Soil Health Science: Rethinking Management to Regenerate Soils

0:08 So we're going to talk a little bit about rethinking the management that you use in order to regenerate soil systems.

0:17 Soil health is the capacity of the soil to function as a vital living ecosystem that sustains plants animals and humans. Key words here are continued capacity and things like living ecosystems. Continued capacity means that it's about rejuvenation of the soil being able to support what you have out there. Living ecosystem means that it's a biological or ecological living system. There's biology involved here we have to pay attention to that. The other key word is function, particularly soil functions. When we talk about soil function we're referring to the ecosystem processes that are in the soil.

0:58 Those ecosystem processes, in fact 90% of all soil function is mediated by the biology in the soil. It's what creates a carbon cycle. It's what creates the plants convert solar energy into chemical energy. That chemical energy is fed to the biology in the soil. Plants have this symbiotic relationship with biology. You create a good bio community cycle that includes the soil food web, the bacteria, the fungi protozoa and nematodes that feed on them and then of course you got all your different types of plants. The plants that you all grow, primarily work a lot with row crop farmers like Mr. Jimmy Hemmings over here, and you raise what grain sorghum, maybe some corn, all these different things. Those are actually later successional plants. They come from a certain ecological special stage we're going to talk about that.

2:02 If you get a good functioning bio community cycle, biology plants animals integrated into your system, you're going to get a good water cycle. You start to see those infiltration rates go up. I mean I've been out to his farm and we've actually done infiltration, we've seen this happen. There are certain things that you can use to guide yourself to know that you're headed in the right direction. And then if you get a good water cycle then you're going to have a good nutrient cycle occur. That's all created by the biology. Even the nutrient cycle itself comes from the fact that the protozoa eats a bacterial or fungal feeding nematode, feed on bacteria. That's region mineralization we'll discuss that.

2:52 So there's been a changing vision of soil. The concept fixed soil properties has been shattered by soil health farmers and ranchers and they've changed how they envision or how they look at soil health and function of their soil. Key here is that what they're doing is that the operation and management decisions that are made enhance those ecosystem processes. So everything they do on the farm they have this in the back of their mind: what is it going to do to enhance the carbon cycle, what is it going to do to build more organic, what's it going to do to change the nutrient cycle? They understand that the soil is a living factory and they know that management activities determine that level of soil health and function of the soil.

3:46 Now been doing this for quite a while as an agronomist as an entomologist at the soil health specialist and I can tell you that I run into two systems for growing plants. One is an inorganic synthetic system chemical paradigm that's conventional agriculture and this leads to a dysfunctional unhealthy soil at least of that soil that you see in.

4:13 That photograph right there it lacked structure, lacks retention of water and nutrients. It's compacted, it's anaerobic, it lacks the proper soil microbe habitat specific to plants you're growing.

4:33 Whenever you do tillage, understand that store that you see up there at the top—it doesn't have any mycorrhizae fungi in it. It doesn't have a lot of the associative bacteria that you need to have in your system. So the plants that you're trying to grow, the soil that follows an organic biological ecological paradigm is a functioning soil. It has the aggregate structure that you need to have to support the complexity of microorganisms. It has good air and water passage, it has nutrient retention and cycling occurring within it. It has proper soil microbe habitat, has the proper fungi-bacteria ratios.

5:17 So you're essentially transitioning your soil system from the dysfunctional system to a functional system. Now would you believe that the soils that you see here are the same soil type? That's actually the same soil type. What's the common denominator in that photo of that slide right there? Anybody know why does one look so much different than the other? It's called management—it's how you have managed that soil. We manage soil to do this or we can manage soil to do this over here. So we just have to understand how to get there. That's what I'm here to talk to you about.

6:05 So I want to get that good functioning soil, I want to be able to build organic matter content. So one of the things we have to understand in order to get there, we have to understand that the soil food web is complex. You have that tilled soil like you see over there on the left—it only has bacteria in it. There's really no fungal association. And so what happens in that system is that you're actually functioning, you're actually functioning right here. You don't have all these other microorganisms really in that system. You're lacking all of that.

6:52 So what we want to do is we want to get more complexity. We don't allow the habitat to occur within that system, and we want to attain what are called spheres of influence. Spheres of influence are simply we're trying to get it to try to steer a poor steer, drill a sphere. These are all areas or areas of influence resulting from biological activity in the soil. You notice on the dysfunctional soil you didn't have any of these spheres—they're gone, because of our management of it.

7:27 So what we have to think of is that these are ecological systems. In ecological systems, they gain ecological successional stages over time. In other words, if you were to go and remove all the vegetation off the land, we were to do brush management, what would you see come back on that field or that rain spot in time? You start out with annual plants, biennials, perennials, shrubs. You were not to do anything. That's why we had yesterday you had Jeff talk about trying to establish native grasses—very difficult to do when you put that system in the first stage of ecological succession. Because what happens in that situation is that it's bacterial dominated. It does not fit the plants that you're trying to grow. As that system gets more complex, the bacteria start grow, start to see the amounts of bacteria go up, you also see the amounts.

8:33 of fungi start to go up. It's critical to understand that because now we're starting to get the mycorrhizal fungi, we're starting to get the free fixing nitrogen bacteria, the phosphorus all utilizing bacteria associated with them, and we start building the system that supports your types of plant that you're trying to grow, which is somewhere right in here.

8:59 The other thing that happens that I want to bring to your attention is the nitrogen bacteria dominated system. The dominant form of nitrogen is nitrate, and that's because you have decomposing bacteria and you also have nitrifying bacteria. So when a protozoa eats a bacteria and it excretes ammonium, that ammonium is immediately transformed into nitrate. That's why in agricultural systems you get a lot of nitrate. There's your form of nitrogen that's not really a good thing for your types of plants that you're trying to grow. Nitrogen is not very water efficient, but nitrogen has to be taken up by the plant, has to be translocated to the leaf, and then water is lost through transpiration. Then that nitrate has to be converted into an amino acid. When it does that, it also requires micronutrients.

10:02 What's happening when you saw that source sample earlier—that dysfunctional soil—see how light colored it was? Doesn't have a lot of organic matter. It's lacking a lot of those micronutrients so that the metabolic function takes that nitrate into an amino acid. That's gonna be a little bit more deep discussion than that.

10:25 So anyway, when you start adding fungi into the system, when you get that ammonium produced, you don't get the ammonium being converted into nitrate because mycorrhizal fungi, especially, they put out organic acids into the soil, and they lower the pH. That nitrifying bacteria don't function, so ammonium stays as ammonia.

10:53 Now the other thing about the predatory organisms that feed on bacteria and fungi is that when they feed on bacteria and fungi, they don't just excrete inorganic nutrients. They don't just excrete ammonium. About 50% is excreted as what we call microbial metabolites. That's actually a chelated form of nutrient, and those things can be used by plants. We're just not able to measure those things right now because they're organic. When you get a soil test back, you're testing for inorganic nutrients. This is one of the reasons that we want to use other testing methods like the Haney test as an example, just to kind of get an idea, maybe what's there.

11:41 So when you look at these ecological systems, understand what your plants need. The plants that you're trying to grow come from late successional grass row crop stage. That's right in here. That means they have to have a ratio of fungi to bacteria of one to one. So that means that they're going to have mycorrhizal fungi. They're gonna have the soluble I-Z types of bacteria associated with them. They're going to have the free fixing nitrogen bacteria. You're gonna build this up to that complex level. And this is the soil food web structure through succession. You see that there's increasing productivity from here to here. The problem that we have in these soil systems is that we always don't tend to pay attention to this plant's successional ladder. And what happens is that we're right here, most of our...

12:43 Agricultural systems, this is from Dr. David Johnson and it's off the Lane Ingham Soulfood website. We're right here in agricultural systems. So really our system is supporting weeds, very high nitrate, it's compacted. We want to be up here at a one-to-one ratio. We want to support the late successional types of plants. Row crops and things that we're growing, back cotton actually has an even higher bacteria ratio. It's up here at 2.2 to 1 to 5 to 1. Actually, it'll grow into a tree if you'll let it. I know that the fact is down the road, Randy Valley along the river, we have a cotton plant.

13:39 You need to understand that you need to have the proper fungi-bacteria ratios and understand that impacts of disturbances. When we manage these things, soil readings regeneration involves controlled disturbance, keeping it, maintaining it where we want to have it. And that's what people like Dr. T are doing with adaptive grazing management. They're able to use grazing as a form of disturbance to maintain that grassland succession state. On crop-planted things, we can use tillage slightly. We can use some of these things, but use them sparingly in order to make sure that we don't take it back to the early habitat stage.

14:26 I know there's a lot of some NRCS people here, and even for farmers, it's important to understand your plant successional stage—plants you're trying to grow—and also understand what your biological successional stage is in the soil. You have to really grasp an understanding of that because if you're in a bacterial-dominated system and you're trying to grow things like grain sorghum or corn or soybeans, I can promise you that weeds are going to out-compete that problem, just like they do when we have native range plantings. And it's hard to establish those types of plants because they don't come from that particular biological succession stage. You just have to recognize that.

15:14 So we understand that monocultures and mono-management invites invasive species, and it invites the biological imbalances that we don't want to have in that system. We want to build it. I had a training out in New Mexico this past year, and what do you see in that slide right there? Is that a healthy condition? I saw acres and acres of this from Brownfield over to New Mexico where you had cotton growing in the weeds, for healthier than the crop, in the cotton. That's what I noticed. I'm sure the farmer didn't think that way. He was probably concerned that he had all the weed pressure and everything that was there. But when you keep that field in that stage of ecological succession, that's what's going to happen. You're going to get those weeds.

16:08 And there's ways to detect some of these things. We're going to talk to you later about a Brix refractometer, how to measure some of the things in order to tell you what's going on in these particular systems. Most of the time, when we think of trying to build organic matter, we have this perception—and I know I did for many years—that we use the typical biomass model. We think that when we build organic matter, it's the amount of biomass that's produced above ground that leads to the organic matter in the soil. That's not really the case. In fact, when carbon enters the soil system, the plants double it, decomposes, and it returns to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide immediately most of the time.

17:01 We burn more organic matter out of the soil than what we returned in biomass. The doctor of Rakhal ski has a lot of information on that. I didn't put a slide in here to illustrate that of time, but just know that that happens. That's what happens with the typical biomass.

17:22 So what we want to do is we want to minimize disturbance, we want to maximize cover, when a maximized biodiversity, provide continuous living routes, and for many of you the option of livestock integration it's possible. Well I'd integration enhances the biogeochemical cycling process in that system. You can do that in integrate life thought that'll be a good thing.

17:55 So what we're going to do with our agricultural management and as far as practices are concerned, we want to choose practices that promote soil health and feed soil organisms and protect their habitat. That habitat is the soil aggregates. We have to have an aggregated soil in order to maintain things like mycorrhizal fungi, prefixing bacteria, soluble eyes and bacteria, especially prefixing bacteria. They are not likewise Obion bacteria that formed nodules on the on the root, and so what happens in that situation is there free fixing, but in order to fix nitrogen out of the atmosphere, you have to be very limited on the amount of oxygen that's there or the nitrogen ice enzyme does not work. They can't fix it.

18:39 So what they do is they grow in population and then they have this association with mycorrhizae fungi that feed them carbon. That's their food source. They're not decomposing, so what happens, they have to have this aggregated soil in order to grow in population. We limit the amount of oxygen inside the colony. When they do that, they can fix nitrogen.

19:00 We have this and a lot of our grasslands association. I ran into this along the Gulf Coast. We have a lot of the heya grass. The heya grass has an association with a little backer and the Zotoh backers where we actually got the medical sutures and stuff because they produce what are called poly. And this was a real long one and I have to have to laugh here Jimmy is I had to teach Ray Archuleta this particular word, and that was polyhydroxy out of Norway. It's just a fancy word or a carbon chain, and the ability of Zotoh backer to build carbon. They actually store carbon until they build enough of a population that they can start fixing the nitrogen to go with it. But those polyhydroxy Alcon no weights where we get the medical sutures that automatically of decompose a breakdown. That would you, it's actually an organic or type of biological polymers.

20:05 So what we want to focus on or the management dependent properties of the soil at the top of the list there you see organic matter content. So that's what we want to do. We want to build true organic matter in the soil, not active organic matter by tilling it in the soil, and then they come in very available very quickly. We want to go through the mycorrhizal fungi. We want to feed the phosphorous all utilizing bacteria. You want to feed the nitrogen free fixing nitrogen bacteria in the soil.

20:42 So we want to focus on organic matter. We get organic matter through the biology. In order to get organic matter, you have to go through the eye of the needle, which are the microorganisms. In order to get that organic matter into the soil system, more particularly, we want to sequester carbon in the way that we do that in the put opposition to the biomass model that I scribe to you is that the mycorrhizal carbon pathway.

21:14 Known as the liquid carbon pathway by Dr. Christine Jones means that carbon enters the soil through the mycorrhizal fungi and then to all the other associative types of biology in the soil. I don't remember if in Dr. Teague's slide if you had a picture of where you did proper grazing management and you saw the color of the soil get darker deeper down into the soil. That's what's happening when we do this. It happens on cropland and stuff also.

21:46 So the first thing we have to pay attention to is photosynthesis and understand that photosynthesis, when we have photosynthesis in the soil it has to do with chlorophyll. Anytime you see a green plant out there, particularly in range conditions you don't have any legumes around, where does the nitrogen come from in order for that plant to be green like that? It comes from the associative types of bacteria like nitrogen fixing bacteria. So just know that plants have this association. We've kind of eliminated that over the past so many years.

22:37 The other thing to understand as we do this, I'm going to show you a video here to prove to you that redox is exactly going to the root system. This is Ray Archuleta. Do you have volume? I can't hear very well. You'll hear his son or grandson telling him that he's making mud. I was laughing, that's the only thing I got out of this video. Sitting there listening to that, I heard his son mention that her grandson making mud in the background, that he would want to know why he was making mud, but what he's showing you there is on the left we have a corn root ball bed and on the right you have triticale, that's another plant that are living and they're putting those polysaccharides or that carbon into the soil.

23:37 You'll see it float to the top. I used to see this a lot. They used to work with irrigation systems in the winter garden area of Texas. We used to dig a lot of pipelines across pastures and stuff, and whenever you would refill those pipelines you'd see all this scum floating up to the top. I didn't know what that was at that time. I didn't realize that those are actually redoxes. They're actually feeding the biology.

24:05 And you know, whenever roots grow in the ground they'll typically start to spew out these root exudates. I wasn't able to get the actual video clip of this, but as they grow you'll see the amounts of exudates that start to come out of that particular plant. When roots grow in the ground they have to come in contact with things like calcium. If there's no calcium there, that root will not grow in that direction.

24:35 I don't have the time to go into that in detail, but just know that we're going to focus on bacteria and fungi and know that bacteria and fungi release enzymes that act if you convert organic molecules and you know from the residues into soluble types of nutrients. That's commonly what we focus on, and we focus on soil protozoa, flagellates, nematodes, mites consuming the bacteria and fungi, and then they mineralize the nutrients that we need to have. And so that right there, that is a simple process of mineralization. However, fungi are way different. Mycorrhizal fungi, you heard it mentioned yesterday, I think Nathan mentioned it and maybe Keith mentioned it. They talked about fungi decomposing the hard to

25:28 Decompose materials in the soil. Because they do this, there is a way to enhance the amount of biomass that you produce above ground so that it produces more humic substances. The way that you do that is you focus on the amount of phospholipids that are being produced by the plant. Healthy plants that are nutritionally sound produce more lipid. The reason that's important: if you have 10,000 pounds with a 2% lipid content and you have 10,000 pounds with a 6% lipid content, the 6% lipid content would give you three times the amount of total organic matter or humic in that soil because when fungi break down those materials they break them down to a 40% lipid content. When they do that, you get a cubic substance that's not going to be broken down anymore. So the more lipids you have in the soil system or in the biomass readily, then you're going to have more of this cubic substance. Now the reason that I mentioned the humic substances in these situations is because we have to understand that biology is what helps us maintain the accuracy, stability. It helps us regenerate the soil. Biologically, it's balanced, it's diverse, works with these different functional groups of bacteria and fungi. They help us build disease and pest effects. The colonizing fungi mentioned earlier, anaerobic microorganisms, the free-fixing nitrogen bacteria, particularly in Bacillus bacterium, build soil structure and cycle nutrients.

27:19 You have to have this form of biology, mycorrhizae. I can't stress how important they are in your system. They assist with plant uptake. They move nitrogen around. That's one of the other keys about these. We found this out a few years ago. They discovered that mycorrhizal fungi are actually able to pick up amino acids. Really, up until that time I was always taught that the only two forms of nitrogen in the soil were nitrate and ammonia. That's it. That's not true. Plants have the ability to source organic nitrogen by picking up amino acids because of their association with microbes, with mycorrhizae. That's very critical for you guys that are growing row crops because those crops are mycorrhizal, everything except maybe canola. But all the other crops that you have, they're mycorrhizal plants. We need to get those associations. They also help you with the pickup or extensions to absorb phosphorus in the soil. As roots grow through the ground, what they do is they deplete the amount of phosphorus around the root zone. So you get this depletion of phosphorus. Mycorrhizae are able to get beyond that depletion zone and access phosphorus and other nutrients beyond that depletion zone. That's why they're so important to plants. That's why you see them go through stress much better compared to non-mycorrhizal plants.

28:58 They have this symbiotic relationship. They also have the ability to form bridges across pore spaces. So when your soils dry up and you lose that capillary water action, they're able to bridge those and pull mobile nutrients and things like that from adjoining aggregate, take them all the way back to the plant. They also assist us with water management. Some mycorrhizal fungi form these storage containers called vesicles. Not all of them do, but a good number of the vesicles store water and nutrients. This is another reason that mycorrhizal plants go through.

33:35 Get that carbon in there in that form, you're going to sequester more carbon in the soil. That's true organic matter. We want less carbon in the air, more carbon down in the soil and understand the importance of humic substances. This came to my attention when I did my first talk in Chillicothe. I happened to have an old professor that was there that I hadn't seen in 20 years. Name is Dr. Robert Pettit. For some reason he was at that training, and one of the papers that he put out was about what humic substances were, explaining their importance to ecology, to soil health. And so I became intrigued by learning about humic substances.

34:22 Humic substances are very important because when you form these humic things like fulmic acids and fulvic acids, what I'll focus on, they have carboxyl and hydroxyl groups. That's carbon with oxygen and oxygen, and then hydrogen, and then you have a carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen. But what happens is that those carboxyl groups and hydroxyl groups can donate pairs, and they drop off when they drop off that hydrogen. You get a negative two charge that are negative there. If you just think about this a little bit, all the micronutrients and things that are in your system, they're positively charged: manganese, copper, iron, molybdenum, and even your secondary types of things like calcium and magnesium. So how do we hold those particular nutrients in the soil? We have to have organic matter. We have to have these humic substances, or you're not going to be able to retain those.

35:28 Humic substances, when you look at humic substances, they're primarily used for the metabolic processes in the plant. They're not really part of the structure there. So the metabolic processes, like the enzyme that you use to convert say nitrate into an amino acid or an amino acid into a protein, they have to, more than likely they have to have some sort of micronutrient because that's a cofactor for that enzyme's functions for those processes to happen. So this is how the soil forms all this and it holds it. It's helping you to perform those metabolic processes. You don't have any organic matter, you're going to start running into problems trying to get your plants to function and grow.

36:21 I mentioned to you earlier, remember I mentioned about microbial metabolites? This is the pool of nutrients and stuff that we don't really have a handle on, but we know now after I showed you about how mycorrhizal fungi help you pick up organic forms of nitrogen like amino acids and stuff like that, we know now that chelated forms and nutrients can be picked up by plants. We just don't know how to measure it quite yet. Haney test is the one that's coming closest to that, but with biology, chelation can happen as part of the organism's digestive process. You add microbes and plant nutrition, and it's no longer ruled by pH alone. It's chelated.

37:06 Soil is habitat for the microorganisms. This is from Dr. Rick Haney. This is what two percent organic matter has in it. You've got something like 2,000 pounds of soil, 2,000 pounds of organic matter with 4,000 pounds of organic nitrogen and 2,000 pounds of organic phosphorus. Biology is what makes that become available to you. There is no other way to get to that other than going through the biology that's in the soil system. This is just another illustration.

38:02 Dr. Haney will send this out to you all the time he'll tell you what the amount of nitrogen and phosphorous and potassium and sulfur in your soil. They're available to you but they may not be plant available to you because you don't have an apology in the soil.

38:23 When you take a nutrient pool just to understand there's a whole lot of nutrients out there that we really don't have an understanding about and what we work with in organic and conventional systems it's just a small little pool of soluble nutrients. There's so much more extractable, so much more total nitrogen in that system. We have to use biology to access it.

38:53 Fertilizer impact. I know this question came up yesterday. Whenever you use high amounts of phosphorus fertilizer, what it does to a plant is that it inhibits Striga lack home production, that's a growth hormone, root growth hormone specifically. This is from Dr. Christine Jones. You see the plan on the right, they used a hundred pounds, I think it was kilograms per hectare of DAP diammonium phosphate. Over here this was pasture problem, they didn't use any inorganic fertilizer. Look at the differences in the sole structure and the root structure. Whole lot of difference there because one plant able to associate with apology, the other plant is inhibited from associated. So once the phosphorus runs out around the root, that's it for the one that doesn't have those mycorrhizal associations and the bacterial association. And I might add that the diammonium phosphate ion, ammonium phosphate, those things also have nitrogen in it. Anytime you have high rates of nitrogen in the system, then you inhibit the pre fixing nitrogen bacteria that are in that system. Those plants will not put the root exudates out like they're supposed to. They think it's already there, so watch them the energy.

40:18 This is the plant health pyramid. I was going to discuss this because the degree of plant health and immunities based on plants ability to form structurally complete compounds. When plants grow they produce carbohydrates, then they produce protein, then they produce fats, lipids and the oil and then they prevent, they grow plants secondary metabolites. You have to get all these building blocks in place before you can make the more complex compounds. So we start with the production to complete carbohydrate. That means that you get the production of this complete carbohydrate it will go into the resistance. It's here in just a second, but the main point here is that you've got to keep your plant in a protein synthesis mode troppo beause this has its foundation the premise that insect and disease pests cannot utilize complete protein carbohydrates for food. Some of my background is I'm an entomologist giving you that statement right there is telling you that in your plant system your insects attack plant that certain stages of growth. The reason they attack those plants at certain stages of growth is because of the amount or the ability or energy level that is in that plant.

41:47 Here's why that's important. When plants produce have successful photosynthesis they put the reed exits into the soil they build the bacteria around the root you get resistance to Fusarium, Rhizoctonia, very psyllium, which were root pathogen, because you're getting the bacteria to grow next to the

42:08 Root instead of allowing the pathogenic types of fungi to attack it. Those bacteria extract nutrients, they pull the micronutrients that's in the organic matter, and then what they do, they feed that to the plant so that it can produce protein, its enzymatic, its biological function occurs. So once plants produce complete protein, then you have increased resistance to insects that have simple digestive system. What I mean by that is if you have resistance to aphids, white flies, and larval insects.

42:47 I learned about this many years ago for a national seed company. They always told us when we plant grain sorghum, and this is something for Jimmy Edmonds, they always told us that in our demonstration trials that if the farmer used atrazine, do not plant a variety of grain sorghum that does not have maize doors with a high resistance. Why is that? Well, if we did that, we'd have the lowest yielding grain sorghum in the trial. Now you should do trials all across Oklahoma and Texas to know how this works. Being a young agronomist, I didn't really care. I just wanted to make sure we had the top yielding variety. Didn't understand what the science was behind it. So that's something to understand is that you have to produce these complete proteins to get those resistances.

43:43 Then you produce batch lipids and oils. When you produce batch lipids and oils, that means that your plants are forming waxy layers on the leaf. You reach that level, you get resistance to downy mildew and powdery mildew. Then as they produce fats, lipids, and oils, then the plant is able to produce plants' secondary metabolites. You get phyto alexins, terpenes, bioflavonoids, you get things that have pesticidal properties. At that time you also get the ability to resist against cucumber beetles, Colorado potato beetles, and Japanese beetles.

44:28 The reason that you get this up here is because the beetles can actually digest protein. So the only way the plant can protect itself is it has to be able to plant secondary metabolites. This is another good book to read. I'm not going to go into detail, but 'A Pest Starved on a Healthy Plant' it's by Frances Chaboussou. So that explains some of these things that I just talked about. Know that your plant has to be in protein synthesis mode.

44:57 This is Dave Brandt in Ohio. He had an interesting trial in 2012. You see these species that are there, you see the ten-way max, eight species, next seven species max, and then his agronomist told him to use 140 units of nitrogen to produce the amount of corn that he needed to have. So he put that out there and he did a part with half that amount, and then he did it with no fertilizer. And here's the interesting thing I'm trying to tie this back to protein production in the plant. Where he had no fertilizer, he got the highest protein content. And if you notice, he also got the highest yield where he had those cover crops planted. So that's telling you that you're going to get higher protein content and yield production, all the things that we show you that we're trying to attain. And just know that the higher protein content in his case means that he gets an extra twenty-seven dollars for every hundred bushels of corn producers they can finish. So that means a new pickup for him.

46:14 Tuning into nature, insects are nature's garbage collectors. They communicate with insects in the infrared spectrum. They can see differences in temperature.

46:23 Things like this they are able to analyze. And actually, we as humans we only see in the visible light spectrum, but insects can see in the infrared. So they see slight differences in some of these and that infrared is going to tell you just how nutrient-dense a plant is. If it's not very nutrient-dense or it has a deficiency, it puts these other wavelengths out, but insects can detect them. They can tell, they know whether to be attracted to it.

47:00 What we have to do is we have to use Brix or a refractometer. Here's just an example. They've got some milkweed plants and they've got some monarch butterflies on bed number two. They have a 12 Brix reading, relatively low. On bed number one they have an 18 Brix reading, much higher Brix reading. That means that it has more nutrients in it, more dense, more sugar. So on bed number two you had a Brix of 12. The insects were going nuts over it. They were defoliating the whole plant. They're very, very active. On bed number one with the higher Brix rating, the larvae and stuff are very lethargic. They weren't moving around, they weren't really eating. The whole lot, there weren't very many butterflies on there depositing more larvae on the plant. It wasn't happening. Why? Because of the nutrient density.

47:55 And that's just a picture there of the manure that was coming out of that particular larvae. You see how it's way darker color than the plant itself? It's telling you that it is a concentration of nutrient, and in the insects' case, it's not very healthy for the insect. That's why they were on the other plant. So just understand, that's how plants repel insects. It's by paying attention to that, using the Brix for track the meters.

48:21 Some of the things that I've learned: for calcium, you have a very sharp line when you look at that light and dark. It means that you have poor calcium. If you see a fuzzy line on it, it means that you have good calcium levels.

48:36 And then the last thing I want to talk about here is a plant's sap pH meter. You can use the plant's sap pH meter when you start seeing low levels of Brix to measure the plant's pH. And what we pay attention to is the ideal pH of a plant at 6.4. If it goes below 6.4, what that's telling you is within the plant cell pH, and the plant cell is controlled by anions and cations. They're negatively charged and positively charged types of nutrients. When you go below 6.4, it's an indication that you're lacking calcium, they need him, or possibly magnesium or maybe possibly sodium. Most of the time it's calcium. When you lack calcium in the system, you don't get good cell integrity. So your probability of disease attack goes up.

49:33 If the pH goes above 6.4, then what happens in that situation is you're lacking nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. You're not producing true protein. So in that case right there, your percent of insect attack goes up.

49:51 So those are some of the tools I think. Jimmy, I've got a plant sap pH meter. I think that's one of the things we're going to start looking at. I think that'll help us understand if we're going in the right direction. And that's all we're trying to do with soil health. We're trying to build the dynamic equilibrium state, trying to build the amount of water-side organic carbon that feeds the biology. We're trying to build aggregation and infiltration, water nutrient holding capacity, and productivity. So just use a little bit of ingenuity and know that management affects soil function. That's all I have to talk about.

50:31 Be happy to talk to any of you about any of these processes and go into more and more details.