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southern MN | In my clayish soils and wet conditions that would help me plant a crop that would still fail.
But your conditions might be way different. So this is a very dependent question, depends on what issues you are dealing with.
Your ditches would help with surface drainage, if that is your main problem.
Your ditches would be rather shallow, so they would not drain out saturated soil very well. Tile is put in about 3 feet deep, so water can flow sideways to it.
Your ditches are too far apart to drain out saturated soils. The middle between the tile runs might only dry down 6-12 inches. There needs to be a ‘fall’ inside the soil profile for the water to flow to the tile 3 feet deep. If I assume your ditches might only be a foot deep, there is not much lateral fall from the soil to the ditches.
So if your problem is spring flooding, but your soil actually drains pretty good on its own, then your ditches would help. Maybe quite a bit!
If you need the dirt itself to drain out excess water sideways to the ditches, then the ditches will just help you think you can farm the ground, but you will still have poor yields, lost crop, and muddy issues in all the spaces between the ditches. You will notice a visual benefit and you can nibble in from the ditches with field work, but the crop itself won’t end up surviving much better over the whole growing season, as most of it will still get water logged during wet periods and not dry out quickly enough to have great growing. As well you are giving up a lot of field area, which on a dry year might have given you more yields than what the modest drainage helps in wet years.
Paul | |
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Ditching ground to drain does it work?
