Progress 01/01/24 to 12/31/24
Outputs
Target Audience: National and state agencies, including NRCS, US Army Corps of Engineers, Indiana Department of Environmental Management, and Indiana State Department of Agriculture Non-profits and environmental organizations active in the state, such as Indiana Corn Marketing Council, Indiana Soybean Alliance, Indiana Agriculture Nutrient Alliance, Indiana Water Monitoring Council, and The Nature Conservancy, University extension faculty and staff and State Soil and Water Conservation District personnel Changes/Problems:Our major change has been the conversion to a subsurface drip irrigation system for field season 3 (originally scheduled for year 2), and the delay in getting electricity to the site due to long time delays working through university systems. We were still able to complete all project requirements utilizing portable power generators and batteries. We have not been able to retrieve consistent samples from our suction cup lysimeters in years 1 and 2. In year 3, we switched to a new brand, but shipping delays meant that they were not installed until midway through the growing season. This will limit our ability to close the in-field nutrient budget, but we still have nutrient content of biomass and grain which helps establish the differences in nutrient use efficiency betweendifferent treatments. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided? This year, four graduate students continued to contribute to research efforts for this project. A Master's student in Agronomy, Jose Vaca, is working on the field side of this experiment by working both the corn and soybean agronomists. A second Agronomy MS student, Ronnie Bernard, is evaluating the impact of the managed wetland on amphibian populations to quantify additional ecosystem services. A PhD student in ABE, Dongseouk Yang, is responsible for monitoring and modeling of water quality and water quantity. A PhD student in agricultural economics, Xiaoshang Deng, is developing the probability distributions of potential profit changes due to DWR. In addition, a post-doctoral scholar and undergraduate student have worked to analyze the UAV imagery (Dr. Bijoychandra Takhellambamand John Shinn). We hosted 3 visiting scholars (Fabricio Garrido, Galo Vera and Samuel Palacios), and 6 undergraduate students (Kendall Daniels, Alexus Arvin, Evie Quehl, Ryland Barton, L Huber, Tucker Ensmenger) have been involved in research on this project in 2024. During a 12-week summer internship experience, these studentswere trained in field monitoring activities, including hydrologic and water quality monitoring. They received training and practice in data logging and reporting. Four of these students continued working on this team into the school year, each expanding their monitoring responsibilities and diving deeper into understanding of monitoring data results. This experiment, its setup, multidisciplinary nature, and progress have also been incorporated into several courses being taught by faculty on the team, particularly economic and hydrological information, including the following: AGEC 525: Environmental Policy Analysis AGEC 654: Economic Dynamics ChE597000/AGEC6900/BE595: Systems and Economics Analysis for Food, Energy, and Water AGRY 337 Environmental Hydrology AGRY 338 Environmental Field Skills ABE 32500 Soil and Water Conservation Engineering ABE 42600 Ecological Restoration Engineering For example, Dr. Sesmero has included this project as an example in one of his courses to explain how to integrate disciplines to set up a useful experiment, which will answer both agronomic and economic questions. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?We have shared these results with the academic community by presenting at three national conferences (ASA-CSSA-SSSA, UCOWR and National Corn Improvement Conference which was hosted at Purdue in 2024). We engged widely with agricultural media, including both tv and radio interviews: Successful Farming, April 2024 sent to 300,000 subscribers across the nation "Save Your Rain", https://www.agriculture.com/how-saving-excess-rainfall-can-benefit-your-operation-8623209 Raver, Devyn, June 25, 2024, Maximizing Midwest drought resilience through sustainable solutions, https://ag.purdue.edu/news/2024/06/maximizing-midwest-drought-resilience-through-sustainable-solutions.html Sustainability Now! Laura Bowling Purdue Agronomy On-Farm Drought Resilience 8-12-24 By Forward Radio is licensed under a Creative Commons License, https://soundcloud.com/wfmp-forward-radio/sustainability-now-laura-bowling-purdue-agronomy-on-farm-drought-resilience-8-12-24 AG DAY, Farm Journal TV, 'Purdue Wetland Research', September 13, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQ4qK4LMk6g What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals? In Year 4 of our Eco-intensification project, we plan to repeat the year 3 experiment, so that we have two years of data with subsurface irrigation, and two years with surface drip irrigation. We are still working with our industry partners to complete elexctrical hook-up to our irrigation pump house and make full use of the state of the art fertigation system dontaed by Netafim, which will allow us to address many additional questions regarding the timely application of fertilizer and other crop protection elements, on demand, through the subsurface drip. We are evaluating different calculations of upward flux of moisture from below the root zone (below 24 inches) to incorporate into our irrigation decision tool. This calculation will also allow us to refine our in-field water balance to calculate actual evpoatranspiration, which will be used to determine treatment specific crop coefficient values. Within the wetland, we will continue to track ecological changes and manage the area to enhance ecological function. This will include monitring of amphipian populations to determine species diversity and abundance. We will extend our modeling results to quantify the potential impacts of DWR on water quality and quantity at regional scales. The next step for economic model development is to parameterize the model utilizing actual cost data from our industry partners. We will continue to expand our communication and extension on this project (Objective 5), especially as we expand on data and process results. This education will focus on public groups like farmers who could implement this practice on their farms, as well as education that could inform policy around the role of depressional wetlands in flood mitigation, water quality improvement, and groundwater resources protection.
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
After two successful field seasons utilizing surface drip irrigation, we worked with industry partner Netafim and AgriManagement Solutions to install a brand new subsurface drip irrigation system. The system includes 24 zones that can be controlled separately. Each zone is approximately 0.3 acres in area. Each zone spans one subsurface drain at a depth of about 1.2 m, and contains 24 driplines at a depth of 12-14". Drip lines are installed 30" apart. Installation in Winter 2023/2024 was challenging, as we encountered multiple rocks and equipment malfunction. Despite concerns about the impact of excessive compaction due to installation, both corn and soybean crops progressed well, with relative differences between treatments confirming what was seen in previous years. For both crops, the fertigation + intensive management treatment, which was the most heavily managed treatment, had the most consistently high yields among replicates. This increases the economic potential for farmers without also imposing additional risks. Higher yields for intensive management and irrigated treatments over the control treatment suggest that crop stress was reduced. Median yields for corn in 2024 increased 15-20 bu/ac with irrigation and fertigation for standard management. The increase was less for intensive management, however, irrigated and fertigated plots varied by only 10 bu/ac across all replicates, while the rainfed, intensive plots varied by almost 30 bu/ac. Additionally, observations of water quality in the wetland used to supply irrigation water found that the recycled water delivered Nitrate-Nitrite of 2.51 lbs/acre for corn and 3.19 lbs/acre for soybean. This is the same as increasing N inputs by 1.3% for corn, 1.6% for soybeans. The wetland was also observed to reduced nutrient loss downstream. Our irrigation scheduling tool that assimilates observed soil moisture data into a traditional check book irrigation scheduler has been automated using the Python programming language, incorporating a dynamic field capacity detection tool that reflects the changing nature of water retention in poorly-drained, shrink-swell soils. Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAV) have been used to regularly monitor differences in biomass accumulation and stress across corn and soybean plots as part of the Drainage Water Recycling experiment at the Agronomy Center for Research and Education (ACRE) since 2021. Analysis of this data has focused on the calculation of vegetation indices from multi-spectral images. Thirty-six experimental plots for each crops with six replicates of two management practices (standard and intensive) and three treatments (rainfed, irrigated and irrigated + fertigated). UAV images were collected every 5-8 days during the growing season. For the 2023 season, the Normalized Differential Vegetation Index (NDVI) was found to be sensitive to early season vegetative growth, and was able to differentiate between irrigated (median NDVI of 0.2 to 0.25) and rainfed (median NDVI 0.8 to 1.1) plots. Variation between management and treatments was reduced after substantial July rainfall. NDVI is less effective once the canopy closes, so we are still evaluating additional vegetation indices, including those based on the shape (height x width) of the plots which has been shown to be a better indicator of late season biomass than spectral indices alone. Development of a journal article quantifying the potential flood control benefits of distributed water storage in the Wabash River basin using the Variable Infiltration Capacity model is continuing. A prototypeeconomic model usingMonte Carlo analysiswith a difference-in-difference approach tocompute a probability distribution of economic profits for the DWR system has been developed.Initial probablility distribution functions for yields under different treatments have been computed usingyield data from teh first two years of our experiment. We are currently working with our industry partners to update the modelwith actual cost information from typical installation scenarios, since the costs to install our experimental system do not reflect what a typical farmer would pay.
Publications
- Type:
Conference Papers and Presentations
Status:
Published
Year Published:
2024
Citation:
D. Yang, L. C. Bowling, and K. A. Cherkauer (2024). Drainage Water Recycling at ACRE. AWRA, UCOWR & NIWR Joint Water Conference, September 29 October 2nd, 2024.
- Type:
Conference Papers and Presentations
Status:
Published
Year Published:
2024
Citation:
Vaca, J., S. Casteel, L. Bowling, and D. Quinn (2024). Eco-Intensification of Corn Using Recycled Drainage Water for Irrigation and Fertigation. ASA-CSA-SSSA Annual Meeting, San Antonio, TX, November 11-13, 2024.
- Type:
Conference Papers and Presentations
Status:
Published
Year Published:
2024
Citation:
Vaca, J., S. Casteel, L. Bowling, and D. Quinn (2024). Eco-Intensification of Soybeans Using Recycled Drainage Water for Irrigation and Fertigation. ASA-CSA-SSSA Annual Meeting, San Antonio, TX, November 11-13, 2024.
- Type:
Conference Papers and Presentations
Status:
Published
Year Published:
2024
Citation:
Vaca, J., and D. Quinn. 2024. Eco-intensification for Corn Using Recycled Drainage Water for Irrigation and Fertigation. Corn Improvement Conference. West Lafayette, IN. Total Attendees 90
- Type:
Conference Papers and Presentations
Status:
Published
Year Published:
2024
Citation:
Vaca, J., and D. Quinn. 2024. Eco-intensification for Corn Using Recycled Drainage Water for Irrigation and Fertigation. Nitrogen Use Efficiency Conference. Champaign, IL. Total Attendees 200
- Type:
Other
Status:
Published
Year Published:
2024
Citation:
Quinn et al. 2024. Eco-intensification for Corn Using Recycled Drainage Water for Irrigation and Fertigation. 2024 Results published within Applied Research for Corn Production in Indiana . Purdue Univ. Ext.
https://ag.purdue.edu/department/agry/faculty-pages/the-kernel/_docs/quinn_researchbookfinal_7.9.24.pdf
- Type:
Other
Status:
Published
Year Published:
2024
Citation:
Raver, Devyn, June 25, 2024, Maximizing Midwest drought resilience through sustainable solutions, https://ag.purdue.edu/news/2024/06/maximizing-midwest-drought-resilience-through-sustainable-solutions.html
- Type:
Other
Status:
Published
Year Published:
2024
Citation:
Sustainability Now! | Laura Bowling | Purdue Agronomy | On-Farm Drought Resilience | 8-12-24 By Forward Radio is licensed under a Creative Commons License, https://soundcloud.com/wfmp-forward-radio/sustainability-now-laura-bowling-purdue-agronomy-on-farm-drought-resilience-8-12-24
- Type:
Other
Status:
Published
Year Published:
2024
Citation:
AG DAY, Farm Journal TV, Purdue Wetland Research, September 13, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQ4qK4LMk6g
|
Progress 01/01/23 to 12/31/23
Outputs
Target Audience: Producers in the Eastern Corn Belt, especially those who have begun irrigating National and state agencies, including NRCS, US Army Corps of Engineers, Indiana Department of Environmental Management, and Indiana State Department of Agriculture Non-profits and environmental organizations active in the state, such as Indiana Corn Marketing Council, Indiana Soybean Alliance, Indiana Agriculture Nutrient Alliance, Indiana Water Monitoring Council, and The Nature Conservancy, University extension faculty and staff and State Soil and Water Conservation District personnel Changes/Problems:Originally, the proposal stated that we would use a subsurface drip irrigation system for this experiment. Due to the timing of funding and project start, we used surface drip irrigation for Year 1. To design a subsurface drip irrigation system that has flexibility for future research, we spent an additional year prototyping the system. In Year 3, we are installing the permanent subsurface drip irrigation installation. We will only have one year of data from the subsurface drip system during the original contract term, but we feel that we have a better designed system with these two years of experience. Part of the proposed monitoring included monitoring hydrology of the subsurface drainage outlet from the experiment field. However, due to standing water levels from other nearby outlets, the equipment purchased to monitor this tile drain was unable to isolate flow coming solely from this culvert. In year 2 we were still unable to develop a monitoring system that works in this location. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided? One of the members of this research team is junior faculty, and this research is helping him to build his research program and develop a foundation for the direction of his research. This year, two graduate students continued to contribute to research efforts for this project. A Master's student has started working on the field side of this experiment by working both the corn and soybean agronomists. A PhD student is responsible for monitoring and modeling of water quality and water quantity. Another PhD student has contributed to this project and has been trained on RGB and thermal remote sensing of corn and soybean using UAVs to detect crop water stress and quantify differences in evaporation rate. We have hosted 4 visiting scholars, and 13undergraduate students have been involved in research on this project. All of these students and scholars have received training in study design, developing a project framework, interdisciplinary research, data collection, and understanding of infrastructure. This year, we hosted 4 site visits, in which graduate students and junior staff working on the experiment had the opportunity to share their findings, training them on outreach and extension components of research. During a 12-week summer internship experience, two undergraduate students and one visiting scholar were trained in field monitoring activities, including hydrologic and water quality monitoring. They received training and practice in data logging and reporting. Four additional students continued working on this team into the school year, each expanding their monitoring responsibilities and diving deeper into understanding of monitoring data results. This experiment, its setup, multidisciplinary nature, and progress have also been incorporated into several courses being taught by faculty on the team, particularly economic and hydrological information. For example, Dr. Sesmero has included this project as an example in one of his courses to explain how to integrate disciplines to set up a useful experiment, which will answer both agronomic and economic questions. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest? In July, two field days were held to showcase the experiment and share results of the 9-acre experiment with two crops, 5 treatments, and 6 replicates. These included a demonstration of how the system functioned and a tour of the wetland and field. Information was provided on the installation on various parts of the system, including the irrigation equipment and the storage control structure. In total, over 50 participants attended these field day sessions. As part of these field days, we developed and distributed a 1-page factsheet about the corn and soybean experiments in the field, as well as a two-page factsheet about the wetland and instrumentation aspects of the experiment. Both our corn and soybean agronomists have also been discussing results of this experiment with farmers and other ag-related groups at several extension events. We have shared these results with the academic community by presenting at several local conferences and seminars. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals? In Year 3 of our Eco-intensification project, we are converting our field experiment to use subsurface drip irrigation, while maintain our specified treatments for irrigation, fertigation, and intensive management. The move to subsurface drip represents a substantial investment in infrastructure that we feel ready to make after two years of successful irrigation from the wetland. We also have a stable ground water as a back-up water source. Through our partnership with Netafim, we are able to establish a state of the art fertigation system, which will allow us to address many additional questions regarding the timely application of fertilizer and other crop protection elements, on demand, through the subsurface drip. We continue to expand our tools for in season management of the wetland fertigation system. We have successfully assimilated observed soil moisture data into a traditional check book irrigation scheduler over the last two years to support our irrigation decision making. This tool is being automated using the Python programming language, incorporating a dynamic field capacity detection tool that reflects the changing nature of water retention in poorly-drained, shrink-swell soils. The remote sensing imagery collected in Years 1 and 2 is being applied based on recent developments from PI Cherkauer to develop a prototype tool for irrigation scheduling based on detected crop water stress. Within the wetland, we will continue to track ecological changes and manage the area to enhance ecological function. This will include additional herbicide treatments for invasive species in the wetland and planting the wetland with a native mix that provides myriad benefits. We will extend our modeling results to quantify the potential impacts of DWR on water quality and quantity at regional scales. The next step for economic model development (Objective 4) is to parameterize the model by estimating the effect of treatment on yields (we continue to accumulate data from our experiments) and using our best estimates of risk/loss aversion of farmers in the US Midwest. We will continue to expand our communication and extension on this project (Objective 5), especially as we expand on data and process results. This education will focus on public groups like farmers who could implement this practice on their farms, as well as education that could inform policy around the role of depressional wetlands in flood mitigation, water quality improvement, and groundwater resources protection.
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
Objective 1: In Year 2, we again successfully completed a field experiment irrigating and fertigating corn and soybeans with surface drip irrigation using subsurface drainage water stored in a wetland as our primary water source. We had five treatments for each corn and soybeans: non-irrigated standard management (control), irrigated standard management, irrigated intensive management, fertigated standard management and fertigated intensive management. We collected data related to corn and soybean growth, taking plant tissue samples at 7 growth stages between both crops (5 for beans and 2 for corn) and completing periodic stand counts and plant mapping. Yield components were recorded for corn and soybeans. With this data, we quantified differences in crop yield among treatments, for which intensive management, irrigation, and fertigation treatments had the highest yields for both crops in the second year. In the case of corn, we noted a difference between the irrigated treatments and non-irrigated intensive treatments, where it demonstrated a boost in yield against the conventionally managed control treatment. In soybeans, control treatments showed stronger differences underperforming against all intense treatments, and a higher yield without differences when comparing the intensive fertigation and irrigation treatments with the intensive control. This could indicate that farmers implementing these treatments would be more susceptible to attain higher yield averages. Conversely, for both crops, the fertigation + intensive management treatment, which was the most heavily managed treatment, had the most consistently high yields among replicates. This increases the economic potential for farmers without also imposing additional risks. Higher yields for intensive management and irrigated treatments over the control treatment suggest that crop stress was reduced. We collected in-field environmental data to understand growing conditions by taking soil samples and measuring in-situ soil moisture and leachate water quality. Soil moisture sensors tracked plant available water and supported irrigation decisions. Water quality samples tracked differences in nutrient leaching from the field for each treatment. Objective 2: In the wetland, we monitored discharge rate and nutrient concentrations at both inlets and the outlet of the wetland and tracked irrigation volumes applied. We have quantified a substantial increase in the duration of the wetland hydroperiod, which effectively expands the spatial extent of aquatic habitat. These data complemented a 14-year dataset of these wetland parameters before it was managed as a DWR site. This dataset will help us understand how nutrient loads and hydrology have changed as a result of our new management strategy. To enhance the wetland's ecosystem services, we took steps to control invasive reed canary grass, which previously dominated the emergent vegetation. Herbicide treatments were applied in the spring and fall to control this invasive species.Qualitatively, we have observed a dramatic increase in frog population. With these data, we characterized wetland flows in and out of the wetland and combined them with water quality data to quantify nutrient masses entering and leaving the wetland, including those reduced within the wetland and extracted in irrigation events. Objective 3: We have developed a hydrologic model for the Upper Wabash River basin that allows us to quantify the impact of different size reservoirs (i.e. 3%, 5% and 10% of drained agricultural land use within the watershed converted for irrigation water storage). Preliminary results were presented at a Purdue research symposium by a visiting scholar working with the project. This work is being developed into a journal article quantifying the potential flood control benefits of distributed water storage. Future work will simulate the impact of DWR on water quality and flood reduction in Indiana and Illinois. Objective 4: A prototype model has been completed to quantify the economic value of adopting the treatments considered in this study (intensive management, irrigation, and fertigation) for farmers operating farms with different characteristics, and that display diverse levels of risk/loss aversion. We developed a behavioral model of irrigation adoption where a risk/loss-averse agent decides on adoption of a treatment based on the probability distribution of yields before and after adopting each treatment. Our model considers the effect of the treatments not only on mean yields, but also other data characteristics, namely the effects of outliers and asymmetry of the data. These additional data descriptors capture the effect of the treatments on profits' upside potential and downside risk, which the mean fails to encapsulate. These effects allow us to characterize adoption patterns under well-known types of risk/loss aversion, identifying farmers that are most likely to adopt these treatments. The theoretical model is now being updated with data from years 1 and 2. Objective 5: Communication of findings has been integrated throughout our project. We are developing a professional network throughout the Midwest around drip irrigation, including engaging industry partners like Precision Planting, Beck's, Netafim and Nutradrip. Our site was used as a training example for new NRCS engineers in June 2024. Through regular extension presentations, our team has made producers aware of new agronomic practices that can enhance yield, reduce costs, and increase efficiency, through the use of intensive management practices and fertigation as a nutrient management strategy. We hosted two US Senators, raising awareness of the importance and usefulness of depressional wetlands in a diverse, agricultural landscape. Through irrigation and water level management, fewer nutrients were exported downstream and peak flow events from the wetland decreased. This is encouraging for the potential benefits of using wetland for DWR, though hydrologic modeling is still needed to further explore these effects throughout the landscape. In 2023 we were able to use the wetland to satisfy 100% of our irrigation needs, reducing the strain on groundwater resources, which suggests the potential for this practice to increase water security for agriculture throughout the Eastern Corn Belt. We have also begun to see positive ecosystem impacts on the wetland since the start of this study. The presence of invasive species in the wetland has been greatly reduced, and the duration of standing water in the wetland increased by 60 days. This longer hydroperiod has allowed us to see more frogs in the wetland than in the past, likely because amphibians in Indiana need water in mid-July for reproductive success. This suggests that we have enhanced habitats for other plants and animals. In partnerships with another USDA-NIFA project, we have quantified greenhouse gas emissions from this wetland and have created a seeding mix to develop an alternative plant community that includes native plant species and encourages complete treatment of nitrate to reduce nutrient export downstream while also reducing the production of greenhouse gasses.
Publications
- Type:
Conference Papers and Presentations
Status:
Other
Year Published:
2023
Citation:
Yang, D., L.C. Bowling and K.A. Cherkauer (2023). Eco-intensification using recycled drainage water for fertigation. 42nd Annual Indiana Water Resources Association Symposium. Purdue University. June 7-9.
- Type:
Conference Papers and Presentations
Status:
Other
Year Published:
2023
Citation:
Yang, D., L.C. Bowling and K.A. Cherkauer (2023). Eco-intensification using recycled drainage water for fertigation. Experience ACRE, August 3, 2023.
- Type:
Other
Status:
Other
Year Published:
2023
Citation:
Held, A, 2024, How saving excess rainfall can benefit your operation, Successful Farming, April 11, 2024, https://www.agriculture.com/how-saving-excess-rainfall-can-benefit-your-operation-8623209
|
Progress 01/01/22 to 12/31/22
Outputs
Target Audience: Producers in the Eastern Corn Belt, especially those who have begun irrigating National and state agencies, including NRCS, US Army Corps of Engineers, Indiana Department of Environmental Management, and Indiana State Department of Agriculture Non-profits and environmental organizations active in the state, such as Indiana Corn Marketing Council, Indiana Soybean Alliance, Indiana Agriculture Nutrient Alliance, Indiana Water Monitoring Council, and The Nature Conservancy, University extension faculty and staff and State Soil and Water Conservation District personnel Changes/Problems:Changes Originally, the proposal stated that we would use a subsurface drip irrigation system for this experiment. Due to the timing of funding and project start, we used surface drip irrigation for Year 1. This proved to be a successful set up, though there were some issues associated with pressure and driplines popping off. Due to the capacity of the wetland, we also changed plot dimensions to be 60 by 75 feet. These smaller plot sizes require more replicates, so we doubled replicates from three to six. We also hope to install a subsurface drip irrigation system that has flexibility for future research, so we are spending an additional year working with the irrigation contractor to plan this layout. In Year 2, the team will further examine the irrigation equipment layout options to determine the best system alternative for this field. A permanent irrigation installation is expected for Year 3. Problems Part of the proposed monitoring included monitoring hydrology of the subsurface drainage outlet from the experiment field. However, due to standing water levels from other nearby outlets, the equipment purchased to monitor this tile drain was unable to isolate flow coming solely from this culvert. Different equipment that can detect velocity in addition to water level will be purchased to accommodate this difficulty. A rainy spring delayed planting of this experiment, and two of the six corn replicates were planted ahead of the rest. Just after planting of these replicates, heavy rains, followed by an extended dry period, led to crusting on the soil surface and subsequently poor emergence for these corn plots. Because of these issues, the first two corn replicates were excluded from analysis in Year 1. Additionally, there were some issues with the planter that affected emergence (both for corn and soybeans), as well as plot width. A new planter has been purchased to be used this year. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?One of the members of this research team is junior faculty, and this research is helping him to build his research program and develop a foundation for the direction of his research. In addition, the collaboration we have started with Michigan State University engages junior faculty who will also be trained and able to build his research program off this experiment. This year, two graduate students were also hired to be trained and contribute to research efforts for this project. A Master's student has started working on the field side of this experiment by working both the corn and soybean agronomists. A PhD student working on has been hired to contribute to water quality and hydrology aspects of this project, both in-field and modeling. Another PhD student has contributed to this project and has been trained on remote sensing of corn and soybean to create machine learning models that can detect crop stress to identify differences between experimental treatments. Drs. Casteel and Quinn also hosted 9 visiting scholars, and over 10 undergraduate students have been involved in research on this project. All of these students and scholars have received training in study design, developing a project framework, interdisciplinary research, data collection, and understanding of infrastructure. This year, we held two field days, in which graduate students and junior staff working on the experiment had the opportunity to participate in the extension side of the experiment, training them on outreach and extension components of research. Certified crop advisors received professional development hours as part of the Indiana CCA conference presentation given by Laura Bowling. During a 12-week summer internship experience, four undergraduate students were trained in field monitoring activities, including hydrologic and water quality monitoring. They received training and practice in data logging and reporting. Each also had an individual summer project focused on their area of interest. Two students presented their summer research at Purdue's summer undergraduate research symposium, and all four students gained experience in presenting research results at Purdue University's Experience ACRE event. Three of the four students have continued working on this team into the school year, each expanding their monitoring responsibilities and diving deeper into understanding of monitoring data results. In addition to these students, two other students have gained field monitoring and resource management experience as part of this project. These two students have focused on managing invasive species in the wetland as part of the long-term management to increase water storage and ecological function within the wetland. Their time has contributed to professional development hours to assist them in achieving their Pesticide Applicator License. This experiment, its setup, multidisciplinary nature, and progress have also been incorporated into several courses being taught by faculty on the team, particularly economic and hydrological information. For example, Dr. Sesmero has included this project as an example in one of his courses to explain how to integrate disciplines to set up a useful experiment, which will answer both agronomic and economic questions. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?In the late growing season, two field days were held in August and September to showcase the experiment and share results of the 9-acre experiment with two crops, 5 treatments, and 6 replicates. These included a demonstration of how the system functioned and a tour of the wetland and field. Information was provided on the installation on various parts of the system, including the irrigation equipment and the storage control structure. In total, over 50 participants attended these field day sessions. As part of these field days, we developed and distributed a 1-page factsheet about the corn and soybean experiments in the field, as well as a two-page factsheet about the wetland and instrumentation aspects of the experiment. Both our corn and soybean agronomists have also been discussing results of this experiment with farmers and other ag-related groups at several extension events. We have also engaged the professional network by traveling to different sites and events and discussing this experiment and our results with industry professionals, crop consultants, and large agricultural companies. We have shared these results with the academic community by presenting at several conferences and seminars. These conferences span disciplines and include University Council on Water Resources, American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers, the Tri-Societies Conference (which joins the American Society of Agronomy, the Crop Science Society of America, and the Soil Science Society of America), and the American Geophysical Union. We also presented our project and experiment results at a meeting with the Dean of the College of Agriculture at Purdue, as well as at a Department of Agronomy Seminar. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?We will continue to expand our communication and extension on this project (Objective 5), especially as we expand on data and process results. This education will focus on public groups like farmers who could implement this practice on their farms, as well as education that could inform policy around the role of depressional wetlands in flood mitigation, water quality improvement, and groundwater resources protection. Dr. Bowling is also collaborating with the Soybean Research and Information Network to develop an article on the implications of the project for soybean management. Dr. Quinn has started a research and extension booklet that will include results from this experiment. It will provide insight on best practices for implementing DWR on-farm as well as lessons learned about our experiment and how it can be useful for informing subsurface irrigation through DWR in Indiana. ?
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
Farmers in the Eastern Corn Belt are increasingly using irrigation to mitigate risks associated with climate variability, most of which are drawn from groundwater. Additionally, subsurface drainage from agricultural fields in the Midwest is a major source of nutrients that threaten drinking water quality. We have an opportunity to leverage changing conditions to develop more proactive water management strategies to benefit corn and soybean productivity, while reducing stress on water resources. In this project, we use an existing wetland to store subsurface drainage to use for irrigation, known as drainage water recycling (DWR). This research evaluates if storing water on farms in Indiana and Illinois offers direct benefits to farmers, while reducing the amount of water and nutrient loads leaving the farm. In Year 1, we successfully completed a field experiment irrigating and fertigating corn and soybeans using our DWR setup. We collected data related to corn and soybean growth, taking plant tissue samples at 11 growth stages (10 for beans) and completing periodic stand counts and plant mapping. Yield components were recorded for corn and soybeansand we regularly monitored for plant diseases. We collected a variety of multispectral and thermal remotely sensed imagery that were used to detect crop drought stress and quantify growth. These data were calibrated with in-situ measurements collected at the time of flights. Bare-earth imagery collected at the beginning of the experiment was used to develop a digital surface model. With this data, we quantified differences in crop yield among treatments, for which intensive management, irrigation, and fertigation treatments had the highest yields for both crops in the first year. Perhaps even more exciting is the distribution of yield for each treatment across all replicates. In corn, yield among different replicates for non-irrigated treatments were more variable, implying that higher yields are less reliable. This was also true for the control treatment in the soybean plots. This indicates that farmers implementing these treatments would be more susceptible to risks. Conversely, for both crops, the fertigation + intensive management treatment, which was the most heavily managed treatment, had the most consistently high yields and lowest variability among replicates. This implies that risks for implementing these management practices are lower than for other treatments, which increases the economic potential for farmers without also imposing additional risks. Higher yields for intensive management and irrigated treatments over the control treatment suggest that crop stress was reduced. We still require additional years of data to further explore variability and understand how different weather conditions affect these outcomes, but the first year has shown promising results. We collected in-field environmental data to understand growing conditions by taking soil samples and measuring in-situ soil moisture and leachate water quality. Soil moisture sensors tracked plant available water and supported irrigation decisions. Water quality samples tracked differences in nutrient leaching from the field for each treatment. In the wetland, we installed flow monitoring equipment at both inlets and the outlet of the wetland and tracked irrigation volumes applied. We also tracked water levels using sensors and nutrient water quality with weekly samples at multiple locations in the wetland. These data complemented a 14-year dataset of these wetland parameters before it was managed as a DWR site. This dataset will help us understand how nutrient loads and hydrology have changed as a result of our new management strategy. To enhance the wetland's ecosystem services, we took steps to control invasive reed canarygrass, which previously dominated the emergent vegetation. Herbicide treatments were applied in the sprign and fall to control this invasive species. With these data, we characterized wetland flows in and out of the wetland and combined them with water quality data to quantify nutrient masses entering and leaving the wetland, including those reduced within the wetland and extracted in irrigation events. These were compared to pre-management data to show how nutrient reduction and high flows have changed. These data will also be used as inputs for a hydrologic model that will simulate the impact of DWR on water quality and flood reduction in Indiana and Illinois. We also developed a model to quantify the "economic value" of adopting the treatments considered in this study (intensive management, irrigation, and fertigation) for farmers operating farms with different characteristics, and that display diverse levels of risk/loss aversion. We developed a behavioral model of irrigation adoption where a risk/loss-averse agent decides on adoption of a treatment based on the probability distribution of yields before and after adopting each treatment. Our model considers the effect of the treatments not only on mean yields, but also other data characteristics, namely the effects of outliers and asymmetry of the data. These additional data descriptors capture the effect of the treatments on profits' upside potential and downside risk, which the mean fails to encapsulate. These effects allow us to characterize adoption patterns under well-known types of risk/loss aversion, identifying farmers that are most likely to adopt these treatments. In Year 1, we used synthetic and existing data from other sites to create initial models. Data from the field study in Year 1 and subsequent years will be fed into the model to reflect field results. Communication of findings has been integrated throughout our project. Through cooperation with faculty at Michigan State University, a similar study has been set up to be run in Michigan, where overhead irrigation is common. Our group has also discussed this project with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to explore future research potential. We are developing a professional network throughout the Midwest around drip irrigation, including engaging industry partners like Precision Planting, Beck's, and Nutradrip. We conducted two field days for producers and industry professionals, with over 50 attendees. Through these activities, our team has increased awareness of our project objectives. We have made people aware of new agronomic practices that can enhance yield, reduce costs, and increase efficiency, namely through the use of intensive management practices and fertigation as a nutrient management strategy. Through irrigation and water level management, fewer nutrients were exported downstream and peak flow events from the wetland decreased. This is encouraging for the potential benefits of using wetland for DWR, though hydrologic modeling is still needed to further explore these effects throughout the landscape. In using water from the wetland for irrigation for 6 weeks, we reduced the strain on groundwater resources, which suggests the potential for this practice to increase water security for agriculture throughout the Eastern Corn Belt. We have begun to see positive ecosystem impacts on the wetland since the start of this study. The presence of invasive species in the wetland has been greatly reduced, and the duration of standing water in the wetland increased by 60 days. This longer hydroperiod has allowed us to see more frogs in the wetland than in the past, likely because amphibians in Indiana need water in mid-July for reproductive success. This suggests that we have enhanced habitats for other plants and animals. In partnerships with another USDA-NIFA project, we have quantified greenhouse gas emissions from this wetland and have created a seeding mix to develop an alternative plant community that includes native plant species and encourages complete treatment of nitrate to reduce nutrient export downstream while also reducing the production of greenhouse gasses.
Publications
- Type:
Conference Papers and Presentations
Status:
Other
Year Published:
2022
Citation:
Bowling, L.C. Less is More: Eco-intensification using recycled drainage water for fertigation. Abstract presented at the 2022 UCOWR/NIWR Annual Water Resources Conference, Greenville, SC, 14-16 June 2022.
- Type:
Conference Papers and Presentations
Status:
Other
Year Published:
2022
Citation:
Bowling, L.C. A prototype system to evaluate the potential benefits of using recycled drainage water to irrigate corn and soybeans. Presented at the 2022 Indiana CCA Conference, Indianapolis, IN, 14-15 December 2022.
- Type:
Conference Papers and Presentations
Status:
Other
Year Published:
2022
Citation:
Cherkauer, K.A., Bowling, L.C., Mazer, K.E., and Yang, D. Eco-intensification using recycled drainage water for fertigation. Abstract GC42A-04 presented at the 2022 Fall Meeting, American Geophysical Union, Washington, D.C., 11-15 December 2022.
- Type:
Conference Papers and Presentations
Status:
Other
Year Published:
2022
Citation:
Lee, K., and Cherkauer, K.A. Multi-input source stress analysis for field crops to improve yield predictions. Abstract H250-1289 presented at the 2022 Fall Meeting, American Geophysical Union, Washington, D.C., 11-15 December 2022.
- Type:
Conference Papers and Presentations
Status:
Other
Year Published:
2022
Citation:
Mazer, K.E., Frankenberger, J.R., and Bowling, L.C. Using existing depressional storage for drainage water recycling. Abstract presented at the 2022 ASABE International Meeting, Houston, TX, 17-20 July 2022.
- Type:
Conference Papers and Presentations
Status:
Other
Year Published:
2022
Citation:
Quinn, D., and N. Vargas. 2022. Intensive Corn and Soybean Management using Drip Irrigation and Fertigation. Michiana Irrigation Conference. Michigan State Univ. Ext. and Purdue Univ. Ext. Elkhart Co., IN, December 16, 2022.
- Type:
Conference Papers and Presentations
Status:
Other
Year Published:
2022
Citation:
Vargas Arroyo, N., Casteel, S., Bowling, L.C., Mazer, K., Cherkauer, K., and Quinn, D. Eco-intensification of corn and soybean using recycled drainage water for irrigation and fertigation. Abstract 111-14 presented at the 2022 ASA CSSA SSSA International Annual Meeting, Baltimore, MD, 6-9 November 2022.
- Type:
Other
Status:
Other
Year Published:
2022
Citation:
Bowling, L.C., and Quinn, D.J. Less Is More: Eco-Intensification Using Recycled Drainage Water for Fertigation. Presented at the Deans visit to the Department of Agronomy, Purdue University, 13 April 2022.
- Type:
Other
Status:
Other
Year Published:
2022
Citation:
Bowling, L.C., and Quinn, D.J. Less Is More: Eco-Intensification Using Recycled Drainage Water for Fertigation. Presentation at the Department of Agronomy Seminar Series, Purdue University, 14 November 2022.
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