southern MN | WJKEIGER - 7/5/2024 20:05
Is there any way that areas like those pictured could be ditched to drain out? I farm hillside fields where the problem with too much rain is keeping it from eroding our soils away.
Nearly all productive fam land in southern Minnesota has been tiled to make it productive.
Open ditches are the heavy haulers to remove all the water, and basically were dug out to improve natural slow shallow waterways.
Surface drainage, open waterways, do not work well in our type of rolling hills and clay subsoils. Water doesn’t soak down, it seeps sideways along the clay subsoil line. Often it seep down into the many shallow potholes we have in each 80 creating 3 to 20 little wet holes in each.
Water has a hard time moving more than 40 feet sideways at any speed here. So we need drainage every 80 feet, so the water can seep out timely. (Some can get away with 100 feet spacing, some need 40 feet depending on the exact soil type. I’ll use my standard 80 foot drainage spacing from my back yard, at that any point of the field is 40 feet away from a tile line.)
An open ditching at 80 foot centers would consume a terrible amount of land, so we do not do that. It’s all tile here.
The trouble is the whole network of rivers, creeks, dug ditches, and tile lines is designed to handle, say 3 inches of rain in a week if they are really new and expensive.
Older setups might handle an inch a week of rainfall, and assume the crops will use some, and there will be a dry week now and then allowing the soil to dry out and create room for a heavy rain 3-4 weeks from now. These systems are designed to deal with one heavy rain, and clear out over time for another heavy rain next month.
Some of the areas around me have had close to 30 inches of rain in 2 months.
The tile in the fields can’t absorb that much. The dug ditches can’t handle that much. The creeks are tearing our banks from not being able to handle that much. Bridges are closed from the rivers not being able to handle that much. If we improve any one thing, the next is already overloaded.
There just is no where to go with all that water. Remember, it won’t soak down into the water table ‘here,’ it needs to evaporate, get used up by a plant, or flow horizontally away. Our farm land is mostly over a very deep heavy clay subsoil.
Many of us have $500 to $1500 an acre invested in tile to drain out these fields. I would expect the pictures up above are indeed tiled.
The system just can’t cope with the heavy rains that we have gotten every 3rd day.
Paul |
July 4th Corn pics SW Minnesota
