Nebraska 4-H "Aspects of Ag" - Water

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08/31/2021 Added

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Nebraska 4-H "Aspects of Ag" - Water Aaron Nygren, Nebraska Extension Educator

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[00:00:13.620]Hi everyone. I'm.
[00:00:14.370]Aaron Nygren. I'm an extension educator with Nebraska Extension.
[00:00:17.510]And today I'm going to talk to you a little bit about water and irrigation.
[00:00:20.870]So first off we have to talk about corn.
[00:00:23.420]So corn is one of our most important crops in Nebraska.
[00:00:26.660]Just like any plant though, corn uses quite a bit of water.
[00:00:29.780]So when we talk about water, water is very critical for plants.
[00:00:33.380]We need that plant to have water,
[00:00:35.150]so it can grow and produce a crop for us that we can use throughout the rest of
[00:00:38.720]the season. So with water, water is very critical.
[00:00:43.280]If we don't have water, we ended up with things like this.
[00:00:46.700]Droughts are known to happen in Nebraska.
[00:00:49.940]This is a picture from the 1930s. This was the Dust Bowl.
[00:00:53.420]The Dust Bowl was a period where we didn't have enough rain.
[00:00:56.420]Temperatures were hot.
[00:00:57.860]We ended up with these drought conditions and we had the top soil blowing away,
[00:01:01.250]which isn't a good thing for our crop. Since then,
[00:01:04.580]we've made changes to how we grow corn. So today for one thing we,
[00:01:08.870]we use no till which helps save a lot more water.
[00:01:11.960]The other thing that's really changed a lot in Nebraska is irrigation.
[00:01:15.440]So over 60% of the corn in Nebraska uses irrigation. You might say,
[00:01:19.670]what is irrigation? Well,
[00:01:21.230]if you have a sprinkler in your lawn to water your grass, that's the same thing.
[00:01:24.980]It's just adding water to make plants grow better. So you might say,
[00:01:29.480]where did we get all that water from? Right? You know, in town,
[00:01:32.060]you see the water tower. You say, well, water comes from the water tower, right?
[00:01:34.880]Well, it still has to come from somewhere to fill up the water tower.
[00:01:38.360]So in Nebraska, the main source of water that we use for irrigation
[00:01:44.690]is called the Ogallala Aquifer.
[00:01:46.940]So the Ogallala Aquifer goes from South Dakota all the way down into
[00:01:51.740]Texas. The important thing with this map though,
[00:01:54.680]is if we look at the color chart,
[00:01:58.190]the blues mean there's more wate - there's more water under the ground.
[00:02:02.000]So this is water that's under the ground.
[00:02:04.040]So if we look at the blue where all the blue colors are,
[00:02:06.500]we'll notice that Nebraska has more of the Ogallala Aquifer than any other
[00:02:10.280]state. So this is a very fortunate thing for Nebraska. Now,
[00:02:14.090]the Ogallala Aquifer doesn't cover all of the state. You'll notice it ends before Lincoln.
[00:02:18.050]It ends before Omaha, but cover quite a bit of the state.
[00:02:21.290]There's a lot of water under the ground.
[00:02:23.690]Now that seems weird that there's water under the ground. So you might say,
[00:02:26.330]how does that work?
[00:02:28.040]So what we have to do is we have to think of that aquifer as a layer of gravel
[00:02:32.510]or sand underneath the ground. So this is gravel, you know,
[00:02:36.800]just like you'd find in a playground or in a driveway.
[00:02:40.070]This can actually be used to store water over time though.
[00:02:43.970]So that's kind of a weird thing to think about,
[00:02:45.980]but what happens whenever it rains,
[00:02:48.800]some of the water soaks into the ground and eventually it keeps moving down
[00:02:53.030]until it gets into the aquifer.
[00:02:55.820]And even though that gravel looks pretty full,
[00:02:58.790]there's actually holes in between that the gravel,
[00:03:00.880]the water can fill up in between the gravel.
[00:03:04.180]The nice thing is this water then stays there for thousands of years.
[00:03:07.840]It'll stay there.
[00:03:09.880]Until we drill a well. So my pump here,
[00:03:14.860]is just a regular pump, but if we drill a well,
[00:03:18.190]which is the hole down in the ground, and then if we install a pump,
[00:03:22.180]which is something that has energy to pull that water out of the ground,
[00:03:25.780]we can use that okay.
[00:03:31.860]To pump the water out of the ground.
[00:03:38.040]So farmers use a much bigger version of this.
[00:03:40.020]They use ones that pump about a thousand gallons per minute.
[00:03:42.660]So it's a lot more expensive, but this shows the same principle. Okay.
[00:03:46.440]So then the question becomes, once we have that water out of the ground,
[00:03:51.180]how does a farmer put it on a corn field or a soybean field? So with that,
[00:03:55.470]we have to use some technology,
[00:03:56.820]some machinery that we've developed over the years, you know,
[00:03:59.970]in the past we would just flood the whole field,
[00:04:01.770]which we decided though that wasn't very efficient.
[00:04:04.020]So one thing we use anymore and something you've probably seen if you've driven
[00:04:07.830]outside, quite a bit of Nebraska is a center pivot.
[00:04:12.210]So with the center pivot, think of it like a giant water sprinkler. Okay.
[00:04:15.360]Giant lawn sprinkler. So we pumped the water out of the ground.
[00:04:19.530]That water goes through these pipes.
[00:04:21.660]And then each one of these is a little sprinkler, just like,
[00:04:24.180]you'd see in your yard, sprinkling water over that field. Okay.
[00:04:27.960]So we might drive by these in the summer.
[00:04:30.630]They look like they're just sitting there. Right? But these actually do move.
[00:04:34.260]Okay. So as a center pivot,
[00:04:37.080]if I use an example like this, most of our fields in Nebraska are square.
[00:04:42.540]So this is my center pivot. So it's a long pipe. It's about a quarter mile long.
[00:04:46.710]It's about 1,200 feet long. When the farmer turns that on,
[00:04:49.860]it actually starts to drive itself in a circle.
[00:04:53.010]So it'll make a circle all by itself until it gets back around.
[00:04:56.550]And then the farmer will shut it off of the entire time it's going around
[00:04:59.970]that it's putting water on. The reason we don't usually see it move is that happens
[00:05:04.500]over three or four days. So it's a very slow, it just moves a little bit.
[00:05:08.370]And it sits there for a couple of minutes and moves a little bit.
[00:05:10.500]So it's a slow process for that center pivot to go around.
[00:05:15.420]That brings us to one of the challenges when we look at a center pivot.
[00:05:19.050]So remember I said, most fields are square,
[00:05:21.690]so we're making a circle inside of that square. Right?
[00:05:25.260]So one of the challenges with center pivots is that I can't irrigate an entire
[00:05:29.100]field. We've thought of some different ways to do that though.
[00:05:32.610]So there's one way that we can do almost all of the field.
[00:05:37.890]So if we use the center pivot like this, think of it like a giant bendy straw,
[00:05:42.780]we've got the normal center pivot and we add on a flexible bid at the end,
[00:05:46.230]this is called a corner system. So as the center pivot drives the corner,
[00:05:51.210]arms slowly starts to come out until it's all the way out in the corner.
[00:05:55.680]So the reach is almost all the corner. And then as it drives,
[00:05:58.250]it goes back in and it keeps doing that all on its own throughout the four
[00:06:02.270]corners. Now you might say, why can't I just have a center pivot like that?
[00:06:06.680]Right. Why can't I just have it longer? That would reach the whole thing. Well,
[00:06:10.230]I have to remember there might be a road here. There might be telephone poles.
[00:06:13.340]So we need to stay on our our own field. Okay.
[00:06:16.370]So the center pivot does that by bending in and out,
[00:06:20.270]occasionally we have to use a different kind of center pivot though.
[00:06:24.590]Sometimes we might have a field where we can't run a full circle.
[00:06:27.140]Maybe there's a house over here. So in that situation, a lot of times,
[00:06:31.100]we have a center pivot set up like this, where it goes one way and it stops.
[00:06:35.270]And then it goes back the other way. Now, when a farmer has one of these,
[00:06:39.320]the most popular name for these are windshield wipers,
[00:06:41.750]and you can kind of see why we call them that name, right?
[00:06:44.240]So they just go back and forth throughout the summer.
[00:06:48.350]So center pivots though, are very critical to Nebraska.
[00:06:52.700]There's actually four companies that make center pivots that sell them all
[00:06:55.190]around the world here based here in Nebraska. Center
[00:06:58.670]pivots allow us to grow consistent corn crops and soybean crops every year,
[00:07:02.270]because we know we can add that water to make the crop grow better.
[00:07:06.080]So that is really vital to our ag economy. The other thing about center pivots,
[00:07:10.880]they're not cheap. Okay. So when we look at a center pivot like this,
[00:07:15.350]this might cost you 50 to 60, even more thousand dollars than that. Okay.
[00:07:19.610]So it's farmers who spend a lot of money on these because they're beneficial because
[00:07:23.600]they help them produce that better corn crop every year.
[00:07:27.230]So thank you for joining me today to learn about irrigation.

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Nebraska 4-H "Aspects of Ag" - Water

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