ajblair - 6/21/2015 06:30

Thanks for testing your own water. Until we know what is actually happening on our own farm, everything else is not so important. The best thing you can do is test every couple weeks all summer long probably for more then one year to get an idea of what you are starting at for your baseline. Then you can take those areas that you know you control all the land the tile drains and try different management techniques on those areas and start to get an understanding of what you can effect as far as water quality.

As far as your N levels, soil organic matter contains up to 2000 lbs of Nitrogen per %, so if you have 3% OM, you have 6000 lbs of nitrogen in the soil. The unknown depending on weather, time of year, etc, is how much of that 6000 lbs is available at any given time to be used by your crop or leached down a tile line. Mother nature generally greatly overpowers the small amount of Nitrogen we farmers apply to our crop, she has already put down 20-30-40 times what we apply.

When you think about N management it is responsible to do our best to control rate and timing to reduce chances for our applied N to leave the field, but the bigger impact is going to come from things that are going to take a change in the way most farmers operate in general. Managing water coming off our fields, mostly in the form of tile lines by using saturated buffers, cover crops, wetlands, etc to filter all the nitrogen mother nature has put in our soils out of all the water mother nature throws at us.

Hope that makes sense. Taking a one time sample doesn't tell you much. Getting a consistent track record of samples along with rainfall data helps a lot to start making decisions. What really blows my mind is the timeframe - its a long road. I can't believe the people who think a lawsuit is going to do anything. There is not judge or jury who can snap their fingers and change water quality.



Agree with all thoughts. We have 100' buffer strips on every farm that adjoins a ditch or stream. I am going to run up to SWCD in the morning and get lined up to take properly samples for the next six weeks in succession. Might give a hint as to what is really going on. 2" of rain last night in 15 minutes. May be a day or so before my tile outlets are accessible? I will post results when we all near harvest. Thanks to all for your input.



Edited by rosefarm 6/21/2015 19:59