Ley Farming: Restore Soil Health While Grazing

0:07 When I first started talking about lei farming I had someone asked me so is that like raising those flowers that the Hawaiian girls put in their necklaces? It's not that, so what is it?

0:25 Well, okay, let's start out here. What does soil provide for the plant? I can hear the crickets chirping—come on, two things. What does soil provide for the plant? Anchor the roots, okay, but growth factors, water, nutrients, right? Okay, so that's pretty simple. We all know that. For a long time you didn't have to come here to learn that, right?

0:56 Okay, so what I have here are two corn plants, and obviously one is little and one is big. Exact same hybrid planted within minutes of each other from about ten feet apart in the field, full irrigation, full fertilization. Why is one two feet taller and about four times the biomass of the other when the grower of both of these plants—same grower—provided all the water and all the fertilizer in excess?

1:40 Turns out the one to the right, he just put in a center pivot and converted from flood irrigation to center pivot, and that allowed him to get the pivot and make a full swing. He took out this little two-acre patch of native grass, and that is where the big corn plant came from. You could see that difference from about a quarter mile down the road—this little patch out in the field.

2:09 So if the purpose of soil is to provide water and nutrients to the plant and those are the only purposes, why is that plant twice as big? Apparently there is something going on in a perennial sod, in that native grass, that we have not yet learned with our modern science, not yet learned how to duplicate.

2:45 So how do we get that back? I would make the field where the little corn plant was growing grow plants like the big corn plant. Well, one way to do it is we can plant a diverse native prairie and wait 10,000 years, come back, and start farming later—because that's about how old prairie was once the glaciers receded from my area. Or can we do something a little shorter in duration? Because I don't know about you, but I'm not very patient. I don't plan on living another 10,000 years to reap those benefits.

3:24 So the concept behind lay farming is to insert a perennial sod into the crop rotation for a short period of time. These are not intended to be forever mixtures; they're intended to be just short-term mixtures for five years, or if you're like me you intend to plant them for five years and you like them so much that you leave them for ten or twelve because it's just hard to kill them once you get them established.

3:57 So how long do you need to have them in there in order to get benefit? How long? From this graph—listen, I got this from my introductory soils course that I had in college. How long did it take to get the—

4:13 Organic matter back up to the original level almost a hundred years right, but where did most of the improvement come first few years right. So instead of planting a small percentage of your land to perennial sods and leaving it for a hundred years, you can get more benefit to your land by planning a sod and rotating it out and establishing another sod somewhere else so that each of your land, each parcel of land is exposed to a sod sometime within your lifetime.

5:01 Now people have been writing about this concept for a long time. This from Exodus—I don't know if this is more of an advertisement for lay farming or maybe this is for your milpa garden. Keith, Jimmy, the needy of your people may I, one seventh of your land. That part about the beasts of the field though, that kind of applies towards lay farm because lay farming, not only are you putting in perennial grasses but you're also pasturing it. And I think some of our speakers, if you're not yet convinced in the need of having animal impact to restore soil, then probably you want to get online and watch the YouTube videos of some of our previous speakers. It didn't sink in enough the first time, but I think having the livestock impact is absolutely essential.

6:06 People have been writing about this for a long time. I mean, obviously 4,000 years ago Moses wrote about it in Exodus. Pliny the Elder in ancient Rome wrote about this, but one of the first modern writers to speak about it was a guy named Robert Elliot, and he was in the UK and he wrote a book called the Clifton Park System of Farming. You can find this book online in its entirety and it's still very relevant reading now. One of the things that Robert Elliot really hammered on was not just planting grasses and legumes but including a third component that we'll get to later that he considered essential to the success of the system.

6:50 Now more recently in Argentina, when Peron came to power in Argentina, listened to a man from Argentina explain this. Basically, Peron was a true socialist and he believed that the government should provide everybody what they needed to live on, and of course that took massive taxes. Argentina has only one industry and that's agriculture, so all the taxes basically to fund all the massive social welfare programs came from taxes levied on agriculture. All exports were taxed, all imports were taxed. All the exports were whatever farmers produced and all the imports were whatever farmers bought, so effectively the price of what they sold was dropped in half and the price of what they bought was doubled. So we complain about high inputs and low prices. In Argentina, it was way worse. So in order to survive, the Argentinians developed this crop rotation where basically they had five

8:13 Years of an alfalfa-based pasture, alfalfa grass pasture, it was taken out after five years. It was pasture, not had. So all the manure, all the organic matter was deposited right back on the land. You could grow a corn crop for one year without an estimated fertilizer, and he could grow beans, and then back the week, and then they'd reestablish the side. And they could do those three crops in sequence with no herbicides, no insecticides, and fertilizers—free sustainable system. And then the government found out a way of making money off this one too, so it's kind of faded away.

9:06 But so this lay farming thing, what's it good for? What's in it for me? Why should I be interested in this lay farming thing? Well, this is one of my favorite sets of pictures. This is from Ray Weil, and it's actually two photographs there, and these were taken with a rise of Tron—Raisa Tron. It's little miniature camera, and they put it in a Plexiglas tube and take pictures of roots. Where's all that feedback coming from bumping it, okay?

9:47 I might have to move it here. The picture on the left was taken on the 3rd of May. That's a canola cover crop rate, and the one to the right, they sprayed the canola out and planted soybeans in it—no tilt. One on the right is picture of the soybean root on the 8th of August. What do you see about basically use it like a pilot hole, didn't it? Went right down the same route channel, followed the path of least resistance. Now, how much deeper do you think that soybean root can go once it has this easy pathway?

10:29 Okay, now canola root is fairly deep-rooted plant, but it's an annual. So this is comparing this from the Land Institute. This is comparing wheatgrass to wheat. There's a little bit of difference in the root system between a perennial and an annual, and you notice that scale: 3 meters. That's about 13, 14 feet. That is a very deep-rooted plant. How much more water and nutrients will the following grain crop be able to access following a perennial cover crop versus name?

11:16 Your roots have an impact on the soil. This is a riverbank, and I think you can just barely see this is a tree trunk here, right here. This is the root system of that tree. Is that root system having any effect on that underlying soil? Pretty dramatic change in the characters that saw roots do change soil. Does that have an impact on drought tolerance of your following crops? Any of this, and he has anybody seen any of this in recent years driving out corn? They remembered they may around here in 2011–2012. Hey, perennial crops are probably the best crops you can have for controlling erosion. Well, who was saying? Was it Willie? Were you saying about we've got 60 years left? Richard was saying that, yeah? UN says we've got 60.

12:27 Years worth of farming for all our soil is ruined at current rates we have to do something about erosion. Our lives depend on it, I mean our lives, lives of our children and grandchildren certainly. And perennial sods are the absolute best way of handling. You can also use perennial sods. One of the beauties of the Argentinian crop rotation was that you could build up a big pool of organic nitrogen that could stay in the following grain crop without the need of nitrogen fertilizer since nitrogen fertilizer is manufactured by and large from natural gas which is a finite resource. At some point we're going to learn, have to learn how to do this over again.

13:23 I first started fighting glyphosate resistant Palmer amaranth in 2008. I had a soybean field and this would have made that soybean field looked like a manicured lawn. It was pretty ugly. Instead of whipping out more and more chemicals I decided I'm just gonna put this field to a sod. And when you decide to use Palmer amaranth as a grazing plant instead of treating it like a competitor it goes from being your worst enemy to your best friend because it is a fantastic forage, extremely high in protein, very nutritious, very palatable and extremely water efficient. If it were not for Palmer amaranth I would have gone belly-up branching in 2012 because that was the only thing that grew on my place and I actually had my best cattle performance ever in 2012 because of Palmer amaranth. Unfortunately all forgot her for bad. When you put in a sod crop Palmer amaranth disappears, it just goes away and I can't find it in those fields anymore. I almost wish I had a little bit of it because it really is pretty good late summer pasture. But it's a great way of managing resistant weeds, diseases and crops, things like sudden death syndrome. This is starting to become epidemic all over the Corn Belt. Almost all crop diseases will fade away in the absence of a host. If they're soil borne or residue borne diseases just go away when you insert a sod crop into the rotation. Nematodes, nematodes tend to go away as well. Now you get different kinds of nematodes in a sod that will build up over time but those nematodes tend to not affect your cash crops that are going to follow.

15:41 Has this been researched? Because whenever I throw out an idea that's kind of left-wing like this, you know, where's the research? On there is not a lot. Why hasn't it? Now Richard was talking about why adaptive management grazing practices haven't been researched a lot. A lot of the same reasons why lay farming has not been researched a lot. Well, one thing is the average tenure of a grad student is about two or three years. Can you do research on lay farming?

16:19 In two or three years it really takes about 12 if you've got a five or six year sod and then you have to follow it track the follow-up crops after that and get through several cycles of that. This is a very long-term research project and grad students don't want to stick around that long. Another thing is if you incorporate livestock grazing as a treatment you need broad expanses which means you need a lot of land which means you need a lot of money. This is not something that is easy to research in small plots because livestock grazing does not lend itself to small plot research takes broad expanses.

17:07 So the other thing is a lot of the funding that we get and our land-grant universities comes from agribusiness. What agribusiness is going to fund a sit research on a system of farming that eliminates the need for their infants? It's just not going to happen. So a lot of the original research done on lei farming is from 150 years old. There's very little recent research on this practice but here is one from the University of Florida and I would say this is really not true lay farming and I'll explain why here in a bit but look at this continuous peanut with no fungicide 1600 pounds she had fungicide in and you can double the yield and you add animat aside in your creeping up they're using a lot of expensive inputs to prop up a very poor cropping system.

18:10 That's why we've done a lot over a lot of our country we've used expensive inputs to prop up for farming systems. Now you rotate a little bit with cotton I'm not sure that this is any more sustainable than and what the continuous peanut is but it is a little better at promote yield but look what happened when they put a two-year the Heeia grass pasture in just a two-year pasture saw look what happened to the yield of the peanuts and more importantly the profit the profit per acre and they did an economic analysis on this and it only took 250 acres to raise a family on that bottom rotation. What does that do for your sole social structure? One of the videos the white art white oak forms video about the rural sociology what happens is when you put a farm family on every 250 acres instead of every 2700 acres what impact does that have on room and the income was more stable year-to-year. I think that's also important too.

19:40 So if this is such a wonderful thing why isn't everybody late for me? Why isn't everybody doing well? There are two myths of establishing grass one is that it takes three years to establish grass you're only leaving this in for five years right so you spend five years get three years getting it established and you only get two years of good out of it before you kill it and you're back the crops. Here's the other one grazing native grass or grass in general.

20:18 is non-productive and unprofitable because everybody knows you make more money on crops than you do on pasture. That's why we've had I don't know how many big historic plow downs we've had over the course of this country, but from 2008 to 2013 we had one of the biggest ones in the history of this country. There was a lot of acres of grass that went to crops.

20:50 Let's examine these two myths now. Wayne Gretzky said something as one of my favorite quotes. Someone asking the secret of his success, he said it's really simple: everybody else skates to where the puck is. I skate to where the puck's going to be. You can look at CRP, say yeah that took three years to get established. You can look at our current native grass pastures to say yeah that's not a very profitable acre compared to that acre over there in crops. So why do we have these perceptions? But instead of Wayne Gretzky looking at the way things are, let's think about the way things could be or should be. Why does it take native grass so long to get established?

21:53 One of the main reasons is because we don't inoculate with mycorrhizal fungi. We're putting in only one component of that ecosystem, that's the plants. What we have omitted from virtually all plantings in history has been the fungal component that is so necessary for the establishment of some of these grasses. This is the mycorrhizal fungi here, this is a root here, and this is the hypha of the mycorrhizal fungi, and you can see all the surface area. This can extend about 18 inches beyond that root zone and access water and nutrients up to a thousand times better than bare roots alone. Obviously that's big, especially for first seedling plant.

22:44 Now when I was with Keith, mentioned I worked for Valent. When I worked for Valent, I was in their mycorrhizal fungi division. It was really interesting. I learned a lot, had some neat experiences. One time when I was on a plane trip home from corporate headquarters, there's this extremely attractive woman who's in the airline seat next to me, and she struck up a conversation with me. I remember that distinctly because that doesn't happen very often to me. And so you know we were talking, you know, what do you do? And I asked her what she did. She said she trains people how to use payroll software, and she was flying to do a training session on how to use payroll accounting software. She asked me what I did, and I said well, I worked with this fungus that makes plants grow better. Oh really? Tell me about that. So there was this woman from the city just fascinated with this fungus that makes plants grow better. Why isn't everybody using this? I wish I knew. I'd really like to sell a lot of it. And well, when the plane landed, when we parted ways, and I holler at her, said oh good luck with your presentation. She hollers back, you know.

24:07 Hey good luck with your fungus and at that point people started moving away from and said I sit next to that guy. They ran over to, you know, hand sanitizers. Anyhow, amazing organism and it is absolutely critical for the establishment of most of, most if not all of our warm-season perennials and some of our cool-season perennials as well.

24:38 This just illustrates kind of how important that is. This is from the journal, range management, 14-week biomass, which in my area that is basically the growing season on the warm season grass. No fertilizer, no mycorrhizal fungi: 0.187 grams per plant. Add fertilizer or you add the mycorrhizae, boy, that bumps it up. You can fertilize it and it bumps it up but not as much as the mycorrhizae. Look what happens when you add both.

25:18 It's not a little different. That's 30, 30 times the biomass. That's pretty significant. Do you see why it has taken us so long to get grass established in the past? We did not use this type of program.

25:40 Now native grass is unproductive. Why is this native grass unproductive? Can you tell why this native grass is unproductive? What would be the limiting factor if you tried to grow corn on this acre? Why are our native grass pastures still native grass? Because I couldn't grow crops. Anything that could be plowed was plowed. The only thing spared the plow was the ground that was too dang poor to grow anything else. So we have this perception of grass productivity on the worst soil compared to crops on the best soil.

26:40 What kind of pasture can you grow on the best soil? Okay. David Hula, I want you to think about something. David Hula set the world corn record yield in 2015: 532 bushel per acre. Wind as corn canopy about the first of June and the black layer about September 1st. That 532 bushel per acre was basically three months of full photosynthesis.

27:25 How many months out of the year can you get a pasture to photosynthetically photosynthesize? Basically any month the temperatures above freezing, right? How much more production potential is there in a pasture that receives the same level of management as David Hula's corn? How many people are managing pasture the same intensity that the average corn farmer manages corn?

28:04 Now here's the neat difference. When you say managing corn intensely, what are you talking about? A lot of fertilizer, the seed decides fungicides, herbicides, a lot of inputs. When you manage pasture intensely, what are we talking about? Any of those? We're just talking about management, not inputs, but management. So my theory is that you can make more money off pasture and be more productive off pasture because it is a more efficient vehicle at harvesting sunlight. Then and we talked about, we're in the business of harvesting sunlight and

32:40 There's advantages to each obviously and depends a little bit on what your operation is. If you are cow calf and you are in this area, which do you already have? Okay, round here, but primarily if you're surrounded by Bermuda grass, you've already got warm season grass, you might want to go with cool season grasses. If you're in northeast Oklahoma, you might be surrounded by fescue and you might want to go with warm season grasses.

33:20 Someone says can we plant them together? I was always taught and my experience has always been that warm season grasses and cool season grasses do not coexist. One eventually chokes out the other, and for most of my life I have had that prejudice you plant them in separate pastures because they require different management. I'm starting to change my mind a little on that because if more and more people are using adaptive grazing, they tend to strike a balance, and I think maybe going forward we will be planning warm and cool season grasses in blends with each other to extend the grazing system.

34:09 Now there's some other tricks you can use to strike that balance, extend that grazing season. One of the things I didn't include the pictures in here, but one thing that we're doing in my area is in our warm season grass pastures we are over seeding with cool season annuals, cool season legumes, cereals, annual ryegrass. And I know in Bermuda grass country that's a common practice. In native grass country, that's pretty revolutionary. The other thing we're doing is on our cool season grass pastures we're interceding warm season annuals, Sedan grass, corn, soybeans, cow peas, Sun him, stockpiling that all throughout the summer and grazing it in the fall along with our cool season grass regrowth. That has been phenomenal because usually on our cool season grass regrowth in September, we've got about this much growth, starting from this table, not from their 6-8 inches of growth. When we have the summer annuals in that cool season grass will get six to eight feet of growth available for fall grazing.

35:25 What's the toughest time of year to provide grazing around here? September, October. Yeah, when you have that cool season grass with the summer annuals seeded into it, we can accumulate a tremendous amount of biomass, and to me that's one of the more exciting things out there now.

35:44 Some of the things I've shown you have been pure grasses. Research does not like polycultures, adds a lot of variability. Actual practice likes polycultures. Now this is a grass legume mix, but better yet is a grass legume in form mix, and Forbes have been very rarely planted until just recently, but Robert Elliot's book, Newman Turner's book, all those guys in the UK that talked about herbal lay pastures considered the Forbes to be the most important component of all the species.

36:32 In the pasture this is chicory and part of the value of these forbs has been they have extremely deep roots and they have an extremely high mineral content. They also contain secondary compounds, I believe, as Willie was talking about the secondary compounds protecting the plants from insects and diseases. Their same secondary compounds in the forbs protect the grazing animals from diseases and from mineral deficiencies.

37:04 And this is a—you look at this, here's forb. Notice where the forb roots are, they are below the level of the grasses. They can access minerals and water that the grasses alone cannot. Some of these things will go deeper than alfalfa roots.

37:24 And another neat phenomenon is during the daytime you have transpiration. Apollo the atmosphere is pulling water out of the plant, so water moves up in the plant. Then at night when the air hits the dew point, that water gives rushing back out of the tops and unloads right here below the soil surface. You get a water pump effect. Those forbs will actually irrigate their neighbors, and this has been documented with the chicory, and I'm sure it also happens with a number of these other deep-rooted forbs.

38:01 Another neat one is plantain. Plantain is a really unique plant. This is a plant native to Europe, but it contains some really strong antimicrobial compounds. In fact, they have found that the urine from cattle acts as a nanobot can be used as an antibiotic 36 hours after, for a period of 36 hours after consumption of plantain.

38:30 Now one other benefit of this, beyond health benefits, is that that weak microbe antimicrobial nature of plantain behaves in the rumen, and just like an ionophore it kills off the archaic bacteria that produced methane. Which means not only does it reduce methane emissions, but methane production is really inefficient in the rumen, and you eliminate methane production, you improve feed efficiency and animal performance. So you can get an ionophore effect from a plant instead of from a pharmaceutical company.

39:13 Some other neat ones, this is cut plant. You can see I'm not very tall, but that plant's a lot taller than me. This plant is native to the Prairie here in the United States. Been virtually no research done on in this country, but in Uruguay they have researched this, and it has increased their pasture production, animal production off pasture on dairy cows by about a hundred and fifty percent compared to regular grass. Pretty exciting.

39:46 Now how's this look for productivity? This is another native sawtooth sunflower. We had to stretch that camera lens out a little bit to give that all in. And you think how do, how would cattle graze that? Well, they tend to straddle it, walk it down and the strip the leaves off. I think I found some back up after they're through. It's kind of fun to watch.

40:16 Other thing about establishing grasses is what if that establishment year is not an economic loss? This is a switchgrass field during the year of establishment. What do you see with it, Kourin? Switchgrass is tolerant of atrazine, 2,4-D, dicamba—a lot of your weed control products that can be used in corn. This is one of our customers and this is what that whoops, sorry—this is what it looked like the next year. That basically looks like Doug Peterson's four-wheeler. Although you can't see it, you can see the stack of ring-top posts there on the four-wheeler. That is a second-year stand of switchgrass in full production prior to first grazing. I didn't take three years to establish and he got a corn crop off in the seating here.

41:29 Now there's better yet. What do you think of this grass? That's actually 30 days after the first grazing. This eastern gamagrass—this is the single best soil-improving grass that I know of. This stuff is amazing. It's got an air-conducting tissue in its roots called a rhizome that allows it to penetrate root-penetrating layers. It also has the highest rate of photosynthesis of any terrestrial plant recorded. It is related to corn, and the productivity, the wildlife value of this plant, and the nutritional value of it—this is my number-one favorite warm-season grass to plant. It is as productive as Bermuda grass with far better wildlife value and far better nutritional value. And this 30 days post-grazing.

42:29 One other attribute of eastern gamagrass is that it is the single-most shade-tolerant. This is from the University of Missouri: most shade-tolerant warm-season perennial grass, which means that it is a perfect candidate. Look at it compared to the switchgrass way down here. There's a switchgrass. If you think switchgrass established well under that corn, here's my gamagrass during the establishment year. And I probably made a mistake turning cattle in during the establishment year, let them graze that corn off. But I really didn't want to combine the corn and I was either going to have to move cows or open the gate. I'm pretty lazy, so I chose to open the gate as I was the only source of feed I had where they're at. But it didn't seem to hurt it. Here's the next year.

43:42 And of course, eastern gamagrass is a bunch grass—all kinds of room in between these clumps, number one for upland game birds to run around in and to insert other plants like alfalfa. I've got red clover, I've got some Sand Point in there, I've got some size remote, I've got some trefoil, I've got some chicory, I've got some plantain, I've got a whole menagerie of plants in there now. Here's the best part about this though. This little marker is 18 inches of depth, and this is what my subsoil looked like.

44:30 Below that 18 inches depth this is where the clay layer starts. How would you describe this layer here? Clay looks like gray play-doh, doesn't it, like modelling clay. That's pretty accurate description.

44:44 Now I have some bags here. I have the topsoil for my field, and I'm surrounded by, you know, everybody likes to make fun of their neighbors. My neighbors are all excellent farmers. They're way, way better farmers than I am, but we do farm differently. My neighbor is an excellent long-term no-till corn soybean farmer as far as corn soybean rotation. He does as good a job as anybody I could point to, but I've got some of his topsoil.

45:44 I also dug down about six inches and took some of the second layer in that soil. The other bags are of my soil, both my topsoil and then I went down 24 inches. Now, my original intent was to get a sample from 24 inches down in my neighbor's field, and then it was about 6:00 in the morning. Keith was coming to pick me up to head down here, and it was dark because I didn't want to steal my neighbor's soil in the daytime, you know, because then you have to explain. Yeah, I'm using it as a bad example. So I do such things in the middle of the night, and I could only dig down a little ways, and that's as far as I could get. That spade just stopped, and six inches down was as far as I could physically dig into that soil.

46:53 So you can take those out, compare and contrast them. I would have liked to have had his 24 inches versus my 24 inches, but what you got is my 24 inches versus his six inches there, and then just a hand grab sample of the topsoil on each one.

47:10 In the meantime, while those bags are circulating around, okay, this is before gamagrass and mycorrhizal fungi. This was fall applied, it in the spring of 2014, and you can see that there is some dark streaks starting to form through there. I'm holding a clod from a control area of the same depth, and you can see that there is a darkening, and you can also see some soil structure starting to form there. It's gone from a massive play-doh looking structure to starting to get some what, kind of blocks in there.

48:04 And this is what it looks like now. You see that white pointer is that the 18 inch depth that it was at? The arrow was at in 2013. So bottom line on this is that you can make a pretty dramatic improvement in your soil in just a few years, and it does not take an economic sacrifice to do so. You can make money on this system while it's in pasture. In fact, everybody I've talked to, people say, well, what happens when you take that out for crops? You know what, every single person I've talked into doing this has not decided to take it out and go to crops. I only know one person that's done that, and he hasn't harvested his corn yet because it's amazing enough, still green. He figured it would be his last corn harvested, but he was sure burying it.