How Plants and Microbes Work Together in Harsh Environments

0:00 Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of the Green Cover podcast where we have really interesting conversations with some of the top farmers and experts in the regenerative movement. Join us as together we can learn how we can be better stewards of God's creation. You know, my guest today is Mr. Kevin Elme. I've known Kevin for many years and I love the concept. I want him to talk about this. He has this concept that it's not just dirt and that's the name of his book that he's written, but also I think it kind of sums up Kevin a little bit of your story because I think that you bought a farm once thinking you were buying soil and boy you found out you just bought dirt, but it can be changed. It can be fixed. So love to hear that story and would love for you to share that story with our audience. So Kevin, welcome to the Green Cover podcast.

0:53 Well, thanks for the invite. It's always great sitting down and chatting with you because every time I talk to you, I'm learning something new. So it's always good.

1:01 Well, yeah, it goes both ways and I don't know if people are picking up on the accent here or not, but Kevin is from Canada. He's got that little bit of Canadian accent. So Kevin, give us just a little bit of your background, some of the context of where you're at now, but also where you have been and a little bit of the journey that got you here.

1:23 So I was raised on a seed farm in eastern Saskatchewan. My grandfather started growing seed in the 1930s and my father continued on and then I started doing the same thing. So we were a family farm pedigree seed operation out of high school. Went to university in Saskatoon. Had my degree in ag with specialized in agronomy, specialized in crop science, minor in soil science. Started my postgrad diploma in soil chemistry and ended up getting a head cold, had to drop out of classes and jumped into the real world. So had some jobs around western Canada and in 1999 had an opportunity to buy some land right across the road from our family farm. So had a family meeting with my wife and said, 'Okay, what do you think?' And she said, 'Yeah, let's do it.' So away we went. And it didn't take long to realize that our neighbor had a gravel pit and I got the sand pit. I got a little bit of dirt, they're better soil textured but it's amazing when you go out and once again out of university I'm trained as a chemical-based agronomist.

2:42 I worked with Dr. Jeff Sheno for soil fertility, started working with a company called Western Egg Labs as a nutrient consultant. And you know, this chemistry, chemistry, chemistry didn't take long before I realized that okay, this soil that I bought, this land that I bought, so organic matter was under 1%, so southern states sounds kind of familiar. Dad's was running around five to six and okay so I need some more fiber, I need organic matter. And so in university what were we taught to build our soil organic matter? You grow this big biomass and you work it back into the soil that's how you build it. Wrong. And so this is when we started looking at some different processes and with the western egg labs we said okay so let's put our ears back and let's see what canola can do. And so this was in the early 2000s, so not the genetics that we have today. We took 5 acres of canola and we pushed it as hard as we could and we ended up with 92 bushels an acre in eastern Saskatchewan. I've never heard of that, but we did it. Had some problems with the swather, had problems with the combine, but if the dog knocked over the garbage can and made a big bang during the summer, I was looking up looking for the hail storm. Really risky. We had some winter wheat. We had 20 acres of that and I said, 'Okay, let's see what we can do.' I ended up with 126 bushels an acre dryland of winter wheat. Never heard of that before.

4:20 But the stress and I was looking at the economics and I'm thinking this isn't right. And so this is when we started looking at okay, so I had short-term hay and rotation. We started into corn grazing. I saw what the corn grazing was doing to the soil. I was seeing what it did to my rotational effect. And then in 2007, I was introduced to this crazy guy in Pennsylvania, Steve Gruff. And so I had a chat with him and became the distributor for Tillage Radish in Western Canada. And from there, so I started putting that into my rotation, seeing some really positive, funky things happening. Then I added Crimson Clover. Then I added proso millet into it. And then I took canola out of my rotation, replaced it with cover crops, full.

5:09 Season cover crops. Then I started intercropping. Then I got more and more livestock integration on. And so it just kept adding. And then I met another crazy guy, Jimmy Emmens. And he was telling me that he was on average in growing his A horizon by an inch a year. And I said that's incredible. An inch that I've never heard of that.

5:31 Dr. Zavala in 2020, I think that was the last year we had our field day on the farm. So we had some soil pits. Dr. Zavala was in there and she was doing her thing and as I was going around taking pictures I'm looking at my A horizon and by definition we should have 4 to 6 inches of A horizon. Well we had 26, 28 inches of A horizon. So it hit me when I was doing one of my presentations. Jimmy did it. Hey, I did it and I don't know what I'm doing.

6:07 Going through and getting this experience and seeing what was working, what wasn't working. And so I formulated the soil health principles that I fell into. And then when I met you and I met Gabe Brown and I met the rest of the soil health world, we all are talking the same thing. And that was a really fun thing.

6:30 So in 2021, dad told me he wanted to retire. Another family meeting, talked to the girls, our two girls, and said, do you are you interested in farming? And they said, no. So we decided, okay, time to sell the farm. And from the soil health coaching standpoint, I was getting busier. Okay, we can sell the farm and I can do this full-time.

6:59 From there, to deviate a little bit, right when COVID started I accepted a job in Australia as a soil health director for a carbon company. Took us a year to get over there. Once we got over there, then it was delayed again. So basically spent a year in Australia, came back to Canada because it didn't work out the way that we wanted and so moved back to Alberta and doing the full-time consulting and doing some consulting for Imperial Seeds in Manitoba.

7:36 In the other little deviant, last summer went to Ukraine with the world rebuilding rural Ukraine group and so went over there and I did some coaching with some large corporate farms and once again, the great thing is doesn't matter where we are, the problems are the same. Compaction, salinity, low fertility, bugs, disease, the usual things. And so it doesn't matter if we're in Nebraska, we're in Alberta, we're in Australia, we're in Ukraine, it's the same problems.

8:16 And guess what? We've managed to create those problems. So using the same management principles is not going to get us out of it. We need to do a massive 90-degree turn to get away and stop doing the damage that we have been doing for the last 50 to 100 years.

8:35 Well, that's quite a journey there, Kevin. I have so many questions. But I want to go back and start with that concept of, you know, it's not just dirt. So you bought dirt, but when you were able to move on and sell the farm, you were selling soil. I don't want to pass over the fact that you started with almost nothing and you ended up with 24 plus inches of A horizon and I know exactly what you're talking about because Jimmy told me the same thing and we had a soil pit and I got to looking and I'm like, 'Yeah, there's 30 inches of dark black, you know, and you could see the line and yeah, it had moved about an inch a year.'

9:22 And so let's go back and talk about that a little bit because that is pretty amazing. What did that do to the soil organic matter? What did that do for the productivity of that soil? And how did you get there? Because you don't get there just simply by growing crops without having a really good plan. So let's back up and talk about that. So one of my early mentors was another crazy guy in North Dakota called Jay Fear. And one of the lines when I listened to him and Brandon was plants fix dirt. And inadvertently, because when I got back to the farm, at the time land prices were low, no one was interested in farming, I could have rented as much land as I wanted for $6 an acre.

10:12 So at the time, you know, I looked at the budgets, I looked at what I needed if I wanted to increase the farm more, I needed more equipment, I needed hired people, and no, I didn't want to do that because that's just more risk. And so one of the first things I did on the farm is introduce winter weeds into our rotation. And that's one of the keystones that I think that really turned our farm around because of the fact that instead of having an annual crop that's growing.

10:40 For 100 days and it's only releasing root exudates for 30 to 40 days. Now this winter wheat is releasing root exudates for pick a number, 200 days. And having that in rotation, it, you know, it really started feeding the soil biology. The two classes in university I thought were a waste of time were plant ecology and soil microbiology.

11:08 So humbling to say the very least. But on the flip side, so Jay Fear, the next one I went to, they had this speaker called Dr. Chris Nichols and she was talking about this glomalin thing and it was just kind of whoa, cool. And the next conference I went to, Joe Clapperton was speaking and you know at both conferences, they were done speaking and no one was around there talking to them. So I had free access to them for quite a long time asking lots of questions. So they helped form my philosophy and help move my direction the right way. So this root exudate thing, the soil biology part of it, it's so important and the microbiome and then spent two days with Dr. James Whites and learned about rhizophagy. So now my whole soil fertility education got thrown out the window and replaced with rhizophagy.

12:11 So as we go through and so we got the winter wheat going, started playing around with something called winter triticale and doing some trials with that and I'm seeing that winter triticale cultivar was utilizing half the nitrogen required that the winter wheat needed. So okay, switched over to that for multiple reasons. Then we started growing some soybeans. We found some daylight sensitive soybeans. So we're not quite in the middle of Saskatchewan, but we're growing soybeans that were producing 30 bushels an acre. The company that we got the seed from, he happened to be driving up to Alaska. So he stopped by the farm and he said, 'Yeah, I want to see your soybeans.' So took him out to the soybean field, jumped out of my truck, my pickup, and he, I didn't hear the door open. So I turned around and looked, and I said, 'Is there a problem?' He said no. He didn't expect our soybeans to be mid-thigh high. He expected the soybeans to be this high and sickly, but we found something that worked. So that once again, now we have a plant C4 legume that is now in our rotation fixing a pile of nitrogen.

13:21 So the quick rule of thumb I developed was for every inch of green growth of soybeans is fixing 10 pounds of N assuming 15 nodules per plant and for every bushel you're taking six out. So there's a little bit of math in there, but that all of a sudden kickstarted my whole nitrogen program. So that and once again, you listen to Joel Williams, another guy along the journey that got to know quite well. He shows the research showing that organic-based nitrogen is the way to build stable soil organic matter and so great. Okay. So inadvertently I did that the right thing. Then I started getting more cover crops into rotation. Then I got the cows grazing. Then so every time I'm adding more and more biology into my system and I was able to cut back on my synthetic inputs when I had more plants growing in the fall. I had this nice green mat on the soil where the neighbors were out spraying it and making it turn orange. I was leaving it grow, having it winterkill. And now I have this nice C to N ratio residue on the surface that we can go seed in. And now our weed pressure dropped. We're getting the same, if not better, yields. Our synthetics were dropping dramatically. Another great person that formed my education process was Dr. Christine Jones. I think you may have heard of her.

14:59 I have another story about her, but she was in Brandon and I said how quick can I get rid of phosphate fertilizer and she said what are you, how are you farming and so I explained what I'm doing. She said as long as you're not using fungicides and you're not doing monocrops, you can quit phosphate today. So I did that, zero penalties. And when we start seeing that we get the biology going, we're doing the traditional soil test, we kept seeing our phosphate levels on their soil test increasing. And so that tells me no additional phosphorus put on. Exactly. And that's where I said, 'Oh, okay. So this is increasing. That's not a good thing. I need to have a more aggressive fall cover crop to tie them up.' So when I have a soil test, it shows close to zero. And this is where there was a producer in western Manitoba. He grew some peas, got them off nice.

15:48 And early. He said, 'Okay, what cover crop do I seed?' And I said, 'Well, you know what are you seeding next?' He said, 'Oats.' I said, 'Go in with radish.' That's nice and easy. So in the fall, he let the radishes grow right before freeze up. Grabbed a soil sample, sent it to the lab saying that he's going to grow oats. So the test came back showing he needed everything right. You need to fill the grocery cart right up on fertilizer. He said, 'That's neat.' In the spring, he went back to the same spots, the same holes right beside it, dug them, sent it away after the radishes rotted down, and the soil test came back saying he needed zero fertilizer. So once again, showed the power of that carbon release. So that this way we're not allowing any of these nutrients to disappear.

16:34 And if we have especially nitrogen, I've been on a rant for the last few years about this excess soil nitrogen we have in our system and that's causing our weeds, that's causing our disease, that's causing compaction because it's causing more human health issues too.

16:50 Absolutely. And that's where, you know, I was able to spend five days with Christine Jones in Western Australia and she did some conferences and she said after she recognized me at the first one and she said, you know up in Canada it gets cold like it gets down to -20 and she looked at me and I went -30, -40. I said yeah, and these Aussies are just freaking out. So the second one I show up and she goes, 'Why are you here? I'm giving the same presentation.' I said, 'Well, I'm not very smart. You know, I need to hear things a few times.' She gave a completely different presentation.

17:28 And so at the first meeting, I gave her a copy of my cover cropping book and she courteously thanked me and I said, 'Well, no, thank you for all you do.' In that second meeting, she was waving this book in front of everybody and saying, 'Every time he says Western Canada, think Western Australia. Every time he says overwintering, think over summer.'

17:49 And so once again, that just because when I went over there I wanted to learn. I want to see what they're doing. I want to. It's the same thing. It's okay. Their seasons are flipped and you know when they are, you know, one of the things that Chris Nichols—I keep my Chrises all lined up—um, Chris Nichols said that it's key to have something green going into the change of season. So when we go into our dormancy here in North America, we're dealing with this time of year. So we're dealing with September and things are cooling down, the plants are shutting down and we're getting ready for winter. And one of the things that she said, we need to have something in the vegetative stage now for those root exudates for the biology.

18:36 And because of nature's intelligence, that biology is going to then start producing glucin. But what it's going to do is it's going to flip it. And what it's going to do is it's going to weather coat our soil aggregates. So now those soil aggregates going to become a little more hydrophobic so that this way they're going to be able to have that integrity.

18:57 And okay. So that's great here, but what about Australia when they're going from their growing season, their winter and it starts getting 40° C and hot and dry. Now, we still want to have that vegetative plant going into their dormancy period to create those stable soil aggregates before those plants die. And by doing that, so if they seeded some oats or some cool season grass, for them winter active in their late winter, they're going to start growing. They'll stay really short. They'll terminate with drought. And now they have their soil armor. They have those root exudates. They have a win-win-win. Now they're going to be able to move forward and get away from, you know, this crazy condition called water repellent sand.

19:52 That's pretty fascinating. And yeah, Christine Jones is just, I think she's helped so many people and yeah, I love that how she made that analogy there.

20:09 Kevin, a lot of people would say, 'Well, that all sounds great, but it won't work in my area. I'm too dry. It doesn't rain enough.' Talk a little bit because you come from a dry area too. Talk about how you've seen, you know, doing the diversity, doing the cover crops, doing the more robust rotation. How has that affected your water, your moisture for, you know, future crops? Because that was a big deal. And that's what a lot of people worry about.

20:39 And that's funny because you know people will talk about they want to grow sorghum sedan up here because in Iowa they talk about drought tolerance. And I say yeah but drought tolerance in Iowa is 10 in of rain. When we start getting to southwest Saskatchewan when we talk about Western Australia now we can start talking about growing season rain of 2 in or less. And Philip Mulvy, Walter Yenn, they both talk about the micro water cycle and one of the things that we were doing down in southwest Saskatchewan where it's a desert there's cacti it's a really tough area to farm, challenging area to farm and what we've been doing is putting a little bit of winter trite in with her dur. It's shocking, I think amazing is one thing, but this is shocking how much having 10 lb of winter trite or 20 lbs of winter trite in with 60 or 70 lb of Durham helps Durham.

21:46 So what'll happen is that the tray it'll be vegetative. So it'll have these little leaves sitting above the surface. So number one, it's going to help you know shade that ground. That's going to be one. It's going to be giving out root exodates when there's moisture that's photosynthesizing. It's doing its thing. And the real big thing is as the durham starts getting tall and gets stemy, number one, the root exodates drop off dramatically. So that winter trite is now keeping that soil biology alive. But what happens with those leaves? Those leaves are down here. And as we start getting the nighttime temperatures start dropping and our due point starts getting close now we start getting dew on that green leaves and so it doesn't matter you know there's times where your air moisture is really low and you get up in the morning you walk across the grass and your boots are dry but there's a lot of days where you walk across the grass at the sunbreak and your boots are wet. And this is what that winter trite is doing underneath that canopy is it is the water's condensing on that leaf and that winter trite will either absorb that water if it needs it or it'll ball off and roll off and land on the surface and hydrate that soil. And when that trite absorbs that water, then you can say, 'Aha, it's using the water.' But because it's photosynthesizing, it's not doing vertical growth. It's going to release that as a rootex, which is going to be based on water. And John Kemp, we did a podcast or a webinar with him a couple of weeks ago, and he said, 'Yeah, as these root exates hit the soil and they start breaking down, they release more water.' So that whole system absolutely works so well.

23:39 So it's converting nitrate over to amino acid and proteins. So nitrates in the soil are a toxin. So this way that win traitically is detoxifying the soil. Detoxifying nitrate takes four molecules of water to break down one nitrate molecule. So it is water intensive. It takes a lot of phosphate for energy. So instead of having that Durham plant or your cash crop tying up its phosphate and breaking down nitrate, it's using that phosphate to photosynthesize to grow. And so this having this winter trite in and nice and simple you can use the same herbicides you can do your management the same you're just throwing a little bit of tricia in so it's easy.

24:21 When we start looking at more robust systems, especially when we start talking about animals, you know once again it was one of the eye states, they did a research trial where they had two towers of soil they had chickpeas and wheat growing in both of them. And in the second one, they had a plastic divider between the two plants. And so in these towers, what they did is they induced drought stress to these two towers. What happened was where the plastic divider was, the wheat died. Where there was no divider, the wheat survived. And what happens is that chickpea was able to bring up moisture through microis. They share it with the wheat plant to keep it alive.

25:11 Once again, as we go through and listen to the Christine Jones and Chris Nichols, and they talk about their ballet of the symbiotic relationship between grasses and legumes, how the grasses accumulate phosphate, transfer it over through microiza into the legume into the nodules to fix more nitrogen to share back with that legume needs that grass to grow. And so unless we have imbalances of plant populations, we need to have the symbiotic. And so this is where in a lot of places now we're using a lot of chory. I love what chory does to the soil. It's a calcium accumulator, deep tap route, phosphate accumulator. Does some great things.

25:54 If it becomes weedy, that just tells you that we have a serious calcium problem. In eastern Australia, I'm working with some producers there. And one of the big weeds they have in their pastures is blackberries. The blackberries we eat. It's a big weed over there.

26:13 Big thorns on them. Animals won't go in there to eat. So they just get bigger and bigger. And listening to Dr. Lane Ingam's work, what does that tell you about your fungal to bacteria ratio? It's now 3:1, 4:1. It's too fungal for the grasses to be happy. So what we did is I told them to go in with milk and sugar doing foliar applications twice a week for the first two weeks and then weekly after that and they said after 6 weeks those blackberry bushes, those patches shrunk dramatically.

26:48 So it's once again, did I learn that in soil microbiology class? No. This is something where, you know, listening to some of these people doing trials and understanding the soil biology, you know, that Elaine Ingam has talked about the fungal bacteria ratio. Now we can come up with a solution instead of going in with 5 liters of glyphosate and not working. We can go in with milk and sugar. What does that cost? And this is the reason why this system is getting pooh-poohed is because as retailers, how do you capitalize on that?

27:22 So that's the challenge.

27:25 Yeah. And when you're spraying that, you can have your morning coffee and add that right in as well.

27:31 Absolutely.

27:32 It went all the way around. So, taking this concept a little bit deeper, Kevin. So, a little bit of trite with the Durham, you know, did all those great things. Have you had anybody try more diversity like fall seeding some flax or some radish or some lentils, something that would help that diversity on the front end? And we've met some people trying this, let it freeze out over the winter and then you don't have to worry about it becoming a harvest issue, a chemical issue or anything like that. Have you seen people do that?

28:08 Oh, absolutely. And this is, you know, this is the first part of September. Starting the middle of August, this is when, you know, harvest has started, and people are then phoning me or emailing, texting, you know, but my phone just keeps on going of saying, 'Okay, what can I do? What can I do? What do I see?' And so this time of year, like annual ryegrass is a great plant, but for us, we can get two seed production off of one field in one year with it. So annual ryegrass, the easiest place to manage it is seeding it from August 1st on, assuming that you're going to get a frost, you know, before October 1st. So as you move further south, keep moving that further and further back. To throw in the flax, absolutely sunflowers. So, I just did a blend for someone: oats or annual ryegrass, some radish, some turnip, and some flax, some sunflower.

29:08 And once again, it's what are we doing? We're increasing that microbiome. We're creating armor. We're getting, you know, more root exudates. We are keep moving the bar further and further. And you know, Gabe Brown talks about the fact that he increases his growing days, his growing season, and that's exactly it. So, I use the example of if because I'm living in Sylvan Lake, if I had a job where I had to drive to Calgary and pick up the Calgary Flames hockey team after a practice and I had to take them up to Edmonton for a hockey game. When I was driving from Red Deer to Calgary, it's an hour drive and it's minus 40 out. What am I? What's that bus going to be like? It's going to be cold. I'm going to have my toque on. I'm going to have my mitts. I'm going to have the heater cranked up. I'll have my woollies on. When I get to Calgary, I'm going to have all these sweaty hockey players get on the bus. What happens to my toque? What happens to my mitts? What happened to my heater? I'm maybe opening a window.

30:12 We're getting it hot in there. And as we're going up to Edmonton, it's not going to get any cooler. And so this is that whole thing of in a lot of our farms, that we're soils that we're dirt that we're trying to farm, we have this empty bus. And what we need to do is get this respiration up. And it once again, it doesn't matter if we're in Ukraine, we're in the States, we're in Canada. We're dealing with people up in the northern northern part of Alberta and it's working. We're dealing in Australia where we're dealing with 95% sand, 1% organic matter on 6 inches of rain in the whole season and they spend half the season at 40 degrees Celsius. So what is 120? Really nasty. But we got the system working. We have the system working. Now it all works.

31:04 Have this dysfunctional system, this is where we need these synthetic props. And so the whole idea of this is when we start looking at going in and when we go cold turkey and no, it didn't work. It's because we haven't earned that right yet. And so we need to do some, you know, some intercropping. So the first year of Durham and winter trite well what happens if we put in something like subterranean clover because we don't have that end cycling system going if we want to start cutting back on nitrogen. So we need to replace that nitrogen with that synthetic nitrogen with a biological do we do some fall grazing to get more NPK cycling? Do we what else do we doing that cover crop is not that silver bullet is one of the tools in that soil health principles to move us forward and that's the where most of the people where they stumble and they get confused they're looking for that one product that one step and nature isn't one step.

32:17 Because that's what chemical agriculture has taught us is that there is the silver bullet there is the one that deal and that might work for a short period of time, but then it causes all these other consequences down the line downstream and then you've got to find another silver bullet to fix the problems you caused with the first one.

32:37 Well, you need a platinum bullet now. [laughter]

32:40 Yeah. And that's where you know the universe or was it North Dakota State University they did a trial on this phosphate solubilizing bacteria that they're using as in no it's going to solve your phosphate problem or no sorry nitrogen is a free living nitrogen fixer that they're inoculating the wheat and they're getting mixed results on it and I happen to be talking to Christine Jones about it. I sent it to her and she said this PhD they should know nature does not work singular they work as teams and so if you don't if they add that free living nitrogen fixer to that wheat if they don't have free living phosphate solubilizers active that nitrogen fixer isn't going to do its job and one of the things that I would like to do a little more research on and you've probably seen it too where that was it a Brazilian or Colombian researcher had has worked 40 years on this bacteria that's going to solve all of the agriculture problems.

33:41 I have so much skepticism against that and once again I don't want to go on Facebook and say no that that doesn't work because I don't know what maybe she does have a super bug that is going to solve all of our nutrition problems. But from all my experience, one isn't going to do it. Two is not going to do it. I had one company say they have in this jug I have the five most important bacteria in this jug. I said, 'Really? You have it figured out so that you only need five? That's unbelievable.' Then you start talking about products like Ecot that I think they cut the count off at 500,000 species. That's diversity. And you know this is once again we're trying to oversimplify something that is very complex.

34:32 I did some work with farming revolution in Eastern Australia and Tamson and she's really good at words and so one of the days that we did our talk she said we're going to talk about simple complex and complicated simple A to B complex is going to be you know convoluted it's going to be maybe tough to track but complex or complicated. So that's complex. Complicated is what we make it. We get in there and we try, no, this is a straight line here. No, it's not a straight line. And that's what makes everything so complicated. We don't understand really all the interactions and subreactions that happen when we go in there and we do a process. And so Christine Jones said, 'Anytime we're looking at doing a new management step, think of how our soil biology is going to react.'

35:27 And that is so powerful when we start talking about regenerative. When we talk about having these cover crops, when we add safflower, what is our soil, what is our soil going to do? When we add coriander, what is our soil going to do? When we add flax this time of year, what is that soil going to do? And is that the right thing or the wrong thing?

35:49 Yeah. Yeah. I love that. I like to tell people I say this a lot of times in my talks. You know, when we look at these natural systems, the system the way God created it. It's not complicated, but it's incredibly complex. So, I like that description. I'll have to I'll have to start building mine out using that because [laughter] that's it's exactly right. And you know the thought of how we can add some of these crops in to give

41:10 In between, get something growing. When you get the taffle, then you throw in your turnips and radishes. And then that next year, if they decide to go to conventional corn, then they can go in and seed whether the clover is at the same time or not. They can go in and through some researching, finding out what they spray on things like subtraining clover for weed control, for seed production, I found out the boxinol works. You get some leaf burn, you get a little bit of yield reduction seed-wise, but in this case, all we want is the end fixation. We want the microisa. So get the clovers growing in with the corn when it's starting. Use bermoxal MCPA mine at low rates. Once again, you have to watch that. And your grassy wheat control there. There's options. So now we have our legume, we have our warm seasoned grass, then we throw in the biennial cool season grass, then we throw in the brassicas. Now we have that ecosystem. Now we're going to loosen up the soil. Now we're going to suppress weeds. Now we're going to reduce the weed pressure where now we're going and we keep going through the list of the check marks. Nature is now congratulating us for producing the way that God has intended.

42:35 What you're doing is you're adding the complexity without the complication. As soon as you make it complicated and too many steps, especially when you're dealing with large acres, they'll throw their hands up and say, 'I'm out.' Whereas if we have this rotation, if we have these steps and we have, in quotes, recipe, now, oh yeah, I could do that. And this is what we see. And when we have that in rotation and we're doing these different things, we're going to get different results and not different from the standpoint of we fixed it in one year. We've been managing our soils for 100 years and so we've just slowly been degrading them for 100 years. We can't rebuild it in one. But when we can go through and we start looking at some easy tests, we can start seeing some huge differences in a short period of time. There's an organic producer just north of Regina that I've been working with and so organic they're growing wheat, spring wheat, put in the winter wheat with it and after that one year they increase their aerobic zone in their soil by 50%. It's a big number. This year in September, they've received 5 inches of rain since September 1st. So it's September 8th was yesterday when they sent it to me.

44:05 And across the road, there's lakes on their land. All the water infiltrated. And that's after 6 years of management. Yeah, and that's huge increasing that aerobic zone. And Kevin, maybe talk a little bit about why that's not just important for the water infiltration, but you know, roots will never grow deeper than what you can get oxygen into your soil. So you can have 4 feet deep soil, but if your oxygen can only move 12 inches, you don't you only have 12 inches soil. Talk about why that's so important.

44:40 That's, you know, the number one tool that anybody that should be doing out in their fields, they should always have a shovel. And I don't like a spade. I like a square shovel. So that this way when I step on it, you have more resistance. You don't have that cutting edge of a point of a spade. So with that square shovel, when it goes in, when you hit that compaction layer, you don't have to guess. You feel it. You stop. And so as I'm walking, I'll walk and I'll just have the point of that shovel touching the ground as I'm walking, kind of as a walking stick. But what I'm doing is I'm listening to how that sounds when it hits the soil. And when it's quiet, that means we have some fairly loose soil. Is it too loose? That's another question for another day. But as soon as you hear a thud, okay, I'm going to dig. What is this compaction? Where is it?

45:32 What are the roots doing? So if the roots go down this far and sideways, now what nutrients are we using? We're using here. And this is the big argument when people say that oh if we're not putting fertilizer we're mining the soil. So I the next question I asked them have you done a mineralogical or a Sparks test on your soil? And you get the deer in the headlights look and what is that? So instead of saying what the plants what's estimated the plants can take out, the mineralogical test tell you the total amount in your soil and in conjunction with that soil test you can then see I have five parts per million of phosphate available on a conventional soil test but my soil test shows that I have 750.

46:17 lbs of phosphate in that top 6 in. Why is the difference? So the US translation of that test is a total nutrient digest is what you would request down here. It's incredibly valuable test to have and it's not that expensive.

46:33 And and you do it once because over your farming career it's not going to change. Yeah. It's something everybody needs baseline unless you manure it unless you dump on a whole bunch of nutrients. So if we have 10 parts per million here have phosphate. Yeah. So we're going to have to add phosphate fertilizer. But if we can increase it and get down here or here. So now rooting zone is getting bigger and for every 6 in we have 750 lbs of phosphate available. And now I have 24 in of rooting zone. How much phosphate do I have available? How much phosphate do I need to be adding? And this is that whole thing. So if we add a little bit now that plant senses that now it doesn't call for microiza. Now we've lost the biological impact. We add a fungicide, we then keep that that seed clean so we don't have microiza infection. Now it needs that phosphate and it's so interesting as we get through that the reliance on fertilizer is based on the reliance on chemical and as soon as we get rid of those we get biological systems now we don't need to have that that chemical input.

47:50 And and and when you access those deeper zones that's that's why you saw your phosphorus numbers come up year after year even though you weren't added anymore more because you're getting to it and you got biology to make it available. I always remember, you know, Gabe Brown talking about, you know, this this was one of those aha moments for him, too, when Chris Nichols, who, you know, was a scientist right in his backyard, just told him to stop putting on phosphorus. And, you know, and that was such a foreign concept to a farmer who has been told throughout the years, you you have to do that. You have to replace it. You have to replace it. And he finally listened to her and stopped doing it. And he just saw those numbers go up and up and up every year.

48:40 You know, when you first hear that story, you go, 'Okay, I know Gabe likes to tell stories. That seems like a story to me.' But then we then we each get to experience it ourselves and it's like that's pretty cool. That's pretty cool because phosphorus is expensive and if I don't have to pay for it, my profitability can go up while my productivity can stay the same or even go up as well.

49:09 Blaine Curtis is with Understanding Egg in southeast Saskatchewan and and he was digging a dugout for his his livestock, get store some water. So he dug down 15 ft and he said, 'What a great opportunity.' He grabbed a soil sample at 15 ft down deep into the soil sent away for for total digest total nutrient digestion. It was the same as the 6 to 12. So 15 ft down. 15 ft down. And so this whole thing of fearmongering of saying we're mining our soil if our roots are always in the same zone. Yes, we're mining that.

49:50 That's a valid point. Yeah. Yeah. As soon as we get that root zone, we get that aeration zone going down. Now, we're taking stuff from how how how deep do we want to say that rooting zone and bringing up and redepositing it on the surface and recycling. So, yes, probably after 10 or 20,000 years of of farming, we're going to be in trouble. But we have to do this smarter. And David Montgomery, the dirt erosion of civilization book, he said the most of the civilizations collapsed because of lack of soil health except if they were on a flood plane and then nature replenished those those areas. But once again, if you once again luck isn't a really good management strategy. So these are the things we have to be looking at moving forward. Understanding the role of biology, the role of chemistry and once again sometimes well once a cultural testament by sir Albert Howard. You read his book and he got mad at the the English farmers because of the fact that they went to use synthetics over good agronomic practices and the whole idea of the chemistry is when our agronomic system fails us, we we make wrong decisions, nature throws us a curveball, we can have it as a patch, not a reliance. And this is where you know the whole thing of while talking to Dre Hagerty back in in they in Western Australia they do get wet sometimes during harvest and that one year the really wet harvest. They were harvesting their wheat and it was

51:48 Making grade. Everybody around them was having sprouted wheat or barley. The buyers weren't buying it. They were trying to find alternative markets and neighbors were saying, 'So, who are you paying off to get take your wheat?' And they said, 'No, I we're hauling it and it's making grade.' And they said, 'Well, ours is sprouted. Why?' And so when once again, Dy loves asking questions and have lots of connections. And was it Christine Jones or does it matter? I said, 'Why did their grain not sprout and everybody else's did?' and they said most likely it's because of the tissue soil nitrate. So once again that plant is trying to detoxify the soil so it's absorbing all this excess soil nitrate it needs water to break it down but because there's nitrogen in the plant and you have this late season moisture that plant still wants to try growing and so it moves the nitrate into the seed head which absorbs more water which then triggers germination in the head. Hagerties didn't have that excess soil nitrate. So, they didn't have this excess soil or the plant nitrate. Their bricks level was 30. I didn't know that that wheat plants can get to 30, but I've seen it at Hagerties. And they had no problems with harvestability, maturity and this is what we're seeing in western Canada for sure is most of the fields have sprayer tracks in it this time of year because they're trying to kill their crop. Why? Because of overapplication of nitrogen. As soon as we have organic nitrogen in the system, now nature's intelligence is going to be able to regulate how much that plant needs and when it needs it and when that legume can just hang on to it.

53:43 We sometimes spend a lot of money to cause our own problems.

53:51 So Kevin, as we kind of wrap this conversation up here a little bit, you've traveled extensively all over the world, consulted with farmers of all shapes, sizes. What would be a piece or two of advice that you would give to someone who's maybe listening to this podcast that they know that this is the direction they want to head, kind of down the regenerative path, getting off chemistry and moving more over to biology. What are some fairly simple ways for them to get started?

54:27 Number one, get a mentor or a mentor group, get part of that because number one, it's your neighbors and friends and relatives are going to try when they see what you're doing these crazy things, they're going to try and talk you out of it. So, get a support group. That's number one.

54:45 Number two, take a piece and commit to that for 3 to 5 years. And this way if you try it and it's a dry year, it's a cold year, it's a hot year, you use the wrong blend, whatever, and it you didn't see a positive, commit to it for 3 years on that same piece this way. Okay, so Graeme Sim, another great guy to talk to, Grant Sim, sorry, was down undercovers, which you know quite well. He said the first year he grew sunflowers, they grew this high and died. Next year he grew them this high and they died. Then in year three they were, you know, 6 feet high and full flower and neighbor said, 'Oh, he found a variety that worked.' He said, 'No, it's the same blend. They just use the same piece on the same for three years. Now we got the biology to get going.'

55:37 Look at your system, find out what is damaging your system. And once again, you may need some outside help with that.

55:43 But number one that I tell people, have a plant in vegetative stage for as many days possible throughout that whole growing season. That's giving root exudates. That's rooting down. It's getting that biology going. And from anybody that I've been working with, you know, that are is in that position of I want to start, where do I start? That's number one for what you do besides getting that mentor group.

56:10 Yeah, that's great advice. I love that. And maybe one last thing, where do people go to find these mentor groups? Because they're probably not going to be their neighbors.

56:21 Well, it's really funny because there is a if if anybody listening wants to make a trip to Edmonton, Alberta in December, where else would you want to be in but in

56:33 Oh, that sounds like a lovely time, Kevin. Yeah, sign me up for that.

56:37 It's the Canadian the Western Canadian Grazing and Soil Health Conference, and it goes on every second year. And it's funny because

56:47 I've been at it from day one. And it's funny because you're talking to someone and someone else be walking by and say, 'Hey, I didn't know you were into this.' So it is a neighbor that's doing something in the back 40 that is out of sight, out of mind or three hours away to find each other.

57:06 Exactly. So there's Facebook pages, there's WhatsApp groups out there. I'm surprised you guys don't have something like that kind of started up. Maybe you do then I just don't know about. Yeah, just go out and go to meetings. When we're at these meetings, these researchers like Chris Nichols, like Graham Sate's going to be coming to Noil in the Plains.

57:38 Great. Like these people, they love talking with producers and you can come and you can throw some questions at them and they're not going to belittle you. They know that this is a learning curve and if I'm starting at here, how do I get to here? It isn't once again, it's not a simple line. It is a complex line to get there because we are going to have setbacks. We're going to have challenges. We're going to have these things that we need to be able to have guidance and coaching to pull these things together. And that's where, you know, I jokingly say that on my business card, I should have a coach, an educator, a psychologist, and a cheerleader because as I'm going through the psychologist part I think I could get sued over, but people come to me asking is this crazy? And yes, it must be crazy because that's what I would do. I would consider that I'm a cheerleader because what they're doing is great. Yeah. What you did this is awesome. Now this is the next step we want to do.

58:40 So these are the things that we want to do is you know put this system together. And so it doesn't matter where you are. Can you just go to Gabe and say, 'Well Gabe what are you doing? Oh that's what I'm going to do'? It may not work on your farm even though you're right across the road. You have to develop the systems. And these are where these soil health principles are really important. These are the principles. These aren't the rules. These are the principles. And that's the key that we have to try to remember. We don't have recipes. We have systems.

59:08 Yeah, I love that. So folks, yeah, get to a conference. Green Cover puts on our Southeast Kansas soil health conference in Iola December 3rd and 4th. We're going to be doing multiple regenerative nexus events, Noil in the Plains, national. There's so many good ones. There is one not far from you and you need to be at it. And then you need to invest in yourself to go, but then reach out to other people. Bring a neighbor, bring a friend, meet a new friend, meet a new virtual neighbor. They're out there and they want to help just like you want to help them as well.

59:46 So Kevin, thank you so much. If people want to purchase your books, where can they go to do that?

59:53 Reason Press is the printer that I worked with, but it's on Amazon. And if they want to get a hold of me, I can get them copies. Yeah, it's the cover cropping book that you guys did, another really good resource. So if you can get a hold of Keith and get his book also.

1:00:15 Yeah. So folks, there's no excuse for not continuing your education, continuing to invest in yourself. Lots of great YouTube videos, podcasts, books, and conferences out there. So Kevin, thank you so much for taking the time to join us. We really appreciate it and we hope that your rest of the season goes well and that you stay warm this winter. Just listening to that hockey analogy on the bus just made me cold. So you guys start to stop up there.

1:00:47 So hey folks, thank you for listening to this episode of the Green Cover Podcast. Keep learning and keep regenerating your soil as well. Thank you. 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.