MSU Extension MI Ag Ideas to Grow With

Andy Lebaron works for EGLE He's been a long term member of the team that has worked on the registration process in Michigan. And he has been one of the main people to help educate on how to use the Michigan Water Withdrawal Assessment Tool. And I call Andy when I know I used to be able to find something and I can't find it now, and he helps me find it. So I really thought for about 20 minutes, 25 minutes here, we could spend some time talking about how the tools used and some of the finer points about other information that's housed within the tool that you might find helpful. So Andy, you're on. All right. Good. That sounds good. I'm ready to go here. So that is the title that we're all introduced here is calling it water withdrawal Assessment Tool Skills. First thing I want to mention about that, the most important part that I want to say is that there really are no special skills required to use the assessment tool. That's like a disclaimer here. There are some may slightly advanced features perhaps, but no special skills required for sure. I know that zoom always likes to delay there first slide. I always like to delay moving forward, but All right, so we've got that. So maybe a better description that I might feel a little bit more comfortable with. It's just some tips on using it, some extra features. And then of course, we're going to talk like a little bit about the ins and outs as was advertised there, The ins and outs behind the scenes. And find what's going on or how it actually works. Because it is obviously to almost everyone in the world, it's kind of a black box type thing where it just spits out, you spits out answers that might seem random at times. The other important thing that I should mention is that no matter how skillful you might be, you can't change a specific way water withdrawal assessment tool outcome. And what I mean by that, you know, is that the information that you put in to the screen, the inputs that the user can provide, that's kind of locked in. Whatever you provide there, that is going to give you the same result no matter what you do, unless something behind the scene changes, which of course is not something that the user or all of you out there have you know access to or what have you. But things do change over time or for various reasons behind the scenes. But as far as what the user control is pretty locked in there as far as how that goes. Okay. So most folks know is that there are just two possible outcomes that come from using the tool. One is, you know, it might pass and you can register the withdrawal. Right? Then you can see the little result there that I got circled. Says the proposed withdrawal is passed. The screening process, Right. Screening process, that's a different phrase that just describes the same water withdrawal assessment tool. It is a screening process you can pass. That's where everybody's happy. If that happened all the time, we wouldn't really even have to be here talking about anything, but it does. The other outcome that can happen as Circle, there's obviously the proposed withdrawal has failed or has not passed the screening process. Make sure everyone knows. I think by this point in time, most do. But failing the watt does not mean you're denied a withdrawal. So that is like, I can't emphasize that enough. Please don't ever think that's the case. It does mean that a site specific review would be required in order to proceed, in order to kind of pursue, you know, getting this withdrawal that you're hoping to be able to put into action. Site specific reviews, that means we get to, for all you football fans, it's basically like we get to challenge the ruling made in the Watt, you know, challenge the ruling on the field. That means both you, the property owner, water user and Eagle, who's acting as your agent. Basically, in these site specific reviews, we are on the same side for these things, trying to work through and get you withdrawal that you have proposed or have hoped to be able to put into place. So we together are going to be challenging that ruling that was made the computer, the watt, the model online there. We're going to do that with the human touch, we're going to have a look at it. Some things that folks might have heard will aren't site specific reviews just hopeless anyway, why would I even bother? No, obviously that's why I'm here. That's not the case, they still do even to this day. We've got like a 96% plus approval rate on site specific reviews, but many of you might know that statistics, they can lie the results that come out of a site specific review, they are strictly tied to your. Location. Like the three rules of real estate or whatever location location. But with the water withdrawal Assessment tool and with site specific, actually two things that you don't have a whole lot of control over, like when you happen to apply and where you want this withdrawal to where you want to use it. Those two things are the most important factors so that the approval rate on site specific, we will certainly change a lot depending on your location and the time that you're putting it in. Putting it through the system, conditions can change over time that will affect the outcome or the results of the tool. Some of those things might be like prior or previous registrations that have been made in the tool which are of course kept track of and accounted for forever. That's what the tool does, that's what it has it forward, track those things. Those can expire. So sometimes folks might register for withdrawal but not end up ever going through with it for whatever reason. So those registrations might expire. They got an 18 month window of time in order to put them in after 18 months. If they haven't done so, that registration gets canceled out, wiped out, which can basically make more room for a new withdrawal, a new registration to be made in that same areas they seem watershed. Or a registration might reduce the amount of water that it's registered for. Sometimes the original registration might be kind of, you know, over and above what might ever be used the further down the road later in time. They might reduce that registration for various reasons. We might also get new geologic data that becomes available to Eagle to be able to use in a particular area that can change the results of the tool follows some of the background things that obviously that the user end doesn't have control over. But we might use that different data in a site specific view or it might even use a different model itself. Obviously the tool, what's going on within the Mat tool is a model being run to calculate stream flow depletion is what it's doing back there. We might use a different model solution. They're called basically just a different mathematical equation essentially to spit out a different answer for that stream flow depletion problem question. We might do that during a site specifically, all these things might change your result. But obviously, it is true that some areas of the state, some watersheds are just very, very tough. If not, you know, real close to being able to say Opus for getting a new withdrawal to pass. That is true. I'm not going to sugarcoat that. So this is just a quick map and it's purposefully like obviously you can't really pick out your area too well in this, that's kind of intentional. There's about maybe 20 is watersheds right now currently that might be add that legal limit where no, I got that big Asterix there no new withdrawals might be able to be passed. The reason I've got the asterisk is that conditions can change and do change over time. So these red watersheds where we're kind of locked out right now may not be that way in the future if we get more information or other things happen, so on and so forth. And another reason that you can't say no ever that a new withdrawal couldn't be authorized is perhaps there's, you know, like a deeper confined offer that might be available that's not available in all areas of the state, like just geologically speaking, what I mean here. So some places don't have a deep confined offer, but if it does and if that's an option, obviously drilling a deeper well is a more expensive well, more expensive proposition. But if it's available, it could be a path forward. There's always maybe that potential option, I shouldn't say always because it's only in certain areas of the state based on the geology or of course, as I've already mentioned a couple of times, other conditions might change that would allow what previously was kind of a locked out watershed where it's at its limit to where it can allow new withdrawals to be authorized, and then full disclosure. Of course, even though I got the 20 watersheds shown here on the map, there are quite a few more. It's not a hard and fast number. I know it seems like it should be easy to just have a number, but it's not as easy as you might think. So there's quite a few more that are kind of right at that cost where another new withdrawal more than likely might push it over that legal limit. I might say somewhere like double to possibly triple. So maybe 40, 50, 60 of these little watersheds perhaps in the state are right at that costs. Obviously, that's a pretty big range I've given you. But that's an estimate anyway. And like I say, I just don't want that to be a complete deterrent to anyone. As far as trying to pursue a new withdrawal just in case there's some other way that we can get this done for you. So that's why the map is like not going to specifically zone in an area and say, don't even try here, Just not ever going to say that. That's just not the way this works at all. So here's some of those extra features that you can use or you can do within the water Withdrawal Assessment Tool to check, maybe check the watershed status, see where it stands. So once you're at the Map portion, you're zoomed in or you're on you've got the tool open to the map portion and you're zoomed in far enough to see those brown squiggly lines. Those are the watershed boundaries. Once you're zoomed in that far, then the next step would be to click on that Map layers heading there on the right side of the screen. When you do that, it opens up a different list of the map layers. At that point, you click or tap whatever device you're using there, tap directly on the word watersheds. To highlight it turns a blue like it shows there, not the checkbox. On and off, just like highlight the word itself. Then once you've done that, anywhere you click on the map after highlighting the word watersheds in the map layers portion, it's, it's going to highlight that watershed that you clicked on. Turn it yellow and outlined in red like that. But it'll also bring up this little window that gives up some more information about that watershed. I'm going to tell you the ID number which is important. I'll show you why and how it will tell the index flow. That's the this is very important to like the status of the watershed. But it's not something that's super useful to the user necessarily. But if you're interested, it'll tell you what the estimated flow index flow means. The median or middle median flow. Half the time the flow is above, half the time the flow is below. Usually, it's the month of August, the lowest flow month for any stream that you might be clicking on there. And almost always it's August, sometimes it's September for different streams in the state. But yeah, the median flow in the month of August basically is the easiest way to think of the index flow. And it's in cubic feet per second, is the units that we use there gives you the name of that watershed, the basin, which is just the larger watershed that subwatershed. The ones that are high landed are pretty small. The basin is the larger watershed like the Muskegon River. In this example here gives you the type of the stream. There's like 11 different classifications of stream, four different temperatures and three different sizes. But there's one category that doesn't have a, that one combination of those sizes and temperatures. That's why we end up with 11 12. I'll tell you what that is. That's also important to the final number, but it's again, something that's not necessarily something that the user can do much about. We'll talk a little bit more about that later today, this afternoon, if you stick around for the Prairie River, but then it'll also show the most important part. Finally, is the depletion available. So the current status of that watershed. They'll give you that stream, this unit here, those numbers that is now in gallons per minute. But it's gallons per minute of stream flow depletion available. That's a mouthful. But what's not gallons per minute of pump capacity and it's not gallons per minute of the amount of water that you might use. Those two things, it's not that. It's the gallons per minute and stream flow depletion available. It would equal the gallons per minute available. If you're doing a direct surface water withdrawal, then you can look at it very like one to one. You can see if I want 100 gallons per minute pump, then there's going to need to be 100 gallons per minute available in the wash. And it's the current line B line and line. What that means is the amount of water in that weird unit that I just explained, available in zone A, zone B, or zone C. So those are the three different grades that you might get, like school grades on your test, your exam B, and C. D is a failing grade in this case, so there's no water available. That's why we don't have zone D here. It's just to how much water is available in zone A, zone and zone as a watershed goes through that progression from zone A, zone B to zone the numbers available that were actually switched to negative if another 25 gallon withdrawals was registered. In this particular example right here, zone A would go to minus two, negative two, and then these two guys here would get 25 gallons per minute less in each of their allotments. You'll see basically whatever the highest. Zone, Grade B, C, that has a positive number available is the zone of that watershed, so the status of it. And then the final bottom line would be how much water is available in zone C. That's kind of going to be the most important take home point. You can almost just skip if you don't really necessarily care if you're in zone B or zone A or what have you, You can almost skip that. Just look at what's available in zone C, How many gallons perm available there. That's your bottom line. Okay. Those numbers, the way to relate that back to your own registered withdrawals or a proposed withdrawal that you're working through. You can see this on the registration receipt that you might give it, that you might give, that you might get after registering a withdrawal. That little summary portion there, it lists the home watershed, but more importantly, it'll show the debited watershed. So these are the watersheds, the tool, the model predicted to be impacted by the operation of this well, and the amount, it's just using ID numbers here. Watershed ID 17733 was debited. That's the ID number for the watershed. The ones not in parentheses are the watershed ID numbers. And then the second number that is obviously the ID number, can correspond back to what you saw there in that little window back on the map. And then the second number that is in parentheses, that's that predicted flow depletion from the model in gallons per minute. So that's what those are giving you there. And then obviously, you can compare that number back to the zone status and the current amount of legally available water that I mentioned just a moment ago. You can also get those same numbers from the view button on the result screen after running an assessment through the tool. When you get to that result screen, if you click that View Report button to bring up something that looks like this. It's got that same basic format of the debited watersheds and the amount of water allocated or depleted from each one of the watersheds. This particular example had three different watersheds that were predicted to be impacted by the operation of that Well, it also shows up in the top there in the results, like the paragraph that short little 23 sentence paragraph it, if the withdrawal failed. So if it was zone D, it'll it will tell you which watershed ID numbers were the ones that caused it to fail. So in this case, there were two different ones, two different watersheds that wind zone D. Most of the time it's probably going to be just one, but it could be two or more, I suppose. Then one annoying part about this is the washed those ID numbers are, they're not labeled on the map anywhere, you can't ever see them until click the button. It's not super hard to find out. Like you don't want to do this search too much yet. You have to peck around to find which watershed it is because the only waters that you might be potentially interested in order that might impact of withdrawal or the results of your tool would be first, like we call it the home watershed as seen on that registration receipt and view report. So the home just means what's the watershed that the withdrawal X marks The spot here. Right. So the withdrawal, you put it in this watershed, that's where your well wants to be, Where you want the well to be, the home watershed. Obviously, that one, you'll need to know the amount of water available and then just kind of working around clockwise all the other watersheds that are adjacent to or touch that home watershed. That's all that the tool is ever going to look at. It won't look at anything beyond a watershed that's right adjacent to and surrounding touching the home watershed. In this particular case, there would have been an extra watershed or two or something off the top of the screen that is touching that blue home watershed. Okay. So now we'll get to maybe a couple tips to pass the water withdrawal assessment tool. I don't want to insult anyone's intelligence here. These are not going to be anything like to rocket science here. Can you actually get that withdrawal to go from whatever zone D to something better? Pretty limited here. The first one, which most folks probably already realize, is if you were trying to register a direct stream withdrawal. And that's not if it's in the cards, if you're, you know, obviously a well would be a much more expensive irrigation source than a surface water direct withdrawal. But if nothing else will pass, basically, it's just a lot harder to get a surface water withdrawal to pass. They have a much higher impact on the watershed than does a well, typically. But for various reasons that we can kind of explain here. But yeah, so switch from a stream to a well withdrawal. If you're building any kind of buffer here, see if you can reduce that down by buffer, I mean, can you get away with or would it suffice to use a smaller size pump or to run the schedule that the well will actually run at? This schedule becomes available for a well. It's not available for a surface water withdrawal. That's a big reason why it's easier to register a well, the surface drop, if the schedule, if you're built in in more gallons used per year based on the schedule, that's multiplied out by your pump capacity. If that's possible to reduce that down, then that may be able to help. Then also, if possible, fully understand it, oftentimes isn't feasible or what have you, but if you can increase that distance from a well to the nearest stream, then that can help the results. Also, if a ball maybe move it potentially to a different side of the field or whatever, sometimes even a small change in the ground, a couple hundred feet or something, there's no hard or fast number, but sometimes even a small change can, um, can make a difference in the results of the tool. Those, of course, that just all they really do if you to pass the water withdrawal assessment tool is to avoid a site specific review. But I want to emphasize that I wouldn't be scared of going through the site specific review process usually pretty quick. Maybe two weeks, somewhere on that range is where we average now for the last couple of years, it's right around two weeks and no cost and we're not going to come out on site and all those kind of things. It's pretty painless and we are going to try and help to get that withdrawal passed for you. Yep. Some of the ins and outs of the tool, the location distance to the stream is like a primary factor in that stream depletion model or that equation. So this is how the tool does it, is it's basically measuring the closest point in all of those neighboring watersheds to the stream within that watershed. So you'll see that very last one, short, little tiny arrow that goes straight south to that closest stream, which actually is running through a lake. So there'll be like an artificial line that goes through the lake that shows up in cases like that. So there is a stream runs through there for the models purposes of trying to calculate distance anyway, Yeah, that short distance, the lion's share, the watersheds might not even get factored in. Just because that closest stream is so much closer, that guy going straight west, that one might factor in. But the rest of my probably is going to drop right off as being insignificant in comparison for what I'm describing here today. Anyway. In comparison to that shortest distance there. Yeah. Just real quick I wanted to go over in case this wasn't ever explained or encountered by any of our users out there and property owners and interested parties. How in the world does well pumping effect stream flow. Anyway, it doesn't make sense on its face until you really start to think about it. A couple of diagrams that I stole from this USGS United States Geological Survey report. It's the Bible on stream flow depletion by wells. Stream flow depletion or how stream flow might be impacted by the operation of wells. Got a chance to, one of the authors of the report, we hired them to come in and teach some of this stuff to State of Michigan employees. Got a chance to learn from Stanley several years ago and it was pretty interesting, good stuff, Good for all of us to be up to speed on this. But yeah, so basically what you're looking at there in the diagram is why do rivers keep flowing? Rivers and stream keep flowing even long after the last rain has fallen or what have you. The reason that happens is because groundwater is moving sideways through the ground, you through the Oxford. It doesn't just sit still, it moves, it is slowly, slowly, very slowly but basically effect moving the same directions generally that you might see on the land surface. It's moving generally same direction, underground, obviously a much slower but heading toward those streams. So groundwater flowing into the bottom or the bed of a stream essentially, or right on the banks is what is keeping those streams flowing, you know, year round or during periods of drought or what have you. That's where that flow is coming from, is from groundwater. So if you introduce a well into that same scenario here situation, so that the well right there initially, once you first start pumping a well after it's drilled, all the water that's coming out of that well that's being pumped is coming from what's called storage or basically you can see in the picture there, it's drawing down the water table causing that V shaped or if you think about it in a. 360 degrees around the well. It'd be a cone shaped area of depression of the water table, pulling it down, that's where that water comes from first, sometime later as pumping continues. You see the difference here, is that now it's not just water being pulled down from the water table. They're starting to show that the flow is being changed a little bit right near the area of the stream. And obviously a stream is a long linear feature just right in the area of the well, it's starting to change the flow pattern. What previously was water flowing downhill towards that stream, now it's being interrupted and interstrted by that well. And then much later, I'm using vague terms because it changes for every single well and situation in the world. But sometime later, so much later, those are my vague terms of time there. But in an extreme case of a well that's close to a stream like this last picture here. Yes. If you pump it hard enough, long enough period of time, it could actually pull water out of the stream back through the aqua, through the ground. And that would be the source of water that's now feeding that well. Or the withdrawals that's coming out of that well might actually be stream flow being pulled back through. That's an extreme case. Um, one more little diagram. I love the diagrams. Stole this one from a different scientific report cited there at the bottom. But this puts a real fine point on a few things here. Says, basically there's not much debate about these things here either. The previous diagrams and how wells work and stream flow and groundwater and so forth. There's really not up for debate, this is understood, this scientific fact. Then this next one here puts that fine point out, Water that is pumped from well comes from two sources. The first source, like I mentioned, it reduces groundwater storage, so it draws down the water table some amount. It might be a very small amount depending on how much is being pumped and other factors like the make up of the geology of that Oxford. It might be a very small amount that gets pulled down or it can be quite large. This he says right there, you can measure this can be quantified by measuring changes in groundwater levels. Obviously, you can put a monitoring well or you could nearby the pumping well, or you can measure in the pumping well after it's been not pumped for a while, after it's kind of settled down, You measure the water level in the well and you can see if that's changing over time or what have you and it will then the second source of water to a well. Like I say, this is just how it is. It is stream flow depletion. It doesn't mean that every well that's pumped depletes stream flow. It just means these are your two choices where water might come from to supply a well. In this case here, I like that. The last sentence there, I don't like it. It's a sad, unfortunately it is. The author here said this cannot be directly measured, the stream flow depletion portion of it. And it is challenging. No kidding. I think we all can agree on that one. There I see the way that we estimate is through some kind of a model like we're trying to do with the water withdrawal assessment tool. A model's job is to figure out these things right here. This is basically what's all going on there to end up at a final result. But how much drought on it is occurring? That is part of the calculations that are going on within any kind of a stream flow depletion model. It's got to know how much drought on there is essentially how far out does that drought on extend? It does not have to extend out all the way to the stream fort to impact stream flow. That much is true also. That's a fact. And then what's the ratio of those two sources? Groundwater stream flow and obviously for our purposes in this law, how much is coming from the stream? That's what we really need to know, are required by the law to know and our doing here, I guess. Okay. My portion is finished here, so I apologize if I'm going along, but any questions, please do. Feel free to give me a call anytime or anyone else in the program. There's my e mail. Also, if you call me, I'm giving you like a 100% money back. Guaranteed to give you the straight answers with no BS. That's a good guarantee. Thank you Andy. If you want to put questions into the chat, we'll answer them at the end if we have time on while the program is going. Or if not, we'll have and answer them within the questions or by e mail. Next up, Abby Eaton. Abby's from Michigan Department of Ag and Natural Resources Development, MDARD. And she's going to talk to us about the reporting tool. That's the second requirement we have as large volume water users. We've got to register and we've got to report, we use more than 70 gallons a minute from one or more wells on a property as part of the farm operation. We have responsibilities. Abby, tell us how your tool works. So I'm going to talk to you at a little bit about water use reporting as it was framed me, I'm addressing mostly the issues that you're commonly going to come across with reporting. But I also wanted to cover a little bit about who should report. And I get a lot of questions on time lines of reporting. Basically, the basic timeline for reporting a questions I get this on. Reporting has been required since 2004, far longer than the tool has been in place, and that's part of our Great Lakes compact agreement. The tool was put into place legally in 2009. The pumps that you have reported prior to 2009 are people use the term grandfathered, I don't really like to use that, but they are Fullingtons purposes considered registered new. Increased large quantity withdrawals installed after 2009 have to go through the Water Withdrawal Assessment tool. As Andy has explained to you, pumps that have been in existence prior to 2009, but have never been reported either have to prove their existence undeniably to eagle, or they also have to go through the registration process under the tool. Once that's in place, you start reporting annually to the Michigan Department of Agriculture. So, who's responsible for reporting? Well, the law says that the landowner has legal responsibility for annual reporting. But unlike other industries, we have always allowed, through lease agreements, that this responsibility can be delegated to the lessee. With that said, the lease agreement really needs to clearly state who is going to be responsible. I know in talking with producers that this often isn't the case. Sometimes there's a handshake, there's some discussion about it, but it's not clearly written, and I really encourage you, if you are either leasing or leasing to another producer, this is made very clear who is going to be responsible for reporting and the lessee should furnish a copy of the annual pump report to the landowner every year. You don't have to, not the whole report necessarily, but if you can just furnish the copies of the particular pumps that pertain under that lease agreement, then that covers the owner for reporting purposes. If you no longer are reporting a pump either to change of ownership or lease status, please do not simply delete that pump from your account. It's really very useful to everyone. If you contact Im Dart first in this case, that would be me. We'll make sure to transfer the pump to the new owner or lessee, if we know who that is. And I know sometimes there's middle dealing going on and we don't always know who the previous lessee was, but to the extent possible, I'll try to track down that information that way the history tracks with it, and Eagle doesn't flag it as a new pump. That has to go through the registration process. By the same token, if you're purchasing or leasing a pump that you think was reported previously but you're not sure, you can contact me to both verify that and also instead of just adding it to your record as with, you know, what I said previously, if it's in somebody else's reporting account, I can transfer that pump to your account for reporting. Going forward, this is just becoming more and more important as we move forward with reporting. And it makes it easier for Eagle to actually be able to gauge what the wells are, what the pump withdrawals are within a certain water management area without taking extra steps. With that said, I wanted to go through some of the common issues that come up in water use reporting. And I am hoping that this is going to work. So my login is the portal that we are required to use to give you access to water use reporting. When you have questions, particularly pertaining to my log in, I can't help with specifics. But the main thing to keep in mind is that I send out letters every year reminding you about annual reporting. One thing I tell you is that every 365 days out of the year, your password is going to expire. If you are reporting and you know it's later than the date you reported last year, just expect to have to change your password. With that said the system. Is now set up in my login. Everybody has their name up in their home page. You can go to account settings to do other changes to your account. If your e mail has changed, you can go in and change it here. Your phone number has changed. Change it here. This will help you with your authentication. All of those things. Always check that to make sure that those are up to date. That's the first thing I can tell you that will be helpful. The other thing that comes up is a lot of times people have set up a second account in my login. It may be for water use, reporting it, but my login does not like multiple accounts that have the same phone number or E mail address. And they now have given you an option in your home page to merge your accounts. So you can look up multiple accounts if you're having problems. See if you've set up something and then you can merge those into one account. If you have some question on which user name is associated with water use reporting, you can contact me and I can let you know that. Because when you merge accounts, we want you to defer to the account that is actually associated with water use reporting. So we don't duplicate that. I just wanted to give you, this is a new feature this year and a lot of folks haven't taken any time to look at it because you might not have the need to. Okay. You should have water use reporting on your home page. One of the things that hasn't changed are the banners that come up with water use reporting. And yet, there are still common questions that keep arising. We still have issue with Safari. If you're trying to access this through your iphone or ipad, if you don't have Google Chrome on your system, you're going to have some issues interfacing with this. It's something that we hope to correct in an updated system that may come out in a year or two. But this is just where we are today. Make sure that you at least check that if you're having some of those interfacing issues, we're going to go through a couple of the common issues that we come across. One of them is just like when you open up your first pump, some people want to re, save the pump or they might accidentally change something in. You don't want to do this. You want to select your pump and just go immediately down to reporting. Skip over it. Go right down to reporting. There's no need to change that unless you are uncertain about your pump location. And if you want to adjust your pump location, you can look at the map to see, you know, that's verified where it should be located. But otherwise, you really just shouldn't be bothering with anything in that pump arena. The main issue we have, bar none, is that don't add their water to the record when they're inserting their pump information. We'll start with gallons. You have the option of reporting either through gallons or acre inches. We'll just do this first. Let's see, Use some of these numbers here. Let's say 1 million gallons and 2 million or 200,000 sorry. Your water use is separated into crops in the top third, since we're mostly talking about irrigation here, that's the focus. But also if you have livestock or any kind of other institutional purposes for it, you might also have pond filling as one of your selections as well. But the main thing is That you have your crops here, you should add your crops and your acres. If you have more than one crop, then you click on the Add New Use button to add an additional option for your year of reporting. And then you would save that. The system does take a little bit of time, but the main thing that you want to notice is that all changes successfully saved came up on, it's an upper banner. Whenever you saved, you want to ensure that that banner shows up. Because what will happen with our system is if you get a phone call and you leave for a period of time, my log in may shut down behind water use reporting. If you come back to the system and you start inputting a next pump and you don't see that green bar come up and you can't tell if it's saving, then it may not be. In that case, you may have to log out and log back in. Sometimes it will throw an error regarding that and that's usually the cause. If there's ever an error that pops up with water use reporting, it usually has to do with some time out with the interface of the water use reporting system. Instead of it can be frustrating, but it's a lot less frustrating if you simply lead the system, come back in and then continue from where you are. You can always check. I will say when you enter in your pump information, one of the first things you should do is just go down and save a conservation practice. It can be one or two or you can do all of your practices at once. Do that first before you get right into reporting, because that'll allow you to preview your report. If you have any uncertainty about whether report has been saving or not, you can go down and preview the report. Okay, And this is what it would look like. So you can see that I've entered in pump one test. The other issue that sometimes comes up is, let's see here, that's three is in reporting acre inches. In my letter, I say that you, especially for acre inches, enter in your water use first. If you're just reporting one crop per pivot, then you may or may not have to do this first. But if you're doing soybeans and corn, then you really need to enter in your water use. It don't trip the system. It doesn't always happen, but it can, and this is the reason why. For instance, let's say we have soybeans, 80 acres, and field corn, 60. What the system is going to look for, when you've put in your acres above, it cannot exceed 140 acres. That's something that was built into the system that we thought would be something that would ensure that mistakes aren't made. It sometimes trips the system up. That's just a good policy in general. So see, I put in 150 and volume acres in the month of August. And that's what will happen if you don't get that correct. Those are the primary issues. The other thing I wanted to say quickly is for conservation practices, we get a lot of reports that come in that have all 24 of these checked off. That's how we know instantly that people don't read these, they haven't considered it because some of them have choice selections regarding establishments. Container capacity is one of these areas. We do want you to look at these and consider what practices are used on your operation. None of these are mandatory practices, but it's something for you to consider and something that we look at just to see how people are implementing conservation practices and keeping their systems up to date. Please do actually read these conservation practices before you check them off and save those are the main issues that come up for reporting. With that said, if you have questions I don't bite, Please call me. I can help you out if you need assistance. I can't I can't actually see any questions. So, if there are any questions out there, if questions show up, we'll forward them to you. I think probably my mistake, we rushed Andy and Abby a little bit much. We'll think about maybe recording the same session with each of them having more time before we put the recordings out. Or maybe we'll just try it again next year with each of them having their own hour to work on them. Both of these people are excellent resources to use and they help you get through something that's required in the state of Michigan. Please get ahold of them. Work them hard, make sure they get the answers back to you. Make sure that you spend the time responding to them when they get ahold of you. A lot of times, situations that people get into, you find out they're a year from beginning to the end. And that most of the problem is the state responds, and then they don't respond until after corn's planted or something. Thank you, Abby and Andy.