Healing Watersheds Through Deep-Rooted Diversity and Soil Biology

0:00 Hey everybody, welcome back to the Green Cover podcast where we have really interesting conversations with some of the top farmers and experts in the regenerative world. Join us as we together learn how to better improve God's creation for future generations.

0:18 You know, I'm sure you've all met people who are just out of the box thinkers, just really, really innovative. And my guest today, Mr. Abe Collins from Vermont is just one of those guys. I've known Abe long before we started Green Cover. We met Abe back in our no till days and just have always been impressed with his ability to think outside the confines of what is generally accepted. And so this is going to be a fascinating conversation. We're going to go a lot of different places and I'm very excited to welcome you Abe to the Green Cover podcast.

0:53 Great to be here Keith. We've learned so much and enjoyed everything we've gotten from you all over the years.

1:00 Yes. And my wife Audrey and I, we still talk about that special trip when we came to Vermont. We visited your farm. You took us around. We saw some of the things that we're going to be talking about today. We saw that in person and just what a great wonderful trip that was. So Abe for our listeners who may not be familiar with you, go ahead and just briefly share your background. How have you gotten to where you're at now?

1:26 It's been a long ride as with everybody, but I started into agriculture working with Navajo grazers in Arizona. And the elder ladies who were the boss told us, 'Hey, when we had big herds and we moved in big cycles across the land, this land was a sea of grass and flowers and it's blowing desert today.' And that really got me going down the road of they're right. And overlapping that with seeing what holistic managers were doing with taking degraded land and turning it back into healthy prairie was a real synthesis of those very similar perspectives.

2:19 I also was focused a lot on water harvesting where water is the limiting factor certainly but also the enabling condition. We need all the water to soak in and be held and grow plants. So when I started dairy farming in Vermont, we came into a world of short grass rotational grazing. And we were one of the early all forage dairies and going from short grass rotational grazing to needing to let the ecology express and feeding at least half of the biomass back to the land really started to change things. And we started bringing in holistic management and Keyline, which is both landscape design and using a subsoiler to incrementally loosen the pack soils that are just so common across farmed areas to incrementally deepen soil.

3:17 And as soon as 2005, we were amazed as farmers what we were finding with the roots and the soil. On clay soils, the roots in the soil going deeper and deeper and deeper by the year by many inches. And I would call myself an applied amateur pedologist, meaning the study of soil formation. And this wasn't just handwaving and magic. We got to see, wow, this is actually soil physics and biology and chemistry all combining with this different grazing to deepen the soil and the water holding capacity and the rooting and the floral resource above the land. And we were definitely in the world of grazing the existing cool season perennial grasslands.

4:04 So I wasn't a dairy farmer forever. When I stopped dairy farming there were 1,000 dairies in Vermont. There are over just over 400 today. And that was really only 15 years ago that I stopped dairy farming and so that's been an alarming decline in the very people who can do this work of healing the soil. We see it everywhere. The consolidation and decreasing family farms that are the bedrock of our small communities and have this latent capacity to heal land at scale.

4:43 So we worked on feedback science a lot in that because we knew that we needed for the land to talk back to us in a way that was more than just looking at the surface. So 3D soil mapping and tracking energy and water and plant growth. And what also became clear in this time was knowledge generation that people on the land—and this is me traveling around the country and the world working with producers and learning so much—like that there's an Alexandrian library worth of knowledge almost on every farm. And as these farms went out of business, we're seeing the loss of that knowledge in effect.

5:23 So that all kind of was proceeding and then about five years ago we formed the Landcare cooperative and we formed Land Web, which is land community water energy biomass, and over the last five years we've been building up these two organizations to heal our watershed homes and leave.

5:42 Our kids deep top soil watersheds with biodiversity and security and prosperity. And I love that concept of how you form these entities and you're utilizing the community landscape to heal the broader problems. And I want to get to that, but I think let's build up to that just a little bit. I want to dive in and explore some of the components that you've used to get to that point. And so let's talk about your rip sewer. Because you took an existing piece of equipment and you made it better. So let's talk about how you did that and the differences that you're seeing when your group is running that rip sewer through some of these fields.

6:31 The subsoiler. And it's funny, I often get the critique of, well, that's tillage and tillage is bad, isn't it? And I'd differ with that a little bit is that we were thinking more along the lines of thinking the land under our feet as like a beloved partner, friend, mother. And when my child or my mother is suffering, for example, from a lack of oxygen, I'm going to do something about it, right? And I don't want to wait 25 or 50 years for a slow process. I want to intervene because that is critical. The soil microbes and the plants are like you and me. We need to breathe. So in a way we do need to go back to Payman's in the 1940s and 1950s discovering that this combination of addressing fertility and plant diversity and good grazing that addresses the needs of the plants and the soil and physical decompaction with a subsoiler that they were able to rapidly deepen rooting depth and soil depth.

7:45 So we started with a simple subsoiler on clay ground. So there were rocks but we knew where both of them were. And clay of course is very high, has very high cation exchange capacity and nutrient holding and is an amazing type of soil but if it gets packed things shut down. It's brick-like. So as we started loosening it, we said, 'Well, this is great and we get results.' Especially after like a wet year and then a wet spring and then the summer drought would set in and we wouldn't have productivity. So we'd loosen it. We'd absolutely the pastures would turn around with the next rain just it would release the plants whereas they had just been stunted and struggling from compaction and lack of oxygen.

8:34 But we also said well we know that we have very low diversity. We went from a monoculture for example of corn to a duo culture of grass and legumes but the research on this and of course teachers like Christine Jones have been instrumental in bringing us up and looking at the research at the experimental stations. So we knew we needed to introduce more plants. So why don't we just sew into the furrows as we subsoil and then it was only one more step to we want to put liquid bio stimulants that include minerals but that include minerals and microbiology and stuff like fish and seaweed and milk. Of course milk was abundantly available to us and the work of Terry Gumpert had pointed us in the direction of using that.

9:28 So liquid seed and this physical decompaction in the context of addressing the mineral deficiencies on the ground which are pronounced here in Vermont and in many places especially with a century or 75 years of ignoring micronutrients and soil biology and just brute strength and ignorance with NPK we didn't have to pay attention to enzymes and the fact that micronutrients are catalytic or the co-actors are the central atoms and all these enzymes that make everything happen. So putting all those three things together basically went through remarkable results on the ground where we farms were doing it and doing everything together all at once. And that was always a challenge because people wanted to study us, to say well these are outlandish claims of deepening soil. We know that it takes a thousand years to build an inch of soil. But only looking at one thing at a time doesn't do the job. Just like caring for a beloved family member, you don't just do one thing, you do everything that they need.

10:41 You change the system. We are changing the whole system state all at once and you know thinking simplistically like in terms of Liebig's law the minimum in the barrel with the low staves the instant you address your potassium deficiency or something, hey, your microbiology and your rooting depth and your plant diversity and your insect health it all comes, it's immediately the next problem, the next shortcoming but we thought about it in terms of enabling conditions rather than limiting factors and this was enabling conditions to care for the

11:14 Whole system. So we kept building iteration after iteration of these and the early rippers were truly made from junkyard parts. We were just bolting stuff on. The pictures of those old machines are pretty hilarious. As we got more and more trials and we have very rocky soils often in Vermont, so we needed a way to not pull up every rock. We didn't want to do the machine work, but it just changed everything so fast that it was like we're going to keep working with this. At first we moved to hydraulic jumpers where the shank would jump over the rocks. But then we found a beautiful platform that had swivels and hydraulic jumpers. And that allowed us to leave it—it's like a physics machine just ducking and weaving around every rock. So it actually goes around the rock.

12:12 And it does it at the same time. It goes around and jumps whatever it takes because all it's doing is finding the path of least resistance.

12:19 So coupled with that and then always with the cedar and the liquid applicator, we just kept developing that. At this point we jumped entirely to that platform of the swiveling hydraulic shanks and had this incredible manufacturing partner in Jonas Shurk, a fellow out of Pennsylvania. And we just kept developing and iterating so that everything was ground driven for the seating and the liquid rate and the hydraulics, hydraulic top link and hand crank shanks for easy adjustment. So and towability between farms because a lot of us are sharing these implements.

13:03 We kept going and it kept getting better and better and of course establishing seed into existing very aggressive cool season perennial sod is always a challenge. So I've spent more time than I care to admit studying strip till and sweeps and building iterations and we test them with our farms. And we think we have a beautiful functional affordable machine to get done. It isn't just a 10x improvement in efficiency and not picking rocks. It makes it possible because farmers barely have any time to do something in an hour that would take two days. That just changes whether or not it will happen. But it goes further to all of the experiments we've done and there's been so much trial and error and effectively by a farmer R&D team. These are us farms using these ones we've built and learning every step of the way to the point that we can hook up and make a plan, address mineral deficiencies because they're so pronounced usually and we need the strong plant growth to stuff the newly loosened soil with roots and exudates and microbes.

14:20 So we address the mineral deficiencies and we custom-tailor these seed mixes to the current successional level of the land and green cover has been beyond invaluable in all this because you've supplied us with the cover crops, the annual cover crops and the forbs and the native plants because we want more and more and more native plants. So we do all that and then we go through a sequence. It's not a one-off. Yeoman's figured this out 75 years ago and we've kept on with it, that we incrementally loosen that soil. Usually we start at 10 inches. We're busting a pan. We're reconnecting the subsoil and the topsoil. The water all falls in, especially when it's on not on contour but on keyline patterns which drift water toward the ridges.

15:11 And that, you know, there was research in Texas in 2011 that showed that contour ripping just alone without any of the other work that we do cut runoff 50% instantly. So that's half the water that used to run off is now soaking in. That's a big change. And then we're also sailing through drought because our roots and our soil water holding capacity is so quickly changed. And then we just each time we do it going three four inches deeper and the roots plunge down and keep going like the benefit extends past the depth that we've ripped to. So it's been a real journey but that's been something we feel really like it's in service to our farms but our larger community of increasing the infiltration and the floral resources and the soil health.

16:00 Yeah, I love how you're combining so many things, the improved infiltration, the loosening of the soil, but then like you said, filling that slot with roots and filling it with biology. You're doing it all at the same time. So talk just real briefly if people are interested in learning more about the rippers, where can they go to get that information. Then I want you to talk a little bit because you referenced the drought. I know you guys just went through a historic drought there in the Northeast. Talk about how those fields that had this technology and this biology.

16:35 Nepo can go to the Landcare Cooperative website which is a simple affair. We've been very inwardly focused but you can fill out a little form and there's a link to the Ripower and we'll get in touch with you and we'll gladly serve you. We want these machines in operation everywhere. The drought follows flood. And it was Hugh Hammond Bennett who said, roughly 75 years ago, that flood control begins where the raindrop falls.

17:11 We need that water to soak in. But then additionally, we need it to not create saturated conditions, but rather we need plant available water. And the field capacity minus permanent wilting point, at which the water is too tightly bound, is where the plant available water is available water content. And the remarkable thing—there's some simple soil physics aspects of that. If your depth of a horizon soil is 6 or 8 inches, you have a very limited amount of water storage in there. But if you double or triple that, roughly speaking, you double or triple your water holding capacity.

17:56 What's amazing about forbs in general is their tap root. A fellow named Skinner did research, roughly 20, 25 years ago in Pennsylvania. And he found that by including over 30% chory, they eliminated drought effects. And there's a—it's because the chory, in effect, shares water with the rest of the shallower rooted plant community. We don't want to think as simply as just chory. We think about all the deep rooted species fairly sharing.

18:26 How that's translated on the farms that have done the work of increasing the rooting depth and adding the deep rooted forbs and prairie plants is that, relative to the norm, they sailed through the drought. And yes, things slowed down for everybody when you have a historic drought like never before in recorded history. But it's the deep roots and the increased water holding capacity and the increased soil horizon depth and rooting depth and the whole system working together and sharing water through hydraulic lift and mycorrhizal fungi. It's such an intelligent, beautiful system. When you're taking care of the system instead of just looking at one thing at a time, the farms that have done the work with the rip sowing process and the deep rooted species relatively speaking, sailed through this terrible drought year.

19:24 That's really encouraging because what you're addressing is drought mitigation. But with your increased infiltration and the better water holding capacity, you're doing a lot of flood mitigation as well. And flooding has been a big issue for you guys, and that has kind of led into some of the other things that you developed. You mentioned the watershed contractors, thinking of these farmers and dairymen as watershed contractors and how that affects the larger community. And I think that's one of the more unique things that you and your group have done—looking at that on a bigger scale. Here in Nebraska we have more irrigated acres than anybody else. We don't have local conservation districts. It's all been arranged around watersheds and not counties, which is kind of a cool concept. It doesn't mean we solve all the problems, but at least we're trying to solve the problems along the watershed and not along some arbitrary county boundary.

20:29 Talk a little bit about this concept that you are promoting—that farmers are watershed contractors—and how that leads to the bigger picture.

20:42 Thanks for the opportunity. I think it's a really simple but powerful idea that we're building up to and we plan to be operating at scale as watershed contractors. In a lot of ways, this came from what my dad taught me. My dad was a carpenter and a contractor, and I paid a lot of bills over the years doing the same thing. I learned carpentry from the old man. And he taught me that building a house is complicated and there are always project changes and the customer wants more and more and everything. He's like, 'I've just learned to do everything at cost plus,' and that's all of the costs of our labor or materials and subcontractors plus a stable margin. And that was—he didn't get rich doing it, that's for sure. But he delivered value to his customers and everybody got to see under the hood every step of the way. And I really admired that about him. And I saw friends of mine who did fixed bids and they made tons of money because they bid real high. But in a way, the chapter that we're heading into where our communities need water storage, they need massive floral diversity to support the insects that—

22:03 Support us, right? They need water holding capacity. They need reduced flooding and reduced drought and reduced wildfire. We could go on. We need that as a society and the people who can deliver it manage land at scale and we haven't seen a lot of success with we're going to subsidize and regulate and do technical assistance and tell these farmers what practices to use which should work out according to our statistical models of BMPs.

22:34 So the concept of watershed contracting is working at a transparent cost of production plus a stable margin which is another thing that we farmers have not enjoyed in serving our communities to heal whole watersheds. And the watershed is the logical unit of analysis. You know from the from the top of all the ridges and the water soaking in the water like Hugh Ham and Bennett said every step of the way and holding it and purifying it and cleaning it. So watershed contracting is where we're working to at scale of farmers organized not just one by one but as cooperative companies where the farmers own the company that heals the whole watershed and as grazers I mean you it feels like a superpower sometimes to manage a herd of 50 or 100 or a thousand cattle and to be able to affect tens and hundreds and thousands of acres. And that same thing goes, we farmers know how to go out and plant a crop on a thousand acres and most people just don't work or think or have access to the equipment, right? And to do that at scale. So watershed contracting is where we're headed. And what we're seeing is that it's very challenging to rapidly heal land at scale and with the speed that our communities need and to pay for it with milk and meat.

24:01 When we think when we expand our thinking to the scale from the from the field to the farm out to the watershed all of a sudden it becomes highly logical to harness that very old equation of 1 to 16 that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. That's a that's a rigorous quantitative equation, isn't it? It's got something to it though. Never thought about it that way, but yeah, I like that. But let's soak in the water and and deepen the rooting depth and the and the floral diversity and all of that, the biodiversity to stop the problems before they happen. And and speaking to your flood thing, it there was something big that happened in 2011 here. And most communities these days are experiencing flood, drought, and fire. But in 2011, tropical storm Irene devastated Vermont and something like a billion dollars worth of damage. But in my hometown of Rochester where I grew up, a steep mountain valley, 100,000 acre headquarters to an entire river system called the White River that flows down into the Connecticut River that flows into the Long Island Sound eventually. We had between 8 and 11 in of rain in a day and that just it destroyed our infrastructure, businesses.

25:22 There was no getting in or out of the valley for 11 days. All the bridges were gone and the community is still recovering here in Vermont. In the last 3 years, every year on July 10th, we've had catastrophic flooding. It's beginning to feel like a bad joke. Catastrophic flooding that's devastating communities. And we just cannot afford that. And our our thinking goes beyond just farm fields. We're thinking at the level of forested watersheds and steep mountain slopes, the whole system and how to address it every step of the way. And it includes part of water watershed contracting includes contour compliant infrastructure. People in the Midwest, people in Nebraska know how much money went in to contour terracing by the USDA. Billions and billions of dollars. Strangely, that knowledge never made it to the northeastern United States. We have almost zero contour compliant infrastructure. So the deeper soil, massive amounts of litter because litter of course dramatically changes infiltration and evaporation, infiltration and all that and soil health but contour compliant infrastructure which comes strongly from the keyline landscape design system is a part of watershed contracting. As we as we build the infrastructure we're going to leave our kids, it's going to conform with the land or it will continue to concentrate water and the roads and the bridges and the culverts will not only get blown out, but they're part of the problem of contributing to the flooding.

27:02 So watershed contracting is about organizing ourselves to heal whole watersheds, soak in and hold the water, recharge the groundwater, purify the water from toxics that we've dumped onto the land for over a century. And and to do this work in service to our community, and it is a new economics that isn't based so much on we periodically just have to bail out this critical industry, which is agriculture.

27:29 Agriculture has always been different from every other industry. But this boom and bust bubble cycles, etc., commodity, everything being controlled by commodity pricing that's outside of our hands. Rather, we're working in service to our communities at a transparent cost of production for whatever it costs. Not a fixed per acre practice rate or something like that. Whatever it costs to heal the land.

27:56 So, I love that concept. It's big. It's bold. It feels fresh. Have you had good buy in from the farmers and the dairyman and even whoever's managing those forested areas?

28:13 So, let's talk about that first. Have you had good buy in from the producer?

28:18 Yeah. And I was it Wayne Gretzky who said skate to where the puck's going to be. In a way we're thinking this and this comes from holistic management of not attacking problems rather we're managing for land, people, economics whole and always thinking about what world do we want to leave our kids. So we've started there and worked backwards.

28:42 And in terms, our farmer cooperative is very small and we've kept it small as we've built capacity because we can't expand out to thousands of farms at all at our current capacity, but we've been built working to build scalable systems. Yeah, we're bought in. The notion is so outside the norm of farmers grow meat, milk, produce, grain and you pay them for that. It is very far outside of that. So we're it's aspirational I guess I would say and we're building scalable systems to be able to do it. But our pilots where we with our farms and with other farms in our satellite, satellite farms within our realm. Yeah. The notion makes sense and maybe we should skip it for the moment, but everybody says, 'Yeah, but that's a fortune. That's going to cost a fortune to heal the land.' That's if you ignore the ounce of prevention, the ounce of prevention in the pound of cure. And so if you're going to ask where the money is going to come from, you really need to ask where does money come from? And if we as a society choose to hire farmers to do this critical work of caring for the land, we can get to that eventually. We should have that conversation in depth another time. But we have good buy in from our cooperating farms. And what we've done is introduce an idea that tickles the imagination and requires more conversation and it requires pilot projects. Pilot projects are where the rubber meets the road and not just sitting around in ivory towers and pontificating in perpetuity. Rather, we do the work on the land to see what does this cost? How fast can we get the results? And in my hometown of Rochester in this valley, that's one of our most important pilot projects to me because that community is sitting waiting at the mercy of the next big rainstorm. And certainly this summer, and I've been told over the years, we don't have drought in Vermont by so-called leading experts. I'm like, we do. Every summer, in fact, we have dry periods that absolutely challenge growth. But this summer, put to bed the notion that we don't have drought in Vermont. We do. So, we have good buy in and it's in effect building and growing an idea and fleshing it out in practice with pilot projects.

31:11 Yeah. I really like that concept. I heard a podcast Bobby Kennedy was on and he was talking about all the hidden costs within systems. And if we could really associate those costs and a lot of these costs are picked up by society, flooding, drought, all of these different things, sedimentation, if those costs would actually be assigned to the practices upstream that are causing them, then you could have a clear economic picture of what the right way to go would be. But so much of that is just being masked because of the subsidies if you will that society is doing. And I think that's kind of what you're talking about is looking at assigning those costs moving them literally upstream if you will and trying to address the problem there before it happens. So how has the communities latched on to this? How are they buying in and are they willing to do the funding, the cost plus program that you're talking about?

32:16 We I don't want to overstate that, you know, we're 50 miles down the road and everything's going along and it's all happening. We're we've been building this point by point and we've had to do the science and the land management and the organizing. But an exciting development for us this spring Vermont has a tradition of town meetings which is direct democracy and that means the whole town gets together and in the high school auditorium or gymnasium and considers the factors facing us. And this spring at town meeting in Rochester, Vermont, we had a unanimous vote of support, which

33:02 Was meant so much to us in support of this White River Headwaters pilot program to do the work of infiltrating the water and healing the watershed in effect. So we had a unanimous vote of support for that and that was a pretty incredible prelude to what we hope are hundreds of towns doing this work.

33:27 And funding has always been difficult and challenging. No question. For one thing, the work of healing degraded land ain't cheap. I mean, the mineral costs, the planning, the bio stimulants, the seed cost. You alone know the seed costs. I mean we're moving toward establishing truly prairie-like very super diverse high biodiversity native plants and focused heavily on forbs incredibly productive as we've seen some remarkable instances of through our friend Russ Wilson recently but that's hundreds of dollars per acre just for that seed and you have to take it from where it is to where it's going to be so the cost of management and the cost of science in the beginning and the cost of infrastructure development. I mean in the end, but it's pretty easy to, and we've done spreadsheeting on this, to look at costs on the order of $5,000 per acre to transform ground from where it is to deeprooted prairie with six and 10 and 16 ft deep root systems and a horizon soils that are 2, three, and five times deeper than they are today. So there's real real challenges with that of pilot projects with funding starting on the farm with the in the watershed context is the right way to approach it for us.

35:01 I love that and I love I mean you look at society today nothing gets past you people can't agree on anything and to have an entire community be 100% unanimous in favor of something speaks to the power of what you're doing and I've always thought that regenerative agriculture is the one place where everybody can come to the table and go away with a win. There doesn't have to be a loser. The consumer, the producer, the environment, society, climate, it can all come away from the regenerative agriculture table with a win. And I think that's what you're demonstrating is that people are starting to recognize that. And that's super encouraging.

35:47 It is. We're not having a war on anything. We're cooperating for the benefit of today and the future generations. I mean I think we can all agree we want to leave our kids prosperity and health and freedom from fear and environmental security is not some abstraction or something divisive. We need the water to soak in and the land to produce through flood and drought and fire and plague for that matter. And it all comes down to biodiversity and soil health are the engines that sustain us. So working toward that rather than against any as soon as we declare a war on something, it's things get divisive. Whereas if we're agreeing no, we're going to leave our kids deep topsoil watersheds with security and prosperity. I it's hard to not get behind that.

36:49 Yeah, I love that. And so then all this kind of led to the formation of the land care cooperative I assume and maybe just talk just a little bit about how that's structured, how that's organized and what exact services the cooperative provides to its members.

37:06 Yeah thanks for that opportunity. So that was actually about two years of pretty intensive looking into corporate structures that could serve the vision. And for farmers cooperatives are not something mysterious. We've known for quite some time that we organize to give ourselves to create power we have to band together and pull our resources. And we created this cooperative to do that. And that means that we own the business. We the farmers own the business. We actually created and this has all been enabled really in the last 10 to 15 years. There's new cooperative forms that enable investment and that enable multiple member classes. So we've created the legal structure to not only be comprised the business isn't only made up of farms but we have membership classes for businesses non-farming community members governments can actually be part owners of this. So there's six or seven member classes and eventually we'll all be able to own this business which is watershed contracting and serving the entire community. That's been important to us. That legal structure is different than we think of today where some outfit whether noble-minded or not owns a company that comes in and does a job. We own the company that's doing the job to ourselves.

38:40 Yeah. Along the way there's been some real practical components that we've discovered through doing that we need. Land care tools is one wholly owned subsidiary of the cooperative and that's

44:28 With as we were trying to learn how to do all forage dairy while we grew topsoil and took care of insects in the early days of Bloom Train and all forage dairy, I had a really remarkable feedback system at hand that I feel lucky, and maybe there's not many of us who have had this opportunity. I would do all this studying and say we're going to change the grazing up in this way. We're going to leave, we're going to let plants grow to maximum vegetative state and only leave 30 or only take 30 or 40%. And we're going to be moving the animals at that point 5 to 10 times a day.

45:07 I remember Neil Dennis was a real friend and I got a call out of the blue from Saskatchewan. 'Hey, I hear you're moving your cows 10 times a day.' It was Neil, and I was doing it with a hundred cows and he was doing it with a thousand. But the learning that came from that and the feedback loop that I had was I'd take my study and I'd go out and I'd change up the grazing, and then I'd milk the cows, and I had a bulk tank with a dipstick, and that dipstick would show the milk response through the animals, through the plants, tying back to my consciousness in this feedback loop that only had a delay of 2 or 3 days. How we changed up the grazing would show up in the bulk tank.

45:51 We also had a penetrometer, which is a simple but powerful tool for us farmers. When all of us were just standing in some pasture, walking a field, saying 'this is green and lovely, looks good, keep it up,' whereas I quickly learned my pen is at 4 or 5 inches and it looks good on Tuesday, but it doesn't rain for 10 days and it doesn't look so good. With these feedbacks of that beautiful soil, forage, cow, milk production back to me and my understanding, I quickly gained a sense we need better feedback than we're able to just get by standing on the land looking. Important as that is, we need more.

46:35 So I started actually with 3D soil mapping, which has been a whole 18, 20 year journey of my life, because all the soil monitoring is 6 inches deep, which came from that relationship between a 6-inch soil core, or a bunch of them aggregated, composited, and fertilizer application and yield response. That's just a simplistic old way of doing it, but it still predominates. So 3D soil mapping so that I could understand the full system as we managed it for deeper and deeper, we're already going below the depth of monitoring at the starting point, but we're going for 4 feet of topsoil, not 4 inches.

47:17 And then it grew to 'well, that isn't enough even.' That's powerful, and it was powerful, but we need more. We need to know energy, water, plant growth, soil, and the nutrient cycles. In a way, this is like an expansion from the holistic management fundamentals of the four ecosystem processes, and everything you do is in a tight feedback loop with plan, control, monitor, replan. So we started growing from that point, which, having embraced that in the '90s, I said no, we need the next steps.

47:59 So we connected with the field with the leaders of the field called environmental biophysics. And environmental biophysics rigorously quantifies energy and matter exchanges and transfers and transformations and flows in the whole soil-plant-animal-atmosphere continuum. So this is from high up in the atmosphere to the water table. What's happening to all the energy, water, and minerals?

48:30 So having all of this measurement means we're working with satellite remote sensing, with 3D soil mapping, with all these measurements on the ground of solar radiation, biomass, saturated hydraulic conductivity, which ties to infiltration, and putting that all together and building a scalable system that feeds back to the farmers on a daily basis relative to their management and the apps that we've been building. We're doing a big training push this winter with our farms for every management action and observation that they make, tying into this quantification of the earth system so that it becomes, in effect, a seamless learning and feedback system.

49:16 That's a pretty broad overview, but I would say that probably 60% of my life is the science portion of it and working with this incredible team of environmental biophysicists, people like John Norman and Christine Mauling and ex-NASA engineers and all these people doing this work. Their contribution and the marriage of, in effect, regenerative agriculture with environmental biophysics, we believe is setting the stage for a new chapter in learning systems and in natural resources science where we're not just saying some experts said we should do this practice, but we farmers are continuously adjusting our management on a daily basis to optimize the healing process of the land. So this is landscape feedback to land stewards in our communities to heal our watershed.

50:10 Yeah, I appreciate that. And I love how you're bringing those two things together because sometimes, you know, people look out at the land and they just go, 'Well, you know, those guys are just they're just farmers and, you know, there's not that much going on there.' I love one of the first podcasts that we did was with Dr. Laura Kavanagh. She's with AEA now, but she was a rocket scientist. She worked on the space shuttle. She was a geneticist, and now she's a soil scientist. And she says, 'Oh, yeah. The soil's way more complicated than those other things.' And so I just love that, you know, how there's so much going on there that we can't see, but by getting the feedback, we can see the outcomes, the actual outcomes, not modeling, which I've always had a problem with that, too.

50:56 The actual outcomes and with the proper measuring and sensing and feedback devices, we can tie it to I did this and here's what happened. Now to try to figure out all the mechanisms of why it happened, you know, that's there's a lot there yet. So there's a lot of undiscovered territory and frontier there for us to continue to study. So, I think that's absolutely fascinating and I love how you've been able to put together this team of all these people and you mentioned the apps and talked about the apps and, you know, I was just looking at some of the materials that you guys have those aren't just, you know, somebody did it in their basement type app. These are very sophisticated, high-end, high level apps. Are those available to other people or are you still just trying them within your pilot programs?

51:53 As of right now, we're building within, and I think one of the foundations and it goes to landscape feedback to the stewards to change our management day by day is that everything that we've done we learn by doing and we have to and it takes this is complex stuff and it isn't like some simple thing of you push the button and the cab comes right it just isn't that. So we have to do a lot of in-house R&D and that's with the farmers doing the research and development and testing and probably this goes to two things. One the intuition and knowledge of farmers I find myself at a loss sometimes to communicate how sophisticated it is to non-farmers. Someone once said non-farming muggles, in Harry Potter speak I guess, it's incredible what farmers know and how tuned in they are to their land especially for me the grazers because the grazers you don't get to brute strength your way through everything you're subject to the laws of nature. So testing everything within our own ranks and not releasing it we don't believe in moving fast and breaking things we need to responsibly develop everything before we release it to the larger community. So, the second we have this available, everybody will know, but yeah, it's been a long slow process and we're okay with that because we want to get it right.

53:30 Are you also starting to tie these practices, these land outcomes, are you also looking at the nutrient density of the milk, of the meat, of the produce? How are you tying that into all the other things that you're doing?

53:47 Thank you for mentioning it because I'm guilty of forgetting to mention how fundamental that is to the whole thing and because that's the ultimate outcome, right? It's human health is water and environmental security and food nutrient density and all of the plant chemicals that come along with the nutrient density, right? So yeah, this is all about healthy food. Absolutely. And the connection between healthy soil, healthy plants, healthy livestock and healthy people. This is well known and well treated by Albrecht and other innovators in this world that you and I live in. But one small example of that is not jumping from healthy soil straight to perfect meat and milk and produce, but rather understanding that we do all the work of plant diversity and deep roots and soil structure and microbial communities to the prairie plants and the animals eat those and then eventually the people get the benefit from eating that food. When we look at the nutrient, you know, we do forage analysis for example of the forbs that we plant or that the prairie plants that our colleague Russ Wilson has been stewarding and the nutrient density in the forbs stuff like chicory and plantain generally speaking is 50 to 100% higher just in mineral content than the grass legume.

55:30 Systems, the shallow rooted grass lagoon systems that were so accustomed to. Yes, we've been earning our way up and it's very exciting because the last four years we've been working very hard on a tool that measures daily biomass production in every field and forecast it out about a week to 10 days relative to our management. But it's not the old just use the NDVI and find a correlation between the satellite picture and some biomass cuttings that were done. This is actually a lot of modeling. There's models running the system between the satellite observations and the farmers observations going in to really track all the plant community types and everything to really track that biomass production on a paddock by paddock basis. And we're beginning the work of marrying the nutrient density of the forages coupled with the biomass production so that we're actually tracking the quantity of minerals per acre per day that are in the plants that are growing up.

56:36 We're actually quantitatively tracking mineral cycling and that mineral cycling goes all the way to the food nutrient density that ultimately is going to create the healthy human beings. That's what we want for our kids.

56:50 Wouldn't it be great to live in a world where we stop talking about yield in bushels or pounds and start talking about yield in nutrients per acre?

57:05 I'm right with you. And what we're seeing, of course, is very high carbohydrate grains, for example, with very low nutrient density.

57:15 It's the shallow rooted, it's the crop species that have continually been bred for yield. And the nutrient deficiencies are actually in the soil. But one amazing thing, and I think this goes to the fact that this is part of a global prairie movement. People around the world managing for the massive plant diversity and deep rooted systems that created the deep soils that today feed the world, like where you live. These amazing profound soils that developed under prairie.

57:51 It is that what we've discovered using the very useful total nutrient digestion test offered by the Regen A Lab and Lance Gunderson's work, by using those and taking 4 foot cores, which we don't take 6 inch cores, we take 4 foot cores, and we use all these other instruments that are measuring the soils very deep, four, 6, 10 feet deep, but what we found when we compare a traditional Mic 3 compared to a total nutrient digestion is massive quantities, as anyone who's done it has found, massive quantities of minerals in the soils and in the subsoils, but they're largely locked up and not accessed by roots. Once we get this prairie level of rooting depth and diversity and start structuring that soil where those minerals become available, there are enormous amounts of minerals available to produce the healthy food that we need in the soils and to not be forever married to high fertilizer inputs.

58:57 But we have to earn our way there because it's acids and enzymes produced by plants and microbes and other soil animals that give us access to those tens of thousands of pounds of minerals per acre.

59:10 That reminds me. Tom Robinson from Australia was over here a couple years ago and I always will remember what he said: you have to earn the right to reduce your inputs. And you can't just go out there and start cutting things out without building the system to replace them. That's earning that right. And we all want to reduce our inputs, but we have to start by building the system. And I think that's what you're doing. And I want to just make sure that people understand that what you're doing, you're doing it in Vermont. And people may think, well, Vermont, you know, that's a little state. It's clear up there in the Northeast. You know, they have this climate and so that's great, Abe, what you're doing, but that's not really applicable out here to us in Nebraska. But we know that it is.

1:00:04 And I just want to encourage people to not discount these concepts and principles. One of the early podcasts that we did earlier this year was with Kip Heinrich. He's right here in Nebraska. He's farming beautiful deep central Nebraska irrigated ground and he's converted it all over to natives. He's converted it all over. So he no longer owns a combine. It's all going through cows and he's doing some annual cover crops, forage crops, but he's converting to eastern gamma grass and big bluestem and Indian grass and switchgrass and then the forbs and legumes.

1:00:47 Kind of what you're doing, but he's doing it here where he could grow 280 bushels of corn, but he's finding that it's more profitable to run all that through an animal because of all of these things that you just talked about. So these principles that you're talking about are applicable all across the.

1:01:06 Country, all across our food scapes. And it's super exciting to me to know that people like you are working on and developing the systems and the software and even the legal structures. I love that concept too that at some point we'll be able to export that knowledge to other areas. So kind of as we bring this to a close, maybe what would just be an encouragement that you would give people that are thinking about starting down this path of utilizing farmers as watershed contractors and looking at this whole concept.

1:01:45 That is a good big question. I think your point about earning reduced inputs is a really important point. And how do we earn that? It's not through an hourly wage. We earn it through care for the whole system. The ability to access the almost infinite power of nature to sustain us and care and provide for us all comes from caring from the whole system. And that care is love for the land and for community. So that is I've never not encountered that in any community I've ever been in. And so harnessing that power of love for and service to community is the starting point and it's ubiquitous. I've never not found it. So I think we are incredibly well equipped to start from that point and then believe in the farmers, believe in our intelligence and our capacity to manage whole systems, not one part at a time.

1:03:00 And it takes knowledge and information that is not necessarily widespread. But in my work, Keith, my experience with you bringing me into your community has been encountering people from around the world who are just doing such incredible work. So we have to be open to the learning and doing something new. And the thing that I found in common from everybody from Christine Jones to Dale Strickler to you guys to heroes of mine like these Navajo grandmothers and like Neil Dennis is its absolute care for the land and willingness to innovate and work with others to heal the commons which is the total functional health of the earth system of mother nature.

1:03:52 So starting with that kind of attitude of love and care for community and willingness to innovate and experiment and then to do the pilot projects in reality, right? We're not just going to talk about this. We're going to start on five or 50 acres and we're going to put everything we have into healing this ground and if we can do it on 50 acres, we can do it on 5,000. It's then it becomes a matter of scaling which is not just multiplication. There's a lot more to it because as each time we grow in scale with something brings in more and more people and more and more aspects of the whole landscape.

1:04:34 Love and care, commitment to the future generations and leaving our kids working watershed innovation, piloting the work on the ground and having the land talk back to us both through our own observations and sense of smell, but also scientifically. So it's a feedback system so that we can every day be adjusting to refine because this is some nuance stuff. That's why your relative who's in the hospital all hooked up to every machine. Those machines are reading every aspect of their bodily function and we need that level to be able to really in a nuanced refined way care for our loved ones. So I'm very hopeful about the future because I think we have all the raw ingredients in effect an incredible earth system communities care for the future and the knowledge that's been generated by people working together in this regenerative agriculture movement.

1:05:36 I think that's a great answer Abe and I think what you just did was really describe the difference between soil health which is important and regenerative ag because regenerative ag includes soil health but it's also regenerating people and the relationships and the community which is what you're doing you and your team there at the Land Lake landcare cooperative and everything you're doing. So thank you, Abe, for all that you're doing for regenerating God's creation for future generations. That's our mission here at Green Cover, and we're just so glad that we've got great people like you that we can do that with. So thank you everyone for joining this episode of the Green Cover podcast. Go out and regenerate your part of God's creation today.

1:06:26 Thank you, Keith. My brother and I started Green Cover in 2009 because we understand what it's like to be a farmer starting out on the journey to improve soil health. We saw the power of plant and biological diversity on our own farm here in Nebraska. But we found that it was difficult to get the right cover crop seed mix. We also learned that there was a big learning curve in successfully implementing cover crops. That's why we built Green Cover so that farmers like you can access the highest quality cover crop seed put into the right diverse mixes along with the technical advice and the educational resources to help you successfully implement cover crops on your own operation. So contact us today and we'll help you with the right cover crop mix for your farm or ranch so you can regenerate your portion of God's creation for future generations.