The Water Table

2025 Wrapped: A Year in Ag Water Management

• Jamie Duininck • Episode 141

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0:00 | 16:03

As we close out another year, The Water Table looks back on the conversations that shaped 2025. In this special "2025 Wrapped" episode, we’ve curated highlights from our most impactful discussions—from Ducks Unlimited to the high-tech future of drainage modeling.

Host Jamie Duininck and guest host Trey Allis revisit stories of multi-generational family businesses, the critical role of recycled plastics in pipe manufacturing, and the evolving mindset around water as a resource to be managed rather than a problem to be solved. Whether discussing the effects of tariffs on agriculture or the rigorous licensing of contractors in Ontario, this year has been a testament to the growth and professionalism of our industry.

Join us for this retrospective as we celebrate another year in Ag water management.

Chapters:

00:00 - Welcome to 2025 Wrapped
00:14 - John Schwartz: Vision and Teamwork in the Swine Industry
01:19 - Samantha Ewald: Wetlands as the Kidneys of the Earth
03:03 - Jamie Duininck: The Minnesota State Fair Experience
03:50 - Lauren Lewandowski Hamer: Recycling and Local Manufacturing in Minnesota
04:32 - Jamie Duininck: The Backbone of the Drainage Industry
04:50 - Tim & Pattie Krengel: Multi-Generational Legacies
06:01 - Toban Dyck: Agriculture Across the Great Plains
07:41 - Chad Klotzbach: Managing Water Quality and Quantity
08:43 - Jamie Duininck: The First Ever Water Table Live
10:59 - Mel Luymes: Legislation and Licensing in Ontario
12:24 - Karl Guetter: Insights on the 2024 and 2025 Seasons
13:14 - Chuck Brandel: LiDAR Drones and Cost-Effective Modeling

Episodes Featured in 2025 Wrapped:

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Jamie Duininck :

Welcome to The Water Table. Today, we are looking back at 2025. I hope you enjoy this episode. Today, I have a special guest on, John Schwartz with Schwartz Farm. John's quite a remarkable guy and has a really remarkable story about his family business and they're in the swine industry.

John Schwartz:

In my own position, and others like myself, aren't necessarily good at a lot of things. We may have some vision and some good foresight on, entrepreneurially, this type of thing, but we need a team of people to buy into what you're doing and to do what you're not good at. And I personally have always felt that there's many strengths I don't have, but one strength I probably have had is knowing who to surround myself with.

Well, I think that's what really motivates me. I think that's something that I put a lot of value on is relationships with the processors we sell to, to the vendors that we buy from, the independent contractors we work with. And I've learned to understand that life is not a zero-sum game. Those have been relationships that have gone on for years and mostly just handshake relationships.

Trey Allis:

Welcome to The Water Table Podcast. I'm Trey Allis filling in again and I'm joined here today with Samantha Ewald, a regional engineer with Ducks Unlimited.

Samantha Ewald:

There's a phrase that says, "Wetlands are the kidneys of the earth." And it's very true. When you take in water and you have a fully vegetated area that naturally is working in its natural ecosystem, the water that comes into that is, one, slowing down. So we're stopping flow rates, meaning we're stopping sediment, we're stopping nutrient removals in areas. If we don't slow water down, it can carry a lot of things we don't want with it and keep going until it stops. And when you find where it stops, say there's a low ditch or you get all the way to the river, you're going to find all that. So when we talk about wetland restoration, it's more than just the ducks.

But there's much more benefits on wetlands, especially in areas where we can slow down water that people don't even realize. I came from the Prinsco world. I understand why people are tiling and why we're doing it and the need for it. I come from a farming background. I was raised on dairy farms. My parents were raised on a dairy farm. I think with everything in the world and in life, there needs to be a balance. If we were to, like you said, completely farm every single piece, we're going to have a lot of other issues. And I think looking back at some of the history of just drainage in general, there were laws right when Minnesota was even a state, they said, "Yep, you're okay to start draining things."

And then it got a little bit further, but then at some point we realized there's some other effects to this. Yes, we're getting great production. We're getting water off the landscape. There was even language out there that's like water's not good, it's the bad thing, any surface water. And that's since changed because we're realizing how important that is. And I think that was just a mindset change of we're learning new things. As you guys are innovating products at Prinsco, you're learning new things.

Jamie Duininck :

The Water Table podcast had an awesome experience here in late August. We got the opportunity to go to the Minnesota State Fair and talk to all of the people at the fair. People are happy, they're eating a lot of food and walking around. And we thought if we could just go in there and ask anyone that we see that's willing to talk to us, what do they think about water? What do they think about recycled plastic? Those kinds of things. The conversation with Lauren from the Minnesota MPCA, or Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, was a great conversation. She is a trained spokesperson for the agency so it was fun to be able to talk to her as she had great comments about plastics and how they perceive plastics.

Lauren:

We have information about what happens when you do put the right things in your recycling bin. A milk carton, you can see the product it gets ground into, and then you can also see that end product, stuff like birdhouses and new picnic tables, park benches. And all of that stuff is made right here in Minnesota too, which provides a lot of jobs and is awesome.

Jamie Duininck:

I work for a company that manufactures corrugated plastic pipe for storm sewerage, agricultural water management, and we use all kinds of the milk jug type HDPE plastic. In Candia County, we can take what they collect in a year and we can make that into pipe in two days, what they collect in a whole year.

Lauren:

Oh, wow.

Jamie Duininck:

Today, I have a couple of guests and been really excited about the opportunity to interview Patty Kringle and her son, Tim Kringle. They're friends. They are customers of Prinsco and I think the heartbeat and the backbone of the drainage industry.

Tim Kringle:

There weren't too many other tiling contractors back in the 60s in our area. And it's a tremendously big area to do. The thing is, I still have these customers today. We still get up in that area, wherever we have to go, but it's continued on from the beginning, generation after generation. I'm taking care of some of the great-grandkids of some of the initial people from when I started. And that all attributes to how mom and dad started the business and ran it.

Patty Kringle:

I was proud of being the first woman to do quite a few things in the state of Minnesota. One of them was I was the first woman president of the Minnesota Land Improvement Contractors, and I was the first woman to be WBE in the state of Minnesota.

Jamie Duininck:

Women-owned business. Yeah.

Patty Kringle:

A disadvantaged women enterprise. I had my own business. My real name's Mary Lee, so I had my own business called Mary Lee Drainage.

Jamie Duininck:

Today, I have Toban Dyck with me. He is a trusted and respected voice in agriculture. He is from Winkler, Manitoba, and he has more than two decades of experience in agriculture.

Toban Dyck:

In one sense, we have our countries, the US and we have Canada, but in the ag sector, at least amongst certain people, we like to think of it a bit borderless in a sense. And if we're going to draw regional lines or put some sort of parameters on things, it'd be more like the Great Plains. We share so much across the Great Plains and you think of water management, it's very, very similar and growing regions and even crop varieties and all that kind of stuff is our traits that are shared into Manitoba and to Saskatchewan and then down to cut through the US.

These shakeups, their flux is inevitable. And I think if there's a silver lining on our side, I think it's a wake-up call. And I think there are things that the market's been a little bit complacent about over the last number of years that it might not be so much anymore. I think that's a good thing, if we can be a little bit more intentional. Even export market development for us, building those relationships, not being too casual about our relationship with the US, be very intentional about all those elements and then being very intentional about cultivating strong export markets elsewhere so that we're not so vulnerable.

Trey Allis:

Welcome back to The Water Table. Today, we have on Chad Klotzbach, managing partner with Allegheny Services. Chad, thanks for coming onto The Water Table.

Chad Klotzbach:

Yeah, no problem. You got it the first try, so that was good. 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, non-traditional drainage states, 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. "

Trey Allis:

Yeah. Do it with a backhoe and throw it in the ground-

Chad Klotzbach:

Exactly.

Trey Allis:

... and it should be good, right?

Chad Klotzbach:

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 NOCS 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:

Welcome everyone to the first ever Water Table Live podcast. My name's Jamie Duininck, host of The Water Table. This will be our 123rd episode in the last five years of doing this. The first one live. We're live from the O'Neil's Event Center here in Spicer, Minnesota. One of the reasons why we started The Water Table podcast was really the community doesn't understand. What we do is really misunderstood. I don't know if some of you saw Kent Rodelius who was here over lunch. Kent retired at the beginning of the year, but had been with Prinsco for over 40 years. And Kent always said to me, "People don't know. You'll get a call still a couple of years ago, once or twice a year, from a woman somewhere saying, 'Hey, can you sell me bathroom tile?' because they didn't know what this was." And I say that just because that's how misunderstood it is.

So that's really one of the main reasons why we started The Water Table was to be able to share what we do with our city cousins and why managing the water on the landscape is so important to water quality, even though they're being told it's the opposite when it goes through a drainage system. It's hitting the streams and rivers and there's nitrate in it and it's all polluted. In reality, if you don't have that system, you're having even worse problems with surface runoff and taking the soil sediment with it and the same chemicals. That's one of the ways that we want to continue to educate and to connect to the community is through things like this drainage school to be able to share technical information with you, the podcast to be able to educate, have all of the information on The Water Table website so people can go back and refer to it.

We don't know of a better way than just to connect person to person. It takes a long time, but when you're competing with the news stations and the media and even government at times where they have the misconception of what's being done or they have an agenda, it's hard to do unless you just go grassroots person by person.

Trey Allis:

Welcome to The Water Table. Today, we're joined by Mel Luymes, the executive director of the Land Improvement Contractors of Ontario.

Mel Luymes:

Our first piece of legislation in Upper Canada in 1792 became our Drainage Act, which solves drainage problems and it solves people problems. And essentially, it created the municipal drains, or you might call them county ditches, and the legislative infrastructure that would allow that to happen. And right from the get-go, our government was all in to drainage and has been very supportive of drainage ever since. Any contractor doing drainage installation needs to have a license, just like a driver's license, except way harder to get.

And it's still going to this day, so that means if you want to do drainage in Ontario, if you're a farmer, you could do it on your land that you occupy or own, but if you're a contractor, you need to have a license. That means that your operator needs to have a Class A license. It goes from C to B to A. At the end, an A operator will have passed the primary and advanced drainage course, have 500 hours in the seat being supervised by a Class A operator and then pass a test with a Ministry of Agriculture staff.

Trey Allis:

So like a road test, get to drive around?

Mel Luymes:

Oh, yeah. Not on the road.

Trey Allis:

Right.

Jamie Duininck:

I want to just share some insights on 2024 and early 2025 here as we enter 2025. And I have Karl Guetter with me, Prinsco's agricultural segment lead.

Karl Guetter:

There's going to be years when you can get your own work done. For those farmers that find themselves a lot of years not having the time, I would tell them don't feel guilty about hiring it out even if you have your own equipment because at some point you just have to get it done. Otherwise, you would just keep kicking the can down the road, down the road, down the road. We've hired projects out, even though my brother and I have a tile plow and all the equipment to get it done. We had a pretty good fall this year. We got a fair amount of pipe in the ground, but I would just encourage those guys to just think about, "I got to do something every year. If I don't have time to do it myself, just hire it done."

Trey Allis:

Welcome back to The Water Table. Today, we're joined by Chuck Brandel again. Chuck, thanks for coming on.

Chuck Brandel:

Yes. Thanks for joining me here in our Bloomington office, and I appreciate the opportunity to talk to you again. Many of the states in the Upper Midwest have public drainage systems. A lot of those public drainage systems were constructed from the late 1800s to the early 1920s, and they're in need of repair or replacement. So when landowners see that there's an issue, they contact the drainage authority, and when you have an underground pipe, sometimes you can't tell where their problem is. We will work with a contractor and the drainage authority, open up some holes, stick the camera in, and look at the 100-year-old clay or concrete pipe. When we work with a new contractor, we do what's called a courtesy run just to their first 500 feet or 1,000 feet.

Is everything going in right? Our clients are very appreciative of that because you can just avoid a lot of problems. We're in a time of great technology and technology advances. And we have a LiDAR drone. That LiDAR drone can survey large areas fairly quickly, accuracy to under probably 200s of a foot. So if we have to replace that 2,500-acre watershed, we can fly that area instead of having somebody drive it and walk the entire area. We still have to have some boots on the ground to measure intakes we can't see underground. We can gather a lot of that survey a lot faster, which means it's less expensive and that infrastructure project can be done more cost effectively.

Trey Allis:

You're looking at, say, that 18-inch pipe that's installed in 1902 has a certain drainage capacity, certain drainage coefficient for that watershed and land that is on. So you can model, whatever, three-inch rain on that watershed and say, "Oh, yeah-"

Chuck Brandel:

The areas where the crop will die because it's flooded too long.

Trey Allis:

Right. And then you can propose, "Well, if we put in a 24 inch, this is how that relieves that pressure from that land." If you upsize your drainage capacity, add in water storage, put in wetlands, all this other stuff that can all go in that modeling too.

Chuck Brandel:

Having that detailed modeling really helps us to make sure we get it right, design it to the right size so that it doesn't harm things downstream, but also design it to the right size that it can be cost-effective for the project.

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Jamie Duininck

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