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Hoorman Soil Health Services

  Farmers are finally getting moisture; rain, snow, and even ice. Recent rains followed by colder temperatures has restored some soil moisture. The slow steady rains have soaked in rather than running off. Waterways finally did fill up with water; but it took a long time. That is both good news for future crops planted next year, but also for water quality. Slow steady rains release much less nutrients into our waterways than fast hard driving rainfall events.  Farmers do not know what the weather will be like this next year but hotter and drier summers are expected. Rain in summer generally makes grain, as long as it comes in moderation. An inch of fully used rainfall generally results in a minimum of 8-bushel corn, 3.5-bushel soybeans, and 6-bushel wheat. However, if moisture occurs when corn is tasseling (mid-July), soybeans are blooming (late July through mid-August) or wheat starting to bloom (mid-May to early June) expect higher yields. Moisture is critical for high yiel...

  Dr. Manbir Rakkar, assistant professor of nutrient management, took over for Dr. Stephen Culman at Ohio State University. She shared that Hoytville and Wooster have two of the longest-running soil quality research experiments. Started in 1962, over 100 research publications have been published on this research. This research was started by soil quality and no-till pioneers, Dr. Grover Triplett and Dr. David Van Doorhan, both deceased. These pioneers had three basic research questions they wanted to answer. First, how much tillage, if any, is required to grow a good crop? Second, how do tillage and crop rotation affect crop yields? Third, how does tillage or no-till vary by soil type? All good questions, still being debated! To answer these questions, they set up long-term plots at Hoytville on a flat (0-2%) heavy clay soil (Hoytville) and at Wooster on a silt loam soil with 6-10% slope. The tillage was continuous no-till, chisel plow, and moldboard plow. They included crop rotati...

  Dr. Jon Witter, Ohio State University water management specialist shared research on how farmers and landowners may capture sediment in runoff, reducing water quality problems. Dr. Witter has been conducting long-term research on two-stage ditches and several other ditch modifications for several years. He found ways to capture sediment that save landowners money on clean out, are faster, more convenient, and are over all cheaper to maintain.  A typical man-made ditch in Ohio is called a trapezoidal ditch with 3:1 side slope which is common throughout Ohio. The bottom is flat, and the sides are fairly steep. Northwest Ohio has at least 10,000 miles of these ditches. When they were constructed to drain the drain the black swamp, the spoils were used to make roads. Often, steep trapezoidal ditches are located next to roads. They tend to erode, and they tend to fill up with sediment and nutrients from runoff. They have to be cleaned out frequently, and often the spoils (sedimen...

Dr. Vinayak Shedekar, Ohio State Drainage Specialist shared additional information on water quality. Dr Shedekar showed improved soil health, cover crops, and no-till had both direct and indirect effects on water quality. A direct effect is increased soil organic matter (SOM) over time. The gain is slow, but on long term research plots, no-till plus cover crops increased SOM from 2.3% (conventional tillage for 75-100 years) transitioned to no-till and cover crops with 4.3% SOM after multiple years. A research question was: Does no-till and cover crops improve water quality? Dr. Kevin King has 41 paired water quality sites with over 200 years of site data. He measures both surface flow and subsurface (tile) flow on these paired plots, comparing conventional tillage to no-till fields. Tile discharge was similar however less nitrogen (N) leaves the no-till fields and on soluble reactive phosphorus (SRP), there was no difference. No-till by itself had some gains for N but no difference for...