Soil Testing and Soil Health: What You Need to Know

0:00 All right, it's 5:30, so we've got quite a few people tuning in here. Thank you guys for joining us tonight. We're really excited to have Dr. Ray Ward of Ward Labs join us. It's gonna be a little bit different than in previous weeks in the sense of I'm gonna let Ray and Keith kind of have a conversation here. We do have some topics that we want to hit and we're gonna let Keith kind of guide that conversation. In the meantime, you guys are all gonna be muted, but if you do have questions, you can go ahead and type those in the chat bar. We'll probably go until about 6:15, and from there we'll open it up to those audience questions.

0:46 Ray, I'm looking here for your intro. Dr. Ray Ward is president and co-owner of Ward Laboratories. He's a certified professional agronomist, a certified soil scientist, and certified crop advisor with a PhD in soil fertility from South Dakota State University in 1972. He has a BS and MS degrees from University of Nebraska in 1959 and 1961. Before founding Ward Labs in Kearney, he served as a lab division manager of Survey Tech in Dodge City, Kansas, was an associate professor at Oklahoma State University, and assistant professor and instructor at South Dakota State University. He holds numerous memberships in scientific and honorary academic societies and organizations, and has received many awards, including the Soil Science Industry Award and Soil Science Professional Service Award from the Soil Science Society of America in 2005. One of my favorites is the 2019 No-Till Innovator Award from No-Till Farmer. His goals for agriculture and agronomy are to help production agriculture use its resources as effectively as possible, to provide information and data for developing soil health, for the best use of soil and water resources while maintaining environmental quality, to be involved in value-added agriculture, and to provide accurate laboratory data for managing production enterprises. Obviously, Ray is bringing a wealth of knowledge and expertise with us tonight. Ray, thank you so much for joining. With that, Keith, I'll pass it over to you and let you kind of guide the conversation here.

2:32 Thank you. I've been looking forward to this like I told you ever since we scheduled it. I've been thinking about some of the conversations that I wanted to have with you and just really looking forward to it. We've known each other fairly well for probably close to 20 years. I kind of got to know Ray through the No-Till on the Plains organization when we first started doing that, and then as we got more involved and as we started Green Cover Seed, we've been on I don't know how many Ray, how many times we've been speaking at the same event, which is always fun. One of my fondest memories of Ray is on the South Dakota bus tours, the No-Till on the Plains bus tours, when Ray would be on the bus and would just be talking about soils and different things and just a tremendous wealth of information when it comes to that. So Ray, I sort of want to start out with this: you know, one of the things that I admire most about you—I mean, everybody knows you're a great soil scientist and have been in that industry for a long, long time—but one of the things that really impressed me is the changes that I've seen in you over the last probably 10, 15 years of going from just kind of the traditional soil scientist with an emphasis on the chemical and the physical properties of the soil to really being a very passionate proponent of the biological component of the soil as well. So tell us a little bit about the journey that you've been on that took you to incorporating the biological components as well. Tell us a little bit about how you got to that point.

4:12 It's an interesting story, Keith. I was pretty much at one time when we started Ward Laboratories—I thought we even thought stripped till or enriched till we come back to soil—you'd have to do deep tillage. At the University of Nebraska, I'm out here and did some deep chiseling, and they were getting healed response. So it kind of makes you wonder what's going on, because we knew all this compaction was a big problem and all those things. And then the No-Till on the Plains got me involved in the tours up to South Dakota, and of course I knew Dwayne Beck and all the strange.

4:49 Things he was doing, you know, I couldn't figure out how that could happen. But over time I just saw enough talking and then the real conversion occurred in 1992 when I was visiting Martin Jorgensen at South Dakota State. It was quite an interesting revelation that when I was at South Dakota State in the sixties as a summer fellow, what really got me when I met him in '92 is that we can hardly afford to grow weed anymore and we're cropping every year. It just really struck me that I need to change the way we're doing things.

5:35 So that's kind of how that journey started in no-till. Then we'd go to the meetings in Salina and no-till is wonderful and we're doing this. Then going back home, we went to have a stacked rotation. He got that figured out and he said now you gotta have cover crops. In that time frame, meeting some folks like Jill Clapperton and some of the other people, Jill finally talked me into getting involved in testing. We started with that phospholipid fatty acid test in 2011. Then I heard that Ray Archuleta said Ray Ward needs to do this AMI testing. So then in 2013 we got started with the NEEM test. It's really changed my mind on what we're doing to the land and how we're treating the land. It's a learning almost every day, and it's just been pretty exciting.

6:40 Yeah, it's been a great journey. Tell a little bit about and I didn't get to go see this, but I know I've heard you say this numerous times. I think it was in 2006 I believe you were on the bus tour that went up to Burleigh County. That's when Jay and Gabe and those guys had planted those first multi-species cover crops and they were in that terrible severe drought. You guys got off the bus and all of those monoculture plots were all dried up and then the diverse mix was really doing well. Tell a little bit about that because I love hearing you tell about that story, partially because I didn't get to go and see that.

7:20 So I'd like hearing other people talk about it. Was that a big turning point for you as well? Yeah, it was. It was unbelievable. If I hadn't seen it, I don't know if I would believe it today because it was just so extreme. I know Gabe shows that picture once in a while, but those things were about two inches tall and dried up. Yet when they mixed 11 or 12 things together, the turnips were about an inch and a half in diameter, lupins are blooming. They said that the roots kind of interchanged and their plants were trading all these things. With my kind of knowledge, I couldn't understand how a biological system would connect cells together from one plant to another.

8:07 Well, they got me thinking. Then you guys repeated the next year the same thing down at your farm with the moisture meters. The moisture went down where you have a single crop, and with the multi-crop, the moisture stayed up higher. It just really makes you wonder what's going on. Then luckily my kids brought me a soil book for Christmas. There are little stories in it. There was a forest researcher that was tracing carbon-14 in a tree. Because they covered it up with plastic and were trying to find all the carbon-14, and you couldn't account for all of it. He finally found that a nearby tree had some carbon-14 in it. Then he explained the mycorrhizae was joining the two trees together. That's how I figured out that it's the mycorrhizae transferring this stuff, not the plant roots themselves. Yeah, that really hit you with a biological system.

9:20 So in other words, your life would have been a whole lot easier if you had never heard of Duane Bach or Jill Clapperton or Rick. Because every time you hear these folks, you know you're the kind of guy that isn't satisfied staying where you're at. You want to go to that next step and learn that next thing. And even better, provide those tests for the rest of us that we can send in. So you mentioned this briefly earlier and I want to go there and have you kind of explain a little bit to folks. I don't think we need to explain to people what a traditional soil test is, you know, testing for NPK and all of that. I think everybody is pretty well understands that. But go ahead and talk a little bit about the PLFA test, which

10:04 You mentioned that you developed in conjunction with Jill Clapperton and then also talk about the Haney soil test and tell a little bit about what those things are testing, when should they be used, how are they different, and just how do you see people best utilizing those biological tests?

10:23 I think that's the phospholipid fatty acid test. The one that we're doing is that we get the soil and it has to come in a cool package, and then we take that soil and we freeze dry it. So that, because we're the phospholipid fatty acids are in the perimeter of the microbial cells, it's been in that outside wall, and we save that fatty acid through the freeze drying, we extract that and then determine the fatty acid on the gas chromatograph. And then certain microbes have certain number of the fatty acids, and so you group two microbes together and the bacteria and fungi and protozoans. But on, unlike the first of the report, is microbial biomass, which gives you some idea of how much microbial biomass is there. And then the diversity is the next part that I look at, because the more diverse your system is, the more help you're going to get from the microbes in your cropping system.

11:34 Gram-positive, gram-negative bacteria. The gram positives are, and I'm not a microbiologist so I don't understand this stuff very well, but the gram positives are the ones that grow in when you have good conditions, and you kind of want to balance between the gram positives and gram negatives. If the ratio is between 1 and 2, then that's a good balance. If you have the higher ratio of gram positive and negatives, that means that things are really in great shape and bacteria are really growing fast. So that diversity is there a little bit.

12:14 Then you look at the fungi, and of course the fungi are the ones making the glues that glue the clay particles together to make salt aggregates to make the granular structure that we have in the soil. And so I really like to look at those. And then the gram, and we then we do a fungi to bacterial ratio, and ideally I'd like to see that about 0.3.

12:40 If you could get it that way, my example is I wanted to prove that ammonia wasn't hurt in the soil, and so I took a phospholipid fatty acid on the site where we put ammonia and on the other side we didn't put ammonia. And young because they're changing a cropping system, when I got done, that my microbial biomass is 40% less on the ammonia side than it was on a non-ammonia side. And then concerning about that, but then I looked at the fungi and bacteria ratio where we added nitrogen, where we added ammonia, the ratio was narrower than it was, or lower if they say that way. So it was almost less than it was about. It was a little less than 0.09, and whereas no ammonia is about 1.41. And then field adjacent that I had, one week they had a molar crop on, and so that fall I took a sample there and I had a diversity of 1.6, which is great diversity.

13:52 You know, walking through the lab about a year ago, I finally figured out why you have cover crops. Because microbes are really small. If I read somewhere that their life is about thirty minutes or so, but if you don't have a plant growing, then they don't have food. Waiting for somebody to feed them, and you don't get anything done. So the cover crop is a source of food for the microbes in addition to some of the nutrients I talked about. And then you know, just look at that. It just tells you what the life in the soil is like and how you might do some things to change that.

14:42 We have some people that are very strong on a phospholipid fatty acid test, and then there's some curiosity seeing what's going on. So we have all that diversity. Then the Haney test, we do that CO2 respiration, which tells you that it gives you a good idea what the microbial biomass is. Doesn't tell you the ratios or anything like that, but it gives you an idea if you've got life in the soil. And then the next thing you do is if we do a water extract from that, and in that respiration there's a 24-hour test. We dry the soil like we do a regular testing, and then we drain, grind it, and then we extract them. I should say not a strike, but way out forty grams of soil, wet it, and then seal it in and measure the carbon dioxide produced in 24 hours. And it's that the bacteria, some of them come alive when to get water, and they go around eating their buddies, and that's how they get the CO2.

15:45 So that gives us an idea that then we do the water extract which is kind of the carbon that's in the water in the nitrogen in the water. Those are the foods for the microbes because they live in those water fields around the salt particles. And if you have enough carbon, then you have food for the microbes and then you have to look at the nitrogen to see if they have enough protein, the balance of carbohydrates so to speak. So on the food we'd like to have the carbon ideally twice as high as the CO2 respiration. That's one of those little things you can look at. I got 60 CO2 and I got 120 carbon, that's great shape. Then you look at my carbon-nitrogen ratio and on the water extract, the carbon hydrogen ratio and if it's ten to one, it means I got a really good protein balance there which is ideal. And those units are used to calculate soil health and of course the higher the CO2, the higher the carbon, the higher that in and the closer you are to the 10 to 1, the better. That's all else well health score.

17:09 Do you see when people send in samples are they requesting a PLFA and Haney test or do they typically choose one or the other? We get more choosing the soil health Haney test, less regular soil fertility. And so for that comparison, the PLFA test is $80 per sample so that discourages some testing from that standpoint. And then we have a little problem in the laboratory because you can run about 40 or 50 of those things a day and we can run 150 Haneys or maybe more, then we can run a couple thousand regular soil samples. So there's some issues there on how to get all this work done. But if you're trying to understand soil health, I think both those tests are really important.

18:08 The other part of the Haney test I didn't mention is that we have an H3 extract which is three organic acids that plant roots exude or leak out to feed microbes. And so that we're mimicked in nature in extracting nitrogen or extracting nutrients. We do an ammonium nitrate for nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, sulfur, calcium, magnesium, zinc, iron, manganese, copper. So we get all that fertility with those three organic acids which then we can make fertilizer recommendations. I say fertilizer but I recommend pounds of NPK. I don't care what fertilizer you use to get those, but it's going to give you a more accurate indication of what you have there for nutrients based on biology, much more so than a traditional chemistry test.

19:08 People say that if they give a healthy soil their salt has to go up and all the microbes are working to make those nutrients all available that you've been putting on and it kind of makes sense that if you have better life in the soil you're going to have more nutrients and so you could reduce your inputs. But you still got to consider the nutrients that you're taking off and how much you're putting back on. So I would assume the vast majority of the tests that you get in are coming off crop ground. But talk a little bit about you get people sending in soil samples from grasslands or rangeland and are they looking at the Haney or a PLFA to give an indication of the soil health in range? Because a lot of times that gets ignored. But there's some acres of grass out there that shouldn't be ignored.

20:00 And it's one of those things that I think as agronomists we got to talk a little bit more about it because effort lands in grass and native grasses or grasses and we don't get very many of those samples in. We get them easily from smaller farmers that are sampling a grassland that have a comparison with a cropping land. But I see a lot of mismanaged rancher pasture and we really got to spend a little bit of time. When I'm trying to do a better job of producers what worries me, Keith, is if over time we keep mismanaging, we would destroy the root system on these native grass or perennial grasses and then we get a dry period, we're not going to have any production. Then we're going to buy a lot more hay to keep our cows alive.

20:59 Thing that happens is the productivity on that goes down and down and down and pretty soon the guy says, well I can't make any money growing grass and just will tear it out and try to grow corn. And that happens way too often. And the last thing we need is more acres growing corn right now. That's right, that's right.

21:20 So you talked a little bit about when you sent in a sample from the PFA, you need to send it in kind of a cool box of some sort. You don't want that getting too hot. Is that the same for a Haney test too, or how should people prepare for that? And I'm guessing that there's instructions on the Ward Lab website if they want to learn more about that, but just briefly tell us how we should prepare these things to send them in.

21:43 The PFA we need to have, you know, in a plastic bag. That's soil bags or plastic linen. The paper basin in or a Ziploc bag. And you need to retain the moisture. We don't want those samples to dry out. Just seal them up and then send them in the cooler. You could have a nice ice pack in there. We've gotten a couple times again with ice. Don't put ice in there because it melts. You got mud instead of a good soil sample. Or if it's cool when you sent it, you could refrigerate them in a night. You know, send them the next day. That would be good in the cooler. And if you're far away, if you want to send like today, one day or two day time on the Haney test or a regular fertility, we say just send them up and send them. Don't put them on your desk. Wait, I'll get it done tomorrow. They will change over time. But if you can, you got two or three days that you can get them shipped and there won't be any problem.

22:52 And so then we get the Haney in the same way you saw a health test. Then we dry those at 110 degrees Fahrenheit. So I would encourage shipping with the UPS or FedEx. And sometimes the post office isn't very fast. So yeah, I would not disagree with that.

23:39 So I want to move, shift topics here just a little bit from soil testing to testing of plants and specifically of cover crops. Because you know, you and I have had this conversation many times throughout the years. And I want to share some of your insights into this with our customers and our followers here. One of the most often questions that we get from people that plant diverse cover crop mix, you know, like what you see behind me here or anything, especially with the hassle of legumes in it, they always ask, well, how much nitrogen am I going to get from growing this cover crop mix? And you know, that's always really hard to answer because, well, it's not hard to answer because the answer is it's a lot of different things. So talk briefly about what some of those factors are that will influence how much nitrogen we get out of a mix like this. And then I've got some pictures that I want to show you. So you kind of give the background and then I've got some pictures to show of some clippings that we just took just last week. We sent them into your lab. You got them tested. We can look at the cover crop and then we'll look at the test results and you can explain to people how to interpret or read one of these test results from testing of cover crops.

25:02 Okay, so it's the cover crop thing to understand is nitrogen cycling and understand the most important part is having feed going to the microbes in the soil. But it's also a way to retain, to stop leaching of nutrients or nitrogen and sulfur. But what we do is what I encourage to do is take a yard square or something like that, you know. And I thought, I where the clippers down your place. And we've harvested that area and chopped them. Put those things on that time. But take a yard square, stuff all that stuff in a plastic garbage bag and you can send that to us. And we'll chop that up. You get a sample out of it and we'll weigh it. The course, chop it up, your sample, representative sample out, and then we'll analyze the plant nutrients: nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, I'll start with carbon too, and on down the line, get all the nutrients. And then if we know the area, the yard square, nine square feet, and then the computer will calculate out of the pounds and the dry matter dunce breaker, and then the pounds of nutrients per four acres. And then we can also calculate the carbon nitrogen ratio. And that tells us then how fast we're going to get the nitrogen out of that and all the other nutrients, of course. But nitrogen is an important one that we look at. But the plant has all those nutrients in it and so we can measure all those.

26:32 Keith, you got a picture? Yeah, let me share my screen here. Okay, can you see this picture of the tractor? Yes, okay. So let me give you just a little history of this. This so this field is here at our house and last year we had spring.

26:59 Triticale growing on this we harvested that the mid to the end of July last year and then we planted buckwheat as a double crop so we planted about 30 pounds of buckwheat along with about 15 pounds of hairy vetch we harvested the buckwheat middle of October for grant a grain crop the hairy vetch was down underneath that and then we interceded rye into that and this is what we ended up with here I'm going to show you this short video clip because this is just about the coolest thing that I've seen in a long time.

27:37 We put the dawn ZRX cover crop rollers and we're going to have fewer webinars just about these cover crop rollers and this whole process of planting green into this now I will tell you that this was not planted until the first week of June so this we had to let this stuff grow out quite a bit longer than we wanted simply because we had such a cold spring that it wasn't growing as fast as we wanted there's probably ten times as much biomass here at the end of May as there was the beginning of May so if you do this type of thing and you invest in hairy vetch and give up on it too quickly you're not going to get your nitrogen back out of it so what I want to do is I want to show you this video and we're we're planting popcorn into this particular field we have some sunflowers planted in the same field also we're growing all these four seed crops I want to show you the video just to show you kind of how it rolled down what it looked like then I'll show you some pictures of some close-ups show you how we sampled it and then we'll look at the actual test results back from Ward labs and rank and talk about that a little bit here so I'll just see if we can run this so this is what it looked like just rolling through the field and planting again with Don ZRX rollers.

28:57 We did not get we didn't fit we didn't feel like we got a hundred percent kill on the hairy vetch so we did end up putting a little liberty over the top of this to knock that out but we got a hundred percent kill on the rye with the crimper alone but that bets there was so much much there that we couldn't get enough down pressure even though you see all the weights that we have mounted on a planter we just couldn't get enough down pressure on these units to completely kill that batch but we're looking at ways to do that but I mean just look at the thatch that that's planting into the the popcorn was coming up in four or five days so we got a good stand we got a good placement but when it swings around to the side here first of all look at all the birds flying around and then if you look real close you can just see there's just thousands of insects coming up out of this you can kind of see it right there just just the Horde of insects because that's such a biologically active soil there's just a tremendous amount of life in that and so that was really fun to do again this is the first year that we've done it with this particular plant or setup there's definitely things that we would do differently for next time but this gives us some good encouragement that you know essentially what we're looking at the holy grail of soil health is organic no-till and so that's what we're trying to accomplish now we didn't completely do it because we did have to put a little spray over the top to finish that batch off we did have an organic guy that looked at this a week later and he said I think that match would have died on its own I don't think he would have had to spray it because he's got a lot more experience on this than what than what we do.

30:46 Let's see so here's here's what this cover crop looked like you can see the yardstick in there so this was 30 inches tall but if you would have grabbed that batch that match would have extended out probably four or five feet tall because there were so much to it here so lots of biomass there and then this this is the portion right here we took two different clippings Davis one of our employees went out and took a clipping right here where it was primarily and then he also took a clipping where of us what he gauged to be about half match in half rye and you can see right here so ray I'm glad that we did things according to your advice I don't know how well you can see it here but we actually have a 1 square yard we just made it out of PVC you can say it's a 3/4 inch PVC pipe get four 90-degree corners and just blew all that together so we have a 1 square yard PVC deal that we can just throw down so Uly Uly the one edge open so you can slide it in I'm.

31:51 I don't think he did. I think he has to kind of work it down, but that's actually a good idea. I'll have to ask. I think that there's a piece of pipe over here you just can't see it. I'll have to ask him about that though. Yeah, so anyway, he just clipped everything that was inside that 1 square yard. He filled a bag. Now rate, you wouldn't like, we were close enough that I actually just gave this to a friend from church who works for you and he took it to the lab. So I guess I gave you the whole worst, but if I was sending this in and I didn't want to send you this whole bag, how would I take part of that to send to you and then let you know how much I actually had?

32:36 That's a very good question. And you know, of course, they get a representative sample. There's an important part, but you could weigh that yourself and then put it, put your representative sample in that bag so it doesn't lose moisture. I guess my computer wants to do something. So you could weigh in and then you can just take out a small portion to send to us. Tell us what the weight was. Now the problem is that we weigh in grams, and so we usually, if you got one pound, that's 454 grams, and we usually go to point two places. But if you need something that can major in pounds, ounces, at least yeah, so that you could get it accurate enough, and then you could just send in a portion of the sample.

33:27 It was because I think Davis did weigh and it was like nine pounds or something like that. I could have said we clipped the square yard, we had nine pounds, and I'm sending you one pound of it. Or so you got nine pounds versus eight pounds, and that gives you what, about fifteen percent error just on how close you can get on the weight. So right, always trying to eliminate air so you can. So sorry by thinking about it, science part of them. So be as accurate as possible. Right, right. If you can say nine pounds two ounces would be great.

34:02 Yeah, so basically folks, this is how you do it. And if you ask me the question of how much nitrogen man am I going to get from my cover crop that I grew, I'm probably going to tell you I can give you a range or an estimate, but the only way to know for sure is to do this right here. You've got to take it when it's kind of at its peak growth. You got to take that clipping and you got to send it in and have it analyzed, and that way you know for sure.

34:29 So here are the test array, and I'm just going to kind of let you explain what the different parts of this are, what we're looking at here. And this was just a standard. I think on your website it's just called the standard cover crop test. We could have got one that had all of the other trace elements, but we just did the carbon and the nitrogen in the biomass because that's really what we were interested in. This one here, Ray, is the one that was mostly batch. So you can go ahead and talk about this one.

35:02 You see the carbon there, and then do you have the bounce? Can you, I can't see the bottom. What should your dry matter us is a four point four or four tons of dry matter? So you got 3,600 pounds of carbon in there and 227 pounds of nitrogen. 650 divided by 22 or two. Nitrogen, carbon, nitrogen. So 16 to 1? No, yeah, we're going to talk about that part too. But so the 16 one with a badge. Anytime that carbon nitrogen ratio is less than 25 to 1, microbes to start decomposing that or getting material and releasing nitrogen. If it's above 25 to 1, the microbes take nitrogen out of the soil, the nitrate on the soil to decompose the residue until it gets down to 25 to 1. So as soon as that starts to decomposing, you're going to get quite a bit of nitrogen out of that 227. How much of it you want to get out this year?

36:14 I was asked that a long time ago and I said 50%. It's still a good estimate. And if you really get good health in the soil, I think you could get post 80% of it out of there in that cropping. The popcorn is that a long season popcorn? Or if you had 115 day corn, you're probably going to get 75 to 80% of that. Yes.

36:54 So looking at this picture, you know, when I was out there looking at it, Dale and I were out there looking at it, we did not. We were severely, we were pretty close on how much biomass or was, we severely underestimated how much nitrogen we were guessing, maybe 140 to 180 in there, but that, that's 227 pounds of nitrogen, folks, right there. And again, if I would have taken this clipping May first and planted my corn May first, my guess is there may have been 40 or 50 pounds, and so if you're going to do this type of.

42:31 And that's one of the comments that you know some people say with a more healthy soil their pH comes up and number one is when we talk about leaching Keith nitrate we always worry about nitrate going down but you can't have an anion going down without carrying a cation with it and the cation it usually goes as calcium and I have a customer in Illinois that sends his tiling water in when we run a sulfur on the water we also run calcium magnesium potassium sodium so I treat my look under our data to see how much calcium it's just amazing a higher that higher the anions are in that solution the more calcium magnesium or sodium is gone we're not with it yeah that's a recycling back we're talking about okay great last question Ray you know there's getting to be more and more talk about these carbon trading programs you know the Indigo carbon program and there's going to be more and more talk more opportunities for people to get paid to sequester carbon down the road I think can you talk a little bit about how viable you think that is how fast can we increase our organic matter in our soils because you see you know thousands and thousands of soil samples what's a what's a reasonable amount of organic matter that we can expect to add to a soil if we're really doing things right you know cover crops diverse crop rotation those sorts of things how fast can we build soil organic matter and thus carbon and then potentially get paid for down the road the speed of building carbon or sequestering carbon in soil depends really on the whole management system and anybody that's mob grazing cover crops is going to raise they're getting better a lot faster than somebody that's just in cash crops and in on our farm or if we did the no-till we've raised the organic matter up about one percent in about fifteen years and then now it's kind of steady in so then we got to go to the next step which I think is putting more livestock into that into that system to build a carpet down in the soil and I was turning to member Paul Janish plots over at Rogers Memorial farm we did a carbon measurements down to six feet on his plots in order I remember was in about 25 or 28 years of no-till we had ten tons more carbon in the soil where he had no-till at that time know when you think about that you had to take I think it's I can't remember the number I'm 44 divided by 12 3.6 you take three point six times that carbon number ten tons and that's the tons of carbon dioxide used you're trapped in the soil so my quick calculations on if we could increase organic matter in one percent in the top six seven inches soil we've we've captured a ton of carbon or 3.6 tons of carbon dioxide and so I don't know how they're you know how the things are going to come out but but there should be some compensation for people who get paid now for you that's been doing this great job ready are you going to get paid can you get more there's almost the penalty for having done done the good work don't say that other people have yeah I just have to bring that up because don't worry if you if you got a good soil don't worry if you don't get paid for your carpet you're still doing you're still doing better stuff anyway you know we've talked about saving soil than in Nebraska Great Plains most places are resources soil and then they go with that so water and yeah we do all these things to save those two things yeah no absolutely well Ray thank you so much for answering these questions now let's kind of open it up and catch some questions from the audience here yeah first one actually is for Keith was that cover crop fertilized applied to the bench or was it just nitrogen from the previous cover crop yeah so good question the we probably I can't remember I'd have to ask Brian for sure we probably put maybe 30 or 40 pounds of nitrogen on that buckwheat back in August when we planted it but I mean we harvested a decent crop of buckwheat so I'm convinced that there was no carryover nitrogen between the triticale and the buckwheat would have taken up any applied nitrogen so I'm thinking that 227 pounds was primarily produced through fixation from that legume there would have been some pulled out of organic matter and just being cycled but the vast majority of that would have been fixed from that legume veg crop okay Ray the reference guide for what would be considered normal kind of ranges on the Haney tests is there a plan to make

48:14 Those ranges region specific or AG land versus grassland prairie, you know, anything about that? I don't know too much about it. My mind's essence there too but too many categories on there. We got someone there of course but we know that the regions are going to be different. And I think at this point a lot of people have to do some of their own calibration. And as we gather more information, I don't know if it's ready for announcement or not but we're going to get some help in our laboratory to do some of these things, so going pretty soon.

48:54 So will be on effort to try to make things and match different territories but that's a good question and it's one I need to know that you guys are interested in that.

49:08 Is there an ideal time of year to collect a sample to test for PLF respiration in a honey test? Of course, I'm the laboratory so the best time to take is right now. But someone told us that the best time to take his test is when you're making plans for your next crop and so that's kind of like a regular soil test. The PLFA is, we're trying to get a picture of microbial life in a soil. That means when plants are growing, so we kind of advise on the field if the best time to take a sample is a month, six weeks after emergence of the crop, the plants it's your and working with.

49:51 So there's two different times for the two tests and of course we get a lot of a new test this time of year too but if you're trying to make plans on fertility now, if you're tracking fertility those things, that's a little different but the best time to take it would be to take the same time each year, some time when you got time so you can do it about same time so you got a better tracking time. And if you take some in the spring and then you're taking the fall and you get more variability and if you're trying to track changes, taking the same time each year.

50:29 Okay, with soil health principle would you prioritize if you were a rancher or dryland farmer averaging 10 to 14 annual precip? Many thanks and maybe Keith you have an opinion on that as well. What the grass needs is rest. And if you see you have to get the animals off of the grass for a period of time and then when you have 10 inches of rain it might be you graze that kind of madres it heavily for just a short time and then they're off for another year.

51:08 I am more rainfall than they can maybe be like my farm is in Southeast Nebraska. We're hoping we got 16 pastures now in our native grass and so hopefully I have two months of rest so that the grass can regrow and re-establish a root system. And you got to leave about half of it out there in that grass, or if you graze down more than that then you start destroying the root system and then it takes time for that root system grow back. And as the root system has to grow back about 30% every year and so that's why it needs that rest anyway. And when plants regrow if you cut them off, you know grace of Monterey it then the plants regrow from the banks carbohydrates stored in that root system. So if you keep the grass growing and you only take half of it then it's growing from the materials left on top.

52:07 Yeah, no I totally agree and I think what Ray just talked about there, you know, covers a couple of the soil health principles. Number one, keep us keep the soil covered and if you graze your pastures off too much it's not going to be covered enough and so it's really important that you keep that ground cover on there, number one to be able to take advantage of the rain when it comes because it doesn't matter if you get ten to fourteen inches of rain or thirty to forty inches of rain, it only matters what you get in the ground. And when I was in California I heard one guy he mentioned when somebody asks him how much rain he got, he says the answer I like to give is all of it because it really only matters what you can get in the ground. And if you don't have the ground covered and if you don't have that living root out there it's going to be really hard to do. So Braes exactly right, it's all about managing that grazing and giving that rest time.

53:10 Yeah, what are the organic acids measured from root exudates? Right, yeah, the three we use an Amy extract, HD extract, our Moloch oxalic and citric acids. And I haven't studied the exudates that Ritz all kinds of organic acids in carbohydrates if they leak out so I don't have many of those names but there's they've told me about 90 or more.

53:45 Different compounds or leaked out by the roots. Plants leak out compounds to feed certain microbes to bring certain nutrients to the plant. I think that the different plants have different requirements so they leak out different compounds to increase a certain group of microbes to get all those nutrients and bring them to the plants. That's a very interesting thing. I don't understand that very well but I'm looking into it.

54:15 What would you consider the value of compost slurry or compost worm cast extract straight after aeration for humans building extract? I don't know. I refer everybody to Dr. David Johnson in Mexico to know what the best way to do it is. But I just had a curious thing with a farmer customer from Montana. He wanted a fertilizer test on a water sample he sent in and I said well there's no fertilizer value to this. And he said yes there is and I said what is it. He said what's compost tea and he said that has to have fertilizer value in it because when I sprayed it on my plants they grow like mad. Well it made me understand that the compost tea and what David Johnson talks about is evident. Compost it long enough then we get the growth of the plant growth hormones produced. It increases the plants to grow. So the tea is in and that's kind of what you'd have to test: how good is your plants grow after you when you put this on. Because the longer you compost it, it seems like the better that gets. Or if you get the fungi out, the better that is. And that's about all I know about it. But I think there's a lot of people interested in it and we're doing some things with phospholipid fatty acid tests in their lab. It's just amazing. Right now I don't have any more to say about it than that but we're finding out things about how it reacts with our soils.

56:04 You know, I might jump in on that just a little bit. You know what Ray was talking about and I see that Christine Jones is actually listening in here from Australia so we may have to twist Christine's arm and try to get her on a webinar down the road here. But she talks extensively about the autoinducers that are being produced by those microbes and those are hormones or signalers that are causing the plants to grow. So inside it's not a biological effect so much as a chemical effect but it's chemicals that are being produced by the biology. It's just a fascinating topic. And if you have our soil health resource guide, Christine Jones has a great article talking about the autoinducers and the effect that they have on plants. And that's probably what you're seeing when you put a compost extract that has almost no fertility in it but you see a fertility type effect. It's not coming from the fertility you're putting on, it's coming from the stimulus that you're giving the plant. So we'll have to reach out to Dr. Jones and see if we can get her on right down the road.

57:22 Where do you see the direction of soil and water testing heading in terms of specific testing criteria and methods? And kind of to piggyback on that, do you think that Ag retail will change how fertilizer is produced so that the salinity and other components are more friendly to the environment and long-term sustainability of agriculture?

57:42 Yeah, that's a pretty tough question to answer because I got lots of biases. But what I think Ag industries does sometimes to us is that the industry is very interested in the biologicals and you see lots of different compounds being promoted and produced. So I think the Ag industry does see some of that. And then at the same time I hear stories of farmers that call and they can't make any money and they're putting all this stuff on and their soil tests are high and they're insisting on still doing things. So we really, it's a long deal of education. And I want the farmers to understand what's going on and I'd like to have the Ag industry be honest enough to work with the farmers on the Haney test. I think is going to continue to be very important. We're doing some other tests and I keep wondering what else can we do. We're doing the aggregate stability. We're doing a test with permanganate carbon test that I'm not sure how to interpret yet. We do some enzymes and then the carbon, the total carbon, total organic.

59:11 Carbon total nitrogen those that we do in the soil there's more interest on that all the time and another test that we're trying to get developed as a summary because we talk a lot about the humans and so we're just going to kind of keep working on some of these things and I got to get people in who can understand things better than I do and so I can set back and take a little time though they'll work with you guys. Keith, it's in the unit dry some of the people in the lab, but because you guys call and say well can you do this and well yeah the computer program doesn't work and if the people in the login room don't understand then that takes a lot of coordination to get some of these things done but it's fun answering new questions and trying to get some answers on some new things that are coming along.

1:00:21 You mentioned the Haney test there. Brian says I want to associate soil health with forage quality. I expect forage quality to get better as the soil health improves. Is the Haney test or the PFA test better for this or is the conventional test going to be just fine for that purpose? I think the Haney test because the biological system is what's going to make that forage better quality and then of course you got to manage the forage to get the good quality too, but the Haney test probably would be the best way. When you can see visually that you're doing a better job you might just go to conventional testing but let's see that CO2 respiration and to see the water extractable carbon nitrogen which is the food for the microbes. I think is very helpful in understanding how healthy your soil is. The other thing that shows you the microbes there but it really doesn't help you with input cost and those kinds of things.

1:01:30 I know we're running just a little light here so I'll probably take this as kind of the last question. Andy says what happens when you don't let the compost go long enough? Do you still get the same organic acids? Keith do you know or Rainy have any experience with that? My logic says from what Dr. Johnson has told us that the longer you keep it seems like the better the stuff is but there could be several concerns. One would be if your composting materials that would have some sort of pathogens or toxicity in it. If you don't go through the full composting process you may not break those down particularly weed seeds. I mean we compost our seed cleanings and screenings and so we need to make sure that's getting heated up enough to at least kill that weed seed and even when we compost manure you know we want to make sure all those weed seeds are composted so that would be one thing but again if you're looking at trying to grow both biology and the autoinducers it's similar to if you put a cake in the oven and it only cooked it for 10 minutes instead of 20 minutes it's going to come out and it's not going to be done. It's going to be a little raw so I would think with compost you're not going to get the full benefit. Now if you spread that you're still going to get the carbon that's in there and that carbon boost is one important part of using compost or manure but the biology just isn't going to be fully functional and you're not going to get the benefit that you would have if you let it go the full term.

1:03:14 You mentioned something that made me realize that a lot of people will turn feedlot manure three times and call it compost and it's still manure and when we're talking about compost or compost tea it's kind of like what the Johnson Sioux compost thing is. It's aerobic in those little cases and not a big one rural stuff that you have to turn every day for weeks. So we really have to be careful what we're talking about. That would actually be a great topic for a future webinar is the Johnson Sioux method of composting because it is really quite unique.

1:03:57 Well with that I think we're going to close here. Ray, thank you so much for your time and answering these questions. It's always great to have an expert with us that knows what they're doing especially one that's as knowledgeable. With that we're going to conclude. Next week we've got Brett Pasok who is going to be on. We're going to be talking about overseeding some bermudagrass so if you've got thin stands of that or even maybe more aggressive stands how to diversify those pastures. So with that we'll conclude. Keith, thank you Ray and you guys have a great rest of your evening. Thank you guys for joining us.