How to Restore Degraded Soil: Dale Strickler's Complete System

0:04 Okay, restoring our soil. Before you undergo any endeavor, you want to ask yourself what are you wanting to do, what are the problems, why are you doing it, and what problems are you trying to solve? And so that's what I'm going to do here. If you're going to restore soil, I want first of all the first course question you want to ask is why are you, what's wrong with our soil? Well, several things are wrong. A world is covered in dysfunctional soil, soil it doesn't work right. Rain doesn't go in it, roots don't grow in it, and nutrients aren't available. And if you're a farmer, dysfunctional soils cost you a lot of money.

1:07 The obvious problem on the farm level with dysfunctional soil is that you don't make any money. You run a risk of bankruptcy and this is your livelihood, not only your livelihood but also your legacy that's something you hope to pass down to your family in the future. And so when soils don't work, at the farm it's quite catastrophic. And because the immediate impact of dysfunctional soil is felt by the farmer, we've often dismissed dysfunctional soil as a problem solely affecting farmers and that couldn't be further from the truth.

1:51 In fact, my friend Gail Fuller's fond of saying soil is the answer. What's the question? And if the question is what's the cause of most of the world's problems throughout history, I think you could say with all seriousness that most of the problems experienced by the human race throughout history can be traced to dysfunctional soil. And I'm not exaggerating. If you think about it, flooding is caused by dysfunctional soil, famine caused by dysfunctional soil, pestilence diseases caused by dysfunctional soil, and warfare caused by dysfunctional soil. And in my book I talk about all of these. Blood, famine, pestilence, and warfare can all be traced to soil misuse and social ills, social and biological ills caused by dysfunctional soil.

2:58 And now we're faced with another one and that's the specter of climate change. Now it doesn't matter if you believe climate change is real or if you think that humans are the cause of it. The fact is that the solution, the absolute best solution for preventing climate change, is restoring our soil. And that is a good thing to do regardless of whether climate change is real or whether humans are causing it. The same things that restore our soil eliminate climate risk and those same exact actions make our farms more money and make this planet better. And so I'm going to go through those processes, but first thing I want to do, I want to talk about why is our soil in such bad shape? What happened? How did we get here?

4:03 And there are two overriding practices and I'll explain some of each of these why they're so bad and they have been practices that have been ingrained into our agriculture systems for centuries. And the first one is tillage. Tillage is horribly destructive. Soil destroys soil structure, causes erosion. Tillage is the primary driver of soil dysfunction. It's been a part of agriculture for seven thousand or more years. The other major problem or a driver of poor soil is the practice of fallow, just letting land sit idle and not grow anything. We used to think that this allowed soil to rest, store up moisture, allowed it to build up fertility and nothing could be further from true. Fallow doesn't allow soil to rest. Fallow allows soil to starve and I'll explain that process.

5:08 So if we're going to restore soil, what's our goal? What are we trying to get to? What kind of soil would be ideal? What kind of soil are we striving for? What would it do? And it would do these things. It would absorb rainfall. We want it to hold moisture for a long period of time. We want roots to be able to grow into it very deeply. And we want it to supply mineral nutrients when the plant needs it in the quantities that the plant needs.

5:44 So how do we change the soil we have into the soil we want? Now when I went to college, I was told a couple things and I was told several things actually. I went to college for seven years so I was told a lot of things. But when it came to soil, making soil better, the approach that we used for most of the last one hundred and some years is that we need to fix soil with fertilizer. Now this is a picture from 1881. I'm not sure if you can tell what that man is standing on what that pile consists of, but I included this little article from my hometown newspaper and the gentleman whose name is highlighted in blue there, Dan Yoakam, my great great grandfather, he was a bone collector. He went down into Oklahoma where the bison were slaughtered, collected bones, put them on a rail car, shipped them back to Colony, Kansas where they were ground up and used as fertilizer. That's a lot of work to get fertilizer.

7:10 And our soils needed fertilizer applied to them or they didn't grow anything. And of course once we had commercial fertilizer, when they found out you could find rock phosphate, treat it with acid, and pull anhydrous ammonia out.

7:24 Of the air we found out fertilization was easy, but it didn't really make soil better. It supplied minerals, but it didn't make the soil more productive. We got better yields, but when it didn't rain crops still died. The soil was more chemically fertile, but it really wasn't inherently more productive. It didn't soak in rain any better after you applied fertilizer.

8:01 What actually makes a soil better? You say here's poor soil, here's better soil. What is the characteristic between the two that makes it better? And the answer to that is organic matter, carbon. Organic matter is composed primarily of carbon. So how do you get more carbon into the soil? How do you get more organic matter in the soil?

8:31 In my agronomy courses I said I just pulled a couple of things in college when I took courses in agronomy, broad-scale agriculture. They said well you can't increase your soil organic matter. It takes thousands of years to build soil, so no point in even trying. It's always going to be going down. The best you can do is to maintain it, and it's going to slowly degrade over time.

9:01 That's depressing. What? Think about that. That's a heck of a life view, isn't it? That makes you optimistic for the future? The best you can do is maybe maintain it and it's going to go down anyhow? That sounds to me like civilization is at some point doomed. And you read things like that. United Nations report says we have 60 years worth of farming before all our soils are so dysfunctional we can no longer raise food on this planet. That's a little ominous.

9:39 Now when I took horticulture classes or read horticulture books, gardening books, they were a lot more optimistic. They said oh this is easy. All you got to do is apply a whole bunch of compost and you can increase your soil organic matter easy. Okay, so where do I get compost? Well, you just gather up a whole bunch of lawn clippings and leaf drop and leaves that you raked up. Let them rot and you put them on your garden.

10:12 Okay, so where do I get the lawn clippings? Well, you go over there and get them and you put them in this pile and you make rot. You carry it over the field. It says so okay, so how am I increasing organic matter here? I'm not really increasing it. I'm just moving. I'm moving it from the lawn and below the tree to my garden. I'm just transferring. And during this transfer, it takes. Unless I want to make a lot of trips with carrying this on my back, I'm probably burning fossil fuel to do it.

10:52 If we're to fix the soil on the entire planet, you know that one acre garden may have taken 10 acres of lawn clippings to make the compost to enrich the earth. There are no 10 other earths where we can rob the organic matter from those planets to fix this planet. Ultimately, if we're going to fix the soils on this planet, we need to figure out how to do it on each and every acre without burning fossil fuel to move compost or to move manure around. Solutions have to be developed using sunlight and rainfall on each and every acre.

11:41 So how do we do that? I think that to illustrate that, I want to show you this picture. This is redwoods, northern California. Visited these and you think man, here are 300-foot-tall trees. 300-foot-tall trees. If you were to clip, dry away and analyze the nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, sulfur, iron, zinc, manganese, etc. content in a 300-foot thick layer of vegetation, what's the nutrient content? And this soil, believe me, is not anything special. It's granite holders.

12:44 How can you grow a 300-foot thick? You cut these trees down. If you put a football field superimposed on one of these trees, it would stretch from goal post to goal post and the trunk diameter would be thicker, would be taller. When that tree is laying flat, the trunk diameter is taller than the goal post. These are big trees. Think of the nutrients contained in that biomass. Where did it come from? Who applied the fertilizer? How come on our crop fields, our crop fields you don't apply fertilizer, corn gets three feet tall, turns yellow and dies?

13:35 How come in this natural ecosystem we can produce 300-foot vegetation without fertilizer? So obviously there's something going on in a natural ecosystem that is not happening in an agriculture ecosystem. Let's take a look at the differences and try to develop a system of agriculture that mimics a natural ecosystem for providing fertility and all these sorts of things. So what are the differences?

14:08 Well, in a natural ecosystem you got roots that live the entire year for several years. You get long photosynthesis. There's no tillage. Soil surface is always covered and there is a diversity of vegetation. Not just one plant species, many plant species in multiple layers. And to compare that with our agricultural ecosystems, we have fruits that live a few months out here. Especially if you look at a corn-soybean rotation, photosynthesis only occurs for a few months out of here.

14:50 Of the world's cropland is no-till. That means 70 percent still killed. I think that's actually U.S. figures. I think worldwide it's even lower adoption of no-till. Soil surface is bare for much of the year and it's monocultures, one species of plant growing at a time.

15:15 Paul Isaacs, University of Nebraska is real fond of saying that the difference between the surface of the moon and the surface of earth—they both have the same geology, same minerals, the same rocks on both bodies. The difference between the surface of the earth and the surface of the moon is biology. Biology has the ability to turn rock particles into soil. You can turn rocks into soil. Here's a picture of a lichen. Lichen is sort of like a little ecosystem in and of itself. Lichen is not one organism, it's actually a symbiotic relationship between a plant, moss, and fungi. And the plant supplies root exudates, sugar, from photosynthesis to feed the fungi, and that fungus dissolves rock and turns it into soil that the moss can extract nutrients from.

16:32 What a cool deal. You get these root exudates supplied by photosynthesis so sunlight, water, broken down photosynthesis and carbon dioxide converted into liquid sugar that feeds mycorrhizal fungi. Mycorrhizal fungi send out these threads to bring water and nutrients back to the plant. And at the same time the plant is feeding the mycorrhizal fungi, the mycorrhizal fungi respond to this generosity by feeding a whole host of microbes that cover their surfaces. And the mycorrhizal fungi also exude a compound called glomalin that is the most powerful soil aggregating agent we know, and we'll revisit that. But the end result is that you get—when things work right—you get this rhizo sheet on these roots, this intense area of biological activity in the rhizosphere immediately surrounding the root system.

17:51 And so when this all happens like it should, like happens in natural ecosystems, fertilizer can become unnecessary. Irrigation can become unnecessary. You have plants growing with minimal need for human intervention. That doesn't mean it's easy. It's not as easy as just going without fertilizer. It doesn't happen that easy. Doesn't mean just shut off the irrigation system or that you don't need rainfall. But when you mimic these natural systems, everything starts to work better. And I've got an entire chapter on that topic. And it's a long, slow process but it's one worth pursuing.

18:54 So your goal as a soil manager—I want to set some goals here—should be if you want to create a truly functional soil, here's what you want to do. First of all you want to maintain good soil oxygen levels so we'll talk about how you do that. You want to capture rainfall, talk about how you do that. Maximize photosynthesis, how you do that, and increase soil biology. If you do these things, your soil will reward you with productivity at levels you're not accustomed to, a much lower level of required inputs in your customers, more production at less cost, and more societal benefit.

19:44 Okay, so oxygen. First of all, you look at this root system on the soil. See how shallow that is, how it just flattens out? And there's no root. So what stopped these roots? Oh, I hit the hard pan. Well, I got news for you: that hard pan doesn't stop roots because it's hard. Stops roots because it is a barrier to the penetration of oxygen. And oxygen—roots need at least 10 percent oxygen in the soil atmosphere. Now above ground, the atmosphere above us is 21 percent oxygen. So when more than half the oxygen is used up in soil atmosphere, roots can't grow any further.

20:44 So this hard pan doesn't stop roots because it's hard. I'm sure you've all walked down a city sidewalk and seen where roots have broken concrete sidewalks, probably seen where roots have broken asphalt. If they can break concrete and asphalt, this hard pan is not a mechanical barrier. It's an oxygen barrier. There's not enough pore space to allow oxygen to diffuse into it.

21:15 So what do you do about it? Well, we've gone to some great lengths over time to try to loosen soil. I've got a story about one of my great-great grandfathers experimented with dynamite. In fact, the governor of Kansas at the time came and visited his farm and explored the use of dynamite in loosening the heavy clay soils and increasing soil productivity. I can tell you dynamite isn't the route to go if you want to.

21:56 Lose in soil but it's a lot of fun to try. My father when I was about 13 years old decided he was going to build a corral in a rocky pasture, an area where it's just solid rock, no topsoil at all, just solid limestone layer.

22:21 We thought well this would be great because we'll be able to work cattle with rain or shine, you don't have to worry about it being too muddy or cattle. The problem is it's really hard to dig post holes to build your corral in solid rock, so dad got some, I think he bribed a quarry foreman with some Jack Daniels and got a hold of some dynamite.

22:51 We stuck dynamite down a little hole we dug and lit the fuse and ran back to the pickup about two seconds. There's the loudest noise I've ever heard, there's this geyser of rock shooting straight up in the air. And then you know we were probably 100 yards away from that and then a little bit, these fist-sized rocks start dropping on the pickup.

23:18 My eyes were this big and I looked over at my dad and he goes, 'That worked pretty well, let's do another.' And so I in that moment I looked down and I said I've got the coolest dad ever. But dynamite's not the way to lose the soil. Number one, we can't afford it. Number two is dangerous. Three, it's illegal. Number four, just doesn't work very well.

23:45 What does work is the creation of macropores. Macro pores are these big vertical channels within the soil that allow for passage like a snorkel passage of air down into the soil.

24:09 What creates these macropores? Now first of all let's look at, we used to have macropores and naturally ecosystems have macropores. Why do we no longer have macropores? Well, it's because of tillage. These are two soil cores taken basically on either side of a fence line. On one side of the fence was made of pasture, the other side of the fence was tilled properly or historically tilled, currently in no-till but had been tilled for well over 100 years.

24:40 And this core, these two little round circles here, these little coin-looking things here. This one is from three foot down in the native pasture and you'll notice it is red in color. Red indicates that this is oxidized. The iron compounds in the soil will essentially rust, become oxidized and turn red when they're exposed to oxygen for a long period of time.

25:13 This one over here which came from the cropland is gray. And that's an indication that there's a lack of oxygen for a long period. Tillage shut off those macropores, severed them. It's kind of like, you know, there is a big difference when you're snorkeling whether your snorkel is an inch below or an inch above the water surface. You have to have connection on your macropores, continuous connection to the surface in order for them to be affected. Tillage cuts them off.

25:50 Another important thing to realize about oxygen in the soil in the growing season, the vast majority have been told about 98 percent of the oxygen use in the soil is by microbes and plant roots get very small amount of the oxygen that's in that soil. So during the summer, plant roots are having to compete against microbes for oxygen.

26:26 But when soil temps drop below 50 degrees Fahrenheit, microbes become inactive. So once they're inactive, all of a sudden there's a lot of oxygen in the soil. So once you know that, once you understand that, you can make use of it.

26:47 That's why in a corn soybean rotation, your ground tends to get hard, hard pans tend to solidify. In no-till corn soybeans you will tend to get a hard pan because you only are growing summer crops in that rotation that are having to fight against microbes for soil oxygen. They will not grow into that hard pan and they won't loosen it. It's only when you get crops that have root systems within your rotation, crops that have root systems that grow when the soil temperature is below about 50 degrees, to get that hard pan broken up.

27:31 You don't deal with dynamite, you don't do it with the subsoil, you do it with roots that grow actively when the soil temperature below 50 degrees. I'll show you an example of what happens when you do that.

27:46 So if you plant a winter cover crop, this is one of my favorite sets of pictures here. When you plant a winter cover crop, this is two sets of pictures. One on the left over here is these were taken with a camera that was inserted inside a plexiglass tube. And this picture on the left, this white streak through here is a canola root, it's underground part of a cover crop mix that was terminated without tillage, so it's chemically terminated and no-till planted soybeans into this cover crop.

28:24 And this picture on the right taken from the exact same spot, this dark streak is a soybean root three months later. Notice that soybean root used that canola root channel as a pilot hole. The canola go through the hard pan because it's a cool season crop growing with soil temperatures above 50 degrees.

28:55 Drills uses that enhanced oxygen content, poke a hole through the hard bin and make it easier for the soybean crop that follows. Now canola root is about the size of Indiana. And I want you to imagine the hole in the hard pan you can get when you use one of these big nitro radishes.

29:23 The tillage radish, nitro radish, is probably the plant that did more to advance cover crops than any other single plant. I think we all escaped off a big debt of gratitude for developing the killer trash. But it's not the end-all be-all of compaction break because yes it does create that big macro. But the next thing you have to do, in order, once you build the highways throughout the interstates, highways, now you need the county roads, county blacktops, and dirt ribs to diffuse oxygen into pores and crevices to nourish the entire soil ecosystem.

30:17 And you do that by creating aggregates. And you create aggregates number one, you have to have the fine fibrous roots in combination of big temperatures. This is a photo that Andrea Russell sent to us, and this is where a radish root was and at winter killed and rotted away. And these fine fibrous roots you see here creating like a manifold conduits to conduct oxygen in between all these soil particles. This is annual rye grass roots. So diversity is important. Yes the radish roots are great, but if all you do is grow radishes you're going to get a very temporary improvement soil stretch, very temporary. Need the full package, the diversity of cover crops and not just the plants.

31:16 In addition, I talked about the glomelin secreted by mycorrhizal fungi. This oat plant over here to the left, see how much darker and better aggregated that soil is? Malin is the most powerful soil aggregating agent found in nature. This oak plant over here was not inoculated mycorrhizal fungi. You notice how the soil just fell away like powder because it was powder. Look at the darker, more better aggregated structure you have like resin. So my garage fungi not only improves your grout tolerance, improves your nutrient uptake, also makes your soil better. It is an essential part of soil improvement.

32:08 Now the next task is to capture rainfall. And it doesn't matter where you live. I have a customer that calls me is from Georgia and all he does is complain about how dry it is in Georgia. I ask him what's your annual rainfall? He says 60 inches. So that's more than double ours. And he said well, we don't get it when we need it. Well that might be true, but it doesn't matter where you farm or how much rain you get, it never seems to be enough when you need it. And every farmer I talk to farms in the driest most inhospitable place to farm on earth. Well, I'm going to call BS on that because I'm going to tell you a story from what may be one of the driest most inhospitable places on earth. And that is elevated Saudi Arabia, two and a half inches annual rainfall, 120 degrees or more in the summer.

33:13 And a major industry here. Now if you ask a million farmers what do you do in this situation? What are you going to grow? What do you, what would you do in this situation? I'd guess 999,999 say move. What else can you do? What can you do in this area? You have no soil, you got steep slopes, no rainfall. What do you do? Well, I'll show you what they did. First of all, the industry in this area is sheep. There they raise sheep. They milk the sheep. They turn it into really a famous cheese. This is not far from Mecca so they sell this cheese to the travelers coming back.

34:08 And the problem is their number one problem. You ask these farmers what your money problem is? It's going to floria, it's flooding. They lose their livestock to flooding just washes them away because when it does rain, see these steep slopes and no soil, water goes rushing down the hills and accumulates in these little valleys here called bodies, these little dry stream valleys because that's the only place there's anything green to eat. That's where all the livestock are. When it rains they get washed away.

34:45 So what would you do? Well, here's what they did. First thing they did is all these little wadi streams, these little dry streams, they constructed these rock dams across these streams so that when rain water comes washing down it is slowed and then the overflow is channeled out of the streams and onto the uplands with these contour terraces here. See this little dry stream here and these wings that come out of there. This is on the upslope but it's this here is slightly downhill from this. So it's, you know, over here is uphill from here but it's downhill from here. So the water is channeled out of the stream onto the uplands. They start at the top of the slope. So they took the resource they had: rocks, made use of it. And this is one year after.

35:57 Salem Grounds. This is eight years after 'How Cool Is This.' Here's the fall: two and a half inches annual rainfall. Look at that grass. Now they've got some, they've got the basis for an industry. They got the basis for prosperity. Think how many more sheep this can carry reliably. The picture I showed you eight years previously, you want to learn more about this? This is a truly inspiring story. This will give you faith in the future of humanity on this planet. Go to YouTube, look up the story of Al Beta. It is a wonderful story.

36:40 And that's not the only example where people have overcome amazing odds. Now here is Olín Teitamo. This is in Peru. This is hundreds and hundreds of years old, maybe more than a thousand years old. This predates the Incas, in fact. And this is 70-plus slopes. They found a way to farm on 70-plus slopes, and again it was stopping water running that was paramount. Stop the runoff, and they've got diversion ditches that funnel water down from each of these little terraces, and the overflow goes down to the next terrace. And they were growing, when this was first discovered by people of European descent, they found they were growing 80, 80 different species of crops on these, and as many as 80 different varieties of potatoes, 70-some different varieties of corn, tomatoes including perennial tomatoes. The plant diversity is equally as amazing as the engineering ingenuity that it took to build these.

38:06 This is rice terraces in the Philippines. How impressive is this? Look at these slopes. What is that, 30, 40 slope? And they're growing something that requires perfectly level conditions, paddy rice, on these slopes. You say, 'Well, that's a way of doing things.' When I describe Southeast Kansas where I live now, I said, 'Well, I live in a desert where it floods all the time.' It seems like we always have either too much—we're begging for rain, praying for rain—and then we're praying for it to stop raining. It seems like there's no in-between. What do you do when you have too much rain? How do you have flood-proof crops?

38:59 Well, this is a schematic, artist rendition of the Chinampas of ancient Mexico. This is from around Mexico City, went with big wetlands around there. And they have floating farms. They can make these bundles of reeds and tie them together, and then dredge mud—all the fertile muck out of the bottom of the lake there—and put it on top of the reeds and use that as a platform to farm on. They anchor it with these stakes so it doesn't float away, but it rises up and down with the lake level so they never lose their crop to flooding. They're in an obvious floodplain. How ingenious is this? This is self-fertilizing, self-irrigating, and you harvest it with canoes, and you can dangle a little fishing line out so you can be fishing and farming at the same time.

40:00 And when I was writing my book, one of the things that amazed me is how independent of one another ancient people discovered very similar ways of dealing with similar sets of circumstances because this is in southern, close to Central America—technically still North America but southern Mexico. This is in Iraq. This is the Marsh Arabs along the where the Tigris and Euphrates river come together. And they're doing the same thing: bundles of reeds, and they farm and live. Their houses don't have flood damage to their houses. Their houses float. They go up and down with the floods. So does their farms. And they construct both farm and house out of bundles of reeds. And in Myanmar—what we used to call Burma—this is a floating tomato farm. And they're doing the same thing: self-irrigating, self-fertilized.

41:22 And what if you're fluctuating between too much rain and too little rain? This is something that Mel Landers sent me. This is called the Indigenous American raised bed farming system. So what happens when you fluctuate between too much and too little water? Here's what you do: you create these raised beds and you dig out these little holes here. When water runs off, you get too much rain, it runs off and it gets into holes here where it's stored. Then when you get too dry later, you've got that water. Instead of running off, it's stored for use later. And to keep water infiltrating to the degree you need, keep it from running off and keep it from evaporating, you mulch everything. And then you plant these tree crops, these perennials on these beds. And while they're little and developing, you plant annual crops around them. And when everything's all together, you get an extremely productive ecosystem. Say, 'Wow, this is really cool. Why aren't we doing this now? Why, why aren't we?' There's an obvious answer.

42:43 And that answer is that if you were to duplicate any of those efforts, it would take a lot of money. You know that those things are quite practical for subsistence farming but probably not practical in this era for commercial fun. Yeah, I don't know I could never monetize those practices.

43:14 However, we don't need to go to those extremes. I'll give you an example of what we can do if all those systems work because primarily they reduced runoff. They promoted infiltration and reduced rental. So how do you do those things without big expensive? Well this is a rainfall set, a USDA rainfall simulator, something Bud Davis came up with. You put different soil, you cut a little slice of soil from the field, different treatments, put it in these inclined pans and then you measure the runoff.

44:02 And this is what happens after a simulated two-inch rainfall. Look at this tilled soil, look at how much water ran off that soil. Look at the color of that soil. That looks like chocolate milk. This no-till cover crop swell, virtually no runoff and no soil loss. This is where we want to get.

44:32 So you don't need to build stone terraces, you don't need to build floating farms, all this, although that's really neat on practical manner. You no till and you cover up. We can incorporate that into our current agricultural system.

44:53 So most amazing thing about that rainfall simulator damage you've never seen what you need. And when they flip those pans over at the end of the demo, flip them over, the no-till cover crop water has soaked all the way through. How alarming is this? This is the conventional tillage no cover crop. Two inch rain and water did not soak in.

45:28 How long is it before this field is thirsty? What percent of the moisture that fell on this is? What percent is susceptible to evaporation shortly after? That's what leads to tillage and fallow, lead to dysfunctional soils when it comes to water. This picture I took this in western Kansas a couple years ago. This is 10 days after 1.1 inch ring. Just 10 days after.

46:03 Where did this water come from? It's only an inch of rain. Just an inch of rain. This water ran off from all this surrounding area. This is maybe at most two or three percent slope, at most. And you had runoff, powder dry soil, one inch rain and water ran off. And it's sitting here, it's not soaking in.

46:33 Over here now, this obviously they've got wheat planted over here to the right. There's a dust storm blowing in the background that made it hard to even drive down the road. And it's too wet to plant and too dry to sprout. This is soil from that field. It's too dry to sprout weak. In the same field a few feet apart where it's too wet. That is a truly dysfunctional soil.

47:03 So how do you, how do you make it functional again? Well, first thing, stop tillage. Look at this. This is the infiltration rate. Moldboard plow, chisel plow, and no-till. No-till water runs in three times faster. And no-till, stop tillage. That is absolutely essential for restoring soil function. The next thing you do to increase infiltration is have cover, have mulch on that soil.

47:37 This is right across the road from this dysfunctional soil ocean. Right across the room and look at this. You can reach under that straw mulch. This was harvested with a stripper header and chemically followed rather than tilled. And there's better systems than this yet and I'll talk about some of those. But you can squeeze moisture. This is across the road from the previous pictures with powder dry soil that couldn't sprout wheat. Look at this, you can squeeze moisture, you can squeeze that into a ball. Right across the road.

48:19 Look at the numbers. Look at this. The more straw you put on the field, the faster the water is. You need mulch, you need soil cover. If look at what happens when you have soil. This is during a downpour. See the property line here. This guy is growing cotton without cover crops, okay. Right, this growing cover with a mulch.

48:46 You don't have enough mulch. How do you get it? Folks, you grow it. Grow cover crops. This is a photoperiod sensitive sorghum sedan. If you want to grow a lot of mulch.

49:07 Oh wow, how do I plant through that? Well, here's an option. You can use a roller crimper, knock this stuff down and plant right into it. Here's a close-up of that roller crimper. It mashes that stuff down in soil contact and then you get this beautiful mat. This is actually my brother's garden and look at that beautiful map that you can plant into.

49:33 And I should have included some pictures from his garden this summer. It was absolutely amazing. That's a cover crop of rye and some turnips that overwintered and some crimson clover. You can see a little red balloons here. Absolutely beautiful mulch. Didn't have to hardly pull a weed all summer. Beautiful system. This is one of our organic farmers customers.

57:20 Skid rows, twin row of soybeans. This is that field just prior to wheat harvest, how far along the soybeans are. And then this is shortly after we purchased, like a week or 10 days after we first, you're off to full photosynthesis now.

57:42 Think back, here's the previous photo. Think back to the picture of the 90 bushel wheat ready for harvest. No green, no photosynthesis. See, this is almost complete photosynthesis here. This is virtually just a week or so after harvest, you're already using full summer.

58:05 Neat thing about this system is Jason has harvested 90 bushel wheat and 90 bushel soybeans from the same field, same year. And it's all by harvesting, thinking of yourself as a harvester of sunlight, not a grower of wheat or a grower of soybeans, a harvester of sunlight.

58:30 Here's another way to think about harvesting some. This is corn and this is a cover crop that was planted at about B4 stage of the corn. You don't want stuff emerging at the same time as in the corn. Senses the competition, triggers a bunch of hormonal changes, we're just done yield. So you need to have no competition in the immediate vicinity of the corn plant when it emerges. But three, four weeks later, stuff comes up, it's not a big deal.

59:08 This does not hurt corn. All this complex cover crop mix was planted after the corn got a good head start, so it doesn't really compete against the corn. You say, why would you do this? That helps corn really doesn't help. What it does do is it gives you an entire second crop. Now it's not nice wheat, 90 bushel corn, two grain or mine official beans, two grain crops. What it is is it's a grain crop plus a forage crop.

59:38 One of the hardest times to provide quality forage in a grazing system, if you're truly managing grazing and trying to strive for high quality grazing, you are basically at a shortage of feed, quality feed in the fall. This supplies that quality. This is a lot of tons of sunlight stored over the summer that would otherwise go to waste at bare ground in between corn plants. And it's made to provide a massive amount of fall grazing when you really need it.

1:00:16 Here's another way of using something. Why you have to put yourself in the position of having to replant your cover crop every year? Take a chance on establishment. Why not a perennial cover crop? So this is a perennial cover crop of white clover and it had a strip sprayed out into through it.

1:00:38 I've also seen and we actually have a webinar on this topic. Andrew Sutter and Rick Clark have are doing this organically along these same lines. In this particular field, this was not done organically. A strip was sprayed, corn was planted in it. And here's the idea. You know, this is planted once, lives for years. And the this clover suppresses weeds, prevents erosion, and fixes nitrogen.

1:01:18 And once it gets to the point where it might start competing against the corn, this is from Dan to setters and this is a device called a Romo. And essentially it's a long, you know, bunch of hydraulic motors with lawnmower decks. They go in between those corn plants and they chop that vegetation, weeds, clover, blow it to the. All that is blown up against the base of the corn plants, mulch the corn plants. And as that stuff decays, it releases nitrogen while it suppresses wheat.

1:02:06 What a beautiful system. Now that there's a lot of this is not a perfect system. There's a lot of things to figure out. Okay, but what promise, what cleverness. This could be. And of course, the clover regenerates before the corn gets harvested. So you've got incredible stock after harvest, stock pasture, got high protein flour to blend with all the corn husks and stocks and grain and leaves. And you can generate a tremendous amount of heat off that acre in addition to the corn ground. And you're doing it without the need. What a cool system.

1:02:55 Now I want to tell you this, just one of my favorite stories. This is Edward James citrus down in Florida. And citrus in Florida is being just absolutely decimated by a disease called citrus greening, spread by a little insect called a psyllid, kind of similar to a leaf hopper. And it's a bacterial disease, so fungicides, antibiotics will. You can inject antibiotics in this tree, massive amounts, but that's incredibly expensive. And then you can't sell the oranges.

1:03:41 So you can tell that this was once a solid stand of orange trees and they're almost all gone. This tree is just about dead. So Edward is contemplating his post-orange orchard career, what he's going to do after all this is ruined. And this 12-foot alligator, his kids spot this 12-foot alligator walking through the orange trees. And they shoot it, they butcher it, they eat it. And they bury the entrails and all the things that you don't want to keep off an alligator. It buried all the remains amongst the orange trees.

1:04:26 Lo and behold, the orange trees around that dead alligator spontaneously recovered from citrus, a bacterial disease, just recovered from. Why? Well, I've got a lot of discussion on this. Essentially, healthy soil creates healthy plants, and there's a number of mechanisms by how that works, but healthy soil creates healthy plants.

1:05:06 What makes healthy soil is organic. Now, it's not feasible to go out and shoot every alligator and mulch the orange with organic decaying alligators, but what he could do is grow more plant material. So instead of having that orange, you know, look at this soil here. It's been tilled bare. This was the university recommendations: tilled soil, eliminate all competition, keep it sterile, and use drip solutions of mineral fertilizers.

1:05:50 Plant cover crops. See, here's some radishes. There's a bunch of different cover crop materials, species. Grow plants to restore the health of that soil. This is incredibly exciting.

1:06:16 How do we create healthy, biologically healthy soil? Well, in natural systems we have diversity. I've described all the advantages of natural systems. This is a permaculture farm that has plant diversity. All these plants have roles; they occupy niches within them, and this is fantastic. If you're interested in this kind of stuff, look into permaculture. The only problem with permaculture is it's hard to scale up to big commercial farms, but that's not written in stone. You know, this may be the way we all farm. But if you're a typical Midwest grain crop grower and livestock grower, how do you take these same permaculture principles and use them to create a healthier farm?

1:07:19 One way is with diverse cover crops. And when you bring this level of diversity with a lot of flowering species and stuff, wonderful things start to happen. One is that insect pests start to kind of disappear. I won't say disappear; they cease to become a problem. Here's a slug, and slugs are really problematic in a lot of especially no-till fields where we use neo-nicotine insecticides. This starts a whole bad cascade of effects. Well, what eats slugs? Ground beetles and spiders. When you create this diverse cover crop ecosystem with mulch and so forth, you bring these helpful species back to your system.

1:08:15 Here's another thing that happens. See this root? I took this in Hungary. Some of the heaviest clay soil you can possibly imagine, and this is a root system that was going down in this soil. In the heaviest clay you've ever seen—sticky, waxy, just nasty. But look at this. This root is four foot down, clear at the bottom of the pit, and it's following an earthworm.

1:08:48 Earthworms create macropores. Again, biology comes to the rescue. How do you get more earthworms? You get more earthworms the same way you get more stray cats: you feed them. And you don't just feed them anything. Look at this: smooth grown grass leaves did nothing for earthworms. Corn didn't do much. But look what happens when you give them legumes. Earthworms have two critical requirements in their diet: protein and calcium. And legume and brassica foliage contain protein and calcium. So if you want more worms, feed them what they need, and they can do the work for you. If you do a really good job, you can get really good worms, and maybe not this kind of work. This is actually a giant Gibsons earthworm from Australia.

1:09:52 Another way you get soil biology is you modify soil temperature because there is a range that earthworms like, there's a range of soil bacteria. On this day, this is the outside temperature: 97.6 degrees. This is down in Oklahoma. This is the temperature taken under mulch. This is the temperature on bare soil: back to 80.6 degrees. 117.1 degrees. What starts happening in microbes at 117 degree temperatures? That sterilizes things. That sterilizes things. Why do they tell you to boil water for sanitary conditions? Because it kills microbes. Heat that water up and you kill microbes.

1:10:54 People say, well, isn't this much better? Say, okay, well yeah, that's better in the summer, but what about the spring? You want that soil to warm up. You know, that's going to cause you problems. All that mulch is going to keep the soil too cool. Let me show you something. This is the first snowfall on my farm a few years ago. I saw these things and I thought this was also a little bit before hunting season. I thought someone has been driving around out in my field. They're probably poaching, beer, so I...

1:11:33 I wanted to reserve this. My nephew is coming to hunt here. So I went out there. It wasn't tire tracks at all. What it was is where a local wheat seed cleaner that offered me Parker wagons full of this chaff, his cleanings dump, and I dumped them out, opened up the gate and made circles and dumped that chaff out there. This melded, these melted spots here are those lines of chaff. The biological activity in the soil is like a silage pile that created enough heat about that snow. You create a real biologically active soil and the conditions for a biologically active soil will create a soil that is warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer. Warmer in the winter, cooler in the summer. Again, what a great deal.

1:12:36 Now the other thing that creates a biologically active soil is manure. Manure is far more beneficial to the soil than the vegetative matter from which it came. It is in microbes. Organic matter is made by microbes. We're trying to build microbes on this. Microbes need it moist. They need it warm. They need to protect it from ultraviolet light, and they need their protein. They need protein and sugar and starch and lipids and vitamins and minerals. Need all of those mixed in together on the soil surface. That doesn't happen. Very rarely happens that you have all those conditions at the same time, especially mixed everything together. So what you do, what happens here is you have a rumen in an animal: cow, sheep, you know, deer, or any other animal with a fermenting digestive system. They'll take all this material. They'll take the high protein stuff. It's got a high fat step, fiber. Grind it all together, mix it, put it into a liquid medium that's protected from ultraviolet light. It's kept warm, allowed to ferment, and then it's deposited out as its absolute perfect soil improvement.

1:14:23 Root exudates in below ground and grazing and manure not 100. Want to remember, you need to leave that soil cover. So you try to grow in excess, raise the excess, retain enough material there, the stems, for soil protection, and then you convert the leaves or milk. That's how you build something. And you say, well, I don't have a, you know, maybe I'm just a gardener. I don't have enough area. I don't have fence. I don't have water. So what are you going to do about fence? I'm not going to do anything, but I'd recommend you build something. What do you want to do about water? I'm not doing anything. I'd recommend you provide something, because scientific research shows that animals do better when they add water. They tend to die without it. Figure it out. The stakes are too big. If you want to generate more income and if you want to create better soil and generate more income at the same time, figure out how to grow grazing, create more grazing opportunities, whether that's grain plus grazing or just grazing. Try to figure out more ways that you can generate grazing opportunities.

1:15:53 That might be portable fencing like this net in here. This is actually one of my neighbors' gardens, and they will take a section of their garden. They will grow grazing crops in the summer on that, and then they will feed on it in the winter, so that hay is converted into manure and mulch, and that becomes an incredibly productive garden spot. Of course, on a large field scale, cattle work well. Sheep also work well. And even in incredibly small places, this is a picture of the world's smallest rotational grazing operation. There are, this is basically grays. These flats are taken out off of a balcony of an apartment and fed to these rabbits on 30-day intervals. World's smallest rotational grazing operation, and then the rabbit pellets here are used to fertilize. What a slick system.

1:17:02 How do you know that you're getting the soil biology you need? How do you measure soil biology? Well, you can send off for a, you know, expensive painting. I love the Haney test. It accomplishes a lot of things, gives us some numbers. But if you want a very simple, and there's other biological tests, but if you want a very simple test for biology, check this out. This is the soil your undies test. Bury a pair of white cotton underwear. Tie a flag to the elastic waistband, which does not decay. The more active the soil biology, faster. So look at this: five years no-till with three years cover crop. That underwear is gone. Dig it up about a month after burying. Looking over here, here is underwear that is completely intact. Conventional tillage. No biology. No biology. So if you really want to just a qualitative indicator of soil biology, see how effective your soil biology is, bury some underwear, dig it up a month later, see what you got.

1:18:29 Very important benefit of soil biology: said healthy soils make healthy plants. Healthy plants like healthy food as food makes healthy people. We're just starting to really begin to grasp think between healthy, how healthy soil creates healthy plants.

1:18:53 How healthy plants and the microbes in our gut depend on compounds in our food. The vitamin mineral content of the produce that we grow has declined precipitously. It takes twice as much food to get the same amount of nutrients that it took in 1940 because our soil health has declined. Healthier soil makes more nutritious food. When you restore the health of the soil, you restore the health and you create healthy people.

1:19:42 I think a lot of our obesity epidemic and diabetes epidemic is because our food is simply not nutrient dense enough. Our bodies are telling us we need to eat more. We need the same nutrition. So when you create healthy soil, you eliminate pesticide needs. I talked about how soil dysfunction causes pesticides.

1:20:08 Isn't it amazing how some people during this pandemic, people exposed have the same people with the same exposure, one person gets incredibly sick and the other does not. Why does the immune system of one person fight off COVID-19 and the other person's condition? And people are at peace and succumb much more frequently. It all relates to our nutrition. Our health relates to nutrition. Our immune system and pesticides comes from more nutrition and poor nutrition.

1:21:07 So what can you accomplish? I want to show you an example from my own personal plan. I dug a pit to put in a patient's drainage. You put in some pipeline for an irrigation system. This arrow is 18 inches deep. Look at this subsoil. 18 inches deep was as far as the roots grew. I had a clay layer here that started at 18 inches went to 28 or 30 inches roughly. So 18 to 30 inches super heavy clay. Below that I had soiling, but look at this clay layer, it's gray, which means no oxygen. And look at the structure, no structure, looks like plato, just smeared, no oxygen penetration.

1:21:57 So what I did is I planted what may be the best vegetation there is for fixing soil. That is a warm season perennial grass, and probably the best of all those in my mind is eastern gamagrass. Very productive. This picture, see my pickup there, this was 30 days after the previous grazing. This is 30 days regrowth. You can see some flowers in here. I've got some alfalfa, clover, chicory, trefoil. This is not, it looks like pure gamagrass, it's not. It's actually a very diverse mix. The gamagrass is just so productive it up. This was inoculated with mycorrhizal fungi.

1:22:42 And every year I dug a fresh trench. This is that side of the trench a year after. Look at this, see these little root fragments going down through here, and surrounding the root fragment is dark soil. This is humus. And this is three years. This is six foot over. That first six foot over, this is the same soil three years later. Here it is. I stuck this little fiberglass white fiberglass rod in at 18 inches deep. Look at that black aggregate. So look at the abundance of structure and no tillage, 12 months out of their year, plant diversity that includes grasses, forbs, and other plants raised to turn the above ground productivity into below ground soil building. So there's still good soil temperatures. So no tillage, basically follow these principles.

1:24:13 A lot of soil health talks start with this. This is your to-do list: keep your soil covered, don't till, add organic matter materials whenever possible, and one of the best easiest ways of doing that is to add it in place by converting everything you grow, the plant material you grow into meat or milk or whatever livestock, generally in place. Keep a living root in the soil 365 days and a quarter, a year, 365 and a quarter days a year. Use of diversity plants. You have this on your list, you can create soils.

1:25:10 This field here I started at 1.9. I measured it at 1.9 when I took this photo. This was 1.9 organic matter. And this past summer I took a sample from that field and it was 8.7 percent. 1.9 to 8.7 percent, almost 15, and actually on that particular field, let me back up a little bit, that particular field I sampled was planted in 2006, same process. And so in 15 years, almost seven percentage points higher.

1:26:13 Folks, if you want to dig deeper into this, I do have a book. Basically this presentation was kind of a summarization and condensation, the cliff notes version of my book. If you want to obtain that book, send me an email. I'll be happy to ship you one. And I do have a website under construction. It should be up and running within a couple days. It's pretty rough right now, but just send me an email and I'll be happy to send you the information.

1:26:59 All right. Dale, appreciate it. With that, we're not going to take any questions here this evening, but we got this recorded. We'll get it posted later this week. And hopefully feel free to email me any questions. And we'll have Dr. Richard Mulvaney on next week. Thanks everyone.