Digging into the Legacy in Dryland Research with Dr. Surendra Singh

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Drew Lyon: Hello, welcome to the WSU Wheat Beat podcast. I’m your host, Drew Lyon, and I want to thank you for joining me as we explore the world of small grains production and research at Washington State University. In each episode, I speak with researchers from WSU and the USDA-ARS to provide you with insights into the latest research on wheat and barley production.

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My guest today is Dr. Surendra Singh. Surendra joined WSU in April 2023 as an assistant professor and director at the Lind Dryland Research Station. His research and extension focus is on resilient and sustainable dryland cropping systems in the region, with wide research areas such as diverse cropping systems, soil moisture storage, organic amendments, long-term research, soil erosion control, soil health, alternative crops, crop rotation, soil acidity, nutrient management, carbon sequestration, grain quality, and farm profitability for dryland farming systems.

Hello, Surendra.

Dr. Surendra Singh: Hey, Drew.

Drew Lyon: That’s quite a wide range of interests there, but all pretty important for dryland farmers in eastern Washington. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about your background and your interest in dryland farming?

Dr. Surendra Singh: Sure. Yeah. Regarding the wide area of research area, as everybody says an agronomist has to wear quite a few hats, so those are few of my hats right now [that] I’m wearing.

So, yeah, a little bit about my background. So, before joining WSU, I was a postdoc at Oregon State University’s Pendleton Research Center, working around all the same area as we just mentioned, mostly into resilient dryland farming appropriation. The initiative, the station had  funding through that, so I was postdoc for two years working on alternative and different kind of cover crops and seeing if there are any suitability in our dryland region, and what we found from the subsequent moisture use and the yield loss from there and what benefit, a little bit into pathology and weed control as well. So, that was my postdoctoral experience.

Before that, I did my Ph.D. at University of Tennessee-Knoxville, where I mostly worked on testing and developing soil health testing methods for the region. And, before that I did my master’s at University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff. And then I’m originally from India, so I did my undergrad in India from Punjab Agricultural University.

Drew Lyon: Okay. So, a lot of different places you’ve stopped along the way to WSU and sounds like they all provided you with some good background for this position in dryland cropping systems.

Dr. Surendra Singh: Yes. It’s kind of a standing water rise to dryland wheat. Quite the spectrum I covered along on the way.

Drew Lyon: Well, that’s good because you bring some different insights perhaps than people who have just focused on dryland research all their career or even farming. So, tell us a little bit about some of the current projects that you’re working on.

Dr. Surendra Singh: So, yeah, as I mentioned, my predecessor was Dr. Bill Schillinger who had been there at Lind Station for about 30 years and following his footstep into the dryland research he initiated and continued throughout his tenure there, and I want to continue that legacy and kind of build upon that. So, yeah, we have quite a few ongoing projects.

Some were inherited, such as long-term trials, long-term crop rotation trials at Ritzville at Ron Jirava’s farms and those have been continued for about over the past 25 years, so I want to continue those. And, looking at the research from the soil health, soil carbon and from that perspective, what are the best indicators we can select from there? How much carbon sequestration we are doing and how those things affect the grain quality and overall yields of each cropping system. So yeah, those are a few questions I want to answer from those long-term experiments.

And in addition to that, we have another trial—it’s called winter pea trial–where we are looking at how including winter peas into [a] three-year rotation will help us quantifying the nitrogen sequestration from there. So, yeah, those are a few projects which I inherited.

And, when I joined last year, we wrote an organic wheat grant to USDA NIFA. In that, we are evaluating whether we can use the perennial legumes and living mulch as a part of the nitrogen sequestration, because in organic wheat, especially during the transition year, it’s been challenging to find the source of nitrogen and probably a little bit of weed control as well–so, using the living mulch and probably perennial living mulch compared to the annual ones to see if we can have a better control on nitrogen and weed management on there. And, we also have a part of grazing that whether we can offset the cost of the living mulch and planting through the grazing.

So, that’s kind of a little out of the box, I was thinking, and we just had the first year of our trial. And so, yeah, I’m really excited about how that affected the soil microbiome and how much nitrogen it put into the soil during the [trial]. So yeah, I’m really excited about it.

Drew Lyon: Yeah, that sounds very interesting. Before coming to WSU in 2012, I did 22 years of dryland cropping systems research in western Nebraska and that included some work in organic. You mentioned the two areas that organic growers really struggle with: nitrogen and weed control. Your idea of using a living mulch to try to deal with both those things is a neat idea. I’ll be curious to see how that works out for you because those are the two problem areas.

So, any particular project you’d like to share results of or that you have results of? I know you just started, so you’re probably just getting some of these underway, but maybe from some of the long-term results? I know you’re bringing more of a soil quality, soils aspect to these systems; Bill Schillinger looked at a lot of soil water and some other aspects. But maybe you bring a slightly different perspective, are you taking a slightly different look at some of these long-term projects and finding some things of interest?

Dr. Surendra Singh: Yes. Yeah. I think Dr. Schillinger did a lot of work on, like, soil moisture and the tillage practices and yield and agronomics and kind of quite extensive work on that. So, what I want to do is, I want to connect soil to that agronomy part, so my area of research would be somewhere in the middle of, like, not going into the core soil microbiology versus the 100% agronomy. I want to have an area which overlaps kind of, that however better soil connects to agronomic output and ultimately the farm profitability and the grain quality. So, those are the things I want to build on.

Drew Lyon: Okay. And anything to report after your first–have you had one or two growing seasons under your belt so far?

Dr. Surendra Singh: Yeah, I kind of jumped into the first one and then this year we had. So yeah, most of the results are kind of still in the air and needs to be calculated and the processing of those samples.

So, one of the trials I’d really like to share is that Dr. Schillinger, he did about eight years of the biosolids research at the station where the treatments were biosolids versus synthetic nitrogen and sulfur fertilizer comparison, and then combine it with the tillage of tandem disc and undercutter tillage. So, those are the four treatments of the trials.

So, the trial was concluded in 2018 and 2019. But when I joined, I was just walking through the field at the station and I saw, like, really lush wheat patches from across the road and I was curious, like, what happened [and] why this wheat looks like much better than the wheat surrounding. It was kind of the dry period, so it was like really moisture stressed like what you’d see late in the summer. So then, we [dug] deeper and we found that was the old biosolids trial where the last application was done in 2016 for the biosolids and tillage both. After that it was just kind of two cycles of regular winter wheat fallow system.

So, we took the sample and just to see if those biosolids effects are still there after seven years. And to our surprise, most of the micronutrients and macronutrients and carbon were there, so that was kind of–I kind of stumbled upon and took a detour from what I was supposed to do. So yeah. And so, then we took the yield measurement and all the biomass and the grain component from those trials. We mapped that out, mapped the plots out back again because we had the coordinates so we could easily go back, dig it deeper, and we found that the yields were higher, biomass was higher. The only things [that] decreased from the biosolids legacy [were] the pH and the thousand kernel weight. So, that was lower in the biosolids except everything like yield, biomass and spike density, everything was quite higher even seven years after the last application.

So, from that, what I learned was these amendments, especially in the dryland system during the active phase of the trial, they may or may not show the effect, but since it’s a dry region, it shows up later as well. And it kind of–I would like to frame it as the legacy effect, if you will.

So, so yeah, [this year] was the third crop we took out from there and the effects are still there. So, I just wanted to put it out there that the effect of any amendment, especially like organic amendment, whether compost, biochar, biosolids, all of that kind of leaves that legacy of it, so we need to understand it better so that we can take the full advantage of it, not while actively applying, but also once we have long discontinued the practices.

So, good or bad, it’s going to be there. Like in our study, in the deeper side of it, there were some concerns about the heavy metals into the biosolids there, so we tested the grain for 12 different heavy metals. The most of the test available and most of those were of concern, and all of them were below detection level of any kind. So, that was my first sigh of relief. Generally, the question comes up that once we apply biosolids, it tends to increase the heavy metals concentration in the grain. So, that was my first clue and we tested it, and all of them were below detection level. So, that was good. And I showed these results during the field day as well.

Drew Lyon: Okay. Did you see any difference between the two different tillage treatments or was it pretty much just a biosolid versus no biosolid effect?

Dr. Surendra Singh: So, yes, tillage did have a legacy as well, which was surprising that after that we kind of moved those plots to regular winter wheat fallow till systems. But, the tillage legacy was more prominent into the organic matter content of the soil, so the interaction between biosolid and the least disturbance was undercutter. So, [the] combination of biosolids with the undercutter showed the highest organic matter in the soil. So, yes, tillage legacy is also there, but between the tillage versus biosolids, biosolids was the more prominent. But, if you just compare undercutter versus the disc, the undercutter was the better one. And it has the legacy even after seven years. So, that was really surprising to me. I did not expect to see [that when] we did like two crop cycles when the trial was going on and then we just discontinued it for two more years.

So yeah, that was surprising. So, I just want to say that whatever the decision we make on our farm, that has a long-term kind of effects and it does show up later as well.

Drew Lyon: I think that points to the importance of long-term research, particularly in a dryland, highly variable climate like you work in. Too often we only get funding to do a study for two, three, four years and things take longer to happen down in that soil, don’t they? And maybe, I think you infer that maybe because of our lower rainfall, the cycling, the things that happen in the soil do so more slowly here than they might in the higher rainfall zone. Did I catch that suggestion or am I making that up?

Dr. Surendra Singh: No, no, that’s perfectly a reasonable interpretation from that. Surprising was that while the trial was actually going on, I think the team did not see a lot of active effect on the yield right away. So, it showed up later. So, that really kind of emphasizes why we need to continue the long-term research, which is one of my caps I mentioned earlier. That’s why I’m interested in, like, longer term research given that we grow one crop in two years, it’s even more important to see that how in long term it will effect everything from yield to profitability to grain quality and [everything under] the whole sustainability umbrella, if you will.

Drew Lyon: Okay. I remember early in my career I was trying to read up on literature and there was a study–I think it was in North or South Dakota–with peas and they were looking at it and they ran it for like three cycles of peas and they didn’t see anything. And they published a paper. And then several years later, another paper came out and after [they] got into the fourth and fifth years, then you started to see that the peas really did benefit.

So, you know, if you’d just done that study or just looked at that for the first four to six years, you would have concluded that there was no real benefit to putting those peas in the rotation. But, if you stuck with it for a while, then those effects started showing up. So, it really is important to do these studies long term, but funding can be a challenge.

But then, you have the Jirava long-term study, so that’s a grower helping you out to maintain these long-term plots. But, that is a challenge with long term is just–despite the fact that they’re so informative–they’re hard to keep funded and maintained over time.

Dr. Surendra Singh: Yeah. That is kind of an ongoing challenge. So, you have to be creative when you have limited sources. So, yeah, Ron Jirava has been really helpful when Bill was here and he is continuing to offer his support throughout. And we just had a meeting at his farm recently. So, yeah, he has been superb in helping us. And so, yeah, that’s really grateful that we have a continuously ongoing site. And, yeah, funding, as you mentioned, it is always three to four years, and if you are lucky maybe you get one no-cost extension after that.

But, we are continuing this. So, whatever trials I am planning and doing the projects, my plan is to have them continued regardless of the funding support because the maximum cost comes from the kind of analysis we want to do on them. Continuing them, we always ask support from our regional funding agencies: Washington Oilseed Cropping System, Washington Oilseed Commission, Washington Grain Commission, and they have been superb in helping us out with the new and existing research. Yeah, we get creative and kind of will continue to do the long-term research.

Drew Lyon: Okay. So, you’re fairly new. You’re just getting started. If somebody has some questions for you or some ideas for things they think you need to work on, how do they get ahold of you?

Dr. Surendra Singh: Sure. Yeah. I think if you’re going from internet, just type Lind Research Station and it will directly take you to mine and Shikha both contact, and it has my phone number, email, everything. And I can spell out my name, but it’s going to be a long one. [laughter]

Drew Lyon: I’ll tell you what: we’ll get that information and put it in our show notes so our listeners can reach out to you if they have any questions. I think you were fortunate to step into a position that had some long-term things going on already, and then also has a lot of–there’s a lot of questions to be answered out there, so you have no shortage of things to work on to build your career on and help growers.

So, we’ll be watching, seeing what you’re doing over the next few years, and thanks for coming in and introducing yourself to our listeners and for the work you do.

Dr. Surendra Singh: Yeah, yeah. Thank you for having me here. And I’m really looking forward to what we stumble upon next. And yeah, I’m really looking forward to working with the growers in the region. And I’m thankful that I inherited a very successful, ongoing program from Dr. Schillinger.

Drew Lyon: All right. Thank you, Surendra.

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Thanks for joining us and listening to the WSU Wheat Beat podcast. If you like what you hear don’t forget to subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast app. If you have questions or topics you’d like to hear on future episodes, please email me at drew.lyon — that’s lyon@wsu.edu — (drew.lyon@wsu.edu). You can find us online at smallgrains.wsu.edu and on Facebook and Twitter [X] @WSUSmallGrains. The WSU Wheat Beat podcast is a production of CAHNRS Communications and the College of Agricultural, Human, and Natural Resource Sciences at Washington State University.

I’m Drew Lyon, we’ll see you next time.

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The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed by guests of this podcast are their own and does not imply Washington State University’s endorsement.