Podcast Episode 71

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Is Drainage Infrastructure More Valuable Than Underground Transit?

Is Drainage Infrastructure More Valuable Than Underground Transit?

Episode 71 | 40:58 min

With Guest:

Dr. Michael Castellano, Professor of Soil Science of Iowa State University

A kid who grew up in the suburbs of New York City to become a researcher on the forefront of carbon, nitrogen and water research joins Jamie on this episode to talk about the value of drainage, the carbon footprint and how research is making precision agriculture much more attainable in the Midwest.

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We’ve got a drainage structure below ground that’s more valuable than the transportation structure underground.

— Dr. Michael Castellano

Guest Bio

Dr. Michael Castellano is a professor of soil science at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. He grew up in Newark, NJ and did his graduate studies at Penn State in the Chesapeake watershed. He has been at Iowa State University for 13 years. Dr. Castellano is an expert in biogeochemical cycling and transport within soil.

Jamie Duininck (00:02):
This is the water table.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
A chance to hear the agricultural side of these issues.

Jamie Duininck (00:09):
A place for people to go find information and education.

Speaker 3 (00:13):
Water management is just going to become even more critical into the future.

Jamie Duininck (00:17):
How misunderstood what we do is…

Speaker 2 (00:22):
I would encourage people to open their minds and listen to this dialogue.

Jamie Duininck (00:31):
Well, welcome back to the Water Table Podcast. This is Jamie Duininck. Today I have Dr. Michael Castellano with me. He’s a professor of soil science at the Iowa State University. Most of what Dr. Castellano does is research focused on biochemical cycling and transport within soil as it extends to the atmosphere and sub soil. We’re going to talk a lot about that. I’m going to get him to explain what they do there and how it’s impacting agriculture. But welcome to the podcast, Dr. Castellano.

Dr. Michael Castellano (01:04):
Great. Thanks a lot, Jamie. Appreciate you having me.

Jamie Duininck (01:06):
Absolutely. We work with a lot of people in your department there at Iowa State and some of your colleagues across the country. A lot of that through Ag Drainage Management Coalition. So really appreciate your willingness to be on and the support that you have had for our industry and for the Water Table here. So thank you. But tell me a little bit about, in a nutshell, what you do there at Iowa State and your department.

Dr. Michael Castellano (01:35):
You could think of me as a system scientist. So we think about all the interactions between plants, soil, the atmosphere, the water table, how those interact to affect the transport and transformation of energy and materials through the environment. And so the energy’s obvious, sunlight that’s transformed into carbon by plants and the materials are things like water and nutrients that are critical for those plants to grow. So you could think about me as a carbon, nitrogen, and water accountant who’s quantifying how much is in different pools, how it transforms from one pool to another, and how fast it flows from one pool to another. Oftentimes for nitrogen, for example, that includes nitrate and ammonium in the soil, their importance for crop uptake, but also their environmental impacts when they are leached to the water or when they’re transformed to nitrous oxide and released to the atmosphere. And nitrous oxide, of course, it’s no laughing matter. It’s a greenhouse gas with 300 times the heat trapping capacity of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Jamie Duininck (02:49):
Interesting that you say you’re a water, nitrogen, and carbon accountant. Just as how you explain that, just because I sit here and think, you started your career and in going through school many years ago, in which those three things weren’t necessarily buzzwords at the time. And today, we hear about nitrogen. For the last 20 years, we’ve been hearing about nitrates in our rivers and the Gulf of Mexico and more and more. But those three things together: water, nitrogen, and carbon; we hear about it almost every day in all walks of life. And pretty interesting that that’s where the tip of the spear is for you. And how did you get to where you’re at? I guess I wasn’t going to ask that, but because you shared that, that’s at top of mind all of a sudden. How’d you get to this position?

Dr. Michael Castellano (03:43):
Oh, yeah. Jamie, it’s funny you ask because sometimes I tell a little story about this before I start talking about drainage systems in the Midwest because I grew up in… Well, I was born in Newark, New Jersey, grew up in the suburbs in New York. My dad took the bus and train to Manhattan every day for work. And so certainly didn’t grow up on a farm. Not far from farmers though. My grandparents and great-grandparents, immigrants, were farmers back in Europe. And my dad was out here visiting us in 2019. And you remember 2019, one of the wettest springs on record. We had all sorts of agricultural losses, particularly on the Missouri, but also in the Mississippi. And we’re driving around. And he still lives in the New York City area. And he says, “Boy, you guys have got a big water problem here you got to take care of. This can’t be good for growing corn and soybeans.”

(04:46):
And I said to him, I said, “You know, Dan, we’ve got a drainage infrastructure below ground that you can’t see that’s more valuable than the transportation structure underground that you took to work every day,” when I was a kid. And he was just so stunned to learn about that and got all interested in it. And I think it’s just a really neat story because most people in the United States I don’t think have an appreciation for the enormous, well-planned, incredibly high-tech engineering approach we have to water management in the Midwest. So that’s a little bit of a story about where I’m from. How I got here, I went to graduate school at Penn State University. And they have very similar concerns with water quality and crop production in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. And so the skills and education I picked up there transferred really nicely to Iowa State University.

Jamie Duininck (05:42):
Good. How long have you been in Iowa?

Dr. Michael Castellano (05:44):
It’s 13 years this January.

Jamie Duininck (05:47):
You know when you talk about the value of that drainage system and that it’s so misunderstood or most Americans wouldn’t even know it because you can’t see it, and that’s part of the beauty of what we do. It’s also part of the… both sides of that equation, it’s a very big challenge. And it’s really, if you say, “Well, why did you start the Water Table Podcast?” It’s for that very reason, is for our city cousins to try to educate people that just don’t understand and they right away go to the negative of what we do as negative because there’s water quality issues and they’re created by all this drainage infrastructure. In reality that’s just simply not true, couldn’t be farther from the truth.

(06:30):
There is problems with our water quality. Those problems would be there whether there was drainage systems or not. But what we can do… And there’s been problems created obviously with drainage, but what we’re learning every day and what we can do can be so positively impactful to our environment. And it’s pretty neat for me to be able to have somebody like you on and then be able to talk about those three things, carbon, nitrogen, and water. And so it’s just interesting that you shared that around because it’s absolutely true, that most people don’t have a way to understand that because you can’t see it.

Dr. Michael Castellano (07:10):
I think that’s right. And I think a lot of people don’t necessarily at first glance appreciate that with drainage and all things in life, there are few solutions. Really we need to be thinking about in trade offs, in terms of trade offs. And drainage presents a remarkable opportunity to minimize the trade-offs between crop production, which we obviously need to feed ourselves, and environmental performance, keeping that high quality environmental functions that we rely on for clean water and other things every day. And I think a great example for me of that is that we’ve drained the Midwest. That was a decision made over a hundred years ago and it’s done. Now, the upper corn belt is the most productive grain production system in the world. And it’s because of the drains we have there. At the same time, we know those drains created some water quality challenges by exacerbating nitrate loss downstream. But they also create an enormous opportunity to reduce that nitrate loss downstream.

(08:28):
And just a couple examples of that. In the Iowa nutrient reduction strategy, which is a really thorough evaluation of opportunities and approaches to reduce nitrate loss downstream ultimately into the Gulf of Mexico, but also as it impacts our water quality, drainage systems or systems that are drained. They enable the most effective approaches to reduce nitrate loss downstream. Things like denitrification wetlands and bioreactors and saturated buffers. These tools aren’t available in undrained systems. And so not only do those systems perhaps not have as high productivity as our drained systems, but they also don’t have these opportunities for nutrient loss reduction practices that we have in these drain systems. I like saturated buffers and denitrification wetlands because they add some diversity back onto the landscape too. I just think they’re really fantastic tools. And then of course, drainage improves the efficacy of some of those lesser effective practices that are applicable on both drained and drained lands. Things like cover crops and reduced tillage. Drainage only improves the ability to practice those conservation practices.

Jamie Duininck (09:51):
A farm that doesn’t have any drainage in it, and the amount of carbon footprint that that farm is using, growing a crop and harvesting that crop compared to a field right next across the road, across the gravel road. And you have a comprehensive system in it. If it’s newer system, maybe you have a saturated buffer, de-nitrification wetland, whatever, on it. But the carbon footprint to grow that crop is similar. But you’re growing 20, 30, 40 bushels an acre more on your corn because of it. So what is that trade off? And that’s what you’re talking about. And it’s pretty staggering when you start thinking of it that way on what we can do if we continue to add these practices.

Dr. Michael Castellano (10:40):
Yeah. I think that’s right. Talking about the carbon footprint, this is something we spend a lot of time on and a growing amount of time, of course, with the increasing importance of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and drawing down carbon from the atmosphere. But coming back to that nitrogen component of it, our work in Southeastern Iowa and Central Iowa, and I know there’s good work in Minnesota too from our friends at the University of Minnesota, show that drainage reduces the optimum nitrogen rates, the economically optimum nitrogen rates that a producer would want to use by 20 to as much as 33%. And not only does it reduce the optimum nitrogen input, it obviously at least maintains, if not increases, yield. And it reduces nitrous oxide emissions as a result too. For two reasons, one, because we’re putting less fertilizer on the system, but also because a wet field emits more nitrous oxide because that’s produced as a byproduct of fertilizer when microbes don’t have oxygen available to them.

(11:56):
They start to breathe the nitrate instead when they don’t have oxygen. So they’re pretty cool, unlike you or me, which we wouldn’t last too long without oxygen. They just switch to another electronic acceptor, start breathing that nitrate, create some nitrous oxide. And so there’s a really significant carbon footprint reductions to be had with drainage. But again, I want to come back to the trade-offs here because it’s not a perfect world. We do burn some carbon. We release some carbon by putting those drains in because we oxidize the soil.

(12:31):
But that’s a one time thing. And over time, every year we reduce those nitrous oxide emissions. So eventually, it catches up to it. There’s a really nice analogy here with cars, with electric cars. Right? So let’s say we drive a Tesla and a Honda Accord off the lot. The Honda Accord emitted far fewer greenhouse gas emissions to be produced and delivered to that car dealer. But over time, assuming the Tesla has a carbon neutral electricity source like wind, over time, that car is going to emit less greenhouse gases. It drives more and more miles. And so it’s just like a drainage system here. Drainage releases a few greenhouse gases in terms of carbon when it’s put in. But over time, the savings is tremendous on the nitrogen aspect. And of course, farmers like that too because it puts more money in your pocket.

Jamie Duininck (13:26):
Talk to me a little bit about nitrous oxide. If nitrogen and nitrates, and correct me if I’m wrong, but attach to water particles and flow through a system and end up in rivers and streams. Is nitrous oxide, is that released through air, air particles or how is that released?

Dr. Michael Castellano (13:48):
Yeah, Jamie, so that’s a great question. So let’s just take it back to the organic matter where it all starts. So on the Des Moines Lobe feature, so let’s think about the area of the country, basically starts just south of me around Des Moines and stretches up to where you are up in Minnesota. Intensively drained landscape, some of the most best producing land in the world. We have roughly 10,000 pounds of nitrogen per acre in our soil organic matter. That’s remarkable. Think about that. The average farmer is just applying maybe one and a half to 2% of that in ammonium and nitrate fertilizers. And the reason they can apply such low fertilizers, if you look at university Nitrogen recommendations, you’ll find that Minnesota and Iowa have among the lowest. Or they actually do have the lowest of the corn producing states. Why? Because we have this huge resource of organic matter below us.

(14:47):
Every year, we can count on microbes to produce, transform. This gets back to my accounting. Roughly one to 5% of that organic nitrogen will transform into ammonium and nitrate. And so that nitrate’s in the soil with fertilizer, it’s identical to that. In wet years, water will drive some of that physically to the drains and we lose that nitrate. As you mentioned, that’s a physical process. So the microbes, we either add fertilizer as nitrate or ammonium. It gets converted to nitrate. Or our organic matter too can be converted to nitrate, is converted to nitrate by those microbes. And it can be physically transported by the water. The other thing the water does, and this is why drainage is good for nitrogen use efficiency, when the water floods the soil and there’s no oxygen available to the microbes. They take that nitrate just like they would take oxygen and they breathe it and they respire it. They turn it into nitrous oxide and dinitrogen, two different compounds, but both gases and those go up through the soil. They diffuse out of the soil and into the atmosphere.

(16:01):
It’s really underappreciated by farmers and I think scientists too, that on average, we probably lose about 30 pounds of nitrogen per acre in the form of nitrate to our drains. When we’re not using conservation practices like cover crops or denitrification wetlands. Those can make major reductions in that 30 pounds in nitrate per acre. We also lose about 30 pounds of nitrogen to the atmosphere every year. We don’t often appreciate that ’cause it’s hard to measure, especially the dinitrogen because we’re surrounded. We’re both bathed in dinitrogen right now.

(16:37):
78% of the atmosphere is dinitrogen, totally innocuous, not a greenhouse gas. It represents an inefficiency in our fertilizer use and because of that, we don’t want it emitted. But once it is emitted, it has no environmental impact whatsoever. But about half of that nitrogen loss to the atmosphere also comes in the form of nitrous oxide, maybe a third of it, 10 pounds per acre as nitrous oxide. And that’s where we have that heat, that greenhouse gas impact there. So we want to reduce that, not just to improve nitrogen use efficiency for the whole system, but reduce the carbon footprint of the system. And I think as we move on here into the futures, our agricultural products are valued not just on a productivity basis, but on a carbon intensity basis. I think drains are really going to shine in that regard that they really reduce the carbon intensity by reducing that nitrous oxide.

Jamie Duininck (17:38):
Interesting. Let’s talk a little bit about cover crops and how cover crops, how we attach cover crops when we’re talking about carbon footprint and soil health, just the opportunity to put more different crops in, different root systems in the soil, from what I’ve been told and what I’ve listened to and read, that that opportunity for the soil to have different root systems and to have different channels for that water to flow, the aeration that’s created is all really good for the soil, good for the soil health. Obviously when we’re talking about drainage, it creates a more mellow soil that allows for that water to get to the drains. But talk to me just a little bit about cover crops. And I think where I’m going with that around how that just attaches to this whole system of [inaudible 00:18:32] managing the water.

Dr. Michael Castellano (18:32):
Yeah. Cover crops, they just have so many potential benefits once a farmer learns how to best manage them and avoid any yield impact on the following corn crop. Very rarely do we see yield impacts on the following soybean crop. If anything, maybe a yield increase there. In some situations, they can reduce the yield of the following corn crop. But I think what we know is that once farmers get some experience, that potential yield loss can be completely overcome with good management. And so it takes a little bit of learning to get there. But once you’re there, the benefits, as you pointed out, are enormous. Not just the soil improvement in terms of helping to aerate the soil, adding some organic matter to the soil. Also retaining nitrogen in the soil. So avoiding nitrate losses. Why cover crops are so effective at reducing nitrate losses.

(19:35):
They range probably in a well-managed operation, probably about a 33, one-third loss, in nitrate loss per acre, 33%. But certainly as high as two-thirds losses in really well-managed operations. The reason they’re so effective at reducing that nitrate loss retaining it in the system is that they’re using the nitrogen that the microbes are transforming into nitrate when the crops are not. So that process we talked about earlier. And that’s really important to think about when we think about the causes of nitrate loss and what we can do to reduce nitrate loss. The main reason we lose nitrate from our corn and soybean systems in the Midwest is because crops really are not growing for nine months of the year. Whereas microbes, they’re working on that soil organic matter anytime it’s warm enough and wet enough for them to do it. And they’re not creating nitrate as a community service for the plants. They’re doing it to fuel their own metabolism. And so if there’s no crop there to use their byproducts that they produce, it just is really susceptible to loss to the environment. So that’s why cover crops are so good at that.

(20:56):
And then the other thing I’d add about cover crops is that one of the things we think can lead to those potential yield reductions in the following corn crop with cover crops is that they may slow field operations in the spring, for example. They could also tie up some nitrogen in the spring because they pull up nitrogen in the soil, they die. It takes a little bit of time to decompose. When they’re paired with the drainage systems, I think there’s a real opportunity for better functioning of the cover crops there because we know drainage systems allow more timely operations in the field. That’s why one of the two big reasons we have drainage systems.

(21:45):
And then the second thing there, in addition to just getting in and managing the cover crop earlier, we talked about how drainage aerates the soil and that allows the microbes to transform that organic matter faster and decompose that cover crop faster and release that nitrogen to the corn in a more timely situation. So I think the benefits of cover crops, that doesn’t even mention the biodiversity impacts at all. But really promising approach towards conservation in our region if we could scale it up beyond where it is now and there’s good evidence we can do that. And I think drainage systems, managing those together as a system is going to be really important. I think as we go forward in the future, we really have to consider how all these pieces fit together to really optimize management.

Jamie Duininck (22:46):
I appreciate that. For people in my world, and not scientists, but people just out working in this agricultural arena, it still is a lot undiscovered for us. So to hear you explain that and as we just continue to learn more every year, I too am pretty excited about the opportunities that cover crops can bring. I totally agree that especially as you get further north, there’s a big difference between Ames, Iowa and Willmar Minnesota here when it comes to weather.

(23:20):
And if you just got plopped down on earth, you probably wouldn’t know any different. They look pretty similar when you’re out in the landscape. But it’s very different when you get those days in the spring and the fall and the heat units that come with them or don’t come with them when you’re up here. So yeah, I think it’s going to be a learning curve for depending on where you’re at with how and what works when it comes to cover crops. Backing up a little bit, I wanted to ask you if you know of any studies or if you guys have done any studies, when you talk about, I think it was 10,000 pounds of nitrate or nitrogen that’s on an acre before there’s any application by the farmer. That’s just organic matter, right? Was that the figure you used?

Dr. Michael Castellano (24:08):
Yeah, so organic matter, we think about organic matter a lot. It’s roughly 45% carbon and then it’s roughly about four and a half percent nitrogen. So it’s about a 10 to 1 ratio nitrogen. So if you think about just an acre of land in Minnesota or Ames, Iowa, down to the depth of the drains. So you’d have to measure all the way down to the depth of the drains. We have about a hundred thousand pounds per acre of carbon. And because we have that 10 to 1 ratio between carbon and nitrogen, we have about 10,000 pounds of nitrogen per acre.

(24:51):
And nitrogen’s insoluble. It’s not available for plants to use. But it is available for microbes to use it as an energy source. And so when they’re eating that carbon as an energy source, just like you or me would eat a vegetable or a potato, something like this, they spit out that nitrogen as ammonium when they’re done with it. And then another microbe picks it up and transforms it into nitrate using that energy in that ammonium. I think a really exciting area down the road is thinking about ammonia not just as a fertilizer, but also as an energy source. So there’s microbes already in the soil that use ammonia and ammonium as energy sources just like you or me may use methane at home to heat our house or to cook our food. Very similar compounds actually, and same organisms in the soil that use them. Yeah. Same organism can use either one, methane or ammonium.

Jamie Duininck (25:49):
So is there any way of knowing if you… Using your analogy, you got an acre of land and that you take that from the soil from the surface down to the drain, that four foot of soil profile, whatever that is, four to five feet. And there’s 10,000 pounds of nitrate in there.

Dr. Michael Castellano (26:09):
Nitrogen, sorry. We got to be careful. Yeah.

Jamie Duininck (26:14):
If you don’t have a drainage system there compared to when you do, what’s the different? The drainage system obviously is the catalyst or it’s the conveyance of availability when that does turn to nitrate to get it to the rivers and streams. But if you have a lot of water and there’s surface runoff, can that same thing happen when there isn’t a drainage system?

Dr. Michael Castellano (26:45):
Yeah, Jamie, that’s such a great question. I really like it. So in un-drained system, we might have a little bit more than the 10,000 pounds, and the reason being… And a little bit more than the a hundred thousand pounds of carbon, a little bit more than the 10,000 pounds of nitrogen. Because microbes can’t do their job efficiently. They’re slowed down. It’s too cold. It’s too wet. There’s not enough oxygen for them to maximize their performance and really transform that organic matter into ammonium and nitrate, the same compounds that we have to buy in fertilizer or don’t have to buy if we have a well-drained system. So a well-drained system, we might have a little bit less than that hundred thousand and 10,000 pounds of carbon and nitrogen respectively. But because the system’s well aerated and it’s warmer, the microbes are able to transform much more of that on an annual basis to ammonium and nitrate.

(27:45):
And the real interesting and neat thing here is that just because you put the drains in, and they’re transforming a greater proportion, maybe let’s say it’s two to 3% in the un-drained system and four to 5% of it per year in the drained system, it’s not like they’re going to run out of it because of the drainage. The system comes to a new equilibrium. And so once it’s well aerated, not only does it accelerate their production of those compounds, but it also accelerates what we call their immobilization of those compounds. So they take them back up and recycle them through their biomass. The importance of soil health that you got to earlier. You have more of these microbes. It’s not a bad thing that they’re transforming more of that. It’s a good thing because at the same time that they transform more to ammonium and nitrate, they also put back more of it into the ammonium and nitrate.

(28:39):
They just keep the loop cycling faster, is what they do. And then one of the big impacts or outcomes I should say, we see of that in our studies on drainage is that not only does drainage reduce the optimum fertilizer rate while maintaining or increasing yield, it also… And perhaps even more importantly than reducing the rate that’s required on average, it reduces the year to year variability in that rate as well. So it really, that’s a big benefit for the farmer that I think is underappreciated, that it really makes the system more resilient, more stable. And is when we think about things like climate change, I think those are going to become more important in the future.

Jamie Duininck (29:24):
Yeah. For sure. I didn’t ask you all that to set it up, but it just is obvious on how you explained it that, part of soil health and healthy soil is the proper drainage system, especially when you’re getting a lot of rain.

Dr. Michael Castellano (29:39):
That’s absolutely right. And I like to emphasize that thinking about it in an accounting analogy, that big pools of carbon and nitrogen in your soil don’t mean a healthy soil. Rapid cycling of those pools in your soil, that’s a healthy soil, where the microbes are active; they’re recycling these nutrients efficiently through their biomass. That’s a healthy soil. And drainage does just that.

Jamie Duininck (30:08):
Yep. Makes complete sense how you explain it. I appreciate that. You do that well for a complicated topic and a complicated system. You explain it in a very easy way to understand. But switching gears here a little bit. You work in something called FACS, which I think is forecasting assessment cropping systems, right? Tell us a little bit about that.

Dr. Michael Castellano (30:33):
Sure. Thanks for asking about that, Jamie. This is an exciting project that’s led by my colleague Suturio [inaudible 00:30:42] at Iowa State University. He’s a cropping systems modeler. So sometimes I like to ask folks in an audience, “How many of you used a biophysical process model today? Raise your hand.” We get very few hand raises. But everybody checked the weather this morning, didn’t they? So we’ve all used a biophysical forecast model. And that’s what the FACS project is all about, is about taking our ability to collect data at greater resolution, both in time and space, using the latest advances in precision agriculture and taking all those data and using them to build process models, biophysical process models, which are just quantitative representations of how the system works, and then using those models to help forecast these processes that we’ve been talking about this afternoon. So how much nitrogen do I need this year or in this operation?

(31:41):
If I put drains in, how much could I back off on my optimum nitrogen rate? If I manage my residue one way versus another, how might I change my optimum nitrogen rate? How might I expect that to impact my yield? Those are the goals of facts. And recently, we’ve grown facts into another project and that project’s called the Iowa Nitrogen Initiative. The Iowa Nitrogen Initiative does just what we’ve been doing in FACS, but it really leverages these advances in precision agriculture to enable farmers to conduct scientifically robust nitrogen fertilizer rate experiments on their fields every year with very little inconvenience to them. All they do is we write them a nitrogen fertilizer prescription for their variable rate applicator. They plug it into the applicator, make that application on the field, send us back the as-applied data and send us back the harvest yield of the combine at the end of the year.

(32:45):
And it really scales up research this program. We’re really excited about this because these models, just like artificial intelligence, machine learning, they’re really powerful, but they’re really data hungry. And they need those data. And so using these scalinsg in precision agriculture, we can now conduct hundreds of scientifically robust experiments on farmer fields every year. And we can really begin to personalize our soil fertility recommendations for specific operations, specific locations in the state.

(33:21):
So if you have a field with this drainage intensity in Minnesota, and you’re in corn following corn, with 50% stover harvest, what do you need to put on for nitrogen next year? Those types of questions. We haven’t been able to get that specific in the past because research has been so difficult and limited to so few university farms. So we’re really excited about how FACS is growing and how it’s led into this Iowa Nitrogen Initiative project. And if there are any farmers in Iowa listening, we would love to have you get in touch with us and put a trial on your field. There’s some compensation for yield loss in the zero nitrogen rate trial, just takes about five to 10 acres of a field. And we provide all the data back, plant, soil sampling of course to the farmer at the end of the year. So a lot of opportunities here.

Jamie Duininck (34:24):
We will appreciate that. We’ll post that information on how to contact you guys and who to contact. I’ll get that from you offline, Dr. Castellano. We’ll post that on the notes section of this podcast episode. So-

Dr. Michael Castellano (34:39):
Thanks, Jamie.

Jamie Duininck (34:40):
… that’ll be great. That sounds really exciting. And for me, just listening and it’s just mind-boggling. I’m fairly close to the agricultural industry and for sure to the water management side and the amount and the speed at which things are moving to precision agriculture. That term has been around for 30 years probably or longer. But the speed at which it’s moving more and more toward that because of the available information and how we can decipher information in today’s world discontinues to amaze me in what you’re talking about right now. In the end, that helps everything. It helps the bottom line for the farmer. They don’t have to apply as much. It helps our environment.

(35:27):
There’s less nitrogen that’s going to have to be applied or less chemical. All of that. And it’s a win-win for a farmer’s bottom line, for a crop, and for the environment. So I don’t know how somebody should be disappointed [inaudible 00:35:48] people that may be about what we’re doing, what you guys are doing on the ground as scientists on the agricultural arena of the Midwest. Not just you guys at Iowa State. There’s a lot of people doing great things, but it’s happening. And it’s like our drainage systems that are underground. You don’t see it. You guys aren’t the most talked about university scientists out there compared to things going on in medical world and stuff like that. So the general public just doesn’t hear about it. So I’m super glad that you’re here today and willing to talk about it.

Dr. Michael Castellano (36:24):
Yeah. Thanks, Jamie. It’s funny you mentioned the medicine because as you point out, we’re really… I think sometimes, we beat ourselves up because we say, “What have we done with all this precision data?” But medicine is no further ahead than we are. So what’s the blood pressure recommendation for a guy our age in the United States? There’s just one. Can that be accurate? No. Right. Some people are fine at a little bit higher than others. Some people need to be lower than others. There’s no personalization to medicine really, right? They’re just standard recommendations.

(36:56):
Our soil fertility recommendations are much the same right now. In both Minnesota and Iowa, the only management that’s considered is whether you’re following corn or you’re following soybeans. No consideration of drainage, even though we know it has a major impact on fertilizer requirements. No consideration of residue management, soil management, even though we know those things have big, big factors in space. And then not to mention the weather year, which compounds that as well. So we’re getting there. We’re really not that far behind medicine. And I think we might beat them to some personalization. So we’re going to try.

Jamie Duininck (37:37):
That’s awesome. That’s awesome. Well, I don’t want to take too much of your time. I really appreciate you joining us today. I’m going to give you the last word here on the Water Table, but probably the last word through a question and probably off the wall, not something expected. If you inherited tomorrow 160 acres of the best land in Iowa, and it was yours to decide what to do with, what kind of practices would you put on that land? What would you do?

Dr. Michael Castellano (38:10):
Yeah. That’s a great question, Jamie. Since I own the land, the first thing I’d invest in is a great drainage system. And here’s a quote from Cato, the Roman philosopher, 160 BC in De Agri Cultura, “See that you carry out all farm operations betimes, for this is the way of farming. If you are late in doing one thing, you will be late in doing everything.” And whether that’s conservation practices like getting your cover crop in the ground, terminating your cover crop on time, planting your crop on time, it all comes back down to a well-drained field. And so I’d invest in drainage not only so I’d have high productivity, great stability of my input requirements, but also to enable me to implement those conservation practices both infield like cover crops and reduce tillage as well as at the edge of field, like a denitrification wetland, which I’d eagerly use as some duck hunting ground [inaudible 00:39:18].

Jamie Duininck (39:18):
Yeah. Well, we can do another podcast and talk about that because I love to duck hunt. So we don’t have time for that today. But I do like what… And I kind of just breezed over it what you said around the denitrification wetlands, the saturated buffers, just how it creates an opportunity for a more diverse landscape on the farm. And I think that’s really important too. And not something that we’ve talked about very much yet at this point. And I think it’ll be well received by a lot of, not only obviously by communities, but even by farmers. There’s a lot of farmers that like wildlife and like to hunt and see wildlife on their farms and things like that. So I think that’s something that’s just another added benefit.

Dr. Michael Castellano (40:08):
Yeah, no, I agree. So many benefits to these edge of field practices for everyone in the state and agriculture and beyond. And so I’m just excited to see those practices grow. I know we’re investing it here a lot in Iowa. I’m sure you are too in Minnesota. And so I think the future’s bright there.

Jamie Duininck (40:28):
Yeah. Well, thanks a lot for your time, Dr. Michael Castellano, Iowa State University, for joining us on the Water Table Podcast.

Dr. Michael Castellano (40:37):
Great. Thanks a lot, Jamie, for having me. Appreciate it.

Jamie Duininck (40:43):
Thanks for joining us today on the Water Table. You can find us at watertable.ag, find us on Facebook. You can find us on Twitter. And you can also find the podcast on any of your favorite podcast platforms.