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Why are we so concerned about soil erosion?
And there's a good reason for it,
one it has a tremendous impact on crop productivity.
The second reason that we're concerned about soil erosion is
the impact on water quality.
There are actually four types soil erosion, one is called pedestal.
In pedestal erosion as the name implies, it's like a pedestal of soil,
a pedestal that has a rock sitting on top of it and
all the soil has gone around it, because of the pounding of the rain drops.
The second type of soil erosion that we can have is rill erosion.
These are small channels that form in the soil, and
these are easily covered up with a tractor.
The other type of soil erosion that we have
is something it's called sheet erosion.
And it is the uniform removal of a thin layer of soil.
So you can't really see this happening,
all right, farmers can't see this happening.
But what's happening over a period of time is that your
losing this thin layer of soil every year.
And what eventually happens is that your productivity goes down and
all of a sudden you realize that I've got a soil erosion problem.
The other type of soil erosion
that you can have is something called gully erosion.
And that's the worst type of erosion that you can have.
In gully erosion essentially what happens there is that these huge
channels form in your soil.
And what happens is that you can not cross those with the tillage implement.
So what usually happens is you have to come in with some sort of
caterpillar tractor to fill in those gullies.
And so that you can carry on a traditional agricultural types of practices.
So the other important fact to remember is that we have two types,
major types of soil erosion that can occur.
One is water erosion,
which we're gonna spend the majority of our time talking about today.
And then we have wind erosion.
Wind erosion out in the western part of the United States is a big concern.
Here in Indiana and in the mid-west generally speaking,
water erosion is a big concern.
So the first type of soil erosion that we're going to look at,
again this is water erosion.
Is a situation where we've been tilling the soil year after
year after year, and not leaving very much cover on the field.
It's clean tilled, there's no surface residue on the soil.
And so when you look at it, all right,
what you see is that a lot of the soil is actually eroded off.
And then when you look at this pan down here, it is incredible how much soil
has eroded off this particular pan and settled down in this container.
In this particular example what we're finding is that we added about
one ton of residue per acre, right, not much residue.
So what's happening here is that we have water which is coming across this,
but what's happening is that that mulch is protecting that soil surface from erosion.
And so what's happening is that what we find rolling off into the tray here
is significantly less soil than we had in the first example.
So the last example that we're gonna look at is an erosion control practice.
And erosion control practices include things such as terracing and contouring.
In this particular example, what we have are strips, and for example,
the strips in this particular case are actually grass strips.
And what's unique about this is that these grass strips totally
trap that sentiment and prevent it from rolling into the tray.
So that when you look at the tray,
there is hardly any sentiment at all in the bottom of the tray.
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