Building Soil Biology with the Johnson-Su Compost System

0:00 We're gonna start it here. Okay so it's gonna get the recording is starting here and we'll let people in and we'll get started here in just a few minutes. Okay.

0:44 I'm gonna get this going live on Facebook here as well.

1:11 Okay I think we're live on Facebook we should be recording here it's 5:30. We've got people rolling in here yet but I think we'll go ahead and get started because we got a lot of good stuff to cover here this evening so thank you everybody for joining us for our green cover webinar here on Tuesday evening we've got a couple of guests that I specifically when we started laying out our panelists who we'd like to get. I specifically had these folks on my list because I've always been fascinated with what they've done and how they've contributed in this composting system that we're going to be talking about is really fascinating but what makes it great is it's so applicable to everybody and we'll get into that here in a little bit.

2:01 Our guest this evening well first of all I got to take care of a few details so we are recording this it will be available on YouTube. Everybody else who's on here except myself and our panelists you're already muted so you don't have to worry about muting yourself. Unfortunately that means you can't talk so I was telling Wave 10 that I've got seven kids and this would be a great feature to have you know at the dinner table just to have everybody automatically muted unless I point to you but it doesn't happen that way. But we do encourage you we want you to ask questions so you've got two ways you can do that you can do it through the chat bar and you can just chat a question you can also use the Q&A tool at the bottom of your screen there if you're watching on Facebook I just make a Facebook comment I will try to remember to check that I'm not as good as Noah is at checking those Facebook comments. But you've got multiple ways that you can ask questions.

3:05 So our guest tonight Dr. David Johnson and his wife Wave Chin and they are the creators of the Johnson Sioux composting method which is going to be the topic of our conversation here tonight. They are both at New Mexico State University and I'll let them give a little bit more of their background. I was talking to them a little bit earlier about how they met I won't divulge your secrets there but great background. They have made a huge contribution to the regenerative ag movement to the soil health movement largely because the process that they've developed is not something that requires this huge amount of equipment and that's one of the things I really appreciated about it.

3:51 So what we're going to do is we're going to just kind of have a little bit of a discussion I kind of came up with questions that I wanted to have answered when you're the host you can be a little selfish so I basically wrote down the things that I wanted to know and so we're going to discuss those first. We've got a few slides that will kind of help back up some of the things that they're talking about and in the course of the discussion that we'll have together the three of us here hopefully it will generate some additional questions from you folks out in the audience. We would encourage you again just to put those in the Q&A or in the chat box so David and Wave Chin why don't first of all just give us a little bit of an introduction a little bit of a background on where you're at right now some of the things you've done and then we'll jump right into these questions.

4:40 You didn't tell me you're gonna start out with the toughest question first.

4:46 Well I'm a molecular biologist at New Mexico State University and I was really a returning student I didn't I've been in the private sector for about 30 years had my own construction business and I decided to make a change for the other hopefully 30 years and I went back to school at 51 and got into different programs at the university. A lot of this was just serendipitous the path that I took the things I studied everything just kind of fell in place in front of me and we ended up looking at soil biology and the influence of this for lack of a better word compost on how to regenerate the soil microbiome. And all of this came about because of my gym actually. I had a project and I said do something good with dairy manure and of course me and the traditional methods I'm gonna go out and make a compost pile and turn it doing it in windrow fashion and I came in with dirty clothes and that was not going to work. They said we're going to do something different. I think everybody can agree with me that we don't work hard most people attending this webinar probably are hard working farmers and we're smart it's okay. And so we kind of put our heads together by understanding the principles of compost understanding that they need an ample amount of air being aerobic and a certain percentage of water and then how do we keep those microbes happy and so kind of put our heads together and then came up with this eventually came up with this end product that everybody is aware of.

6:52 Background, are you a biologist as well? No, no, and I think it's the greatest part because anybody on this webinar can do it as long as you're curious and as long as you're willing to learn. And because I am not associated with any university and as a matter of fact my day job is a real estate broker. And being the David in this regenerative ag research that does not have a whole bunch of funding, I did not read the marriage license very well and I did not read the fine print, and I became the unpaid volunteer research assistant.

7:36 She's actually a geek. She looked at all kinds of papers, reading all kinds of scientific journals all the time. So I'm a closet geek and so I'm coming out of the closet now, but you know, I think a lot of people out there are that way. They are curious, and that is the great thing and that's a great point I'm glad you brought that up because you don't need a lot of formal training in order to learn a lot because there are so many resources out there. I often talk about the university of YouTube kind of jokingly because there's a tremendous amount of education occurring there. This video will go to the university of YouTube for somebody to watch down the road as well. So I appreciate that perspective that you bring and the fact that you just have to be a good thinker and a lot of your process here is pretty much common sense, and I really appreciate that.

8:35 So I'm going to share my screen so we can start bringing up these slides here. Do I have the right thing up there? You've got it, okay, great. So I'm just going to ask you the first question here and like say we're just going to go through the questions and we'll kind of talk about some of these different things and lay the groundwork for the discussion here. So first of all, you know, when I think about what you've done, the word compost scares a lot of people as it gives the picture of you know, lots of work, these big machines turning all this compost, expensive equipment to do it. Tell us a little bit about how your method is so different and how it's achievable for just about anybody to do.

9:20 I guess the biggest thing about our method is you don't have all the equipment as you say. It's you don't turn it. It's done in a bioreactor. I have a picture here in about three slides. Let me just go to that. There we go. There's a link to how to make it if you like, but it's pretty simple. There's three things that you want to observe in this. You want to keep it at 70 percent moisture content. You want to keep it aerobic and the pipe in the center are there for 24 hours. They're just to form as you fill the bioreactor. I guess back up one. I guess the timer is going to take over here, but the pipe are only in there for 24 hours and you pull them out, and those holes will stay there and you'll have air flowing up through the center. So you're never more than six to eight inches away from aerated air, so it stays aerobic.

10:20 So with the 70 percent moisture content and aerobic and also no turning, which is the nicest thing about this, but it takes about a year to mature. We see a complete shift in the population of the microbes. We see a four times increase in the diversity. The microbes that are there at the beginning don't show up in the test at the end. So it's a maturation process that takes about a year and the compost when you're done it, it all collapses in on itself and it looks like a deep dark decadent rich chocolate cake. And it slices like a cake and when you put it in your hands and squeeze it, it's like clay, it'll ooze between your fingers. But what you see in this when you look at it under microscope is a significant number of fungal spores and bacteria. Most important here are the fungal spores to restore that fungal community to your soil.

11:25 Yeah, and would you say that's probably one of the biggest differences between Johnson Sioux compost and traditional compost is that fungal component? Yes. But seeing that they're spores, at the application rate we use, this reactor takes about 2,000 pounds of material to fill wet material. You end up with about 700 pounds, but that 700 pounds will treat about 350 acres. It goes a long way and that's why I always emphasize that allowing it to mature and make sure the quality control is there is very important if you are inoculating at such a small rate. You know, for two pounds per acre, making extract out of those two pounds to inoculate your land while you're planting and make sure there are contact. That's very important because if you don't have a high quality end product, it will take a lot more than two pounds per acre.

12:31 So let me reiterate one thing. Go ahead. We do use worms. The worms are put in there as soon as the temperature of the pile gets below 80 degrees and they are key to the quality of the end product. So it is a vermicompost.

12:50 Are you using like the red wigglers or what are you putting in there for worms? Yeah, we go to Walmart and we'll buy about 100 worms and throw them at the top, and by the end of the process it's chock full of baby worms. And they, if you've done it right, they processed all the way to the edge of the material and you see all the worm trails going around.

13:13 And if anybody want to write this down, if they are interested in doing this, make sure you don't allow this pile to dry it out. If you can't remember which, neither one of us can remember to water it regularly, so that's why we put a timer to irrigate it. And so in the video also has the how to set up irrigation. Don't let it dry down and don't let it freeze.

13:42 This is a biological incubator, so there are a lot of organisms. They like certain conditions to live and to flourish. And just like us, we have certain resiliencies, but if you take your kid outside in the middle of winter when it's freezing temperature, that kid is not going to last too long. And so you have to think that's why the biological part comes in here. Always think about biology. So don't let it freeze and don't let it dry.

14:18 So like in the heat of the summer and you guys have hot summers there for sure, is that every day are you watering every day, but as it cools off you don't have to do quite every day or how do you gauge that? Since we're in the desert, I irrigate about a minute a day. I put out about a gallon and a half of water. I use, I've changed it to a what they call a spot spit sprayer, and I use six of them on there and it does a fine mist over the top for one minute. And that just settles through the pile and it keeps it wet.

14:51 If you're in a cooler climate or more damp climate, you don't have to do it that often. Just check it every once in a while. What you want to see on that material is a sheen of water when you pull it out of there. You want to make sure because that's what enables all the microbes to transit on organic matter and break it down. Based on the literature, worms and the fungi, they like that 70 or relatively 70 moisture content.

15:22 So if you stray too far away from it, gets too dry they don't do well. If it's too high, that you reaching the 100 saturation, it becomes suffocating, so you ended up with anaerobic condition because the air not infiltrated.

15:41 When you use this, it's a two pound per acre rate what we see, and analyzing that extract because we're making extract out of it, is we're putting out about 80 million bacteria per square foot and 10 million fungal spores per square foot on that feet. So that's this is part of regenerating that microbial community.

16:03 If you don't have it, you know some people, they may have fields that are very healthy, and this, they probably don't need this. But if you have a field that you've pretty much broken, we see this goes a long way to kick-starting that system and regenerating that microbial community. And you're getting free living nitrogen fixing bacteria into it, you're getting phosphorus solubilizers, you're getting carbon and nitrogen cycling, you're getting metal oxidation from the microbes, you're getting plant pheromones. And also you're getting situations where they would start to work together as a community, a situation we call quorum sensing, where it takes a community of bacteria to work together to express genes to have certain operations go on.

16:59 And those numbers are fascinating because you're talking about 90 million organisms per square foot times 43,560 square feet in an acre and you're pulling that out of two pounds of this compost, so I mean that tells us how concentrated it is.

17:15 And I would love to go into more of the details of how you build this bioreactor, but like I discussed with you before, I don't think we have time for that and there's really good resources online. So folks that are watching this either live or on YouTube later, there's a link or you can just go to YouTube and search for this topic. There's really good videos on there of how to build the bioreactor, how to set it up, how to do all of that, even how to pull the extract out. And if we have time at the end, we can discuss that a little bit more.

17:47 But I do want to spend our time kind of focusing more on the process and why you did this. So I want to just give you the opportunity to tell us how you developed the BEAM process. And if you hear him talking about BEAM, it's Biologically Enhanced Agricultural Management, as you can see on the slide there. But David, tell us a little bit about how you came up with this and why it's important, and then we can go into a few details of how you've actually seen it really change things for people using it.

18:19 Okay, well I really backed into this literally. But you know, I was an MPKA junkie. You know, I spent my whole life figuring all the numbers and getting, you know, figuring out what to put out on the field fertilizer-wise. And this just kind of came out of my research out of the compost research looking at.

18:44 The influence of that compost that we made in this system, how it affected plant growth. And what I started to see is we didn't need fertilizers. You know, what we were able to restore or regenerate that microbial community in that system. We call it a BEAM or biologically enhanced agricultural management, looking at agriculture from a different perspective, not of all these amendments that you have to put on because we saw the damage we're seeing the damage from that and we're seeing that we're losing fertility in these soils. So it's just a different way to look at how to grow a plant and start to look at how nature did it.

19:22 Yeah, in one of his earlier research trial, what he did was that he when he analyzed and he tried to see that if the NPK influence the growth on the plants and also the organic matter and then just because he's a molecular biologist, so he threw in the soil fungal to bacteria ratio. And to his surprise, you should see him, he come running home with this with his eyes wide and say you wouldn't believe this. And I went back and calculated like it three, four times, make sure I was not mistaken, that NPK did not correlate. And to his even bigger surprise, organic matter did not correlate, but fungal to bacteria ratio correlate. And so from that point, he thought well, I need to do a further research and then see why. And so that's the subsequent research design to confirm that observation.

20:31 And that's why we often tell people that when you have something that it might appear to be an anomaly, investigate it, because that observation might lead you down a path that is, to your surprise, it's going to be very beneficial. Probably 98 percent of the greatest discoveries on this planet are all serendipitous, so pay attention to those anomalies.

21:00 So you're saying that the organic matter content didn't matter nearly as much as the fungal to bacterial ratio? It didn't have any correlation at all to plant growth? Wow, I was surprised too. I expected the organic matter to be a predictor and I just threw in the fungal to bacterial ratio because I'd gone and seen Elaine Ingham and I'd taken her class and just observing, I wanted to see okay if what she was saying was true. And it showed to be a very good correlation. Yeah, and but we're not saying that organic matter is not important, but what the research results tell us is that if you don't have life in your soil, the organic matter is not going to be as beneficial as what you think.

21:58 And just like with human society, that you can have a big room full of money, like on the pallet, but if you don't have the right people to utilize the resource and to make, to invest or use that to build something and then to generate even more income, it's just a pile, a pallet full of paper or material. So that comes back to being biologically enhanced agriculture management, is that when you do the right type of management and inoculating with biology, or it can be making this type of compost, or it can be if you have range land and properly utilize the cow for rotation, and you know the proper management is very important. Just like biologically enhanced agriculture management, it's so important to incorporate the cover crop because they feed the microbes. So you have to keep the cycle of life going, and it's the efficiency in the cycle going to enhance your system and to have a really well working BEAM.

23:25 Yeah, it's a biologically functional carbon, yeah, it's what we're shooting for. Even we've seen soils four, five, six percent soil organic matter and they're dead and people are still having to throw fertilizers to grow underneath it. But if you have a functional carbon, all the biology working, it all works together to improve the plant's ability to photosynthesize. The plant sends down more exudates to feed those microbes. Those microbes increase in population, increase the ability to extract the elemental nutrients of the soil, parent material, or fixed nitrogen from the atmosphere. It's a positive feedback loop that you're trying to rebuild in this system. And we're just, as she was saying, mimicking what happened in the great plains, trying to restore that biology that was there with the six foot plus deep soil carbon profiles and their productivity. It's we're just trying to mimic that in agriculture.

24:25 And as a farmer you are at the driver's seat to allow the positive feedback loop or negative feedback loop. And so if you go on the positive feedback loop, then you increasing the efficiency, then you don't need all the amendments and that you can have a productiveness on your farm by utilizing the life on your farm and the sunshine that you get. And then you also get to hold on to the water that you get as well.

25:00 Okay, yeah, and so you talk a lot about microbes and I know you probably wanted to talk about this slide just a little bit about some of the different microbes.

25:08 And how they're that backbone of the system. Well it's all perspective how we look at this planet. And if you look deep enough you'll see that microbes are the backbone of every organism, every multi-celled organism on this planet. And not one organism can survive without its community of microbes. And soils are the same. And we have to adopt that perspective in our farming. You know, whatever we do, we want to be thinking, okay, what are we doing to the microbial community? Are we benefiting it or are we setting it back?

25:44 I told somebody the other day in one of the talks that I did: we don't have all the answers, but I think we're asking the right question. Because the question is: anytime that we want to add something to the system, the question should be, how will this affect the biology? Yeah, I say I don't know the answer to it, but at least we're asking the right questions. You're not alone. You know, a lot of this is way above our pay grade to understand the dynamics of nature. You know, she's got multiple ways to do this—multiple pathways. If one pathway is not working, she can go another way.

26:24 But keeping these organisms fed, either with a cover crop or a commodity crop, is essential. You have to have that carbon flow into the soil to support those organisms to help them live and thrive, increase in population, increase in the structure, changing from bacterial dominant to fungal dominance, increasing in diversity. And all those work together to change that biological functionality. The living roots is so essential in this system to grow your microbes, enable for the microbes to feed back to your plants.

27:04 So that's why above ground, how you manage by minimizing your disturbance—may it be chemical, biological, or mechanical—so if you minimize all those disturbances, allowing the plants with those living roots to work with the microbes to create their synergy to produce for you. And that's why also, if you disturb too much by extracting above-ground biomass too much, then it takes away the capability of the roots able to go down and then feed those microbes, and they cannot regenerate. So when you extract too much, that's when you start going into a negative feedback loop. That's when you start seeing the compaction of soil as well. So it's all interconnected as a system.

28:03 Yeah, and I think I'm just going here. I think you have talked about the feedback loop. I think we had a slide talking about—I think it's about third from the end—but also there it is. You need to consider that it has to be multi-species covers, and as she's saying, you need to leave part. Nature has a golden ratio. If you look at how much corn you pull off of a field, it's 40 percent. If you look at how much cotton you pull off of a field, it's 40 percent of the plant. Yeah, if you look at almost every wheat crop, oats—almost all of those, nature allows 40, but she expects that other sixty percent to remain to keep that system built up and surviving.

28:51 And as you can see here, just the photosynthesis, you know, photosynthates from the photosynthesis go down to feed that soil microbiome. The microbiome can then extract elemental nutrients from the soil parent material or fix nitrogen from the atmosphere in each cycle. On this, it's a positive feedback loop. You increase your photosynthetic capacity of these soils. We've seen a change from about 500 grams of dry biomass per square meter to 3,000 grams of dry biomass per square meter capability once you bring the soil microbiome back and have it functioning with the cover crops.

29:32 So you see the soil microbiome population increase again on another cycle, enables it to extract more nutrients or fix more nitrogen. But we also notice soil respiration goes down. You get a more efficient system. So this really works for carbon sequestration. It's going to be a great tool. Farmers will be able to be more profitable. They'll be able to restore and regenerate their soils so they can pass this on to their children and not pass a problem from what they have now, allowing the carbon in the right place, have the right resident time.

30:16 And that's important when you're looking at this cycle here. And another thing about it is I have thought deep and hard about the soil health principles that they've been teaching, and those are all very good principles. But you know how it goes—the devil is always in the details. For example, when I talk about not over-extracting, having the livestock available for you to improve the soil is really, really great. But then if you don't manage that livestock and you over-graze or allow them to get on the land at the wrong time, then you're extracting or you're damaging again. So be mindful about when you are applying those soil health principles.

31:11 Yeah, and I think I've heard you eloquently explain almost every one of those principles in this context. So would it—

31:18 It would be fair to say that when you're applying the soil health principles properly you get this positive feedback loop. And indeed the rich do get richer when it comes to the soil. But when you misapply them or you don't apply them or you just ignore them, you get the negative feedback loop and the poor get poorer again when it comes to the soil. Would you say that's accurate? Yeah, oh yeah. Think about it if you bring in a herd of cattle onto your pasture and thinking you are inoculating your soil and doing all the right things, you know with the hoof action, saliva, dung, urine, yes that's great. But you leave them there too long, you graze it down to like a putting green, and that is overly extract. You're going downhill and you're going downhill. Those forage, they're not going to recover. And then the next year is going to be even worse and that's that negative feedback loop you're talking about. Yep.

32:23 As you bring that carbon back, you're building up that pool of nitrogen in that system so you don't need the fertilizers. You'll get to that point, you know it takes a few years, but we're seeing that we can completely do without nitrogen fertilizers in these systems and still have as good of productivity or better productivity and be much more profitable.

32:47 Yeah and I think we've got a slide that talks about that and I'll go to that here in just a second. But people ask this question a lot. In fact somebody may have already be asking it here. I'll maybe beat them to the punch. But I've heard people ask, you know like Dr. Christine Jones and others this question too. How, like, use you know if you implement the principles of soil health, you start inoculating your soil with this compost extract, how much can you cut back on your fertility in that first year? And that's a big question right now because of the huge expense in it. A lot of people are asking, how much do you feel comfortable? I'm sure there's a lot of things that play into that, but I know that's a question that people have on their mind. Yeah, back up to that one with the half circle on it.

33:42 We started an experiment in Willcox, Arizona with Howard Buffett looking at employing BEAM on one treatment on the left at this point. We just called the inoculation of the compost extract as being right, okay, okay. And then a BEAM plus 15 nitrogen about 38 units of nitrogen per acre applied. And then the conventional, and this is what the crop consultant said they needed 256 pounds of nitrogen to get 250 bushels of corn. And so this is in 2019. Go ahead, go next slide.

34:24 This was our cover crop in 2020. And what we started to do is roll this cover crop down and then plant into it. And we were only using the BEAM on the commodity crop. Not, he didn't have the equipment to inoculate the cover crop seed. So we were limited to just applying the extract on the corn as we planted it, you know spraying an extract in making sure it got seed and soil contact as we planted the corn and two gallons an acre at two gallons per acre or two pounds to a two pound per of compost break and we mixed it into about 20 gallons of water so we had a 20 gallon of extract solution per acre applied, only two pounds of the compost in that 20 gallons. Okay.

35:20 And good next slide. He didn't have to spray any for weed control on this corn crop with the cover crop that we got in. We saw the check, go ahead, go to that next one if you want.

35:35 We saw a change from 2019 to 2021 from fungal bacteria ratio 0.007 to 1.43. And when we talk about fungal to bacterial ratio we're talking about the mass, not species, because if you're talking about species the bacteria still have a larger number of species. But when you look at the mass ratio fungal bacteria ratio, fungi has increased quite a bit compared to the bacterial mass that had reduced. This farm had been no-till for the four to five years previous to this. And you can see just with no-till he was still very bacterial dominant, extremely bacterial dominant. But to make that change in two years to go from 0.007 to 1.43 was pretty dramatic. We did not expect this.

36:37 I don't know if people can appreciate how huge those numbers are. I've looked at a lot of PLFA tests, and most of them if you get a 0.1 you got to feel like you're doing pretty good because one-to-one is you know you just almost never see that. 1.43 to one is incredible. Let me before we go to the next slide, let me ask you this. I'm just going to go back. How much of, how much of it because you got a huge amount of carbon here and that's going to be the food source for the for the fungus that you're putting on. Exactly how much do you think that? Well, I mean it's a combination right. It's the carbon, the huge carbon source plus the organisms to break it down. But if you put that out on bare soil I'm guessing you wouldn't have got those numbers. I don't think so. There's so much benefit from having that cover keeping the soil temperature down, keeping the weed pressure down, providing forage for the fungi.

37:43 Earthworms are key in this soil. This soil was so compacted when we started. The first cover crop we grew didn't grow into the ground, it pushed the ground up and we had like a corrugated field. When you drove over it, it was just like driving over corrugation. So it was very compacted. All of that has changed now. When you walk on this field, the farm manager was walking and says you can feel the give in it. It's starting to get some resilience and tilth. So it's completely changed the way he looks at farming.

38:23 He was comparing his conventional corn to the corn with the bean and bean plus fifteen percent. Is why am I putting nitrogen down?

38:33 I'll show you the crop productivity here. After this one, this was our change in soil carbon. In four to five years of no till before, his carbon increase rate was .029 percent per year, about 1.26 tons of carbon per hectare every year. Once we started introducing the cover crops, the beam approach, we changed to 0.26, that was 11.3 tons of carbon per hectare per year, which is a phenomenal rate. Most scientists have seen nothing over a half to one ton of carbon per hectare per year. But with the right biology, this system begins to function again.

39:22 And you know, as people start talking about getting into carbon programs, that's a huge payout there if you're getting paid on actual carbon fixed and they're actually doing reliable measurements. That's a huge number. You figure in Australia they're getting paid about 25 a ton, so that would mean they were making more with carbon than they were with the crop. But that's gravy for this. But what happened here is you're changing how the system is functioning for your arm.

40:02 There was a question about the compost, that two pounds of compost is at 70 percent moisture content, it's not dry, so it's even less than two pounds when you figure out the actual weight of the compost.

40:21 Do you have a slide here on yields? Here's a corn and pinto bean rotation. Our first year, our transition, we matched the productivity of conventional with the beam plus fifteen percent and we only lost about 6.6 percent of the productivity with the beam with no nitrogen. But when you did the final analysis of the profit, the beam plus fifteen was one hundred twenty-two dollars an acre more profitable than conventional and eighty-six dollars an acre more profitable in the bean. When he talked about conventional, he's talking about the full recommended rate of nitrogen application.

41:05 The follow-up pinto bean crop, you could look, both beam plus fifteen and bean outperformed the conventional and the conventional actually lost money that year. But the beam plus fifteen and bean only one hundred forty-three to one hundred thirty-two dollars an acre more profitable.

41:26 Another interesting thing: salinity is a problem in that area. But we noticed in this, he had overhead sprinklers, so there's no flooding going on here, but we saw a forty-seven percent reduction in soil sodium content in all three profiles that we measured: zero to fifteen centimeters, fifteen to thirty, and thirty to forty-five centimeters. So all kinds of improvements start to become realized when you bring the biology back.

41:58 I haven't been on Howard's farm here, but we've got some customers in Cochise, so just on the other side of that valley, and they were pointing out where this is at. That's tough soils, that's not good farm ground, it's terrible soil and it's terrible water to boot. But it seems to do good in these southwestern farms. We're branching out a little more trying to get a few more projects to see how it will do.

42:24 Somebody asks where does sodium go? Well, I don't think it's being leeched because water is so expensive there. They're very frugal with their water resources and they don't get a lot of rain. We do see the possibility that maybe the organisms are opening the soil up more, might be getting more diffusion down through the soil. But what we noticed in the composting process, which FDA said do something good with dairy manure because it was very saline, and that was our first compass bioreactor using one-third of the raw material was from the dairy cow manure.

43:08 In a windrow composting process, the compost gets more saline and they had concluded in their research that compost was bad for soils. In the static process where you allow the fungal community to predominate, we saw a reduction in that sodium. Now it wasn't being leeched through the pile because I wasn't putting enough water to leach and it didn't stratify in the reactor either. We're seeing that maybe it's being tied up. There is a process: fungi secrete oxalic acid, oxalic acid forms oxalates, and oxalates tie up positive metal ions. We're suggesting maybe there's a

50:19 There's one section there on citizen scientists that have shown some of the bizarre results from applying this. One in Australia, the ranch manager sprayed it on one side of a chestnut tree and that side of the chestnut tree leafed out a full month ahead of the rest on the other side. And it looked like a tree without a trunk. And the chestnuts on that were twice as big as the chestnuts on the other side of the tree. So again, bizarre things.

50:54 But as far as the worms goes, that no, we don't screen our worms, but you can do that for your next batch because it's like a worm farm. There will be a lot of worms, so many more than what would you start out with. Well, when you're making the extract, you're putting it all the material into a screen and spraying it and stirring it and many of them will survive. I just save all the material that doesn't go through that screen into another bucket and the worms are usually in that, and then that becomes part of your next batch. Yeah, yeah, but many of them are sacrificed. Well, they'll make more.

51:38 Several people asking about the cold weather question. You're saying you don't want to let it freeze, but is there a certain temperature where you'd be better off just bringing it inside anyway, just to have a higher ambient temperature to speed things up? Well, I think as long as you don't let it freeze, you're good. The more consistent the temperature is, the faster it's going to mature. Inside is good. We've seen many different ways to do it. You might be able to put hay bales around it and a heat tape at the bottom if you're really cold climate, but leave the top, you know, double plastic on the top for solar insulation. We've seen one hoop house in Colorado do a 40 by 40 reactor and they got down to 32 degrees internal temperature, but when they pulled it open, the worms were still active. So our has gone through minus 16 degrees Fahrenheit for three days, never above zero, and survived fine, but it's a freakish event though. But otherwise, we're relatively warm here in the region. Yeah, but people could move it inside if they needed to. Yes, we've seen dairy farmers move it in with their cows. Their cows keep it heated. If you have a root cellar, I think that would be the ideal. You know, that to have that constant temperature. Yeah, yeah.

53:06 Okay, so here's another great question. Adam is asking how long are the organisms viable in the extract after you make that extract? Of course, I'd recommend using it as soon as possible. I haven't ever really pushed the envelope to find out. We've had some observations in Australia of a farmer that left it for three months and, you know, in the shade, and it still was effective on their planting, but that's just secondhand information that we have no way to verify. And so to ensure that everything is viable and you have all the species that come from your compost that they are staying viable, I would suggest that you use it as soon as possible. At this point, we haven't have the resource to do the further test and on that yet. And so that would be something would be nice to verify, but you know, it takes a little bit to do the testing on that. And if you have leftover compost, all I do is put it in a smaller bioreactor and I put hay on the top and I put a drip system to keep it wet, and the worms will consume that and keep the pile opened up. Yeah, that you also use a piece of same material to cover the top part of your bioreactor if you do make one, that way that it keeps the moisture content constant. It helps keep it constant like that, but also keeps the wildlife from getting in there or, you know, neighborhood cats or something like that. Bobcats like these files. Yeah, that's crazy.

55:04 Have you ever had people that, you know, in the process of making this compost, have you ever had people actually plant like cover crops in it and have living roots going at the same time? It's a big no-no. We suggest not. Yeah. If they're looking for the mycorrhizae fungi, what we noticed in the soils that we applied this to and there's no mycorrhizal fungi, you know, since you don't have a plant root, you won't have any association. It's other fungi, right? Yeah, and we noticed where we did put the compost, we saw 23 species of mycorrhizae come and flourish. So I think it's more your developing the community for them to come and thrive in because they're everywhere. Yeah, mycorrhizae fungi, you need those living roots. So this is a different process and different environment. So don't jump too far ahead. You want to incubate all those organisms first and take them to inoculate your land with your seeds or with plants already have living roots in the.

56:18 Ground and that way they can work together. It's kind of like build it and they will come.

56:24 Gotcha, and also your cover crops, the multi-species cover crops are instrumental in that. Yep, yep. So yeah, build it, you'll come. I really like that. Several people asking questions about how to get this in. Either people are asking, can you make a slurry and put this on your seed and let it dry as kind of a seed treatment? Have you had people run it through a foliar application through a sprayer or even through center pivots? Can you do any or all of those?

56:56 All of those. Our number one recommended way is to make the extract and inject it into for our planting. We've seen the best results there. Contact is very important. Don't just. That's why we say infero, so that way when you inject it in furl, that you have the sea contact.

57:16 Seed coating, we really recommend if you to make a slurry and use about a quarter of that per 50-pound bag and tumble those seeds. And we really recommend to plant them damp if you can. Drying, you don't need to richly actually. The seeds flow pretty well when they're damp. But a project in Belgium did that with their cover crop seeds and they saw twice the productivity of the cover crop with the seed inoculated.

57:50 Pivot, senator pivot. I think you could put it through a center pit. What we see is you need a living root if you're going to do a topical application. Yeah, don't put that on bare ground. No, no, no. You need to have a living root. And as far as foliar, definitely this stuff's amazing for taking care of diseases, foliar diseases. I used it on my tomatoes when they started to get a wilt, it went away. I had all my cottonwood trees were weeping from a fungal infection. I took the compost and spread it on the weeping areas. It they completely dried up and the trees don't show any more weeping fluids anymore. Just make sure that if they are going to run through the center pivot afterwards, clean that out really well because this are microorganism and they they can develop the biofilm. More import for drip systems. I wouldn't recommend it in a drip system because you more like a biofilm. Yeah, but overhead pivots, yeah. That's a pretty good size orifice and you're not going to. This is all screened through a paint strainer, a 5-gallon pail paint strainer. I think it's about 200 mesh, so that way it doesn't clog up your injectors on a tractor when you're doing an injection.

59:22 Yeah, the spray tips and stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Joseph is asking, have you ever gone micro hunting to try to increase the diversity of your starting population? When I first started, yeah, I went to the mountains. I grabbed duff out of the forest there and any place that I could find decaying organic matter, I would put it into the pile. But make sure that is the decay organic matter above ground. Don't try to grab the dirt. No soil, no soil in the compost. And you know when you process this material before you put it in the bioreactor, it goes through a water bath and you're trapping on it all the rocks. All the soil settles out of the system. All you're getting into this director is organic matter, which is what you want.

1:00:11 So you don't want any soil in there at all. No, I. What the soil does is it it clogs it up. It doesn't let it breathe properly. Again, oxygen is key to this system. And anytime you block it, either putting wet grass in there or green leaves, you know, all this really should be try that material that's dried before. And then you just re-wet it and you're only wetting it for about 40 seconds, just enough to get a surface coating. Once the pile starts heating up and steaming it, water penetrates everything and you have that film and they're traversing across that film of water. Yeah, so even like feedlot manure, you have to be careful because sometimes if they're pushing it out of the lot and they get too much dirt, you'd have to be kind of careful about that. Yeah, that. And you don't want any cow patties or horse apples. You need to break this material up. You need as much surface area as you can get. If you've got a veil grinder, throw all your material in there and run it through a veil grinder and it's ready to go then. Yeah, or a chip or shredder if you don't. We run hours through the chipper shredder. Okay, just think about, take a step back, think about those dirt, gravel, sand, mineral type of thing. If you are only inoculating your land with two pounds per acre, right, and you ended up with some soil, sand, or rocks in that two pounds, you are going to dramatically diminish the amount of micro. You're diluting the effect. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

1:01:50 So we got a question here from Willy. Kind of one, one soil nerd to another here, I think to you. She says, can you elaborate on the soil respiration decreasing at higher microbial biomass associated with increased microbiome? Higher soil respiration always regarded as positively correlated with soil health. Does that max out at a certain point? Well, what we notice, and usually the area that they're, the test that they're using to figure this out.

1:02:22 They're in one part of that curve, they're in that linear increase and they're assuming that as you increase the amount of carbon, increase the amount of microbes, number of microbes you can add more respiration. My research has proven that not to be so. At that point in the beginning, yes, but this thing starts to level out and you start to get more and more efficient. I've seen seven times the amount of carbon, 30 times the number of the microbial biomass, and only twice the respiration.

1:02:57 So if you are, yeah it looks like that at this part of the curve, it looks like it's linear, right? But then that means you have not reached that critical point of efficiency. The nervous system, they've never been up in that upper range where you have a functioning high carbon fungal dominance system. And I noticed this also in grazing lands over in the southeast. The exact same thing I observed in the lab and in all the field studies I've done here in NMSU. The same thing showed up over there, that those people that were adopting what we call an adaptive multi-padded grazing management process actually saw a 30 percent reduction in respiration even though they had more microbes and more carbon in their soil.

1:03:49 A lot of these tests are not great. The PLFA, I am really not a fan of. I like visible visual microscopy to assess the microbes that are there. Everything else gets biased. The respiration, I'm not really fond of that where you take that soil, you grind it up, you dry it, you re-wet it, you add some nutrient resource and see what the microbes are doing. You completely destroyed that population structure of your soil microbiome. Yet if you do it in situ or in the field, that's where you can see what your real respiration is. And that's where you'll start to see that as you improve the healthier soil, it becomes more and more efficient at not respiring so much carbon but having it go into the soil.

1:04:46 I use this very kind of dumb example. That I'm not in shape, you know, I'm a thin person but I am not in shape. If I have to go up four flights of stairs, I'm huffing and puffing and I can't, don't talk to me for a while, just let me catch up with my breath, right? We have a couple of friends, they are triathletes. I mean, you know, just listening to their activity makes me tired. They can run up four flights of stairs and then they are hopping around like we're going next, you know what we're gonna do? And they're just breathing normally. And they, because their system is so much more efficient, they are in shape. They are at that level compared to mine is down there, that I'm more sedentary in compared to them.

1:05:48 So you know, you cannot compare. Like okay, well four flights of stairs is a lot for a lot of people to run up. Well, there are some people that are in very good shape, they can run up there and still run a marathon. So when you say respiration, then the more you produce, the more you respire, yes you will still respire more, but the rate is not the same. The rate of respiration would be lower for a functioning very well functioning system.

1:06:25 Yeah, yeah, good stuff. Just maybe one or two more questions, we're already over time, but this is really great stuff. Interesting question here. This is coming from Ecuador. When you start filling your bioreactor, do you need to fill it all at the same time or can you continue to add other stuff on top of it to be worked into it? What's your recommendation there?

1:06:52 We recommend getting all the material ready to fill one bioreactor and doing it. And if you can do it today, if it tails into the second day, but you want, since you know that you have to wait a year, you want to don't want to delay the filling of this and you would like to have the whole bioreactor start to process at once instead of having a heating phase then going down, putting in more, having a heating phase then going down, you want to get the heating phase to last about four days. Keep in mind it's different from the other type of composting process. This is fully aerobic from very beginning to the end. And also you're building a system. As soon as you putting the stuff in there, all the action starts. They are starting all this adjusting process and microbial activities and everything start happening. So every time when you add more to it, then you were resetting it. And you added more, you're resetting, so they're different timeline there. So this is really the type of process you need to do it all at once.

1:08:10 Yeah, save your material if you have food waste. I dry mine under a glass piece of glass and I just collect it and then I run it all through the chipper shredder and then put it into the pile that way.

1:08:29 So last question here, this is a question of scale. You showed the picture of the bioreactor, you know, you say you put about a ton of material in, I think, and it cooks down to 700. I know that you reference the big project in Colorado, I think Patrick O'Neil and those guys were behind that, very large scale one, which can be done. I don't want to get into that. If people have questions about how to do this on a large scale, shoot me an email and I can put you in contact with some people that have done it. What's the smallest scale that you've seen people do this at, you know, like if it's a home gardener, they don't need 700 pounds of finished product. How small a scale can you go to with this and still make it work?

1:09:11 The very basic concept is that if you have like one foot of material like this, you need to have the beginning point where the air can start penetrating and infiltrate. So let's say if you want to make a smaller one, you can probably make a let's say two and a half feet diameter, and then put a six inch pipe in the middle, right? And then you can make that kind of cylinder, and then you can pull out the pipe after one day. Using the same material, just design it smaller so that way the air infiltration is still there, so you're not going to have a dead zone and become anaerobic. And then you can adjust the amount of water that you put in there, and then still keeping it at roughly around 70 percent moisture content.

1:10:19 You're never going to have enough of this, even if you're a small farmer right now. You can grow straight into it. It does fantastic. Coating putting on your garden, there's so many uses for this. So yeah, so don't be afraid of making too much, but the key is having it fully aerated so it doesn't go anaerobic, and then keeping the proper moisture. And then, you know, temperature, right? A smaller one is going to be more susceptible to freezing, I'm assuming, because it's just not generating the heat too. You know, so, and worms, don't forget the worms. Don't forget the worms. Yeah, can't forget the worms for sure.

1:11:01 And we also have some people that they don't want it as tall because it's harder for them to fill, so you can make them shorter as well. So there are different ways to do it if you don't need as much product at the end, but you do have to adhere to some of the principles.

1:11:20 So again, we didn't get into a lot of the architecture of how to build it, but there's great resources out there. You mentioned the Chico State resources. You can just go to YouTube, search for Johnson Sue compost bioreactor. If you Google it, you'll find it. I did that earlier and the Chico State stuff comes up really well. So tons of good resources. If you can't find this stuff, send me an email and I can help put you in contact with the right websites or the right links. Keith at greencoverseed.com, you can get a hold of me, and we can get you those resources.

1:11:57 Fantastic information, David, Wayfin. That's just great stuff. Pretty good stuff for a contractor and a real estate agent, actually. That's a great thing about this country, I think. I am an immigrant, naturalized citizen back in the early 80s. And what I love about this country is that if you try hard enough, you get a second chance or third chance, a fourth chance. You have to be curious, willing to work hard, and people are so receptive and most times so generous. And that's why our belief is to put all this information online somewhere, making it open source for everybody to try it, because the ingenuity of the people here, it's amazing. They can experiment on things that maybe they come up with something better and share with everybody, and we all move forward together in the right direction.

1:13:06 Yeah, you're exactly right, Wayfin. This country is great that way. And I've really been appreciative of the people within agriculture in general, but people within the regenerative ag, soil health movement are very, very sharing. You know, they're not holding these secrets because I want to be better than you. People are very generous about this information, and you guys would be at the top of that list. So we appreciate the generosity of your time. We've gone almost 15 minutes over, but hardly anybody's dropped off because it's been such good stuff.

1:13:43 Thank you so very much. Folks, next week, Dale Strickler is going to be on. Dale has got his third book published. It's called 'Restoring Your Soil: The Complete Guide to Restoring Your Soil.' So make sure that you're on, and you can listen to Dale talk about all the things that are in that book. And then in two weeks, we'll have Dr. Richard Mulvaney talking about how fertilizer recommendations are way overblown from universities. It'll play right into what you're talking about here as well, because it's all biologically driven, so it's all going to fit together really well.

1:14:20 Happy Thanksgiving, everybody. Thanks for joining again, David, Wayfin. Thank you so much for giving us your time. And thank you for the opportunity to share with everybody, and thank everybody who's growing something for us to eat. I mean, for this Thanksgiving holiday, I love Thanksgiving and I love to eat, and thank you for growing things for us to feed us.

1:14:46 All right, take care, everybody. Thank you. Happy Thanksgiving.