Rebuilding Soils: Leadership, Workers, and the Right Tools

0:00 Okay I want to share with you this morning about rebuilding our soils and that's really what we're here about. We're here to talk about soil health and really about what do we need to do to rebuild our soils and to do this I'm gonna kind of start this by talking a little bit about the history of the conservation movement and where we have been as a nation with conservation and where I think we need to go.

0:36 The history of the conservation movement basically kind of started like this. Back in the 19th century the late 19th century, as the pioneers were moving west there was a lot of encouragement from the government to move west, to do homesteading. You know, 'Move land for the landless, home for the homeless' were some of the advertisements that were put out and there were a lot of people that moved west into the tall grass land prairies of the semi-arid Midwestern and western states, the southern plains and things went well initially. Prosperity followed in the decades after settlement. More people settled and more grassland acres were broken.

1:29 You know the government didn't necessarily help. This is a quote that I came across when I was looking at this. Look at this quote. This was Professor Milton Whitney who was chief of the Bureau of Soils and he said this in 1909: 'The soil is the one indestructible immutable asset that the nation possesses. It is the one resource that cannot be exhausted, that cannot be used up.' And that was kind of the mindset and the mentality back here, you know, in the late 1800s, the early 1900s, as the government was encouraging people to move west, to homestead, to start farming. And this was the mentality that was out there.

2:10 Now to offset that, and we'll be talking about Hugh Hammond Bennett a lot here in a little bit—he's the father of the conservation movement—but commenting on Professor Whitney's statement he says, 'I didn't know so much costly misinformation could be put into a single brief sentence.' And that's very, very true. Now, had Hugh Hammond Bennett been around to witness the latest campaign for President of the United States he may have had to amend that with some of the comments that were made on both sides there. But yes, a lot of costly misinformation and just that mindset that the soil is indestructible and we don't really have to worry about it, we don't really have to take care of it, led to a lot of problems that we face.

2:56 A post-World War One recession led many farmers to try new mechanized farming techniques as a way to increase profits. And you see the pictures there. Between 1925 and 1930 more than five million acres of previously unfarmed land was plowed up for production and just a lot more land was being brought into production. And as we were in a recession after World War One, guys needed to farm more ground to try to make a profit. And with the help of this mechanized farming, farmers produced record wheat yields in 1931. The 1931 the Depression was just coming in, people didn't have any money to buy the wheat. And because there were such so many acres that were being produced there was just a huge glut of wheat. No one could afford it, no one could buy it. So the farmers didn't have any money. So what do farmers do? You plant more acres, okay? And that's exactly what happened. The wheat market was flooded, people were too poor to buy, so what did they do? They expanded their.

4:00 Fields in order to turn a profit they broke out more prairie, they farm more ground, and any ground that they weren't farming they just kind of left lay bare. And then you all know what happened on the heels of all of this—it's leading up to this perfect storm, if you will, of the Dust Bowl. And on the heels of all this expanded production of all these acres being broke and brought into production, on the heels of this mindset that the land is the one indestructible asset that we have as a nation, we had one of the most severe drought periods that we've ever had, strong winds, and it led to the greatest man-made ecological disaster in modern history, and that's the Dust Bowl.

4:42 And you've all seen pictures of that, and they're very sobering. I think that anybody that farms should be required to watch Ken Burns's Dust Bowl documentary on PBS and also read the book 'The Worst Hard Times' by Timothy Egan, because they both give really sobering accounts of the Dust Bowl, what the causes that led to it, and what happened. And we've all seen these heart-wrenching pictures of what happened because of all of these different factors that came to be. In the 1934 yearbook of agriculture, it stated that approximately 35 million acres of formerly cultivated land have essentially been destroyed for crop production, a hundred million acres now and crops have lost most or all of the topsoil, and 125 million acres of land now and crops are being rapidly losing topsoil. So a pretty bleak outlook in 1934 as we were just starting into the teeth of the Dust Bowl.

5:42 Andrew Hugh Hammond Bennett, again as the father of the conservation movement, he stated that soil erosion control on cultivated land is essentially an agronomic problem. And Hugh Hammond Bennett was really a man ahead of his time, because while most people were focusing on terraces and waterways and kind of mechanical type things to try to stop this erosion that was going on, he recognized very early on that it was an agronomic problem. It was a problem in the way that we were farming. And so I just want to take a few minutes and look at some of the things that he pushed for, and again, that's the start of kind of the conservation movement that we are continuing on this legacy or this tradition.

6:30 So the Soil Erosion Service was formed in 1933, and it was mainly demonstration projects throughout the United States. You can see the different areas where the SCS (Soil Erosion Service) had demonstration sites, but it was very limited in funding and very limited in scope, and it was set to expire in 1935. So it was only a couple-year project. And so they were making some progress in demonstrating how to stop some of this erosion, but that funding was set to run out very soon. And in 1935, Hugh Hammond Bennett was testifying before Congress because he was trying to get a more permanent agency, more permanent funding to help combat this Dust Bowl that was going on, all of this erosion that was happening.

7:22 And some of this is a little bit of urban legend, I think, because nobody knows for sure if this really happened or not. But Hugh Hammond Bennett was one of the largest dust storms—the date was making its way across the country, started in Texas, came up through Oklahoma, Kansas, and it just kept moving east. And it kept moving east, and he was getting telegraphs telling him how far.

7:43 It was progressing. You know March 20th 1935 Hugh Bennett was testifying before Congress. You can see a picture of the Lincoln Memorial here during the Jefferson Memorial in Washington DC and the dust cloud there. But legend has it that as Hugh Hammond Bennett was testifying before Congress he went over to the windows and threw open the curtains and you couldn't hardly see outside because all it was was a cloud of dust moving through Washington DC and he says 'gentlemen you are watching Kansas passed by your window' and that made a really big impact on those legislators. You know sometimes that's what it takes.

8:24 Shortly thereafter in April in 1935 Congress passed public law 74-46 which recognized the wastage of soil and moisture resources as farm grazing and forest lands is a menace to the national welfare and they established the Soil Conservation Service the SCS as a permanent agency in the USDA. So that was kind of the start of the conservation movement.

8:53 In addition to that because 75 percent of the land in the United States is privately owned and privately held and for some reason farmers don't really trust the government. I don't know why that is. I don't know if it's still that way but back then evidently it was. They knew Hugh Hammond Bennett and others knew that if the conservation movement was to really be effective it had to be more than just a government agency or a government entity. Congress realized that they needed active support from landowners to really make this work.

9:25 In 1937 President Roosevelt established the legislation to create conservation districts. In 1937 Brown County Soil and Water Conservation District in North Carolina was formed and more than three thousand local conservation districts were soon to follow. We're glad to have the Oklahoma Conservation Commission over here as one of our sponsors. If you want to know more about soil and water conservation districts you can sure talk to them. I know Blaine is in here somewhere. Be more than happy to talk to you. But I'm guessing that most of you have some association with your local Soil and Water Conservation District and that's great. It's a great partnership between both government and private.

10:14 The conservation movement started largely to stop erosion from the Dust Bowl and they were able to do that. Some of the things that the Soil Conservation Service and Hugh Hammond Bennett came up with stopped erosion and from there it went on largely to preventing erosion. If you look at the last 80-90 years of the conservation movement since the dustbowl it has largely been preventing erosion. So building terraces, putting in grass waterways, encouraging reduced tillage, maybe even conservation tillage or no tillage, making a conservation plan. You've all been involved in conservation plans. So it's largely been about preventing erosion and even the famous T factor—the tolerance factor—you know how much soil erosion is tolerable. They'll have that discussion. But I'm here to challenge us, myself included, that we need to move beyond that. It's time to change the way we think. We need to move beyond just preventing soil erosion.

11:24 We need to move beyond tolerance for soil erosion. We need to move beyond being just sustainable because what good is it to sustain a soil resource that is already largely degraded? We can't just remain sustainable. We have to regenerate. We have to rebuild, and that's what this conference is really going to be about. It's going to be about rebuilding our nation's soils, and we can do this. This is where we need to shift gears, and many of the people in this room have already done that, but we need to get more people on board with this movement to not just prevent erosion but to rebuild our nation soils, and it's a huge task.

12:06 We've got 900 million acres of farmland in the United States, and the vast majority of it has experienced significant degradation through erosion and loss of organic matter. Has anybody ever seen this picture? This is a rest stop in Iowa. Iowa has some of the nicest rest stops along the interstate in any state I've ever been in. This is one of the rest stops in Iowa, and what this shows is a picture of the depth of topsoil in that part of Iowa. Iowa has some of the best soils in the nation. The one on the left, that big tall column, shows you how much topsoil they had back in the 1890s, and then it's like 1920s and 1950s and 70s and 2000 or some, but look how much topsoil Iowa has lost over the last century. That's, you know, they still have more topsoil than most of us ever started with, but look how much they've lost.

13:12 I'm here to tell you that most of the ground that's being farmed, most of this 900 million acres of farmland, has had significant degradation of topsoil loss and loss of organic matter. Because of that, we're not nearly as productive as what we could be. So we need to rebuild. We need to start restoring these soils, and hopefully in a hundred years, this rest stop, they can update that and they can have another set of pillars where we see that starting to come back up because we can rebuild our soils. We're going to have people here telling you about case studies of where they've done that and how they can do that.

13:50 Whenever I think of a huge rebuilding project, my mind always goes to the story of Nehemiah in the Bible, and so I want to do a little bit of a comparison between the rebuilding project that Nehemiah had going on and how that relates to the project that we have in front of us to rebuild our nation's soils because I think there's a lot of similarities between the two stories. So I want to just take you through a little bit of a history lesson of how Nehemiah rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem and what it took for him to do that because the parallels for what it took for him to do that and what it's going to take for us to rebuild our nation soils, there's many parallels.

14:33 So 586 BC, the Babylonians attacked Jerusalem. They destroy the city. They burned the temple. They break down the city walls, and they carry off the Hebrew people, the Jewish people, into exile. This is when Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego all get taken out of Jerusalem and into Babylon. Babylon was basically modern-day Iraq. Forty-seven years later, Babylon falls to the Persians. The Persians are modern-day Iran, so they were fighting back then as well as now. The Jewish exile, Tsar, part of the spoils of war.

15:12 They get moved from Babylon to Persia and then three years later after being under Persian control the Emperor Cyrus the Persian Emperor issues a decree and he allows limited number of Jews to return to Jerusalem's rebel leads the first way the Jews return and they rebuild the temple between 535 and 536. They rebuild the temple and then 61 years later Ezra leads another group exile back to Jerusalem about 1,500 men and their families so they've started going back to Jerusalem they've rebuilt the temple but they haven't rebuilt the the walls of the city and then 10 years later in 445 BC a report comes back to Persia and this is where we're gonna pick up the story this is where Nehemiah comes into the story and this the Nehemiah the book of Nehemiah starts out with the words of Nehemiah the son of hack Alya and before we get into that just briefly Nehemiah was a Jewish exile who was born into captivity in Babylon he was later moved to Persia when Persia took over and he was the cup bearer to the King we know that because he said he tells us that in in the book and that's a significant thing because even though he was would have been considered a slave or a captive he had a very prominent position in in the government if you will in in the king's court because the cup bearer was responsible for tasting all of the wine before the king drank it just in case somebody poisoned it he would die first. Okay so you know it's one of those deals where hey this is a really important position but if you die well better you than me kind of think so it you know they were it's not like he was gonna have a family member do that he was still having a slave do it but it was probably one of the highest positions that a slave or a captive or an exile like this could hold so it was really a very honoured position when he says he was cup bearer to the king it was a position that held really quite a bit of power and prestige so that's kind of the background on who Nehemiah was and so here's the report that comes back to Persia from from people that were travelling through okay they didn't have Facebook and Twitter so the the reports were being carried by people so 10 years after Ezra led up these 1,500 people back what some of these people came back through and it says the words in Nehemiah the son of Halleck ila now it happened in the month that is Lev in the 20th year why was in Susa the capital that Han and I one of my brothers and some men from Judah came and I asked concerning the Jews who had escaped and survived the captivity and about Jerusalem and they said to me the remnant there in the province who survived the captivity are in great distress and reproach and the wall of Jerusalem is broken down and its gates are burned with fire and so this is where Nehemiah realized that he had a huge rebuilding project and he needed to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem and so this is where we're gonna pick up the story and there's three points that I want to make here that are gonna apply both to what Nehemiah did and what we need to do as a soil health movement if we're gonna do this huge rebuilding project we need to have the right leaders we need to have the right workers and we need to have the right tools in order to accomplish this so let's look first of all at the right leaders the right leaders have several characteristics that are common amongst all leaders number one they care very.

18:55 Deeply and we see that here with Nehemiah because in verse two he asked the people. These people were coming through somehow he knew they were from Jerusalem. He asked concerning the Jews who had escaped and who were there in Jerusalem. He says how's it going for you guys? And when he heard the words that they told him, he sat down and he wept and he mourned for days. He cared that much when he heard that the walls weren't rebuilt and that basically they had no protection because in those days a wall to a city was hugely important because the city without a wall had no protection from all the enemies around them. And people could just come in, take whatever they wanted to. They had no protection. So a wall to a city was extremely important. And so to Jerusalem to have no city wall, he knew that they were susceptible to attack. He knew that they were susceptible to all of their enemies that were wanting to come in. So he sat down and he wept and mourned for days.

20:02 And I wonder, you know, when we look out across our country, when you were driving here and you saw the same of many of the same fields that I did, when we're living there, there's a lot of fields out there that are tilled bare and if the wind picks up, those things are going to blow. And when we get a big rain, they're going to wash and they're going to erode. And I wonder, do we look at those? Now we may not sit down and mourn and weep and fast for days, but do we care? Do we care when we see that? We probably care when we see it happening on our own ground and it hurts when you see your soil wash away or blow away. It hurts and you probably want to mourn and weep. But do we have that same effect when we see our neighbor's land blown away? Because we've got to be thinking more than just our own little part of the world. And so we need leaders who care so deeply that they're willing to sit down and weep because of the destruction going on around us.

20:59 Number two, these leaders prepare thoroughly. Before Nehemiah took any action at all, it says that he prayed and fasted for four days. Okay, now I'm not saying that you have to pray and fast for four days before you make any decisions, but good leaders prepare thoroughly before they take any action. They don't just make a snap decision. They're thoroughly prepared before they take that action. And then when they do, they act boldly. Okay, so they care deeply, they prepare thoroughly, and they act boldly. And I'm here to tell you that every person in this room, you're going to fall both into the leader category and the worker category in this soil health movement. You will be a leader. It may be at a national level, maybe at a regional level. It may be at a very local level. It may be just at your own farm level, but you are a leader in this movement. But you're also going to be a worker. So just because you're not some national leader, don't think that this doesn't apply to you. They care deeply, they prepare thoroughly, and then they act boldly.

22:09 Look at what Nehemiah did. Now I'm not going to read all of this, but basically what he did is he went into the presence of the king and the king knew him so well that he said, Nehemiah, why are you sad? You know, you're never sad. You're always an upbeat kind of guy. Why are you sad? And Nehemiah said, why shouldn't I be sad because the city where my fathers are buried, the city where I came from, my home country, the walls are broken down and they're subject.

22:36 To be an attack, why shouldn't I be sad because of that? And the king says, 'Well, Nehemiah, what do you want to do?' And basically, Nehemiah—and this is very, very bold for a slave to ask the king—basically for a leave of absence. He says, 'I want to go back to my city and rebuild the walls.' And we don't probably understand how much courage that took to ask that. That is what I call bold action, because that king could have very easily have said, number one, no you can't go. Number two, you know, how dare you be so brash and bold to ask me that, you know, off with his head kind of a thing. But the king said, 'Well, how long? How long you gonna be gone? How long is it gonna take?' And so Nehemiah kind of gives him a time frame, and the king says okay, go.

23:25 Leaders act boldly just like Nehemiah did here. He saw a need, he cared deeply about that need, he prepared thoroughly, and then he acted boldly. And that's the kind of leadership that we need in our soil health movement if we're gonna move beyond just preventing erosion but to be actually rebuilding our soils. It's going to take that kind of leadership. And fortunately, we have a lot of leaders like that. We have a lot of leaders in our national soil health movement like that. You're gonna hear from some of those leaders here. There's many other people who are taking leadership roles in this movement who care very deeply and they prepare thoroughly, and there are a lot of bold actions being taken. And I'm very glad to see that.

24:08 So we've got good leadership. We need to develop more because we need leaders at every level of this movement. We'd have to have them at the national level, the regional level, the state level, the local levels. Within the Soil Conservation District, like say there's 3,000 soil and water conservation districts. We need to have people that want to rebuild their soils on the boards of every single one of those districts in order to make effective change. So if you want to be a leader in this movement, get on your local soil conservation district and start making an impact.

24:43 Okay, so we have the right leaders and we need the right workers. And the right workers share a common set of characteristics as well. Number one, they share a common vision. They share a common vision with the leadership. And Nehemiah did a great job of talking to the workers. So he says he went up at night by the ravine and he inspected the wall. This is after he went to Jerusalem. He entered the valley gate and returned. The officials didn't know he was there yet. Then he said to the officials, he said to the people that were in Jerusalem, 'You see the bad situation that we're in? That Jerusalem is desolate and its gates are burned by fire. Come, let us rebuild the wall so that we will no longer be a reproach.' I told them how the hand of my God had been favorable to me and also about the king's words which he had spoken to me. And here's what the workers said: 'Then they said, 'Let us arise and build.' So they put their hand to the good work.'

25:40 And again, the workers need to share that vision that the leadership has. And it's the leader's responsibility to communicate that vision. That's what you see going on here. Nehemiah communicated that vision. He identified the problem. He said why it was a problem. Here's what we're gonna do to fix it. And the worker said, 'Let's get up, let's get going, and let's get this thing done.' And so our workers in this need to share a common vision.

29:46 Million acres here in the United States. It'll just crush us, it'll overwhelm us to the point where we would not be able to function. But if we look at what we have right in front of us, what do we have to take care of right in front of our own house, we can do that. And once we get ours done, we can help others. And that's where you go from being a worker to becoming a leader in your own local conservation districts. That's why we don't just have the NRCS as one big national entity, but we also have the local conservation districts. And it's much more manageable when we take it in bite-sized chunks like that. So each one to his own work, but each one helping others. And if you read through the whole book in Nehemiah, you will see that they built the part of the wall in front of their own house, but then they also help their neighbors. And that's the recipe to not being overwhelmed and to be able to get all this work done.

30:43 And number four: these workers have to be extremely courageous, both in rebuilding the wall. And we need to be very courageous in rebuilding our soils as well. Because what you're going to find, and let's see how many of you can relate to some of these statements or relate to Nehemiah and his workers: not everyone is going to support your work. Okay, Nehemiah chapter two, it says Sanballat and Tobiah the Ammonite official heard about it. It was very displeasing to them that someone had come to seek the welfare of the sons of Israel. You may be doing things in your local community that may be displeasing to some of your neighbors. You may be doing things that aren't supported by your community. That's just the fact of life when you try to do a big rebuilding project. Not everybody is going to be on board with it. And sometimes you'll even be ridiculed for your efforts.

31:39 Okay, ridiculing is not something new. Look at what happened: when Sanballat heard that they were rebuilding the wall, he became furious and very angry and he mocked the Jews. He spoke in the presence of his brothers and the wealthy men of Samaria and said, 'Who are these feeble Jews? What are these feeble Jews doing? Are they going to restore it for themselves? Can they offer sacrifices? Can they finish in a day? Can they revive the stones from the dusty rubble, even the burned ones?' Now Tobiah the Ammonite was near him and he said, 'Even what they are building, if a fox should jump on it, it would break their stone walls down.' Okay, you're going to get ridiculed for some of the things that you do, just like Nehemiah and his workers did. People are gonna be jealous. People are going to not understand what you're trying to accomplish. People are gonna be very territorial and they're not going to support your efforts. And sometimes they'll ridicule you. And hopefully it doesn't come to this, but in Nehemiah's case, it even led to plotting and attacks. And it goes on to say that these leaders of these other clans around Jerusalem became very angry and all of them conspired together to come and fight against Jerusalem and to cause a disturbance in it. Now hopefully in your community, if you don't get support, if you're being ridiculed, hopefully it doesn't come to the point where you're getting attacked for what you're trying to do. But there may be times when you may be attacked, I don't know. But how do we deal with that?

33:14 Courageous leaders deal with that or courageous workers deal with that well. Number one, again it comes down to leadership. That's something the leaders have to do. You know, Nehemiah, he prayed to God, and because of the people that were trying to fight against them, he set up a guard day and night. So you need good leaders to come up with a plan.

33:33 Number two, you need to be prepared. You need to be prepared to be ridiculed. You need to be prepared to not have support. You need to be prepared to have some sort of attack. And what Nehemiah had them do is they carried their burdens and took their load with one hand, and they carried a sword or a weapon in their other hand. Now I'm not saying you need to conceal and carry because of that—you know, go ahead and do it if you want to. I don't think it's going to come to that, but the point is you need to be prepared and you need to be ready for not being supported by some in your community or some, you know, maybe at levels up above you, whether it be in government or organizations of some sort. This movement is not always going to be supported by everybody like it should be.

34:22 So you need to be prepared, and then just like Nehemiah and his guys, we need to continue in spite of the threats. We need to continue in spite of the lack of support that we may feel that we have from people around us. And in Chapter Four, 16, it says those who are rebuilding the wall carried burdens, they took their load on one hand doing the work, while on the other hand holding a weapon. So we need to be prepared for that. And with the right leaders and with the right workers, we can do that. And I think that we can make a lot of progress in this if we're prepared and ready to do that.

34:59 And the last thing is we talked about having the right leaders. We talked about having the right workers, and lastly, we need to have the right tools. Every job is best accomplished when using the right tools. Now the book of Nehemiah does not give details about what tools that they used. You know, I'm just guessing that these are some of the tools that they would have used to rebuild the wall—you know, stone tools, you know, block and tackle to move some of the big stones, you know, trowel, shovel, different things. We don't know what tools they used, but I'm sure they used the best tools that they had available to them.

35:35 And it's the same way in our rebuilding project. If we're going to rebuild our soils in this nation, we need to use the best tools that we have. And trust me, we've got some really good tools at our disposal, and we need to be using them. And if we're not using the right tools, it doesn't matter how good our leaders are, doesn't matter how good our workers are. If we don't use the right tools, we're going to really, really struggle to get anything accomplished.

36:01 And so some of the tools, and I'm not going to go into detail on this because the rest of the conference is going to be talking about these tools, okay? I've got people way smarter than me on the schedule to come up and explain these to you, but we need tools like cover crops because cover crops will rebuild the soil faster than not having them. Because cover crops are putting into the soil and not taking out, and that we've been taking out of the soil for too long, and that's why we've degraded it. Cover crops can help protect it, they can armor it, they can prevent the erosion, they can put carbon.

36:39 Back into the soil and have rebuild it very, very quickly. And I know Alan Williams is going to talk about a farm that they recently purchased and how they've been able to build that up, not necessarily with cover crops, but by having crops growing, and some of the data that he has is just pretty stunning.

36:57 Another tool that we have access to is no-till farming. You know, once we stopped tilling the soil, we can allow it to heal, we can allow it to rebuild, and we're really, really going to struggle to rebuild our soils very quickly if we don't either reduce or eliminate the tillage because when we expose that ground—which is what tillage does—we expose it to the elements, and that's when it can blow away, that's when it can wash away, that's when the organic matter will go up as CO2 into the atmosphere. So we need to really, really reduce the amount of tillage that we're doing if we're going to rebuild our soils, and we need to keep the soil covered. Every job is best accomplished with the right tools. In soil, cover or the soil armor is extremely important, and if we don't have that soil covered, you know, it's going to get too hot, it can get too cold, it can wash away, it can blow away.

37:57 This is a picture of one of our soybean fields from this year that we planted into a cover crop ride that we let get about four feet tall, and then we planted into it and then we rolled it down. And even in August when I took this picture, kind of push the soybeans away—look at the soil armor that we still had on the soil surface there. That is what we want to see when we go out to our fields. We don't want to see the soil. We just want to see the armor, we want to see the residue.

38:23 Soil biology is another tool that we have at our disposal. It's been largely ignored in conventional agriculture because it's hard to take care of what we can't see. And by and large, you know, we can see earthworms, and Jonathan Cob had just tons of earthworms out on his farm, and we could see those, but there was so much more that we couldn't see—all of the bacteria. The other picture on here shows mycorrhizae fungi and just showing what it can do for the soil. And again, other people will talk more about what these things do, but by leveraging the biology of the soil, we can rebuild these soils because that's how they were built in the first place. That's how God created these soils. He created the soils, the plants, and the biology to all work together. And when we are continually feeding the soil everything it needs from the outside with fertilizers and herbicides and insecticides and fungicides and all of those—when we continually do that, we basically are eliminating the biological aspect of it. And that's why we have not been able to rebuild our soils very quickly because we're not doing it biologically. And as people are going to share, when you get the biology right, the soils will change extremely fast.

39:45 We have Dr. Jonathan Lundgren here. He's going to be talking about beneficial insects and how that can be a tool in our quest to rebuild soils. And you're going to get to hear him twice today because he has to leave tomorrow to go down to Mexico to a conference, so he's going to get both his talks in today, but you're really going to enjoy what he has to share with you about that.

40:10 And then finally, properly managed livestock. You know, a lot—there were a lot of questions yesterday out at.

40:16 Jonathan's place about how fast can we change the soils, how fast can we raise that increase that organic matter level in our soils. And that's a hard question to answer, but I think most people would agree that if you have properly managed livestock, you will see the changes happen much more rapidly than if you don't have livestock as part of your operation because livestock are a great way to harvest and generate income while still feeding the soil and giving back to the soil and putting back into the soil. And Dr. Williams will be sharing extensively about how properly managed, properly grazed animals can really increase the soil rebuilding effort much quicker.

41:02 When we have all these right tools in place, when we have the cover crops and we have the biology and we have the soil armor and we're doing no-till or reduced tillage and we're having that properly managed livestock, we can start to rebuild our soils that we have lost over the past decades and a couple hundred years that we've been doing conventional farming here. We can bring this back. We can do this.

41:28 In summary, in a huge rebuilding project like this, we need to have the right leaders, and I think we've got a lot of good leaders in place. We need more, especially at those local conservation district levels. We have a lot of good workers, but we need more. I would have loved to have seen twice as many people in this room. We need more workers. We need more training. We need more people who are willing to take the charge and to do the work in front of their own house, and then we need access to the right tools and we need to understand how to use those tools to the best of our ability. And that's why we're all here. We're going to be talking about a lot of the tools today and tomorrow that you can use to do this rebuilding project.

42:16 How long? Here's a question for you. We'll see if you know your biblical history very well. How long did it take Nehemiah and the Jews to rebuild the walls? You know, they had a mile of wall, 15 feet high, 12 feet wide at the bottom, 7 feet wide at the top, 10 different gates, all these different towers. How long did it take him to do that? Years? Decades? How long did that take? Plus they had these guys attacking them, so they had to work with the sword in one hand.

42:50 Well, Nehemiah chapter 6 tells us, so the wall was completed on the 25th of the month of Elul, all in 52 days. That's stunning to me. That's stunning. I never really recognized that till I started studying this. They did this in 52 days.

43:11 How long will it take us to rebuild our soils? What did we learn in college? How long does it take to build an inch of topsoil? Thousands of years. And that's true if you're not using the right tools. If all we're doing is letting natural processes, weathering to rock change at the topsoil, yes it can take thousands of years. If we're using the right tools, it's not going to take thousands of years. It will take a few years. Allen's going to share some information on this farm that they bought that was completely wore out and how they literally changed it in just a few short years. It's not going to take us as long as what the experts say. It's not going to take us as long as what we might think if we work together, if we have the right leaders and we have the right workers and we employ the right tools. And that's why I'm so excited and I'm so glad that each and every one of you are here because we're going to be talking about these tools. And I think if we work together, we can rebuild these soils much quicker than what we ever thought.