Seven Freebies for Farmers: What God's Creation Provides

0:00 [Music]

0:04 So my talk is titled the seven freebies for farmers and some of this may be a little bit familiar to you. Hey David, why don't you go ahead and dim the lights just a little bit to make the screen show up a little bit better. But I entitled this seven freebies of farmers. It's going to be really kind of a base introduction. I feel like I'm the opening act for The Rolling Stones or something here, so I'm just going to lay some groundwork for lot of the information that I think Dr. Jones is going to share, and then she can really build on this and get into a lot more of the detail.

0:38 So just a little quiz to get you started. If you want to get the attention of an animal, what do you do? Well, you can use something like this. Anybody know what that is? Yeah, that's a duck call and they make calls for all sorts of animals. So if you want to get their attention, you know, make a sound like that animal try to bring him in. What if you want to get the attention of a soldier? You can get a bugler. Okay, because there's certain bugle calls that will alert the soldiers to different things. You want to get the attention of a child? Well, I send in the ice cream truck, right? That'll get their attention. What if you want to get the attention of a farmer? What do you do for that? Is there a call for that? Why yes, there is a call. This is the call of the farmer. Zach knows all about this. You just say we've got an auction coming up, right? That'll draw in. But really the call to the farmer is hey, we've got free stuff. There's freebies here, and if you don't believe it, look around the room and see how many people actually paid for the hat that they're wearing. Everybody likes freebies. Everybody likes free stuff, and as Farmers we're so blessed because we have so many free things at our disposal.

2:01 And I'm not just talking about Seed corn company caps and you know trips to the Caribbean if you buy a whole bunch of corn seed. Not talking about that. I'm talking about the free things that God has given us through his wonderful creation that are at our disposal as farmers, and that's what I want to talk about here this morning to kind of set the stage. There's seven really crucial free things for Farmers if we would only take advantage of them, and kind of the subtitle of this is are you getting your share? Because if you're not getting your share of these free things, it's only your fault. Nobody else's fault. Because the thing these seven things I'm going to talk about—just because Lauren is getting a bunch doesn't take away from my access to it. We each have equal access to it, and these things are virtually unlimited.

2:55 So we're going to go through these. It's kind of set the stage for the rest of the day, and then we'll let Christine dive into the really high-end technical stuff. So number one, the number one free thing that we have access to is solar energy—sunlight. It is free. It is limitless, and plants—I say it's the best way to capture, store, and convert it, but really it's almost the only way to really take advantage of that. Now, you could argue, you know, solar panels and things like that, but from a farmer standpoint, solar energy is limitless and free, and it's the energy that drives our system. It's the energy that drives our system, and it's so important that you take advantage of that solar energy. And often times as Farmers we don't even think about it. We don't think about what we're doing, you know, as we're planting those corn seeds, as we're planting those soybean seeds. You know, outp these cool little solar collectors called leaves and photosynthesis, right here. CO2 plus H2O with the power of the sunlight and the chlorophyll in these plants, it creates C6H12O6, which is glucose—it's a simple carbohydrate sugar—and oxygen is a byproduct.

4:07 Byproduct we'll talk about oxygen later, but that's important for anybody who wants to breathe. It's a great little byproduct. And so this formula you learned it in elementary school, you studied it in high school—the most important chemical formula in the world because it's the basis of our life and it's the sunlight energy that powers the whole thing.

4:28 Really, as far as farmers, we're not really growing corn, we're not really growing beans or wheat or anything else. We're really just capturing solar energy and turning it into something of value. We're solar farmers. Solar farmers. Now I know there's in some of you are areas there are a lot of solar farms coming in, but that's much different than being solar farmers. We're capturing the power of the sun and if you don't capture it, it's just simply wasted.

4:57 So what we need to do is we need to think about what we're growing, how we're growing it, the sequence that we're growing it in, and figure out how to be more efficient at capturing it. So if you're in a corn soybean rotation, which many people in our area right in here and I know we got people from all across the country and even across the world, but around here corn soy means rule the day. In a corn soybean rotation and there's nothing wrong with those crops, but if that's all you're doing, you're capturing less than 50% of the sunlight that's hitting the ground. And so that's kind of wasteful. If you were only 50% efficient at anything else you would think that's kind of wasteful.

5:41 Well, maybe fertilizer that's maybe not that much matter, but we'll talk about that in a little bit. But you have to have something growing there more often if you're going to take advantage of all the sunlight that God is sending you on the acres that you have. So corn, soybeans, put a cover crop in there, graze the cover crop. We saw that yesterday. We saw cover crops planted after soybeans and some after corn in those different plots, and then we're planting right back into it. So we're capturing the maximum amount of solar energy because we're putting those cover crops.

6:14 I talked yesterday about why rye is such an awesome cover crop because it can be planted so late and it will germinate in 34 degree soils and at 38° in sunshine it's photosynthesizing. Nothing else does that. And so even on those cold winter days when the sun is shining, that rye plant is doing a little bit, it's cranking out a little bit of photosynthesis. And so we need to maximize that effort and we need to convert as much of that sunlight as possible.

6:46 Now maybe some of you in here are wheat farmers or have wheat as part of your rotation. Hopefully you know wheat is a great crop because it allows us to do lots of different things after it. Now unfortunately what many people do after wheat is spray it, spray it, spray it, keep the weeds down, or they till it, or hopefully nobody in here does this, they burn the stubble. But we've all seen that down in Kansas, you down in your area. That's not uncommon. At least it used to be, and it's probably some people will still do it.

7:18 So with wheat we have so many opportunities to do these wonderful diverse 10, 12, 15 way cover crop mixes that we can all get really excited about because they have all this huge diversity. And to me that's one of the most important reasons that you would do it. And it doesn't have to be wheat. It could be you could be growing rye for cover crop. You could be growing peas for the human consumption market. It's something that's harvested in the summertime that allows this other type of cover crop because now we're capturing the maximum amount of solar energy.

7:51 When you harvest wheat July 1, that's pretty close to the longest days of the year. And then all that fallow period you're wasting the maximum amount of sunshine days that there is. And so just be thinking about the rotation that you have and where can you put these cover crops into the rotation to capture that solar energy because when you have

8:13 A field that looks like this could represent wheat stubble, it could represent corn stocks, it could represent a soybean field, but when you have a field like that and nothing is growing and the weather conditions allow something to grow, then it's a missed opportunity. You're wasting that solar energy, you're wasting the opportunity to turn that sunlight into something of value, something that can help build your soil, something that can help grow your livestock, something that can feed your soil biology. It's a missed opportunity.

8:48 Now I know that some of you are from much drier climates, and sometimes even here you know it's quite dry, and so there are things that you have to consider. You know, that's the context of the operation that you're in. In a drier environment, you have to time this really well. You can't terminate one crop and plant your next one like we were doing under the pivot. We don't typically do what you saw yesterday. We don't typically do that on a lot of our dryland acres because we don't feel like we can support that on the rainfall that we get year in and year out. So you have to kind of tailor-make these solutions to the context of your environment.

9:31 All right, number two. So number one: solar energy is free and plants are the best way to capture it. Number two: carbon is not a problem. Carbon is not a problem. Now that's probably something you don't hear very often in the news. I think carbon needs a new press agent because it's gotten a lot of bad press and it's the whipping boy for everybody from you know this group to that group. They blame carbon. Carbon is easy to blame. It's relatively easy to measure and it certainly has increased in the atmosphere, but it's not the problem. We'll talk about that. I'm not smart enough to know what the problem is. Maybe Christine can enlighten us on what the problem is. The problem is it's not in the soil anymore. That's the problem. But carbon is free food for both plants and biology, and if you're going to feed your plants and feed your biology, and if you're a farmer and you're trying to grow something, the sunlight is the energy. It's not the food. It's the energy. The food is the carbon, and again, that's free.

10:35 That's free, and so what we need to do is again as we think about photosynthesis, you know, the first part of photosynthesis is taking CO2, and that is partially coming from the atmosphere. And I say partially coming from the atmosphere because you know that's where a lot of it is held, and there's about 400 of 1%, so it's at very low concentrations. But often times a limiting factor in us growing better and bigger and more productive crops is we don't have enough carbon. Those plants can't pull enough out of the atmosphere. So when we have a system that's developed and we have decomposing residue, so that field that you saw that Brian had planted you know ten days ago, that corn was just coming up and there's all that rye residue out there. Well, when that corn gets knee high and it starts to canopy, that rye is going to start breaking down, and as that residue breaks down, guess what? One of the byproducts of residue breakdown is carbon dioxide, and the concentration of that CO2 will be a higher concentration below the leaves as it will be above the leaves. And guess where God put the stomata of a plant when He designed them? It's underneath the leaf. And so we can capture that CO2 from my residue decomposition. I can capture it before it ever gets to the atmosphere, and you know it's a very common practice in greenhouses. You pump extra CO2 into the greenhouse because it always increases production. And so carbon is not a problem. We just got to get it in the right place at the right time.

12:17 So here's how it works. Carbon is the food. So the plants are producing carbon right here through photosynthesis. This is that glucose molecule, and the plant has an amazing ability to turn this into many many

12:29 Different compounds it does not stay as glucose but it is paid out through these liquid root exudates and I got a cool picture I'm going to show you here in a little bit. It's leaked out as much as 50% of the carbon that a plant produces through photosynthesis. It's not used by the plant to grow roots, to grow new leaves, to flower, to put on seeds. As much as half of what it can produce through photosynthesis is leaked out through the root system.

12:55 The biology, all these critters here, they're consuming it. It's their food source and so they're taking it in and then in exchange they are having to deliver something back to that plant. Because plants are very smart, and if they're not getting a return on their investment they're going to stop putting as much of that carbon out. So it's kind of a situation where the poor soils get poor because that plant can sense if there's biology out there, and if there's no biology it's not going to put as much carbon into the soil. So the bad soils get worse and the good soils get better because where you do have a lot of biology, the plant says, 'I've got workers here, they just need to be fed,' and so it pumps massive amounts of carbon into the soil to feed the biology and provide all these services: sourcing nutrients, delivering nutrients, protecting the plant. All of these things is what makes the soil a living system.

13:59 Carbon is not a problem and if somebody's telling you there's way too much carbon, just tell them, 'Well, it's just in the wrong place.' And the solution is pretty simple: we just need to put it back where it belongs, and that's into the soil. And it's a cycle. Carbon is a cycle.

14:17 Here's some pictures from our friend Jimmy Emmons from Oklahoma, and these are really cool pictures. But I understand Jimmy told me in a conversation we had earlier—because Dr. Jones was down in Oklahoma earlier—he said, 'My pictures aren't as good as what Dr. Jones is going to share.' So I'm going to share these but you're going to see some other ones in Christine's presentation as well. This is Jimmy Emmons, farmer in Oklahoma. He planted a cover crop of cereal rye, and the rye was probably 10 inches tall. They had a field day, he was out there digging around and these are some pictures that he took.

14:56 First of all, look at all the great soil aggregation on the roots. It tells you he's got a very active, biologically active system that's forming all those glues and making that soil cling to the roots. And as he took his iPhone and he has a little magnifier on it called the ProScope, and he was looking at these things more closely, he saw this picture on the right. And what this is—again, this is just with his iPhone and a magnifier—this is kind of a hole right here. You can see the soil around it. That's a worm burrow. So as he dug up the soil and he kind of broke it apart, it exposed a worm burrow and he saw this cereal rye root from this cover crop, from that same field it was growing sideways through this worm burrow. And so these root hairs—what you see, these little root hairs coming out—those weren't actually growing in the soil, so they're incredibly well preserved and he was able to see that.

16:01 As he got to looking at it, he's like, 'There's something kind of interesting.' And he kind of noticed this right here. So he upped his magnification and he got this picture here. This same picture on the left, but this picture on the right—look at all of those little liquid droplets on that. Now that's the liquid carbon, the liquid root exudates that are being pumped out by that cover crop that's only 10 to 12 inches tall. Okay, so it's not like it's 4 feet tall rye, but it's actively growing and actively photosynthesizing. And think about that being the diameter of a worm burrow, so what, an eighth of an inch at the most. Look at how many droplets of carbon.

16:43 Nutrients are being pumped into the soil in that tiny little area and then you multiply. A cereal rye root has massive amounts of roots in one plant and then you have a million plants per acre. You start doing the math and those are some crazy big numbers of how much carbon is being put into the soil. And I have it on good authority that this carbon is 30 to 50 times more effective at becoming soil organic matter than what the actual rye plant that's going to decompose above the ground is going to be. So this is the basis of feeding the system, building the soil. But this is why carbon is not a problem—it's a food source for all of those organisms.

17:29 All right, number three we got sunlight—free. We've got the carbon that's free. Number three: nitrogen is free and abundant. And when I say that, now this crowd understands that, but if you would say this to a group of conventional farmers they would want to stand up and fight you because they'd say well you want to see my bill for nitrogen? How can you tell me that's free? Well, they're not wrong. We spent as an industry almost $5 billion a year—and that's just in the US, that's not the rest of the world. We spend $5 billion a year putting nitrogen fertilizer on our crops. That's a huge amount of money, oftentimes one of the biggest expenses that people have.

18:21 How can I say it's free? Well, when you look at the makeup of our atmosphere, we've got CO2 right here—carbon dioxide, 400 to 1%. So that plant is pulling, when it's pulling the atmosphere in, it's pulling in 400. It's not 4%, it's not 410 of a percent—four hundredths of a percent. And if you want to have a little bit of fun, when somebody is talking about well carbon is ruining our lives and carbon is going to destroy the world, ask them how much carbon is in the atmosphere. They probably won't know. They're going to say it's way too much, it's just lots and lots and lots—four hundredths of 1%.

19:09 Nitrogen: 78% of our atmosphere is nitrogen. So above every acre of crop ground there are 30,000 tons of nitrogen just sitting there in the atmosphere waiting to be taken. 30,000 tons of nitrogen.

19:29 Now here's the problem. The nitrogen in the atmosphere is in the dinitrogen, so it's two nitrogen molecules bonded to each other with triple covalent bonds. So it's N2. It's literally inert because it's tied so tightly to each other they really aren't interested in interacting with anybody else. And so that's why there's good news and there's bad news. The good news is you can take a breath—you're taking in 78% nitrogen, it does absolutely nothing to you. But if you've ever had a whiff of anhydrous or other forms of ammonia, you know what that can do. And we all know people that have either been killed or seriously injured from those types of accidents. It can be very destructive to the human body. But not this—the atmospheric nitrogen is N2, so it's completely inert to people. It's also completely inert to plants.

20:25 Plants are taking in all that nitrogen when the stomata open up. They're bringing in the atmosphere, they're stripping out the carbon molecules, they're bringing in all that nitrogen, but the plant can do absolutely nothing with it, just like our bodies can do nothing with that nitrogen, which is a good thing. It just has to exhale it right back out. And so what has to happen is if we're going to make this into a form that plants can actually use, this bond right here has to be broken. You have to break this triple bond and it takes a lot of energy. And you have to combine it with hydrogen and oxygen and other things and put it into forms of nitrogen that the plant can now use. And so we, in our wisdom, mankind can do this, but it's incredibly expensive and energy intensive.

21:14 These huge nitrogen factories—this concept kind of got started during World War I. They perfected it in World War II, but they had no interest in making fertilizer for farmers during that time. They were making nitrogen to make bombs. That's how the fertilizer industry really got started—was making bombs. Because when you unlock those nitrogen molecules, there's a huge amount of energy potential in that.

21:45 Some of you in here are old enough to remember—I think it's probably 27, 28 years ago now—the Oklahoma City bombings with Timothy McVeigh. He blew up a seven or eight story concrete Federal Building in Oklahoma City. What was his bomb? A truckload of ammonium nitrate. And it blew up that entire building. So nitrogen is free and abundant, but in order to get it into a form that plants can use, it takes huge amounts of expense. So when you're paying your bill for nitrogen, you should not consider it a fertility input. You should consider it an energy input because you're paying for the energy that it takes to make it available.

22:26 But God in his wisdom has given us these tiny little critters that do the exact same thing that those big factories do. So rhizobia bacteria will form associations with these legumes. We saw that we were digging up peas and fava beans and things out in the plots, and you could see those nodules forming. Some of you I know saw some that were pink, some of them that weren't pink. But the pink ones mean they're really actively converting that nitrogen into plant-available forms of nitrogen. So rhizobia are the engine that makes this work for legumes.

22:59 Don't ever tell people, 'Well, I'm growing soybeans, I don't have to put nitrogen on because they could make their own.' They can't. Those plants can't do that. They can only support the biology that is doing that for them. That's a big distinction because apart from the biology, that soybean plant would not be able to get any of that nitrogen out of the atmosphere. So rhizobia bacteria—incredibly powerful, incredibly important—but it's not the only thing that's out there.

23:30 There are other things as well. These free-living diazotrophs like azospirillum, Bacillus species, cyanobacteria, there's different types of algae, there's other types of endophytes. We're discovering—I say 'we' like I have anything to do with it—but the industry is discovering new organisms all the time that can be beneficial nitrogen fixers for our plants if we create the right environment for them, for the plants to host them. These are free-living. They're mostly single-celled organisms. So you might look at this slide and say, 'Well, Keith, that's great news. I'm just going to go dump a whole bucket load of azospirillum out on my corn and never have to worry about nitrogen fertilizer again.' Well, not so fast, my friend.

24:19 Here's the deal. Rhizobia bacteria—that little nodule right here, this little nodule that's made up of billions of rhizobia bacteria—to create this whole nodule factory, just think of that as a whole big factory. They've got multiple shifts working the factory line, and that thing is producing lots of nitrogen. If you grow 70 bushel soybeans, then your soybean rhizobia, they have to crank out 350 to 400 pounds of nitrogen in about 60 days in order for that to happen. That's a huge amount of nitrogen. Think about putting 400 pounds of nitrogen on your field—what that looks like. These guys are producing it at the microscopic level: 400 pounds of nitrogen in 60 days. That's incredibly powerful, incredibly efficient. But it's because they're working as a group in that nodule colony.

25:15 These things are more single-celled operators. They're like the mom-and-pop shop instead of the huge factory. They can't produce nearly as much. So you're looking at probably 30 to 50 pounds of nitrogen per.

25:28 Year here out of these types of organisms. Is that going to be enough to grow a 250 bushel corn crop? Well, not by itself, but it's part of the solution. But how far does 30 to 50 units of nitrogen go to help a cover crop or a forage crop or in a system where you're not heavily extractive and you're hauling all the nitrogen away in the form of a crop? In a system where that nitrogen is continually cycling, this often is enough to make the system work. And that's how these soils were built in this area and across much of the world, thousands of years of these crops growing. A lot of these native perennial grasslands did not have huge amounts of legumes. So it wasn't just ryegrass that were doing it; it was these things that were out there doing a lot of the work and the heavy lifting as well.

26:21 A couple of resources that I would encourage you, if you want to dive into this on a much deeper level: We did a couple of webinars, one with Dr. James White. You definitely want to watch that if you haven't seen Dr. White talk about rhody. He talks extensively in there about endites that can live in the leaves and endites in the soil and how the plant roots are actually taking those up and stripping off the cell walls and converting the nitrogen out of these bacteria. It's a fascinating topic. That's on our YouTube channel. You can watch that, and then I referenced this yesterday as well: The Nitrogen Solution from Dr. Jones. Three years ago we did this; it's been viewed 71,000 times. I think this is our most popular video, and I'm very thankful that something finally passed the video of me running the air seater completely off the road, which used to be our most popular video. So I'm happy to report that there's something actually educational and not just embarrassing that is now our most popular video. If you haven't seen that, please watch that—not the air seater one—this one. Go to our YouTube channel and search for that. It's a fascinating webinar. It says 'Part Three of Four.' There's Christine did four webinars. This one is all about nitrogen. There's one that's all about phosphorus, and then there's a couple of other ones as well. She'll probably share some of this information, but you can take a deep dive on that yourself.

27:56 Number four: Oxygen. Oxygen is free, and it's available, and we often times don't think about oxygen as something that we need in our cropping system, but it is very important because all of those living organisms, all of those bacteria, all the fungi, all of the nematodes, all these things they need oxygen. And you have to have oxygen for your roots to grow. Roots will never grow deeper than where you have oxygen in your soil. And that's why compaction hurts you in several ways. It really reduces your infiltration, but it also is really important because when it limits how far that oxygen can get down into the soil, your roots will never go deeper than that. You have to be able to exchange the CO2 that is part of the byproduct of these plants growing. That has to get exchanged with oxygen, and we often times don't think of that. Sometimes our limiting factor is not moisture; it's not carbon. Sometimes the limiting factor is oxygen, and it's simply because you can't get oxygen down far enough into your soil because you have something that looks like this where there's no pore spaces.

29:10 We brought some of these soil cores back. Just think about how much pore space is in this parent material stuff down here—not very much. And so how much oxygen can get down through that? Not very much. And I can't push roots down unless there's oxygen there. Now, there are some tiny roots down here because before this hillside got cut, there was a short grass perennial out there. So there are some channels going down, but not very many, and it's not going to be a very productive piece of soil. So whenever you have compaction, that's one of the things that really hurts you is not just lack of

34:10 The need for us to put on a lot of these non-nitrogen fertility products because nitrogen is not naturally part of the soil, it's part of the atmosphere. Now we have nitrogen in the soil but it came from the atmosphere, but these other minerals are part of our soil and the way that we can get them out is through this microa.

34:28 Now when I'm done here, we're going to instead of doing question and answer time, we've got some bonus content that wasn't even advertised, but Willie Pretorius over here with Ward Labs is going to share a few slides because they're developing, he in conjunction with Ward Labs is developing a new test to more easily test not only for microa in your soil but also to test your plants to see if they're actually colonizing the microa that are in the soil because one of the big concerns with all of these new corn varieties, wheat varieties, soybean varieties is have they been bred for so long in such an environment that they've lost their ability to colonize with the microa. It doesn't do you any good to have microa in your soil if you're planting a plant that won't associate with it. So the test will look at both of those. So Willie will come up in a little bit and talk a little bit more about that.

35:28 Number six. So we got solar energy, we've got carbon, we've got nitrogen, we've got oxygen, we've got soil, and we've got water, precipitation. It's given to all, you know, the Bible tells us that the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike. So when you're in a drought, stop blaming your neighbor's sinful lifestyle for being in a drought because that's not, you know, because he's probably doing the same thing with you. But the water is given to us all. Now do we always have enough of it? No. Do we sometimes have too much of it? Yes. So we can't really control how often and when it rains or snows or hails or any of that.

36:12 So when you look at the water cycle, there's not a lot of this that we can control, but there is some of it that we can control and it's a really important part. We can control this part right here, this part of the water cycle, how much of what is falling through precipitation, how much of that is getting into your soil through infiltration. That's up to you. That's completely on you. And if you have poor infiltration, that's your fault. It's the fault of the system of how you're farming.

36:47 We could go into all of the details and you saw in some of our fields out there, we don't have as good of infiltration as we'd like. And some of that's because we ran heavy equipment when it was a little wetter than it should have been. Some of it was past tillage sins, you know, it was some gravity irrigation. There's a whole number of things that can hurt that, and that's okay. You just have to understand it and then figure out how can I make it better, how can I improve it, how can I help reduce some of that compaction and increase my infiltration.

37:17 So that's the part of the water cycle that you can control. And when you can control it, it's a huge thing. Many of you have seen these pictures. This is a picture that Russ Jackson took. Russ is a customer of ours. He grows cereal rye for us. If you've bought Elbon cereal rye from us, there's a chance that it was grown right here on this field, Russ Jackson down at Mountain View, Oklahoma. He took this picture a few years ago. They'd been in a pretty bad drought and they got this big 5.3 inch rain event, and isn't that how it happens a lot of times? You're in a drought and then you get two months worth of rain in a couple of hours.

37:57 So he took this picture because it's just a stunning comparison between two different systems. Over here, his neighbor's management, conventional tillage, he only grew small grains, no cover crops, no grazing, and it was the NRCS had been out just earlier that same summer.

38:18 Taken they had done the infiltration test just like we had done yesterday. They had done these tests on these two fields so they knew exactly what the infiltration was. So his neighbor got 6 inches in an hour, so that guy got 16,570 gallons of water stored from that rainfall event. That sounds like a lot. 16,000 gallons of water per acre? Yes please, I'll take that. But when you compare it with what Russ's system—no till crop rotation, he uses cover crops, plan grazing management—his infiltration was 6 inches an hour. So even if this 5.3 inches came in an hour and it didn't come quite that fast but it did come fairly fast, he got it all. He got 143,000 gallons of water into the ground. And because of the way he's farming, his organic matter levels were much higher than his neighbor, so he could store it and he could hold it. Because for every percent of organic matter that you can increase—and that's a big thing to increase a percent of organic matter—but when you can, you can store an additional acre inch of water. And that's a pretty big deal. So 27,000 gallons in an acre inch. So look at the difference. Who's going to grow the better crops following? Well, that's pretty easy to know. Russ is going to because he got so much more water.

39:58 When you get a rainfall event and people say, 'Well, how much rain did you get? I got half an inch. I got 6 inches.' Whatever, the only answer should be, 'I got all of it.' I got all of it. And then people will go, 'What do you mean?' And so then you can do your little soil health elevator speech when you say, 'I got all of it.' So that's—infiltration is the part of water that rainfall is free. But if you can't infiltrate it, you can't store it. It's wasted. So farm in such a way that you capture the maximum amount of moisture. And that's important because your plant needs it to grow. But photosynthesis will stop without water.

40:43 There's only two things that go into photosynthesis, and that's one of them. Now we're not going to run out of CO2, but there are times when we run out of water because of how we're managing our system. Now you can be the best manager in the world, have the best soils in the world, and if you're in an extended drought, things are just going to stop. Things are going to slow down. There's no two ways about that. But you have to manage in such a way that when the opportunities are there, you can capture the moisture and have it for your plant to be able to photosynthesize.

41:18 Number seven—number seven we kind of been talking about it throughout—soil biology makes the system bigger, faster, stronger, and more efficient. Soil biology drives the whole system. Soil biology is what's driving that nitrogen. Soil biology is what's freeing up those minerals and those nutrients and getting them into your plants. Soil biology is helping put the carbon where it needs to go because they're consuming those liquid carbon exudates and they're turning that into organic matter. The soil biology makes the system so much better. Now earthworms—you know, we were digging up earthworms yesterday. People were seeing them. I heard Sergio talking this morning in his farm in Italy. He's got five times more earthworms than his neighbors do, and that's a huge advantage. Huge advantage. You want better infiltration? Get earthworms. They'll take care of that job for you. You know, you have too much residue on your soil surface? Have more earthworms. They'll take care of that as well. So earthworms are the one part of soil biology that we can actually see. These other things we have to do some other tests for. So sometimes people will say, 'Well, what soil test should I run to see if I have biology?' The first question—

42:34 I always ask is do you have earthworms and if the answer is no then I just say save your money that other stuff's not there anyway but once you start seeing some earthworms starting to come back and you start to see their populations grow and they're active now yeah hey you can run at you know this PLFA you can do some DNA testing you can do other things like that and so another little added bonus content. See this is like one of those DVDs you rant and then it's got bonus content on it so we have Dr. Laura Kavanagh in the back of the room she's also going to come up and talk about some DNA sequencing DNA analysis, some testing that she's working. She's with AEA Advancing Ag and they're developing a DNA test to help farmers understand what you have in your soil so she's going to talk a little bit about that as well but the soil biology makes the system bigger faster stronger and more efficient and if you don't have it you are really really missing out on a lot of them.

43:35 So here's what I like to say about soil biology: you need them, your system needs them. So sometimes you have to seed them and by seeding them that means you may have to put some biological starter out there. You know, there's companies in here selling biological products, compost extract. We can put that on the seed for you. There's lots of good products out there so sometimes you have to add that to help jump start the system and it's not like your soil doesn't have anything out there but adding some of these products can help accelerate you to the point where you want to get.

44:13 So you need them, so you need to seed them and then you have to feed them because it doesn't matter how much biology you have out there if there is a lapse in the food chain they're going to die off, they're going to go dormant, they're going to disappear and so you have to keep them fed and the only way that they can eat if you don't want them eating all of your organic matter is you have to have a living plant out there. You have to literally have green cover out there growing because those root exudates are what is feeding them and so the biology is really important. So you need them, so you might have to seed them but you absolutely have to feed them.

44:59 Now you might think that farmers should be the richest people in the world because look at all this free stuff we have right? Obviously we all know as farmers that it's not as easy as just saying yeah I'll take that, I'll take that, I'll take that. There's a huge amount of intricacy in making all these things work in your system and so the way that you cash in on these freebies it's through soil health.

45:24 And so I'm just going to real quickly and I know this is preaching largely to the choir with the soil health principles and I'm not going to go into any great depth on them but I just want you to keep them in your mind as Dr. Jones comes up and talks later that these are the basic principles that all of us regardless of where we're at, whether we're farming in Nebraska, Arizona or Alabama or Italy or Brazil or wherever else you're from, these principles will work in your area. The practices that you use to implement them could be drastically different and they will be drastically different.

46:01 Number one you got to keep the soil covered. That is so important. Keep the soil covered, keep it cool, protect the biology. If your soil erodes, if it washes away, if it blows away, doesn't matter how good it was, it's gone. So you got to keep the soil covered. Number two you need to minimize the disturbance. I was listening to Davis give the plot tour yesterday and when he came to the hairy vetch he was talking about Jerry Leiners. This is Jerry's Leiners picture right here. So this is Jerry's field. He was rolling down hairy vetch, a beautiful crop of hairy vetch, pulling his planter right through that. That's the ultimate in minimizing disturbance and it's the ultimate because not only is he eliminating the.

46:46 Physical disturbance of any tillage. He's organic, so he's eliminating the chemical disturbance as well. So don't just think of disturbance as tillage. Certainly that's mechanical disturbance, but there's also a lot of chemical disturbance we do when we're spraying chemicals, we're putting synthetic fertilizers out there. And notice the principle isn't to eliminate—I mean, that would be great if we could—but it's to minimize. Because all of these things, tillage, fertilizers, chemicals, they're tools and you may need to use them at the appropriate time. But the thing with the tool is if you're using it for the wrong purpose or you're using it too often or you're using the wrong tool, you're going to break something. You're going to break something and it will likely be very expensive to do so. You need to use your tools appropriately and efficiently and effectively.

47:40 So minimize disturbance like Jerry was doing here. This is a picture of what that same field looked like. How would you like to have any corn field look like this, let alone organic corn? Beautiful. Now, could he do this every year? No, he was not able to do this every year, but the years that he did, it was beautiful. And when it didn't work as well as this, it was largely a timing issue. And we, you can ask questions about that later, but that's a beautiful field and any of us would be proud to have that.

48:12 Number three: maximize the diversity, particularly the biological diversity, because the more of these organisms that we have, the better off that we're going to be. And so you need to have a system. You have to grow a diverse amount of plants if you want a diverse amount of biology out there. Number four: having living roots as often as possible. And that may mean interceding in between your corn crop. It might be some perennials and part of the system, but just think about your rotation and how can I have living roots out there as often as possible? Because that's what's feeding the biology, that's what's driving the system.

48:46 And then number five: integrate properly managed livestock. You know, get livestock out on the ground as often as you can. This is a picture from one of our customers out west using his pivot as a mobile fence and he's grazing residue out there using his pivot.

49:04 And then of course number six. And I guess I got a couple more. So this is a beautiful picture. This is on the front of our Soil Health Resource Guide right in front of you. This made the cover because it's such a great picture. It's an awesome-looking black steer there with the Rocky Mountains in the background. This is from Mark King out on the western slopes of the Rocky Mountains, you know, grazing a beautiful cover crop. So it was a close competition. Every year we kind of have a competition to see what the cover of this is going to be. So I ultimately had the last say. So I like this one because we have a lot of people raising cattle, but this one was a strong second place because how that person got that pig to smile like that, I have no idea, but it's pretty darn good. So it's not on the cover but it is in the book because it's a pretty awesome picture.

50:00 So there are many ways to integrate livestock, not just with cattle, but I know there's people in here running chickens. You know, I talked to a guy yesterday running 600 laying hens through the alleyways of a pecan orchard. There's so many cool, innovative, and creative ways to integrate livestock into the operation. Don't be afraid to try different things.

50:24 And then of course the sixth principle, and maybe the most important—I alluded to it—it's the context. These principles will work. You have to find the practices, and that's why it's so important that you connect with other people in here, because you can really learn from the practices that they found that work. And it might not be that those are going to work for you, but you might, it will help generate creative ideas for yourself. So please utilize this time during the breaks, during lunch, connect with the people around you. Connect with people that you think you know you could either help or be helped by down the road and continue the learning long after the conference is over.

51:05 So that's the seven principles for soil health. So thank you for your attention and patience, and I hope that sets the stage for Dr. Jones.