MSU Extension MI Ag Ideas to Grow With

So my name's Lyndon Kelley. I work for Michigan State University and Purdue Extension working on irrigation design and management issues. I appreciate our Stress Moment and discussion about stress. I found that one of the times, if you're an irrigator, that is the most stressful is when you're walking through that field in the upper right or upper left-hand corner, something's went wrong. The power's out or somethin' didn't get repaired in time, and you're walkin' through a crop that's showin' definite stress. And if you look at the corn, it tries to cut its water use by rolling up, pineappling, a lotta people call it. But it's just a feature that corn has to try to reduce its water use. And you wanna talk about stress, when I go out and visit producers and we're walkin' through that field that should be watered, and it looks like that, there's a lot of stress. Soybeans can do the same thing. On the left-hand side, notice they've flipped their leaves over and it looks silver. My son's tellin' me that that's, you can do that from 50 or 60 miles an hour goin' down the highway, you can see if the beans are lookin' good during the heat of the day, they'll be flat out and look dark green. And if they're turning silver, then we're behind. So those are a couple issues. Most of us don't wanna wait until our crop has that much damage and that much setback before we apply water. So we have this concept called irrigation scheduling. When do we turn the system on? How long do we leave it on? That ends up being the volume of water that we're applying. And then when do we come back and do another application, how long will that water last? There's a lotta reasons to talk about irrigation scheduling. Yes, we wanna maximize yield and quality. We wanna get maximum efficiency of the water that's there. We're gonna talk a little bit about minimizing disease potential, not applying when we don't need it and making applications that minimizes the number of times we have to get the crop wet. We wanna maximize our inputs, everybody thinks about the water or the energy it took to apply the water, but also your seed, your land cost, your labor, all of those things we wanna maximize by adding water, which is our greatest reduction in yield in almost all situations. Some of you are gonna be asked to do some irrigation scheduling and some record-keeping because you're raising production contract crops, and they wanna make sure within that agreement that you're meeting the contract, that you're supplying the water that was required to get the most out of those crops and keep the quality up. There is quite a discussion, I've got it in the green down there, especially here in Michigan, as we look at things from more of an efficiency or a protection of the environment. We're more interested in how efficient is the water used. Did you get the most crop out of the water applied? And then, of course, we have a couple places here in Michigan GAAMPS Requirements and their water use reporting has a conservation practices. And these are all designed to make sure we're not overusing water. And then last thing on the lower right is the contact information. I'll refer to that. The website there has a lot of the information that I talk about as far as being on the Web at our website. So as irrigators, what we wanna do is supply the water that nature doesn't supply. Michigan and Indiana are supplemental irrigation states. That means the bulk of the water that crop uses comes from rainfall in the season and soil moisture that is being replenished right now. But we start the season with a full water profile. And those two amounts of water, the natural rainfall, and the soil moisture in some situations, a lot of situations in our sandy soils, will not meet the total need that the crop could use to have its maximum efficiency and yield. So by supplying the red line, which is the crop water need, at the time when it exceeds the blue line, the rainfall that's available, what we're doin' is that little bit of water allows us to maximize the efficiency of the rainfall that was there, plus all of our inputs. That number is going up. Now, here's an oddity, it's hard to explain, but we are in a wetter environment than we were 20 years ago. 15, 20 years ago was the time span in the blue. If you had seen this slide 12 years ago, I would've told you that we needed about five 1/2 inches of water on an average year to raise a crop of corn to maximum efficiency. A little of that comes from longer-season corn. We tend to be growing longer-season corn than what we were 15 years ago. But some of it also comes from that concept that we have longer periods of time between rainfalls and we have greater amounts of rainfall happening at one time. Sometimes those rainfalls are greater than the amount of holding capacity our soil has. So even though we've got the rainfall and it's an increased amount, we still need more irrigation than we did before. The nice thing is on our irrigated sandy soils, we are rebuilding the aquifer underneath us during the off-season and by those large rainfall applications. All crops that we commonly grow here have a water use that falls between about 2/10 of an inch and a quarter of an inch. So if we look at an average of an 85 degree day and we talk about corn, soybeans, green beans, field beans, potatoes or alfalfa, they're all going to have their maximum water use somewhere between 2/10 of an inch, an inch every five days that would be, and an inch every four days, a quarter of an inch. So that's sort of our peak amount of water that's used there. And that's sort of the goal we have is to be able to meet that requirement. Some of you are gonna say, well, how did you know how much water's being used by that plant each day? Some very smart people in the '60s and '70s used tools called weighing lysimeters. These were a big box of dirt that you planted your crop into something of the size of like a semi-trailer on a scales level with the field topsoil. And when it rained or you applied irrigation, that block of soil got heavier by the weight of that water. When we looked at the daily water use of the crop, it would be the weight that was removed from that block of soil. So then all they did is made sure that they watered slightly heavier than the crop would be using so that there would always be some drainage out of the bottom of the box. They'd subtract the drainage off of the water going in and what they're left with is the daily water use. So that was an early calculation. They quickly turned that into weather information. And as we take a look at in viral weather and some of our other weather stations, we can predict the amount of crop water use that we have by the parameters that we think of mainly being net solar radiation, temperature, wind speed, and air humidity. So the question is, as an irrigator, do you have enough water? And this is gonna have a lot to do with irrigation scheduling. If you are short on water supply, if you cannot meet the requirements that the crop has, then you have to start watering sooner and you have to keep your profile, your holding capacity of the soil and the root zone of the crop you're raising higher to be able to make it through the dry stretches, if we can't meet the need each day. Most of the irrigation equipment and the systems that we see start out with designs set somewhere around five gallons per minute per acre. So if we were gonna irrigate 100 acre field, you need a 500-gallon-a-minute pump. That pump in the peak water use time, usually a week or two every summer in 2012, probably five, six weeks, you needed to run 24 hours a day, seven days a week to meet those requirements. So that's just meeting the requirement. If we were lookin' at vegetable producers, a lotta vegetable contract companies tell me I really ought to tell people more like an inch in every three days, so that there's some time off and there's some room in there in case we have breakdowns to be able to catch up. So five gallons a minute's sort of our planning design, seven gallons a minute if you wanna be able to take a day off a week. If you drop down into that category of 3 gallons a minute, 300 gallons a minute for a 100-acre field, then you're looking at only being able to put about an inch a week on. And there was, many years ago, that was a recommendation. But now at this point, what we find is that you about have to be applying water all the time at that inch a week to be able to keep up with the same yields. And there's times you're gonna be applying water and then it will rain, and you'll actually be less efficient. So do I have enough crop water capacity? Well, a lot of people, they may start out that way and then they add an extra pivot to the system. And all a sudden, it takes a week to get everything under water, to get that weekly use of water in. So what do we look at? Well, what we do is we tend to balance our crops so that the peak water use of the crops are not happening at the same time. So if I have two fields that are getting water from the same pump, I'm gonna put crops on those fields that have different peak water use times. The classic was to use corn and soybeans together. Soybeans have their peak water response. In other words, the time they make the best use of water is at R-3, which would usually be late July, third week of July. And at that point, that's when we get the greatest return from the water that we applied to soybeans. On the other hand, corn has its peak water needs at the week of tassel and the three following weeks. That's the time that has the greatest potential yield increase for the water applied to corn. So if we had soybeans being later in the summer and corn being right around starting the week before the 4th of July, we would have two different peaks that are there. Probably the question that we get now is, as we're planting soybeans earlier and earlier, and working on different time periods, are we going to get to the point that we're using, that having the same peak that's there. So we've already talked about these, when the peaks are. We looked at a field last year, planted two different maturity groups, a 3.2 and a 2.4 soybean maturity group, planted on April 18th, and then more than a month later on May 23rd. There was 18 days difference in when those different plantings reached R-3. So if you're looking at that time period, and you're limited on water, you wanna be starting to look at what crop is gonna be the most important and whether we're willing to sacrifice one of those, and not feed it when we have peak water use and we have a dry spell. So all this comes down to irrigation scheduling. And here is a nice little tool out there that helps me describe it also. This is a graph that comes out of the Michigan Excel Irrigation Scheduling Checkbook. Bruce MacKellar, who's online listening to me right now, is one of the major contributors to this tool and helpin' us keep it up and running. It generates an annual graph. If you take a look at this graph, the upper blue line is the maximum amount of water that the soil will hold in the root system. If I exceed that, put too much water on, that's the water at any point is the little pink dots that are there, then I'm gonna leach. That's leaching water that I either paid for in pumping costs, and potentially leaching out nutrients or other contaminants that head towards our groundwater. So that leaching's a bad thing. It's a waste of the national resource and the potential safety of our water supply. On the other hand, the brown line at the bottom of the chart is where we start seeing yield reduction. That's where the thin crop rolls up. It actually expends energy to reduce its amount of water that the crop is using. And that allowable depletion is where we would say, well, the crop is still gonna have the maximum yield down to this line, but we don't wanna go below that. And then if you notice here, it's like a big game of when to apply the water and when the rainfalls are gonna come. And if you look at that, the water was in the black bars at the bottom, the rainfalls in blue bars. There are times if you knew it was gonna rain, like right there at August 15th, if you knew that rain was gonna come the next day, you wouldn't have applied the water and you would have been able to avoid that. So that's gonna happen all the time. You can't know the future. But you can try to maintain some holding capacity. And if you look at the chart that the gentleman has here, most of the time he has some holding capacity available to catch a rainfall 1/2 inch or three-quarter inch rainfall without losing it, and yet still keeping maximum yields. So what we need to do is try to make that information more available. The scheduling tool you've just seen that Bruce MacKellar put together, it draws information from the Michigan Environmental Weather Network. This is 86 weather stations scattered across the state. And here at those stations, they can provide you with an estimate of potential evapotranspiration, how much a reference crop would use. And in our case, it's six-inch grass. So six-inch grass on July 11th used 21/100 of an inch. So a little more than an inch of removal in five days. That information's available to pick up off your computer. Some of you would say, well, I'd like to have that a little more readily accessible. So if you go to this website, they will send you a text each morning that has the last five days and the next three days predicted evapotranspiration for the reference crop. So this information is really available. I get three of these each morning. They come in at about 5:30. I hear them bing, bing, bing. And it tells me what the forecast was and what the recent transpiration was. So what I need to do is just add those together. If I look at a week here and I say, well, here is a week in the middle of July, where I had some cool days in there or shady. I didn't get any rainfall, but I did only have 8/100 of an inch, less than 1/10th of an inch. I had some fairly warm days with some high, Thursday of that week. We used 22/100 of an inch. But altogether, we used 1.12 inches of evapotranspiration for a reference crop. So you'd say, okay, so I'd need to use about 1.2, 1.12 inches, an inch and 1/12th to meet the crop's water needs. And I'd say, yes, if you were growing grass or hay crops, that would be true. But what we need to do is transfer that number into a crop coefficient that stands for our crop at the developmental stage that it's at. And what we've done is we have a coefficient, a crop coefficient, and it's just a multiplier that gives us the difference between grass and the crop we have. Now, if you think about corn crops, when we start out the year early, the crop coefficient's gonna be less than grass. In other words, we're gonna use less water than grass. So it's gonna be something less than one that we're gonna multiply. But then when we get into, I'm sorry, I meant to say soybeans, as I get into the R stages, I'm gonna be equal to grass. And at the case of R-3, the most important stage, I need 120% of what grass has. So that's a crop coefficient. Some of you'd say, oh, this is too much work. We've added a simple chart up here that just goes by temperature. If you have an 85 degree day, and at seed fill time I need 22/100 of an inch of water, that's what that crop is gonna use that day. That's a quick and easy chart. This other system's more accurate. Same thing for corn. If we said corn has the week of tassel, and the next four weeks are going to be its peak water use up through the beginning of dent, we're using 120% of what grass is, and the same temperature chart's available. This is available at the website. It's a free thing, I call it the dashboard method. You pick up that, make a couple copies, put it on the dashboard. We do have a register, just like your checkbook register, if you wanna fill it out. But at least get started looking at how much this is. This is the kinda thing that somebody calls and says I just put an inch on, was that gonna last three or four days? Or how much water do I need to apply on Sunday to make it till Friday? This is the kinda calculations that we can get from that. So this crop coefficient, we said it was 1.2 or 120%. I'm gonna take the evapotranspiration from the text message that I got. And that's the reference evapotranspiration times the crop coefficient, and I'm gonna use it to get the crop's water use for the day. There is a couple other tools that are up there. Some people like just an Excel spreadsheet. There's a very simple Excel spreadsheet. It walks you down from a full-pull file. As we use water, it goes down. When you add irrigation water, it comes back up. It's a very usable, easy tool. And there's some people that have used that and the text information from Mod Weather, and have got by very well. They can prove to people how much water they used. They can prove that they were not grossly overusing it. It's a good way of documenting without a lot of time. Indiana's got into the PPAC too, 86 stations in Michigan. We have five in the area from Indiana, Pinney Purdue, and then down at Columbia City, the Northeast Station PPAC Center. And they put theirs up for you to use. If you take a look at their tool, it's much the same type of system. Matter of fact, it would feed in if you have crop land down there, or if you're interested, you're one of those people that were on today from Indiana, it works much the same. Here we go. We've got four days, the last four days, we use 6/10 of an inch of crop off the chart. We talked about 120%, so 120% of 6/10 means I need to apply a little less than three-quarters of an inch, 72/100, and I'll be even, okay. If I wanna get a wetter profile, if I've been running too close to dry, I'm gonna apply somethin' more like an inch to gather that, or I'm gonna come back a day sooner to get that same thing done. Another tool that I think has probably got a lot of future for a lot of people, it's also one of the most available tools for crop consultants and contracting companies to take a look at. It's coming out of the National Weather Forecasting System. It takes a little hunting around to get there. This website is listed here. And there's also information on our Web page on how to get to here. But basically you wanna go through and the map will come out as a United States map. You're gonna zoom into our area, here I've got a Michigan map up. It's going to give you a choice between weekly and daily. So I'm gonna hit this button if I want weekly or daily. And it's gonna give you the reference ET or six-inch grass at that site. And in the same way, if you take the chart from the handout that we talked about earlier, and we said, well, at soybeans at seed fell and need a 1.2, this is the last week I'm gonna be at 1.2, I'm gonna take 1.2 times the 1.1 that they give me for my area, and I'm gonna need 1.32 inches of water that week to feed that crop. I'm gonna look at that and I'm gonna say, well, am I gonna do that in one or two applications? Or maybe I'm gonna use three applications over the next two weeks to get that done. We'll talk a little bit more about makin' those decisions. We don't actually water the crop, the plant. We water the earth that the plant is growing in. And that's dependent on how deep it's growing. If I have soybeans on an Oshtemo, that's Michigan's most commonly irrigated soil, and those soybeans are rooted to 24 inches of depth, I have 3.3 inches of water-holding capacity. If I had a corn crop in that same soil and it's rooted to three foot of depth, it is gonna hold me five inches of water. So now all of a sudden, if I have the profile full, if I get a thunderstorm on the 4th of July and it's full, and I use 2/10 of an inch a day, each inch is gonna give me five days. So I've got 25 days before it would absolutely run out of water, okay. It's a little warmer weather and I got quarter-inch removal, each inch is gonna give me four days. So I've got 20 days, just about 21 days of use in this soil. If I had a heavier soil like a Capac alone, we don't irrigate too many of those, but you see some in the Schoolcraft area, I've actually got about another week's worth of water stored up in that soil that's there. And then if you're on the sands, the absolute sands like a Spinks sandy loam or a Spinks sand, then I may have short of three inches of holding capacity. So if I'm a quarter-inch in a day, we're more like 12 days and we're out of water. So it's a big difference in what we have there. Irrigation scheduling on these Spinks soils has gotta be a lot tighter and more precise because we just don't have the holding capacity in the soil for it to have the reserve that we would in these heavier soils. - [Eric] Lyndon? - Yeah. - [Eric] Do you wanna take any questions now? Or do you wanna hold 'em off- - Sure, fire away. How can I help ya? - [Eric] I just have one. Somebody wants to know about the Wabash River Valley or maybe some areas with limestone like Putnam County, Indiana. Any information about those areas? - I'm gonna have to get your name and come back to you. 'Cause I really don't know the soils types down there, but I do have the materials to help me find that. And we could work through that. I'll put my slide up at the end of the day. When I do these meetings, I realize that all I really do is give you an idea if you wanna call me or not to talk about what you wanna learn. A lotta times, you get reference material and I know people go home, look at the reference material and say, hey, I would like to call that guy. In this COVID era, I live for your phone call to come. I like to help people, I like to talk about irrigation. Give me a call. Any others, Eric? - [Eric] Nope, you're good for now. - Okay, so this is the chart. It's actually the input chart from that Excel tool that Bruce MacKellar devised. The link is there at the bottom. But basically, this tool is putting in all of that. It's scheduling and telling you what that crop K-sub-c is. You can see that here under the canopy cover or K-sub-c starting out and then changing as we go. We add irrigation here. And then the rainfall it's taking right from the weather stations, or I can override that. So that it really becomes very automated and it becomes a good source of information without a lot of input. Some of you are saying, well, let's go a step farther. Why don't we actually look at the moisture in the ground? I hope you caught the earlier presentation by Dr. Dong about soil moisture meters. He's got a major project trying to make soil moisture meters easier for producers to get information out of, and cost-effective enough that we could put multiples in a field and be able to draw information from it. But really the idea is here's a matching schedule, irrigation schedule, from the tool that Bruce put together, the Michiana Scheduler, and soil moisture monitors in the same field. And if you notice, when we rose to the peaks two different times, both times at three foot, our soil moisture went up to the point we got a bump. We're always going to have changes at 18 inches or eight inches. We're gonna see those changes all the time, 'cause that's the moisture the plant's gonna draw from first. It's the first place that, when we apply water by overhead irrigation, that gets wet. So it's gonna go up in moisture and then go down as we draw. But really, if you wanna look at that long-term, did we make use of everything that's there, we wanna see very few of these situations where we peak over in the soil moisture content. For most producers, the important thing is they're gonna look at this line halfway in between. And when that starts dropping down into the lows, they're gonna irrigate and they're gonna try to avoid it ever having much impact there, the irrigation they apply, having much impact on the soil moisture deep in the profile at three feet. And if you notice, this one actually happened from two consecutive rainfalls right there at the middle of August. So I thank Dr. Dong for that work that's there. There's a few more of the sensors that are going on. A neat project with fields in both Michigan and Indiana coming up this year. He has an excellent bulletin talking about this whole idea of how to increase efficiency. Irrigation scheduling is a major section of that bulletin, but also size of applications and those types of things that'll go there. So it's a good capstone to what we've talked about today. So we talked about the other topic that's here. How do we manage irrigation, but not increase disease? Okay, so I borrowed this from Dr. Marty Chilvers, and he borrowed it from Dan Henley. It is a famous picture of 2019, a field that browned out from tar spot in the irrigated portion, but the dry corners are still dry. Marty would remind you, I've heard him a couple times in the last couple weeks, the irrigated portion still greatly out-yielded the green dry-land corners, but it also is obvious that it progressed that crop along maybe a little faster than we wanted to. And we're seeing that's there. So how do we do our irrigation applications so that we have the minimum potential to increase disease? So that's sort of where we're gonna go next here. Here's a few quotes there. The first guidance that we had comin' out on tar spot talked about things, but most foliar diseases require a wetted period to advance them. If we look at tar spot there on the second bullet, about seven hours of free moisture on the leaf is where we see the disease kicking up and progressing forward. So if I could water and have it dried within three, four hours, we aren't gonna contribute to a major amount to the spread of the disease. Unfortunately, few farmers have the ability to only irrigate, say, from 10 in the morning till, well, you can actually go back to maybe eight o'clock in the morning till like five or six in the afternoon. These would be the time periods that we would expect on a normal day that the crop would dry within three to four hours. But most of us don't have the capacity to do that all the time. If we do have a field that's starting to have a tar spot, maybe we would start looking at watering ahead and skipping those evening hours that would leave the crop wet through the dark, through the hours that we wouldn't have the drying happening. So just to make sure we aren't just talking about tar spot, here's the chart that Darcy Telenko, disease pathologist out of Purdue, has put together. And notice in the case of gray leaf spot, it could take 12 hours of free moisture. On the other hand, Northern corn leaf blight, a lotta seed corns treated for blights that are there six to 18 hours, so it's not quite as specific. Tar spot, we've got narrowed down to seven; Southern rust, six hours of time. And then they just splash up in some other incidents that are there. But our amount of water free time, as far as water on the surface, makes a huge difference. (coughs) Excuse me. So there's a couple things we could do. We could drip irrigate our crops. We see some sweet corn going in and we can greatly reduce the amount of fungicide needed to raise that sweet corn if we do drip irrigation. We have some subsurface drip irrigation going on also, but there's some major limitations there. Most of us think about drip irrigation really being the champion for things like Christmas trees that needs water a few years out of the beginning, and has huge spacings between the rows. Overhead irrigation really has prospered where we have total root saturation of the soil between the rows, probably by knee-high the time the corn or soybeans are half-grown. We've got better than over root saturation. - [Eric] Lyndon, we've got about five minutes left. - Thank you, I appreciate the warning. So let's think about timing. And we already said we can't all do it, but let's just think as far as limiting our applications to only the time it's gonna dry. But not all applications make a major effect. This is also coming out of that same equipment that Dr. Dong has been working on. And when we look at the last, I'm tryin' to remember, yes, last year's data, that first application that's marked up there with the green arrow was a quick irrigation. It only had the crop wet four hours. Only 1.7 hours of total drying time from beginning to end. So the actual sensor never came close to the seven hours it needed. On the other hand, we don't have control of some things like a wet day that happened there that gave us a nine-hour period, so we can't control that. Second arrow that came in again, an irrigation application, that only had 1.4 hours. The ones that we wanna try to avoid is that third arrow that's there. And that one, that application came in the evening and it ended up being eight hours before, at that location the sensors were at, that they dried. The rainfall is the next application that's there because we can see it. It took almost a day to get the total. And there's not much we can do about those. But timing's one thing that we could do to try to reduce that. The next thing would be, well, maybe we could avoid actually doing the irrigation application. Are we actually doing the irrigation application at a time that the crop needs it? Or as we get later in the season, like a lot of the tar spot is happening, could we use a little bit larger applications and less often, and use up more of the soil moisture that's in the soil profile, and avoid some of these later applications? One way to do that, we've already talked about the soil moisture probes that are there. That's an excellent way to see if we're there. Most of the time after you've gained some experience, you get a threshold number. You know that at two feet, you don't want it to drop below 30. And if it's still in the 18, 19 range, then you can say, well, let's hold off a couple of days and see if it rains, and avoid that irrigation application. We already talked about irrigation scheduling. We've looked at some of these applications that are here at an inch, if they were a little bigger, could we have went a longer time period there? But at least we avoided doing a lot of 1/2 inch applications and having twice as many total wetted points on this chart. We talked about that time period you could increase your capacities. Now that's a little hard in Michigan with the regulations that we got, but in some cases, we may be able to turn our machines up or run fewer machines at one time, and get our capacities up so we could water fields that were sensitive just during the day, try to maximize the water use efficiency by increasing, so we can have more control over it. Probably the greatest thing that's available to all of us is this idea of making fewer applications, but making them larger. There's two benefits here, more water to the crop and fewer wetting events. So in this scenario here, we needed seven inches of water to make it through July. So we looked at some data from 2019, and it needed, between rainfall and irrigation, we needed seven inches of water to get that corn crop through July. Two of it came in rainfall and the other five needed irrigations. So I've got a number of different applications all totaling five inches of applied water, five inches of applied water. So if you look at the second one down there, I did five applications of one-inch each. And that means I got the crop wet five times, and I netted four and 1/2 inches of water. That net number is, that we lose about 1/10 of an inch of the first water that we apply stays in the foliage and on the surface. This is that water that's left in the air due to evaporation until it evaporates from the leaf surface or the soil surface. So if I compare that one-inch application five times to a 1/2 inch application 10 times, I double the number of times that I got the crop wet plus I have 6/10 less water getting to the plant during July because I've doubled the number of times that I wetted the crop that that water just evaporated from the surface of the crop, never going through it to actually help contribute to the evapotranspiration process. Some of you are gonna say, well, I can't do that. Yep, you're right. We use a lotta nozzles out there that applied water very fast. If you think about it, the same amount of water is going through your machine at any one time. The only question is how far does your sprinkler spray that water ahead of you or behind you? We have equipment out there that, on a standard 160-acre machine, getting 700 gallons a minute, will put out water as quick as one inch in 12 minutes. And there is old high pressure equipment that would put one inch on in 80 minutes. Now I'm not saying go back to high pressure equipment, but somewhere in the middle, and most of the sprinkler companies have seen this coming, and they've got new equipment out that can spray water further with less pressure than ever before, and that ends up being less likely to have runoff and more likely to get more water into the soil profile. Any questions that we can try to solve at this point? - [Eric] Great, thanks, Lyndon. I do have one question so far in the Q and A, so everyone feel free to go ahead and add your questions into the Q and A box at this time. But before I get to that, I just wanna let everyone know that there's a survey that we'd like, let me go ahead and put that into the chat box right now. Love your feedback for this session, or you can even feel free to put in feedback about another session or the week overall. But then also, this is your opportunity to request RUP and CCA credits. So you can either click on that link in the chat box, it's a hot link, or you can copy and paste it into a Web browser if that doesn't work for you. So while you're doing that, I will read you the first question, Lyndon. It's a little bit long, but it's an interesting one. "La milpa is a concept that comes from agriculture "that illustrates my working method "and that is pivotal to the creative work I do. "The concept of la milpa, a crop-growing system used by the," I might say these wrong, but the "Uto-Aztecan, and Mayans "and other cultures throughout Mesoamerica "where at least three types of plants are cultivated, "corn, beans and squash." Here's the question. "Has your work investigated water use efficiency "to these crops to offer a nutritious diet "and complement one another at various levels "like sustainable development and things like that?" - Nope, we sure have not. Monoculture's could be bad, but on the other hand, monocultures also let us maximize the efficiency of the water used by that single crop. Here, I mean we have some inter-cropping that goes on. We have soybeans that are planted early into wheat, but at no point do we, and we may be feeding both of those crops at the same time, or watering both those crops at the same time, but we have not had any work go on as far as havinh two crops being irrigated at the same time that goes into that, sorry. - [Eric] Okay. - While you're lookin' for the next question, I get these beautiful pictures. If you're still on the slide that I have up, I get these beautiful pictures sent to me. And then I get some pictures sent to me that I have a hard time explaining to people. So I don't wanna get on anybody's back about it, but if you wanna turn off the general public about your use of water, what you need to do is spray water during a rainfall in front of them while they're driving down the road. Just a word of warning. I'll get that in there somehow. Thanks, next question. - [Eric] Or if you give them a car wash while they're driving down the road. - (laughs) Yeah. - [Eric] All right, well, that was the only question in the Q and A box, so thank you very much, Lyndon, for the presentation. You all have Lyndon's contact information up on the screen there. If you have a question, like this gentleman did earlier, feel free to contact him with some kind of area-specific types of questions, and he'd be happy to reach out to you. I'm going to leave the session open for another 20 seconds or so, so if you have not had the opportunity to click on that survey link, please do so now. And we'll see you back in about 10 minutes or so with Todd Feenstra talking about a water use project here in the Southwest part of the state. So meet us back here in about 10. - Eric, can you capture the email address for the gentleman that asked the multiple crop at-one-time question, and I can do a better job of answering him. - [Eric] We have that saved into the Q and A. So if you remind me later, I'll just pull that report for you. - Great, thanks. - [Eric] Although it was an anonymous question. So if you were the one who asked Lyndon about the la milpa question, because it came up anonymous, we won't have contact information, please go ahead and reach out to Lyndon at the email on the screen, and he can talk further about that with you.