Podcast Episode 132

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Ducks Unlimited: Balancing Wetland Conservation & Agricultural Production

Ducks Unlimited: Balancing Wetland Conservation & Agricultural Production

Episode 132 | 35 min

With Guests:

Samantha Ewald, Regional Engineer of Ducks Unlimited
Trey Allis, Guest Host and Prinsco Application Engineer

How do we find the balance between productive agriculture and wetland conservation? Guest host Trey Allis sits down with Samantha Ewald of Ducks Unlimited to learn how their engineering expertise goes beyond conservation to actively restoring wetlands to filter water, capture sediment, and remove nutrients. From tackling failing drain tile systems to transforming farmland into thriving wetlands, learn how they’re finding solutions to benefit agricultural production and environmental conservation.

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We're not creating wetlands. We're not trying to make someone upset. The goal is to restore wetlands.

— Samantha Ewald

Guest Bios

Samantha Ewald

Samantha Ewald, PE, graduated from North Dakota State University with a degree in Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering. She is currently a Regional Engineer with Ducks Unlimited, where she specializes in the design of wetland restoration sites across the upper Midwest. Her work involves transforming landscapes and improving water quality by addressing complex drainage systems, aiming to balance productive agriculture with vital environmental conservation.

Trey Allis

Trey graduated from North Dakota State University with a degree in Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering. He joined the Prinsco team as an Application Engineer in 2017 and primarily focuses on Agricultural engineering. Growing up on a farm and in the Ag community, Allis has spent a lot of his career focusing on the Flexible Dual Wall product and the value it adds to the industry. He is passionate about education and bridging the gap between research and application.

Samantha Ewald (00:00):

So we’re stopping flow rates, meaning we’re stopping sediment, we’re stopping nutrient removals in areas. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but there’s a phrase that says “Wetlands are the kidneys of the earth.” I think with everything in the world in life, there needs to be a balance. Ducks Unlimited hit a million acres of conserved area in one year. Our goals are to restore wetlands. We’re not creating wetlands, we’re not trying to make someone upset. The goal is to restore wetlands.

Trey Allis (00:30):

Welcome to The Water Table podcast. I’m Trey Allis filling in again, and I’m joined here today with Samantha Ewald, regional engineer with Ducks Unlimited. And welcome to The Water Table, Sam.

Samantha Ewald (00:40):

Thanks for having me.

Trey Allis (00:42):

Yeah, great to have you and great to line this up. And maybe just to kick things off a little bit, we’ve known each other for quite a while now. It seems like quite a while. After going to school together, meeting at NDSU, we actually interned together at Prinsco and worked there for a handful of years and a lot of good times there. But you now work at Ducks Unlimited as a regional engineer. So great to have you on the podcast and want to get into some of your work that you’re doing with Ducks, and how that intersects with some of the water quality and water initiatives that are going on within the world and the state, and some of the region and stuff too. But want to kick it over a little bit and talk about Ducks Unlimited a little bit. What does that organization really do? I’m sure a lot of people heard about it from duck hunting and stuff like that, but give us a little background on what Ducks Unlimited does.

Samantha Ewald (01:34):

Yeah. Well, Ducks Unlimited is probably more than what people think that they see or what they know. So a lot of people will know Ducks Unlimited for the t-shirts and the shirts, or the logo, or even the banquets.

Trey Allis (01:47):

The magazines too.

Samantha Ewald (01:48):

The magazines, yes, there’s a lot of things. The podcast, there’s so many things out there, but a piece that people might not be aware of is the conservation side of things. And Ducks Unlimited has a whole team of conservation experts anywhere from scientists, to engineers, to biologists, to GIS to people who lead all those teams. So we’re doing a lot in the conservation space, and I can get more into all those details, however detailed you want to go.

Trey Allis (02:14):

Yeah, sure. Maybe kick it over a little bit into what do you do as a regional engineer within Ducks and within Minnesota?

Samantha Ewald (02:23):

Our team on the engineering team, it’s really similar to a consulting agency, what they’re going to do. They’re going to take a site, a construction site, they’re going to design it, and then you take that all the way to completion. So, our engineering team has got seven individuals. We’ve got three PEs on staff and construction managers, and techs and other engineers, and we’re taking pieces of land and we’re determining how to make those wetlands the best they possibly be. We’ve got a team of biologists that starts that process. So they find the pieces that we need to work on, and when the engineers get involved is anything that takes a big structure, or a watershed, or public drain tiles involved anywhere that you need a little bit more engineering to look at the hydraulics, the hydrology of the site, and then get the right permits and the right approvals for those and be able to explain that.

Trey Allis (03:14):

Sure. So how did the projects kind of, I guess, come about or come across your desk or how do you find them and how do they start up and get to that point where you do need to start engineering a structure and rework in some of that land?

Samantha Ewald (03:30):

Well, I’ll say first that everything I’m talking about today is in Minnesota, every state is different. Ducks Unlimited is throughout the country, and even Mexico and Canada, the ducks need to be everywhere, and some are more concentrated than others. But when I speak specifically about these questions, I’m talking to Minnesota, because you’re going to see Iowa similar, maybe the Dakotas, but then you get to the coastal regions, it’s much different projects. They’re not working on prairie potholes, they’re working on salt restoration marshes. So, projects will come to us through our biologists. And every project that DU does is through some kind of partner, a LGU, a local government organization. That can be a watershed, that can be the DNR, US Fish and Wildlife, someone at the state, federal county district level is who we’re partnering with. And they come and our biologists determine what’s the highest priority, what do we want to work on, what fits in our budgets, and then they give them to us and they say, this is what the goals are, this is what we want to achieve and here’s what we need to get it done by.

Trey Allis (04:32):

Sure. So from some of those projects, and you had me out on site for at least one of them before too, but is it essentially, or maybe give a high level of what I guess a typical project looks like at the start? Maybe when everything is in that kind of discovery phase or I don’t know exactly what way to say it, and then say, hey, we want this end goal of X. We want essentially more ducks here, whatever more water in this wetter wetland that’s already there. But what does some of those sites look like on the front end?

Samantha Ewald (05:02):

On the front end, it can look like a bare previously farmed farm field, or it can look like a WPA, a waterfall production area, that has been sitting for 50 years that no one’s touched since it’s been a WPA. The projects themselves, they start by just the first recon, is reconnaissance. We go out there and we determine what should be done. And everything that we do are goals are to restore wetlands. We’re not creating wetlands, we’re not trying to make someone upset. The goal is to restore wetlands. And so we’re going in first, before we even get to that site, we’re looking at aerial imagery. You can find public data from the forties and fifties and sixties of aerial imagery of what things look like years back. You can look at the soils and that tells you a lot. Wherever clay is, that’s where clay and depressional areas, that’s where wetlands are going to be.

(05:52):

You look at the vegetation on that. So you’re doing a lot of pre-work to determine where those wetlands are before you even get to site. And then we get on site and we start looking at things. Our biologists are very good at picking out vegetation and other aspects that maybe I wouldn’t catch as an engineer. And we’re going out as a team and we’re figuring out where things should go. From that, we determine what are the permitting steps, who do we got to get approvals from? If there’s a county tile going through it, there’s a lot more conversations that we have to have. If there’s private tile that’s coming through these and they’re hitting crossing lines, we got to talk to those guys. So, it’s a lot of coordination in the upfront. And then we’re determining an engineering design. We are sending out a whole survey crew, all Ducks Unlimited employees from our engineering team, and they’re surveying the site for elevation and position of where everything’s at, where are the ditches, where are the wetlands, where do we need to clean out wetlands?

(06:46):

Because over time you’ve got a small depression in the land, and if they’re soil eroding, that soil is going to go in those small depressions. So we’ve got to clean that out, and when we clean that out, we actually find native seed-beds from hundreds of years ago in those too. So, all exciting stuff is we’re determining all of that. We’re putting the survey together, making that design, and then we’re putting that out to bid. And we put that to bid. We get contractors bidding on them, we close the bids, award a contractor, and then depending on the timeline, sometimes we’ve got to work around endangered bats or turtles. We’ll have that construction start. We’ll be out there CMing the project construction managing and taking that all the way to completion with the final sign-off and have those basins filled with water.

Trey Allis (07:28):

Right on. And like I said, a lot of that’s wetland restoration, and I don’t necessarily need to get into the full biology of wetlands, but I guess where we’ve started seeing some more things on the landscape and kind of in the ag landscape with other watershed plans and how it intersects with some of the county infrastructure is with more kind of storage ponds, and hey, we need to storage so many cubic feet of water in some places and then we try to, or not we, but some of the engineers involved with those projects try to incorporate some of that habitat where they can, obviously that takes up more land, but from a wetland standpoint, from my understanding of it, shallow pool of water, a lot of native vegetation around there. Is that kind of hitting the mark? Is that the gist of it?

Samantha Ewald (08:12):

Yeah. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but there’s a phrase that says “Wetlands are the kidneys of the earth.” And it’s very true is when you take in water and you have a fully vegetated area that naturally is working in its natural ecosystem, the water that comes into that is, one, slowing down. So we’re stopping flow rates, meaning we’re stopping sediment, we’re stopping nutrient removals in areas, we’re slowing that down, and that helps clean that water before it goes to its next spot.

(08:38):

If we don’t slow water down, it can carry a lot of things we don’t want with it and keep going until it stops. And when you find where it stops, say there’s a low ditch or you get all the way to the river, you’re going to find all that. That’s where it’s going to go. So when we talk about wetland restoration, it’s more than just the ducks. Ducks Unlimited is in the sustainability, they’re in the science markets. They’ve got people working on all aspects of this, the ducks, it’s a nice benefit. The ducks love it too, but there is much more benefits on wetlands, especially in areas that we can slow down water that people don’t even realize.

Trey Allis (09:12):

Yep. And that’s from what I’ve seen over I guess my career at Prinsco too, and obviously we’re dealing a lot with drainage, dealing a lot with water. And I mean throughout the history of, well, kind of the upper Midwest for the most part, is straightening ditches, putting in tile, that water has been moving downstream quicker. And that’s just kind of, I think it was former guest on here, Mike Castellano said, “Hey, we drained Iowa. And that was the decision that was made 150 years ago. And that landscape looks a lot different. It’s a lot more productive.”

(09:46):

But then now I think it’s kind of shifting a little bit back to maybe not a full mindset change, but maybe just a little bit of shift into, hey, what can we be doing on these landscapes to include some of those benefits that come from slowing down that water, like you mentioned with sediment capture, nutrient treatment. And I’m also a hunter as well, and having that habitat there too, because that’s not the goal with everything that we’re doing within our ag drainage water management industry, that’s not the goal, is save, we’re going to farm everything. I think there’s a balance that needs to get struck between having some of that habitat, having those kidneys on the earth, but then also having that production side of things and being able to have that work together.

Samantha Ewald (10:26):

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I came from the Prinsco world. I understand why people are tiling, and why we’re doing it, and the need for it. I come from a farming background. I was raised on dairy farms, my parents were raised on dairy farms, so I understand the need for that. There’s no doubt about that. I think with everything in the world in life, there needs to be a balance. If we were to, like you said, completely farm every single piece, we’re going to have a lot of other issues. And I think looking back at some of the history of just drainage in general, there was laws that said right when Minnesota was even a state, they said, “Yep, you’re okay to start draining things.” And then it got a little bit further, but then at some point we realized there’s some other effects to this. Yes, we’re getting great production, we’re getting water off the landscape.

(11:09):

There was even language out there that’s like, water is not good. It’s the bad thing, any surface water. And that’s since changed because we’re realizing how important that is. And I think that was just a mindset change of we’re learning new things. I mean, as you guys are innovating products at Prinsco, you’re learning new things. Tile drainage has changed a lot in the last 50 years. So, there’s a balance with everything. The goal for Ducks Unlimited is to just to not let that spread even further. We’re trying to stop that rapid loss of wetlands, because like I said, they have benefits to both wildlife and people. And that’s even in the Ducks Unlimited mission. The Ducks Unlimited mission is not to create hunting properties for people. It is to conserve, restore wetlands for North America’s waterfall. And so, that benefits both animals and people.

Trey Allis (12:00):

And talk about a little bit. So I mean, obviously there’s a lot of historical loss of wetlands throughout history, and again especially upper Midwest, things like that. Where are you seeing some of those opportunities to restore and kind of flip those landscapes back to more natural native habitats?

Samantha Ewald (12:20):

And there’s a lot of pieces of land out there that are just incredibly difficult to farm. You’ve tried everything. You can tile drain the heck out of it, maybe you don’t have the right elevations to drain, maybe there’s no county or district place a tie in tile, and so there’s places out there that it’s like, you know what? Let’s take this piece of land and let’s put it to a better use. And so that’s where a lot of the pieces come to them.

(12:47):

There are people who said, “You know what? It’s just not worth it anymore. It’s time to just let that little piece go and let the rest do its great opportunities in production.” And so those pieces of land, actually, when we look at ducks specifically, we want to try and find those pieces of land that are close to each other. So you can have one wetland over here, and one over here, and one over here, but if you have them kind of in a little quarter, half mile, mile radius, ducks actually like that better. And that’s better for production. So that’s a lot of the goals is where can we find pieces of land to add onto a public place or where are there already wetlands that are doing really well that we can add onto that as well?

Trey Allis (13:25):

They just like being close to their friends or they-

Samantha Ewald (13:28):

Well, they like, so think about if you wanted to be out in nature, it’s different to go to a park in the middle of a city versus go to the boundary waters. So if you can find a bigger area, they’re more comfortable in one nest in those areas.

Trey Allis (13:42):

Got you. So I mean, mostly focused around some of those bigger nesting habitat areas.

Samantha Ewald (13:45):

And that’s the whole piece of the Minnesota and North Dakota. We’re in the Prairie Pothole region. We are a prime nesting habitat. And when ducks nest, they produce more. And so the focus of Ducks Unlimited, a lot of that is in the Prairie Pothole region all throughout the nation. You’ve got everyone everywhere. But that Prairie Pothole region has a lot of impact on the duck populations.

Trey Allis (14:08):

Favorite duck hunt that you’ve been on?

Samantha Ewald (14:10):

Favorite duck hunt?

Trey Allis (14:11):

I know I didn’t prep you with that question.

Samantha Ewald (14:12):

Oh, man. Well, gosh. So my first project I started at Ducks Unlimited, it was actually probably 30 minutes from my house. It was called Stuart WPA, and it was my first project. I had a big learning curve. I mean, I came from making pipe, and doing pipe, and then having to learn just a little more in depth on that whole side. I mean, we have the engineering principles, but there’s a lot of details about ducks that I never thought I would know. And so that was my first project. I learned a lot from it. And this last, not this last summer, but the summer before or fall before, we don’t hunt ducks in the summer.

Trey Allis (14:51):

I was going to say, “Come on.”

Samantha Ewald (14:53):

The fall before that, I was actually able to go and hunt that property with my family and shoot a teal out of there. And then had my first trained duck dog go get that teal. And so it was super cool, because I knew that site so well. I’d stared at that thing on the computer for months and analyzed the heck out of it, but then I got to go walk out a mile into that site everyone else does after construction, and work for it, and get some ducks. So that was pretty dang rewarding, I would say.

Trey Allis (15:20):

Cool. Yep. That’s awesome. Right on. That was just a sidebar. Sorry to flip that.

Samantha Ewald (15:26):

No, you’re good.

Trey Allis (15:27):

Back to some of your projects and whatnot. Maybe what are, I guess some of the numbers, I don’t know if you really have them, but as far as impact that you guys are doing on wetlands, whether that’s the acres that’s reintroduced, or projects, number of projects that you’ve been on, but what is all going on currently and what have you done seeing throughout the last few years?

Samantha Ewald (15:50):

Yeah, I think the easiest number to remember is last year Ducks Unlimited hit a million acres of conserved area in one year, a million acres in one year. That was the biggest achievement they’ve had in years. I mean, every year they keep doing more and more and more all throughout the United States, but to conserve a million acres in one year is crazy. I have all the numbers written down for all the Minnesota side, but just that first, that achievement, is just crazy to see. That number just isn’t how many acres of wetlands. That would be crazy if we had that much acres of water. So that number is anything from upland restoration, like ducks need wetlands, but they also need uplands. So, pheasant hunters out there too. They’re also getting that benefit as well. So a lot of that concludes the uplands.

(16:39):

That includes things too, of grazing programs. So we’ve got biologists and other crews that are doing other pieces. So I mean, if they go and say, talk to a farmer and say, “You’ve got this many acres, let’s create a program so that grass can keep growing, it can create habitat, and you can have a rotating schedule, and here’s how we’re going to seed that. Here’s how we’re going to modify that.” So, those acres count as well. So, there’s a lot of different avenues that create the acres of conservation. You enhance, you restore, you protect, there’s all different ways to conserve, and it’s not just make a wetland that accounts for that. There’s a lot of other aspects of DU that are creating that number.

Trey Allis (17:17):

It’s not just digging a hole and holding more water. There’s a little more to it.

Samantha Ewald (17:22):

I mean, sometimes it is just digging out the wetland and creating more water, yes, but a lot of the times there’s a lot more to it than just that.

Trey Allis (17:29):

Cool. What’s some of your favorite projects or your type of work that you’ve been involved with at DU?

Samantha Ewald (17:36):

Well, you can probably guess my favorite type of work at DU is when involves tile, because I know tile, we know tile.

Trey Allis (17:43):

You get to be the experts around everybody. Yep.

Samantha Ewald (17:45):

It’s funny, I get the calls from other states saying, “Hey, we’ve got pipe in the ground. We don’t tile like you guys, but how do we do this?” So yes, it’s been really helpful. Almost every project that we work on as Ducks Unlimited engineering has some sort of tile in it. We work with a lot of private tiles, either rerouting around, or replacing old, or what we call daylight, is we’ll take a tile from somewhere else, we’ll let it open to the earth, and then that’ll dump right into the wetland, like 10 feet up the wetland. So we do a lot of that, and that’s the whole dump the tile into a basin, let it get its water quality and then send it wherever it needs to after that. But some of my favorite projects are the extensive tile removal ones. We do have one in southern Minnesota. It’s not done yet.

(18:32):

I started it when I started at Ducks Unlimited, our projects can go from anywhere from a year, a little over to 10 years. It all just depends on what’s going on and all the approvals and the waiting games on everything. But this project in southern Minnesota is a complete shallow lake restoration, meaning right now there’s saturated soils, but there’s no pooling of water in this entire shallow lake. And in this project, there was a county tile that ran straight through the middle of it, and then also branched off the sides, and then also tied into everyone else’s tile. So I can’t even tell you how much tile was on this site and coming in and about, but to look at every single one of those, make sure the flow rates that are existing off of that and being able to either match that or improve that while still restoring a wetland.

(19:20):

It takes a lot of numbers and a lot of crunching, a lot of hydro CAD modeling, but it’s exciting to be able to do that dual benefit. The farmers around the area knew that that county tile was failing and they knew they were having issues with it. We saw the blowouts along the tile when we went out there to go survey it. And so it’s fun to just tie the two worlds together for the benefit of everybody and get some more ducks on there.

Trey Allis (19:47):

So I guess with a project like that, I mean, you said you have infrastructure that’s in place failing, going down, which is the opportunity for an improvement, either of that tile or an improvement of, like you said, with the land, with the wetlands and doing something a little bit differently there. I assume all that tile was tied into other, like you said, other tiles-

Samantha Ewald (20:07):

Branches, yep.

Trey Allis (20:08):

[inaudible 00:20:08] further up. So, is that what you were talking about with bringing in that daylight, essentially dumping that into the wetland and holding it there for a while, for a period of time with some treatment, and then it continues on downstream somewhere either the back end of that tile, or [inaudible 00:20:23]?

Samantha Ewald (20:23):

Yeah. Luckily for this project, the start of it was at the project, the shallow lake site, so we’re not catching something miles and miles down with a lot of flow rates. We’re just catching the neighbors tile. And so what we’re doing with this is some of them were too deep where we have to actually route them around, but then most of them were able to daylight into that basin, and at the end of that basin there’s an outlet structure. We’re going to put a concrete structure with some stop log weirs, similar to an agri-drain structure. It’s a little bit bigger than that, and then that’ll control the rate to go to the county tile. That’s downstream. So we’re utilizing some of the things that are there, but then we’re also improving it in some ways. It’s going to be a really great project, it just takes a while. I think next summer is when construction will start, as long as permitting goes well and approvals go well, then everything else, there’s just a lot to it.

Trey Allis (21:12):

Yep. Right on. I mean, I’ve heard the theory before too is just make the wet spots wetter where they make sense. And that’s what we were talking about before of having that balance between, hey, we can keep production in some areas, but if we know we’re having issues and instead of continuing to battle those issues, let’s look at doing something a little bit different. And that’s a cool story, cool opportunity for something like that that you get involved with.

Samantha Ewald (21:35):

Yeah, there’s even other ones too that we’re just starting on the same kind of county tile, county tile failing. I mean, I just went and looked at some, I’ll show you pictures afterwards, but it’s like clay tile that just crumbling. It’s pretty cool because in my line of work too, I get to see what’s been buried and see why it failed where it’s at. So I get to see the opposite side of you guys. But it’s interesting, you learn a lot when you start digging up dirt. We can’t see a lot what’s going under underneath the water. So when we’re digging that up, we learn a lot of our projects do like tile investigations too. So we go in with literally an excavator and we start digging into a fine tile, note where that tile is at, what the size is, how it’s flowing, and then repair it and put it back so that we know what we’ve got to design to when we actually get to a construction.

(22:20):

We don’t want to cut someone’s tile in the middle of the spring and then all of a sudden there’s a pool of water, or you name it on that, but there’s a lot of fun things that we can do to improve some of the structure that’s out there, but it also is a limiter. I know I’ve got a limiting pipe downstream from a tile, and I know that’s what my limiter is, but I need to make sure I’m putting in the correct capacity of that pipe as well.

Trey Allis (22:42):

Cool. Maybe switching gears a little bit, and we kind of mentioned some of those learning and growth over the years, and like I said, we got to start our careers together. What’s some, I guess, advice or maybe some learning moments or ah-ha moments that you’ve had through your career that got you to where you’re at here?

Samantha Ewald (23:01):

I think pipe on a screen, pipe on design, pipe on the plant is very different than putting it in the ground. I think we knew that. We know it’s not the same thing, but when you’re physically getting out there and working directly with contractors, that is when the real learning happens. A lot of the work that we’re doing is replacing failing structures from the last 50 or a hundred years, we’re making them better. Corrugated metal deteriorates, things happen, grounds shift, people have new motives, so we’re going and replacing a lot of those. And so you learn how people did things and then you shift and figure out how to do it differently. But some of the things, even a few months ago, we put in 24 inch dual wall to replace a county main, and we had to video it, look at it, and see what it did. And these pipes were 25 feet underground, under the hill in some spots.

(24:00):

And so you’re trying to design the best you can to that, but then all of a sudden you start encountering water in the trench, and as you and I know, water in the trenches for one, difficult to deal with, but you got to put the right bedding in some of that, otherwise you’re not going to get that compaction on the pipe. So completely shifting and saying, “This is what we had on the plans, but now we’re seeing that that’s not the condition out in the field.” We’ve got to totally swap and 180 that, and then make sure we’re installing that pipe correctly. And then repairing pipe out in the field, that is not fun. I have also learned that is not fun, especially when water is flowing. So just all of those things, we know that it’s not very fun, but just to experience that firsthand is just you get a real understanding for some of that.

Trey Allis (24:46):

Yeah. Hopefully there’s some tile contractors out there listening, and that’s what they’re saying too, like, “Yeah. No crap. That’s what we’ve been dealing with.”

Samantha Ewald (24:52):

Exactly.

Trey Allis (24:53):

But no, I would echo that as well, is that is something to, like you said, everything works good in a technical note or in a guide or when you’re typing something up and yeah, I can draw up whatever you want and have it look really good and have the best recommendations, but until you get hands-on with actually doing some of this stuff and understanding what it’s like to be wet and muddy and pissed off.

Samantha Ewald (25:16):

And cold and done for the day.

Trey Allis (25:21):

Yep. Yep. And maybe that’s my point, or my lesson is, hey, there’s some engineers out here that are trying to sympathize and understand what’s going on there. But that’s always been my advice to a lot of younger people or people getting into, or coming out of college, and getting into the industry a little bit is, “Hey, go out on site and go check out what these folks are dealing with.” Whether that’s, I think something that probably both you and I did is, hey, there’s a fitting that isn’t working well and there’s some angry contractors that are doing it. All right, go out and talk to them and try. You try doing it yourself and figuring it out. And yeah, you learn a lot that way. And that’s, again, when I’ve learned the most. And what I’ve learned the most is getting out and talking with different people and getting out and experience some things and working hands on with a lot of that stuff.

Samantha Ewald (26:07):

And I’ll tell you, Marmac couplers do not work good when it’s cold and they do not work well when it’s wet, but it’s fun to just see all the different pieces of it and having, I would say it’s two ways when you try and get the experience, if you’re a contractor or someone out in the field, keep giving feedback to the people that are giving you that knowledge. If it’s your sales rep, if it’s your engineer, give that feedback. Because if we don’t hear some of that, we really don’t know what’s going on too. And then, I think asking questions in both sides just to try to understand things. And we’ve had contractors just like, “Does the stripe need to be at the top of the pipe?” No, that’s just an indicator. But you ask the question and that’s great because now, unless there’s perforations on the bottom and et cetera, et cetera.

Trey Allis (26:57):

We just went through this training today with some of our new hires, that’s great.

Samantha Ewald (26:59):

But just asking questions in both ways, I think that’s how we learn from each other. Don’t be embarrassed to ask the dumb questions. I have been asking the dumb questions because it’s important to know it rather than not, and then make a mistake or make someone’s life a little harder with that. And understanding, why do we start with pipe? Why do we push the spigot into the bell so we know that bell doesn’t create a shovel? It’s just all those things, the more we’re willing to just share back and forth with things of what’s working and what’s not working, I think that’s just the biggest success that you can find on things.

Trey Allis (27:29):

Yep. Well said. That’s good point. What’s maybe something that you wish you learned earlier in your career?

Samantha Ewald (27:39):

I wish I would’ve went to civil engineering school. I guess. We do a lot of concrete structures and a lot of civil engineering pieces, like I had to learn serving completely from brand new. It would’ve been a little nice to not have that huge learning curve, but we went to school for agriculture and biosystem engineering. I mean, did you know what you wanted to do when you got out of school? Something ag related?

Trey Allis (28:03):

Yep. Probably a little more than you.

Samantha Ewald (28:05):

Yeah.

Trey Allis (28:06):

Isn’t your PE in civil though?

Samantha Ewald (28:07):

My PE is in civil, yes. But that was another learning curve.

Trey Allis (28:07):

I was going to say that’s another, because having to learn another for that engineering discipline.

Samantha Ewald (28:12):

I didn’t go to school for that, so you go to school and you try to find what you think your fit is, and then we end up at print school in the agricultural setting, but a lot of what we do is civil engineering, or we did with civil engineering, and I’m doing even more of that. So it’s hard to, in school, to get exposure to everything. You try your best on things, but then afterwards just getting exposure. Looking at LinkedIn, reading articles, listening to this podcast, you learn a lot. So I wish I could get the information faster, but you just only have enough time in the day.

Trey Allis (28:47):

Yep, that’s right. Well, another one of our employees said that before too, is anybody can get an engineering degree as long as you know the system and what to play with. But it all kind of sets you apart, is what other experiences are you doing? Is that your internships? Is that working on your farm? Is that picking up other odd summer jobs? Is that, I guess doing any number of things to kind of build out your kind base of learning. And like what you’ve been saying is you get to learn from a lot of different avenues. You ask those questions in different environments with different people. That builds you out a lot better to learn more and be more well-rounded and well-versed in a lot of different things. And I think that’s what I’ve seen from a lot of successful folks within our industry, within our company and other colleagues as well.

Samantha Ewald (29:32):

Yeah, I mean, going to Agriculture and Biosystem Engineering College, I don’t think I would’ve had the knowledge of tile drainage that was, but there’s definitely pieces here and there that would be more helpful as well.

Trey Allis (29:46):

Yep, for sure.

Samantha Ewald (29:46):

One of the other points to make is that, and I touched about a little bit, but Ducks Unlimited has hundreds of employees. I don’t, I think it’s, I’m not going to even guess, because there’s so many employees. I think it’s almost the size of Prinsco itself. So we’ve got our small regional offices, you’ve got regional offices in each, it’s like each state, but some states are two. So there’s an office in Minnesota, there’s an office in Iowa. There’s one that covers Wisconsin, Michigan. So there’s little field offices within Ducks and Limited, there’s four regional. So if you’re to take the country and divide it in the middle and the half, there’s four regional offices. So all of the little ones they report to their regional and then the regional reports to national headquarters that’s in Memphis, Tennessee. And at each of those different levels, there’s the people that I mentioned, the engineers, the biologists, the leadership teams, the scientists, the other pieces.

(30:38):

But there is people that are going and working with large companies like Coca-Cola and ExxonMobil for sustainability practices of we have the infrastructure to do some conservation efforts on behalf of you, how do you want us to do that? We’ve got people doing that. We’ve got policy team who are stationed in the capitol and having these conversations daily of how does laws both state and federal level affect what we’re doing and how do we make sure that we’re still keeping that conversation open and not forgetting about them. And so there’s just more to all of this than we’re talking about today. And I encourage everyone to take a look at the website and just go to About DU and look at some of the things because it is not just digging a hole to find a wetland. And it’s not just the banquets. There is a lot of pieces to Ducks Unlimited.

Trey Allis (31:28):

Right on. Favorite duck to hunt?

Samantha Ewald (31:31):

Ooh, favorite duck to hunt, favorite duck to eat would be a mallard, so that’s close. I kind of like hunting teal, because you got to be a pretty dang good shot in order to get them.

Trey Allis (31:44):

They’re too fast.

Samantha Ewald (31:45):

They’re so fast. But I just got, once a year, we all get together on the Ducks Unlimited side on personal time and go and hunt on a project in the past. And one of those, some people might recognize is Lake Christina. It used to be a very… Apparently back in its heyday, it was a canvas back central. It was like the breeding habitat for most canvas backed ducks in the region or the state. And then when that lake turned eutrophic, a lot of them left and they didn’t have a lot of breeding. And so Ducks Unlimited projects, way before my time, went and allowed that lake to be drawn down so that it could reset itself essentially and bring the water levels back up. And because they’re able to manage that, the canvas backs came back. And it is crazy to see all the ducks out there.

(32:37):

I shot my first canvas back out there last fall and just got the mount back a few months ago, and that’s hanging on my wall. And it’s just a good reminder that that whole thing can go full circle and it takes a long time. The things that you and I are talking about and people that talk about in conservation, it’s not an overnight fix. These are long term projects and sometimes that gets frustrating to see some of those impacts, but just to see that go full circle and be with a really good team that I’m on just makes it all worthwhile.

Trey Allis (33:07):

Awesome. Well, thanks a lot, Sam. Appreciate your time, appreciate being able to catch up again and coming on The Water Table and sharing about what you do and what Ducks Unlimited does with bringing that conservation. Again, having that balance of what’s out there on the landscape. And we focus again, a lot on production, a lot on moving water. It’s okay to hang on to some of that in some spots.

Samantha Ewald (33:30):

Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

Trey Allis (33:32):

Appreciate it.

Podcast Episode 132

Ducks Unlimited: Balancing Wetland Conservation & Agricultural Production

Episode 132 | 35 min

With Guests:

Listen Now

Guest Bios

Samantha Ewald

Trey Allis

Transcript

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Podcast Episode 132

Ducks Unlimited: Balancing Wetland Conservation & Agricultural Production

Episode 132 | 35 min

With Guests:

Listen Now

Also Available On

Guest Bios

Samantha Ewald

Trey Allis

Transcript

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