Managing Grazing to Regenerate Soil and Farm Profitability

0:07 Good morning, thank you for the invitation. Thank you for the organization, and I love the direct work you guys are doing. I grew up on a farm and I've been a research scientist my whole life, but the research I do is very different to most people because having grown up on a farm I realize that the people who are managing the land are the ones who are going to decide what happens. So as researchers, if we want to get our stuff practiced, we have to work in close partnership with leading farmers in order to have things used by them. Otherwise it's just another paper floating around in the wilderness.

0:48 I work with a group of scientists, 14 of us from 10 disciplines covering soil microbes all the way to social issues and economics and scale economics. The goal of our team is to find out what grazing management results in the highest soil carbon. Now normally I would be very critical of someone who only aims one thing, but when you think about it, Heath's talk yesterday was absolutely first class. The complexity of what we're dealing with—what single thing actually encapsulates all of those things and it is in fact so for numerous reasons, all of them, these are fundamentally important things.

1:40 2015 was the year of soil, International Year of the Soil, and the scientists around the world stated unequivocally: if we carry on managing the way we're doing it at the moment, we've got about 60 years left of the soil because we're losing so much soil and also functional. So we are destroying the function of soil. But because we have destroyed so much of the carbon, that's the bad news. The good news is there are really good farmers and ranchers in North America and in the rest of the world who have actually improved the amount of soil carbon by a great deal. Those are the people we work with.

2:19 When I started, I came—I am—recruited me in 1990 because of my knowledge on regenerative grazing. When I started working on regenerative grazing in this country, I found out from various networks from the Sand County and other people who issue grazing awards, from the NRCS, the guys who've done a pulled soil cause rut through North America, and also the labs we visited, the labs in Karnataka who has actually got the most carbon in the soil. This will probably surprise you: over 90 percent of them were using intensive grazing, holistic management, Stan Pines branching for profit, or MIG. And I have one collective term for that: adaptive multi-paddock grazing. That encapsulates said genre of management wherever I've been in the country.

3:16 I've been a research scientist in 72. I visited every grazing nation in the world. When I visit them, I make arrangements beforehand to visit their leading ranchers. Every single one of them in every country I've been to follows AMP grazing. So there's a precedent for us. So when we started doing our research with Nathan, I like to explain in detail later on, but I'm going to lead up to exactly how we do it. Our research was at the ranch scale, commercial wrong scale, because other answers were doing a better job and the research isn't grazing. There's good research out there, but not in grazing. The ranchers who are doing a good job are 20 to 30 years ahead of academics. Those are the people we're working with.

4:07 So let's start off with: why are we concentrating on soil health and carbon? 90 percent of soil functions are mediated by microbes. Keith explained us extremely well yesterday, so the way you manage the plants and the landscape is critical to using all the functions that life on Earth depends upon. The biggest limiting factor in rangelands and in agriculture is not the amount of rainfall god, but how much you get in the soil. This is a picture from Mexico. This ranch, prior to this photo, looked like that ten years prior. Thirty years after that picture, the neighbors all still look like this. The only difference is these guys practiced AMP grazing very, very well.

4:57 This elixir operator is done in Mexico and they captured nearly all their water. Right? In order to make an ecosystem work, you have to capture the energy. Energy drives every living thing. Photosynthesis: capturing it, turning it into sugars, and then that feeds the plants which feed the animals, but also feeds the soil microbiota. Hydrological function, which we just spoken about, is fundamentally important. The mineral cycle—this has to be functioning well. You can have all the right species there on your property, but you can manage it in a manner that does not cycle the nutrient properly and have good water relations.

5:49 To understand how to do that, and that's like the guts of our research. So you've got to manage the plants so it has community dynamics below ground and above ground that actually make these things work really well. But with any year, you've also got to manage adaptively as the seasons change to get there.

5:57 Let's now look at what happens in the normal continuous grazing. Most people use continuous grazing and in this 3,000 acre area in South Texas, those green dots are GPS collars on the cow herd through the year. And the one thing you notice straight off is they do not graze uniformly. They ignore certain areas. This is at an NRCS type stocking rate, and they will camp on those areas.

6:40 Now, this is the size of areas that most research is conducted on. Even if you had the same stocking rate in there compared to there, you can clearly see from this picture that there's no way that you will get the same impact on the environment or landscape. Looking at these areas, when you should be looking at that whole area, this is one of the major reasons why we work with commercial ranchers and we measure: what is the heterogeneous impact in a commercial scale? Because this determines what's going to happen.

7:17 What happens in each one of those green dots is they concentrate on patches that they really enjoy and they keep nipping them down. And these plants are not hit too heavily at all. So in terms of light capture, how good are we doing here? You might be doing reasonably well here, but not here. What do you think the roots are like?

7:40 The first rattle that comes along and suddenly that turns into bare ground, and you don't go back. If you carry on managing the same way, you do not go back. So this is a direct product because of pet selective grazing and lack of recovery after grazing.

8:06 So what we've seen right around the world is you can take a continuous graze pasture that even under light stocking in, you get more bare ground than you would have otherwise. You can turn this into that just with regenerative adaptive multi-paddock grazing, where you have water runoff and losing carbon, to actually capturing it and turning it around. And I've worked in areas from 8 inches to 80 inches, and the same principles apply. You just gotta manage slightly different to apply the principles.

8:36 So what you do in regenerative adaptive multi-paddock grazing is you divide these areas up so you can put the animals in one paddock so they've grazed the right amount before they move on. And you do each paddock like that. You don't come back until they have recovered. That's the key. You might need to put water in to make sure that you've got good distribution, but these are all the things that you can control. And this is what makes a difference between continuing the decline in your resources or actually regenerating them.

9:15 So the normal type of situation that you would find is a couple of paddocks on a farm. There'd be a single herd in these managed continuously, or you might put all the animals in one herd and move them around with a period of grazing followed by a period of recovery. Does that solve the problem? Not really.

9:42 So what people have done is numerous ways you can subdivide each one of those pastures. But let's just take that as a grazing unit. They're their previous paddock divided into eight. Do you think that'll solve the problem? No. And let me illustrate why. People conflate overstocking with overgrazing. They're two separate issues. Overstocking is when you've got too many cattle for the amount of grass that's there. So part of the adaptive management is making sure that you've always got enough grass at any point for the number of cattle you go. If you haven't, you need to reorganize to plan where you change that so there is enough forage available for the cattle.

10:26 Overgrazing occurs when the animals are grazing for too long a period. They go back to those same plants and nab them off, keep them short. And if you come back too soon after grazing—if they have not recovered properly—that's when you start going backwards. So even if you're moving through 8 paddocks, you're gonna be grazing for a week or two. Then people generally say, well, 60 or 70 days rest is going to be good enough. We found out: no, it needs to be double or triple that depending on where you are.

11:02 So the guys who really made a success of this, they will divide up the whole place. And they might—the beginners will want to have just a single herd in each one of these things, but they only have limited success because of the length of grazing period and that the recovery period is too short. The people who have had the most success, particularly during dry periods, are those who put everything in.

11:25 One paddock the whole herd together and they go through these areas. So if they have very short grazing periods a day up to three days and then they have recovery periods of 90 to 120 days and that is what has produced through good results or building that the soil back to what it is building the plants back to what it is what there should be having deep roots so that they can handle the drought and developing the increased microbiological activity that restores the micro and macro aggregates that allow most of the water to go.

12:04 So these are the people we've been working with and examples. One of the first group to do this was the Noble Foundation. They had a poorly grazed area, lots of weeds, a couple of decent grasses in there. And normally people would come along and with the advice that now you need to spread there to get rid of the weeds. But that doesn't help. Why? Because in three years time you got to come and spray the weeds again because you haven't got through the proposal agent, which is poor grazing.

12:35 So what they did was they divided the area up into 18 paddocks with a watering point and then moved the animals through there specifically looking at the species that they wanted to prevail grazing they're moderately getting off and he come backing back again when they had recovered.

12:56 So these are results they got accused in the room he was there with Charlie. He was first class, Charlie. Gopher, these are the number grazing days the years of Richardson you can see they're almost a four-fold increase. We got farmers here at Henrietta who've achieved that in Toni HS. They've increased the number of animals they can carry and just about got rid of their bare ground on their property, huge increase.

13:26 Now you'll notice here a couple of blips. What are those due to? The odd rat that comes along. So you just apply your principle. Make sure we got enough course for your cattle. If you haven't and you get to do some of your cattle, but you have a short grazing period with a long period of recovery and you move forward.

13:45 So these are the things. These are the keys in order to get increased profits. You aim to improve the ecological function and those will deliver increased profits. That is the way you need to look at it, not just say okay what are we going to buy now to increase our profits. Now you increase the function and that makes it work.

14:08 They're flexible stocking. So when there's this grass then you need for the cattle, you change the cattle numbers. In the long term that is much cheaper thing if you buy and hey and keep them going. If you keep degrading your resource and your bank balance, your bank manager will call you fairly quickly.

14:30 You need to spread the grazing over the whole ranch grazing one of those paddocks at a time so that each one is raised properly and can be afforded a decent recovery. Grazing moderately in the growing season because when you move out of a paddock you want to leave enough of the synthetic material there to be capturing the energy feeding the soil microbes and growing the next couple grass before you can hold it hold it again.

14:49 Use short grazing periods because that minimizes the negative effect on the plants and it also keeps good nutrition in front of the cars all the time. So if they're moving quickly they're in a more constant plan of nutrition, not a seesaw plan of nutrition, and they do much better as a consequence.

15:05 This is a key, probably the most important thing is adequate recovery. You've got to know what to look for. You know the growth curve of plants you start off with it, you graze it down and then it's going to grow up and before it starts hitting seed again you need to grow as it comes down again. It would then remain vegetative so then you can harvest it numerous times, get three four harvests during the season and you always got good nutrition in front of the cars.

15:36 In dry country it's a little bit different. We'll talk about that later. And the key is to adjust forage your moves as the growth rate changes. So you're going to look at the recovery of the plants, know when it's best to graze again. It might sound difficult if you haven't done it before, but some of our best grazers just got a high school education. They pick it up. They look for it. They look for the right things, no problem at all.

16:05 Many of our best guys. So the reasons that for failing to get positive results: increasing your animals too much before the soil and the plants have improved. In most of our areas, you can institute improved management and it's going to take in the 30 inches of rainfall. It's going to take five years before you start seeing I could be producing more now. We can consider increasing things. But in dry areas down to 15, 20 inches, you could wait longer than that. You can see the building. You can see the cover on that on that they saw improving it's.

16:42 Only when you're producing more grass that you should actually improve the number of animals. You've got a plan adequately and the number of good teachers around who can teach others to do that. You've got to have adaptive management. If you just say at the beginning of the season 'I'm going to graze and cross-growing seeds for a week and give them a rest of 60 days' and you're just going to stick to that all the way through, that is a recipe that doesn't work because in a wet season you need to move quicker than that. In the dry season you need to move more slowly. And all the research we've done shows that if you are adaptive in your management you get 20 to 40 percent increase compared to just doing it as a risk.

17:25 So do not defoliate too heavily in the growing season. You want your plants to grow quickly after you defoliated them so that you decrease your coverage period. That works really. And you've got to have adequate recovery before regressing. And a lot of people don't understand the soil that they're working with. If you've got a farm with very shallow soil, rock about this deep below it, and you expect to get the results of people you've seen in a bit of growing area, it's not going to happen. So you need to go to the NOXIOUS or people like that where you can find out what's down below there and get an idea of what's the potential and bear that in mind when you determine your planning.

18:11 Research in this arena, if you want to achieve good results, you've got to have a goal. This is the improvement I want to get. How many researchers will tell you this is the goal? The goal is actually to get a paper. They say 'Okay, if I do it this way, what result do we get?' Is that really helpful? No. You want a guy who's saying 'Okay, I'm going to manage this to get the best result.' That's what we're aiming for. We need to find out, okay, what is the best that we can get?

18:37 If you have got small plots, a couple of hundred acres, and the area that you're working in has commercial ranches of 10, 20 thousand acres, that small area of the research is going to be deficient in understanding the impact on the land. So that's why we work with ranches at a commercial scale. And you remember back at the Green Dot slide that I showed you and the size of the plots there, that illustrated that point there.

19:14 So most researchers measure production but not the ecological indicators that go with it. You need to understand range science teaches that good condition range is going to be made up of these key grow species. But that condition, even though you got the right species, can actually be functioning poorly ecologically if it's not capturing sunlight, mineral recycling, water cycling. So you've got to bring those things in. And you've got to study the soil: how much bare ground there is, how much litter cover there is. Those are the indicators that tell you long before your gang. So just looking at the plant species is only halfway there.

19:57 Too many people elevate the animal numbers. Some of them start off by doubling, which is almost guaranteed to fail. And they do not proactively manage as conditions change. In dry season you've actually got fewer animals and you've got to manage them differently to achieve a good result. If you don't do that you will not get anything like a desirable result.

20:23 Most, even the guys in Ammaji and Savory, they underestimated the recovery periods and they've only started being successful when they've actually doubled or tripled it. And research at a short term, it doesn't tell you very much. Guys want to do research for three or four years. It's a funding cycle. And at the end of three or four years, even if you've got really, really good management, you're only just beginning to show signs which may or may not be significantly different. So you have to go on for at least 10-15 years in most rangeland settings in your research before you actually get a treatment difference that you can measure. And that's why when we go and work with ranchers we work with neighbors who have been managing the same way for 10 to 15 years so that the biology has been able to settle down to that particular management. Then you will start being able to measure differences.

21:17 So what do we need to know? We need to know what is actually causing degradation or improvement. And the one thing, if we concentrate, is if you're managing in a different way, like if you want to do EM, does it work everywhere? We don't know that. So we need to include in our research: okay, where does it work and where doesn't it work? And the other thing is just increasing the number of paddocks is not going to solve your problem. It's the way you manage within a different number of paddocks that.

21:52 Actually creates the results. It's the same thing in business management. Pays everybody will tell you that if you've got different management in different result. If you want to get excellent results, you better have excellent management and that's what we look. So one of the keys is looking after the biology. These little critters, as Keith pointed out, really world yesterday drive the whole system. But they need to be fed. They improve soil structure, which is critical to getting water in the ground. And the chief players in that all the pungi, who also provide nutrient access for plants. He showed you the very tiny mycelia. They got little chemicals in that at the end of the mycelia. They can actually drool through rocks and get all the nutrients that are otherwise unavailable. They got a whole network here that connects things together and they feed back and they swap those minerals for the energy that they're getting. You've got to look after these guys. Nearly all our bad management, over grazing, tilling, horses are decrease it in them. And you've got to take care of that. They produce exudates which feed the bacteria and fungi. They also increase the water and nutrient retention. Fungi have got a whole network underground. You look at the work of Paul Stamets in the firsts in, in the East, sorry in the West, covering hundreds of thousands of acres, all connected. They connect to the plants. The plants communicate with each other. If you break that up, you haven't got a functional system anymore.

23:30 If you've got a small plot this size or even the size of this room where for your research and you have excluded animals and you're clipping instead of grazing with animals, there's a whole host of things that make the ecosystem work that you've excluded from that. So the research result that you're coming up with is very deficient compared to how nature works. Research being done at the moment shows that the higher the fungal to bacteria ratio, the higher the plant productivity. David Johnson, that New Mexico is needing very that, particularly research. And as Keith pointed out yesterday, they are built in mechanisms in natural systems with 80% of the microbes are they actually been officials and help you. You got to manage in a way that facilitates these things working well.

24:27 The other friend you've got, great friend you've got the earth's ones. You can see you get different ones that operate quite differently, but they really break up the soil as was discussed yesterday. And they poop is the best fertilizer. If you've got a healthy earthworm population and healthy fungal population in a cropping or a grazing system, you don't need extra fertility. They will provide the fertility. You just got to manage to get to that point. Fortunately, all the people that we're with have actually reached that, so we know this is true.

25:05 The other big thing is the dung beetles and other cop ráfagas, some insects that really work for your world. I mean, they dig down and they get rid of these piles, enhancing nutrient cycling. And also the flies that lay their eggs on us and abutting plaza, you get rid of them in a heartbeat if you have got a system that favors that dung beetle, something getting rid of our things. What we see generally with high density grazing, where you moving every day or so, the animals bunched together like this, they drop an enormous amount of dung, increase the infiltration and reduce flies. Now when you got a herd like this moving around, you might only graze twice in a particular paddock in it, yeah, once in the growing season and once. All the dung beetles and all the other insects follow these little critters around. They follow the sit there, the way they would have the buffalo. So they're in high-density and they actually go around the whole place, making sure that all the biological functions that were there under the buffalo are actually functioning well. So that's part of the success.

26:10 So what we've seen is under continuous grazing, there's a profile. And then after 10 years, sample of a look at the amount of darkness in there, that's extra carbon, starting off with less than 1% organic matter up to 10%. Now not every place is like that, but these, this is the range that we're seeing. And the infiltration going from less than an inch an hour to up to 10 inches. Now, some people exceed that up in the Northern Plains, Saskatchewan and North Dakota. We have got people who have gone from one inch infiltration an hour to 18 inches an hour. You can have a huge storm and everything goes straight in the ground. Those guys are really making things happen. And that's just in a 10-year period.

27:03 So let's not come back to looking at the causal mechanisms involving the ecology that's actually driving this life yes.

27:12 Amp tracing not too far from here now. You can't keep the thing looking like this all the time, but you can extend the number of days by grazing moderately, getting off it, and the winter's ready to graze again. You come back there, so you can keep the amount of green on the ground going for much, much longer than just grazing lightly and staying in one place, which is what this would represent. So you're fixing far more energy here than you are there, and definitely there. What a cycle because you're getting off and that you're building the carbon—it's really good there. And a lot of continuous grazing it can also pretty be pretty reasonable. We've measured that as well. The heavy continuous grazing where you've got a lot of bare ground—not good at all. Mineral cycle excellent yet worthy, and very poor here because a lot of the minerals are just being washed off with the erosion.

28:07 So let's look at some different situations here. Yes, amp grazing where grazed about twice in a growing season and two or three times in the non-growing season. You keep it like this. Black continuous grazing—lots of grass. They put a green down at the bottom here, but not all these things function really well here. The nutrient cycling is not doing very well at all. Even though you've got cattle here, no grazing—a lot of the antique. Our people will say we need to get rid of all these animals. So here's a place not too far from you in Texas in RCS. Individuals there haven't been grazed for, I believe, 25 years, and it's dominated by big bluestem and little bluestem. In your safe man, there's a good process, but it's not great.

28:53 How much photosynthesis is happening? How much recruitment of species underneath me? There's bare ground underneath here because you've got these wolfy plants and share everything else out, so your biodiversity is extremely low. You walk through there, you want to see any insects at all. You walk through here and it's just alive with life, and that tells you that everything is working well. And when you look at the biology of a soil, some of these different things—so there's a huge difference according to the way you manage.

29:25 The research we did concentrated in three contiguous counties there because we were working at the ranch scale, and in science you need the concept of replication. We worked in three counties that were close to each other, and in each of those counties we had an amp grazer through the NRCS. Nathan basically and Tony had identified as these guys are doing the job well. We compared neighbors' usual case scenario, which would be heavy continuous grazing, and then best-case scenario continuous grazing, which is light stocking with continuous grazing. So those are three we compared.

30:07 The results the amp grazing gave three tons per hectare for Europe more than the usual heavy continuous grazing, and the light continuous grazing was intermediate between them. We decreased the bare ground hugely with amp—was better than both of the others. Soil fertility went up. Jeff, I believe it was, he showed the results that we had that went up quite a bit because of the increased amount of carbon. Name the world holding capacity and the infiltration was improved. We improved the sole microbial composition. We changed it from a one-to-one function of bacterial on the ungrazed area, the light continuous and heavy grazing, and on the amp grazing it was 2 to 1. We really increased—you might have fun now. Part of that was when you graze in an area and you give it recovery, all the strong, taller grasses like little boosting, big bluestem, Indian goes—they really come to the fore, whereas previously they had been knocked over. Continuous grazing fungi, and those tall grasses got very strongly together. In fact, big bluestem is an obligate fungal plant. It needs robust killer mycorrhizae, so the funky was very, very strong, which is polar reason why we got extra productivity. And the species composition changed because we were allowing the grazing to recover adequately and restoring those productive species.

31:37 And the increased livestock production—it went along with it. It's quite interesting when you go on to these first place as Nathan would take me to do these places. You walk on them and you've been on the neighbors, and they've got more grass and double the stocking rate compared to the neighbors. See the problem? The reason they had double the stocking rate is because they were producing more grass. So they were correctly stocked that it would overstock, but they were managing in a way that was producing on rocks. It was evident right from the beginning, and at the beginning I thought, well, this can't be hurting the soil if they've got this increased productivity with double the number of cattle.

32:18 Went in and measured the soil carbon name and there was a whole extra three tonnes a hectare a year being produced on the amp grazing compared to the continuous race because we had all these things working well. There was a longer period of green so there's more photosynthesis. All the microbes and the fungi in that were operating well so that just underlined yeah, these reasons we thought were worth contributing or likely real.

32:51 So on the strength of that research which was done here in North Texas basically near Monster Jacksboro and Weatherford, we decided well, going to the dry country we need to know, okay, is the same sort of thing happening there? If we go east of the Mississippi, is the same thing happening there? When we come up to the northern Great Plains, is the same thing happening there? So we managed to get some grants from shale and other people where we templed that about half a dozen of us to go take soul measurements in those areas.

33:28 What we did is we located through our networks Jay, you've got a fenceline contrast and we measured at the top of the slope, midslope, and at the laps today's top little that and then likewise on the side so we did a whole 15 little calls in there, there and there. And we measured the with a very accurate infiltration meter or Decagon and we had these Garcia professionals at the job, Applied Ecological Services, and they came and sampled to a depth meter. Most scientists only worked at 6 inches or a foot in depth and that gives you almost no indication or put a full amount of provenance order so we at least went down a meter on the understanding that you probably need to go down three meters to really get a good idea. But that's what we did in those different places.

34:23 So up here in Saskatchewan, Alberta, and in North Dakota, we came up with this figure. After 20 years, we'd put this amount in the ground over and above the neighbors with amp graces. And not too different from here. And also when we went to the dry country, now you can imagine in New Mexico considerably less. And one thing that we found was that we would pick up a change in infiltration before we pick up a significant change in the amount of carbon. And that tells me that all the biological things were happening but they hadn't translated into extra carbon in account.

35:13 Then when went across the Mississippi, Ritz longer growing season, we got seven tons per hectare over five years, hugely more productive.

35:28 Now the scientists will turn around and just say it's absolutely rubbish, you're making these figures up. And I'm going to show you, no, we're not making them up. When the Buffalo ran the show with wolves chasing them, this is where the organic matter is. Conventional grazing took it all the way down here. This is where scientists do their research in a degraded situation. Now showed you yesterday, most of these people took these measurements in areas that hadn't been grazed. A, they degraded. B, there hadn't been grazed so all those soil functions we've been talking about it had been just static. No wonder they measured no increase in carbon. In contrast, we have located the people who've been doing a good job of increasing in through the various areas that we knew like the labs we showed increased Bob.

36:18 We measured to 1 meter after they had shown that their development so we've been measuring there and there. We know the difference between our cells. These figures are real. Nathan, was he here? He's my man. We used Antoni. They showed us the sights and we made sure that we sampled on the same source in the different branches. And he's a man who did, he knows his game. You've measured all over the state.

36:50 So coming back to this, the weakness of our approach is we didn't measure beforehand. It takes a decade or so before you get these things so we jumped in at the end and said, okay, is there a difference after 10 years of different management between the normal way of grazing and the amp grazers? So what stuff showed was yes, there is a difference but we need to tighten up our science.

37:12 So what we've done is we brought up a really good scientist trained in the UK, Christian Davies, who there's labelled CO2 where you can go to the fence line and you measure, you expose the plants to labelled CO2 on both sides of those things at the same time and they will give you an instantaneous record on that day this is how much carbon we actually fixed, that's our offense compared to the Soviets. And the result we come up, we start getting this ready to publish because we're also doing DNA analyses on the soil samples so we know which little critters below the ground we're actually doing all the.

43:31 Great improvement the amp grazing which are being aimed for 10 years in that particular instance. A great improvement this was a grazing exclosure that hadn't been grazed for 25 years. We had them in the different areas there and you'll see that this was just about as good as that. Think back to the energy, the water cycle, the mineral cycle and the biology. How good was not grazing at all?

44:03 So that had really good hydrological properties because the rock density was low. So there was good, but there's no life under this management. But just about as good as that with all the other benefits. You can make a good living there. The biology, the biodiversity is there. This is pretty close to being what we can do.

44:26 So the nitrogen loads that we calculated followed the same deal. Very high under continuous grazing, much better, better, better. And the same story with phosphorus.

44:39 So this means that we are looking after the land for the general population as well. So we're looking after our individual properties, making a better living on them and also helping the population in what they do.

45:01 So I'm going to diverge now. Most of my research has been done on rangeland but now that we're involved right around the country, what everybody's doing, just ranch. They're doing range with a little bit of forage, a bit of cropping. And what we've learnt in the process which came up yesterday is when you include amp grazing in a cropping cover crop system, you get huge advantages.

45:24 And that's just so this is on Gabe's place about three years ago, cover crop. And that day it was an August day, but it was 90 degrees, hot as Hades, and the neighbors look pretty sorry. But these guys look pretty good because they saw they'd be brought up. So soon after that picture was taken, they did their daily move. Here's the electric fence. They put the cattle in there. This has taken it in another portion of the deal where this is showing them moving. And I wanted to show you the amount of litter being left behind. This is discussed a little bit yesterday. Is this waste? Nope.

46:03 At the beginning of the season you don't want to knock them down like it. You want to have a high graze to trampled ratio. But as the stuff gets away from you, let them graze, get the good stuff. And but you do it in a manner where you have a high trampled to graze ratio. So then you put this on the ground and it just makes this will give you just technique. So that's what drives a system. You're going to manage for those little critters as well. So that's what's happening there.

46:29 So you guys know Gabe's story. He was in trouble because he had a couple of series of droughts and he couldn't borrow money to buy fertilizer and stuff. So he went back to the drawing board and worked with NRCS. First of all, they started off from no-till, some improved, then crop rotations. So that improved things as well. Then bringing in cover crops as part of the rotations jumped it up further. As soon as they moved from three or four species in the cover crops to twenty-five-plus, it really jumped it up. And that's one of the really good things that we need to do more detailed research on. But because so many people are getting results, if I was farming I would go to this information. I don't need a guy writing a paper to tell me that this works.

47:15 But then when he brought his amp grazing and he does em grazing really well, it has really skyrocketed from there. Three and a half up to 1600. And we believe that's continuing.

47:32 A little bit of time. So the other thing too, I've just used sources information. What's happening at the same time as you put in carbon in the ground, as you actually increasing all these other things. Now Keith explained it in detail yesterday. If you're just putting on N P and K, that actually reduces your microbial content. So you start losing all of these other things because the microbes aren't actually making them available. But if you go back to biological management with good management, then you actually bring these things back because the microbes are actually driving it and making them available. That means better nutrition for the plants, the livestock, and we believe for the people.

48:18 So we need to continue doing research on that. Here's another example from Georgia. Hundred thousand millimeters of rain and they measured sort of the depth of 8 inches. Yes, sir. All cropping lands that have been really cropped up was in poor condition, low levels of carbon. They changed across the permanent grassland and under some irrigation with dairy cows. Now they carried, they obviously fed their cows to bring up the energy levels.

48:52 They put in organic fertilizers on me and this is the reason I'm showing you this. But the figures they got, there's a bit of a lag at the beginning and then it shot up. Same figures that we've been coming up with, about 8:00 in those areas where you can really go through this, that's only 30 centimeters. If you went on a meter, I reckon you probably just—anyway, the point I'm trying to illustrate here is it suddenly peaked and then plateaued. Or we don't understand why, because all the stuff we've been looking at, we've been following some of these guys like Gabe for 15 years and it's just chaotic. The only thing we can think of is that these guys were still using inorganic fertilizers, so it put a ceiling on the biological activity. We gotta test this hypothesis.

49:46 There's just an observation here of what's happened up in Saskatchewan over a 10-year period. They've moved from that to that, and this is what they've achieved. We've just measured as part of our big grants up in Canada. We just measured on Neal Dennis's place and the neighbor's. The University, not us—the University students who actually don't believe in amp grazing, don't think it's a crock—they measured on the neighbor's point 0.8 of an inch an hour in filtration. They went across to Neal's place and they do measure it in long lines and everything: a mean of 1.8 inches. So that's an independent assessment that's very close to what we've been doing and should change a few minds.

50:38 Well, that's not happening down here because we got different soils. So one of the things that we're doing, looking at from here right up into Canada, is how do the different soils respond to these things? And in order to help people, we have to understand that. We're working with CSS to actually do that. So we are under attack as people who think animals are part of the solution by a lot of people around the world, and their biggest beef, as I say, is cattle in particular put out too many emissions. Now I got a little bit of a problem with that because, as a fool of mine said, using this language—and I'm gonna use it—anybody can have a little cage that he puts the animals in and measures the CO2 that comes off. Is that how it works in the real world? Let's have a look at this.

51:37 So we took our figures: the amount emitted by the cattle and the amount sequestered, even under the poorest grazing we measured it. And then if you change high continuous to low continuous, you got fewer cattle, so you got less emissions, but you're putting a huge amount in the wrong way—way moving the emissions. And even under amp grazing, which you've got the larger number of cattle, your margins because the extra amount that you're sequestering is still great. Now a colleague of mine is part of a research team up in Michigan. He's a Texas boy, Jason Rancher, I say. He's running on planted pasture. He had this differential: no fertilizers involved, and just a grass-legume paddock managed with amp grazing principles. And he compared that with summer. Sometimes they have to have irrigation periodically just to fill in a gap so they got decent quality product through the year. So the emissions were higher because as soon as you start using gasoline and the expense of putting irrigation out there, that has got a carbon footprint. So when you add that in, then you've seduced way ahead of the pack.

53:04 Now these situations are on grass only, but they don't represent the cattle industry, because if you take animals from a place where the sequestration far exceeds the emissions and you put them in a feedlot, they inherit the carbon footprint of corn, transport, and everything involved for the whole production cycle that involves feeding grain. That changes things completely. So we've yet to do that, but we're having to tread carefully because when we started asking questions and working with Alan Williams—he is one of our partners—the advice we got back from everybody was: you need to be very careful about who you say is doing a bad job. If you tell the corn guys that they're part of a big problem, you will be dead. You're never working in again. So we have to—okay, corn is really good in grass. So if you have a grazing thing with corn, even that doesn't keep them happy. But that's what Alan Williams is doing. He's getting his good gains with his grass, finishing with mixed cover crops and stuff like that, by grazing, measuring the bricks and stuff like that on corn and all the other things in there. You can do it, but that you're still missing for these guys. So we're having to treat carefully, but you can bet that if you had a grass-only system or even if you were feeding grain—

54:36 That was produced the way the Rodale Institute does and they produce stuff that is very negative. Probably they're actually putting more carbon in the ground than the crops are producing. The way they did it, you will have a whole agricultural livestock that is a sink, a very strong sink that offsets a lot of the industrial living. But we're a long way from being able to even talk about that in wider circles.

55:09 So that's what we're doing now. You'll notice that our concentrate and work with leading farmers—these are the reasons business things of the commercial scale. It integrates commercial science into whole gross responses. Think back to what Keith was talking about and the complexity of what you're dealing with and how these things interact with each other. We need to know those things. We don't know what happens on a small plot. We've taken all those interactions out of there. So that's the cornerstone of our research. It also identifies the emerging properties. If you've got the fungi working well and the earthworms working well, it's a synergism. You had dung beetles. There's work in the UK I was invited to speak to the Royal Society a month ago and they've had experiments on there where they were incorporating grazing, but then it got expensive. So they're asking, are we going to do cutting instead? They've got 14 species of dung beetles. Obviously those disappeared completely. That's got a decrease the amount. So soon after they actually did this to switch from grazing, everything plateaued. And I think it's because they're not using the full system—a supposition, but that's an observation I've made.

56:27 So the other thing is a human element. It's been known for a long time with the art of farming—those people who can put things together in a way that really succeeds are a small part of the population, but they can produce results that are so much better than the average. Those are the people we've got to learn from and we've got to learn about the synergies and how they do that to be able to get other people to do the same and move in the right direction. And that's what we hope to do. The other thing too is we have found people who do a good job of managing adaptively to improve the land while increasing their financial situation. Those two things go together. You can't sell anything if you're not going to actually improve the financial situation. You need to do the two together.

57:17 So that's what we hopefully will learn by doing it this way. And the other thing too, what characterizes research in agriculture is how many scientists actually consider the unintended consequences of the stuff they try to tell you to do. Like I'll tell you some of the unintended consequences. The dudes are in there. Got the anoxic lower third of the Mississippi. The amount of soil we lose from agriculture is three times higher every year than the total crops—corn, soybeans, and hay. Is that sustainable? No. We're just about wiped out pollinators. That's all the baseline for all living things. Those are unintended consequences, but the real result of the way we as industrial people operate. Fortunately, they're people who've shown us a way to actually get away from that.

58:22 So what have we learned from ranches? Now I'm going to irritate a lot of people by putting this, but this is from what Davis and Dave Pratt, both of whom really know what they're doing, have said. It takes a minimum of 10 paddocks just to stop overgrazing. If you're operating with 8 or fewer paddocks, you're not rotationally grazing. You're rotationally overgrazing. You're staying in long enough to keep rubbing off the species that you want and you're coming back before they've recovered. You know, you might be on a slow move downhill, but you're going downhill. To support decent animal performance takes 14 to 16 paddocks. Even with good management, the most rapid improvement in your resources takes 30 or more paddocks that you're moving through. For the reason I say, if you can have a short period and adequate recovery and change your stock numbers, the biggest decrease in workload and greatest improvement has been greater than 50 percent. This is from gauzy drink who've been doing it a long time—many of them 30 years. Let that's got some substance.

59:29 So the fastest and cheapest way to create more paddocks is just to combine herds. So it doesn't cost money. You just gotta know how to do it. And if you want to begin this, go to a chap who's done it, learn from him, so you don't make mistakes. One herd reduces workload a lot. Checking four herds takes much longer than one. Productivity per acre is improved without decreasing animal performance because they're moving.

59:55 Regularly they're uneven planet nutrition and that works really well. Long recovery periods absolutely critical carrying capacity and total productivity increase of low cost and you've got to have elements like do not move to the next adjacent paddock move to the one that's recovered the most and that's why if you looked at the picture that they had of them the different layouts there you've got to be able to move around the place because rainfall often isn't even of your property when we were opening on the wagon or ranch we had 35,000 acres we were operating on we had 30 rain gauges over that area so we had got a very good handle on how things vary in each a rainfall event so you've got to keep your eyes up.

1:00:43 So we have done field work for the ranchers we've also done modelling financial and watershed modeling and in grazing modeling and our net results all of it published these are the glass here now more recently until two years ago I didn't know about these two German teams that are working in Namibia and Argentina they've been coming up with identical results ecological function and profitability increase with an increasing number of paddocks short periods are grazing with adequate recovery give the greatest profit and ecological function adjusting grazing management with changing conditions increases ecological and function and profitability and the converse of that is if you have fixed protocols you don't get anything like the same results.

1:01:38 So yeah let it that explains itself and we've got figures from the field and figures from our modelling that show that is about a twenty this going managing adaptively there's be twenty to forty percent greater increases they're just moving the day at fixed time periods and from fixed paddocks to you you've got to think about this game profitability decreases if recovery is too short or too long every environment is going to have different parts in the dry areas it's going to be different to you tall grasses can be different short class for instance in the tall grass prairie well plant master my work as soon as you leave it too long and the plants are going across to setting seed that's when your animal performance in trouble so you have to time your recovery periods so that you good don't get hit by that and if you just developing lots and lots of grass but it's low quality might look good but it's gonna pitch animal okay so you've got to get that right and you can do it there's enough people out there doing it that we can learn from them and stocking rates can be increased without damaging ecological function as a number of paddocks is increased.

1:02:50 What this straight translates into is adaptive stocking is less sensitive to over stocking than constantly shocking the advantages of amp over continuous so less important that low levels are stocking but are very important at high levels the people who want to hit the high end and get the profits they can do so at the same time as building up their land and increase their profits at the same time by having many pedals gives you much more flexibility and ability to control your over grace so short periods for the greatest number of headaches so the Germans and ourselves is these are the German teams results in higher net returns lower income variability one of the really important things through drugs if you're managing world you can actually protect yourself what well by having many paddocks at Sam now is protecting the resource space and facilitating the restoration of a wide range of management scenarios from editors around up to 18.

1:04:00 There are many advantages. The way you achieve those is to aim at improving this and that's important because most people don't appreciate that they just take the resources as given and don't think they're having a negative effect you've got to change their energy you've got to match your numbers thomas lee before the prices go down in a draft spread the grazing of the whole ranch so that you don't kill small little portions which actually spreads till you've hit the whole ranch and that's degraded differently had moderately short guising periods adequate recovery and adjust for interest rates change.

1:04:42 I must say thank you to the Dixon Water Foundation we've done a gigantic amount for conservation supporting kuvira various conservation groups right around the world and they've paid for most of my research the government guys at universities in that they think am grazing is a crock and unfortunately they try to show that it doesn't work and I learn from people who are making it work and document what they doing and stronger.