Soil as an Economy: Why Carbon is Your Farm's Currency

0:00 Than being the currency of the soil, and then later on in a talk she kind of used this word 'carbonics,' talking about kind of the same concept. And so after visiting with her about this whole concept, I've had this idea in my head for over a year now of how the soil really functions as an economy.

0:19 I've been working on this talk in my head for about a year, and so it's kind of something different. It's going to be more of the theoretical side of soil and how everything works together. But basically what I want to do is I want to explain one of the most complicated systems on the face of this Earth—this whole soil ecosystem, how plants and soil and all the little soil animals interact. I want to explain that to you by comparing it to another very, very complicated system, and that's the economy of a country.

0:51 But I think it's going to help you understand soil because we all live and we work and we function inside of a country's economy, and so it gives us a good base of understanding. So I'm going to simply draw a lot of parallels between a US economy—our economy that we live in—and a soil economy. Now, because we're all very familiar with the economy of a country, you know there's lots of political cartoons about the economy and what drags it down, you know, the stimulus package, and so the economy is in the news all the time. So we're very familiar with it and we understand the concepts of it. So I think it's going to help us understand the soil, or at least that's my hope.

1:30 And so what I want to do is I'm going to cover a lot of information here in a fairly short period of time. But there are seven keys to a healthy economy, and you all know these because you live and function and interact in these economies all the time. You've got supply, demand, currency, capital, energy and resources, infrastructure, and defense and protection. And I just really quickly want to go through each one of those—is how it applies to a country's economy.

1:58 With the supply side, you know, strong economies are very productive. You have to have people that are producing things if you're going to have a strong economy. And a high percentage of all entities involved in that economy are producing something. When you have an economy where you have a lot of people that aren't productive, you are not going to have a very strong economy. And diversity is very important. You're going to see that phrase come up over and over again in this talk because if you are only producing one or two things within your economy, you are very susceptible to being weak and being attacked. So diversity is extremely important.

2:34 On the demand side, you have to have people that want something if you're going to have a strong, flourishing economy. And economies are strongest when the majority of the people involved are both suppliers or producers and demanders or consumers. You have to have that trade going both ways. That's what makes a strong economy. And again, diversity is very important.

2:57 Currency—we all are familiar with currency. It allows for quick, efficient, and fair transactions or exchanges between producers and consumers. It's the way that we make deals. It's the way that we buy and sell. In order to be currency, it has to be universally desired and accepted, and it has to have different forms and has to move and flow easily. It can't be bulky.

3:23 Capital is simply accumulated, stored, or saved currency. And it might be cash—you might have cash in the bank, you may have a savings account. It may be investments that you've made in equipment. That would also be considered capital. But it's basically stored or accumulated currency is what makes up capital.

3:43 And then of course, energy and resources. If you're going to have a strong, flourishing economy, you've got to have energy. Energy drives the system, but it generally is quite expensive, and so it's a big expense in making an economy work. And then of course, your natural resources provide a base for your growth and expansion.

4:00 May have a very small economy if you don't have many resources but if you have access to a lot of natural resources your economy can grow and it can flourish. Infrastructure simply again it allows those economies to grow beyond subsistence and the two most important infrastructures I believe are transportation and communication and so we're going to be looking at each of those in more detail as well and then of course defense and protection because strong economies will always be under attack by those who want to consume without producing. You're always going to be under attack and defense and protection requires investments of capital and so those are the seven keys to a healthy economy for a country and I believe those are the same keys to having a healthy soil economy.

4:47 That's what we're going to spend our time here in the next 45 minutes or so just going through what are these keys to this healthy soil economy so we're going to look at them one by one and basically in this soil economy there's three major players. You've got the plants, you've got the soil itself, and then we you have what we're going to call the soil biota or all the living organisms that are within the soil. Now technically I should probably have a fourth component up here of livestock just know that anytime you put livestock in this it's going to make everything I talk about work better and generally work faster. Just to simplify things I'm leaving livestock out for right now so we're looking at the plants, the soil, and the soil biota or the soil organisms.

5:32 So from the supply side who are the suppliers, who are the producers within this soil economy? Well first of all you have the plants and the number one things that they're producing or they're supplying to the economy is going to be carbon. This right here if if you didn't learn anything in chemistry class in high school, Steve, I know you did because you're a chemistry expert with a microscope and all this is the most important chemical formula in the world and it's also one of the most simple. It's simply photosynthesis and plants take carbon dioxide and they take water and with the energy of the sun with chlorophyll in their plant cells they produce sugars and oxygen and that really is the formula for life right there and we're going to talk a lot more about that but this is what's driving this plant economy is these plants are producing carbon and we'll see how that works as we work our way through the rest of the economy.

6:28 So the soil is also a supplier. It's producing nutrients or minerals because almost all soils are extremely rich in a lot of minerals and those minerals are what plants need so in this economy the soil is producing these minerals, releasing these minerals, but it's also providing a habitat or a place for these plants and these roots and all of this soil biology to live so it's providing the nutrients. It's also providing the habitat or the living space and then also water storage. Plants need water, soil can store water.

7:06 So that's the supply side there and then of course all of the little soil animals, all of the soil biology, they're producing nutrients through fixation and we'll look at these in detail exactly how they're doing this. They help cycle nutrients, they help make them available, and they also provide very valuable services such as defense and protection and so that's kind of the players on the supply side. That's what each of them are supplying. On the demand side of course we all know that plants need nutrients and water and they need services like plants need protection. Plants need support services for protecting and defending them from diseases, pests and predators.

7:47 The soil what does the soil need? Well the soil needs carbon as we'll see as this economy starts to interact, these different players start interacting, but also needs services such as protection because we've seen pictures here of what happens to the soil when it doesn't get protected. The soil cannot.

8:04 Protect itself it needs to get that protection from other members of the economy. It has to have that cover, it has to have that protection, and then the soil biology it needs food and it needs habitat because they are living, breathing organisms and creatures. They have to have a place to live and they have to have something to eat. So that's the players on the supply and the demand side. And you know, in a strong human economy, one of the leading indicators of a strong economy is low unemployment rate. That means everybody's contributing, everybody's working, everybody has a role. And that's the same thing in a soil economy. It's strongest when plants, the soil, and the biology are all producing and consuming. And too often we miss parts of that in our farming systems.

8:53 You know, we practice in this country there's a lot of what I would call agriculture welfare practiced when we externally provide the plant with everything that it needs from the outside such as fertilizer inputs, crop protection inputs. When we provide all that from the outside, we weaken the economy because we're no longer allowing the system to work the way it was designed. There's this great quote from Abraham Lincoln. He says you cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.

9:29 And that's a great quote when it comes to working with people, but I believe it's the same thing with your soil and with your plants. You are not going to help your plants permanently by doing for them what this system could and should do for themselves. Now there's sometimes they need a little help. They may need a little fertilizer, they may need a little bit of protection, but when we provide everything for our plants that the soil should be providing, we weaken the whole system. We need to allow the system to work the way it was created to work, with the plants, the soil, and the biology all interacting together, the way that God created it to do.

10:09 Okay, currency. Currency is important because it allows goods and services to be exchanged more efficiently. And you know, we've got the dollar, we've got the British pound, the Japanese Yen. Those are all currencies, but in old days before we had all that, you know, people would trade beads or they would trade livestock or whatever, but it had to be something that was kind of universally accepted. The cattle thing, it kind of fell out of favor, you know, because it was not easy to carry around. And the cartoon there, you know, sorry I've got nothing smaller than a large cow to trade in for this. So currency, you know, became something that was easy to exchange and easy to move back and forth.

10:48 And I think this really makes sense, as many of the speakers have been talking about the importance of carbon, but I put forward to you that carbon is the currency of this whole system. And when you have plants and soils and biology interacting, all of these transactions that are happening in the soil, it's all based on carbon. That is the currency. It's the currency in this formula. And carbon is so important because it allows goods and services to be exchanged between the plants, the soils, and the biology very effectively.

11:19 Carbon is essential to all life. You and I, we're 19% carbon. Our bodies are 19% carbon. Carbon can form over 10 million chemical compounds. It's extremely adaptable, and it's found in almost everything. It's the most important but the most overlooked of all plant nutrients, and it's the main food source for soil biology. It can be collected. Think about carbon in the terms of currency here. It can be collected through photosynthesis. It can be spent and traded to soil organisms for valuable services. It can be saved, and that we'll see that with soil organic matter. It can be universally desired by all members of the economy. All parts of this economy want carbon.

12:08 And it also has different states. We have gas carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, we have liquid carbon that's moving through the plant through the photosynthetic process, and we have solid carbon in our organic matter. As these plants grow and the tissue grows and the roots grow, that carbon becomes in a solid state within the plants. So it really works well as a currency because it can be switched back and forth between different forms.

12:38 Now capital, our definition of capital was it's accumulated currency, stuff that we save, it's stuff that we invest whether it be cash or into equipment. And in this paradigm of the soil economy, the soil carbon capital is organic matter. When you take this currency which is carbon and you have saved it and you've invested it in your soil over a period of time, it becomes organic matter, it becomes humus. And it's needed for growth and stability, and you can see some of the functions of soil organic matter there. That's a whole entire talk that someone else can do at some point in time, but I think we all understand and know how valuable soil organic matter is.

13:22 If you look at capital-rich economies, economies that have a lot of capital, they're very stable, they're very productive, they're very resilient. They can weather a lot of storms and they're very efficient in how they interact and how they work. And that's exactly the way that our soils are. When you have a soil that has high organic matter, it's going to be a very productive system, it's going to be a very stable system. It can hold lots of water, it can weather lots of storms, it's very resilient to drought, it's resilient to diseases and insects and pests. And it's very efficient in how it produces. I think that's been very well played out in the last day or so here with the producers that have been talking about their soils and what they've seen happening.

14:04 The more capital-rich soils that we have, the high organic matter soils work really well. I don't know probably many of you know Walt Davis, but he had an article in a magazine here just a little bit ago that I wanted to put up here. This was a quote that he had that I wanted to read. It says: Biological capital is diversity plus the long-term effects of having biodiversity. It is soil with high organic carbon that has excellent tilth and structure and holds a lot of its mineral content in organic form. It is diverse and healthy populations of plants and animals both in and on the soil made up of healthy individuals.

14:47 Biological capital is what allows the ecological processes—water cycle, nutrient cycle, and the energy flow—to function properly and it provides a system of natural checks and balances that limits the populations of pest organisms. It is wealth in the truest form and is vital not only to agriculture but to society as a whole. When biodiversity is high throughout the entire soil plant animal complex, both productivity and stability will be high. Weeds, disease, parasites, and pest organisms of all types will still be present but not in concentrations high enough to interfere with the functions of the local environment or those of the humans living in the environment.

15:29 A lot of words there, but Walt Davis is a really smart guy. This was in The Beef Producer. He writes a column in there called The Grazer Gazette that was just published last November. Just a really good summary of what biological capital is, and that's what we're trying to do with our soils. But you don't get that without accumulating. You've got to accumulate currency to get capital, and that's what that carbon is.

15:57 Okay, energy and resources. I said that in a human economy, energy drives the system but it's often very expensive. Guys, we are so extremely blessed because our source of energy for this entire economy that we're working with is completely free. Think about that. Think about how great an economy is.

16:23 Country would be if you had completely and totally free energy. And we don't in our human economy. Some people say well wind power, that's free, you don't have to pay for the wind. Yeah, but you got to pay for that turbine, you know, turn, and a solar panel those don't come free unless you're planting a plant. We have solar collectors that are completely free. All we got to do is put them in the ground and turn them loose and make them work.

16:51 A healthy soil economy should not need significant purchased energy inputs. And yes, our farming economies that we're working under require extensive energy inputs, but you look at a natural functioning thriving plant ecosystem, it can do just fine without any energy inputs from man. It did for thousands of years. And so this healthy soil economy doesn't need extensive energy inputs from the outside because the solar energy within this photosynthesis is completely free.

17:29 So for resources, what are the natural resources that this economy needs? Well, number one is carbon. Carbon is the most valuable nutrient that plants need, but again it's the most overlooked. You know, and when people ask me what I think about global warming, sometimes that's maybe a little bit of a trap question. And you know Jimmy and I were talking about this at breakfast, how do you respond to that because it's kind of a politically charged topic right now. I just simply respond by going, you know I'm not smart enough to know about that. All I know is that my plants need carbon and lots of it. If there's excess carbon dioxide in the air, I'm more than willing to take some of that because that's the number one thing that our plants need. So not only is our energy for this ecosystem for this economy completely free, our number one input is completely free as well. And we've got all these other people driving cars and stuff putting more up there for us to take. Now I would say that our sulfur that we got used to be free from a little bit of acid rain, but we've cleaned up the air too much and now we got to buy that. But carbon is free, the energy is free. Kind of makes it sound like we should be making all kinds of money because everything's free, right?

18:43 The number two most important thing resource in this whole plant economy, the number two most valuable nutrient that plants need is nitrogen. Well, our atmosphere is 76% nitrogen. You know, carbon dioxide is just a fraction of a percent like what 0.02 or 0.03, it's a very, very small percent of the atmosphere, but it's very important. But there's all kinds of nitrogen in the atmosphere. We just got to figure out how to get it, and it's not that hard because the plants have the ability to do that. And we'll see that in more detail here, but again within this economy, you know God has put all of the pieces in place for us. We just have to figure out how to get them integrated into the way that we're farming and operating. And all the other mineral resources, you know, we need just to hire a lot of tiny little miners to go out and mine them because when we talked about the supply side, the soil is supplying a lot of these nutrients, a lot of these minerals, but you have to mine them out. And so on your payroll within this economy you need lots of little tiny workers to go out and get those.

19:55 Just showing you a few of these and number one would be rhizobia, which we're all familiar with. That's a bacteria that will actually form colonies with on the roots of a legume plant. And on the right hand side there, that's a legume nodule that's cut open. See how nice and pink that is? That shows that it's really healthy. It's a little factory, it's a factory producing nitrogen. It's pulling nitrogen out of the air and making it available to that plant. But it's not just rhizobia that do that. Dr. Christine Jones, one of the leading soil microbiologists in the world, she says.

20:35 From an agricultural perspective, the most important of the free-living nitrogen-fixing bacteria, and what she's talking about here is not rhizobia, but bacteria that produce nitrogen but don't associate on a plant root. They just live free in the soil. They're associative diazoalphyll soil because the atmospheric nitrogen that they fix occurs as dinitrogen, and associative because, like mycorrhizae of fungi, they require the presence of a living plant for their carbon. These bacteria live in close proximity to plant roots and are linked to plant roots via the mycorrhizal highway.

21:09 So what she's saying here is that these guys can produce nitrogen for a corn plant because they're not associated with just legumes, but they do require the presence of a living plant for their carbon. So basically what she's saying is these guys will produce nitrogen but not for free. They'll sell your plant nitrogen if you're willing to give it some carbon. See how the economy is working? Carbon is a currency. If your plant is willing to give carbon to these associative diazotrophs, they're willing to give nitrogen back.

21:43 Here's an article that was in Scientific American a while back. The headline was 'Mycorrhizal fungi run the largest mining operation in the world.' Kind of an interesting article. I would encourage you to go read it if you want, but that picture is a highly magnified picture of a little piece of feldspar, a little tiny piece of sand, and those little crevices running through there are where the hyphae of mycorrhizal fungi have penetrated into that little piece of feldspar and has pulled out or extracted minerals. What they're doing is they're pulling the minerals out of that piece of feldspar and they're trading them to the plant that they're associated with for, guess what, carbon. If you don't have carbon, the system's not going to work. When you do have carbon, your plant can go out and buy the minerals and the nutrients that it needs.

22:43 Steve, have you seen things like that under your microscope yet? Is that true, John? Has he? Okay, but it's really cool because this mycorrhizae of fungi—and here's a picture of it here—they form little arbuscules or little nodules within the plant root, and then they send out these hyphal strands, and that's what's allowing your plant to access a lot of the minerals that are in the soil that roots by themselves could not get to.

23:13 Here's a quote from that same magazine article from Scientific American. Jennifer Frasier was the author. Says: 'Mycorrhizal fungi mine the soils not only for the basic food nutrients for plants, who're familiar with like nitrogen, phosphorus, etc., but also those hard to come by trace elements like zinc and copper and manganese, which plants need for strong immune system health and survival against a potentially hostile world of pathogens.' Oddly enough, many soils are rich in important nutrients, but they are often locked up in a physical form which makes them unavailable to most plants. And when they're locked up in a physical form that plants can't get to, guess what the recommendation from our advisers are? You need to put it on. You don't have enough copper in the soil. You don't have enough zinc in the soil. You're manganese deficient. So we can add that through a foliar application, and yes, we can. That works. But that's agricultural welfare you're doing for the plant. You're doing for this economy what it could and should be doing for itself. But the plant itself can't do it. It's got to be these mycorrhizal fungi to do it, and you're not going to have those if you don't have the carbon currency to spend to get them up and going.

24:31 Okay, infrastructure. Infrastructure is simply, you know, equipment that you purchase, you know, roads, structures, bridges that are needed for a country or a region or organization to function properly. You know, it's the things that

24:50 You build to make things more efficient, like transportation and communication. And if you know when you're a country and you're in a war, one of the first things that you do when you're at war is you try to destroy the other guy's infrastructure. Because without infrastructure, you can grind an economy to a halt. And if you can grind an economy to a halt, you can bring a country to its knees. So one of the best war strategies, one of the first things that they'll do is try to disrupt infrastructure.

25:22 When we look at infrastructure in the United States, here is the interstate highway system in the United States. That's infrastructure. We can transport things back and forth across those roads. Those are great, but that's only covering a part of the country. So when you add in the rest of the highways, it starts to look like this. Now we've got really, really good transportation infrastructure, and it becomes very easy and very efficient to move goods and services from one part of the country to another.

25:59 When we apply that to the plant world, the picture on the left is a plant with just a developing root system. Think about that as the interstate highway system. It's the major arteries for transport. But the one on the right adds in all the side roads and all the highways and all the other roads. That's mycorrhizal fungi that has colonized the same plant, and it's allowed much greater transportation. It's allowed much easier, much more efficient transportation to move things throughout this soil ecosystem.

26:33 Mycorrhizal fungi transports phosphorus, which is one of the hardest to access, nitrogen, potassium, calcium, magnesium, iron, zinc, boron, copper. And in dry times, they will help transport and supply water as well. And that's why you can read study after study after study where the experts will tell you that plants that are highly colonized with mycorrhizal fungi are much, much more resilient to drought conditions than plants that are not. And that's because you've got all these transportation infrastructure bringing things in.

27:07 Here's another quote from Christine Jones. She says mycorrhizal fungi can extend quite a distance from plant roots. They form networks between plants and colonies of soil bacteria. Plants can communicate with each other via messages sent through these networks. Mycorrhizal fungi are both the highway and the internet of the plant and soil world. So the mycorrhiza, that is the main infrastructure within your soil because it's helping transport things as well as help communicate messages throughout the soil.

27:40 I like a soil system without mycorrhizal fungi is like a farming system without roads, rail lines, or ports. There's huge potential, but it's severely limited. About five or six years ago, I went over with Neil on the Plains to a tour in Brazil. We toured the Mato Grosso region, kind of in central Brazil. Huge, huge farms. I mean, there's guys farming 50, 60, 70,000 acres of soybeans. And they'd have operations like this where they'd be running 15 to 20 combines in the field. And there's huge potential for these guys to expand their acreages as well. But what's limiting them is their infrastructure.

28:25 Because you can harvest it, but you still have to get it out. And they're about a three-day drive to the port from where they're at. And believe me, if they ever get good infrastructure to that region of Brazil, we'll see our soybean prices drop by at least a dollar and a half because they will kick our butt. Because they can grow two to three crops of soybeans a year, and they're very good at it, and they've got a lot of land to do it with. But what's limiting them is transportation infrastructure. Their roads stink. They've got no rails, no major railways coming from that part of the country to the ports so they can export. So it all goes by truck, and their roads are small and much undersized.

33:07 Around the tip of that plant root, the plant root is leaking out these carbon sugars, different types, different forms depending on what they want. They may need phosphorus, they may need zinc, they may need boron, they may need protection and different facets of the biological world in the soil will bring different things to that plant root depending on what the plant is requesting.

33:30 And you know, if you stop and think about the highly complex nature of how that's working, it just kind of blows your mind of how sophisticated the communication and the transportation systems are. But there's highly, highly developed infrastructure within the soil. If we can develop it, we'll have very strong and very productive economies.

33:55 This is a picture that I made much simpler, just letters and not big long words, but this is my vision of what things are happening. You see the arrows moving out from the plant root is carbon because that's what's going out. That's the currency. This is how much I'm willing to pay. And then each of those different types of biology living around that plant root is saying, okay, yeah, I'll give you two nitrogens if you give me two carbons. Yeah, I'll give you a nitrogen and a potassium if you give me a couple carbons. I don't really think that's how it's working, but that's how it works in my mind.

34:29 And you even see the drops of water because the plant, especially in dry times, will trade carbon for water. And especially through the mycorrhiza, the mycorrhiza can go out and it can get water that your soil has stored. And the mycorrhiza are more efficient at pulling water out of the soil storage system than what plant roots are, so it's able to access more water than just the plant roots by themselves.

34:55 They also communicate through the mycorrhizal networks. Plants can communicate with each other. And there's a lot of studies being done on this right now. I don't know that anybody truly understands to a real great extent how this is happening, but there's plant signaling going on. And if this type of stuff interests you or fascinates you, which it does to me, part of the aim Symposium with no-till on the plains, Dr. Jack Schultz from the University of Missouri, he's one of kind of the leaders in this whole field of plant communication, and he's going to be speaking at that. And Joe Clapperton as well, and they're going to be talking about this whole area of plants communicating with each other.

35:46 Basically, what this picture is showing here is that when one plant gets attacked by aphids, there's two ways that that plant can communicate the threat to other plants around it. One is chemical signaling through the air, and one is through the mycorrhizal fungal network because the roots are all tied together through this one fungus organism. And somehow that plant is communicating to other plants that there's danger there. And if you get on and watch the YouTube videos, they'll have these real sophisticated experiments of how they'll put a bag over one plant and infest the other one with aphids. But whatever chemical compound the plants are releasing to try to combat the aphids, the plant with a bag over it is already producing, even though it could not have gotten it through the air. So they're showing how it's tied together with the fungal network.

36:40 And that kind of leads into this whole defense and protection because the plants defend and protect themselves from many, many things. Think about it. How many times when you're threatened and you need to defend or protect yourself, how often does that involve moving or running or trying to get away? You know, that's one of our biggest defense mechanisms. You know, if a car is coming straight at you, you know to protect yourself, get out of the way.

37:14 Well guess what plants can't do that. You know, plants can't get out of the way. They're rooted in one place and so they have to have other mechanisms to defend and protect themselves because they can't run away, they can't go hide. They have to defend themselves where they're at and they need defense against water, too much or too little. You see that raindrop impact? It can be very destructive if it's not protected. Wind, heat, cold, compaction, weeds, insects, diseases—you name it. There are any number of things that this whole, not just plants but the soil and the soil biology, all three of these things within this little ecosystem, need protection and defense from.

37:54 So they have several lines of defense. The first line of defense is the soil armor or the soil cover, and I know Darren did a good job of talking about that cover. And you know, other people—Alan Meno, I love that quote. You know, is there anything, any such thing as too much cover? You know, not in my area. He shows this 15-foot-tall residue, which is great. But Ralph Derp, who is one of the no-till pioneers in South America, I love this quote. He says, 'Almost all advantages of the no-tillage system come from the permanent cover of the soil and only a few from not tilling the soil. We should always aim at full soil cover.' Because when we have cover on the soil, we're protecting it from the wind, we're protecting it from the rain, we're protecting it from the heat, we're protecting it from the cold. So the first line of defense is to always keep your soil covered.

38:46 The second line of defense is this plant signaling. Again, you know, I don't understand a lot of this, but this was a really good article in the Scientist magazine. And again, if you want to learn more about this, I would encourage you to search for Dr. Jack Schultz. He's got some videos out there or come to the AIM conference. But basically, when an aphid attacks a plant, it has two different mechanisms to warn other plants and also to send up SOS signals to bring in the cavalry, if you will. And so these plants are releasing these volatile compounds that other plants can sense and also other insects can sense. And so when you have an aphid infestation, the plant can actually send out a signal that will bring in aphid killers. And these aphid killers can—whatever this plant is releasing, it can sense that, it can smell that—and so it will bring these things in. But it's also communicating again through its root system, through that mycorrhizal fungi network. Somehow it's exchanging messages back and forth saying, hey, you might want to get prepared. I've got aphids. You know, you might want to start calling in the reserves because we're under attack. So start bringing it on.

40:02 Here's a picture. The Noble Foundation folks that are going to be talking later on here may talk about this a little bit. I kind of put this in after the tour that we had at the Noble Foundation. They were talking about the endites, this symbiotic endy fungus, which they're developing to live inside of a plant, and it's providing a lot of protection from different diseases, different insects, and different pests. And so there's these symbiotic relationships, but that fungus isn't doing that for free. The plant has to buy those services through the currency of carbon. And so if your plants are limited in how much carbon they have, if your soil system is limited in how much organic matter it has, these services will still be available, but you just simply cannot purchase enough to make it a really healthy, thriving, functional system.

40:53 And the fourth line of defense is diversity. I mean, how many times have you heard people talk about diversity? You know, you can't overstate that enough because most diseases, most pests, are going to attack one or two things in your system. Very few things are going to attack everything you've got in your system unless you've only got one or two.

41:16 With cover crops when we try to design a cover crop mix we want to have the diversity there so that's one of the lines of defense is that if one species one type of plant is under attack, hopefully these other ones won't be because it's a different plant type. Diversity is a really good line of defense.

41:36 Those are the keys to a healthy soil, all seven of those. And I just want to real quickly leave you with these 10 takeaway points. You're probably thinking good grief, I thought he was almost done. These will go really fast, it's kind of a summary, but these are the 10 takeaway points that I hope you get from this talk. Number one: these economies are intimately interconnected and what you do to one part of the economy is going to have a big effect on the other part. What you do to your plants is going to affect your soil, and what you do for your soil is going to affect your biology, and what you do for your biology is going to affect the other two things, whether you do that in a positive way or a negative way, it's all interconnected.

42:15 Number two: you need to reduce the amount of welfare you're giving your economy. Get everyone working on it. If you continue to provide welfare payments to your plants, to the soil, they will stay lazy. There's just no doubt about that. You got to get everyone working the way that they're supposed to—the plants, the soil, and the biology.

42:42 Number three: increase your cash flow. You go in and talk to your banker, and he's probably saying yeah I'd like to see a little more cash flow out of this year. Well, wouldn't we all. In our plant soil ecosystem, you can increase your cash flow simply by having more things growing. In our area, corn soybean rotation is king, that's all guys want to do. A corn soybean rotation is less than 50% efficient and taking advantage of the free energy that we receive on a daily basis. But if you don't have something growing out there, you can't take advantage of it. A corn soybean rotation will never raise organic matter levels very quickly, if ever, simply because there's not enough carbon going back into the system. What we need to do is add other things in there. We need to add cover crops, we need to add a cereal into the rotation, we need to add cattle in there because cattle will help cycle that carbon and make that carbon in more stable forms.

43:48 To increase the cash flow you have to have more things growing more of the time. You can't have these big windows like John Herrman was talking about. Eliminate that fallow period, even if it's just a couple of months. Get something growing out there to increase that cash flow.

44:02 Make capital investments of long-term carbon or organic matter and don't sell off those investments. It doesn't make any sense if you go out and invest in a piece of equipment and then four months later you just push it off a bridge. But that's what guys do all the time in their soil ecosystem. They'll have invested in this nice carbon input into the soil and then they go out and they plow it, or in our area they'll have guys bail up their residue. That's capital investment that you're basically selling off at a very cheap price. We've got a lot of guys that think that tillage piece, that vertical till, well that's okay because it's just tilling the top part of the soil and not very deep, but that can be just as destructive to your carbon capital as the plow can.

45:00 Number five: solar energy is free. Use every opportunity to have plants capture it and boost your economy. So instead of just doing corn, do corn and then cover crop rye and then come in with beans and then come in with wheat right after that and then come in with a diverse cover crop after your wheat.

45:17 Then graze that with cattle. Recognize that picture, Darren? Nice looking cattle there right, but we need to do whatever that we can to take advantage of all this solar energy and incorporate it into long-term carbon and soil.

45:33 Number six: take advantage of free manufacturing and free mining resources. Okay, all these little workers, all those rhizobia, all those associative diazotrophic nitrogen-fixing bacteria, mycorrhizal fungi. If you give them the carbon, they'll work for carbon. It's kind of like somebody working for peanuts, I guess, but they'll work for carbon. So if you can provide them with that carbon, they'll come work for you and you can have huge, huge, huge labor forces doing all their work for you. You just have to have the right currency to give them.

46:08 Number seven: employ lots of these little guys. Bring them in, encourage them, do whatever you can. Biological diversity is such a key point here. Get as many of those guys in there as possible. And again, you're not going to do that if you don't have the carbon to purchase their services.

46:26 Building eight: do not destroy this infrastructure. You will really see your economy grow. You've got the mycorrhizal, you've got these nice worm channels, and then what do people do? Coming in and discing it every fifth year doesn't really hurt that bad. We actually had a guy from the University of Nebraska say that. I'm not proud of that. We don't even have football to brag about now. We don't have anybody, you know. It's just sad in our state right now.

46:57 But if you build these infrastructures, if you build these transportation and communication networks, why in the world would you go in there and destroy them? One of the speakers yesterday was talking about the tornado going through. Jimmy, I think that was you. And how you compared this tornado to tillage. That's exactly right. When we go in and we do tillage, even if it's just a light tillage pass, guess what? Most of that microbe is going to be right where that vertical tillage thing is running. And that is exactly like basically declaring war on your economy because, remember how I said a war strategy is to disrupt your enemy's infrastructure? Well, why would you declare war on your soil by doing tillage? Because you're destroying the communication and transportation infrastructure.

47:44 So don't declare war on your own soil, for heaven's sake. Protect your economy as soil armor. Not only don't destroy it, but try to prevent other things from destroying it as well. Cover is king, and you've got to keep things covered up. I think everybody that has spoken here has really outlined that.

48:02 And then the last one: diversity is just so important for a healthy economy—plants, roots, soil biology. The more things you can have in your rotation, the more plants you can have in your pastures, the more diversity that you have all working together, the better off you're going to be in having a healthy, strong, functioning economy.

48:24 So there are the 10 takeaway points. I don't know if that confuses things or helps you understand things, but for me it helps me understand how these things are functioning all together. Because I live in an economy. I earn money, I spend money. I have currency, I have investments. I can understand all of that because I live within that every day. So start using that knowledge and apply it to your soils and just kind of start thinking about it in terms of this little functioning, robust economy underneath the ground, underneath the soil.

49:04 So hopefully that made a little bit of sense to you. Like I say, I've never done this talk before, so I would appreciate any input that you have.