thawed soil out in the field and were sinking in having quite a difficult time getting in a harvest because we didn't have much of a frost depth this year. The early and continuous snow cover that we received most of the soils here at least in the valley and extending outwards from the valley maybe only froze a foot or a little bit more and that was it and so by time February came around the soils had actually fallen to the bottom from fever heat thinning the frost layer and you had snow covered soils and fields that were had no ice in them though. So that's a troubling item if you try to harvest during the winter but actually for the spring it's actually kind of good because you get some faster infiltration and drainage occurring when snow melted has been occurring in these last couple weeks here. So we'll talk about for the folks that are perhaps still waiting to harvest and still have crops on their fields and then on the fourth item down here we'll also talk about harvested perhaps you got harvested in the fall or winter but oh look at those ruts and the thing is everyone faces tough choices especially in falls well just had and so some pretty substantial ruts and ruts all across the fields were quite prevalent throughout the region and was just a reality for a lot of folks on it so we'll talk about dealing with those ruts and what you can expect in the years coming afterwards too from compaction that occurred with those ruts in those areas but items two and three right here these different scenarios just bear in mind that there's a lot of recommendations depending on when harvest comes but the recommendations will kind of look similar because it's just a matter of when harvest did occur that you're going to be dealing with high residue situations in both scenario two and three so let's go ahead and get into that first scenario that we're going to talk about so harvested in the fall no ruts but you also had no fall crops so a lot of residue on the ground perhaps for the folks that are not accustomed to a no-till situation or a high residue situation for it if you are a long-term no-tillers then perhaps this is also just another this is probably just business as usual for you so one of the things that I like to point out and I like this graph right here that I want to spend at least a moment going through is when you have a lot of residue on the soil the first things I start thinking about with spring planting is our soils up here being able to dry out so we can get in and get a good crop stand established and going and so the water that's in the ground it has two different routes that can go it can go up or it can go down and the most efficient way is for it to go down when you have a lot of residue on the soil surface it limits the amount of evaporation that can occur so you're you're reducing the amount that it can be lost upwards to let that soil dry out so this graph right here what it shows is that on the side here has the evaporation rate all the way from zero going up to one so this would be 100% evaporation rate at the very top here and we're looking at days on the bottom here this is days after some wetting events so this would be enter a big rainfall event or the snow melt itself something that would saturate the soil quite substantially and then I've got a few curves on here the very top curve this one that goes just straight across the top this is the atmospheric demand it just sits at 100% so if the air could have its way it's going to pull every bit of water out this is it would be at it would be at 100% the atmosphere would take as much as it can the two other lines I have on here the first one is a bare soil that's the dyed line that's pretty steep here after the first couple days after a wetting event so that's 100% bare soil just completely bare the other line the solid one is a 100% residue covered soil so these are your two bookends in your fields you probably fall somewhere in between these two so I'm a big fan of bookends what's what's the two ends because if you know what those are then you have an idea of where you and everyone else are falling at in between so the things on this graph right here to notice is that of course this bare soil in the it's evaporating a lot more water than the 100% residue covered soil as you would expect this is very common it goes along with our intuition and experiences for things but I want you to notice is that after the first several days this this starts dropping down quite quickly because the soil is drying in that terms and a drier soil would evaporate not as fast as a wet soil so it drops down quite quick over time after about three four days is actually over about 50% efficiency at losing water out for it but it's still substantially higher than that of the residue covered soil the residue is covered soil right off the back it's losing evaporation at only half the rate of a bare soil would be after three four days that now narrows up to where only it's about a quarter difference and then if you look out here around one week and a little bit further so in between like seven and nine days the 100% bare and 100% residue covered soils actually come together they converge together and they behave very similarly afterwards from there so the point that I want to emphasize here is that yes bare soils will evaporate more water than a residue covered soil however after about a week a week and a half that's not the case anymore it doesn't matter how much residue you have out on the ground if it's been dry everything's going to eventually look the same after about a week week and a half now when things don't look the same as if you get repeated rainfall so if we you know as we continue into our spring here which is when I'm making this recording here it's it's mid april so if we continue this spring and we stay relatively dry it's not going to matter if you have a lot of residue out on the field it's going to dry out just the same as if it was a bare soil but if we get in a situation where we get heavy rainfalls once a week particularly twice a week then we're really going to start seeing the issues of high residue cover be more of a issue with being able to get it implanted with it because those soils are going to be wet so it really depends on what our rainfall is going to do for it one of the things to think about too with evaporation and losing water upwards drying the soil out upwards wise is if you look at evaporation rates again here on the side where we're zero up to 100 or one of the relative terms and then instead of time after a wedding event now we're looking at just tons of residue per acre when we think of tons per acre out on the field it's we see a similar trend to where the higher amounts of tonnage the more coverage there is and the lower the evaporation rate but the annoying thing is is that different residue types will have their own curves and it becomes residue type specific on what you can expect to happen and that's actually an annoyance there a much better metric to use for evaporation rates is actually not the tonnage or the percent coverage of residue those metrics are fantastic for indicators and things like wind and water erosion but they're not a good indicator or the most precise indicator of how much evaporation leaves the better metric is actually the thickness of the residue type and the reason being is that it almost doesn't matter at all what type of residue you have out there whether soybean, cotton, wheat or any other crop they all tend to follow pretty much the same line that's a very nice convenience for it and you can see that in this graph right here is the same data set it's just now looking at residue thickness and inches from the ground so this is residue that's actually sitting on the ground this is not standing stock so this is residue on the ground for it and something I'll just point out here is that I put in a red line down here at the one inch thickness and if you follow that up to the data and then go to the side you'll see that at a one inch thickness we're now down to about 30 percent of the maximum evaporation rate that is possible that the atmosphere is thirsty for so 70 percent of the evaporation rate drop occurs in the first inch after that first inch you go out to two inches three inches four inches it matters a teeny tiny bit very little bit most of the bank of the buck is in that top inch we're in that first inch so if you're doing some kind of residue management practice and you're thinning down four inches down to two inches you're not really gaining much ground it's not until you get underneath the one inch thickness that you see a big jump in the change of evaporation rates for it but thinning down the residue layer can substantially change the evaporation rate you're going to have very high coverage of this soil covered by crop residue and still being able to get it to dry out if you can thin down that residue management layer and we'll show some examples of that in some trials and upcoming slides here soon so in this graph right here what I want to show is really a demonstration of that first graph where we saw that a bare soil versus a 100 covered soil after about a week they started behaving the same on how dry that soil was if you didn't get an additional rainfall so right here you know that graph right there was a conceptual what we see in many many studies a local example is on this graph right here what I have is on the top graph this is the soil moisture content in the early months a few years ago on a silty clay soil so this is one of our Fargo soil series of very high clay and soil content for it and this is a little moisture at a two inch depth the bottom graph is the soil temperature and degrees Fahrenheit also at a two inch depth and we've got four different tillage practices that we had on this field so but the main thing I want you to notice is that you can see in this bottom graph in the first couple weeks here we had you know temperature and the soil was right around freezing a little bit below so we're coming out of winter and then suddenly you can see the temperatures jump up above 32 and we start following that soil the first time that they jump above 32 if you look up here at the moisture graph now you can see that suddenly all the moisture jump up real fast that jumping of moisture isn't from snow melt infiltrating it's actually from ice thawing the type of sensors that we use are electric sensors and any electric sensor including the sensors that end on run has on their weather stations and and it's electric sensors is the most dominant type of technology that's used for soil moisture sensing they don't detect ice they only detect the liquid water so when they're frozen and you see that like wow it looks like the ground is really dry it's not it's just that most of the water is in ice and it's more of an ice detector now so but that big jump you can see that suddenly that's all thawed and you can see you know the types of tillages here some had much higher water content some had much lower water content when it first came out of the winter thaw and they stayed different for uh about a week a week and a half and then you can see they start coming together because we did not get another rainfall and we actually had about three weeks without any rainfall then after the snow melt and you can tell that first week and a half there's moisture differences the next two weeks afterwards the the soil is the same dried out just the same and they give you an idea of how much residue differences there were in between these tillage treatments here some of these treatments had residue levels as low as 30 ground cover other ones had as high as 80 percent residue cover so in between 30 and 80 percent of the ground covered with residue they dried out the same and behaved the same because we didn't get any additional rainfall that occurred it was a dry spring so when it's dry everything's dry when it's wet that's when you see differences in tillage uh and residue management emerge uh on the ability of the ground to dry out so this is a local example this was a down around morton or vargo silty clay soil so early season differences in temperature and drying out after a wet uh spring or after a wet fall or even in a wet spring uh you know we think about that getting off the crop uh to a good start or a poor start perhaps but does it matter by the end of the year when we look at yields because that's what we're really interested in is the how much we can still are used for to get an economic return off of them so what I want to show now is uh some production scale tillage trials that was a collaboration in between the SU and University of Minnesota that included uh Jody DeJeanne Hughes and Abby Wicke and myself on it and uh you can kind of see uh the scale of these tillage trials this was uh actually on that field that's vargo silty clay soil that the moisture and temperature grass just came off of we have these big strips down the field with the different tillage practices we had chisel plow in the fall with a spring field cultivator pass we had two different types of strip tillage a ball chain system also had a spring culture system where fertilizer was put down in the berms with the strip till uh implements we also had a shallow vertical till that was only tilling down an inch or two it was more so just for chopping up the residue and thinning down the residue layers not really doing any tillage or digging itself it's just for thinning down that residue layer to try to see if we could get a high percent residue cover which is good for erosion control but also being able to thin down that residue layer to get water to evaporate out in these soils that can be difficult on getting the water drained down and here in the foreground on the image this was done on one half of the field that was tile drained in the background of the image you'll see the exact same setup and strips back there that's on the untilled drain portion of the field as well but this gives you an idea of a scale and you can see the planer out here in the spring planting so temperature wise with soil warming up is about what you would expect in between different types of practices we also had areas that were in no till that we monitored that we had as buffer strips around these research tiles that we ran for four years on a variety of sites so these are average soil temperatures across the three farms for the three farms that we had the one that was on the Fargo silty clay soil high clay content they also had another one over by Barney North Dakota that was on a sandy loam site and then the third site over near Fergus Falls Minnesota that was on a lone clay loam site so we covered a lot you know clay soils loamy soils and sandy soils for it so these are average temperatures across all three farms and they fall almost spot on with that Fergus Falls site that had the loam soils for it but what you see is that you know the chisel plow soil or chisel plow treatments and the berms of the strip till whether it was fall shank or spring culture it did not matter those systems warmed up just pretty much the same and many times the strip till was just slightly ahead of that of the chisel plow now if you look at the no-till areas they were typically seven eight nine degrees cooler than that of the chisel plow areas and the strip till berms as you would expect because a lot of residue and thick residue and these were in corn soybean rotations the vertical till to where we have around seventy eighty percent residue cover on it but not doing much digging it's just thinning that residue layer they warmed up only a few degrees behind the chisel plow and the strip till berms on it if you look at where the no-till temperatures were and the chisel plow or strip till temperatures were the vertical till didn't even fall necessarily midway it's still towards that of the chisel plow and the strip till because we thinned out residue layer able to get water out and was able to warm up quite nicely in there even though it has a very high amount of residue cover on it and on our vertical tillers we did two past system one in the fall and then one in the spring where we also broadcasted fertilizer in front of it and used it to make sense try to get a little bit soil contact with fertilizer on that second spring pass and if you think about drying down wise it doesn't match the same pretty much same store here story here the chisel plow and the strip till berms dried down the most as you would expect the no-till had higher water content as you would expect from the abundance of residue there and that vertical till again it dried out if you look at where the no-till is versus the chisel plow and the strip till on it it dried out midway it's still lean towards being closer dryness wise to the chisel plow and the berm of the strip till and the nice thing on the strip till is that just a few inches away underneath the big layer or thick layer of residue that gets moved off right from the shank or the culture the trash cleaners just move off to the side you have an abundance of water right there that's a nice storage that conserves and stays throughout much later into the growing season and when the plant needs water and late summer dry spells perhaps but it's a no consequence to the earlier temperatures in the berms there so that's a nice combination of getting best of both worlds of drying warming but yet also conserving water for times when the crop needed most for it now what what does that all mean by the end of the year yield wise well let's take a look at some of this real quick try to go through this gracefully to some extent so here we're looking at the Fergus Falls and the Barney site so this is the Fergus Falls site there's a one with the lawn clay lawn soils the Barney site is one with the sandy lawn soils this was corn year the corn yields for 2015 here we saw one treatment was different from the rest had the clay clay loam site the strip till with the shank that was done in the fall yielded about seven bushels six seven bushels lower than that of the other treatment systems which didn't none of those differed at all from each other and the thing is is that that strip to a shank wasn't because of the strip till system itself what happened here was when we were putting in the fall chisel plowing vertical till pass and that strip to a shank pass the chisel plow was put in the vertical till was put in but when we started putting in the strip to a shank it started raining at the site so we held off we waited a little while but then the ground started freezing or we started getting into where the ground was going to start freezing so and we didn't want to kind of chunk in the strip till after the ground frozen we've had to come back and refresh in the strip in the spring anyways probably because it'd be too chunky so we went ahead and put in the strip to a shank when it was probably a little bit too wet and when we dug down and looked at the sidewalls you could see that it was kind of glossy which indicates that it had a smeared sidewall to it a good indicator or what you really want to look for whether it's the bottom of a tillage depth or on the sidewalls of something like strip till is that if the soil looks like it's a matte finish that's good you didn't smear anything but if it looks like glossy paint on it then you smeared the soil and that has a yield consequence to it and in this case tilling when it was too wet had a seven bushel per acre consequence to it because of timing the soil moisture condition when it went in and the thing here that I want to really emphasize is that tilling to dry a wet soil kind of goes against our intuition of what actually happened if it is as a rule of thumb if it is too wet to plant it is too wet to till without smearing that soil and so if you're going to till a soil to get it to dry out so that you can plant the tillage itself is going to cause a yield reduction there so very cautious in the spring on wet soils to try to use tillage to increase the amount of evaporation that's going to occur for it what I would suggest is actually just try to either don't do any tillage at all and really get to know your planter much better because our planters are pretty awesome out there you can adjust them and get used to this might be your opportunity to see what your planter can really do in a high residue situation or go in and just thin down the residue layer without actually digging and smearing that soil for it so but if we go on to 2016 and soybean at both those fields no differences at all in between any of the tillage treatments even though they were differences in temperature and moisture early in the year in 2017 no differences in corn yields in in between the two sites among the tillage treatments in 2018 we did see a increase in about four three to four bushel per acre boost in soybean in the strip till both of them whether it's fall shank or sandy site because later in the year we had some dry spell in the summer in that reservoir just a few inches off the side apparently helped out that crop and gave a nice yield boost at that point for it so in general soybeans are pretty resistant or intolerant to all sorts of things they're a very tough crop actually except for salt so very weak on salts but otherwise very rarely do we actually see a tillage effect on soybeans even though they're being planted after corn for it now if we go to that silty clay soil that high clay soil what I want to point out here is in 2016 in corn there's as I mentioned before there was a side once the north side of the field was tile drain that's the first two column we yield the second two column we yield that's the non-tile drain parts we also notice that I include saline and non-saline portions of the field because we the western side was a saline seed the eastern side had no salinity problems on it so we kind of have a combination of saline non-saline tile drain non-tile drain to be able to take a look at but in here in 2016 on the corn yield the top table here there was one effect of tillage and that was the vertical till yielded around 20 bushels per acre lower in a lot of cases than all the rest but again this was not a tillage issue here what happened here is that the fall pass went in but then the spring pass where we were going to incorporate or broadcast nitrogen fertilizer out in front of the tillage implement and then use the tillage implement to incorporate it a little bit our equipment rep was actually out of the country and we weren't able to do the second pass so fertilizer got broadcast on the surface and we just got a lot of emission losses of nitrogen there and so this is a nutrient management issue this is not a tillage issue or tillage effect here is a fertilizer effect for it so you know the biggest part about getting these tillage programs work is getting down the nutrient programs first form typically nutrient consequences of yields are much higher than that of a yield consequence or a yield benefit tillage year so and in most cases if you've got the fertilizer program figured out and down solid your tillage effect tends to disappear good or bad wise on so nutrient availability and access is a good way of kind of eliminating even the need for tillage whatsoever and a lot of systems in the bottom graph on sweet beans here what we saw was that there was no tillage effect on it but we actually saw what appeared to be a difference in whether the ground was tile drain the blue circle here is the two tile drain areas whether a saline or non saline and the red circle is the un-tiled drain area and you can see that there's around a seven seven and a half partial difference in between a boost from tile drainage versus area that wasn't tile drain for it and this is something that I really want to emphasize here is that here the drainage was controlling the issues for it and when I talked about when you have two options of getting rid of water drain it down or evaporate it up draining down is a much more efficient and productive way of getting a soil to dry out in terms of crop success and yields for it and there's a difference in between having a drainage problem versus having a tillage or residue problem with excess moisture a tillage program will not be able to fix a drainage problem so if you have a drainage problem it's going to take a drainage solution to deal with it because tillage is not going to be in the same ballpark of just being a viable tool to fix a drainage issue or you won't be able to do it with it so being able to identify what's a drainage issue versus which is pretty much more severe issues versus what's a residue moisture excess issue is important on picking what's even your right approach to dealing with your specific fields and situation so this next graph here you know that was or the previous graphs that was for those research trials that we had on three farms of production scale one of the things that Jody Jejone's use and I did in our upper Midwest tillage guide that was published in 2017 that you can google and check out library information in there we looked at a variety of research trials in the regions and summarized those on when how often what's the odds of having a corneode response to different tillage methods out there and so this chart right here shows 18 site years across North Dakota Minnesota in between 2005 and 2012 and what we have here is that 44% of the time in a corn system corn sweeping system it didn't matter what you did tillage wise they yield the same 44% of the time stripped tillage will outperform the other tillage options for it and only 12% of the time will chisel plow actually give you a yield boost compared to something else that's significant and so if you think about 12% of your fields so you know it's like one out of every eight fields we're one out of every eight years you can get a chisel plow to get a yield benefit for it so if you think about the economics of it and tillage if you're doing tillage there's some costs tillage pass or those two tillage passes for it you want to be able to just not only break even you need to make more yields to make it worth the time to profit off of that so if you're only getting a one out of every eight fields one out of every eight years a return on seeing a yield boost that yield boost has to be enough to account for all those years and fields that aren't responding to it and the vast majority of time we just don't see chisel plowing being able to pay for itself usually it's a loss because of these odds and occurrences of when it actually sees a yield boost and that yield boost isn't high enough to cover those other years and other fields if we go to soybeans again soybeans are very resilient and actually my number disappeared here this green this big green area about 74% of or 76% of the whole graph is they don't react to different tillages methods out there they're just the same for 18% of the time you might see yield boost from strip till because of the water being available if it gets dry periods a year and then chisel plowing with real cultivation only 6% of the time you see a benefit or a notable yield boost from it so one out of every 15 years one out of every 15 fields that that yield boost has to be able to also pay for to not only break even but try to make some money off and this is for 17 site years and that same interval from 2005-2012 on a variety of studies in between what's going on so in this next graph right here what this next session section we're going to so this would be still waiting the hardest out in your fields so the crop's still in there from 2019 so here the first thing is is when you go into harvest oh if you can't avoid those ruts because ruts will have a consequence for next couple years to come up on so wait for the soils to dry as much as possible before you get in so you don't have to spend more time out in the field leveling and filling and then also having the consequences for the next couple years from the compaction that would have occurred underneath those ruts if you have ruts compaction happen if you're able to harvest the 2000 if you were able to harvest when it was frozen out in the field you know look to minimize your tillage again if the soil is too wet to plant it's too wet to till without sparing it and having yield consequence because of that this is a great opportunity actually to get the no-door planters better than ever if you haven't already planters are really awesome out there you can deal with very high residue zones and get some really great yield stance and a great crop from the field if you set up your planters well and adjust them often ideally for every field that you're going into even as painstaking as I may sound but adjusting the row cleaners making sure the bars are level adjusting the row down pressures certainly taking a look and adjusting that closing wheel making sure that it's getting you know it's closing right but then it's also not pressing down too hard where you're getting some lift and the variable seed depth on it and making sure that those disc openers aren't dull for going through and doing those small adjustments will make a world of difference for getting a good stand in high residue conditions for it so and some areas just going to have to consider preventive plan based on the timing that crops come out and depending on what our weather spring rainfalls end up doing out here so depending on when that's done in the spring rains you might look into cover crop options if you're going into pp grounds also check out the timelines and rules see if that November date is changing and what you might be able to do with something that you may plant cover crop wise out there when you graze it or harvest it for a cover crop seed itself or something so check out the rules on preventive crop and also note that not only will we wet up here but I'll lie pretty much the whole entire Midwest was tremendously wet so some seeds might be in higher demand throughout the entire Midwestern region and may affect seed availability for some of those cover crops and then that last category there harvested during the fall or winter but oh look at those ruts that came out from it and again everyone had to face some tough decisions no one likes to let a crop over winter but some fields were pretty severely rotted this year so what can you expect from that one of the things I like to do is kind of visualize what happens underneath the ground this is a cool image from a field day from a number of years ago to where they dug out these pits lined the soil back but then put in lighter colored sand drove heavy equipment over so there's a manure hauler here tires that's two different types of tires but the biggest thing is that the one on the right is over inflated that's inflated at the road conditions the one on the left is inflated for field conditions if your tires are inflated for the road so they're 40 plus psi they are too high for in the field you want to get those down around 10 psi if you can to be able to get all the area full area of the of the tread on the ground to distribute the weight but here just in between over inflated and under inflated see that the soil is still caused a rut but how deep the compaction was with the bending of those so you can see visually the bending of those sand layers there I highlight them in red you can see that the over inflated one went much deeper than the properly inflated even though the rut depth where this yellow line is here is the same that's what I want to emphasize here is that the depth of the rut unfortunately doesn't tell you much about how deep the compaction went the only thing you know for sure is that you do have compaction underneath it and out to the sides from that from that rut and with our equipment weights and actual loads that we have these days on combines and rain wagons and stuff like that our compaction is deep and it goes deeper than what a tillage angle mesh can reach for certain and so what can you expect with these well back one last times we had some really wet conditions in 2009 jody's own fuse had seven farms in western minnesota they were looked at fields that had ruts in them and then adjacent areas within those fields that didn't have ruts in them that producer stayed off of and they looked to see what consequence that had on the next year and the year afterwards corn and soybean yields from them and on those rutted areas they filled in the ruts with a chisel plow before they went in and planted on them so and you can see on the left hand figure here this is the first year after the ruts and corn and you get these nice this the left image is where there were no ruts so nice even cob size and grain counts on them on the one on the right is where the ruts were and you can see the variability and how the crops how the plants were doing with it so that has a yield consequence so in 2010 all seven locations were in corn in between rutted and non rutted area the stands didn't differ the grain moisture didn't differ there was significantly lower plant heights in the rutted areas and also the growth stage lag behind as you would expect and there was a 17 percent hit or drop on the yields from those rutted areas in that first year after the ruts occurred in in the second year afterwards when these fields were in soybeans the exact same stories stands and grain oysters didn't differ plant heights were lower in the rutted areas growth stage lag behind in the rutted areas and again a 16 loss on yields in those areas for them they didn't go into a third year afterwards but this data is very consistent with the much broader literature across the world for a variety of crops if you look at deep compaction that goes beyond the top soil beyond the reach of tillage equipment and stuff you'll see a yield drop around 15 or 20 percent sometimes it might extend up to 30 percent sometimes it might only be 10 percent but in that range in the first couple of years you'll see a multiple year effect from that but then we'll taper off and then eventually get back up higher there may be even a permanent yield consequence that doesn't emerge every single year you know when you think five six seven eight nine ten years afterwards but on inclement weather years you might see a five percent drop two to five percent drop on those yields so because of that deep compaction that just takes a tremendous amount of time to heal so some strategies for dealing with ruts if you have those is just level off the ruts and and only till only as deep or shallower than the rut itself just enough to be able to get in and spring plants probably going to take a couple passes to do it thing is that subsoil is dry slower than topsoil so the only way to insult compaction is to smear it so if you're digging into wet subsoil by trying to go deeper than the bottom of the rut you're probably not doing much any good and you potentially could be actually making it worse because the only way to insult compaction is to smear the soil along with compaction you get these slabs of soil that's really unpleasant to plant into for ruts that are less than four inches you might use a secondary tillage implement to do it then a couple passes if it's greater than four inches then you might get out the chisel plow and start filling those in again multiple passes that probably need for it good strategies for any year is that probably adjusting the tire pressures form finding ways to minimize the number of passes on your fields because with a typical corn soybean rotation that has tillage in the program you can easily you know cover 70 80 90 plus percent of that field within a given year so minimizing the number field passes and minimize the odds of compaction that you have to deal with minimize your loads control traffic if you can based on the size of equipment that you had and avoid wet soils if possible avoid those ruts because you might get a crop out but then you're you can expect that 15 on the 20 percent yield loss for the next two years because of it especially on fields that have from one end to the next every single pass of the combine there's a lot I wish we've had a number of fields like that this year because of the tough wet fall that we endure and the biggest thing is patience a few extra days of waiting will go a long ways of helping protect your soil from the occurrence of compaction occurring in the first place which if you can prevent the occurrence of it then you don't have to worry about the time needed to try to remediate it and the losses that are going to come with it even when you try to remediate and a few items here is that that I like to throw out there is that mechanically working the soil homogenized it so this is strategy for any year still as a sole physicist I think of what makes a good soil good healthy soil a lot of folks think biology wise in a physics matter I think about what a great soil is a soil that can drain very efficiently and well which you have to have pores many pores big pores don't do that but it's also strong and firm enough to hold up your equipment that is what makes it good healthy so it's having simultaneously good drainage and strong so to hold you up on when we mechanically work a soil we homogenize it we make it weaker so where equipment doesn't stand on top of it and then actually it can reduce drainage for it because we're aiming for water going up not water going down necessarily particularly below that till it's down for it and it's a high input on your behalf natural ways not mechanical ways but natural ways that soils aggregate they add a lot of cohesion and friction to the soil so that's what makes them strong is when you have cohesion and friction in the soil in between those aggregates they can stand up and because you're making aggregates the spaces in between them is what lets water drain very well unfortunately we do not have a mechanical tillage implement that works at the aggregate scale those aggregate sizes our equipment works out you know inches to a half a foot or a foot scale which is too big to be able to work and get both those realities of good drainage and strong firm soils for equipment standoff to happen naturally to actually occur so unfortunately we just don't have that technology that exists but we have many natural ways that that does exist every time you get in another crop in a root system that's not broken up afterwards every freeze thaw wedding and drying or cracking and shrinking and swelling that occurs you get aggregate formations and tillage innately homogenized and unworks aggregation for it so something to keep in mind because these wet falls are probably one they happen and they re-appen and so if we're dealing with compacted soils from ruts and trying to fix those that has a multi-year consequence to it if we have wet events every 10 or less years then the number of years that we're maximizing our yields become quite limited so and that's what I've got for you for challenges and some thoughts and hopefully I advise for you for dealing with residue high residue after wet harvest some expectations from different tillage programs that you can have and consequences of tilling when it's too wet certainly a thing to exercise caution with with this spring and then also dealing with ruts for quite a number of folks that are having to deal with those this spring or did have to deal with them also in the fall so I have my email address here feel free to contact me if you ever have any questions or want some more information on these studies and I've put a few links out here one for that upper midwest tillage guide that I mentioned earlier that Jody and I wrote back in 2017 also have an op-ed that I had in ag week back in the fall on this idea on this content right here as well as a few other interesting or amusing links that you might find useful so I appreciate the opportunity to speak at this virtual Langdon Soil Health workshop and I hope you all are doing well and staying safe out there and again please feel free to contact me at any time if you wish thanks again and take care bye bye so I hope that everyone enjoyed the presentation it was very informative and I could see that the chat box is full so um Abby you you still think that we need to answer some of these questions from the chat box or you've answered most of them I think I answered most of them in the in the chat box if people want to look at that but you know there are some questions about like on the the the tillage study being done at the Morton's share farm and then also the sites in Minnesota and just north of Morton and about whether you know the the direction of the tillage usually you know chisel plow or something like vertical till tillage will be done at an angle to the planting direction and how that might have influenced the results and I think I think it definitely could have I mean going at an angle would certainly be beneficial for for corn residue but I also you know we took pretty good residue counts residue percentage on those fields and I feel pretty confident I mean the chisel plow was black so there was a really good working end of the residue and and you could see residue differences um whether that would be maybe just look at it as relative to each other versus versus how it might be going in an angle in the field but but that would be something kind of that I'd be curious looking at and asking Erin about is if maybe they took some measurements from fields surrounding that had those same treatments and how that compared to those the other question that was kind of asked is about how do you talk about ruts and management um in a no-till area like particularly the western part of the of North Dakota um and it seems like like yeah I mean we're we're not you know using using tillage in the western part of the state is probably not something that people are going to do um but you know I think if there are ruts they're going to have to knock the tops off somehow and I know that there's some no-tillers on this call and this is where everybody gets kind of nervous when I know your name and and what you do um but I think in a lot of those scenarios we're just kind of knocking the tops off um with maybe a shallow vertical tillage or like some farmers I work with they'll set a disc on the road to make sure that it stays very shallow as they cross the field and they're only hitting those areas where in their no-till systems that are long-term no-till they're only hitting those areas that they um that they have ruts and avoiding the other parts of the field so um so I don't know if anybody who is a no-tiller on this call wants to wants to talk about maybe what you've tried um in those systems as well or if there are other questions people just want to ask instead of putting the chat box this is the fun part where everybody has to figure out where their unmute is um should we for a moment unmute everyone um I don't there might be some people with kids in the background which could be pretty noisy okay yeah I don't see anybody calling in so most people are either using their smartphones or their computers and it should be the mute or unmute button should be on the left bottom left hey I see Marla Rickman from Manitoba on here can we can we call on you Marla I know you've done a ton of tillage research hey Abby how are you I'm great how are you good good so yeah we um I wouldn't say I've done a ton of tillage research but um we are actually looking a little bit right now at a lot of corn residue heavy corn residue around the valley part of Manitoba on the heavy or clays where um either the crop didn't come off last fall or it came off in the winter and so I we've seen a fair bit of burning of that heavy corn residue happening so far just as a way to kind of get rid of some of it to get started so I am running around and doing a little bit of monitoring on a few fields where you've got neighbors who are you know one's burning one's telling and just taking a look at how that's going to progress through the spring and whether we're going to see differences only if there was any actual advantage of burning one of the questions that comes up when I talk to some of the farmers is well if I'm burning but not tilling is that better than tilling in the residue and so I mean those are good kind of theoretical questions to discuss yeah do you have opinion on that whether burning would be better than tilling or well as a government person I'm supposed to always say that burning is bad um but uh at this point I don't really know what we're seeing pretty decent burns on some of the the residue in terms of just removing it um there has been long term studies looking at removal of crop residue by bailing which does not take all of the surface residue off that shows that like in long term soil health kind of conditions you don't see a huge decrease in soil carbon over time with that that removal of residue it'll be interesting to see I mean if we had any studies looking at burning as a long term solution but this is a short term thing and and in a case where we're dealing with farmers who are um kind of struggling with very wet soils and that heavy heavy batch of residue if burning is the thing that they're going to try this year um it's just this year and a lot of the guys who are talking about it this isn't a common thing some of them are saying like I haven't burned in x number of years don't really want to do it but this is the the choice of making this year because it seems like the cheaper and easier alternative than trying to get across the field when it's wet until it yeah I think that's that's good advice as long as it doesn't become a habit or a long-term solution exactly exactly it's reasonable to to implement all the tools we have in the toolbox um yeah I have farmers that I work with too that that will be burning fields and um and it's you know they've exhausted you know five other options and that's kind of their last resort in some cases and some of them can't burn a field because it's too close to town or whatever else that they're concerned about it so um but yeah it seems like if you if you try to whatever you do this year in these wet conditions just don't make it a habit maybe in the future yeah and then hopefully the wet conditions don't become a habit too yeah that would be nice any other comment for me there were a couple takeaway points um like um I hear this a lot around laying in that you know we gotta dry down the soil well what um Erin said actually that um just doing the tillage on wet soils will reduce the yields and the only reason people want to till or dry their soils because they want to plant it early and they're looking to plant early because they think it's going to give them better yields but if you are compacting your fields and you're going to be losing your leads or yields right there because you tell the wet field what's the point of doing all that and then the difference between all the tillage practice was weak week and a half at most they roughly then come to the same level moisture levels or temperature levels and then we also have drainage issues we are slightly drier in the northeast in 17 18 early part of 19 um September and August were very wet in October but before that we were quite dry here so it's slightly different than the eastern part of the state but Erin also said that doing tillage basically hurts the drainage so to me I don't know what's the very ideal solution but I would say that whatever we could avoid tillage it's better um yeah and I agree with that if you like you was saying with the planters if you can adjust your planter and and use that to your advantage this year and direct seed into some of the residue versus trying to work it prior to planting that that may be that may be the best approach especially if this window becomes very tight for planting um that I would just I would consider that and that's what I kept hearing for a lot of the cafe talks we had this winter was you know what do you do with the fields in the spring and a lot of it is just if you can direct seed into it modify your equipment to make sure it has sharp disc openers and that it's ready to go um and and check your check it as you go in the field um but that seems like pretty good advice and if that doesn't work then you then look at some other options and try to figure out how to how to manage it from that and you know uh no till planting will work very good um if we had soybeans last year they don't leave a lot of residue even it's it could work in canola fields if they were harvested last fall um corn is a different you know kind of a like issue maybe wheat is stubble maybe a bit difficult for people but there are crops and if we just sub wide as we get we got this question I'd be doing the cafe talk a lot that you know for some people it's either no till or nothing we looked at it like if you avoid some tillage passes or wherever you could plant without doing any tillage is it good for the soil I would say a hundred percent it's better it's not to that level where um you know like we go no till you know I understand we won't get those benefits but wherever we could uh reduce tillage we'll save money and there would be some benefits to the soil too yeah so and if you have to pee pee a field um do it and I think uh I think we'll we'll have some good maybe we'll do some more webinars coming out on on cover crops for plant mixes and there is some information on the NDSU soil health webpage too um regarding prevented planting so if you go to the homepage ndsu.edu slash soil health you can find some information there now if you want to start digging around and looking at it um but I imagine we'll come back with some more information on PP because some of these fields just if you can't get in it and do a good job then maybe it just it's not one that you can do so so unfortunately that seems like the situation we're in right now but you can build great soil health with a year you get a free year of kind of cover crops and building up that soil and transitioning to a reduced till system and and it um maybe that's the one way to look at it so we have another webinar Thursday right Naeem and that's my webinar yeah yeah and so Abby will talk about the soil health practices which actually help again with the vet fields the way we have designed these topics that you know a lot of people are worried about you know vet is spring and um the challenges which that brings so Abby's presentation would roughly be the same but Abby would take a different approach which I'm not going to talk about right now because I don't want to spoil the fun and um Abby's presentation is about 27 minute long the reason I want to point that out because some people may think that today's presentation was belong so every speaker is different and the topics they cover are slightly different and everybody has a different style so uh next Thursday same time 11 o'clock and hopefully um you guys if you faced any problems in terms of getting the link right or whatever else because I was getting I was getting text um from the group text I sent like five minutes before can you text me the link you know so hopefully those people um um you know got it figured out so next Thursday that would be the second one and then two weeks after that again we'll have webinar one presentation and then question and answer or discussions Tuesdays and Thursdays 11 o'clock same link same telephone number yep and if you need the information early we have four of the yep of the six webinars posted on the NDSU solar health webpage on the webinar tab so if you anticipate you're going to be busy at that time and you can't catch it you can still get the information and just watch the recorded webinar um but then tune in if you want to have some of the discussion so um so for example on Thursday say you know you've already watched that webinar for 27 minutes and you just want to come in at 11 30 you could probably catch a lot of discussion at that point too so um so hopefully that helps with some of these schedules as they get a little crazier this the spring but um yeah today was great we had 75 people thanks for for joining us yeah thank you very much and we hope that you found it useful and hopefully we'll have more people on Thursday um and again like Abby said not only these presentation but we could also have you provide links for this whole uh session for example which include the presentation plus all of the questions um and the discussions we are having so that um you know the people can access these at any time whatever time works for them perfect okay all right well hopefully we see a lot of you on Thursday and um good luck good luck this spring thanks everyone