The Water Table

#118 | Accidental Advocate for the Drainage Industry

• Jamie Duininck • Episode 118

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From introducing GPS for grid tiling in New York to sharing best practices in agricultural water management, Chad Klotzbach of Alleghany Services has become an advocate for the drainage industry. Learn why he feels education is so important and how applying research from the Midwest is benefitting his East Coast business.

Chapters & Episode Topics:
00:00   Today on the Water Table Podcast
00:26   Welcome Chad Klotzbach
01:00   All the way from New York
01:30   Farm drainage up and down the East Coast
02:07   Second generation and GPS
03:10   More opportunity = More challenges
04:35   Average project is 35 acres, Boston, Maryland, Delaware… it’s diverse!
05:55   The benefits of education
07:20   Bringing the Midwest research to the Northeast
08:24   Non-traditional drainage states
09:46   Selling snake-oil or advocate?
11:25   Shameless drainage promotion
12:40   The first bioreactor in Massachusetts
14:14   Controlled drainage
15:00   Precision agriculture – including drainage.
16:30   Three feet of rain in the spring
17:15   Learning from the conferences
18:53   Still a lot of work to do
19:20   Personal achievements
20:50   Big thanks to our guest!

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Jamie Duininck (00:00):

Today on The Water Table, had the opportunity to sit down with Chad Klotzbach with Allegheny Services. Talked a lot of things about drainage and water management out on the East Coast in the traditionally non-drained states, and kind of what water management looks like throughout his neck of the woods, and also what we see for the future of the industry. Welcome back to The Water Table. Today we have on Chad Klotzbach, managing partner with Allegheny Services. And Chad, thanks for coming onto The Water Table.

Chad Klotzbach (00:33):

Yeah, no problem. You got it the first try, so that was good.

Jamie Duininck (00:36):

The last name part?

Chad Klotzbach (00:37):

Yeah, exactly right.

Jamie Duininck (00:38):

Perfect. Good. I'm sure you've had a whole bunch of different pronunciations with it, but no, thanks for coming on. I think we first ran into each other probably out of CDN out east.

Chad Klotzbach (00:47):

Yeah. Maybe was it that, or was it? May have been the Cade, a couple.

Jamie Duininck (00:51):

That could be as well. Yep. But anyway, Chad's managing partner with Allegheny Services and you have your fingers in a bunch of different, I guess, industries out in New York, and we want to get into a little bit about maybe some of the uniqueness that you have out in New York and working in the drainage industry, water management industry. But yeah, maybe first kick it off. Tell us a little bit about your business and what y'all get involved in.

Chad Klotzbach (01:16):

Sure. Absolutely. Well, despite New York State, we actually have a decent amount of farms within New York. So our business itself, we're kind of split between drainage and construction. So for the most part, we're doing farm drainage up and down the east coast from the Carolinas up to Maine, mostly focused within Western New York. We also have a construction site as well. So with that, we're doing GPS equipment, commercial civil site stuff. We got a bit of directional drilling, so got our hands in a few different things across the board.

Jamie Duininck (01:48):

Yeah, sure. And like I said, farm drainage is kind of one they've been dabbling into a little bit more. Also got into business with your dad too. Now you're taking that to a new level from my understanding, from some of the conversations that we've had. So maybe you want to talk about some of your growth that you've had over the years?

Chad Klotzbach (02:04):

Sure. Yeah. So my dad started the business back in the early eighties. I went to school for some engineering, came back. I was like, all right, what's the opportunity here? Do I want to get into the drainage business? Do I want to go be a consulting engineer? What should I do?

(02:19):

So I was like, all right, I'm going to commit. Family business. There was about five of us on staff at that point, and we're just doing kind of local work within Western New York and 2010, guess what? GPS was starting to come out. Then I'm like, all right, it's getting pretty cool. It's kind of interesting. What can we do with this?

(02:38):

Not to get into the way back of history of things, but in the 1830s drainage started in New York State. So what happened between there and 2010? I'm not really sure, but it kind of dropped off in the sense of you really didn't see much pattern or grid tiling. So we went to like, okay, we now have GPS. Can we expand this? Really what they're doing in the Midwest, does this make sense in New York state? I don't want to say we pioneered it in New York, but we pioneered it in New York in the sense of we were able to educate and expand that to farmers across the area.

(03:10):

As we started to grow and travel a bit more. It's like, okay, now if we're instead of doing jobs two to three hours away, what does a job look like six hours away? What challenges does that look like? What does a travel crew look like when it comes to this? And does it make sense? Can I travel 10 hours away for a 30 acre field? If I don't do it, who's going to do it? And that's really some of the questions that we had as our business expanded to what it is today. And we always kind of joke internally, it's like we're a drainage company, but we're really a logistics company because all we do, our focus is on planning and where things are at the right time to make sure we have the right people, the right equipment and everything is kind of how the system works today. But it's a little bit different than just cranking pipe in the ground.

Jamie Duininck (03:58):

Yeah, exactly. And that's what I want to chat with a little bit more too. So you're talking to a corn and soybean farm kid here in Minnesota with 160, 80 acre, big, nice fields, long runs, all this other stuff. What are some of the projects that you get involved with? I mean, specialty crops, I guess crops and kind of acres drainage wise. Give a little background on that.

Chad Klotzbach (04:23):

We are all over the place. I'd say on average we're about 35 acres is our average size project. But I think right now we're doing a project in Hudson, Massachusetts, which is 30 minutes from Boston. And it's a farm to table place. They're throwing in some drainage to help manage their orchards. Kind of right on top of a hill. You pull through the suburb and here's this little farm. So we do projects like that to good projects in Connecticut, down in Maryland and Delaware. We're dealing with, they're a little bit larger fields, but that obviously there's... We will get into that I'm sure, in terms of the conservation drainage and water quality aspect of it.

(05:02):

So really we have sand down in Maryland to heavy clays up near Lake Ontario. It's really broad and really diverse, just like our customer base. So we can have orchards, vineyards to pretty large dairy, organic chicken, and just your typical corn and soybean guys as well. Vegetable guys, we're pretty diverse. I think New York State is one or two for cabbage production in the country. It's little things like that that you look at New York like, no way. But it's a pretty interesting state from that perspective.

Jamie Duininck (05:38):

So cool. Yeah, getting into a lot of different diverse background on fields you're working in and different environments like that also have a unique opportunity for, maybe people know a little bit about drainage or what it is, but there's still kind of a big education effort on some of those benefits to what a tile system does to a field. And then also what are your other options as far as conservation, drainage side like that. So how do you work through some of that, I guess, education piece for the farmer, for the landowner?

Chad Klotzbach (06:09):

A bit of a loaded question there, but I guess let's back it up even further. So back in, I'd say 2018, 2019, I started to get questions from different state agencies of funding of like, okay. I'm like, "Hey, I have these drainage projects. There's some cool conservation drainage projects. What can you as either state agency, federal agency, what do you have to offer?" And they're like, "Drainage is bad. It doesn't matter what it is, that's bad."

(06:36):

So my question started, okay, well obviously there's information out there. So I think I reached out to Keegan. I actually reached out to our pipe suppliers, things like that. And being where we're at in New York state, we're very reliant on the Ontario Canada market. So our pipe comes out of Canada. Most of our research is through the Ontario, the drainage program. That's actually a provincially regulated aspect.

(07:00):

So our standards, we'd send our employees up there to really take all that information. So as I started to reach for more information, there wasn't a print scope. We had at the time, it wasn't even ADS, it was just a local Canadian manufacturer. So we were relying on the information they could pass to us. So as I started to ask more questions and find like, "Hey, who's kind of leading the charge of education and understanding?" I essentially came up to ADMC, joined ADMC, then asked more questions and just kind of expanded that knowledge base of like, "Okay, what does Ohio State think about this? What does Minnesota? What's going on in New York? What's going on in the Northeast?"

(07:41):

And I found out there really wasn't much in terms of education and what's the future of the industry look like there. So ultimately it was like, all right, let's take this research that's happening in Minnesota and Iowa and how is it relevant and are the practices that we can do in the Northeast?

(07:58):

So then what does it look like to pitch to state government? Is it just me as a contractor pitching this to the state government? Can I get other industry advocates to help us funnel some of this money towards this stuff? So really that's been my job from running a tile plow has turned into managing the business, but also trying to advocate for the industry.

(08:21):

And we've kind of coined a term at the last CDN meeting of non-traditional drainage states. And I mean it in the sense of traditional drainage in the Midwest, everybody knows what it is. But you get into Oregon, you get into Washington, you get into Georgia or North Carolina or even New York, you have to educate to farmers. So when they ask a question of, 'Oh yeah, I have a wet spot. I'm going to run one line out there and that'll take care of it." What pipe are you using? What soil types do you have? A lot of the times it's just, "Well, no one's ever asked these questions before. I just thought you put a perforated pipe that I buy at Home Depot, take it up to the wet spot and off the water goes."

Jamie Duininck (09:02):

Do it with the backhoe and throw it in the ground. It should be good, right?

Chad Klotzbach (09:05):

Exactly. So it's not only showing the depth of the industry and the information and the research that's involved with it, but then it's like me as a contractor going and explaining to our customers, our farmers, our conservation districts, our NRCS offices of like, "Hey, we're not just draining wetlands. We're actually providing good services with conservation." We're managing water quality and quantity at a level that I think most people don't even understand or can picture that we as contractors can do that.

Jamie Duininck (09:37):

So when you're having some of those conversations with the farmer at Leonora, you just looked at like a snake oil salesman?

Chad Klotzbach (09:44):

Yeah, you're selling it. So obviously you can't be telling the full truth. So it is always good to have you get Vinaya from Ohio State or somebody like that to like, "Hey, here's a great video on YouTube that's explaining exactly what I say." I like the term kind of accidental advocate for the industry. I was just trying to do drainage and do it better. And then I was like, here I am in Minnesota at a meeting talking to you. It's like, what am I doing out here? But it's really, you end up in places I think you would never expect to be.

Jamie Duininck (10:18):

Yeah, for sure. And it's jumping after those opportunities. Sounds like that's what you've done with a lot of your career as well.

Chad Klotzbach (10:24):

Yeah, absolutely.

Jamie Duininck (10:25):

Is kind of continuing that path of growth and building that out and networking with the right folks and getting to know the right-

Chad Klotzbach (10:32):

The very important people like yourself.

Jamie Duininck (10:34):

Yeah, something like that. But no, within this industry, that's some of the things that excite me about it. It seems like it's been around forever. The pipe, or maybe not the pipe pipe's been around for a while, but drainage pipe has been around for a while and some of the practices are still kind of the same. And I think we're kind of at a spot, and that's one of the reasons for the podcast. One of the reasons, or a lot of the topics that we're talking about with at ADMC and these other groups and whatnot is how can we be doing things a little bit differently or what opportunities are out there to... I don't know if it's not necessarily flip the script on drainage, but let's say let's tell our story a little bit better on how we're managing water.

Chad Klotzbach (11:20):

Shameless drainage promotion.

Jamie Duininck (11:21):

Shameless drainage promotion.

Chad Klotzbach (11:23):

That's what I always like. That's my kind of industry term. Who is shamelessly promoting the industry? In the sense of from research to development, the good things that are going on versus seeing the news article of tile drainage causes millions of fish dying and whatever body of water they decide to claim it at that point. So it always goes back to the causation correlation argument.

(11:48):

But I think that's one of the benefits of being where we're at, especially on the East Coast. It's like we're not only educating when it comes to drainage, but we're educating with the sense of we can provide a solution that drainage through the quality aspect of conservation drainage can provide through edge of field treatments and different things like that. So going in and if we have funding available, if there's anything along those lines, I can present more to our customers and also present more to, "Hey, there's a funding opportunity. Look at this awesome stuff that we can do and how do we make it work here?"

(12:25):

We ended up, we did a project... Was it last year? I think we finished it up last year. Same thing we did probably I think the first or second bioreactor in Massachusetts. Once again, we're 20 minutes outside of Boston. And I remember this project just like, "Where are we? Why are we doing drainage here?" But it really came into the state funded a hundred percent of it because honestly they hadn't really seen it before. So in the sense of, once again, drainage contractor coming in and pitching it to a farmer who had connections with the local Department of Agriculture and building that project off of that.

(13:03):

And we ended up, we had a lunch and learn or whatever it was that we invited everybody to come by. We had representatives from pretty much every level of government that's like, "Wow, this is a really cool project. How do we do more of this? What does this look like in the future?" I'm like, okay, well here we are once again as a drainage contractor doing the work for the larger industry.

Jamie Duininck (13:26):

Yeah, for sure. And that's a much appreciated, like I said, an accidental advocate for what we're doing. Good that you're out there and that you're spreading that word that way. And we need more input like that more folks like that and bigger lift on, I guess the other companies and representatives, advocates in the industry as well to continue telling that story as well. So you mentioned that's an interesting project that you've got to do. What other ones kind of come to mind when you get to do some unique stuff out on the East Coast?

Chad Klotzbach (14:01):

Control drainage projects down in Delaware, Maryland, those are pretty cool ones. If you're not familiar with that, you're essentially actively managing the water table. So for me, I am an engineer as well. So that's the nerdy part of me that's like, "Man, control is amazing." When you can manage water in the sense of we have this in our mind of get it off the field as quickly as possible versus, well, only when you want to. So as we kind of progress within the industry and we become more and more intelligent all the time on how we look at our fields, we manage our acreage. It's like, okay, if I can now sit on an app on my phone and say, "No, there's a hurricane coming that's probably going to drop eight inches of rain. I'm going to drop the gates and let some water out to increase storage in the field."

Jamie Duininck (14:47):

Build up that storage there.

Chad Klotzbach (14:48):

What does that look like from a watershed perspective as well? So can you store more? And that's how my mind always thinks is what's next.

Jamie Duininck (14:56):

Yeah, exactly. And that's something that has been brought up in our industry a few times, but I think it's still underappreciated, is there's precision in agriculture everywhere from your genetics, your seed, your fertilizer, your tillage practices, your no-till practices, all this other stuff is you can fine tune everything down to the acre, but water isn't necessarily part of that conversation yet. And that's where thing like control drainage and automated drainage and stuff like that really builds that into that scope too. Especially as important as water is to growing a crop.

Chad Klotzbach (15:30):

So much so I remember going to a conference and it was all these ag startups that are all funded billions of dollars behind them. And I get up to this one where it's like, "Oh, through this AI, it can tell you what type of ride if seed to plant, when to plant it, all this stuff." I'm like, "Well, what about water? How are you managing that?" "Well, we're leaving that up to the landowner." I'm like, "So you have all this technology and all this money, and yet there's one major aspect you have no consideration of or no control over." So where's the drainage come into this? Where does that active water management come into play?

Jamie Duininck (16:01):

And it's easy looking at water on the state-irrigated land on the standpoint or by adding it to it, but when you're taking it away, like you said, that's the jet my old man always has is, "Hey, we need to get rid of it. Or what do I want to do? Stop water. I want to get rid of it." Well, maybe you do want to get rid of it at some point, but here we're talking in 2024, and at least in southern Minnesota we had... Well, it is a little bit of an exaggeration, but it's not much. We had three feet of rain in the spring.

Chad Klotzbach (16:30):

Oh, I was here in the spring, yeah. It was.

Jamie Duininck (16:33):

But then we didn't have three tents all through late summer into fall. No, and that's another point for those practices that are out there, tools that are available for these practices. So something else that you've been dabbling a little bit more is talking about water and agriculture, but on the irrigation side, on the supply side. So what are some of the things that you've been learning from either going to those conferences or meeting with some of those folks?

Chad Klotzbach (16:58):

Yeah, I guess, and even beyond irrigation is what's the impact of drainage on groundwater? What's the impact on drainage on water on a whole when it comes to agriculture? So I know one of the conferences this spring that I went to, I sat there and NASA gave a presentation on the 18 satellites, or I don't remember the specific number, but they can tell you down to what the evapotranspiration rate. So how fast the water is leaving the soil in Kansas. The satellites are that accurate.

(17:31):

So I was like, "So what about the east of the Mississippi?" They're like, "Well, that's more drainage world." And I'm just like, wow, okay. Irrigation is awesome. It's necessary. But on the drainage side, I kind of feel like we're a bit far behind when it comes to some of the data collection and just as an organization, I think we could do a bit better.

(17:53):

But also when it comes to groundwater modeling, when it comes to where does the drainage water get into the ground, what's the impacts of that? There's so much more to the story that I think we tend to... We are all basically farmers at heart, whether or not we grew up on a farm and as a farmer, it's today's problems today's, tomorrow's problems tomorrow I'm going to deal with today today and I'll worry about tomorrow tomorrow. So for me, I always try to plan a little bit ahead and that's an automatic mindset for myself. And I see that even in my dad. It's that same, we wake up in the morning and focus on today's challenges, but for the most part it's like what's beyond that? And taking that as a challenge.

Jamie Duininck (18:40):

Yeah, it definitely is a challenge for developing essentially the industry that we want to see it. Like I said, there's a lot of work out there that we're getting after and or I guess a lot of work to do to bring our industry up to the next level. And that's kind some of the exciting things that I see, I guess for myself in the industry and a lot of that opportunity that's still out there. So maybe just to wrap up a little bit, what else gets you excited about where you're at in your career and kind of what you're doing with Allegheny Services or elsewhere?

Chad Klotzbach (19:13):

Sure. I did-

Jamie Duininck (19:14):

With the industry.

Chad Klotzbach (19:14):

So yeah, after whatever 15 years, I'm like, "I'm going to take my PE." So I just-

Jamie Duininck (19:19):

Congrats on that, by the way. Should have kicked off with that, sorry.

Chad Klotzbach (19:21):

Just I passed that last month. It was much harder than I expected, but I got through it. No plans of stamping drawings, but essentially all it does is lend a sense of credibility to the conversations, and your PE as well. It's like if I walk into the room with the same amount of knowledge in my head, how you're approached and how you're interacted with those two little letters after your name.

Jamie Duininck (19:46):

You can put a little letters on your business card in there.

Chad Klotzbach (19:50):

Exactly, yeah. So there's that end of things, but it's really what does our business as a whole continue to advocate, continue to expand and continue to focus on what's drainage like in our non-traditional drainage states and really how does it impact the Midwest and what's the story that we tell overall? So it's like engineering, marketing, you put it in a business sense.

Jamie Duininck (20:14):

You can kind of flex your brain a few different directions with that.

Chad Klotzbach (20:17):

Exactly. But it's been fun to see you guys grow quite a bit too. Your new plant down in Georgia, I was lucky enough to go and visit that, and it was pretty cool to see what you guys are doing and expanding on that. So you guys know. You get excited with growth and new ideas and new regions and new challenges.

Jamie Duininck (20:40):

Yep, exactly.

Chad Klotzbach (20:41):

Otherwise, we probably wouldn't be doing this if we were doing the same thing every day.

Jamie Duininck (20:45):

Correct. Yep. Well said. Well, Chad, thanks a lot for coming on. You've been on the list for I guess, a little while to get on the podcast, so I'm glad we can finally make it work. Just took you to fly to Minnesota.

Chad Klotzbach (20:57):

Exactly. Right. 3:30 in the morning just to get here in time. Right.

Jamie Duininck (21:00):

Perfect. Awesome. Well thanks a lot, Chad.

Chad Klotzbach (21:03):

Sure. No problem. Thanks for having me.


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