East Central South Dakota | In my opinion the importance of sub soil is directly related to your annual precipitation and when you receive it. Sub soil moisture is just a storage tank for water when you need it. If it continues to rain you don't need sub soil as bad. Here, we will almost always have a two to three-week period of hot and dry weather in July and August. If we have subsoil to draw on, we will coast through and without subsoil, we get hurt. Subsoil is no doubt a bigger deal for the plain states than the corn belt.
I think drainage tile is a pretty good indicator of excess soil moisture, but a fairly poor indicator of the amount of subsoil available to plant use. A million years ago when I had a research work study job as an Agricultural Engineer, one of the things we (I mostly ran errands and collected a check) tried to model, without my success, was underground water movement. It is very hard to model, with all the variables. However, we had one main frame computer that filled the whole basement of the library and had probably 1/100th of the computing power of a PlayStation. Today's whiz kids could solve an algorithm and earn some bitcoin to use on something I haven't figured out yet. :)
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