MSU Extension MI Ag Ideas to Grow With

Our next speaker up is gonna be Dr. Jeff Andresen. And Dr. Jeff Andresen is one of the few people I remember being there before I started. I've had 35 years in, so he must have over 35 years in, right? It's up there. It's up there. Okay. So he's our state meteorologist. And that gives him an opportunity to talk about a lot of topics He's well sought after all over. He's travelled all week, last week talking to people about meteorology and and primarily water and temperature is the issue. And it's been a hot topic because we're all talking about climate change and what's, what's in our future. So give us an idea. Jeff, what was 2022 like compared to the average? And where are we going in the future? Well, thanks very much, Lyndon and good afternoon. I pulled my earlier slide at the last minute. A bit of irony. Well, I don't know if we want to call it, but it is interesting for many parts of the state we're dealing with the second significant icing event in just five days that's pretty unusual. So I have some freezing rain imagery to share here. We won't talk so much about that. But as Lyndon mentioned, wanna spend most of my time here over the next 20-25 min looking in the rear-view mirror at last year, at our weather and climate. Where does that fit in given recent trends over the last few decades, especially in and where we're at right now. And if we have enough time, I would like to end with a little bit of a look ahead. There are some, I think some important trends in the outlooks that are certainly relevant given to where we are right now across many parts of the state of Michigan. Well, starting with that and again, looking at 2022, we'll start there. And I'm going to start with mean temperatures across the upper Midwest. On the left-hand side here. These are for the summer months, the core of our growing season, June, July, and August. And really the mean temperature is around the left, the departures from normal on the right, that's probably the where we should spend most of our time here. But for most of the state, it was a relatively we'll call it mostly normal type of at least the middle part of the growing season. The tan and brown colors there indicate for most areas of the state, it was at or a couple of degrees above normal, depending on location. There were a few spots that were just below, but really pretty close overall to the long term normals here for mean temperatures during the middle of the growing season. And this particular graphic I've got here, these are actually daily temperatures. And this is for the Three Rivers down in St. Joseph County in the southwestern part of the state. It's representative. And so for each of these particular blue bars here, we've got the observed max and the Min for the day. But for some context here and background reference, we've drawn those, we've plotted these on the climatology, long-term, 30-year normals for the area and the area here in the background that's in brown color here. These are the normal max and mins for that time of the year. And you can clearly see the annual cycle show up here in temperature, warmest temperatures climalogically in most places in Michigan, you can see tend to occur the second half of July into the first couple of days of August, and then the coldest time of the year that usually about the last week of January to first couple of days of February. So again, annual cycle shows up real well. And finally, two more colors on there. The sort of the salmon color or the pinkish color here. Read that those are the maximum recorded temperatures, the record maximum temperatures for that date. And then the blue on the other end of the distribution of scale. Those are the record low temperatures. And again, you can see where did those observed temperatures lineup relative to normal during the course of the year? And at least for a lot of the middle of the year again, those summer months, June, July, and August at this location and many other parts of the state, temperatures were pretty close to where they typically are. Two, maybe a hair or tad above. There were some other interesting pieces in here, some records in here, some late spring freezes that occurred during April. You can see those here. There also was a period that this is from many parts of the state, not all, but where we had an extended very, very warm period here in May, made a huge difference in terms of planting our annual crops. So this past spring, huge, huge role in that. And we had been delayed up until that time, but with almost two weeks of much warmer than normal, a lot of people got a lot of work done. So that was a very, very positive thing. And then on the other end here and the latter part of the year, we can see some of the first freezing temperatures and the first killing freezes for the fall all the way to the end of November, but that was in turn followed by another extended warm spell which helped with grain moisture and drawing down grains that were still out there. Then at the very end you can see it has been an unusually mild winter. Top, top 10% depending on where you are, but very, very mild. There were three cold air outbreaks during the winter thus far. Two of them occurred last year, one year Thanksgiving, and then the other one right before Christmas with the blizzard conditions over most of the state, but other than that, it's been significantly milder than normal, so that that's sort of a real very, very rapid review of temperatures are degree day totals for the overall growing season here, the actual values on the left-hand side and then again the departures on the right-hand side with temperatures, again generally overall 1 to maybe two degrees Fahrenheit, warmer than normal. You can see that the vast majority of the state we ended up with somewhere between 100-300 base 50 degree days of surplus. So a little bit above where we typically are and that would be in most areas, would amount to five to 10% of what normally occurs. So a little bit, again, a little bit better than normal we typically see in a given season. So moving on to the, really the focus of much of our discussion here today and that's water. Precipitation is a mixed bag. It depends greatly on where you were. Observed totals for once again, the summer season here on the left-hand side, and then the departures from normal on the right-hand side. We already start to see some differences here that become even larger when we consider the growing season and really the year as a whole. And that is that we have areas in western portions and southern portions of the state where we actually had surpluses of a few inches here for the summer season. But as we move north and east away from that, we tend to get drier and drier as we move toward, especially towards the east and where we had deficits during the growing season. And those, those show up, as I say, with longer periods of time as well. Those are important here. One of the take homes, once again, back to St. Joseph County. Here is a somewhat representative site. These are daily accumulated precipitation totals that's in the green during the course of the calendar year. And then the brown line in the background, that's the 30-year normal accumulated precipitation. So again, if we see our green line paralleling are brown line, we can say we're moving right along that, right along with what climatology would tell us where we should be. And of course, if we deviate from that, well, we've either got a surplus or a deficit. You can see that we did have a little bit of a deficit early in the year last winter, but that was made up in the spring again, April was wet in most portions of the state and led to delays with field work and then planting. We went along fairly fairly consistently near normal during much of May and into June. And then there was a very, very large event here then this this course did not happen everywhere. This is primarily across southern sections of lower Michigan, but we had a week in which we had 3, 4 even 5 inches of precipitation, some very heavy rain on almost consecutive days. Again, that was the first week of July, and that led to at least temporarily a surplus of precipitation. But the key factor here is if you look at the slope of this accumulation here, you can see while it is still going up, it's not going up as quickly as the normal. So after all of that rain, we had really an extended dry period that went for most of the rest of the calendar year. And actually in some parts of the state and the East, it's actually continued, up to the recent past here. So that extended dry period is one of the major factors I think it's important to consider as we, especially as we look ahead into the upcoming season. Another one, another thing I think it's important to look at is all of this water here. You look at the timing of that. And all of this rainfall came. And mostly just ahead of some of our more sensitive stages for a lot of our annual crops. So the timing of it was a lot of rain, but it provided water, made it fertile Many areas we certainly did not run out of or lack for water when we went through pollination and pod set for soybeans and some of the sensitive stages. So that was very, very well-timed. But that did not happen everywhere. And especially as we move north and east up towards the thumb, towards the southeastern part of the state, that heavy precipitation was not there and that extended dry period continued. And we did have increasing dryness and problems with lack of water and eastern parts of the state as the season went on. For the growing season as a whole here you can see on the right-hand side our graphic. This now includes May through September, the five months you can see overall for the state as a whole actually was a little bit below normal, but its all dependent on where you work. And yes, we did have many areas, especially of Eastern lower Michigan and Eastern Upper, where we were below normal, some cases significantly below the normal. But as you move west and south, you can see greens there and some, even some well, some surpluses that developed in that part of the state. But the real, the real challenge this year in terms of water was across eastern portions of the state. This is a graphic of, once again, a daily accumulations the precipitate, and this is from Constantine so still St. Joseph County, just a different location but representative. This is from our enviroweather network here in the state. And this basically depicts precipitation in the blue colors. The light blue is the observed precipitation at Constantine. The dark blue is the last ten years as basically a mean to compare it against. There's that big events that we talked about, that you saw at Three Rivers just a couple of minutes ago in this case was even larger than what fell at Three Rivers. And for some additional context here, we also have potential evapotranspiration rates in here, both the observed rates, which are the light green accumulation and then the dark green is the 10-year average. Again, as a reference to compare it to. So what you can see though, even, even with, well, in some cases, areas, it was a little bit wetter than normal some parts of the season it was drier than normal, especially towards the end. You can also see that our potential evapotranspiration, which is the atmospheric demand for water. How much water could evaporate if there were if it were unlimiting, it turned out to be about an inch, inch and a half higher than the long-term ten year average. So that was elevated some of the above normal temperatures, also, sunnier days. There's a couple of meteorological factors that go in there. And at the same time for the whole season, the rainfall at this site anyway, was a little bit below normal. So what that suggests here overall is that the water needs are at least additional water to be supplied by irrigation would have to be a bit larger than it typically is. So again, above normal PET, a little bit below normal rainfall. That's how it turned out at this site as you moved east from here though to the to the eastern side of the state, the deficit and precipitation was significantly larger than what you see right here. Now again, I show this one because it is representative of the southwestern portion of the state. As a result of these precipitation patterns during the year and we look at the US Drought Monitor and where Michigan was at different times of the year. You can see it started off and looked really pretty good. There's a little bit of D0, abnormally dry conditions up in the Eastern Upper Peninsula. By the time though we get to early July, you can see a fairly significant area has worsened here or at least gotten dryer across the Central lower, especially here just to the west of the valley. And then by September, towards the end of the season, the beginning of the fall, you can see that shifted further east. And that's the key pattern here as we look at the development of the longer-term dryness. And since then, I mentioned that its still been dry, especially in the eastern part of the state. We've seen even a more of a South and East word progression of that area. And I'll show you that in just here in a moment. I did mention, well, what happened after this. Here is a very similar graphic. This one goes from the beginning of October through well up through Sunday through Saturday, excuse me. Once again, green is the observed precipitation. Brown is abnormal for Three Rivers here. And you can see in this case again that the winter not only very, very mild, but it's been pretty dry. We did have fairly significant precipitation back in October last fall, but since then, the slope of this line much less than the normal. And we've developed a fairly large deficit on the order of about 3 inches or so. But one thing to note here as well, once we got to February, which is out here, you can see that we do have a bit of an upturn here in precipitation and while December and February across much of Michigan, we're drier than normal. That's not it's not true for all portions, but the majority of the state it is. Once we get to February, precipitation has picked up again. And given what's happening today, given what's happening, those are signs of a pattern change, a jet stream change, certainly towards a wetter type of pattern. And that's where I'd like to end up here with. With that deficit or with some of the precipitation pattern that you just saw that has resulted in below normal soil moisture values here across well, you can see much of the eastern corn belt and especially including portions of Southeastern Michigan, extends eastward all over into Southern Ontario as well, where they're still pretty serious problems with lack of water. And I would say climalogically, it's important to note that this is, this is pretty unusual for Michigan. We live in a humid climate. It doesn't seem like that all the time, but it is by climalogical standards, a humid climate. And one of the other pieces of that, and this is wonderful. It's a, it's a, it's a gift and blessing. We want to look at it. But the vast majority, it's not 100%, but it's pretty close to it. of seasons, in the off-season, we get recharge of our soil moisture. And that is so important as we look ahead into the upcoming growing season. I, I say this primarily we're talking about irrigated systems here, which of course we're adding water. But if we look at this, Holistically in a bigger picture, at rainfed agriculture, it's all about the abundance or lack of water at different times of the growing season. And if we have a full profile when we start, we're much less likely to run out of water when we need it during the middle, typically or latter part of the summer. And again, what we have this year because of this extended dry period is something climalogically fairly unusual that that we're this low. This would not be unusual if we went out into the High Plains or or out in the West where we don't see frequently recharged, but then the eastern corn belt and in Michigan we, we almost always do. And again, if you play the statistics, you would still probably be pretty bullish on adding water to that before the growing season starts. And again, that's what the outlook sort of suggest is I, I'll talk about that in a moment. Our drought Monitor and the latest one here available. You can see that there is a large area in Michigan. It's a little less than half of the state by area. But the real concern here is the southeastern portion of state that's where conditions are driest and we actually have a D2 or severe drought conditions and we look at that and of course, there aren't at this time of the year besides some hydrological impacts and looking at water levels lower than what they typically are, we just don't see the impacts Or certainly not There are very few agricultural impacts. If it were a different time of the year, if it were the warm season, that would be a different story. But it is, It's been a long time since we have seen D2 conditions. Some cases, you've gotta go back to the drought of 2012 was the last time that we observed a D2. So again, it doesn't happen that often here not like it does out, out to the West. And with that, I would also bring your attention as we move out into the Great Plains. There's still areas here that are in D3, even D4. This of course, is an extension of the severe drought conditions we've had over much of the last one to two years, one crop to look at out there especially you can see where there's a lot of this really dark area. Some of that is our Central and Southern Great Plains hard red winter wheat belt. And that would be the next crop that certainly could be, as well as forages, of course, in range that could be impacted by that dryness, but things have been a little bit better. They've had some precip here recently, but still long-term, they have major, major deficits. And as further west than that out into of course an area with the worst drought problems in the lower 48, California has had a most cases at that very, very wet winter conditions. And so the good news is, is that for this upcoming year, the water allocations for many growers will certainly be better or higher they had last year there were major limitations in many cases, so it should be better than that this year. The not-so-good news though, I guess it's really a reminder is that one season is not going to make up for having four or five consecutive, very, very dry years. They have a long way to go in terms of making, bringing water back into their system. So it does help in the short-term, but more water certainly needed long-term. The other last thing about this is for much of the Colorado Basin, which which again,  a lot of the Southwest depends on the Colorado Basin. They're still, the rainfall and snowfall there has not been as heavy as it has been in California. There still are major, major problems. There are reservoirs are still at very low levels and will be there at low levels for some time. So there are issues with water are going to continue. But in some places there will be a little bit of an improvement though because of the very, very active weather pattern that they've seen. So moving ahead here, where does this fit into our historical contexts? With a little bit warmer and drier than normal depending on location. Well, it's a little bit well, some of it some of it fits, some of it not as well. These are mean annual temperatures across Michigan. The direction of our temperatures has been upward. For some time. We're about two degrees Fahrenheit, warmer on average now than we were 100 years ago. But a couple of things, you can see a lot of that warming occurred during the '70s and '80s and '90s here that's in this portion of the graph. The red line here is a moving average fit to the individual dots and it looks at decadal type timeframes. I think that's the most useful thing here. One important observation, note that during the last decade or two, we have had a leveling off of the temperature. So it's been basically more sideways than it is one direction or the other. There's a couple of other important things to note about this 2-degree warmer overall climate than was the case in the past. It's not symmetrical around the year. And we've seen more warming during the cold season, during the winter. This is the same thing. The graph that you just saw accept only now for the month of January or December, January and February. But that's where we've seen the greatest changes. The other issue is that there has been more warming at night. Our minimum temperatures are rising more quickly than our daytime temperatures, and that's especially true in the summer. I'll show you a graphic on that next. That's what we have here. This trend that you see here, we're looking at summertime temperatures. So in the middle of the growing season, June, July, and August, own months only. And on the left-hand side you've got maximum temperatures. And if it's a little hard to see. But in much of the central corn belt, and especially in areas to our south, this is true in southern lower Michigan as well, that our maximum temperatures during the summer, have been level, some cases they've even dropped a little bit. But look at the minimum temperatures which are on the right. Those in contrast has been going up. And that's where most of the warming again has occurred at nighttime, not during the day. But overall, if you look at that, there's some cancellation that is one thing we have not seen that has been projected for the long-term distant future. More extreme heat events that is definitely happening in other parts of the US, especially the western US. It's also happening in other, but not in the Midwest and upper Midwest. We have not observed that yet. And that's again, the record that you're seeing here is evidence of that, but we're a little bit in the minority. If we look around the world at that particular type of trends. So more changes in the winter, in the cold season and at night than what we see during the summer. The big changes is climalogically and statistically in Michigan really relate to water and to precipitation. This is the same timeframe, 1895 through 2022 through the end of last year. And you can see here that annual precipitation, all liquid plus melted frozen precipitation added together for the state, has increased on the order of ten to 15% in the last 100 years. That's a lot. And in terms of inches, somewhere on the order of three to 4 inches that we have now of water on average that we did not have in past decades. That's more than a whole month of summertime precipitation. Again, not that we get it every year, but on average, that's what we see. That is an awful lot of water in the landscape again so that we can use and that we did not have before. We, there's two reasons for it. One of them is we have more days with precip, and that's what you see here in light green. This is the fraction of days with measurable specific precipitation. Those are increasing as our multiple precipitation day events. So wet days that  follow wet days. That's the dark green on the bottom, that's increasing. We also are seeing heavier precipitation per event. The red circles here are increases. You can see clearly across the region. Relatively large increases in especially heavy events. This is the top ten heaviest events each added up each year. It's also the one percentile. All of those are increasing to give us a combined for more precipitation. On the other end of the distribution, if we have more wet days. It also means that we're seeing are dry spells actually are shorter in duration than they were in past years. And that's what this is. Once again, for Three Rivers, it's looking at a period in the middle of last century, 1950 to 1970 versus the more recent 2000 to 2020. And the bar graphs here, the one on the top is for the old period. You can see that the range and it consecutive dry days, it's about two days or a couple of days less than it was in the past. And that makes sense based on more wet days. You might wonder and ask the question, well, if we've got three to 4 inches more on average a precipitation, what's happening to it? Where's it going? And that's what this graphic shows. This is from a crop model simulation experiment in northwestern Ohio, but it's representative of what we see in Michigan. Precipitation is up here on the top in black. And you can see there's, there's your ten to 15% increase over time. This is 61 to 17. There are increases in evapotranspiration. That's that's the biggest fraction of that precipitation that comes in, but they're not that large. You go down to the bottom here though, when you look at the other two terms and that water balance, which are runoff and drainage. And the intriguing thing is that the majority of that increase is going into aquifer, the groundwater. It's at least on this case, it's out of the rooting zone, but it's into either the groundwater or into surface water or both into the hydrology. So that's that's what's going on. And again, it's the resource is certainly there and the trends are there to support that as well as to that additional water. Just and I guess what we can say very, very on a positive note is if we look at the occurrence of drought, and this is the Palmer Z-Index. Greens are surpluses of water over extended period of time, and that's sort of the orange colors are deficits or long-term lack. And this goes back once again to 1895. And you can see that this index has been increasing steadily across Michigan, especially over the last 50 to 70 years, 1930s, the Dust Bowl Era. Hopefully we will, we will not see again, but those are the benchmark, driest years and growing seasons. Again, these are summers that we've had in Michigan and they have not had been observed since. So the bottom line here is that with this increased water that we're seeing climalogically, yes, we still do have droughts, as we saw in Southeastern Michigan did this year. But on average, they're less frequent and less severe than they had been in the past. And I think that's an important take-home, certainly, certainly involving rain-fed agriculture. I know that's not our,  but it also of course, influences irrigated agriculture as well. One additional thing a caveat here. There is a type of drought that's getting increasing publicity and it's a very short-term or a drought that develops very quickly. It's referred to as a flash drought. The term is being used more and more by the atmospheric science community. And it's one, again that develops rapidly either due to very high evaporative demand, that is potential evapotranspiration or PET or two SM here to soil moisture factors or lacking soil moisture. In the Central and Eastern US. the evaporative demand type flash drought sparked by far the most prevalent. What I bring this up  for is because statistically there is a sign of them increasing in frequency in the Midwest. And that's what's the series up here on the upper right. This is a study that just was published at the end of last year. And I've put up in the corner here the last time we saw definitely a flash type of drought. Don't have to go back very far, but it was the early part of the growing season of 2021 and that's the Drought Monitor. For that timeframe, we had dropped conditions develop rapidly within a four a six-week period in that season. And that's exactly what this flash drought is about. Fortunately, of course, and many of you remember this. We went from that flash drought situation. We had very, very heavy rain during June and we did a complete reversal and we went from too dry in many spots to almost too wet. Which is also not good, going from one extreme to the other. But again, it's a term I throw out there because what we were looking at before was more than longer-term hydrological type drought I mentioned they're less frequent and less of that. That's true. But we still have these short-term flashy droughts that show up and they can cause problems, of course, if they're at the wrong time of the year at silking for corn, e.g. that's something we don't want to see. So that is something to keep in mind as well in terms of our record. One last thing here too, in terms of our trends. Again, this is in the too much of a good thing category. On the left upper left-hand side here. If we look at the opportunities for field work and this is generic fieldwork, it could be tillage, it could be harvest, it could be spraying, all of those things. Does whether allow those activities to take place. And each week somebody gives an estimate in a given area, 0-7. For the previous week, we come up with a number. And if we look at those during the summer, June, July, August months, and we plot those over time. This graphic here goes from 1999 through 2019. For the summer its a flatline. It hasn't changed even with more wet days. But if we look at it for the spring season, this is for April and May at the downward trend. So what it's saying is that for field work activities, for the, weather, we have fewer opportunities, the slope of that line, Incredibly is one event per year or 60 possible events in that timeframe. But the statistics say we're losing on average one whole day per year. The interesting thing is if you look at the amount of work actually done and actually cataloged or, or, or that's logged, that's actually increasing. So what that suggests is even though Mother Nature is not doing us any favors, it's actually getting worse. The technology is more than compensating for that. And that's a good thing. That's a good thing. More a greater speed of operation. There's a number of things that go into that, but the same thing is true, but to a lesser extent in the fall, there's also decreases, but that's again with more wet days, with more precip. That's the reason we're seeing the decrease in field work days. So you can have too much of a good thing. And Lyndon, do I have just a minute to summarize here with a? Sure. Let me, let me look at where we were trying to characterize Michigan and across, especially across the eastern part of lower Michigan. We're at a deficit situation a little bit of that in the West, but not nearly as pronounced as it is in the East. But a couple of things to note here. Very importantly, even though the next week, week and a half, we probably will see a continuation of normal to above normal mean temperature is more mild. Whether the issue is one thing is there's gonna be a very active storm track across the region and so precipitation is going to be above normal. We've already seen that start to have an influence or an impact on those long-term deficits. This is the new eight to 14 day outlook. The six to ten day outlook from yesterday is very, very similar. And also the jet stream change is expected during the second week of March. And for the first time in awhile, it is bringing some of the cold air from Canada and the Arctic down into the lower 48, especially over the West. But at least on a temporary basis, some of that cold air is finally going to move over to the upper Midwest and to Michigan and give us maybe another, another cold outbreak. We're not seeing anything severe, but certainly colder than we've been over again. February, January was the third warmest January on record for the State of Michigan, that's hard to do. And 129 years, very, very mild. February is going to be much, much above normal, but again in March, maybe some changes to get some cold air here, but still, what are the normal? This is a forecast, the colors here, I'll just tell you that the pinks are 2 inches or more rain in the next two weeks. So the Ohio Valley is the center of that Storm track. We've got a system moving through today. We'll have another one on Wednesday, and then possibly one. It's looking interesting for Friday that one could cause some significant snowfall in Michigan. But I think the most important point is that with those systems are bringing up lots of Gulf of Mexico moisture. And some of the deficits that we've encountered over the last couple of months are going to be certainly less than they are or they were. So more and more water coming in. And you can see for much of Michigan year at least 2 inches of water equivalent by the middle of March. So very, very active weather pattern. And then beyond that, for March, mean temperatures here expected to be normal to below normal, that reflects what you just saw on the eight to 14 day outlook with that change in jet stream pattern, but look at that precip pattern. Classic, That's a classic La Nina pattern. Where at the very end of a La Nina event that's gonna be, it's dissipating. It will be gone by, by certainly by the end of spring, early part of the summer. But you can see clearly above normal precipitation is favored. That's also true for the three-month March through May. Now, that could be a rough thing once we get to April and people want to start working and getting things done, that could be an issue, but at least in terms of the recharge part of it getting the water back, it does look more likely than not, that we will a lot of that deficit hopefully will be erased or gone. And finally, for the upcoming growing season, this is way out there, but it is suggesting normal to above normal mean temperatures for much of the upcoming growing season. This is, those are on the top couple of panels here. More importantly though, I think still is that signal for wetter than normal conditions. This is, this is fairly unusual for these long-term outlooks to have this consistent for this many periods. This goes all the way into the summer and even into the fall with again, the forecast for above normal precips. So that's something I would keep certainly in the back of your mind as far as thinking about water needs and water demand for the upcoming season? It is. So the bottom line here is as we look at the overall material that we've looked at. Yes, we do have some deficits in some parts of the state and the region, but the situation is changing and it may change its fairly significantly here before the beginning of the growing season. And I'll stop there and turn it back over to you. Lyndon. Thank you. Okay. How about I don't see any written questions, but I've got one. How sure are you at this? You're predicting more water in Michigan? Molly just before you talked about how it was getting drier out west? Yes. Hard to hard to tell people that we're so blessed that we're going to get more in the future when everything they hear on the news is saying it's less how sure are you that it's going to happen? Well, good question. Yeah. Can you release the screen and I'll get share my screen? Go ahead. There you go. Your questions a very, very good one and it's important, and I should've mentioned this beginning. We looked at a lot of trends and certainly those trends are all, wetter than normal. But a trend is not a, It's not a forecast of the future, but it's, it's really important. It's been, it is arguably the most consistent trend that we have. And as Molly mentioned, it's not widespread. It's true for much of the upper Midwest and for the Northeast. Very, very true. But for the West it's been, in many cases it's been the opposite. So regionally, how long can that go on? Well, it probably can't go on forever. If we look at the long term future projections of where we're going, it does, though, they do suggest some increases, further increases in precipitation, primarily during the cold part of the year, the cool season, where we would have more but the precipitation, more of it would fall in liquid form or as rain than in snow. The other red flag, or at least it's a flag there of caution is when these projections go out for a couple of decades, they also suggest with increasing temperature that increases our potential evapotranspiration rate. So the water and the other problem is, is that many of the projections don't show a lot of increase for the warm season, for the growing season. So combined level or even maybe a little bit of a decline in observed precipitation, increased temperatures, and increased PET rates. That's that's definitely a concern. We don't want that to happen. That's for the long term. But for the short-term for the next decade or two, one would probably expect more of the same. It's not as never any givens. But that's certainly consistent with our the last couple of decades here with just more water in the landscape, but we still do as we saw in the eastern part of the state this year and in central lower last year or the 21 season, we still do once in a while, have dryness pop up. A lot of that soil dependent as well. Okay, Good. But it's a challenge. Do you have a full screen showing irrigation water review? Yes. Okay. To go from where Jeff left us. He sounds like an irrigation salesman's best friend. Greater amount of water available to use, but a greater need to do, to use it for irrigation. And so that's been, that's, hasn't been hard to entice people to add irrigation, it's been a little bit more of a regulatory issue or help keeping people calm about where our irrigation water use is and how it's affecting things. So before I go too far, make sure to remember that April 1st is your deadline and Michigan, Indiana, also for water use reporting. In Michigan, have Abby Eaton is out there to help you. She does encourage me to tell you to read your letter that was sent to you between Thanksgiving and Christmas and do everything there first and then if you need help, look at, get a hold of her. If your challenge is in getting logged into the system. There's the Michigan login has a help center and 1-800 number listed there. Just a little note that I added in there. Make sure you're not like the guy that's driving too fast, 120 mi an hour and putting your your speedometer on top of your truck. Make sure when you're reporting you have registered what you're reporting. A lot of the issues that producers have had lately, Yes. You're supposed to report that you're supposed to have registered first. So make sure you're registered first. There I got through that issue what we're talking about is irrigation. We're in a very blessed area. We get more rainfall than, than we need all but the June, July, and August months on average. And if you look here, we've plotted rainfall in  the blue line and the red line would be typical corn crop water use. And what we do is during June, July, August, we tend to fall short from rainfall we're a supplemental area. So we're making use of most, most of our crop. Two-thirds of our crop is grown on rainfall. And that other third or a quarter, depending on the year is coming from irrigation. And this has changed just in the 20 years I've worked on irrigation we're up from five-and-a-half inches on long-term trend to 6 inches of irrigation needs, even though our rainfall in the area has went 35-38 inches. So those are Constantine numbers there. But we're getting more water, but we have a greater need. More people are interested in what you're doing. And if you can, if you can substantiate or tell us how or be able to say that you have used this scientific method to determine your irrigation. So that's part of it. We have very simple systems that are paper systems. Dr. Don went through some of this earlier, but it could be as simple as a chart on the dashboard of your pickup and looking at the high temperature of the day and the stage of the crop you're in and you can keep irrigation schedules. Dr. Andresen along with Keith Mason, have an excellent tool. If you are looking at this tool, you can sign up and it will send you those ET forecasts, just like Younsuk talked about before. So there's really no reason to keep track, to not do a good job of keeping track of how you're making your irrigation decisions. Federal governments even out there posting either a daily or a weekly water use number here. In this example, 1.28 was that reference ET for grass. And they're raising potatoes in the field. So they're going to need about 1.3 inches of water that week. And they're probably going to divide that in half and do it as two applications at at seven tenths or somewhere in that neighborhood. MSU has this scheduling program, we've talked about that. But basically it's using the Excel spreadsheet to look at the removal of the water. That's sort of like if we think about a checkbook irrigation system. The checks being written are those daily water removals. And the deposits are your rainfall and your irrigation applications. So if we plot those, we get these nice little charts and that's what we're going to look at from here on in. Here we looked at Constantine last year. If we did not irrigate, but we ran it through this scenario, we would've been fine up through almost the last week of June. Sorry. Last yes. The last week of June. And then we fell short. We're at the point where the crop would wilt. And the wilting in  soybeans is when it flips over and shiny side on the bottom reflects the light. Instead of using it to make sugar and energy for the plant. We would have still had drainage in the neighborhood of 2 inches of drainage of that 17 inches of rainfall that fell during that cropping season from May 1 to the end of September. So we still had some drainage even though we didn't irrigate. Because sometimes the crop didn't use as much as the rainfall did accumulatively, If we added irrigation to that, now the rainfalls in the blue bars, blue bars at the bottom and the rain and the irrigation is in the black bars at the bottom. And notice he's doing one-inch applications and he's applying water. He does right there in the middle about the seventh or eighth of June of I'm sorry, July in this case, we get a rainfall that he didn't expect. Hadn't irrigated for about a week. But that rainfall that week plus those rainy events added some drainage. So that irrigated field by the end of the season had 7 inches of return rainfall to the field within the season. Actually more inches than it was actually used for, sorry, three-and-a-half inches of drainage. He is 7 inches of irrigation, so about half of his total irrigation amount returned within the season. During that, those one major event when we spiked over the holding capacity of the soil. So if we looked at two sites, Montcalm Research Station and then down by the seed corn plants in Constantine, you'd find that last year we were short, just like Jeff had told us, somewhere in the neighborhood of 10% short on rainfall. We needed our crops somewhere between six up at Montcalm and seven down in Constantine. But we still had recharge in those neighborhoods right at about half of the water that was put on, recharged in one event or another before the end of the season was over. We still have a major amount of recharge that goes on. Even though we need those that amount of water that can make it through the dry spells. So back a few years ago we started talking about what's a good threshold to say to trigger, to start the irrigation. Obviously we want to trigger before the crop wilts. That's that 50% line down there. Most of our soils at about 50%, our field crops will start to show signs of reduced growth and roll up or flip over so that they don't use all the sunlight. So that would be the very conservative amount of water. And maybe a challenge at that point to keep up. On the other end would be as soon as I have an inch of capacity in the soil and the green line, I'm going to refill it. Okay if you take a look at those and you look at the chart at the bottom on Kalamazoo, one of our more heavily heavy soils that we irrigate. And you look at the amount of water use, on average, you saved about 2 inches of water by going down to the, to the limit to the almost to the wilt point before you irrigated. There are more events that happened, rainfall events that you didn't make full use of. When when you go to the blue and green lines where we're closer. The other thing to notice is there's a spectrum there that Kalamazoo soils. So the first three columns there and the yellow, blue, and green and the Spinks one of our lightest irrigated soils is on the far side and the yellow, blue, and green. And notice that there's gonna be a lot more water use in any of those when we get into sandier soils. So I think we tend to forget how much our soils have, the ability to hold onto water and mediate out that water and the irrigation decisions that are in there. Dr. Dong showed this slide earlier about irrigation treatments and one of the projects he's has here at for field crop locations. One tomato project in Michigan. But basically following those best management practices from an irrigation schedule plus a soil moisture monitoring system. That would be treatment number two, they got a 319 bushel yield. And when you look at that, they used about the same. They got the same yield using 30% more or using a threshold that allowed 30% more water in the profile. When you looked at his efficiency numbers, he produced a lot more food. The same amount of water, using the treatment to the best management practice. Now not all of those. We did have cases where some 130% more water actually out yielded. But in most cases, the yield was not enough more to pay for the amount of energy it took to do that irrigation. Prices where they're at, at $6 corn. If you look at 218 bushel, that's what was raised on the dry land corners. Converted compared to either of our treatment two or three or a full hundred bushel over, That's $600. That amount of water that takes there is only about $70 expense, about $3.50 an acre inch. So the dollars are way, way above the cost of the, the energy to pump the water. And remember the producer has the full expenses already in the system. So we are scrutinizing things a little tighter now. A few different things that happened, but we're still primarily a southwestern Michigan irrigated state. About 75% of the irrigation is down there, right along the state line. If we look to our neighbors, that other half of my job, I'm doing a better job of helping them expand irrigation down there. They've over a five-year period of time, expanded almost double the rate that Michigan has. That's sort of surprising because Michigan has more water availability over more acres than, than Northern Indiana does. But they've been expanding at a faster rate. So that's sort of adds to that question. What's happening in Michigan that were slowing down? And is it justified. What keeps irrigation from expanding? Well, yep, there's not the contracts and things, although the expansion of contracts is happening faster in Indiana, That's probably what's pushing the expansion of the irrigation down there. But people like raising crops on irrigated ground to reduce risk. And people like having contracts to help pay for irrigation so that the two have went together and those contracts are probably a little more common. Yes, we've had we've went through low prices and now high prices. But when high prices came, we also had dramatic increases in irrigation expenses, primarily for steel and equipment. Yes, we have some limited groundwater availability, although we have huge amounts of acreage that is in very, areas that the hydrology would tell us has water for those uses so primarily in Michigan, our restriction is more on governmental issues than total irrigation available soils, water, soils that have water available for irrigation. So part of that comes back to do you have enough water? Almost everywhere in Michigan we can come up with 100 gallons a minute for a vegetable operation or a small truck crop farm. But most of the irrigation in Michigan, about 80% is on field crops. And we sort of think about 500 gallons a minute, for a hundred acres as being the capacity. Can we justify that capacity? Well, yep. That's what 24-seven you would have to pump to be able to meet crop removal on alfalfa, corn, field beans, potatoes, soybeans about any of the crops that we have. When we get into that hot day over 90 degrees in the middle of the season, we peek over a quarter of an inch removal per day. So we need to be able to put an inch on every four days. That tends to be the number that most of the industry uses for the minimum amount of water for doing an expansion or other projects. Is that water available? Well, if you look at the chart here, Andy LeBaron helped us put together we divide Michigan up into those codes. These are the MI-WAAT assessment tool, Michigan water withdrawal assessment tool. And we look at the available acres, that red is the ones that are overdrawn. If we're thinking about from a checking account analogy the red is overdrawn where we're at a point where we really cannot issue anymore uses of water. The orange is almost there. And from a practical standpoint, from an irrigation standpoint, the areas in the orange are at the point where one more withdrawal is about all it takes even if it's a well, the wells have less impact on streams  so that they're allowed much more quickly in the system than direct withdrawals. If we look at the yellows, which is still the majority of the state, they're in, yellows and tans. Those are within one or two more wells or direct withdrawals. Direct withdrawals one or two would take either of them out. In the case of a well, that maybe hasn't quarter or the impact, we may have four more. But basically, if we think about 100, 100, 100 acre farm needing 500 gallons a minute, we're really can't expand in these tan and yellow areas more than another thousand acres or so. So it's surprising to a lot of people to think of Michigan according to the theoretical impact gauged within the MI-WAAT tool that we are out of water. It's very surprising, especially you think about all those other people that have talked today. It doesn't seem like we're out of water here. One of the indications, one of the most heavily irrigated watersheds, Prairie River watershed runs between Branch and St. Joe county. Big discussion going on down there about reclassifying from a warm stream to cold transitional stream, which basically would remove, go from 24% of the total August mean to 4% of the August mean. In other words, a much tighter restriction in water. This is happening at a time that the actual August mean flow has increased and its increased at about 1.7 percent  per year. So we are working with a theoretical model for impact, but we have not seen those decreases on the annual average or mean for August. In this case, the trout discussion is based on the fact that in 92 they decided not to put trout in there, stop stocking it. In 2014, 15, they found trout in the river. Now they want to transfer that. All of that expansion of trout, all of that prospering of trout happened at a time that the amount of irrigation doubled in that area. So there's gonna be some hot discussions when you think about 2022 for irrigators, one of the hottest discussions is, are we going to start redesignating or reclassifying these rivers and streams so we have less available water. Last but not least, before I end here, 2022 brought about our first major fine to a user that we know of. A Cass county producer was the first he was forced to pay a $30,000 fine to the State of Michigan for use of unregistered or incorrectly registered water withdrawals. That settlement did include granting him five withdrawals that had been under review. Producers working, professionals working with him were told that it was just he said it was just cheaper to pay the $30,000 than going to court. Note that Cass County is one of the most heavily studied counties as far as water impact from irrigation. So this is happening in the areas that have been most heavily studied. So those discussions. So if I was going to say yep, there's two major things going on. We want to irrigate because of the economic advantage and advantage in food production that we can make and the efficiency. Yes, that's an important thing. But 2022, one  of the major things that it brought for us is it brought to a head. This discussion about can we restrict our water use and reduce our potential for irrigation expansion based on a theoretical model. Are there any questions? I think I'm about out of time.