Imagine owning a northwest Ohio crop field and controlling the amount of water underneath it from anywhere in the world with a cell phone.
That form of smart technology exists now, though it’s not widely embraced yet because of costs.
But the hope is that, like many technological advances, it’ll become more affordable once more people embrace it.
It’s also seen as another small step toward improving western Lake Erie water quality.
Steve Lyon, an associate professor and associate director in Ohio State University’s school of environment and natural resources, cautioned during a webinar this week that people should realize this latest bit of smart technology “is not a silver bullet” for curing algal blooms that have impacted the lake almost every summer since 1995.
Yet it’s an interesting development, as is the whole era of controlled structures for drainage tiles that began several years ago, Mr. Lyon said.
“You can open and close them like a valve, holding water underground,” he said. “What’s getting more modernized are these control structures and how they work.”
Automated structures “take the guesswork out of the manually controlled structure,” Mr. Lyon said.
“What they’re doing is actively responding and managing water all of the time,” he said.
Until now, those inground structures had to be manually operated, which can be labor-intensive for farmers.
Now, with the tap of a cell phone app, they can raise or lower water level beneath crop fields or be programmed to automatically do that based on seasonal instructions entered into a structure’s memory bank.
To understand how and why this type of technology evolved, step back for a moment into the 1840s, when settlers began draining the million-acre Great Black Swamp that spanned diagonally across much of northwest Ohio and into northeast Indiana near Fort Wayne.
Created 20,000 years ago when the last glacier retreated, the historic swamp was 40 miles wide and 120 miles long. It encompassed a whopping 1,500 square miles, nearly enough to cover the state of Connecticut.
This region became one of the world's most productive for farming after it was tiled and drained because the former swampland has such rich, fertile soil. Most of the work took until 1920.
It’s often been said that northwest Ohio is unlike many other parts of the world, because farmers here have the luxury of excess water. They have a drainage system that is designed to move water off their land rather than fight to keep it on.
The excess water ends up in a vast network of underground tiles beneath many of the fields, where it flows out into creeks and streams in the western Lake Erie watershed after picking up farm chemicals embedded in the soil. That happens most often when there are frequent and intense thunderstorms or rainfall so relentless that the water has to go somewhere.
Much like groundwater, rainwater that seeps through cracks and fissures is often overlooked by the public at large because it’s underground.
Far less than half of what scientists refer to as runoff actually comes off the surface of fields. More of it flows through the drainage tiles.
So to better control that beneath the fields, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Ohio Department of Agriculture began promoting controlled structures that work like dikes. They hold back water trapped in the drainage tiles until farmers release it.
Doing so helps keep the soil moist during dry spells and keeps western Lake Erie waterways from being socked with so many algae-forming fertilizers, such as nitrogen and phosphorus, all at once.
Justin McBride, an engineer in the Ohio Department of Agriculture’s division of soil and water conservation, told The Blade on Friday there are about 2,000 manually operated control structures across 35,000 to 40,000 northwest Ohio acres.
To put that into perspective, there are about four million acres of farmland in northwest Ohio, meaning that there’s still quite a lot of room to grow for controlled structures, he said.
What about the fully automated ones with smart technology?
“You’re probably talking about single digits,” Mr. McBride said.
The main reason is cost: The smart technology control structures, which operate independently from the grid with electricity produced by solar panels, cost $7,000 to $10,000 apiece, he said.
Manually operated control structures — which peaked in sales in 2013, the year after the prolonged 2012 drought — cost $1,000 to $2,000. They’re a lot of work, but a few farmers have installed as many as 30 to 40 of them, Mr. McBride said.
But $1,500 of the cost for manually operated control structures — and as much as $4,000 in cases where more equipment is needed — can be reimbursed through the DeWine administration’s H2Ohio program, he said.
The fully automated control structures are not yet subsidized under H2Ohio, Mr. McBride said.
“Like any technology, as it becomes more widespread, the cost will hopefully come down,” Jane Frankenberger, a Purdue University agricultural and biological engineering professor, said.
Ohio is the envy of nearby states for having 2,000 or so manually operated control structures, whether or not it transitions to the fully automated type in the coming years.
“No other state has anywhere close to 1,000,” according to Ms. Frankenberger, who said her own state of Indiana has fewer than 50.
Mr. McBride said he cannot think of a single control structure in northwest Ohio that was installed without USDA or state of Ohio assistance.
That’s another example of the massive commitment the state and federal government has made to Ohio following Toledo’s 2014 algae-driven water crisis, when the city’s tap water was deemed unsafe to drink or touch the first weekend of August that year.
Research shows who use control structures get better yields, sometimes substantially but on average about 6 percent more, Mr. McBride said.
Ms. Frankenberger said the research she’s seen is more modest, with average yields about 3 percent better.
Either way, control structures are seen as tools to help improve yields and water quality. Whether or not farmers seek out the fully automated ones is yet to be seen.
“I think they’re catching on and I think they’ll keep expanding,” Mr. McBride said of control structures in general.
First Published March 24, 2023, 10:29 p.m.
