Nitrogen, tile drainage & water quality in Northwest Minnesota

University of Minnesota Extension Northwest Research and Outreach Center specialist Lindsay Pease talks to the Red River Farm Network about nitrogen, tile drainage and water quality issues in Northwest Minnesota.

TRANSCRIPT

Red River Farm Network: This is the Soil Fertility Minute brought to you by the Agricultural Fertilizer Research and Education Council. Our guest is University of Minnesota Extension Northwest Research and Outreach Center specialist, doctor Lindsay Pease.

Lindsay Pease: Yeah. We always hear about tile drainage and, you know, it’s great benefits for yield. But there also are some questions that come up pretty often about the water quality. And we have been collecting some of that data at the Northwest Research and Outreach Center in Crookston, you know, really looking to see, are we seeing any water quality issues caused by the tile drain? Particularly for nitrogen, this is not likely to be much of a contributor to water quality.

And some of that reason is just because we don’t get a lot of rain, and we don’t have a lot of drain flow through the tile. Just because we’ve been really drain limited, we haven’t seen much nitrogen movement through the drains at all. Even in our wettest growing season so far, we only saw about a pound of nitrogen loss per acre, which is being very efficient with our losses.

RRFN: AFREC is a farmer led program advancing soil fertility research. Find out more at mnSoilFertility.com.