Why Fallow Destroys Your Soil: The Fallow Fallacy Explained

0:00 Welcome to our webinar today. Thanks everybody for joining in. We're looking forward to a really productive discussion. So I want to just establish a few ground rules. I'm Jonathan. Everybody's muted so you won't be able to talk, but if you have a question we would love to hear your question. You can ask your questions in the Q&A panel. We'd love to hear where you're from when you ask the question, so go ahead and tell us that if you're comfortable. If you have a message that you want to send just to our panelists, you can use the chat to do that. But if you want everybody to see your question, do that in the questions. Otherwise Keith is going to hand it over to Keith and then Keith you can tell us about our topic and our guest today.

0:55 Thank you Jonathan. Appreciate the introduction there. Well thanks everybody for joining us on this first day of June. Gosh, it's hard to believe it's June already. That time is certainly flying past. So we appreciate all of you taking time out of your busy schedule to be on our webinar. You know, as we were talking with the sales team about what should we be looking at doing for our next webinar, the topic of fallow came up. And so it's got me thinking about the fallow fallacy, because a lot of people think well if I fallow my ground it lets it rest, it lets it capture more moisture, it lets it capture all these nutrients. And I will admit I probably used to be of that mindset, that that would be truly resting your ground. But since we've been headed down this soil health path, the regenerative agriculture path, what we have learned is that there's nothing more destructive for the soil than to have nothing growing on it.

1:54 We used to think we were great farmers when we would harvest our wheat in July and then we would keep it bare, we'd spray the weeds, we'd keep nothing growing out there for almost 10 months until we planted corn the next year. And we thought that made us really good farmers by having that nice clean field. And again, what we've learned over the years is that that was not the best thing for that ground. We were doing nothing to build the soil and in fact we were decimating the biological populations that we would have had out there.

2:27 As we were thinking about this, I thought who better to address this type of topic than Nicole Masters. And so I reached out to Nicole. And yes, many of you know Nicole, or have maybe read her book 'For the Love of the Soil.' She'll probably talk a little bit more about that later. But Nicole is what I would consider to be one of the top agroecologists. I'm not exactly sure what title she would give herself, but she is one of the top people, not just in the United States but in the world. She actually is from New Zealand and has worked all over the world with farmers all over the world. So she has a vast amount of experience of how plants and biology build the soil and in the absence of them, which is what fallow is, when nothing is growing, in the absence of plants and biology, how destructive that is to your soil and to the process of trying to generate or build your soil health.

3:29 So we asked Nicole if she would be willing to share some of her thoughts, some of her experience in working with other farmers around that topic. And fortunately we were able to find a time frame to work because she is one busy lady. She travels a lot, does a lot of workshops, does a lot of seminars. It has some pretty exciting things coming up. We're going to talk a little bit more about that at the end of the webinar. We'll give you just a little sneak peek into some of the new things that Nicole has going on. So with that, I am going to turn it over to Nicole and she is going to share with us the fallow fallacy and why we need plants and biology to build soil health.

4:13 Wow, Keith, that was quite the introduction. I feel like I'm all that. As far as labels, not really one for labels, but yes, agroecologist is probably as close as I would get to a label. So what I'm really going to focus on in this session is more around the incredible positive things that we can do to build and focus on this soil health approach. I think someone's not on mute maybe. It's your keys if you want to check on that. And for those of you that have been involved with soil health for a long time, you're probably very familiar with the soil health principles and the idea behind a principle is having a framework and having something that actually guides actions when you're looking for some kind of outcome. So some of these will be familiar to you in terms of some of these principles. You might call them different things. You might have other principles that you are farming or ranching by, but for us we talk about having a collaborative mindset. That is a mindset of collaboration with nature, with relationships with people, with communities, and really looking at how do I collaborate in order to improve my outcomes. Looking at maximizing photosynthesis, we'll talk about that a bit. Keeping soil covered, we're definitely going to dig into this one. Optimizing and reducing inputs as an outcome to improve soil health. Thinking about your context. If we have systems, always have disturbance, so really thinking about optimizing.

5:54 Disturbance rather than avoiding disturbance, it is part of natural systems and encouraging a diversity of plants and animals. What I want you to think about is that our paradigms are what really shape and form what practices become available. Your paradigm encompasses those mindsets, which then becomes possible in terms of the principles that we have and the practices.

6:21 If we're thinking about what's possible or what practices we might do in an industrial mindset or an industrial model, that's going to be very different from people that are considering how do I build soil health, or maybe people that are like their paradigm is that everything is energy and everything's connected. Your paradigm is going to shape what principles you follow and what practices, and then it's mutually reinforced.

6:50 Some of the things we're going to talk about are true in a conventional industrial model where those practices and principles create these outcomes. They are a truth, and they're a truth for people that are working from within those particular paradigms. I don't really go around trying to force people to change a paradigm, as it is what shapes how you see the world. But it's through seeing something new that we can step out of some of these paradigms, and that's where I think the practices that we're going to talk about today might actually offer an opening into other ways of seeing the world and other ways of seeing what could be possible.

7:29 Context is a huge one. I often hear that there's a practice that works very well, and maybe that is in New Zealand or it might be in Virginia. We've got people on this call from Utah, from Nebraska, from Arizona, Montana. These contexts can be shaped by your actual environment. They might be shaped by your soil type. Do you have a very heavy gumbo soil? Have you got alluvial soils? Have you got ash soils? Have you got sand? That is going to shape your context for what becomes possible. And I know some people in the last few years have had less than three inches of rainfall. That's definitely going to shape what becomes possible. Your context is also shaped by who you are, what your goals are. What's important to you is going to very much shape what becomes possible. I think not putting too much pressure on ourselves to try and replicate what you might see someone doing on the other side of the world of really finding what's going to fit well for you in your context.

8:39 Why is it so important? Why do we have a principle of keeping soil covered as a soil health principle? Well, one: if we've got cover, then we're going to actually be able to reduce erosion from either wind or water. We're going to reduce that impact from raindrops. Think about that catastrophic impact of soils that are just bare when that raindrop hits it, the shearing potential. So we end up with soil crusts, we end up with soils that don't breathe, that won't infiltrate water. When we see that, then we'll start to see specific plant weed species that can be induced to germinate when soil stops breathing, and there's probably quite a few that you know of.

9:20 If we keep soil covered, we can dramatically reduce evaporation. Again, it depends on your context, but there's some research to show that you can be reducing evaporation by as much as 50 percent by having some kind of litter, some kind of cover just to protect that surface. We also find that you can reduce salinity by keeping ground covered. The practices of reducing and taking any kind of material off that soil surface are likely to increase salinity as we start to see water drawing sodium and other minerals out through the soil profile.

9:56 We can mitigate climactic stresses. When soils are naked and there's no cover on that surface, then that soil temperature can change dramatically. It can change by like 70 degrees. We've seen in some places that by having bare soil, even with cloud cover coming past the sun, we can see dramatic changes in the temperature of that soil. That's going to have an impact on your microbiology, that's going to have an impact on all that soil structure.

10:25 By having soil covered, we can provide a habitat for microbiology and beneficial insects. Often we think, well, if we've got ground cover, then you're going to have insect pests, you're going to have slugs. Those are all happening because of an imbalance in the microbial workforce. The view that if you have ground cover and you have slugs is true in a conventional context because you don't have the predators, you don't have the nematodes that are eating the eggs of slugs, for instance. So that's just one example. As we start to build this system and build more resilience, we see more and more beneficial insects and microbiology. We also see a reduction in pests, weeds, and diseases.

11:08 By keeping soil covered, we increase our nutrient availability. I want you to consider that minerals, particularly potassium, is all about having ground cover, it's all about having leaf litter and all those solar panels up there increasing that bioavailable potassium to your following crop. So all of these are what we call feedback loops. They are positive feedback loops. If we end up taking off all the ground cover, we end up in a

11:38 Negative feedback loop so instead of having carbon sequestration further down the profile we have greenhouse gas emissions where by influencing that nutrient availability in a downward spiral we can have lower quality of litter and what we're seeing is operations now that may have three or four years of stubble build up because of the quality and the microbiology that's happening in these systems so now we're seeing producers actually having to burn to deal with stubble build up because they don't have quality in that letter. And in the same place if we're looking at a downward cycle then we could end up with more pests and pathogens by not having carbon being allocated further down the profile by stressing these plants by not having adequate.

12:35 I'm going to leave you to manage any questions that come up okay. So maximizing photosynthesis, this really is how we plug into the Sun. So I want you to really just imagine that the plants are like a plug that you've just gone up stretched up to the Sun and plugged into the sun to catch all that free energy. The whole planet is driven by this process which enables us to breathe oxygen and live on the planet. Carbon and of course there's many materials but carbon being one of them is the currency that drives the planet so we really want to look at how do I increase plant photosynthesis but it's a very inefficient capture in many ways and when we look at systems with high inputs and poor soil health we find very inefficient plant photosynthesis.

13:26 So if you are seeing that situation first you want to look at what's happening with plant nutrition, if there are any stresses on plants is that affecting photosynthesis as well as stimulating and feeding microbiology. We want to ensure that we have living roots for as long as possible and I know for some of you that's a challenge and a short season. But looking at how do we maximize that even if plants only grow this big and then they're terminated by frost or snow, just to have that living root in the system can be incredibly beneficial. Having a diversity of plants with different leaf architecture so we're capturing sunlight before it hits the ground and really looking at how do we build soil carbon and the beneficial metabolites. We're not going to have time to really dig into that today I don't think but the huge benefits that we're seeing from having diversity and biomass of microbiology that are releasing these metabolites that are so important for plant defense and so important for human nutrition.

14:32 So if we're thinking about this carbon cycle and for some of you this might be a little basic but for others this might be a new topic to you is there are a few cycles of carbon happening in the soil. The short cycle that top part that top spiral, top circle, I call this 'I'm here for a good time not a long time honey' cycle. This carbon cycle is plant roots, this is leaf litter, this is stubble, this is manure, urine, dead bugs that kind of thing right. So some of that carbon is there for a very short time. You notice that stomata on the underneath of a leaf do actually take? They will preferentially take carbon that's coming off soil surfaces over the carbon that's coming out of the atmosphere and in part it's because it's more concentrated at that surface. So every day the soil is breathing in and breathing out so there's this respiration cycle that's very very important, it drives plant growth.

15:34 Then if we move further down through that process we have what is termed the deep stable or recalcitrant protected carbon and where this is coming from is through the relationship of mycorrhizae with plant roots. So the plant is capturing sunlight energy drawing in carbon dioxide and water and then converting that into carbon, hydrogen, oxygen carbohydrates and then releasing oxygen right. Part of that carbon, hydrogen and oxygen is passed down through the plant and released as exudates to stimulate microbiology around the root system and also to pay that mycorrhizae for its services. So that carbon is being put down much further through the profile typically we're looking at forty centimeters or sixty centimeters depth is where we see that expansion of this more protected soil carbon right. And that really is your bank account, it's the hospital, it's the pub of that soil environment for microbiology to be sharing resources, for them to be able to find and access nutrients like phosphorus or zinc and then to be able to pass that to the plant and those plants to be healthy right.

16:51 So and it's an incredibly complex system I'm making it overly simplistic but basically what we're talking about is by having living plants we are now building that carbon building block for water holding capacity for nutrients and bioavailability of all of these different aspects that's going to contribute to your bottom line.

17:16 Can visibly see it in some soils so this photograph here was taken in sandy soils in Western Australia underneath perennial grass establishments so what you can see is those soils literally look like they're bleeding. That soil pit there is six feet deep so you can see that carbon is.

17:35 Actually looks like it's dripping right. So the dark gray color is your carbon. You can see it concentrated up there in the top soil but really it's moving right down the profile. So when we think about building soil and building soil tab, then it's really a process that's happening from deeper down and coming up right. So how do we get more and more of that material laden down through that soil profile right? What other ways you might see it is through what we call the rhizo sheath that lovely sticky substances that's all attached to your roots. And again, what we've got in here is carbon in, but it's also mucilage, it's byproducts of the roots being shared. It really is the hive of activity in a soil.

18:26 And what's really interesting is in this rhizo sheath that may be as much as two units of pH difference between the rhizo sheath and out in the main soil environment. So you might have saline soils, you might have a pH of nine. Those soils that plant is experiencing a pH of seven because of that buffering of the microbiology around those roots. So it protects them against fluctuations in temperature, fluctuations in pH issues like aluminum, heavy metals, and protects them against pathogens. So having a healthy plant that's able to pump those sugars, pay for those services, as we see the buildup and we see these beautiful rhizo sheets forming even in the most extreme of environments.

19:09 Now you will see these in heavy soils. You can see them in sandy soils. Often they show up more in sandy soils. But they show up on most species. It's only things like onions, asparagus. There's only a few species where this doesn't show up, but pretty much all of your cultivated plant species will develop a rhizo sheath right. So start digging holes and taking a look. Do we see this kind of development? And then you think, when that plant's harvested, the huge amount of organic material that's been returned into the soil system right. And that amount of root material in annual wheat, maybe as much as 3,000 pounds an acre of root mass. And as we get into perennial systems, that may be as much as 36,000 pounds of root material being returned to the soil environment to stimulate microbiology. So as we get more perennial systems going, then we're going to get more organic material obviously being bound into the system.

20:15 So when we start to see environments where people are taking plants off, we see long fallows. So this system on the left, this soil here had actually been under a fallow for three years. And what we see in these situations is total collapse of those soil structures. So we get surface crusting and we lose our aggregates, our crumbs, which are the reactors for nutrient transfer and energy in any soil environment. And so what happens, you can look at this example of kochia. These create the conditions for primitive what we call bacterial dominated weed species that they love what happens in these bare soils. So one of the side effects of having soil uncovered like this is the buildup of nitrates, and then you're going to get your nitrate-loving plant species. So kochia would be one of them, foxtail, barley grass, fat hen, lamb's quarters, red root pigweed, Russian thistle. There's a bunch of them that love nitrates.

21:25 So when we get that nitrate in soils that might have been there for some time, you get a small amount of rain and it's enough to trigger the germination for plants that are literally going to mop up this excess of nitrate because they can deal with nitrates in the environment and they're going to take that out and make it so bioavailable, which is important for landscapes. But we know that kochia in some environments, people are losing as much as 90 percent of production to the invasion of kochia. It is a biological problem. It's not due to a lack of herbicides. I believe that kochia may now be herbicide resistant to five different herbicides. It's not a herbicide problem, people. It's a biological issue. What can we do to build aggregate structure and to mitigate these losses of things like nitrates so that we don't get the germination signal for these particular plants? And we can talk about that more if you want to.

22:23 One of my ahas a couple of years ago was we were digging holes in Colorado, and on this property we could not get the backhoe through that soil. And the ranchers said to me, well, it's just, you know, soils are frozen here in Colorado in winter. And I was like, okay, you know, we don't have this problem in New Zealand, and I'm like, okay, that just must be normal. Then we went maybe half a mile up the road on the same soil type that had been managed totally different, and the backhoe went through this soil like a knife through butter. This issue of frozen soils like this—I'm not talking about a layer of ice on the surface, but the frozen layer of soil—is a biological issue. What is happening with that aggregation? So you see on the right-hand side that beautiful crumb structure. Those crumbs are all built by microbiology. You don't build these kinds of structures without the presence of microbiology, and it's in relationship to plants. So having living, growing plants on that surface with their roots right down stimulating microbes is how we get these aggregates or these crumbs, these little reactors right. If we are undermining the activity of microbiology, if we don't.

23:36 Have very good photosynthesis. We don't have very healthy plants. We're going to see these kind of frozen layers, so I think this is really interesting and for us all to be digging more holes and taking a look at what is happening in winter. What you might find as you see this effect underneath a fence line where you've got beautiful aggregates and then out in your field where you've been managing for some time as we get these super frozen soils.

24:00 Right, so these aggregate structures—this is in corn on the right and corn balls taken off wheat oats on the left—on properties this is the middle of summer in Victoria, Australia, and seeing these beautiful aggregate structures. In fact, we could drop a penetrometer, so like a tool to look at how tight the soil is. We could drop these right down to the hilt in the middle of summer in these soils, and that activity is happening all through microbiology. So what this means is now we have no limitation to water movement. We have no limitation to air movement. Our nutrients are being moved right through that profile.

24:44 And so I think that's sorghum Sudan. So see those beautiful aggregates all attached to that root system. So this is the reactor I'm talking about. So we're zooming in here onto an aggregate—so that crumb—and what you see is aggregates themselves are made up of smaller and smaller crumbs. In between all of those crumbs is water. So water will be inside the actual aggregates, covering. There'll be biofilms because really, if you think about it, microbiology themselves in soils are aquatic organisms, right? So they're living in these films. They need that water. They are inside these little crumbs, and in there is where we get gas exchange. So that might be methane, carbon dioxide, nitrates. It's all happening inside this reactor.

25:35 And as we improve soil health, what you see and we see more and more aggregates and more and more aggregate stability. So this means that these aggregates will stick together. As we see a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, we see a reduction in leaching and a reduction in things like erosion. So the aim of the game really is: how do I build beautiful, sticky chocolate cake and have that structure because this is the key to resilience? This is the key to profitability.

26:08 So this is zooming in actually onto an aggregate. This one is five millimeters in size, which is a fifth of an inch, and they've actually zoomed into that single crumb. And inside that crumb is all of these pores. So those yellow little bits, that's all holes and air spaces and water spaces. Microbiology have actually woven through that. Small earth organisms, worms, or the rest of it would have been creeping and crawling through that—probably not a worm, it's a little small—and what that means is that we've got gas exchange, right? What it also means is that these soils are more resilient to the use of herbicides. They're more resilient to bioaccumulating and bioremediated chemicals.

26:54 So for some of you there's no getting away from chemicals. It's in the rainfall in America. It's in your irrigation water. It's just in water. These aggregates are actually able to bioaccumulate and help to reduce chemical loadings, right, and take that out of the food chain.

27:10 Right, so we end up in a vicious cycle when we start to lose aggregate structure, when we start to get compaction. What you find is these compacted, tight soils need more nitrogen, and they're going to lose more nitrogen. We see a significant reduction in yields. So you might have noticed this if you ever have a field that you drive through a lot, where you can see where the vehicle goes because there's less growth. And there's less growth there because of this compaction effect. And what some people have is this compaction effect across their entire property. So up to 10 times more nitrogen is lost from compacted soils, which means we need more inputs to maintain production.

27:49 So I want you to dig a hole, take a look. Have you got compaction up in that top layer? Have you got a surface crust? Have you got compaction down in the plow pan, right? All of that is impacting on your bottom line and your profitability.

28:03 Right, so under bare fallow, what we see is aggregate stability can totally collapse. In some studies, like a hundred percent degradation of aggregate stability—so how well these crumbs hold together. So this, the soil, I can't remember where the soil was anyway. This is what we call a very bacterial soil. You can see all that structure has collapsed. This is one way that you can tell: do yourself a favor and do a flaking test. Now, all you've got to do is find soils from, in this case, three different places. So under a fence line or somewhere that hasn't been disturbed is a good start. Maybe a soil that's your best soil and your soil that's your worst. Often I find people want to choose their need things. So look at what the neighbors doing. And what you want to see is that water stays clear.

28:58 So in each of these cases, the water on the left-hand side has been under biological management. They have been using diverse multi-species cover crops. They've been using both of these. Actually, we're still using some chemical herbicides, but they were.

29:14 Buffering them with microbial foods and what you see is without all this mucilage and all of these byproducts of microbiology—so I talk about the poos and the wees and the spit and the vomit from microbes—they protect the aggregate. They keep that aggregate from collapsing whereas if you don't have a lot of active biology then the water comes into these aggregates, rushes in and aggregates collapse and you see that going into suspension like that. So the water becomes dirty, you'll see aggregates just falling out.

29:47 There is an app called Slakes—s-l-a-k-e-s—and if you get the app you can just use single aggregates and take photographs of them and exposure to water and it'll give you a score for how good is your aggregate stability. This is one of the simplest tests and one of the most enlightening in terms of: am I part of the problem? Yes, yes you are. No. So this is what happens when we have soils.

30:13 I know there was a there was an event in 2013 in Iowa when they lost five tons of top soil in one week during heavy rainfall events. We see these kind of events across the planet. Our biggest export in the US is soil, right? So we're losing on average about 5.6 tons per acre per year of soil—depends where you are. There are places in the midwest that can be losing as much as 100 tons per acre per year. It's a significant problem. This is a biological problem. Where is the relationship with the living plant? Where's that relationship with microbiology to hold those soils together?

30:59 I love this image from Kim Deans. She's in Tinga, New South Wales, Australia. This was post a significant fire that hit the region in 2019. The fence line is looking out towards her neighbors. So Kim and Angus Stains are on this side of the fence. They have been practicing adaptive grazing management, biodynamics, using biologicals for a long time. But what's interesting to me is that the dust storm literally starts and finishes on that fence line. And that dust storm went for weeks—that the soil is moving where they don't have adequate microbial activity. These guys were—I don't like talking too much about neighbors, I hate some of these neighbor photos but they were—yeah, there wasn't a lot of ground cover, right? So a lot of overgrazing, poor management of soils. So what we see is that that erosion and that dust has actually been formed by a lack of microbial activity.

32:03 And then these guys got rain. So the same fence line and the rain arrived and it didn't stop for about three years, I believe. But when the rains arrived, everyone was celebrating because their dams were filling up. And if your dam is the first thing to fill up or your ponds, that's not a good sign, right? That's telling you that you do not have—poor structures, you do not have infiltration. It literally looks like a lake starts on the other side of the fence. This is a level playing field, right there? There's no change in elevation. Water literally could not move into these soils. This is something to be very, very concerned about, right?

32:40 We talk about water holding capacity. There's—if water can't even get into your soils it doesn't really matter if you're a bare fellow or cover crop. If water's not moving, water's not moving.

32:53 So the other consideration I think around keeping ground bare is that there's some pretty good research to show that this is having an impact on the climate. So when we have bare soils, what it does is it can push the atmospheric boundary up. And in this particular study they found that the atmospheric boundary actually lifted by 800 meters—which is 800 yards. I can't put in a defeat, sorry, which is significant. And what that does is it pushes away rainfall, it reduces expectation. The couple of studies in Saskatchewan, Montana, and Western Australia showed that it was reducing precipitation by up to 20 percent, right? So the impact of just clearing land has so many flow-on effects. But I think this is one of them that we need to be thinking about—is that what we're doing on properties actually has flow-on effects downstream. So what effect are we having by clearing land and keeping it bare right through the growing season? It's just something I'm going to leave you with, all right?

34:01 And then diversity of plants and animals. So the more diversity of plant species that we get into the environment, into a soil, then we're going to have different types of root architecture. We're going to have plants reaching and making different nutrients available. They're also talking to different types of microbiology and communicating underneath that soil surface. So we are getting a huge range of these beneficial metabolites, we're getting multiple benefits for the ecosystem, for the environment, and for food and for our inputs, right? So being able to reduce inputs through having a diversity of root architecture—so something that's kind of fun to think about.

34:42 I also think that there's something in this in thinking about what have we done with many of our modern cultivars. So this is Corazon or commute wheat on the right, modern wheat on the left. Some of our modern plant varieties have lost the ability to communicate to microbiology. Many of them on varieties no longer communicate to mycorrhizae. They're very

35:07 Important carbon pump through the soil system. They don't communicate with some of the protozoa, and these protozoa are responsible for nutrient cycling and consuming bacteria and all the rest of it. We're really undermining our ability to build soil carbon and soil structure just through thinking about what plant species are we using. I'm seeing more and more plant breeders think about this because the resilience of the plant on the right compared to the left is measurable in terms of what's happening with dry or wet or any of the extremes. These plants have more resilience.

35:45 So how many seasons do you have left to build for health? The study came out in 2021 and found that using lidar, lighter and satellite imagery, there used to be 14 to 16 inches of this beautiful A horizon, what we call the topsoil in the Midwest. Some probably some of the best soils in the world except for maybe areas in the Ukraine. They've estimated that around 35% of topsoil has been lost across this Corn Belt. That means 35% of people or these soils are on subsoil. People are farming on subsoil. It's costly. Midwest farmers around three billion dollars a year in lost revenue and lost performance and productivity.

36:34 What is it going to take for us to get our soil resources back? The dust storms that we're seeing now globally, it's not getting any better. What we're doing on the land impacts well beyond the farm gate.

36:59 Yeah, thank you Nicole. But boy, so many different paths we could take on following up with that. You know, I really liked what you had to say at the beginning about it really being a paradigm shift. And for so many of us, once you start down the road to changing the paradigm on what does a good field look like, for us initially that paradigm was not having anything growing out there because we wanted to conserve our moisture in that fallow period. But now we understand that when we don't have plants growing, we don't have biology. And so much of what you talked about, you kept saying it's a biological problem, it's a biological problem. Well, if you don't have plants growing out there, that's a biological problem because you're not going to have the biology. And that's to me one of the biggest fallacies of fallow: that we are not going to be able to host that biology and promote the biological communities without that living plant.

38:09 We got a lot of good questions rolling in. We're going to start with an easy one. This will be the way to get started and it really segues off what you left us with there. Phil is asking if we would have had the ground covered with that, have helped avoid the dust storm accident in Illinois a few weeks ago where all the, I don't know if there was seven, eight, nine different people killed on the highways there in Illinois because of the dust blowing.

38:40 Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely Phil. And we saw this in Montana as well with people killed on the highways due to dust storms. When you look at it, I want you to imagine that like the finest particles in dust of what's moving off the pasture, the finest particles in soil is your humus. It's your carbon. So it's the first thing to leave. So often if you're seeing something like that, you're like wow, someone's literally blowing dollars out the window. And that dust storm went from right up in Alberta all the way down to Texas. Like it was just phenomenal dust storms, discontinuing because of the disconnect with life.

39:23 You know, and it's understandable in areas that have been in drought and just there's no moisture to get a cover crop up and going. But you know, in Illinois, it would be very rare that they wouldn't get enough moisture to at least get something planted. And I want to go back to a comment that you made earlier and maybe have you expand on it a little bit because this goes to the same issue. You said a plant only has to be yay big, and I'm not exactly sure how big yay is in order to do benefits. But talk a little bit about, because these guys are typically in a corn-soybean rotation like many of us are, but rye can be planted really late and still get some growth. How much growth of rye do you think if there wouldn't have had to have been to not only stop the dust but to really encourage the biological communities to be working on that surface compaction, all those things that you talked about.

40:25 A good question, and I'm it's more from my own anecdotal experience than seeing it in the research. But I really think that even when a plant is two or three inches high, yay big, you know it's going to depend on how well, did you put and you guys do this anyway, you are putting microbials on with your seed, but by priming those seeds, we find that actually there can be a really robust root system even if the plant's only that tall. We've seen some phenomenal effects in soil aggregation and soil structure and breaking through hard pans in plants that were less than a month old. So there are, and you'll see this Keith all the time I'm sure there.

46:47 I'm not answering your question Chris sorry. Yeah, but it's a great point and you know, unfortunately, it's hard enough to shift the paradigm of a farmer who's out there and sees it and understands it all the time. It's infinitely harder to change that paradigm of a policy maker who doesn't understand any of these agronomic principles, and that's going to be a real challenge not just in California, but that's going to be a real challenge across all of the West. And it's going to move into the high plains and into the Midwest and the Corn Belt as well, no doubt about that.

47:22 So Dwayne Dodsworth, and I believe Dwayne is from Western Kansas, he's got a follow-up question on this. He's asking, you know, lower moisture environment like Western Kansas where they do a lot of wheat fallow, you know, that's just traditionally been a rotation you're very familiar with that from Australia as well. How does one balance living roots in the soil, you know, from a cover crop versus having moisture for that cash crop?

47:51 Yeah, and I think this speaks to are we having a long-term focus or a short-term focus. So when we talk about these paradigms, it is true that there is, and we look at just one soil to another and go fallow is going to have a higher water balance, but not in the long term. So what I suggest is that people actually start trialling this in an area that's not going to, you're not going to lose the farm in the process of really looking at building soil health in an area and moving away from the fallow mentality. And take a look, and it does look like it's taking up to seven years for some, in some regions, for people to see, 'Oh, actually I'm now ahead of the curve.' So it produces a finding that they will have higher yields in the dry season than equivalent yields in a good season once they've built that soil health, but it's a really challenging thing to do when many of us are in super low, low rainfall times. Happens, maybe this is a challenging time for us to be building this water balance, but I do think you've got to be able to weigh this up in your own context and just start so that you can see for yourself how long is it going to take and how well is it going to work for you and your in your region?

49:17 Yeah, that's a great answer, and I would just kind of tack on to that too. You know, it's a lot about the context of how you're using it. Certainly in those environments, you can't do a cover crop and then come right back in with a cash crop immediately, but you can do a cover crop if you have sufficient recovery and recharge period of time. So if you plan to cover crop in March, terminated in June, and then you're not planting wheat until September or October, well, that's a long period of time to recapture the moisture that's used. You have the benefit of preventing that evaporation. You've got almost 100 percent infiltration, so it's really about how it's used within the context. And then, you know, probably another way, again, I really like what you say Nicole about, you know, don't do it in a situation where you're betting the farm. Do it on, you know, take your worst field and maybe convert it away from cash cropping and switch it over to a livestock grazing base because it doesn't take nearly as much moisture to grow forage as it does to grow grain. And then that gives you the ability to cash flow during that transition period. Nicole, like what you were saying, and then once you get that up and going, now you can switch that over back into the grain rotation and take another parcel and start working on building that up. So we've seen people do that pretty successfully as well.

50:42 Yeah, and I think it's a good technique. I hate that people always want to give me their worst field though. Like, if you want to go faster. Yeah, I get it, and it does, it makes so much sense. Well, you know, the worst field is the least opportunity cost for you to try because you know you're probably going to be lucky to break even on that one anyway. Everybody has a field like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

51:10 I want to throw biomorphic silica in there for people to be thinking about as well. So biomorphic silica is, it's so silica and soil is the most abundant mineral in soil, but it comes in thousands of different forms. The biomorphic silica is a little bit like silicon in terms of its water holding capacity. So one molecule of biomorphic silica holds on to 700 molecules of water. Now soils can be as high as six percent of the entire soil can actually be in this biomorphic form, but when we have bare fallow, when we are cultivating, when we're using a lot of ag chemicals, that number drops to below one percent. So there's a biological component in terms of how soils are made up of and what biology are doing in terms of holding on to this moisture to make it available. So we're missing a lot of the opportunities by cutting plants heads off.

52:09 Okay, great, thank you. Boy, so many questions to choose from. I'm going to switch it up just a little bit here. Dr. Robin Gross, he's down in Arizona now, but he was with the University of Wyoming, bred the Wyo winter pea. He's asking, most crop cultivars have been bred for conventional farming systems. True.

52:31 Plant breeders devoting enough effort to breeding plants for agroecosystems managed using the holistic practices you advocate?

52:42 Yeah, it's a great question. What we're seeing in the conversations I'm having with plant breeders is they're realizing it's like breeding racehorses and suddenly you realize that you don't have good feet and really bad behaviors in your horses. They're saying the same thing with plant breeders who are now starting to look at epigenetics and now going, well, hang on, if we're not forming relationships with mycorrhizae, that has some significant issues in terms of nutrients and resilience. So I feel like it's happening in pockets. Part of it's been driven by producers on the ground, so farmers themselves saying, hey, hang on, I don't want the neonicotinoids on my seeds. I don't want seeds that have been grown for very high phosphorus, high water, because that's actually not my environment. We're seeing some movement in Australia and New Zealand that I find really positive.

53:44 Yeah, that's a good point. We're doing a few things—we're not plant breeders, we don't pretend to be—but for cover crops we try to go back and find the oldest cultivars we can. We've got a couple growers growing Turkey Red wheat, Scout 66, which is a very popular wheat from 1966, and we're growing those and using those as wheat for cover crops in a scenario because there's some people that, if they're a certified wheat grower, they can't use cereal rye. So wheat is still an option, but we're trying to go back to those really old cultivars, kind of like that picture of the spelt roots that you showed, that has that huge root system there.

54:28 Andy van Niekerk is asking: you mentioned that you buffer your herbicide sprays with biological food. Can you elaborate on what food can be used and how do you use that? Tell us a little bit more about how you can buffer those herbicides with biology.

54:48 We've been using for over twenty years things like vermicastor worm extracts and fulvic acids. On properties where we've been doing this testing, the actual grain that's been harvested is tested as normal—no chemical residue—even though they may have used post-emergent herbicides, pre-emergent herbicides. Yeah, it's pretty exciting. Some of the work that was done in New Zealand was actually showing that there's organisms in the soil and that structure in the soil was actually breaking down things like 2,4-D and bioaccumulating some pretty heavy chemicals so it wasn't even showing up in soil tests after those chemicals were used. Looking forward to more research happening in this space.

55:41 Yeah, and there's a tremendous amount of people doing different things with compost extracts and using humates and just doing different things like that. So I would encourage you again to just try it on different strips. The best way to learn is to do small trials on your own operation. Even if it's not replicated—you're not doing it to try to publish in some journal—you're doing it to prove to yourself: does it work or does it not? Get with a group. In Nebraska, our extension agent Jenny Reese has a really good group of farmers that do on-farm research, so they can do similar projects across many different farms. Instead of replicating it four times on your own farm, it's being replicated by some of your neighbors, and then you get together and see what you found out. Consider doing that as well.

56:35 Cindy Zink—I know Cindy is the coordinator of the South Dakota Soil Health Coalition—she's asking about that slake app you were talking about. Is that available on Apple as well? Do you happen to know?

56:51 I don't speak Apple, not sure. I believe so, yeah. It was developed by a university. Yeah, I believe it is actually. It's really cool.

57:04 Okay, I hadn't heard of that, so that's gonna be one of the things I'm gonna have to go look up and try to find here. I know we're up against our hour and there's a whole bunch of questions here. Yes, everybody wants to ask Nicole a question, so we certainly appreciate everybody's enthusiasm. We're gonna do a couple more questions and then we're going to have to wrap it up. Just for everybody's information, we are going to be posting this out on our YouTube channel, so if you want to watch it again or if you want to have other people watch it, it will be on our YouTube channel here pretty soon.

57:44 We have a question here from Antonio. First of all, he congratulates you on all your great works. He wants to know your perspective on the greenwashing of regenerative as a term because we all know that's been happening in different places. But how do we prevent that? How does a farm using the principles of regenerative agriculture be considered regenerative if it uses food for the cows from conventional farming? What are your thoughts around that subject because there's a lot of talk about that?

58:15 There is, like I started this whole session, I really don't get stood in the labeling. I'm more interested in the outcomes. Seeing organizations that are very interested in, like New Zealand Merino with the regenerative index, you know, what is happening in terms of improvements of water quality, reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, food quality, whatever that is.

58:46 I think the greenwashing stable door is blown open and the horse is well bolted when we're looking at a doubling of the use of the term regenerative being applied to some of the biggest ag chem type food producers in the world. So I feel like we're going to get more into the actual, you know, show me these improvements. What does this look like in finding ways to do that? And at the same time, I'm happy if people are taking a couple steps towards this direction. Any steps is going to be an improvement in terms of reducing chemical ladeness.

59:28 But I think it'd be interesting to look at the amount of cover crops that went in last year and then consider how much more glyphosate went in last year. This is where I'm concerned about practice-based certification. These are not about practices. You can make any practice degenerative and you can make any practice regenerative. Anyone that's certifying on practices has me very concerned. I'm more interested in what we're doing with outcomes and I'm less interested in being able to control the rhetoric on language.

1:00:03 We definitely have to look at not just individual practices but what does the system look like and then the outcomes too. But we have to be careful that we don't push away the large ag retailers and the CPGs because if we're really going to move the needle on a large scale across the whole world, we're going to need those people as partners. And so it is frustrating, I know it can be very discouraging sometimes to work with them, but they're going to be a needed partner in some way, shape or form. So we have to figure out how to work with that.

1:00:43 I'm going to do one more question, Nicole, and then we'll kind of wrap it up here. Adam is asking a question and this is kind of the one that's near and dear to my heart, so I'm choosing it as our last one. You say can you speak to the benefits of cover crop mixtures when you have multiple species in a mix and how they can benefit the microbiology of the soil and overall soil health? I'm assuming he's asking as compared to maybe doing a monoculture, single species cover crop.

1:01:26 Just consider that the exudates that are coming out of root systems can be very unique to those particular plants. They may be filling different roles. Like some might be attracting this specific fungus, some might be releasing this specific phosphorus. Every single plant has different complementary roles. I think you said later you work with cherries and apples, so thinking about in perennial systems what are the companions for those trees in the wild? Because they were actually offering benefits in those exudates and metabolites for plant defense, reductions in weeds and all of this. So the more diversity we have in the system, it also gives you a backup too if the climate changes, gets hot, gets cold, and you've got another species that might kick in. So you're kind of covering your bases. But I also think we're not just growing for ourselves but thinking how do I bring more vibrant life and attract a diversity of insects and birds and that whole piece. Let's stop being selfish.

1:02:30 No, for sure. And you know, we just have seen so many benefits of diverse mixes because diversity equals resilience. And if you don't know what your weather is going to be, then you just need to try to be as resilient as possible. Definitely where it's at.

1:02:49 Nicole, we thank you so much for spending time with us here. I do want to just as we close here talk a little bit about some of the things that you've got going on. I mentioned that you're originally from New Zealand. You recently purchased some property in Montana, which is very exciting. I know we just sent you some seed and hopefully you got that seed planted for your operation there. Tell us a little bit about what your plans are for that little parcel of the Paradise Valley.

1:03:18 We are very excited. Six acres doing this myself, which is a little intimidating. And working, but what we're planning to do is set up an educational center here, the Underland Lab. So being able to show what's possible in Montana in terms of some of these species that we're talking about, different plants, different types of composting, vermiculture, regenerating with horses, that's the thing. But yes, the education center here will be just a fantastic focus.

1:03:54 Point on the gateway to Yellowstone. So yeah at some point when you have that all up and running we can come to a course there and then we can take a little Yellowstone vacation and just have the whole thing all wrapped up. That's right, yeah we're going to tie it in with Retreats and other things, but also our create program which is the agro-ecological coaches school. We aim to the goal is to be able to start running it from here instead of I just got to stop traveling so much.

1:04:28 So the create program is something that people can do now and have been doing and it's a 36 week commitment right. Tell us a little bit about what that is and what you get at the end of that.

1:04:41 Yeah, so the create program is really for people interested in doing this as a career. So some of you have been involved in regenerative systems for a long time and are now potentially looking at what else could you do with that knowledge because it's so needed right now. There's a huge gap in the people providing the extension side the education, the facilitation, consulting and coaching. So this program is very much around the coaching side, so it's not where you come to learn about how do I build soil health. That's how do I communicate more powerfully around soil health and how do I work with others, clients, workshops, whatever that looks like. So we were looking to hire people before COVID and just discovered there were very few people that could do the diagnostics in terms of animal health, plant health, soil health, water quality and bring that all together with the human aspect. So this program's already designed around people in terms of you know you have some amazing skills in this area and then how do we expand in that and that side. So yeah, there's huge opportunities right now for people and this is a great stepping stone.

1:05:54 And that's really important because you know we talked about ag retailers earlier and even CPG companies. Part of their problem is they can't find people trained in regenerative principles in order to drive any of these things forward. And I know there's a number of them looking, you know they ask us and I said well you can't have any of my team. I'll keep my ears open for others and so there is a real need for this and there's going to be huge job opportunities for people trained in this. So that's a pretty intensive one but you've also got some online courses. I was looking at those just the other day and in fact I've got one of my, Kate from our sales team is going to do the horse course, you know building soil health with horses. But so if any of you are interested, Nicole has a number of different soil health, regenerative ag training courses on her website integritysource.com and they're, you know I've looked at a lot of courses over the years and these are as reasonably priced as any that I've seen. So check those out, take a look, she's got all kinds of resources there at integritysource.com including your book.

1:07:05 How many years has the book been out now? Since 2019, the end of October 2019. And it's interesting because you know I started writing it in 2017 so I feel like you know the minute you write a book you put a line in the sand and then that the water comes up and washes that line away and you're like, but you know and I plan to yeah do another book but that'd be great.

1:07:33 Yeah and one of the things I've really appreciated about reading your book is that you'll talk about a principle but then you back it up by talking about and here's how it was lived out in this farmer that I've worked with and I think that's really important so it's not just a book about theory, it's about successful people practitioners actually seeing these things work out in the field and that's really important. So go over to integritysource.com you can learn all about all these things and you know again we appreciate everybody joining us here. I know everybody's time is super valuable. This will be posted out on our YouTube channel. We apologize for all of you that we didn't get to your questions, just some great questions there. So Nicole, I'll give you the last word.

1:08:22 Oh no, I appreciate this so much Keith. I appreciate you guys tuning in. Thank you, just always amazes me that people tune in when we have a yarn. So yeah thank you very much and hopefully I'll see some of you out in the world. I'm gonna be in Wyoming next week and South Dakota in August so yeah keep an eye out for in-person workshops. And oh UK gonna be in the UK in two weeks. Are those different places that you're at, do you have those listed on your website as well? Yeah I mean it's on the website. Okay great, so again happy June everybody. Thanks for joining us. We will be following this up with some additional videos on the fallow fallacy. They won't be live webinars but we're going to be doing some recordings with some of our customers talking about how can we avoid fallow situations, whether it be a corn bean rotation, a wheat fallow rotation. We're going to be doing some recordings and putting those out on our YouTube channel for you as well. So we'll let all of you know when those videos are coming out. So thanks again everybody, have a great day and a great week. Thank you Nicole very much, Keith and team and everybody, bye.