Ag Geek Speak
GK Technology Inc Team Members, Jodi Boe and Sarah Lovas talk about precision agriculture, agriculture mapping, agronomy and drainage.
Ag Geek Speak
19. Reading the Landscape with Dr. Tom DeSutter pt. 1
Join us for a captivating conversation with Dr. Tom DeSutter from North Dakota State University as he unravels the mysteries of landscape variability. Dr. DeSutter's expertise offers a fresh perspective on the delicate balance between soil health and agricultural sustainability, particularly in the unique terrains of North Dakota.
And now it's time for A Geek Speak with GK Technologie, sarah and Jody friends, and I can't wait to get in the fields again. No, I can't wait to get in the fields again. Can I call Tom? Are you going to be offended if I call you a geek?
Tom DeSutter:I am not. I would probably be honored actually to be in the presence of fellow geeks.
Sarah:Well, to that end, here we go. Geeks. Well, to that end, here we go. Hello, welcome back to Ag Geek Speak, where the geeks like to speak, and today we're going to totally geek out about soils and how we think about variability across landscapes. And we have a special geek guest for us today, Dr Tom DeSutter from North Dakota State University. Welcome to the show, Tom. Thank you for joining us.
Tom DeSutter:Well, thank you for having me. Often I remark about who my favorite North Dakotans are, and oftentimes it is fellow geeks, Jodi and Sarah, and so thank you for having me. I've learned a lot over the time that I've known each of you about the state of North Dakota, and that helps with the perspective. So thank you.
Sarah:Well, that's great. So, first of all, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, tell us a little bit about your background, how you got into soils and what led you to the great state of North Dakota and the job that you do at NDSU? And, by the way, what do you actually do at NDSU?
Tom DeSutter:Today I'm drinking coffee and sharing stories. And I get paid to do it, which is really kind of an odd thing.
Tom DeSutter:Anyway, that's pretty awesome I grew up in Northwest Iowa, a town called Haywarden, iowa, and it's about 400 yards from the South Dakota border where I grew up, and so my dad was a carpenter, my mom was a bank teller at the time. My grandfather one of them was a farmer in central Iowa and the other was one of the first Schwann's drivers out of Marshall that let the first depot out of Marshall, minnesota, where Schwann's is located and so grew up pretty much my dad's a carpenter. So I I I bent nails most of my youth and then went to South Dakota State to pursue a degree in something and and ended up doing five years as an undergrad. It's not uncommon, right, especially when you don't know what you're doing Did my master's degree at South Dakota State with Dr Sharon Clay she's a weed scientist there and so then got married actually actually 27 years ago today.
Tom DeSutter:Wow, oh, congratulations Thank you, thank you, and then so my bride. We got married. We moved to Manhattan, Kansas. I worked as a technician for Dr Jay Hamm at Kansas State and then pursued my PhD during that process, finished that with Dr. Gary Brzezinski and then did what's called a postdoc. So it's kind of the transition between your PhD and a real job. I did that in Ames, Iowa, at what is now the National Lab of Agriculture and Environment. Did that for two years and so 2006 showed up in North Dakota State University and started September 25th of 2006. And so I'm almost on my 18th year, I guess.
Sarah:Wow, that's great. So what exactly is your job at NDSU then, right now?
Tom DeSutter:Right. So my primary role is titled I guess it would be is environmental soil scientist, which basically means lots of things right to lots of different people, but primarily I've focused on historically saline and sodic soils as part of my research portfolio and then currently spend most of my time thinking about dry beans and water logging and salinity, but also the reclamation, the rejuvenation of soils that have been disturbed through the extraction of energy resources out in the western part of the state.
Sarah:Just to be clear on that, when you're working with that reclamation out there, it is primarily in lands that are going back into agriculture, correct?
Tom DeSutter:Correct. Yeah, certainly there's plenty of native type lands, of native type lands. You know, we have a big project near Watford City where along the Missouri River there's a lot of forest service land. That is fairly, you know, a lot of pasture-ish type land, not really any grain production. And then we do work a lot in other areas where grain production is the dominant land use.
Sarah:One of the big reasons why Jodi and I really wanted to have you on our show today is because back in the day when we were a couple of your students, we actually took a class that you taught called Soils and Land Use. And I don't know, Jodi, you'll have to give your perceptions of that class, but from my perspective it really did help me think about soils. You know, I've always thought about soils strictly from agriculture, strictly from farming specifically, and so it kind of helped me think about soils outside of that and how we might view them, you know, across the landscape and those sorts of things. Do you remember taking that class, Jodi?
Jodi:I do and I loved it and I have told a lot of students since I took that class that it was the best class that I took at NDSU and a big part of it was is not only were we learning about new terms, et cetera, of soils and in management, but we really had opportunities to apply those concepts from other classes and apply it to something.
Jodi:So one of the projects I remember doing was going and finding a piece of land and then looking into the soil series that it was and then writing about the other, the catenas or like the different soil series that combine into that. And I think that the part of the purpose was like coming from, hey, if you are looking to purchase a piece of land and the only information you have is what type of soil series it is, how can you tell if that's going to be a good investment or not? And really that's such a practical skill to be able to have some limited information, but valuable information, about a soil and determine, you know, what can I do with this and if I'm planning to farm this, am I going to be able to make my money back on this long term? That sounds really crass when I say it like that, but it helps you really read the landscape and understand its potential, and I I took so much away from that class back when I was an undergrad.
Tom DeSutter:Good yeah, you know you mentioned reading the landscape, right? I mean, there's a great book, that's out there that maybe someday we'll discuss.
Tom DeSutter:but Long story. So thank you for that, because you know I'm fairly pragmatic, I guess, and so you know, I think I myself of what I would have benefited learning more of or how to think about landscapes or whatever it is. But certainly when we think about soils right, we think about it from the standpoint of it's a chemical, physical and biological components physical and biological components. And when you look across the landscape, my whole objective with that class is that at some point you can think about the three things at once and think about, okay, where it is on the landscape, it's wetter, how does that drive microbial activity? How does that drive aeration, whether it's aerobic or anaerobic processes, whether it's aerobic or anaerobic processes, how does the soil profile and the texture likely change between the summit, the back slope, the toe slope, the foot slope, whatever, and sort of thinking about that from that perspective. So yeah, that's in essence soils and land use.
Sarah:That's how I approach the course, so I'm going to back us up because I think sometimes we get lost in some terminology, especially when we've got other audience members who might not necessarily be quite the soil geeks that we all are here. So, Jodi, you use the word catena. Can you help me understand the catena? Can you help me understand the catena? And then, Tom, you were talking about different locations on the landscape. You know the toe slope and all of those sorts of things. Why don't you guys describe what some of those words actually mean?
Jodi:So I don't even know if I'm using it right, so you guys will have to correct me. Soil scientists in the room. Please correct me when I say this, but remember, Jodi is a weed scientist.
Sarah:Yeah, I'm a weed scientist. Yeah, I'm a weed scientist by training, this is, but she plays a soil scientist on tv every day and does a wonderful job.
Jodi:I uh stayed at a Hampton Inn last night or a Holiday Inn last night, I can't even get the hotel name right. But anyways, if I understand and remember this right, isn't it um different soil series that are in a related area, so like the soil series that are on, like the depression, the back slope, the toe slope, that form in the same areas but they vary based on what position they are in the landscape I think that's fair enough, yeah maybe one of you can define that more simply than I did.
Sarah:j Jodi yeah.
Tom DeSutter:I mean it's all developed under the same same conditions, right? It's just how life over 10,000 years or longer has has altered those. So one of the beauties of the, the beauties of you know, of having been the instructor right. And then when you go to these meetings and you give, you know, you give talks, and then it's easy to like point out people and say Sarah, can you describe to us what the you know sort of thing is?
Sarah:And all of a sudden.
Tom DeSutter:You know she's no longer on her phone, but she's looking up and staring and wondering what's what is happening and so, but yeah, so the back to the landscape position. I don't know if your audience sees video on this or not, but I've had a bit of erosion on the top side of my head and so that would be more like the summit, would be like the top of my head and my shoulder being more like the shoulder back slope as you move down the landscape position to your toes, in essence the toe slope, and so changing in properties as you move from the top to the bottom right.
Jodi:And I think this is such an important discussion to have, because and again, this kind of goes back to when Sarah and I first had this idea of having you on the podcast because when we are using ADMS to make zone maps, what we're doing is we are, you know, starting out with an image of a field and then bringing in satellite imagery, bringing in topography information to make a zone map that makes sense for the field, and we ask ourselves these questions all the time is that, are these zones that we now have here? Is this describing the landscape that we're seeing? Is this describing how, maybe, water's flowing through the field? Is this describing how this world's serving productivity? That's exactly what we're looking for all the time when we're making maps, and that's what I think we try to help our customers understand too is how different positions in the landscape might affect zones differently. Toe slope, slide slopes, shade slopes, slopes that I'm making up the names of.
Jodi:These are all things that we may not know the names of when we're making these maps, but they're always things that we're thinking about. We just don't know that we're thinking about it.
Sarah:Well, and the topography across the landscape really changes. You know how the soil changes across, how the soil changes across, but there's a whole bunch of things that go into what changes soils and how soils form over time. And I think this conversation would be remiss if we did not bring up the infamous Dr Hopkins term of CLORPT.
Tom DeSutter:So, dr Hans Yenny, right, so you're thinking about the five soil forming factors right.
Tom DeSutter:Climate, living organisms, relief, parent material and time, and so the one that I think that probably isn't as easy to understand is probably the parent material, and that's generally what all soils have started from something, and in the till plain of North Dakota that's generally just granite, a rock, and so how that rock breaks down over time, which then dictates how the soils become soils right, because they started as parent material, but then they developed over time because of water weather, dictates how the soils become soils. Right, because they started as parent material, but then they developed over time because of water weather. You know hydrolysis of, you know the splitting of water, which then drives reactions, and so all this sort of like mushes into a bucket and you stick your hand in it and you mix it up over 10,000 years and you get essentially a soil, and so the the, the plants that have grown across the landscape positions, the living organisms, will dictate largely a lot of that soil development and so, unfortunately, gravity is also also very prominent. It's still active outside. You know you can pick up a pen and you can, you can drop it. Still active outside, you know you can pick up a pen and you can, you can drop it, and so that tends to move things down the slope, right.
Tom DeSutter:So if you get a, if you get a what we would call maybe a frog floater rain in in August, right, and so you know cause I think we've been fortunate here, as of the last few weeks we've gotten a lot of really good rains that are sort of soft right. We haven't had a lot of really good rains that are sort of soft right. We haven't had a lot of like pounding type rain. We haven't had this, and I was speaking with someone the other day and we really couldn't remember the last time we've had this stretch of the time where we've had this nice of a infiltrating rain. And so because most of the time when you think about these landscapes, you think about, like, the effective rainfall, and the effective rainfall is the rainfall If you get two inches of water, how much actually gets into the soil and how much runs off.
Tom DeSutter:Speaking with some of my North Dakota friends here this morning this was the first morning I think that people have noticed that standing water has been in the field, and so what that means is that now you have water has finally infiltrated into the soil, has filled the pores, and now the infiltration of that water is being decreased because of the fact it has no place to go, and so it's not because it's a pounding rain, it's just because that the profile is now full, and I think now you'll start seeing a lot of the tile drains really start running because of that, and so across the landscape, though, if you get a two inch rain that comes in an hour, that top part, top of the summit and the backslope part get very little of that rain, and so you do not get a lot of plant growth.
Tom DeSutter:If you don't get a lot of plant growth, you don't get a lot of plant growth. If you don't get a lot of plant growth, you don't get a lot of root development. If you don't get a lot of root development, you don't get a lot of organic matter put back in the soil, and so that's why, oftentimes, when people make their zone maps and they identify those areas, some of it has to do with erosion, some of it just has to be due to a depletion of water over the thousands, hundreds of years and not growing plants.
Sarah:And just to put this, what Tom is saying here, kind of into real life. So the Hillsborough Endon Station is actually between Hillsborough and Halstead, and so to do this podcast I drive from Hillsborough to Halstead, so I get to drive right by there, and this morning noticing puddles out in the field for the first time, and as of today, since the middle of April and we're recording this podcast on May 24th and so as of today, at this point in time, I think we are finally up around. Oh, we're going to be getting close to about six inches here, probably pretty close. We were at probably four, four and a half or five inches by this morning since the middle of April. And so now, because we finally had all of these infiltrating rains, we are finally at the point where we're seeing puddles in the field. But, to Tom's point, we really haven't seen those infiltrating rains like what we've had for a very long time in this area, probably a couple of years, to be quite frank.
Tom DeSutter:Yeah, I mean, I think, I think it's an exciting time for agriculture because you finally may not have to worry about drought as much come in July. Um, you know, we're, we're, we're. Last year of the year before, we just didn't get all. I mean, we had a lot of snow last year. I don't. I don't know if it helped as much as as we think it did, but anyway, back to your point. I think it's a, it's a good. It's a good rains and and a lot of good soil water.
Jodi:And I like the point, okay. So what I want to say here is you know, it's one thing to notice that there's puddles and there's water ponding, but it's another to think, okay, why is that? And again, thinking about your class and also thinking about what Sarah and I try to do with our customers is to help bring meaning to those things that we're noticing out in the field. And I mean that's why I love agronomy, because when you're out in a field, right, the field is trying to tell you a story. There's all these signs, but it's just a matter of you being able to read and interpret those signs.
Jodi:That's the same thing with looking at landscapes and looking at soils. There's all these different signs that are here that are telling you about the landscape. You just need to be able to see what's out there and then know what that means. And that's that's sometimes a challenge, right, you need somebody that also knows it. But like, for example, like if you're out scouting wheat in August or maybe late July, mid July, and you see a bunch of birds flying in and out of that field, okay, that's weird. You notice that that's something out of place. You probably have a bug problem going on.
Jodi:Same thing with like fields. Now, if there's puddles standing, that means that water is now filled up for that poor space. We've been replenished in terms of having enough rain in our profile. So again, all these little things that we notice when we're out scouting fields as agronomists or when we're in our offices on our computers making maps, those little things that you notice, there's likely something that that landscape is trying to tell you. It's just a matter of okay, I noticed that. Now, what does that mean? What's causing that?
Sarah:And do I need to bring that out in my zone map that I'm making? It's a great point, jodi.
Tom DeSutter:Yeah, I mean it's back to maybe a discussion in the future, but that reading the landscape and what that actually you know, not just driving by the landscape, but actually reading the landscape.
Jodi:Yeah, and again, that's agronomy. It's single decision agriculture.
Sarah:Because we get to actually map that and bring that to life, which is so cool, and make it into something usable.
Jodi:Right, because it's one thing to notice something, but then it's another to do and trying to help. All of you do is see these differences in these variability in the field and then bring that into something that you can then manage differently from elsewhere. So it's it's like putting everything together.
Sarah:It's like putting that book together and putting it out so that somebody else can use it, and it's the perfect blending of science and art all at the same time. Yeah, we literally get to color every day. That's all we do. Professional coloring by number.
Tom DeSutter:That is a. That is a. That is a wonderful profession to be a part of, right, and so you know. But you know, you think about all the training that you've both had, right. I mean, you both have master's degrees from your respective institutions one local one not, but that's okay. And then Joe, we could only get into Purdue?
Sarah:Yeah, they wouldn't let me at NDSU.
Jodi:I had to go away.
Tom DeSutter:Most all-weed scientists now are from Purdue anyway. But anyway, to have that sort of like that background and utilizing that background. And both of you grew up on farms and so you grew up in rural communities. You knew your community, you knew that and you know the support of your communities is so vitally important and it's not just the precision ag and helping people, but it's helping those rural communities thrive. Right it's like, because a lot of that, your successes that you offer, offer successes to those rural communities, those townships, and so I don't, you know, I think it needs to be stated that it's not just precision ag but it's like rural development. And so you know, you can kind of blow it up a little bit, but it's, but it's, at the end of the day, it's what it is.
Sarah:So blow it up a little bit but it's. But it's, at the end of the day, it's what it is. So that's pretty fun. I I do want to back this conversation up though. Um cause at at the beginning of our our our conversation of CLORPT um and the five uh soil forming factors, uh, climate, living organisms, relief, parent material and time, we were talking about parent material and how that can be a really complicated thing for us to grasp. Now, specifically, like in North Dakota, here we've got a lot of calcium in our parent material. Is that correct, Tom?
Tom DeSutter:Yeah, yeah, I mean there's certainly plenty of calcium is an ion, right? I mean there's certainly plenty of calcium is an ion, right? Salts would be calcium and anion would be a cation and plus an anion, and so you combine those two and that makes a salt. So we tend to group things, like you know. We just say salt because it's an easier way to sort of compartmentalize life, right, and so so we just say salt. But yeah, our pair materials have lots of uh, our groundwater has lots of carbonate in it and so, and we have a lot of calcium carbonate enriched groundwaters, which then obviously enrich our soils. I'm just the same. But so you have to have this carbon dioxide from the plant roots respiring and that combines with the calcium and you end up with a lime.
Sarah:So our soils tend to be pretty naturally rich in calcium, at least in this neck of the woods or prairies.
Tom DeSutter:Yeah, I think most arid and semi-arid. You know the valley corridor. The valley corridor is more sub humid, you know it gets more like 24 inches of rain per year, and so the depth of those carbonates tends to be a little bit lower. But yeah, it's definitely enriched in calcium. If you look at a base saturation, most normal soils are enriched in calcium.
Jodi:Can we dig in a little bit more to that and thinking about the theme of? Okay? One of the things we're probably seeing a lot when we're working on zone maps or just being out in our fields is that we've got salts here in North Dakota and we've got calcium carbonate, which is a salt, right? Am I thinking about that right?
Tom DeSutter:Oh yeah, it's a salt.
Jodi:Because it dissolves and separates into the ions, but we also have a lot of salts that you know make it so that it's very difficult to grow crops on. Can you talk about, you know, what in North Dakota makes us so different and why we have so much salt compared to, say, Minnesota, Iowa, South Dakota? What makes us unique in this challenge that we're dealing with?
Tom DeSutter:Yeah, so part of it is the parent material itself and that's. You know there's a lot of shales that were pushed, that were. You know, if you almost all the fields that you are in, you'll probably find some shale at some point, and you know it's easy to see If you go up to Langdon. It's like these Van and Co soil series. They're very coarse textured and a lot of that coarse texturedness is just because of the shale um and so, but that shale has is shale, is pretty much everything. It's got anions and cations and so it's fairly enriched and that got all ground up when the glacier came down through and and so that distributed these you know shale, and then the salts that that are that are within them across the landscape.
Tom DeSutter:And so thinking about, like, why minnesota might have less of that, or illinois, or something you know a lot of it has to do with the parent material, but it also has to do with the amount of rainfall too, right, I mean. So if you think about the hillsborough area, you you know you might get what? 24 inches of rain a year if you're you know 20 to 24, somewhere in there.
Tom DeSutter:But if you look at what the atmosphere demands from evapotranspiration, that is like why water evaporates is because you have a high concentration of water in the soil and the atmosphere has a low concentration. Well, things move from high concentration to low concentration and so water wants to move from that soil up into the atmosphere. So in the Hillsborough area, you know, the atmosphere demands about 40 to 45 inches per year. Okay, so you are in a deficit. Over over every year you are losing water to the atmosphere.
Tom DeSutter:And if you go out to the western part of the states you know where Jodi grew up you might get 12, 14 inches of rainfall per year, but the atmosphere demands 50 plus inches, and so the rainfall if in fact you got more rainfall would help leach those salts down and you wouldn't notice the salinity. But in fact, because of the fact that water wants to move up all the time, it's, it's not unlike if you take a paper towel and you put it into a, into your coffee cup, and watch that coffee rise up into the, the napkin. That is what's called capillary rise, and so that is bringing dissolved salts up, or the coffee up into the actual napkin. When the water evaporates, the coffee stain is left behind or it's on your teeth, whichever one it is.
Tom DeSutter:And so that's the salts that are being left in the root zone, and that's why we tend to notice it more, because of the fact that evaporation is driving water movement mostly, and so we always have to remember, too, that salts are dissolved in the water to some point, and then, when the water evaporates, the salts are left behind. So it's not unlike everybody's ball cap that has a white ring on it Same thing, right? That is not. Unlike around the wetlands, right? That's the same ring around the wetlands, right? That's not. That's the same ring around the wetlands is is that water wicks up the salts, the water dissolves, the salts are left behind, and that's why you have that white ring around, you know, your head, or or a wetland.
Jodi:So I think, in short, right, if we had more rainfall, if we had enough water that was coming down that was greater than evaporative demand, we probably wouldn't see as much salinity as we do here in North Dakota.
Tom DeSutter:If the water is managed from the bottom right, I mean, that's yeah, and so you can't? You have to sort of think about it. Managing salts is number one. Priority is managing the water, and so so if you can't, if you can't keep water from coming up, bringing salts with it, you will never reduce the salinity over time. But tile drainage does do a nice job of like lowering that water table so that water does not wick up very far enough, and then. So then you're removing that water, allowing that gravitational water to move down, dissolving salts and moving them down into what would be the tile drain.
Sarah:And so that is why tile drainage is one way of helping to manage salts in those types of areas.
Tom DeSutter:Oh, 100%, I mean that's. You know, the first choice is always it was crop selection or plant selection, finding something that is tolerant for that salinity level. But the more larger investment of course is going on, investment with tile drainage is probably going to outweigh trying to change varieties of a certain crop and try to just kind of play with it, as opposed to just taking care of the water.
Sarah:So you know, let's just visit about that for one second From a standpoint of trying to actually remediate and manage those salts long term. To actually remediate and manage those salts long-term, if you can possibly economically make drain tile work into the economics of that land management, that farming operation, that's going to be the way to go for long-term management. But if you can't do that immediately, I know from a zone standpoint, Jodi and I always try to, you know, make sure that we can manage those salinity areas within a field separately. And so you know, we can try to create different cropping systems in that zone. We can try to change seeding rates in those areas, certain crops. We need to increase seeding rates so that there's just more plants out there to use the water that's there. We can try to separate out and plant something like barley in there or those sorts of things. And is that kind of capturing that correctly?
Tom DeSutter:Yeah, I think you know the. You know the first thing, as you stated, Sarah, was basically a crop selection, and so barley tends to be our best, you know, our most efficient plant at growing in saline or droughty conditions, right, and it sort of lines up a little bit that plants, if they can handle drought, they tend to be a little bit more, a little bit more salt tolerant, and so, and the other way is that plants can you know things like kochia, unfortunately, or sugar beet I know I get you know Jodi says oh, a weed. All right, we got to talk about that. Some plants, most plants, require potassium to help regulate their water within themselves and some plants can use sodium as a replacement. And that's why some of those plants tend to be more salt tolerant is because they don't need as much potassium, they can use sodium in replacement of that. So genetically, you know that's maybe a mechanism to increase the salt tolerance of crops is to allow them to use sodium as a replacement to potassium in their water regulation.
Sarah:So but that's why.
Tom DeSutter:That's why kosher does well in saline soil, Right, and so so we have projects right now that we're basically we're sampling, we're trying to, we're going to, we're going to, we're going to digest the plants, determine what their ratios of cations are and try to get a better handle on what what's driving some of these salt tolerances.
Sarah:I also want to point out that when we're let's say we're in a scenario where where we're going to plant barley across an entire field and there's potholes there and andotholes are the surrounding circle around the pothole, is salt affected? I think it's also important to realize that just because barley is a salt-tolerant crop doesn't mean there do we actually want to make in that salty area versus the better producing areas of the field. From a conservation standpoint, there's no reason to be applying fertilizer to the same level in that salt-affected area as the other parts of the field, and so this is where the concept of variable rate yield goals sometimes comes into play.
Tom DeSutter:Yeah, I mean, I think you're a hundred percent correct, sarah. And then it's like how much investment you know if you think about quarters as your income coming out of a soil like a map of your field, and you think about quarters coming up, and the most highest yielding place has the highest stack of quarters you know, probably because of your investment and your inputs. But then as you move across the landscape, that thickness or the height of those quarters goes down, and in some places it goes underneath the actual field itself, and so you're actually losing money in those areas. So taking your approach of thinking about yield potential and the cost of inputs will dictate where those quarters are and how high they are across that field. And so, no, I like that. I like that concept a lot actually.
Sarah:I think it's also important to point out that oftentimes soil samplers, who will zone, sample many of these zones because historically we have used flat rate applications in these fields. Oftentimes we find accumulations of nutrients because the yields haven't been at that level, and so by the time you take into account your lower yield potential in these lower producing areas, these salt affected areas, and then you take, then you look at the soil sampling data that's coming back, you realize that there's actually an accumulation of nutrients that already exists in that area and then that helps you manage cost even more and so making sure that you think about these salty areas. It's really important for us to think about that separately from some of the greater producing areas in the field.
Tom DeSutter:You know we had I'm going to go back to Sarah you mentioned about. You know, do you put an investment in? So, one of the landowners we work with out in the Tioga area they are, you know, it was really the first time I'd really sort of thought about it. He had a field of peas, I think it was, and he was. He was he hon of whether he was going to apply any fungicide. I believe it was, and he was like, well, the crop is worth this and this is how much the fungicide is. And it's like, well, he'd rather almost take the yield loss and gamble on that than throw the investment in and maybe not get it right. And so it was really at that point in time when I was like, you know, we all have to remember that North Dakota ranks, you know, in the top or ranks number one in like 14 different commodities and so, but that also means that we are probably ranked number one in in in the number of choices that farmers have to make, right, and so, and so.
Tom DeSutter:I, I, uh, I grew up in Iowa, fully admit, you know. Uh and Sarah, what is was the first person that I heard I state from, and I didn't know if it was supposed to be an insulting term or whatever, but anyway, she called me. I was from an I state, so now I use that, unfortunately because I live here.
Sarah:It just means it's a state that starts with I. I know that's it, but there were no other ones.
Tom DeSutter:when I was in Iowa, there was the only one and so. But it got me thinking, sarah. It was like if you took a farmer from Iowa, which corn and soybean is like the rotation right and that's the choice, unless you're doing corn on corn.
Tom DeSutter:And so, but if you took you know the average Iowa farmer and you put them into, put them into Montreal County, burke County, you know one of these Western counties I don't think they last three years. The amount of decisions that people have to make annually is staggering, right, it's just, it's completely staggering to me.
Jodi:I completely agree, and I mean that's. I got an ag econ degree as an undergraduate as well, and that was exactly why I got it, because my first summer in undergrad I crop scouted for one of Tom's graduate students, lee Breeze. But it was amazing because Lee would make a recommendation and it would be agronomically correct, but the farmer might not end up doing that. And it would be agronomically correct but the farmer might not end up doing that. And it helped me really understand and think more about okay, this thing might be agronomically right, but the farmer is considering something else and making a different choice. Why?
Jodi:And to me that came down to like economics what's the part that's missing out of this equation? And it's the money side, it's the time side, it's the logistics side. Yeah, I agree and it's funny you mentioned that, Tom too about like bringing a farmer from Iowa into North Dakota. It's really hard to be a farmer here in North Dakota and I know it's not easy to farm any place. But from his perspective, right coming from a place that's primarily corn and soybeans, he understands that there's a lot more choices that we have to make up here versus farther and more of the traditional Corn Belt state and part of the country.
Sarah:So I think we've had a really great conversation about Iowa and kind of the I state concept and North Dakota and all the decisions that we have to make here. But I do want to point out that we actually do a lot of mapping in the Palouse area out in Washington. And boy I tell you what. The first time I made a zone map out there and you're taking into the shadows of the mountains, let me tell you how complicated topography data is out there. I mean there's two ways, there's up and there's down.
Sarah:It's not like mapping in the flats of the Red River Valley of North Dakota at all, and so it's interesting when you start thinking about how the landscapes and how the crops and they're dealing with different moisture regimes out there. If you don't have access to irrigation, you know it's going to be dead and at the same time they can still raise wheat in the dry land. They're making things work in dry land scenarios. But every place is unique to the very things that we're talking about. That concept of the I-state crop rotation of corn and soybean, that is unique to them and it's a very interesting system that they have to play with. The decisions that a Western North Dakota farmer has to make is very unique to there and quite different from an Eastern North Dakota farmer. And the Red River Valley plain in the clays right. And then, of course, when I'm thinking about mapping in the Palouse areas again, everything is unique. It's so fun to think about how the landscapes play into all of that.
Tom DeSutter:Everything is unique, it's just, it's so fun to think about how the landscapes play into all of that. Yeah, and that gets back to the, you know, reading and understanding the landscape right and so, and making the best decisions that you can with the data that you've collected, or the data that you can get, and then have the support of the agricultural communities and trying to better our lives and better, you know, the lives of the children, those that have it. So, you know, I think it's an important. It's not just about soils, it's not just about crops, but you know it's a much broader conversation.
Sarah:Well, I think that is a really great place to wrap it up for this time. Stay tuned next time for the next conversation that we're going to have with the great Dr Tom DeSutter, hailing from North Dakota State University, and with that Jodi this has been another wonderful episode from GK Technology where we have a map and an app for that I can't wait to get in the fields again.