MSU Extension Irrigation

 So my name's Lyndon Kelley, Dr. Younsuk Dong and me are from Michigan State University. I also work part-time for Purdue University. We do irrigation education and today we're talking about irrigation. Okay. So like I said, Dr. Younsuk Dong is a new irrigation specialist at Michigan State University, you'll be hearing from him a few minutes. Jim Camberato is going to finish up our day talking about some nutrient management and irrigated crops. And Kim Cassida is going to talk about some options as far as irrigated land and forages. The, these recorded versions of these webinars will be available at the Ag Engineering website at Michigan State University. And we may expand where those that are available. Also at MSU and Purdue, we believe in equal opportunity for all of those people that we're educating. And our statement is at the bottom of the first screen. Huge difference the last three weeks have made. Most of us have refilled our profile. In other words, we think about irrigation from a standpoint of our soil in the root system being the piggy bank. And we've, most of us across Northern Indiana and Southern Michigan, mid Michigan have refilled that profile here in the last three weeks. In other words, we've got more rainfall than the crop is going to use and that the waterhole capacity in the root zone can hold onto. When we look at the map here of Indiana and Michigan, you'll notice that the last week, most of us got more than the crop could use. Some of us just even up. It was a base week. You can fit this map off of the network federal debt, whether network at the link provided at the top. Also at that same link, you can find out what they estimate the next week of reference ET, and reference ET for our case is six inches grass, six inch grass. And you say, Well, I'm not raising six inch grass in my field. But what we're using a six inch grass is our reference. So we've done that across the whole country. And we tell, we calculate how much six inch grass would be. And then we're going to talk in a second about how to convert that to a number for your field crop. And for this time a year, the numbers that are up there for Michigan and Indiana are a little bit below normal. Normally we'd be at like 1.4 or1.5 inches a week. In other words, we need an inch and a half to keep up as far as rainfall or we'd need to add irrigation or use soil moisture to get there. So we've had sort of a cool, nice week ahead of us and behind us. As far as water use with a little under normal amounts being used there. And the link will take you to that page if you want to look these up yourself. We said we'd do a little bit of irrigation scheduling education here. If you had a corn crop, and that corn crop was at V 14, in other words, it's not, not shot, it's tassel yet, but it's close. It's going to use a tenth of an inch more than grass, 1.1. So that's called a crop coefficient. The coefficient for corn at that, the V14 is 1.1 or a 10th of an inch more than grass. So when we times that at times are around 1.28 reference ET number, evapotranspiration number, that's the number that crop used plus the evaporation from the surface. We end up with about a 1.4 for the week. So we would say that this week, you're going to need 1.4 inches of water to keep up, to hold everything at the same place. You get less than that between rainfall and irrigation, then you're going to use up some of your soil water holding capacity, some of your piggy bank in that root zone. And if you go over that amount, you're going to add to that. Most of us are going to have, if we think about eight tenths of an inch of rain over the last week, we're going to be right in there. Where are we're down from the top of our holding capacity about six tenths of an inch. That's important for people that are going to put nitrogen on this week because we don't want to put that nitrogen with irrigation water on the field in capacity greater than what the field can hold. In our example here, that would mean that we'd have to go on with a half an inch or less to be able to get that nitrogen in and still keep it in the profile. And then we did the same thing for soybeans. Soybeans can take a little bit more stress, and at this point they're using a little less water. Their crop coefficient being six tenths of an inch. Coming up with eight tenths of an inch as far as the crops actual use. From there, we'd like to go to Dr. Younguk Dong, He's going to talk to us a little bit about some irrigation management aspects that he's been working on. Alright. Thank you. Can you see my slide? Yes. Okay. Good. All right. Well, thank you, Lyndon. My name is Younsuk Dong. I am an Irrigation Specialist in Biosystem Agricultural Engineering department at Michigan State University. We thank you for the opportunity to talk about how we can improve irrigation water use efficiency using weather based irrigation scheduling tool. So in this presentation, I'd like to look over the concept and background information for the weather based irrigation scheduling tools. And then describe the tools such as MSU Enviroweather Network Program, MS irrigation Scheduler Program, and IrriSAT. So first of all, I'd like to briefly talk about some background information for weather based irrigation scheduling tool. So evapotranspiration is the major parameter for all of the weather based irrigation scheduling talks. So evapotranspiration, estimates the transfer of water vapor from the soil surface and canopy and leaf surface to the atmosphere. The evapotranspiration is important part of information for irrigation scheduling because this estimates how much water has been lost to the atmosphere. There are four major factors involved in evapotranspiration from atmospheric side. The first one is solar radiation. So the predominant source of energy to evaporate water is the sunlight. So the more solar radiation, the more evapotranspiration. The second factor is air temperature. So the warmer the air or evapotranspiration. A third is relative humidity. So the dryer, the air, the grader for evapotranspiration. We lastly the wind speeds, so the greater the wind, the greater the evapotranspiration. So Lyndon earlier talks about how we can get our actual crop evapotranspiration. But, but here is again on the ET. Evapotranspiration can be estimated in different ways. So, one of the techniques they accept that as an international standard is actual crop evapotranspiration equation, which is used to obtain what is called reference potential ET. So reference potential ET assume of 40 inch grass cover surface. That is where water and shade. Reference potential ET is based on the four-inch egress. So in order to find our actual crop evapotranspiration, we need to multiply reference potential ET evapotranspiration transpiration by the crop coefficient, which is Kc here. The Kc  is just multiplier value that allows to calculate actual crop evapotranspiration for specific crop types at a specific development stage. or this figure is an example for crop coefficient for soybeans. So as you see here, the crop coefficient change as the crop growers. So it is important to know the growth stage of your crop, to estimate actual crop evapotranspiration. What are the weather based irrigation scheduling tools available for us to use? Or the first tool active mentioned is MSU Enviroweather Program. I believe there are more than a hundred weather stations installed in Michigan and some in Wisconsin. You can use the link here in below to get to the website. They are currently transitioning to a new website. But you can still find the same tool using the bottom link. MSU Enviroweather Program provides daily reference evapotranspiration value from each weather station. Which is very useful information for understanding how much of water from my field has lost to the atmosphere. They have a program, It's called Enviroweather RPT forecast sign up tool. So this tool uses the current and forecasted weather condition to asked me how much irrigation is needed to replace, what is lost to the atmosphere due to the evaporation from the soil and transpiration by the crop. This alert, sends a daily list of potential evapotranspiration for the last four days and next five days based on weather data from the selected weather station. The user can select to have these alerts sent by text or email. And the user can setup to get alerts for multiple Enviroweather station. This morning I received an e-mail from Enviroweather at 5:30 am. This email in the right figure, this e-mail includes that last four days and next five days of reference, potential evapotranspiration for Constantine. So how, how can I use this reference evapotranspiration values to understand how much water is being lost in my soybean field today. So let's say by soybeans at B3 growth stage right now. So the crop coefficient is at 0.6 and today's preference potential evapotranspiration is 0.17 inch. So your 0.6 times 0.17 is equal to approximately 0.1 inch. So about 0.1 inch of water will be lost from the soybean field to the atmosphere today. So next I want to mention is the MSU Irrigation Scheduler Program. You can download the program using the link below. Each year, the MSU Water Irrigation. When you go to the website, you can find the scheduler in the Quick Links section. The MSU Irrigation Scheduler Program is an extra version of an irrigation scheduler, which can be easily adapted for irrigators who are comfortable using Microsoft Excel. On the right figure is a screenshot of the menu tab in the MSU Irrigation Scheduler Program. And there are eight buttons available to set up the scheduler program, download the weather data from Enviroweather, and third, the irrigation or rainfall data and generate the multiple reports. Or to setup the scheduler program on the user needs to input their field information such as soil type, crop type, emergent state, the new list on Enviroweather station to the field. Irrigation amount per application, irrigation trigger points. There's a table under the field identifier. It is called opacities and soil. These values determine soil type, and are provided by default. However, they are user definable. So if you know the specific type of your field, and initial water capacity, you can just type the values in this table. So once all the information is entered in, the user can click the button at the bottom to initiate the scheduler for corn or soybean or other crops. In the calculations tab or user can input their irrigation amount and correct the rainfall amount if necessary. And observe the calculation on all the details. One thing to mention here, the rainfall and irrigation barriers are automatically downloaded from MSU Enviroweather website. This calculation tab, you can see the river water in the root zone, the percentage of soil water capacity field, the drainage, additional soil water capacity of the root zone and project ET, and estimate the growth stage and so on. So there is a lot of information you can find here. In the soil moisture tab in the scheduler program, there is a graph that describes the river water in the root zone and maximum water holding capacity in the return. An allowable depletion and full water, bordering capacity lines. The recommendation for proper irrigation is to maintain the available water in the root zone values, which is pink in this graph. Pink line between the blue, which is for water boarding line, and brown line, which is, which represents allowable depletion. So if the water, if the well water in the root zone is above the blue line, which is the full waterboarding line. This means the water will move below the root zone. If the available water is below the brown line, which is allowable depletion line. This means the crop might be under water stress. Ok. This information will help the irrigator to provide an adequate amount of water to the crop while preventing crop water stress and irrigation. On the right side, the right figure is the weekly report that is generated by the scheduler program. This report includes water in the root zone and 40 case forecast evapotranspiration will generate this report yesterday for a soybean field in Constantine.  It looks like irrigation could be applied on with the next couple days if there's no predicted rainfall soon. As water capacity, which is blue line, are pushing to irrigation threshold, which is red that line here. Where lastly, I'd like to mention that eerie step program. So this program was developed in Australia, but can be used the worldwide. Uses a satellite image to determine the NDVI, normalized difference vegetation index, for each fill. This can be determined. And a specific crop coefficient can be estimated. An advantage of software, of this software is that it allows you to observe the condition of your crop visually. But the disadvantage is that the data is only uploaded once a week and depends on not having cloud cover as the satellite go over your field. So if there is cloud, cloud cover your field, you might not have the data for the week. The link for the website is shown in below here.  So all the tools that I mentioned today require some basic site specific information to understand how water moves. Some tools need information such as the evapotranspiration, soil type, each emergent state, rainfall and any other tools or issues with the downloading the data or program, just please let me know. I'd like to mention that I'm going to talk about how to improve irrigation water use efficiency using sensor technology. So if you're interested in using sensor for irrigation scheduling, please join the next session as well. Thank you. Lyndon is it you now? Yeah. You're muted Lyndon. Working on it. Okay. So now share my screen. Are you there? Yeah. Put it in presentation mode I'm seeing your slide deck. Okay. As we said, you'll have to, you'll have to do the display setting, flip it one more time. Remember how we did that up at display? I think as we said, Betsy will keep us in line and try to get the things out. So I'm going to quickly run through a review of fact sheet that we've been using that MSU. We use this primarily with people that are working on a new installation. It's worked well for people that have experience as just a reminder of things to go through and people that are new to irrigation. And so it's up on our sites as irrigation planning checklist. So it's something that several of us have contributed to over the years. If we look at irrigation, our goal is to just supply the water that rainfall doesn't. So that water is not the limiting factor to yield. Here we got a graphic with the blue lines showing in our annual or monthly rainfalls and our red line, the consumption by corn, although all crops sort of follow a curve much like that, somewhere in, around the late June, rainfall doesn't keep up with what the plant could use an optimum conditions. And we use irrigation water to do that. Luckily, here in Michigan, most of the year we're recharging the aquifer so it gives us a good water supply in areas that are sandy, sandy loam soils be able to draw from. So there's a number of topics on there. The important thing on this page is this is the link at the bottom to get this checklist to look at. First water requirement, waters the heart of the irrigation system. You need to have enough to be able to get the investment out of your equipment and land. If you're short on investment is just going to be like a runner with a poor heart. You're always going to be able to not do as much as what you're, the rest of everything else that you've invested in. Good. So how much water do you need? Well, most of our crops, whether we're talking potatoes, green beans, flowers, anything that takes up a 100 percent of the sunlight that hits the ground is going to use somewhere between 2700, so little over a quarter of an inch, but less than a third of an inch on those hottest days. And we want to build our system to be able to keep up with those hottest days. We do have some soil moisture reserve that we can use in there, but we'd like to at least be able to keep up with the system for five or six days in this scenario. What's that mean? Well, if you're a large aggregator and you're dealing with acreage, five gallons a minute pump capacity. So pumped with five GPM or five gallons per minute pump capacity, be able to supply a quarter of an inch a day, slightly less than our peak. But that's the place that most people find to be the most economical direction that goes there. We had a lot of vegetable producers in the crowd. They would be saying no lended, we want to be able to take a day off at five gallons a minute. We're going to have to pump every day, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. During those hottest, driest spells. We need to have some backup time. So they would say seven gallons a minute to do that. So what's that mean? If I have a 100 acres, I need a 500 gallon a minute pump to go through that. Some of you out there are trickle irrigating and we have the chart there. That's going to give you a equivalence to the larger numbers, but just in smaller scale. Remember when we trickle irrigate or methods of irrigating that don't irrigate every portion of the acre. In other words, we're only irrigating the trees because we have the excellent distribution from a trickle system, then we only think about it from a standpoint of what are we irrigating that gets sunlight interception and we reduce those down. So you may not need five gallon submit it. You maybe need one gallon a minute because your, your Christmas trees are only getting a quarter or 20% of the total sunlight area. So, are you going to say, well, do I have the right to use the water? Well, that's all out there. We're going to cover a couple of different aspects. One of the aspects that were talked about in the checklist is the registration and water rights that are in there. Both Michigan and Indiana have, as part of the Great Lakes Charter, have adopted a registration process in Indiana, we call it the significant water users. In Michigan, we call it the large volume water users. In both states These are people that have a capacity to pump 70 gallons a minute or more from a combination of pumps used on a single farm. Say both states are following that. Great Lakes compact, no adverse resource impact. Michigan has a tool called the MIWWAT tool,  the Michigan water withdraw assessment tool, that tells you whether your proposed withdrawal is likely to cause an adverse resource impact according to their calculations. In both cases, both in Michigan and Indiana, if you have a registration, then you need to report your monthly water use. If you're planning a new system, make sure you have a system in there to calculate how much water use per month. It may be nothing more than the number of minutes or hours that you ran in that month, times the capacity. But we need to have a system to together to record that information. Michigan to Indiana, are riparian states, that means if you own the land, you have access to the water as long as your use of the water does not impact other people and their use of the water. So it's not like we're out west where we talked first and use first in right. It's more of a balancing act that goes there. The biggest issue that we seem to see is that if you're using surface water, your land must be a joining the surface water edge, to be able to use that. For our riparian doctrine. Another thing that comes into point, if in both states, both Michigan and Indiana, if you're using greater than 70 gallons per minute and your large well impacts the small whole well around you, you will have to make them whole. You'll have to modify their well or to replace their well so that their home water use or their small water use, less than 70 gallons a minute, is not affected by your large water use, greater than 70 gallons a minute. And on the slide here we have the complaint number for Michigan, 1800, I'd say actually a 855 number. If you have a negative impact, There's lots of ways getting water and there's a couple paragraphs on each of these describing them in the, in the FAQ sheet. The bulk of our water is coming from deep irrigation wells, often ten to 12 inch wells, producing six to 1000 gallons a minute. But we do have some suction wells and horizontal wells out there. Those are using centrifugal pumps and sucking the water from the ground. And then in, sort of in the middle are those 6 and 8 inch wells for greenhouses and smaller scale overhead irrigation systems. It's a good idea to look at what, how other people are sourcing large volume water. Look at their well, who installed there well, see how happy they are with it. There is a well code in Michigan that requires the well driller to file a well log in. You can look at those well logs or in your community. You get a good idea about who we are, how deep the water is, and what kind of structure it is, and what people are working in your community that have had good success. And a lot of times that's the best information is that, well driller that's had success in your area. The same thing goes for surface water, especially if you're digging possible. Usually there's an excavator in an area that does a lot of time digging and he'll have a good idea of whether you'll potentially be able to get water from an inlet from upon if you're using freshwater. A couple of things to remember: You need to be able to either get about three foot below the surface of the water so you don't create a vortex that sucks air. Remember you're sucking the water out of the river or lake stream. So we've got to make sure that we're not sucking in air. And then that water does have some potential contaminants in it. So we need to think about whether that contaminant is something that's going to affect our vegetables or those types of things, disease issues, those types of issues that are there. I've got three different headlines here. There's actually about a page information on the check list here all about planning. As far as, is there a way I can share this with the neighbor? If you look at the field on the diagram there, that's actually two different owners, one to the south and one to the north. And it makes it dramatically more profitable to be able to split that with the neighbors. So you look at those options of sharing with a neighbor and how you would do that in a lease agreement or a rental agreement, or an agreement between the two of you to share those costs. Map your projects out, acquire an aerial map and think and the long run. Make sure that we get adequate water in, in line in case we could expand. It'd be terrible if the guy to the north put that pivot in and they didn't have enough water capacity by him and the neighbor reached an agreement to be able to cover that plan too. So do a little planning. Get multiple beds. The way the big advantage of multiple beds is to get three or four different people to look at your site and come up with their best plan. Somewhere between those plans is going to be the ideal option a where to be. But to come up with the ideas, it works best to get those people that had been designing irrigation equipment to look at that, get a couple of different ideas of where to go with it. Power is the next big expense. Once we get through investing in our irrigation or equipment, we've gotta add the power to it. Hands down the cheapest source of power is three-phase power. In Michigan. There's only been a few years out of the last 30 that diesel power has been cheaper than three-phase power, and it was long ago. There's a conversion chart there. If your bio diesel fuel at $3, you could pay 20, almost $0.24 a kilowatt hour. Most of us are going to pay somewhere in the neighborhood of $0.11 a kilowatt hour. So it's about, it's less than half the cost. He is three-phase power. When you add to that. Electric motors are about half the cost of diesel engines. Far easier to maintain. You don't have the oil and radiator to worry about. And far easier to add automated controls. So three-phase power is the place to be. A lot of times we're spending time with farmers calculating how much you can subsidize the local power supplier to bring you three-phase power over a 10-year investment. A lot of you are thinking irrigation economics. What can I afford to pay for that? The first call I usually get is how much does it cost to add irrigation? So on the website. We can point you to some fact sheets that are using the DIRTI formula. That's the depreciation, interests, repairs, taxes, and insurance, what it would cost over ten years to own that. Here's a quick synopsis of that. Basically the cheapest, is going to be somewhere right around a $100 for the equipment and a $133 to put seven inches through it. And that's going to be a standard 160 acre pivot with a well right in the center. And then the costs more than double as we go up to smaller fields and and less total acreage covered. We need to add to that how much income you have. An excellent tool there and the link developed by Dr. Roger Betz, at Michigan State University. It's a capital investment model. It compares your dry land farm scenario to your irrigated scenario in your investments. Takes a little time to set that up, but it has an excellent results that are there. If you have time to look at this slide here, Here's the slide, the last set of comparisons we did for last winter. And notice corn has shot way up above where we were in 2020. When we were talking producers. At that time, we couldn't afford to pay for irrigation equipment unless it was a very low cost investment and a high-income that was there. Things are turning around this why we're talking to more people. Make sure that when you're making this irrigation investment, you're not trying to build it and they will come, make sure you have something actually wind up. If you're thinking about seed, corn or vegetable crops or feed contracts that are out there. They do exist, but it takes a little bit of work to having those in place. So do your homework over the summer here, see who's talking about working together. Most of the irrigation equipment in Michigan and Indiana has been bought with the help of some of these contracted crops. And then last but not least, before you make this investment. And this is probably more from my wife and family than anyone else. Before you make this investment, makes sure you're thinking in the long run and how it's going to change things. Your summers will never be the same. Once you add irrigation, summer will be the quickest time of the year. I remember growing up we didn't have irrigation once we had the nitrogen on the crop. We had a couple of months to take vacation until we harvested that crop. Now when you add irrigation, you're doing something all the time during that summer and that changes things. Irrigations are very equipment heavy investment. So it doesn't work well to only use it as an insurance policy. You need to be thinking about getting those higher yields every year. And then last but not least, make sure your lenders involved and make sure that you realize that once you add that irrigation, it will increase the value of the land. It will increase the value of the land greater than the investment of the equipment. And that will raise your neighbor's land, and it will raise the value of your land. So think about that. If you're adding irrigation to rental properties of properties you want to buy in the future. All of this information is in that irrigation checklist. It's designed to be there to help you think about what questions you need to be asking people. A lot of times when people talked to me about near new irrigation investment, I'm guiding them to that checklist, letting them take a couple days to look at it and then getting back with them and the questions just get more intense as we go. From there, Betsy, we want to go to Dr. Kim Cassida. And talk about  forage crops. Forage crops, we've had a little bit of a shortage scare earlier in the season. And we have some interest in being able to use some of our irrigated land to help out in the possible feed shortages that are out there. Dr. Kim. I hope you can all see my first slide. Hello to everybody. Lyndon had asked me to talk to you a little bit about what some of your options might be. But also for this little short presentation, we're also making the assumption that some of you may not be really familiar with how the hay industry works in Michigan because you haven't grown it before. So the first question I want to talk to about is just why should you even consider growing forage under irrigation? It's not the first thing we think of here in Michigan for sure, but there are some producers who do it. But one of the things that is important to remember is that the Hay market, again, as it is a national market and a large part of the country has been under a drought for a fairly significant period of time now, even though in Michigan was one of them until just recently. But what we find is that our hay stocks because of this, when those were assessed in May 2021, they were below normal. And dropping in many states across the country. So the red states on this map are the ones that are seeing a decrease in their stocks. Another way to look at that is this chart just for Michigan looking at, hay stocks over about the past in years, where the the blue line represents the hay in storage in December, which might be considered as the maximum amount of hay available after the growing season. And then the green line shows the stocks that remained in storage in May after we've gone through the hay feeding season. And what you can see here is that the green line tends to be showing a distinct drop over time. There were also not seeing as much hay being grown at the end of the year. And part of the reason for that is that we've had a string of really poor hay growing years here in Michigan for various reasons our wacky weather patterns that we've been having. It's hot and it's cold and it's dry, then it's flooded. And, and this kind of wreaks havoc with our perennial forages. They just don't deal well with this. And this has caused our hay stocks to decline. And you can avoid part of this by looking at an annual forage to fill in some of those gaps. What we see with our hay prices have been all over the place, but generally high. What we tend to see here in Michigan is that we'd never have an oversupply of good quality hay. The best quality hay, particularly in small square bales that are liked by the horse market  are always going to be getting that premium price. It's been a fairly stable model kit for people who want to deal with the hassle of growing hay. So what is our market here in Michigan looking for? First off, we have our dairy quality hay, or we need really top nutritional quality. Typically this has been alfalfa or some of our perennial grasses, but we also see a growing market for small grain forage in the dairy category, and I'll be talking about that in a little bit. This market tends to prefer, prefer it's hay in large packages. So we like particularly the large square bales. And it tends to be sold in large lots, truck loads. Our second category that we sell a lot of in Michigan is horse hay, the primary quality factor driving this market is it needs to be dust and mold free. There's a premium for green color or soft texture and low sugar. Our primary species here are grasses, timothy orchard grass, teff, and to a lesser extent alfalfa. And that teff grass is one that has some potential for going into an irrigated system. This market prefers its hay in small square bales and it's usually sold in relatively small lots. And lastly, we have what we call a beef cow hay, which is the lowest nutritional requirement of the three categories. And pretty much any species can do in this market as long as it's got some, some minimum level of quality or even fairly low quality. Again, they prefer large bales because they're usually feeding a lot of animals. And the lot size that could be transferred in this market could be almost anything from just a few round bales, do a truck load. The next thing you need to think about, if you want to get into the hay business is how you're going to sell that. One option is to sell it directly out of the field, which has some advantages of that. The seller sets the price. You don't have to handle it. You just tell the buyers it's ready and they come and get it. You may or may not help them loaded up to you, charge extra if you are going to help them load it. This has some increased weather risk because if you don't sell all the field that sit or all the hate that sitting out in the field. You have the risk that it might get rained on if you don't go get it yourself and put it away. So this doesn't really work very well for large tonnages usually either. Although if you're selling large round bales to beef markets, you may be able to get them to come with pickup truck and take quite a lot. The second option is to sell it out of a barn or a hay yard. Again here the seller sets the price that you're covering your handling cost to put it into storage. Either the buyers can come to get come get it, or you can deliver it. It's up to you. Price accordingly. If you do this, you will need on-site loading equipment. Because if the buyers come to get it, you still have to load it for them. They're not going to come with a with a loader. Another option here is we now have video auctions that will sell, hay right out of a barn so you don't have to take the hay right to the auction. You send pictures and usually a forage test and the hay is sold online. And then the buyer will contract with a with a trucking company to come and get it again, you would have to load it. Then lastly, we have live auctions. In this case, the seller is going to haul the hay the auction site on, and typically they don't want to haul it back home if it doesn't sell with a reserve so the price is pretty much at the mercy of the bidding. But the lot sizes here could be quite variable from very small to very large. Another question that came up was, how am I going to get it harvested? We actually have a lot of custom forage harvesters. Wildly available across Michigan. It is not necessary that you have to have your own equipment to do this. You can certainly choose that. But if you want to find out who's doing custom harvesting in your area, just ask your neighbor, somebody who's going to know. A lot of times it might be the same companies that are combining corn or whatever. And just for fun, I tried googling it. Custom harvesters for forage in Michigan. And this came up actually with quite a lot of hits. So that's another way to go. Now, keep in mind, depending on how you're going to sell. Based on what I talked about earlier, if you are going to store it, you need to have some consideration for how you're going to do that. Again, if you sell out of the field, you don't need to worry about it. However, if you store under a roof, you'll always get a better price if you have protected it from rain. So if you have net wrapped around bales, wrapped dry hay or baleage, they don't need to be stored inside. They can go outside on a well-drained site off the soil surface in a yard. Especially for a short period of time, and it won't affect your price very much. If you are making square bales of any size, you need to have those stored under a roof because they are shaped like a giant sponge and they will not shed water. Looking at your irrigated systems, I tried to think of what are some of the opportunities that you might have to use your irrigated system to grow some extra crop during your off time. So obviously a key thing to look at here is your fallow periods that you have got under the pivot, such as when you've harvested another crop. Depending on what you're growing, that fallow period may fall at different times a year. So I broke this up into sub categories based on what that period might look like and how long it is. If you have at least six weeks available and there will not be any frost. Some of the crops that you can grow include teff and oats. And you can have a frost-free period up to 16 weeks. Particularly with teff, you would actually get some growth and more than one cutting. However, if you have frost possible during that window, teff goes off your list because it is not frost tolerant. And you are left with the oats, oats or peas and spring triticale. And these  usually require a little bit more time to get best yield. So you would want to have at least eight weeks available for most of these. If you have ten weeks available up to 16, you might think about red are bursae and clover, these are legumes, so they have a little bit different growth cycle then the grasses do and they also will fix nitrogen for you. So it has a potential both to add some nitrogen credits to your next crop in your rotation and also give you high-quality forage. If you have a theory that goes over the winter, you can consider winter triticale or Rye. I just want to throw this in. This talk is mostly about annual forages, but I do feel obligated to throw in that if you are looking at your pivot corners that are otherwise be an unused or just as part of a regular rotation, you should consider perennial forages as a possibility in that rotation. And if you're going to do that, alfalfa is your best bet because it is our highest value perennial forage that you can grow here. Now, I want to talk just a little bit about several of the options that I just mentioned. One is small grains. These the best forage options amongst the small grains are with your triticale and rye. Spring triticale and oats you can grow barley and wheat as, as foragers, but they don't tend to yield quite as, as well as these ones. So for the winter triticale and rye, you would need to plant that by late September in Michigan in order to get maximum forage yield, you can plant it later, but the later you plant it, the less forage you're going to get out of it the following spring because you won't have as much tilling happening before winter. Spring triticale can be planted in April or May. Oats can be planted either in April, May, or late July, early August to get you a  fall harvest. They will eventually winter kill, but they are tolerant of a little bit of frost. And if you can time your planting so that your harvest date is right about the time of frost. You can actually get very high sugar content in oats. These will be managed similar to meet with fertility program. We want to harvest stem flag leaf for the best quality. This is a bit of a change from what everybody's, used to. We used to say harvest at boot for best quality. But flag leaf is actually one stage earlier than boot. And at that point you can get very high protein and digestible energy in that crop. If you want to go to the maximize yield potential, you would go to the soft dough stage and that might make a difference in harvesting for this winter triticale between early May to late me, going from flag to soft go. So if you can get that off in early May, you have the potential to get about 5.5 pounds per acre of a forged dry matter. And you still have time to plant another crop in that rotation for the rest of the season. Teff grass is a warm season plant and basically they love hot weather. So this is a crop that you don't want to plant until your  temperatures are up to 65 degrees. And it will be killed by if you breathe on it with cold air. So it is done as soon as you have a frost, you need to have a window of opportunity to get it growing and harvested and in-between your frost periods. And it can be used primarily for forages, what I'm talking about today, but it can also be grown as a grain crop. If you're into that, it will grow back. So you can get up to four tons of dry matter per acre on this in multiple cuttings, if you have a long enough window. And this is really good to me. Because as far as forages go, this one tends to be fairly low in sugar, which is not something you normally want for cattle or sheep, but for horses, it's a good thing. This, one of the primary problems with this one is the seed is absolutely tiny. It is absolutely vital that you have good seed bed preparation in order to get it established. I usually tell people to establish the field, prep the field like you were going to plant alfalfa. It needs a firm level seed and you met need to make sure not to plant it too deep. And another disadvantage here is that actually yields so much that it can be hard to get it dry because it's got very fine leaves and it tends to kind of mat down and be a bit slowly dry. But if you can make it work, It's an excellent crop. The last species I want to talk about are some annual legumes. Basically there are two I'd like you to consider here. The Canadian spring pea and the Austrian winter pea are actually the same species, just basically the spring and winter version of them. The Austrian winter pea is winter hardy. The Canadian spring pea is not. Those are often just called field peas here in Michigan. And then we have a fairly new clover on the market called perceive clover with a new variety name that is much more winter hardy than earlier varieties were. So typically here for growing perceive clover in Michigan right now I'm only recommending that people grow frosty unless you want it winter kill. And these basically have the same planting windows as small grains do. They established pretty well, grow well, they have good yields. We have research data here that perceivable actually our yield, red clover in a seeding year first-cut, which is what you want if you're one of those short fallow periods. It's high protein forage, highly digestible, gives you nitrogen credits. I don't know how my oats snuck in here other than, perhaps I was thinking that, uh, that we often grow peas together with oats because the viney growth habit of peas makes the fall over if they don't have something to climb on, and the oats will give them that. So where do you find some results on, on yields of these? You can go online to my website, look at our MSU forage variety test. These are done. These are published every year and they're available at this link. We are currently testing alfalfa, red clover, annual legumes, like perceived clover, perennial grasses, and a number of annual grasses. Most years we have teff and rye grass. We haven't done  a sorghum test for a couple of years. But you can find that in our archives. And this is what the results of that might look like. This is our most recent test. Results for 2019, seeded test for triticale and hybrid regular rye. And this will give you heading dates, the height of the plant, the yield in tons per acre, and the percentage dry matter at harvest. Which can be a useful piece of information if you're trying to figure out how likely it would be able you'd be able to get that dry down to the moisture targets for either hay or baleage, sorry. You can also just come to the forage website in general, which has a lot of useful information about forages of all types, particularly when you go to the Extension pay. And with that, we can move on to the next item. And then next item is Dr. Jim, Camberator. Jim, can you hear us? We're going to go a little over time. It's our first time through this. And that's okay with everybody. Jim, we want the full meal deal. We want to know. I don't know much and nitrogen we lose and how much we should put back in. I think we're going to get more playing out of the recording of this than we did out of the live. And then what we're going to go to some questions. Okay. So you can see my screen. Yes. Yes. Okay, great. Alright, I want, I'm going to talk a little bit about nitrogen loss and nitrogen replacement. I have few slides, kind of as a guide. Irrigation water aspect. It is mostly physics. Nitrogen loss is as much biology as physics. And so it's not quite the perhaps the exact science the irrigation scheduling is, so there's a lot more uncertainty and you'll see why. All right, So I've kind of simplified it the factors affecting and loss the nitrogen sources. And we add nitrogen in a few different ways and the conversion to nitrate, which is a form of nitrogen, this is important because that's the form that's lost easily. If we could keep a nitrogen in the ammonia form, Nitrogen management would be a lot easier. And then we have a couple main pathways of nitrogen loss. Bleaching, which is dependent on the water-holding capacity of the soil primarily. And then denitrification, which occurs in your more poorly drained soils. And that's dependent on the days of saturation. So our three three main nitrogen sources. Urea, liquid nitrogen, urea, ammonium nitrate, which is about half the area, half ammonium nitrate and anhydrous ammonia. And so, and urea ammonium nitrate. Half the nitrogens and the urea form. Initially, a quarter is in the ammonium form and a quarter is nitrate, and then anhydrous ammonia, of course, that's all ammonia. When it reacts with water, it is converted rapidly the ammonium and then urea is, that's the form of nitrogen in it, pretty quickly turns into ammonia. So again, because of the biology of soils, whatever we add is moving towards nitrate, a form that can be lost. And I mentioned earlier the different pathways for loss leaching, which would be the  downward movement of nitrate or urea out of the root zone, which earlier Lyndon spoke about, or maybe in our personal conversation about plants routing a few feet deep. And so when we speak of leaching, really thinking about downward movement beyond the reach of plant roots. And I put in the urea because when it's first apply, when it's in the urea form, it's just as leachable as nitrate. And because it converts over to ammonium and the first one to three days, we don't usually think too much about leaching of urea. But every so often, including this year, we have situations where people will fertilize, finish fertilize, and pull out of the field. And then they'll get a heavy rainfall. A couple of weeks ago, a farmer finished a field in Indiana. And immediately it rained 2.5 inches overnight. And that other couple inches over a two-day period, that half of that liquid nitrogen was in the urea form, a quarter and the nitrate form. And both of those are going to be moving down in the soil profile. Perhaps out of the root zone. Denitrification takes place in poorly drained soil. And it really only acts on the nitrate form. And it creates some volatile gases that percolate out of the soil up into the atmosphere. Ammonium again, stays in the soils that's like potassium. So it's actually attracted to the clay and organic matter. And in most soils, even with excess moisture, it's going to stay up in the upper part of the rooting profile where it was put. The only qualification to that is if you're on a sugar sand, or with a CC exchange capacity of 1.5, then ammonium and potassium and pretty much everything else that's going to move fairly appreciably with a lot of rainfall, but still not as bad as nitrate or urea. Alright, I just got a little illustration of kind of these pathways. So urea turns into ammonium that's on the soil surface and be lost in the air. But we're talking about irrigation. So hopefully when you apply, if you're broadcasting urea on the soil surface, if you water than with a half inch of water, you eliminate that ammonia lost to the atmosphere. Once it hydrolyzes to ammonia, reacts with water, it's going to turn into ammonium and then into eventually into nitrate. Nitrate saturation can go up into the air or with excess water movement, it can leach below the root zone and out, out of the reach of the plant. So we're really worried about this in most situations about nitrate. Well, here's where the wretched biology comes into play. As a number organisms that convert ammonium to nitrate. And they're pretty good at it. And so they're going to easily, this time of the year, nitrogen that's added to the soil. And the ammonium form or the urea form is probably going to be nitrate within a week, at best even shorter before that. And the rate depends on the source and the placement. So anhydrous is the slowest convert. Then the ended urea will be faster than anhydrous, but not as fast as ammonium nitrate or ammonium sulfate. And the banded materials are going to convert slower than broadcast materials. Again this time of the year, your talking a few days to a week. Early in the spring, you might be talking one to three weeks. And of course in the winter time, those microorganisms slow down quite a bit and it could be 5, 7, 8 weeks. That's why we get fall application of nitrogen and some years can be fairly efficient because if the soils get cold and stayed cold, then the conversion of anhydrous ammonia to nitrate is very slow. This conversion is dependent on moisture. Its optimum at field capacity, which in an irrigated field means a lot of the time conditions are really good for ammonia to be converted to nitrate. And then the warmer it is, the faster it happens. pH is important. It's optimum at the pH is we'd like to grow plants near-neutral, maybe slightly alkaline or slightly acid. And then you can use some chemical inhibitors. I have the chemical names up here, but this would be products like instinct, centiro, tribune, BCD. Those substances. And they can slow this process. Again, they don't last very long, particularly when it's warm. And so maybe they slow nitrification for a week or two. But the more nitrogen that stays in the ammonium form, the less potential for loss. So probably you put nitrogen now more than a week or surely two weeks before planting, before the rainfall or whether you have an inhibitor or not, whether you banded it or not, the majority of that nitrogen within the nitrates form and subject to loss. Here's just the depiction of what they inhibit. Nitrification inhibitors do. Alright. So leaching is really primarily dependent on water holding capacity in the types of soils that are irrigated. So in our climate, so the sandy soils and I just had the approximate water-holding capacity, a different texture soils. And earlier you saw tool where you can choose your texts and then sets up an irrigation scheduling based on field capacity or the maximum that the soil can hold against gravity and then 40 percent of field capacity. And if you envision the soil at field capacity, then every amount of rain that you receive is going to move that water and whatever's in that water down in the profile. So if you have a sandy soil with about an inch of water holding capacity and it rains an inch, you can envision that entire foot of soil moving down and another foot. And a loamy sand, it would only move down six inches or so, et cetera, up to a sandy loam. So your movement's going to be less. In the more clay and water holding capacity there is in the soil. That'll give you somewhat of an idea whether you've lost nitrogen or not. So if you've gotten six inches on a sand, it holds one inch of water, you're likely move that original water and the nitrate that was in that water below three feet. Denitrification and more poorly drained soils is a little more difficult. Initially, you don't lose nitrogen in the atmosphere. It takes a day or two for the microbes to deplete the soil of oxygen, even though it's saturated, there's enough oxygen in the soil to prevent this denitrification process from occurring. But then once that my oxygen is depleted, then you can lose upwards of 5% of the nitrate nitrogen per day, or maybe some more depending on temperature and the nature of the soil, etc. But this is probably only going to happen in, well, it's only going to happen in poorly drained soils where you actually have saturation. One of the difficult things that we found is sometimes it doesn't matter if it takes a couple of days the saturation to begin losing nitrogen. And you're going to need two or three days for significant nitrogen loss to occur. Is the plant in that time period damaged enough that the availability of nitrogen is no longer the limiting factor. And so it's really difficult to assess in these poorly drained soils whether to go back with more nitrogen because it's not only dependent on how much nitrogen was lost, but whether the plant root system is healthy enough to respond to additional nitrogen. Whereas in the sandy soils where you have leaching, those planets are just fine. Give them more nitrogen, they're going to take it up and utilize it. If it's the original nitrogens lost. One of the things we're saying, we're talking about nitrogen, but sulfur has become an important part of soil fertility programs, particularly in sandy, low organic matter soils. In irrigated soils where you have high yield. And sulfur, the form that plants use as sulfate. And it is very similar to the nitrogen nitrate in it's leaching loss. So if you have a sandy soil and you believe or you know, you've lost nitrate. Well, you've also lost sulfate. And you need to replace that as well because the plant is not going to respond to that nitrogen that you add if it's also short on sulfur. And I've actually seen situations where farmers have gone back with additional nitrogen and situations where they lost nitrogen with it and they could not included sulfur. And the deficiencies. And the damage to the crop has gotten worse. So you really need that. Carefully about whether they include some sulfur. If you're injecting, you can include ammonium thiosulfate or ammonium sulfate. In the irrigation water. If you're applying and making your ground application. Granular ammonium sulfate or K mag or pelletized gypsum are also good sources of sulphur and dependent on whether you need more nitrogen or maybe you want to add some potassium or, or the availability of these materials. There's advantages and disadvantages are better application of each of these materials. Alright. So, I think the question part is what I was looking forward to. There's lots of specifics that are important and I'll be happy to answer any questions. One thing I want to mention now before I forget about it, is it's hard to soil test for nitrate. This time of the year, particularly if fertilizer was banned. Leaf tissue testing is not that helpful either. You have a couple ended the season tools that aren't very satisfying because they don't want to wait the end of the season to get a report card. You want to do some proactive. But if you get to the end of the year and you do want to make an assessment of your fields. There is this I train test and there it's also grain analysis I think can be useful and it's a little easier. And the stock nitrate test. So if you have any questions related to that, happy to answer those or provide additional information. Lyndon? Yeah. Any anybody out there have specific questions on nitrogen management and irrigation at this point for Dr. Camberato? We got a few questions that came in when people registered. I think if Dr. Cassida is with us if she could prepare to talk about hay lines and the irrigation pods, we can follow up with that. So Jim, I'm going to roll and get you started on questions here. How late can I put nitrogen on? I've seen that Purdue has done some work that shows that there's some benefits to nitrogen far later than we thought. Yeah, yeah, so research has shown really within a couple of weeks after soaking you can still get a response. Although I I think you really want to have all that done within a week or two before.  But we did, we did some work where we produced an extra 100 bushels of corn with an application that essentially wasn't available until V15. And that took the yield from a 125 to 240 bushels. So if you have, if you have water, you can provide moisture during the grain fill period. You can go right up to tackling time. And really, if you had nitrogen deficiency, you have a great opportunity to increase yields or recover lost steel. Good. Any other questions for Dr. Camberato specifically before we open it up and start working on the questions that people submitted? Yeah, Jim, this is Bruce Mackellor, I'm a Melissa Franklin alias today. But I do have a quick question for you. We seem to have you seem to be seeing some more of that striping loss. And I think part of that is because even though we were dry early on, people were still doing a lot of field work up here when the drought really started to take hold on corn. And so we have some root growth that was probably inhibited. We've got some rolling corn in places we probably really normally wouldn't have based on the amount of rainfall that we had and water holding capacity and some of these fields that are irrigated or maybe a little bit rolling in. But I think maybe the root system may have been compromised a little bit. And some of those, and we've seen, of course, a hollows where they've drowned out and just completely gone now. But do you think there's any possibility that it'll grow back into some of that again, or perhaps even, you know, if we move nitrogen down, let's say to the bottom of that root zone, are we likely to pick some of it back up as roots get bigger, I guess. So. Yeah, the roots will continue to grow all the way up till soaking time. And so you may recover some of that nitrogen. Your water movement and the fusion and the courser soils up is not that great. So you get a lot of capillary movement of water and nutrients back up into the root zone. But I wouldn't count on that. Definitely not the sand or loamy sand and maybe the sandy loams. That's gotta be limited. That upward movement. But yes, definitely. I've seen situations where we've moved nitrogen and sulfur down and then the roots will catch up to it, catch up to it later. And with both of those, they can completely recover. Under many situations. Like I mentioned earlier, when we fertilize, really lay out with severe nitrogen deficiency, but we ended up adding a lot more nitrogen and yielding the same as the normally fertilised crop. And you'll see that with sulfur as well, that the plant will actually recover and something else will be eliminated via water or potassium or genetic potential or some other factor. So you may see some crops grow out of nitrogen and sulfur deficiency. Here if your soil is dry and the plants grow roots deeper in the profile. The sulfur deficiency, I think you're right on target because I've seen plenty of fields now where you get a little bit darker soil and there's no striping in that versus the area. And he started looking at those plants. It really doesn't look so much like nitrogen. It looks more like sulfur and places where they put additional on. So yeah. Yeah. And the more organic matter, the more nitrogen and sulfur you'll get. As the mineralization is also dependent on kinda optimum water, like we talked about, nitrification is optimum at field capacity. Mineralization is as well. So I want to and not irrigated fields that were too dry, that was limiting release of nitrogen and sulfur from organic matter. And then when it's too wet, it's also a lipid it. So maintaining good, consistent moister actually increases the availability of that organic nitrogen and sulfur. So the warmer temperature than the flush of moister probably ended up releasing both both nutrients to the crop. Jim I have one quick question. Another addition to that, it probably doesn't pertain to irrigation, but it does cover a lot of the areas up here. We have a lot of fields in the northern part of Van Buren, which is one tier up from the southern tier, and then Allegan County, southern Allegan County, they have damage to the roots from water that just kept coming. Basically, we didn't necessarily have any water while we did have standing water for quite some period of time, we didn't have huge amounts of rain but it just kept coming and enough things that never dried out. I know root damage, it's kinda hard to assess, but if you've got a decent stand and it still looks like it's starting to come back from that. And we fear the nitrogens gone, probably go ahead and put a limited amount of nitrogen on to help try to bring that back or sure there's going to be denitrification losses on that. Maybe not so much leaching losses because of this all time. Yeah, I think he can in our old recommendations used to say no more than 30 to 50 pounds of nitrogen. And, and to me that's appropriate for those situations where the part of the root system has died and you see new routes emerging. But you probably limited yield potential. The thing that was new that we found is if, if the root system and the plant wasn't damaged, then they can use up to a couple of hundred pounds of nitrogen very late the season. But as I say, for those where you're not quite sure how much damage there is, there's some death in the roots. There's some new roots coming out. Now that we're kind of restricted to 30 to 50 pounds of nitrogen. So if I could come in here, first, if you have any questions, please put them in the chat. I think we'll hang on to Dr. Camberato for a minute here. If Kim Cassida could answer this question, do we have any success stories with portable pasture irrigation systems, K lines or I-pods, irrigation pods. You work for a university that has a dairy farm and a beef farm on K line. What do you think, Dr. Cassida? Well, I think what our research with the K lines on those, in those two situations has shown that if the K line is going to pay for itself, you need to be producing a very high quality products. So on the dairy farm instance, the grazing dairy, I believe they would probably argue that it has significantly improved their performance. But when a cost comparison was done for the grass fed beef, it was much harder to demonstrate that it paid for itself. And if you were just a, you know, an average beef producer not marketing to a really high-end market. It's probably questionable whether that is going to be cost-effective. But of course, every farms individual circumstances differ. There is a lot of labor involved with those systems. You have to move them. And you need to have your fences and your alleys and the rest, the whole, the whole farm basically needs to be set up to accommodate the irrigation systems. Thank you. I've had this same experience. I would just say any irrigation system you put in, look at all the alternatives, spend a little time and figure out what your long-range goals are or is this really going to work for where you're at. So thanks. I don't see anything new in the chat. A couple other questions that we had. I think we're gonna give Youngsuk a second to talk about how do we minimize evaporative irrigation loss and how do we avoid increasing disease? And then in the meantime, I'm going to quickly address this one question that talks about windmill and solar power for livestock and irrigation, small-scale irrigation. That's sort of two questions together. There's some excellent work going on for irrigation purposes. We need to have a storage tank and the system to be able to use windmill or solar power. Please send me an email with the specifics of those. We do have some resources. The Amish community, Northern Indiana, southern Michigan, has done a lot of work. There's a number very professional forums that do work all over the United States on solar irrigation. They actually helped MSU with a project on taking irrigation to Africa using solar power pumps. It's very specific. It's not your grandpa's pump mill hooked to a windmill. It's very specific designs for either solar wind. Be glad to talk to whoever submitted that question. Youngsuk, you want to handle the disease, irrigation correlation and the minimising evaporation. Or I can handle one of those if you want. Because they both go somewhat together. So for, avoid causing disease and also minimizing those water by evaporation, we recommend bigger application if possible. For overhead irrigation system. There will be some amount of water that lays on the surface will be evaporated. So this is something you need to consider. For disease, we're currently working on using the sensors in irrigated field to monitor what environment, the condition, and how it can cause disease pressure. So that's something ongoing research project. We are working with Dr. Marty, Chilvers and Scott Bale. So hopefully we'll have some updates by end of this year. More to come on those. If there's any other questions, please type them into chat or I think you can chime in. There was one question on here about creating a pond as a water source. Looks like I've got one for livestock and one for irrigation. I'd be glad to help you work with those, but ponds are very specific to the area. If you have round water saturate or if you have saturated soils with the groundwater tables that high. And you can dig down to that, that works well. But it's actually the replenishing of that water, that's the issue. And then also, I know in livestock we have problems sometimes with disease, drinking from ponds. And we have foliar diseases, diseases that are passed through pond water. I'd be glad to talk to it a little more detailed. Whoever submitted that question too. I put my email on the front page of this, though, if you can go back to that or we can put it up in a second. I don't see any additional questions. If you're out there and you have one. It looks like we have one. Maybe not, Maybe that was I don't know. Jim, it seems as though the more advanced farm has better color even though the plants were in wet conditions is a function of more time, to plant V8 or later. Okay. So I'm not, I'm not quite catching,  it seems as though the more advanced corn, yeah, I think the lighter the corn is, the more extensive the root system, perhaps the dryer the soil. The rain call has less impact or the excessive rain fall has less impact on the plant and its ability to take up nutrients. So we've seen that in past years where different planning dates, the corn was small or the damage was extensive, whereas the larger corn just basically thrived with excess water. So I think it's because they have a better root system. They've most cases drive the soil a little bit more and they're able to tolerate that excess water. Good. Thanks, Dr. Camberato. Any other questions that are out there. I need to say the RUP restricted use pesticide credits. We have not got a confirmation that we expect to get a confirmation for an RUP credit for today. If you're listening to us live and you want that RUP credit lease, send me an email link and I can even reach out to them as wow, I can always we were able to join us today. Once we have that information with the codes and what we need, we can communicate with those who registered. Okay. So expect an e-mail from Betsy Braid from MSU. Does that sound okay? We only have a few people up there. We'll send them an email. Any other questions for today? Obviously, we're at an hour and 36 minutes. That means that we're about 50 percent more than what you expected. Hey Lyndon I do have a quick question for you. Do you? What what are we going to be able to put on for nitrogen through a pivot? I mean, what's kind of the limit if in a single pass? First, most of the guys that setup to put irrigation or put nitrogen fertigate. Once you have the equipment, the question becomes why put it all on at once? Why not reduce my risk by putting it on in smaller increments. 30 pounds works real great. That's right around 10 gallons per acre of 28%, or a little more of 26 percent. If we want to get the thiosulfate with a sulfur in it, that Dr. Camberato's recommending. So I see a lot of 30 pound applications. I think that was his recommendation for a 30 pound application, maybe one week before tasseling and then see where the market is and how the corn responded. If you're going to get a bounce from that, you're going to see that bounce over the next 14, 20 days is what we usually think. And then re-evaluate and hit it again. You can get 50 pounds on 60 pounds, 20 gallons a minute. But remember, we've gotta have enough profile empty to be able to hold the water with the nitrogen in it. And then you are at risk of having that nitrogen laid in water high on the profile. So if we keep getting good rains, you know, it's funny. We were blessed with rain, but now we're talking about the problems that that causes. But, so maybe we should learn to pray in moderation. I'm not sure if somewhere in there is where we're at. And we look at that that information and say, well, maybe it's better to go smaller increments. Yeah, I'm just concerned, we're going to have some folks in southern elegant and Calhoun in this kinda Crescent over here that got the heavy rains that are probably in that in that boat. I'm guessing. If I fly it out, is it other option, fight it out or high boy, applicator? We lost a pilot or didn't lose a pilot damage to pilot two weeks ago doing that operation and gas County. Just North to South Bend. And we've seen a lot of urea and ammonium sulfate going through the air. And a common question I'm getting is how much water do I need to apply? And is it important to do it as soon as possible and a quarter inches? I usually enough to get that in. And the sooner the better. So those are good things. They're also really on the urea would be good to get it done within 24 hours. Because the losses store pretty quickly and they're finished by three days though. Yeah. Other thing if you you know, when we fertilize delay, the plants took up about 2.5 pounds of nitrogen per acre per day. So, you know, in ten days of 30 pound application is used up. As he said, If my last two to three weeks. But before soaking, it could easily be five pounds of nitrogen per acre per day. I came, I got an email here just a second ago that says how much and for tapped. Not sure. I know a couple of producers that have teff that are taking their first cutting and they're wondering if they should put a little more on. And I have some producers that are seeding teff after wheat today. So it could be either of those scenarios. Well typically, with a forage crop, you don't want to put on more than 50 pounds of nitrogen at a time. And our warm season, grasses don't use nitrogen as effectively. Or it doesn't push yield as much as it does with the cool season grass. Let's say probably 50 pounds a band when you plant it. And maybe if you're going to get some regrowth cuttings, you could put on another 50 pounds after that first-cut. That's probably as much as I would put on on teff. I don't  think you'd get economic return for any more than that. The other question here is, comes back to something you presented. If I grow it, will they buy it? Now in other words I guess he's saying or they're getting, and he's not a livestock producer, is going to be able to find a market for this. Well, I think that the answer to that is if you put up a good quality product and advertise it well enough, yes, they will buy it. We never have enough good forage. Now, if you're putting up sort of average to poor quality forage, we usually have plenty of that around. So I think the key thing here is if, if you're going to add that to your enterprises, then you want to make sure you're doing it in a way that you have a premium quality product. Hey, Kim, I got a quick question beyond that, for teff, can you go in after we'd get a reasonable yield? Yeah. We've done it. What we're going to yield the expected might get from something like that. Well, it depends on where you are in the state. You really only need 66 weeks to get the first cut on teff. This stuff, you plant it, it sits there for like the first two or three weeks. You think it's going nowhere and you think you have a failure provided you do have an established in the plants are there. And then it just takes off, it goes nuts. So that for time yield that I was mentioning is probably a two cut system, but you can easily get two tons in the first cutting, do 2.5 maybe. And then the rest of it comes from subsequent cuttings. Now if you only have that short window after we eat, you're not going to get multiple cuttings because frost it's going to come and kill it. But you could still be looking at a significant one cut system. Is there any concern about termination on that just to get it cleaned up for crops for the next year? No, it's going to be dead soon as it faces. This one is not one. There is no question that frost will be, teff will be winter killed in Michigan. We have some things that can, that can manage to squeak through, but teff is not one of them. Looks good. That sounds good. Yeah. Kim I'm guessing that this producer is raising this teff after wheat on some irrigated border rows or buffer areas between seed corn plots. We're going to need to put some oats in with that teff you were talking about three weeks and it's going to get at least three inches of water over that time. Yeah. I wouldn't put I would put oats in with teff because that's going to create a drying problem. Now you're going to have one big fat stemmed play it in one very five-step plant. It's going to create a drawing differentiable at least I've never heard of anyone. Yeah. Okay. Interestingly, tough. Usually teff is grown by itself. And that's where you're going to get the premium market for it too. If you mix it with something else, you dilute that factor of being able to market it to the horse owners that want low sugar forage as seeds still available? Far as I know, I checked with some with some seed suppliers couple of weeks ago and they they really seem to indicate there wasn't much problem with the seed supply for most things. Okay. Any other questions out there? We're now almost double. You got double your money's worth. Are you going to give them twice as many credits? No high-value around the first car. I didn't tell you the truth. We're working with them on that. So we're going to try to slim it up for another time. I appreciate the three people that stuck with us. I appreciate the speakers that are with us. We're going to make the recordings available as quick as they can and post them at the Ag Engineering irrigation website. Think I can do that at both universities or at least a link from Purdue's to MSU's to get that done. I thank Dr. Kim Cassida for talking to us about forage and Dr. Jim Camberato from Purdue talking to us about nitrogen management. Younsuk Dong for helping us with irrigation management. And for all the help and Betsy and Bruce and the others that are out there. I appreciate it. Two weeks from now we'll be hopefully talking to you guys plus a few.