From the Land Grant University in Urbana Champaign, Illinois. This is the closing market report for the March 2025. I'm extension's Todd Gleason. No update of the commodity markets this afternoon for this program as Mike Zuzlow is out of the office. However, we will talk about the weather forecast with Eric Snodgrass as usual.
Todd Gleason:He's with NutriNAG Solutions and Aggabal, and then we'll take up wetlands, constructed wetlands in particular. I had an interesting conversation with Jill Costell. She's with the Wetlands Initiative and Marshall County Farmer Rex Newton. You'll find that of interest as well. I'm really positive.
Todd Gleason:It's a good conversation you'll want to listen to. And then in the second half hour of the day, if you can stay with us on our home station, you'll hear all of commodity week. If not, it's up online right now on demand at willag.org with panelists including Dave Chatterton, Kurt Kimmel, and Greg Johnson, all on this Friday afternoon edition of the agricultural programming that comes to you from Illinois Public Media. It is public radio for the farming world online on demand at WILLAG.ORG. Todd Gleason services are made available to WILL by University of Illinois Extension.
Todd Gleason:We're now joined by Eric Snodgrass. He's at NutriNag Solutions in Dagrabal. Thanks for being with us on a Friday. Looks like today is gonna be a good day to get out and do some work in the yard, I suppose.
Eric Snodgrass:Yeah. Yeah. But it it's it's like one of those things where you know it's setting us up for something. Right? Like, when we get this mild at the March, it just it's always a precursor to something else crazy happening.
Eric Snodgrass:We do have to be on the lookout later this weekend for the risk of severe weather, especially as we get into the day on Sunday. So, yeah, beautiful. Get out. Enjoy it. Do whatever you can outside, but just keep a very close eye on the radar going into the later part of the weekend.
Eric Snodgrass:We do have an enhanced risk. That's a three out of five on the storm prediction center scale for very strong thunderstorms coming through this weekend. So, yeah, temperatures, I mean, we may hit in Western Iowa, Nebraska, parts of South Dakota. It may get 90 today. That's that's just nuts, Todd.
Todd Gleason:Wow. So is that a trend for April? Does it set up weather that is severe in April, which sometimes happens? What what are you expecting?
Eric Snodgrass:Yeah. I am expecting the severe, especially through the April and probably into the second. And April's an active month for us anyway. But if you asked me what I thought the temperatures are gonna do this April, I'm just gonna confess. I have no idea.
Eric Snodgrass:Todd, I've spent a week trying to figure out if April is going to be warm, if it's gonna be cold, if we got a frost risk coming in in the middle of the end of the month, which is not uncommon, but you got a lot of guys that have seen some warm conditions in March wanting to get out there and not just scratch it or but get some stuff going. And, they're looking at me going, hey. Are we gonna get another cold spell? And I'm like, maybe. I I hate it, Todd, but I do not know.
Eric Snodgrass:I don't know what's gonna happen in April. So full confession, I feel quite limited in my ability to see into the future right now.
Todd Gleason:Well, what happens this week? I I know you've given us a preview of some weather that's severe, but, really, what are you looking at?
Eric Snodgrass:Yeah. So here's the big news. Okay. We do expect very heavy rains from Eastern Texas all the way through the Ohio Valley. All that area we call the Mid South, right, that whole region will likely be experiencing three and in some places up to eight inches of liquid.
Eric Snodgrass:Now to the north of that, coming out of the Colorado Rockies into South Dakota through Minnesota, Northern Wisconsin, the next three systems I have lined up may may put down a stripe in there between seven and twenty inches of snow. Now I spent all day yesterday and the day before that in Minnesota telling a bunch of Minnesota growers, you got a bunch of snow coming. And I'll be honest with you, no one was upset because they know they get to keep that moisture. Now here's the real kicker. April, there's a system that's trying to come out to hammer the Southern Plains.
Eric Snodgrass:That's where all that dust has been coming from, Todd. So if we hit that area with this heavy rainfall, that could be a major dent put in the new drought monitor, which just told us yesterday that we have 45% of the lower 48 in d one to d four drought. A year ago, we were at 20%. So we're more than double. So this is why this is so critical, but I can see the rain.
Eric Snodgrass:I just have no idea what's gonna happen with these temperatures beyond the next two weeks.
Todd Gleason:Okay. So no idea on the temperatures, but congratulations. You told us that you thought April, the spring would be wet, maybe all the way through May. I won't I won't ask you about that, but we do recall that you also told us that it's probably, maybe, possibly going to be dry in the summertime. Have things changed?
Eric Snodgrass:Yeah. Well, you just rattled off the three most common vocabulary words of any meteorologist, probably, maybe, and you know? But the reality is, Todd, that CPC last week released a forecast for summer which puts the driest air right over Iowa, and that's too darn close to home for us. Now it's echoing what other some long some other long range models are doing as well. The European is not as aggressively dry as these other models.
Eric Snodgrass:But, man, if that happens and we hit the Black Sea with risk of dryness in summer, boy, this could be a very, very interesting marketing story. But listen. I told everybody last week, I'm showing you these things and telling you these things. Don't change anything today based upon it. Right?
Eric Snodgrass:We we these are all so speculative. And I just confessed, I can't even tell you what middle to late April temperatures are gonna do. So take it all with a grain of salt, maybe the size of Champaign County, and let's just go on forward from there.
Todd Gleason:Well, if you're well, are are you better with South America? Do we have a good good chance down there?
Eric Snodgrass:I actually do feel like I I nailed one thing in South America, and that was the northeastern Brazilian drought. They had about forty five days of very limited rainfall. It rained last week. And I said, watch this area because I think it's gonna go over dry again in April. And today's model runs took it back over dry.
Eric Snodgrass:Now it's 10% to 15% of the safrinha crop. But any dent we can make in the safrinha crop is good for US Farmers. Right? So let's watch that carefully as well as La Nina fades and spring transitions, and I sit here in my office trying to figure out what the atmosphere is gonna do next.
Todd Gleason:Okay. Anything else before I let you go?
Eric Snodgrass:That's it.
Todd Gleason:Alright. Thanks much. That's Eric Snodgrass. He is with Nutrien Ag Solutions and Daggerville. Have a safe weekend, Eric.
Eric Snodgrass:Yeah. You too. Thanks.
Todd Gleason:You're listening to the closing market report from Illinois Public Media. It's public radio for the farming world. Up next, some advice. Aaron Hager, weed scientist at the University of Illinois, wants to make sure farmers understand about Enlist soybeans and 24 D.
Aaron Hager:One of the things that we really want to emphasize this year around 24 is its use in soybean varieties that are resistant to it, and those would be the Enlist soybean system. There are only two available labeled post emergence products containing two forty that can be applied in crop in Enlist soybeans. Those would contain the choline salt formulation of two forty, in particular either Enlist One, which is two forty choline by itself, or Enlist Duo, which is a premix of two forty choline and glyphosate. There are no other salt formulations that can be used in crop and we certainly do not want to use ester formulations in crop. Esters tend to have higher potential for volatility than salt formulations and again, if we're concerned about off target movement, applying an ester formulation in crop when air temperatures are typically going to be relatively higher than what they are when we use an ester in a burn down scenario, that is really something we discourage people from doing because it increases the likelihood of seeing damage to non target vegetation across our landscape.
Todd Gleason:Aaron Hager is a weed scientist at the University of Illinois. His audio comes to us courtesy of Cesar Delgado, farm broadcaster in Ottawa, Illinois. Up next, a conversation I had for the Illinois nutrient loss reduction podcast, which you can find on our website at willag.org under the podcast tab. I spoke with Brex Newton, a farmer from Marshall County, Illinois, about a constructed wetland that he has on a property which he rents, and then with Jill Costell of the Wetlands Initiative. I started with Jill just to outline exactly what she does for them and how constructed wetlands work and the things that they can do for your properties.
Jill Kostell:Yes. I'm the water resources program director. I have a background in civil and environmental engineering, and I manage our smart wetlands program at the Wetlands Initiative. And the Wetlands Initiative is a non for profit located here in Illinois. We design, restore, and create wetlands.
Jill Kostell:We do this work through innovation, collaboration, and using sound science to improve water quality, habitat for plants and wildlife, and our climate.
Todd Gleason:What's the difference between a constructed wetland and what the wetlands initiative does?
Jill Kostell:Yeah. The majority of the work that we do is what we called wetland restoration. And with a restored wetland, your goal is to restore the natural hydrology and native vegetation in a former wetland that was either drained, farmed, or otherwise modified. So it doesn't have its hydrology and its plant life anymore. And the purpose of this practice is really to restore wetland functions, habitat, and diversity to something similar to what was its original condition before being modified.
Jill Kostell:A constructed wetland is an engineered ecosystem that could be built anywhere but on a former wetland. It is essentially an artificial wetland ecosystem designed to mimic a natural wetland's ability to clean water. In this case, the wetlands are cited to intercept a tile main and designed to provide the optimal conditions needed for the wetland processes to remove excess nutrient as much as possible. And in this case, our main goal is nitrate removal since tile drainage is responsible for most of our agricultural nitrate load in our streams and lakes. But I would say because we are using native vegetation and developing this shallow emergent marsh, they can also provide valuable wildlife, waterfowl, and pollinator habitat.
Jill Kostell:And this constructed wetlands is what we do through our smart wetlands program.
Todd Gleason:When you're thinking about wetland restoration, how do you know if a wetland was there previously?
Jill Kostell:We can tell by the soils. Wetland soils have specific characteristics, and those characteristics stay even if the hydrology or the water levels have been modified. They've been drained off. Those soil characteristics remain, and that's one of the ways we identify former wetland is looking at the soils.
Todd Gleason:In the case of the wetland that you've been working with farmer Rex Newton on, and we'll hear from him in just a bit, is that a restored or a constructed wetland?
Jill Kostell:That is a constructed wetland for cropland tile drainage treatment, which is the official conservation practice name. And so that was designed specifically to intercept a number of tiles. We put them two tiles. That means they were coming through their property and joined them into one tile, and that goes directly into the wetland. The wetland processes occur.
Jill Kostell:That water stays in there for a while. Wetlands are doing all the awesome things that they do, and then we have a structure at the end that controls the water levels, and then the water eventually then goes right back out into the creek. It would've gone to, you know, directly if it wasn't intercepted by the wetland. And water leaving the wetland has a lot less nitrate than it did coming into the wetland.
Todd Gleason:Do you verify that through sampling or some other form?
Jill Kostell:Yes. We have monitored two other constructed wetlands. But, yeah, we've done watering. They're actually quite easy to monitor because you can just monitor and take a water sample of what's coming into the wetland and what's leaving the wetland, and you'll see a difference in the concentration and the load. So we can estimate how much we're we're removing.
Jill Kostell:Now the wetland, that will be monitoring will begin on that this year. So we'll have a better sense of how well that wetland is working. But in general, constructed wetlands, if they're designed correctly and sized correctly, we expect at least a 50% nitrate removal. Some of our wetlands move up to 90% of the nitrate coming in.
Todd Gleason:And how do they do that? Is it just captured by the plants? Does it stay put? Is it removed in some other form?
Jill Kostell:Yes. We are really relying on the, microbes that are, living in the sediment and on the plants within the wetlands. Plants do take up nutrients to grow, but those plants also die so they can release some of those nutrients back into the water column. But the process that's really sustainable is the ones done by the microbes, which is converting that nitrate into a nitrogen gas. So the microbes will do there if there's nitrate, and there's a they will breathe the nitrate in in the absence of oxygen.
Jill Kostell:So you wanna have a little bit of an anaerobic layer in the wetland. And then the carbon from the plants and the sediment is what provides them their energy to do that work. So if you have carbon, you have nitrate, and you have microbes, they will keep on, removing nitrate forever. It's a very sustainable process.
Todd Gleason:What considerations should farmers and landowners keep in mind when considering a wetland for their properties?
Jill Kostell:Well, we wanna make sure we have somewhere where there's a tile main that we can intercept. Feel like somewhere between 30 to 200 acres of tile drainage, is a good size for these. That doesn't take too much land out of production because we want the wetland treatment area to be at least 1% of the drainage area captured, and then, therefore, the total project size project size is closer to 5%. So we like those odd corners or areas that may be slightly wet or hard to farm. Those are kind of the best, areas to put it.
Jill Kostell:But they also have to really consider that this is a we don't say permanent practice, but we are excavating. We are digging, you know, essentially a pond and not filling it up. We only have about two at maximum, two feet of water in these wetlands because that's the ecosystem that removes the best, is best for removing nitrogen. So we have to you know, and the other thing we have to consider that it's a capital cost. You know, this is not of all the tile treatment practices, this is probably the most expensive one.
Jill Kostell:However, it's also one of the most cost effective practices given the amount of nitrate these wetlands can remove and as well as their longevity with very low maintenance. The good thing is that we currently have farm broil programs that can provide financial assistance to help ops, you know, offset some of those costs in installing a wetland. All wetlands pay a very major role in reducing nutrients, even, you know, restored wetlands, constructed wetlands. Wetlands are often referred to as nature's kidneys as they can clean, you know, purify water by removing the pollutants. And so restored or constructed wetlands can do this.
Jill Kostell:Constructed wetlands, we are just designing it such that we're really trying to optimize that nutrient removal.
Todd Gleason:Jill Costell is with the Wetlands Initiative. She mentioned a farm that they've been working on putting in a constructed wetland that's operated by Rex Newton. I spoke with him as well. I started by asking Rex to tell me just a little bit about himself and his operation.
Rex Newton:Oh, boy. Well, I started farming in '75, so this is gonna be my fiftieth year. In the early eighties, I started dabbling with no till because NRCS office had a planner that they were letting us use to demonstrate. So I did some strips and what have a yielded challenge, I guess you'd call it. And I'll be darned, the no till was about a little over six bushel better.
Rex Newton:I thought, well, that's not bad. So I've started growing there with a no till and the attachments back in that era weren't all the greatest. Milletail was kind of in the back burner. So I've grown that and I've seen benefits from it. The one landlord is pretty conservation minded, so he's the one that put the wetland in.
Todd Gleason:Why is it you wanted to put the wetland in?
Rex Newton:I'd say it was both of us, but I left it up to the landlord to make the decision because I had gone to a meeting that Jill spoke at and I thought, well, this is interesting. So I approached the landlord and told him we ought to look into this whether we do it or anything or not. So that's when Jill and Gene come out to our farm and visit with him and he got interested in it and that's come to happen. We got one in there. It drains 60 acres of tile.
Rex Newton:And I think the wetland's 2.8 acres. But we also got pollinator plot and stuff like that around it too. So it was pretty easy sell really mainly because he's he's pre conservation minded. And we've grown that and now we're concentrating on nutrient management with cover crops, six years of cover crops. And strip till I started doing some of that about four years ago.
Rex Newton:And Todd, we've never In 1982 was the last year I mowed board plowed and it was a disaster because 'eighty three ended up being a drought year and that corn, corn on corn, mowed board plowed made 56 bushel to the acre. And then across the road, I no tilled corn on bean stubble, and it made a 25 bushel to the acre. So that was another selling point to change my operation.
Todd Gleason:From the farmer's perspective after the fact, is there much management that has to be done with the wetland? Do you have to care for it very much?
Rex Newton:Well, not so far. I mean, they get a person that comes in and and checks on it and tries to manage the species of weeds that we don't want. Right now we've got some cattails and I'm sure that's from the seed bank. When you dig down that deep, why you're going to get some seeds from way back. So we're gonna start sampling the water coming in and the sampling of the water going out.
Rex Newton:And that way I got some real stats that I can use on both sides. I got corn and soybeans and I'd like to take some out of those tile lines to test. So I even got a comparison there. One side will be corn and one side will be beans. Then I'll have nitrogen on one side of the creek to test and then cover crop on the bean stalk or on the corn stalks going to beans on the other side.
Rex Newton:So I'm kinda excited about seeing how that's gonna prove to me whether I'm doing the right thing or not. I feel like the science is telling me I'm doing the right thing. So I feel comfortable there, but I think this would be more of a more of a selling point, so to speak.
Todd Gleason:Yeah. So if you take tile line samples out of out of the cornfield, out of the wetland field, and then out of the soybean field, plus if you were able to convince them to pick up samples prior to your cornfield, after the cornfield, but before the wetland out of the out of the creek, and then before and after the soybean field, you'll have a whole lot of data to show what really is happening across the board. What's across the board. On all three dip, on all three of your fields, and then what's what the total load is coming out, and what it looked like and what it looked like going right to fantastic. That's that's really good stuff.
Todd Gleason:I hope that, I hope that that's that's able to take place. Any advice for farmers and landowners who are considering adopting a wetland? I mean, you you were there, I'm sure, as they were building it, trying to figure out where to place it, those sorts of things. What do you suggest?
Rex Newton:Well, you gotta be patient for one thing. Because it seemed like it took so long for the seeds to get started and stuff like that. Your pollinators plots, and then you have invasive weeds you gotta control. As far as the soil and work that they did, that was fine. And then starting to see how it was going to really work was kind of fun to me because I'd go down there and look and start seeing some different birds.
Rex Newton:And I don't know my bird names, species, but they were different. And then the monarchs showing up. It just kind of gives you a good sense that this has got to be good. And like I said, if I get some test results on the nitrates and stuff that it is removing, it'll be that much more rewarding, I'm hoping. So basically, it helps, Todd, when you got a landlord that's that's interest interested in saving the soil for the next generation.
Todd Gleason:Rex Newton is a conservation minded farmer from Marshall County, Illinois that has been working with his landowners to improve their properties, in this case, by deploying a constructed wetland. We also talked today with Jill Castell from the Wetlands Initiative. She was working with Rex and the property owner to put the constructed wetland into place. You've been listening to the closing market report from Illinois Public Media. It's public radio for the farming world online on demand anytime you'd like at willag.org.
Todd Gleason:That's willag.0rg. If you can stay with us, you'll hear our commodity week program program next. If not, it airs on many of these radio stations over the weekend, and it's already up on the website and in your favorite podcast applications. I'm Illinois Extensions, Todd Gleason.