Erosion -- winter 2016

     All in all, the Palouse Hill region hasn't faired too badly this winter.  The traditional-conventional tilled ground is the worst, of course.  Microclimates come into play and raise havoc in places, and leave other areas lightly touched.  It appears that fields with any kind of conservation tillage where residue is left on the surface has less damage.  The more the residue, the less the damage.  My biggest surprise was east of SR195 toward the Idaho border, --some serious erosion.  This is traditionally annually cropped with winter wheat seeded into lentil, pea, garb, or canola ground.  The fall was extremely dry, so the winter wheat emerged very late.  Many people still cultivate this ground prior to seeding, and these fields are ripped hard.  Those who have seeded directly into these fields without cultivating faired quite well.    The pic's below are all from the areas that traditionally use fallow as part of the rotation.  This region nearly always gets ripped during the transition from winter to spring.  Rarely does a farmer get a stand of winter wheat that protects the highly eroded areas of his fields, and this fact continues to make a bad situation worse.

       Most of the cultivated fallow fields seeded to winter wheat get their rill pattern established in Oct-Nov.  These normally are not seen without walking the field.  When the ground freezes and the snow or rains come, these little traces gain size as the season progresses.  In this pic the snow drift continues to feed this erosive condition.

     This pic shows deep rilling on a fallow/winter wheat field using tillage.

        This pic shows shallow rilling on a fallow/winter wheat cultivated field.  Unfortunately, any volume of water received from here on will find it's way down these rills, making them bigger, moving more soil, and depriving the crop.

      Another example of serious rilling and soil movement (same field).  That snow bank carries a lot of water with will feed more soil and water into the ditch at the bottom.

      This pic shows the dirt in the remaining snow bank.  We had high winds on relatively bare ground when we received our snow.  Not only do we have water erosion, but earlier we had wind erosion.

      

      This no-till farmer apparently thought his field was too rough, so he took his quad and heavy harrow and combed the field.  Quads have tremendous traction, but they have their limit, which was exceeded here, exposing soil to the elements.  From my viewpoint this is recreational tillage, with little purpose in no-till.  This combing of the field is standard practice with conventional tillage because the primary tillage operation (plow, disc, chisel) leave the ground in an un-seedable condition.  Sometimes multiple passes, are made to smooth the terrain.  Many of today's drill designs will handle uneven terrain.  Harvesting can be tricky for some crops grown in the region, but doable.