MSU Extension Irrigation

- So welcome, you're here today to talk about irrigation. This our attempt to keep moving forward with some education without increasing the amount of contact with potential diseases like coronavirus, so that's why we're here today. My name's Lyndon Kelly, I work for Michigan State University and Purdue extension doing irrigation work primarily around the field crops area but we dabble in some of the vegetable crops and specialty crops and that's what we were trying to do here this spring. On the screen, you're gonna see some information from three other people that work in Michigan, Doctor Younsuk Dong, he's a post-doc, he's gonna be presenting to you a little later today about soil moisture monitoring and using that in irrigation scheduling. Steve Miller's been our irrigation specialist at Ag Engineering at MSU for a few years now. He comes to us from DEQ and has a lot of experience and helpful suggestions on both the water management and the policy discussions. And then myself, I work both on the irrigation education in the Indiana and Michigan area. As an irrigator, our goal is to supply the amount of water that the crop could utilize beyond the amount that's available from rainfall. So that's in Michigan Indiana, we are supplemental irrigators, we primarily look at the amount of water that comes from rainfall and then we add when it comes short. So here's the typical graph I have for corn up there but it's the same graph that we would have for almost any crop. It's gonna have a peak water use time and a lot of times that peak water use is gonna be in hottest, driest day that the crops at full canopy and it's gonna be greater than the amount of water that is available in the soil from rainfall. If you look at the graphic here, you have the monthly dots there and then the crop is the red line and the red line exceeds the monthly dots, so they exceed the amount of water the rainfall uses. And that's the amount that we're gonna irrigate, that needed to come out of irrigation. Now also, the nice thing about this in Michigan Indiana is that we have a high amount of recharge that happens on both ends of the year, January through April and then October through December our crops aren't using a lot of water, or if any, and we tend to build the aquifers underneath us. So that sorts of lends to the idea of why we're sort of in the perfect area for irrigation here in Michigan Indiana because, we are in an area that's getting more heat units but also getting more rainfall. Up in front of you right now is a recharge map of Michigan and those darkest blue areas, it's the right date today, we're right down here, those darkest bluest areas mean that you're getting somewhere between 10 and 15 inches of recharge ever year. That's water that is passed the plants root system and goes down to build the aquifer underneath us and as irrigators we tend to go back and pull from that aquifer, those few months during the summer to meet the crop need. So the other thing that's really important is if that aquifer will give its water up to you. And here's a glacial map of Michigan and if you notice, in the blue areas we can almost always get 500 to 1400 gallons depending on how dark blue or how good the aquifer is. But our heaviest irrigated areas in Michigan is right down here in south-west Michigan where we have the soils that let the water pass through and build up the aquifer and then those soils are also well drained. That's the other piece of the project there that puts all the positives together. That well drained soil lets us raise some high dollar crops with less risk from both flooding out in the Spring and then irrigation to make it through the drought in the Summer. So we're gonna talk a little bit about certain capacities and at what capacities we start having some extra legal requirements. We're gonna talk a little bit about why irrigation is beneficial, so it's of beneficial use and that's important because of our Riparian status. Sort of the new registration and reporting requirements. How we avoid adverse resource impacts, that's something that we said we would do when we have our new water legislation in Michigan. How we avoid negatively impacted the neighbors and if we do, how we compensate them. And then any restrictions that we have as far as moving water from one parcel to another. If you look at both Michigan and Indiana, our Riparian states, east of the Mississippi. We tend to follow the Riparian doctrine, not a law but a doctrine. It's a setting of rulings that were left down, those original rulings came from Europe and moved with us as we settled in the United States on the eastern side. West of the Mississippi, we've looked at it totally different. First in use, first in right has been the pattern that we've followed. It allows you to own water, sort of like we think of gas or our oil rights in Michigan. You can actually own that right and you can sell it off separate from the land. So you'll see some places in Idaho and out west, where you buy land but you don't get the water rights with it. Sometimes the water rights are three or four times the value of the land and now it's very common that the water rights are purchased by a municipality or an industry or a holding company and then they lease those water rights back to you. East of the Mississippi, we assume that you have access to the water and as long as your use of the water does not negatively impact other that have access to that water you're allowed to do that. It can be modified by legislation and I'm gonna talk to you about the different legislations and actions that we've had in Michigan that have been those modifications. It's part of that public trust doctrine, I already said that it's not a law, it's a doctrine. It's a set of rules or rulings that were made at the Apallete or state supreme court level. It is based on the concept that the use of the water is beneficial to the land owner and to the community. Irrigation definitely increases the amount of money and value that the land has, so it's always been considered beneficial use. Some of it was based on the navigable lakes and streams and so we talk about being able to float along down the stream, and at what point that is waters of the state where they have jurisdiction. But probably more important today is to talk about what you can't do. We can't really sell of give away those rights. In other words, I can't say you can't take water from my property. Because actually, my ownership of that property is based on my land ownings and it's already the community's water, it's just the access to it that we're talking about. And then we can't detract or diminish the other Riparian owners. In other words, we can't lower the level to the point that they can no longer get irrigation water or they can no longer access the lake or other things that are there. So, for most of us we think about this being sort of an irrigation well type concept. If I have an irrigation well, that well has a zone of impact that's sort of where it's drawing its water from. You think if this like a funnel, this is the upper edge of the funnel and you're looking down inside it and that's the well screen. And all of the water inside that funnel is moving towards the screen at the rate that you're taking out the water. So there's 600 gallons a minute going out your well, there's 600 gallons a minute flowing into that funnel. So that's the impacted zone, if that impacted zone ends up drawing down a home well near you then you have responsibilities to that. In Michigan, we've actually had a law, twice we've had a law. We had it, repelled it, put it back in place but basically it says, if you have a large well and they define that as 70 gallons a minute or greater capacity, capacity to pump 70 gallons or greater which is the same a 100 000 gallons a day. Those two numbers are equivalent, you're a large well, greater than 70 gallons, you're a large well. If you're less than 70 gallons, you're a small well and in this legislation, if your a large well impacts the small well to the point that they can no longer get the quality or quantity of water they originally had, then the large well owner has to make that person whole. They have to pay to reconstruct or lower their screen or construct a new well so that they have access to the water. It doesn't mean that the small well owner can say, no you can't use the water. It's just that you both have to be able to use the water and financial responsibility is that of the large well owner. And there's a phone number there that we've actually put in place here in Michigan, so if you have a complaint you can contact them and get the information on how to follow through those. So it's probably for people that are gonna build a large well to take into account what wells are around them and whether they impact them. So it's really good if your home well is grandma's because you feel better about building grandma a new well than you do somebody that's really mad at you. But what's really important is, when you build that well you and your well driller end up being responsible to make sure you're not negatively impacting the others, people around you. The other thing that we see a lot in those early clear back, in the early parts of Michigan we started talking about how far we could transfer river water. And they decided that we would use the term Riparian, Riparian's Latin for next to water. And Riparian owners have access to the water for the land that touches the water. So we actually look at the parcels that touch the water. So if grandpa had a farm, 80 acre farm here and it bordered on the river and the title of the farm actually read that, bordering to the river, then that whole 80 acre farm had access to water and we could irrigate the whole 80 acres from it. If he decided back in the 40's that he could get rich parceling off the frontage to the river, and selling home lots then that would be E, F and G. Those still have irrigation rights, but he severed A, B and C. So they no longer have access to the river by legal description and it really isn't legal for them to draw water from the river. D still has open access and there is an illegal right there. Now he could put a well down and in Michigan, our doctrine, or we sort of look at it like we're punching a hole into a big sponge underneath us and we assume that any water you take out at one parcel would be the same water that you would probably take out at the next. So we let people, and our most common example is municipalities, go outside of town. Out where there isn't contaminated water, they buy a few acres and put down large well fields and pump the water back into town. So we do not have these restrictions on wells but we do on surface water. Now some of you are gonna say, boy I know people that are irrigating and they go across the road and that's not the same parcel. The truth is; yes, this is probably one of things that are more ignored in the irrigation area than others. But I think the major reason that it is ignored is that this is a legal issue between two Riparians. So the state cannot take you to court, another Riparian has to be able to show that he had a loss, that he had a loss to the court and that the water use by this first Riparian pumping from the river was negatively impacting him to the point that the judge would rule that he would have to cease and desist. In Michigan, that has been the one area that has immediately stopped irrigation. So if you get a court order from a judge that says that you're negatively impacting the neighbor, he can put a lock on your pump almost immediately and the sheriff's responsible for that, and then you end up having to figure out whether you can get an alternative water source or whether you can somehow mediate the situation so that the neighbor's whole. So that sort of takes us up to about 2005, in Michigan's history as far as using water. In the early 2000's there was this big discussion about how are we gonna keep other states from stealing Michigan's Great Lake resources. And there was actually ads in Michigan, this one was just near MSU's campus and you can see that they're worried about back, it says, back off suckers and it's the Texas, Utah, California and New Mexico and we don't want them using our water. So there were actually projects where engineering companies looked at what it would take to pipe water out of the Great Lake's region and send it to the west. None of those were terribly economically feasible but it was enough of a scare that the Great Lake's region, the states and provinces in Canada, the states in the United States got together and said; what do we do to be able to manage the water ourselves? And they formed a group called the Great Lakes Charter and then later on, the annex agreements. And these are agreements between the states and provinces that they will manage water and in doing that, the Federal government gave them the right to say no to the export of water out of the diversion, or direct water out of the basin. So what did we have to do? Well, they said if you're gonna manage water first you need to know how much you're actually using. In Michigan, we passed some legislation that changed how we looked at our water. It did not change our Riparian rights, matter of fact, the last paragraph of the legislation says, this does not change your Riparian rights but it did put in some parameters. The first one, if you have the capacity to pump more than two millions gallons per day, you gotta get a permit. What we see is agriculture rarely gets to that number. Especially when we look at that as two million gallons today, over a 30 day average. So we rarely get there. But if you're pumping more than 70 gallons a minute you have to do two things; you have to register and report and then you have to prove that there's no adverse resource impact. So we don't wanna have a permanent damaging of the resource, the water, the water levels and we don't want to change the environment. So where does agriculture fit? If you're irrigating more than 10 acres, we usually see 70 gallons a minute being used. If you're using high-pressure for cross protection or for distributing the water, we tend see gallonages above that 70 gallons a minute. So most of our large scale irrigation, more than 10 acres or so tends to be above 70 gallons a minute and then below that we see lower water uses that may avoid the registration and the reporting. There is no major advantage to avoiding the registration and reporting, these things in both Michigan and Indiana are free because actually the land owner does have access and right to the water. So in Michigan we define this no adverse resource impact, by; that we shouldn't use so much water that we change the fish population in our local stream. So it's a little bit of a hard concept when you first think about it but what we're looking at is fish as an indicator of the environment. And if we change the fish population in the stream then we've changed the environment, that's the concept that's there. So what we've done in Michigan is we've isolated the areas that we have information and flows, that ended up being about 135 stream segments and then we projected from the data on those the 13 000 stream segments in the state. Those stream segments each received an estimate of how much flow they had at the lowest point during the summer, usually August is their lowest flows. And then it was determined in the legislation that no stream should go more than 25% below its low average flow. So its August flow, we couldn't go below 25%. And then if it was a trout stream, that number's much smaller, closer to 4% and then there's a category in the middle. But we've put this whole system together and it's in a little tool called the MiWwat tool and we'll talk about that a little later today. There's 13 000 stream segments up there. It's actually they bound some of the smaller ones together so we're at about 11 000 now and if we take a look at those in the last days of 2015, at that point there was water available at 1400 gallons a minute or more in the dark blue. 70 to 700 gallons a minute which would be in our irrigation category in the aqua. So in the end of 2015, the blue in and the aquas, the two colors of blue and the aqua, probably all had water available in the allocation system that was used within the law. The oranges, reds and yellows were all at some point that we had allocated all of the water to the point that they were worried about reducing the flow of the local stream and had some process in place to then look at alternatives. And we'll talk a little bit more about that. So I've got a couple of slides in here about a checklist for irrigation but one of the first things that we ever talk about, is how much water do you need and then can you actually get it at that site? Can you actually get the water that you need there? And then, there's this checklist, fact sheet number 11 has 20 items on it that you ought to think about before you start irrigating. Everything from, can you actually get enough water to can you actually economically, feasibly put this system in? I'll skip through this. So we talked about this whole where we are as far as the reporting thresholds and the registration thresholds and they're the same. We said that it's 70 gallons a minute or more and that could be one or more wells totaling that. So if you like a greenhouse set and every four buildings have a well, we total all of those in one parcel and if we're greater than 70 gallons a minute capacity then we have to go through the registration and recording process. As far as the permitting process, it's a 30 day average. So if you're pumping 12 hours a day, it would be half of that total in the 30 days. So we'd actually have to have wells greater than 1400 gallons a minute to be able to actually be a concern, and very few irrigation wells are at 1400 gallons a minute. And then very few of those run on a 30 day average, anything over 50%. When we started out the original paper forms that we used in 2005 and 2006, identified our surface water withdrawals and wells, so ponds, lakes, streams, by GPS location, so the Lat Long locations, and we set our rated capacities. That was actually referred to in the legislation as your baseline capacity, it's the most water you would use from that site in per minute. So we talk about gallons a minute, so it's 600 gallons or 800 gallons per minute which is your baseline capacity. And then since then, we've went and modified that several times. As far as reporting, we said we had registration and reporting. The procedure for reporting has got more in-depth, originally we were on the paper system that we talked about here. And it was simply going in and identifying where you were at and then telling them how many thousands of gallons or acres or inches of water we used in each month. So we went a 30 day or a monthly water use time period. In 2018, the state of Michigan came through with a computer system and you were required to log in to this system and then fill out your water use reporting. And that's been a major challenge and we've had a reduction in the number of total large volume water users reporting since then, so that's a major area of work for many of us to try to figure out how to reestablish that. So the log in, once you log in to the state you actually log in to the vendor system for the state. Once you've established it, that's the hardest part, getting logged in. Once you've established it, it's really pretty user friendly. It has the concept that you have a farm and then within that farm you have pumps. So if you have a farmer that has three locations, he may have a south farm a north farm and a west farm. Each of those is like a filing cabinet, that's where I'm gonna keep the information for my water use. I'm gonna break it down in each filing cabinet, south farm, west farm, north farm, each filing cabinet. Then within that filing cabinet, you're gonna pull open a drawer and that's gonna be the pumps. So I may have the river pump, I may have the long well or someone's well and each of those are under the pumps. It is important that you match the water withdrawal MiWwat tool registration number, we're gonna talk about how you get those registration numbers in a second. But you're reporting to the state, the amount of water use from each of those locations. Once you filled it out once, it's all in that system. The first time we do this, it takes 15, 20 minutes per withdrawal. But once they're in there, the next year you come through and all that solid information's up there and all I have to add is the monthly water uses. It will allow you do to that monthly water use by either gallons or acre inches. Acre inches is the concept, it's more of a western thought, they talk about acre feet out there. But if you had a one acre chunk of land and you put one inch of water over that whole acre, you would have a acre inch of water. It's equivalent to 27 154 gallons, 27 154 gallons, so the two numbers either way there's a way to convert between them. And then the last thing you're gonna need to do is once per farm, you're gonna need to talk about the irrigation practices that you're doing to minimize your water use, effectively use your water use. Just a hint, if you ever get in here we're still dealing with a little bit of a challenge. Once you go to do your monthly water use, it keeps throwing you these signals that things aren't good. That's because it's trying to balance how much total acres you have, but you never told it how many acres you have so always tell it how many acres and what crop you have. So I have six acres of blueberries and then I went up here and then, four acres of those blueberries I put four tenths of an inch. So if you do one over the other you get in there quickly. So four ways we talk about measuring water flow and keeping track of those numbers acre inches is by far the most common. Probably less common in the smaller, specialty crop area but we already talked about an example here. The farmer has one application June of three quarters of an inch on a 142 acres. So that adds up being 106 and a half acre inches and the machine actually does the conversion for you. So all he keeps in his records is a monthly calendar of how many times he turned the machine on, how many acres it covered and then how much water he put on at each of those applications. Pump capacity is the second most common that we see, applies to almost everywhere. We sit down and sort of figure out how many gallons a minute you're working out and then we usually convert that to hours because most of our metering systems that we put on pumps keep track of the hours that the pump was running. So, this gentleman's figured out he's got 500 gallons a minute and that's equivalent to 33 000 gallons per hour. So this is covering like a one and a quarter acre inches and hour, this system. And then he simply writes down the last day of the month, the reading that's on the flow meter, or in this case, the reading that's on the hour meter. And then does the math to figure out how many gallons a minute he used in each of those months. Flow meters are a little simpler, they already know how many gallons they're using and they read out gallons. The only thing that needs to be careful of is that flow meters need to be recalibrated once a year to keep the quality of the information up. And they have to be read the end of the month otherwise you're just guessing anyway where you're at so you have to send somebody out the end of the month to get your monthly readings. Some industries, and this happens to be the greenhouse and some of the vegetable industries, have some general numbers we call industry average numbers. So we've seen this in the hog industry, they know that the average finishing pig uses so much water. A grower pig uses two and a half gallons per day, so if I have him in the barn 100 days, he's using 250 gallons per pig. If I have 1000 pigs then he has 250 000 gallons per churn in the barn. We see these in green houses too, where they have some estimates of 1000 square feet of greenhouse area into petunias or into a certain plant, uses so much water. So those are industry average numbers. So onto registration. We have new and old systems. The date originally was February 28th in 2006, then in 2006 we had some legislation that came through and moved that date up to October of 2008. And if you were in before that, the assumption is that your impact onto the stream, the data that we used what we said we estimated the needed flow was already in the estimates. So your impact to that flow was already calculated and part of the information. And then from passed that date, February 28th of 2006 in the original legislation for, last day of October of 2008 in the newer legislation. Then you had to have a MiWwat or a Michigan water withdrawal assessment to look at your potential impact. So you had to meet that no adverse resource impact and that's the legislation that we're gonna talk about in a second. And the threat of this was if they could not grant you the water, then you'd have to form a user committee. You'd have to pull together everybody in your watershed that was using large volume water and get some of the existing users to reduce their use to allow you to have enough to be able to put your new use in. There has been a total of five standards, four before the MiWwat tool and, since the MiWwat tool's had its second revision, the MiWwat tools, all of the new ones. The only reason that you wanna ever look at this chart is you legally are responsible to meet the standard that was in place at the time that you established your well or withdrawal. So it's pretty much historic issue now, everything's into the MiWwat tool. Before you fill out the MiWwat tool, we need to know how much water to use. In general, when we look at crops, our crop removal's between 26 and 2900. So in other words, a little over a quarter of an inch a day for the crops that are there. So a quarter inch a day is equivalent to five gallons a minute. So we tend to say, if you had 100 irrigated acres you would need 500 gallons a minute and you would have to have that run 24 hours a day seven days a week, at that peak water use times. So in like 2012, this area had like 17 days that had peak water uses above a quarter of an inch and you would have actually been sliding a little bit behind. But all of the other years since 2012, we've never hit those peak number, a quarter of an inch a day or five gallons a minute has been sort of the number that we talk about. Many of you do not irrigate every acre, you may say you have six acres or four acres of blueberries but the blueberries are using the water, are not taking all of the sunlight that's in there so we're not using the water, transpiring water from every inch of land. So we need to do a conversion, so here's a little bit of math that's up there and basically it tells you that if you had a six and a half by six and a half square or round circle, that was equivalent to that, that that was about a thousandth of an acre. So each of those plants or trees would take about 26 or 27 gallons of water, would equal an inch of water. The other way to look at this is a lot of people will say, well my fruit orchard is about 50% actual water use by the plants. And so they made a determination, basically if you were looking over the top of an aerial photo, how much of the area is foliage that is receiving water from your plants? Here's a charts for soy beans, sweet corn, field beans, all of them are right around a quarter of an inch max. So we started to look at the quarter of an inch. Remember there are a couple reasons that you don't get all of the water that you irrigate into the plant. One would be runoff, two would be the lack of uniformity and then three, evaporation to the air. Three is a very minor number here, runoff is a huge number that exists so we wanna avoid that and then, this lack of uniformity all depends on how good you've done in designing your equipment so that everything that's in that irrigation system's receiving the same amount of water. So we already talked about numbers there. And if you're working with trickle, you're gonna be looking at the number of hours times the gallons per minute, and then how many areas you're actually putting water on gives you an hourly conversion. And field scale, we tend to look more at continuous hours of pumping. So you've got a number, you say, okay I need 100 gallons a minute or 500 gallons a minute. Does, well me taking 100 gallons a minute or 500, whatever the number I'm at, will that cause an adverse resource impact? The state's done all that work for us and they put it all in this MiWwat tool. MiWwat stands for Michigan water withdrawal assessment tool. It's a fairly easy process that you go to. It's just the answers that may be a little more challenging. But, to actually sit down you go to the MiWwat tool, the address is up there at the top. Now since most of you are looking at a new situation, so you're going to hit the button that says you're looking at an assessment of a new situation. It's got a safety in there that says, sorry, is this been a previous irrigation use? And it's no, it's new. So that's there. That opens up the tool, it asks you where in the world, where in Michigan, you're actually gonna put this withdrawal. It let's you do GPS Lat Long, or a street address. That will narrow you up, right here's that harbor. So that will pull us in to the Benton Harbor area, I think we're actually something, and we're over here, right? Ron's in the room, he's not even paying attention. So it gets us close, we find it on the map and then we turn on. Let me just try and give you a few hints here. These base maps, if you hit that button it opens up and says aerial view. Most of us wanna get an aerial view so we can pick out from the recent map, our farm. We open up the aerial view, we narrow in. Here you can see the end of the highway, the lost highway, I've always wondered what happens out there. So we're just over here. Here, here, right here, yeah we're right there today. So we find our point, we keep blowing it up or shrinking it using the plus and minus signs. And then at some point, we get our farm big enough and we're actually, today in this building right here. But if we wanted to put a well up right outside the building complex here. We hit the button that says, new well withdrawal. It lets our cursor or our mouse move over and when we hit the left hand button on the mouse, it will drop the well in that location. It will tell us that that location is this GPS coordinates, so it has an automatic system for reading that. You tell it that we want ground water, so we're gonna put a ground water well. If I was on a stream, I would say it was surface water. Or you get the option of a shallow pond and the shallow pond would be a pond that is not connected to a stream. So this one is actually connected to a stream, so they would consider that to be a stream. I don't think this one's connected to a stream so it would be a shallow pond. At that site, we've told it that we're gonna pull out of either, since it's a well, it opens up the well opening data point and we tell it it's gonna be a glacial well. Glacial wells have a screen on them, that's the easiest way to say. Bedrock wells are more middle of the state and you're actually pounding a hole or drilling a hole into the rock and the rock screens the water for you. So in almost all of our irrigation is in glacial wells but there's a few places in the state that we have some rock wells. They do give you a little bit of information to help you out here. It's the depths to bedrock is 229 feet below us, is their estimate here. The average well, so they've looked at the wells in this community is 86 feet deep. 93% of those wells are in glacial material and only 2% are drilled into the bedrock at this location. So we fill out and we're gonna tell it, well we wanna put our well at 100 feet deep and it's in the glacial material. And then how often are we gonna pump that well. If you don't do anything it's continuous, is the default and then we're gonna write in, well we wanna be able to beat that need we talked about, pump 24 hours a day, six days a week because we don't work on Sundays here at the front swim wreck right. So six days a week and then we wanna be able to have that amount of water available May through September. So we've highlighted May through September and then we hit the little button that says run the model. Once you run the model, it gives you this neat little green light, yellow light, orange light and then red light. And I'll talk to you a little bit more about that. That's the quick definition that you see on the first page. If you say that you wanna view a report, it will give you additional details and this is the details that you wanna talk about. So if you call me and you said, hey I was working on the tool and it says that my impact is gonna be 122.4 gallons to the closest water and the neighboring water shed, we must be pretty close to the line here, 114 gallons of impact. So what they're saying is, they're estimating out of that 600 gallons a minute that's coming out of the well, 122 gallons of it would have went down this stream and 114 gallons of it would have went done this stream. And one of those streams, that's too much. So you have the option, it gives me this orange light to hit the site specific review button, that's right here and that's a way of going in and saying, okay let's have the state look at additional information. Now we're looking at it and my line, you see the little cursor up there, is pretty close to the threshold. So I may go back through and say, well how much hassle do I wanna go through? And in this case, I'm gonna sit there and I'm gonna say, well I did get a proceed, a yellow or a green. I'm down in here in the caution, I have to go to a site for a specific review or I'd have to ask for less water. So we're gonna go back in and hit that rerun button and we could lower our well. We could move our well further from the stream, well we were pretty close to the break line so it didn't matter, or we could reduce our amount of pumping. We could reduce the amount of pumping and I think we went through and asked for 570 gallons a minute and it gives us a yes. You can have that much on the registration and here's the report. I did not hit the buttons, they don't like me putting great wells in everywhere across the state and then not using them. This is what you register and then at the bottom it says, tell us your name and phone number and whether this is all true. And you fill that out and when you hit submit, it will come back with a registration form. So in the state of Michigan you get this, if you're lucky and you're in that green or yellow category you can go home 20 minutes after you've started with the registration. If you have a lot of water use in you area, this may be a process that's more in the years. What happens if you don't do this? Well there's a couple things that are up there. If you can't get water at volumes you need, it's not legal to cause an adverse resource impact, we'll talk about that in a second. But the next alternative is to form a user committee. Not one of these have happened in the state. There is a discussion going on right now about requiring a user committee here on the west side of the state, and those discussion will be going on here this winter of 2020. That user committee will be the people that are large volume water users, and the local government officials. They all come together and try to figure out how to reduce the water use within the community so that the new potential water user can get the water they want. What's the law do if you just ignore this? Well there are some civil actions that are in there. If you lie to them, there's a penalty that's there. It is knowingly causing that adverse resource impact, adverse resource impact, ARI. It's a $10 000 a day fine, and you say, well how do I knowingly cause that? When you fill out the MiWwat tool it says, that this is information telling you whether they think it will cause and adverse resource impact or not. So once you've filled out the tool, you said, I know that they think that this will or will not cause an adverse resource impact. And then the state also has the right to recover any costs that they have spent at finding you and then finding out that you've caused this adverse resource impact. Same rules apply in Indiana, except the registration process is a given. You just notify their department that you need water and that will be granted, everywhere in the state except two trout streams right in the South Bend area and those are on basically the same basis. So one phone call, you get your registration. And the registration systems sets you up for the reporting system in Indiana.