Six Truths for Rebuilding Your Soils

0:00 Folks, I don't have to tell you that in agriculture here we have a problem. You know Science News ran this article saying more than 57 billion tons of soil have eroded in the US Midwest. 57 billion tons—that's a huge amount of soil that we've lost. According to concerned scientists, the national soil erosion rates are on track to repeat Dust Bowl era losses eight times over. We didn't fix the problem coming out of the Dust Bowl, and we haven't fixed our soil erosion problem now.

0:30 Here's Hugh Hammond Bennett in 1933 standing out in an eroded field, and look at the look on his face—just look how dejected he looks, depressed. I hope that we all feel that way when we see a field that has serious erosion, because we should be discouraged. We should be depressed because of this soil loss and degradation. And unfortunately, it's still happening today. You've all seen it, hopefully just on your neighbor's farms and not on yours as much, but it still does happen even on well-managed soils and properties.

1:03 So we have this problem of soil loss and degradation, and it's not just from water erosion. We have the wind erosion issue as well. In 1935, but then many of you—and I know we've got folks in here from Illinois—this happened just this past year, 2023. I think six people lost their lives in a traffic accident in Illinois. Walter said eight people lost their lives, and it was because there was so much soil blowing across the road that people couldn't see, and this led to this tragedy. So we need to be better. We can be better.

1:42 In addition to the erosion issue—and again, I'm preaching to the choir here, I know—but as a nation we've lost more than half the organic matter in our soils. You've probably seen pictures like this. You know, these are soils right across the fence line from each other. This is a farmer who's just been doing conventional tillage, no cover crops, no soil health practices whatsoever. Look at the difference in the color, look at the difference in the structure. These soils started out the same; they're no longer the same. They're different, and it's all because of the management that's been applied. But unfortunately, there's a whole lot more of this out in the country than we have of this.

2:21 So we've got a big problem, and how do we solve this problem? How do we solve this problem of the continuing erosion, of the loss of organic matter? You know, we're being told that we have to feed all these people. You know, the only solution is we have to rebuild our soils. We can't just stop the erosion and think that we're going to be okay. We have to do more than just stop erosion. We have to rebuild what has been lost. We have to reclaim what has been taken from us. And it's possible—we can do this. We can go from soil that looks like this—no structure, not a lot of carbon in it—to something like this that's highly structured, highly aggregated, lots of carbon in it. We can do this. Many of you have done this on your own operations. We can do this across a much larger scale.

3:06 And it's a huge task, it's an enormous task, because there's 900 million acres of crop land across the US. Now, that includes the grazing lands, but just because it's got perennials on it and you're grazing it does not mean that these things don't apply. Some of the most degraded soils in the world are perennial rangelands that have been poorly managed. And so there's about 300 million acres of cropped ground and 600 million acres of rangeland or perennial, but they all, or most of them, have been degraded to some level or another. You can see a map of degradation there. It's a massive undertaking to try to think of how are we going to bring this back to the way that God created it.

3:46 Well, when I think about a huge rebuilding project like this, my mind always goes back to the story of Nehemiah in the Bible, because Nehemiah was faced with a huge challenge and a huge task as well. So what I want to do here this morning is take you through the story of Nehemiah, and we're going to look at the leadership principles that he applied to get his job done and see how we can apply them to our own issue of trying to rebuild our soils. So that's kind of the context of what we're going to do. We're going to look at the book of Nehemiah, pull out some rich leadership lessons, and apply them to what we're going to be doing here over the next several days, but really, more importantly, what all of you have dedicated much of your life's work to as well.

4:38 A little bit of background before we jump in here: by the year 486, the Jews had been in the promised land for over 700 years, but for 490 of those years they disobeyed a commandment that God had given them that talks specifically about giving the Sabbath rest, a Sabbath year of rest, for the land. In Leviticus, God tells the nation of Israel: when you come into this land which I shall give you, then you shall have a Sabbath to the Lord. Six years you shall sow your field, six years you shall prune your vineyard, gather its.

5:07 crop, but during the seventh year the land shall have a Sabbath rest. Now we'll talk more about this later about how does that apply to us today, but for right now think about it in the terms of, you know, back in 486 BC. And so for 490 years the Hebrews had essentially just ignored this commandment. They just said, yeah, we'll just harvest every year, that land looks fine, nobody's going to notice. Well, you know what, God noticed. And so he says the punishment for this, part of the punishment—the timing of the punishment anyway—is that they were going to be conquered by Babylon and carried off into exile. And the time frame of this exile was 70 years, one year for every one of those Sabbath years that they skipped. And it says the whole land will be a desolation. You will serve the king of Babylon for 70 years.

6:01 And it's interesting this comes from the book of Jeremiah, but this is a very famous passage. I've heard this quoted many times. Lots of graduating seniors choose this as their life verse, but I don't know that they understand the context of this. And I want to read it because I think it's really important because it should give us all encouragement. So this is all from the book of Jeremiah: 'For thus says the Lord, when the 70 years have been completed, you know, when you've served your time, when you've paid the penalty, I will visit you and I will fulfill my good word to you to bring you back to this place. For I know the plans that I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not calamity, to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me and I will listen to you. And you will seek me and find me when you search for me with all your heart. I will be found by you, declares the Lord. I will restore your fortunes and I will gather you from all the nations, from all the places where I've driven you.'

6:57 So he's sending them into exile as punishment, but he says I will bring you back. And this fundamentally changed the Hebrew nation. It fundamentally changed the Jewish people. So that's kind of the background of this, and that's why—they had many other sins as well, idol worship and all manner of things—but the timing of the exile was all based on this Sabbath year rest.

7:22 So in 586 BC the Babylonians attack Jerusalem. The Babylonians attack them, they destroy the city, they burn down the temple, they break down the city walls, and they carry the people off into exile. King Nebuchadnezzar, Babylon was the most powerful empire in the world. It's modern-day Iraq. You may have heard of them. It's the same land, it's the same area there. And so this is the beginning of the 70-year period. Now during this period, some stories that you're very familiar with—Daniel and the Lion's Den happens during this time. Daniel would have been one of those Hebrews carried off into exile. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego and the fiery furnace, they would have been part of the Hebrews carried off into exile into Babylon.

8:04 And then about 50 years later, in 539, Babylon falls to Persia. Nebuchadnezzar gets a little big for his britches, and the Persians come in, they conquer them, because now Persia is the most powerful country in the world. Persia is modern-day Iran. Okay, so conflict even way back then. And the Jewish exiles are moved over to Persia as part of the spoils of war. And so that's where we kind of start to pick up the story here.

8:29 So Cyrus, the Persian emperor, in the year 536, he issues a decree and he says, hey, some of you Jews can return to your land. Now there was no reason for him to have to do this. He had no obligation to do this. The only thing that I can consider is that God put it into his heart to say, let some people go back. So Zerubbabel leads the first wave of Jews to return. They rebuild the temple in the year 516, which is exactly 70 years after the exile started. So the temple was destroyed for exactly 70 years. That's not the end of the story. That doesn't mean everything was perfect after 70 years, but they had a place to worship again after 70 years.

9:12 Now 61 years later, Ezra leads a second group of people to return, and that consisted of about 1500 men and their families. And that brings us up to the time of Nehemiah. So the year 445, a report comes to Nehemiah. So it's about 10 years after Ezra takes all the people back. It's 111 years after the fall. It's about 30 years after Esther is made queen to King Ahasuerus. And about 30 years later we read the story of Nehemiah. And so it starts out, 'The words of Nehemiah the son of Hacaliah.' This is Nehemiah 1, verses 1-3. So we have to kind of understand who this guy is, and he's an amazing man. He's a great leader, and I want to draw out some principles of leadership based on his story. So he was a Jewish exile. I'm convinced he had never been to Jerusalem. He was likely born in Babylon during the exile.

10:09 Captivity there and then later taken to Persia as part of the spoils of war and he was a very humble man because at the end of verse one so he goes through this whole chapter but at the end of chapter one he kind of throws this last little sentence in there and it says and I was the cup bearer to the king. Now that doesn't mean anything to us today because we don't understand what a cup bearer is but it was a very important position because even back then there was all kinds of political intrigue and people were trying to assassinate the leader and take over and different political parties and sounds way too familiar right. And so one of the easiest ways to knock someone off was to poison them. You'd poison their food, you'd poison their wine and so the king would have people that would taste the food before it came to the king and then they'd watch that guy and see if he died. If he died obviously the king wouldn't eat the food. If he didn't die then it was safe for the king to eat. In the same way with the wine the cup bearer would bring the wine, he would drink it first. They would watch him, see if he was going to die. If he didn't then the king would drink it. And that's a position that Nehemiah had so he was still a slave but he was probably the most elevated slave in the whole kingdom because it was a position of great trust but not so much that, well, you're kind of dispensable. So they had a relationship between Nehemiah and the king.

11:36 And so this is what we see in Nehemiah 1: some men from Judah came and I asked them concerning the Jews who had survived the captivity and about Jerusalem and they said to me, the remnant there in the province are in great distress and great reproach and the walls of Jerusalem are broken down and its gates are burned with fire. And I believe it was at this point right here that Nehemiah understood that God was giving him the job, the project to rebuild the walls. And I think he also understood how many challenges stood in his way of doing that. He'd never even been there. Why should he even care but he did.

12:16 And so we're going to look at the response that Nehemiah had to this and what can we learn from it. So we're going to learn that any big project whether it's rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem, rebuilding our soils or anything else that you're undertaking, it's going to require these three things. You're going to have to have the right leaders. You're going to have to have the right workers and you got to have the right tools. And if you can put those three things in place you can do some pretty amazing things.

12:44 So what are the characteristics of the right leaders? Well number one, they care deeply. No leader is very good unless they care deeply. Look at what Nehemiah did. He specifically asked these people. So these people came through. He was in the capital Susa and he knew these people were from Jerusalem and they were passing through and he specifically asked them how are things going? Now he didn't have to do that. He'd never been there. He didn't necessarily have to do that. You know, sometimes I know that there may be things wrong with people but I don't ask, not because I don't care so much is I don't feel like I have the time to help and that's a pretty poor attitude. I will admit that I don't care enough to ask sometimes but Nehemiah did. He asked how they were doing and then when he heard the report, oh it's terrible, the walls are broken down, and essentially what he was saying is that every time we try to do something because we have no walls the walls were the only defense that a city like that had, people come in and steal our stuff. They take whatever crops we've grown. They've taken whatever we've built. And that's why he said they're in great distress and they're a huge reproach because all of the neighboring city states, they're just coming in and taking whatever we can do. And so when he heard these words he sat down and he wept and he mourned for days. That's how much he cared. He wept and he mourned for days. Now I don't know if any of us see an eroded field, a field that has obviously been abused, degraded. I don't know if we sat down and we weep and we mourn for days but it should make us sad and it should really make us sad if it's our ground or something connected to us or close to us because that should hurt if you care. It should hurt. And Nehemiah cared and he hurt.

14:39 So they cared deeply. Number two, they prepare thoroughly. He didn't just jump right in and start to try to make a plan and fix the problem. That's that's part of my problem sometimes. I want to, I see a problem, I just want to jump right in and start fixing it. I don't prepare thoroughly enough sometimes. So that's why it's really good to have a team around me that can help with a lot of the preparation, help with that timing. Nehemiah I believe was inspired to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem right away but before he started anything he prayed and he fasted for four months.

15:11 I could take you through the verses where it shows this one thing about the book of Nehemiah. It's very, very precise on the dates. He uses a lot of 'in the month of,' you know, 'in the such and such day of the such and such month of the reign of such and such.' It's very precise on the date, so we can date things pretty exactly. So he prayed and he fasted for four months. Now I don't know that that means he didn't do anything other than pray and fast, but he made that part of his daily routine for four months. That's how he was preparing to do this.

15:43 And then number three: once you've cared and once you've prepared, you need to act, because it's not enough to care. It's not enough to prepare if you don't ever do anything with it. At some point, as a leader, you're going to have to act boldly.

15:59 So here's what it says in Chapter 2: 'And it came about that the wine was before King Artaxerxes.' Okay, so Nehemiah was bringing the wine. 'Now I had not been sad in his presence.' And so the king said to me, 'Why is your face sad? Though you're not sick, this is nothing but sadness of heart.' I want to stop right there and think about this. Here's the king of the most powerful nation on Earth, and he is astute enough to notice that this slave—but I think that there was more of a relationship there than just a slave. He was able to notice that something was wrong with this guy, and further, if he wasn't physically ill, he said, 'This is nothing but sadness of heart.' I find that pretty impressive, actually. Are we observant enough with the people around us that we can not only see when somebody's struggling, but also ask, 'Hey, what's going on? Doesn't seem like you're physically sick, but something's going on here. What's wrong?' If a king can ask that to his slave, we need to be able to ask that to our family members, our co-workers, etc.

17:06 So Nehemiah says, 'Then I was very much afraid, and I said, 'Let the king live forever. Why should my face not be sad when the city, the place of my father's tombs, lies desolate and its gates have been consumed by fire?'' And then the king said to me, 'What would you request?' And, folks, at some point—it may be soon, it may be later—but at some point, every one of us in this room, as we're out there pushing soil health, regenerative agriculture, at some point we're going to get in front of the right person. It might not be the king, but it's going to be in front of some sort of a decision maker, policy maker, somebody of influence. At some point, they're going to ask us that question: 'What do you want to do? What do you want to do about it?' And if you don't have an answer, you're going to look pretty silly. If you don't have an answer, it's because you cared deeply and you may have prepared, but you weren't ready to act boldly. So what would you request? Are you ready for when somebody asks you that question? 'Hey, we've got all these problems. Yeah, everybody can see that. What do you want to do about it? What would you request?'

18:26 So I to the God of heaven—love this, shoots up a little prayer. This is one of those 'before you take a big test, just shoot that little prayer up'—and I said to the king, 'If it please the king, and if your servant has found favor before you, send me to Judah, to the city of my father's tombs, that I may rebuild it.' Then the king said to me, 'How long will your journey be, and when will you return?' So it pleased the king to send me, and I gave him a definite time. See, this tells me that he had done his homework. He had prepared. Not only had he prayed and fasted for four months, but I think he was doing a lot of figuring out how long would it take to do this, because when the king said, 'Well, okay, how long is it going to take? How long you going to be gone?' he had an answer. He had an answer. And we need to be ready to give that answer when somebody asks us, 'What would you want to do?'

19:21 Love that part. Number four of the right leaders: they humbly lead by example. In Chapter 5, Nehemiah says, 'I also devoted myself to working on the wall.' Okay, so he wasn't just getting everybody else to do the work. He was right there beside him, working on the wall. 'And I refused to acquire any land.' He was not using his position of leadership and power and influence to acquire all these riches. That shows how humble of a guy he was. Now, later he was installed as the governor of Jerusalem, and so there's a lot more to the story, but at least at this point, he was right out there with everybody else doing the work.

20:03 And number five, they share vision and they inspire courage. They inspire vision, or they share vision and they inspire courage. And we're going to look at how they do this as we look at the right workers, because it's not enough as a leader to have vision. That vision does you no good unless you can transfer it.

20:25 To the people working with you and around you and for you, you have to share that vision. And then when things get tough, and in any big project things are going to get tough, can you inspire courage in the people around you and the rest of your team? So I think that we've got the right leaders in this room and every one of you here are a leader. And some of you may be going, well, you know, I'm not in charge of any big great things. Don't tell me I'm a leader. Well, you know what, you are. It may be at a fairly low level, just your own farm, your own family. And for some of you it may be a next level up. You're on the board of the Soil and Water Conservation District or something like that. You know, it may be that you're on a church board. Each one of you have leadership positions.

21:10 And so as we go through this next three days, be thinking about what can you learn to help you be a better leader? What can you learn that's going to help you prepare thoroughly and then to act boldly? And so when that question comes, what would you do, you'll have an answer for them.

21:29 So the right workers. It's great to have the right leaders, but if you don't have workers, the job's probably not going to get done. So number one, the right workers share a common vision. And this is leadership's responsibility to share this vision with them. Here's what Nehemiah says in verse chapter 2: So I went up at night and I inspected the wall. The officials did not know where I had gone nor had I told the Jews, the priests, the nobles, the officials or the rest who did the work. Then I said, then I brought them all together and I said, look guys, you see this bad situation we are in? That Jerusalem is desolate and its gates are burned with fire. Come, let us rebuild the walls of Jerusalem 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 then they said, and these are the words I hope we leave this event with: let us arise and build. So they put their hands to the good work. That is sharing that vision. That is getting your vision across to people. When you know this, whether you call it a pregame speech or a halftime speech or whatever it is, they were inspired and they said yes, let us get to the work and they put their hands to the good work. So as a leader, again, doesn't matter what level you're at, as a leader you have to share that vision with the rest of your team.

22:52 Number two, they're willing to learn. Look who he had to work with. He did not have a bunch of carpenters and stonemasons and trained tradesmen to do this. He says in there he had priests, the nobles, the officials, and I like how he says this, and then the ones who actually did the work. So I had all these professional people and then the ones that actually did the work, but none of them, none of them knew anything about building walls or working with stone. And so you have to be willing to learn as a good worker. Dedication to the cause is more important than a preexisting skill set if the person is willing to learn. So if you're hiring people for whatever team you're on, it's probably much more important that they're dedicated to your cause, that they share your vision, than that they have tons of practical experience in whatever you're trying to accomplish, because you can learn the skill sets and the day-to-day activities. You can't necessarily learn that passion and that vision. You have to come in with that. And so that's, you know, when you're looking for the right workers, find the ones who are willing to learn.

23:57 Number three, they don't get overwhelmed. And it can be an overwhelming task. Look at what they are up against. The walls of ancient Jerusalem would have been a mile in circumference, average height of 15 feet, 12 feet wide at the bottom going up to 7 feet wide at the top, 10 gates and six towers. They had unskilled workers in a hostile work environment. That's a lot. That's a big task. It's easy to get overwhelmed. And again, we can get overwhelmed pretty easily ourselves. 900 million acres of farmland, most of it experiencing some level of degradation. 10 billion people they keep telling us we have to feed by 2050. And do we have a hostile work environment? Maybe, yeah. Some of you more than others. But we are not always supported the way that we would like to be. So how do you get workers to not be overwhelmed? Well, again, it comes back to leadership. But look what Nehemiah did. I love this, very clever. He says, above the horse gate, the priest carried out repairs, each in front of his house. After them, Zadok the son of Immer carried out repairs in front of his house. After him, Melam the son of Bariah carried out repairs in front of his own quarters. So if you've got this giant project, tell people to focus on the portion of the work that God has given to them and not to try to solve the whole problem, but fix what's right in front of them.

25:18 Front of you first—number one, that's what's going to be most important to that particular person. And then once you get that fixed, now you can help your neighbor, now you can help the rest of the community, now you can start working on a gate. But build the wall in front of your own house first. Later on in chapter four, he says each one to his own work, and that doesn't mean that everybody's working independently, but it means you can focus on what's right in front of you. So in other words, we need to fix our own soils first. And then now we have an example, now we have the experience we can reach out to our neighbors, we can reach out to our community, we can reach out to our state, and we can help them do the same thing as well.

25:58 But you've all been around people that are trying to get you to do something when they haven't done it in their own life. And you know how hypocritical that looks when somebody tries to get you to do something and they haven't done it themselves. So do your own work first, focus on that portion of the work that God has given you to say grace over. Number four, they are courageous. You have to be courageous because not everybody's going to support your work. When Sanballat the Horonite and Tobiah the Ammonite official heard about it, it was very displeasing that someone had come to seek the welfare of the sons of Israel. Not everybody's going to support your work. And I know I've, you know, I know many of you and I know some of your stories. You haven't always been supported in your communities, in your coffee shops. I would venture to guess there are, that's very little coffee shop time spent with most of the people here. Number one, you're too busy. Number two, you don't find support there. And that's okay. You come here to find support, but not everybody's going to support that work. And you might even be ridiculed for your efforts. Look what he says in chapter 4: Sanballat became very angry and he mocked the Jews and he said to his brothers and the wealthy men of Samaria, 'What are these feeble Jews doing? Are they going to restore it for themselves? Can they finish it in a day? Can they revive the stones from the dusty rubble, even the burned ones?' Now Tobiah the Ammonite said, 'Even what they were building, if a fox should jump on it, it would break their stone wall down.' Now I don't think that was true, but he was making fun of them. You know, he was ridiculing them. And I would guess that most of you in here have been ridiculed at some level, at some point in time, for some of the things that you've done. Not everybody is going to support your works. And hopefully none of us have been the subject of plotting and attacks, but maybe when Sanballat, Tobiah, the Arabs, the Ammonites, the Ashdodites—see, they're recruiting more and more people now to come against the Jews. When they heard that the repair of the walls of Jerusalem went on and that the breaches began to be closed, they were very angry, because if they have a wall, they can no longer come in and take everything they want. And they conspired together to come and fight against Jerusalem and cause a disturbance in it. Now, hopefully you aren't being plotted against and having attacks come to you on your farm. But you know what? At some point maybe, and maybe it's not a physical attack, but it might be some other type of attack. And so you have to be prepared for that. We have to be ready for that. So how do we get courageous workers? Again, it goes back to the leadership. Leadership has to set that example. Says we prayed to our God, and because of them—because of these people that we're going to attack—we set up a guard against them day and night. Okay? So leadership had a plan. And number two, you have to be prepared, and you continue the work in spite of the threat. If you stop the work because of the threat, I mean, that's the whole reason you don't negotiate with terrorists, because you just encourage more terrorists to do the same thing again. You have to continue the work in spite of the threats. And Nehemiah says, 'Those who were rebuilding the wall and those who carried burdens took the load with one hand doing the work and the other hand holding a weapon.' Okay? So they had a trowel in one hand and a sword or a knife or something in the other hand. They were ready, they were prepared, but they continued the work in spite of the threats.

29:13 So we're each leaders here, but we're also each workers here, okay? So at some level you're serving as a leader, and at some level you're probably serving as a worker. And that's perfectly fine. That's how it should be. So as a worker, you have to make sure you understand the vision, you have to be willing to learn, don't get overwhelmed, and be courageous. And again, hopefully these next three days will help prepare you to be the right workers that we need to carry out these tasks. And then number three, we have to have the right tools, because no project can be accomplished without having the right.

29:49 Tools now we don't know the Bible doesn't tell us what tools Nehemiah used. It really doesn't matter they would have used the best tools they had available. They probably weren't great but they used whatever they had available. I just found these on the internet threw them out there. That's really not important but what is important is what tools do we have at our disposal to do our task because that's what these next three days are going to be about. You're going to hear people up here talking about the tools that they're using on their own operations and to set the stage for this I want to just share with you these six fundamental truths of biograph.

30:27 Some of you have heard this before some of you may not have but I want to go through these because I think they're really important because this is the fundamental building blocks of what we do as farmers and in order to understand what these are, biograph is a term that I just kind of made up. So if you haven't heard of biograph that's okay. It's biological grace and really to get that you have to understand what true grace is. Something that is given to you by grace number one, it's free. You can't buy it. Number two, it's undeserved. You can't earn it otherwise it wouldn't be grace and number three it's unlimited. You're not going to run out of it otherwise again it's not by grace. And so we have six things that we have access to of biograph.

31:14 Now the best example of true grace of course is God sending his son Jesus to die on the cross for our sins. That's free. You can't buy that. You can do nothing to earn that. It's undeserved and it's unlimited. The grace that I have does not take away from the grace that any of you have. But in addition to that we have these things in agriculture. We have these tools that we can use that follow these same three principles: free, undeserved, unlimited.

31:38 Number one, solar energy. It's limitless. It's free and plants are the best way to capture, store, and convert it to something of value. Really as farmers this is what we grow. You know we grow plants but the reason is so they can photosynthesize and they can create that glucose molecule which then gets converted into something of value. We're sunlight harvesters if you will and I'm sure some people up here are going to be referring to that and talking about that. But solar energy is free. Have you ever thought about that? We don't have to pay for it. Now right now we aren't taxed on it. I'm sure the government somewhere is talking about a solar tax but it's free. It's there for the taking. We don't, we can't buy it. You don't deserve it. You can't earn it. You can do nothing to earn more sunlight and it's unlimited. The sunlight that I get is not going to take away from the sunlight that Colton's going to have on his fields. That's, it's truly given to us by grace and so photosynthesis is the way that we convert that into energy and into things of value.

32:46 And so if you're in a corn-bean rotation folks you're only capturing about 50% of the solar energy that hits the ground. You're wasting the other half. You're wasting the other half. So we need to put cover crops in wherever we can. That's the power of cover crops. As it's capturing solar energy in time frames when our normal crops aren't and then we can use livestock. There's going to be a great livestock panel up here. They're going to be talking about how do you convert that now to something of real value.

33:12 And so maybe you're a wheat farmer. You know we used to grow wheat and we thought we were really good farmers because we'd grow this wheat crop. We'd harvest it in July and we would keep it perfectly clean until the next April or May and we thought that was a sign of a good farmer. You didn't have any weeds growing out in your wheat stubble. Well little did we know that we were literally killing and starving off our biology and now we understand that we're wasting. So yeah you harvest wheat in July. That's some of the longest days of the year. There is so much solar energy lost when we don't have a cover crop out there to capture it at some point or some way.

33:53 So solar energy we have to capture it. It's the only way that we get new energy into the system. You know people talk about old sunlight, new sunlight. Well old sunlight is petroleum products, you know gasoline, diesel, most electricity. You know much of that is generated through the burning of fossil fuels. That's old sunlight and they have a place. We need them. They're tools but capturing the new sunlight and putting it into our operations is how we're really going to make progress.

34:22 Number two, carbon is not a problem. Now there's a lot of conferences that you can go to where carbon is widely discussed as the problem. Carbon is not a problem. It's free food for both plants and the biology. It's a big part of photosynthesis. You can't make glucose. You can't make C6H12O6 without CO2 and that's the basis of life you.

39:39 Other because as an industry here in the US we spent almost $5 billion on nitrogen fertilizer in 2023. I think it's like 4 point, yeah, 4.8 billion in 2023. So how can I say nitrogen is free when as an industry we spent $5 billion putting it on?

40:05 Well, if you look at the composition of our atmosphere, and I apologize, this is really hard to see, but this little sliver, carbon dioxide, little sliver here. And by the way, if you get in a global warming or a discussion with somebody, always ask him this question: so how much carbon is in the atmosphere? Most of them won't know. Most of them won't know. How much is it? 4 hundredths of 1%. It's not 4%. It's not 4 tenths of a percent. It's 4 hundredths of 1% is carbon, CO2. That's not very much, but yet our plants can take that in and grow. However, nitrogen, it's this huge area. 78% of our atmosphere is nitrogen. Above every acre of cropland in the United States, around the world, 30,000 tons of nitrogen just hanging out. That's part of the atmosphere. It's free for the taking, but the problem is it's pretty hard to take. And so that's why I say nitrogen is free and abundant. It's just not in the form that we can use because it's held in the atmosphere as dinitrogen. It's two nitrogen molecules bonded together with three sets of really strong covalent bonds. And if you remember your chemistry, it takes a lot of energy to break that. And so it renders it inert in the atmosphere. I can breathe it in, and because those nitrogen molecules are bonded to each other, it does nothing to my body. I breathe it right back out. And it's the same way with a plant. A plant takes in the atmosphere to get the CO2. It's taking in huge amounts of nitrogen, but God never designed plants to access that nitrogen directly from the atmosphere. They can't do it. They can't do it. And so what we have to do is we have to build these big factories, and these were built, you know, during World War I and really ramped up in World War II. The Haber method. We can now break that nitrogen bond, and we can make, combine it with hydrogen and oxygen, and we can make ammonia and nitrates and all these different things. And it becomes very powerful. It becomes very useful to the plant. But it's very expensive to do. And so when you look at how much you spend on nitrogen, you're not paying for the nitrogen. That's free. It's all over the place. You're paying for the energy that it takes to put the nitrogen into the right form. So it really shouldn't be part of your fertilizer budget. It should be part of the energy budget on a farm. But what it takes, man, billions of dollars to do. God has provided these tiny little organisms that do the same thing.

42:46 So we got rhizobia bacteria. Again, you're all familiar with rhizobia. They will form symbiotic relationships with legume plants. And again, don't ever tell anybody or let anybody say, well, I'm growing soybeans. They can make their own nitrogen. Not true. They can't. They can't use atmospheric nitrogen, but they will work in conjunction with rhizobia to provide the nitrogen for them. And so you know, we have soybeans and peas and alfalfa and all these legume plants that have that ability to form these relationships. The rhizobia are putting out the right chemicals, the right enzymes, and they are breaking that nitrogen bond in these little nodules, and they're binding it with hydrogen and oxygen and turning that into forms of nitrogen that the plant now can use. It's a beautiful system. It's almost like it was created that way. But it's not just for legumes. We've got other things. There's free-living diazotrophs like azospirillum and azota and bacillus and cyanobacteria. They're discovering new ones all the time. And these things are doing the same thing rhizobia do. They're breaking that bond of the dinitrogen. They're combining it with the right other elements or making it plant available. But these guys can do it for a corn plant, a plant, a grass plant, any plant anybody that's willing to pay. These guys give them food because they can't eat nitrogen. They have to have the carbon. And so we've got this great system that God has created that the biology are making the nitrogen available to the plants.

44:17 Now you might look at this and go, well, I've already paid my tuition here because I'm going to go home and I'm going to throw out buckets full of these things on my ground and grow 300 bushel corn. Well, it's not always that simple. You see, rhizobia, incredibly powerful because they form nodules, and there are billions, billions of rhizobia in one of these nodules. Essentially they're creating vast amounts of nitrogen. If you grow 70 bushel soybeans, that takes 350 to 400 pounds of nitrogen to do that. How many of us would grow soybeans if you had to apply 400 pounds of nitrogen to do it? Well, we couldn't. But rhizobia can produce 400 pounds.

44:57 Of nitrogen in 60 days, incredibly powerful. These guys might produce 40 to 50 lbs in a year, not nearly as powerful because they're working as single celled organisms. But what does 50 pounds of nitrogen throughout the year do to a forage crop, to a grass crop, to a grazing crop? Can make all the difference in the world. And so it's not the only answer, but it should be part of the answer for the nitrogen problem.

45:26 All right, number four: soils are rich in minerals and plant nutrients. You know, we talked about nitrogen, but we also spend a lot of money on phosphorus and potassium and iron and all these other trace minerals. When we send a soil test in, the lab sends back an analysis and says, 'Well, you need to add this, this, this, this, this, this and this.' Well, what they're telling you—they're telling you how many of the mineral nutrients in your soil are available to the plant. They're not telling you what's in your soil. And so if you really want to know what do you have in your soil, you have to do something like a total digestive nutrient or a total nutrient test, something like that. You can get that test and you can learn folks: most of our soils have enough of these minerals to farm for thousands of years, but they don't show up on a soil test because they're not available to plants.

46:23 And just like God never made a plant to pull nitrogen directly out of the atmosphere, he didn't make plants to pull the minerals directly out of the soil. It has to go through the bugs. It has to go through the biology. I love this article that was in Scientific American. It says, 'Mycorrhizal fungi run the largest mining operation in the world.' I love it because when you think of a mining operation, you think of this enormous equipment, you know, one truck that has a tire the size of a house. You've all seen those pictures. But they're saying the largest mining operation in the world, you can't even see it unless you have a pretty good microscope. That's pretty cool.

46:59 And so what's happening is you've got this little piece of feldspar over here on the right, and look at these: it's got these little tunnels, these little channels. That's actually mine shafts—those are hollowed out spaces inside that little soil particle. And it's being done by mycorrhiza, which looks like this. And again, we've got some really good mycorrhizal experts here, so make sure you visit with them. Willie Pretorius, where's Willie at? Yeah, Willie's right here. He's with Ward Labs. He knows way more about mycorrhiza than probably anybody else in this room. So if you have mycorrhiza questions, talk to Willie. But essentially, this mycorrhiza is forming these arbuscules inside this plant root, and then these aren't root hairs—this is mycorrhizal hyphae coming out into the soil. And that's what is burrowing into this rock. It creates the right chemicals and the right enzymes, and it actually cultivates the right type of bacteria to dissolve solid, solid mineral, turns it into liquid mineral, and it delivers it right back to its host plant in exchange for the carbon.

48:07 And so so much of the fertilizer that we put on—if we had the right biology in our soil, we could be pulling that out of our soil, and we wouldn't have to be applying it. So number five: the fifth principle. And again, remember, these things are free. I don't have to pay for that carbon. I don't have to pay for that nitrogen in the atmosphere. I don't pay for that solar energy. I don't pay for those minerals. Well, I guess when I bought the land, I did, but they're there for the acquisition. They're undeserved, and they're virtually unlimited.

48:38 Number five: soil biology makes the system bigger, faster, stronger, and more efficient. And I've been talking about that for these last several, you know—soil biology is what is converting that nitrogen to be available. It's what's mining those minerals and making it available. Biology drives the system. However, you can't have any biology in your soil without a plant out there, because as powerful as the biology is, the only way that they're going to exist, the only food source that they have, is going to be that liquid carbon root exudate. So if you don't have a plant growing in the soil to feed them, to host them, to give them a habitat to live in, the biology is not going to be there. So which is more important? Well, they're both more important, and they depend upon each other. So the biology makes that system bigger, faster, stronger, more efficient. We're going to have a whole panel talking about soil biology. And again, I know there's lots of people here that have done lots of Johnson Sue at home and other types of biological extracts. I would predict that some of the richest conversations that will happen over the next three days will be around some of these biological topics, and they should be. You know, it's a fascinating area of farming. It's one that we don't know nearly enough about, and even the experts.

49:52 Will tell you that they only know a fraction of what's out there to be learned. I frankly find that very exciting. It's exciting to know that there's undiscovered things out there that we can learn and we can get even better at as we discover both new organisms and new ways to use them in the system the way that God created it.

50:13 And then number six, water is essential for all life and processes. That's the sixth truth of biog Grace. Now you may say okay, water is it free? Well, you know rainwater is. You don't pay for it. Sometimes we wish we could, and for those who have some irrigation, you can. I'm not talking about irrigation here. I'm talking about rain. So yes, it is free. It's given to us by Grace. Is it undeserved? Well, yes. I don't think that you get discriminated on. You know, the Bible says that God makes it rain on the just and the unjust alike. Again, we don't always get what we want, but we can't do anything extra to deserve extra rainfall.

51:01 Is it unlimited? Is it unlimited? Well, we could spend quite a bit of time arguing about this, but Colton's going to come up here and steer wrestle me off the stage in eight minutes. Can't get into that discussion. It's unlimited in the fact that all of the rain you get is available to be used, but most of us—well, not most of us in this room—but most agriculture people waste a lot of the rain that they get.

51:30 Some of you have seen this picture. It's from Russ Jackson. Russ took this. Russ is a farmer in Oklahoma. He actually grows some seed for us, some of the Rye seed, Elbon Rye. He's one of our growers. So this was a rainfall event in Western Oklahoma. Same soil type, big rainfall event. 5.3 inches fell overnight, and he came out, was driving down the road, and he took this picture because these are the same soils on this side and this side. Now some people say well, this guy just had a lot of slope and it all ran to the ditch. Well, no, it was that way across the whole field. And so he had this. The neighbor had infiltration rates of 6 inches per hour, and that 5 inches came in about an hour. It was one of those big rainstorms.

52:18 And as I go around and I talk, you know, farmers have varied opinions on global warming, climate change, all things like that, and that's great. Almost every farmer though will tell you, if you ask them, our rainfall events are less frequent and they're more intense. Pretty much everybody agrees with that. Okay, so a big rain, 6/10 of an inch an hour, he got 16,000 gallons of water in his soil. The rest either ran off or evaporated away. Russ, on the other hand—and so the neighbor was conventional tillage, just growing wheat, no cover crops, no grazing. Russ had a good crop rotation. He's gross cover crops, plan grazing management. And so he had it. And the NRCS had been out just a couple weeks before that and tested his soil. He knew exactly what his infiltration rate was: 6 inches an hour, 6 inches an hour because they had tested it. Well, 5.3 is less than six, so guess what? He got it all. That rainfall event was unlimited for him because he took it all into his soil and he was able to utilize 144,000 gallons of water for growing his next crops, for making his next system work.

53:31 And so, yeah, we could argue about that, but we don't even take advantage of the rainfall that we get when we get it, and then we still complain about not having enough. So the thing about Grace is it does you no good if you don't do something to accept it, if you don't do something to grasp it. You have to do something to implement it and integrate it into your lives. Otherwise, it's just something that's setting out there. It sounds really good, it looks really good, but unless you're specifically doing something to get it integrated into your lives, it's not going to help.

54:04 So you know, in the case of, of the example of, you know, God sending his son Jesus, that does you no good if you don't accept that Grace into your life. And all of these other things do you no good. The sunlight, the carbon, the nitrogen, the minerals, the biology, the water—you have to do something to get them into your system. And so I'm not going to go through these because you all know them. They will be talked about up here, but we need to keep the soil covered. We need to minimize the disturbance. These are the soil principles. We need to maximize the diversity. We need living roots as often as possible, and we need to properly manage livestock, properly integrate manage livestock into the system. And when we do that, now we're applying those biological Graces to our system. That's how we integrate them into our lives.

54:47 And so these big projects, all of this overwhelming stuff in front of us, looks a lot less daunting when we have the right leaders, the right workers, and the right tools. So as we close, how long did it take Nehemiah and the Jews to rebuild the wall? Remember, it was nearly a mile in circumference, 15 feet high, 12 feet wide, 10 gates, unskilled workers. Again, Nehemiah has very.

55:16 Exact in the book and it tells us in chapter 6 so the wall was completed on the 25th of the month of Al. Any thoughts on how long it took? 52 days. 52 days. Now unless you knew the story of Nehemiah you're probably thinking, 'Oh golly, five years, 10 years, government project, 50 years.' 52 days. That is shocking. That is shocking. But Nehemiah applied these right principles.

55:52 So how long will it take us to rebuild, build their soils? Well, I'm not here to tell you we can do it in 52 days, but it's not going to be as long as the experts tell us. You know, the experts will tell you it takes a thousand years to build an inch of topsoil, and that's true if the only thing that we're relying on is the weathering of rocks. But folks, we've got all of these tools, we've got all of these biological graces, we can do way better than just weathering rocks down to create our soil. And so when we put the right leaders and the right workers and the right tools together, we can rebuild our soils much, much more quickly than that.

56:32 So as we close, I just wanted to have a little bit of a final discussion about this sabbath rest for the land because people do ask about that. 'Hey, should we be letting our land rest every seventh year?' Well, it's a good question. Now I don't believe that we're still under that commandment from God. That was specific to the Jews at that time, and I don't believe that that's an edict or a commandment from God for us. However, God didn't just tell them to do that because he was trying to control them. There's a reason why he wanted them to do that, and so we need to look at what was the reason for that and how can we apply that to our lives today.

57:17 So you know, I do know some people that do give a Sabbath rest. You know, they won't take a crop off once every seven years. Rick Clark talks about having regenerative years within his system where you know he's not harvesting grain, he's just grazing it with livestock and he'll take that whole year to kind of reset the system and rebuild it. Now many of us probably can't afford to give up a cash crop once every seven years.

57:46 So if you think about it, what would happen? I mean, the reason that God told them to do that is because the land does need to rest and recover. And here's a very common fallacy: giving that Sabbath year rest does not mean nothing is growing. That is the absolute worst thing you could do for your soil is to have clean, bare fallow. You know, in our wheat stubble example I talked about earlier, we had 10 months of nothing growing out there. That was not letting the land rest. That was starving the system. And so that would not be considered based on what we know now as having a rest for the land. The rest happens when you allow these plants to grow, when you allow the biology to flourish, and you don't take things away from the system, you're not exporting via a truck or a hay bale.

58:35 And so what if we did that every year? What if we took 1/7th of every year and had something growing without removing anything? So 365 days divided by 7th, what's 1/7th of a year? 52 days. Now I'm not saying that that's, is that a coincidence that it's the same amount of time it took him to rebuild the walls? I don't know, but I thought it was pretty cool. But when people ask us how long does a cover crop need to grow before you get, you know, the majority of the benefits? And before I even ever looked at any of this, I would just tell them probably seven weeks. You can get the majority of the benefits in cover crop growth in seven weeks. That's 49 days. That's pretty close.

59:22 So I think that we can accomplish—and again, I don't think we're under a statute or a requirement to do this—but I think we can accomplish that rest and rebuilding for the land that God was wanting the Jews to do. I think we can accomplish that if you can have a cover crop or some crop growing out there for about seven weeks. And that doesn't mean it's going to get huge. You may be in a rainfall-limited environment, you may be in a situation where you don't get massive amounts of growth, but if you can have something growing out there, it can rebuild your soils and it can give this rest for the land that God wanted the Jews to do even back then.

1:00:00 So if we can get something planted and let it grow for 52 days, seven weeks, and I asked Chris Nicholls—many of you know Chris, very widely respected soil biologist—a question. I said, 'How long does a cover crop have to grow before you feel like you kind of got your at least your money back, break even?' And she kind of thought about it for a little bit and she said, '30 days.' If you can get 30 days of growth in, in 30 days you'll have much more root development than you will above ground development, but that's what she looks at, and she thinks in 30 days you'll at least break even. Seven weeks, you can get the majority of it out of there.

1:00:39 So the rest of the conference is going to be dedicated to looking at a lot of these principles, a lot of these tools, a lot of these concepts, and you'll be hearing from people that know a whole lot more than I do up here. So thank you very much for your attention. I appreciate it very much.