Podcast Episode 108

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An Ag Real Estate Perspective on Tiling, Watersheds & Wetlands

An Ag Real Estate Perspective on Tiling, Watersheds & Wetlands

Episode 108 | 48 min

With Guest:

Chuck Wingert of Wingert Land Services, Inc.

Jamie sits down with water quality expert and agricultural real estate guru, Chuck Wingert in this episode of the Water Table Podcast. Their wide-ranging conversation covers system tiling, drainage coefficients, optimum spacings, a holistic approach to watersheds and more. Chuck’s vast knowledge of the ag industry and land sales in the Midwest gives him a unique perspective to speak on a wide range of topics. Listen in and enjoy!

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The best erosion control you can install on your farm is system tiling... research shows the frequency of flooding has been reduced.

— Chuck Wingert

Guest Bio

Chuck Wingert is with Wingert Land Services, Inc.; a full-service agricultural real estate firm specializing in the brokerage, appraisal, and management of farmland in southern Minnesota. Starting in 1976, Wingert Land Services has assisted more than 18,000 landowners in Minnesota and Northern Iowa with the evaluation of soils, layout, and engineering of agricultural drainage systems and erosion control practices, restoration of wetlands and use of governmental programs to retire marginal land. Since 1985, they have represented sales and purchases including farmland, hobby farms, livestock facilities, recreational land, and rural developments.

Speaker 1 (00:00):

Today on The Water Table Podcast, I’m interviewing Chuck Wingert of Wingert Land Services. Chuck has been in the industry for over 40 years, and we have a great conversation about land and managing land in today’s environment.

(00:20):

Well, welcome to The Water Table Podcast. Today, I have with me Chuck Wingert from Wingert Land Services, and I’m really excited about the opportunity to talk with you today. I was going to say interview, but I think, Chuck, this is just going to be a conversation between you and I. We’ve known each other a long time. I’m guessing more than 25 years, less than 30 probably because I’ve only been in the industry for 28, but probably not long after that that we got to know each other.

(00:50):

Like I told you before the podcast this morning that you are the right guest for The Water Table. If you could pick one guy, you would be in that top five of right guests to tell the story of the last several decades of what we dealt with in Minnesota. And why is it interesting here and why are a lot of these things coming together here with our topography, our soils? We deal with things that other parts of our country and world don’t deal with and we grow a lot of corn and soybeans, but we do have some issues with water and soils combined.

(01:37):

I just want to talk about that with you. And first of all, thank you for being on the podcast, but it’ll be fun to have a conversation. And maybe let’s just start by telling your history. How’d you get involved in–where I see you, whether you see yourself or not–I see as kind of an expert in this whole water quality and agriculture arena because of your experiences, and you’ve got a lot of them in land, in drainage, that all converge on what we’re going to talk about today.

Chuck Wingert (02:08):

Well, everything in life is sort of an evolution. I actually went to a technical institute on engineering and architecture and worked with an architect in the cities. The architecture profession is depending on how the economy is doing. And we were in a down period after a while, and my cousin called from Southern Minnesota and said, “We really need some help down here at NRCS, and we know you know design, we know you know drawing and all that stuff.” I came down just for a short little bit to take a little break and I haven’t left yet.

(02:40):

I went back to Mankato State in business management, and during that period started a drainage surveying business because I’d worked with NRCS. You can’t do the work that contractors need from 8:00 to 5:00. I’d work on it every night and they couldn’t pay overtime, so it just made logical progression to start the surveying company.

(03:01):

As that evolved by the mid ’80s, I was spending so much time with farmers that wanted us to look at the soils, look at outlets, what do they need to do for drainage to bring it to maximum production, what do they have to do for erosion control to get it in good shape. This is before they would go to an auction or make an offer on a farm.

(03:23):

I finally got licensed in ’85, and then we did both businesses from ’85 till 2010 where I turned it over to one of my long-term staff and then I just focused on real estate. But over that period, we designed well over 70 million feet of drain tile across Southern Minnesota, and the two businesses go hand-in-hand. The drainage is so important to farms in our area and the real estate, that background’s been really valuable.

Speaker 1 (03:51):

I think when you look at my career in this industry from the mid ’90s and as it’s evolved and as drainage has and subsurface drainage has become a thing in more Central Minnesota, Western Minnesota, North Dakota, places like that, they realized the need and the opportunity. They could farm without it, but when they get it, the opportunity they have to improve on water quality, to improve on yields, to improve on getting in yields by getting into the field earlier because it’s good to go from a planting standpoint, whereas they might have to wait a few weeks if they don’t have that drainage.

(04:34):

But in your area, where you focused on early on in your career around that Mankato, Minnesota area, you really have to have drainage because it’s more rainfall than it is in Central or Western Minnesota, and you got a lot more topography you’re dealing with like you told me this morning. I wasn’t aware there’s seven rivers that converge on Mankato there. There’s a lot going on.

(05:01):

Way before your time, there was different types of drainage being done there. It’s interesting how it evolves in people’s minds being 100 miles away. Well, we’re doing drainage to improve our yields in Central Minnesota. In your part of Minnesota, they were doing drainage to improve their yields, but somewhat out of a necessity also.

Chuck Wingert (05:26):

Well, you get down by Mapleton, which is just south of Mankato and that’s what they call the lacustrine soils. It’s where the glacier ground to a halt. It’s powder fine, ultra, ultra heavy, and your optimum spacing down there is every 33 feet. There’s a lot of farmers now going, “What we did back in the ’70s and early ’80s at 100 hundred feet, you could barely afford to go 100-foot spacings,” and that’s before we had drainage guides, design charts, soil books. Once we got those, we knew that we needed to be narrower, but economics didn’t allow it.

(06:00):

Over the time, it started at 100, then down to 80s, 70s, now there’s a lot of people taking two strings in between the 100s we did back in the seventies or if they’re starting from scratch, there’s more people going every 25 feet because it’s ultra heavy. As you get out of the Mapleton area into Mankato and as you move out, that’s the glacial till where it’s still very heavy, but it’s not that ultra, ultra heavy stuff in the Beaufords, Barbots, and Lura soils that without good drainage is pancake flat. When it rains, the only way it’s going anywhere is through the ground and into the drainage system. It definitely needed down there. You’re in the wrong business.

Speaker 1 (06:39):

And when you use the words pancake flat, it kind of triggered a thought with me. It’s also some of those areas almost the soil is almost like pancake. It is so powdery that when you pour water on it, if you don’t have the right drainage, it just sits there, right?

Chuck Wingert (06:59):

Yeah, it does. And even with really good drainage, when you get some of those years where it’s just nonstop rain, those areas suffer where you get out into the glacial till where there’s a little more slope to it, those actually will do better. But it is just a characteristic of the Mapleton area that it’s the heaviest we have in the state in one spot. There’s a lot of areas that have a little Barbiter, a little Lura, Okoboji. But here, that’s all it is.

Speaker 1 (07:28):

Yeah, and it’s interesting, I didn’t plan on talking about this, but there still is a lot for us to learn in our industry about what are the optimum spacings, because I think too many people just kind of go with what is being done. Now in that area, you’re talking about something specific, but even up in this Canyon High County area or in North Dakota, you go and if you’re in North Dakota right now, it’s 40 foot spacing or 60 foot spacing as well. They’re talking about from one area of North Dakota, you could go 200 miles and they’re doing the same thing and it might not be what’s appropriate, it’s just kind of what’s being done because they see other people doing that rather than really studying. And there are contractors that are doing that studying and that are giving that kind of advice. But I just think there’s more for us on the water table even to discover there and to talk about with right people as we go. That’s more of a comment than anything. And you’ve been involved in that for four decades now.

Chuck Wingert (08:32):

Well, and the one thing I’m seeing right now is everybody, there’s a move to really narrow up spacings. Well, that increases your coefficient, but then they aren’t upsizing their sub mains. They aren’t upsizing their mains. You’ve got to have a holistic plan, not just, “Okay, I’m going to do my farm at 25 foot spacings.” Well, that’s fine, but if you don’t have the outlets to take care of that, in dry conditions when it can drain out, you’ll be fine. But in the wet conditions when you really need it, you don’t have the outlet to get rid of the water in the timeframe that you need it.

Speaker 1 (09:04):

Yeah, that absolutely. We’ve talked about that on the podcast on proper sizing of outlets. We’ve talked about drainage coefficient, but it is absolutely something that, and you can go across the Midwest, that we are going to have to address if we want to optimize yields and really water quality too, because when you get that soil profile full, what happens? You start having erosion and different things. It is absolutely, and I think some of our government agencies or adversaries and environmentalists who maybe don’t understand some of that, well, why would you want to upside and let’s fight against upsizing mains, but in reality, it’s part of the whole system that can create better water quality and less erosion.

Chuck Wingert (09:55):

Well, and you’ve seen Skaggs research and some of these others that the best erosion control that you can install in your farm is system tiling because once you get that water out of there, the soil’s more of a cohesive unit. It stays together where once it’s over saturated, it just goes. And you know about the sponge effect, which the environmentalists that I’ve worked with don’t want to hear it, but we can now turn all this ground into a gigantic sponge. And that’s why the research has shown with the advent of system tiling, the frequency of flooding has actually been reduced.

(10:30):

The problem is now we just get big rains and we had a fourteen-incher a couple of years ago. We’ve had five and two days earlier this spring, I think nine inches in May. And so we’ve been getting this frequency of big rains. Even a good trial system, I always kid, once you get a system tiled, we get a two-inch rain on Monday. You won’t even notice it. We get a two-inch rain on Wednesday. You might have a little ponding. It’s the two-inch rain on Friday that it’s hard to design for. We just don’t have the economics design at a two and three-inch coefficient, which a lot of the cities are designing at two and four-inch coefficients. It’s gone in two seconds. There’s no absorption in concrete. There’s no absorption in ceilings and roofs, but the farms, we’ve got gigantic sponges that we can create to minimize these floods.

Speaker 1 (11:23):

And just to explain that a little bit, this is obviously it’s different in different soils, but as a rule, if your tile lines are four feet in the ground and you have four feet of soil, there is air in that soil, there’s soil and there’s water. And so the soil’s about 50% and the air’s about 25%, and the water’s about 25%. As a rule now, and every soil’s not the same, but it’s about a foot of water you can store in that four foot of soil profile. You start thinking about that. If you can pull that water out of the soil to get it to be the optimum, and then you get that two-inch rain, that first two inches is now being stored in that foot of profile.

(12:13):

And then if you get two more inches right away, like you say, you’re going to have a little bit of ponding. But if that can wait a week in between those, it’s just going to continue to store that water in the soil profile. And that’s where you start to see positive water quality attributes. That’s where you start to see your crops being your root system not being too wet and being able to grow deeper and creating a healthier crop. There’s a ton of benefits that if you aren’t willing to research it or aren’t around the industry, you just wouldn’t understand and understandably wouldn’t understand. There’s no reason to know that, but it’s really healthy for our environment.

Chuck Wingert (12:55):

Oh, absolutely. We can absorb the chemicals and fertilizers that much more when there’s air pockets in this ground. It very much misunderstood. And I’ve had to speak in front of some of these groups where they flat-out told me ahead of time that you’re going to be the T-bone steak that we’re going to dangle in front of all these hungry dobermans. And so I brought tables of documentation, university research, and there was I think like 90 different governmental groups there. And there’s a number of people that came up and said, “We appreciate it. We never knew the other side.” The rest of them didn’t want to take any information. We’ve already made up our mind and we don’t want to hear it. And that’s what we’re up against.

Speaker 1 (13:38):

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Chuck Wingert (13:39):

Knowledge is king if somebody will listen.

Speaker 1 (13:42):

Yeah, and I think it’s our responsibility in the knowledge we have to just keep putting it in front of people, and maybe we have to learn at different times. Our approach can be different or whatever, but if we keep putting the right things in front of people, hopefully, not everybody, but hopefully you’ll continue to get people to say, “Huh, I didn’t think of it that way.” Or we can do things because I think our industry is showing too over the last my time in here of almost 30 years now that we’re adaptable too. At times, like anything, that can be a challenge. People don’t like to change, humans don’t like to change, but I think our industry is doing things differently.

Chuck Wingert (14:27):

Absolutely.

Speaker 1 (14:28):

That absolutely is creating a better environment for all society, not just farmers, whether it’s drainage water management, some of our buffer strip initiatives and bioreactors. And we’ve done a ton of talking about that on the podcast, but it’s exciting to see where this is going. And I know you are dealing with some things currently where you’re on a committee or you’re involved with some stuff with the Minnesota River, and talk a little bit about that and where you see that going.

Chuck Wingert (15:07):

Well, we’ll see. There’s a big move. Of course, there’s some positives and there’s some negatives, as always. The positives, we’ve seen some changes in NRCS that some of these things that early on, the environmentalists back in the eighties said, “If we listen to you, we’re going to lose 50% of the wetlands in the state.” And I said, “You’re absolutely right because we included 80% of the land that’s got a hundred year cropping history, shouldn’t have never been called a wetland in the first place.” But we have seen some changes that some of these are just letting go of it. We shouldn’t have called them wetlands. On the other hand, we’re seeing more push to have every drainage system, county and judicial, have a big retention pond. The question is, who pays for that? If it’s a public benefit, right now it just all falls, right?

(15:57):

We’re going to mandate the farmers have to buy this guy’s farm to turn it into a big retention pond and you’re going to pay for it, or we aren’t going to let you do anything. Well, if it’s that big of a benefit to the public, is it really the responsibility of the farmers and potentially break the farmers trying to pay for that? Again, there’s positives and negatives, but as we talked ahead of the program, I was the national president of the Land Improvement Contractors, that’s farmer, farms, ranches, Timberland recreation, transitional land, and a lot of the brokers that are good friends that I work with out in Colorado and Texas and Nebraska always kid me that, “You and your heavy clay soils, you system tile them, but you still don’t know exactly what you’re going to get every year. Where out here with our irrigation, we know we’re going to get two 20 to two 50 bushel of corn a year.”

(16:55):

And I said, “That’s true, but you’ve had to change everything because you couldn’t blow it up in the air anymore. It’s all switched to drip irrigation because you don’t use as much water. And even with that, your aquifers, the Ogallala you’ve read about, dropping dramatically and all these aquifers are dropping where some of them have had to go back to dry land because they just can’t keep going deeper.” I keep telling them, “That’s fine, and you’re right, but to be in an area of the United States that getting rid of our unusable rainfall is our problem…”

(17:27):

Some of them, we had a client that wanted to ranch, so we were out there meeting with them and in the night we’d sit down and talk a little bit about what’s going on. They said, “Well, what do you do?” And I said, “Well, I do drainage engineering.” And they said, “What do you mean?” I said, “Well, we go into a farm with our heavy clays and we’ll go anywhere from every 30 to 80 feet apart to take the unusable water out of the soil.” And they go, “Where does it go?” “It goes into collector lines, then it goes into streams and go to rivers.” “You just let it go away?”

(17:55):

And they literally said, “How do we get it? If you’re going to just throw it away, how do we get it?” Well, that’s what people forget. We’re in such a fortunate part of the United States that we’ve got 360 million contiguous acres within one country with the best river system in the whole world, that you don’t have to go through four or five states to get or countries to get your product out that we’re so fortunate, but we forget about those kinds of things and just try to turn it into a negative rather than the major positive it is.

Speaker 1 (18:29):

And how do we continue? I think that’s a real opportunity for us is how do we continue to take what we’ve been blessed with and make it better rather than start to talk about how can we regulate that or how can we slow it down? Let’s look at opportunities for cleaning up that water even more, which we’ve done with some of these very, very economically. When you think about water quality in cities and how they have to treat water to get it to have less phosphorus, nitrate, whatever it might be in it, whereas we can just run it through a buffer strip and we’re seeing just tremendous changes in that water from one end to the other, up to 90% reduction in nitrate with bioreactors, and I can’t remember what it is, but 40 or 50% with just a controlled drainage system.

(19:32):

Not every field, when you talk about 360 million acres, works for that. But if we look at the ones that do and say, “Let’s just do more of this. Mains, we talked about that, increasing our ability to redo our mains and to have larger mains so we can store more water, all of that’s going to make a big difference. And I think we have to find a way to partner with our adversaries in regards to, let’s not be adversaries. Let’s look at how we can do this together. That creates a win-win for everybody. And I think that’s one reason why I wanted you on the podcast is you’re willing, if you didn’t know this, you’re willing to share your opinion in life, and I’ve always appreciated that about you. But also when you take someone willing to share their opinion, that also has the knowledge, which you do, how do we combine that with then making a difference in the world and the world that we can make a difference in?

Chuck Wingert (20:36):

Well, that’s one thing people forget. You watch TV sometimes, and when they’re interviewing a farmer at the state capitol, they got the guy with the bib overall that’s got manure on it. And it’s like that’s the farthest thing from reality. Farmers are one of the industries that are the quickest to change. If I can find some tillage that can do a better job and leave more residue on the surface, if I can do something to reduce erosion, farmers are so quick to change. I’d say probably quicker than almost any other industry. You see the turnover in machinery that can do things better at such a rapid pace. And they’re all for, they’re the ultimate environmentalists. They live here. We’re not trying to contaminate the soils that they live in and where they’re raise their kids and their water. They’re just the opposite. And they’re very conscious about making sure the farm is in a better position when they leave it to their kids. They’re not opposed to looking at alternatives at all. But we still have to try to deal with the economics of doing that. It’s not a cheap sport.

Speaker 1 (21:43):

Yes, yes. And I agree, and I want to step back a little bit too when you’re talking about water quality and retention, and there was this idea, and we were talking about storing water in the soil profile, and there was this idea up in North Dakota 20 plus years ago when they were having a lot of their year after year spring floodings and how do we manage water? And now they’ve finally gotten to where they’re currently building the Fargo diversion, which was a big political football for a while, and now they’re spending almost 4 billion to build a diversion when in fact, there was a plan, they called it the Waffle Plan, where you would take sections of land and push the water into that area and let it sit, just like when you pour syrup on a waffle literally and how it sits in the squares.

(22:37):

And that would have worked. But the same concept is if you would have said, we’re going to have an initiative to tile, I’m just throwing out numbers, but 50 million acres from the border of South Dakota up to Fargo by tiling that land and allowing that land to hold the water. Instead of it being above ground, it would’ve been stored, but it would’ve been stored below ground, probably would have been able to have the same effect as what the Fargo diversion is going to have for a third or a quarter of the money that they’re going to spend doing that. And that’s water under the bridge, so to speak, because they’re doing that. But these are the things that we need to continue to talk about so that everybody understands what we can do and the benefits that are involved in that.

Chuck Wingert (23:35):

Well, and I’ve been doing a bunch of projects with the Fish and Wildlife people recently, and one of the things I look at is they’re concerned about the migratory birds and places they have big areas that they can land on the way up. And with controlled drainage, we could do a lot of things. Like you said, not every farm’s conducive to it, but we can shut it off, let water get on the landscape over the winter and the spring when the migratory birds are coming up, you’ve got all these places to land, feed, and when it’s before planting, you can pull the dams and let them drain out, raise a good crop, and it could work out very well.

(24:17):

Again, not every farm’s conducive to that, but there’s a lot of areas that are. Mapleton’s, not really. We looked at it for decades ago, but it’s so heavy, it’s hard to do that. But some of these lighter soils are very conducive. Big peat areas are very conducive to that. We could back that water up, have really good places for water storage and migratory birds, drain it out when we’re ready to plant. That water moves through peat so easily. We can accomplish both, but it’s just educating landowners and agencies that this could be a real positive.

Speaker 1 (24:55):

Yeah, yeah. And I think when you start talking about, and I’m all for that and really excited about because I enjoy the outdoors, I enjoy doing those kinds of things with hunting and fishing, but when you start talking about manipulating the land that way and needing the landowner to be involved with opening and closing gates and flooding or allowing the water to be on the field and then getting it dry enough time to plant, we can’t just expect people to do that, that own the land and take all their time to do that without being compensated somehow to do that. And that’s just another piece of this on how do we connect the general public and what the general public’s needs are with private property and private landowners. And I think that’s going to be something that’ll be evolving for a long, long time that there’s going to be that tension there. And can we find a happy medium?

Chuck Wingert (25:58):

Well, there’s a lot of farmers that would do it. Not to be negative, but one of the problems I’ve always found with controlled drainage is the contractors. We want to get in there, put our main in and ram those laterals in. We don’t want to take any time to think and we don’t want to take time to design and contour design those things. It’s going to take some education, and probably like you said, some extra money or somebody that’s designing these and said, “Okay, you don’t have to think about it. We’ll take care of it ahead of time. Here’s the plan, go install it.” Because that’s been what I see as the holdup to what could be a very strong positive.

Speaker 1 (26:38):

Do you think that’s coming now? That there’s other, I don’t know if you want to say agencies or companies that are building the capabilities to be able to do some of that design work and that are out there and open to that?

Chuck Wingert (26:56):

I’d like to think so. The problem is if you get the big engineering companies involved, it’s so expensive that it takes out somebody right away puts you behind the eight-ball before you even start. But right now, rather than just saying, “Okay, we’re going to make you install these retention ponds, let’s look at the whole picture,” like you’re saying and not just say, “Okay, here’s a stopgap.” But we could be doing something within the soils that would be more productive than just saying, “Okay, we’re going to run it into a pond.”

(27:28):

And as you see in town, any housing development has to have a big retention pond. Well, we take a lot of ground out of production that could put houses on, and is it really? In the low flows, it’ll work, but when we have the rains, they really aren’t that effective. And the ones I’ve seen, some of my staff only slows it up for a day and that drains out real fast. That’s really not, in my mind, the solution. I think looking at more of a holistic approach and saying, “What can we do within the soils?” Rather than just say, “Let’s build a pond to dump it into,” is probably going to be more cost-effective and more beneficial, drop more sediments, all those kinds of things.

Speaker 1 (28:19):

How involved have you been in your career with working with watersheds and what’s your experience?

Chuck Wingert (28:25):

Well, I’ve done enough of it. We had in just the Blue Earth County, I think we had close to 90 drainage systems, county drainage systems put in from 1898 or 1889 until about 1930 when the wheels fell off at the depression and very under designed. There’s some other designed at a one 16th inch coefficient. Well, what happened? Well, I think they looked at it with the farmers and said, “Here’s what you need to do.” And they all passed out cold and said, “We have to do something, but we aren’t doing that.” To make it equal, they just lowered the coefficient ,where now a lot of them are trying to do at least a half inch or a one-inch coefficient.

(29:03):

And trying to get those upgraded is very important because we’ve had some systems that were just done now that were $1,650 an acre was your assessment. And that’s probably equivalent to what it was back in the early 1900s. It broke a lot of people. It straightened the farms out forever, but it financially destroyed people. But we’re at that point now where a lot of these systems are over a hundred years old and they need to be brought into this century. But we have a lot of pressures to stop that from happening at all.

(29:37):

And we’ve done a couple of things with Rinke Noonan and where we have all this upland and when you have an under-designed system, you get what I call the designated holding pond. The poor guy that was in the low gets flooded out, and we don’t really want to help you. It’s working fine for us. We said, “Okay, let’s do that. Have the system by your ground and we’ll turn it into the retention pond.” Rather than upsizing our mains and doing all these other things, let’s just turn that into a big wetland, use the existing outlet as your overflow and let everything else come down into it. It’s going to clean the water, it’s going to drop any sediments or fertilizers, and this guy doesn’t have to spend a fortune to fix it up. I think there’s a lot of things that can be done within existing systems, and they’re starting to happen as a way to solve it environmentally.

Speaker 1 (30:33):

I wasn’t planning on going this direction, but I want to, so I’m going to. If you look back, you’ve been to so many meetings where we talk about what the landscape looked like a hundred plus years ago, say in the early-nineteen hundreds, and all the wetlands that we’ve lost and those wetlands, just to be clear, where the government encouraged farmers to drain those wetlands before 1985. And we did a lot of that and we created some incredibly good productive land in doing so.

(31:12):

But since then, since Swamp Busters, December 23rd, 1985, is when you and I have been to a lot of meetings and they’ll throw up slides and they’ll show you, “This is what it looked like. This is what it looks like now.” And really with the whole characteristics or the whole idea, we need to find a way to get back to some form of what it was. And what do you think a hundred years from now, this is your opinion, of course, but what do you think people will look at? Because when I start thinking about that, I’m really proud of what I’ve seen over the last 30, 40 years. If you go from Swamp Busters to today on things like you just talked about, there is a lot of areas where we said we should just make this into a retention pond.

(32:07):

They bought the land. We could go into example over example of that. There’s projects, the CREP program, there’s CRP, that have done this. And some of that isn’t permanent, of course, in the CRP, but it still is there. And I was out just last night looking at a project and the water that was coming through the main there in the outlet, it was awesome. It just looks like I could go for a swim in it. And I was proud of that. And so the question, really long question, but really is where do you think our society will be at when right now they look back because they’re looking at what it looked like a hundred years ago, what do you think they’ll look at a hundred years from now and say, “Have we improved?”

Chuck Wingert (33:00):

Well, when you look at what was done in the turn of the century and the early-1900s, I hope that people look at what we do today that we’re only as under-designed as they were from then. But there’s one thing people forget with RIM, CREP, WRPs, all those things. We’ve retired well over a quarter million of acres in the Minnesota River Basin alone. But they forget about that. They say it’s getting worse. Well, if it’s getting worse and we’ve done this, has that been effective or do we need to change things?

(33:37):

I hope for the future that we see things get more education, but unfortunately, we become a soundbite society. We don’t want to dig into anything. We want the answer in 10 words or less. And so it’s going to be hard to educate people to help us make the changes that farmers are willing to do. But right now, we economically can’t do that. We’ll see where it goes, but there’s a lot of positives out there, and we’re always going to need food. As the world gets bigger. We need to, the farmers, I was on a group that was supposed to look at it years ago, we’re supposed to double or triple our production by 2050, yet we’re not supposed to use drainage. We’re not supposed to use chemicals. And God forbid you use fertilizer. How are we supposed to do that? We have to have a holistic approach on what’s going to happen.

Speaker 1 (34:35):

And I’ve said this many times, and I heard this, how I’m going to articulate this, I heard this from a mutual friend of ours, Charlie Schafer from Agri Drain, but just around when you look at a farm dollar and what happens to a dollar that’s made on the farm is when you make a dollar on your farm and you made that dollar because of a drainage system, so you maybe would’ve made 50 cents, but now you’re improving your yield and you’re making a dollar instead, what happens to that?

(35:12):

That dollar goes through the entire community, and it creates a tax base which pays for school levies, which builds churches and hospitals in these rural communities. And what we do is just so rewarding to those of us in this industry because we’re building, we’re not manufacturing a toy that’s given to a seven-year-old at Christmas, and he’s done using it by the time he’s eight and it’s broke by the time he’s 10 and thrown in the garbage. What we’re doing is we’re installing a drain tile that is managing the water on a farm, creating more yield, which is creating more money, putting more money in people’s pockets year after year after year for generations.

(36:02):

And that is where it gets pretty exciting because we’re building a tax base for all rural America. And that’s where I hope we can connect the dots with those that may be our adversaries today. And I think that’s what connects and why, I want to bring it up a little bit, not that I want to talk to you much about this, but land values and the land values of land and then the land values of land that has proper water management on it, and how you see that just in your career and the difference that it makes.

Chuck Wingert (36:38):

Well, I was having fun. I had my grandson with me the other day, and there’s a young guy that I sold a farm to and I said, “Gorgeous farm, but you got to get out there and tile it,” because his dad has never been a big tiler at all. You just farm what you have, and they’ve got a farm here and a quarter mile down the road they have another one. Well, the son, after he bought it, system tiled it. And I showed my grandson, here’s the one that dad has that’s not tiled. Corn was all stunted. There’s areas that were, obviously the seed didn’t germinate and the field just looked like not good. Quarter mile away, there’s sons beautiful crop, beautiful crop, and just the work I’ve done, when you start taking it by, dividing it by the so many feet per acre and times so many dollars per bushel, brings in mega millions of dollars into those communities, those farmers, every single year.

(37:37):

And like you said, you feel pretty good because it’s made a dramatic difference in the lives of those farmers and the profitability. Being in business for 48 years, I can tell you there’s a huge difference between the guys that said, when I first started, guys would call me up, “We wanted to do some tiling, and they’d literally look at the ground. I can only do 2000 feet.” “Great, let’s look at where you’re going to benefit the most.” We do that, and they did that for three, four years. Then they were up to 5,000 feet per year, then they were 10,000 over time. Now they buy a farming system, tile it. You got to have the economics to move ahead where the guys that are always going to tile have never moved ahead at all. They’re still talking about it 40 years later.

Speaker 1 (38:18):

Yeah. Well, that’s a good time to share with you. I don’t know if you’ve heard this, but another mutual friend of ours, Roger Ellingson, has-

Chuck Wingert (38:27):

Good friend.

Speaker 1 (38:27):

… a saying that if you love yourself, buy a house in Florida. If you love your kids, buy land. And if you love grandkids, buy land and tile it. And that’s really what you’re saying right there is it just improves things for the generations to come, and you get the benefit of it too. It’s pretty great that way. It’s been fun talking to you. What else you want to share with me today?

Chuck Wingert (38:53):

I’d say just one thing. When you talked about where things were and where we are, I sold a farm to a gal and we got talking and she said, “Would you like my dad’s PhD thesis? He did in 1954 on drainage.” Yeah, amazing, amazing. Very in-depth. It’s wonderful. I should see if she’d let me release that to you because you see Blue Earth County, there wasn’t a straight road in the whole county. You went-

Speaker 1 (39:21):

Yeah, around all the things.

Chuck Wingert (39:24):

The tax base was terrible. As more drainage came in, it improved. One of my arguments for years was, “Why is this so shallow?” Well, number one, they were doing it by hand, but two, my philosophy was they only went so deep because they were going from here to there to get the water off it so that they could have better pasture. He pointed that out exactly. But then as they saw the benefits, now they started putting a couple next to each other, turning their field square, the road straightened out. The tax base has changed dramatically, dramatically. You take drainage out of any county in southern Minnesota, in Minnesota, period, you wouldn’t have any tax base at all, it really made a dramatic difference from where we were. Once drainage came in, the economics of a county, the farmability of the land, the roads being straight, there just really was no negatives to it.

Speaker 1 (40:21):

Yeah, and when you say that, it reminds me of a comment that was made that was a real lightning rod comment, and that was rightfully so, if it isn’t explained more, but is some of these half-acre wetlands and things like that are just worthless. What do they do? And there is benefit to every wetland, of course, with water quality, with things I wouldn’t understand around whether it’s insects or ducks or different things that use it.

(40:57):

But I think what needs to be asked in that is if managing the water on that wetland, that small nuisance wetland I’ll call it, which maybe is offensive to some people too, but managing the water and being able to farm through it, what are the benefits of that? You’re only looking at the, we have to keep it this way because there’s benefits to having this small wetland, but if you move that wetland to a different part of the field, or you have a three-acre wetland here and six quarter-acre wetlands over here, and you move that all to one five-acre wetland, what are the benefits of doing that? And there are benefits of that too, from the standpoint of farmability, of raising more crops, of building a road straight, whatever it might be. There’s lots of different benefits, and I think we forget about that.

Chuck Wingert (41:48):

Well, and just one of my farms, I created a thirteen-acre wetland on, and one of the fish and wildlife guys I was working said, “Chuck, that’s a waste of time.” And I said, “Why is that?” And I put a donut in there so it could have ducks. And he said, “Because they have the babies, then the predators eat them walking to somewhere where they can get to water.” He said, “They want to see thousand-acre tracks where they can spread out. You have good nesting, uplands, wetlands.” He said, “These little ones, yeah, there’s water quality and there’s benefits to it, but wildlife is not it, especially ducks.” And so that was a little bit of a wake-up call for me that you think you’re doing a good thing. You’re finding out I’m just feeding the predators.

Speaker 1 (42:33):

Right, right, right. Yeah. And it’s really interesting when you think of that. I think we all personally think that way. What can I do? And we do small things like that, and sometimes it doesn’t have any benefit. And so that’s where I think that’s why this podcast is good. That’s why your willingness to come up here and chat about this is good because people want to do good. And sometimes they do that on their own and they’re not making much of an impact. Whereas if we can do the research, if we can ask questions of people that have experienced things before, it can help us get to the right place faster. Thanks for being here on that.

Chuck Wingert (43:14):

No, I appreciate the time. It’s always good to talk about drainage. One of my soft spots.

Speaker 1 (43:21):

I know that I’ve had the opportunity to have my wife on the podcast talk about land, and I need to get her brother on there. And you work with them some, but they don’t have the knowledge and history you do on drainage. And that’s really what I wanted to talk about was water quality on the farm and why it makes a difference. I think I just want to state that on here too, that our industry has really benefited from having you and your voice involved for the last 40 years as you’ve been such an advocate and on behalf of the industry, I want to thank you for that, and thank you for being part of the podcast.

Chuck Wingert (44:05):

Well, that works both ways. I always appreciated your efforts and Kent’s and Prinsco’s that when something was going on that’s going to be negative to the farmers that are like our wetland, well-intentioned law written by people that don’t understand what it was or have any boots on the ground to know what’s going on. But I’ve always appreciated your efforts. We’ve been to Washington together and the capital together, and to stand up for the farmers and stand up for the industry. Not all the other companies are willing to do that.

Speaker 1 (44:38):

Yeah, well, I appreciate that.

Chuck Wingert (44:39):

It’s not just about money. It’s about you’re making a living and protecting the farmers and being active when there’s something that needs to be done.

Speaker 1 (44:47):

And I think you and I grew up with the same parenting where when there’s something that needs to be said, say it, and there is a difference between right and wrong and make sure that you’re vocal on what’s right. And I don’t think we’re losing that in society, but what we are losing is just the knowledge of the farm and agriculture. There’s so many less people. When you grew up, there was many more people that grew up on a farm than there are today. And I’ve mentioned that before too, where growing up rural Minnesota, graduated high school with 33 kids, and just a quick memory and count, a third probably of them grew up on the farm. And I asked my kids the same thing a few years ago. How many kids do you know in your school? And they went to high school with many more, a couple hundred, 250, I think.

(45:49):

And it was one hand that they could count that they were friends with or that had knowledge. If they didn’t have the knowledge of the farm from the fact that my wife’s parents still live on the farm, still farm, or the little bit that I get involved in it with my work and my wife with her work, they wouldn’t have any knowledge of it. And that’s where most of society is today. We have a responsibility that I think as the farm community and those of us that are connected to agriculture one way or not that we forget about too, that we just think, “Well, you should know that.” And the reality is, “Well, how would they know that if they’re not?”

Chuck Wingert (46:32):

Well, there’s so many less farmers. We lost so many young farmers back in the eighties that went to town and never came back. And one investor I was working with, a farmer was telling him that they aren’t making any more farmland. And he said, that’s not the problem. The problem is they aren’t making any more young farmers. Every young farmer we can get our hands on and keep on the farm is extremely important for the future and the knowledge base that goes with it.

Speaker 1 (47:01):

Yep, yep. For sure. Thanks for joining me today, Chuck.

Chuck Wingert (47:05):

Always good.

Speaker 1 (47:06):

Yep.

Chuck Wingert (47:08):

Thank you.

Podcast Episode 108

An Ag Real Estate Perspective on Tiling, Watersheds & Wetlands

Episode 108 | 48 min

With Guest:

Listen Now

Guest Bio

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Podcast Episode 108

An Ag Real Estate Perspective on Tiling, Watersheds & Wetlands

Episode 108 | 48 min

With Guest:

Listen Now

Also Available On

Guest Bio

Transcript

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