Lake Doctor | A Lilly Center for Lakes and Streams Podcast

Regenerative Agriculture: How Good Farming Practices Benefit Our Lakes

• Lilly Center for Lakes & Streams • Season 1 • Episode 25

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Russell Anderson embodies a rare perspective in the conversation about water quality and land management – he's simultaneously a farmer, owner of Wawasee Boat Co., and a lake resident. In this thought-provoking episode, Russell shares his journey toward regenerative agriculture and how these practices are helping protect Lake Wawasee and surrounding waterways.

Discover the fascinating evolution of farming practices as Russell explains how no-till techniques create a protective blanket over soil, preventing erosion and keeping valuable topsoil where it belongs. He dives deep into the world of cover crops, revealing how plants like cereal rye perform "biological tillage" – creating pathways for water infiltration and capturing nutrients that might otherwise wash into nearby lakes. You'll gain appreciation for the complex ecosystem beneath our feet, where microorganisms equivalent to "two cows per acre" drive soil health and productivity.

The conversation tackles the sometimes tense relationship between agricultural and environmental interests, offering insights into how mutual understanding can bridge divides. Russell's dual perspective highlights how shared goals – farmers wanting to keep soil and nutrients on their fields, lake residents wanting clean water – can unite seemingly opposing viewpoints. Dr. Nate Bosch adds scientific context, explaining how the Lilly Center quantifies nutrient movement through watersheds and works with farmers to implement science-based solutions.

The episode concludes with a fascinating explanation of nutrient cycling in lakes, helping listeners understand how fertilizers, sediments, and waste products move through landscapes to impact water quality. You'll walk away with a deeper appreciation for the interconnectedness of land management and water health, and how innovative agricultural practices are helping protect our valuable water resources for future generations.

Visit lakesgrace.edu to learn more about the research mentioned in this episode and discover how you can support healthy lakes and streams in your community.

Learn more about the Lilly Center's work at https://lakes.grace.edu/.

Have a question we could answer on the podcast? Send an email to lakes@grace.edu or submit a comment below.

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Speaker 1:

Thanks for listening to the Lake Doctor podcast. I'm Suzy Light and my co-host, dr Nate Bosch, is a professional lake nerd.

Speaker 2:

That's true. I received my doctorate from the University of Michigan in limnology, which is the study of freshwater ecosystems. In today's episode, we're excited to welcome Russell Anderson. He is a farmer in our area. He also co-owns Wawasee Boat Company, a local marina, and lives on Lake Wawasee.

Speaker 1:

And we're going to be learning about regenerative agriculture. We are really excited about today's episode. The doctor is in, so we are joined today for this Lake Doctor podcast with Russell Anderson. Russell, you live in the northern part of our community and you have the unique experience of being in agriculture as well as owning a boat company. Tell us a bit about yourself, please.

Speaker 3:

Well, like you said, I'm Russell Anderson, live in Syracuse, do happen to live on Lake Wawasee. My parents moved here from the western suburbs of Chicago in the late 70s and bought a marina Wawasee Boat Company. So I grew up playing at the marina and around the lake and stuff. And then they bought a farm in the mid 1980s and all of a sudden I thought farming was cool and so, yeah, we have a farm too and I went to college and got a degree in agronomy and came back and have been farming full time as well as helping with the marina. I mean, it's really my parents that own it, but I help and as they age I'm more involved in the helping of running it. But yeah, we're a full-time farm as well. My son is now involved, so we have kind of feet in both worlds farming as well as lake enjoyment.

Speaker 2:

And the farm acreage that you guys farm has some history with your family as well. I think your mom's family Well, actually it's my dad's family, Is it your dad?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, the original piece of property that my parents live on had been a 67-acre farm. Our family got connected with northern Indiana in the late 1890s. My historical family I mean going back generations had all been from Chicago and air quality was becoming a big issue in Chicago and they had some children that were really struggling with that. So they bought a 67-acre farm in northeastern Kosciuszko County and ended up coming down here primarily in the winter when the snow was on in Chicago, and then they'd go back in the summer and they were in construction. They built buildings in Chicago and then the kids would spend the winters down here to get away from the coal-burning heating systems and such and the smog and all that. And then from then on, as the generations have gone on, it's turned into more of a lake and summer enjoyment and then eventually my parents moved down here full-time in basically the fall of 1977.

Speaker 1:

So you're a farmer and a crop farmer. What kind of crops do you grow on your farm?

Speaker 3:

Primarily corn and soybeans. My son also has an Angus cattle herd and he raises beef for freezer beef production, but the farm is mainly corn and soybeans.

Speaker 1:

And, as a farmer, you take care of the soil. Tell us about the conservation techniques that you're using on your farm.

Speaker 3:

Sure, well, I mean, I've always kind of had a conservation mindset. My parents, my grandparents, going back, have always had that kind of mindset. So you know, probably first and foremost has always been no-till. No-till is basically where we don't do any kind of plowing or cultivation between harvest and planting and after harvest the, the litter, so to speak, or the residue is just left on the soil surface to kind of be a blanket or protection for the soil, and then the following spring we plant into that directly and that's kind of the gold standard or the most notable conservation thing.

Speaker 2:

So, if I can just break in there, for for our viewers and listeners, no-till meaning no tillage. So conventionally, agriculture would often after harvest, in the fall a producer would go out and start to turn over the soil, start to plow the soil right. That would be the most conventional. And why would they do that? Versus why do you not want to do that?

Speaker 3:

Well, I mean it really wasn't possible until the technology existed to allow for no-till to. I mean, fundamentally, agriculture is an ancient profession. I mean you go back to Greek and Roman or medieval times and everybody plowed because it was necessary one to loosen up the soil so that the seeds could be scattered and germinate. But then two cultivation, or the plowing or cultivating of soil, has always been used as a weed control method, and so really it wasn't until the 70s or 80s that no till was even possible, because of the changes in equipment and then also the changes in chemical weed control. And it's just it's evolved at a much faster pace now and involves a whole bunch of additional things, but I mean it goes back thousands of years and the tilling of soil is I mean it's fundamental to what everybody thinks of is growing a crop and it doesn't have to be anymore.

Speaker 1:

And the advantage to doing no-till seems to be soil and water retention Keeping your soil where the soil needs to be. Yeah, I mean so wind and water retention, keeping your soil where the soil needs to be.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I mean. So wind and water erosion is a huge problem in agriculture, and it's been a huge problem in agriculture again, going back thousands and thousands of years. And I mean literally. I mean literally tons and tons of soil can be lost with water and wind erosion. And so no till. I mean I say it's helpful and it is, but it comes with its own set of challenges. It's not a silver bullet that just simply solves all the problems. But what it does do is it provides a blanket of protection over the soil to reduce that erosion. Then after that, as a farmer, I have to work through all the other issues, the negative issues that come with it, in order to maintain crop yields and production.

Speaker 1:

What other kinds of conservation measures do you participate in?

Speaker 3:

Well, for a long time we've done things like grassed waterways and filter strips, which are basically permanent sod areas around the perimeter of a field or maybe through an area of a field that might have a particular low spot that water tends to follow. Instead of plowing or growing crops in that area, you put in a permanent sod, not very wide, maybe 50, 75 feet wide. That kind of helps control the water flow. Those are kind of edge of field things that we've done for a long, long time. But I would say about 10 years ago we kind of changed from strictly conservation to having more interest in regeneration and that change in mindset has brought on the use of cover crops.

Speaker 3:

And a cover crop basically is a planting of some plant. It could be anything really, but it's. It's the planting of a crop in the off season, when the cash crop is not growing in the field or when the cash crop is starting to become harvestable and the the reason for the cover crop is not economic like the cash crop. The reason for the cover crop is to either reduce soil erosion or benefit soil health, and that's kind of the new buzzword anymore is soil health.

Speaker 1:

That's that regeneration, that you're talking about. Okay, so corn would be the cash crop and rye might be the cover crop.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so cereal rye is probably the most commonly used cover crop in the united states. So either after a corn or soybean crop is harvested, we would plant a cereal rye cover crop. It would germinate and grow not depends on the fall weather, but it would grow a little bit. And then, of course, now here in january it's dormant, but then come early march when the snow melts and the warm temperature.

Speaker 3:

I mean the interesting thing about a cover crop, and one of the reasons it's managed so intently is because we want it to grow in less than ideal. We're asking this cover crop to grow in a time of year that's not ideal because we want to save the ideal time of year for the cash crop. So we want it to grow in March and April, when it's 45 one day and 30 at night, and 65 the next day and 20 at night. You know that kind of thing. And so it will start to grow again in the spring and then it can get, depending on how we manage, it can get quite large, or sometimes we maintain it a smaller size before we plant our cash crop.

Speaker 1:

So what happens to that cover crop when you're getting ready to plant the cash crop? Do you? You don't till it in?

Speaker 3:

No, I mean you could, but that would defeat some of the purposes of doing it. You know, if you go back 100 years, it would have been plowed in and it would have been called a green manure and it would have then been treated as normal plowed crop production. But in our case we're trying not to do that and so we chemically terminate it. We've played around. Like I said, we've been doing this about 10 years. We're by far, in a way, not experts on it, but we're learning and we've played around with it. We've experimented a little bit, anything from killing it very small to letting it get the one year. We let it get about five, six feet tall before we actually terminated it.

Speaker 1:

That was an interesting that was interesting, and does that then put nitrogen back into the soil or other?

Speaker 3:

It could. Cereal rye happens to be a grass, so it doesn't fix nitrogen. A legume like an alfalfa or a clover or something like that would put nitrogen in the soil. The reason cereal rye is so popular, so to speak, is it'll grow in just about any conditions. I mean, we seeded it as late as the week before Christmas and still gotten it to grow, so it's almost bulletproof. It'll grow almost any time of year and it provides a good root system to sequester.

Speaker 3:

It's a big word, but it basically sucks up nutrients that are free-floating in the soil, that are either coming from the soil particles themselves or, as that cash crop. You know we've fertilized our soil to feed that cash crop. Well, we're only harvesting the grains. So all the stover still has a lot of nitrogen and phosphorus, potassium and all the rest of them in it, and as that decay process is ongoing, those nutrients are slowly leaching back into the soil. Well, in a traditional system where it's either plowed or just straight no-till, those nutrients just end up floating in the soil environment. And if they're like a potassium ion that can attach to a soil particle, then great, it'll stay there.

Speaker 3:

But if it's a nitrogen and it's not readily taken up by the soil it can wash away with rain events. But by having that cereal, rye or it doesn't matter but any other cover crop there growing, those roots are able to more likely pick up those nutrients. So as the decay process of the cash crop is going on, you've got an uptake in the cover crop and it's basically becoming like a biological bank. And then we terminate the cover crop in the spring and then that decay process re -releases those nutrients back to the cash crop. So our goal doesn't always work, but our goal is to create a nutrient cycle and have better retention.

Speaker 2:

And from what I understand about ryegrass as well is it often has some pretty deep penetrating roots which can create some channels for water to infiltrate, and even then some of the cash crop roots the next year will follow those sort of nutrient rich channels left behind from the rye and the roots of the cash crop can occupy a deeper soil profile than they normally would, if maybe there's a from years of cultivation there's like a hard pan layer or something just below the surface that constricts the root growth of the cash crop, right yeah.

Speaker 3:

I mean. So, like we were saying earlier, you know, no-till comes with benefits but also comes with some negatives. And one of the sometimes one of the problems with no-till over long term is compaction. And as heavy equipment drives over a soil, over time it will tend to compress it and that makes it harder for the roots to penetrate through it. So again, one of the reasons that tillage has been popular going back through the ages is to loosen that soil so that new roots can grow easily.

Speaker 3:

Well, the cereal, rye or it could be any other, it could be a canola, it could be an oat, a radish, a brassica, it could be any cover crop. Those roots are growing in that off season and essentially what they're doing is they're doing the drilling, they're doing the penetrating, especially ones that are particularly good at it. And then exactly what happens? Once that cover crop is no longer the cash crop is able to channel its roots right down the existing root channels from the cover crop, and that's only possible through the no-till. I mean, if you were to disturb that with tillage, then you break all those channels, so they kind of go together.

Speaker 2:

Right, I've also heard it called biological tillage. Yeah, when you have some of those cover crops right.

Speaker 3:

Right, and I mean I've told my son, you know, and you have some of those cover crops, right.

Speaker 3:

Right, and I mean I've told my son, you know, we're able to get tillage done through our cover crops in March, at a time that we can never consider doing it with an actual tractor and plow, and the fineness of those root channels is incredible, infinitely higher than anything we could do with a steel plow.

Speaker 3:

And so, yeah, I mean it is a form of biological tillage and it fosters soil life, which, at the end of the day, in terms of soil health, you're trying to build more soil organism life. I mean they estimate that an average soil has about 4,000 pounds of soil microfauna microbiology growing in it. Well, that's equivalent to about two cows per acre, and if I had two cows on every single acre of my farm, I'd certainly be feeding them, I'd be caring about their health. Well, I have that same biological weight in soil microbiology. So part of the cover crop system is to feed them and to provide a food source for them, because at the end of the day, they're only a small fraction of the whole soil environment. But they're really driving the bus. I mean, they're the ones that make this thing really work, and so that biological tillage it kind of comes together. It's tillage, it's food, it's water infiltration, it's soil protection, it's a lot of things.

Speaker 1:

So if we've got water infiltration, we don't have water runoff, which is bad for lakes and streams. What other kinds of environmental impact do you see the ag technologies having?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, well, another thing that Russell didn't talk about but that I've been really intrigued by is sometimes it's called nutrient management is sometimes it's called nutrient management where producers will do soil testing across a particular field, and usually it's set up in sort of a grid across the field, and so the producer then knows all of the soils across that field and what each of those grid cells needs as far as sort of a prescription of nutrients then for the next year, for example, and so then when it comes time to add some fertilizer before that cash crop, the producer then can from what I understand, the sprayer or the broadcast spreader can actually turn on and turn off certain nozzles so that different parts of the field get different prescriptions of nutrients, and so we don't have access in certain areas and too little in other areas. We have just what everything needs, and so we can get better crops, but also then we don't have as much runoff, because we're not putting excess on which is just going to get washed off into a nearby stream or lake.

Speaker 1:

This sounds like not only good stewardship of the land, but a cost-saving measure. Is that accurate?

Speaker 3:

Yes, for the most part it is a cost-saving.

Speaker 3:

Like Nate was talking about, I have fields that will have 20 different soil types in it and, depending on their sand, silt and clay content, their orientation on the topography, their water holding capacity, they all have different needs and so it's a prescription.

Speaker 3:

And so you know, in the 1950s we didn't have the technology to do this. We basically took a soil sample and then made a broadcast application of fertilizer to the whole field. Now we're down at two and a half acres and we're taking a soil sample every two and a half acres on a grid and then coming up with a prescription for each of those management zones. And then, exactly as you said, as the GPS lead fertilizer spreader goes across the field, it can add and subtract or increase and decrease the amount of fertility to hopefully dial in for what that soil needs. It is a cost savings because we're not over applying in the areas that need it, but then it's also more efficient because we're applying higher in the areas that are deficient. So we're kind of tailoring it to that. Some of the cost savings is lost a little bit in the technology cost. Cost savings is lost a little bit in the technology cost, but in terms of the application of the nutrients and the impact on the environment, it's definitely a positive, absolutely.

Speaker 2:

And you've seen some of those fertilizer costs rise really quickly over the last few years. And so that cost savings becomes more and more important as fertilizer prices go up. Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 1:

You know, farming sounds so simple to some people and it is hugely complex. What kind of advances in technology are you seeing that are going to be making your job as a farmer more efficient?

Speaker 3:

Fundamentally, I'm technically not doing anything different than my medieval counterpart did a couple thousand years ago. I'm growing a crop, but how I do it is fundamentally changed, and that's driven by computers, gps and the ability to automate the implement far beyond what was ever possible before. And so it's the satellite technology, it's the GPS, it's the auto steer, it's the ability to make all these infinite changes in rates, in seeds per acre, that we can tailor things in a lot better. And you know like, our sprayer has 120 foot wide boom and in the old days it would have sections that you could turn on and off. Because, let's be honest, no field is perfectly shaped. A lot, especially around the lakes, a lot of the fields are kind of wandering in shape. So a sprayer like that comes into a field and there's going to be overlap.

Speaker 3:

So years ago they had ways of turning off certain boom sections to limit that. Well, technology has advanced. Now Our sprayer, 125, 120 feet wide, it has 100 nozzzzles on it and each nozzle is individually controllable. So if we wanted to, we could spray one 15 inch strip all the way down the field and if it happened to get just a little bit wider it would turn on nozzle number two, and it would get that spot too. And the computer is able to instantaneously calculate all that far faster than an operator ever could. And so the efficiency of the application of chemicals or fertilizers, it's just. The controllability is infinite almost anymore.

Speaker 2:

And what's really cool about, even with the nozzles turning on and off, from what I understand is it's not just giving a prescription to those different grid cells across the field, but also as that sprayer nears a body of water maybe it's a wetland, maybe it's a stream, maybe it's a pond typically not right along a lake A farm field wouldn't go right up to the lake but sprayers as it's turning, because with a 120-, 120 foot boom you've got that boom hanging out quite a while. As the sprayer vehicle is turning and that boom now is out over, over a stream or a wetland, all of those nozzles will turn off.

Speaker 2:

so it's not over spraying in that, in that particular water body.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I, I mean really, the possibilities just go on and on and on. We can create field boundaries that the sprayer will not apply anything beyond that boundary. So we can go out and say, okay, this is where the edge of the field is, even if there is a stream next to it or whatever. We can set it back. We can also go around and mark tile inlets that might be in the field that it will avoid. So I mean, really, the ability to protect the environment is far easier now than it would have been ever before the technology was there.

Speaker 1:

So your stewardship and your interest in the environment has led you to help educate public. Tell us about some of that work that you've been doing.

Speaker 3:

Well, yeah, I mean, I'm also a board member of the Wawasea Area Conservancy Foundation. I sometimes get joked for being a farmer on a conservancy board, but it's a good combination. I enjoy working there. But I don't know, 12, 15 years ago I decided you know, we're not perfect, but we're trying and there, wawasee Area Conservancy Foundation to invite people who especially have a lake interest to come out and take a tour of our farm and kind of see what we do and explain it. And you know, a lot of people either come from an urban setting and then vacation at Lake Wawasee or the lakes in general and they have an interest, but they don't really know, and oftentimes they don't know what they don't know and so we spend time it's usually a one-day event in August and when we have a tour and they come and ask questions, we have a little program and it's good.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, a few years back I was able to go on the tour and several of our Lilly Center staff members were able to come as well, and it was really fascinating and seeing the light bulbs go off and people's sort of facial expression as, oh, that's why farmers do this and that's really interesting that they're doing this Particular practice. That was a really a really great tour.

Speaker 3:

Well, and we've been able to partner with some other people like the Natural Resource Conservation Service. The NRCS, through USDA, has been able to bring out a soil erosion demonstration trailer the last few years and that's really helped with the hands-on part and helping people see physically what's going on in a rain event. So it's cool.

Speaker 1:

What do you think are misconceptions that groups of environmentalists or groups of agriculture folks have about each other?

Speaker 3:

I don't pretend to be an expert on that, but many farmers, I think, look at non-farmers environmentalists as people that don't understand. Non-farmers environmentalists as people that don't understand. I mean, again, farming's hard. I mean I get stuck, I have to pull big equipment out of ruts, I have to deal with a four-inch rain that can be devastating to my crop. I have to deal with bugs and devastating to my crop. I have to deal with bugs and funguses and such that want to eat my crop. It's a tough business and it's not solved with talking.

Speaker 3:

It's hard work and I think sometimes farmers feel like environmentalists don't really understand that part. It's harder than it looks. At the same time, farmers, I think, have a tendency and I've been guilty of it myself is we kind of get in a rut and this, you know, we kind of get in this rut that well, this has worked and we're not going to deviate from it. My dad did it this way, my grandpa did it this way and sometimes I think environmentalists feel that farmers aren't willing to change. It gets back to the livelihood thing about putting their paycheck on the line. But farmers are guilty of sometimes getting in a rut. But farmers are guilty of sometimes getting in a rut and I wish there was a little bit more understanding of how hard the actual farming world is.

Speaker 2:

But then I also wish that farmers were a little bit more willing to get out of that rut. One of the things that we've found at the Lilly Center that has helped in this regard is building trust between them and a shared sense of goals. Started to look at the landscape around our lakes and see some of the changes that we'd like to see made in a positive direction with our lakes. We quickly realized that 70, 80% of the land around our lakes here in northern Indiana is agricultural land, and so if we're going to move the needle in our lakes, we're going to have to work with agriculture, and oftentimes environmental folks and agricultural folks are at odds with each other and point the finger at each other and blame each other. But we instead took a collaborative sort of approach and just sat down with and started learning from some of our producers.

Speaker 2:

I remember sitting down with you really early on, russell, when I first started here, and other larger producers in our area as well, and what quickly became apparent was the same goals are there. A producer is not going to want to allow topsoil to erode off their field, like you were just describing, or waste excess nutrients that they've paid for in the form of fertilizer to be washed off their field, just like an environmentalist, a person maybe living on a lake in the area isn't going to want those things to come into their lake. And so, as there's some shared understanding and shared goals, then the next step is okay. Now how do we accomplish those goals if we don't want to see those things come out?

Speaker 3:

Farmers have been referred to as the original environmentalists, in that they are the caretakers. I mean, it's God ordained they are the caretakers of the soil, the plants and the animals, and so they have a very high calling to do that.

Speaker 2:

And that was the first job right All the way back in Genesis, adam and Eve. They were farmers, exactly.

Speaker 3:

All right, and so I mean there is a very high calling, there is a very high order to preserve and protect God's creation. But, like I said earlier, agriculture is a managed system. The one nice thing about, say, setting aside a wetland or setting aside a woods to kind of just be its own thing is you just you manage it by letting it be its own thing. But when you're at, when you're managing an agricultural system, you're managing it to ultimately feed people. And you know, sometimes people like to point fingers. Well, in reality, this is a worldwide cultural thing that we're dealing with Because at the end of the day, the worldwide agricultural system has to feed and clothe and fuel our species. And I mean we can't just wipe out agriculture because we'll all starve to death.

Speaker 3:

But, as with anything that's human-created, I mean we have made mistakes.

Speaker 3:

The Greeks made mistakes, the medieval people, the Chinese, the Incas, the Aztecs, we've all made mistakes, and a lot of it was because we didn't have the technology to do it or we didn't have necessarily the understanding of how God created this immensely intricate, connected world.

Speaker 3:

And so there's blame to go around tenfold. Farmers tend to get a lot of it because they're still on the land and they're still managing it. A lot of society has the luxury of being kind of removed. They don't see some of the ramifications that they bring to the planet because they're removed and that doesn't make the farmers more guilty or the other people less, or vice versa. Everybody has a hand in it and it's hard to get a few people to do one thing, let alone a worldwide system to get into agreement. But I mean, farmers are doing their best to try. I never, ever want to say anything negative about farming because I tend to take the Jeffersonian agrarian mindset that it's a very high calling and we have a lot of responsibility to watch God's creation. But I've made my fair share of mistakes and the whole concept of regeneration is that we can improve and we can do a lot better we can improve and we can do a lot better.

Speaker 1:

And, nate, are there any research projects that are happening that help ag and the Lilly Center?

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

So we were invited by the Indiana Department of Agriculture a few years ago to join researchers from Purdue and Indiana University and Notre Dame to start to look at the best available science.

Speaker 2:

It's called a science assessment Look at the best available science for the different practices that Russell's been talking about and actually quantifying them with real numbers as far as how much of the nitrogen phosphorus is reduced by different practices on the land.

Speaker 2:

And so we could then have this tool, which would be a result of the study, where you have a 40 acre field and you say we're going to apply filter strips along this edge and we're going to do cover crop and no-till, and for us then to quantify by percentage or by pounds of phosphorus or nitrogen that would be reduced because of those practices being implemented. What that allows is it allows producers to start to optimize what practices they're doing on the basis of what's the best bang for the buck, if you will, for downstream water bodies. It also helps an agency like the Department of Agriculture start to incentivize, through some of their funding programs, certain practices that have a bigger impact than other practices, and so we're really excited one to be invited to be part of that study along with other universities in Indiana, with the four of us as as well, as we're excited for what the results will be of that research.

Speaker 3:

That's really good because you know you mentioned cost savings earlier and one form of cost savings is to not lose what we have. And I mean I've heard it said that one ton of soil loss per acre is equivalent to about the thickness of one sheet of paper, and the minuscule of that thickness over an acre adds up to a large amount. And if we can retain that and like your study is hopefully going to help us quantify that, the cost savings in some regards is just the fact we didn't lose that.

Speaker 1:

We so appreciate our farmers, the understanding that you are feeding the world. You are helping us. If nobody tells you today thank you for being a farmer. I want to say thanks for being a farmer, and a good one.

Speaker 3:

Thank you.

Speaker 2:

Hey, I'm Dr Nate Bosch, director of the Lilly Center for Lakes and Streams, and today we're talking about nutrient cycling. And we're in a great spot to talk about that because we're right here next to one of our live stream sensors. We've got 14 of them throughout Kosciuszko County here in northern Indiana and they're looking at water that's moving into and out of some of our lakes. So the stream sensors start with the sensor itself, which sits down in the bottom of the stream channel. I've got one out here with me because of the ice down there right now and it uses doppler technology in order to look at how particles are moving past that stream sensor and from that the stream sensor can pick up on how much water is moving through, what the flow rate is. It can pick up on water velocity of its moving through. It can also measure the depth of the water in that particular stream at that spot. It also looks at water temperature, air temperature, barometric pressure. All of that data comes here into our data logger box. This box has got storage for all of the data. It's also got the communications that gets that data eventually to our website, so anybody can go on our website and see day or night, any time of the year, exactly what all of this data is showing around our particular county. The solar panel here is what powers the data logger center, and there's a battery in there as well to help when you have nighttime and several cloudy days in a row, like we often have here in northern indiana in the winter months especially.

Speaker 2:

Let's move on over towards the stream and talk a little bit more about the nutrient cycle from that vantage point. All right, now we're down here by the stream channel and we're talking about nutrients and how nutrients relate to our stream sensors. So the reason we have our stream sensors above and below several of our lakes here across our county is to be able to develop nutrient budgets. So we want to know how much nutrients nitrogen, phosphorus primarily is going into our lakes and how many nutrients are coming out of our lakes. It gives us a great sense of how healthy those lakes are. So we have the stream sensor. It's measuring the amount of water that's moving through the stream channel at any particular time, and so the units would be something like liters per second. How many liters of water are moving through this stream channel every second of the day? Now we need to go, take a water sample in the stream alongside that stream sensor and use that water sample to analyze the amount of phosphorus or nitrogen that's in that water and that is going to give us a concentration of phosphorus or nitrogen. So phosphate, for example, is a common type of phosphorus that we would sample for. So we'll get a measurement of phosphate that would be milligrams of phosphate per liter of water. Now you can maybe start to see how the math is going to work right. If we have milligrams per liter and we're multiplying that by liters per second, the liters are going to cancel out and we're going to get milligrams per second. So we're going to get the mass of phosphorus that's moving through per unit time, such as seconds. So we can then scale that up over the course of an entire year and we can figure out how many kilograms of phosphorus moves into a downstream lake per year. The day and with snowmelt and rainfall and droughts and floods and the concentration of the nutrients themselves are going to be a little bit more stable than that, and so we put the concentration of the nutrients along with the flow of the water and we can then from that figure out exactly how much phosphorus, how much nitrogen in different forms is entering our downstream lake, and then, when we look at the same data from the outflowing stream, we can see how much is leaving the lake, and that helps us develop a budget of nutrients for the lake itself how much is going in versus how much is going out.

Speaker 2:

Why do we care about nutrients? Well, nutrients make up the base of the food chain, and nutrients also continually cycle within our lakes. So the food chain just to remind us, we have nutrients coming in, that's the base of our food chain. Those nutrients help feed the next layer, the next link of our food chain. That would be our plants, things like phytoplankton, also known as the algae, or the aquatic macrophytes, also known as weeds, in our lakes. Those plants, then, are going to feed the next layer, which is the zooplankton, the tiniest little animals that live in our lakes. That layer is going to feed our planktivorous fish, our smaller fish. That layer is going to feed our piscivorous fish, our fish that eat other fish, our larger fish in the lake. And as those different layers eat each other or die or decompose, or as we have waste products coming from some of those animals in the lake, it's going to bring nutrients back again to the plant layer that we have and it's going to be recycled throughout the lake until it either gets buried in the bottom sediment of the lake or it moves out of the lake through that outflowing stream. Okay, so we've talked about why nutrients are important in our lake. We've talked also about how we can quantify the nutrients going into and out of our lakes. Let's talk about what some of the sources of those nutrients are.

Speaker 2:

So we're here by a stream. This is called Kiefer Evans is the stream name. It flows into Winona Lake, which is in Kosciuszko County in northern Indiana. This stream comes through lots of different sorts of land uses. It comes through just upstream of us. Here there's a neighborhood and there's some smaller ponds within that neighborhood that this stream flows through. So you have people's yards around there, you also have some golf courses upstream and those would be other places where we have nutrient sources. We also have agricultural fields. So where are the actual nutrients themselves coming from these different land uses?

Speaker 2:

Well, fertilizer is one. If you look at a bag of fertilizer, it's got three numbers on it amount of nitrogen, amount of potassium, amount of phosphorus, and so those nutrients. Then if we have too many nutrients on an agricultural field or someone's lawn or a golf course and those plants there that are planted and growing, whether it's grass or a crop. If there's more nutrients there than those plants can absorb, the excess is going to run off with water, precipitation in the form of rain or maybe snowmelt. Those excess nutrients are going to come into a stream like this so we can get fertilizer would be one source.

Speaker 2:

Another source would be sediment. Maybe we've got over here along the stream. There's a little bit of an eroding area here along the stream bank there, and when you have that eroding area it's going to allow sediment to come into the stream, and often phosphorus not as much nitrogen, but phosphorus often will adsorb or connect to sediment particles. So wherever the sediment particle goes, that's where the phosphorus is going to go as well. So as sediments come into the stream channel and flow downstream, so too phosphorus sort of a hitchhiker along with that sediment coming down. We can have sediment coming from an agricultural field. Maybe it's being tilled in the fall and we get a big rainfall that washes some of that sediment into one of our streams. That can be another source. We can have sediment from a construction site. Maybe there's not silt fencing around that construction site as there should be, and so we can get sediment moving nutrients into one of our water bodies in that way as well. So fertilizer sediments. Another is animal waste, and so it could be wildlife in a more wild area, in a more urban environment, it could be pet waste, it could be people waste with septic tanks or wastewater treatment plants. Those are all going to be nutrient sources which move through streams and eventually end up in some of our lakes.

Speaker 2:

So nutrients are a good thing.

Speaker 2:

They make up the base of our food chain, as we've talked about, in our lakes and streams.

Speaker 2:

But we can have too much of a good thing, and that's really what we're looking at here in Kosciuszko County and throughout the Midwestern United States.

Speaker 2:

Too many nutrients can lead to lots of excess algae, and some algae can even produce toxins. That's one of the things we're studying here at the Lilly Center to help keep people and pets safer as they recreate out in our local lakes. They can also make excess weeds grow in our lakes which can start to be detrimental to people's recreation in our lakes, which can start to be detrimental to people's recreation in our lakes and start to choke out some of the natural functions of our lakes. We're so excited at the Lilly Center to work with several partners working alongside of us in reducing some of those excess nutrients Groups like Soil and Water Conservation District and watershed groups and lake associations and agricultural producers themselves. We can work together to reduce these excess nutrients and make our lakes and streams healthier and cleaner as a result. If you want to learn more about some of this work that's being done, head to our website, lakesgraceedu, and you can help us as we make our lakes and streams clean, healthy, safe and beautiful.

Speaker 1:

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Lake Doctor podcast. Please like, subscribe and share, and make sure to join us next time. It's bound to be fun.

Speaker 2:

Listening to this podcast is just the first step to making your lake cleaner and healthier. Visit lakesgraceedu for more information about our applied research and discover some tangible ways you can make a difference on your lake.

Speaker 1:

If you have a comment or a question that we can discuss in future episodes, leave a comment or send an email to lakes at graceedu. We'll see you next time. The doctor is in.