So sometimes when farmers are engaging in these contracts to get the pipelines installed on their lands they go through a process with the pipeline company themselves to create this contract about when remediation is going to be complete and what they can expect that to look like. Normally when the pipeline companies are making those contracts the contract will say that there will be 100% compensation during the first year for any crop loss, and then that decreases by about 25% for the next few years sequentially. So by year four or five there's no compensation for any damages to the land. But there's, obviously, a lot of interactions happening on that land. There's a lot of heavy equipment, there can be some compaction.

And so we started this study because there were a few pipelines that were being installed in northern Ohio. We wanted to see if these claims by the pipeline companies that land would be 100% back to production within five years with no adverse effects would actually be accurate or not. So we wanted to just validate that claim and then be able to share that information with farmers because we found that there wasn't really a lot of research that had been conducted on this type of landscape. So within pipelines and agricultural interactions.

From a personal perspective, I grew up on a dairy farm in the Midwest and we had a field where there was a pipeline installed back when my grandparents owned the farm. So way back in the 1930s and '40s there was a pipeline that was installed. Obviously, technology has changed a lot. And best use practices have changed a lot in the last 90 to 100 years which is really exciting. In my perspective, on our farm, we had a lot of damages I could still see while growing up on that area. Crop yields were still decreased after all that time. I knew that pipeline had been installed with what was called the single lift. So that's normally when essentially a backhoe just goes in and scrapes the entire segment of the pipeline trench out. And then after that the pipeline's installed and that soil is completely put back, just dumped back into that trench.

More recently pipelines are installed with a double lift or a triple lift excavation. So that's where the topsoil and subsoil are measured out, and then the first layer is taken out in the topsoil is piled in a separate area compared to the subsoil. And a triple lift is, obviously, getting more nitty-gritty into the actual horizons of the soil. So the pipelines that were installed were all double lift excavations so I really wanted to look at how pipeline installation has changed over time. So some of the older studies that we were able to find they were from the 1980s and those are mostly single lift excavation compared to more current practices. So we wanted to update the science there and explain what the remediation actually looks like over time with these improved technologies.

So we conducted a survey, with the help of a social scientist at Ohio State, and it had three different components, basically, looking at what the conditions were, what the land use history was before the pipeline was installed. And then during the pipeline installation process, what yields looked like before and after. And just self-reported yields essentially. And then the last component was a landowner experience section. So we were really asking questions about how did you feel? Did you have an experience during this time? Did you feel like you had a choice in interacting with this? Do you feel like your lands back to the production that it was beforehand? And just looking at a little bit more of those emotional responses to pipeline installation as well.

And the challenging part about this study was that we weren't able to do a true before and after. So I had started my master's program after the pipelines were installed and we hadn't been able to collect data before the pipelines were installed so we chose to do the adjacent unaffected area as that pseudo-replicate. Completely unaffected area, it was outside of the right-of-way, and we were able to use that as a comparison just saying, "This is what the ideal conditions for the field would be in this weather year," right? So we had a year that we had a really intense drought and then the next year was one of the wettest that we had on record for that area. So we were able to do that cross comparison.

For all of our pipelines we took three equidistant sampling points along the pipeline as well as three paired sampling points in that adjacent unaffected area. And at each of those sampling points we took soil cores and we also hand harvested yields. In addition to that, we took penetration resistant samples using a cone penetrometer. And we did that in a higher replicate because it's known to be a little bit less accurate over time so we were able to take more samples to be able to create that average across that sampling point.

And then when we got back to the lab we measured soil moisture and determined coarse rock fragments. We put some of the soil through a sieve and measured how many rocks were in there just to see if there is any rock fragments coming up from that pipeline excavation that were lower in the soil horizon. And then we did an aggregate stability measurement which is really looking at how well the soil holds itself together. Then we also measured particle size distribution which is a really fancy way of saying, we measured how the soil texture changed in the right-of-way versus adjacent areas. And then we did a whole bunch of chemical suite like pH, soil organic matter, [inaudible 00:12:26] exchange capacity, and all that good stuff as well.

We were looking at this field survey as an opportunity to get on the groundwork done. But then the farmer survey that we actually sent out, we were thinking that this could be a way for us to get data across the entire pipeline rather than just the on ground samples. So we sent it out to 600 landowners across all three pipelines so that's 200 surveys per pipeline. Essentially I did a lot of groundwork and plotted out where the pipeline ran through the state, and dropped GPS points, and went through county tax auditors websites, and everything like that. Was able to find landowners and we send all of the surveys out that way.

Just visually I was able to see that the corn cobs were smaller and a little bit more misshapen in our right-of-way areas compared to our adjacent areas which I just thought was interesting personally. When we were looking at the soils our penetration resistance was significantly higher. A little over 15% higher in our right-of-ways compared to our adjacent areas. And this just meant that we saw a significant increase in compaction. There was definitely an impact, even five years after the fact, of that heavy machinery going across that land over and over again.

We also saw that our particle size distribution, so that's that texture again, was lower in our right-of-way areas. Basic soil science. So soil texture is sand, silt, and clay particles, and the sand is, obviously, the largest texture and the clay is the smallest texture. So when we're seeing a decrease in our particle size distribution, that just means that in our top areas where we were sampling the soil there's more clay there. In this section it's really important because normally the clay in the areas that we were sampling is higher in our subsoils. So essentially we read this to mean that there's more soil mixing between that topsoil and subsoil which is evident after the soils are churned as they're excavated and then put back onto the trench after the pipelines are installed.

So with that soil distribution we saw about 12 grams per kilogram of clay higher in our right-of-way areas compared to the top 20 centimeters of our adjacent areas which is really, really important for this study. It was consistent with what we predicted but, again, just surprising that it was that significant. We expected to see a lot more variability across all of our sites. Obviously, anytime the pipelines installed the conditions are going to be different for every farm. Tuesday at Farmer Joe might be very different than Wednesday at Farmer Tina's farm. And it could just be that there was a lot more rain or the vegetation was just slightly different so there's less compaction that might be happening on that land. But overall we did see that significant increase in compaction.

I think that one of the most interesting facts that came from this was actually in the survey section. When we were doing the survey we had that land use section and that installation practices as well as the farmer experience. One of the main questions that I thought was super interesting was, during the installation process were there times when soil conditions were not optimal but pipeline installation continued? And we specified what optimal or suboptimal meant. Slightly suboptimal was that soils were still wet but I would only drive on them if tasks were essential and very important and time sensitive. And then extremely suboptimal in that question was, soils were completely saturated and worked during or immediately after large rain events and I would not have been on them personally. And we actually had 78% of respondents say that soils were suboptimal, and 55.5% of those people said that they were completely saturated. So that was really significant.

We looked back at weather patterns and rainfall during the installation times for this pipelines and it was a really wet year. But that also means that the pipelines were still being installed when the soils were extremely wet as well. And towards the end of the survey, for that landowner experience, we asked a question asking if the lands were generally back to the condition that it was prior to the pipeline installation. And 82% of people said that they were not back to that pre-installation situation. And over half so 56% or so said that they were not satisfied with having a pipeline installed on their ground. Only a 1/4 said that they would be open to have another pipeline go through their ground as well. We thought that was really significant because that showed that across all of the pipelines, across the entire state that were being installed during that time, most people were generally unhappy and they were not open to having this experience happen again which is pretty significant.

Obviously, we've been talking in generals and averages across all of our studies. But it's really important, especially in the context of pipeline installation, every single site is individual and it's really site-specific. So when we were talking before about weather variability and how it might be super wet or it might be super dry when this pipeline's being installed, all of that impacts how the soils and the crops interact after the pipeline's been installed. Some of our soils that we were looking at after the pipeline was installed, there were essentially no significant differences between the right-of-way and adjacent areas. Other ones had extremely significant differences. It's going to be really important to take this all with a little grain of salt and really dig into the details rather than just making some of these generalizations and saying, "Well, all pipelines are bad." But they're really not. It's really about the installation practices and the remediation that's happening after the fact making sure these can get back to 100% productivity.

But then also just give them more autonomy. If they see that there's some remediation that hasn't been completed to the extent that it should be on their land they can take this information back to the pipeline companies or to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and say, "Hey, we've got data that proves that this is happening. Can you come out to my field and I can show you where it's happening on my field?" And just have that baseline for being able to do improvements and bring it back to the quality of soil that it should be and the quality of production that it also should be.

I think that, additionally, it can also give farmers a little bit more leverage when they're doing some of these contract negotiations. I know that some of our farmers that we were working with had created a cooperative of farmers. So there's 15 of them that had gotten together and they did their contract negotiations together. And maybe some of this research will just be able to promote that and make sure that people are talking back and forth. Because when pipelines are installed it can be secretive between landowners. You're not necessarily allowed to have conversations about "Well, this is what I'm getting compensated for, how much are you getting compensated for?" Or just sort of some things like that. So hopefully it can give people just a little baseline to be able to talk about these things. And it'll give them an opportunity to be more successful going forward.

The federal energy, all of the FERC regulated ones are, from what I've been told, a little bit less secretive but they also have really complicated contracts on both sides. So farmers who might not be used to reading 200-page legal documents might get really confused. I got really confused reading through some of the environmental impact statements and the agricultural mitigation statements as well, and it was my entire job to be able to read through that at the same time. When you're worried about crop harvest, and moisture sensors, and tractors going into a ... Needing to be fixed and things like that, you're not necessarily going to be super focused on being able to read through all of the nitty-gritty details. Hopefully, some of this will be able to just refresh that information and make it a little bit easier to digest.

For all the rest of the people listening, if you don't have a pipeline going through your land you can always write a letter to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Just keep up to date on what pipelines are going to be installed in your area. And just support all of the farmers and landowners who are going through this. It's a really stressful process. And to have an entire field or half a field taken out of working production for five-plus years is really stressful. Do anything that you can to just support the people that it's happening to.