Farming Video | 5 Questions About Chad Henderson’s Tile Drainage System

00:00:00 Hey y'all, it's Chad Henderson with Extreme Ag and we're here today with McKayla Todd. So McKayla is my area person here, and she's with a DS 00:00:08 and McKayla, you wanna talk now as you can Game? I do, yes. Hi, I'm Mikayla. 00:00:13 Um, I'm the Southeast Business Development Manager for advanced drainage systems and we make plastic pipe. We have been since 1966 and uh, we make it for drain tile. 00:00:21 We have water management solutions. And that's what we're gonna talk about with Chad today. So one thing I wanted to talk about, 00:00:25 and the question that I get a lot is, will this work on my farm? Will it work with my soil type, 00:00:30 my topography and my crop type? Yes, yes, yes, yes. Okay, good video. Anything else? I want you to elaborate. Yeah, I get what 00:00:38 Your soul type is, your topography, what your fields look like. So, so let's just talk about, 00:00:42 again, let's take them one at your time. What was the first one? What is your soil Type? What is the soil type? 00:00:46 So we have a silt loam. Some of it is a red clay. Uh, they classify it some as a, a Decatur Silt Lo loan. Uh, and a lot of times that don't mean a lot to a lot 00:00:56 of us that look at it. And our hands look like this. I got red dirt down here. Okay. So we got some gray dirt, we got some red dirt. 00:01:02 What boils down to is a lot of our areas, we have to have these lift stations because a lot of 'em are lower and they're bowls that we can, we could drain 'em, 00:01:09 but we can't get the water out. So we had to do these, we have five of these lift stations and the areas that we work it in, we have 00:01:15 to get the water up and over, maybe a levy into a ditch, anything like that. So that was our kind of why our soil type is what it is. 00:01:22 So question number two. Yes. Uh, topography. What do your fields look like? It's not, some people think it's flat here 00:01:27 in the south, and it is. Some of it is, but you gotta go full south in here. Yes. So we're in North Alabama. 00:01:32 We're about an hour and 45 minutes from Nashville. So that's where we're located at. We have rolling terrain, we have some terraces. 00:01:39 And what we uh, get into here is in Tino's rolling terrain. The water, like you see in the north 00:01:44 that we've learned from our, our fellow farmers that's been tiling all their life is if you know, you think it's here in the bottom and it 00:01:50 really comes outside of the hill. So we have learned that here. And like I said, we, we are definitely still young 00:01:56 in the game on tiling. You know, we've, we've picked it up from a lot of these people with a DS. 00:01:59 They've definitely taught me the better way to do things, you know, so that's, that's kind of 00:02:04 what our terrain is. Yes. And let's talk about your crop type. What are you rotating? What are you growing here? So 00:02:08 A lot of times what we have is we try to get three crops in two years. So we grow corn and then we grow wheat 00:02:14 and then double crop beans behind it. We won't get our wheat acres up and beyond what our harvesting power is. 00:02:20 So we'll, we'll run in that rain anywhere from 2000 to 2,500 range on wheat. But before we've been historically having 00:02:27 to keep our wheat on our higher acres. Well that's not the case now since we put this lift station in and this tile system, we've been able 00:02:33 to work this farm here. As you'll see behind me, all this is in wheat. Before we could work only the heel in wheat. 00:02:39 And so it allowed us to do this. This is the first time this has ever been farmed in wheat. And I'm not gonna say it's gonna make a hundred bush 00:02:44 of wheat by no means, but I promise you it will make wheat where we didn't used to make wheat. 00:02:48 Right. You know, we gonna have some bowls in it where the tile's still doing its job. It's going to take a minute for the ground 00:02:53 to heal from when you just put a whole lot of pipe through it. But with that being said, we're way ahead of game from 00:02:59 where we would've been, especially the year we're in now. We've been in such, such a wet year, a wet spring. 00:03:03 Heck, we ain't even finished planting corn yet. And here it's two weeks before June, you know? Yep. Another benefit of tile is that we can bring pieces 00:03:09 of your farm back into production, so where you're not wasting your inputs, not wasting diesel water, anything. 00:03:14 So talk about how many acres that we brought back into production and why that's beneficial for you. Ooh, we own our farm with a tile 00:03:21 and we're somewhere around 250 acres, tiled now five lift stations. And I would say outta that, 00:03:27 we brought back into production probably 20, 25, 30, 30 acres or better. Um, and we could work the ground. 00:03:34 Don't think it's like, oh, well they, we couldn't work it at all. No. We could work it, but we could get a, 00:03:39 a best 30% of crop off of it. Yeah. And we just couldn't get work. If we could work it, it would be in June, July planted 00:03:46 and then we'd run against the window. We would make again, half to a third at best because of the lateness on the planting. 00:03:52 And with this system, it allowed us to plant more timely. We had farms that you could plant the heel 00:03:58 and you couldn't plant the bottom. Well, I didn't wanna go up there and turn around on the, he so at delayed the hills for another two or three weeks. 00:04:04 Well now we get uniformity in planting. And the first farm we'd done that with, it was just eyeopening to see how much it changed in 00:04:11 to topography and to see where we was headed, you know, with drying out the ground, you know? Yeah. You know, everybody was like, oh no, 00:04:18 you gonna dry the whole farm up. Like it's going to be, it is gonna be dry, you'll never get any more water on it again. 00:04:22 Like, and that's not the case, you know, but it's been real well for in bringing back areas and, you know, I've done a little video, some of y'all seen, 00:04:29 my son was out there picking up rocks, right. And I put the rocks in the field to get the irrigation through it. 00:04:34 Well then we put tile down and we had to go pick the rocks up because we didn't need a irrigation runts anymore. 00:04:39 So, you know, it's always a catch 22 with a farmer and we're always picking up something, putting it back down. But I hope this tile is something I don't 00:04:45 pick back up. Hopefully not. That'd be tough. So something that Chad and I talk about a lot is OnFarm consistency. 00:04:52 So being able to work your ground at the same time, plant at the same time, harvest at the same time. Talk about your experience with that 00:04:58 and how it's helped you with That. You know, in what we do now with XT Extreme Mag, you know, we've, we've done a lot of stuff with, uh, with these videos 00:05:06 and we're trying to always changing, man. I know I appreciate all y'all hanging in there with us, but we're always changing on why we do the videos. 00:05:13 Mm-hmm. And that's, this, that's the part of segmenting out is the why, you know, it's not about the product. 00:05:17 It is, you know, we've got several people, several companies that make tile, right? Mm-hmm. Um, y'all have been really good to me. 00:05:23 Uh, we've done a lot of business together. Again, like a 250 acres style, that's that my dad's like, oh my goodness, you're tiling down here. 00:05:29 So, but with that being said, we've got a good relationship with a DS, we like the way that y'all work. 00:05:33 It worked well with us and it has really made our farms more consistent. You know, it's great to go out there 00:05:39 and make 300, 320 bushel corn, uh, 290 bush corn like that. That's, that's all good. But for us to pick up, the best way 00:05:46 to pick up a farm average is to fix the bad spots. Whether it's compaction on your end rows, which this year I've got a ton of, 00:05:53 or whether it's a low spot in tile again this year with the rain we've had, man, this has been godsend. So it's going to make our averages better 00:06:02 where we can average take a whole farm and average a better corn. You know, where I don't have that 00:06:06 three or four or five acres. And yeah, we can say, oh man, that farm was, if you take out all the holes I had, 00:06:11 then I averaged 280 bushel corn. Sure. Well guess what? Those holes are still there. And you gotta pay rent on those holes too. Yep. 00:06:17 So the true averages is where it's really at, you know, and that's really, really where it's at with all our farms. And that's the why, that's why we tile, is 00:06:25 to pick up the averages on the farm, you know, because that's what it's about, the consistency the tile brings. 00:06:30 Mm-hmm. So what we're seeing here, this is the first time again that, as you've seen in our video, that we farm wheat here. 00:06:36 And you can see as it lays around, the green stretch is where we've usually farm wheat at. So when we get any lower than that, it would just drown out. 00:06:44 And you can see some spots. Here's a spot right here, this little darker in color, you know, where the tile comes together at, 00:06:49 and the dirt was disturbed pretty good bit. There's another low swag out there, but y'all, I'm telling you like none 00:06:55 of this would be in wheat without it. This is a duck hole that they used to hunt on, actually was hunted on last year, last season. 00:07:02 So it's flooded. They decided not to hunt it this year. So we put the whole thing in wheat, and without this lift station 00:07:07 and without the tile, we'd never be able to do this. So this is about 30 or 40 acres that swings around all the way around these trees to make it 00:07:13 where we can harvest the crop off of it. Again, like I said, will it make a hundred bush a week? Probably not this year, but like, it'll make 70 or 80 00:07:21 and then we'll be ready to roll on as we, 00:07:23.965 --> 00:07:25.165