Episode Details

Introduction (Recording 12/31) (Airing 1/10)

• Thank you for listening
• Farm4Profit episode vs Farm4Fun Episode
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What’s Working in AG

• BW Fusion – Brody Benton
  • 1 – What did you see working well for growers in 2021?
    • Corn
    • Beans
      • Area Specific?
  • 2 – What didn’t work well?
  • 3 – What should our listeners be thinking about this time of year?

Our #1 most requested topic – The field tile exploration (Does it always pay?)

We will see how this goes as it might become a multi-part episode

There are more than six million acres of cropland in Iowa where wetness limits productivity. Slightly more than half of the 375 different soils series mapped in Iowa have problems with excess water. The drainage of farmland is obviously important for improving the productivity of Iowa agriculture. Based on the large number of acres susceptible to excessive wetness and the yield response from removing this wetness, farmers and landowners are becoming increasingly interested in drainage. AND that’s just Iowa……..!

The two major methods of farmland drainage are surface drainage where standing water is removed using surface ditches and subsurface drainage where excess water is removed through a system of underground drainage tiles – that is what we are going to focus on

• Joel Hayes – He and his brother run Hayes Bros Drainage in Grundy County Iowa and have been in business since 2009.  They have covered most of the state of Iowa during their time in business.
  • Their dad/family also farms around 3500 acres
• Joel Lange - @centraliowa_rainage  - Joel and his family own and operate Central Iowa Drainage in Guthrie County Iowa where they have been farming since 2012.
  • Joel’s family moved their entire farm from O-Neill Nebraska to Iowa in 2012

General Questions

• What is drainage tile?
  • Drain tile is a system of pipes with perforations or holes that channels water away from intended areas
  • Field tile is tubing or pipe buried in the ground to convey subsurface water to an outlet such as a stream or ditch
    • What are outlets?
      • The structures used to control the minimum elevation at which water leaves the drainage tile, which in turn controls the maximum elevation of the groundwater table in the area drained by the tile system to which the outlet control structure is attached.
    • What are inlets?
      • Purpose: A common practice that is used to. drain farmed depressions is a tile riser, which is essentially a pipe that acts as a direct conduit for water from the field to the receiving ditch or stream. A blind inlet or French drain is used to filter at least sediment from the water that is drained from the field.
• Why do we install drainage tile?
  • The purpose of subsurface drainage is to lower the water table in the soil. The water table is the level at which the soil is entirely saturated with water.  The excess water must be removed to a level below the ground surface where it will not interfere with plant root growth and development. 
  • The major reason for installing subsurface drainage is to improve the productivity o