That’s why y’all have all that good duck hunting through there…
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Tile…?
Oh boy, my day has finally come! 
Plastic drainage tubes. Like big industrial ones. They bury them in the ground under low spots and the excess water drains into them. Then the water runs thru the tile and empties harmlessly into the nearest drainage ditch/creek/or river, etc.
It’s basically like how drainage systems work in the city, but to drain farm plots out in the country hillybilly style 
.
Just like in the city tho, if you get too much water too quickly, the tile can’t keep up and the low spots will flood. This will drown out the crops and either hurt them or kill them depending on what crop it is, how resistant to submergence the hybrid is post-emergence, and how far along in the growing cycle you are.
You might have to replant those sections or leave them empty depending on what your insurance situation is like and how far into the growing season you are because now you have to consider things like how much many growing days a compatible hybrid requires to reach maturity, what the weather might be like during the dry down phase when the plant prepares its seed for harvest, when certain required chemicals can be sprayed, both legally as well as logistically in concert with all the other growers around you.
Do you own your own spray equipment, or do you pay the co-op to do it? This matters because the pros have to spray everyone else’s too within certain windows… and those windows will almost always be shortened themselves by inclement weather and other benchmark criteria not being met. So they have to juggle all that and you are just one of many. Or you can take out a loan that would make your head spin for a bunch of stuff that you will only use MAYBE 3 times a year and will become obsolete and break down constantly well before the loan is paid off. Your choice. Both have their advantages, but I’d just pay the co-op to do it, personally
All that is to say, it is important to make sure your field is tiled and maintained correctly. (Sometimes it’s not your fault tho. Part of farming.)
Even if the water doesnt kill the plant or you are able to replant, excess water also creates an environment that encourages the growth of certain molds and pests that will stress the plant and result in lower yields and/or damaged grain…which you can and should be docked for damage at market. (But that’s a whole different story)
The tile also gets gunked up, silted, worn out and leaky, and all sorts of critters like to burrow in there and build nests and dens and stuff like that. So ya gotta try to keep them as free from debris as possible. Kind of depends on a number of factors how feasible and frequently you can get to obstructions. It’s a whole thing, but it’s pretty basic. You can do it the lazy way and just replace the tile every so often. It’s plastic. There’s companies which that’s all they do is install tile.
It’s far from rocket science tho. Most of this stuff is common sense. Most of the time, the farmers just wanna talk basketball. The good ones, at least. The bad ones are the dullest people on earth, and they’re usually hok fans.
Go Cyclones!
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Growing up on Gulf Coast farms, I had no idea what that was, either. We just have ditches. Y’all have French drains for farms. 
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Yup. the best ground that is perfect for farming is essentially the film that developed on top of the ****** up remnants of traumatically scarred mass glacial deposit called glacial till.
Thanks Canada!
The good stuff is all top soiled glacial till. There’s also a bunch of rocks in it that got carried with the glaciers and turned up into a kind of cake and just plopped here on top of everything else. The grass used it and replenished a lot of it naturally, as well as died and attracted animals which just made it even more nutrient rich and built up as top soil.
But that is what made the initial stuff so mineral rich, the grinding of those rocks and the resulting Prairie grass ecosystem. So when the pioneers just plopped some seed in the ground, they discovered corn grows like weeds here.
Now we have to put that stuff in the ground artificially for the most part. It all got used up. So now we gotta mess with the ground in lots of different ways so that we can all… have lots of corn, I guess? 
And in a way, that’s how we got a tight-shirt guy and a French kid and a Serbian Sniper… in other words, that’s how we got Iowa State.
Cyclone Science! 
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Pheasants too
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You posted some very interesting YouTube videos a couple of months ago detailing some of what you say here about that soil in Iowa. Do you happen to remember which thread that was in by chance?
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No but I’ll hook u up. I remember what the videos are.
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