Building Soil Health in Perennial Pastures: Principles from Native Rangeland

0:07 Good morning, how's everybody doing? So Keith asked me to come speak to you today regarding kind of the focus around hernial pasture systems and how that relates back to our ecology in our area and how we work within that framework. Because many times when we think about soil health, we think about no-till, we think about cropland, but most of the principles that we follow, that we've been taught to follow, are largely principles that we've been following for many many years on native rangeland.

0:50 So today what we'll do is we'll talk a little bit about the principles that we want to try to follow and how those correlate with rangeland and pasture land. I work for the Noble Research Institute, and formerly the Noble Foundation. We work primarily in the southern Great Plains—Kansas, Texas, and Oklahoma. We work with, in any given year, roughly about 2,000 producers. We provide consultation services. A bunch of the Noble guys are over there.

1:21 When we look at the demographics and the acreage and the land use of the operations that we work with, about two-thirds of that land area is rangeland. About one-third of it is some cropland, but one-third is introduced or introduced forage-based pasture systems. So when we talk about pastures, we don't mean just the south 40, right? It's a pasture, right? We're talking about introduced systems.

1:57 So let's talk about what the characteristics are of each of these. Some of you may or may not understand or know what the differences are between rangeland and pastures. So largely we're talking about native lands, native landscapes, large expansive landscapes, mostly not always, but largely in the central part of the United States and west. They both have a mixture of C3 and C4 plants, which means they're either cool-season plants that go early in the fall through winter, early in the spring, or their warm-season plants, which are plants like we're most familiar with—plants like big and little bluestem, Indian grass, switchgrass. Those are our big tall grass prairie-type species. They're all warm-season perennials.

2:45 Rangelands also provide a tremendous amount of ecosystem services, not just the production of the forage species that they grow. They also provide livestock production, wildlife habitat, which is very important and growing much more so as we work down that road. But they're highly variable in terms of how we look at those soils. I know you've all probably seen a soils map and it just looks like this smattering of colors. Well, that's the inherent variability of rangelands. The soils can be different. Geologic time has made those soils with different capabilities, different chemical and physical attributes, and largely a lot of the biology is different in some of those as well.

3:34 Topography, climactic issues, all those things are different. They add to the complexity and the variability in a rangeland system. Many of us think that just because there's not very many inputs, that it's easy to manage rangeland. I would argue that it's harder to manage a native system with dynamic plant communities than it is to manage a monoculture of, say, Bermuda grass. It's much more difficult and dynamic to deal with a system like this than it is to deal with a single species.

4:09 So we're here to talk about a movement. Right, soil health movement. No movement will move forward without the science to back it up, so we have to have data to support our claims. Right? The trouble with the soil health movement, and it's really not trouble, but the fact is that producers are largely twenty years ahead of the science.

4:34 Usually in the scientific field, when we test a hypothesis, we'll come up with a hypothesis, we'll develop a study to test it, and then the scientists develop the studies and then it trickles down through extension and so on and so forth to the producer to make better decisions. The soil health movement largely has been pushed by producers doing the right thing for the right reasons, right? And the science is catching up, but we do have some science on rangeland.

5:07 I want to talk about the right science and understanding the complexity and the context more importantly of that science. For instance, here's some information from Derner and Schumann in 2007. They found that limited capacity for additional carbon sequestration with management. Another study in 2016 found that short periods of carbon uptake and long periods of balance or small losses.

5:34 So we're talking about rangeland being a carbon sink versus being a carbon source, so an area in times when we had increased rainfall it was a sink and we had losses in droughts. Several other studies here found annual and decadal changes due to environment and management. So basically on rangeland, environment matters, right? We've got a page full of information and data that says that drought and rainfall cyclic patterns in rainfall have a huge impact on our ability to capture and install store carbon.

6:13 That's not a shocker, right? We know that. We've heard two talks this morning that really talked about how we get carbon into that cycle. What I want to point out with this is that I'm not saying that this science is wrong. It is right, but let's understand the context of what they're trying to say. All of these studies, most of these studies, I'll put it that way, we're taken into Western rangelands, or we just don't. I'm talking about short grass prairies like ready. Short grass prairie systems right up in here where a bumper crop of blue grama might produce 1500 pounds of production.

6:57 It takes roots and it takes development and cycling and all of those things to work to build the carbon, build carbon in the soil. So what I'm trying to say is understand the context. What I'm afraid of with some of this science is that someone will read a study that was done on rangeland in the short grass steppe of Western or Eastern Colorado and they'll just say well we can't store any carbon on rangeland now, when that's most certainly the contrary.

7:33 You'll see some here's some very good systems focused research from Dr. Teague later or tomorrow. Most of this science and a lot of these studies have been focused. They're reductionist in thinking, so they want to test one specific thing, right? I want to see if we can have a control and I want to keep everything else the same and I want to test this. The trouble with that is we tend to take things out of context with it.

8:02 When that happens, we don't understand the dynamics of studying the entire system. Our business, our ecology, none of it works in a vacuum, right? Agriculture does not work.

8:18 In a vacuum we have multiple dynamic functioning systems. Here's another study that's quoted by a lot of the detractors. In 2008 was published, there are six different rangeland sites. They studied this site and measured the carbon flux for six years and they found that two of them were actually a source and four of them were just barely a sink.

8:50 Now let's put it into context. This is on native rangeland that was measured for six years. Here's what they don't tell you: all of those sites were undisturbed or ungrazed. My friends, rangeland needs a cow on it. Rangeland needs to be grazed. Those plants evolved under disturbance. They evolved under having some sort of grazing pressure. Now how we manipulate and manage that grazing is a different conversation. The point is that they must be grazed to be as functioning. That is a six-year-old broken system, yet it's being published as fact.

9:32 So let's talk a little bit about pasture. Pasture, as you all know, they're primarily used for introduced forages and in our part of the world it's primarily Bermuda grass. As we move east you get into some of the tall fescue and into that fescue belt. As we move west we get into some of the pasture, maybe Klein grass or some of the old-world bluestone. The WWB dolls of the world—these are all typically managed as monocultures. Again, nature hates monocultures. That's why we spray weeds, right? Mother nature's trying to make it not a monoculture, yet we keep trying to make it one. So we need to figure out ways to work with her rather than against her.

10:27 Typically, cultural inputs are synthetic fertility, hay management. All these things are tied to pasture lands. Typically on a smaller scale, they're not anywhere near the scale of those characteristics. But as we look at the spatial, kind of spatially where we're at, there's some pretty cool sites from Earth star, basically just kind of showing this darker green area. This is where we have most of the pasture land. As you move further east it's a little more dependent on consistent rainfall. As we move west, we get into more angst laughs. The thing about both systems, and here's where we'll start to move the train back together: how we manage those systems are very similar, but if we focus on ecological principles and not practices. So let's take practices out of our minds. Let's not talk about brush management or putting fertilizer out or nutrient management, and focus on the principles on how we really truly address problems in these ag systems.

11:42 Soils are extremely important. We've heard a lot about carbon today. This is a quote from our founder that says: no civilization has outlived the usefulness of its soils. When the soil is destroyed, the nation is gone. I cannot express to you how important it is to understand the basic tenets of managing your soil. I really like this schematic. I think it shows pretty well how that carbon cycle works in one slide.

12:15 So we heard a very good karmonic talk from Keith to talk about how that CO2 is taken in from that plant, taking in, cycled through those nutrients, added the biology to the system, and we start to see things work. We start to see functioning cycles, right? Water cycles, what water cycles, nutrient cycles, energy flow—all those cycles start to work. We know that there are practices here on the right that we can use to help build.

12:50 That biology and build those structures there. Also over on the left-hand side where there are those practices that help us create carbon sources. There are practices on both sides of the story for cropland, pasture land, rangeland. Largely all of them can be solved by following a few management principles.

13:14 I want to mention one more thing about carbon. Most of us when we think of carbon we think about carbon in terms of the atmosphere. Most of it's in the atmosphere and in the terrestrial plants on the landscape, there in the great sequoias, there in the native prairies of the Midwest. So most of the carbon is tied up into the plants and the atmosphere. Right, there's more carbon in the top three feet of the Earth's crust than there is in the atmosphere and all of the plants on the planet combined.

13:55 So where do we have the greatest impact as farmers and ranchers and as scientists? In that top three feet. That's why we hold the keys to changing the direction of the agriculture industry and we hold the keys to solving a lot of our carbon emission issues globally, not just here.

14:18 Here's another thought, an adaptation from Dennis Chessman I thought was really pretty cool. We look at the land acres in the United States, about 2.3 billion land acres. About 56% of that is privately owned by farmers and ranchers just like yourself. If we were to increase the soil organic carbon by half a percent on all of those acres, that would capture roughly 6 billion tons of carbon. That's 60 percent of our global annual emissions. Half a percent. How many of you all have been testing for soil carbon on your properties? There's a few hands. How many of you have seen increases?

15:08 We can do a lot to change the direction of climate, whether you believe it or not. Climate change is happening. Is it our fault? Is it somebody else's? Is it cyclical? I'm not going to get into the argument today. But what I can say is climates are changing, and how we affect our landscape has a huge effect on the potential direction.

15:40 I mentioned five principles. These are the principles that you typically want to follow when we're managing for soil health, when we're managing for healthy soils and we want to build carbon. You've already heard it once this morning. The first and foremost is keep the soil covered.

15:55 Second, now from range and pasture, sort of a twist, a perennial pasture twist on this. I'm going to focus on optimizing disturbances. When we talk about these principles on cropland, most of the time they'll say minimize disturbances. I don't want to minimize disturbances because rangelands for sure are a disturbance dependent ecology. They have to be disturbed to stay a prairie. A prairie has to be disturbed to stay a prairie. How did the prairie stay a prairie? It burned. It was grazed by large ungulates and then left with long periods of recovery and then it burned again.

16:42 We'll get into that more later. Increased plant diversity—there's multiple ways to get there. We're going to talk about each of these and how they relate to range and pasture. Keep a living root in the ground. Proper livestock integration, not livestock integration. Proper livestock integration—that means having a plan, understanding.

17:05 What your stocking rate is, understanding how you can manipulate those plants with stock density. That's proper integration of livestock, so keeping the ground covered. Why is it important? You heard a very good explanation by Nathan Hale this morning and a good explanation from Keith on why we need to keep those covered. I'll just talk about a few of those. Really it focuses around preventing erosion. We cannot build soil health if the soil is moving. It has to stay in one spot, right? Pretty intuitive. Limits water loss from evaporation. Reduces hoof action and compaction. Carbon to build organic matter, food for the microbes. We've heard all the reasons that keeping the ground covered is so vitally important, and I can't stress it enough that if you only take away one thing, figure out more ways to keep your ground covered and reduce bare ground. Bare ground is enemy number one if you want to build soil healthy soils.

18:09 Let's talk about why water is important. As farmers and ranchers we don't have to tell each other why it's important, but I think it's interesting to note that most of you have seen this graphic. We're talking about a growing population, an urban population up to upwards of nine billion people by 2050. I haven't looked at my watch this morning, but it's already 2017. We're moving in that direction quite rapidly. Here are some quotes from information from Sea Metrics talking about water. Water has grown more than twice the rate of the population. Water demand or water use has grown at more than twice the rate of the population increase in the last century. So not only are we growing by leaps and bounds in terms of the human population, we're using twice as much water to get there. Two-thirds of the world's population is projected to face a water scarcity by 2025. 2025 is not very far from now, and that's 66 percent of the earth is projected to face some level of water scarcity. I like this last one: an estimated 1 billion in population growth, which is what we're expecting over the till by 2050, global agriculture alone will require an additional 2 trillion cubic meters of water. That's equal to the annual flow of 20 Nile rivers or 1 Colorado river. That's a lot of water, guys. So are we going to make more water? Going to make more land? No. We have to be more efficient in how we use the water that we receive. We can't make it rain, but we can most certainly manipulate and manage the rainfall that we get and keep it in our soil.

19:56 How do you do that? You build a bigger sponge. You build a soil that has the capacity to hold the water that you get. We can't manage droughts without understanding that one simple fact: infiltration rate. You had a very good demonstration again this morning by Nathan Hale. Most of our soils have some level of an inherent infiltration. It's certainly affected by biology. It's affected by soil aggregation. Why is it affected by soil aggregation? Because as we aggregate those soil particles, what happens between those soil particles? We start to have more pore space, right? So as we build organic matter we open those pore spaces up. That basically adds a highway for that water to enter and infiltrate into that soil. So as we increase organic matter we would typically increase pore space as well. Some more data on soil and soil carbon and water. This is from Jones in 2006 where he looked at and/or measured those soil.

21:08 Organic concentrations and looked at the increase in water holding capacity in our CSS tomates with 1% increase in soil organic matter. It's roughly 20,000 gallons of water holding capacity, what, 20,000 gallons of extra water holding capacity per acre on your farm for every 1% increase in soil organic matter. 20,000 gallons—that's a lot of water guys.

21:41 Some research in 2013 from Dr. Teague looking at how he looked at specific grazing management dynamics and how that grazing management affected soil organic carbon, how it affected cation exchange capacity and also water holding capacity. We also see that the multi paddock system outdid both of them. So not only is it important how we treat our soils, but the management that we have placed to that landscape also has implications to how much water we can hold and save.

22:22 Optimizing disturbance. So I mentioned to you earlier that rangeland is a disturbance dependent ecology, right? We talked about how the prairies were formed. So as grazing—a disturbance, most certainly it is to that plant. It is a disturbance, but plants are built to recover from grazing. What they're not built to do is sit in a park somewhere and never be utilized. You can go in parks all over the country and preserves all over the country where cattle have been taken off the landscape, and you can see dying, dead, oxidized plants that have not been utilized. Plants are built for that. Fire is also a disturbance. What about fertility and herbicides? There are disturbances as well.

23:15 I'm not going to get into the should we or shouldn't we argument. I will say that we need to optimize the use. If you're going to use it, have a purpose for it. If you're going to use fertility, have a purpose for it. Take a soil test, understand why, how much, and when you should apply the fertility.

23:40 About plant diversity. We talked a little bit about plant diversity and why it's important. You heard a little bit from Keith about the root exudates. I mean, we understand that those sugars are coming and being leaked basically from those soil roots. Different plants exude different types of exudates. They attract different biology. That's why we have to have diversity in our plant systems. And it's not only in just exuding different types of exudates. We want different plants providing different recruiting architecture. So we want shallow rooted plants and we want deeper rooted plants. We want tap roots, we want fibrous roots. We want all of that. That's when we start to really build the function of the system.

24:29 Also noted here, some information from Komen: 20 to 50 percent or more carbon enters around the root zone from these exudates and exfoliants. Exfoliates is slough toe fruits. Perennial plants lose about a third of their roots every year just because they're perennial plants. They slough those smaller roots off and regrow new roots. That's why we don't want to do anything from a grazing or manipulation to slow down root development because they're already losing a third of those. So 20 to 50 percent more carbon enters that root zone from those two than actually is present in the roots themselves by the end of the growing season. So we're funneling carbon in through those systems here's some information adapted from Zack.

25:19 Looking at in 2003, looking at the microbial productivity. As we increase the number of plants, we get more microbial biomass. As we increase the number of plants, we get a greater microbial respiration, so CO2 respiration. There's more bugs functioning and working. We also see in that same paper, as the number of plants increase, the amount of nitrogen increased. So this is native rangeland right here. I'll ask you a question: how much nitrogen does it take to produce a ton of forage? 50 pounds. On that native rangeland site, there's close to probably 4,000 pounds of production on that site.

26:10 Who pulled the buggy across there and put out the hundred pounds of nitrogen? Nobody did. Those plants are utilizing the organic nitrogen produced by the functioning biology in the system. No one's adding ammonium nitrate. That's how the prairies can produce six to eight thousand pounds of grass—they have a functioning biology.

26:37 How do we increase diversity in pastures? We've talked about how we do it on rangeland. How do we do it in pastures? We've been experimenting with some demonstrations and looking at how do we build diversity in a strongly dependent monoculture like Bermuda grass. If we have Bermuda grass, one thing that has worked for us is to manage it for Bermuda grass in the summertime. Let's not try to make something, another warm season plant compete with it in the summer. We just haven't had very much success at that. What we can do though is when that plant goes dormant, we can plant things, intercede with things like cover crops.

27:18 This past year we've got some seed from our friends at Green Cover, planted 11 species cool-season mix. There was five small grains and six legumes. We planted at about 50 pounds per acre. We interceded in the fall. We did add 30 pounds of in-row phosphorus. We felt like that really helped us with seedling establishment, and the site showed it. On sites where we did not add the in-row phosphorus, our stand didn't start as well. Where we did have the in-row fall phosphorus, we just felt like we had a lot better stand establishment.

28:06 We grazed bred heifers on those in ten-acre paddocks and moved them every two to three days based on the utilization. So we wanted about 50 percent utilization, and then we moved them off. We weren't doing really high stock density, ultra-high stock density grazing, but we also didn't just kick the gate open and unload the trailer. So moving every two to three days on ten-acre paddocks, we produced about just shy of two tons per acre on a Bermuda. That's a Bermuda grass field, about 3,500 pounds of production again. Two to three day moves. You can see our fence there. That's a little more utilization that I would like to see, to be honest with you. I don't want to see those areas. I want to see some trampling and about 50 percent of that utilization gone, and then we'll move to the next area.

29:01 Let's look at the cost of what that cost us. One other thing I want to mention before we get there—when we talk about overseeding and interceding, we've really had, have not had a tremendous amount of luck interceding with fall-planted Bermuda grass into sod and having any kind of fall production. We have had it on good years, but you almost have to terminate the Bermuda grass with, say, a quart of Roundup in, say, middle of September or—

33:38 Associations that are built. Roots have different species and also vary their composition of root exudates. When we talk about sugars, it's not like they're just exuding corn syrup. They're exuding multiple different metabolites. When we look at this, this is some information from tall fescue plant that produced a hundred and thirty-two different root exudate compounds and metabolites. It's not just sugars. It's multiple different exudates coming out of that root, and each of those different exudates are drawing different biology. That's how we start to get the system moving in the right direction.

34:34 How do we increase diversity on rangeland? We've mentioned this earlier. We utilize and manipulate the timing, the distribution, the frequency, and the intensity of grazing management and fire on rangeland. The timing is how long that group of calves, those cows, that herd is in the pasture. The distribution is how well are they distributed across the ranch, what kind of rotational system do you have to allow growing season rest. Rest in the dormant season does not help you. Active growing season rest is where plants will rebuild those root systems and root stocks. Frequency is how fast do we come back, and then intensity is how hard did we graze it. All of those things can be manipulated through a grazing management plan to increase diversity on rangeland.

35:40 The same can be said about prescribed fire. Prescribed fire often gets a bad rap or a black eye in the soil health arena because when we burn, we're burning off carbon. But carbon is important and it's also an opportunity for us to increase that carbon flux with following growth. Just to reiterate, every square inch of this state was historically burned. Every square inch. This is some information from Keith Blair. In the rolling plains, that top number is the estimated fire frequency. What was the return interval? How many years did it go from being burned? It burned here year one. How long did it take to come back? The second number in there in our area here, 2.8 million acres is how many acres burned every year. Just in this area, historically lightning fires, Indian lit fires, this area has a fire return interval of about every ten years from East Texas to the high plains to the trans-pecos. They all have a fire return interval. Fire was a very important part of rangeland ecology and the function of those native ecosystems.

37:23 So what about the carbon? We burned it all up, right? Well, some work done by Jim Ansley, a colleague of Richard Teague's down the road, studied burning across multiple years and measured CO2 fluctuations pre and post fire on unburned and by unburned sites on the burn site. In wet years, the carbon that was lost was reclaimed in twenty-eight days because of the influx of growth that followed the fire. In twenty-eight days in wet years, and drier years it took longer—eighty to eighty-two to two hundred ninety days. Regardless, his data suggested that the carbon that was lost in the fire by the end of the next growing season

38:14 All of that carbon had been reclaim so that begs the question why don't we use fire more. There's a lot of reasons why we do and don't use fire. The point is let's not use carbon as excuse not to do it because fire in many landscapes are what keeps our grasslands open. There's been two Fredericksburg Texas lately it's turned into a cedar forest right. That's because we stomped fire out for a hundred and fifty years.

38:51 So how else do we increase increased diversity and rangelands. Often we will try to reclaim lands and plant them back in a rangeland or a native seeding mix. In our state plans is I think leads the nation in Texas at planting somewhere around forty thousand acres a year and that's only a fraction of the acres that are planted to rangeland plantings every year.

39:21 So how do we do it right most of the time. Most of the time we were either converting cropland to native pasture or to native range land or we've got a system that looks something like this that has been completely worked over, worked into the ground and we want to reclaim it. Right now we've been taught we should. We could go directly from those systems, a plowed up worn out field or a largely degraded rangeland site and we can run down here to Turner seed and get us a five-way mix. A big bluestem, little bluestem and Indian grass and plant it.

40:07 How often, how many of you have ever planted native rangeland plantings in here. Few of you. How many of you had it worked the first year. Almost, maybe one. He was lucky. Here's the point. We're told that we want to plant what we want right so we go. When we take those plants that are highly dependent on soil biology and functioning mycorrhizal associations and then we take them and we plant them in a wore out field and then we blame it on the rain when it doesn't work. It's not the rain. Those plants are highly dependent on mycorrhizal associations. They have to have them or they will not persist. If you're plowing, the mycorrhizal associations will not occur. They're not there. We just broke them when we plowed it up.

41:06 So we grow the biology first. Cover crop it for a year or even two to get the biology started. Another way is to let's just not put the big five species in our mix. Let's look at other mid cereal grasses that can help start as somewhat of a nurse plant or a mother planting to get it there until we get to the point which the biology will support those native grasses that'll help us get down that road further.

41:45 Proper livestock integration I mentioned that earlier. Really this is focused around adaptive grazing. What I mean by adaptive, that I mean nothing ever works the way we planned it. You can have a great plan like your air cedar hooked your tractor and it all goes right. This the same thing works in grazing management planning. We do. We make do our best to make a good solid plan and then the next day we change it because something changed right. The point is understanding some basic principles. Number one make sure you go and understand and got the correct stocking rate. None of these grazing systems will work if you don't have the right stocking rate okay. Once we know how many acres the ranch can support whatever rate that is, a count of 20 acres, a count of 5 acres, whatever it is, once we know what.

42:41 That number is then we can start to manipulate things with stock density. Stock density is the amount of live weight per acre we have in a certain unit that's how we start to build all the biology using that cattle.

42:56 Understanding the difference between the grazing period in the rest period and which one is more important. Is the grazing period more important or the rest period? It's most certainly the rest period. Plants have to have the ability and the time to recover and it doesn't matter if it's a big bluestem or Bermuda grass, having that residual forage.

43:18 Understanding what those rotation cycles are, how long do I need to come back? Remember we talked about frequency as one of the key drivers for managing these landscapes. A couple of other points: increased grazing distribution as much as possible, keep your livestock together in one herd where possible. Understand some of you may be seed stock operators and that's difficult at times, but the more you can concentrate your grazing effects the more everything else is being rested. So if we can put cattle in one herd, that increase is not only the density, the stock density on that acre, it also increases the rest periods of the other acres.

44:06 It doesn't matter if you're in the Serengeti plains or if you're down the road in Henry out of Texas, it's not the numbers, it's the timing of the grazing.

44:23 If I'm stocked at a cow per 220 acres and I've got a hundred head, I can run a hundred head for a year or I can run six times that for two months. Does that make sense? I can run a larger amount of numbers and a shorter amount of time. It's the timing that matters, it's how long they're in the pasture. That's what leads to overgrazing. Overgrazing is a symptom of time, it's not the animals' fault. It's a symptom of time. They were in there too long.

45:03 Extending the grazing season. I hate that word, to be honest with you. In my opinion, the grazing season starts January 31st and it ends January 1st and ends December 31st. There isn't a grazing season, right? But what we're talking about there is extending and filling some of those forage gaps. We look at opportunities to use covers with those. I think in our area, based on our experience, where we're going to fill that gap is early in the season, and these mixed Bermuda stands have 60 to 80 days early season growth, as we explained earlier.

45:44 I don't think the consistencies are really to have much green forage in the fall in a Bermuda stand. We just haven't had the consistency now where we can fill that forage gap. It is during those periods stockpiling forage, stockpile Bermuda grass, stockpile native range, utilize it not in the growing season but save it for those early days, keep it as standing hay. Really, I really see that as the answer for us here in this area.

46:19 If you're going to feed hay, feed it with a purpose. This is some information from Dr. James Rodgers on one of his studies where they tested where they fed hay and where they didn't feed hay. You'll notice the nitrogen is three times higher, the phosphorus is double, and the potassium is double where they fed the hay as opposed to where they did not feed it in the same pasture under the same conditions. So use hay feeding if you're going to feed it strategically in those areas that you might feel need some little needle in love. Everybody's got the pad, got it.

46:55 Everybody's got a pasture and they know their pasture and they know there are areas within that that need more help than others, aren't as productive. Feed hay in those areas, try to increase the biology there. Think of it this way: for every dollar your cattle consume of forage, they'll deposit roughly 85 cents of that somewhere else on the farm. The reason that number comes up is that cattle will recycle about 85% of the nutrients they consume—goes back out on the farm. So we want to see an even distribution of that manure and urine from a grazing perspective.

47:34 If you're interested more about stocking rates, Rob Cook wrote a really good article in the Cattleman a couple months ago. I'd encourage you to look that up. And at the end of the day, he is most certainly correct: stocking rate still reigns supreme. If the stocking rate isn't right, your rest periods won't matter because they won't be long enough.

47:57 Having the correct stocking rate can lead you to a very sophisticated plan, or it can lead you to just put up one wire. Johnny Rodgers, a rancher in South Carolina, talks about the benefits of just putting up one wire, close one gate, and see the difference. The difference can be amazing, and it can start you down the path of building something much more complex and informative.

48:24 The key is to build a framework for land stewardship upon your property. Don't focus on what everybody else is doing, but understand those principles that we talked about and how do those principles apply to your ranch or your farm.

48:43 I'll leave you with a couple of slides. This one's somewhat sobering. This is a picture from Brian Nichols out in western Oklahoma sent this in to us, and I attached this quote from the UN: 'Humanity loses another 0.3 percent of our global food production capacity each year to soil erosion and degradation.' So every three years we lose one percent of our food producing capabilities—almost one percent. It doesn't take very long to get us in a bind if we continue to let our soil leave our land and go on our neighbor.

49:21 We talked earlier about understanding the symptoms but also further understanding the root problem. For a long time I had one of those hanging on my wall, right? I was focused on brush management. I was focused on rain seeding. I was focused on the practices and why the practice mattered, when I really should have been focused on: why is that brush in my pasture? Why do I have to apply fertility? Why do I have to reseed this pasture? Something else is going wrong. Once you recognize those issues on your farm or ranch, then you can start to put the effort, attention, and dollars in the right spot.

50:07 I'll leave you with this schematic, and you can exchange economy for ecology, but I'd ask you to rate your own property. On the left we see commercial agriculture—we see a degrading, unsustainable system that, I'm sorry, will not sustain our landscape into the future and support a growing nine billion population. As we move to the right, we start to get a little more sustainable. We hear that word a lot. Sustainable means that we're holding our own, right? I don't want to be sustainable. I want to regenerate the soils on my property. So I'd ask yourself: where do you rate in here? And where do you want to be in the future?

50:58 This is how we're going to change the direction of the AG industry in the United States. It starts in the rooms just like this. That's how the soil health movement started. It started by farmers that wanted to do better because somebody said they couldn't, and they did it anyway.