Education

Bs Brigham Young University. 1979

Ms Oregon State University. 1987

Ph.d. Oregon State university. Dec, 1991.  Crop and soils major, minor soil science, integrated minor geosciences, remote sensing.  Another, minor statistics.

Continuing education Nevada Water Resources Association

Western water rights,

Groundwater flow modeling

Contaminate plumes in aquifers

Estimating draw downs from adjacent wells

Geophysical borehole analysis

Introduction

Hi, this is Mike—a consulting agronomist, for lack of a better term. I am probably a soils geomorphologist, to use one of those big words. That just means I study how soils develop across landscapes. The “landscapes” part refers to the different hillslopes of your fields, including very flat fields that are surface-irrigated.

Chances are, those flat fields were leveled some years back. This means some of the original surface topsoil was moved into the lower parts of the field, leaving the subsurface layers of the original profile exposed at the top. If you manage these types of fields, you are probably trying to work out not only irrigation scheduling, but also how to get uniform water flow and infiltration down the rows. In reality, you aren’t just dealing with massive issues across a single field; you are managing two or three entirely different fields within your field. It is no wonder this is a challenge.

The Problem with Grid Sampling

Going back to hillslopes, when I was in school, precision agriculture was just coming onto the scene. To be a bit verbose, I worked on this back when we referred to the practice as “putting fertilizer where it was needed,” rather than applying a uniform blanket application. We called it the problem of variable soils.

The entire philosophy of soil sampling for inherent fertility shifted back then. Because not many people had background knowledge of aerial photos or remote sensing, the fertilizer folks thought they could make it easy by doing grid sampling. They sampled each grid, fertilized each grid, and measured the harvest on each grid.

But going back to those irrigation-leveled fields: did the topsoil and subsequent exposed subsoil actually end up in a neat grid format? Likewise, do rolling north-south or east-west hills end up as grids? If you put an aerial photo in the hands of a farmer—who has a lot of practical, non-technical knowledge about his own land—I would bet a hundred bucks he could rearrange those grids based on landscape position and be far more accurate regarding yield variation and fertility needs.

Lessons from Pendelton and the Willamette Valley

I once did a geostatistical study of sample spacing on a wheat field near Pendleton, Oregon. The field, which sloped somewhat gently to the north, had what the statistics folks call anisotropy—a big word meaning there was more soil variation going downslope than across the slope. The across-slope sampling distance was 100 meters, while the downslope distance was about 50 meters. Incidentally, the fertilizer industry thought a 100-meter sampling distance and grid size was perfectly fine. They weren’t entirely wrong when it comes to what a farmer can afford; in other words, farmers can only pay so much.

Another time, during a discussion about using aerial photos to help define different soils, a professional precision ag guy looked at photos of grass seed fields in the Willamette Valley. Now, it rains a lot in the Willamette Valley. He said—not my words, but his—”All I see is wet soils and drainage problems.”

I said, “Really?”

What a lot of people confuse is the ranking of limiting factors. My major professor, Floyd Bolton—Floyd was from the Oklahoma panhandle, pronounced Flood Bowltun. We actually used to get mail in our graduate office addressed to “Flood,” I am not making that up—always talked about the ranking of limiting factors to yield. Most people, even educated professionals, will wrongly rank fertility (especially nitrogen) ahead of soil water.

As an aside on soil water, people commonly refer to it as “soil moisture.” I had a grad committee fellow named Wysocki—from Minnesota or one of those cold places, could have been Wisconsin—who corrected this term. In his words, “Moisture refers to the properties of a woman’s body. What we are talking about is water in the soil, so therefore let us use the correct term: soil water.” Do you think for a moment I am making that story up?

Water vs. Nitrogen

Now, back to those wet soils in the Willamette Valley grass seed fields. For a moment, place yourself in the farmer’s position. Your fertilizer guy gives you a grid soil map showing various levels of nitrogen. Grass seed takes a lot of nitrogen, in reality. But you also have an aerial photo showing wet spots and drainage problems. Ask yourself: is nitrogen fertility going to change yield on wet soils more than correcting the drainage problems by placing drain tiles in the field? It’s your dime.

With the lucrative prices for hazelnuts recently, many growers have moved from grass seed production to hazelnuts. Hazelnuts need excellent drainage. The old standard field drainage tile spacing was 40 feet. My son has a friend—a wealthy grass and hazelnut guy—who purchased a newly planted hazelnut orchard, pulled out the trees, redrained the field at 20-foot spacing, and now grows excellent trees with a lot less blight infestation. As I say, weak trees are highly susceptible to pathogens.

People don’t wake up in the morning and say, “I am going to make a lot of mistakes today.” Rather, they usually say, “I am on a budget; how can I solve this problem the cheapest way?” They use their best thinking, and then over the years, they tweak the methods, even if it costs a little more to get better results.

There’s another thing about grass seed production in Oregon. To borrow a line from the movie Out of Africa regarding coffee: “You plant it, it grows.” In Oregon, it’s estimated that there are over 250 different varieties of ryegrass naturally occurring. That translates into a simple truth: growing grass seed is easy. The hard part is growing only one variety in a single field.

Off-Station Research and the Widow’s Field

Here is another story I am still trying to live down. I was doing research in production fields rather than at the official experiment station, which is referred to as “off-station research.” The way this works is I get together with the county agricultural agent, he suggests a few farmers, I talk to them, pick out the fields, and then we proceed. I sample transects and landscapes.

One farmer, who was the head of Oregon Wheat, had a brand-new shop he was tickled pink about. It was a Quonset hut, high enough to pull his combine into, wide enough to work on it, and heated for winter use. It had a very small office that held a desk, two chairs, and a filing cabinet. His house across the driveway was an older, well-maintained farmhouse. His wife stopped by with a look on her face that said, “We better get a new house in the next five years or I’m out of here.” I am not making that up either.

We went into his office, where he had USDA aerial photos of all his fields. His friend had recently passed away, so he had taken over farming the widow’s ground. He had a lot of fields and suggested we go through the photos to find a site for me to sample. He was right on the money with the second field, and I told him I wanted that one.

He emphatically said, “No.”

I pushed back, but the man had excellent negotiating skills. He said, “Let’s make two groups. One group we will consider, and the other group is definitely out.”

I said, “Okay.”

The field I wanted went into group one to be considered. Then, he systematically rejected every other field I picked until there were only two options left: my original choice and his own field adjacent to his shop, where he could keep an eye on me.

Now, I had to get research results. This was about my third year at this, and I wanted to capture all the variability of the region’s soils in a single field—the good, the bad, and the ugly. My chosen field had it all. His had none.

The discussion went on, and he mentioned that he and his late friend had been cooperating for years across some 20 miles of the region. If one was working in an area where the other had equipment, they would share tools so they didn’t have to transport heavy machinery a long way, and vice versa. It shook out that his friend lived on one side of the plateau and kept his equipment there, while the farmer I was dealing with kept his at the other end.

This was back before cell phones. If my guy needed to rod-weed a field, he would drive by in the evening, see that his friend’s equipment was sitting there idle, and the next morning he’d fire it up, pull it out of his friend’s field into his own, and start rod-weeding. If the friend came by, he knew exactly what was going on. If there was a timing issue, he would walk out into the field, wait for the tractor to come around, and say something like, “Hey, hurry the hell up, I need my equipment for this other field by the end of the week.” The farmer would just work longer hours to comply.

But back to the field I wanted. It was actually owned by the widow, located right next to her driveway leading from the access road down into a gully—a draw or canyon, you know, out of the wind. It had a lot of steep, white ground on the northeast slope.

The farmer said, “She is a so-and-so about this field. I have to take this field just to get the rest of her good ground. See all this white ground? If a single weed shows up, I have to rod-weed the entire field all over again. I actually have to plant barley, hope it makes it, and even then, I just blow the grain out the ass end of the combine. It doesn’t even pay for the diesel to harvest it.”

With that, he took the aerial photo map—which was nicely mounted on cardboard with a protective plastic sheath—and threw it Frisbee-style into the corner. Clearly agitated, he said, “This is your field, next to the shop.”

To clarify, that “white ground” on the upper slope was eroded Mazama ash, with brown soil down in the lower portion of the field. Mazama ash is a wind-deposited loess, evenly laid down but later reworked by wind and water—mostly wind. The white ash is deeper on the northern slopes where it was held in place by more historical vegetation. Over the years, this thicker layer of ash had its subsequent loose topsoil eroded right down to the bright ash layer.

On my disappointed exit, I said to myself: If “Mazama ash” could have come out of this guy’s mouth instead of “shitty white ground,” he would have my job and I would be out on my ass.

Saltwater Intrusion in Utah

Another project that went sideways involved a grower in Howell, Utah, who had what he called a problem. It seemed that every spring when he turned on his pivot to water his alfalfa, the first two irrigations went fine, but by the third watering, his alfalfa would wilt. I worked on this for about two weeks and came up with a plan to sample his well water. I told him, “This is not my primary area of expertise, but I will find some answers. I need to talk to a local well driller.”

He asked, “Why?”

I responded, “I need to know the soil profile.”

He asked, “How deep?”

I said, “All the way down to your pump.”

He said, “I know all that. Why do you need a well driller?”

I replied, “I am a soils geomorphologist and I am new to the area. I need a well driller’s log.”

He said, “What do you need to know?”

I said, “Okay, how deep is your well?”

He said, “65 feet.”

I said, “This is the desert, why isn’t it deeper?”

“Can’t drill deeper.”

I asked why, and he said, “Blue Bonneville mud.”

“What?”

“That’s right.”

I looked over my shoulder downhill toward the draw. “How close is the Great Salt Lake?”

He said, “15 miles that way.”

I said, “Oh, shit.”

He said nothing.

It turned out he had saltwater intrusion from the Great Salt Lake leaking into his freshwater aquifer. The aquifer gets some natural recharge each winter—I estimate a few feet of fresh water floating right on top of the denser saltwater layer. No one knows for sure, and no one knows exactly how much cycling and mixing goes on, but he gets about two weeks of pumping fresh water before the pump starts drawing the salt layer and the hay wilts.

This happens all over the world to varying degrees. In Los Angeles, they pump every drip of recycled water from the sewage plants back underground just to increase the hydraulic head on the freshwater side and prevent the ocean from intruding. Even where I live currently in Thatcher (near Tremonton, Utah), a neighbor complains about saltwater “getting into his well.” What is to be done? Not much, short of an aggressive managed aquifer recharge project in this area, as well as in all lake-perimeter aquifers. Recharging the aquifer is the real issue, not just refilling the lake surface. It hasn’t been deeply studied, but low river flows into the lake combined with huge evaporation losses result in dropping lake levels. In this state, the natural recharge of aquifers on the perimeter of the lake is lowering. If the aquifer level drops, more saltwater intrusion occurs. Who knows if some of this subsurface intrusion is actively contributing to the lake levels dropping, but increasing the freshwater aquifer level would certainly slow the saltwater intrusion down