Allen Williams on Adaptive Grazing and Soil Recovery

0:10 Now we just got through with Thanksgiving and I have to tell you this story about my mother-in-law. Four years after my wife and I got married, we would spend our Thanksgivings with my in-laws, and my mother-in-law was of the generation that felt like all meat had issues, it had to be cooked to death to kill any of the bugs. But the other thing that she liked to do was she liked the biggest turkey that she could possibly find.

0:53 There were really two things that went on every Thanksgiving: one was the great turkey cooking war, as I called it. She would cook the turkeys until it was so dry that I felt like I was eating sawdust without putting giblet gravy or something on it. So I would walk through her kitchen and turn the temperature down on the oven, and she would walk through and see that and turn it back up, and we would just keep that little dance going there.

1:22 But I do remember this one time she went to the grocery store to buy a turkey and she always wanted one that weighed well over 20 pounds. She went to the bin where they have all the turkeys right before Thanksgiving, and the way that she would judge it—she didn't trust the weight on the package—so she had the feel of the turkey, she had to heft it to determine whether it was heavy enough or not. She would pick one up and feel the weight and set it aside, then reach down and grab another one, pick it up, set it aside, and she kept doing that.

2:02 There was a stock boy standing off to the side watching her this whole time. She got down to the very last turkey and the man got up, felt the weight of it, and set it aside. She turned and looked at the stock boy and said, 'Son, did these turkeys get any bigger?' And he said, 'No ma'am, they're dead.'

2:34 I do want to give you their here's some resource information. A lot of our presentations are posted on these websites, or at least the first two. On the Pastor Project website we also have a lot of webinars that are recorded that you can access that deal with adaptive grazing, with cover crop, livestock integration, and we have numerous other resource tools listed there as well. We have similar resources on the Joyce Farms website, and I've been writing routinely for Graze magazine since 2013, and I'll have at least three dozen articles on Graze Online dot com if you want to access any of those.

3:28 Just a little bit about who we are and what we do. I was born and raised in South Carolina, and our family's farm has been there since 1840, so I basically represent the sixth generation in our family in that particular operation. It was a very diverse operation when I was growing up. I often tell people that it was sort of like the old Barbara Mandrell song, 'I was country when country wasn't cool.' You know that's sort of the way I feel because when I was growing up we were very diversified. We had sheep and we had pasture pigs—and we didn't know they were pastured, that's just the way we did it. We had pastured poultry, but we called them barnyard birds. We had a diversity of crops that we grew and produce and those types of things, and we had a general store and we sold a lot of our products through the general store, so that was direct marketing, but we didn't know we were doing any of those things.

4:34 I went away to school, got into academia, spent 15 years as a researcher and professor at a couple of different universities, my last one at Mississippi State. At the end of 15 years I finally realized that we were experiencing a lot of problems and issues. It really appeared that what we were doing in terms of our research at the universities was actually making those problems worse. All we were doing was putting a bandaid on the issues rather than addressing the root cause. So I made the decision, and I was a tenured professor, so I could have stayed there no problem, but I made the decision after 15 years to leave because I wanted to do far more than I felt like what we were able to do in that type of situation.

5:29 Jonathan Mutt, much like you with Blue and your farm and all of that, I had a lot of the same thought processes in making that decision. So today we do a number of things. We have cattle operations, we do a lot of grass finishing, and we do a lot of consulting and field trials. We consult throughout North America—the US, Canada, Mexico, and down into South America—and we've done this for a number of years now. We also participate in a lot of conferences and workshops. I'm on the board of directors of the Grass-Fed Exchange, and so we do those annual conferences. By the way, our next one is coming up in September of 2017 in Albany, New York, so check us out on Grass-Fed Exchange dot com and look at our agenda. We've got an absolutely fabulous lineup of speakers and farm tours if you want to take advantage of that.

6:36 We do a ton of workshops around the country, including the one that we did there in Nebraska. And we also have a meat and poultry company. We market specialty pork and poultry and grass-fed beef predominantly to upscale restaurants up and down the East Coast.

7:03 These are some of the poultry that we raise. They are Red Bro Canaurs or naked necks—a thin-skinned chicken that makes an outstanding product for fine dining. So that's the birds that we have settled on, and we produce Poulet Rouge and products like that. We also use the heritage black turkey rather than the standard commodity turkey that you see there in the picture. We also produce very high quality grass-fed beef. We'll average on every load—and a load is 42 fat's—we'll average about 85% choice and up, and out of every load about 10 to 12 of those will be USDA Prime. So you can achieve very high quality beef, 100% grass-fed, and as you can see here are some of the pictures of the beef that we produce, so that'll rival any grain-fed beef folks anywhere.

8:19 A day workshop I was doing up in Wisconsin a few weeks ago, I ran across this accident scene that you see here on the screen. There had been an accident in a Smart car, and when I got there an ambulance was carting away the couple that was in the Smart car to the emergency room, but the squirrel that they hit refused treatment and left the scene of the accident.

8:47 Okay, so we do have a problem today, folks, that we're facing in agriculture, and here's part of what we're noticing.

8:57 In Keith's opening presentation he showed very similar slides but this is a slide of a massive dust storm on the border of western Kansas eastern Colorado in January. Now we shouldn't be seeing this anytime of the year but much less in the dead of winter. And then that is that same dust storm when viewed from ground level.

9:24 Now if we'll take a look at this picture you can see that we're looking at a 2014 dust storm in the upper left in Colorado and it is eerily similar to a dust storm in the middle of the Dust Bowl in 1930s. We're seeing more and more incidents of these types of things occurring and it struck me the other day in Keith, in your history that you gave of the settlement of the Great Plains. It took us less than 60 years to go from invading the Great Plains to creating the great American Dust Bowl.

10:13 Less than 60 years. Now when you look at the time line we had 20 plus years of heavy conservation efforts right after this but now we seem to have forgotten those very lessons that we learned and so in yet another 60 years we're right back at that same point. So we are facing some very serious challenges that we're going to have to address.

10:44 This is another one I'm working with a number of foundations including the wind rock foundation and Walton family and several others addressing the hypoxia problem or the dead zone in the Gulf that we experience every year. And since I reside in Mississippi you know for the economies of Mississippi Alabama Louisiana and Texas the coastal economies this has a multi-billion dollar a year impact on those economies due to harm to our estuaries our fisheries and to our tourism industries. So this is a real problem and this is caused by runoff through the Upper Mississippi River drainage basin.

11:32 This is another issue that we're facing. We're seeing ever-increasing acres of grassland being converted into row crop ground. To the tune of more and in the figure that I have up here now is actually outdated we now have more than 10 million acres over the last several years in the Midwest alone that has been converted from former grassland into row crop ground. Now one of the major issues with that is that a vast majority of that 10 plus million acres is absolutely not suited for row crop production and we have enormous erosion problems because of it.

12:17 So we're experiencing more and more of those types of problems. Now we also have a conundrum that we're facing today. These were two articles that appeared just a few weeks ago on the exact same Sunday in two different newspapers. The USA Today article was talking about the proposed Monsanto Bayer merger and they were interviewing farmers to get their thoughts on that merger and one of the first things the farmer said was well we fear further price control and in those types of things but then the second thing they said but yet we're hopeful that this merger will produce additional GM crops and chemicals that help us increase our yields. However the exact same day the Houston Chronicle had an article interviewing farmers from the same state and the title of that article was bumper yields plow farmers under.

13:21 So now what is it? Do we want higher yields? Yet when we get higher yields what happens? This happens. More crop less cash. Keith, very similar to the wheat right that you talked about earlier. So this appeared the very week that I was in Nebraska speaking at that eight workshop tour in the Omaha world-herald talking about farm economics deteriorating land values falling loan defaults rising. All of these things occurring in us but yet US farmers once again produced record corn and soybean yields however farm income is down 42% since 2013.

14:19 Now George Vaughn Voight had this comment last year. He said we're treating soil like dirt and it's a fatal mistake as our lives depend on it. War pestilence even climate change are trifles by comparison. Destroy the soil and we all starve. That's eerily similar to a comment made a long time ago in 1500 BC by Jewish philosopher and he said this: upon this handful of soil our survival depends. Husband it and it will grow our food our fuel our shelter and surround us with beauty. Abuse it and the soil will collapse and die taking humanity with it.

15:23 According to the United Nations FAO global soil destruction is so intense that they estimate that we only have another 60 to 100 years left of optimum crop production before we start experiencing severe famine around the world. And yet at the same time we're talking about significant population growth over the next 30 years. We're gonna need almost 15 acres of new cropland annually to feed that population growth but yet we're losing twice that okay each year through soil degradation.

16:07 The techniques that were supposed to feed the world are now the same techniques that threaten us with starvation. And this is very interesting. In an analysis of undisturbed sediment in an 11th century french lake it revealed that the intensification of farming over the last century has increased the rate of erosion 60 times. 60 times. And Russ we've seen River flow rates over the last several decades increase what up to 400 fold. Up to 400 fold. So we do have issues that we're facing.

16:55 And this is a timeline of what happens with soil with poor farming practices. You see what that soil looked like in 1961 and now compare that same field in 2002 after 16 years of continuous corn soybean crop rotation. Dramatically different.

17:27 Another paper by researchers in the United Kingdom shows that soil in urban allotments and that's just small pieces of soil, even rooftop gardens, those types of things in cities and in towns actually contain a third more organic carbon and 25 percent more nitrogen than our typical farmland soils in the u.s. Many of these allotments, these urban allotments folks, and we ought to take this to heart and feel a little bit ashamed by this, we're talking about people in the cities raising gardens that on the same plots of land are producing four to eleven times more food that what we're producing on our giant farms around the countryside. And we're seeing this in the u.s. I have clients that are able to produce between forty and eighty thousand dollars an acre revenue on their farms. Forty to eighty thousand dollars an acre revenue. I was talking to one of them just the other day. His name is Douglas Hayes out in California.

18:50 Now folks that's our potential. That's the types of things that we can do. And yet we're struggling to even break even on many of our farms and ranches. But we have people out there that are clearly showing us a way that we can do things far better.

19:12 Now that's the bad news. The good news is that Keith related earlier and it's in Jonathan related. We have hope okay. We actually have solutions.

19:26 Solutions start with the soil. This is a diagram from Dr. Elaine Ingram just simply showing the soil food web. In other words, what it boils down to is that to have vibrant, thriving life above the soil surface, we've got to have vibrant, thriving life beneath the soil surface. If I take a shovel and I dig into your soils on your farms and ranches, I should see evidence of more life beneath your soil surface than what I'm seeing on top of it.

20:01 Here's something we need to remember: 90 percent of soil function is mediated by microbes in the soil. But yet those microbes are dependent on the plant. So how we manage our plants is critical to the success of those microbes in the soil. So plant growth and health is highly correlated with how much life, what kind of life, is in the soil.

20:26 So bottom line, just as Jonathan stated, bugs matter, insects matter, microbes matter. And more importantly, that microbial community structure matters.

20:43 This is what an acre of healthy soil should look like. Now, don't pay attention to the numbers in the middle column. You see four bacteria? That's an incredibly large number—not quite the size of our national debt, but still rather large. Rather, pay attention to numbers we can relate to over here in the far right-hand column in red. So here's what we should see if we have an acre of healthy soil: we should see more than a ton of bacteria, more than a thousand pounds of actinobacteria, more than a ton of fungi, more than a hundred and thirty pounds of predators in the soil—the favorable protozoa and nematodes—more than 400 pounds of earthworms per acre, and more than eight hundred pounds of insects per acre. So you add all of that up, and that means that for every acre, if we have truly healthy, vibrant soil, we should have more than three tons of life in and just on the surface of that soil.

21:52 A handful of healthy soil contains more microorganisms than all the people who have ever lived on the face of this earth in the whole course of history. A handful of healthy soil. And George Washington—I love this quote from him—he says, 'Soil is an almost magical substance, a living system that transforms the materials it encounters, making them available to plants.' And so we're going to spend some time talking about that.

22:29 So what are the roles of microbes? Well, one is, if we look at mycorrhizal fungi, mycorrhizal fungi do a number of very favorable things for us. First of all, they produce a soil glue called glomalin, or glue mahlon. And this soil glue—they use it to attach themselves to the roots of plants in the soil. But yet we get another benefit from it in that these soil glues aggregate soil particles and significantly increase the ability of our soils to absorb and capture oxygen and water—the things that are critical for life.

23:12 In addition, mycorrhizal fungi are very long, thread-like, or filamentous organisms. And I'll show you a picture here in a little bit. But when they attach themselves to the roots of the plant, they greatly extend the reach of those plant roots to pick up and absorb nutrients. And mycorrhizal fungi are so good at absorbing nutrients in the soil that they can do this six to ten times better than the plant roots themselves. They're so good at it that they can even extract minerals out of rock and feed that mineral to the plants. So they feed the plants, and the plant roots in return produce root exudates or sugars that feed the mycorrhizal fungi. So it's the world's oldest bartering system, and it works quite well.

24:12 Our problem is that when we do a lot of cultivation, what happens to the mycorrhizal fungi? We've destroyed it. When we use a lot of glyphosate, what happens to the mycorrhizal fungi? We have destroyed it. So there's a lot of practices that we put into place that are not very favorable for the mycorrhizal fungi. We should have between 10 and 50 thousand different species of microbes within a single gram of soil. And if we do, their nutrient cycling services are worth up to twenty trillion dollars annually, making them the world's most valuable ecosystem.

25:00 This is what some of our soil bacteria looks like. The actinomycetes are actinobacteria. How do we know if we've got a lot of that in our soil? What is the immediate thing that we notice if we've got a lot of actinobacteria in our soils? Exactly—you can smell it. A deep, rich, earthy aroma. How many people remember that when you used to till fields? How many people smell that anymore? You store your soil, it almost smells sterile now, doesn't it? We don't have a lot of aroma to it.

25:37 This is mycorrhizal fungi. Outlined in red is the plant root itself. And all of those fine, white, thread-like organisms branching out from the plant root are mycorrhizal fungi. If that plant did not have the mycorrhizal fungi associated with it, it could only absorb nutrients that it were in direct contact with the roots. That's it. But you can see from the picture that when you have a strong mycorrhizal fungi population in the soil, you greatly extend the reach of those plant roots.

26:19 Now, another thing that mycorrhizal fungi do for our plants and for us is that it interconnects plants in the soil, the roots. And when we have diversity and complexity in those plant species, then the mycorrhizal fungi become even more important because that interconnection allows them to be able to feed different secondary and tertiary compounds that different plants produce to other plants that don't produce those. And it also helps to increase disease and pest resistance in our plants when we have a thriving mycorrhizal fungi population.

27:09 Now, another thing that's critical in our soils that we are almost devoid of is mycorrhizal fungi. We do hundreds of thousands of soil tests annually across North America and down to New Mexico, and there's three things that our tests show us our soils are heavily lacking. One is the mycorrhizal fungi. Second, our soil protozoa. And protozoa are the predators of the soil. Just like above the soil, if we want to control the deer population, we've got to have predators and hunters to do that. Beneath the soil, we need predator populations to control the prey in the soil. And the prey in the soil are the bacteria. And without those predators, our soils become highly bacterial-centric.

27:58 And the protozoa, one of their jobs is to consume the bacteria. And the bacteria, they consume nutrients and push them down through the root zone and trap them within their cellular membranes to hold them. But they're not a time-release capsule. So the way that those nutrients are released from the bacteria is through them being consumed by the protozoa. So without the protozoa, our soils become bacterial-centric, and our bacteria lock up a lot of our nutrients, and they're not available for plants.

28:35 Uptake nematodes favor among nematodes perform a very similar function. Not all nematodes are bad—there's actually just like not all insects are pest insects, same with nematodes. There's actually far more favorable than there are unfavorable. We just have to keep that balance.

28:59 Now all of those things that I just showed you're microscopic, so we can't see them with the naked eye, yet they're our indicator species that we can see that allow us to be able to gauge what we're doing in terms of progress pertaining to soil health.

29:14 So insects are vitally important. Remember what we said earlier: you should have more than 800 pounds of insects for every acre of healthy soil. And with insects, you can have predators, right? And predators often come in the form of spiders. And so this is what you should see out in your fields. Yesterday, as the Sun was getting low out at Jonathan's place, and we were standing out in the fields, exactly the fields were absolutely covered with spider webs. That's precisely what I want to see.

29:58 Now in a workshop I did a few months ago up in Wisconsin or Minnesota, one of those two places, I showed this picture, and there was a lady in the audience that said, 'Ooh, spiders! I have to have spiders to have healthy soil.' You know, she just couldn't wrap her mind around the concept of her pastures needing to be full of spiders.

30:19 But earthworms—so we should see lots of earthworms. Now I did a workshop back in early November down in South Texas, and we actually had somebody there, a gentleman attending, that said we don't have earthworms down here. They don't exist down here. He said, 'When I was a kid and I wanted to go fishing, I had to go buy my earthworms. We couldn't dig up any earthworms.' And I said, 'How long have y'all been farming all of this land?' 'Oh, you know, since before I was born.' So did they not have earthworms, or was that an indictment on their agricultural practices for all of those decades? And I would venture to guess this gentleman was in his 60s. Okay, so rather that was an indictment on their agricultural practices over that time period.

31:16 Dung beetles—we should see dung beetles returning to our pastures. And there's multiple types of dung beetles. There's three main classes: there's tunnelers or drillers, then there's the dwellers, and then there's the biggest dung beetles, the rollers or the tumblers. And all three species or classes are vital to us. This is an example of the tunnelers or drillers working in a manure pat. And this was a client of mine that just started a couple of years ago with adaptive grazing. He had never in his life seen dung beetles on his farm. And so he started noticing these strange occurrences in his manure paddies. So he called me up one day and said, 'I'm not sure what's going on here.' And I said, 'Well, take some pictures and send them to me.' And this is what he sent. And I said, 'Well, you got dung beetles.' And he was absolutely thrilled and overjoyed that dung beetles had finally showed up on his farm. And in three to four days, his manure paddies would completely disappear.

32:25 Now what's that gonna do for your fly cycle? It's gonna break your fly cycle, right? You can have far less fly issues in your livestock when you have dung beetles present. Like this—this is an example of some of the different species of dung beetles. There's dozens of different types of dung beetles out there, but if you have a thriving population, you should be seeing dung beetles of at least half a dozen to a dozen or more different species or subspecies.

32:53 We're also seeing the return of pollinator insects. Yeah, and as Jonathan said, that is something that is absolutely vital to our very lives.

33:11 So you know what we should be seeing is a vast array of insects. Now here's something else that we should be seeing though, and that is a significant increase in our soil aggregate layer. And this is another thing that we're having an issue with all over North America. In the bottom left-hand picture there, that's a microscopic view of soil aggregates, and you can see all of the pore spaces that are created there for oxygen to be held in the soil and for water to be held in the soil. So basically, our soil aggregates are the lungs of our soil.

34:00 This is what healthy soil should look like. And we actually saw this yesterday at the Cobb's farm. They had a lot of deeper aggregate layer. I call it the cottage cheese appearance. You know, it has those little curd-like appearance. That's due to the mycorrhizal fungi producing that soil glue that then sticks those finer soil particles together. And you can see from this you've got an incredible amount of pore space for water infiltration and for oxygen infiltration into the soil.

34:40 What we're finding across North America is that our soil aggregate layers in so many of our pastures and row crop fields is less than an inch deep. Now and I'm even finding this in states like Illinois and Iowa and Indiana and Ohio and eastern Nebraska and so forth—soil aggregate layer less than an inch. And unfortunately in South Texas, folks, several of your homes, I've been finding soil aggregate layers of less than half an inch. Okay, so we've got to rebuild that. The good news is it doesn't take near as long as you think. And we'll talk about how to do that.

35:32 As I said, we do a lot of soil testing, but not just soil fertility or chemistry. That is such a minor snapshot of what's going on in your soil and what you really need to know. But yet since the 1960s, that's been our gold standard with our land-grant universities and so forth, that we rely solely on a soil chem panel to tell us what's going on in our soil and inform us about what we need to be doing in terms of fertility as farmers and ranchers. Less than 20 percent of what we really need to know—we've been relying on for six decades.

36:16 Here's the other thing though: when you take a course soil sample, how deep are you taking it? What do you—how deep are you told to take it? Six to eight inches, right? So think about this, folks: we've made all of our soil fertility decisions for the last six decades based on only the top six inches of soil. Really, that's what we've done. All of our research, all of our conclusions, everything are based on that. But yet what goes on deeper in the deeper strata of the soil is just as critical.

36:59 And we need to know biology, so we do a lot of soil biology testing now. The tests that I have up here have been great tests—I've used them for years—but they all have some limitations. So we're now using a lab in Illinois called Quorum that just recently had a multi-million dollar addition that allows us to be able to look a lot deeper. So both on the soil chem panel, they can look at active and inactive fractions—in other words, both available and bound soil elements, which is critical to know. And in terms of soil biology, they're

37:34 Able to tell us not only the active fraction of the soil biology which is what we get from a Solvita CO2 test or from the PLF test, but now they're able to tell us that inactive or spore-related fraction, or what is our true microbial potential in the soil. And because they have metagenomic and proteomic and PCR capabilities, they're able to tell us the specific bacterial, protozoa, and fungal species that exist in that soil. So now we can go much deeper in, and our discovery process is going to take another leap forward because of these enhanced capabilities.

38:16 We do a lot of in-field measurements as well, so I want to know your physical characteristics of your soil. So we measure your compaction using penetrometers, we measure your soil temperature using soil thermometers, and also forward-looking infrared cameras or FLIR cameras. We look at water infiltration rates using double-ring infiltrometers. We measure available soil nitrogen using N meters. We take a look at your soil aggregate layer and we measure plant biomass to get a starting point and to see what's going on there.

38:53 This is measuring soil water infiltration rates using a double-ring infiltrometer. It's a quick and easy process. Unfortunately, again what we're finding, even in fields in Iowa and other places, is that a lot of our water infiltration rates are now less than half an inch an hour. Now think about the ramifications of that. That means that for every inch of rain that you receive on your farm or your ranch, your soil is only able to infiltrate two-tenths or less, and the rest of it is ponding and pooling and then running off. So you're losing 80% of every inch of rain that falls on your farms and ranches. So an inch is not an inch. It's just like Gabe Brown said in the video there—it's not what we get, it's how much we can keep in our soils that's important. Our problem now is that we're not keeping it—we're sending it on down the road. That's why our river flow rates, folks, have increased 400-fold over the last several decades, because we're not keeping our rainfall anymore.

40:16 We use penetrometers to measure soil compaction, and so I want to ask you this question: can we control runoff with organic matter? We'll consider this—at 2% organic matter, our soils can hold only 21% of a moderate to heavy rainfall. But yet at 8% organic matter, now we can hold 85% of that same rainfall. So as we continually degrade our soils and lower the soil organic matter, it's precisely what I just said—we're keeping less and less of every inch of rainfall. But as we improve that soil aggregate layer and organic matter, now we can hold much more of that rainfall. And our NRCS data tells us that for every 1% increase in soil organic matter, every acre can hold an additional 25 to 32 thousand gallons of water. That's highly important to us.

41:13 So let's talk about specific strategies that we can use to be able to rapidly build soil organic matter, significantly increase that soil aggregate layer, and improve complexity and diversity in everything from soil microbial life to plant life to insect life to wildlife. So we're going to talk first about adaptive grazing. And we sort of introduced it yesterday at the field day, and I know a number of you in here do practice adaptive grazing. But the first thing I want to say about it is this: it is goal-oriented. Goal-oriented, and it's reliant on stock density, not stocking rate. Management and flexibility are key. In other words, it's not a rigid system, and don't make one out of it. If you do things the same way every day, every month, every year, you're going to stagnate. You have to shake things up. That's what adaptive grazing is all about—it's about not doing things the same way day in and day out, month in and month out.

42:46 We stress frequent movement and rest of our paddocks. So frequent movement of our livestock gives our paddocks millennia of rest. We heavily stress root system recovery, and it's highly reliant, at least in the eastern portion of the US—basically from here east—on temporary fencing technology. Now I work with a lot of ranchers out on Western rangelands where we're grazing across anywhere from hundreds of thousands to more than a million acres, and we're not going to string poly wire across that broad expanse, right? So what do we do there? Well, we rely on Cowboys. We rely on Cowboys, and depending on where you are, they're called Cowboys in some areas. In Nevada and Utah, the Mormon Cowboys are called buckaroos, and in Mexico, we call them vaqueros, right? So we're working in all of those regions, and we employ Cowboys in all of those regions to move our cattle for us, to have the same high stock density, frequent movement, long rest impact that we can implement using poly wire and putting it up and taking it down.

44:05 There's one thing about a cowboy—they only want to do one thing: they want to sit on their horse, right? You put them a foot and they complain and complain and complain. So as long as they can stay on that horse all day long, they're happy. So we found a way to make them happy: move cattle every day, live with the cattle, move cattle every day. You know, actually, further east here in Texas and all of that, if you could figure out a way to string poly wire paddocks from horseback, you could get a lot of Cowboys to do that for you here. But now here's one other thing, and I'm going to repeat this numerous times today: nothing that we do in agriculture is singular or linear. I'm going to say that one more time—nothing we do in agriculture is singular or linear. And as a matter of fact, nothing that we do in life is, if we're honest with ourselves. Let me give you an example: how many men in here are married or have girlfriends? All right, if you say the wrong thing to your wife or girlfriend, is that ever singular? No, it has compounding, cascading effects that last for a very long time, right? And boy, the next time you have an argument, she remembers the last one, right? So compounding, cascading effects. Everything that we do has compounding, cascading effects in agriculture, either for the good or for the bad. And that's what we have to realize—nothing is singular. And I'll talk more and more about that as we go along.

46:09 So what does high stock density grazing look like? Let's start in the upper left-hand corner and work clockwise around. So in the upper left-hand corner, that's about 250,000 pounds per acre. In the upper right, that's a hundred thousand pounds per acre. In the lower-left, that's a half a million pounds per acre. And in the lower right, that's 1 million pounds per acre. Now would I go with any of those stock densities all the time, every day?

46:41 No, otherwise it's not adaptive. I'm doing things the same way all the time and I'm going to stagnate. Each of those has a purpose and an intent and throughout the year I'm going to employ many different stock densities on my own farm to achieve specific sets of goals. Really what we're trying to do is simulate what occurred through many thousands of years with nature with our large wild ruminant populations so we're trying to create both biomimicry and eco mimicry impacts.

47:32 We do that today. We don't have the large herds of wild ruminants anymore that are free to roam. Everything's cut up and confined. We got fences, roads, houses, buildings, everything. So we use domesticated livestock to do that for us today. So we use them to nurture ecological memory.

47:51 Observation is critically important. We want to observe the behavior of our animals each day, their performance each day, the plant performance, and what's happening with our soil and our soil level organisms. In other words, observation, daily observation is the very best tool that you have to be successful at this. Flexibility is the key and we'll talk a little bit more about this later, but you want to do things like alter stock densities, change your rotation patterns through your farms and ranches, alter grazing height on and off, alter the rest periods, and if you do multi-species grazing, alter species order.

48:45 So how rapidly can we build new soil organic matter using adaptive grazing? This is just a smattering of our data. We have far more than this, but I wanted to give you a snapshot of what we have found. You see the different states that are represented here and then we go from year one to year five. Year one will be the year that adaptive grazing was first implemented on these different operations. After five years, in all of these cases, you can see that we made significant progress in being able to grow new soil organic matter.

49:25 But we also said that our microbial population is critically important. And so likewise, we also have been monitoring the soil microbial population and we measure that in nanograms per gram of soil. The yellow bar here represents year one, the year that we began adaptive grazing on these different operations. The green bars represent year five and how far we were able to come in building that soil microbial population in just a short five-year time period.

50:04 Now I want you to think about this microbial population like this. Many of you know this is a little foreign to you, thinking in these terms, especially nanograms per gram and all of that. You know, who thinks about that on a daily basis? None of us. So think about the nanograms per gram like you think about fertilizer. How many people in here grow corn? Okay, what's the rule of thumb? How many pounds of nitrogen are required to grow a bushel of corn? Okay, it's about a one-to-one relationship, right? It's going to have a range about point eight to one point two or three, right? But on the whole, it's gonna be about a one-to-one relationship.

50:58 Okay, so if Dan if you wanted to grow 200 bushel and acre corn, then how much nitrogen do you need? Well, yeah, and it depends on what's in the soil, but total though, counting what's in the soil, everything you need at least 200 pounds, right? Okay. Now if you only had 20, what's going to happen? You're not gonna come anywhere close to producing 200 bushel and acre corn, are you? Okay, so think about this microbial population in the soil in the same manner. If I have a thousand nanograms per gram, 600 nanograms per gram in my soil, that's like having 20 pounds of nitrogen. I'm not even going to come close to achieving my objectives in terms of productivity and so forth from my soil. But if I can build to eight, ten, twelve thousand nanograms per gram of microbial activity in my soil, now that's analogous to the 200 pounds of nitrogen to grow 200 bushel and acre corn.

52:16 And we do that by doing this. We use high stock density to be able to create carbon, new organic matter, sock and carbon in the soil. This is the type of trample that we desire. Now a lot of people when they see either these pictures or they see it in our operation or somebody else's operation, they think their immediate thought is boy, how do you have wasted a ton of grass? I can't believe you did that. Why did you waste all that grass? I didn't waste anything. I have just built new soil. I've just sucked a lot of carbon into the soil and I'm going to show you some data later that's going to show you just how rapidly we can do that with this type of grazing methodology.

53:10 So here's another thing that we pay a lot of attention to is how much of each plant can we take on a single grazing before we significantly impact root growth? So we can go up to 50% leaf volume removal and have no more than 2% root growth stoppage. But look what happens if we increase that just another 10%. You know, if we want to say well, surely just 10% more, you know, that's that can't have very much of an impact. Well, we go to from 2 to 4% root growth stopping all the way up to 50% root growth stoppage. And if we allow our livestock to get into the 80% or so take, right now we have a hundred percent root growth stoppage.

54:00 And here's why that's important. Okay, you look at these pictures, you look up there at the A-frame and you see that if we allow our livestock and closely crop down our pastures, what happens to the roots? They die off, right? But they not only die off, they get much, the living portion of the root moves up much closer to the soil surface. So here we go folks, compounding, cascading effects that I talked about earlier. Nothing is singular. So what's all the compound and cascading effects occurring here, all right? First of all, we have left very little solar panel on our plant for plant recovery, the photosynthetic activity to occur in plant recovery, right? So it's automatically going to take that plant longer to recover because we've removed most of its solar panel.

54:52 Secondly, if it turns off hot and dry and those roots have died off up closer to the soil surface, you're in real trouble and those pastures are not going to recover very rapidly at all, and that's a long-term mistake. Remember yesterday out in the field I talked about when we make mistakes, we want them to be very short-term and immediately correctable. Well, that's a long-term mistake that's gonna last for the whole season or maybe even years. The other thing is where do the microbes live? In the roots, right? Okay, in the root zone. So if we shrink the root zone, we've also shrunk our microbial population. That means we've also shrunken our soil aggregate layer. That means we've also lowered the amount of soil that's going to be fully oxygenated and holding water. See how this gets to be compounding and

55:43 Cascading very quickly, so I want to give you a case study here. And if you've heard me speak before over the last two or three years, at least you've seen this, but for those of you that haven't, this was an opportunity that we had. My partner and I down in Mississippi that I ranch with had an opportunity to acquire some land that was adjacent to some other land that we had, and so it made it a strategic purchase. And this is what it looked like at the time of purchase. It was the fall of that year. And just a little bit of history on this piece of property—it had been in pretty much continuous cultivation. It's about 150-plus years. And in Mississippi, many of those years would have been cotton. And what does cotton do to soil? Destroys it, okay. So it had been in a lot of continuous cultivation—used up, used up, used up. And it's also important to know that because we're going to talk about the latent seed bank in a little bit. And I want you to know that that latent seed bank hadn't been tapped for more than 150 years, okay.

57:05 For a handful of years ahead of us purchasing this property, it was owned by Mossy Oak. How many people know who Mossy Oak is? Yeah. Well, the largest outdoor company, started as a camouflage company. All of that. And so they bought it as a hunting property. They planted their food plots all over it and everything. And the hunting was so pathetic that they decided they would sell it. The biggest deer they could harvest off the year during the interim period that they had it was a 120 class. And that would have been a huge deer at that point in time for them. But we viewed this—we've been doing all this adaptive grazing, you know, with clients all over North America. We knew what our results and men, and we've been collecting a lot of data. But this was an opportunity to start literally from ground zero and collect data from baseline forward into continuously track what was happening as we applied certain management practices, as well as keep an ongoing pictorial diary. So I've got literally thousands and thousands of pictures through the years looking at this.

58:18 So this was our starting point. Our soil organic matter ranged from 1.3 to 1.6. It's a pretty pathetic water infiltration rate—less than one-half inch. And our plant bricks (and if you don't know what that is, I'll explain it later) was 2%, which is pathetic. Basically, bottom line is that meant that the forages that we measured there had very little nutrient density, okay.

58:46 We had forage specialists from Mississippi State and NRCS come out and do an initial survey. And in terms of what's considered forage species (and I do the air quotes for a reason on that—we're going to talk about that later), they could only count three to four. And it was about a thousand-acre property, so they could only count about three to four across that thousand acres. In the initial stocking rate, that first grazing season, we stocked at one cow-calf unit into six acres, which is not very good at all in our country.

59:24 So the very first winter, we dropped cows in there—that winter—and these were just staging cows getting ready to calve at next spring. So we bale-grazed them, and I'll show you pictures of bale grazing a little later. But basically, we just sent bales out about every 25 feet apart and through the winter controlled their access to them. The first grazing season, we used high stock density, short duration grazing with long rest periods. This is what it looked like during the first one grazing season.

59:58 What do you see growing there? Be honest. You can say it—weeds, okay? Weeds. Well, folks, I'll tell you, we had weeds, weeds, and more weeds. You know, we had ragweed, giant ragweed, sumac, ironweed, pigweed, milkweed, multiple species of milkweed, multiple species of thistle, on and on and on. We had blackberry, we had newberry, we had ash, we had cedar. You name it, it was all there across that landscape the first year. So that's what our cattle had to eat. That's what they had to rely on.

1:00:39 One thing I want you to know as we go through this series of pictures: we did no mechanical intervention. We applied no fertilizer or lime. We did no herbicide spraying of any sort, and we planted nothing, okay. Now, this—you know, remember I said I used to be on faculty at the University? And if I would have done research like this at the University, guess what that would have come out of your pockets—the taxpayer's pockets—right? And frankly, whether it worked or not would not have affected my paycheck. But here, this affected my wallet, my bottom line. So if we made a mistake, it was on us. There were no taxpayer-funded dollars paying for this, okay? So that's what we did the first year.

1:01:38 Now, high stock density grazing with the weeds—we had a lot of people, including my very good friend Dr. Gordon Hazard, that first year said, 'Allen, you're gonna starve those cows to death.' And frankly, we didn't know whether we would or not, okay? And we were prepared. If we had to move the cows off this place, we were prepared to do that. But guess what happened? They started calving in April and we calved in April and May. So they started calving in April and May, and the cows just picked up body condition. They kept gaining body condition off of weeds. And we kept wondering, 'Wow, what's happening here?' So we pulled tissue samples from all of these different weed species that we had in there, and we pulled tissue samples from the improved variety of forages that were there—what few were there—and we sent them to the Mississippi State forage lab. And guess what we found? In every case, the weeds were significantly better in nutrient analysis than the improved variety forages. Every single one was better. They were better in crude protein, they were better in potassium, they were better in that energy. So they were better in RFQ, and in terms of mineral content, they were better to the tune of four to eight fold than the improve variety forages.

1:03:11 Why? Why explain that to me. Why in the world would they have been so much better in mineral content? It's actually not a hard answer. Most weeds are far deeper rooted than the improved perennial forages, right? So they were reaching over all of those years of continuous cultivation. What had happened? All of that farming and all of that had essentially mined out a lot of the mineral in the top strata soil, right? But yet, because they were growing monocultures all of that time, you know, roots weren't reaching deeper into the ground. So with these weeds, they were reaching down into the strata beneath that layer and pulling up minerals that were not in the top strata. So they were much more highly mineralized than the forages that had roots only in that top strata. We found they would also graze our trees along the wood lines and eat the leaves, and they loved those.

1:12:52 Aggregate layer that I can build in my soil. I'm limiting the amount of mycorrhizal fungi I can have in my soil, compounding cascading effects. But when I have complexity and diversity, now look at what happens. Look at the incredible root structure that you have beneath the ground. And why is that important? Because where do the majority of microbes live and function? Well, in the root zone, as we said earlier. So the more root I create in the ground, the more microbes I can support in the ground.

1:13:28 Here's another reason I want to grow a lot of roots. It's because two-thirds of organic matter increase that we get comes from those very roots. So that's what we're after, that's what we want to achieve. So here's my desired mix. I call it the principle of three. This is what I want in every pasture or in every cover crop mix. And there's a reason that we have settled on this because our data, our research clearly shows us this is creating the type of diversity and complexity that allows us to achieve the most rapid results in soil building and building microbial populations.

1:14:16 So whether I'm growing a perennial pasture mix or a cover crop, I want three different plant classes represented at all times: grasses, legumes, and forbs. Now, if you're a weed scientist or a forage specialist, what are you going to call those forbs? Weeds, right? You're going to call them weeds. I call them forages and I call them medicine for my livestock and I call them soil builders. I won't forms.

1:14:57 Now, oftentimes today we think that a native Prairie is grasses only or predominantly grasses. Folks, that is not the way it was. That's not the way it was. We think we're restoring native Prairie when we just go out and plant a bunch of native tall grasses. No, we're only restoring a third of what that native Prairie was. And you'll find, and we've measured it—Russ and I've done some of these measurements. When you go out there and measure quote native prairies that are nothing but native tallgrass species, you actually have a lack of diversity, a lack of life. Not this incredible plethora of life that Jonathan Lundgren was talking about.

1:15:39 So this is what I want to see. But even more importantly, I know I don't want to see just one grass and one legume and one forbs species represented. I want to see at least three of each of those, compounding cascading effects. So I want to see all three represented. So this is what I want prime pastures to look like. As it's native Prairie, it's going to be different than that, but I want to see legumes, forbs, and grasses represented in all of them, in multiple species of all of those.

1:16:14 We can create the same with warm season cocktail mixes, with cool season cocktail mixes. So why complexity and diversity? Well, again, because I'm trying to create positive compounding and cascading effects. And again, they always occur, whether for the positive or the negative. Our job as a manager is to make sure they're positive.

1:16:45 One reason is that I want as many secondary and tertiary chemical compounds being produced by my plants as possible. How many people have heard Dr. Fred Provenza? A handful of you. Now, Fred, he's a professor emeritus at Utah State, but he has done a lot of the seminal research in looking at plants' secondary and tertiary chemical compounds. And here's the deal with those. First of all, we all know about the primary nutrient compounds that plants produce. We've done forage analysis, that kind of thing. And when we get those results back, we're looking at the primary, but I seriously doubt any of you have sent all samples where they've done an analysis for secondary and tertiary chemical compounds.

1:17:34 But here's why they're so important. First of all, every plant species produces a different array of secondary and tertiary compounds. They don't all produce the same secondary and tertiary compounds. Secondly, those secondary and tertiary compounds are critical in terms of medicinal benefit to your livestock. Where do most of our pharmaceutical products derive from? Plants, right? From plants collected around the world, and they isolated specific secondary or tertiary chemical compounds from those plants to create a pharmaceutical for us. Well, why in the world doesn't that apply to our livestock? Well, of course it does.

1:18:25 And if we have monoculture or near monoculture pastures, we are automatically limiting not only the nutrients available to those livestock, but we are also automatically limiting the medicinal opportunities for those animals to self-medicate on a daily basis. And here's another thing about a lot of those secondary and tertiary chemical compounds in plants: they also have anti-parasitic properties. So you won't have to deworm in those types of things. We can, we've been able to do that. We've been able to totally do away with deworming of any class of livestock because of a diverse array of secondary and tertiary chemical compounds.

1:19:16 And here's one thing I want you to do when you go home: go out into your fields. And if you have to go out into the ditches to do it, do it. If you got to go into your ditches to find the array of species that you need to be looking at, but take grasses, the blades of your grasses, and just sort of ball them up and roll them around on your hand to break up the cell walls and then smell the aroma. Then take your legumes, clovers, whatever, and do the same thing. Then take forbs and do the same thing.

1:19:53 Always with the forbs, they're going to be much more aromatic, much more aromatic. The grasses are going to have sort of a sweet, sugary smell, and it's going to be just a slight aroma. The legumes are going to have an intermediate aroma, but still sort of sweet-smelling. But the forbs are going to be very aromatic and distinctly different from each other. What's creating that strong and it's pleasing—it's not a put-off aroma, but what's creating that very strong aroma? Secondary, tertiary chemical compounds.

1:20:39 So do that when you go home and take a notice of that. That's a direct indicator of the amount of secondary and tertiary compounds that are in there. So again, with diversity and complexity in our plant species, we also create diversity and complexity in our microbial species and our soil level microorganisms. And remember, it's exponential rather than linear. If you want to produce exponential benefits on your farms and ranches, you can only do that through complexity and diversity. We can't do it—as Jonathan said earlier—from a sac or from a can of chemicals. We can't do it.

1:21:21 So we've talked about the secondary and tertiary compounds. This is an example, and not everything in here are perennials, but a lot of these are annuals that will seed and reproduce themselves year after year. I work also.

1:21:33 With a lot of grass-fed dairy operations throughout the US, this is the type of mix that we're looking at for optimum production on grass-fed dairies. And you can see that we have our principle of three following through here right. We have grasses, legumes, and forbs represented, but then multiple species of grasses, legumes, and forbs also represented in those pastures. So what you're seeing here is a very diverse array of plant species, and that produces dairies that thrive. In your annuals, we want the same thing: highly diverse, complex mix following that principle of three. You know, on Green Cover Seeds website, I always tell people whether you buy seed from them or not, use their Smart Mix calculator because it's the best tool on the market to help you design your mix.

1:22:38 It's very easy to move the mob—you know, as we call it, the cattle movement—for any of you that have done this for any period of time, you know how super easy it is to train the cattle, and it's so easy that we can do this on that farm that I was describing earlier that we purchased. It's about two miles from the East End to the West End, and we had the cattle grazing over on the east end, and I wanted to move them all the way to the West End to start my rotations back. And so all I had to do was get on the Ranger. We didn't require horses, dogs, or a bunch of people. Just me by myself, or my son can do it, or my grandkids can do it on the Ranger. What the cattle will do is they'll line up and follow you wherever you go, and they won't stop till I stop.

1:23:28 Across that two miles, they were coming across areas that had not been grazed for quite a while and were pretty lush, but yet they didn't stick their heads down and graze and stop. As long as I kept moving, they trusted that I had something even better for them waiting on, and they kept following me. And so they followed me all the way. The bottom left-hand picture is when I stopped and got off the Ranger, and there's a gap gate right there—poly wire gap gate. And I waited for the stragglers. You can see they spread out in a long line. I waited for the stragglers to catch up, and then opened it up. And on the bottom right, that's them filtering into the new paddock.

1:24:06 Now there are simple and easy ways. If we want to do multi-day moves—multiple moves a day, excuse me—and you don't want to be there, you saw this in the video with Neil Dennis. We can use bat latches with either spring gates or bungee gates. I like the bungee gates better. The spring gates oftentimes tend to backlash and get all coiled up on you. The bungee gates won't do that, so I prefer the bungee versus the spring when you're using bat latches. But we have a series of five bat latches. You may not be able to see the other setup going down through that field there, but we have a series of six paddocks set up with five bat latches set up for the dividers set to go at intervals of time. The cattle don't have to be there. The cattle move themselves into the next paddock throughout that day of grazing.

1:24:57 This is another very quick and easy way to do it. You know, if we just can quickly reel out and subdivide our paddocks, and then really quickly reel up each spool of wire, to allow the cattle to be able to move into the next paddock for multi-moves today. This is a fencing rig that I use—a double deck on my Ranger. I've got my bed subdivided. I use three different types of post: I use ring-top posts, I use T-posts for severe corners and things like that that I can drive in and have tension pulled on with my poly wire. And for long runs a lot of times too, on my ring-top posts, I'll use the three-eighths inch, four-foot fiberglass posts that I just a couple of taps—or even just push those in. And then the upper deck I keep my reels of wire and gate handles and those types of things up there, so it makes it very easy.

1:26:03 Now here's the deal, folks. This is so easy to do that even my kids and grandkids can do this without any problem. And so you can use it as a teaching tool for your kids. Now I want to ask you this: any of you ever had a kid that you just had a discipline problem with? Well, our youngest grandson happens to be one of those kids. You know, he's one of those kids that nothing—no form of discipline—phases him. You know, we've tried spanking. Doesn't work. You know, he just laughs. You know, timeouts doesn't work. Take away his video games doesn't work. You know, nothing. So we kept searching for what will get his attention, what will be a really good method of discipline, and it wasn't until we found this that we finally discovered something that would work.

1:27:05 These are grass-fed dairies in the Upper Midwest. Actually, that's New York State, but again, just showing that we have a lot of diversity and complexity in those pastures. Now we do keep our cattle out of our ponds and so forth. We don't let them get in the ponds, and this is how we do it. We just ring all our ponds with a single strand of poly wire. And we've gone in and we used a track hoe or an excavator to build ramps into our ponds. We built them twelve feet wide, went down, and laid geotextile fabric down and rocked over top of that. And so the rock extends into the pond, and in the bottom right picture, you can see that we've got poly wire into the ponds so they can walk down the ramp and they're still on that hard surface rock, even in the pond there, and drink. So they don't muddy it up, they don't muck it, they don't linger anything like that. And again, it's only twelve feet wide. We don't want it wider because we want them taking turns going down to drink.

1:28:09 And that is now in NRCS approved protocol. We were there experimenting for that, and that's now an NRCS approved protocol. You can actually get equipment funding to do that. And we do a lot of stockpile grazing in the winter. We stockpile a lot of warm season perennials for our cattle in the winter. We have cool season perennials as well, but we take advantage of stockpiling warm season perennials. And this was back in January of 2016, just moving our cows on to that warm season stockpile. It holds up very well, and they do extremely well on it.

1:28:49 Now here's the deal. I'm going to ask you: who is the employee on your ranch or farm? You or your livestock? You know, I want my livestock to be my employee. I don't want to be their employee. And too often, unintentionally, we become their employee. We do their bidding, but rather than making them work. Now, this I will show you just some real quick examples here of different farms that we've worked with. This was Pompey's Rest Farm in South Carolina. This is just after a single year of adaptive grazing, what he was able to achieve. This is what his farm looked like when we first started working with him, and he said this is.

1:29:31 What it's looked like the last 30 years. So we implemented adaptive grazing and that's what it looked like after the first grazing season. He made the comment that he's never seen grass that lush on his farm in the last 30 years. So a single year of adaptive grazing, that's what he was able to achieve. No sir, that was just what came up.

1:30:00 This is some work that we've been working with Green Acres Research Farm up in Ohio. And this is some work that they're doing. So they're looking at cover crop livestock integration into row cropping situations. And so they're looking at year-round rotations of cover crops in between cash crops. And so this was a warm season cocktail mix that was planted. And you can see moving from one paddock to the other, 55 days after planting the cocktail mix, they had 8,500 pounds per acre dry matter available for grazing. And over a 120-day grazing period, the steers gained right at three pounds per day. No fertilizer or starter fertilizer was applied. And after recovery from the first grazing of the second grazing, they had 4,500 pounds of dry matter available for that grazing.

1:31:02 So they planted an 18-species warm season mix. And here's what happened in just 120 days. Okay, soil organic matter increased from 3.6 to 4.4, a gain of 0.8% in 120 days. They added 20,000 gallons per acre water holding capacity in 120 days. This project is being conducted over 100 acres. Some multiplied over that 100 acres, that's an additional two million gallons of water holding capacity. The soil nitrogen increased 58 pounds per acre. Soil mineral value increased more than $100 per acre over that time period. The soil microbial activity increased 44% and earthworms increased to more than 130,000 per acre in their counts in 120 days.

1:32:04 In a Penn State trial, they compared a two-seed perennial mix to a five-seed perennial mix. Now the two seed was orchard grass and white clover. The five seed was orchard grass, white clover, fescue, alfalfa, and chicory. So they, at least to a certain degree, yes sir.

1:32:31 How much rain did they get? It was a little more than normal because of the year. You know, it was this year. I would have to go back and look on the records to see what it was, but it was about, if I remember correctly, about 11 percent above what they normally would have received. You're in that same time span, yes sir. Now this will be repeated, so we'll have year-over-year data to continue to look at on this. Now if it were my country doing that, saying I didn't get any rain from July till just earlier this week, that would have been the difference. But alright, so they follow the principle of three somewhat that I espouse here. They, you know, the five-seed mix, they didn't have three of each, but at least they have the three main classes: grasses, legumes, forbs represented.

1:33:28 They did a nine-year trial, and so the only difference was whether they planted a two-seed mix or a five-seed mix. And these pastures, they grazed them the same way over the nine years. At the end of the nine years, in tabulating their data of what they found was in the five-seed mix, and to me that's not aggressive at all. Okay, that's sort of bare minimum, but yet comparing just two to five, they had 31% more forage dry matter production over the nine-year period. 31% more, folks. How much more did it cost to plant five-seed versus two-seed, or at five-seed verses two-seed, you know, to get 31% more forage? And everything else was treated equally of that entire time period. 31% more. That's why with much more diverse mixes, we're seeing not 31% more, but two-and-a-half to fourfold more, okay?

1:34:33 So if you up the diversity and complexity, you significantly improve that. Their soil organic carbon down to 39 inches in the two-seed mix was bumping it around a half a ton per hectare, but in the five-seed mix, they were sucking in 1.8 tons per hectare. Significant, significant difference, okay.

1:34:56 Down in Mexico, some ranchers that we've worked with for quite a while, and I just want to show you some things that some of the guys down there have been able to do. The Los Thomas. This is a fence line comparison. Los Thomas on the left, the neighbor's ranch on the right. Five years ago, there was no difference on either side. The Los Thomas looked exactly like the neighbor's ranch five years ago. Again, the Los Thomas, you see some of the abundance of growth. And let me show you what kind of rainfall they were able to achieve that on. They're typically in the state of Coahuila. They're typically an 11-inch rainfall region. But the last four years, 10, 9, 8, and 5—that's all five years ago—they were predominantly a monoculture of Tamesga grass, outside of the brushy species growing there. Today, they have more than four dozen different forage species that have all showed up from the latency. By they run across 150,000 acres of very rough terrain, so you're not planting anything there. So all of that was volunteer from the latency. Mike, today it takes some 40 acres to run a cow-calf unit. Five years ago, it took 200 acres to do the same thing. On their neighbor's ranch, cross fence line, still takes 200 acres. The only issue they have is that somehow their fence keeps getting cut and their neighbor's cattle keep on their ranch.

1:36:20 This is the Lewis Noble Robles ranch in Chihuahua. Again, a fence line comparison: adaptive versus conventional grazing. And here we lost the cowboy. The grass was so deep. But now, actually what we wanted to show there was we just threw the hat out, but we want—this is desert. Okay, understand this is desert. And look at the density of that sward of grass growing out there. Many of the current generation never thought this was possible in that desert, okay.

1:36:56 This is a Catara's Cattle Company, again in the state of Chihuahua. He's standing in desert. Does that look like desert? You know, look at this. When I was in Nebraska a couple of weeks ago, I said, you know, this looks like Nebraska in the springtime, and this is a desert of northern Mexico. And this is how they achieve that. You can see the movement patterns by the yellow arrows. If they move up and down this slope with their cattle in the paddocks, and you can see all the cattle in the paddock with the red arrow there, so that's where the cattle were in that particular day. So again, high stock density, frequent movement, long rest periods allowed them to be able to do this.

1:37:32 So I'm going to ask you this question: does grazing strategy and methodology matter? Well, I'm going to contend that it absolutely does. And another project I'm working on is a project with Team Soil Carbon, and what we're doing is we're going around North America and we're measuring what we call a triad of grazing operations. So in every area we're looking for ranches.

1:38:03 Or farms that have been adaptive grazing a minimum of five years and then we're looking for operations that have been doing a slow rotation, you know rotating every one week, two weeks or every month for a minimum of ten years. And then doing conventional grazing where basically the cattle or continuous where they can go wherever they want across that former ranch. And we're going in, digging at random locations soil pits that are three foot, and we're taking soil samples on the walls of those pits every six-inch gradient down to 36 inches. And then doing an analysis on that.

1:38:45 Well, here's what we found on our initial analysis. So the first data, the first tryout of farms were in Mississippi and so we used the form that I just described earlier where we've only been doing the high stock density on that farm for five years. So keep that in mind and compared it to a farm that's been doing a slow rotation for 50-plus years and then to a farm that for 30 plus years the cattle have just been able to go wherever they wanted and grace whatever they wanted. The soil strata, the horizon number one would be the top six inches and number six would be all the way down to thirty six inches.

1:39:27 That last six inches of soil, you can see that in terms of total soil carbon after just five years of adaptive grazing on land that had been continuously cultivated—keep this in mind, continuously cultivated for a hundred and fifty years before that. In just five years we saw a significant amount of carbon into the ground all the way down to three feet. And that's what's so significant about this, all the way down to three feet, compared to what you see out of 50 plus and 30 plus years of continuous grazing. The same thing with soil organic matter. And then if we look at carbon sequestration rates, we see that we sequester significantly higher levels of carbon compared to the other two grazing strategies.

1:40:30 Yes sir, that's correct. Yes sir, nothing. And we did that on purpose. We wanted to take that opportunity to see what can you do without all of the standard interventions? Okay, in other words, using low stock as our primary tool, what could we achieve? It was right out of how it is a thousand acres right out of thousand, just its 998. No sir, it's not a baby step. It could have cost us an awful lot of money, but instead what it did was it saved us an awful lot of money.

1:41:18 So think about this. And this was our sixth year of grazing that piece of property, that particular piece of property. Okay, so in six years folks, I haven't spent a penny on fertilizer or lime. I haven't spent a penny on mowing anything. I haven't spent a penny on any seed and I haven't spent a penny on any herbicide. In six years, also I haven't spent any money on anthelmintics, de-wormers. Also I haven't spent any money on fly control. You start adding all of that up and the only piece of equipment I cranked by the way on a daily basis is the Ranger. Okay, so start adding all of that up and you can see the ramifications of that financially very, very quickly.

1:42:17 And when you consider that also, not only did we not spend all of that over that time period but we added a whole lot more cattle. We started with about a hundred and twenty head. Now we're at 683 cows. Six years. Hey, think about the ramifications of being able to do that and multiply that across farm after farm, ranch after ranch and the impact that has on our bottom lines.

1:42:52 So I'm going to finish up with this. Yes, well we—is you remember earlier we grass finish, you know, and market to, you know, right, right. So also we have taken control of our own market as well, all right. And I'm not controlled by the volatility of the commodity market. That's correct. We didn't just grow cattle, we grew very high quality. And again, you saw the pictures where we're growing choice and prime grass-fed beef.

1:43:36 Yeah. Yes, ma'am. Yeah, in, I'm going to talk a lot more about that tomorrow as well when we talk about how epigenetics and what your management influences what happens. But here's the deal, we routinely change things up, okay? So my stock, I never got below about fifty thousand pound stock density. That's about as low as I ever go, fifty thousand pounds per acre, okay? But I went all the way up at times to a million, okay? And everywhere in between. So I was constantly changing stock densities.

1:44:08 Now we do move every day, okay? And that's important to me. I like to move at least once every day, but if I'm going higher stock densities then I'm going to be moving to multiple times a day, right? Okay, yeah. So, so that, and we alter, you know, what we do. So, so let me talk about this by talking about by using this, okay? So principle of disruption, okay? This is very important to us. Again, I said earlier, do not settle into routine. Do not settle into a pattern, okay? Or regimen, because that's when you stagnate and you stop making progress.

1:44:48 Rather, you want to constantly introduce planned disruptions. And I assure you that with nature, with large wild ruminants and all of the fire caused by lightning and all of these other things, nature had disruptions, okay? Don't think nature was constant. Absolutely not. So we need plan disruption. And this was not a plan disruption. This was not, oh, okay? This was a guy that was doing high stock density grace and got caught in a sudden heavy, heavy downpour with a very high stock density on a small paddock and they churned it up. And he called in a panic, what do I do? I'm going to have to receive this, how do I heal this? And we said leave it alone, let it heal itself. And this is what happened, okay?

1:45:35 So here's what happened. My, that disruption, even though it was unplanned, he found several more plant species that came up from the latency mite that weren't there before, after disruption. And he had almost four times the forage biomass production out of those same acres after that disruption. So that, that was a hundred and twenty days, right? Okay, so flexibility is key, all right. So don't do things the same way every time. It's not a system.

1:46:12 So how can you be flexible? And I'll talk more about this tomorrow. But after stocking densities, don't move through your rotations in the same pattern. All to rest period, salter species order. If you do multi species, alter the time and season of the year that you're moving through different paddocks, different areas of your farms or ranches, okay? Alter everything. Nothing is sacred and nothing should be sacred in that regard. Constantly, and I do skip skip a paddocks and that kind of thing. I'll purposefully give some paddocks double rest from time to time and all of that.

1:46:46 So I want to leave you with this today. Just remember that sometimes there are good ideas and there are bad ideas, and this is a very bad idea. And by the way, this fella is now singing soprano in the church choir. But so thank you all very much. I appreciate it and I've enjoyed it.