 South Dakota's educational effort to raise awareness about the importance of soil health continues. The USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service entered into a cooperative agreement with the South Dakota No-Tel Association and IGRO South Dakota State University Extension for delivering these seminars with the latest soil health and productivity technology to South Dakota farmers and ranchers. Well, our next presenter is Dr. Cheryl Reese-Reeds, a student here at Hancock, Minnesota. She received her undergrad and master's degrees at the University of Minnesota and her PhD in agronomy from SDSU. Cheryl currently teaches soil science and agronomy production courses and advises undergraduates and graduate-agronomy students at South Dakota State University. Her topic today is going to be saline and sodic soils so understanding the differences and management solutions. Okay, everybody, please. Thank you for inviting me to speak in Mitchell here. Today my topic is going to be a little bit different from a lot of the other topics on the agenda. You're going to hear a lot about cover talks from Dr. Peter Sexton and Elaine, other people who are going to speak. But today I'm going to talk about something a little bit different. I'm going to talk about saline and sodic soil management. So how many people have the topic to solve? Here. Okay? Okay, so I see a lot of people with saline and sodic soil management. And we've done a lot of work on this. We've done work here. I've heard from some people that we've done some work on the problem with that. They've been dealing with white light. And we're going to talk here. So here's my outline. I'm going to talk a little bit about the positive problem. I'm going to also talk about testing for salt, what you can go for in the soil test. I'm going to talk about sampling for salt. A little bit about how you can go. What you need to look for there. We're going to talk about some management that we have. And of course it's going to involve sunflower crops. And it's also going to involve plenty of plastic systems as well, too. So I have quite a few slides here. I know we're ahead of time. I won't take more time. If you guys, Ruth, how do you want to do questions? Do you? Oh, I'm not sure. Just a little bit, Cheryl. I see the question. No. Can you hear me now? Yeah. Can you hear me? Okay. So, Ruth, how do you want to handle questions at the end? Do you have questions during when I'm speaking? Whatever's more comfortable for you. Okay. I teach the college, so I'm used to getting questions. So if you have questions, if you really want to, if you see something on the slide, just let me know. I'll try to watch the audience here. So let's get going here. Okay. So salt problems. We have a lot of salt problems, and they seem to be getting worse every year. Especially when these plants, they, in a field, they start out small, and then each year, they grow a little bit bigger. And so what's going on there? So we've had a lot of changes in the climate since the mid-80s. I mean, from North Dakota, you guys haven't seen the rain. Your father probably didn't see the rain that you guys have seen in the last 15 years. You're kind of up in that northeastern South Dakota area by Wabbe, where we've had all this rain. A lot more rain, okay? So we've had a lot more rain these last few years. We also, in the 70s and 70s, the 80s, we did corn and soybeans, and we did a lot of tillage. We did a lot of tillage there. Tillage is going to destroy our soil structure. So we're doing, with the tillage, we're doing something bad for the soil. We're destroying what you've seen with your water and everything. We're destroying that soil structure that allows water to go down in that soil profile. The other problem is that we have salt that are indigenous to this area. When it wasn't wet, when we weren't tilling, those soils were down in the soil profile, but they weren't coming up. Salt have always been deeper in the soil profile. So here, let's just take a look at South Dakota right here. Very good pointer. Okay, so here's South Dakota right here. Here's where you guys are up by Lisbon up there in North Dakota. We're all underlaying there by what we call the Pure Shale. And there's different formations underneath here. The very top one is called the Bear Paw Shale. It's the upper deposit of the Pure Shale. We have this shale here that's below the majority of our state. Okay, here. We'll get that to go. There we go. Okay, so here we look at the upper Midwest, right up in here. All right, so this is a precipitation map right here. So here's South Dakota right here. Here's North Dakota. We can see that. And then you look at your decades here. If we look up here in the 80s and the 90s, there's a massive increase in precipitation. Okay, so what have we done? We changed our cropping system. Typically it would have been wheat, grazing, fallow. We've done a lot more tillage. And we've added corn and soybeans in there. Corn being a short season crop. Right here. Right here. Okay, so here's the Pure Shale. This is in Spain County right here. This is a precipitation map right here. And this is Spain County up by Redfield, South Dakota. And what they did here is they came through here and they did some sampling. This is done with South Dakota Geological Service. And they came through here and they sampled across the county site. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. And so what they did is they did some sampling here. And what they did is that each of these sites, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, what type of formations do we have underneath there? All right? So that red line right down here, the KP is the Pure Shale. And if you look along the left-hand side here, it says elevation and peak above mean sea level. And here's the ground surface right up here. So you can see right up here a lot of this, just across this one transect here in Spain County, we have a lot of that pure shale that's close to the surface. Well, those salts are all in that pure shale. That's where they are. Those salts are indigenous in that pure shale. And so what we do here is seasonal use of the tall grass prairie. Water was greater that than corn and especially soybeans and weed rotation. We also had very, very deep roots with these prairie grasses that removed the water from deeper in the soil profile. And I'll show you that here at the end how those perennial grasses really can pump that water out. So, here's what's happened basically. We've had this abundance of precipitation in the 90s through the 2000s. We have those salts that are indigenous down there. They're not very far down. What we do is in soil, and I teach my soil science class that we call this capillary rise. So, lots of soil science terms here for you guys today because I teach soil science. Capillary rise right here. What happens is that groundwater comes up. It dissolves those salts from that old pure shale. The calcium, the magnesium, the gypsum, the sodium salts that are there. It dissolves those salts from that pure shale. And then what happens is, based upon what your soil texture is, so based upon if you have a silky loam soil, if you have a silky loam soil, those salts become dissolved in that water down there from that groundwater, and now they start creeping up due to capillary rise. Kind of like, if you look at a really thin tube or if you look at a thermometer and it has water in there, you'll see that it has a meniscus in there. So, it's climbing up in the soil because it would rather be more attracted to this soil above the surface that's in the groundwater. So, capillary rise occurs. It comes up against gravity. It depends upon your texture and your soil probe and your porosity. So, a soil that has a lot of clay in it. You're not going to get water creeping up as much. It can't be soiled. You're not going to get water creeping up. It's in these intermediate textured soils, like these silty loam and these types of soils where we see that water start to creep up. The water, the salts are dissolved in there. The water comes to the surface. It starts to warm up in the spring. The water evaporates. Where are the salts? Right. They're on your fields, right? They're right on your fields, and that's how they get there. That's a little bit of a background about how these areas develop. Okay, so now that we know how they develop, what can we do to manage them? How do we figure out what do we have? Okay, so now what we have to talk about is the type of salts that we have. We have calcium magnesium salts and we have sodium salts. So with the sodium salts, sodium means just like your table salt, sodium. What that means, we call that a sodic soil. If we call that a sodic soil, we have the problem that plants will not grow and the soil is dispersed. So dispersed means that you don't have that nice soil structure out there. You walk out there and it looks like pavement. There's no, the aggregate stability is not there. So that's what it looks like. This is a field up by pure pond. So you get a rainfall or something like that and you get this. You get this at all. You'll start drying out. This has a high clay content. Some of this does on the surface. And nothing's going to move through here. It looks just like pavement. Plants will not grow on the soil. It's dispersed. With saline soil, you have calcium and magnesium. Now you have plants that are going plant problems. But usually in a saline situation with calcium and magnesium salt, usually your water will move through there. So if you have an area out in the field where you don't have any water moving through it and nothing's growing there, it looks like concrete and you might want to look at testing for sodium. Saline problems typically, we do have some structure there. The problem is here, is it no matter if it's a saline or sodic soil problem, we have a high water table. This is up by pure pond, South Dakota. Here, and we did some field days up by pure pond. We did some soil kits. Here, this is a very soil horizon. But down right in here is about six feet down and we have water down here. You can see how white that surface is there on the salt right there. That's where the problem comes from. So what type of salts do we usually have here in South Dakota? We have typically, a lot of our salts are sodium sulfate and depending on where you are you can have some gypsum. We also have lime too as well. But typically when we look at the solubility here, right there, we're not as worried. Lime is usually not a salt problem because of the low solubility. So what does solubility mean? Solubility means how much of that salt will dissolve in water. What is the solubility of that salt? The salts that are really soluble are the ones that move up fast. What happens is by these sodium salts down here, sodium chloride, they have a high solubility. So the higher the number here, the more soluble the salt. So the sodium will move up fast in the soil profile. It gets up to the top because of the soil that is dispersed. It seals up. Now you have a big problem. How do you get that salt out of there? Right? Like I said, typically we have these salts right here, calcium magnesium salts, and then of course we have our sodium salts. Salts, but different problems and different management based upon if we have a calcium or magnesium salt, based on if we have a sodic salt there. So when you're testing and looking at your salts and your soils, you've got to define what type of salt problem do you have first. This is what I'm talking about with this dispersion. So what's going on here? So when I talk that a sodic soil is dispersed, it means that the soil, the clay particles are pushed apart in too much evenly space so that soil is so evenly dispersed there's really no porosity to that soil. There's no channels for that water to move down into that soil profile. So you can't get anything in through it. The terms that we use are flocculation versus dispersion. Flocculation means that the soil is held together in aggregates, that there's pores between those individual soil pads for water to move down through it. When we have sodium, that aggregate stability is destroyed. Like I said, just some pictures here. Saline stress, calcium and magnesium. You guys all have seen areas like this in your field. High pH, droughty conditions, it's salty. So their salty water will not move into those plant roots. You can't get anything to germinate there. Poor germination, poor growth. But if you look at this soil here, it's not great, but there's a little bit of structure on the surface. It doesn't look like pavement. Right here, these are where we have these sodium problems right here. pH typically higher than 8.2, a lot of dispersion. No water movement anywhere into that soil profile. We have erosion and we have root limitations because this soil is so dense and so hard. This is a field with a farmer that we work up by Purcon, South Dakota. He's had a lot of issues with this field right here. He does do no-till. Up here in this area here, we have a little bowl area here and he hasn't been able to get anything to grow here for quite a few years. Last May, he had about a 3-inch rainfall that came down, washed all the salt. Remember, we have these sodic soils where we don't have any water moving into the soil profile. So what's it going to do? It's going to run off. As it goes down the slope, it's going to increase in velocity. You're going to pick up that speed. So what happens here is you have a little bowl-shaped area up here trying to divert the water over to the ditch. Now we have some problems here where some junk got in the ditch there so it not flows out over here, flows into this area right here, concentrated flow. This is looking north right there from the area where we had the bowl-shaped area. This is looking south. This big gully right here was not here the previous year. So lots of problems with managing these areas. The big problem we get with these sodic soils is we have a lot of erosion problems. So like I said, just the difference between saline and sodic soil. Just to define what these are so you guys have this definition in your hand. Soils tend to help the soil fluctuate. Saline soil typically does not generally become a hard set. We typically will get some water movement with that. You can see those salts go a little bit farther down into that soil profile to get some rainfall so that white area will appear and disappear based upon the moisture and how much moisture you've had rainfall. Water moves similarly compared to normal soils. Plants may be more negatively impacted than saline soils. Sodium soils are dead dispersed or they swell. They become hard set. They become like pavement. Water cannot move with a lot of huge erosion problems. It can impact fertility because of this restrictive layer, this high density and this low fertility. But that's just a summary of what these soils are. So we're looking at when we look at salt and soils, we need to decide is it a calcium, magnesium salt problem or is it a sodium problem? What is the problem? So in South Dakota, you guys all know where some of the saline issues are but when we look at the sodicity here, we see that up here by Aberdeen and Spring County here, 20 to 30% of these soils have sodic variety deeper down in the soil profile. Sodium in there. Here's a rural county down here. Also a problem down here. More up here, you know, there's more coming up here. We have not as much here but really, you know, the red and the yellow, you know, 10 to 30% of those soils in any given area have sodium deeper in the soil profile. Okay, so is there any questions on what the problems are and how they differ? You've got to go on. There are any questions? Okay, so soil testing for salts. Some terms, I'm just going to go through this. I didn't know what my general audience would be so I wanted to define these terms before I started talking about them. Electrical conductivity is the measure of the total salt in the soil. We add salt to water. It increases the conductivity. Same thing with soil. We can measure that in the soil testing lab. Can I exchange capacity? Let me get you to remember that. Can I exchange capacity? So that's going to be the soil ability to hold on to positively charged cations. SAR, so the Sodium Absorption Ratio. It's a number that we calculate based upon the relative concentration of sodium to calcium and magnesium. We typically do this from somebody called a saturated paste. And then the other one that we've worked with, most more soil testing labs use that you're probably going to see are the changeable Sodium percent. We measure the Sodium on the exchange sites from the kind of change. Typically here, I'm going to talk a lot about this right here today in South Dakota. In South Dakota, the reason we did this project is because we know these salty areas are getting bigger. Also, when I would teach my soil science classes and I would get soil in from up by Pierpont, these salty soils. When I had my students go in there and we test them and we come up with these SARs that are fairly low. Okay? Five or six SAR. Okay? Five or six SAR. They were dispersed soil. We tried to run water through them. They were dispersed. Now he would work. We've always used in South Dakota these guidelines right here. All right? So, we use an SAR of 13. We say if it's greater than 13, it's a soda soil. Well, I never saw that when I bring my salty soils in and have my students try to run water through them. If the SAR was five or six, that soil was dispersed. They couldn't get anybody to run water through it. It's like, what's wrong? Are these numbers wrong? All right? And then the ESP, the same thing. These numbers are very, very similar. So, we know that's becoming a lot bigger problem in South Dakota with the saline areas. I knew from working with the soil that I give from salty areas in South Dakota for my class is like, what's going on here? So, we wrote a grant in RCS and we had some money to study these areas. And so, what we did is first thing we did is like, okay, we need to test do these numbers work. These numbers of determining the cutoff values for saline, sodic, soils were determined by the National Salinity Lab out in California. So, we needed to do it for South Dakota. So, these numbers here are old numbers here from South Dakota or from California. The numbers that we look at now, if our SAR is greater than four, we consider it sodic. If our ESP is greater than five, we consider it sodic. These numbers are too high for South Dakota. Okay. So, just a little bit of a review of what's going on here. So, cation exchange capacity. So, soil science here at, you know, 200. So, what's happening with cation exchange capacity? Just a little bit of a review. What happened? Why do we have sodium problem? Past recommendations said that when 15% of the cation exchange sites were occupied by sodium, we classified it as a sodic soil. So, cations, our clay soils here are negatively charged due to how the formation process, the geological formation process. So, we have negative charges of reside on these clay sheets here. And, of course, we have positive cations that can be occupied on these sheets. So, what happens is when we get greater than, now in our case, we're looking at 5% in South Dakota, not 15%. We're looking at 5%. We're looking when we get greater than 5% of these exchange sites occupied by sodium, these soils end up just like a refrigerator magnet, right? So, they're negatively charged, and we need these positively charged cations on here to neutralize that charge. And if we have calcium and magnesium, especially calcium, we'll actually flocculate that. We'll form a bridge. Negative charge on one clay. I sell negative charge on another. Throw a calcium in there. Positive to negative, just like a refrigerator magnet. What happens? It's together. We have aggregates, stability, formation. We hold that cell together. When we put sodium in there, sodium has a positive charge on it, but the problem with sodium is that that positive charge is insulated. It's completely insulated. It's a small atom. You put a lot of sodium in there. You have that negative charge on those clay micelles, those clay aggregates. What happens? Nothing in there to neutralize it over. That's why we have the problems that we have. That's why we have the dispersion. Just like refrigerator magnets, we have too much sodium in there. We have repulsion. Okay, so how do we figure this out? So how do we figure this out? What we did is we took large columns of soil. We brought them in from the field from different places it was sold. And then what we did is we did some amendments as well. We worked some soil amendments and I'll talk about that in just a minute. What we did here is we looked at, okay, based upon what the SAR is, so down here it says initial soil SAR, initial sodium concentration. So here is 5. Here is 10. Here is 15. And here is 20. Then what we did is we started running water through this. Okay, so permeability. Milliliters per hour is what we looked at here. So what we saw here in South Dakota that when we saw an SAR on these big soil columns that we brought in, we brought in there about this big round, about this deep. Our graduate student did this work on part of his PhD. And what he did here is he ran water through this. He's an initial one. So we saw slow infiltration at an SAR of greater than four. We're doing this work with Tom DeSutter. Do you know Tom DeSutter up in North Dakota? Yeah. The soil scientist, have you ever heard of Tom and all and he's doing a lot of salt work up in South Dakota or in North Dakota. We did this work with Tom DeSutter. He's looking at the number he's using for North Dakota is 5. So remember, we said this used to be 13. It's way lower for our soils than 13. So right here, considering one milliliter per hour as a threshold, the data suggests that SAR greater than four can be considered sodic because once we look at this much sodium in the soil, we can just see how much, oops, sorry, we can just see how much there that our water infiltration slows down. Okay. So that's the problem. That's the problem. And here's how we're trying to give some terminology and describe the extent of our problem with some of these soil testing values. So in South Dakota, here, all numbers are soil you see to measure the total of salt. We used core with a saturated paste. Greater than core, we call it a saline soil. That's the saturated paste. We'll talk about that in just a minute, too. Okay. SAR of greater than 13 was sodic. ESP greater than 15 was sodic. These are old numbers. We are rewriting all of this. We're going to work with the NRCS to put out some bullet design. New NRCS research project for North and South Dakota. We're still going to go with core as the saturated paste of the saline soil. But here, we're going to use in North Dakota, they're using five. In South Dakota, we're using four. And ESP of five. Okay. So a lot of different numbers here than what we originally thought. And that's why when I go get the soils, the soil samples from these south areas from out in the field. And I bring them in to my students to work on doing water infiltration. I have an SAR of five to six. And it's like, that's why the water went through it. Because there's too much sodium in those soils already and an SAR of four or five. Okay. So, now, when you're testing for salt, there are some questions you need to ask the soil testing lab. Because what we're going to do is we first of all have to determine the total salt content. And then we've got to figure out how much sodium is in that total salt content. So just a percentage. So, when they extract for salt, soil testing labs will either use most of them use a one-to-one extract. So what does that mean? That means that you take 100 grams of soil and you mix it with 100 grams of water and you mix it together. And that's a one-to-one extract. Okay. Then you let that sit for a little while and you'll put an EC probe in there and you'll measure the electrical conductivity. With the saturated paste, that is totally different. With the saturated paste, what we do is we take the soil and my kids love to do this. Probably I'll do this when you're little. Your grandkids do it. You take a cup of soil and you mix it with enough water just until it looks like melted chocolate. And that's called the saturated paste. You let that sit. That settles out. And then you measure what the EC is in the top of that saturated paste. So we have two very different ways of determining the EC. Here we have a much more dilute method than what we have over here. If you take one-to-one, you take 100 grams of soil, 100 milliliters of water and mix that together, you're going to get a fairly dilute solution. Here, remember, we're going for melted chocolate with the saturated paste. Why is this important? Because the EC is used to estimate the total salt. So if we're going to calculate we need to know the total percentage of salts that are there. You can use our EC to do this. But we have to make sure that we understand the method that we're measuring the total salts. Because if we look at the concentration of sodium on the top of the fraction and the concentration of total cations in the bottom, if we have a different number down here, that's going to make our percentage different. So because the EC is used to count the total salt either for SAR or the ESP. So here, this is how this goes. If I'm reading a EC of four and that is the sodic soil on the saturated paste, that is going to be equivalent to a EC of two in a one-to-one solution. And remember, we're looking at that the archrituria for a saline soil is EC equals four on the saturated paste. It's not EC equals four on a one-to-one solution. So here, and if we go take that sum lab, may do a one-to-five solution. Once again, we're deluding that out. An EC of four on a saturated paste equals an EC of two on a one-to-one solution equals an EC of 0.72 on a one-to-five solution. So understanding how the EC is calculated is very important when you're trying to determine the total salt that you have out of this soil. Okay, this needs to be taken into account when making mandatory recommendations. So here's a little graph, and I also should mention, too, I have a very technical article. It's available out on one of the tables. There's only about 60 copies of it, but a lot of this information that I have here, we are putting in where we have a corn manual that was very poor when it was initially made, and we are rewriting that completely, and we're going to have the chapter for saline photo-to-photomanagement, that draft chapter, Ruth, you have that right there. I'll put them on the registration table. We've got two different ones. There's also a really good one there from North Dakota. So if you're interested in some of these, the stuff that I'm showing here, if you want some information about this to take home and read, Ruth will have that back on the table back there. So just a little general guideline, too. Texture is really important, too, measuring our EC versus our, we're going to do the saturated paste or a one-to-one dilution. Dave Franson did this back in 2007. He's a soil scientist at NDSQ. So keep that in mind that when you are testing for salts, you're going to ask for the EC. The EC is going to estimate your total salts in that soil. What that number represents is going to be different based upon your extraction method. So when you talk to the soil testing lab, you need to know their extraction methods. Now, we've contacted a lot of our soil testing labs around here. About Iowa State is about the only one that's running the saturated paste. So if you go to North Dakota, University of Minnesota, Eggvice, Ray Ward labs, pretty much everybody is doing one-to-one right here. Now, what type of sodium index are they calculating there? What types of values are they looking at there? Well, pretty much everybody, Eggvice labs up in North Dakota, Minnesota Valley testing, Ward labs, pretty much everybody there is running, pretty much everybody's running the ESP. So that's what you're going to probably, that's the type of dad you're going to get. Okay, so now, soil sampling for salts. All right, so we're going to sound the top six inches, you know. Is it going to be like phosphorus where it doesn't move? Is it like nitrate or chloride where it's going to move? What do you think about for soil sampling for salt? Okay, so when we look at soil sampling, you know, once again I teach soil, so I use some soil terms here, everybody. Okay, all right, taxonomy. Soil scientists, you know, with biology, you know, we have a taxonomy system where we classify all the different types of organisms. Well, soil scientists also have their taxonomy system as well, too, where they come up with this long name right here that describes what the soil is. I'm going to use an X line and an Aberdeen soil. These soils are more common up in the probably up north up by Redfield and up in that area here. You guys, your soils down here probably be like a beetle soil or something like that down here, your soil series name. Fine, smectic, frigid, leptic, natural doll, okay, that's our X line soils. It's the soil series name that you would see on the NRCS soil survey now. And Aberdeen, fine, smectic, frigid, leptic, natural doll. So what does all this mean right here? Fine texture, lot of clay, whole climate. The differences are here, all right. Natural, natric, sodium. Let me give you sodium in it. We have quite a bit of rainfall and this means that it was derived so what is the very difference between leptic and glasic when we look at this, okay? Leptic means that you have the absolute worst sodium conditions that you could have. Glasic would be the best, typically in the middle. Right here, here is an example of a leptic soil. These slides are from Tom to Saturday up in North Dakota because I didn't have as good of pictures as him, okay? So the sodium is very close to the soil surface. Leptic soil to get this columnar structure. So if you see something like this out in your field, this kind of columnar structure that starts to form and the soil is really, really hard and dense, you most likely have sodium there, okay? Glasic means that that sodium is deeper in the soil profile. So you get it down here or something like that where you see kind of that hard pan. Anyway, we get these hard pans forming here in South Dakota. And a lot of times those hard pans are due in there making that soil really dense. So nothing will grow through it. Okay? Like I said, here, and of course these areas are going to be interspersed between each other. These areas that you know in your field are small, okay? And they're scattered out. And the degree of of sodium issues you can change in a very short, short period of time. So here's the leptic where that sodium is more on the soil surface right there. It's going to grow there. And here's that gloss that goes over there. So soil sample. Howdy. Why? Where? Where are we in the soil sample? Okay. Agenomic is two feet. Typically that's what we're looking for, okay? Now, I know there's a lot of different opinions on tile. Tiling in the audience here. All right. If you were tiling with the sodium is something that's kind of tricky, okay? It can cause problems. Okay? At least three feet to figure out where that sodium is. Okay? If possible to the depth of the tile. Why do we want to do that? It's a lot of work. Why do we want to go that deep? If we are going to tile, if we want to invest in that tile, we want it to work. Okay? What happens is if you're evaluating for a drain tile there, then you need to look down at least three feet deep. Why? Okay? So here's a picture. This here are three different types of X-line soils up by Aberdeen up in that area there. Right here we have the SAR right here. And then the surface below the depth below the surface. Okay? Here's your X-line right here. Okay? So here we had not very high SAR at all. All the way down. All the way down to 30 inches. Three feet down. Here, on the X-line one, we started about four. Okay? So North Dakota says that five there dispersed. We come down here. What about two feet? We're at ten. Okay? With this last X-line right here, we started about six. Ten inches down, we're at about SAR of 15. About 18 inches down, foot and a half, 20 inches. We're at SAR of 25. And at almost three feet, they are of almost 27. Okay? So now, you go put a tile line in here. Okay? You put that tile line below that sodium horizon. I think you're going to get water to flow in there. Get your sodium horizon here. Get your tile line down here. The water going to flow. No. Yeah, so why isn't it going to flow? What's that sodium doing to that subsoil surface? What's this doing? It's dispersing it, right? It's dispersing it. Okay? So, here's the problem right here. That we see. That's why I don't know if timing is a very good idea in South Dakota, with the types of soils that we have. So, when we have it's kind of like a balance. I think it was a teeter pattern. So, if we have quite a bit of sodium in here in the soil and we have a high EC we'll have a dispersed soil. Alright? Because we have enough calcium magnesium over here to flocculate that soil and have some soil structure there. If we take, and we start tiling and we start moving some of those other soils out of this water. We start moving some of that calcium that magnesium out of that soil through that tile water. Remember the sodium? It's going to move up and down pretty fast. But once it gets up, it's going to disperse the soil. It'll still move if you get water through there. Okay? So, right here, that's the problem. So, you know, it may negatively impact the flow of water from the tile line. Your water doesn't flow from the tile if the field still remains wet. So, that's why when it comes to tiling in South Dakota you need to know what your subsurface soils are. You need to know what types of soils you have there. Because if you do have sodium down deep tiling is not really a good option. So, any questions so far about that stuff? All right. So, soil management. How can we manage this? How long do I have until like? 15 minutes. So, how do we manage this? So, we've looked at this a couple of different ways. We've looked at this by putting soil in the sod and we've looked at this by putting perennial crops on. I'm trying to recover crops out there. Okay. Studies that we've done. We've worked at Pierpont. We've worked at the Andover. We had to say we're going to put it in the fall. So, Pierpont's been red-topal. I have to give credit to the farmers we're working with here. Pierpont is red-topal. Andover is Roger and Grant Ritz. Redfield is going to be, we're working with Jim Miller, crop consultant there. And then Kenny Selma is the he farms the land and Jerry West is the landowner. That's what we've been working with here. And then down in your area down here we've been working with David Gillan at White Lake. So, these are the farmers we've worked with. We couldn't do this research without them. So, what we've done is we've looked at, now, if we have too much sodium there, if we add some calcium, can we improve that ploculation? So, what we've done is we've taken and we've put out our studies, where we put all these plots out. We designed them so we can do statistics on it. We can do statistics. So, four blocks and the treatments that we've put on are going to be calcium sulfate or gypsum, elemental sulfur, calcium chloride and no cell. Those are the types of cells that the treatments that we're putting out there. And then what we've done is we've done two cover crops. Of course, there's nothing growing out there because the cells are so high. Drilled in the corn, in red field we've had some luck. We have more of a saline soil there because a lot of the cover crops we've just put into the soil. If we drill it in the corn, we're putting it in the yeast. But we're always putting the cover crops, in mid to end of June with after these solid salts and I'm going to put them back in. So, now you say I have salt, you tell me to put more salt out there. That doesn't make any sense. I have salt and now you tell me to put more salt out there. Here's what's happening. Most of them have a component to either sulfur or in the case of chloride where they're going to lower the soil pH. So, if we put anything with sulfur on. So, if we put an ammonium sulfate we put gypsumide, we put elemental sulfur on what happens is we lower the soil pH we release calcium from the line and we hope to be able to exchange that with the sodium on the exchange sites. So, that's why I showed you that picture of cation exchange. That's what we're trying to do. We have too much sodium on those exchange sites. We're trying to lower the soil pH and put too much calcium on it. Flood the system with calcium and through cation exchange now we have more calcium in solution. We'll promote the movement of the sodium on the exchange sites. Get it in solution and now once sodium is in solution we can get it to go down and we get rainfall. Elemental sulfur takes longer to work than gypsum. So, if I'm going to put out when we look at this, we, when we look at the elemental sulfur, we need to oxidize that down to sulfate to form our acid to get the calcium on. So, typically when you put amendments on and you're going to apply amendments, you put on the elemental sulfur rod that's going to take about six months to work compared to gypsum. Well, but you need less of elemental sulfur. So, anything, so here's what we're doing. Any amendment with sulfur lowers the soil pH releases the calcium cations into that solution to exchange with the sodium. And we have to have the formation of that hydrogen, of the acidifying of that soil to get that calcium off. That elemental sulfur, when it's applied straight as, we need the soil bacteria to oxidize that into our sulfate so we can have that acid formation. So, that's what we're doing. And asking you to apply a sulfur, but I'm really not asking you to apply a sulfur. I'm really asking you to apply something that has an acid in it to lower that pH and get that calcium off. So, here, let's take a look here. I just did some study here. So, this is pure plexic acid right here. This is our right here. So, I don't have a very good pointer. In the red box up there, here's my pure plexic acid, sodium right there, 4,846 parts per million, SAR of 19. Bad soil. Okay, that's the first thing I'm going to talk about. What we did here is we had, this is what the plot looks like right here. These plot, this is put on a year after these photos were taken. Okay, so here's site number one. No treatment, no salt amendment, no cover crop. Looks pretty ugly. Looks like it looks like concrete. And those are the white cells on the surface. So, that's the first one right there. This one here is calcium chloride. We had some cover crop on the surface. You can kind of sort of roll it right there. We had a big rainfall that came down through here after we planted our cover crop. Kind of roll it a little bit there. Cover crop we planted with barley and sugar beads. So that's that one right there. Here's gypsum down here. So gypsum down here, you can roll it a little bit better right there. You can roll it a little bit better there. That's the gypsum right there. Pure salt on the surface. And here's our elemental salt for right here. And if you look at this elemental salt for right here, you can see that that soil doesn't have quite, it doesn't have the white salt on the surface that these other ones do. So at least in this study with the conditions that we saw at Pierpont where we had the high sodium, the high SAR. Now we have a lot of magnesium in this soil too. That has an influence as well too. But at least here we saw we put an elemental salt for a year before we came out and planted a cover crop in there barley and sugar beads. The barley is way better than the sugar beads today. I agree. And you know what? People have that huge problem up there. I asked him and he said can we work in this field? He said you can do anything you want is what he said. So you know what would happen is if we start growing all these weeds for a cash pop, then they start getting diseases and dials. That's exactly what would happen. So right here elemental salt for barley germinated, goes pretty well. Gypsum, some of the barley germinated calcium chloride salt. So how much should we put on? We do these calculations based on SAR. We'd rather use EC or ESP to do the calculations. Gypsum, we put on to lower that almost four times per acre right there costs 12 cents so it's not cheap. Calcium chloride works really fast. You can put calcium chloride on. Calcium chloride is highly dissolvable in the soil. You should not put calcium chloride on if corn is growing there. I learned that the hard way. But it came back. I thought I was going to be dead. We put some on. I told the graduate students I said make sure you put it down the middle of the row. I said do not put it near the corn plant. So what they did was broadcast it all over. You can't look at the corn plants of the calcium chloride. They look like they were gone. But fortunately we had a big rainfall two days later. All the calcium chloride went down. The corn started looking a lot better so I felt a lot better about that. Mother Nature intervening. Elemental sulfur you don't need as much. So that's a little bit cheaper but it takes a lot longer to react. How are these rates calculated? I'm running out of time. I only have five minutes left. You're interested in learning on how you calculate these. The information you need from your soil test is the candidate's change capacity of the soil. You need that measure and you need the ESP. I would prefer the ESP versus the FAR. So what we would want to do is we want to reduce the ESP in that surface soil down to at least 5% if not less. So I'm not going to go through these calculations because I'm running out of time here. If you want to go through these if you're interested in this from a consulting point for applying gypsum I can show you how to do it. It's also in that guideline up there. There's some nice boxes and step-by-step details on how to do it. But this is the method where we use the ESP and what we're basically trying to do is we're trying to take that and we know this is the total salt on the surface. We know what our ESP is. We test that. We want to go down to 5. What's the difference between what our ESP is to go down to 5? That is going to be the math that we work out to determine how much of an amendment that we put out. I guess that I'm going to run out of time. Now, since these amendments are a little bit different the word we use when I teach science is molecular weight, the mass. You can put on just like a line, a different line product you can put on different weights based upon what their mass is. So if I put on one kind of gypsum I can put on 0.19 tons of sulfur like I put sulfur gas like I put 5.7 and so on. Last but not least I want to mention is this here I know in almost all the time. Do I have 5 minutes yet or not? 3! Okay, talk fast! Okay, right? So here, David Gillan is a great producer is he David Gillan here? I didn't know he was coming today. So here in the area in his field right here white salt, 2010 contacted us, we got some money from the corn console, what can we do? So sites, we did a field day down there 2011 tall wheatgrass right here, looks just beautiful that's this old white site right here okay, look at this here there's a little bit of snow out there 4 inches down, very very few salts right there, no salts on the surface right here, down at the bottom of the pit soil science, if you like to talk about redox features okay, redox features means if you have this orange in here these orange colors like you can't really see them right in there, right in there that means iron has been oxidized if you have a piece of old equipment that sits out in the woods you don't pay any attention to it what happens to it, what happens over time it will rust okay, when iron in the soil is in the present of oxidant it does the same thing, it turns orange so I know that where I had those cell problems there hasn't been water there for a few years soil water, the water table is deeper right by his cornfield, in his cornfield is a matter of fact, sorghum corn a soybean rotation water at the bottom, we did this in August right here, the wheat by the south the SAR by the site right there oh, I'm hitting too many buttons right here the SAR was one, sodium is 179, here right in the pit in the cornfield, horizon 1, 2 and 3 sodium, 1296 SAR borderline right there we have sodium issues there so, like I said, I talk a little bit more about this, but I'm running out of time Bruce Kunze did work with looking at material energy as soil scientists looking at water table depth here, where is the water right here, these lines are where the water table depth is based upon precipitation look at this, where we had alfalfa and grass 2010, we had all that rainfall we had the same problem in South Dakota, you guys did ok, too much rainfall even when we had that alfalfa right there, that water that soil that water table was considerably lower I'm going to end there, because I'm running out of time I'm going to go here and I'm going to give a credit to all my people that helped with their research again, right there ok, so like I said, I really appreciate coming and talking to you about yourselves here I think it's an important subject we're going to take two quick questions I'll be around so if you're interested in talking more about that I'd be happy to answer questions thank you very much