Is drainage water recycling for you?

By Vinayak Shedekar and Elizabeth Schwab, The Ohio State University

The February issue of Ohio’s Country Journal featured an article by Greg LaBarge on “What is drainage water recycling?” (https://ocj.com/2023/02/what-is-drainage-water-recycling/). I decided to continue this conversation, especially for those who may have started wondering what it would take to implement drainage water recycling (DWR) and irrigation for field crops. Let’s try and address some additional questions on DWR. 

What sites are suitable for drainage water recycling? The short answer is: a site that can benefit from both improved drainage and supplemental irrigation. If you know how to access the USDA-NRCS’s Web Soil Survey, you can look up the suitability of the field’s soils for drainage as well as irrigation. The surface topography and the layout of the field’s subsurface drainage system will play an important role in deciding the location of the storage pond, as well as the appropriate irrigation method (subirrigation versus overhead or drip). … Continue reading