The 5 Principles of Soil Health: Why Tillage Damages Your Soil

0:04 There we go, we are now live. Opening up the floodgates, hello everyone and welcome. We're just letting people start funneling in here. I enjoy seeing a bunch of names that have been here for gosh almost every single webinar. Shout out to Fernando, he has been on almost all of these. Lots of good people that are on here this evening, so thank you guys so much for joining us.

0:38 I'm going to start this live on Facebook and we can get started. It's kind of a bittersweet webinar this evening. This is the last webinar of season two, and if you have not been a part of each and every one of these webinars, we do have all of the recordings available on YouTube and on our website as well. So if you've missed any in the past, feel free to go check out our website or go check out YouTube in order to watch those. Just search for Green Cover Seed Webinars and you can get all the recordings there.

1:15 But tonight, to wrap things up, we figured we'd put a nice little bow around season two and kind of wrap things up with our very own Dale Strickler. Dale is an agronomist. He's been with us for how many years have you been with the company now, Dale? A little over four years now. Four years, man. Time flies when you're having fun and learning. This is going to be, I believe, mostly a new talk from Dale, but a little bit inspired by something I had heard internally that we were talking about, and I really appreciated the valuable information that Dale gave. It helped me as a sales rep understanding cover crops and kind of the whole system, and we thought it would be a great way to close out this season by sharing that information with you guys.

2:00 So with that, Dale, do you want to start sharing your screen and present on restoring the skin of the earth? And I will mention here before he gets going, Keith is with us. So if you do have any questions at all for Dale or Keith, you can type those out into the chat bar and Keith should be able to answer those as Dale is presenting. Otherwise, we will go until about 6:15 and open it up to your questions and get to those right around 6:15. So with that, Dale, we're going to let you at it. Have fun and we're excited to learn.

2:36 Well, restoring the skin of the earth, and of course the skin of the earth refers to soil. I just absolutely love this first photograph that I have in here for a title slide. So what better title slide? This is a photo that one of our customers submitted, and you can see that there is a good inch where this is down in Texas where this red dirt has been turned into rich black soil. I mean, there's probably a good inch of thick black soil that's been formed on top of this profile. And this is after about five years of using the processes I'm going to describe in this presentation.

3:31 I was taught in college that it takes a thousand years to form an inch of topsoil. Maybe that's true from bare rock, but we have dozens if not hundreds of farmers and ranchers who can testify that you can build soil much, much faster than that. And this is testimony to that process. And this is not from having anything hauled in and dumped on top of the ground. This is soil generated in place.

4:05 So I think we probably ought to start out with, I mean, what are we defining here? What is soil? What about soil makes it better soil? Isn't all soil created the same? And obviously no, it's not. What would an ideal soil do? The ideal soil will be able to supply what plants need. So what do plants need? And essentially they need water and they need mineral nutrients: nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, sulfur, manganese, magnesium, calcium, etc. And something that I'll focus quite a bit on that we almost always ignore is oxygen.

4:50 Roots need at least 10 percent oxygen in order to function. And we focus so much on water and mineral fertility, and we so often ignore the role of oxygen. If plant roots have access to enough oxygen, they can root deep enough that water and mineral fertility become less and less of an issue over time. And so we'll focus a lot on that. And the other trick is that these all have to be supplied to the same root at the same time. That's the trick. That is the challenge. If you can solve all these challenges, these are basically the soil challenge: water, minerals, oxygen to the same root at the same time. Why is that so difficult? Well, if you

5:49 Look at what makes a soil. You've got pore space and the soil should be about 50 percent pore space ideally, and half that pore space filled with air and half that pore space filled with water. You should have at least four percent organic matter, somewhere between four and ten percent organic matter is usually considered ideal.

6:19 Most of our cropland soils are in the one to three percent range. Very few are in the four percent range. Once you get over four percent organic matter, the soil begins to behave differently. It changes, it becomes softer and easier to work, it becomes very forgiving. So we should always have a goal to get that organic matter up. I prefer five percent or better, and it's very difficult to get there. Once you do, then your soil just becomes a dream to work with.

7:01 Our mineral component is the sand, the silt and the clay. Now the problem with supplying water and oxygen and minerals to the same root at the same time is the pore space. First of all, most of our cropland soils do not have 50 percent pore space. They have less than that because we have a history of tillage that compacts the soil. We have soil compaction problems.

7:40 I had one soil professor who said if you want to know if your field has a compaction issue, has it been tilled in the past? If you say yes, then it has a compaction issue. That's almost guaranteed. So fixing that lack of pore space is really paramount, and a lot of the struggles that we have in supplying either air or water to those roots has to do with the percentages of sand, silt and clay.

8:13 If you look at this sandy soil, what is it going to have difficulty supplying to a plant root? Obviously with these coarse pores, you can visibly see the pores. Water is going to enter the soil very easily but it's also going to drain. Sand, the large round particles, do a very poor job of holding water and of holding mineral nutrients. So I have a soil that can provide oxygen very easily to the roots but a very poor job of holding water and minerals and providing those to the roots.

8:56 To contrast that, if you look at clay, what is this clay going to have a hard time doing? Obviously rainfall is going to have a hard time penetrating this. There's just no big pore spaces for it to enter, and also there's no area in here for oxygen to diffuse from above from the soil surface. So this is going to have very poor root penetration because there's just no oxygen diffusion into the soil. Rainfall and oxygen are going to have a very hard time penetrating this heavy clay soil.

9:36 Ideally a soil would be able to supply all three: water, minerals and oxygen. But if they either have too much clay, they have a problem getting oxygen and also too little rainfall infiltrations. They're not efficient in capturing rainfall. Too much sand, you have too little ability to hold water and nutrients.

10:07 Ideally, this is what we would like our soil to look like. We have these little balls called aggregates that are composed of sand, silt and clay, and they're formed in little round bowls but they are porous. There are little spaces within each of these aggregates to hold water, to hold nutrients, but air and water can freely pass through all the spaces in between these particles.

10:37 So this is what our soil should look like in cross section. We should have these very large macropores, and basically if you do the math here, these are going to be about three hundredths of an inch bigger than that. You need big holes in order for air and water to move easily into the soil. You also need these small pores because these small pores are where water is held in the soil. Air is held in the macropores, and these are like the highways where air and water get in, and also where water stays. But the micropores and the mesopores are where water is held.

11:46 These small pores hold water and the surfaces of the soil particles are where the nutrients are held. They're held to the surfaces of either the round particles, which would be sand and silt, but almost all of your nutrient holding capacity in a soil is held on the surfaces of clay.

12:10 Very flat layers like pages of a book or held by organic matter the humic substances, the decayed organic matter. So if you look at the inside of one of these aggregates, it looks like this: you've got these little fungal strands. And this aggregation process is created primarily by soil fungi. Soil fungi are so important and most of our crop plants lack adequate fungal populations. We have a lot of bacteria but we typically are very very lacking in fungi. So getting those fungal populations back up there, both mycorrhizal fungi and saprophytic fungi, is very very important. We'll talk about how to do that.

13:04 Now we talk about lack of pore space and people well, we'll look at their soil: my soil is loose. But if they're only looking at this surface layer, oftentimes this surface layer is loose because of tillage. But tillage loosens the soil above the bottom of the tillage implement, but it compacts the layer below. And where this yellow air is located is what we call a plow pan in the soil.

13:38 I have one of our customers. He, I was out at his field, he said, tell me why I'm not getting the yields that I should be off this field. I said, well, let's get a shovel and look. And we went down and here we found it: this flat layer within the soil. Look at all these horizontal cracks in that soil. Every you could pull up and these things look like cookies, look like chocolate chip cookies. They were so flat. That's from an ancient history, it's probably nothing that the current farmer did. This has been there for decades. You've got this layer that was created first by a moldboard plow and then probably later by a disk arrow where the weight of that implement—in order to lift up something, has to be pressing down on the layer below it. And this was the layer below the tillage implement. And if it's shallow, it can be broken up by freezing and thawing. If it's too deep, it doesn't get broken up by freezing and thawing. So simply moving to a bigger tillage implement does not fix this problem. It just moves it deeper in the soil where it's harder to remedy by natural processes.

14:56 So getting rid of this plow pan, because it is a barrier to roots—why is it a barrier to roots? It's not because it's hard. It's a barrier to roots because roots have to have oxygen and oxygen cannot penetrate through this because there are no pore spaces. It's got flat layers that have no open voids in them for air to move through. Air can't move through it, roots can't either. It's not because it's hard, it's lacking oxygen. That's just critically important.

15:34 So how do we get macropores into these root limiting layers? What creates macropores? Well, there are three main things that create macropores and this is one: look at that perfect round hole. Well, you think, man, that looks like someone did that mechanically. No, this was done biologically by one of these things: a dung beetle, a tunneling animal. And so there are animals that can perform this work. And there are other animals that perform this work. Earthworms can perform this work, a number of other ones. In tropical areas, termites can do this work. Any sort of burrowing animal can do this. And also, perhaps more importantly and easier to manage, plants can do this work.

16:29 One of my favorite sets of photos here: to the left here I have a picture of a canola root taken on the third of May. And then this field was chemically terminated, planted no-till to a soybean crop. And the picture here on the right is a soybean root taken from the exact same spot. This was taken with they put a plexiglass tube in the ground and use an underground camera to take pictures of the roots. What do you notice about the soybean root? It used that canola root channel as a pilot hole so it could go deeper and then expand beyond that.

17:23 So why is it important to have this canola root here? If you understand how oxygen cycles within the soil, in the summertime, most of the oxygen is used by microbes. When soil is warm, microbes are going to use somewhere 90 plus percent of the total oxygen use will be from the microbes. When the soil temperature cools below 55 degrees in the fall, however, microbes basically go into suspended animation. Plants, however, can grow down. Cool season plants can have root growth that continues down.

18:08 Until the soil freezes at 32 Fahrenheit. So by having a cool season deep taprooted plant within your crop rotation, you can poke holes through that hard pan and it's so critical to have that cool season crop within the rotation.

18:29 That's why I catch a lot of flack because I really bash on the corn soybean rotation. Like several people I respect say it's not a rotation. It's an oscillation. Rotation means you go around. Oscillation means going back and forth, and corn soybean rotation is not a rotation, it's an oscillation. You've got two summer crops in there with no winter crop.

18:56 And without that winter crop you're starving that soil from root exudates, which we'll talk about later, and you have no opportunity to poke holes through that hard pan. And that hard pan will get harder and harder and your yields will go down and down. And then you'll take desperate measures to restore those yields and talk a little bit about that. What those desperate measures are, why they work, and why they're not actually helping you in the long term.

19:25 So once you get a hole poked in that hard pan like this guy has done here, I'd like to thank Andrew Ruschel for submitting this photo to us. It's a great photo. Nice deep tap root. This is from a nitro radish that winter killed and he also had annual rye grass in the mix. And you can see how the annual rye grass roots are holding that open. If you don't have something to keep that hole held open it'll just collapse and fill in and the effects are just temporary. You need to have the next wave to exploit that.

20:04 You know, on D-Day in the beaches of Normandy they had the artillery barrage and then they sent in the ground troops. The artillery barrage by itself wasn't going to do anything. You have to have the next wave of roots just like you had to have the ground troops in there to exploit that hole in the defense there.

20:26 So we can poke holes through that hard pan but ultimately we have to eliminate the hard pan. How do you eliminate the hard pan? You have to change those flat layers into round aggregates. How do you do that? Basically what we need our soil fungi. This is a micro. These little threads. This structure here. This big V-shaped structure here are two root hairs coming out and all these little threads coming out of it are mycorrhizal fungi. Mycorrhizal fungi exude off their hyphae. All these little threads are called hyphae. They exude a compound called glomalin and that is the most powerful soil aggregation agent that we know of.

21:19 And those mycorrhizal fungi are fed by root exudates. We preach and preach about keeping a live root in the soil at all times and this is why. We preach that it's because all the organisms responsible for that aggregation need to have root exudates in order to live. You don't get good aggregation. It's the lack of having live roots in the soil that causes it to be hard. And people say well I've been no-till in 20 years, my soil keeps getting harder and harder.

22:00 That's because you're not providing a live root in the soil at all times. And particularly if you are in a no-till corn and soybean rotation, yes, your soil will become harder and harder over time because you're not following the principles we're going to talk about here.

22:21 So how do we get more fungi, more soil organisms? Well, first of all you provide a better habitat and you provide more food. And does this work? Yes it does. These three soybean plants to the left of that yellow line were from conventional tilled field. And the ones to the right, these two plants here in the photo to the right of that yellow line are just adjacent to the previous field. Plans similar times, similar varieties. Only in long-term no-till and cover crop. Yes, you can do that. So how do you do that?

23:03 And again, this, for those you that are old enough to remember what a broken record sounds like, all of us, everybody that talks about soil health talks about the soil health principles. But you can't emphasize them enough. And I want to try and rather than just repeat what we've all heard, I'm going to try to give my own little twist on these principles. And the first principle is to stop tillage. I'll show you why. Look at this. Look at this field. This field received 1.1 inches of rain 10 days prior to this photo being taken. There is standing water here. Where did the standing water come from? It ran off from over here. This field has been tilled and drilled.

23:54 To wheat and the wheat is not sprouted, this is dry dust. It was powder, you could pick it up and just pour it out of your hands, just like baby powder like flour. And there's a dust storm in the background. In fact, the highway, I'm surprised the highway was actually open.

24:17 Standing water, it's too wet to even drive in over here, and too dry to plant seed over here just a few feet apart. Does this not indicate a problem to you? Number one, there's no water infiltration because soil structure has been destroyed. It's been powderized. There are no aggregates. The aggregates have been broken apart. There is no pore space in this soil.

24:46 Now there's some pore spaces where they just tilled, but as soon as the raindrop hits it, it's going to break apart, seal over, and the water runoff. And this is in about a 15 inch rainfall area. They need every drop they can get, and the water slides right off. And it's not—you notice even where it's standing, there it's not soaking in. It's had 10 days to go down and it hasn't. It's evaporating instead. You cannot afford this in a 15-inch rainfall amount.

25:23 And where that dust storm was blown, as I was driving past there a guy was pulling in with a deep ripper. Got to stop that soil from blowing. Well, that's just like using amputation to stop the bleeding. People use tillage to keep as a cure for what tillage costs. You have to stop tillage. That's really paramount. You can improve your soil with tillage, but it takes massive effort, mainly because of what tillage does to soil organic matter.

26:01 Now this is just moldboard plow, disk, arrow, chisel plow, and no-till. And this is the amount of organic matter lost, pounds per acre over the season. This is pretty hard to replace. This red line is the amount that was produced by that crop. So the more tillage you do, the less organic matter you're going to have, everything else equal.

26:38 Now people will tell me, well, when I till, I get better yields. So I'm going back to tillage because I made a tillage pass and that part of the field yielded more. That does occasionally happen because if you have, particularly if you've been no-till long enough without cover crops, and your soil has become harder and harder, and you get less and less pore space in there, tillage can create pore spaces. You get a layer of loose soil, and so you'll get better early development and you might get a yield increase.

27:15 Another thing that happens is that you will have a mineralization of organic matter. Like that moldboard plow, we had about four thousand pounds, pretty close to four thousand pounds of soil organic matter lost from that plow trip. Organic matter is 5% nitrogen. That's 200 pounds of nitrogen. Well, you get a yield response if you put 200 pounds of nitrogen on your field absolutely, you will.

27:54 But think about it, so people say, well, that's that's free fertilizer. I don't need to fertilize. Well, no, that's just basically converting your savings into cash. Tillage doesn't create fertility any more than an ATM card creates wealth. If you use your debit card, does it create, does it make you richer? No, it gives you more to spend, but that spending came from a loss in your savings. You are not gaining by tillage. So it is a short-term gain for long-term pain.

28:29 And you can see like here's another study. In 24 hours, 1333 pounds of organic matter gone. And I convert this CO2 back into the organic matter to make it over half a ton of organic matter, poof, gone per acre. You can't, you can't sustain that, folks. You really got to cut the tillage up in as much as possible. Now if you're growing potatoes or sugar beets, you know tillage is going to be unavoidable. If you're growing a row crop, but we really need to get rid of it in every other situation we can.

29:12 The other thing is to keep the soil covered. You look at what keeping the soil covered does—it stops runoff and gets water in the soil where it belongs. Now if you stop runoff, not only do you have more soil moisture later, you have less flooding and less ponding within your field and downstream. You look at this, you look at the amount of soil cover. And this is metric tons per hectare, which basically, this is half a ton per acre, this is one ton per acre, this is two tons per acre. So once you get over about half a ton per acre of residue, your water runoff on this slope—and this particular study basically was eliminated and entered your soil.

30:10 And as you, this from Herb Alberto Blanco, University of Nebraska Lincoln, from very good book that he has written on soil management, you can see that as you increase the

30:25 The crop residue per acre. This is basically pretty close to a thousand pounds per acre, so this over here at the far right would be about five tons of crop residue per acre. The more residue you have, the more moisture you have.

30:43 Pretty simple, and it's not just about moisture, it's also about temperature. And this is some pictures that Brett Peschick, one of our salesmen, provided. Look at this: almost 98 degree air temperature with this thermometer, and he stuck that thermometer into the soil. That's bare 117. Do you know anything that thrives at 117 fahrenheit? There isn't much that's hot. And that's, I'd have to do a little quick conversion of what that is, and is that about 45 centigrade? It's hot. Let's put it that way. Too hot for comfort and too hot for microbes. This will essentially virtually sterilize.

31:33 So what we need to protect our soil microbes from the intense heat that you can get from having bare soil is put a blanket on. Now this is a fire blanket that went through this. You can see the forest fire destruction in the background. These are some fire blankets that save the lives of firemen that got trapped. Forest fire firefighters got trapped by this fire. These two blankets saved their life. So that's what you're trying to do with your soil: save those microbes' lives.

32:13 This is the same day Brett took this. The same day that bare soil was 117, this covered soil was 80.6. What a difference. Microbes can function at 80 fahrenheit. They can't at 117.

32:32 Now if you are in Louisiana or Florida and you're down in the swamps and you see a big old pile like this and you decide to go over and investigate, you dig around a little bit, you're going to see these inside. And if you dig a little bit, mama might come and investigate you. Why do alligators lay their eggs in piles of debris? It's because decaying debris generates heat.

33:10 And one of the big objections to having that residue on the soil surface is, say, 'Oh, that's going to keep my soil cold and I won't be able to plant in the spring.' Is that really the way it works? Does an alligator put its eggs in that pile of debris to keep those eggs cold? No. It's to keep the eggs warm. That decaying debris generates heat, which will hatch those eggs.

33:42 And I can show you some proof of this from my own farm. This was taken on the opening day of deer season a few years ago. We had a light snow the night before, and I'm driving by my field and I see these things. I thought, 'I've got tire tracks out in that snow. Someone is out on my property poaching deer.' And I drive in there and I say, 'Okay, these tracks stopped, but there's no vehicle.' Turns out it wasn't tire tracks at all. And I looked down and I put my hand in there and sure enough it was warm. And it wasn't tire tracks. It was where I had spread—I had a customer that cleans wheat seed and he gave me wagon loads of chaff to get rid of for him, and I spread them out here on my pasture. This is where those windrows of chaff were. Biological activity decaying that chaff generates enough heat to melt that snow.

34:51 So having that thick residue can protect your soil from excess heat in the summer. Can also generate heat in the winter time. It's the best of both worlds. Keep your soil covered and then keep a living root at all time.

35:07 And I'm going to tell you something that is extremely important: fallow does not rest our soil. People seem to have the idea that we need to rest our soil. Nope, we don't. Fallow doesn't rest our soil. It starves it. You are depriving that soil of what gives the soil life. People say, 'Well, we're going to fallow the soil to store moisture,' and I have an entire hour-long presentation, and it could be two hours long or even three, on how to farm, and my opinion on how to farm in arid areas where people think fallow is necessary in order to raise a crop.

35:48 I think we've gone at it, and actually we did a webinar on that not long ago on farming in that. It's on the National Kansas Grazing Lands Coalition website if you care to look that up on dryland farming in areas where we typically fallow. Fallow is a horribly destructive practice to soil. It's just like fallow is to our soil what fasting is to our body. A very short period can be somewhat beneficial. Once you get over a couple weeks, it's very detrimental. You starve, you die.

36:32 And so how do you eliminate fallow periods in your soil? And most crop rotations have fallow periods built in. Think about now, of course, if you're out west, you know fallow usually refers to a 10 month period with nothing growing.

36:50 Supposedly to store moisture. But even in the corn belt you drive over the corn belt right now, what color is all the soil? The fields, they're either yellow or brown, they're not green. You know, we'll grow corn or soybeans five months out of 12, and then for seven months the most productive soils in the world are doing nothing. They're receiving sunlight, they're receiving moisture, they've got favorable temperatures for about half that time, and they're growing nothing. It's a colossal waste of sunlight. Most productive soils in the world doing nothing just drives me nuts to see it.

37:32 I think we'll look back in history and just wonder what were we thinking? How do we make use of that sunlight during those fallow periods? In areas where we don't really call it fallow, one way is to drill something in after harvest like here's some rye and some peas, and we've got a complex cover crop here: rye and winter peas and some brassicas drilled in immediately after corn harvest to use that time period.

38:05 Here's something else that you may not think of. Look at this, this is a fantastic wheat crop photo on June 21st. What's wrong with this picture? I mean, this is a picture that would go on one of those calendars you get at the bank. Bank gives calendars out to farmers, you know, so thank you for the 100,000 interest you paid this year, here's a calendar. What's wrong with this picture? How much photosynthesis? What, first of all, what's unique about June 21st? Now December 21st was last night, and not only did we have some planets line up, which is unusual, but December 21st is the shortest day of the year. In the northern hemisphere, June 21st is the longest day of the year. This is the longest sunlight. We get more sunlight in the northern hemisphere on June 21st than any other day of the year. How much photosynthesis going on in that wheat field? Zero. We're wasting the longest day of the year.

39:19 Is there a better way of doing this? Absolutely. This is just one example. If you watch our webinars, we've done webinars with people who are doing relay cropping and things like that to capture more of the sunlight that falls on their field. And this is one example, this is just red clover that's been seeded into a wheat crop so that as the wheat matures, drops its leaves, the leaves and nests dry up, the canopy opens up, a little sunlight in there's another crop underneath to use that sunlight, not let it go to waste. And as soon as that wheat is harvested, there's a growing cover crop fixing nitrogen, making livestock grazing or hay or something. Grazing and some pasture potential and feeding root exudates to their soil organisms, keep them alive.

40:19 Another colossal waste of sunlight in my opinion is the entire month of September in the corn belt. This is a good looking crop of corn, but how much photosynthesis is going on here? None. From black layer to the day of harvest, every acre of corn without some sort of cover crop seeded in it is a colossal waste of sunlight. How much better situation is this? This guy not only raises corn, he raises cattle. How much more beneficial to his cattle is this stock pasture going to be? How much more benefit to his soil is it going to be by having those root exudates going on there? This is tremendously superior to that corn without the cover crop in it. Use the gifts that God gives you: sunlight and rainfall. Pretty much everything else, sunlight, rainfall and oxygen, everything else you gotta buy, including the land to capture that sunlight and rainfall.

41:32 Another way of utilizing it, this is annual rye grass and some crimson clover that were seeded at about V4, V5 stage of the corn. And look at that. I mean, this corn is still green and you can tell this rye grass is a bit starved for light, which is not a bad thing, as that's indicating that the corn is getting most of it. But you want enough sunlight getting through to keep that stuff alive. And because as soon as that corn canopy starts to senesce, fall apart, you've got the reserves, you've got the second stringers going in there and capturing that sunlight. In fact, capturing that sunlight that's wasted in the corn field has become so important that a lot of people are experimenting with this corn. I guess you'd call this skip corn, corn in 60-inch rows instead of 30-inch rows. They double up the population, slow the planter down so that it's more accurate, the sprockets are not running nearly as fast.

48:38 After the corn is harvested, I just think we have spent too much of the last 7,000 years trying to have, trying to figure out how we can grow only one thing, spending tremendous amounts of money to kill everything in a field that's not corn, in the corn field trying to kill everything that's not wheat in the wheat field.

49:04 How much more economical would it be to have a system like this where we have plants intentionally in place that are not corn, designed for the sole purpose or the primary purpose of helping the corn plant? So what a neat system. The pasture value they can have, the nitrogen fixation value provides fertilizer and provides the weed control, and then after harvest it provides pasture, hay, and then another principle is diversity.

49:38 Look at all the diversity in this picture. We've got flowering mustards, we've got veggies, we've got peas. How gorgeous. And the idea behind diversity—there's several benefits of diversity. One is that you can get more yield out of a diverse mix than you can out of a single species typically. And at the very least you will get more yield than you will of the weighted averages of all the species in the mix.

50:10 You look at this diagram. You see how sunlight is captured through a depth of leaves. You'll have big tall plants, intermediate plants, and then you'll have plants whose leaves hug the ground and catch the last little bits of sunlight. You use a higher percentage of the sunlight with a complex canopy rather than a simple canopy.

50:35 Same way below ground. Look at these four groups—they don't even start to branch until you get below the fibrous roots of these grasses. They don't compete with the grass for water and mineral nutrients at all. Their roots are extracting from different place in the profile.

50:53 In fact, at night the water that has come up in this plant during the day, once the transpirational pool, once the transpirational pool of the atmosphere stops, once you hit the dew point, at that point water will flow down in this plant and leak out in the roots and irrigate the neighbors. That's been documented. I've got pictures of it. It's a neat process, but also there are other benefits to diversity.

51:25 I'll show you an example of one: one is resilience against any one disease or insect pest coming in and wiping you out. This is a picture from one of the sorghum breeders we work with. And this is to the right: a grain sorghum hybrid that is resistant to sugar cane aphid. Now a few years ago those were non-existent. You look at this sorghum over here to the left which is susceptible, just nearly dead. In fact, I'd call that a zero-yield field.

51:55 Well, one way is with resistant hybrids. In other ways with multiple applications of insecticides. And another way is through diversity. In fact, you see the little white plant here. This is a sorghum-based cover crop, but we've got a lot of species in here: pearl millet. The only species in here that's affected by the sugar cane aphid is the sorghum. Everything else in here isn't bothered by it.

52:27 So you've got less risk, but also see this buckwheat here. Buckwheat pollen is high enough in protein that ladybug and lacewing larva can survive on it just like we can survive on tofu in the absence of meat because it's got enough protein to sustain us. It tastes nasty but it'll keep you alive. Same way with buckwheat pollen. And ladybugs and lacewings will lay their eggs on buckwheat plants because their larva are insured a good food supply even if there are no aphids in the area.

53:09 And when aphids do show up, just like me, if I've been forced to eat tofu for a long period of time and someone throws a steak in front of me, I'm going to attack it. So they'll move out and just wipe out any aphids that show up. This is how diversity works, people. It gives you resilience and also provides benefits below ground to those below-ground organisms.

53:36 And I'll show you how diversity helps earthworms, for example. Take a look at this: no food added to the soil, worms lost weight. Brown grass leaves, we'll let them eat brown grass, like Marie Antoinette of soil biology, let them eat brome grass. No difference. Brown grass is useless to earthworms. Corn, not a lot better. But look what happens when you give them legume leaves. Earthworms don't like grass residue that well. They like things that are high in calcium like brassicas and legumes.

54:19 Where they were given legume residue. Now we like having the grasses in there because they're going to provide that persistent soil cover. They're going to provide a lot of high carbon root exudates to nourish bacteria. But their residue is not very nutritious to earthworms. That's why it's nice to have them both. Don't choose one or the other, choose both. That's why we preach diversity. Look at this wheat, sorghum, both grasses. Both have residues with a very high carbon nitrogen ratio. And high carbon nitrogen ratio is the same thing as low protein. Nitrogen is protein, so if you have high carbon to nitrogen ratio, it means the protein is low, low nitrogen, low protein. Look what happens when you introduce these legume cover crops in there. Your earthworm populations explode.

55:18 And then livestock grazing. You incorporate livestock grazing. Why do we do that? For a long time, people said, 'Y'all, you want to keep those cattle off. They're going to pack my ground.' A lot of landlords don't want cattle on the ground. That's a mistake, and I'll explain why that's a mistake. Look at all this growth here. You think, 'Man, that's going to make a lot of organic matter.' When I, you know, we used to say plow that under and turn into organic matter. No, this above ground growth makes very little organic matter. As hard as it is to believe, this will produce virtually no organic matter when it's put on top of the soil. And you say, 'Well, gosh, that's a waste.' No, not really, because all these big solar panels contribute to root exudates. Again, we're back to the root exudates. Sorghum produces root exudates like no other. But isn't it a shame that all that above ground growth didn't.

56:21 I will back up a little bit here. I've seen trials where root exudates, pound for pound, the root exudates of a crop will produce about 85 percent of the contribution to soil organic matter. And the tops only about 15. Actually, the tops and the roots combined, only about 15. And that amazing, almost all your soil organic matter is built from root exudates, not from the plant material itself. But what if you could turn that plant material into organic matter? Well, the problem is that on the soil surface, microbes need it to be warm. They need it to be moist and they need to be protected from ultraviolet light. And they have to have high protein material. The material needs to be sufficient in protein and carbohydrates and fats and minerals, all mixed together. Now on the soil surface you got here, the sunflowers got the fats here in the head. And you got this sun hemp with the high protein. You got this corn plant here and sorghum plant here with all the sugar. And the sunflowers got zinc and you got some other plants in here that are rich enough. But they're not mixed, plus you see the sun shining. You got ultraviolet light, which kills microbes. And this is a completely hostile environment to microbes. They cannot function in this environment.

57:58 But you know where it is dark and warm and moist 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, and has its own mixer attached to it? And gosh, if I could just invent such a machine that would gather all this material, mix it up, and put it into a fermentation chamber for about 24 hours and then deposit it back on the soil surface, I'd have nature's. I'd have the best soil improvement machine ever. And such a machine exists. It's called a cow. What built all these beautiful prairie soils that I'm sitting on now? Bison. A ruminant animal. That's how ruminants improve soil, because all that plant residue does not produce much soil organic matter on the surface. It's valuable for protection, but to really contribute to soil, we want to turn a portion of it through aroma.

58:58 Another thing that happens when you have these cow pies is you get dung beetles. As long as we're not killing them with ivomec, we'll get dung beetles that make those big tunnels through the soil that allow rainfall to slurp right down in that soil. Where I'm at right now, we have heavy clay soils and it's very hard to get rainfall into the soil. But when you have dung beetles working for you, every little bit of that rain goes right in the soil. If you got sufficient dung beetle populations, very, very valuable. They also take all the nutrients in this and put it down here in the root zone where there's moisture during a drought. And to give you an idea of what grazed cover crops, grazed diverse cover crops can do, this is a.

59:55 The results of a Haney test that somebody gave me. This was taken prior to grazing a diverse summer cover crop: sorghum sudan, pearl millet, sunhemp, cowpeas, buckwheat, sunflowers, might have been a few others in there. But look at this. This is in the fall of 2018, and this is Haney test: 14 pounds of nitrogen, 10 pounds P.

1:00:29 Now take a look at one year later after they grazed diverse cover crop. He showed this to me and said, 'Is this real?' 147 pounds of nitrogen, 101 pounds of phosphorus. The K went up a little bit too. He said, 'I applied no fertilizer. Where'd it come from?' Biology. Biology created it, created this nitrogen out of thin air. And it freed phosphorus up from unavailable forms and converted it into available forms.

1:01:14 Yes, this does work. I'm going to show you one of the best examples. This is, I guess, bragging on myself here, but when you put all these principles together, it can be pretty magical. This is a trench I dug into one of my fields, one field I used to own. And you can see this is the walls of a trench that I dug when I was messing with my subsurface drip irrigation. Look at this heavy, heavy gray clay. And the color gray in a subsoil indicates a lack of oxygen. So I had roots down to 18 inches deep and no more because there is zero pore space in here.

1:02:03 So what did I do? What to do? I planted a diverse mixture of eastern gamagrass—extremely productive perennial grass that has roots that have hollow spaces in them to conduct air. This will deep root deeper than just about any other grass because of those hollow roots with air-conducting spaces in them. They bring their own oxygen supply. I also had, you can't tell it from the picture, but there is, well, you can see a little bit over here—there's some red clover, there's some alfalfa, chicory, trefoil. Had a diverse system here. The gamagrass just got so tall it kind of dominated everything. This was pastured with livestock using rotational grazing.

1:02:54 And so if you look at the soil health checklist: no tillage, check. Complete soil coverage, check. Continual living roots, check. Diversity, check. Livestock grazing, check. All of these checked off.

1:03:09 This is a year later. Look at this. This is not gray clay anymore. You see they're starting to get some root penetration. And look at this. One other thing I did: I inoculated this with mycorrhizal fungi, which I think is also a key to restoring your soil to its fullest potential. See this root fragment? Look at the dark color following that. That's the glomelin coming out of those roots. You can see these streaks wherever there's a root, there's that glomalin.

1:03:46 And this is two years later. Look at that. This stuck this marker in there at the same depth where I had that arrow two, three years previous. Isn't that amazing? Isn't that unreal? Look at all those roots. Look at all this aggregation. Yeah, you can fix soil.

1:04:12 And what does that do for your crops? Well, take a look at this. This is just a still photo I took out of the film you can find on YouTube. This is, a lot of you guys probably know Michael Thompson and Clint Cox. I'm going to put in a plug here. They don't know I'm doing this, but I'll watch this film again. During the drought, just get on YouTube and look 'During the Drought' Peter Berk, Carmen Cowgirls, or Michael Thompson, Clint Cox.

1:04:49 But this is a field. Both of these are now farmed by Michael. This is the one to the left is one he, this is his first year farming it. This is one he's been farming for a while. Look at the difference in response to the drought.

1:05:09 Management does make a difference. You can fix soil, people. So I just wanted to put in a plug for my books: The Drought Resilient Farm, Managing Pasture. Drought Resilient Farm about five bushels a week right now over the rest of your lifetime. Managing Pastures about half the cost to one big round bale of hay. If reading this book and that enables you to raise one more calf on your life in your lifetime, this book will pay for itself 30 times over. You can buy another one, or you can use your profit to buy 29 more books for your friends.

1:05:50 But anyhow, thank you. Appreciate everybody watching tonight, people that have watched throughout the series. I know I've been just part of a couple, and I've really enjoyed all of them that I've seen. I've got a couple more to catch up on.

1:06:10 There's been some really good ones and Noah Keith did a great job lining them up. I hope everybody watching appreciates them as much as I do. But obviously there's no point in doing it without all you people watching, so thank everybody for watching.

1:06:29 What do we have for questions? I haven't been paying attention to time. Noah, how'd I do?

1:06:34 That's fine, we're definitely over time so I don't think we're gonna take any questions this evening. But if you do have questions, you can email me. Well, you know what, I'm just gonna have them email you directly. Dale at greencoverseed.com. There is a one or two here that I do want to get to. I know we're over time quite a bit here, but also we'll plug that Keith says that Dale is going to eat a serving of tofu for every book that's ordered in the next 24 hours. So go ahead and get your copy of Drought Resilient Farmer now.

1:07:10 I'll take one for the team there you go.

1:07:14 Frank asks, CRP is in perennial species, however it is often a struggle to get back into grain production. What would be the best management practice to take advantage of the 20-plus years of perennial roots? The shame of the CRP is that number one, they typically lack diversity. They have warm season grasses and nothing else, and they did not include mycorrhizal fungi, which is an essential part of that prairie ecosystem. I think if you want to get them back into production, I would leave them in grass for a while longer. I would include mycorrhizal fungi and some legumes and forbs to put in that mix. Alfalfa, sweet clover, I think can tremendously benefit and get some grazing out there. Grazing the cycle all that abundant high carbon nitrogen ratio residue. Allow the animals to blend it with the high protein legume, run it through the rumen and put it back out there on the field. That is the best way to build soil and you've already got the soil building machinery essentially in place. You just need a couple more ingredients. If you're going to return to grain production, I would recommend starting out with soybeans because you've got all that very high levels of carbon, very high carbon nitrogen ratio material. It's going to sequester a lot of nitrogen when it decays.

1:08:50 Okay, there was a question on Facebook about asking where the earthworm data came from. One of those came from Kansas State University, the one where they had the wheat sorghum rotation. The other one I think from Clive Edwards. The two big earthworm gurus in the U.S. probably Clive Edwards and Eileen Clad, Cledivco I believe is how you pronounce it. I think Eileen is from Purdue and Clive I think is Ohio State. But that's actually a table that I have in my book, Drought Resilient Soil. I've got several tables in there on the earthworms.

1:09:52 Eric Copeland asks, can you please print the five principles again? Keith is typing them out there, but Eric, we do actually have our soil health resource guide. We've actually done articles on each of those five principles, and in our next edition we're working on getting out here in 2021, first part of that. So look for that as that comes out. You can request that on our website if you want to read more about those. It's not going to be as in-depth as what Dale's presentation was here tonight, but those are the fifth and there's actually a sixth one as well that some people will mention, which is the context aspect of that.

1:10:31 I think with that we'll probably close here. Like I said, I apologize we didn't have time to get to any questions. I'm sorry, I'm so windy.

1:10:39 No, you're good, Dale. Dale has plenty of time to answer questions here, so if you want to send them an email, it's Dale at greencoverseed.com. That's D-A-L-E at greencoverseed.com. Yep, send away, so be happy to.

1:10:52 Wonderful. Well, thank you so much Dale for your time. Thank you guys for tuning in. We appreciate all of you who've been a part of this season two and making it as wonderful as it was. Dale, do you have any closing comments before you go?

1:11:07 I don't think so. I think let us know what topics you'd like for us to talk about.

1:11:15 Absolutely. Yeah, we're starting to work on season three right now. We've got some things in the works, so look for announcements. We're not gonna take a huge break. We're going to try to hit things up again in the middle of January, first part of February, so it should not be too long before we get back. If you missed this or any of the previous webinars, we do have them recorded and they will be posted on our YouTube page later this week. So with that, everyone, have a merry Christmas, happy holidays, and we will see you in season three in a couple weeks. Thank you everyone. We appreciate it. Thanks for hopping on Keith as well. Take care you guys.