In this episode, crop consultant Darren Dunham shares about some of the soil related challenges farmers are facing in his area of North Central North Dakota. Darren lives in Maxbass, and has worked there for Centrol Crop Consulting for the past ten years. He grew up on a farm in the eastern part of the state and those early experiences have stuck with Darren and informed how he gives advice to the farmers he works with. Unfortunately soil blowing away is still an issue in many areas. Where Darren is now, north of Minot, minimum till and no-till have been really common pretty much since the advent of the Concord Air Seeder. That’s not the case in the Red River Valley, where Darren grew up. 

“As they were pulling these fence posts out of the ground, they realized that they were on top of an old fence. That the old fence had been covered by soil from wind erosion…That's four feet of soil that had drifted in there…..but that was back in the day of plows and pony drills. Everything was tilled black and lost a lot of soil. It's heartbreaking to think about it. Just the massive amount of soil, nutrients, organic matter that is rearranged for one, but gone, period.” Darren Dunham

Darren finds himself addressing a different issue with a lot of his clients. Salinity issues have become a significant problem for North Dakota producers. The right answer for how to handle salinity is not always straightforward or quick. Moisture management and getting saline-tolerant crops established in some of these spots is easier said than done. All of this salinity management gets back to a fundamental principle of soil health of keeping a living root in the soil as much as possible. 

“Salinity is a water issue. You have to manage the water. So other than putting tile into the field, we're gonna suck the water through plants and alfalfa is the number one water user crop that we have in North Dakota…. So the alfalfa is hopefully intercepting that water that is moving by capillary pressure to that salient spot, intercepting it before it has a chance to percolate to the top of the soil, evaporate and leave its salt as precipitate on top of the soil.” - Darren Dunham

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