Improving Soil Health To Help His Crop Through A Drought
2 Aug 231 min 18 sec

Kelly believes the drain tile he installed to eliminate wet spots is also helping this crop get through the extremely dry times. Here is why.

00:00 Hi, this is Kelly Garrett from Extreme Ag Down this afternoon. I've been down here scouting this cornfield, 00:05 and I specifically looked at the areas that historically have been wet on this field, and a DS installed tile for us here last fall. 00:13 And while it might seem counterintuitive, tile does help us during a drought. We've received some rain here this last week. Things looked nice. 00:21 We feel very blessed and very fortunate. But the last half of May and June were very hot and dry. The corn would roll up, and the drought stress was very noticeable In an area that needs tile but 00:31 doesn't have it, the soil goes anaerobic, the root system doesn't go down. It only goes down maybe six inches to a foot, depending on how wet the soil is. 00:40 The soil below that, again, is anaerobic. There's no biological life, nothing's going on. And then when the drought sets in, 00:47 the root system can't chase that water down and the soil is still anaerobic. No biological life going on, no microbial system going on, 00:55 no nutrition available for the plant. And when we install the tile, it makes the soil healthier. Tile really is a soil health product, 01:04 so by making the soil healthier, the plants can mitigate the stress better and life goes on. So this tile, while it helps us in a wet time, it also helps us in a dry time.

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