Time is ripe for drainage water management
By Janet Kubat Willette
jkubat@agrinews.com
Date Modified: 10/26/2011 6:22 PM
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ST. PETER, Minn. — It's a critical time for farmland drainage.
Landowners are installing new and additional tile to improve soil productivity at the same time the Natural Resources Conservation Service is releasing reports that show nutrients are leaving farm fields via that subsurface drainage.
A NRCS Conservation Effects Assessment on the Upper Mississippi River Basin released in June 2010 said that "about 51 percent of cropped acres require additional nutrient management to address excessive levels of nitrogen loss in subsurface flow pathways, including tile drainage systems."
Weather records show rainfall coming in more significant events and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization reports the world will need 70 percent more food to feed an additional 2.3 billion people by 2050.
Enter drainage water management. Drainage water management is managing how water leaves a farm field through subsurface drainage.
The goal is for the water to be cleaner than it is now before it enters the nearest ditch, river or stream. There's also opportunities for water to be recycled from one part of a field to another.
Last week, 180 people from across the nation gathered in Minnesota to discuss managing water at America's Ag Water Management Summit. The Twin Cities meeting included a tour of a St. Peter farm field where controlled drainage and a bioreactor were being installed. About 120 people took the roughly three-hour tour, said Alex Echols of the Sand County Foundation.
Dave White, NRCS chief, was one of the people on the tour. It was good for him to get out and see the bioreactor under construction and also the control structures for controlled drainage, he said. Previously, he'd only seen them in pictures.
White is eager to move forward on developing national standards for drainage water management. Now, there's interim standards in place in Iowa and Illinois, but nothing nationwide.
In Minnesota, there is a cost-share payment rate for control boxes for drainage water management and a conservation activity plan for setting up drainage water management, which is known as practice 130, said Don Baloun, NRCS state conservationist.
NRCS will probably not cost share tile, which is really a production practice, but Baloun does see the opportunity to do payment rates on solar pumps if needed for subirrigation and possibly for the additional cost of laying tile on the contour.
What's subirrigation? One of the drainage water management options discussed was using a solar pump to pump water from a wet part of a field to a drier part.
Redwood County farmer Brian Hicks installed a controlled drainage system on a 53-acre parcel in 2008. The system has four different zones, each under a different management.
"It's a situation where we definitely needed drainage, but there were places in the field where we were seeing drought conditions later on," he said.
The goal was to recycle water from the lowest zone to the highest zone using a solar pump, Hicks said, but the pump broke down.
Hicks installed controlled drainage on another field in 2005. The 100 acre field is divided into two sections, one controlled drainage and the other conventional drainage.
He paid for the whole thing himself, having learned about controlled drainage through University of Minnesota faculty. The U of M was unwilling to get involved in the installation, Hicks said, so he and his family put their heads down and charged ahead. The NRCS thought he was speaking a foreign language when he inquired about cost share for control structures, he said.
Now, however, the U is on board and is gathering thousands of samples every year from the sites and analyzing the data.
For his part, Hicks has been happy with the results at harvest time. When it was soybeans, there was little yield difference, but his corn yields were 10 percent higher on the controlled drainage parcel of the 100 acre field
"That's real money, that really helps my margin," Hicks said.
His 150 acre project is but a raindrop in the ocean, but farmers need to start somewhere.
"The sooner we can get this accepted among the farmers and the contractors, the sooner we can start reducing the load of nutrients that's ending up in the Gulf of Mexico," Hicks said.
Baloun senses the urgency of acting.
"What bothers me the most right now is the missed opportunity," he said, "because having heard from a tiler not too long ago that he is going to put in four million feet of tile this year, if a bunch of that would have been suitable for drainage water management, we really have a missed opportunity."
He's going to challenge the engineering folks at NRCS and also the state technical committee to develop an action plan as to how the NRCS can best address drainage water management going forward.
Baloun wants everybody at the table - from technical service providers and land improvement contractors to state agencies, university faculty and federal agency folk. There's key roles for the Minnesota Department of Agriculture, Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, Board of Water and Soil Resources, conservation districts and watershed districts to create an action plan that projects five to 10 years forward.
Everyone needs to deliver a consistent message to landowners, he said.
"The biggest thing is communication," Baloun said. "We've got to have everybody on board and we have to have the commodity groups, all the folks in ag, saying you know what, this is a good thing … if your farm is suitable for drainage water management, you need to do it because we know right now if we don't we're going to be sending nitrates to surface water."
Yet, drainage water management is no silver bullet. Controlled drainage works best on land with 0 to 2 percent slope, Echols said. Bioreactors aren't so slope limited. Bioreactors mimic the biological function of a wetland to remove nitrogen from water, he said.
Wet buffers are another idea. The vast majority of buffers have tile lines running under them. Is there a way to pump the water up into the buffer to provide good denitrification cost effectively?
These options don't take land out of production. Building a wetland does, but that's another option to treat tile water, Echols said.
White talked about a couple other options that are being developed in the Chesapeake Bay region, including one that involves using a steel manufacturing waste product to remove phosphorus from water.
"I think the goal here is for ag again to jump out ahead and prove that we are serious about farming in an environmentally sound way and our intent is to use every tool we have in the toolbox," Baloun said. "NRCS is ready, willing and able to work with the other state agencies. Let's put a good plan together (and) let's make it happen."