Good. How are you doing?

Yeah, absolutely. So just a little bit of background. All of the research that we did for this study was based in Ohio, but there are oil and natural gas pipelines being installed all across the country, all across the world. It's, obviously, super important because as a global society we have a lot of energy requirements. So this is a really efficient way of bringing energy to people but there's also some ramifications afterwards. So normally when these pipelines are installed they go through agricultural lanes so it has an impact across crop production but also soil quality and fertility over time as well. So normally when these pipelines are installed they go through a right-of-way area, or an easement as it's typically known. And this can be anywhere from 100 feet to 200 feet to 500 feet wide. And this is normally where the pipeline trench is actually laid as well as the work area where all the heavy equipment is trafficking over this entire area.

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.

Sure. So we started off by looking at it specifically from an agricultural perspective. So we had spoken with some farmers and they had said that, "Well, we're seeing some ponding in some of our fields or we're seeing decreased crop yields." So we wanted to look at it from a 1000-foot overview. And just looking at that broad-scale aspect but then also narrowing it down into some of the more specific soil concerns. One of our primary questions was that we wanted to understand how crop yields might be different between right-of-way areas and non-right-of-way areas. We also wanted to look at how pipeline installation has changed remediation over time.

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.

Yeah, absolutely. Obviously, anytime that anything is done on land farmers are going to have a really emotional response to it. I can personally attest to that. There's a really intense connection to the land and wanting to be a good steward of that land. When pipeline installation occurs farmers are told there's going to be a certain remediation timeline. They want that to be able to follow through. So we wanted to just document the experience of farmers who had had pipelines go through their fields and see what the process looked like from the beginning through the end to right now essentially.

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.

Yeah, that's a fantastic question. No, surprisingly because I didn't know that the pipeline was installed until I started this research, funny enough. I had started this research and I was talking with my parents and my dad essentially went, "Oh, yeah. You know that little patch in that field that we've always had bad yield?" And I'm like Oh, yeah, it's just a bad section of the soil." I hadn't really thought through it. And from that point on I talked to my dad and then my aunts and uncles about the history of it. And I learned that there was a pipeline that had been installed in there afterwards. So it was a funny back and forth between that.

Sure, sure. So we had evaluated 29 different field sites across northern Ohio, across three different pipelines. So we had the Rover, Utopia, and Nexus pipelines. So some of these pipelines were federally regulated and subject to eminent domain. And there was another pipeline that was not subject to eminent domain, this was a privately funded project. And we collected soils data and crop yields across the right-of-way area as well as an adjacent unaffected area.

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.

Oh, good question. So eminent domain is essentially when the federal government comes through and says, "We're going to do this thing and it's for the common good so we're going to compensate you for the land but you don't really have a choice whether it's going to be installed or not." And so farmers that are subject to eminent domain have a little bit less wiggle room when being able to decide if they want the pipeline to be there, they just get to decide this is how we're going to proceed. They have a little bit less autonomy when it comes to that situation.

Yeah, absolutely. So that was really the largest learning curve for me. So I came from a physical sciences background, I was really interested in being able to talk about soil science and really get into the nitty-gritty there. But as we were going through this study we realized hey, we're looking at three entire pipelines that cross an entire state. And there's, obviously, a lot more landowners that are affected by this than the field groundwork that we're able to actually do. In our fieldwork we were really limited by time. This was completed during COVID so we were subject to all of those extra regulations like we weren't able to be in the lab at the same time as some of our other lab workers and all of that 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.

It seemed like a really important aspect of the project just to be able to really capture what the farmers were experiencing. There's, obviously, going to be a little bit of bias in the farmers that wanted to work with us and were really excited to reach out. There's normally an aspect of I'm really excited and happy about this. Or I'm really excited to talk about this because I had a negative experience. So we wanted to get the survey out there to capture the in-between as well as the extremes.

That is a great question. We had a lot of data that we analyzed so I'm going to try not to get too in the weeds. So let me know if I'm getting too far into it. Overall we saw that there was decreased crop yields in both corn and soybeans in the right-of-way areas across all of the pipelines. So corn yields were decreased by 23.8% in our first year of study and 19.5% in our second year of study. So an average about 21% over both years. And then soybean yields were lower by about 7.4% and 12.5% in the first and second years respectively. A decrease in all of the yields but a more significant decrease in our corn yields.

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.

Good question. So going back to, at the very beginning, when I was talking about compensation. Normally during year four or five is compensation stops for farmers so that's when we were starting the study. It was about a year and a half across the pipelines so we were starting on year four for some of our soils and year five for some of the other ones just because we were taking samples across the whole entire top of the state at the same exact time.

Yep, that's exactly correct. So in year one if they were corn they'd be soybeans in year two and vice versa.

Something I guess that's really important when I'm talking about all of this is that we were measuring each site against itself, not necessarily each site against all of the other sites. So we were measuring particle size distribution from the right-of-way on one field to the adjacent area on that same field. The soil types we made sure were the exact same spatially across the field before we took the soil samples. When I'm saying that, the clay was higher ... It was higher in this field compared to 200 feet away in the exact same field and the same soil type.

[Inaudible 00:22:39].

Yeah, great question. So all three of our pipelines were installed with double lift excavation. And so when I was looking at single lift versus double lift that was really looking at a literature review of historically this is what single lift has done and this is what double lift is doing currently. So I would say that our study is consistent. It's showing that pipeline installation does have degrading effects on soils over time and crop yields as well. I think without a longer term study it's going to be really difficult to actually analyze that. So some of our studies that were single lift, they were looking at those soils over 30 years. And so, obviously, this study was only done over two years so I would really love to see a longer-term study that can document those things over time.

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.

Yeah, absolutely. I think that the most important thing that can come out of this research is just that farmers have more information. So a lot of the farmers that I was talking to said, "Well, Theresa, when we first started this process we were looking for anything that could give us any information about what we might expect from this pipeline installation process like what the remediation timeline might look like, what compensation should be" And they couldn't find anything. Especially by publishing all of this data in open access so it's available for anyone to read, that the information will just get out there and farmers can create a better workaround for themselves to be able to have a good platform when they're starting these conversations as pipelines are starting to be installed.

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.

I think it's a little bit of both, actually. On some of the pipelines, especially if they're privately owned and being installed off of private money, those have a little bit more tendency ... Anecdotally from what I've been told, they have a bit more tendency to be a bit more secretive just because ... Again, Farmer Joe can be paid a little bit more if they know how to speak about how much their land is worth compared to Farmer Tina who might not or vice versa.

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.

Absolutely, all the time.

There's so many things that they're working on all the time.

Yeah, absolutely. So our energy requests are not going to go down but our food requests aren't either. So as we keep increasing our population and we have more urbanization, there needs to be more concentration of good food being produced in a local area. So I think it's just really important to be able to have the most and best quality production on the land that we have.

Yeah, absolutely. So like I mentioned before, all of our research that we've published about this is open access so you can literally just type in pipeline study Ohio State or anything like that and it should pull up some of this information. We have a review article that I developed, and that was looking at essentially everything that's been published that I could find across the whole world. So there's studies from China, and the United States, and Canada, and Brazil all included in the same literature review so you can read through that just to get a little bit of a baseline about how different aspects of soil are impacted. But then it also goes into natural versus agricultural landscapes and there's some shrub and step grass in there as well so that's super interesting. You can also look at the summary of our landowner experiences and that survey as well if you just type in pipelines to the Ohio State. You should be able to find everything like that.

I'll speak first to farmers and then I'll speak second to everyone else listening. First, if you've got a pipeline coming in do as much research as you're able. And reach out to me, feel free to do that. I can give you contacts to people who you can talk to. Other farmers who have had it ... Had the pipelines go through so you can talk about their experiences. Also, reach out to your local Department of Ag or your Farm Bureau, that's how I was able to get in contact with a lot of the farmers that I was working with. And just do all of the baseline research that you can before you sign a contract. Know who to contact to work on the remediation aspect. I know a lot of our farmers that we worked with, halfway through the remediation the person that they were calling switched jobs, and then all of a sudden they didn't know who to talk to anymore. Make sure that you've got a working phone number for that person all the time.

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.

I'm a super outdoorsy person. My husband and I just got married last year, yay. But we ended up backpacking up to about 12,000 feet elevation to an alpine lake and we got married up there with just a couple of our friends and family. It was a really amazing trip. We got hailed on, snowed on, rained on. And then the day of the wedding was beautiful and sunny, and 75 degrees.

Oh, yeah, for sure. So most of us were coming from sea level or just above sea level so definitely a lot of elevation training and just practicing the hikes. But we took it pretty slow on the way up just because ... My sister got elevation sickness which was really hard so we ended up taking a break for a little bit. Your body gets adjusted as you go up higher. And then just take breaks as you go.

It was crazy. Would not do it again but it was a really cool experience.

Exactly.

Yeah, no problem. Thank you so much for having me this has been a lot of fun.