T-storm Erosion

SUMMARY:  Although most chem fallow fields had some visible erosion, some did not, including one field that experience 2.6 inches in one burst.  All of the conventional fallowed fields showed extensive damage which included combination of sheet, rill, and gulley erosion. Erosion was inverse to the amount of residue and  how fine the field was worked.  A few fields were just gutted.

More Detail:
This spring/summer we have had a number of thunderstorms that resulted in spotty downpours which has caused significant erosion in conventionally tilled fallow, and some fields in spring crop that were prepared with tillage.  Monday evening a wide band of damage was done all along the northern boundary of Whitman County from an intense thunderstorm moving from east to west. We received word that our Thornton operation received 2.6 inches of rain and all fallow ground, whether chemical fallow or conventional tilled fallow in the area was gutted.  This morning we did a drive by to assess the damage in the area and found that all the chem fallow held up well, and our fields didn't look as if they had any water move across them.  The chem fallow fields that had poor areas from past erosion did have visible erosion.  Those areas though, mostly filtered out and stopped when it encountered areas with residue.  That's not the story with cultivated fallow fields.  All of them received heavy damage, first through sheet erosion, followed by extensive rilling, and that followed by ditching.  I'm sure that many of those fields, if not all, had been fertilized, so a lot of fertilizer went down the creek along with the soil and water.  The county road crews are going to be busy, and a lot of taxpayer money will go to clean and repair the roads associated with those fields. The cost has got to be staggering when you factor in: current fertilizer loss, lost future productivity from the soil that once resided in those fields, and the cost of clean up. One operation I observed got hammered Sat. evening with damage along a quarter mile of public road.  Although they had recently cultivated that field and there wasn't any weeds, by Monday, they felt compelled to re-cultivate, and they got nailed again Monday evening.  Some people follow bad decisions with more bad decisions, and the ground pays the price.  The irritating thing about this is that if you approach them, they will explain it away as "nothing you can do with that much water coming that fast" -- and that is just bullshit!  With modern farming techniques, all the soil, and most of the water can be held in place and not lost from the field, but it requires a willingness to change farming practices.   For twenty six years (1980-2006) these water events, either summer or winter, were extremely rare.  For the last six years, (2006-2012), these events are becoming more frequent, more intense and more wide spread.  It may not happen every year but I'm guessing that the trend will continue.  My farming career was mostly during drought conditions.  My Son may have to survive in an environment with more extremes.   I haven't taken any pics yet, and don't know if I will.  It's getting boring -- same farmers, same fields year after year.  The NRCS has 75 years of pics of eroded fields. One looks just like another.  I wonder if there is another business in the US that still exists using the same practices they started with over a hundred years ago---- besides farming????
         Tomorrow I will do a walk around.  I may update this post if I find it different than expressed here.

      ------- 7/19/12 update: this morning I did walk the fields and took a few pics.  I was happy to see that our fallow field didn't look as if it had any especially hard rain; although the neighboring fields showed quite a pounding.  We surely lost some water; however, the residue didn't show dirt deposited on it.  Even the "new" chem fallow fields in the area did well.  Some severely eroded areas where there was no residue had some spiderwebbing.  You could see the streaks of dirt where it entered areas with residue and soon stopped.  Looking at the cultivated fallow fields, many areas appeared to have lost 5-10% of their surface to a depth of 3-6".  That translates to many tons (50+) per acre.  Many years of productive life left those fields.  An example is the pic above.  Recent deep cultivation, done vertically, compounded the destruction.  This pic shows one of the flaws with this old conservation practice of divided slope farming.  The crop filtered out a lot of dirt heading for the drainage ditch; however the cultivated top was hammered.  In the 70-80's this would have been a successful practice but it isn't today.  Although it shows potential water quality improvement, the sustainability of the productive capacity of the field is diminished.  Technology and practices have improved and we don't have to settle for "some success" as demonstrated above.

Above is our operations chem fallow field near the eroded field above.  Even though we drill vertically with a hoe type opener, I didn't find signs of water or dirt movement.  This is not a good practice to rely on for the future.  We could get a bigger event that may do damage.  We are replacing our hoe opener with a single disc (minimum disturbance) type opener this fall.  That should give us a higher level of protection from these weather events.

NoTill Guidlines from Dakota Lake R.C.

The Dakota Lakes research station is a great source of information that can be used to formulate your Direct Seed system.   This 30 page primer should be a "must read" for anyone considering Direct Seeding.

              http://www.dakotalakes.com/NoTillGuidlines_Beck-Doerr.pdf

The caution here is:  -- keep in mind that this station is in a 14-16" rainfall zone, but most of it comes during the growing season.  When their spring "breaks", they have few cold (freeze or frost) nights that retard plant growth, where we are plagued with them.  They have very cold winters but they get a lot of heat units during the growing season.  With Direct Seeding, they have been able to bring high yielding winter wheat varieties normally grown south of I80, to north of I90.  C4 crops like corn can be successfully grown.  Prior to Direct Seeding the region was based around spring wheat.  The principals that are stated in the guide are sound, but they have to be applied with knowledge of our climate.  Don't try and shove a square peg in a round hole -- look for alternatives that follow the specific principal you are trying to achieve.  The by-word for Direct Seeding has got to be:  rotation--rotation--rotation. Successful DS starts with the combine and it's spreading of chaff and straw.  Mats are difficult to manage.   Beginning DS requires more applied N until the soil microbes adjust to the new system.  This can be years. When tillage is stopped, destruction of organic mater is drastically slowed or stopped,  which decreases N that is produced from these operations.   Weed species are associated to a specific rotation of crops.  Changes in rotation will change some weed species.  Rotations with a mixture of high residue and low residue crops will diminish seeding issues.  Chopping high residue crops creates a mat on the soil that helps hold moisture close to the soil.  The down side to that is; cold, wet soils and tough surface mat to seed into.
     (my comment: -- for us, the lack of markets and related value of the product for alternative crops have been a major stumbling block for us.  Hopefully the future will be better for crops like dry peas, canola, mustard which we would like in our rotation.  Another issue that has become clear is that everything is site-specific.  Within a field, soils vary and micro-climates exist.)
       One profound statement you will find in this guide is:  pp.13--"Grossly understated is the detrimental effect of soil erosion on soil fertility.  Preventing............................."

Cold Soil and Direct Seeding

I've happened on to a project (1994-2009) called the Alberta Reduced Tillage Inititive (ARTI).  This project had many partnerships, including private, public, and education.  They studied many aspects of Direct Seeding (DS) including effects of cold soils.  The following URL access' their site.
                          http://www.reducedtillage.ca/about.aspx
     This is a big site.  One study indicates that tall standing stubble (stripper header) warmed faster than the short stubble mat left by regular platform header,  and allowed better seed/soil contact with disc type opener.
     I will update this post as I have time to read other studies.

Bio Fuel

A thought provoking article on biofuel from 2005 research at Cornell and UC-Berkeley.  Have the ensuing 7 years changed the economics using their parameters?
     http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/20050605231841data_trunc_sys.shtml
I have long thought that one needs to "follow the money" on this hyped fuel.  The Camelina based alternative fuel does intrigue me.  The inputs appear to be significantly less then the output.  Steve Camp of LaCrosse, Wa. is involved in a study and it looks very positive as an alternative to diesel. In Summary: -- he is self sufficient, processes his own fuel, takes approximately 1/6th of his acres to grow all his needs.  To me, this has real potential.

Soil Moisture

This post will be updated on occasion when I find info that relates to the title:
Keep in mind that midwest and Canadian research will not translate directly to the PNW; however, the principals that they employ can benefit us -- don't discount their value too quickly.  Some ideas work in our environment and soils.

The following are excerpts from NoTill Farmer website:  http://www.no-tillfarmer.com/

No-Till, Right Rotations Store More Water

Scientists at the 102-year-old Agricultural Research Service Central Great Plains Research Station in Akron, Colorado, are in the 20th year of a major project determining which alternative crops farmers could use to eliminate — or at least reduce the frequency of — fallow fields.

Storing Precious Soil Water Is Key

Merle Vigil, an ARS soil scientist at Akron, gets farmers’ attention when he tells them that storing water in just the top inch of an acre of land — an “acre-inch” — is worth $25 to $30 an acre. Vigil, ARS agronomist David Nielsen and ARS soil scientist Joseph Benjamin made this calculation by using 10-year average crop prices in equations they developed to relate crop yields to stored water levels.

Four to six tillage passes to kill weeds result in a loss of 3 acre-inches of water over 14 months of fallow. Those six passes cost $24 to $48 an acre in fuel and labor costs.

“Adding that to the cost of water lost, that’s $99 to $138 from your pocket,” Vigil tells farmers.

The scientists have shown that using no-till practices in the conventional wheat-fallow rotation can increase net farm income. They have also shown that by combining no-till and no-fallow, farmers can capture much more of the precious 14 to 18 inches of rain or snowmelt that may occur each year in various parts of the Central Plains.

The idea is to store precipitation in the soil during the idle months,” Vigil says. “That was a good idea then, but today it is not economically or environmentally sustainable for most soils in the region.”

Fallow loses 65% to 80% of precipitation to evaporation. Besides wasting water, fallow causes a decline in soil organic matter, leaves soil susceptible to wind erosion and gives low economic returns.

Ways To Save Even More Water

The project has shown that no-till’s value for storing precipitation in soil can be enhanced by changing harvesting equipment to leave even more residue on the soil surface. This includes use of a stripper header. The stripper header removes just the head of grain, leaving the rest of the plant standing to enhance precipitation storage and erosion protection. Traditional combine headers cut off most of the plant stalk with a sickle and then leave the stubble short.  [my comment:  most of my life I have watched the relationship of snow and stubble height and concluded that 4" of stubble was all we needed to keep wind off the soil surface.  That was wrong -- what should have been observed was that 4" dropped the velocity of the wind below the point where snow moved.  The taller the standing stubble the less air movement along the soil surface, and less direct sunlight.  This apparently, is reducing moisture loss another 1-1.5" over and above normally accepted DS techniques. References are being made toward this conclusion, but I haven't found direct statements through research projects to confirm.] 

Also, the scientists have recently shown that skipping one or more rows — rather than planting every row of a crop — conserves soil moisture and improves crop yields.

“We proved the value of stripper-header harvesting and skip-row planting in ancillary experiments and then made them part of the ACR project in recent years,” Vigil says. [my ?:  does this mean that you need to maintain stubble height in skip row?  Other sites are indicating that, for the growing crop the stubble needs to be flat to minimize sunlight intercept. Statements like, spindly stalks, and reduced tillering are connected to amount of direct sunlight the crop receives -- more is better.]

Adds Nielsen: “Including crops such as millet and triticale, grown for forage instead of grain, reduces the risk of total crop failure from a lack of rainfall during the critical growth stages of grain crops.”

He has found other ways to reduce the risks of drought, including estimating soil water in the spring to see if there is enough to warrant skipping fallow.

[my commentary:  removing fallow from our rotations was a prime reason for us to look at DS 30 years ago.  The problem in the past has been the low $ value of all our alternatives to wheat.  That may be changing.  If so, all we have to deal with is changing 100+ years of mindset of "wheat is all there is".]