AgCast 216: How Rice Farmers Cut $31/Acre Water Costs, Lessons from the Delta, Part 7

Transcription:

Colson Tester: When you pump from a reservoir versus 120 feet you can save up to $31 an acre.

Chad Fiechter: Welcome to the Purdue Commercial AgCast. This is Chad Fiechter. And Todd and I spent some time in Arkansas, talking with farmers, advisors, researchers and industry leaders about what they’re seeing. What’s working, what’s changing, and what might be surprising to Midwestern grain farmers.

This special series, Lessons from the Delta, is what we learned.

We’ve broken it up into several episodes and what you’ll hear is a lot of conversations that we had as we were driving around the Delta. Some of ’em are in the truck, in fields, conversations that popped up about managing risk, the challenges around water, labor, and capital, in ways that look different than what we’re familiar with in the Midwest.

Our goal isn’t to compare the two regions but it’s to ask questions where we can try to learn a little bit more about how production systems are built when the constraints are a little bit different.

Colson Tester: So we’re looking at 120 acre reservoir off that farm in Poinsette County. These provide service water, so we’re not pumping the ground water up. Dr. Henry has a paper out that shows that when you pump from a reservoir versus, you know, 120 feet, 130 feet over here, you can save up to $31 an acre on pumping cost just because you’re not having to pump it up that high.

Todd Kuethe: Right.

Colson Tester: You’re pumping 15 feet versus 130. This also provides, a lot of habitat, you stock this fish again, are just gonna get in here naturally from birds coming over here, but you can stock it. I know they’ve got bass and crappy and everything in here. We came through here one time and people don’t always realize this, but pelicans are migratory bird species.

Chad Fiechter: Oh, I didn’t.

Colson Tester: Know that. Yeah. We’ve came out here a couple times and there’s pelicans out here. So birds love this stuff. Again we’re creating all kinds of different habitat. You got the wetlands, you got, 120 acre, basically a lake here.

But if you look right here, he’s got an .Electric re lift. So we’re just gonna pull water out of this. He’s got another one over there. He’s been able to shut down, stop using three of his groundwater wells. That he’s connected all the underground. He’s able to not pump out of the ground because of this. So that it helps his rice also because when you pump it from 130 feet down, that the water’s pretty cold.

Chad Fiechter: Yeah.

Colson Tester: So you get water shock. You’re not getting that out of this. Also with us recirculating or you’re catching all those nutrients and stuff that run off the field. So there’s another thing, it’s a nutrient catch. So we’re catching it here. We’re putting it right back on the field.

Chad Fiechter: Okay. This is a, an individual farmer’s reservoir? Yes. You said it’s a hundred and what? 120 acres? 120 acres.

Colson Tester: 120 acres. We’re gonna do really dumb math real quick. ‘Cause math is not my subject, so it’s 120 acres. An acre foot is just a foot over an acre of, so you got 120 acres here. You’re gonna lose some because of the slope and then the corners, it’s not gonna be 20 acres, but we’re just gonna, for my math skills,

Todd Kuethe: yeah.

Colson Tester: We’re gonna cut it down to a hundred.

Todd Kuethe: Yeah. It’s easier.

Colson Tester: Parts of this, it’s gonna be eight foot deep, a reservoir is probably somewhere between six to eight feet. Yeah. And have some sendimentation. So there’s six to 800 acre feet of water in here, and there’s 326,000 gallons in every acre foot. So 800 acre feet times 326,000 gallons. That’s how much water’s in here. We’re not.

Aaron Shew: So you could hypothetically irrigate three to 500 acres of rice.

Chad Fiechter: Yep. Okay.

And is that, does he own is or would the fields we’re looking at around here, the rice fields. That’s this guy like Yep. So this is all going right here onto his farm?

Aaron Shew: Yes.

Colson Tester: Yep. So energy costs are gonna go lower because he is pumping outta here. We’re not using the groundwater, we’re using surface water. It’s creating better yields because the water’s warmer. We’re recycling those nutrients.

And then also allows him in the winter. We had talked about putting our boards and our boxes in the winter catching rainfall, but he’s also able to pump this water into those fields in the winter to progress that some, sometimes you’re gonna get a dry fall, you’re just not gonna catch a lot of rain, so you’re just gonna have bare fields. So some farmers will artificially flood those fields with pumping. And so when you have a reservoir or a ray lift into a ditch or some sort of tail water recovery, you can just keep using that water.

Todd Kuethe: And Chad, I got bad news for you. You cannot ice skate on this one. I don’t think.

Colson Tester: You cannot.

Chad Fiechter: You can’t ice skate here.

Colson Tester: No.

Chad Fiechter: Water ski? I

Colson Tester: Possibly water ski. I don’t know.

Aaron Shew: Chad, you paddle?

Colson Tester: Yeah.

Chad Fiechter: Really? Is it, there’s no motors. I can’t take a boat out there.

Colson Tester: Well, no, it is. You could if you wanted to.

Aaron Shew: There’s no, there’s no ramp.

Colson Tester: Yeah. There’s no one. Hey. But if you, at the research station you were at yesterday, if you look at the reservoir, that’s just south of him. We passed it. There’s a boat ramp, and I know that farmer does put a boat ramp on every one of his reservoirs so he can fish ’em.

Todd Kuethe: Yeah. A hundred percent multi-use.

Colson Tester: For sure.

Aaron Shew: This was part of a broader project. Um, so Equip CSP, NRCS provides some incentives and helps subsidize these for farmers. So they’re very expensive to build, I mean, several hundred thousand dollars to get going. And so there is a, there’s an equip program for that.

And you’re choosing to take ground out of production. Yeah. Right. So that’s a part of this equation too. So it’s like, okay, it’s a big investment to build a structure like this, but it’s also the economics of, okay, I’m gonna take forty, sixty, a hundred twenty acres out of production.

Todd Kuethe: Yeah. So this,

Aaron Shew: But you think about that pumping costs and some of the other trade-offs, like it’s still gonna cost you money ultimately, but it may give you a lot more longevity.

Todd Kuethe: So this levee that we’re standing on, then they trucked all this dirt in from somewhere

Colson Tester: It came from here.

Todd Kuethe: Oh, came from here.

So they would’ve had to, they dug this up, built this levee?

Colson Tester: Yes.

Todd Kuethe: But like sometime the not too distant future, this where we’re standing would’ve looked exactly like that over there. Yes. And they just had to correct. Yeah. So that is easy. Huge project. A project.

Aaron Shew: Where does the water that’s in the reservoir come from?

Colson Tester: So there’s a rather large ditch right around here, and then there’s a lift that comes from that ditch. And they pump it in here. And we can go over there in just a minute. Look at that too. Just see that setup up. So talking about e quip. So quip and, and the cost of this project. ’cause these things are massive.

And not everyone’s gonna cost the same. This was actually a reservoir before they just didn’t use it. But it was. The equipment on it was outdated, it was gravity fed it was just failing, so they weren’t using it anymore. A farm bill cap on an individual was $450,000, and I’m pretty sure they hit that and they the farmer did some of that a little bit more on his own.

Than what you would’ve normally done just to fit everything in that 450,000 cap. Normal farm equip contract, you would look at roughly 60 to 75% of it is gonna come from your NRCS contract, and then the other 40. 25 is coming from that producer. But they’ve decked this one out. Like I said, there’s a couple relives here that go into the fields.

One cool thing they have is pump automation and flow meters. So they, if you look, there’s a little core that’s going, this discharge pipe coming off of the, well. That there’s a little propeller in there and they can get on their phone and see how much water’s coming through that pipe at any given point in time.

So it’s, that’s like having a dash on your car, like you can drive it, but if you don’t know how fast you’re going, sometimes it might not be the safest thing. It just gives ’em an extra tool. They’ve also got a on off switch over here on the power unit. To where they can turn this well on and off on their phone.

Mm. So, and that works a couple good ways, is that they can turn it on, turn it off right there, and then they can flip over to their flow meter and make sure that the water’s going through the pipe. Some of them you get nervous if you turn on a well and you’re 10 miles away. You don’t know if it’s actually going or if you’re just gonna burn up your motor.

So that’s a good way to do that. The biggest gain, I think you talk to a lot of farmers that you get from pump automation, and this is you get to spend more time with your family.

Aaron Shew: That’s right.

Colson Tester: Friday night, your grandkid, your kids have a baseball game, but you’re turning off wells because you turn ’em on Tuesday or Wednesday or whatever. However you. Irrigation works. You can go to the ball game, sit in your rocking chair, in the bleachers, wherever, pull it up on your phone, turn ’em all off. You turn it on Tuesday morning like normal, and then all of a sudden a storm comes through at one o’clock in the morning and you wake up to thunder and lightning and you look and it’s coming.

And you’re like, well, I don’t need to irrigate now. You, instead of coming out here messing up your roads, mudding, you, you’re you just roll over. You turn. All the wells off on your phone. You go back to bed,

Aaron Shew: You’re tell me you’re having less fun in the field.

Colson Tester: A little bit less fun. You, you get more sleep and more quality time with your family.

Okay.

Aaron Shew: That’s when we talked a little bit yesterday at the Rice Center. And riding around and just water management. Dr. Burcham was talking about, just chasing water. Not everybody has an automated system. No. I don’t know what the adoption rate is now.

Colson Tester: It’s getting better.

Aaron Shew: It was pretty weak.

Colson Tester: Yeah.

Aaron Shew: You know, four or five years ago. But it is getting better specifically because of this. But it’s yeah. ‘Cause that was the number one thing we would hear four years ago when we’re working out here, is without pump automation, somebody’s out here almost every few nights. ‘Cause you’re turning stuff on and off and it’s all hours of the day and you’re worried pumps are gonna blow up.

Colson Tester: And so that, that leads it to something else is that it’s, these guys have a problem sometimes finding people that are willing to work outside all day long. So the size of the work crews is getting smaller. And th this allows to run a good sized operation with fewer people. Just because everything’s automated. You can see it at the shop, shake your wells, they’re all running the, there’s flow gone through ’em. You don’t have to have two or three guys running around just doing that. You can have ’em working on something else.

Todd Kuethe: The the one complaint I would have about this is if I was gonna build 120 acre retention pond like this, it’s so beautiful. I’d want it to be right next to my house.

Colson Tester: Yeah.

Todd Kuethe: I’m shocked that they weren’t like, let’s put this one right next to my house and every afternoon I could fish at sunset. Yeah. That’s what I’d be doing.

Colson Tester: There are some guys that have it right next to their house. But yeah. So, so this is one of the ways though, that we’re alleviating that ground water use that’s helping slow that trend of,

Todd Kuethe: and then

Colson Tester: depletion.

Todd Kuethe: Is this also some place that people could duck hunt like these kind of ponds like this?

Colson Tester: Yep. Yep. The producer could easily duck hunt. The water’s kind of deep you’re gonna get ducky side of it. But the fields are gonna make better.

Todd Kuethe: Oh, okay.

Aaron Shew: They walk around.

Colson Tester: Yeah.

Aaron Shew: Make sure more food algae.

Colson Tester: Yes. Six to 18 inches of water is all you need. You got a put of water out here?

Todd Kuethe: They want, you want a duck walking around? ’cause you don’t wanna get sitting ducks. Right? That’s the, uh, that’s right.

Aaron Shew: Yeah.

Todd Kuethe: Yeah. It’s like the fish in a barrel.

Chad Fiechter: Okay. I got, we gotta go back ’cause you said something, now I’m trying to think about it. Is there a benefit to over wintering your rice fields with water on them?

Colson Tester: Yes. So obviously it’s going to keep it’s spraying that habitat for the waterfowl. Once you put the water back on it, you’re gonna start seeing macro invertebrates come in. Ducks need protein source when they’re migrating back north. That it provides a really good source. It also provides cover depending on how much residues out there. It also helps deteriorate that rice stubble. So instead of having to burn out a lot or till it in, and there’s a lot of work to it, if you flood it, it will help reduce that. It’s not the same but. That’s one of the benefits of it.

Aaron Shew: Ducks won’t land.

Colson Tester: Yeah.

Aaron Shew: Like if there’s no water on a rice field in the winter. Yeah. They generally aren’t gonna land.

Colson Tester: Right.

Aaron Shew: They, they look for water.

Chad Fiechter: Yeah. Okay. So would a farmer flood his field besides wanting to create habitat for waterfowl or

Colson Tester: They’re, yes. For the residue management, just because it is, it’s pretty difficult. So you could roll it, flood it, and then it’s gonna help deteriorate that, those, those macro invertebrates the ducks will even do it. So as they’re scavenging for seeds on the bottom they’re in there kicking it up and moving around. So they’re helping deteriorate that rice stubble too.

Chad Fiechter: If you’re finding value in this series – we had a lot of fun making it, but hopefully it’s good for you – make sure you subscribe to the Purdue Commercial AgCast so you don’t miss out on what’s coming next, including our regular Ag Economy Barometer insights and future conversations like this one.

We’re also sharing short videos on YouTube from each stop as we were spending time throughout the Delta, so be sure to check those out as well.

Thanks for joining us, and we’ll see you next time.