How to Apply the Six Soil Health Principles on Your Farm

0:00 So the soil health principles are really a guiding factor in a lot of the decisions that we make both as green cover as well as on the farming side of things because they are the principles that when applied properly allow us to farm in ways that are different, farm in ways that are more profitable, farm in ways that are more in sync with nature.

0:22 And so in our soil health resource guide, we always stress the soil health principles. And some of the people that read this magazine every year are brand new and some are veterans and have read many articles about soil health principles. But they are so basic that we never want to skip them. We never want to take them for granted. We never want to think that we've gone beyond our understanding of those.

0:49 So what we're going to do is we're going to utilize some of the knowledge within the green cover team here to put some of the put some practical very practical uses how that you seen the soil health principle work on your own operation on the operation of your customers as well. So that's what we want to talk about.

1:09 So we have here Scott Ravenamp. Scott is a farmer from for many, many years. Scott grew up in eastern Colorado, farm there for many years. Currently is in northeast Nebraska. He and his wife Becky, and they're raising livestock up there, mostly cattle, but dabbling with some small animals up there, too.

1:30 Brian Burns, of course, my brother is the main operator of Providence Farms. He's been farming literally here all his life. I can remember him as a really little kid farming the carcass with all of the equipment that we had. And so he's got a wealth of experience and knowledge and wisdom there as well.

1:52 And then Zach L. Zach of course is one of our sales team members, but also farms outside of Moran, Kansas. And I'm sure in the course of us talking about these different soil health principles, each one of them will share a little bit more about crops that they've raised and rotations that they've used and different things that they've seen.

2:13 And guys, as we're having this conversation, don't just talk about the successes that you've seen from applying these soil health principles. Talk about the failures that you've seen when these principles didn't get implemented. Whether because you just skipped them or because the weather did not cooperate and would allow you to do it.

2:34 So for example, keeping the soil covered is a great goal and you can plant all the cover crops you want, but if it just simply does not rain, you're not going to keep that soil covered. It's going to be very difficult. So we can talk about those as well because those are part of the reality of farming in today's day and age.

2:52 And I like the fact that we have a really broad range of perspectives all the way from Scott's experience in eastern Colorado, which is very dry, brittle environment to Zach in southeast Kansas where they typically get quite a bit of rain, but also have fairly shallow soils. So even though they can be flooding one week, a couple weeks later, they can be in a drought. So in other words, Zach just complains all the time.

3:23 It's never good. No, just kidding there. So all right. Well, let's just jump right in, guys. And again, as we go through this, feel free to share some of the crops that you've grown, the rotations that you've done, all of those as we go through this.

3:39 So first principle I want to talk about is keeping the soil covered. I kind of led with that. I think that's one of the most important because if you don't keep that soil covered, so many of the other things that you try to do just simply don't work.

3:57 So Scott, you're first on my screen here. I want you to talk about that. I know when you were in eastern Colorado, that was a big push for you guys and extremely difficult in that very limited rainfall environment, but why was that such an important principle for you and how did you do your best to implement it?

4:14 Yeah, I actually have told several people that, you know, I don't want to rate the soil health principles. Just in the last like two months, I've told several people this. I don't like rating them, but in my mind, this is the most important one. And so I do rate it. It like Keith said, it's very difficult to achieve the other ones if you can't or don't do this one. There's a lot more don't than there is can't.

4:46 When you're talking about cover crops and you move them to a cash crop, especially like rye and trite and those highcarbon residue crops, when you take them to maturity, it's a different beast than it is as a cover crop and understanding the importance of carbon in your system and not calling it trash. I think that was probably for me personally the two big things that really changed our view of ground cover is we quit calling it trash and that's a huge thing. Because it's not. Carbon's one of the few things you can't go to town and buy more of. And Ray Archeletta, we were driving around after he we did a field day at the house there in Colorado and

5:33 We were out driving around that evening before supper with just a couple of us in the vehicle and Ray, and he's the one that really got it through to me that you have to think of carbon as a nutrient. It's on the elemental chart. Once you start thinking of that as the same level of importance as nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur, I mean that was an aha moment for us. No doubt about it. And then everything became geared towards how do we keep more of it? How do we keep it standing? And in that environment, it was actually to try to keep it off of the surface because our soil was becoming so active that it would eat it faster than we could grow it. And so that's where stripper heads, non-chopping corn heads, anything to do to keep that residue standing. It obviously helped the snow retention. When it did snow, it helped with getting the wind off of the surface, but anything we could do to gain that residue.

6:29 I was actually just telling somebody last week, we actually tried to insure our residue for hail. We thought it was that valuable. We checked into fire insurance one year during a bad drought. Could we get fire insurance on our residue? Because we knew that if we lost it, we were going to lose. And I, we actually told insurance companies this. We said, 'Well, you can offer us some insurance or you'll pay for the next two crops anyway because we'll typically lose the next crops if we lost our residue.' Again, I feel like it's the most important one, even though I don't like ranking them.

7:07 Yeah, love that. And I love how, you know, a lot of people do refer to it as trash and they talk about trash farmers. Zach, I remember a couple years ago you wrote an article called One Man's Trash is Another Man's Treasure.

7:22 Why don't you kind of use that to lead into how you view keeping the soil covered as a soil health principle?

7:27 Yeah. So Scott's right on that residue is super important. And funny enough to me, or in my area, like it's important the same way as Scott's talking about is holding moisture for next year. But honestly, it's probably as valuable in somewhere you get more rain in the times that you get more rain than it is without. Especially in the growing season or the early spring when those big heavy rains tend to come. I've seen fields around here that, you know, you can wash a two-foot gully out of something that is just bare, you know, soybean residue, and if you have just a little bit of, I mean, it doesn't even take much, some type of crop growing out there, it completely stops it. And we're a heavy terrace area. And yeah, you want to rebuild terraces every year if you don't cover your soil. And that is no fun for anybody. I haven't touched a terrace in a long time just because of that simple factor.

8:37 But it also does another thing. When your crops are at the most sensitive stage of seedling, like you have to start your crop out that seedling, it's got to get started right. Again, same thing. You know, you can plant it, and like this spring we had what it was like nine inches of rain in two weeks. I don't know that the sun shined in those two weeks, and if you have real fine tilled soil or even soil that's not tilled but not covered, like that ground gets hard and tight and all the air collapses out of it and you don't start off with a good sand. Whereas if you have that residue there, you know, if nothing else, it protects it from that high impact of the rain droplet, but it also gives that structure in that soil because if you think about, you know, 25,000 gallon of water per acre inch, like multiply that times eight, now you're talking about how many foot pounds of pressure there is just from that much moisture being in that soil. And we have easily, easily, easily seen where you've got something with a little cover crop come up and be in great shape. And then on the flip side of that is we have, you know, you mentioned light soils or thin soils. Heavy clay is the term that I would point at. Which makes it, you know, it goes from wet or muddy, mucky to like bricks basically. And if you don't have a cover on there, yeah, it's gonna turn into a brick and it's gonna get hard. Those little roots, they just can't do it. Super important.

10:17 Yeah, I really like how you talked about the raindrop and compaction, and I've never really thought about keeping the soil covered as a way to address having less compaction in your field, but really it is. And that's something that we all fight. So, another tool to add to fight. So, we've gone from the very low rainfall environment and how it's important in eastern Colorado to a high rainfall environment in southeast Kansas. Brian, you're here in the middle, central Nebraska, kind of in the middle of the rainfall. And you've been no-tilling for what, probably close to 40 years now.

10:53 How does this and back then we didn't even talk about principles of soil health. Jay Furer hadn't coined them. I think everybody understood them but they weren't really written down. How did that play a part in you becoming interested in doing no till?

11:09 Yeah, so my first attempt and it was just an attempt at no till was in 1989. I had to learn from the national no till conference. I got the no till farmer and of course back east they were dealing with too much water and how to manage residue and so I had a lot of failures to start with. But the reason I was doing this is to try to save moisture, to try and eliminate tillage to hold moisture. Obviously, the residue helped that. The first several years trying to go no till, one of the big things we did was plant corn into the wheat stubble and it was just kind of soup out there because there was no soil structure yet. So that was difficult because sometimes it'd be too wet to get out there for weeks. But as the soil structure improved, then that helped. The other thing I remember is I thought it was cool that I could go out there and count like three or four years worth of residue, which was good to start with because it did help hold the soil just like what Scott was talking about and everything, but as the biology ramped up, then that stuff started disappearing. At the time I had no idea about biology and all that in the 90s but so the extreme of that is then once we got irrigation in the mid 2000s, when you start having 240 bushel irrigated corn then it was a matter of how do we deal with all this residue and even though it breaks down you still have a lot to deal with and probably my biggest struggle has been keeping the residue put, you know, dead residue. It seemed like if we try to run our air seeder after we plant corn, it just loosens everything up and then we'd get a 70 mph wind and then we'd have places in corn stalks where it would be bare ground where the grain cart ran and then there would be places where we had standing stocks where it would be two foot residue. So that's been a real challenge.

13:14 The one thing I noticed this year, we did a bunch of different trials with biology and starter, non-starter, and all that kind of stuff. But it seemed like the biggest visible difference that I saw when I was out there spraying, the corn at 6 to 12 inches tall was where there was heavy residue and light residue to no residue. The heavy residue, the corn was obviously way behind, didn't look as good and I think that's now whether there ever becomes a yield drag there, I doubt, and maybe it's even better because in the season it'll get, you know, that what was a negative becomes the positive. But I do think that was you go north and east, that's what limits people from saying, 'Oh, I want to keep all this residue because the crops just look terrible to start with, and so managing that, you know, some guys try to strip till.' There's all different kinds of things that people try to do. The latest thing we're trying to do, we can talk about this more later, but is interceding as another way of getting living residue out there. You know, Zach mentioned that as opposed to just the dead residue, the brown residue, we need that green residue out there.

14:33 Yeah. You know what, something you said, Brian, reminded me of you know, Paul Yasa always stressed how important the uniform distribution of residue was. Uniformity was as important as anything. And I think you've seen that and you were really stressing that. So it's not just having good soil cover, but having uniform soil cover because that really impacts being able to plant into and get the next crop growing. So let's move to the next principle here. Often times called minimize disturbance. I also have kind of started referring to this as maximizing your disruptions because while we want to minimize the disturbances to the ground, we know that we're going to have to do some of those. So when we do those disruptions, let's maximize the impact of them and minimize the detrimental parts of it. So let's talk a little bit about what that looks like in your operation, maybe what the disturbances that you have to try to minimize or the disruption that you're doing, how you maximize that. So Zach, start with you.

15:41 Yeah, that's an interesting way to put that. Never thought about it like that, but I like it because you know, we obviously try to minimize our disturbances with our machinery as much as physically possible. Like unless there is something that needs tended to or addressed, like we're going to leave it alone. I like to modify machinery and about every piece of equipment that we own has been tweaked in some form or fashion to help.

16:11 us achieve this goal. But at the same time you have to maximize the disturbances that you make by minimizing those disturbances too. So maybe your planter needs to have a different set of closing wheels on it instead of one it came with so that when you are using it and going across and opening that sole surface open you're doing a good job and every pass you're making you're getting your money's worth.

16:45 But as far as just like tillage goes, yeah, like outside of we live in a very tilled area outside of maybe an inline a thin shank inline ripper helping us with some tree roots along the edge of a field or something like that's about the extent of the disturbances you're going to get out of us. We don't tramline or anything like that. Our fields are too small and it would be silly to see the RTK map on all these medium small medium-size fields.

17:17 But I also like to make a point to not get out there when I shouldn't be either. You know, if it's too wet, I stay off of it. Like you don't, you can cover a lot of acres an hour when you're spraying and doing projects like that so that you don't have to use disturbance later. And then you know, like I said earlier, those all the roots you can do and all the roots you can put in there will help hold that machinery up.

17:44 Even on harvest, I'm a big advocate of like give it just a little bit. Like maybe don't start first thing in the morning, give it a little time to settle up and firm up on it.

17:57 Yeah, I mean minimizing is super easy, but it also I would go a step further. You also have to take this into consideration about another principle that we're going to talk about that's animal integration in the future too because you can have some pretty significant disturbance without managing animals properly and you can do as much maybe worse damage.

18:26 That's a great point. We definitely will be talking about the proper integration of livestock, not just throwing livestock out there. So, Brian, Zach did a pretty good job with covering the mechanical disturbance and how to avoid that and how to mitigate that. Talk maybe a little bit about how you're trying to minimize the disturbances of the chemical and the biological portions.

18:57 Yeah, you know, just trying to reduce the amount of chemicals we use. I guess one of the things that's I've been fairly successful with is using some type of acid product citric acid or we have another product called growthful that's a really low pH, we're adding to our spray water to try to. I've been pretty successful at taking a full rate of Roundup 5 lb, I think 24, 25 mil, dropping that down to about 16 ounces and getting good kills with it.

19:31 So doing that I've tried to reduce the amount of residuals that I've put out there. Just, you know, thinking that maybe the residuals, I mean, I think all chemicals are hard on biology, but maybe that if that residual's out there longer, it's probably doing more more damage. So looking at that and then obviously trying to add back stuff whether it's through spreading compost, you know our starter, we we haven't put any infuro starter on for probably over 10 years so we're going with fish and different biology and humates, you know, and those kind of things to try to stimulate to feed the biology that's there and also probably introduce some new fungal.

20:20 It's our most, all soils that have been tilled over the time are bacteria dominant. So, that'd be a big push is trying to get fungal back. A lot of our compost has wood chips in it. And I do wonder because I'm using a lot of wood chips in my compost and they're not all completely broke down when we're spreading. So, I am wondering if I'm starting to tie up some nitrogen or having some issues there.

20:48 So that's where it's like, you know, reduce your nitrogen, but you do, it's not, you know, things don't just happen in a vacuum. You got to look at all the considerations. And so I got, you got to be a little careful with some of just eliminating or reducing things and do too much, you know, at once.

21:07 Yeah. I like how you said that with one of the ways to minimize disturbance is to try to mitigate the damage of whatever disturbing effect, you know, whether it's tillage or a chemical past, you know, what can you do after that to help heal it to help reverse some of the negative impacts and I think that's really important. Scott, what what's been your experience both as you're farming and as you're working with all of the green cover seed growers, which are some really good farmers across the country, probably in 10 or 12 different states. You work with some really top growers. What are you seeing out there for how these guys are trying to minimize their disturbances? Yeah, I would I would start off by

21:54 I openly admit I'm probably personally traumatized by tillage. Having grown up on a summer-fallow wheat operation in eastern Colorado, I spent the overwhelming majority of my childhood driving tractor doing tillage. I'm struggling with the idea that even one or two tillage passes is acceptable, but as we've moved into the organic world that becomes a bigger practice. At the same time, I think Brian and Zach touched on it—I'm also starting to realize a lot of the chemical passes are probably a catastrophic event for our soil. And so if you view them as the same thing, you got to figure out what that balance is.

22:41 I struggle to find dirt clouds in nature that aren't man-made. And so I view that as a reason we shouldn't do tillage. It's not a natural feature of the soil that I'm aware of in very many places. Zach is right. One of the things we're really going to struggle with is animal impact can be just as detrimental, especially if it's repeated catastrophic events for the soil. Sometimes it's actually good for the soil. It appears to me we utilize some bale grazing in some of our perennial systems up here where we remove cedar trees, put bales in and graze on it. It actually helps heal the soil. If you were to do that in really good grass, it might be kind of hard on the grass for a year or two, but it looks like it's a good thing for the grass. So some of these things that we view as catastrophic events may not be for the soil if they're not done repeatedly.

23:41 When we made the transition to no-till in Colorado, we settled into a rotation for a few years where we were doing a tillage pass once, basically once every four or five years. We had it in our head that we had to do it to level the fields out to swath Proso millet. It took care of the badger holes. At the time, we had no idea soil health wasn't in our lexicon at all. We had no idea what any of that would have meant. We were just doing it to make the field smooth so we could swath. But our rule was we wanted it planted back to Proso millet, again not understanding the importance of it at the time. We were planting it back to Proso millet typically within twelve hours to get a living root back into that soil.

24:29 I'm definitely that's probably the one that I go back and forth on. I've lived all the extremes from full tillage to full no-till to now we're back to where maybe it isn't the end of the world. I'm probably headed more down the road of how do we get rid of all these synthetics, especially the chemicals. And I would even say that's true in the livestock industry—the more of those catastrophic events you have happening with chemicals, we're down to very minimal inputs on our cattle and loving the results of it. And it kind of all goes together. It's hard to think about those as disturbances, but they are. When you do stuff even to the livestock, it can be a pretty big disturbance.

25:18 Yeah, I might add something there. You reminded me, Scott, about that book 'When Weeds Talk.' It basically says weeds germinate because of the soil conditions. There's a seedbank of everything out there. We can think of that as a disturbance too—how the soil is basically signaling, I don't know if it's the chemicals or whatever signals it's putting out, whether it's saying I need grasses to grow or I need broad leaves to grow. I think understanding that better is going to be one of the keys to being able to eliminate some of those synthetics without doing so much tillage. And I would even second that even in a perennial system—we're clearing cedar trees, starting to understand why are the cedar trees there to begin with? Then you have this flush of weeds come behind them and it's, what are those weeds doing? And I think people need to quit having such a knee-jerk reaction that we got to do something immediately. Sometimes I keep telling myself and Becky that if we're really busy and we don't get anything done with it, that might be the best thing. So that's kind of become our deal—kind of accepting of some of it. And as we've taken the inputs out of the cattle, it seems like the cattle are even finding a use for some of that stuff. I'm convinced the synthetics in the cattle was messing them up. And yeah, sometimes we need to just step back a little bit and let mother nature tell us a little bit more.

26:58 Well, I really like that. And I think one thing to understand is that all these

27:04 Disturbances that we talked about, but they're all tools and tools are needed in the process of farming. So that's why it doesn't say eliminate all these things, but how do we minimize the negative impact, maximize the positive impact? But every time you use a tool, it's going to cost money.

27:22 And so one of the best ways to become profitable is to do this right here: minimize the use of these disturbances however possible. It's going to look different for every operation, but really something to consider. I want to move on to number three and keep living roots in the ground. Brian, we're going to start with you because you actually alluded to this one earlier. One of the things that we're going to be doing here on our farm on a bigger scale is the interseeding to keep living roots in the ground. Talk about why that's important and why we've chosen to make that investment into equipment to help make that more possible.

28:01 Yeah. And probably I mean I know they tweak these rules all the time but it probably should actually be you know diverse living roots you know because you can have a monoculture out there as living root and then you could you know like corn and then you could plant rye but you've got to you could have you have roots out there for 365 days but it's all grass you know and so I think you know that's the importance of having that diversity of the different types of living roots. But so yeah we were doing some of this 10 years ago, interseeding and playing with that. And then about the time we got doing it on any kind of scale, we started getting at the time it was Roundup resistant pig weeds. And so we kind of just quit doing it just because we didn't know how to handle, you know, the chemicals with, you know, how to handle the weeds and interseed and all that. I still don't necessarily have an answer to that.

29:00 We've been using more Liberty corn and they try to burn down and reduce the residuals. There's some residuals that are probably better than others. As far as interseeding. So we're doing that in corn at three, three or four leaf. Experimenting a little bit with soybeans. It's a little bit different animal there. At some point you probably got to take those interseeding out. And then this what I'm actually probably going to do tomorrow is we had rye that we harvested for grain and then we double cropped sunflowers, planted that. There's just coming through and then we're going to be interseeding a cover crop into those sunflowers. So the flowers are planted on 30-inch spacings and then we'll come in with a Henker interseeding and put two rows between each row of sunflowers with a mix of different legumes, broad leaves, brassicas, probably not much grass. There'll be a little volunteer rye in there. We may or may not spray that out. Just depends on how bad it is. So that's kind of what we're looking at doing in those realms. The other side I'll say is, you know, like what Zach mentioned with livestock, we've got some cows now. So we're planting a high diversity grazing mix. Doing a couple different times. And then we are going to look at putting some perennials in. So that's your ultimate, you know, diversity there. Doing running a perennial for five or six years possibly. Then maybe look at going back into our romp situation again.

30:46 Thank you Scott. You grew up in the art of fowl country which is the opposite of keeping living roots in the ground as oft possible. Maybe just talk a little bit about how did your mindset change to move from that mentality to growing more crops because your rainfall didn't change but it was your mindset that did change. How did that work? How do your friends and neighbors back home, how are they handling that now? And what have you seen from our growers when it comes to this keep living roots in the ground?

31:21 So we talked a little bit about this the other day that Peter Donovan was one of the ones that opened my eyes to the sunshine spill effect. And I actually challenged people a little bit. The majority of wheat fallow country now which isn't most of it's not wheat fallow they're running a third a third of the acres are raising a spring crop but they that area of the world's probably actually doing a better job of utilizing sunshine than corn and soybean country is because when they plant them wheat crops or them cereal crops you know that crop will capture sunlight for the better part of a year and then then they're running the spring crop acres the same way it's eliminating that period you know I again, I want to tell you, we did it for the soil health principles. We didn't. We did it for financial reasons.

32:07 We needed to take we wanted to support another family on the farm. When Becky and I came back to the farm, we there was no land available, but the there was 28% of our county was in CRP of the farm ground. And so we just looked at it as, but we're like, okay, we got a half to a third of our acres are growing nothing. Were wanting to support go from two.

32:29 Families to three families. The simple math said put that other third or that half of your land into production every year. And it actually a lot of that decision occurred in a year where we had a lot of rain in the spring. We struggled to get some of the spring crop acres planted and we just we were like here we are living in a desert. We got all this rain and we're summer following some stuff and more than likely come fall we're not going to be able to get the wheat up.

32:59 And it was kind of an aha moment. You know, it was a common occurrence to be too wet in the spring to get the field work done, come around to wheat planting time in the fall and you were worried whether you were going to get it up and you were doing this practice that quote unquote conserved moisture. It literally made no sense.

33:18 I you know in a harsh environment it's a hard thing to do you know but one of the things we did and looking back you know we wasn't even really intentionally doing it this way but we basically abandoned all the crops we were growing in that system and I shouldn't necessarily say abandoned but when we quit farming in Colorado we was not growing any of the crops we were growing when Becky and I started farming we had completely switched out our crop rotation.

33:47 And I and I think that holds true everywhere. If you try to implement this stuff and that's the only thing you do is go no till or you know whatever it is and you stick to the same crop rotation, it's almost destined to fail. You've got to diversify your crop rotation to have more options. I'm convinced that's true because everywhere I go it seems to be the case.

34:11 If you were a corn soybean farmer and you went no till and that's all you did, it failed. If you were a cotton farmer and you went no till, it failed. And if you're a wheat fallow farmer and you went no till, it failed. The guys that are successful at it and making it work are running very diversified cropping rotations. I wouldn't even call it a rotation. I don't like that. I think you got to keep your options open more than that to where if a field needs something for some reason you need the diverse you need the flexibility to make that decision. So I think I called it a full flex rotation or an adaptive rotation. I think that's a what but it's a hard thing to get through your head that you know next year you may not be planting this crop even though you've been planted on it.

35:00 You know there was days I would go out to plant stuff and I literally didn't know what field I was going to be in that day. We would make the decision as we went. And also wasn't afraid to pull the plug on a field that morning. If we'd seen something we didn't like, weed pressure, a lot of it was residue based. If there was issues with residue that we didn't like, we would switch gears and go a different direction that morning. And and you know, I think having that flexibility is key to making that all work.

35:32 Yeah, being flexible certainly on all these principles is very important. So farmers, you know, I and it goes back to, you know, no till. We talked a little bit about how some people are so locked into that it's almost becomes a religion to them. But we need to be pragmatic, which means we need to do what works and not dogmatic, which means we're always doing the same thing, you know, regardless of the situation. So, Zach, over to you about keeping living roots in the ground. Brian kind of brought up, you know, the use of perennials. You work with quite a few customers who have converted some ground to perennials who are thinking about doing that. Maybe talk a little bit about, you know, how that can fit into this system and why that is such a powerful soil building tool.

36:19 Yeah, perennials are oftentimes an overlooked part of a rotation. Brian mentioned, you know, short-term perennials. I think that's a great plan and play. We've done some of that ourselves, especially on some of this ground that, you know, it's pretty marginal stuff to begin with if I'm being real honest. And there's it's so broke up by perennial grasses anyways. Like seems like that was probably what it was to get started and somebody had a couple good years and tore it out. And I think it's a huge benefit to it. You know, you can build a lot of soil if you plant and manage a perennial really well for a few years. And you can take it back into production if you want to at that point and have quite a bit better than you already started. And it just gives you a lot more diversity of root systems if nothing else into those into those cropping systems.

37:16 I also agree with Scott a whole bunch like you need to look at diversity of your cropping systems. People say, you know, you can't grow a diverse cover crop mix because you're doing corn and soybeans every year. Well, I'm sorry, but that's exactly why you can't grow a diverse cover crop because you're you're closing yourself into such

43:21 It depends on the situation, but any chance we get, we're trying to put some more biology in there and then feeding it with compost or whatever. So probably compost would be a pretty good backbone of what we've done in that whole process. The same thing could be with guys that are spreading manure. I would say it's way better to at least condition your manure as opposed to spreading raw because that can create some issues with not only what it does to your organic matter, just breaking that down, but also you could have some weed issues, weed seeds from the manure.

44:05 Yeah, we've definitely seen that in the past. Scott, what are you seeing out in the country? What did you do? Maybe talk a little bit more about your farming in Colorado. You ended up not growing any of the same crops that you started with. Maybe talk a little bit about how you diversified the operation and why.

44:25 Well, again, I want to tell you it was for soil health principles. It wasn't all financially driven decisions. You know, we just wanted more production out of the same acres. But yeah, the guys mentioned the winter stockpile grazing. That is so super easy. I also challenge people. I contend it's a lot like growing rye. There's a big difference between planting a diverse warm season mix and taking it off for forage in September and removing all that carbon and kind of killing the plant so to speak versus letting it go to full maturity or closer to maturity, letting the frost take it out. There's a different effect on the soil. Even though it's all the same plants, it's going to have a different effect on the soil.

45:09 That was the last thing we were implementing and one of the easiest things to implement and I wish we'd done it sooner. We should have listened to Gabe Brown about five or six years sooner and got to doing it because it was kind of a game changer and it wasn't necessarily as much on the crop fields as what it was allowing us to do to some of the native rangelands there that we could graze in the summer, we could graze in the winter with the diverse mixes and that was pulling the cattle off of the native rangelands and so we were kind of getting a two for one. We were getting the improvement in the crop fields, but we were also allowing our native grasses, and I again I shouldn't even use that term, our survivor grasses, they were what had survived a hundred years of mismanagement, letting our survivor grasses recover and it was crazy how fast it was changing things.

46:08 In a wetter environment like I'm in in northeast Nebraska, you could have the same effect. The other thing we don't talk enough about is the diversity in our animals. Lots of talk about cattle. Zach has goats. I'm a little bit jealous even though I don't want them because they have a place and you know we need that diversity in the livestock. I'm all excited because we got a bunch of turkeys and we actually seen our first prairie chicken on our place this last week and we're getting ready to get overran by grasshoppers and it's like man if I had a thousand chickens out there they'd be going to town right now. So we need that diversity in the livestock component just as much as we need it in our cropping systems.

46:59 And again, it can get that all working together. And then it even ties into how diversity in your annual cropping system could affect your perennial if you have a mixed operation, can affect your perennial systems too. And it goes back to if you look at mother nature, there is no monocropping in mother nature and usually if it is, it's not a good situation.

47:30 Yeah, that's a great point. You know, as we try to emulate God's creation through these principles, there's none that are probably more closely related to that than maximizing biodiversity because that's just what you see in natural systems and it's what you do not see in most farming systems. So Scott, you were mentioning livestock. Let's roll into this fifth principle of the proper integration of livestock and how that can be, doesn't always be but how it can be really beneficial to soil health and building the soil back. How have you seen that play out? You know, when growing up and even the majority of my farming career, livestock on the crop land was taboo for us. I mean it just did not happen. We were convinced again that the residue was too important. Well, we were looking at it from an annual cropping system, not from our previous knowledge of taking it with a swather.

48:34 I would contend the improper integration of livestock includes hay and chopping of silage. It's kind of all tied together when the virtual fence collars and I know it's something relatively new, but I'm convinced it's the autosteer technology of the livestock world. If

48:58 You don't integrate it in the next couple of years, you're going to get left behind. And just so people know, you've had it for what? A couple of weeks. A couple of weeks.

49:09 And I cannot stress enough the possibilities. I actually text one of our best growers here just a couple of hours ago because I had a random thought going through my head and before it got replaced by another random thought, I wanted somebody to know it. I text him and he grows really good corn in northeast Nebraska and I said, 'We need to figure out how to graze cattle on standing corn in the winter with virtual fence and take the harvest expense out of the equation.' That there's those kinds of possibilities are kind of mind-boggling really when you stop and think about it.

49:51 The world of the virtual fence stuff, what's coming and what it's going to allow us to do, I really don't believe we fully grasp the possibilities of what it's going to do to the livestock industry. And again, it will tie directly into the cropping industry because livestock make a great rescue tool. I mean, I'd like to see it become the replacement for crop insurance. If you could rescue stuff with livestock, it would really change how you could do things. And I get it. I grew up not enjoying the livestock, but again, I was doing it in the conventional setting with feed lots and having to feed them and trying to make them calve at the worst time of the year and all the stuff you shouldn't do. And having changed that, it's now the only thing Becky and I have is a livestock operation. And it's pretty relaxing now doing it in a different way.

50:47 Yeah, great points. And I agree the virtual fencing is going to be a game-changer and it's going to allow people who have spent the last 30 years taking fences out. It's going to allow them to do that proper integration with minimal fencing inputs, which is very exciting. It makes things like that possible. Brian, we recently got back into cattle. Maybe talk a little bit about why we did that and what you're hoping to see from our livestock integration.

51:19 Yeah, I would say, well, one, you know, we found somebody that was willing to partner with us to do a lot of the day-to-day work. You know, we wanted to be able to diversify in this area, wanted to be able to show what we could do with cover crops. And so we currently have about a herd of roughly 40 pair, spring pair. We got a few fall pairs, but we have zero perennial grass. And so they're all running on grazing cash crop, grazing row crop ground, I'll call it. We will probably put in some perennial mixes here this fall. But I think one of the big things that led me to really wanting to push this harder is the fact that collars are actually going to be here. I mean, they've been talking about collars for 10 years, but you know, it was always, well, maybe next year, maybe next year. Well, that next year is finally here. So I'm excited to see that. You know, obviously perimeter fence is a big issue because right now we're putting up wire and taking it down, moving it around and all that. Well, with collars, you're still going to need some kind of perimeter fence. And what I would like to see, you know, EQUIP do instead of, and Zach could speak to this, you know, they're doing all these programs, cost share programs, but it's all cross fencing. Well, that's all extinct now. And I wish they would pay for perimeter fence whether you have a cow or not. You know, if you want to put perimeter fence, you put it in, you show the receipts and you show that it's done. And that's how we're going to get livestock back on crop ground is we got to get perimeter fence back in these fields. Then whether you own the cattle or somebody else owns it and they run collars, you know, but without that perimeter fence, somebody's going to have to do that. And if they could help capture that, I think that'd go a long way. So I don't know. Maybe we'll have to, I think I mentioned that to Jimmy once. We'll have to continue to do that, that we need the perimeter fence, not the cross fencing.

53:35 Yeah, great point, Zach. It's already been mentioned that you have goats and lots of experience with some of the small ruminants as well as cattle. How have you seen livestock integration be a benefit to your farm?

53:51 Yeah, like we mentioned, you know, it can change that crop ground fast, but one thing that often times gets overlooked and Scott mentioned it earlier about the cedar trees and the perennials. What we have seen is the decrease of productive perennial pastures in our areas because of woody encroachments, invasives, whatever it might be. And we're talking, you know, when you get 40 inches of rain a year and you know, March to end of October growing degree days, like that's a long time for stuff to grow.

54:31 To grow and we can get a lot of trees to grow pretty fast. And even just driving around in my lifetime, which is definitely less than a lot of producers on the landscape, but I can see stuff changing and there gets to be a point where they've started pulling stuff out of pastures or that they're it's just decreased the stocking rate so much. Well, that doesn't necessarily mean you have good healthy soil. And one of the ways we use our goats is to go in and let's just call it remediate some of these properties. And that's the best way for it because you can have, you know, tractors, chainsaws, whatever. And sometimes it takes that too, but nothing passes through a goat better than a bunch of trees and weeds.

55:19 And it makes a huge difference into your system on what's growing. Like we mentioned earlier, the diversity of weeds. Why is it growing there? Well, you can use livestock to do this, but you have to do it in a way that you're actually managing the livestock correctly. Like, it's not the 'Oh, I'm going to turn them out here. They're going to stay here the whole year. I'll feed them some hay this winter and move on down the road.' Like, that's not how you get it done. And I don't have the goat fence collars yet. Significant hurdles for small ruminance is the cost. I mean, they basically cost the same as the animal. But you know, there's got to be some type of economic threshold to where it does make sense. And I know a labor threshold that makes sense just from this side of it.

56:19 But we still like to graze, you know, perennials. We like to graze our annuals. It gives us an opportunity to plant those diverse cover crop mixes and it just like is this multiple layers of biodiversity on that landscape. And we have cattle too like so it's a multi-faceted grazing opportunity.

56:42 Yeah, very important tool to be integrated properly and more and more people I think are looking at it as a tool. So as we move into the last principle here and not one of the original five but added later on Ray Archeletta the team there understanding a I think really did a good thing when they recognized the importance of context. Context, not necessarily being one of the agronomic or biological principles, but really the one that allows us to talk to people in any state in any environment and say 'These will work for you if you understand your context.' And you know, that's why that is so important because the principles are going to work, but the practices that you use to get the principles onto the ground all have to do with your context. And so, Zach, we'll start with you. You work with growers all across the country.

57:45 You know, the customers of ours in all shapes, sizes, climates, and everything else. How have you seen context be such an important soil health principle? Yeah. And this gives a unique perspective too from like the seed buying side of the industry. So we work with a grower in South Florida just north of the Everglades which north of the that's still south. And what they deal with and have for growing season and soil climate conditions. I mean, it's not even a comparable situation to even Bladen, Nebraska. And the context of the situation, it all revolves around your goals. And I'm a big advocate of you can make anything work as long as you can tweak it enough to where it fits into what you're trying to achieve.

58:45 You know, probably not going to go out there and plant a hairy veg for a seed crop in South Florida, but you can use different types of cover crops and build your soil still to maintain like there's a lot of pepper growers down there and grow really healthy soil for those peppers or even fight some of those orange tree problems. But at the same time, like you talk to that guy, the very next person could be a grower from northwest Nebraska and they're dry land and you know it gets to minus 20 degrees for three weeks in the winter time. And it just it's all about the modification to your goals. Like I said, we can't copy and paste stuff, but there is a way to make it work everywhere. Everywhere as long as you're willing to put a little effort into getting it where you need to be.

59:48 Yeah, I like that. It definitely takes the effort and you definitely can make it work. Scott, you again work with growers across multiple states. You have the benefit of having farmed in two vastly different environments and climates. So, you've lived the context. Why do you see it being so important for not just yourself, but everyone? Yeah, I agree. It was nice. I like that it got added. I like that more people talk about it. The way I explain it is it's the only one that you don't have to apply, but it's the most important to understand and you probably will have to change.

1:00:30 Your view of your context. Again, if you get stuck in it that you know, all I'm going to be is a cotton farmer in North Texas, well, the other ones are going to struggle to be implemented. The other principles. You'll have to you got you have to understand it, but you're probably going to have to change it.

1:00:57 I don't know if I have a whole lot else to say about it other than that because I think Becky and I have done it. That's literally what we've done. We've changed our context. We still try to understand it, but again, you don't necessarily apply it like you have to the other principles. All the other ones, you've got to apply those. This one, you just got to understand it and be able to change it.

1:01:20 Yeah. And it really becomes a filter through which all these other principles are going to be implemented as well. So, I like that. Brian, we'll kind of let you have the last word in the conversation here. Where how do you see context playing such an important role in these soil health principles?

1:01:40 Yeah, as I'm sitting here thinking about it, you know, I don't have the understanding of context of different environments. Basically except for when I was in school for 18 months, you know, I've only lived a mile away from, you know, where we grew up, which is where you live right now. But I'm going to hit it as the context of, you know, who's your who owns the land? You know, do you own the land? Do landlords own the land? What's their feelings? Are they willing to invest in this or do they think it's just garbage? You know, that everything needs to be tilled. And you know, there's there's a you got to decide. Do you want to continue to do that? Invest that, you know, if it's not really doing what you think it is or you don't have control long term. I think there's context of what's your risk ability, you know, to sleep at night, you know, how much are you willing to risk and do trying things that may or may not work. What's your context of your bank situation? You know, you know, does do you have to do certain things? You know, most people take out crop insurance because the banks ask them to if they take a loan out. So, there context there, you know, of of of that, you know, and so you you have to do you can't just say, 'Oh, I'm going to do all these things regardless, you know, you have to do it within your ability to be able to farm or ranch, you know, another year.' And sometimes, you know, sometimes we just don't know. And sometimes you got to take that risk. You know, Gabe talks all the time, he didn't have a choice. And that was probably true. Most people have choices. You know, it's just a matter of understanding those choices and trying to make the best ones, you know, and then learn from your mistakes. I always I tell all our guys, we always learn more from our mistakes than we do our successes. And at the end of the day, you know, that's where we're at. When I said, you know, in 1989 is when I first tried no till, you know, it was a failure. I tried no till and wheat. I think it was wheat into wheat, you know, I was like, you know, we tried putting fertilizer on with a four-wheeler and a little sprayer because that's what they did type of thing, you know, and it was the disaster. I think my wheat made like 18 bushels or something. So, we've come a long ways, but there again, you know, it's just it's a matter of trying it, learning, trying something new, and keep going.

1:04:19 Yeah, I like it. So, there you have it. You know this the six principles of soil health they are going to work but you have to understand that context and filter these principles through that in order to find the practices that are going to work on your operation and your context is going to change from year to year. You cannot get locked into I'm in this context. You know, like Scott said, you know, you just you have to be able to change that mindset. Even if your environment, your conditions don't necessarily change. The weather's going to be different every year. Your approach to farming needs to be different enough to match that. So, thanks everybody for listening in and watching this little episode on principles. 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.