Optimizing irrigation: Scheduling and Soil Moisture Monitoring
Print
EmailMarch 7, 2025
More Info
This session explores strategies for effectively managing water resources using advanced irrigation scheduling and soil moisture monitoring methods.
The 2025 MI Ag Ideas to Grow With conference was held virtually, February 24 - March 7, 2024. This two-week program encompassed many aspects of the agricultural industry and offered a full array of educational sessions for farmers and homeowners interested in food production and other agricultural endeavors. More information can be found at: https://www.canr.msu.edu/miagideas/
Video Transcript
Today, we're on the second session of the Michigan Ag Ideas to Grow with Irrigation Day. This will be what the third year, fourth year we've done something. Michigan Ag Ideas was a program that was put together the first time through the COVID era, and it was an alternative to what we used to have the ANR week at campus. The irrigation team here made up of Dr. Dong, Angie Gradiz and Brenden Kelley, they decided that they would put together this one day event. Most of the things that we're talking about today, there's additional information at our website. Probably the quickest way when I'm on the phone to tell people to find that is doing Michigan State University or MSU irrigation, and it will pull up either Missouri State or us, we're the green and white ones. So with us today are two members of the Michigan Irrigation Team. They're using the MIT as their abbreviations, the Michigan Irrigation Team. Our leader is Dr. Younsuk Dong from Biosystems Ag Engineering at Michigan State University, and there's two new employees on that team. You're going to hear from Angie Gradiz. Angie came to us from UNL, University of Lincoln, Nebraska, is that right, Angie? She's not even nodding. She's been with us about a little shy of a year yet, so this is her Nine months. What was the university? University of Nebraska Lincoln. You were. Right. Okay. Were they the Cornhuskers? We are the Cornhuskers. I'm still a Cornhusker. Okay. We won't hold that against you. We we serve all, work with all. So first, our topic for this hour is going to be optimizing irrigation, and we're going to be emphasizing scheduling and soil moisture monitoring. As Lyndon said my name is Angie Gradiz. I'm a water use efficiency educator at Michigan State University extension. Um, and with Doctor Younsuk Dong he is an MSU biological biosystems and agricultural engineering professor. He is a irrigation specialist, and today we are going to talk about irrigation scheduling and soil mature monitoring for efficient irrigation. So I think we all have heard about the word irrigation scheduling, but what it does, it really answers the questions on when and how much to irrigate. There are a couple of factors that irrigation scheduling and positive effects that can give us. The first one is it gives us less water stress, therefore, more crop yield. Because the crops reach to their maximum growth potential on specific on timing, it increases the yield quality as well. On the other side, it avoids any other watering, so you can decrease the disease pressure, specifically from fungus. Let's see white mold on soybeans, for example. On the other side, we have water conservation and efficiency, so it avoids any unnecessary irrigation. When we talk about over irrigation above or below the root zone, it helps us to decrease the nitrogen leaching or runoff. The last one is the one I like the most because it does not really hurt our pockets, which is reduced resources costs. First one, irrigation scheduling can help us decrease pumping, most of the times and therefore energy savings. Also, if we are leaching, it can lower our fertilizer cost to prevent nitrogen leaching or any chemical. Now, irrigation scheduling is basically applying the right amount of water at the right time and it's all a soil water balance. This water balance includes ins, for example, irrigation and rainfall and outs, such as surface runoff, which is pretty visible and other unvisible ones like evapotranspiration and deeper percolation, among others, but those are the most typical that you're going to see on the soil water balance and It's basically like a checkbook account. It creates a balance of ins and outs. On this picture, we have the famous bucket or the soil water bucket, which think about it, is just like a bucket. First one, we have a saturation point where no water can be held anymore. Then we have the field capacity walls where water is at 100% We have the permanent wilting point where water is just not available for plants to grow anymore. The difference between the field capacity and the permanent wilting point is the available water holding capacity. This will change according to different soil types, um, and in this example, we have the different soil textures and the available water holding capacity. So there is one point in between that I would like to highlight and it's the MAD and the plants well, the plants can go MAD, but that's not what it means. It really is the maximum allowable depletion. At this point, it will change over crops and growth stages. But for corn and soybeans, most of the time we say it's 40 to 50% of the water holding capacity is going to be your maximum allowable depletion. So let's see an example in here. We have in Michigan, mostly sandy loams. So the available water holding capacity for this type of soil is 0.12 " and the root depth is our main interest. We have a root depth of 24 ", for example. A total available water content is going to be 2.88 ". If we set up our maximum allowable depletion at 50% and we have a total available water content of 2.88, that means when the water is depleted at 1.5 ", then you might want to trigger your irrigation. There's this table that can be very useful, but also you can just search the web soil source survey from NRCS and locate your field, so you are going to obtain all your available water capacity and other soil reports. Now, what I talked about in the last slide, it was just mainly the basic and there are two types of irrigation scheduling. I'm going to talk about the weather based, which it uses a reference potential Evapotranspirations in inches per day. This is just a reference point. Usually is going to be either grass or alfalfa and a crop in which is at unit less multiplier. What it does, it basically When the crop grows, it has different crop water use or evapotranspiration. That's what it does. At the end, we're going to have a potential crop ET. What do I mean is potential? Because it's like a model. It's something that it could be. So let's do an example. Let's say we have an average of reference evapotranspiration from 0.25 " per day and our peak water use for corn and soybeans is going to be 1.1 of the crop coefficient. On average, 0.28 " per day is going to be our crop water use or evapotranspiration. And if you remember, our maximum allowable depletion was 1.5 ". If we divide our maximum allowable depletion and the evapo transpiration or crop water use per day, the frequency of that is going to be five days. So this is just an estimate, and there are other tools that they are just more correct or more useful, but that can be very, very important to know. Where are you going to obtain your reference evapotranspiration, there is the site of the enviroweather from MSU in which you can obtain your nearest or closest weather station. For example, I put Coldwater because I live in Coldwater. There is the date and the start accumulating date that you are going to look, for example, if it's one week or either three days, it will just depend. And it's going to, tells you the rainfall and also the reference potential evapotranspiration. There is the other tool from the National Weather Service, which gives you the reference evapotranspiration as well. Now, on the last example, I use an average but on tools like this, for example, the MSU Irrigation Scheduler program, which is on a daily basis, that will be more ideal because it tracks down on a daily basis and at the end, you are going to have the amount of rainfall that you got during that whole period. Also that irrigation audit that can be very useful when reporting and it just, the soil water balance is a complete snapshot of how your so water can be or looks like. So as technology has improved, so we do. We still have the MSU Scheduler program on Excel, but we wanted to have a more compacted or user friendly but also free and now we have the app. There is an option for Android and also for iPhone. So if you want to try it out, you can scan the QR code or you can search on your Google play or App Store Irrigation MSU app. I'll just get you through how to sign up and adjust the settings or basic things that you can do with the app. The first one, you want to create an account with your username, email, password, and then you're going to set up that create button. The good thing about this app is that you can set your font size. There is a small, medium, and large depending on how you would like it to see. There is an option in English and Spanish. You want to do your field location. For example, you're going to create or select the plus button and then put your coordinates or just move it with your tab to see where is your location. You can select the gator acres in your field. And set up your field characteristics. What is your soil type? We saw before or the importance of setting our soil type according to the water holding capacity and maximum allowable depletion, also the crop being grown, what is the length of the growing season and it will indicate your nearest enviedwa station. So it automatically builds that into the app. Again, if you don't know what are your field characteristics, you can just go to the soil survey and locate your field. This app will tell you what is the maximum recommended irrigation amount on the day and what is the percentage of the capacity field, which is basically what I told you before, the maximum allowable depletion. It also gives you a forecasted evapotranspiration for the future seven days so you can plan your irrigations according to what you have. It will get the rainfall from the MSU or the nearest weather station. But as a best practice, is to have a rain gauge on your field because we know the variability of the rainfall and it can vary within a mile. Having a rain gauge on your field can help you and you can just override that amount from the weather station. If you have put any irrigation, you can add it there on every day. What's your capacity fields, we'll tell you what's your available water content in your root zone and other things. The important part, as you remember on the MSU Excel scheduler, you will have the soil water or the snapshot, the graph of how it looks like, same as in here and you can use the line at the top to see just like the time range on where you want to see your soil water. It will tell you the rainfall, wilting point, was that irrigation added, all similar things. The MSU app also provides weather from your nearest weather station, for example, what's the temperature even day and night and it will enable notifications when there is, for example, that 50% of the capacity field reaches to a specific threshold. You can set it up by a specific time. If you feel like you want to just get a notifications in the morning or afternoons, you can do that and you can set that threshold as well. With that, I'll hand it over to Dr. Younsuk Dong. Well, thanks, Angie. Next part of the presentation, I'm going to focus on the soil moisture sensor based irrigation scheduling. So earlier Angie briefly talked about the importance of soil type because soil type really determine how much moisture can be held in the soil. Um, to do that, um, there's a couple ways to do one definitely is actually taking soil sample and send it to the soil lab to analyze what the texture is. So, um, typically, they provide the percentage of sand, silt and clay, and from the information, you can use that so the triangle to figure out which soil type you have. Um, the soil on the right figure it shows the water holding capacity for different type of soil. So as you can see, the red line is the wilting coefficient wilting point and the blue line is the field capacity. So if the moisture level is above the field capacity, it means the water will start drain downward by gravity. If the moisture is below the wilting point, the red line, it means that the plant can really uptake the water from the soil because soil is going to hold, um, tighter the water than what plant can do. The gap between the blue and red is called available water for the plants. So that's the very important information we need to know for scheduling irrigations. As you can see, the sand soil, the gaps are much smaller compared to loam soil. So as we know, the sand soil doesn't hold a lot of water compared to fine textured soil. This graph represents how the difference of the water reading capacity for different soil types. Next slide. All right, so another way to measure the soil type is using the USDA Web Soil Survey. So you can literally just type USDA Web Soil Survey in Google, and you can get this website, or you can use the link here to show on this slide. Once you get on the website, just click the Start WSS icon in the middle. Next slide. Once you do that, then you need to drop GPS coordinate or you can zoom in to your specific field or the field that you're interested in, and then you can click the AOI icon, which is area of interest and the select area that you're interested. And on the top, the tab, it's called soil map. Once you click that, and it will give you the soil textures or soil types in the area that you were selected. This case, this field mostly has 4B soil, which is Oshtemo and which has been known as sandy loam soil. Next slide. This is another example. It looks like this field has mostly Oshtemo soil, but upper right corner has different type of soil it's called 5B. So how do you get the 5B? You can look on the left, there is a small table. It shows MAP unit symbol 5B and MAP unit name, and it looks like 5B. It's called Spinks Loamy Sand. So that's how can we can see, you know, whether there are two different types of soil in the field, and some field might be more complex. This is pretty straightforward, most of the Oshtemo and Spinks soil in the upper right corner, but some fields, you might see more complex, the variability of soil. But the soil survey really provide a good understanding of the variability of soil that are in the field. Next slide. Um, I do get a lot of question about, Hey, I want to know water holding capacity for my soil. So you can click soil Report on the top. There's tab, it's called the Soil Report. Once you click it on the left, there there's tab it's called the Physical Soil Property. Once you click it a Soil Physical Property first, and then you have to click the Physical Soil Property. Then you have to hit the view soil report and after that, on the right bottom, the chart, the table, it's going to show each soil that are present that selected area and also provide available water holding capacity inch per inch. Next slide. Okay. Here's two examples. Mostly southwest Michigan, a lot of irrigated ground, we see these two types of soil. Oshtemo soil, the other is spinks soil. Oshtemo we talked about that is sandy loam soil, which is fine which has more fine texture compared to spinks soil, which is loamy sand. So looking at the water holding capacity, oshtemo soil for top 24 inch, fifth column for oshtemo, it shows 3.3 inch. So what it tells us is top 24 inch for you if you have oshtemo soil, it can hold about 3.3 inch of water. If you are interested in 36 inch depth for a soil, it can hold 5.09 inch of water. So if you're growing soybean, some of the vegetable, which typically has shallow system, you might want to look for 24 inch or maybe 12 inch, depends. If you're growing corn, we typically look at 36 inch depth water reading capacity. The spinks soil, we know it's more coarse textured soil. Look at top 24 inch, spin soil can hold about 2.16 inch. Top six inch for spin soil, it can hold 2.64 inch. You can see the difference between the Oshtemo and spinks soil in terms of the water holding capacity for top 24 and top 36 ". Overall, the NRCS soil survey map, it really gives you a good idea of what the capacity that your soil has in terms of water holding. Next slide. All right. So USDA and NRCS also categorize the soil in terms, they call the hydrocological soil map by the A, B, C, D group. Group A is typically means the sands and sand and or gravel. Group B, typically means the sandy loam, loam and silt. C's clay loam, and D clay. They also call the A over D or B over D or C over D. These soils typically has high water table. So that's why there is D, which is clay layer in the deeper zone. But if you can drain that soil that field, then the soil group considered as the first layer. So if you got A over D soil, but if you're putting the drain tile, now you're drained water, and now that field now considered as group A. So that's what the A over D or B over D and C over D really means. Um, as you can see on the right figure, the most of Northern Michigan or the West Central, northwest Michigan, we see a lot of greens. So they got a lot of sand. Southwest Michigan or Central Michigan has A and B, and mostly B, yeah. And the thumb area, we see a lot of C or B over D or C over D. As we know, they got a lot finer textured soil up in the thumb area. Next slide. I'm going to talk about soil moisture sensors. There are just varieties of soil moisture sensors out there that basically use different technology like FDR, TDR, or capacity. But basically, they all measure the soil moisture. They actually estimate the soil moisture content in that specific depth. Um, they're more the probe type. I see lately, um, you know, the syntax has been around for a long time, but the probe can be useful if you want to um dig, you know, digging holes to put these sensors that show in the figures. But, um, but it's all about the cost, right? So these probes, um, can be more useful if you got multiple locations and spread out, uh, um, instead of a point measurement. But anyway, there are just a lot of different soil moisture sensors out there that you can utilize to estimate moisture content. Next slide. So in general, there are two different kinds of moisture sensors. One, this is soil tension, Watermark sensor is predominant, they use soil tension method. I know a lot of Nebraska use it. California folks use this Watermark sensor, um, And I think lately I heard from Mississippi folks use this watermark sensor a lot. But basically this Watermark sensor measured the actual soil water tension. So it measured how much the plant has to work really hard to work hard work to pull the water from the soil. So what it means, if these sensor values are increasing, it means plant has to work hard to pull the water from soil. Right. If this sensor value is decreasing, then there are a lot of moisture so plant doesn't have to work really hard. So on the right bottom, the figure shows, as you can see, it's increasing because it's drying, the soil is drying and which means the plant has to work harder and harder to pull the water because there's less available water for the plants. But after irrigation or rainfall it drops it, and then plant there are more moisture available for plant, so plant doesn't have to work that hard. So Higher number of this watermark sensor means dry, the lower number is wet. That's pretty much what you need to know. Nebraska has some general recommendations for different soil texture, how we use it. Typical recommendation for irrigation scheduling for most of the crop, we use 50%. If you see the 50% depletion in water holding capacity, that's the trigger time. That's the time that we should start irrigation. Um, so for example, if you got loamy sand, you're looking at 50% depletion in water holding capacity. Look at the table here, which means forty. So when sensors reach at forty, that is the time that you need to trigger start the irrigation. Something to keep in mind is if you've got a center pivots that takes about 48 hours or sometimes 72 hours per three quarter or 1 " application, you might want to start early because it takes that extra days, hours to apply the, the whole area, irrigated area. So you might want to lower the number, maybe trigger at 35 or 30 so that none of the area in your field get underwater stress. Next slide. There you go. Another type of sensors measures as volumetric water content. So basically per volume, how much moisture in it. This is more straightforward. It means the lower value of the sensor means dry, higher value means it's wet. More moisture, you know, less moisture. So, this type of sensors are becoming more popular, um, and I see there's more sensors, different shape, um, different types coming out from a lot of different companies, um, and the general recommendation for different soils are provided here in this table. But again, this is just a general recommendation, but you need to look at your specific soil soil conditions. So if you got some higher organic content in your soil, which means it holds a little more moisture more than the less organic content. So you need to look at the site specific condition to determine where to trigger or when to trigger the irrigation. Next slide. Here's something we, uh, we deal with the soil moisture sensors and one thing we're doing is the composites. If you've got sensors at six, 12 or 24 inch, just looking at the whole the root zone, see how much moistures are in the top 24 for our top 18 in this example, we can composite, we can combine all these values. We do have Extension bulletin on how to composite this data or you whoever you buy from the sensor, they might already have the equation embedded on their system. If not, you can reach out to us, but the composite data shows really nicely when the plants are taking water. Upper right figure it shows the capacity filled. And you can see at 9:00 A.M. When the sun's up, plants are up taking water, and you can see the capacity fill is decreasing because moisture is decreasing because plants are uptaking water. At 7:00 P.M. It does not change because sunset and plants are not up taking water. Then the next day at 9:00 A.M. It start decreasing. Really useful information to figure out when the plants are uptaking water. You can also quantify how much plants are uptaking water based on these informations. Bottom figure it shows just the example of very water content sensors, how they fluctuate over the seasons at different depth. Next slide. Here's an example that we collect in 23. Under the center pivots, as you can see, apply a little over 1 " on this field, and we had installed the sensors at 6 ", 12 ", 24, red line is six inch depth, green line is the 12 inch depth, and the blue line is 24 inch depth. So after irrigation, I see the red line spike 12 inch green line spike and 24 inch depth also increased after that. So if the irrigation goal is keeping only water in top 24 inch, then we like to see 16 12 inch spike, but probably not in 24. This is not bad. I mean, we didn't see that high spike at 6 " at 24, but we might be able to reduce the irrigation amounts to only wet the root zone. Next slide. This is the example for drip irrigations, same depth, 6 ", 12 ", 24, and they had a big rain, so the grower turned the irrigation off for several days and then he turned back on and he just used a timer to trigger his drip tape. As you can see, pre uh, pre regular patterns whenever the irrigation was on, we see the 6, 12 inch spike but not much than the 24 ". So this is really optimal amount that he applied for for for whatever he wants to do because he wants to keep the top 24 inch wetting, not not pushing water below the 24, so One other thing that the soul mosture sensor can be used for is it can also tell whether your irrigation systems work or not. So somehow if timers malfunction, you see that. You see that from the sensor data. If you don't see the spike, then, um, then the timer maybe irrigation system was not. For some of the consideration for sensor installation, first, we need to look for where the roots are. So depending on what crop you have, we need to put the sensors in that root zone. We typically put one sensor right below the root zone because we like to look at whether we are putting too much water, that can be really helpful. Make sure you count for the slope, the soil types. I know earlier we talked about soil variability. I don't know if you remember the one example we had mostly oshtemo soil, upper right corner, small section has spinks soil, two different types of soil. You probably want to put a oshtemo soil area because that represents most of your field. Please consider that. Installation, make sure there's no air gap between the sensors. If you've got air gap between sensor and soil, you're not going to measure really correct moisture. Your sensor value might be really low compared to what extra moisture content. Next slide. This is the rule of thumb, if you got corn, about 70% water extraction is happening top 50% of root depth. It's really important you give moisture at least top 50% of depth. But that's general rule of thumb and most of the crops, especially the fruit crops. Next slide. I get a lot of question about earlier I talked about soil variability, but how many sensor do I need to install? We had a project last year, we picked the three different plots and we install over 100 sensors. We took measurement at 100 locations and look at the variability of soil moistures. You can see here the darker blue means the higher moisture than average, the lighter color means lower moisture than average. You can see it's very clear there are a lot of variability within the field. Next slide. We also looked at organic matter content because we know high organic matters tends to hold more moisture. So as you can see, there's two spot or heavier, more organic materials verse compared to other areas. Next slide. We also took soil samples on every location and looked at the percentage of sand, silt and clay. Mostly the soil shows pretty sandy soil, which we know on this field. Next slide. Then we start comparing. How does higher moisture is shown? Why there is higher moisture content on the left side of this plot. What we found was, we found the higher silt content because it holds more moisture, we also found higher organic matter. So higher moisture content caused by higher silt content and higher organic matter in this case. Next slide. What we done was after we collected 100 samples, we ran the statistical methods to determine if I want to be 90% confident or 95% confident with the certain percent marginal error, how many sensors do we need? As you can see, if you can accept, 4% marginal error and 90% confidence interval, we can find one location that will represent the most optimal condition. Next slide. So here's the example of the research that we got from statistical analysis. And on the map, there are the circle in blue, and those are the location that we come up with, based on this, statical analysis that that will be the right location that will represent the most condition for three different plot. Um, the next step for this is, you know, we really don't want any growers to run all the statistical analysis. So we plan to work on developing the app to help provide some tool for growers where crop consultants, they can use it, to come up with, um, where would be the best location to put the sensors. Next slide. Okay, I would like to briefly talk about this ERT and tTem, the tool that we just got. We tested ERT last year, and this is basically the electric resistivity tomography. There are a lot of electrode that we install and one electrode send the current and the other side electrode receive it. And based on the speed of current, the tool can estimate different property of, uh, of soils or sometimes it can be moisture underneath the soil. This is one of the field that we tested last year using ERT and we can create the map and we know that there is well, we have monitoring well and the water level is at about 30 feet ish. This map also shows at ten meter, which is 30 feet ish, there's completely blue, which means there's water. So really exciting. We were really excited using this tool to look at the potential groundwater, where the groundwater is collecting more data to better understand whether it's sustainable, increasing or decreasing, depleting, or so forth. The tTem we just got and we'll be started using this year. This is electromagnetics, the technology that we can this tool to create the 3-D map. This next slide. The reason I mentioned this tool is we mainly got this tool to look at the groundwater, but there has been a lot of study using this tool to look at the variability of moisture. Earlier we talked about trying to come up with where will be the best location to install the sensors, but we might be able to use this ERT and tTem to collect the variability of moisture because otherwise, then we have to go every single location to collect the samples were getting measurement which will be too much work, but we'll be exploring this tool to understand the variability of soil moisture starting this year. Next slide. This is just an example of the variability. You can create 3-D groundwork mapping using this tool. Next slide. Okay. I'd like to briefly mention other sensor technology. I know I talked about soil moisture sensor based irrigation scheduling extensively because that's pretty much most common method so far, what we're using. But there are other methods. It's called the SAP flow sensors. Basically, you install the sensor on the stem or in this case, the trunk, and there is a thermocouple on bottom and top up sensor, and between the thermocouple, there is a heat map. So what it does when there is a lot of water flowing through the stem or the trunk, which means the plants are taking water, then there will be higher the heat transfer is going at the trunk and based on the information, the engineers, scientists, they come up that equation to estimate how much of water each tree or each plants are using has been using water per day. So this is the SAP flow measurement we collected last year from these apple trees. The units, the data we are getting is per day, how much gallons of water used per tree. In July, for example, in this case, average set flow per tree is 0.33 gallons per day. Um, and August was 0.27 gallons per tree per day and 0.22 and so forth. But as you can see, as we're going to October, November, tree water use decrease. So another tool that you can use to understand how much tree are using water. From this information, you can decide when to turn irrigation on, how much water do you have to put it back to the soil. Next slide. Here's another sensor, the FloraPulse, we just got last year, use similar technology like SAP flow. But basically, it gives you a bar. The higher, it shows example right here between the negative ten and negative 14 is optimal. If you're greater than negative ten means too wet, negative 14 is too dry. There are a lot of tech companies trying to come up with different ways to look at tree water use, basically. Next slide. Briefly, we want to talk about this irrigation, the study that we have been going on. The scheduling is very important because it helps to determine when to water and how to water. If you don't properly water,, if you water maybe once a week, no matter what, we get rain or you could creating a u a favorable environment condition for disease. In Michigan because we're in humid climate, most of the mornings we have dew and if you're applying water at the wrong time, you could actually extend the leaf wetness period, which could impact and increase the disease pressure. So you're interested in whether we need to whether irrigating daytime is better than nighttime or nighttime is better than daytime. We had a five different treatments testing south campus farm. Next slide. And overall, we looked at water use efficiency and and because we had a pretty good amount of rain last year, and we didn't see any statistical difference between the treatment in terms of water efficiency. But we did see some disease rating differences in this study in terms of downy mildew, not the white mold or fungi because we didn't see that in this field. But irrigating at night time starting at our stage our three stage for soybean had the same lower disease severity as non irrigated area. So, um, Based on the last year data, the nighttime was better. Also, the R3 stage, which is we've been recommending to start irrigating soybean had a lower disease severity as the rain fed soybean plots. Next slide. All right. Back to Angie. Okay, thank you for your presentation, Dr. Dong. So just a quick comment, we are launching our needs assessment just to understand your needs on, specifically water use on irrigation. If you have a time, you can fill out this by scanning that QR code on your phone is totally anonymous and confidential. We are just going to see what are your needs, if you have any research that you would like us to do or specific topics that we should be focusing on. So if you have time, please fill out the needs assessment. We are also creating our mailing list. If you want to stay informed about irrigation information and other events like these ones, please join our mailing list by scanning this QR code. I'll send the links later as well. I put it on the chat so you can have it. This will help us to create a big connection of old irrigators so we can better understand each other and just as a communication. If you have any questions, please reach out to us, even Dr. Younsuk, Lyndon Kelley, myself, and Brenden Kelley. This is our contact information, our cell phones and emails. If you have any questions, please put them in a Q&A box. Okay. Well, I see the question from Lyndon, Will our good job of irrigation scheduling cut my water use or increase yield? Well, Brenden has a study on the scheduling on the corn and soybean production, working with the farmers, and one thing we saw was if it was a wet year, it helps to reduce water use. But if it was dry year, it actually helps to increase the yield. So it's depending on the weather. Okay. I don't see any other question, but what I can do I can I can drop the link for CCA credit. So please use the link in the let me use the link in the chat to get the CC credit for this presentation. I see the question, do you have a recommendation for number of sensors per acre sorted types, So just so far, just my experience working at the growers is yes, they can put at least one sensor per so type that's recommended. But another thing to consider is whether your irrigation system has the ability to differentiate the irrigation amount. For example, I think Angie is going to talk about VRI next presentation, but variable rate irrigation. Yeah. I'm just going to briefly mention it, but if you got drips, if you can separate the zone for a different soil type, that's great that you can do that. Yeah, one sensor per type is probably recommended. I know because of cost of sensor, it's hard to purchase several of them and have an installed view Yeah. Okay. Well, if you don't have any further questions, then I guess we'll see you again at 11:00.