Grazing for Soil Health: Building Living Soil with Livestock Integration

0:09 Well, as Jonathan said, I am from Mississippi and we do have a handful of people here today from Mississippi, but you know Mississippi is that state of the union that is either first or last in everything and neither is good. And we're first in obesity and all of those types of things, so that's typically where we stand on any of these national rankings.

0:41 I just want to tell you a little story here that's pertinent to us. Many of you may not know this, but for years the government has mandated that the automotive industry install these little black boxes in your vehicles, and you may not have been aware of that at all. But the purpose of those black boxes was to collect data on the last words of the driver right before an automobile crash. Now what they found was that in the vast majority of states, the last words right before the crash were something like 'oh no' and then some type of primal scream. But in Mississippi, in 95% of the cases, the last words right before the crash from the driver were 'here, hold my beer, let me try something.'

1:41 So that just tells you a little bit about the way we think. What I want to concentrate on today, and Jonathan is right, I am going to talk, but this will be more tomorrow. I'm going to talk about the utilization of cover crops and the integration of livestock into rotational cropping situations. We've been working with this in many different regions of the country, so tomorrow I'll share with you a lot of our experiences and data and things like that. But today I'm going to concentrate on talking predominantly about grazing for soil health.

2:22 I just tell you a little bit about myself. I was born and raised on a family farm in South Carolina. It's been there since 1840, so I represent the sixth generation. I have kids and three grandsons now, and the grandkids would represent the eighth generation in my family. I went away to college to get educated and came back home intending to stay right there on the family farm for the rest of my life.

3:01 When I came back home, I started telling my father and my grandfather and my uncles, because we were an extended family operation, everything they needed to change, everything I'd learned in college, and everything we needed to do different. Never mind that they had been pretty successful and had bought and paid for farms and all of this for many generations before me, but all of a sudden I knew better. They didn't exactly take to heart everything I said, and that's probably a very good thing. But I ended up, at the repeated request of a major professor, going back to graduate school and then going on for my PhD.

3:48 Totally unintentionally, I ended up in academia. So I spent 15 years doing research and teaching and doing extension work with my last appointment being at Mississippi State University. That's how I got to Mississippi. During that time, I became very conventionally oriented and very commodity oriented. I was completely steeped in that world. All the research that I was doing was completely steeped in that world. But what I started noticing was that we were requiring more and more inputs to be able to do the same thing. Our level of cost per production unit was rising. Our net margin per animal, per acre, was steadily decreasing. It took more acres, more animals, more acres of crops, whatever, to still make the same amount of gross income and net income.

5:07 Gradually, I started thinking about why that was happening and whether we were contributing to that. I started thinking about the generations of my family that were able to buy land and pay for land and make it in agriculture, and why they were able to do that. I found, first of all, they were very diversified. They weren't one track mind, only growing this, only planting that, only having cattle, only growing corn and soybeans. But they were always historically very diversified, even diversified to the point of being very creative and innovative in their marketing, in how they marketed the products that they were producing.

6:11 I started thinking about when I was growing up on the farm. We didn't have a lot of these products, and I'm 55 years old so I'll date myself there, but we didn't have a lot of the products that we had after that. So we were able to produce livestock without the benefit of a lot of the products that today we're told we need all the time. I started wondering about that, why, and how can we get back there. So in 2000, I made the decision to leave academia. Keep in mind I'd been there 15 years. I was tenured, promoted, everything. I had a guaranteed paycheck, the benefits, all of that that goes along with that. So if I left, I gave every bit of that up. It was a tough decision, but I made the decision over a lot of thought.

7:06 Conversation with my wife and a lot of prayer to do. That was back in 2000 when we went back into private business full-time farming and ranching in North Mississippi, Northeast Mississippi, in what's called the black belt prairie. We also have been consulting very heavily since that time, so we've worked very heavily in the grassfed beef sector, in the soil health sector, and in the pastured meat sector, and that type of thing. We've been privileged enough to be able to work throughout every province of Canada, 49 of the 50 states in the US, in Mexico, and South America.

7:53 I say that to say this: in our consulting work, we've been able to see a lot of different environments, a lot of different farming and ranching situations, and there's enormous benefit to that because you learn from what other people are doing. I often tell my clients that we consult with that I learn more from you than you learn from me, because we're able to glean all of this knowledge, and together we're able to grow. That's what gatherings like this are all about. I applaud Keith and Brian and everybody else that had a hand, the Noble Foundation, everybody that brings us together like this, because this allows us to network and interact and to be able to learn from each other, to be able to glean the knowledge that we need to take those next steps forward.

8:50 As Steve said this morning, we have a lot of challenges that are facing us, and we're going to talk about those challenges today and tomorrow, but we have a lot of challenges that are facing us that are pretty serious, and we've got to know how to move forward. But now that being said, I also am more optimistic about agriculture and the future of agriculture today than I have ever been in my entire life. The reason for that is because we are seeing people all over this country that do have the mindset of change: how can we do this differently? How can we be innovative and creative? And how can we share this? That's the other great thing that I'm seeing is the willingness to share that knowledge rather than just keep it to yourself and say this is a secret. The willingness to share, and so I applaud that.

9:56 In that light, I'm going to plug another conference that is coming up in April: the Grassfed Exchange Conference. I'm one of the founding members and on the board of directors of this particular organization, but we specialize in conferences that educate people in regenerative agriculture. The conference this year is going to be April 27th through 29th at the Georgia National Fairgrounds and Agra Center in Perry, Georgia. The title of the conference this year is 'Regenerating Lives One Farm at a Time.' We have an absolutely outstanding lineup of speakers this year: people like Gabe Brown, who by the way is also on our board of directors, Burke Tycker, Ray Archeleta, Dr. Mola, Fred Provenza, and on and on. It's a power-packed lineup of speakers. It's three days of speaking, seminars, workshops, and farm tours. One of our tours is White Oak Pastures, Will Harris's operation. If you're interested in coming to that particular conference, we do have a limited number of seats for the White Oak Pastures tour, so please go ahead and go online to grassfedexchange.com and register for that tour if that's the tour that you want.

11:31 Now, you know, this being the new year and all of that, my wife was after me about what were going to be my New Year's resolutions, what was I going to do? Basically she was suggesting that I eat healthier and live a healthy lifestyle and all of this. I thought, well, I eat grassfed beef and pastured meat and all that, I think I eat pretty healthy. She said, 'Well, why don't you just give this a try? Why don't you try a vegan, gluten-free, non-GMO, lowfat, soybean-free, antibiotic-free, organic, low-carb meal?' And this is what I ended up with.

12:22 Grazing for soil health: where do we start? Well, we start with the foundation, and the foundation is the soil. That's the basis for everything. Steve, I was a lot like you when I was in college and when I taught in college. When we talked about soil, we talked about soil chemistry and the physical properties. We never talked about soil biology. I don't remember a single class in college talking about soil biology, and that's most unfortunate. It's not the case anymore in a lot of instances, and that's good. But bottom line is our soil should be alive. It should be vibrant. When you talk about soil health, that's what I think about: I think about soil that is alive, that is thriving, that has a multitude of living, breathing organisms existing in that soil. Microbes in the soil mediate 90% of plant.

13:41 Function, but yet the microbes are dependent on what those plants. If you have soil that's devoid of plants, then you also have soil that's devoid of a lot of microbes, your life. Okay, so they coexist and that coexistence is very symbiotic.

14:07 So in healthy soil we should see many different types of soil bacteria. We should see mycorrhizal fungi. Now we've measured soils all over Canada, the US, Mexico, and South America agriculture soils, and I'll tell you today and I'll show some data a little bit later on, but we have a real problem because we have a lot of agricultural soils out there that are very, very depleted in soil microbial population or life, okay.

14:51 Now mycorrhizal fungi, when you think about that particular organism, it's a long threadlike, filamentous organism that attaches itself to the roots of plants and they're much finer than the root hairs of the plant, okay. And they are six to ten times better at picking up micronutrients from the soil and transferring them to the plant. And then in return, the plant produces root exudates that feed the mycorrhizal fungi. So it's the world's oldest bartering system, but we've disrupted that bartering system through a lot of our modern agricultural practices.

15:36 You can see that it forms a nice dense mat around the root zone in the soil there. And what happens is that in highly microbially functioning fields, these mycorrhizal mats can actually cover thousands of acres—a single continuous mat of mycorrhizal fungi. Okay, and they transfer nutrients from one plant to another to another. So no matter how many different types of plants you have growing there, they're all connected through this mycorrhizal mat and they share nutrients through the mycorrhizal fungi.

16:20 Now beyond bacteria and fungi, we should also have our predator population in the soil. And one of the primary classes of predators are soil protozoa. Now what's one of the primary functions of soil bacteria? They have many functions in the soil, but what's one? They consume nutrients as they are pushed through the root zone by rainfall, by moisture leeching through the soil. So they consume those nutrients to prevent them from leeching beyond the reach of the plant roots, okay, and to hold those nutrients in the root zone. But they're not a time-release capsule, okay, so they can't just release these nutrients. Something has to happen for them to release these nutrients for plant availability and uptake. Well, what happens is the soil protozoa consume those bacteria, keep them in check, and effect the release of those nutrients for plant uptake.

17:33 A lot of the soils that I've measured throughout the US and Canada are highly bacteria-centric, meaning that they are almost devoid of a lot of the fungi that we need and of the predators. What happens above the soil when we have a lack of predators? What happens to our deer population if we don't have hunters and other predators? Our deer population grows way out of check and then we have a lot of issues, don't we? Okay, the same thing is going on beneath the soil. So we've got to have these soil predators, and in a lot of instances we do not. So we've got to restore that, okay, so we can have that natural balance.

18:21 So what it boils down to, folks, is this: even when we apply a lot of fertilizers, okay, we have those fertilizers. A lot of that is tied up in the soil and it's not available for plant uptake. It's only available for plant uptake in an economical fashion when we start to reestablish this soil microbial profile in a thriving manner.

18:47 There's also a lot of favorable nematodes in the soil, okay. You know, a lot of times in agriculture we think all nematodes are bad, but they're not. There's only a handful of species and nematodes that we have to be concerned about in terms of being pathogenic and that type of thing. There's actually a lot of very favorable nematodes that do a similar job as the soil protozoa.

19:15 Then if we have thriving soil microbial populations beneath the soil, we have indicator organisms of healthy soil. And where we see healthy, vibrant soil, we also see a thriving insect population—a soil-level insect population, okay. And a lot of those insects are shredders and degraders. So they take all of that biological matter that's on top of the soil and shred it up to help turn it into new organic matter. And that shredding process then allows the microbes beneath the soil to start acting on it even further, okay. So again, a very symbiotic process.

19:59 Another indicator species are earthworms. In healthy pastures and in healthy row crop fields we should be seeing earthworms—lots and lots and lots of them. Here's the deal: in a thriving healthy acre of soil we should have more than two tons in the top eight inches—more than two tons per acre of bacteria and fungi and protozoa and all the other soil microorganisms. More than two tons, okay. In terms of earthworms, we should have more than 800 pounds of earthworms per acre, okay, and more than 800 pounds of these.

20:45 Soil level insects. Now if you notice Peter's film this morning, what did you see as he did the slow motion passes through these pastures? What was going ahead of the camera? Insects, right? Insects. That's what we want to see. That's what we want to see. So we want to see a thriving earthworm population, and this particular field here, this is a field of a farmer up in Southern Illinois. And we've worked with him for several years in reestablishing a soil microbial population. And again, tomorrow I'll talk more about this, but we've integrated cover crop, livestock rotations, and made some strategic use of soil biologicals and so forth.

21:36 Last August, and it was pretty dry and pretty hot, we went into his corn fields. He's got a little over about 2,500 acres of corn this year was what he planted. And everywhere we went, we couldn't find a single field that did not have this. If you'll notice, you see around the brace roots here, what do you see? All of that is earthworm castings. Okay, everywhere around every single stalk of corn in every field, that's what we found. And then when we took our spade and dug up, we found earthworm tunnels everywhere through the soil, and you'll see earthworms here. Okay, in the middle of August, very dry, very hot, and we found those all over his cornfield.

22:29 This particular farmer, because of this, and again, remember I said that's an indicator organism, so we also have a thriving microbial population underneath that soil. In three years, he has been able to reduce his inorganic fertilizer inputs more than 55% in three years, and we're still reducing it. So that's the power of what this can do for you. So again, building topsoil, you know, we want to see all kinds of soil level insects. We want to see earthworm castings, all of that type of thing. Another indicator species that we see returning are dung beetles in our pastures. How many people have dung beetles in your pastures today? Great, fantastic.

23:20 You know, dung beetles do all kinds of good stuff for us. We have three main types. There's many different varieties, but we have three main types: tunnelers, dwellers, and rollers or tumblers. And everybody's probably seen the rollers and tumblers. Those are the larger dung beetles that form the ball of manure and roll it around on top of the ground and into the burrow. But they all do the job of incorporating the manure back into the ground for you. And these are just some examples of different types of dung beetle species that we have out there.

23:55 One of the other things that we're seeing return as we reestablish the soil microbial population and the organism population and diversity and complexity in our plant species is we're seeing the return of pollinator populations. Okay, so bees, all types of butterflies, many different pollinator insects are returning.

24:28 Now, what is the value of soil organic matter? So if we're going to build that soil microbial population and soil organism population, as a result, we also get an addition of soil organic matter. So what's the value of that? Well, in some research that was published, we have found that when we look at these critical nutrients, for every 1% soil organic matter, we have about $750 worth of these nutrients in the soil. So if we can build up to 5% soil organic matter, then we have more than $3,700 worth of nutrients sitting there in the soil, waiting for us, that we don't have to apply now.

25:16 Steve talked about this a little bit, and you saw the demonstration over here earlier this morning. But one of the things that we do a lot of is we measure soil water infiltration rates. We do a lot of baseline when we first start working with any clients. Then we do a lot of baseline, collect a lot of baseline data so we can monitor progress. So one of the first things we do is measure water infiltration rates. And this is a double ring infiltrometer here that you see. And alarmingly, we are finding that on many different farms and ranches across North America, soil water infiltration rates are now below 1 inch per hour. And as a matter of fact, on a lot of fields, they're less than a half inch an hour.

26:12 And we're talking about fields in Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana, where we're supposed to have the heart of our corn belt, you know, deep, dark, rich soil that looks that way. It's still sort of looks good when you look at it, but we don't have any water infiltration rates. And then when we measure hardpan and soil compaction, it's astounding what we're seeing there. I was in the Delta of Mississippi last week doing some work with some farmers there, and our water infiltration rates, unfortunately, were such that we didn't have a single farm that we measured that was above an inch an hour. And hardpan started as shallow as 6 inches on a lot of those operations. And again, that's some of the.

27:10 Best soil in the Delta that we were looking at. This is the demonstration that you saw this morning or another version of this, but bottom line is we need cover on the ground, okay? And Steve said this very well earlier this morning. Cover is critically important to being able to keep our water on our farms.

27:40 Now can we control runoff through building our soil organic matter? Well, if we have 2% soil organic matter, then with every moderate to heavy rainfall our soils can only absorb about 21% of that rainfall, so almost 80% runs off, okay? Almost 80%. If we can build our soil to 5% organic matter, now we can hold 53% of that same rainfall. If we build them to 8%, now we can hold 85% of all the rain that hits our farm. And you heard Gabe say it in the Soil Carbon Cowboys video earlier this morning, and it's absolutely true. It is not how much rain you get, it is how much rain you keep.

28:40 So this is a picture of Hurricane Joaquin back in October that hit the Carolinas and predominantly came up through the middle of South Carolina. The picture on the left is my family's farm and the picture on the right is a neighbor's farm there in South Carolina. They both got 10 inches of rain, okay? But you can see the results where you don't have adequate soil cover.

29:15 Here's the deal. If you build your water infiltration rates through building your soil microbial population, through increasing and always having roots in the ground, cover on top of the ground, armor on that soil, then not only do you get to keep the rainfall that falls on your farm, but you get to get your neighbors too, okay? Because theirs is running off onto you, particularly if you're downslope of them. So you're getting theirs as well as yours. This is the NRCS rule of thumb. For every 1% additional organic matter, each acre of soil can hold an additional 25,000 gallons of water. Now there's a range there, but that's just the general rule of thumb, okay?

30:02 Now the question then is, and Peter Bick said it in the film this morning, he said you know we used to think that it would take centuries or even thousands of years to rebuild soil organic matter, but what we have found is that we can rebuild soil organic matter much more rapidly than we ever thought. So how do we do that? How can we rapidly rebuild soil organic matter? Well, we've implemented quite a few strategies in order to get this done. One of the things that we've done is implemented bale grazing through the winter months. And this is an example of that. This is bale grazing with some farmers that we're working with up in Nova Scotia.

30:46 And it's just as simple as setting out bales prior to winter in a checkerboard fashion. We put them out about 30 feet apart or so, and we control cattle access through a single strand electrified polywire, just temporary fencing that many of you probably already use. And you can see the residue that's left behind as we move forward.

31:17 Now a lot of my former colleagues at the University would look at me and say, Allan, what a waste of hay. I can't believe you're leaving all that hay behind. Why didn't you put a ring up around those bales, you know, and that type of thing? Well, because I'm doing a lot more than just feeding cows. I'm feeding my soil, and I'm building soil, okay? And we have monitored this. We have tracked this in the Upper Midwest. We've done this in Michigan, in Wisconsin, and Minnesota. We've done it in New York, in Vermont. We've done this in Nova Scotia, in Ontario, in different places. And what we found is that in a single winter of bale grazing, we can add between a half and 3/4 of a percent organic matter in a single winter of bale grazing, okay? That's pretty astounding. That makes it an incredibly effective tool. And guess what, folks? It also makes it very, very easy to feed your cattle. We've already put the bales out. Everything's already there. And all we're doing through the winter instead of cranking a tractor and hauling hay out to cattle is we're just simply moving a polywire and letting the cattle eat the hay and harvest it themselves, okay?

32:37 Another thing that we've done quite a bit of is winter stockpile grazing. And this is stockpiling everything from perennial forages to warm season cocktails and some cool season cocktails. So we've been able to utilize all of these different types of forage species to stockpile for winter grazing. And you see this stockpile growing here. And you may think, well, there doesn't appear to be a lot of value to that, okay? It looks to me like it's sort of dried out. You know, it's going to be highly signified. There's just not going to be much there. But here's what we're typically finding, and I've got a lot of data like this, okay? This isn't the only data set. But take a look at what we found in that winter stockpile. You know, the suggested range is over here on the left. What we actually found in that sample in that stockpile in that picture is over here on the far right column, okay? 65% TDN relative feed forage quality. 179, okay? That's good feed, folks. That's.

33:49 Good feed and we're not having to do anything except control their access to it through a single strand polywire and let them harvest it themselves so it makes it a very simple way to be able to move the cattle through in a higher density manner through the winter months apply that manure and urine in a very even distribution during that time period so that it's sitting there ready and prepped to be able to fertilize that soil when the temperatures start warming up the snow melts or the ground warms up and everything starts growing again.

34:27 So those are two of the tools that we've used. Another tool that we use is what we call adaptive high stock density grazing. Now the reason that we call it adaptive and I'm going to go into more detail about this just a little bit later in my presentation is because we're extremely flexible about what we do in our grazing methodology. A lot of times what we try to do in our grazing systems or frankly anything that we do in agriculture and this is just human nature, we want to make things rigid, we want a system, we want a routine that's what we want and we want to do it the same way every time but folks, nature doesn't operate that way. Nature is always throwing us curveballs and so we have to understand that and understand that the biggest thing that we can do first of all is the most powerful tools well I'm going to say that two of our most powerful tools are setting right here on either side of our nose, our eyes, and then this organ inside this thick skull of mine, the brain, that allows us to use those powers of observation to be able to be flexible and to adjust as we see conditions before us.

36:04 So we'll talk about what is adaptive high stock density grazing here in just a minute. Another technology or tool that we've been using to rapidly build soil microbial populations and organic matter is a quorum sensing technology and this is working with microbes and all of this I'll talk more about that tomorrow but quorum sensing is just simply communication, that's the form of communication between microbes. So that's a quick and dirty definition and again tomorrow we'll talk more about that.

36:34 So how long does it take to build new soil organic matter? Well, this is real data from different farms and I just started going through all of our data sets and selecting some but you know I wanted to give you different states to look at but you can see where we started in terms of soil organic matter and then where we were after four, five or six years so you can see that we can build new soil organic matter much more rapidly than we imagined and we were taught. This is another slide showing the same thing again, some additional data from Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and Missouri that shows how rapidly we can build new soil organic matter.

37:22 Now the other thing though is how rapid can we build those soil microbial populations? What can we do there? So one of the things that we look at is we look at total living microbial biomass. That's just simply a measure of all of the microbes that exist in the soil, how many are there and we measure that in nanograms per gram of soil.

37:59 Now the more the better. The more the better in a lot of soils. Again, remember what I said in soils that we've been measuring all across the US and Canada for water infiltration rates and soil compaction it was pretty disturbing. Well, guess what? This is too. In most soils that we've been measuring, our total living microbial biomass has been 2000 or less. And to give you a rule of thumb here for highly functioning soils where you can significantly reduce input cost and external inputs, you need a minimum of 6,000 nanograms per gram. Living biomass all right, minimum of 6,000. That's what our data is telling us.

38:51 So you can see that we've been able to, and again these are different farms and this is the number of years that we took to increase that total living microbial biomass but you can see that we've been able to be very successful at rapidly increasing that and I will tell you this that if you have these levels of total living microbial biomass you do not have any more soil water infiltration issues and you have greatly alleviated your soil compaction issues. You'll find that roots go much deeper into the ground and your plants are much healthier and perform much better. So again, that's a good indicator of where you are in performance and maybe where you need to go.

39:48 Now another thing that we concentrate very heavily on in order to rapidly build soil organic matter and repopulate the soil with soil microbial populations is plant species diversity. Now again remember, nature doesn't exist in a monoculture. In nature you will never find a monoculture of anything. In nature you will always find diversity and complexity. So I no longer have any monoculture pastures. Everything that we do is a polyculture of some form or fashion, whether it's derived from the latent seed bank in the form of warm or cool.

40:36 Season perennials or whether it's planted in the form of annuals we always strive for the greatest degree of diversity and complexity that we possibly can in our plant population so diversity is the key that's what I want pastures to look like now.

40:57 When I want to graze for soil health I want to see all different types of plant species growing out there and not a monoculture. Why? Because diversity and complexity above the ground equals diversity and complexity beneath the ground in the soil. So the more we can encourage that above the ground that's mirrored below the ground in terms of root mass, root depth, penetration, everything. Another reason for plant species diversity and complexity is that we get greatly enhanced nutritive value for our livestock and for us.

41:56 Dr. Fred Vin's work—and Fred's a professor emeritus at Utah State University—but he has spent many years, decades in fact, doing a lot of research looking into the health and the grazing habits of livestock. And what he has found is that not only are livestock seeking the primary nutrient compounds—and those are the nutrient compounds that we typically think about when we have a plant tissue analysis done, forage analysis and all of that—what we're looking at are the primary nutrient compounds. When you have a ruminant nutritionist or any animal nutritionist design a ration for you, that's what they're looking at. They're looking at the primary nutrient compounds. But what Fred's work has done is he has found that there are literally hundreds of secondary and tertiary chemical compounds that exist in all of these different plants. But the key is that you don't have the same secondary and tertiary compounds in the same plants. So the only way that you can get the diversity of these secondary and tertiary nutritive chemical compounds is through plant species diversity and complexity. And what Fred found is that given the option—given the option—and the ability to select, livestock will actually eat from 50 or more different plants in a single day.

43:27 Given that option, so what are they doing? They're balancing their own diet. In other words, they're smart enough to do that if we give them the opportunity. But when we have monocultures we're not giving them that opportunity, folks. All they can eat is what's in front of us. It's like us going to a buffet and the only thing on the buffet is celery. So that's our choice. That's all we get. In a way, we're doing that to our livestock. And then to supply whatever else they may need, what are we having to do? We're having to supplement. Supplementation is never cheap. So the secondary and tertiary compounds are very, very important. And it takes the diversity and complexity to be able to supply that to our animal population.

44:14 Now another reason for diversity and complexity is that where do our microbes live and thrive? They live and thrive in the root zone of the plants because remember earlier we said it's a symbiotic relationship—they feed each other. So the more roots we put into the ground in terms of mass and depth, then the greater area our microbes have to live. Think of it this way: New York City, sort of landlocked, so if they want to increase the population what do they have to do? Build up, right. So if we want to increase the population of microbes in the soil, what do we have to do? Build down with our plant roots. Build down with our plant roots.

45:06 Now adaptive high stock density grazing—we call it AMP or AHSD. AMP means adaptive multi-pasture, or adaptive high stock density. Basically the same thing. A very good friend of mine and a colleague at Texas A&M, Dr. Richard Teague, has done some very good research. And one of the things that he did was he looked at a ranch in West Texas that had been continuously grazed for a long time. In other words, the rancher just basically allowed the cattle to roam over the ranch wherever they wanted at any point in time, year round. So what they did was GPS collar the cows. And they still—the rancher managed the ranch the exact same way. Didn't change anything for the next year after they GPS collared the cows. And they tracked those cows' movement through that ranch for that entire year. And here's what they found: they found that only 39% of the area of the ranch was even used by the cows throughout that year. And you see all of these concentrated areas of green dots—that's the GPS signals from the collars. So that's where the cattle were on the ranch during that year. And you can see where they concentrated. Where were they? They were in the draws where more water concentrated. So they were hanging tight where the lush forage was typically growing on that ranch throughout the year and ignoring the rest of it. But you can also see that 41% of those GPS points were on a very, very small percentage of the ranch. And when they started this, it took 25 acres per cow unit to maintain them.

53:53 It full week on a targeted piece of land to make rapid improvement, yes you can. Okay, and then you can relax again and do just once a day moves, that type of things. So there's all different types of flexibility that you can build into the system.

54:10 I'm going to give you an example here, and this is one of our farms in Mississippi. We purchased this farm about 5 years ago because it was strategically located next to another farm that we were grazing, and so it made it a very good purchase. But when we purchased it, it had been just absolutely used up. That's what it looked like—I mean it was absolutely terrible, a lot of bare exposed soil. Whatever was growing there would definitely be classified as a weed or brush species.

54:56 You know, we've been working with these adaptive grazing principles for a while now, but we had never taken a piece of ground and tracked it from the very beginning, all the way through. So we said let's take advantage of this and let's collect a lot of baseline data right here at the very beginning so that we can track and monitor progress all the way through. That's what we've been doing over the last 5 years on this particular piece of property, and that was the farm that was featured in Peter's film there.

55:30 This is where we started, okay, and this is in the Black Belt Prairie of Mississippi. If you know where that is, aside from the Delta of Mississippi, that's the second best soil in the state of Mississippi. Organic matter was below 2%—1.3 to 1.6% across the farm. Water infiltration rates were less than a half inch an hour. The bricks on what few forage species existed were less than 2%. Major forage species that we could count were no more than three to four, and it took five acres or more at that point per one animal unit. That was the fall of the year.

56:22 So that first winter there was basically nothing to feed the cattle, so we put out bales in a checkerboard fashion and bail grazed it that first winter. Then the first grazing season that next spring and summer, we used adaptive grazing principles—high stock density, short duration, long rest periods—and then we made strategic use of soil microbials using quorum sensing technology that we'll talk a little bit more about tomorrow.

56:51 This is what it looked like in year one, okay. Those are my grandboys there in the ranger, but we put cow calf units on here. We didn't put old dry cows, we didn't put yearling heifers, anything like that. These were gestating, lactating cows that we depended on to make some money, okay? So that's what we put on this place from the get-go. They calved in April and May.

57:27 So this is what they were eating, and you can see here ironweed, giant ragweed, sumac, pigweed—you name it, it was all there. We grow everything in Mississippi, right? Everything, okay? It's bad, I mean we can grow it all, but so all of it was there. All kinds of weed and brush species, and that's what the cattle were eating.

57:54 Now I had neighbors that came by and took a look, and they told us we were going to starve those cows to death, weren't going to get them rebred, you know, all of this. Well, we were a little worried about it, yeah, to be honest with you. But you know what? The cows kept gaining body condition, they kept gaining body condition. And as they move through a paddock, this is what it would look like after they get through.

58:17 They would take the ironweed and the giant ragweed, all of that, and they would strip all the leaves off of it and eat all of that, and then they would go down and start eating the lower growing stuff, okay? So we started doing plant tissue analysis and measuring bricks on all of that, and we found it was very high in bricks and the plant tissue analysis was very favorable. Why? Because these weeds were deep rooted, okay? Deep rooted, so they were reaching down deep into the ground and pulling up a lot of minerals and all of that. So they were actually pretty highly nutritious.

58:56 Yet you know, we had a lot of people tell us we need to just take that 90-foot boom out there, okay, and spray, you know.

59:07 There we go. This is year two, okay. So what do you notice by year two? Still grazing, still see some weeds, yeah, but what else? Now a lot more forage species in the mix, right? Now we did no mechanical intervention and we did no chemical intervention. We just used the livestock as our tool.

59:29 That was year three. Now you're seeing a definite succession, far fewer weeds, a lot denser forage growth. Year four, okay. Now what were we doing during those years? We're being very flexible in our adaptive grazing technologies. We were using the livestock as a tool, but at the same time depending on those cows to nurse those calves, to wean off good calves, and to breed back, okay? Those cows have never—that set of cows has never been removed from that particular farm. They have been there.

1:00:13 Since day one without any put and take, all we've done is add. We've added more and more, so we've never had to remove any cows from that particular piece of property. We've added herds every year to increase the numbers. So this is where we were after that four years.

1:00:38 Remember where we started in soil organic matter: 1.3 to 1.6. After that time period we were up to 5.2 to 5.6. Forage species—remember initially we had NRCS and extension personnel come in at all these points to count as well. Again we said three to four, now we have over 43. None of that was planted on this farm. Those 43 are all a result of the latent seed bank, using the cattle to tap into the latent seed bank. So that incredible array of forage species all came up from what was already there that we tapped into and then allowed to establish and proliferate.

1:01:30 Plant biomass is now averaging in the mid-teens to the low 20s, and remember it was 2% earlier. Water infiltration rates are 10 inches an hour now and they were less than a half inch when we started. The stocking rate is now one animal unit per 1.5 acres. And on top of that we've seen a significant increase in earthworms, soil-level insects, pollinator wildlife. We've been measuring microbial population, so all that's increased significantly.

1:01:59 Many of you do this, but it's very easy to move the mob. The cattle move themselves. As a matter of fact, to be honest with you, compared to the traditional, conventional way that we used to do things with managing cattle, this is so much easier, even though we're moving cattle on a daily basis and at times even more frequently than that. This is so much easier to do. All I'm doing was replacing labor with labor, because if I wasn't doing this, I'd have my butt seated on a tractor cutting, raking, bailing hay and then feeding hay back in the wintertime. You're not adding any time, you're just trading labor for labor, and this is much more enjoyable.

1:02:39 It allows you to be much more highly observant. It allows you to be able to see what's happening and to pay attention to the cattle, pay attention to the plants, pay attention to the soil. Before that, all we were paying attention to was trying to beat daylight and dark on a tractor. So now we're able to be much more highly observant, and the only piece of equipment that we crank on a daily basis on this farm is the Ranger to do the fencing. So again, the cattle move themselves.

1:03:12 On this particular farm, it's about three miles from the east end to the west end, and we had the cattle grazing over on the west end. Then to restart their rotation, I wanted to bring them all the way back over to the east end. So I had to come all the way back across everything, and so I just got on my Ranger and called the cows. You know, they know that when they see or hear the Ranger, it's time to move to a fresh paddock. So they lined up and followed me three miles across a lot of fresh grass that was ungrazed over that three-mile track. They never put their heads down to graze because I didn't stop. As long as I kept moving on the Ranger, they kept moving, and they were looking down and looking up at me. But the reason they kept moving is because they figured, 'Well, he must have something even better than this,' you know, and they never stopped until I got to the point where I wanted to put them into a new paddock. And that was right here—that's a little polywire gap gate there. We open that and they funnel in, new paddock, immediately start grazing. So it's a very, very easy process. It also makes it very easy to gather them, to work them, and your corrals, everything. It's just super easy.

1:04:26 The other thing though is it's so simple that your kids and your grandkids can do it, all right. So I use this as a teaching tool for our kids and our grandkids. You know, we've got three grandsons and they're 14, 12, and nine now. The nine-year-old, he's a challenge. He's a real challenge, and now he loves the cattle, loves the farm. But here's the deal: he doesn't respond to any known form of discipline, all right. And believe me, we have tried absolutely everything known to man on this kid to get him to listen and to respond until we discovered this.

1:05:16 Now another thing that we do is we never let our cattle into the ponds. All of our ponds are ringed with a single strand of polywire, and what we did was we built ramps into the ponds using geotextile fabric and rock over top of that. You can see that we've put polywire out into the pond, and these ramps are typically no more than about 12 or so feet across. You don't want them too wide because you don't want too many cattle trying to go down at once. You know, they'll take turns going down to water. So this allows the rock to go on down into the water here, and what it allows is the cattle to go down and drink but not get into the ponds themselves. So we never let them into the ponds. And off of every pond that we have, we also have piping coming off with troughs that are gravity-flow fed. So we have trough systems set up off of each pond as well. Typical rule of thumb for us is that we never want our cattle to

1:06:27 Water off of a single watering point more than one week at a time. We always change watering points every week as we change our rotation with the cattle, and that's not saying that's the right or wrong thing to do. That's just what we're doing to try to keep from overusing any one water point.

1:06:48 This is what our winter stockpile looks like right now. That's the 43 plus species that are growing in a lot of warm seasons in there that we stockpiled for our winter grazing for these same cows, and this is just simply moving the cows onto that fresh stockpile and letting them utilize that.

1:07:15 For fencing it's very simple. This is the fencing rig that I use. You saw on the video what Neil Dennis uses. There's all kinds of setups that you can do, but I like to use a ranger and I double decked it so I can keep dividers down here that I can keep different types of posts that I use, and then in the basket up top I keep my reels and gate handles, all of that type of thing. So there's a lot of different ways that you can rig up to make your fencing job very very easy, and even kids or whatever can do it.

1:07:53 Here's the whole purpose: who's the employee? Are you employed by your cattle and your livestock or are they your employee? In other words, who's doing the most work? If you're having to cut, rake, and bale hay all summer long to feed back to them all winter long, guess what, you're their employee. They control you. You want to control them. So that's the point of this slide. We've got to think about that.

1:08:29 Now here's another deal: does grazing strategy and methodology matter? Well, I've been working with Peter and the folks from Carbonation and what we like to call Team Soil Carbon, and that's a Consortium of scientists and experts and so forth. We've done some measurement and we did some measurements in Mississippi last fall. The team of scientists came in and we looked at three operations. We looked at the operation that I just talked about that's been using adaptive grazing strategies implemented for five years. You saw what it looked like in the beginning, and then we went to two neighboring farms with the exact same soil type. One of the neighboring farms had been using rotational grazing for the last 50 years, so they do a rotation about once every two weeks. That's their typical rotation for the last 50 years. The third neighboring farm was like that ranch in Texas. They just let the cattle go wherever they want and they've been doing that for the last 40 plus years. We went in and at random locations on each farm we dug three-foot deep soil pits and collected soil samples every six inches, so every six-inch gradient down to three feet we collected soil samples. We took a lot of different measurements, but some of the things that we did, we measured total soil carbon, and you can see that with the adaptive high stock density grazing for just five years, from the top six inches all the way down to three feet, you can see the total soil carbon compared to the other two neighboring ranches that had used either a slow rotation or continuous grazing across the ranch for decades is significantly higher in all gradients all the way down to three feet in total soil carbon.

1:10:37 If we look at soil organic matter, again after just five years of adaptive grazing compared to the slow rotation or continuous grazing, it's significantly higher. So organic matter all the way down to three feet compared to the other two operations. And then finally, if we look at carbon assessment per acre, basically carbon sequestration, carbon that's put back into the soil, again the same thing. It's significantly higher carbon sequestration rates compared to the slow rotation and the continuous grazing. Pretty staggering when you see what that's all about.

1:11:21 The Lost Ranch in Mexico, after just five years of adaptive grazing. The neighboring ranch, the Los Thas, very very low rainfall high mountain desert area. This is what the Los Thas looked like five years ago. There was no difference across the fence. Again, some of the growth at the Los Thas, and this is what we found: the last four years rainfall has been ten, nine, eight, and five. Five years ago they were pretty much a monoculture of tobasa grass. Now they've got many different species that have come up from the land's seed bank. It used to take 200 acres to run an animal unit, and now they can run an animal unit per 40 acres. Their neighbor still takes 200 acres to run an animal unit.

1:12:18 Pompei's Rest Farm in South Carolina. This was data that was presented at the National GLCI Conference in December in Texas. This particular client, he just started in 2014, so this is just after a single year. This is what his pastures look like. The title of his presentation, by the way, was Soil Destroyer to Soil Builder. He did a fabulous job with his presentation, but this is what his pastures look like initially when we first went there and always keep.

1:12:56 A pictoral diary as well as the other data. This will change. There we go, this is what it looked like after one year of adaptive grazing. So quite a stark contrast. A single year of adaptive grazing and he's been grazing this farm for more than 30 years. His name is Don and Don said he has never had this much grass in his entire life. This is California regenerative grazing in the middle of the severe drought. You see what you have here and across the fence, adaptive grazing principles applied here. Continuous grazing.

1:13:45 There. Okay, one other thing to finish up. Another thing we practice is what we call the principle of disruption. You know, occasionally you got to throw a monkey wrench in the thing to be able to elicit a response out of nature. In other words, nature can be just like our own bodies and settle into a routine and not make any progress. Okay, you know what elite athletes have to do to continue to progress and to grow as an athlete? They have to constantly change their exercise routines right and challenge themselves. If they continued to do the same exercise routine day after day, what would happen? Okay, their bodies, their muscles would stagnate and they would reach a plateau that they couldn't push beyond and then they would start digressing right. We find the same thing in our land. So if we implement a system that we don't change, even though it works the first few years, what we'll find is that we'll hit a plateau and we will no longer make any progress. So we have to do something to disrupt nature okay and to create this incredible regenerative response just like our bodies have the ability to respond tremendously to stress, to higher input. Okay, nature can do the same thing.

1:15:22 So this is an unplanned disruption, unintended disruption. Cooper, you ever seen, ever had this happen okay? You know, you have cattle in a high stock density in a paddock, all a sudden you get a big rainfall. It looks like they've plowed it all up right. So this was one of our clients. You know, this happened. They said oh my gosh, what are we going to do here? What's going to happen? And I said just let's do nothing. Let's wait and let's see. Let's give it some rest and recovery. And here's what happened. They tripled the forage dry matter production through that disruption okay. Now do you want to continuously do that? No, but my point is planned disruptions can be very good. So what are some ways to be disruptive okay? Altering stocking densities. Rather than having the exact same stock densities all the time, alter them throughout the year and periods of the year. Do not move your rotations through your farm or your ranch in the same pattern every time okay. Alter the movement patterns through your farm and ranch each season each year so that you're not hitting each pasture at the exact same time of the year every year okay. Alter the grazing heights in which you're grazing it up or down. Alter the rest periods. And if you're doing multi-species production, alter the species order from time to time moving them through those pastures. And there's a multitude of other ways that we can be disruptive.

1:16:55 So with grazing though, there are good ideas and there are bad ideas. Not everything is a good idea. So this would be today's bad idea okay. I'll leave you with this and then we'll pick up tomorrow and continue. And for those of you that have heard me speak before, you've heard this story, but many of you here have not. So I have a very good friend of mine that loves to fish okay. And you know, life is all about incentive right? It's all about incentive. So if we're going to change anything that we do, we're going to change it because we're incented to change it. It's like this buddy of mine. He was fishing and he was out on the lake and the fish were biting very well that day. So well as a matter of fact that he ran out of bait. He was using live bait, but he didn't want to go home, didn't want to leave the lake because his wife had a long list of honeydews for him if he went back. So he wanted to stay on the lake fishing. So he started looking around for what he could use for bait and he happened to see an old cottonmouth up on the bank of that lake with a frog in his mouth. And so he said, you know what, I can use that frog as bait and that snake can't bite me with that frog in his mouth. So he reached down, grabbed the snake behind his head, pulled him up into the boat, yanked the frog out of his mouth, dropped the frog in the bait bucket. And then he realized he was looking at a very angry snake and he didn't know how to let that snake go without him biting him. But then he remembered he always carried that bottle of Jack Daniels with him fishing. So he reached down and he grabbed that bottle of Jack Daniels, poured some down that snake's gullet and before long his eyes rolled back in his head and his whole body went limp and he just tossed him out in the water, reached down in his bait bucket, baited his hook with the frog, commenced to fishing again. And before long he felt a nudge at his feet and he looked down and there was that old cottonmouth with two more frogs in his mouth okay. So incentive is what it's all about folks. Thank y'all very much. I've enjoyed it.