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[00:00:07] The Dirt PodKast:
Welcome to The Dirt, an eKonomics PodKast bringing you the down and dirty agronomic science behind growing better crops and bigger returns. Backed by nutrien-ekonomics.com, we break down the latest research, news, and insights to help farmers make better business decisions. Let’s dig in.
[00:00:32] Karl Wyant:
Hi, welcome to today’s episode of The Dirt. I’m your host, Karl Wyant, and I’m excited to dig into today’s episode. Dig might not be the right word, it might be more dip into it, because we are going to talk about water, and how water is tied to your fertilizer program in terms of pushing it out through an irrigation system. Super interesting topic if you are on irrigated acres and we have Cory Broad here today with us, he’s from California, big irrigated acre state. I live in Arizona, another big irrigation state, but we’ve got Nebraska on this list. We’ve got Texas on this list. There’s a lot of irrigated acres out there that I think if you’re on one of those acres, this is the podcast you’ve been waiting for. And our hope today is to get you to end the episode, call up your favorite crop advisor, and go grab a water sample to start thinking about the stuff we’re going to talk about today.
[00:01:23] Karl Wyant:
And I think more broadly it applies to this agronomy of water idea where you can take one water sample and just get so much information out of it, so much utility, whether it’s for your irrigation system management, like we’ll talk about today, fertilizer management, pest control, product interactions. There’s just so much you can do with a water sample. Of course, the data from a water sample can be a little opaque. It’s like reading a chemistry report, but we’ll talk about that.
[00:01:49] Karl Wyant:
Before we talk too much, let’s introduce Cory Broad. He specializes in irrigation systems and improving the efficiency of irrigation systems by lots of testing, some products. And of course he makes great LinkedIn content where he is showing the before and after of irrigation performance. If you love watching power washing driveway videos on Instagram, you will love watching irrigation clean out videos. It’s awesome. I can’t tell you, Cory, how much of your content that I consume. My wife makes fun of me, but that’s okay. Everybody has their own thing, right? Cory, let’s start off by having you introduce yourself, who you are, where you went to school, and what you do day-to-day.
[00:02:25] Cory Broad:
Absolutely. And don’t worry, my wife makes fun of me too for making the same videos, so we’re in the same boat there. My name’s Cory Broad and I’m the regional and agronomy sales manager for AvidWater, a large scale irrigation company based in California. We have 16 stores in the State of California, basically north to south, and then all along the coast and then obviously the interior of the Central Valley where I live in Fresno. It’s important you mention all those irrigated acres. California has eight million of them. We’re centralized to serve that, which is really exciting. And then we recently opened up a new store in Baja. And so we’re international now, pretty exciting. Again, a large scale company, really focused on everything from the well out, pumps, pipes, electrical, full irrigation system design and management. And then as you talk about some of the rescues and the advising and the different things that go along with it because growers invest a lot of money in these systems and obviously there has to be an ROI there.
[00:03:16] Cory Broad:
I’m from Fresno, California. I grew up here. I went to Fresno State. I’m Fresno through and through. With my role with the company, I get to see a lot of things all across California. Obviously involved in the Irrigation Association on a national level, the Almond Board of California. I definitely dip my toes in different parts of the industry.
[00:03:32] Karl Wyant:
And Cory, you’re also a certified crop advisor.
[00:03:34] Cory Broad:
Yes, I know that’s near and dear to your heart. And yes, I’m a proud member of the Western Region CCA.
[00:03:39] Karl Wyant:
I think through today’s episode, we’ll be able to really tie irrigation system performance and maintenance with that crop advising piece because it’s like a Venn diagram. They’re so related. And I think for those listeners here who have these irrigation systems, this’ll become a pretty cool topic over dinner after you listen to this podcast.
[00:03:56] Karl Wyant:
Let’s just get into it here, and just chat about irrigation. Not every state and province is blessed by getting enough rain during the growing season. We have to irrigate. We have to provide the crop the water it needs to get the yield that we want and the crop quality. But what I wanted to talk to you about was we have the irrigation piece, the water piece. How often are growers running fertilizers through these same irrigation systems?
[00:04:20] Cory Broad:
Here in California specifically, all the time it feels like. And you can extrapolate that across the entire irrigated acre segment, whether it is eight million irrigated acres in Nebraska, the total 55 million in the United States, the nearly two million in Canada to our friends in the north.
[00:04:37] Cory Broad:
When I think about the true value of the irrigation system and it being maximized, it is of course to incorporate fertility into that because of labor savings. Hopefully because your system’s designed well and maintained well, there’s an efficiency level of the application of that, and then hopefully reduction in fuel and all those things. And again, that’s how you maximize the value of the investment that you made in putting in a high quality irrigation system. Very much a very regular practice.
[00:05:02] Karl Wyant:
55 million acres fertigating, combining water and fertilizer. Great way, like you said, use the plumbing system to your advantage and cover a lot of acres with a fertilizer program in a decent amount of time. We’ve set the stage here for fertigation. We’ve also got growers who are using water in their tanks when they’re going out, knifing it in near the seed, maybe putting out a starter. And that’s a lot more common because even dry land growers are using those liquid fertilizers there.
[00:05:29] Karl Wyant:
I think there’s just a place to really think about water because it’s got to go through it, some sort of no or some sort of spray tip. It’s got to go through some sort of tube. And what we’re going to talk about today is all the challenges with the water itself because not all water is made equal. It might be wet when you touch it, but there’s lots of stuff in the water that can kind of get in the way of your irrigation system or your injection rig performance and we’ll dive into that.
[00:05:53] Karl Wyant:
Before we talk about the water chemistry, I think we got to get some terminology out of the way because you and I could just sit here and just yell acronyms at each other and we would understand each other. But to the uninitiated, I think we need to talk about things like what is irrigation efficiency? What is DU? What is clean out? And we’ve already covered fertigation. Cory, maybe start with irrigation efficiency and then we’ll talk about DU.
[00:06:16] Cory Broad:
Irrigation efficiency, right? It’s water applied versus water that’s beneficially used. It will be related to this next terminology with DU, or distribution uniformity. Think of it as water out, if you will, and then water in. And the out is what is applied and the in is what is beneficially used. And again, hopefully that efficiency number is very high because that means that what you’re doing is working well, and you can extrapolate that again back to the fertigation tie-in. These things are all linked together in this Venn diagram as you said.
[00:06:44] Cory Broad:
Now you sit there and you say, well, if my water is that efficient, then there’s a mode of action that’s going to make my fertility more efficient along with it. And if your water is inefficient as far as it being applied and then actually being used, you can make a generalized assumption that your fertilizer that’s traveling with it is in the same boat.
[00:07:01] Karl Wyant:
That relates to this next piece, the DU. Describe what the DU is.
[00:07:05] Cory Broad:
Distribution uniformity. I won’t go all the way through the textbook part of it because it is way too much. You talk about acronyms, now it gets into jargon as well. But again, it’s a measurement of efficiency that’s used pretty broadly in the industry. People often refer to it as a percentile. It’s actually technically not. But distribution uniformity is, again, an efficiency measure of the application of the water of the irrigation system.
[00:07:27] Cory Broad:
It’s like anything, you can have a really high DU and you can still have a poor application efficiency or irrigation efficiency because maybe you mismanage the system. Maybe the system’s operating well at a high DU, as in all of the nozzles are relatively putting out the same amount of water. There’s always going to be differences due to manufacturer variances and some losses within the system from pressure, changes in elevation, and different things. It’s just a natural cost.
[00:07:52] Cory Broad:
There is no true 1.0 on DU, but there certainly are and should be expectations of a lot of drip systems say that are maybe 0.92, 0.94, even 0.96 when they’re brand new. Think of it in a way of almost like your fuel efficiency of your vehicle. It’s great the first day you drive it off the lot, but over time, there are deposits and challenges and different things and grime that starts to make that number go down. This would be a very similar piece to this conversation about maintaining it so that DU number stays high.
[00:08:23] Cory Broad:
Because again, we need that high DU, get that water out evenly, so that we can have an opportunity to do great irrigation efficiency because we’re managing the applied water well. So again, the overlap in the diagram, but DU is what I would say most growers and most people in the industry are thinking about when having these discussions. What is the DU of my system? What is the relative output from one emitter to the next?
[00:08:48] Karl Wyant:
You want them to be as even as possible so you’re not introducing spatial differences of water and fertilizer application, where maybe one row’s getting a lot of water because there’s something wrong with the application right there. And then you go one row over, and you’re not getting a whole lot of water going out. And you’re going to see that in the field, unfortunately, with your crop performance.
[00:09:07] Cory Broad:
I relate it to customers all the time, and I say this is the largest sprayer on the farm in my opinion. And you wouldn’t let your guys drive down the row with a Skittles bag colored of different nozzles and reds and greens and yellows and blues, would you? Well, of course not. No, I’d make sure that all my nozzles are the same output and same relative maintenance. And I said, well then your irrigation system should be treated the same way. Would be exactly the same concept of keeping that application rate as even as possible.
[00:09:34] Karl Wyant:
This idea of having the even distribution of the water and the fertilizer, it extends to center pivots, solid set, micro sprinkler, drip, the whole nine yards. Even the applicator on the liquid on a nozzle bank or a knife injection here going out on a row, that’s a really good point. We have to think about not just the quantity of water going up, but the spatial extent over a field because that just relates so directly to your plants’ performance over time. Cory, you mentioned the gunk and the grime and the slime. We can’t forget the slime. How does one start to assess the gunk in the system and why are water samples just an important part of that discovery and diagnostic for how plugged up is the irrigation system?
[00:10:14] Cory Broad:
It’s a fantastic question. And I think it’s similar to the discussion you probably have with folks on the soil science side of things. We should be getting soil samples regularly. We should be evaluating them. We should know what’s going on within our soil, and there’s no substitute for your shadow in the field.
[00:10:30] Cory Broad:
It’s kind of the same concept when it comes to the irrigation system. There’s no substitute for physically flushing and removing contaminants because, again, we put in really great filtration systems, but that doesn’t mean that, even just the inorganic matter, the dirt, silt, sands, pieces of clay that migrate through the system, whether it be from a repair that got made and some dirt got in, or just a general operation.
[00:10:53] Cory Broad:
So many customers that tell me, “Well, my water’s clean.” Everybody tells me their water’s clean or fair. They never say it’s horrible. With that being said, you know that there’s some level of constituents that are in there, some debris that’s going to build up over time. And to kind of go back to the car euphemism from earlier, if you operate this irrigation system, as we may do in a season here in California, for 800, 1,200, 1,600 hours, depending on how many acres that pump is serving and what crop and so on and so forth, you can imagine that’s a lot of hours on an irrigation system. Just like a lot of miles on your car. Over time, those contaminants build up.
[00:11:26] Cory Broad:
So first off, there’s no substitute for physically looking at it, physically measuring it, which is like what a DU report would be. And then again, flushing that material out. And then while you’re flushing it, hey, there’s a great opportunity for me to see and collect a water sample, and say, “Hey, I should have this analyzed because I know that I’ve removed all the dirt, but what about all the things I can’t see?” And maybe some of it you can, that might be scale or carbon in, or things like that, but there are a whole host of things on these reports, as you’re familiar with, that you can’t see that could be a problem, maybe not, maybe help you.
[00:11:57] Cory Broad:
There are opportunities to look at this, and go, wow, there are pieces to this that it can adjust my fertility program again to enhance that opportunity to increase ROI. That’s what we’re looking at is we’re looking at a major investment that we’re trying to maximize the ROI on. Water sample is a fantastic step to do that.
[00:12:14] Karl Wyant:
Cory, you mentioned that everyone thinks they have okay to good water. I’ve heard the same. How variable are these waters that you’re seeing that just come into the farm? I know there’s regions of the country where some are pulling from groundwater, some are pulling from the purest snow melt water that you’ll ever see. There’s variance here. How rough of a sample have you seen where the report is like, ugh? Describe some of those worst case scenarios.
[00:12:35] Cory Broad:
Plenty of horror stories. Obviously here in California, we have a unique dynamic because, again, we rely on a lot of snow melt water that comes through our reservoir system and into our canals, and we’re very lucky to have that, but we also use a lot of groundwater here as well. There are challenges that come with both of those, and they may actually look different.
[00:12:51] Cory Broad:
I may look at a terrible water quality sample, and it could have 250 parts per million of sodium in it, and it’s completely dominating the complex there and the SAR and all these different things. Numbers are getting really crazy. Chlorides are generally accompanied with that. This is probably a groundwater sample that I’m speaking about. And with all of that, it may or may not have bacteria or fungus ability to be grown in that water as well. That’s pretty awful.
[00:13:16] Cory Broad:
I also have customers that have challenges with that snow melt water because it’s almost, quote, “too clean” and that water doesn’t even go into the ground because there’s no SAR. There’s no calcium in it. There’s no potassium, there’s no sodium. Sometimes sodium’s a good thing. If soil’s negatively charged, we love to have some positively charged elements in our water so we can pull it into the ground. It’s a different challenge. And it’s not ugly in the sense that you go, “Wow, that water’s really clean. If I’m trying to remediate soil, it could be a great opportunity.”
[00:13:41] Cory Broad:
But if you don’t have the opportunity to get that water into the soil, it kind of goes back to the irrigation efficiency discussion. I applied it, but maybe it wasn’t beneficially used because it actually never made it into the crop profile, and maybe it ran off or maybe it evaporated. Again, there are these things. The dynamic of these water samples that I look at, I probably review 30 to 40 samples a week minimum, and it will be those two extremes on a very regular basis.
[00:14:07] Karl Wyant:
That’s a great point. That water sample is such a key foundation for predicting challenges with penetration and infiltration. We’re going to talk more about how the stuff in the water that can clog up your irrigation system. Salinity issues. I of course live in the hot part of the country where we have challenges with salinity every day. Such a great tool and there’s lots of labs around that’ll get one sent back to you and really help with the interpretation of the chemistry. There’s lots of crop advisors that are familiar. Cory, you mentioned you’re looking at 40 water reports a week. That’s a lot of water chemistry and a lot of knowledge to return to the system in terms of, well, here’s what it all means. Here’s what you should be doing next. In your experience, how often are growers taking a water sample to think about irrigation system performance?
[00:14:50] Cory Broad:
I think there’s a dichotomy there. I think I have customers that are doing it, I’ll say, at least annually. Because they’ve been on a program, they’ve had data. It’s kind of like going to the doctor. Do you need to get a physical every three months? Most healthy adults don’t. If you’ve been getting one regularly every year, you have a running track record, a medical history. Kind of the same concept on the farm. My water source hasn’t really changed from these drastic differences of maybe poor groundwater to snow melt, et cetera. I’m using kind of a fixed asset, if you will, a semi-known quality and a track record history of data of what I might be dealing with. Yeah, annually would be just fine.
[00:15:28] Cory Broad:
And then I think there’s still a large swath of customers that there are no major odors. There are no major color differences. There are no major amounts of that sand silt clay coming out. It’s probably all right. They’ll use the term hot. I know the water’s a little hot, which means probably have some sodium, maybe have some chloride. And we know that’s there, but we’ve actually never really quantified it. We’ve never really addressed the boogeyman that’s there and said, okay, what does that actually mean? And then what are the impacts of it downstream? You can look at it from a soil perspective. You can look at it from a fertilizer fertigation mix, making sure that that’s even, dare I say, compatible, but also just beneficial.
[00:16:07] Cory Broad:
And then again, what’s the crop response to that too? Obviously in California, we have a pretty dynamic crop mix here. You can look at even just two tree crops like pistachios and almonds, they behave very differently and tolerate salinity and chloride very differently. Knowing that number is going to be very important.
[00:16:21] Karl Wyant:
Data’s your friend, right? It’s funny you say hot water. I call it spicy water like, ooh, this water’s super spicy.
[00:16:27] Cory Broad:
100%.
[00:16:30] Karl Wyant:
Some good local slang here. Cory, I had an experience as an agronomist working in irrigation systems and water challenges. I had a center pivot of alfalfa. And the two outer rings, which are your two most productive yield rings for hay, kept losing bales. Took soil samples, had the records, the bale records. And it turns out we went out and did the distribution uniformity assessment, and those two outermost rings, those nozzles were clogged, and they were putting out half the water that we expected them to. Really a nice lesson early in my career, inspect those nozzles regardless of your irrigation system or injection system or knifing in system, whatever you’re using, make sure those things are clogged so that you’re satisfying the assumption that you are putting out whatever rate of fertilizer that you wrote down on your spreadsheet or your piece of paper and your water that you dialed in on the schedule.
[00:17:19] Karl Wyant:
A really good lesson for me early. We cleaned up the nozzles, and got those two outer rings back in production. And it was such a simple fix and did some good water sampling. And I think it’s the early lesson in my agronomy career on the power of distribution uniformity in water samples. I’m sure you’ve got plenty of those tales. I know you show it on your LinkedIn videos and all the cool content you make. I know your growers can probably say, “Yeah, this half of the block used to not produce very well. Now we fixed it.” I want to hear some horror stories on just the plugging, and maybe what were the emitters plugged with and what did it look like when you cracked that emitter open or that half inch tube, and how did you fix it?
[00:17:55] Cory Broad:
The ones I think that stand out are generally the ones that are just obviously not as common. Of course, some dirt, again, sand silt, customers will tell me, “Well, yeah, we just flushed last week.” But does that mean you flushed appropriately? And I think that’s what I, again, I’ll start with what I enjoy is when I can explain to somebody the math behind it because it’s really just a math problem, no different than a fertilizer application. It’s a math problem on getting that stuff out.
[00:18:19] Cory Broad:
When I can sit down and I can say, “Well, did your crew flush this for how long?” “I don’t know.” And then you talk to the crew, and they’re like, “Well, we usually flush it for about two to three minutes.” And then you do the math, and you say, “Well, the velocity of the water to get from this end of the pipe to the other, you actually need to flush it for seven minutes.” And you can kind of see the light bulb turn and they go, “Wow.” And I go, “So let’s try this again.” And we go and we do it, and more stuff comes out, even though they just flushed.
[00:18:41] Cory Broad:
Well, it’s because there was stuff that was still in the system that hadn’t migrated all the way out and that stuff was still there. We opened it up, and all of a sudden more stuff comes out, and they go, “Wow, it was running clear. I thought we were fine.” Those are the ones that are a little bit scary because that happens a lot because we think we’re doing a good job, and it’s kind of an unintended consequence of trying to do the right thing, but not doing it the right way.
[00:19:02] Cory Broad:
But the other things that I see all the time, I have seen things that are growing in there that I can’t even tell you what it is. It looks like something out of the movie Alien. But literally have seen things growing inside of filtration systems even when you open up the lids to a sand media tank and the water just kind of sits in there over time and it’s warm, and maybe there is some leftover fertilizer and different deposits in there. And all of a sudden you have these things that look like cow patties growing inside. That’s definitely something that’s always scary.
[00:19:30] Cory Broad:
The most challenging ones in my experience tend to be actually the dirt. When I think about getting a water sample, and I say, “Oh wow, this person has calcium carbonate. Okay, this water’s prone to scale. Okay, yep, there’s white debris on the outlets of the emitters because it’s sat there and it’s precipitated and now it’s blocking the outlet.” And I think about that, and I go, “Well, that one’s actually not very scary because I can apply chemistry through the system. I can get it through into that emitter, and then I can get it to the outlet. I can break that. It’s a chemical bond that I can just reverse.”
[00:20:02] Cory Broad:
And I go, “Wow, okay, perfect. That’s an easy one to do. Again, just a math or kind of a science problem.” Biological, definitely the next level of challenge, but because it grew, I can hopefully break it down or kill it, and then remove it or at least allow it to pass. I think about that and I go, “Okay, well that’s something that’s still scary but probably doable.”
[00:20:21] Cory Broad:
And then when I think about dirt in and of itself, that’s a big challenge. Because if it’s gotten impacted inside of that emitter or that emission device or sprinkler head, unless I can flush it out of the tube itself or the supply pipe, I may or may not be able to rescue the emission device itself, which again, could be 1,000 feet of drip line, could be X number of sprinkler heads, could be so many drops on a pivot. That’s when these things start to become more costly and definitely more invasive.
[00:20:47] Cory Broad:
Beyond that, you talk about the fertilizer side. That’s one that always scares me because I talk about all this fertility that’s being ran. Well, if that interaction happens from a constituent in the water and something that’s in a base of that fertilizer, that’s where it becomes really challenging because that’s a much more significant chemical reaction to try and unlock. And sometimes, as you know and have probably seen, you don’t get to unlock those things. I know we’ve harped on it, but the importance of having that fertilizer, and that water sample together for your advisor to look at, I think makes a huge difference. You can apply that product with precision, but also with peace, and knowing that it’s going to be able to get out there and do what it needs to do.
[00:21:28] Karl Wyant:
And see that before and after of performance and better fertilizer applications and better crop performance and restoring the yield potential of the outer ring of the center pivot. Cory, is there a way to detect how much dirt is in your irrigation system besides looking at it and it looks like chocolate milk?
[00:21:45] Cory Broad:
Well, you can’t manage what you can’t measure. I think you’ve heard that before. You’ve probably said it on this podcast many, many times. I think for us on the water side, the simplest thing is the flow rate of the irrigation system and the pressure in which that irrigation system runs. If I’m able to sit down and say, well, every time I look at that flow meter on block A, whatever crop it is, whatever size it is, it is 1,000 gallons a minute. And all of a sudden I say, wow, it’s now 900 gallons a minute. Rough math again, 10%. What’s going on there? What’s causing that?
[00:22:18] Cory Broad:
I have customers that reach out to me very regularly. I did a remediation on a field last week where a customer said, “I noticed a difference in my flow meter. And block A is the same as block B and the same as block C. And in block A, it was different and it’s lower. And I want to make sure that we have a good operating irrigation system. Let’s get water samples, let’s get in there, and then let’s make sure that we can get that where it needs to be.”
[00:22:42] Cory Broad:
Those are the things that being able to apply with precision, apply with peace, you also have to be kind of detailed on some of those things. So having a flow meter in place and actually tracking, keeping that data, I don’t care if it’s on a piece of paper at the filter station, if it’s something with remote technologies that’s constantly capturing that data, even better. With all of that being said, if we can look at that data, just like going to the doctor, I can see what your blood pressure is. I can see what your heart rate is. I can get some parameters to operate on, and go, okay, yep, we’re operating as it’s supposed to be.
[00:23:11] Karl Wyant:
Cory, are you using any drones or NDVI to detect changes in distribution uniformity on fields in your practice?
[00:23:19] Cory Broad:
Nothing that we’re doing directly, but customers are. Customers have access to this technology from maybe their direct crop advisors, from third-party providers. A lot of customers are starting to invest in their own, or are using some other form of technology that maybe has satellite NDVI or something like that accompanied into it.
[00:23:36] Cory Broad:
It’s nice when they have the data because now we can go and we can marry that and overlay it with the irrigation system design, and we can say, “Okay, well look at that. This change in this area is downstream of a block valve. Oh, okay, maybe it’s dirt. Maybe it’s an issue with the valve. We don’t know, but let’s go to that area now. Let’s go investigate what’s going on there.” We don’t necessarily have all of that data all the time. But man, when customers do have it, now it’s like, okay, we can really start making a difference because again, we have all the irrigation design information. Let’s overlay it and then let’s try and investigate that further.
[00:24:11] Karl Wyant:
Cory, that’s so interesting. Some of your anecdotes here of just before and after, we’re obviously talking about better applications of the water itself, better application of the fertilizer, the crops you’re actually getting what you’re, as an agronomist, writing on your prescription, right? They’re getting this many pounds of nitrogen an acre because we’ve improved the spatial extent of the efficiency of that distribution uniformity. But are growers also seeing improvements in just diesel costs and power costs when they fix an irrigation system?
[00:24:39] Cory Broad:
Yeah, absolutely. One of the ways that distribution uniformity is used is within irrigation scheduling. You’ll have to forgive my napkin math as we sit here and talk. I don’t have the calculator in front of me. But I talked about distribution uniformity being like a 0.9 or a 0.92, or something along those lines. If you want to use that to do proper irrigation scheduling to make sure your field is well irrigated, which again would also apply to fertigation, don’t ever forget that. It’s an important topic in this podcast. If I sit there and I say, “Well, I’m supposed to apply 48 hours of runtime this week or 1.8 inches of water,” giving you two methodologies that customers might look at, what you do is you take that 0.9 DU say that you have on a score by going out and getting these measurements and you divide 48 hours by 0.9.
[00:25:25] Cory Broad:
It’s a markup. It’s kind of a cost associated for the inefficiency of your system. You over irrigate part of the field to make sure that a majority of the field is well irrigated or not under irrigated. You can imagine, going from a 0.9 to a 0.8, that 48 hours now becomes even bigger. With that being said, now we have rising power costs. The price of fuel is certainly not going to go down. I think about availability of energy during certain times of the year. Us in the West deal with that quite a bit. The lack of flexibility in the pricing of energy. It doesn’t move a lot.
[00:26:00] Cory Broad:
With all of these things being said, energy as it’s related to water, is one of the highest costs for growers in the West when it comes to producing a crop at the end of the year. We are very, very cognizant of energy here in the West. And I would imagine that that’s going to continue to impact all these different acreages that we talked about that are using irrigated practices.
[00:26:22] Karl Wyant:
To the listener, if we haven’t convinced you to go grab a water sample yet, now we’ve made one more point on the connection between your water chemistry, your irrigation system performance, whether you’re in Nebraska on a center pivot or California on avocados, and now energy costs because you have to have energy to move water. And the more efficient your water movement is, the more efficient your energy uses. Cory, thanks for that.
[00:26:44] Karl Wyant:
Just a couple more questions here. You mentioned the connection of what’s causing the plugging problem, and you mentioned a couple products. I just wanted to have you maybe go through some just general chemistry classes here of those products. First, I wanted to say the time piece. If you’re going to flush a system, you have to have enough time to get the water across the whole system and through the whole system to do the job properly.
[00:27:06] Karl Wyant:
And Cory, I’ve seen plenty of your LinkedIn videos where you’re showing that second pulse of dirt that comes out if you wait long enough. Just cool stuff to see. It’s like, oh yeah, instead of four minutes, I should have done seven minutes, and here’s the math because of my system, how it’s built. And every system’s built a little bit differently. Thinking about the time it takes to get across the full span of a center pivot through the full tubing of a drip emitter system and what have you. Cory, what are the other sort of major product chemistries that we need to think about when trying to restore the DU of the field and the irrigation efficiency?
[00:27:35] Cory Broad:
There’s going to be things that are used in remediation, these rescue scenarios, which are a little bit harsher and generally higher volumes because we’re trying to undo probably a lot of damage. Again, could be that 1,600 hours worth of damage that we talked about earlier, could be just one instance.
[00:27:50] Cory Broad:
But when I think about what I see customers using in the marketplace on a continuous basis to make sure that their systems stay clean depends, with that water sample information, what am I up against? Am I up against biological? Am I up against some type of scale formation, say? That could just be acid. It comes in a ton of different forms and your crop advisor will be able to help you understand what’s best for you, bang for the buck, best for your soil, safe for your irrigation system, but also solves your problem. I think about that on the scale side.
[00:28:20] Cory Broad:
And then of course have a lot of customers that say, “Hey, well, chlorine, right?” People are used to chlorine. It’s in pools and it’s in our tap water in certain cases. People are generally comfortable with it. That is something that can work. But again, I always say it goes back to what’s in your water already, and then also what’s going to be in your soil long-term. Because what’s left behind? Well, if I don’t want to leave chlorides behind, then maybe that’s not the best case.
[00:28:41] Cory Broad:
All of these products have pros and cons to them. Some are physical in nature, some are economic because maybe a different product is more expensive because it doesn’t do that. There’s the PAA, peroxyacetic acid and hydrogen peroxide combination. Very, very common. People like it because it works. It’s generally pH agnostic, and it’s very effective and it doesn’t really leave anything behind compared to, again, this chlorine discussion.
[00:29:06] Cory Broad:
All of these things should be evaluated through the lens of long-term crop health production, soil is a huge part of that, and then also what’s going to actually work for you today to solve this issue. Because DU is a today measurement. It directly impacts what you’re doing on the farm today the moment that you turn on that switch to run water.
[00:29:26] Karl Wyant:
That’s great, Cory. Just like we think of fertility plans and soil samples, every field has a water chemistry that’s just by the way the plumbing’s designed or the aquifer is that’s sort of assigned to it. Thinking about these relationships with crop advisors, with experts like yourself that can come in and look at a water sample because it’s unique to that field, unique to that irrigation system, and make sure that they have the right remediation plan to get the ROI, to get the improvements in the fertilizer application, to get the improvements in the energy use in that bill at the end of the year.
[00:29:57] Karl Wyant:
Cory, I think that’s a fantastic way to kind of tee up the agronomy of water that we need to pay a lot of attention, especially on the irrigated acre side. You mentioned 55 million acres. That’s a lot of sampling that needs to be done, and I think we have lots of room for improvement in our annual water sample that we should be taking. That’s my advice. I don’t know if you want more frequent of samples than that, but it’s such an unexplored space in the irrigated crop markets of just what’s in my water. Even in the rest of dry land where we’re putting water into tank mixes and injecting it into the seed row, there’s just all these interactions water can have regardless of irrigation system that I think we should talk about more often as agronomists.
[00:30:36] Cory Broad:
I cannot disagree at all. And I’ll go back to if customers are getting an annualized sample, I think that’s a great starting space. If there’s a, I call them an asset as far as a pump or a well or a certain specific irrigation system, block zone, however you want to define it, that is giving you a problem or is a known problem, then maybe the frequency should be stepped up in that area so that you can make sure to stay ahead of it because water does change throughout the season.
[00:30:59] Cory Broad:
Just like how our soil temperature changes throughout the season, this water quality can change too. If you’re using groundwater, the depth in which you’re pulling from might change based on what other people are doing in that same aquifer, or how well your well is built, designed, maintained also. You can sit there and think about it, and say, well, maybe the quality of that water is also changing.
[00:31:18] Cory Broad:
And then again, did my source of water also change, or am I blending water together? Did I build a new piece of infrastructure, which is, again, very popular in the West, with a reservoir or conveyance system? Well, now I’ve taken what we identify as generally groundwater and really now kind of turned it into surface water, and introduced bacteria and sunlight and all of these things, and dirt and leaf litter into that matrix that existed from all the groundwater constituents that could be high in sodium, chloride, so on and so forth, sulfate. Now we might’ve actually changed what that water looks like completely by just putting it outside even for a short period of time.
[00:31:54] Karl Wyant:
Interesting. Yeah, that’s great advice, Cory. One more question. Is there anything we didn’t get the chance to cover today that you want to make sure we mention?
[00:32:02] Cory Broad:
I think we’ve done a very good job. Obviously you’re extremely knowledgeable. The folks at Nutrien do a great job. I would say that, and this will really tie the fertility piece back in one last time, if you go and you read Drip and Micro Irrigation, Fifth, Sixth Edition from the folks at Cal Poly, which is a great resource for irrigation management and design, it will say in there and in their fertigation book that the distribution uniformity of the fertilizer cannot be higher than that of the irrigation system when fertigating.
[00:32:31] Cory Broad:
If there’s one thing I can leave you with again in the value chain of customers invest a lot of money and time working with great crop advisors, buying fantastic fertility products, and then the labor to go put that in and the energy to convey it as we talked about, let’s make sure that we’re getting the best bang for the buck by making sure that the last piece to that step, which is the output of the irrigation system, is operating appropriately.
[00:32:54] Karl Wyant:
Well said. I think we’ve given the listeners a couple things to do, and I’ll wrap this up here. Go grab that water sample. Very important. If you haven’t, not to use a pun, but dipped your toe into the water sampling game, there’s great labs out there that can walk you through the chemistry. There’s advisors out there that can read through some of this maybe chemistry stuff that shows up on a report that can be a little hard to interpret. Some labs do a good job of assigning values to the numbers that come back to give you that plan. Of course, take a look at those books from Cal Poly, but we also need to take a look at your LinkedIn videos. If you love watching before and after irrigation clean outs, highly recommend you follow Cory on LinkedIn. I think it’s a ton of fun to watch that stuff.
[00:33:33] Karl Wyant:
So let me land the plane here. Cory, we appreciate you taking the time to chat with us about irrigation. We covered a huge amount of space, 55 million acres spread across Canada all the way through the central plains and then back out west. And of course, I think we feel this is probably the most interesting topic ever to come into agronomy is the agronomy of water and the importance of soil sampling.
[00:33:54] Karl Wyant:
Make sure you connect with Cory on LinkedIn, watch those clean out videos. My wife for sure is going to come after me for watching those things because I show them to her. And then we also have a link here just for the listeners of this agronomy of water article that we published with the Western CCA Group a couple years back in the ag literature.
[00:34:10] Karl Wyant:
And finally, please go grab that water sample. It’s clean bottle, some patience. Make sure you run that system for a little bit at the first. But go grab it, get it sent off. It’s super interesting data that comes back. If you are interested in learning more about nutrient management, we have a great website, nutrien-ekonomics, with a K, .com and keep listening for more insights from our agronomy team in the next segment. Cory, thank you very much.
[00:34:36] The Dirt PodKast:
Farming isn’t farming without questions, and now there’s a place to go for answers. At eKonomics, an entire team of agronomists are ready and waiting to help for free. No question is too big or too small. Visit nutrien-ekonomics, with a K, .com, and submit your question with the ask an agronomist feature. What are common signs a crop has a potassium deficiency?
[00:35:03] Lyle Cowell:
Signs of a potassium deficiency. First of all, we have to think about why do crops need potassium? What are the primary factors that crops use potassium? And the main reason that crops utilize potassium is in water balances within the plant. Potassium has an endless list of roles within the plant, from enzyme activation to many, many other roles.
[00:35:26] Lyle Cowell:
But the big factor that crops will suffer from first is deficient use of water within the plant. What do we se for deficiency symptoms? They tend to look drought-stricken. A lot of bronzing, brown tissue, especially along the edges of the leaves. Sometimes in broadleaf crops, you’ll see necrotic brown or even white flecking across the surface of the leaf. So really it looks affected by drought.
[00:35:52] Lyle Cowell:
Now the primary part of the plant that becomes affected first is the older leaves. Potassium does not move very readily within a plant. The older leaves are always affected much more severely than the upper leaves. So you’ll see those lower leaves really starting to show the effects of what looks like drought.
[00:36:11] Lyle Cowell:
Now what can complicate this is that potassium deficiency is often more severe in sandy soils. Soils that probably are affected by drought more often. You might walk across a field and think, well, my crop is suffering from dry conditions. Well, potassium may be the problem. Potassium might not be as available as the soil dries out. The potassium itself might not be as available to the crop, and potassium levels are likely lower in those sandy soils than in soils that are higher in clay. When you combine all those factors, we can easily mistake potassium deficiency for the impact of drought. Keep your eyes open, look at soil tests, think about what the real risks are, whether it’s drought or whether it might be a nutrient deficiency. Use all the tools at hand to really try sort out what the real problem can be.
[00:37:04] Lyle Cowell:
I should mention one other thing that we sometimes see, especially in areas where we use the word swath, some people use the word windrow crops, when we cut and leave the crops in a row in the field before harvest, crop residue can be a great source of potassium. And potassium leaches out of residue very, very rapidly. A couple of rainfalls and that potassium will be largely out of the residue. And you will then sometimes see a pattern in the field where the crop looks better in areas where there was more residue from last year’s crop. It’s because potassium is being supplied from last year’s residue to next year’s residue. It cycles very well through the residue. And again, you’ll see this pattern, but it’ll be a pattern of symptoms much like we just talked about, a pattern of drought symptoms.
[00:37:56] The Dirt PodKast:
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