Building Soil Health Through Diversity and Grazing: A 4,000-Acre Case Study

0:00 I'm gonna give you a brief rundown of what I've done and what we're doing, how we got there, and how we've applied cover crops and focusing on soil health now to our operation. I'm from Clinton, Oklahoma. Meechum farms—I manage that. It's a four thousand acres of cropland, about eight thousand acres of grass, so it's quite a bit of ground to cover. We got cow-calf operation, stocker cattle, and a feed yard supplemental cattle.

0:44 Clinton, Oklahoma's in western Oklahoma. West of Oklahoma City. If you aren't familiar with Oklahoma, we had our moment of fame in 1996. That's kind of interesting—Garth Brooks added us to a field art project for him, so that was fun. Probably the most profitable crop we grew.

1:13 I ran a custom harvest business right out of high school through 2011. We covered a lot of ground. 2009 was a peak year. Through all that, I got to see a lot of different farming practices. I got to see no-till work in several states across the different regions and multiple crops, and it opened my eyes to a different way of farming. Where I'm raised, you plow, you grow wheat, and you run cattle, and I was it. I didn't know nothing different. So I got to see a lot of different things through that, so that led me into what we're doing now. Meechum Farms—with one of our customers and local where I grew up—and I got to help them growing.

2:08 Up as a child, so when we quit harvesting, they asked me to come around their farm. I thought we did well. I did it. We wanted to implement no-till farming and precision agriculture practices, has a big change from the days of plowing 4,000 acres, so it's quite the deal.

2:29 When we first started, we grew wheat, corn, Milo, started growing canola. We have some alfalfa. The goal we're trying to grow all of our own feed for cattle, so that worked pretty good, but it wasn't getting us where we wanted, so we moved into soil health in 2015 and these are our crops we grow now.

2:57 We kind of cut back on our wheat. We're growing about the same amount of corn. We've kind of cut out Milo. Fighting the sugarcane aphids is not something we want to continue to dabble with till we get some of our other things corrected. We can't—we don't like using all the jug methods to fix everything until we get our pollinators and insect things corrected. We're just not going to dabble with it. We're growing more canola, that's a good brassica rotation, winter canola, spent a lot of good for our soils. Getting away from wheat was a big big step.

3:43 Alfalfa is great feed, but it's detrimental to your soil health, so that's something we were phasing out. Sesame, the limited area crop that it works pretty good in our era, growing a lot of that. That's a double crop behind wheat or canola that does pretty good, and it's pretty good cash crop, provides.

4:07 A good canopy through the summer and good weed suppression. We like that for a cash crop this year. We dabble with some cow pea production per seed, and like he said, okra that was never seen, you know, okra harvested for seed, but we did it. So it's pretty interesting. We do a lot of interseeding into our cash crops, a lot of multi-species would go into our wheat for grazing. That's working really well. We get a lot better plant diversity and we get a lot better animal health with that. I don't dabble with the cattle personally a whole lot, but that's the results we see out of it.

4:57 We focus on focusing on grazing and crop 365. There's a grazing 365 kind of movement. The idea is to have a crop growing 365 days a year. That's our goal. We don't try to leave. We don't let the ground really lay at all. We have something growing all the time, be it a cash crop or a grazing crop or a combination. That is a go. And by doing that in our area, it's been very beneficial. We keep our soil temperature down the summer, which can actually conserve moisture versus laying the ground fallow.

5:33 That's kind of a hard conception to push to people that don't understand that, but soil temperature, water infiltration, that all plays into it. In our area you get 25, 30 inches of rain in a year, and when you only absorb half inch an hour and it comes in a three inch rain in 15 minutes, most of that rain's running the ditch.

5:57 If you can help your water infiltrations and that results better, this was combining okra that was fun, never done that. We actually had a common fire right at the end of that little event.

6:25 Western Oklahoma we have some problems. We've tilled there forever and we have hot, long dry summers that's conducive to wind erosion, water erosion. If you look at that picture you see how red it is. Now that's not even a good representation. Our soil is so red that's a combination of lack of carbon and oxygen affecting the soil, and there's just no carbon there or organic matter.

7:01 Typical standard cultivation practices, there's less than a tenth of a percent. It's detrimental with our no-till. We've brought it up to somewhere in the neighborhood of one and a half percent. So we do that in a couple of years, that's been a good move in our direction. Tillage, you have no residue, no armor. That's how much your water infiltration. That's a focus on soil health. You need to focus on our average rainfalls 30 inches in our country with 30 inches of rain driving in winter.

7:41 We swing on bushel acre average. That's just that work in today's economic picture. And with 30 inches of rain, that is pitiful. Our county yield average is 33 on corn dry land. Canola is 18, soybeans 12. So we realized that's not a sustainable practice, so we implemented changes the

8:08 First thing you got to do is stop plowing. Send them to the scrap guys, trade them off, whatever you got to do, get rid of your plows. They—that is dead. And it's so hard to break when you're in a situation. Did you do that? That's what you do. That's what your granddad is, what your dad did, that's way they've always done. And while I want to keep working, they won't, they just will not.

8:31 We use no—we use vertical tillage when we first went to no-till and it was, that's just a worse way of plowing. That's a there's a big push in that and they don't work. It created more problems than it solved. It looks nice but they don't function.

8:51 We focus on improving water infiltration. We see no-till—probably see that slide—but we see no-till as maintaining your current soil health status. It's not really a way to fix it. Cover crops and the soil health movement we're practicing here is how you move that bar higher. That is how you increase your organic matter, increase your carbon, and all the other things that we've been talking about. How to do diversity? You focus on diversity and your soil and everything else will come. But we just couldn't get there with no-till. We just wouldn't do it on its own.

9:37 A lot of people do their standard soil tests. I do NPK, your sulfur and micronutrients. Most of them are irrelevant there. They give you data. This really serves no logical purpose. We've drilled crops and we put the right amount of fertilizer out for our tests.

9:56 And we either beat or exceed those yield goals and then we come back we still have nitrogen. Let me, I was going where to go where it come from? You know what, do we do it? Was all the organic forms that we weren't testing for. So we were wasting money. We use a Haney test. It's kind of some of these newer tests they test different but different methods focus. They do carbon testing and things like that. We focus on organic matter, soil pH, base saturation, your bacteria to fungi ratio. They really don't have on a test yet but that's something that we're aware of. Farming standard farming practices are very bacterial basics and you got to move them to more fun. You got to get some fungi, your micro fungi working in your soil to do the things you needed to do. You got to build carbon. That's you can test for carbon now. Increasing your carbon levels makes everything work.

10:56 Initially we went to no-till. We just replaced apply all of the sprayer chemicals jug method created lots and lots of spring. I'm tired of sitting on the sprayer. Y'all are in that situation started seeing weed resistance. The chemical bill just got bigger and bigger and bigger. You put more and more chemistry's out it's creating more and more problems. Your band dating it, you're not fixing the actual problem and when we graze we had horrible compaction problems in no-till with gravy and we had no increase in profit margin which was the goal. We were able to farm more we didn't fix make any.

11:47 So how do we go from where we are to where we want to be with soil health? We've all seen, you watch Gabe Brown, you listen to Ray Archuleta, you see all these impressive soils doing all these things and growing all these crops with no fertilizers. You can't get there from where you're at overnight. It took decades to get to that situation. You know, go fix it overnight, how do you work on your cost and profit? It's a profit, you know, how do you fix that?

12:18 We started reducing fertility. We took a percentage of our fertility budget for every crop and we moved it into blends or other species and diversity and started phasing out fertilizer. We're down to, we reckon, about half the fertilizer we did three years ago already. And we're only a year and a half in this Sultana season and we're growing comparable yields. Initially, you're not gonna grow more crop, you're gonna grow similar crops for less money, which is profit. That's the idea.

12:55 So changing types and amounts of pesticide use — watching, you're gonna have to use roundup still. It's, I know it's not, we've seen this not so good, but you can't not just use it. They want you can be responsible with it. Don't go put it in as a tank mix partner every time you spray. If you don't have grasses to kill, don't run around with it. Do use what you got to use, don't use it just because it's an insurance policy.

15:17 Small progressing to learn what they do. For it everything has a purpose, be it grazing or soil health or whatever. Put your blends together accordingly. You don't get overwhelmed with it, stay with it. Do something, everything and they're everything you add for diversity is a step in the right direction.

15:39 You're gonna increase your grazing potential. That's a good way to bridge the gap. We use cattle to help cash flow. This you'll want to break the bank trying to curb fix your soil and not get anywhere. Changing soil health takes time. If it's on soil, not production first, focus on fixing your soil and the production. Increase in production, profit will come.

16:08 You just focus on this year's crop. You're not gonna get where you want to go. There will be successes and failures. That is a corn crop this year, little volunteer sesame and it is that is a failure. Now we also had some made 180 bushel dryland in an area has a proven yield at 35 but that was not so. That was fun. This is a sesame crop. He's about half grown, that's my wife Jamie. She's about five two so but that crop got to about eight feet tall last year. I was a lot of cover. That's a good cash crop. This is this year's canola stand that is a farm that would be considered some of the worst soil in our county. It's been about a year and a half in soil health spending no-till for three years that is an impressive winter.

17:10 We can always stand for this time of year and we did that the time we see due to now it's had about a half inch of rain on so that's proof that the system works.

17:23 It's a neat field this was actually the same field that the back corn was in. That is an eighty pound wheat mix, eight pounds of winter peas, pound of radishes, half a pound of clover, four pounds of buckwheat, a pound of rape and volunteer corn and sesame. Everybody tries to kill their volunteers to recover. It's a free diversity and we're grazing that. That was in wheat in 2014, doubled assess me this year. It was in corn now, stew the sweet mix and we will graze that out, grow cow peas on it and canola from 17 to 18. That's kind of a way to work your diversity and your rotations. It's real key not to grow the same crop to your. It's hard to do in a lot of cultures.

18:20 That's a close-up of it. You see all the residue that mix has a low carbon and nitrogen ratio that will help break down your BT corn stocks. I don't know if you've ever seen that but they do not like to break down very well. And you see notice that's this green standing crop got a lot of discussion about how do you see through all the residue. The best way to do is do it while still growing it. Actually seeds better. This is that crop now after it was burned down and I lost my picture. There's actually that we stamped to come up very nice and it's very uniform and we're grazing it now so you put cattle out there on wheat.

19:10 Pasture, you have the problems with the cattle on wheat, and that dry matter will absolutely help give you roughage. You get a mix with the wheat works good. They'll eat all that dry matter. If you can see in that, that has a little sun hinter, survived. We're not sure how that's going to turn out just yet. Controlling that, that's a good legume to grow. Cattle will eat it when it's little, but it didn't die with glyphosate, so learning on the go. That field had a Sudan in it, and it was eight feet tall at one point. We're gonna use shorter grasses, versatile sort of next summer, some of the dwarfs. They talked about being over-competed our brassicas and our legumes that we wanted to grow and out-compete them. And the cattle focused on those legumes and brassicas first, so the grass got away. The Sudan took off, and we just never got, they never got a chance. The other stuff never got a chance to compete with.

20:27 Don't overdo it on the brassicas, especially with cattle. You can get too many brassicas. A lot of seeds per pound and they do really well when you get them out there with the little nitrogen, moisture. They really grow, and the cattle will overeat on them, and it can actually give you negative effects, positive. So just keep that race with that ration. That mix, look at your total seed counts on those varieties when you're picking different species and different things, whether we're gonna start adding flax. It helps to your micro.

21:06 Activity your microphone guy activity. That's something we learner and we do it and aware of some stuff we're working on trying to figure out how to do a little better.

21:17 I like to see you into the green standing crops and then apply or burned down you got to really watch your herbicide use especially stuff with residuals you know ALS inhibitors your su chemistry's everybody likes to run finesse on their wheat if you put finesse on your wheat you will not be growing coverage this year so think about that preemptively.

21:49 We over grazed it to being with on some stuff you don't want to move more than half the plant they had a slide yesterday it was really fascinating I thought showing the route change when you over grace and I believe in that if you over graze that past half it will take more than twice as long to grow back so if you want you actually will grow more grazing by controlling the time how far do you graze that plant coming way back on our fungicide use our wheat we grow we are growing varieties that are resistant to rust a lot of the varieties you get nowadays especially out of some of our universities are they have really just quit focusing on rust resistance fungicides are cheap it's not it's not a top priority no more.

22:42 That's not the band-aid that's the band-aid approach that's welfare that's forming welfare don't do it that way we lean on our grower groups like these we have a group in Oklahoma Western sole Health Group it's about 80 members a little Facebook page that we use and we share all our info we're doing and we are moving the ball rapidly by doing that so it's a good.