How to Get the Best out of your Drainage System

Jun 09, 2022

By Sarah Fronczak and Ehsan Ghane

Are you preparing to add or change out tile lines in you fields? Tune in to the Michigan State University Extension Field Crops Virtual Breakfast on Thursday, June 16, at 7 a.m. Ehsan Ghane, MSU Extension agricultural drainage specialist, will provide research-based recommendations to help producers make the best choices on pipe in their fields.

When you buy your drainage pipe, do you ask yourself if one pipe material removes water more quickly than another? You can get pipes with various perforations. Some pipes remove water more quickly than others, so you can plant on time in spring and harvest on time in fall. A sediment preventive measure is needed in non-cohesive or weakly cohesive soils. Example soils that may cause a sedimentation problem are sand, loamy sand, sandy loam, loam, silt loam, and silt. If you have a drain sedimentation problem, you can use either a sock-wrapped pipe or a sand-slot pipe to prevent drain sedimentation. Join this webinar to learn which of those pipes removes water faster.

Source : msu.edu

Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids