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Company addresses Iowa farmers’ pipeline concerns

Public informational meetings in Iowa to discuss the proposed Dakota Access oil pipeline are drawing large crowds, including farmers whose land will be impacted by construction of the pipeline.

Tad Wesley is an agronomist with Illinois-based Key Agricultural Services, which is helping Energy Transfer Partners address farmer concerns.

“One of the big concerns that they have is protecting the topsoil. They’re concerned it will be damaged in some way,” Wesley says. “So we talk to them about how we will segregate it off and keep it in separate piles, so that when it goes back on the nutrients that they’ve built up over years of farming, and the topsoil that’s so valuable, will be back where it came from.”

Wesley says compaction is another concern that is being addressed.

“As they build these big pipelines, there’s a lot of traffic that goes back and forth across these fields,” he says, “and so we are helping develop plans to alleviate that compaction at the end of construction so that we don’t hurt the potential yields, in the future, on this land.”

Wesley says it takes a couple of years to return the land to full production.

“Usually within two to three years we’ve back to full production on the land that we put these pipelines through—which is why the pipeline has a progressive reimbursement plan to help play for crop damages on it for those two years, post-constuction.”

The pipeline would transport crude oil from North Dakota’s Bakken Region to a distribution hub in Illinois. It would travel through 18 Iowa counties, from northwest to southeast.

AUDIO: Tad Wesley