Podcast Episode 95

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Trailblazers & Torch Carriers…Taking Water Management to New Levels

Trailblazers & Torch Carriers…Taking Water Management to New Levels

Episode 95 | 33 min

With Guest:

Alex Buseman, Graduate Assistant, Iowa State University

In this episode of the Water Table Podcast, Jamie sits down with Alex Buseman, a graduate assistant at Iowa State University who is currently working on three research projects dealing with water quality in agriculture. Does the type of woodchips in a bioreactor matter? How does the only dual-chamber bioreactor in the world function? What is the Forest to Farm Program? How long do bioreactors last? Listen and learn how the next generation is carrying the research torch to ensure farmers can implement cutting-edge water management practices.

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It’s hard to care about something you can’t see... So we have to educate people.

— Alex Buseman

Guest Bio

Alex Buseman grew up in a small town in Northern Iowa and attended DMACC, followed by Iowa State University, graduating with a degree in Environmental Science. He’s now a graduate assistant at Iowa State and involved in three research projects involving woodchip bioreactors. Alex will graduate in April and become Conservation Services Manager at the Iowa Soybean Association, where he will help landowners across Iowa implement conservation practices on their land.

Jamie Duininck (00:01):
Well, welcome to the Water Table podcast. We’re now into 2024 and looking for a great year of more topics, education and just talking about water quality in agriculture.

(00:20):
Today I have Alex Buseman with me. Alex is currently a graduate assistant at Iowa State University and an Iowa native, and excited to have Alex on today and just talk a little bit about what he’s involved with there from the standpoint of research and what they’re doing at Iowa State on water quality. As many of the listeners know, we’ve had Dr. Matt Helmers on many times, and he’s quickly becoming an icon in this whole industry of water quality in agriculture, so it’s fun to have someone of the next generation, as Alex is, to just talk with us about what he thinks and what he’s doing and the exciting things that we can do to impact our farms for the better with water quality. So, welcome to the podcast, Alex.

Alex Buseman (01:15):
Thank you. I’m excited for it.

Jamie Duininck (01:17):
Yeah, good. Tell us just a little bit about your background. I know you’re from northern Iowa, but how did you end up where you’re at, at Iowa State now? Tell us a little bit about that.

Alex Buseman (01:31):
That’s a funny story, because I never knew what I wanted to do with my life out of high school. I went to Des Moines Area Community College right out of high school, and I moved to Ankeny and didn’t know what to do, so I started taking some random gen eds classes and took a random environmental science course and learned all about nutrient flexion in Iowa and Mississippi River and Gulf of Mexico, stuff like that. So, fell in love with the idea. Graduated from DMAC in 2020, and then I moved to Ames, went to Iowa State, started taking any class I could that involved water quality and water conservation, that sort of stuff. So I’d say my education grew at Iowa State, involving water of course. And then I accepted a role with Matt Helmers as an undergrad intern for his lab. And I worked in agricultural water management throughout the two years I was here at Iowa State. And that helped me get to where I’m at now, because I’m a graduate research assistant with Dr. Michelle Soupir, working with [inaudible 00:02:55] field work and diving into the world of agricultural water management.

Jamie Duininck (03:06):
Before we get into some of the specific questions, how do you see your peers, whether when you were in undergrad or now, how do they think about the paths we’re going down for water quality and is there a lot of excitement for what we can do in our industry to just do things different, but that really impact us for the positive with water quality?

Alex Buseman (03:35):
Yeah. We have a lot of work to do, that’s for sure, but I’d say a lot of my colleagues are involved in water quality in some way or another. And so there’s a lot of optimism going forward. It’s only going to get better from now as more people are recognizing the problem and doing what they can to solve it.

Jamie Duininck (04:00):
One of the things I wanted to talk to you about was this dual-chamber bioreactor and pump. Can you explain what that is and why that’s exciting? And to my knowledge, Iowa State, this is the only place in the world that’s doing this right now. Why is this important?

Alex Buseman (04:19):
From our knowledge, this is the only pumped bioreactor in our world. It wasn’t planned like that originally. A dual-chamber bioreactor is basically two bioreactors in one. It’s connected to the same tie line and it’s meant to treat higher flows than a typical bioreactor would receive. That’s why there’s two. We had this field that was expected to have a lot of tile drainage, and then that just wasn’t the case. It was just an error somewhere. And so the hydraulic residence time of the tile water in these bioreactor chambers was really high, which is not ideal because with high hydraulic residence times, there can be complete nitrate removal, which isn’t ideal because in a high HRT setting, hydraulic residence time, there can be methane production when all the nitrate is reduced. That can move on to reducing the carbon dioxide in the water and so it can lead to methane production.

(05:34):
To solve this, we had a creek adjacent to the chambers and we thought maybe we could pull some of the high concentrated nitrates from the water, pump the water from the creek through the bioreactor and then send it out back into the creek, just no nitrates. So we got that going in 2022, and it’s been running ever since, except that the project just ended recently. It did show promising results. We were able to have flow when most bioreactors weren’t having flow, so that was good. The only problem I would say is that it introduced sediment into the chambers, which can lead to blockages and more problems and that sort of stuff.

Jamie Duininck (06:38):
Sure, sure.

Alex Buseman (06:39):
But it was good. I thought it was a interesting project.

Jamie Duininck (06:45):
The sediment, is that probably just because of higher flows, that that’s how that got there?

Alex Buseman (06:50):
Right, yeah. Because typically in a tile you won’t have that much sediment in the water, but when you pull it from the creek, it’s just going to increase it.

Jamie Duininck (07:03):
So that probably means if it’s too much and it blocks it, that it just has a shorter life.

Alex Buseman (07:10):
Right.

Jamie Duininck (07:10):
Yeah. Okay. Good. Well, we’ll be excited to hear more of the results of that as you guys share them and understand them better. There was another project, this Forest to Farm Project. Can you talk about that? I’m very unfamiliar, and maybe to share with our listeners what that’s about and what you’re doing there.

Alex Buseman (07:32):
Sure. That’s a new project we got going on here. We’re trying to tie forest management strategies to water quality strategies. We have these lower marketable trees and forest. These would be ash trees because they’re all going down with the emerald ash borer. We have hackberry trees and hickory trees. They’re not useless, but they’re considered less profitable for, mainly forest management. So the idea is to harvest those trees to make room for more multiple trees like the oaks or what you have. So we are currently working with some people in the Forestry Department, in the [inaudible 00:08:26] department, at Iowa State. Dr. Billy Beck is who I’m referring to, and he’s the wood expert on campus here, and he is trying to develop a supply chain of these trees. And so we’re shaping up these trees and putting them into bioreactors in an isolated setting. So only hackberries are going into these one chambers. And so we’ve done some preliminary results in some column bioreactors in the lab, which is just creating a field scale bioreactor and shrinking that down to about a foot long or so, maybe a little bit longer than that.

(09:12):
And that can show us what we’re going to see. Obviously, it’s not going to be exactly the same since it’s not a field scale bioreactor, it’s not exposed to the field settings. And so we’ve had these hackberry and hickory trees, the wood chips seem to remove the most nitrate than other trees or significantly more I should say. And that’s motivating us to do this at field scale. So there’s still many bioreactors in construction or in planning. We have 20 or so bioreactors planned and maybe eight in the ground already. So we’re going to have a few standard with just the random mix. We’re going to have, I think, three to five hickory, hackberry and ash and then compare across the few we have and see if we can influence how bioreactors are going to be constructed in the future.

Jamie Duininck (10:37):
Very interesting. I look forward to… There’s probably a lot of questions there, but do you have any idea why he’s picking the types like hackberry? What’s the reasons for that? Is it more absorption?

Alex Buseman (10:58):
I wouldn’t say we have a direct answer on why these wood species are better at removing nitrate than others. In my opinion, it’s just because there’s less naturally occurring and microbial properties within them. I know Billy has also talked about the spore distributions, which are just tiny little holes in the chips. He would be an excellent person to bring on and talk about it, but also we’re trying to think about the marketability of these trees in the forest. These trees are great in abundance, but they are not necessarily profitable for these forests. So we’re trying to take those trees out of the forest to allow more room for more economical trees and then also improve water quality.

Jamie Duininck (12:08):
Good. That’ll be really interesting to get those results. And that’s really where I’m going with the next question around some of what you’re doing in your thesis and decades old bioreactors and what can we do? I think we’re getting more and more information, more and more time on these bioreactors to really know what we have and that they do work, but how can we improve them and have maybe high performance bioreactors with specific varieties of wood chips. So that’ll be really exciting to see them and look forward to that. We’ll for sure have you or others back on to talk about that in the future, whether that’s next year or in the future, because I’m curious about that ’cause I really want to know why too. It’s interesting. But talk to me a little bit about that, about your thesis and what you’re doing there and what you’re finding, if you can share any of that at this point.

Alex Buseman (13:09):
Yeah, absolutely. The main research question I have with this project is how long do these things last? That’s a very common question across all landowners. They don’t want to invest in something that is short-term. So I basically want to investigate how long these things last and what’s driving these things, what’s deteriorating their performance over time. I have three sites in this project, all of which are nine to 10 years old. They were installed in 2014, 2013. So I reached out to these landowners and I asked them if they’d be okay with me coming out and monitoring their wood chip bioreactor, and they were all for it, excited ’cause they were all questioning the same thing I wanted to answer, how long do these things last and how do they do when they’re this old? So I started out with just basic water samples and we’re seeing how they are removing the nitrate.

(14:17):
And then also we’re doing these tracer tests because these tracer tests, they show us how flow is moving within the chamber. And so to explain a tracer test, we make a big plug, a jug of water full of a naturally occurring, non-toxic and conservative chemical. And so we input that into the inlet and then sample the outlet at certain time intervals, whether it’s 20 minutes or 30 minutes or an hour. It all depends on the flow. And we use auto samplers for that. So it can go for multiple days if we need. And so there’s a bunch of math calculations that will describe the flow through the chamber. If it’s experiencing preferential flow patterns, if it’s non-uniform flow, if there’s dead zones or gaps that are just not experiencing any flow, that can also paint the picture of the performance because in an ideal bioreactor, you want ideal flow, uniform flow. You don’t want that there are many dead zones or gaps where there’s no flow moving.

(15:49):
So we’re doing that at all three sites along with the nitrate removal, and we’re seeing differing results across all three sites. I’ll start with the first one. This is a big one located in Storey County. This site is unique because it receives a ton of flow throughout the year. I bet it’s flowing right now and it’s snowy and cold. So this site is great at nitrate removal. Nearly complete nitrogen removal across the board here. So that was good. And then I moved onto the tracer test and conducted that. But the curve we see, the calculations we see there, are showing non-preferable flow patterns. So what’s going on? I tried to look into the results and I found that there’s sediment being delivered in these high flows. So when the flows coming in real fast into the water control structure, it’s also bringing sediment with it. And so when it’s going into the chamber and slowing down, a lot of that sediment is being deposited.

(17:15):
When I first went to this site, this would’ve been in April or May of 2023, I was poking around in the water control structure and I found nearly two feet of sediment just built up in that water control structure. So it’s blocking the flow going into the bioreactor. And so with that, the hydraulic residence time is increasing because it can’t flow perfectly through the chamber without any blockages. And so I had to inform the landowner, “There’s probably a broken tile line somewhere upstream that’s letting that sediment in.” And so I told him that he needs to be vigilant of that, so he can either leave it and come flush the sediment out. You flush the sediment out of the inland water control structure by just pulling all the stop blocks and that’ll just bypass all the sediment. And so I told him that he should either look into fixing the upstream top breakage, or continue just to look for that sediment buildup and flush it as needed. I recommended once a month at least. And so that was the story for that one.

(18:53):
There’s another site that I have in Dyersville, Iowa. That’s northeast Iowa. This bioreactor is interesting because it has really high nitrate concentrations coming in. Our suspicion is that it’s receiving that inorganic fertilizer and then it’s also receiving manure applications. So we’re seeing high nitrates coming in. So I visited the site, just the same as the last one, started taking water samples, and we looked at the nitrate removal and it was very poor. So the inlet would be about 30 and the out load would be maybe 28 milligrams per liter of nitrate, which is very poor when you think of a bioreactor. You can think of it removing 60% to 90% or even a hundred percent. This is experiencing less than 20% removal, if I remember correctly. And so we’re trying to think of what’s limiting this nitrate removal. Is it temperature because it’s a microbial driven process, so with low temperatures, there’s low microbial activity. And so I started looking at the temperature. Temperature was normal across all bioreactors. It’s pretty standard and decided that wasn’t the limiting factor.

(20:35):
Also, I looked at the dissolved oxygen concentrations of the bioreactor. Dissolved oxygen is important because denitrification is… It works in anaerobic environments. So anaerobic meaning there’s no oxygen. It’s an airtight chamber and there’s no oxygen. So I looked at the inlet and outlet dissolved oxygen concentrations and decided that wasn’t a limiting factor either because at the outlet it was basically zero milligrams per liter of dissolved oxygen. So then that leads me to look at the flow again. So I did another tracer test and I compared it to the previous test they did back in 2017, and it looked optimal. There was no problem happening with the flow.

(21:44):
So I’m thinking, “What is causing the problem? Why is there poor nitrate removal in this bioreactor?” And my experiences with the Forest to Farm Project makes me think of what’s going on in the wood chips. Back in 2013, 2014, we weren’t keeping track of the wood chips that were going into these chambers. And so I’m thinking, “Maybe the wood chips are limiting the microbial activity to remove all these nitrates.” So I think we’re planning to sample some wood chips. So we’re going to go up there and bring a shovel and start digging and taking a sample of these wood chips to figure out what’s exactly inside here and we’re going to determine if that is the limiting factor. Right now that’s our best guess. Everything else that’s going on is optimal. It doesn’t seem like there’s a problem other than the nitrate removal. So that’s what we got going on for that one.

(23:00):
The third site is located near Washington, Iowa, so southeast Iowa. This site is also 10 years old. And so same thing, I started with sampling water to look at the nitrate removal. This one seems perfectly fine after 10 years. We’re not seeing any sediment build up in the inlet. The nitrate removal’s fine. The flow has not been completed. We haven’t done a trace test there yet. We tried and there was a malfunction with the auto sample, so we had to scratch that data and then we’re going to try again, come snow melt. But for now, that site looks perfectly fine. It’s removing nitrate, it’s receiving sufficient flow and all looks well. Some good news for that landowner. But that’s what I have going on with that projects, looking into what’s causing these issues.

(24:09):
So the sediment for the first one, potentially the wood chips, that’s our best guess for that one now. And then also we’re seeing these things can last longer than 10 years. That’s the deadline or the lifespan we predict these things to last, but that doesn’t mean exactly at 10 years these things are dead and you need to recharge it. It just depends on the site really.

Jamie Duininck (24:41):
I think just listening to that, I think that anyone involved in agriculture in the state of Iowa should be excited about what’s coming and the future of conservation in Iowa, just because there’s a lot going on at Iowa State around the research side, not just what you’re doing, but what others are doing. And I think to expect change, but expect positive change will be something in the future. But just wanted to end with that a little bit is how do you encourage landowners or how do you think we should, maybe not you personally, but how do you think as an industry we should encourage landowners to join the cause and to be thinking about and implementing practices for conservation on their farm?

Alex Buseman (25:35):
That’s a great question and a great challenge to face in the coming future. That’s also what I’ll be doing going forward after I graduate, helping landowners implement conservation practices on their land. First of all, I’ll say we always have to respect the landowner’s decision. It’s their land, their decision. If they don’t want to do anything, that’s okay. It’s hard to care about something that you can’t see. You can’t see the nitrate in the water, and so it’s hard to care about that. I understand that. So we have to be educate these farmers about what’s going on and tie in other ideas. If you put a saturated buffer on your land, and for the listeners that don’t know, a saturated buffer is a vegetative strip that is meant to create a barrier between an agricultural field and a nearby creek stream ditch, that sort of stuff.

(26:59):
And the tile will connect with the saturated buffer and reintroduce the high nitrates in the water with the soil microbes and all that sort of stuff. Helps remove nitrate very well actually. The thing farmers don’t like about it is that it takes a lot of land out of production, so you got to bring in other ideas. How could a saturated buffer be beneficial to a landowner? You got to think of, if these guys hunt, there is new habitat there, it can make your land look more aesthetically pleasing. You just got to think of other ways to motivate people into doing these sorts of things. And say they don’t have the right environment for a saturated buffer, a wood chip bioreactor could fit in anywhere on the farm. As long as there’s tile, it can fit in somewhere.

(28:09):
So we’ve got to think of ways to encourage farmers to do these things. One thing I always like to bring up is Des Moines Water Works. A simple Google search can tell you that the nitrate removal facility they have, costs about $2,000 a day to remove the nitrates in the drinking water for the city of Des Moines. And so this thing isn’t on every day, but over the last 10 years, it has been on for over 400 days, which has resulted in a cost of nearly $5 million. And it increases the rates of the utility use for the people of Des Moines. So if you’ve got family in Des Moines, that might be a motivating factor for you to lower your delivery rates of nitrate into these rivers. And that’s not only for the city of Des Moines, there’s plenty of rivers that are water drinking sources all across the country. And so 10,000 of dollars a day, $5 million over 10 years, the average bioreactor cost is only $8,000. And so I see that as a better financial investment than $10,000 a day for the nitrate removal facility. So it’s just finding multiple examples on what might motivate people to implement these practices.

Jamie Duininck (29:58):
I listen to you, Alex, and it’s exciting to me because I think there’s two generations before you that were the trailblazers in this whole thing in agricultural conservation. And then Dr. Matt Helmers and his generation are the implementers, and it’s your generation that can carry the torch and take that implementation and really make it what it can be. And that’s exciting to me. I’ve been around now for over 25 years in the industry and watched this develop and to see young, smart minds that are willing, able and excited about implementing some of this is fun to see. So keep the work up. It’s great what you’re doing. I’m also just thinking about what you’re just talking about with Iowa and farmers in Iowa, that it’s their land and they have to decide what they want to do on it. And yet when I think about that, that is so true. But it has been ingrained in a farmer’s mind that we keep the land, we keep the land in the family, we keep buying more land when we can. That’s what we do.

(31:07):
And there’s an old saying that would go, “If you love yourself, you buy a condo in Florida, if you love your kids, you buy land and if you love your grandkids, you tile it,” because that’s how long land stays in families. And I think what people like your generation is changing, is that mindset a little bit around, tiling is a foregone conclusion to a farmer. They know they need to do it because it improves the land so much and improves their bottom line. But what’s the next step around water quality? If we love our grandkids, what are we going to do and what can we do to make that water better for them and future generations? So I just want to leave it with that. Excited about what you’re doing. Keep up the hard work and, Alex, we’ll keep you in the loop here at the water table. And as your results come in over the next months and years, let’s keep connected and hear about what you’re up to and the positive impacts you’re having.

Alex Buseman (32:16):
Absolutely. Thank you for having me.

Jamie Duininck (32:18):
Yeah, thanks Alex.

(32:23):
Well, thanks for listening to this episode. I have so much fun recording these. I hope you have as much fun listening as I do recording. These episodes are available on all major podcast platforms as well as YouTube. So find them and download them when you can. Thanks for joining us.