News

How center pivot irrigation helps my family’s farm

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Central pivot irrigationBy Nick Peterson

As I have made my way around the state of Minnesota the past number of years through work, school, and recreational trips, I’ve realized my idea of Minnesota is quite a bit different than I grew up thinking. Growing up on a crop and livestock farm in Sherburne County, it is apparent that our way of farming is more in the minority than it is the majority.

Much of the soils in Minnesota can be characterized as anywhere between the silty loam hills and bluffs of Southeastern Minnesota all the way to the heavily clay soils of the Red River Valley. In fact, it is these highly productive soils that represent the majority of farming production in the state.

These soils (along with most of the soils across the Corn Belt) contain organic matter up to 4 percent and would leave a farmer from the red clay of Georgia very jealous. As I stated before, though, we see a much different scene in Sherburne County. Located within the Anoka Sand Plains in the central part of the state, our lands are mostly Sandy Loams or Loamy Sands with textures of 50 to 90 percent sand content.

In comparison to those silt and clay soils, these sands drain excessively and make it difficult to grow a crop due to the limited water content in the soil through the summer and fall. The conditions we saw last June, July, and August illustrates this difference. While much of the state’s cropland was certainly seeing crop stress due to the abnormally dry weather, a few of our dryland corn fields were completely killed due to moisture stress.

So, how can farms such as my family’s be profitable? We can, thanks to center pivot irrigation.

Increasing yields
Many of you have seen the long cast iron implements stretching across fields from a central pivot point throughout the year. These apparatuses water the field with water pumped up to that central point. The increase in yield that we can see from irrigation is tremendous.

A corn yield increase from 50 to 230 bushels on our coarse soils would not be out of the question with the right fertility. Although implementation costs average around $1,500 per acre, yield increases make this a very obvious investment.

A benefit of the excessively draining sandy soils is seen in the spring also, as we are able to enter the fields to do tillage and begin planting well before farmers on heavier soils near us are able to.  This difference is often up to two weeks. This enables us to plant longer day corn, up to 105 day maturity, about the same maturity that growers in Southern Minnesota plant more than 100 miles south.

While we are able to grow high yielding corn on our irrigated acres, this is only half of the gain.  The ability to water the land when it is needed also allows us to grow a variety of specialty crops such as kidney beans, seed corn, and seed beans. A number of producers around us see great profits in raising potatoes for potato chip and French fry production as well.

Thanks to the benefits outlined above, there has been an increase in irrigation being implemented across the state, reaching much heavier soil textures than the sands we farm. A friend of mine at the University of Minnesota farms with his family near Northfield, Minn. and regularly sees high yields across much of their dryland acres. He recently told me this spring and summer they are installing four center pivots that will irrigate almost 640 acres of their land. This input will absolutely benefit their farm and could possibly take their corn and soybean yields to the next level.

Careful planning
It is important to realize that the water quality and supply of the pivot and surrounding area is a factor that needs to be carefully considered before undertaking a project such as this.

We are blessed in the area we farm to have a very dependable water supply. There are very rarely occurrences where neighboring well water levels are affected due to this irrigation pumping, but this is not the case in other areas of the state or other areas of the country.

Much of the Southern plains in the Texas panhandle up to Nebraska are heavily irrigated but are in danger of losing much of their ability to pump the amount of water they are used to. If a neighboring well, especially if it is a municipal well, sees affected water levels, the DNR can easily regulate your ability to pump water for irrigation. In fact, there have been some cases where the grower did not do enough legwork up front to look at the potential effects, and spent tens of thousands of dollars to drill a well for this purpose only to have the DNR disallow them to use it due to a poor water supply.

Future outlook
With the recent bearish grain prices projected for the foreseeable future, there may be less irrigation being implemented. Assuming the water supply is strong enough to handle the load, though, the benefits could be exceptional.

While every acre is not ideally suited for irrigation, my family is extremely thankful for it, and will strive to responsibly implement it to keep it a viable option when my brother’s, as well as my own children, are farming our land in generations down the road.

Nick Peterson is a student at the University of Minnesota and an “agvocate” for the Minnesota Corn Growers Association.

Did you like this article?

Share this post with your friends!