Building Soil Health in Dry Regions: What a Decade of On-Farm Research Shows

0:00 Thank you, Sophie. Yes, my name is Jacen Burns and I am the sales manager here at Green Cover and it's just been a joy to be part of what Green Cover is doing and where we are going for many years. And so it's been a really good webinar series so far with education and research-led education through universities. I know sometimes the sentiment can kind of be well I want to see real on-farm research or real practical things like that, but it's not always just one or the other. And so the researchers and the people from certain universities that we've had on this webinar series have been really inspiring, really encouraging because they are doing both. And it's not just in the lab, but out on the fields and getting their hands dirty and working with real farmers, real producers for real practical solutions.

0:47 And so we're going to continue that today. So I'll introduce Megan here and then we'll get going with the presentation. But Megan Chapansky is a professor of agri-ecology in the department of soil and crop sciences at Colorado State University. Her research group applies system-based approaches to improving the resilience of cropping systems. And Megan I know that word resilience is really big for you and talking about that quite a bit especially in the area that you mostly work in, kind of eastern Colorado area where it's very dry and very arid. And so I know that hits home with a lot of the people that we work with as Green Cover, a lot of our customers. And so thanks for joining. It's our honor to have you here today.

1:29 Great. Well, thanks very much for inviting me to share with this group. I mean, you guys have been great partners over the years. And I also want to introduce Lauren Haford. I'm going to be the one doing most of the talking and presenting today, but Lauren Haford really helped lead the farms project, which I'll talk about in part of the presentation. And so I wanted her to join us. She's also a graduate student with me right now at CSU, but she might be able to help with some of the Q&A at the end. So Lauren, thanks for being here as well.

2:04 Thanks. All right, I'm going to go ahead and try to share my screen and get started. Great. Hopefully someone will let me know if that doesn't look good, but I think we got it up. Yeah, so I am based in Fort Collins, Colorado. I've been here 12 years and I'm originally actually from Manhattan, Kansas. So not kind of ironically, I now do all my work sort of between here and my home base and never kind of thought that's where I'd land, but here I am. And I've become pretty passionate about trying to understand how we maintain resilient farming systems that are both profitable, productive, protect our soil. I do a lot of work with soil health and a lot of work on farm and collaborating with amazing producers out across the plains.

3:04 I try to keep a producer-driven systems-based focus on our research. So what does that mean? That means understanding that farmers are constantly balancing the complexities of staying viable economically, also trying to manage their farms based on their values around soil health, sustainability goals, and constantly balancing what this year's weather and what long-term climate trajectories are doing. And with all of that messiness, management decisions are made and some of those have feedbacks and so it's just really complex. And so how do we approach that? We do it with teams. And so there are so many innovative producers I've been able to work with over the past decade. I'm not listing them by name, but please know that they are like some of the most important parts of the research that I'm going to be talking about today. I also want to highlight Ron Meyer, who's CSU Extension. He's going to be retiring unfortunately this year, but he's been involved in pretty much every on-farm project I've done. We have amazing students that work with us.

4:16 Highlight three different research projects that we've worked on. One focused on reducing fallow frequency in dryland systems. One focused on what we've learned looking at how soils change when irrigation is retired. And another one that was a large multi-state on-farm study called FARMS that Lauren and Joanie Mitchk and the Colorado conservation tillage association led. So just know that all of this is teamwork and never happens in isolation.

4:49 I'm going to give you my biased view of the world which is that plants drive everything. So the management of plant inputs drive soil health. I'm going to talk about the challenges in maintaining soil health and limited water and then what we've learned doing on-farm sampling and research in terms of the different ways farmers are addressing these. What practices seem to shift soil health metrics. And then I am not a microbiologist, but I feel like that is the topic that gets the most questions and interest and farmers are trying to figure out and understand the value of soil biology. And so I'll just give my two cents mostly at the end on where I think we are in managing and measuring soil biology. And then I have some questions for you all and thinking about how we can make our research more relevant moving forward. Hopefully you'll have some questions for us as well.

5:44 So here's my view of the world. Why plants rule? I see it this way. Carbon is the backbone of soil organic matter. Most of our soil organic matter, the term organic means that it contains carbon. So those materials which are plant residues, animal residues, microbial residues, whatever that soil organic matter in the soil is the engine, the cog in the engine that supports microbial activity. It's the food, it creates structures around them, housing for the microbes. And it's the soil microbes and their activity that supports the functions that we're looking for in a healthy soil. For example, they mineralize. As they decompose soil organic matter, nutrients become available through mineralization. They help cement particles together to create aggregates that influences air and water flow through our soils. So all of those processes are microbially mediated but I see the organic matter as sort of the bedrock that those microbes need to carry out those functions. And where does that carbon come from? Where does that organic matter come from? For the most part, it comes and originally if you go back, it all comes from plants and it all comes from photosynthesis. It comes from the amazing ability that plants have to pull carbon dioxide out of the air and turn it into solid biomass. And so the more that we manage plants and plant inputs, the more we build soil organic matter. And that really is the key of soil health. So that's how I view the world is very plant-centric with the plants feeding the microbes and building soil health.

7:35 I'm going to give one example of why we have seen this play out in our water-limited systems. So there's the long-term cropping systems trials that the university had for some 30 years before I started here at CSU, started by Gary Peterson, Dwayne Westfall, where they had been looking at on the bottom here, this conceptual figure shows sort of a three-year growth window. Hopefully you can see my cursor, not sure if you can or not. But this dotted line here is trying to show that we have a window every year when we can grow plants right. In winter it's too cold we don't have enough temperature but once that starts warming up we have potential to grow biomass again if we have water and into that then we fit our crops. So in this example here, we have a year of corn and then we have a long summer-fallow period and then winter wheat is planted, grows a little bit in the fall, goes dormant over the winter, grows again in the spring and we harvest it. Right? So we choose with our crop rotations how to fit plants into these growing windows. And so this long-term research has said as the adoption of no-till happened, it

8:56 It might be possible to reduce the frequency of this summerow period and still be viable. We use summerow in our region to store soil moisture to stabilize wheat yields. And so sharing some of that research when I first got here, I had farmers say that's fine, and your university plots might say that we can reduce summerow before our winter wheat, but that doesn't work on my farm. I don't get enough rain. I don't have the right soil. It doesn't work where I'm at. And so this question of can we have use research to say is this generalizable across large spatial areas is one of the questions. And so we actually took it to winter farms to ask this.

9:39 So the question was can we insert a crop like a preso millet, a grazed cover crop, different forage species into that window in place of summerow and what are the implications? So I use this example because it's sort of also how I think about doing research, which is farm fields are long-term experimental plots. And so we can use lots of different farm fields that have practiced different management, have had different management systems over time as actual experimental plots. Um and so we managed to recruit a bunch of producers all over western Nebraska down to southern Colorado that had different management or crop rotations. Everything from the traditional wheat fallow system to fallow once every two to three years. So a corn wheat fallow, corn wheat millet fallow is the blue triangle, so mid intensity and the green boxes here are farms that have taken fallow out of their system altogether. And we could sample their soils, gather yield data for them and try to see if these different rotation systems are having different impacts on these different soils across this huge gradient of both climate, soils, soil types and everything.

11:03 So the take-home was that yes, reducing fallow frequency was net profitable across all of this wide range of farms. And we could also then look at the different components and think about what is the series of feedbacks that's enabling these farms to stay profitable without fallow before their winter wheat. And so the way we think about it and the way the data support it is that by reducing tillage in these systems we are retaining more residue on the surface, we are losing less water through evaporation by having coverage on that. So with reduced fallow we're increasing residue inputs back to the soil. We found that the comparison between the wheat fallow and that continuous rotation there was a 300% increase in soil fungi that corresponded with a 300% increase in soil aggregation and that produced a very small increase relatively in soil carbon. So even with small changes in soil carbon we are seeing large impacts on things like soil biology and soil aggregation. And so the key here is that farms are complex and all of these factors are interacting and cascading with a simple management shift, which was the frequency of fallow in these systems.

12:34 Getting back to the farmer question of well that doesn't work here, it is true that the benefits were smaller on sier soils and higher evaporative demand soils in climates. So the hotter your area and the sander your soils, you saw smaller benefits from reducing fallow in your systems in terms of improving soil health. But we think that we can shift as we increase plant inputs into these systems, we can build soil health even in our water limited regions and stay profitable.

13:10 So let's talk a little bit more about water. The water availability constrains our ability to build soil health because without water we can't grow biomass. So that's always this constant tension we have in our climate. But I think I'm going to share what I find to be some pretty interesting data that the water availability we know reduces plant growth but we expect it also to impact soil biology. But our soil microbes are incredibly resilient to low moisture environments is what we found. So I'm going to show you a few examples and think about what the implications are for that.

13:48 So this is an image of the Ogalala aquifer which spans and touches parts of eight different states in the central US. And the color here shows which areas are at greatest risk to get to a level of groundwater depletion that it's no longer economically viable to irrigate. This timeline is not realistic, right? Because farmers adapt, things change over time. But what it does highlight is the huge heterogeneity and variability of different groundwater levels across the Ogalala aquifer. The gray areas are the areas where there's deeper pockets of water like the sand hills of Nebraska where we don't see depletion, but then we see these intense reds in areas especially in Texas and the western edge of this aquifer.

14:46 And so this is bringing up these challenges where in Colorado for example, we have state compacts and we have requirements to retire a certain number of acres to meet those state compacts. In addition, there's a lot of great work happening around extending the life of the aquifer and improving our water management. We've done surveys of irrigators across the whole area and I just want to emphasize that this is not an unknown problem. Irrigators are extremely concerned about declining water and mostly because of the value it brings to their farms today, but primarily they're worried about the future of their communities and the generations in front of them in terms of being able to farm. So this is a very personal and very challenging situation to be in. And so how can we learn a little bit as farmers are wrestling with limited water in terms of how we might manage these systems, especially those at greatest risk of needing to shift out of irrigated agriculture.

15:50 So we can look historically back because there was a bunch of incentivized retirements through the CREP program in the Burlington area of Colorado back in the 90s. And so we asked the question of you know we know irrigation has enabled higher productivity and from past research that has also contributed because we have higher plant inputs and residues returned to the soil. We have higher soil carbon actually on our irrigated pivots than we do on our dryland fields. So if we turn that well off, if we turn the spigot off, what happens to that accumulation of soil carbon? Can we hold on to it to support more resilient systems as we transition some lands from irrigated to dryland management?

16:39 So we could use neighboring fields. This image here shows on the left a still irrigated center pivot system where we could get soil samples and on the right a neighboring field where the well had been retired over a decade ago. And we can compare soil carbon across those and as well as using those corners which had never been irrigated as sort of control points. So this is another way that we are taking data from actual working farms to ask specific questions within the realities of how farmers are managing those systems.

17:20 The not so happy news is that within about ten years, the soil carbon gains during irrigation have been lost in most of these systems. So here's the graph here. On the y-axis we have the soil profile going from the top down to 70 cm, several feet deep. And then going across the top is the soil carbon content. So the blue here is still irrigated. That's soil carbon content in our irrigated pivots. The red is ten years after irrigation's been turned off and if that land was converted to dryland annual cropping. And in the middle, I think what's important is those were ones that were in the CREP program. So they were incentivized to be planted to perennial grasses. And we see that by having perennial grass systems or grazing systems potentially in these systems we were able to hold on to more of that carbon that was built during the irrigation era in these soils. So perennial grasses maintain our soil carbon better than annual crops after retirement. So again driving home the point that plant inputs is really what's going to drive building and maintaining soil organic matter in these systems.

18:48 Plant productivity decreases with reduced water availability, but we could also ask what is the impact on soil microbes? Do they totally shift their communities? Do they slow down their turnover, their decomposition rate, their breathing, basically their respiration? And if they do, that would slow down the losses of soil carbon as we go into lower moisture situations.

19:18 This diagram shows the carbon cycle where plants use carbon dioxide from the air through photosynthesis to build carbohydrates. That carbon then gets allocated below ground and becomes part of soil organic matter, and microbes feed on that to get their energy and release carbon dioxide. We can measure that respiration from the microbes to get a sense of how much carbon is being blown back out to the atmosphere versus what was brought in via photosynthesis.

19:59 We did this on a research station where we looked at fields going from still irrigated to no longer irrigated. Plant productivity declines, which is not surprising. But what was really interesting is in the absence of new plant input, when we maintained some plots in these experimental treatments, the soil microbial biomass did not change and the respiration, the activity, the turnover rate, the rate at which the microbes are chewing through old organic matter did not slow down with reduced soil moisture.

20:44 This messy graph on the bottom shows volumetric water content on the x-axis and respiration from soil microbes on the y-axis—the rate at which they are breathing CO2 out of the soil, which means they're decomposing organic matter. The blue dots are the irrigated and dryland plots and the red is the irrigated plots. What we see is basically a flat line. There's a lot more moisture in our irrigated plots than our dryland, but the microbes are breathing at the same rate, meaning they are amazingly resilient to low moisture. That's good in some ways, but not so great for soil carbon. While we might be balanced in terms of photosynthesis inputs and respiration outputs in irrigated systems, when we convert those to dryland, we have a massive reduction in photosynthesis because plants are impacted much to a much greater extent by low moisture than our microbes, whereas our microbes just keep respiring.

21:52 The take-home for me is that we really need to maintain plant inputs to maintain soil health, and that is really hard with limited water. So what's a farmer to do? These systems are water limited and it's complex. There's no prescription on how to keep plant inputs in these systems. I think the best thing we can do is be creative and learn together, and that's the value I've found in working with the Colorado Conservation Tillage Association and the Farms project, Farmers Advancing Regenerative Management Systems. This was an NRCS-funded project that Joanie Mitchek led, and the goal of this whole project was to increase the adoption of soil health management systems in the high plains. It provided financial assistance to participants and offered technical and social support, and my lab was involved with evaluating the soil health impacts of different management systems across this.

23:06 On the right you see a graph of the location—it was Kansas, Colorado, and Nebraska that were involved. There were 24 different farmer participants, and they were clustered in networks and had mentors, with field days and a lot of social engagement and networking across farms. Now we get to the challenge, right? When we do research projects, we usually try to look at rotation diversity or irrigation retirement, one or two practices. It gets really complex looking at multiple practices all at the same time.

23:44 Same time, but that's the reality of farms. And so this is also the tension we're constantly holding in these systems. So this shows here the different regenerative practices these 24 farms were using. So most of them were using some form of cover crops or grazing, but they used a lot of diverse practices. So, how do we look at the impacts of practices on soil health when we've got really a soup of different ways that farmers are adapting their systems based on their local context?

24:15 So Lauren and the team helped develop this regenerative index score for each farm so we could compare them to each other and it was guided by the five principles of regenerative management system. So minimizing disturbance, maximizing cover, maximizing living roots, maximizing diversity and integrating livestock. And you can see here the rye scores by farm and see that there's a huge range in the scores and there's a lot of diversity in how farmers stack those practices basically across their farms.

24:59 So then we measured soil health across all these farms at two different time points. But I'm going to show you the aggregated data of both of those time points together because the question was then do those practices, do the regenerative index scores which reflect the different practices correlate with soil health measures?

25:21 And so this graph here shows those rye scores on bottom on the x-axis and some of the different soil health metrics we looked at. Percent organic matter, nitrogen cycling enzymes as an indicator of microbial activity, mean aggregate size, and then on the bottom is microbial biomass shown measured using PLFA where the blue is bacteria and the red is fungi.

25:54 So, we saw a lot of noise. So, you can see the lines of dots that go vertically. That's variability within the field. And it's also adding 2020 and 2023 data together. So, it was replicates within field and also variability across sampling time points. We did not find trends between 2020 and 2023. Part of that because we had drought on one end of the farm sites in the first year. We had drought on the east edge in the third year. And this is part of the challenge of measuring soil health is a lot of it depends on year-to-year variability. And it can be really difficult to see signals across that noise. So we have a lot of infield variability.

26:46 Even with that we do see though that organic matter did increase slightly with increased use of those regenerative practices. So we see a very slow increasing line in the organic matter. We see a much steeper line increasing with aggregate size. And wet aggregate stability across pretty much any experiment we've done in our region has been the most consistently sensitive indicator to responding to everything from 90 days of integrating grazed cover crops into a system relative to fallow. We've seen increased aggregation to that cropping intensity or the diversification reducing fallow frequency. Aggregation was really responsive to that. We've done studies looking at compost additions. Aggregate stability is the one that responds to that. So if I had a choice of one indicator to measure, it would be aggregate stability. Of course, it's the one that very few labs do and very few labs that do it do it the way we do it in our research labs. And so that's the challenge with it. The microbial indicators were noisy and not very helpful for the most part in responding or being related back to this. The other piece then was were there certain components of that rye score that contributed more or were more aligned to the soil health metrics.

28:17 And the most correlation we found between part of the rye score and those soil health indicators was maximizing living root. You see I'm a broken record here. Continuing to have plant inputs into the system is what seems to be driving our growth in organic matter, our growth in aggregate size and you see a slight trend in increasing in both the nitrogen cycling enzyme activity and the microbial biomass.

28:49 I also want to finish by saying this was a lot of noisy data. What do farmers do with this? The reality is at the end of this farms project, this data gave us another aspect to think about and talk about with farmers and thinking about what the goals were with their management practices, what they were trying to shift in terms of the outcomes. But the soil test data was not particularly useful or informative for farmers when we surveyed them at the end. It was really the ability to engage with other farmers and learn what each different farmer was doing in their operation, what was working and the social networks that came out of that.

29:28 So while on-farm research and data is where I work, the value of the conversations and the co-learning is often much greater than what we actually get in terms of numbers and data crunching outcomes. So just want to point that out. So again soil aggregation is my favorite indicator. I think it also indicates it's relevant in our region in particular because improved soil aggregation in our surface soils helps us with infiltration. So use the water when we get it and we store it. The other thing is that it is an integrated indicator I think where it reflects soil fungi, soil microbial activity which creates the glues that hold the particles together. But usually those microbes are there because there's a little bit of organic matter that they're decomposing. And so it's all of the factors that work together that help form and hold those aggregates together. So I do think it's really useful indicator and particularly relevant in our water limited regions.

30:39 So what about soil microbiology? Right? I hear so many farmers talk about the value and that's what they're excited about and it captures our imagination and I completely agree. I think we're really challenged though in our ability to scratch that itch in a way. So we know that soil microbes are important. I feel they're incredibly important. The question is can we measure them in a meaningful way that's useful and then can we manage them in a targeted way. And my view is that soil organic matter is the engine that supports that microbial community. And that those microbial communities are critical for supporting the functions we want our soils to carry out.

31:24 So this is where I spitball a little bit and probably lean a little bit beyond my expert expertise in this area, but I'm going to say what I think we know, what we do know, what we think we might know, and what we don't know about managing soil microbial communities that I think hopefully is somewhat relevant for farmers. So, what we know: microbes are important. We know through decades of work that we can inoculate with microbes like rhizobia on legumes. It's very effective. Inoculating with mycorrhizae can be effective as well. These are soil organisms that have symbiotic relationships with our plants. And so if we inoculate with the seed, they're right there with the roots and can form their symbiotic partnerships to support legume nitrogen fixation or mycorrhizal colonization of our roots. So we know that those things work, right? We know we can shape microbial partnerships with plants in some ways through inoculation, for example.

32:30 What we think we know: soil fungi are particularly important in building soil aggregates, bacteria too, but soil fungi seem to be a slightly more important. We know that different plant species exude different quantities and qualities of carbon from their roots and we can isolate those in laboratory type settings and show that those support different microbial communities around their roots. And we can say generally which groups of microbes carry out which functions at a really coarse level. However, what we don't really know is how to measure soil microbial communities and link them to soil functions, especially in bulk soil and on real farms to inform management and help farmers. Right? So the PLFA measurements are useful indicators.

38:11 Lauren helped lead. That project is over, but there's some really nice resources at that web page. And I will pause there. Thanks.

38:24 Yeah. Thank you so much, Megan. That was great. A lot of interesting stuff there. So attendees, whoever wants to, yeah, add some questions to the Q&A and, in regards to what Megan just asked or about the presentation, I have one maybe we can start with and then go to some of the chats and Lauren, you can chime in here too, but with the farms project and just real practical like what did that look like tools that were used or like what was the what it looked like to gather some of that data and go out to the farms and actually pull samples and things like that?

39:01 Oh, you should talk Megan.

39:04 Oh, about the actual collecting the samples part. Yeah. Like how are they collected? What was actually collected? Yeah. Yeah. I whizzed through I didn't share all those details. So, we basically split each field into four parts to try to get some of the variability across the field. And we had a mapping tool so we could go back to the same parts places in 2020 as we did in 2023. And we collected soils down to 15 cm, 0 to 5 and 5 to 15 cm. And then we some of the analyses were done at Ward Lab, some of the analyses were done in our lab. Augustino Bore with Kansas State did aggregate stability analyses along with Logan Simon. And so it was a collaborative effort. We would meet at gas stations and exchange soil on state lines. It was hilarious. Yeah, so it was a huge effort of sampling and also some of the most fun we had and we got students involved and they really enjoyed interacting with the farmers. The other part that wouldn't have been useful at all without the management history. So Lauren and others on the team helped collect five-year management histories of each farm. Without that, it's kind of useless to us in a lot of ways. So having that management history was critical.

40:36 Awesome. Okay, we've got a few questions we can go to. We still got, you know, just about 15 minutes for Q&A, so lots of time. I'll go to Christine's question here in the Q&A. What percentage of these projects are funded by government subsidies? It looks like is the question.

40:55 They are all federally funded. They I don't know what is meant by subsidies, but they are all federally funded. So, USDA basically, USDA NRCS funded the farms project. Some of it was actually supported by Colorado Wheat Research Foundation. So the Colorado Wheat Growers Association returns some of the funding from the wheat varieties to CSU. So that's also a nice farmer collaboration that supports research, but most of it is federally funded.

41:37 Okay. So Jackie is asking with an increase in soil organic matter, how or what does the water holding capacity increase as the percentage organic matter goes up? Yeah, I have that slide somewhere. I didn't put it in the slide deck. Here's my, so yes, we do know that there is a slight increase in water holding capacity as you increase soil carbon. The Soil Health Institute did a nice analysis of that across a huge number of sites in the last few years. I penciled it out in terms of the number of gallons, you know, relative to say acre feet and it comes out to like 0.8 acre feet of water per percent increase in soil organic matter is one way to think about it. Meaning it's great, it's useful, it builds, I think maybe more important, it increases the aggregation and the infiltration. The quantity of water it holds in our water limited areas where we're looking at maybe going from 1% to 2% is not huge. So useful, but I think less important than the impact organic matter has on structure. I don't know if that makes sense.

43:04 Yeah, I think that does and I would agree that the benefits of increasing that organic matter would

43:10 Yes, water holding capacity, but as you said as well the infiltration and the aggregate stability and everything. So yes, there could be some gallon a gallon number you throw out per acre of you know if you increase it by half a percent or percent. But hopefully the goal is just you capture all of it whether that's you know a one inch rainfall or more.

43:32 Right. Yeah. And we do know there's data out there showing that soils with higher soil organic matter do weather droughts better.

43:42 Here's a question that was in the chat I think from earlier on in your presentation, but can shading from like tarping or even shrubs and trees benefit water retention and micro protections?

43:57 Oh, interesting. We actually did some agrotics studies recently which is always some people are excited about, some are not. But I think the interesting thing in our climate, a lot of our plants actually get too much sunshine. And so we do see that plants are a little bit less stressed with a little bit of shade. I don't think that gets to that question, but yeah, I mean, if you cover the soil and or shade it, you will cool it and that will reduce the moisture demand or draw from it.

44:33 Did that answer the question? Yeah, I think so. And it's not exactly the same situation, but we kind of think about that when recommending cover crops for like interseeding V3 to V4 in corn. So right in the middle of the summer and we'll use a lot of cool season, cooler season species because they're underneath that canopy of the established corn. So there's shade, there's less, you know, heat stress on those crops. So sometimes we will use some brassicas, some clovers, which wouldn't have a chance growing all by themselves out in the bare field. So yeah, I think that's a good example.

45:11 Okay. What are your thoughts about the claim by the company that their biological product increases soil carbon? And I guess you can kind of take that to just other products that are out there.

45:24 Yeah, I won't speak to that product. I don't know it at all. So microbes are involved in stabilizing soil carbon. They generally don't build it unless they're cyanobacteria that photosynthesize, right? Unless they are fixing carbon from the atmosphere themselves, they are not increasing your carbon. They might stabilize what's there, but they generally don't grow carbon. Plants do.

45:59 I think that's well said.

46:02 Okay. And Lauren, if you have any other questions, too. I guess we have a couple more over here, too. But okay, let's see. Which funding sources or grant opportunities should partners look to for funding on research opportunities?

46:24 That's awesome. I mean, for on-farm research, and Lauren, you probably speak to this. We've had the really great partnerships with the SAR program, which is a USDA one as well, but it really prioritizes farmer engagement and there's a whole range of different producer practitioner, you know, producers can lead their own proposals. They can partner with researchers to do them. There's a whole range. But those SAR options have been great. Otherwise, I mean, if there is, I you know, I'm always open like if there's a group of farmers that wants to come together with an idea. I mean, that's really what led to a graced cover crop project, which kind of fed into the farms project. So, Lauren, do you want to say any more about how to research.

47:14 Yeah. I think like Western Sarah is a great fabulous option if you don't mind doing a little bit of your own grant admin. So, writing the proposal, keeping track of budget and giving reports, hosting a field day. If that's within your capabilities, then

47:35 You can just apply for it and they'll give you money to do your own projects. And then if that's not in your wheelhouse, because I know you probably have a thousand other things to do, like fix the tractor, then I mean I think I spoke with a bunch of professors this last few months and they're all pretty psyched to work with more farmers. So reach out to extension land grant university, find a professor who's working in something that you want to study and see if they're open to writing a grant with you or working with your group.

48:10 Like funding is always going to be an issue. But if you can cross that hurdle with extension or a land grant university professor, then they can bring a lot of resources to bear like undergraduate labor to go out and do the sampling. Yeah, so I think there's tons of opportunities out there. It's just you have to find them and that's always more time and that can be a hurdle.

48:42 Yes. But I would definitely echo this. We at Green Cover are forever thankful for what this has provided. For us, that's kind of part of our genesis story, our origin story at Green Cover. Keith and Brian got a grant from this to do some moisture sensing testing. And what they saw was diverse cover crops were way more moisture efficient than a single species or kind of monoculture. And so that's kind of what kicked us off on using cover crops more on our farm and then therefore, with their entrepreneurmindedness, started the Green Cover back in 2008, 2009. So yeah, we love this for sure.

49:23 Megan, I'm curious what you think about this with biochar. Has there been any conversation about biochar application?

49:30 Yeah, yeah. I haven't worked a ton with biochar. I've had colleagues who've done a lot of research with it. Actually, we have a compost, a western producer practitioner grant to look at compost extracts with and without biochar potentially. I mean, it's a carbon source. It's not as active. I think the biggest challenge that I've seen is the cost and the quantity. So I don't think there's anything bad with biochar. It has a lot of ability to hold onto, you know, kind of has exchange sites to hold onto nutrients or find out how, you know, create some little homes for microbes. We know microbes do live within biochar. So I think it's great.

50:17 I mean, I did talk about, you know, I'm biased towards plants being inputs and that's partially because of the scale of the farms that we've been working on. They don't have a scale of ability to bring other organic amendments or residues onto that sort of acreage. But if you have a smaller operation, you can do things maybe like biochar, compost, manures, all of those things are also going to bring carbon into the system.

50:51 Yeah, Sophie is asking, Lauren, could you share some of your main takeaways from the farms project?

50:58 Yeah. Echoing some of the things that Megan said, like the producers we worked with were all managing these crazy complex operations and trying to fit regenerative practices in everything they do. And that's super hard to do, especially when you have to make a thousand decisions on exactly how you're going to build your compost, apply your compost, or whatever it is you've got going on. And so I thought that it was really valuable. We had a ton of events where, you know, webinars where the farmers would just talk to each other. We didn't have a speaker. We just had people, you know, everybody, let's go get on a webinar and troubleshoot interceding. And people would come with their issues and everyone would be like, oh yeah, I tried that. I tried that. That sucked. That worked. And so I think that collaboration and helping each other troubleshoot the details of how to apply a practice was super valuable. And we did some network analysis showing like, you know, who is still connected to whom or who built connections and the friendship network was the one with

52:24 The most growth and I hope that means that it's a durable network and I know some of these guys still talk to each other. I saw Dave Dryden's on this, so hey Dave. And yeah, it was a really cool thing to bring a bunch of really innovative soil health producers together and see what they did together. So that was awesome.

52:51 No, that's great. Thank you for that. Yeah, it sounds like collaboration to actual sometimes it just takes like a sounding board and not just feeling like you're alone trying to find these solutions and finding like-minded people that still have differences too in different environments and things but still yeah finding solutions together. So I love it.

53:11 Yeah. Megan, I have this thought and it sounds maybe kind of what you're saying, but correct me if I'm wrong with so maybe taking the conversation back to the biology or some of these products that a lot of people are talking about and you kind of alluded to that too of there's definitely a place for that, the microbes and different things like that. But you've also mentioned, you know, plants and roots, you know, you can't really do it without that. And then you talked about the soil health principles. So I guess that's where I would kind of encourage people to be and it feels like that's what you're saying is those can be great options, you know, adding the biology, adding some different inoculations and stuff in addition to just rhizobia and mycorrhizal fungi. But also not losing sight of, you know, the principles, the tried-and-true things and they can be helpers to the plants but not replacing, you know, the soil health principles essentially. I guess what I'm saying.

54:10 Yeah. Yeah. And I think, you know, I mentioned that largely because there is just so much out there right now. And I'm not an expert in it enough to say this will or won't work. I do think though that you want to be a little cautious and thinking about and also respecting the fact that if you are building a healthy soil environment to a large extent those microbes will be there. And that's the key thing is our soils have an amazing capacity and diversity of soil biology in place and so the jury is still a little bit out on to what extent we can shift that by adding things. Yeah.

55:04 Yeah. Right. We'll do this last question here in the Q&A and then probably wrap up. So have you monitored the 4 inch soil temperature throughout the growing season? He's saying he's in southwest Minnesota in the last two years. The 4 inch temperature has struggled to stay above 70.

55:24 So it's been too cold. We don't we haven't had that problem. Cool. A different environment, huh? Yeah. We, yes we measure whenever we do those soil respiration measurements for example we are measuring down at that basically 4 inch depth and we rarely have a problem of it being too cold in our environment especially with the dryness that we are having this year so I don't know that I can yeah so the question was they have a hard time getting it above 70 degrees. Yeah, that's what it looks like. And that's a concern. I kind of wish we could unmute and talk to each other, right? Yeah, I'm not sure if that's for getting certain crops to grow or or what the context is there. Yeah. But yeah, we can David, I see you here in the chat. We can you can always reach out to any of us at Green Cover and have more of a context driven discussion, but appreciate you putting that on there. So yes, I guess that'll end our time. Megan and Lauren, thank you so much for joining. Everybody, we will finish up this series next week, so tune in for that. Keith will be hosting and we'll have another great conversation. But yeah, thanks for everybody for being part of it today.

56:47 Yeah, thanks for having us. Yeah, thanks so much.