The Clinton County Extension Service with support from the Clinton County Farm Bureau and Clinton County Soil and Water Conservation District hosted a program on August 8, 2013, "Farm Drainage for the Environment and for Profit."
This was a good program and we had about 50 people in attendance in the morning and a few more popped in for the afternoon (when PARP credit was offered). As usual, I had to perform my duties as host so I only caught about half of the programs but I'll report on what I have notes on.
Jane Frankenberger from the Purdue Ag Engineering Department opened with, "Making Farm Drainage Decisions." I don't have a lot of notes from this one as I was still scrambling around but the two items I did jot down were that in a long-term study they've been doing at the Southeast Purdue Ag Center (SEPAC) in Jennings County tile drainage at 66' spacings had shown basically the same yield response as tile spaced at either 33' or 16'. Another practice she's been working on is called Drainage Water Management.
This document explains this far better than I can but basically a structure is installed within the tile system where you can close off the flow of water out of the tile and conserve water for use in the field. The item I noted for this is that each structure can control water for about 2' of field slope from where it's installed. Within that area the long-term yield impact ranges from 5.8% to 9.8% depending on which study you look at.
Clinton County Surveyor
Dan Sheets was up next with "Clinton County Drainage Permitting." Dan talked about how any time a farmer ties into a county drainage structure, either field tile or an open ditch, you need to contact the Surveyor's office
BEFORE you start work on the project. There is a permitting process and fee which is not too much and far less than the fine (and costs of possibly having to redo the system) if you do work without getting one. The Surveyor's Office would like to be notified when you're doing the work so they can inspect where it outlets into the county system and also so they can GPS it. The key points I took away is that they want you to use sub-mains and not make too many outlets into the county system. The big message is that county drainage is a public utility owned by the taxpayers and needs to be treated like any other public system.
The next speaker was
Justin Schneider, formerly Staff Attorney and now Director of Public Policy for Indiana Farm Bureau speaking on, "Legal Aspects of Farm Drainage." I'm going to leave this alone as I simply don't have the space here to fully discuss it but if you're interested in one perspective, you can take a look at
this paper by Gerald Harrison of the Purdue Ag Economics Department.
After lunch
Eileen Kladivko of the Purdue Agronomy Department spoke on, "Tile Drainage and Nitrogen Management." In contrast to every other presentation, I have a full page of notes for this one so I'll hit a few highlights. Much of this presentation focused on studies Eileen has been involved with at SEPAC for an extended period of time. First, Nitrate is not lost from the system in July-September. The vast majority of it is lost from November through May. It's important to note that this is different from studies done farther North. For example, in Minnesota 100% of Nitrogen is lost in April-June as before this the ground is frozen and no water flows through field tile. This is not the case most years in Indiana.
The key variable here is the amount of water which flows through the tile. The concentration of Nitrogen in the water is the same whether it's a wet or dry year, just that in wet years the quantity of water is much greater so more N is lost. Also, in recent years they've been experimenting with cover crops and fields with cover crops show a reduction of 5-20 lbs per acre per year over fields without. Studies in Iowa show that cover crops reduced Nitrogen loss from about 45 lb/ac/yr to about 18. So cover crops do seem to help conserve Nitrogen.
Ben Reinhart from the Clinton County SWCD and
Kerry Smith from Howard County NRCS gave the final presentation, "Tillage and Conservation Cropping Systems for Drainage, Fertility and Weed Control." This was another presentation where I took very few notes however Kerry did some demonstrations showing how effective cover crops and no-till are at reducing erosion. Ben's discussion was on some of the practices such as no-till and cover crops which increase water holding capacity of soil and may reduce the need for drainage.
I may not have taken many notes for this session but I did get a nice picture of Kerry Smith and two assistants (one is Tom McKinney, I didn't catch the name of the other gentleman) demonstrating soil erosion differences between no-till and conventionally tilled fields.
The final presenter for the day was myself talking about Pesticide Drift (this was different from what was on the agenda). My main point was that I've been receiving a fair amount of drift complaints in the office this year and farmers need to be willing to talk to their non-farmer neighbors. If you aren't and something happens, instead of calling you about it, their call might be to the State Chemist's.
I have a page up on our Extension Office website which includes PDF's of some of the presentations. I encourage you to take a look at them when you get the chance. Thanks again to Farm Bureau and the SWCD for their sponsorship of the program.
Farm Drainage Program Page
