Reading Soil Health in a No-Till Field: What the Pit Tells You

0:00 Planting some stuff and we really got a big difference in the soil. You can see a dark solid here coming down like this. Over here the dark soil is way down here. Banana comes up pretty fast and then I don't know, I didn't dig over here very much.

0:30 So there's the clay right there. So I have this thing coming up kind of this way, it's kind of mixed over here on this side. And so what kind of a ravine was in here that dropped this fast.

0:52 And you can use your imagination, Paul. I mean you can use yours too. But when you're digging the soil, bit it's always fun to get in here because you get to see stuff you would never imagine seeing from the top.

1:05 And we could start at the top and then look at this soil right here. We're digging around the soybean right there and when you look at these little crumbs of soil, they're just full of roots.

1:24 And we're just discussing the broadcasting nutrients on top like lime or manure, compost or fertilizer. And you have all these roots right up here at the top taking up nutrients and then the roots are going down this way. Whether to get that material to grow, you have to have nutrients with it. So all the nutrients are moving with the root system as it takes them up and then transports it to different parts of the root system.

1:57 And we're looking in here to kind of see where the root depth is and we're going to see if I can find anything down here though.

2:10 So there's one little tiny hair right there, Paul. This is probably at least five feet deep. That's from here and then another foot and a half on top of the straight handle, so that'll be five feet.

2:28 Just see the road sticking out the top. You still got it there and there's you want to see, there's a root sticking out of there. You see there, yours are near the top. These are five feet down. That's a long way. Now Paul, look at this here. The black and I assume those are old roots that are growing in there. This could also be great in the end.

2:56 The gray striping as you can see here and over here you can't see it because it's black here. But it makes me think that this soil has been watered, deposited here by water. Even though the stuff down here is silt and people call it clay but it's not clay, it's silt. And it acts like clay because there's no organic matter in it and there's no structure in it. It breaks down and seals. Anytime you get water on it, it won't go through because it's small particles but there's still sail particles, not quick, because that doesn't ribbon off.

3:35 I'm going to pass these two around. This first one, so one side's got a root sticking out, the other side's got a root sticking out. The one is white, that's a living root this year, soybeans. The brown one was probably the corn from last year.

3:50 And so you can see what the difference is, and sometimes you'll be lucky to find this year's root going down last year's root channel. I'll let you take it past it that way.

3:59 The second one here, three headed to he says look at all the black dots. The black dots could be decaying roots from years ago, leaving the cards behind. Anybody scratch your head, go huh? Well, if you look close here, there's actually one of these black dots has a browned root going through the middle of it.

4:17 And that brown root might be last year, it might be five years ago, I don't know. But again, following the root channel from before and also following a higher carbon content, a better soil to grow in, the root has a better environment growing. And so you can see it here in the middle here, provided someone doesn't break it.

4:42 So the subsoil here is pretty much a really small blocky structure. Sometimes these soils are more prismatic, but these are really small blocks. They're kind of sturdy like that, but we call that blocky structure. And so it gives the soil strength to hold this up under when they're working.

5:10 Yeah, there's a good one. This is small enough it might break. So look quick, a black channel with a brown root going down through the heart of it. And again, that's about five feet down in the soil here.

5:24 And so when people talk about last year's roots, last year, 10 years ago, who knows how long ago some of those roots are, that's where we like to have following those old root channels on down.

5:49 And the carbon left behind from an old route very nicely reach up that way. Oh, he's collecting them there. He's supposed to pass them on.

6:10 Yeah, and then I got below that red layer and there's a root hanging in in here. So it's just none. Right, big black one, who knows.

6:27 Now you guys have any questions on the soil, what we're seeing down here? And there's no cover crop on this part.

6:44 Question over here, right? Um, why is the soil so breakable?

6:53 Let's see, how should I explain this? When it's breakable, we have to have it breakable so roots can grow in it. And we, the microbes make glues that hold the sandstone clay particles together to make a granular structure. And then deeper down, it makes bigger blocks instead of little granules.

7:19 And so the soil is not breakable. It's held together by those pieces. And as we dig at it, we break them apart. But they're still little blocks of soil like that. And when you put those together, then that gives that soil strength and structure.

7:44 And so then it holds you up when you walk on it, so you don't sink in it. Or if you're walking on a sidewalk, then nothing will grow. So if it's growing, you want to the saw structure so hold you up it.

8:00 Holds the tractor. The breakable sole is actually bad, we want it all together. Well, yeah, we the breakable structure from what you ask it would mean that the structure is there's no structure left and so it won't hold you up.

8:25 So you go across here, you have a lot of variability. The top soil may be about the same but underneath tremendous variability. So you're pulling a soil sample the first six inches but that doesn't reflect what we're seeing down here. But the crop is going to grow. Plant growing over here would grow differently than the plant growing right over here because it was below that first place. Yeah, and probably sometimes you see these variability in fields and if we could see this we might explain something to go that deep. Explain right now the fertility, the reason we do the zero to eight or zero to six with zero, mainly zero to eight is that the soil test that the universities calibrated for us were based on a zero inch zero to eight inch center. Because why was it zero to eight or zero to six, it's as far as the probe, that's how deep we plowed.

9:24 And when I was in college we sampled the plow layer. In Nebraska we had these good soils that we plowed deeper than anybody else could plow. So in Nebraska calibrate on zero to eight, South Dakota and Kansas calibrate on zero to six. So that's why the different states have different calibrations. Fan favorite plowed in South Dakota and why we only go six inches deep, there's lots of rocks anyway. And so it's to tell people that Nebraska is really blessed because of the kind of soil we have here.

10:00 And somebody said something. The guy from southern Kansas was speaking this morning, southeast Kansas, if you lost this much soil you'd be on bedrock and here we got glass so deep and we can, so some people don't think we need to save soil. But we're not going to produce as much on that new soil and all this topsoil is going to be polluting something somewhere. So we got to stop the erosion on top and we're blessed with this deep soil but we don't need to lose it.

10:35 And the concept that you know I tell people we do things because we're changing and we have to have the right mindset to change because most of us say well we never did that before. And so these are new ideas that we have. And this just makes you think about this whole system. And number one, I said number one resource in Nebraska's soil. You know, in number, and some people might argue number two source is water. So if we save the soil and we put on, we manage our inputs so we're not polluting anything, then our water quality is going to not get any worse and might get better. And so these are all positives that we have in this system.

11:23 And how do we do that, I see there's a root down here at about eight.

11:31 It's nodules on that soybean root and the saving roots you know that we you pull the root and you look at the taproot say they see the nodules on there and say yeah it's nodulated but in between the rows these soybean roots grow laterally and then there's out between the rows you'll find these nodules out there and so that means that long as you have good soil structure then the air can come in.

11:58 Real small nodules or just roof hair growing off of there down about yourself so ray in your experience but what would you say is the best way or the first step to take into building better soil structure just better soils more you know so we can start eliminating I know not a hundred percent to start eliminating some of the inputs that we have and using what's available.

12:28 The first step is I think is this stop doing a tillage okay and and now you got a weed problem and and that demonstration plots that they showed this morning and the one that amazed me was oats and there's hardly any weeds growing in that then you think about as when I was a kid we planted alfalfa all was all planted oats and we said the oats is there to control the weeds and there's a proof there this morning.

13:02 And so what can we grow in the corn with the corn as a companion crop to keep the weeds down and that's where all these strange ideas are coming from some of these guys can we get a companion crop so we can really reduce our herbicide right and then if we're if we're in the pheasants how many weeds can we have in the field without without being a real concern and what hurts me out is what's what's that level of not it's not affecting yield right right so so there's so the first thing you gotta do is stop doing tillage.

13:39 So you save water and save this so I started doing no-till to save water because 1991 we had no crop down at western and and it was too dry and so then I 92 I convinced myself I needed no-till and I told my nephews farming he said I got to disc everything and level it so we got started in 70 or 94 doing a no-till we've been no-tilling since then and now we're doing the cover crops and I've got three out of the four years I've got cover crop on and I'm letting the tenant graze that with no charge and those kind of things I'm paying for the cover crop so I can learn about what those things are doing.

14:18 And eventually when and I got a corn corn bean wheat rotation eventually I need to replace the second year corn with something and I told him I wanted milo and he said it itches and is that a cab as I drove away I was sitting in a cab but paul this this road and there's little protrusions out on that road I think they're probably branches branches coming off yeah they were down about this deep and and those that root system that you see here.

14:56 That's a conduit for taking water and nutrients up to the plant and bringing photosynthetic down to the root tips because the root tips is where cells elongate, divide and elongate, and that's what makes the root grow. The plant doesn't push the roots down—they're always growing at the tip. And roots need oxygen to grow, just like we do.

15:15 So when we talk about soil structure, the idea is that when water goes in we push air out, which is carbon dioxide. As the plant uses the water, air comes in, which is oxygen. And so think about your soil being a great big lung, and you're doing everything you can to get that air movement as good as you can. And when you have compact soil—remember in the good old days when you had a crust and you went out with the rotary hiller, and then the plants screened up? Yeah, they put oxygen in the soil.

15:56 So because you put oxygen in soil, if you got this structure, you don't have to worry about—you got oxygen in the soil, right? So soil structure, saw a root growing down an old root channel. So how does that relate to where you know, where we were planting tomato in shifted previous years?

16:21 Good question. And in the olden days when they planted corn after corn with rich till, and then you get potassium deficiency, they figured out that the corn roots are growing down the same root channels and sucking all the nutrients from around that root channel. And of course potassium is the first one that went, and so you had potassium deficiency. But now if you put a cover crop in, it has a different rooting system—as they showed over there this morning—now you get new roots, just new root holes for the corn to follow. And so then that diversity of cropping is what keeps your nutrients available so they're not extracting in those little areas around the root. And then the other advantages come along with that: mycorrhizae, as they talked about this morning, and stuff. So the microbes that do a lot, and the earthworms are moving stuff around.

17:14 You just had a discussion on putting lime and phosphorus or nutrients on top the ground, and you think about all the roots up in this top, top two or three inches of soil that are taking nutrients in and move them down. And then you think about the root of the worms making those holes and moving stuff up and moving stuff down. It moves in the soil—it's incorporated, it's getting incorporated naturally.

17:41 Yeah, and believe it or not, and Paul, the one I wanted you to tell about—the phosphorus that you put on. He put a hundred pounds of phosphorus in his desk chisel and no-till, and the phosphorus moved further in the no-till than it did in the tillage. And then he's talking about the lime and all those things. And so when you hit a barrier, it's interesting. If you put it, if you had some soil here and then you put a layer of sand in here and then you put soil on top of it.

18:12 The water will not go through that sand until it's saturated on top. And so you have this tillage kind of disruption there, water moves down and it won't move into that until it's saturated up here. For no-till, you've got channels going down and water movement's better.

18:34 The whole thing in Brookings, South Dakota in 1969, we had 109 inches of snow, had a snowpack at 39 inches average on the landscape. And the ground was not froze and the soil scientists were arguing about, well, the water's going to go, there won't be a flood. And I figured out that the ice crystals at the top of that soil was a different structure than the soil. And when it melted, it all ran off and we had huge, huge flood. There was only one way out of town on the interstate, everything was under water. So there's just the physical parts of these things we don't talk about very much, but it's just an interesting type thing.

19:23 One of the things that Brian talked about was this layering and the soil structure here. And I see this on our farm. Right here it's dried a little bit, it's easy to see that. See the platiness. And you can pull those plates apart.

19:52 So the roots, if they're, if that was bad, the roots would be growing on that face. But they're going through. So I'm not worried about this platiness. And it breaks apart that way, but see there's some roots grown on there, but they're still going through that and going on down.

20:09 Dwayne Beachler told me one time that to get rid of this platy structure like we see in here, you have to have a perennial grass growing on the land about half the time. And with livestock getting more important, maybe this will happen in time. But I guess I'm willing to put up with it even though I don't like the looks of it. But here's when they turn sideways, yeah, there, you know, there'll be some on that turning in there, going on there.

20:48 Like when people convert to no-till, which we did about, this would be our seventh year planting no-till. How long in general are you guys seeing before you know that changeover starts with your soil structure? I suppose it all depends on what some of your practices are. Yeah, I think so. Normally we said five years and you have to say something. NRCS in Nebraska has said if you're receiving a payment for no-till, if you're receiving a payment for something that involves no-till, whether it be CSP or EQUIP or whatever, if you do a tillage pass, you cannot sign that field up for seven years. So NRCS Nebraska has said seven years to re-establish no-till. I was with Ray. I said five years. So I think what NRCS has done is try to make a number for the entire state. Eastern Nebraska, four or five years.

21:46 Western Nebraska, maybe it is six or seven. So the Randy rank up at Pander, Nebraska, he probably had about the fastest recovery and he's using like livestock I think it's a feedlot manure and a cover crop after wheat. He's using wheat in his rotational corn beans.

22:05 When he noticed when we started him and I went out and dug her, look for earthworms before we even started our no-till and we would go out in the field and because we were ridge till which wasn't as bad but we've been hard, we find a few right, two or three, and within about four years I mean every shovelful we had some for sure. And then that's where we kind of felt that maybe we were on the right path.

22:31 All right, to me earthworms yes, here's the first clue that you're doing a good job okay, you can see that the easiest yes, you know. And there was a place where the root grew but then this one moved to the side but when it found his place to go through again, if the roots are going through I don't call that a layer that I'm worried about. I'm looking for restricting layers. If all the roots stopped and turned, then I do something okay.

22:58 People say how deep do you go and I say about this deep because almost everyone you have a tile spade and if you did find a root restricted layer, this is about the deepest your equipment can tell. If I go this far and don't find the layer, I probably couldn't afford to do the tillage for a deeper layer.

23:17 Is that platinum? The bigger plates over there whale compaction, these really thin places just natural soil we're mentioning. I broke those up, this one is still here sort of. We started picking at the sides here and you can almost draw the tire right here on where the platiness is for those over here and see this side you can see it.

23:47 And it's plating but it's still, it's basically more compacted. Is that the blocky structure that was there? Yeah, because the but it's not coming out his box but it breaks his plates. And I say if you're on this side you can see it almost and draw the tire out of the box, the other, the other one there's a kind of a crack right there.

24:18 And you can't see that, I think that's an old whether it's kind of the old tillage fan. Well, that could be another over here. Okay right, right there, is that the old tillage? Village man, that's and again is it, are you concerned about? Yeah, you can identify it but when I look at it, the roots are growing through it so I'm not too worried.

25:00 Now if roots stop, the odds are water is stopping as well. So if you have ponding water or an area where runoff is starting because water's not infiltrating again, do some digging. I've been in some fields outside Lincoln, we got Salt Creek bottoms. The salt creek bottom's always interesting watching a rainy spring because they, the wet spots they're driving around is too wet to plant then they.

28:39 One chemistry, right? The other thing is pay attention, label rates on plant size. The rate they give are typically two to four inch tall weeds. Well, at 60 mile an hour, by the time you see a weed it's a foot tall. By the time you get around to calling the custom sprayer or it's stupid tall by the time it gets there, it's four foot tall. And then to save money you want a half rate, that's giving it a flu shot in my opinion. You're teaching it to survive.

29:08 That's why I say successful no-tillers will own their own sprayer so you can get timely application, or you treat your commercial guy real good, Christmas ham and a six-pack or something, so that he's getting dicamba on corn and soybean.

29:26 And we have resistant weeds already. Well, I don't like the dicamba and 24D because of we got too many specialty crops around now.

29:40 They didn't, you know, that's one of the things on Facebook they're saying they were going to use 24D to burn down their cover crop and wonder how soon they could plant. And when I was in college and took week science, 24D was a pre-emerge treatment banded on and they controlled weeds for about three weeks. And I always think of that when I see somebody wanting to plant right after, but right after 24D application.

30:16 So they're rolling down stuff like they showed over there for the ride and they roll that stuff down and plant later. It's just amazing what we could do if we took our mind to and said, because my dad never planted corn until May 20th. So if he waited till May 31st he'd probably accept that, but when you're planting corn the 15th of April, there's no way in heck you're going to wait until Memorial Day to plant.

30:42 So that's the way we think and so if you could reduce your herbicide costs, and when they said eighty dollars an acre for herbicide, Paul, about Crimson, I heard that, but I think there's a lot of them in there. I saw that on the Facebook discussion too, and I couldn't believe that because our Gold Rogers farm is twenty dollars, one small twenty five depending on what do you propose to merge and there's too many people that just want to do post-emerge, a burndown at planting and post-emerge.

31:12 We learned years ago a residual before planting, don't let the weeds get started, and then your post-emerge you select for what weeds you have. You don't select the cheapest product because that's the way it's widely available. And unfortunately when Roundup went generic, that's what happened. It got cheap and widely available and that's when we ran into problems. I learned no-till in 78. We didn't have Roundup Ready crops, we didn't even have Roundup weeds. When it came in the early eighties it was a hundred dollars a gallon and the application rate was a quart the acre at 25 bucks. I go, I'm not spending that.

31:50 So the saw structure at the top when I dig up on top with my spade, it's pretty

31:56 Nice, and I can see about probably about an inch of soil that appears to be new soil.

32:05 And when you think about soil development and the thing about, say, protecting the soil at the top and having the earthworms bring soil up to the top, and that's adding soil at the top, so think about growing soil in your operation instead of thinking about going deeper down. Think about what you can get on top.

32:31 So quick, break it off at the end. Did I tell the story about Keith Thompson in this group? No, not yet. Okay, Keith Thompson, I was telling him he's from Osage City. We're on a bus tour. I said Keith, I think I'm building soil at the top. He said, well, Darwin figured that out. And he sent me a paper from Darwin, 1881. Then Darwin said that artifacts sink in the soil because earthworms are bringing soil up to the top. And so things are sinking. There's old sidewalks, the old houses, sidewalks, sunk down. No, the earthworms brought it up. So all that beside it and think about that a little bit.

33:10 And on our farm and our good bottomland soil, it looks like I have about two inches of new soil at the top now with earthworms bringing that stuff up. And in 27 years of no-till, so it's just a different concept of thinking about stuff.

33:31 And then Dale was telling us the last group about raising carbon in the soil. And he told me a story that sounded too phenomenal for me. But the guy asked how's the fastest way to get carbon in the soil? And I said cover crops and mob grazing and having livestock stomp organic matter in the soil. Plus every time they bite the plant, it'll leak out some compounds to feed microbes in the soil. And then Dale said perennial grass growing in E-rays that were getting better, really a huge amount in 15 years. But me, being more practical, I think you could maybe raise the organic matter one percent in 10 to 15 years of good no-till farming. And then having some maybe some cover crops and cattle grazing.

34:30 I have, I can't match the people that tell the stories on my farm. You know, fishermen tell stories like this long. I see, I get out of the coffee shop bragging about your yields in the fall. I know, and my yields are farm averages. I don't brag about what the yield monitors said. I was bragging about what money I get. That's on the accounting firm when they showed me that at the end of the year.

35:08 So how do you guys got any other things about the soil? So the guy from southern Kansas talked this morning about if he lost, I think two or three feet of soil, he'd be really, he couldn't plow anymore because there's.

35:28 Rock too many rocks and we're in Nebraska we're blessed with these kind of deep soils, this silt here, and in a lot of places you got about three feet of soil over bedrock. And so soil conservation stuff really is important, but I can't see why we should lose this viable topsoil and wash it away and then try to build this stuff up below.

35:55 Try to put a cover on that, save to protect the soil from the raindrop. Because what the raindrop does is takes these granules, these little granules up here, and the raindrop pounded on this for an hour, the inch of rain pounded on that for an hour, will dissolve all these little granules. And then you have clay and sand and silt, and we know that the silt won't—if you spray this out it's not going to take much water and it would start repelling it. But the clay, the largest clay particle is two microns in diameter.

36:37 And so if we laid—and nobody knows what a micrometer is—and so if you laid 5000 of those edge to edge you'd have one centimeter or three-eighths of an inch. And if you made a square out of that, 5000 times 5000 is 25 billion clay particles, I mean 25 million clay particles, one layer thick in three-eighths of an inch. You know, if you built that up three-eighths an inch cube, 5000 times 25 million is 125 billion clay particles in that little cube. That's why bentonite seals pumps, because the clay is very small.

37:16 And so if you got any clay in your soil and you let the raindrop pound on that and make that crust, now you seal it so it won't take water. And then you seal it so air can't get in, and then you have to break that crust to get the air in there for the roots and the microbes to live. So think about that, and the biggest culprit on this thing is raindrop. If we get any, and I guess down here they're a little better than we are, and Carney's been pretty lucky too on that. But so those are the kind of things to think about.

37:57 Paul, do you got anything? I'm trying to remember we said yeah they're not with this group talking about getting started no-till in those five to seven years or whatever to really get that structure to build. In the early days when people were really discussing compaction, there was a study done in Minnesota where they had an area that they took and seeded it to a perennial and tried to evaluate the compaction year after year after year. So there was no extra tillage and they were trying to keep a consistent root pattern there by using the same perennial, then and not have to replant or anything like that.

38:33 And they found that it took about 15 to 20 freestyle cycles, wetting drying cycles of the soil, doing this to firm some vertical structure. And when you got that horizontal structure from years of tillage, that's what you want to do is just to break up.

38:49 And if you think about it, you go out in the soybean cover field in the spring from harvest last year through the rains, drying back out through the frost, the mild frost thaws back out on that soil surface. You'll get 15 to 20 freeze-thaw cycles and that top layer is pretty mellow in the soybean cover field we've all seen it go down to tillage depth. At tillage depth, if you got a pan say down there at six to eight inches deep, you might get three cycles, you may get five cycles. You got a soil that cracks—that counts because it's building some vertical structure. But think about three to five cycles, and then I know I'll till my corn into the bean stuff because that's easy. You accumulate another three to five more. You look in at that corner as you say, I'm afraid that all that reservoir doesn't do tillage. You just erase those six to ten that you accumulated and you restart your counter for 15 to 20.

39:43 Now if you think about that three to five each year, multiply it by five years, there's a lot of people said, you know, after five years my field started behaving differently. What finally happened? You accumulated this freeze-thaw, wetting and drying. You accumulated that breaking up the structure. But more importantly, you quit killing the soil life with tillage. And those three to five years that growth—because there's a lot of people go out there saying I'm going to find a cover crop, it's going to improve my soil biology. If I got zero soil biology, I do something to feed zero, you still have zero. If I got something that's already building and I got a little bit of life there and I put some feed to it, it'll build faster. And that little bit extra might be manure like Randy Reink uses, or it might be, you know, park the tillage—number one, accumulate those freeze-thaws, accumulate biological activity.

40:31 Now I said this once at a meeting and this is an NRCS training and one person looked at me says, 'Let's freeze-thaw,' and I sort of said, 'Where do you work at?' Southern U.S., says, 'No, I'm NRCS in Hawaii.' I'm like, 'Oops, never mind.' She didn't even understand wetting and drying, depending on which side of the island you're on. But they have a lot more options when it comes to cover crops because their growing season was year-round.

41:02 So Paul, I had an opportunity one time to see a guy researching ice wedges in an experiment he's doing. And when the water freezes in the soil, it migrates to one point and it makes wedges in the soil. You know, they're maybe a quarter inch wide, and that's what breaks that up. And one time in the winter time, there were some people saying, 'Man, it's really getting dry,' and I was out on a dry dirt road and there were big cracks in the road. And when it's froze and made me realize that those ice wedges in the road were spreading the soil apart and the road was full of water once it wasn't dry. But when you think about freezing, I don't know how you think about it, but my water does migrate and makes wedges or ice wedges in the soil to break up any compaction.