Five Keys to Regenerating Soil Health | Gabe Brown

0:07 We graze about six months out of the year, feed maybe the rest of the time cattle. We can find the velocity calves. I know April might seem like it's summer here but we still have snow in April. Matter of fact a year ago we had snow nine months out of the twelve, so they can snow any time where we're at.

0:28 As I farmed with my father from 1983 to 1991, and then they purchased it from them, it seemed every year we were seeing more and more symptoms. You know whether it be a lack of moisture, poor fertility, if we're having to put on more and more synthetics in order to give the same amount of production, we were seeing more and more weeds. We had some years we had too much moisture, as fast as we couldn't infiltrate it. You know salinity was starting to become an issue, and we started to see more and more of these symptoms. I came to the realization over time that what we were looking at is an integrated ecosystem.

1:14 My friend titled a photo best when he took this photo. He titled it: 'This soil is naked, dirty, hungry, and running a fever.' And that's what it is. It's not mimicking a native ecosystem.

1:29 I have to look at things and I had to decide how am I gonna improve soil health and where do I start. I get that question no matter where I travel: where do I start? The answer I found was in 2,000 acres of native prairie. When you look at a true native rangeland, and I know that's getting harder and harder to find, but take a look at it. What does it have? Well for one thing there's no bare soil disturbance. There's armor on the soil surface all the time. In a true native ecosystem you don't find bare soil very often.

2:06 That type of ecosystem cycles water. It's very efficient at using the moisture that it does have. It has these living plant networks. There's living plants in there in that ecosystem all the time. And then it cycles nutrients real well. You know, nobody's out there adding synthetics, yet you're still getting production every year. Why is that? And the last one: it has thousands of years of research and development. You know it kind of blows my mind how we call this current production model conventional when I would argue that a natural ecosystem is really the conventional model because it's been proven over a long length of time.

2:53 I had the opportunity in 1997 to listen to a gentleman from Canada by the name of Don Campbell. He told me this: 'If you want to make small changes, change how you do things. But if you want to make major changes, change some way you see fit.' That really stuck with me ever since he said it, and it really makes sense. I came to the conclusion over time that the greatest roadblock in solving a problem is the human mind. I can't tell you how many times I hear 'that will work in North Dakota but it won't work here.' And I tell the person you're right, and because with that attitude you'll never give it a chance to work. You have to change your mind in order to open the door to other options.

3:41 What I'm going to visit with you about this morning is five keys to regenerating soil health, and these are universal no matter where we go all over the world. First one: least amount of soil disturbance possible. You look at that native ecosystem and what do you have? You have that living plant network, and those roots they store carbon, they build organic matter, and they cycle nutrients. That is what truly makes it a sustainable ecosystem.

4:15 This is a real good photo of a particular agricultural land. On your left a farmer had a forested area and he cleared and tilled the forested area and he farmed it monoculture soybeans for seventeen years. That's the same soil. Look what happened. Well what happened, he burned the carbon off of it. He went from 4.3 percent organic matter down to 1.6 percent organic matter, and if we look at the structure on the last year, those.

4:49 Beautiful soil aggregates able to infiltrate water cycling nutrients be a home for all that soil biology. On the right it's very compressed, we destroyed soil structure. That's what happens with tillage. I wish when I started back in 1991 I would have archived some of my soil. Does it look just like this soil on your right over here? That's what it looked like—it was lifeless, it was compressed and could not infiltrate water as was proven by those infiltration tests. But we can change that. As Jonathan said at this point, we can regenerate things.

5:22 This is living proof to me. This is a young man Michael Thompson up in Kansas. Four years ago in this very Archaleta speaking, he started to adopt through some of these principles. They went from a conventional tillage to no-till. He sent me this picture here this fall. Three years of no-till, look at the difference in that soil, which is going to have higher carbon, which is going to have more life, which is going to infiltrate water, which is going to cycle nutrients, all by going to no-till and adapting these other principles that we're going to talk about so we can regenerate our soil.

5:59 You know I really get upset when the buzzword today is let's be sustainable. Why the hell would we want to sustain degraded resource? We need to be regenerative. We got to regenerate our resources in order to become sustainable. So on our operation, what we did back in 1993, I had a friend in the northern part of our county who was a no-till and he said, you need to go no-till in order to save moisture and save time. But he said I'm going to give you some advice: if you do that, sell all your tillage equipment first, then you're never tempted to go back. And I actually did that. I sold all my tillage equipment so I could afford this no-till drill and we've been a hundred percent zero-till since 1993. And when I say zero-till, I mean zero-till. That's one of our fields after we're done seeding. You know, it's pretty difficult to tell that we were even out there, and we want the least amount of disturbance possible. Now I realize there's some organic producers that are going to do a little bit of tillage—just minimize it as much as you can.

7:04 Now what's the benefit of no-till or minimum tillage? One of the most underappreciated things we have going for us in a natural ecosystem is things like mycorrhizal fungi. What is mycorrhizal fungi? Mycorrhizal fungi secretes a compound called glomalin and that starts the formation of soil aggregates. We need soil particles. If we're going to be able to build soil structure, build a healthy soil, we have to have mycorrhizal fungi in the ecosystem. Years of tillage will destroy that, as I'll show you. There's other things that will also.

7:44 Mycorrhizal fungi are fungi that form a relationship with the plant roots and they secrete this glomalin and start the formation of soil aggregates. May be hard to see, but you see that? It looks like a spiderweb. That's not organized. That's the fungal component and it's forming relationships, transferring nutrients with the plant, starts the formation of soil particles. This is a close-up of our soil right where that single disc opener opened up that soil. Look at the soil particles. Every one of those particles was formed from the glomalin by mycorrhizal fungi. The creek, you have to have that in order to build soil. You're not going to have that until the till stops.

8:29 The other thing mycorrhizal fungi do extends the root network. You know on the right here it shows the mycorrhizal pathway bringing nutrients from a much larger area of the soil profile, so your soil has become much more efficient at transferring nutrients. It also, because of that symbiotic relationship the fungi forms with the roots, it colonizes those roots so to speak, takes up space in the root, and then the bread and root system is no longer susceptible to fungal diseases, pathogens, et cetera. Think of it this way: a lot of us in this room have been farming on one type of crop. Have we seen in the past five to seven years? We've seen a dramatic increase of use of fungicide. Why is that? It's because we no longer have the mycorrhizal fungi in the soil forming that relationship. Those plant roots then are now more susceptible to fungal diseases.

9:31 Nature can heal it if we give her the chance. So mycorrhizae fungi improves aggregate stability, it builds soil carbon, it improves water use efficiency, and it increases the availability of many of the nutrients that the plants need.

9:48 How do we increase that? It's relatively easy. We reduce or eliminate chemicals, tillage, fertilizers, and we have to have a living root in the ground as long as possible so that mycorrhizal fungi and decomposition can take place.

10:05 I'm going to talk a little bit about my neighbor. I can do that because I know he didn't follow me down here. Since 1983, that row of trees there separates his place from mine. Every fall, and I mean every fall, he's gone until that little spot right there. Every fall, and my land actually sits lower than his.

10:34 I took these photos here June 15th, 2009. The Weather Service was forecasting a major rainfall event, which for us was usually about a quarter inch, but it started raining at 6:30 in the evening. By 12:00 midnight, we had thirteen point two inches, which when you only get ten inches of rain a year, that's pretty major. We ended up getting another 1.4 inches the next morning. We ended up with thirteen point six inches total.

11:03 JPR, who's our district NRCS conservationist, came up. He took this picture. That's the road going up to my farmstead there in the background. I've got true slope there. Does that mean look like it? At thirteen point six inches of rain, now I am embarrassed. There's a little bare spot there, you know. But I'm not Indian. When you get down a dream, I couldn't infiltrate at all, and we lost a little bit of residue. But that isn't bad.

11:28 Three weeks later, I undertook this photo of the neighbor's field. I could count on two fingers the number of acres that dried out at that low spot in the past thirty plus years. Every area gets conceited every year. We get a rain event, it floods up. And to me, that's kind of the definition of a rigid soil. But so be it.

11:50 The fact of the matter is he's destroyed the pore space every year. Until he destroys those soil aggregates and those pore spaces, how is it any other way? I mentioned that we could infiltrate a half inch of rainfall per hour. Back in 2011, NRCS came out and did a double-ring infiltration test. We can now infiltrate over eight inches per hour. I have never seen a rain event with eight inches for our area on our place. It's not how much rainfall you get. It's how much can you infiltrate into your soil and move throughout the soil profile and, as we'll discuss later on, store in your soil so it's available for when the plants need it.

12:38 Principle number two: armor on the soil surface. A healthy ecosystem always has armor on the soil surface. I just love this photo of that dead tree. You know why would this gentleman spend thousands of dollars on a no-till drill and then have their soil like that? That is not conducive to a healthy soil because what's going to happen the minute he gets rain, if there's any slope at all, he's going to have erosion gullies. We see this hole, and yes, I even saw them in the great state of Texas. So I know it can take place anywhere.

13:16 Here's us planting corn into our cover crop residues on the soil surface. When I say on a no-till planter, I'm a no-tiller. There's no trash grippers on it. Why would I want to leave that narrow band of trash to be throwing wind erosion, water erosion, a place for weeds to germinate? I see the white caps today, as Paul's going to talk about, can get through them. That resident, we can do it. We have the technology to do it. Leave the armor on the soil surface.

13:50 Here's just a picture of where I used a grain drill to go through some cover crop residue. The crops are germinating just fine. Well, weeds do terminate through that surface residue, but not that many. We can reduce our synthetic herbicide use because we have that armor on the soil surface. We're mimicking nature.

14:13 The other thing that armor really does is that it modifies the heat. And I know what you're saying. I said if you're in North Dakota, you don't get hot. Well, we really don't compared to down here, but we can get up relatively speaking. We took these photos on a day where the air temperature was in the 70s.

14:34 About 97 degrees in the cover crop it was 87 degrees under that farmer on the soil surface. The bare soil was 107 degrees. Well, what difference does that make? That 20 degrees — if you look at soil biology and look at evaporation and see what happens at different temperatures, we find that at about 100 degrees, very little of that moisture is going for plant growth. That plant is going to shut down and quit growing. So in the previous slide under my cover crop with good armor, those plants are still growing, but in the bare soil where we don't have that armor on the soil surface, that plant's shutting down. We're no longer getting the growth, and as that temperature keeps increasing, then it starts negatively affecting soil biology and all the nutrients are plant gives from bias coil valve. We need to keep the soil temperatures down.

15:34 The other thing it does — we actually dug this peaceful with soil on that. Or that temperature outside was 97. That's earthworms right under the soil surface. You know, the soil is cool enough under that armor where the soil life is still cycling nutrients from aside to cover crop residue. And I know that's a little hard to see, but that's solid earthworms. Gasps teased a nutrient dense didn't cost me a penny. We have a model on our operation we want to sign the back of the check, not the front. It's a pretty good model to have. Let the earthworm supply the nutrients. Let biology supply the nutrients. Works real well. When I started, I bought that place in 1991. I could never go fishing because you'd never find an earthworm on any of the cropland fields. Last spring we did earthworm counts — 12 inches by 12 inches, two inches deeper — averaging over 60. That's a lot of earthworms, and they're working free as long as I provide the home for them. That's what that's my goal.

16:36 Okay, that's the second principle. Third principle is diversity. I bought this native pasture back in 2002, and I tell people I bought it for two reasons. Number one, it was a true native pasture with a tremendous amount of diversity. My son teaches rangeland management at the local community college, and he brought his classes out to this paddock, and in two hours they found over 140 different species of grasses, forbs, and legumes. That's diversity. We have that in our native system. Why don't we have it in our monoculture type of system? Now, the other reason I bought this pasture is because with that many rocks, I'd never be tempted to break it up. I'm just not that ambitious.

17:21 This is now — I thought I had one of the rocks, but I was in Australia in 2012, and I like stuff on the car. When I saw this field, if you close that is seeded there's no, it's coming up there now. I don't feel too sorry for. I'm looking up her right. He picked the worst room. There's a rock pile. It was kind of funny. The trend that was traveling with being him and I got out — we were taking pictures. You all behold the farmer salsa. And what are you doing? Well, it was easy. We just played. We were dumb Americans with this team. The guy was really nice, and he says, 'Yeah, I kind of got my work cut out for me,' but he had it on an email and me a picture. That's all of them combined. A notes in that field. So how would you like to buy this news? Because I don't think — now I tell people I can build a lot of photos and we can regenerate soils, but I'm not going to give you — it's gonna be a real challenge there. Pretty generate them.

18:13 So look at production agriculture today. No matter where you go, what do you see? You know, in this area that I travel in this past week, I saw a lot of the winter weeks. You travel through the Midwest, what are you going to see? You're gonna see monoculture corn. You're going to see monoculture soybeans. What happens when we see monoculture after monoculture after monoculture, then combined with tillage? We destroy the resource. Jonathan talked about it this morning. How overtime, the resources have been degraded. And I'm here to tell you, I have never been on any operation anywhere around the world, including my own, that doesn't have integrated research. I have yet to see a truly healthy full farm ecosystem, but we're making improvements.

19:00 That we're giving in 2006 I was having a no-till on the plains conference and this gentleman was speaking there. It's Dr. Adam at the oligarchical Raziel. He is the world's foremost authority on cover crops and he said two things that day that really stuck in my mind. First thing he said was you give me two inches of rainfall, year 200 inches or anywhere in between, he said I'll get you a cover crop growing. This is a man who's worked in over 65 countries all over the world. He knows what he's talking about.

19:33 The other thing he said was he said cover crops are meant to be seeded in multi species combinations and I would, I never forget this, James Beard ICI was sitting near me and we looked at each other and I was just ticked at myself. How can I be so dumb? For years I've been seeding cover crops in only two or three-way combinations, but the author here was talking about seven and a ten-way consonant combinations. Look at in an ecosystem, what is it? It's a lot of different species. Why aren't we seeding these cover crops mimicking nature multi species combinations?

20:07 So I'm going to show you in a series of slides here that were taken only a mile from my place and it shows the importance and the power of diversity. Our soil conservation district had some plot land miles help me now. I'll set this up. The winter of 2005-2006 was very open. We didn't have a lot of snow and snow is critical for our moisture, so we decided to test what the author had told us. So we were going to go down there and we're going to see her cover crops as monocultures and then we're going to mix them all together and see the diverse monoculture and see if it made a difference. Now we started seeding in May and it was really dry. We were seeding in the dry soil and between May and when we seeded and between July 31st when this photo was taken we only had an inch of rain. Well, you can see the monoculture strip of turnips was basically dried up. It was done. If you step right next it was the low C broccoli all dried up. You know, and that's what you'd expect from an inner ring and you go down the plots until we got to the plot of the cover crop combination.

21:15 No difference at all in seeding day. Times moisture not the only difference is the diversity. We took the species and mix them all together those eight species and that's what we got. So for years we've been told all you've got to grow is monoculture. Really is that like nature? Why do we limit our thinking to them? So NRCS clicked those plots took the weights. Look at that, the combination is three to four times as much biomass as the monoculture. Now at the bottom there where it says full rate half rate, that simply got too many plants per square foot. Is the reason it tailed off slightly but how do you explain this difference? Dr. Chris Nichols who's a soil microbiologist she explained it best when she said not only do the fungi and she's talking about the mycorrhizal fungi that I mentioned earlier provides for the needs of one plant but the fungal hyphae pipeline connect to multiple plants thus supplying the nutritional and energy needs of all microorganisms and all plants. So the pan Heike under there because we had been no-till and we had the diversity and we had different gritty nips in that covers we were able to transfer nutrients throughout the soil profile and get much more production.

22:39 Our conclusion to that, everyone of us who saw that new monocultures are our detriment to soil health. Think of it this way. We're in nature, do you find a monoculture? Very very seldom, usually only when man is planting or managed feeding. Nature's from running in their course its diversity that drives soil health. We need more diversity in our soil ecosystems. So what we've done on our operation and others, we all know there's four different rock types: cool season grasses, cool season broad leaves, warm season grasses and warm season broadleaf. Well I mentioned of my father-in-law Hebrew is sprinkling on spar all cool season grasses. So we'll leave down on our operation. Now we've diversified where we grow some of each of the four crop types. Now don't pay attention to any other crop types I'm showing you. They may or may not work on your operation.

23:34 Only you can decide that. Just wrap your mind around the fact of diversity and try to focus on the ball for a proper test. It absolutely drives me crazy. I spend a lot of my winter traveling and talking about soil health, and when I get into the Corn Belt, they're either growing corn on corn or they're growing corn beans and they think they have diversity. And I tell them, you can keep doing what you're doing, but don't complain to me that your costs are so high and that the soils are being unproductive. You have to expand your mind. Glad we can market different crops. Really, don't your semis have tight, you know, come on. You can depend, build your own market in all things. It always works. It would be much, much more profitable because of it.

24:17 So in our cropping system now, we've evolved. We know we see some of each of the four crop types every year, and then also we're intercropping. For instance, in the upper left, that's folks with three types of clover. The upper right is a mixture of cool season broad leaves. The lower left, that's corn with hairy vetch growing in it. And then the lower right, that's sunflowers. And there's actually about 20 different cover crop species growing in with us with that sunflower. We want diversity in the cropping system anytime we can get it.

24:50 Number four, fourth principle: living the rhythm the ground as long as possible. You look at a true native ecosystem, what do you have? You have all the warm season grasses? No, you have a mix. You have a mix of warm and cool seasons. And then you've got with that all this different shapes, sizes, rooting depth. You have different leaf areas. About two-thirds of your organic matter ease have come from roots. The more roots we get in the soil, the quicker we're going to deal that soil.

25:28 Here's a poster up picture that old books has been extremely profitable for us. We're able to go in there. We have that armor on the surface with a decent amount of armor. We're able to go in there with no herbicide. We haven't used any synthetic fertilizers on our operations since 2008. We haven't used any fungicide since before the turn of the century. We do occasionally use a herbicide, and I'm trying really hard to get away from that. I just don't quite ever figure it out yet. But we'll go in there and we'll see totes along with blowers. This particular case we use for seed crimson clover. Well, straight cut that. Oh, it's awesome. We got that over growing, capturing sunlight, right? So here are fixing nitrogen. Maybe grew it in the ground as long as possible.

26:16 It boggles my mind how much producers like to write checks above every interval. And there's approximately 34,000 tons of atmospheric nitrogen. It's free. Only I do is find the label. Now I'd rather write a check for the elevator. Okay, whatever. Is there really any reason why we're converting fossil fuels into nitrogen? No, no reason whatsoever. Makes no sense to do it. Should be doing this is a corn crop that's hairy. That's going in with the corn. We're able to combine that corn off. Look at, we're balancing our lifestyle protein needs by having that in there. Meanwhile, I that border crops growing that actually sell meat, supply nitrogen to the corn. It's free. All we got to do is have to see Keith and Brian over there.

27:09 Okay, here's corn where we brought you with bloggers and turnips in broadcasting. And our dry environment usually doesn't work. In this particular case it did. And that's what it looked like. And our corn they're ready to combine. Really good understory growth of turnips and clovers growing underneath it.

27:32 Trying to do this now, I will caution you this will give you kicked out of most crop insurance programs. But we quit crop insurance on our operation. I no longer want to be on welfare.

27:52 So now we'll get into living right as long as possible. Cover crops give us the opportunity to do that. And when I think a cover crop, I think of this: cover crop is the diverse mix that enhances the function of the soil. That's what it's there to do. It's enhanced soil life. These are just some of the cover crops we grew on our operation this past year. Again, don't pay any attention to the species because they may or may not work on.

28:21 Your operation but notice I have some of all four crop types. We're trying to get that diversity as we get a living good in the ground as long as possible. You use cover crops to design for what you don't have. The first thing that you think about planning to cover ground, you need to ask yourself is what's my resource concern? What am I trying to do on that particular field? You know, do I want to improve infiltration, increase organic matter, jumpstart nutrient cycling, what is it? You have to decide that first. I see way too many instances where producers just go and they plant a cover crop, it's going to cure-all fable. Well, is it the right one for the right situation? You have to think that through before you decide which one.

29:09 The other thing is, where do you have a gap in time where you can fit a cover crop? That's why I like the corn-bean guy. The best thing they can do is plant a cover crop where there's a win there with time following that winter week where they can get a cover crop. You have to think about that. You're going to design a next or this website, green cover seeds calm. They developed this harvest calculator, looks something like this. A lot of new ones being made now. It is absolutely the greatest tool there is to help you determine and make it easy to determine the species that you should use. Animations for you. Write down that website. You can use them to work now.

29:57 I'm going to show you an example here, several examples of how we address resource concerns by using cover crop. Okay, these are some producers who live about 15 miles south of me there in North Dakota. And there, they had a window of time following. In this particular case, they use fealty and then our environment field. These can be harvested real early. Down areas can use something like winter rye. You give a longer window of time. But their system was they had tilled for years and years. They didn't have structure through their soil. So they had to get some glance that would proliferate my horizon funds up. And so they decided on this mix here. This mix has several species in it that will form that relationship with mycorrhizae function. And so they went in following that pea harvest.

30:50 I'm going to tell you first hear about what they did. A field of cross line that was split with a single roll wind break of trees. So they harvested the peas on both fields, one on each side of the trees. They planted a cover crop on one side, no cover crop on the other. And this is the cover crop that they planted October 1st. That's food by October 1st. They had that amount of growth on it, great standing out in there. And we decided to see, you know, how this affected livestock team. So what we actually did, we wind all the calves before we turn them out on it and turned out 141 pair for 16 days on that cover crop. Average 52 pounds gain on the calf. We didn't weigh the cow, just the calf. So in other words, 3.1 pounds a game. So when they hit the map on it, and this was done a number of years ago, calf prices have tripled since then, but at that time, they never been extra $66 per acre. But the important thing is what's the value of the recovery time they were able to give that native range by getting their livestock off the native range? And then, most importantly, what's the value of improved soil health?

32:06 Next spring, they went in, and that's that wind that tree row. You can see in the upper right on the left-hand picture. He had just planted corn into there. That's the residue that was left because when we're grazing these cover crops, we're using good management practices, only taking about one-third, leaving two-thirds there on the right. That's on the opposite side of those trees. Look at that windy room because there was no cover. Now, but this is a sandy soil site. We were worried about how much moisture is that cover crop using in our limited moisture in Mark? So NRCS came out right before he planted this warrant, and they drove the soil on both of those fields, took many samples to figure out how much moisture was used. The answer was four one-hundredths of an inch. Now I'm not saying that's all the moisture the cover crop used. I'm saying the boys fear that was left on each of those fields that explained. So seeing the field on the on the right, which had.

37:56 We didn't roll it down or anything, we just planted it directly into it. We planted corn again. We did not use any synthetic fertilizers at all on it. In July we took the leaf tissue analysis on July 7th. Now if you start with pretty degraded soils and just give it one year of cover crops, we found it absolutely amazing. This leaf tissue analysis with the exception of calcium showed that all the nutrients were supplied. Now I don't want to give you the wrong impression. I'm not here telling you to do away with your synthetics. You're going to have a wreck if you do that. Actually, when you move into this type of scenario, you're going to have to increase your synthetic fertilizer for the first few years because all of your nutrients are going to be tied up in that above-ground biomass and the roots and in the soil biology itself. So you need to increase your synthetics until you get the nutrient cycling right.

38:53 But what we did in this case, we used a whole year of cover crops. So that's the energy, that's the fertilizer so to speak that this corn crop is running on. We combined that crop on November 8th. And what we have done is split the field in half. Half of it we put some compost and compost teas. The other half had the county average. Rooney County's quota is just under a hundred bushels per acre of corn. We averaged 122. Now through this, we have a year of cover crops, but we're just using it to show people how fast we can jump start soil evolution. You can nutrient cycle. You can do it much faster than we used to think possible.

39:36 Now this photo here is on a friend of mine, about 20 miles north of me. He had a problem. He was complaining there's too much residue. I'm having cold soil. Test my residue. He just got started in no-till. This was about six, seven years later. We went out there and we could tell what he had planted the previous five years. And he was thinking, man, do I gotta go back to tillage or what? I'm getting all this residue build-up. We said, my friend, you don't have a residue problem. You got a carbon-nitrogen ratio problem. Those previous crops he had used spring wheat, winter wheat, corn, sunflowers—all very high carbon crops. There was no nitrogen cycling. Sure, he was using fertility, but it was synthetic fertility, but it was being tied up in the growing crop.

40:26 This is very easily taken care of. All one had to do was he had to go in there and start seeding legumes with brassicas. So after a winter wheat harvest, he went in there and he seeded some lentils or peas along with radish. The next year he added peas as a crop in this rotation. Boom, problem solved. Residue cycle drew no longer has that issue. I hear that many, many times when I go on to farms: 'Oh, I can't go no-till, it's too cold on the soil.' Well, what's your crop rotation? What's the carbon-nitrogen ratio? We can use cover crops to balance that and get that cycle through. With peas, I certainly recommend adding something like the radishes, the brassicas, to store that nitrogen for the following years, which they do very efficiently. And that photo shows that roll of radishes the next spring, breaking down, breaking down. There we're releasing that nitrogen, breaking down that residue. Works extremely well.

41:32 Here's another symptom we can address. You know, I've got a neighbor who farms 42,000 acres, and the planes are going constant, flying fungicides, pesticides, et cetera on that problem. I got a good friend, Jonathan Lundgren. He's an entomologist at ARS in South Dakota. He told me: for every one insect species that's a pest, there's 1,700 species that are either beneficial or indifferent—meaning they won't help your problem. So why us producers, are we so focused on killing that pest? We should be focused on providing a home for all the beneficial insects to take care of that pest, and then it takes care of it without us having to write the checks. So on our operation, I mentioned we haven't used insecticides since before the turn of the century. Here's lady beetles. You attract them and they're ferocious pests. Also attract all the pollinators, you know. While you read about that, and it's easy to pick up now, it's talking about the problem we're having. We're losing all the pollinators. Are we providing the home for them?

42:38 It's pretty hard to attract pollinators in the corn-soybean rotation, right? If we provide the habitat, they will come. That's what we can do with cover crops. In this particular sunflower field I mentioned, over 20 different species growing in it, and underneath that sunflower field we have species like buckwheat, tremendous pollinator attractant. It also helps to cycle nutrients. Buckwheat secretes an enzyme that will help break down organic phosphorus in the soil. We're sitting on an endless supply of phosphorus in our soil, but we don't plant crops like this that will help it cycle through. Instead we want to write a check for it. Makes no sense.

43:26 This one here is phacelia. Phacelia is a flowering plant with tremendous root mass that will increase organic matter in yourself, but it also really attracts the pollinators. All that same thing attracts the pollinators. This particular photo I took on October 8. We get our first killing frost on the gates of October. As your soil is becoming, on the 10th of September is usually our first killing frost. I took this on the 8th of October. As you improve soil health, your soils will stay warmer a lot longer, which in our environment, that's a good thing because it will extend the growing season. Now in warm environments, if you have that armor, it will keep it cooler longer.

44:08 Spiders, you know, I can't tell you walk you through our cover crop fields how many spider webs do we have. Do I have a grasshopper problem? No, they're all in with spiders. It's simply a matter of providing them home, and you could use a lot of these cover crop species to attract those beneficial insects. We need to start doing that in order to get the ecosystem functioning as a whole.

44:33 This one, and I'm going to talk a lot more about this tomorrow, but this is a very important one. This one's animal integration. Look at how nature did it. You know, our central plains here, there were large herds of bison. I own this newspaper, the Prairie Farmer, from 1871. It was on the front page of the paper. That's how our prairie soils were formed, through these large herds of migrating animals moving across the plain. Then you had the residents once they would take a bite, trample, dung, defecate, urinate, move on, cycle nutrients. You drive today frost anywhere in the US where the young are either locked up in the Capitol or they're non-existent.

45:19 On our operation, when we took that operation over, we could run 65 cows out there for above 35 years on those free passes. Today we're running 350 goats per acre. We're running 1,400 stockers and grass-finished animals. We've got a flock of sheep. We've got pastured pork. We've got broilers. My son is limited on broilers to the number as long as we can help butcher. We've got laying hens and land. The laying hens follow on the grass finished stockers. They're not bad at all, except supplemented with a little bit of oyster shells during the summer. Other than that, they're just free range. Four dollars a dozen for eggs, as many as we can produce. It's absolutely amazing. But what we're trying to do is harvest different energy levels because we're trying to mimic nature. Think of that. In the plains with the herds of bison and pronghorn deer and all these other species, they're all harvesting a different level of energy. We're just trying to mimic that, and I'll get more into that tomorrow.

46:28 Now actually, we graze these cover crops with the crop on the cropland. We try and do that in a way where we leave that with as I said earlier, and I'm going to show you through a series of slides here, the problem I have with the quote unquote normal MDMK soil tips. Here's the type of residue we leave when we're done grazing the cover. Here's a quote unquote standard DMDK fall test. I know that's too small for you to read it. In the upper left, it says columns of nitrogen in the top two feet of the soil profile: 10 comma. How many units of corn can you grow on 10 units of N? How many is the comment I heard? I'll show you what we can do there. We are planting into that type of residue. I plant corn, usually between May 15th to May 20th, somewhere in there, so the soil temp is right and I can plant the corn. Now you see, I'm a no-till on the left, that's planted.

47:30 On the right is not no disturbance. Arviragus throw a surface now see the amount or residue there on the left. The photo was taken then on June 16th about three weeks after planting on the right July 1st. Where's all my residue going?

47:48 Here's the corn crop then in late July of Tesla. Dr. Ray more drones or Lance Kearney Nebraska came and took this sample himself. There's the leaf tissue analysis every single nutrient test before including nitrogen was in the hide or satisfactory ring. I don't apply anything. There's no manner on there, there's no compost, there's no synthetic fertilizer. You saw that first of all tests showed ten units an where is it coming from?

48:19 Here's what that field looked like at all. This was taken a number of years ago. I'm embarrassed for that because that's bare soil. I'm degrading my resource that we need. There's no cover on it. Since this time that's why I've really wrapped it up efforts that have something growing in with the corn. That corn yield in 142 bushels per acre. That's over my whole farm, not here now. County average is about a hundred. We did 142 and my soil tests go 10 units. And if I had sold wine that all I do is listen to their dramas, I'd be right to checks all the time now.

48:56 The check I really hate writing is the one to arrest. Here's what we did in 2012. The reason I don't have twenty thirteen or fourteen up here we didn't grow four in the past two years. There was other crops that I thought would be much more profitable. Now I know my land cost in that'll roll but look at my cost. Introduced a bushel corn down at the bottom that includes everything dollar 44. Now since 2012 we've dropped out of the crop insurance program also. So that's the cost for stated corn locally. This fall is a dollar seventy three is what a dropper to their basis with solar. I can still make a profit at that. Not much but I can still make the trouble.

49:37 I was speaking in Illinois last year and I had a banker come up weed. He says maybe you know if corn drops below five dollars after my borrowers will not make their payments. I said boy that's going to happen and he said yeah I know that's why I'm not sleeping at night but that's what's happening. We become so entrenched and ingrained in this monoculture type production model ignoring soil health. If we focus on the resource we can really save cost and at the same time we can produce healthy nutrient-dense foods.

50:07 Where do those nutrients come from? The soils a lot. All you got to do is have the soil biology in order to cycle that organic material through soil biology. Soil without biology is geology. I really like that thing.

50:23 The problem you can't, the reason you can't use the quote unquote standard test is it takes into account the chemical and physical properties of the soil. It does not take into account what the biology. Most insightful through and the reason that is is because with the current production model we're on most oils have very little biology. You know Jonathan made the statement this morning that's more organisms in a teaspoonful a healthy soil than there are people on this world and that's true and a healthy soil but we've degraded our resource. We need to start focusing on how do we do that biology and then how do we test our soil?

51:05 This is the contact information for Dr. Rick Haney right down here at Temple Texas. Dr. Haney has developed a soil test that will revolutionize soil testing in the United States. It uses root exudates to break down the compounds of the soil and be able to accurately predict as to how much nutrients you're going to get to cyclists. Geobiology you have a wonderful resource here. I was with him Friday and part of Saturday. That man is in my mind one of the true pioneers and leaders in this movement because he's thinking as a farmer with them. How do we cycle this through take advantage of that lab that's very close to theirs? What he's doing is he's measuring the water extractable organic carbon and that's the food that the biology piece and we're able to see if we focus on that. These are a couple soil samples Dr. Bini took for my place where we're able to significantly increase the amount of the.

52:08 Organic fractions of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium that our soils are cycling through so he can accurately predict how much of this you'll be able to get cycling through. Take advantage of that test—it will save you money down the line instead. In nature's economy, the currency is not money, it is life, and we've ignored that life in our production system. We have to start thinking of that.

52:39 So what are we able to do? I mentioned that when I started, my organic matter levels were over 1.7 to 1.9%. Last summer we tested those fields again—we're from 5.3 to 6.1%. As we integrate livestock, we've been able to significantly ratchet that up. What difference does that make in my pocket? Figure out the nutrients. This was pretty simple math. When you figure out the amount of NPK and some of these nutrients in the soil, as you increase the organic matter in your soil, you're going to have much more nutrients available. Check your local costing at the local agronomy center and figure out what that is.

53:19 Now as you increase the organic matter, you're going to be able to increase the water-holding capacity of your soil. I have silt loam soils, which is the middle column. When I started, I had less than 2% organic matter, which meant that for every foot in the soil profile, I can only hold about two inches of water. So a four-foot-tall profile, I can only hold about eight inches of water. Now as I've increased organic matter to well over 5%, I can now hold over 20 inches in my profile. That's huge, you know? When the plants are going to be able to access that throughout the growing season, we build resiliency into our systems. In some ways, we create our own drought. I know there's people in this room who have had droughts for many years, and I sympathize with you. I've been there. But there's ways—once that drought is around—that we can build back the resiliency in our soil and make our soils so we can better combat that lack of moisture.

54:18 So 1% organic matter in the top six inches of soil can hold about 27,000 gallons of water, okay? As we've increased the organic matter in our soils, we have gone—on our 5,000-acre operation, we used to only about 256 million gallons of water in our storage, and now over 800 to 910 million gallons of water that's stored. That's just like irrigation. Earlier this past fall, speaking out in the Bootheel region of Missouri, they're getting over 50 inches of rainfall and applying 50 inches of irrigation for 200-bushel corn. I just showed you the kind of corn I'm getting about 15 inches of water use. Efficiency—it's not how much you get. There's no reason in the world they can't throw a 200-bushel corn on their natural rainfall. The reason they're not able to is they've got a destroyed soil ecosystem.

55:17 Soil carbon is the key driver for the nutritional status of plants and therefore the mineral density in animals and people. Soil carbon is the key driver for moisture and water-holding capacity. Soil carbon is the key driver for farm crop productivity. I can go on—most operations anywhere in the world, the amount of carbon they've got we can directly tie it into the amount of profit in their operation. Here's what we've been able to do on our operation. On the left, we started out with very shallow soils and low organic matter. We went to no-till, which is a tool—one step up. We then started to diversify the cash crop—another step up with organic matter levels. We then started to add cover crop—another step up. Then we went to multi-species levels of cover—another step. But then we really started integrating livestock, which I'll talk about tomorrow, which built soil health even further. These are all tools that you use to improve your resource.

56:26 Now we've done—we actually have a plot of land that we've taken to 11.1% organic matter, and we're working on taking that to field stage. So 11.1% organic matter is considerably higher than what the soil scientists tell us our soils were before tillage. But we can build, and we can build this soil much faster. If you take nothing else away from my presentation, take this away: plants mix dirt. They change it in the soil with diversity. You need them. If we have healthy soil, we're going to have clean air and clean water, healthy plants, healthy animals, and we haven't even started talking about these spectacular people yet. But that's what it's about on our operation. How do we regenerate this soil using these five principles? And they can be used anywhere in the United States.