Ill put my .02 in. My farm is dissected by a 1 1/2 mile drainage ditch. For 25 years I have had a buffer strip along both sides all the way from end to end. Like what was mentioned before I have my doubts about how much filtering it really does because the banks are raised. Water is allowed to drain off the fields and into the drainage ditch only through a few surface drains. When we have a decent rain on a dry year these drains remain dry because the water is absorbed through the soil before it reaches the surface drains. On a wet year with saturated soil or during a downpour the water going through these surface drains is flowing deep through the filter strip on the way to the drains. I doubt if much of the water is being filtered by the grass in the filter strip in this case.
On the land I farm I have established a 60 foot square brome grass patch around every stand pipe or tile surface drain on the farm. Yes these patches are a pain to plant and harvest around but I do have confidence this brome grass is filtering out a few soil nutrients before they go into the tile. It bothers me to no end to see farmers pull their planter up to the stand pipe, get out of the cab, pull the stand pipe and plant on through allowing dirt and trash to fall into the tile. Sometimes the farmer takes the time to put the standpipe back into the hole. In a farm magazine ad the other day I saw an ad for a tile intake cover that is claimed to be able to be farmed over. Grrrrrr. I do not fall apply N. In the spring after the ground thaws and it’s too wet to plant some of that fall applied N is leaching down into the tile lines. I also have a couple of long waterways on a side hill though most of my land is flat enough to not require waterways. Waterways slow down farming in that part of the field but I hope the waterways are keeping soil out of the drainage ditch and along with the soil P and K take a ride to the river too.
There are a few simple practices like this we farmers can do to slow the flow of soil nutrients in the water that runs into our rivers. Some of these practices do slow us down for sure but we are going to have do something to clean up our act before a public who knows nothing about farming but listens to so called environmentalists with a wild look in their eyes forces us into it. New technology in our planting equipment can help speed this up though. My planter is equipped with GPS controlled planting rates. If I figure out how to do it I can program the planter monitor to automatically shut off the planter while I am crossing a waterway. This way I can leave the planter down and just pull the throttle back a bit while crossing the waterway instead of stopping to raise and lower the planter every time. Many planters in my neighborhood have this technology.
If we wait until the government gets any farther into it, well, we all know how badly the government can screw things up with complication.
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Today's Featured Article - Gatherin of the Orange - by Rick Nikolich. In July of 1998 I was talking to fellow Allis Chalmers collector Mike Schilling about the annual "Gathering of The Orange" AC show coming up in August of 1999. He got this wild idea that we should get a convoy of AC tractors and drive them from Charlotte, Michigan 105 miles to LaGrange, Indiana.
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