Podcast Episode 77

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How 5 Million Dollars, 39 Test Sites & 29 Bright Minds are Transforming Drainage

How 5 Million Dollars, 39 Test Sites & 29 Bright Minds are Transforming Drainage

Episode 77 | 29 min

With Guest:

Dr. Jane Frankenberger, Professor of Agriculture & Biological Engineering

We are joined by Dr. Jane Frankenberger of Purdue University to talk about the Transforming Drainage Project, which took five years and covered dozens of test sites across the Midwest. The project delivered invaluable data to propel agricultural water management into the future. Join Jamie and Dr. Frankenberger as they discuss drainage and how water storage and controlled drainage could change the future of agriculture.

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As a society, we need to think about the incentives pushing people towards the best solutions, and there, our incentives in agriculture could change.

— Dr. Jane Frankenberger

Guest Bio

Dr. Jane Frankenberger is a professor at Purdue University and a pioneer in the research of drainage design and management, watershed modeling of agricultural systems and soil and water conservation strategies. She spearheaded the $5 million Transforming Drainage Project that advances water storage in the landscape to increase the resilience of drained agricultural land.

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 to 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):
Today on The Water Table podcast, I’m speaking with Dr. Jane Frankenberger of Purdue University. Dr. Frankenberger has a wealth of knowledge. We’re going to mostly cover the Transforming Drainage project that she spearheaded. It was a five-year project in which they focused on control, drainage, saturated buffers, and drainage water recycling. But throughout her career, she has a wealth of information and a wealth of experience on all things drainage. I hope you enjoy this podcast.

(01:05):
Welcome back to another episode of The Water Table podcast. Today, I have Dr. Jane Frankenberger with me. Dr. Frankenberger is at Purdue University, and she has a wealth of experience in drainage and drainage water management. We’re going to talk a lot about a project that she spearheads called Transforming Drainage in a minute, but I just want to give you a little bit of her background.

(01:30):
I’m going to read right from her bio here. But in her extension program, her goal is to build the capacity of agencies, producers, watershed coordinators, communities, and citizens to protect water quality while maintaining agricultural productivity.

(01:48):
In the research side, Dr. Frankenberger’s research has advanced drainage designs and management watershed modeling for agricultural systems and soil and water conservation strategies while delivering tools and strategies to stakeholders who can use them to inform decision-making. It just goes on and on the things she’s done in her career and how she has been involved in our industry. I’m really excited to just start this conversation and see where this goes today. Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Jane Frankenberger.

Dr. Jane Frankenberg (02:23):
Thank you. It’s great to be here.

Jamie Duininck (02:25):
So I even want to talk later about some of the things you did before Purdue, which are pretty neat, but I’m just starting with how you got involved in this, and probably fast-forward and we can go back. But fast-forward to your most recent project, this Transforming Drainage project from basically 2015 through 2021, and you led this group, really focused on controlled drainage, saturated buffers, and drainage water recycling. But let’s talk about that and tell me how this group was formed, why it was formed, and even some of the results.

Dr. Jane Frankenberg (03:06):
Thanks. As we have a great group of my counterparts at all the various universities. I know you’ve interviewed many of them already, and I’m very fortunate that we all learn from each other, we work well with each other. So we had done some smaller projects together, some actually that involved the Ag Drainage Management Coalition, various projects. Then the opportunity came to apply for a $5 million grant. So we actually started the planning of it at one of the meetings of the Ag Drainage Management Systems Task Force back in 2014. We said we would be able to get much further if we had data across the entire Midwest or if we could pull together the data that had been collected before, and then we could develop tools that really allow these practices to be designed more easily and more consistently, and we could do education that’s coordinated across the Midwest.

(04:09):
So we wrote the proposal to USDA, it got funded, and I was the project director, and that’s how it took off starting in 2015. The original name wasn’t Transforming Drainage. It was something like Managing Drainage in Agricultural Landscapes. But as we got started, I think it was Charlie Schafer, who we were just talking about, who suggested that if you want to transform drainage, why don’t you just call it Transforming Drainage? So we said, “That makes sense.” So that’s how it got the name that sticks with it to this day.

(04:45):
So the project itself has actually finished formally that funded part, but there are many offshoots. Many people have various funding streams and are still trying to improve those tools, add more research that helps us show the impacts of these practices, and do more education that makes people aware of it. So it’s still going on though the funded part has ended.

Jamie Duininck (05:09):
Yeah. I’m assuming that will have a life of its own. It’ll go on for quite some time, right into the future. Is that right?

Dr. Jane Frankenberg (05:17):
Right. That’s what we hope for because we still need to transform drainage. We haven’t finished that task. We’ve made progress.

Jamie Duininck (05:27):
How many sites do you have? Talk a little bit about the project and some of the results coming up, but how many sites do you have and where are you working on these projects?

Dr. Jane Frankenberg (05:41):
The ones that were funded by the project were about 20, that had various kinds of funding. The number that sticks with me is that 39 sites had data that we eventually uploaded to a database that everybody put the data together. Some of it had been collected earlier than the project, so we can’t claim that that was directly funded by it, but people were willing to share, and that was part of their contribution to the project. So in what we call the Transforming Drainage Database, which is available on the web to anybody who wants to have measured data to do any kind of research with, there are 39 sites, and I can look at my numbers here, but there’s something like 200 types of data that are there. So it includes not just flow and water quality but also all the agronomic data. It’s a set of very complete data sets that are now available for others to use.

Jamie Duininck (06:42):
Yeah, I saw that. 206 was what it was, the site years of tile drainage, and then 153 of the nitrate-N load. Explain that a little bit.

Dr. Jane Frankenberg (06:55):
A site year means that someone has collected, usually in continuous flow. So there’s thousands and thousands of measurements of flow, and then enough water quality samples. So they’re drawn periodically so that they can be representative for the whole year. So one site year may sound like one measurement, but actually it’s hundreds of measurements that go into one site year. At all our sites, we had, for example, if it’s controlled drainage, one side that’s controlled and one side that’s free, and they’re being measured all the time. So there was controlled drainage sites, there were saturated buffer sites, and the fairly new practice, although I think you’ve talked about it on previous podcasts, the drainage water recycling, which was really just getting off the ground at that point. So between those practices, gives the number that added up to, as you said, and it’s all the way from the Dakotas, both North and South Dakota, and mostly in the Midwest, but there are sites in North Carolina as well.

Jamie Duininck (07:58):
Sure. Can you give me any examples of ways, and I know this is just done. 2021 is when the project ended, but of examples of where you’ve been able to use all this data and work with maybe some agencies or people that maybe weren’t as interested in drainage or had a negative view of drainage and be able to use some of the data just as talking points in your conversations, if nothing else, in which you can create and build a bridge with some people or agencies that maybe we had a negative view of what we did?

Dr. Jane Frankenberg (08:43):
Okay, that’s an interesting question. I actually think that all the agencies that we typically work with are very much on board. So we’ve written some papers that have synthesized that. One was led by Matt Helmers on the nitrate component, and one was by Mohammad Yusuf on the yield for controlled drainage, for example. So that enables us to, say, across all the sites, but I think the agencies, as I know them, are very much looking for solutions. So to the extent that we can show that these practices do indeed reduce the nitrate losses, people are very welcoming of the data, and this gives us the evidence.

(09:29):
The hope is that as agencies prioritize among practices, because these are obviously not the only practices, they’ll realize that addressing an innovative drainage management practice is a very important practice to fund and to support in various ways. That’s what the data allows us to do, that just talking about it wouldn’t. So every agency I’ve talked with, including EPA, the various USDA agencies, and many state agencies that have been involved, have been very supportive and very welcoming of the project. They, of course, need data too. They can’t support a project if there aren’t data that show it’s effective. So I would say it also helps them.

Jamie Duininck (10:14):
Yeah, it’s interesting because the name of this Transforming Drainage, and you gave a nice explanation of how that came about, but in reality, you’ve done these projects, you’ve done this research, and you’re getting all these results, and you may not see some of the actual transforming in the field and in the day-to-day practices for a while, but because of the results you’re getting of really significant good results around controlled drainage and saturated buffers, those are the two I’m most familiar with. But people are going to start to do them even if they aren’t required or if there isn’t cost sharing involved. I think because of the positive results, those things will come to around cost share over time, but that’s when the transforming actually happens. So you have something you’ve called then.

Dr. Jane Frankenberg (11:08):
Yeah. One of the things that we said in our vision was that people would at least start to consider it a practice. If you say that you’re going to tile a field, we hope that at least people will ask the question, the contractor, the producer saying, “Okay, would you like to install control structures and have the possibility of controlled drainage?” So even if you decide no, at least it’s considered. Whereas before, that question probably wasn’t even asked.

Jamie Duininck (11:36):
Do you ever think about what things will look like in 20 years, 40 years, 60 years in regards to some of these significant projects that you’ve been involved with and worked on, and what will that look like on a large scale? You may not be around in 60 years, but what would it look like for some of your relatives that are driving down the road and seeing the landscape in Indiana and the Midwest in regards to things that you worked on? Because I think that’s pretty neat. Do you ever think about that?

Dr. Jane Frankenberg (12:12):
Wow. That’s a big question. In fact, I’m less optimistic that I can predict anything because what I thought 20 years ago would be in place now is not. So it’s very hard. But I will say, in the agricultural world around places like here at Purdue, looking at digital solutions, the data science that’s just exploding, people do seem to be very confident that we’ll be able to manage much more remotely and through various digital means than we have now. As the automated systems become more feasible, become more affordable, then that starts to open up whole new ways of collecting data and of getting systems on the field that were obviously very heavily manual before. So certainly, people will be doing things more automatically. What they’ll be doing, it’s hard to say.

Jamie Duininck (13:07):
Right. I would say just for encouragement to you and encouragement to this process is, I’ve always been really frustrated, and I’m going off-topic a little bit here, but really frustrated with how information doesn’t transfer like it should. Being here in Minnesota and being pretty involved in the Dakotas and seeing what’s happened in places like Iowa, Illinois, especially Ohio, how much further along they are, or parts of Canada, parts of Ontario, how much further along they are in their drainage practices than what we are, and why doesn’t that information transfer even from banking relationships, things like that, where you’d think larger banks would say, “Hey, this is good for farmers in Illinois.” That isn’t necessarily transferring to branches in North Dakota. It is now, but it took so much time, like you’re talking about. But I think, around how we think about things as a society when it comes to the environment, when it comes to climate, it is changing.

(14:14):
Even people that don’t believe in climate change are seeing the fact that the climate is changing. This year we’ve had so much. Our April had a lot of rain and a lot of cold weather. If you look back, that’s been that way more years than not, that Aprils have been cold and wet and haven’t allowed for planting like 20 years ago in April. In our last 10 years, more than half of them have been that way. So I think people are starting to understand that the climate is changing, whether they believe in climate change or not. But with the change that’s happening, how am I involved in that? What does that mean for me?

(14:57):
So I do think personally that this is going to come a little faster than what the last frustration of the last 20 years has been when people that are younger than us that are just getting into farming and getting into agriculture or looking at, “How do I make a difference on my farm?” And we can’t expect them not to think about it from their own perspective, “How does this affect me?” But when they do think about how does it affect me, I think they’re going to think about these practices. So I’m excited.

Dr. Jane Frankenberg (15:29):
Okay, good. So one of the things that we as a society need to think about are the incentives pushing people towards the best solutions. There, I think, our incentives in agriculture could change. So that gets into the policy aspects, but it’s one of the things that I’ve learned through working in this area, what incentives farmers face and how they could shift. But since you mentioned the climate, I don’t think I specified really what the goal of the Transforming Drainage project was, which is thinking about water storage in the landscape. So the three practices that we focused on controlled drainage, water recycling, and saturated buffers, as I mentioned. But what they have in common is that when we have too much precipitation and we need to drain it off, that we think about how we can hold some of it back four times that our dryer.

(16:20):
Of course, that’s exactly what we’ll need more of under climate change because we keep having… The wetter seasons are getting wetter, and the drier seasons are getting drier, not less rain, but more evapotranspiration because of the greater heat and more of the rain falling in more intense bursts. So it very much could be that the changes in the climate drive people towards these practices where we think not just of how to get rid of the water when we want to get rid of it but how can we store it from for when we might need it down the road. That’s a message that you and many folks do share, but I think it doesn’t resonate with everyone until they really need it.

Jamie Duininck (16:59):
For sure. As you’re talking, I’m just thinking about another real-life, real-time example of water storage in the soil profile. In the upper Midwest here, I just mentioned we had a really cold, wet April. We had a really wet winter season from really, it started in November until now, and we went from 30 degrees in snow to, within four days, 80 degrees and everything melted off and we didn’t see, yes, we had some rivers get to flood stage, but nothing actually flooded or got to the highest levels ever even close to that, whether you’re talking the Red River Valley in North Dakota or the Minnesota River or the Mississippi River, and parts of Minnesota had the most snowfall ever when you get up toward Duluth, and Minneapolis was second most moisture ever in the winter. Yet we didn’t face that flooding stage.

(18:03):
I believe a lot of that’s because of how we are treating our soil profile now, comparatively to 20, 30, 40 years ago. We’re not talking about all that much controlled drainage involved yet, but we are talking about drainage, which does reduce that, the water in the soil profile all winter long and it creates a storage available, which is good for water quality. So I just mentioned that because I think these things, as you said, they’re misunderstood and they aren’t transferable. So it takes time and an understanding of what’s out there and what’s possible. When you start talking about saturated buffers, controlled drainage, and drainage water recycling, it only enhances the ability to store water in the soil profile.

Dr. Jane Frankenberg (18:52):
That’s good. I have followed the snow this year because I have a lot of relatives. I don’t know if you know, I’m from Minnesota.

Jamie Duininck (18:58):
No, I did not know that.

Dr. Jane Frankenberg (19:00):
I know you’ve had a lot of snow.

Jamie Duininck (19:02):
You should be glad that you were able to leave at least this year because it got long here. So let’s talk a little bit about some of your… Just because I think it’ll be really interesting for me and for our listeners, but before Purdue, and you’ve been at Purdue for a while, how long have you been at Purdue?

Dr. Jane Frankenberg (19:25):
27 years.

Jamie Duininck (19:26):
27 years. But before that, you spent some time in Senegal on a five-year small irrigation project. Before that, you also have some international experience teaching in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Sorry about that, but tell us about that, what that experience was like, and those years, all that time ago, still affects you today around how you approach things.

Dr. Jane Frankenberg (19:58):
Oh, interesting question. So yes, I was actually a physics major in college. I hadn’t found agricultural engineering at that point, and I wanted to work overseas. So I did. I went and taught physics and math, as you say, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It was very interesting, and I really felt a strong desire to do more of it. So I came back and started looking, “What field could I go into that would allow me to do more of that?” And somebody said, actually at the University of Minnesota said, “How about agricultural engineering?” So I had never even heard of it, and I said, “That sounds perfect.” And so I got into agricultural engineering specifically because I wanted to work on small-scale irrigation development in Africa. So I went to Senegal, which is a very dry area, but we had the Senegal River there, so there was water available.

(20:51):
It was actually a very tough time in the 1980s in that part of Africa. Most people think their climate was changing earlier than others. So it was very, very dry. So people were interested in the types of irrigation we could bring. So I worked in French in a language called Pulaar, and it was all fascinating. But then, after a total of eight years in Africa, I decided that was enough, came back, and worked on my PhD. Once I started thinking about what to do next, the water quality issues rose to four. I was at Cornell University. So it became very clear that here in the US, thinking about water quality is probably the most pressing issue. So that’s how I switched over to that and then came to Purdue to work in water quality, not originally in drainage.

(21:44):
That’s the other thing I would say. It was not going to be part of my job description. They didn’t write it for somebody to work in drainage. But once you work in a place like Indiana, you can’t really avoid drainage. That’s where the water goes. It doesn’t move through streams and rivers like other places in the country. So it’s been great, but I’ve been so fortunate that, especially since 2002, when things really started moving with the Ag Drainage Management Coalition and the Ag Drainage Management Systems Task Force, that there has been a lot of energy around working in drainage.

Jamie Duininck (22:18):
Sure. You mentioned in that a little bit about where does drainage water go, and I know in one of your research projects there, you use DRAINMOD to predict the pathways of drainage, water, and of nitrate. Talk a little bit about that, maybe starting with what is DRAINMOD for our listeners, and then talk about your research a little bit.

Dr. Jane Frankenberg (22:43):
Okay. So when we try and discuss what the impact of different actions we can take, one of the tools that engineers typically use are simulation models. So we’re trying to simulate the system that we have, and then we can ask what-if questions. So DRAINMOD is one of the leading models developed by Wayne Skaggs way back in the 1980s, but it keeps getting improved. But he developed it to ask questions exactly like what would change if we put drainage water management or controlled drainage in a site so that we can simulate these kinds of questions. So people have used it for all kinds of questions. We more recently used it to think about what will change with the surface runoff if we changed the drainage patterns.

(23:32):
So DRAINMOD has made a strong impact to be able to ask those questions. We didn’t end up doing so much with it in the Transforming Drainage project because we decided that what was really needed also was those monitoring sites. But it is one of the things that people can do with the data that were collected during that project. They could use it with DRAINMOD simulations, but that project was more specifically based on field research, which is, I would say, harder. It’s certainly more expensive and time-consuming to get the data in the field, but it’s something we needed to do as a basis. Now more questions can be asked through modeling as well.

Jamie Duininck (24:16):
Sure. You’ve done so much in your career. I just have a question that’s popped in my head around, what’s been the most enjoyable and gratifying either research or extension project that you’ve worked on in your career, and why?

Dr. Jane Frankenberg (24:34):
What a great question. It’s certainly some of the things that I’ve done together with partners and again, really appreciate all the wonderful people that are working in this area. This may not be very creative, but I think I’m going to land on the Transforming Drainage project. We had a great project manager, Ben Reinhart, who I worked with and just getting together and thinking with really smart folks what we could do that that would make a difference. I think that would be the most fun.

Jamie Duininck (25:07):
Yeah.

Dr. Jane Frankenberg (25:07):
Yes, I can’t think off the top of my head of a more fun one.

Jamie Duininck (25:10):
I didn’t necessarily expect anything different because I think of where that can go in the future and what we’ll see, like I said earlier, in 20, 30 years. I think we’re going to see so many of those practices now adopted. That’s pretty exciting. It should be pretty exciting for people like you that were involved at the beginning and that led that to have that legacy. So I’m not surprised, and I think you picked a good one. But one thing I’d like to do is, first of all, I’d like to just say thank you from our industry. I think our industry should be quite grateful for the type of work you’ve done. When you read all the things you’ve been involved with, I think your legacy will live on for quite some time within the drainage water management and water quality of agricultural drainage industry. So thank you for that.

Dr. Jane Frankenberg (26:06):
Thank you very much. It’s quite a statement.

Jamie Duininck (26:09):
I think it’s true, as I knew who you were but got a little more familiarized myself with some of your stuff, it just made me excited to be part of the industry and, in some ways, work alongside people like you that are doing this work. So thank you for that. I would like to just let you have the last word here on The Water Table podcast. Anything you maybe want to ask a question and/or share anything you think our listeners need to know.

Dr. Jane Frankenberg (26:41):
Thank you again. Once again, as I have been thinking forward here, I think that the future really will depend on what kind of incentives our society sets up for people to make decisions that keep going down a traditional path or if the incentives are there to enable them to use these newer practices and think of water management more holistically. So we hope that aspect will grow. I certainly want to thank you for what you do. I’m going to listen to more of the podcasts. I started listening, like you say, like I said this weekend, and I think that’s really great to get to know the people who are doing these things, and I certainly greatly appreciate it. So thanks to you. I guess I’ll end with that. It’s very enjoyable to talk with you, and I look forward to continuing to work together.

Jamie Duininck (27:38):
Yeah, I appreciate that. One plug that you just gave me the opportunity for on the podcast is, you can go back and we have the library of all this, probably episode 80, 81, right in here. So we have 80 plus episodes that you can go back and say, “Hey, I’m thinking about this subject, or I want to understand something about water level control structures.” We did some podcasts with just different people, like from Pheasants Forever and things like that. You can find all those and just go back and listen to it, because not every episode is going to be for everybody for sure. So I think that’s what excites me the most, there’s a library now that’s going to be saved forever for people to come back and be able to find and use for their knowledge, for their advantage, and whatever they need to learn from.

Dr. Jane Frankenberg (28:37):
It’s very exciting. I listen to a podcast every day when I’m out on a walk, so now I can’t wait to learn from more people as I’m walking and learning about drainage. How fantastic is that?

Jamie Duininck (28:47):
That’s a little intimidating. I have to keep up the good work so that I have stuff for you. But thank you, Dr. Jane Frankenberger, for joining us on The Water Table, and we will check in with you again as time goes on. As you’re working on different projects, there may be more that we want to discuss.

Dr. Jane Frankenberg (29:05):
Thank you so much.

Jamie Duininck (29:08):
Thanks for listening to this episode. I have so much fun recording these. I hope you have as much fun listening as I do recording. These episodes are available on all major podcast platforms as well as YouTube. So find them and download them when you can. Thanks for joining us.

Podcast Episode 77

How 5 Million Dollars, 39 Test Sites & 29 Bright Minds are Transforming Drainage

Episode 77 | 29 min

With Guest:

Listen Now

Guest Bio

Transcript

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Podcast Episode 77

How 5 Million Dollars, 39 Test Sites & 29 Bright Minds are Transforming Drainage

Episode 77 | 29 min

With Guest:

Listen Now

Also Available On

Guest Bio

Transcript

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