It’s been a while since I have specifically written about our most visually apparent marginal ground. I looked and I haven’t written about it since before we added new readers. I’ve made off the cuff comments but haven’t had a dedicated article on it. Many people refer to salt affected areas as Alkali, or maybe just crap, but it doesn’t matter the name. All that matters is that ground doesn’t create a return when we invest inputs into it. Salt affected areas can be saline, sodic, or saline sodic. For simplicity I just always refer to them as saline. Similar look, similar causes, same profit loss.
As I mentioned, saline acres are such a visually apparent problem that I think there would be very few people that wouldn’t recognize that a problem existed. It’s barren, no crop is growing, easy to see that. What maybe harder to recognize is that it isn’t just the barren areas that are affected. We see that our corn or soybeans have germinated and are physically out there, but they are suffering far out from the obvious areas. I like to look at imagery from soybean years to get a handle on the problem areas for a given field if we are trying to plan with a landowner CRP or other grass establishment programs.
Soybeans are one of the least salt tolerant crops we have, so that imagery will show the extent of our salt problem fairly well. You as the producer probably have the best imagery to go off of though, you combine yield data. Those nice green and red areas give you just as stark of a visual as the barren areas are to the naked eye. We have access to some amazing technology that should allow us to understand the extent of our problem. But are we using it? I have to wonder if we allow ourselves as farmers to see what our eyes tell us. It’s not hard to see there is a problem, it’s not hard to acknowledge that we lose money by throwing inputs out there, but yet we are still doing it. Somehow, we are able to shrug it off and throw those losses to the back of our minds. I think the shrugging is easy when we don’t run the numbers.
If we were to actually sit down and see what we lose by farming those areas, we wouldn’t be moving our shoulders to our ears anymore. There is a free program that can do this for you called Every Acre Counts. If you were to utilize the program you would end up with very detailed numbers for just like it says, every acre. The most important of these numbers being the profit and loss. It seems we can dismiss knowing we are losing money on marginal ground until we see actual dollar amounts. If you want to truly be at your most efficient, your most profitable, I highly encourage you to look into this.
So, what is saline? It’s salt pure and simple. Water rises through capillary action carrying salt with it. Water evaporates, salt stays causing a high concentration of salt closer to the surface. I know there are some conspiracy theories out there that it’s the salts in fertilizer and herbicide that cause the issue. It’s not, sure if you had an actual chemical spill, it would have a high salt concentration, but the sheer volume needed to cause the saline issue we see in our area doesn’t even register from chemical salts. Our soils form from parent materials that were at the bottom of an ancient sea. Seas are of course salt water; thus, our soils have a tendency towards higher salt concentrations. After our current soils were formed, plants overtime adapted and grew and took the salts lower in the soil profile. It’s their roots that are the most important tool here just as in any other aspect of soil health.
Why do the saline areas seem more prevalent in the last 30 years? Well, several things coming together at once. We got wetter for a consistently longer period. We started and keep breaking grass that either wasn’t farmed before or they learned their lesson and put it back to grass. So, we are trying to farm the most susceptible acres for the first time, or again. The sprayer is killing “weeds” out as far as possible. Taking the vegetation away takes away the only thing we have to combat the salt. The last big contributor is our crop rotation, or lack thereof.
Once soybeans became glyphosate tolerant, we saw their usage skyrocket not so slowly creating the corn soybean only game we see now. We went from having the most salt tolerant crops in the rotation with small grains to the least tolerant in soybeans. We also had more hay acres. These salt affected areas may have just been left for grass hay or planted to alfalfa where at least you have a perennial plant that is a little more salt tolerant than row crops.
Crops are still not going to fix the problem as they only grow for a few months of the year with much lower root density, but replacing small grains with soybeans did exacerbate the issue. Farming these areas in the first place is how we started the problem and getting them back to perennial vegetation is the solution.
I know, I know, I have tile enthusiasts screaming that tile will fix the ground. There are many physical and chemical attributes that come along with saline affected areas. It gets worse because there isn’t enough water usage. This leads to the idea that we should drain it. Another attribute of salty soil is its water infiltration. To which calling it very slow would be an understatement. If you look at a field after a rain, what areas still look wet (I don’t mean the bottom of the sloughs) after all other areas have soaked in? Those saline areas are wet because that water cannot penetrate downward. How will tile drain the salt out if the salt can’t reach it because the water can’t reach it? We are talking about needing water to infiltrate something similar to concrete. Even if we didn’t have the issue of the tile functioning as it should, is the investment worth the return? How long will it take for that infrastructure expense to pay dividends? Is this a better investment than planting it back to perennial plants?
I can’t answer those questions for your operation. The only way I think you can know what is best is to run the numbers. It seems that when it comes to our salt affected areas we only operate in the mindset that it has to be farmed. By not having all options open we are losing money chasing the farm at all costs mantra and only making the problem worse cause those saline acres, they are only spreading.