Why Healthy Soils Don't Blow in the Wind: A Soil Health Perspective on Erosion

0:00 Hey everybody, welcome to the Green Cover podcast where we have really interesting conversations with some of the top farmers and experts in the regenerative world. Join us as we learn together how to regenerate, steward, and share God's creation for future generations.

0:14 I don't know how many of you remember, but in May of 2023, there were seven people that tragically lost their lives on Interstate 55, just south of Springfield, Illinois, when a dust storm swallowed up the highway with dust blowing off the fields. It made international news because it was such a tragedy. And our guest today, David Kleinmid, lives in that area, so he got to experience this tragedy firsthand.

0:42 And I know that he has some very passionate feelings about this and why it happened and how it can be prevented. And we know that there's lots of problems in agriculture, but we also know there's lots of really good solutions. And so I'd like to welcome David Kleinmid from Illinois as our guest today. David is a consultant and a farmer in that area. David, welcome to the podcast.

1:05 Hey, thanks Keith.

1:07 Yeah. And so before we kind of get into the specifics about that tragedy, and by the way, it's not limited just Illinois, the same thing happened in Nebraska and in Kansas just recently over the past couple years as well. And so these are not just isolated problems, but they're the symptom of a bigger issue. But before we get into all of that, give us a little bit of your background. Tell us who you are and tell us especially about the great news that you and your wife just experienced here recently too.

1:38 Yeah, thank you. So I grew up on a family farm in West Central Illinois. Had a love and a passion for farming and really with livestock as well and went to school. I guess I went for ag business economics, really kind of had more of a passion at that time for treating the farm as a business mindset. And when I graduated, I worked in retail for eight or 10 years there and was climbing up some different corporate ladders, you might say, within the industry. I learned a lot of the agronomy and stuff firsthand on a field basis kind of things.

2:23 2012 was our drought year here in Illinois. I had some aha moments. That was kind of my inception year of starting to use cover crops as a means to sequester those nutrients that we had applied out there for a corn soybean crop in that springtime. And with the failed crop, we thought, well, let's use a cover crop to sequester that. It's kind of a funny story I like to tell people. My aha experience was I was using annual ryegrass and it was being sold to me as cereal rye basically, but everything was ryegrass, you know. So I was like, well, what's the seeding rate? They're like 50 lbs an acre. So I'm seeding 50 lbs an acre of annual ryegrass out there.

3:09 And when we finally caught some rains from the hurricanes there, that stuff took off and it looked phenomenal. Maybe a little too well.

3:25 Annual ryegrass would be what 18 or 20 pounds not 50.

3:28 Well on the high side I mean I got I use a lot of three to five pound rates you know in some mixes and it looks great. So 50 pounds an acre was really good for the guys with cattle. It was a really big challenge next spring on how do we manage this now. But we learned a lot. And I think that's the big thing is we had to continue learning.

3:53 Beyond that I stepped away from the ag retail world and started my own consulting business where I focus mainly on a lot of soil health but I do a lot with soil testing and nutrient management and helping guys understand the biological function of their soil and pull that into why we should be using a cover crop and using different tillage practices. Sometimes it's no till, sometimes strip till, sometimes still some minimum tillage. But trying to fit it into what a farmer's comfort level is willing to risk, right? So trying to make sure that a farmer is still profitable and isn't losing any yield and profit while using a cover crop and these conservation practices as well.

4:42 Yeah, that's good. That's good. And you and your wife just recently had a big life event here.

4:49 Yeah. Yeah. Just a couple days right after Christmas, we had our first child and everyone's good and healthy and if I look like I'm tired, it's

4:59 Because of the child. [laughter and gasps] Well, get used to looking like this for the next 18 plus years, probably. But now it would have been easier if I was 20 years younger and did this. Maybe it's tired but totally worth it. So congratulations. That's great. Very excited for you guys.

5:22 So as a consultant you work with farmers, how big of a geography spread do you have? You know, lots of diversity in geography as well as in the crops that they're growing? Do you have some livestock guys kind of in that mix? What does that look like? Yeah, mainly it's a lot of corn, soybean, a little bit of wheat. Mainly where I'm located at is kind of between St. Louis and Effingham, Illinois. So kind of south central Illinois. I go down into Kentucky a little bit and go west of Columbia, Missouri. Some as far north as Kiwani, Illinois. So kind of that northern part of north central part of Illinois a little bit. My focus is mainly right here within Illinois trying to stay within driving distance from home. It's become a lot of traveling and sleeping in hotels and I really like to be in my own bed at night.

6:30 Yeah, for sure. And so do you have some livestock guys in the mix? Yeah, there's a few livestock guys I work with too on some grazing. Obviously in Illinois, it doesn't seem to be as big or prevalent as what it is when you get out into Missouri and even Kentucky. But there's more guys looking at livestock now with the price of corn and beans. Yeah, cattle are extremely high right now to be buying them. But it's another added revenue stream when you start to add the diversity into it. And honestly running that bushel of corn, that $420 corn through a steer and backgrounding a steer can increase that profitability on that corn bushel pretty good right now.

7:18 Mhm. Yeah. So let's go back to kind of the opening statement that I made talking about that tragedy there in Illinois, kind of in your backyard. I've heard you say that erosion is basically a biological problem, not a mechanical one. Take us through maybe kind of what happened in this situation and what were some of the things that went into the cause of that and what maybe we could be doing to prevent it.

7:47 Well, Keith, one of my favorite books is A Soil Owners Manual. And I think that it's right over there for me. I think that is a book that almost every high school ag class, maybe even biology class or even junior high should have and every farmer should have it. You know, when a lot of people take over a family farm or even first generation farmers, there's nobody out there that has an owner's manual as the soil owner manual, you know, says in the first chapter of how to treat the soil and what soil actually is. And I think over the last 60, 70 years we've really looked at the soil as a chemistry set, you know, something that just holds a plant upright. And if we look back at the moldboard plow and everything and the destruction of soil then with that tool and then fast forward to today, you know, the conservation tillage. I don't know if I really like that word or not, but the tools that we have with vertical tillage, high-speed disc, and things like that, in thinking about that top 2, 3 inches of the soil that we're working, now we're rapidly degrading that soil ecosystem. And especially destroying soil aggregates at a rapid pace and oxidating off that soil. And when I start to think about that tragedy up there off of I-55, you know, I think it was a misconception nationally that there was farmers in the field there. There was no farmers in the field. Corn was already up that tall. The soybeans were up. This is soil that was being blown off fields that I mean they were worked, they were dried. And quite frankly they were worked to a powder. Got a jar of that soil here and I kind of say you know this stuff, it resembles gunpowder. That's what it looked like and it completely filled up ditches. And you know there's been a lot of changes in that environment of tillage both in the fall and the spring and starting to use more cover crops as well to try to minimize that amount of soil loss. But even this year.

10:26 There was a dust storm that engulfed Chicago. You know, so we used to think that was just a western state problem and now it's becoming more almost an annual thing here in the eye states in the cornbelt. And we get a lot of rainfall in the springtime usually. Ironically, right after that, 2 days, 3 days after that dust storm, there was I want to say 3 or 4 inch rainfall event and I was up in that area the day after the accident, pulled that sample out of the ditch. Ditches that were four or five feet deep were just completely level with soil.

11:12 I got stuck in another dust storm up there that day in the back roads. And couple days later, I went up there after the rains because I was going to collect some samples of the muddy water and stuff, but it was so muddy going down roads, you couldn't even get down roads. And ironically, I was just at a meeting here this morning in the local soil water conservation district and we were talking about a lake that's about 50 years old. Most of these reservoirs have about a 50-year max capacity and then we've got issues. And the amount of soil that's entered into that reservoir is a lot.

11:54 And basically when I did the math on it and thinking like a ton of topsoils or five tons across an acre is about the thickness of a dime. And so I brought in a roll of dimes and showed this is how much soil we've lost in this 50 years. And this is why it is so important that we focus on it because we're really farming subsoil now. We're not farming that fertile soil that we once farmed even here in Illinois. It's changed a lot.

12:28 So I really focus a lot on getting guys to understand why it is important to have aggregation in that soil and what aggregates are, what builds aggregates, what destroys aggregates, and what that can provide us. And I get it that when we're talking about the farm economy where it's at, everybody's just looking to get by today and we're not thinking about next year. But if it's a family farm, we want this farm to be passed down to the next generation and the next generation after that. And maybe we need to be focused out 150 years from now and saying what are we going to do? What's our great great grandchildren going to farm? Are they going to farm the same crops? Are they going to farm the same way? I guarantee something's going to change and it'll be different. But the biggest thing is our soil is our greatest asset that we have and we cannot just treat it like a depreciating asset of a tractor or combine.

13:33 Yeah, that's a great point and I contend all the time that if landlords would understand that land represents their most valuable asset, so often they don't even think about when they auction that off to the highest bidder. The only way that highest bidder is going to make any money is they have to mine your soil as much as they can. They're going to take, take, take. Whereas if they establish a long-term fair and equitable relationship with a good farmer who really takes care of it like it's their own, they're going to come out so much further ahead down the road. But it's just hard for them to get to understand that. So I think we have a lot of educational work to do with land owners as well as the operators.

14:22 Yeah, if land owners, the managers, the bankers, the insurance industry, I think they all need it. Ironically, my wife and I went out to Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire here this fall, and we went to a farm museum out there in Vermont. And at first I was like, okay, this is going to be a farm museum. I've been to enough farms, whatever. But I was shocked when we went in there and the first thing we did is sit into an auditorium and watched this little 30-minute documentary. I got it actually right here. A Place in the Land. And it talked about George Perkins Marsh and his views on the land and how much of a conservationist he was and talked about the erosion that occurred from them logging off those hills. And shortly before we went out there, I stumbled upon a bunch of old letters from George Washington talking about land and land management and how much the land was degraded from just basically farming it to death. And he was really, I mean, did you know George Washington farmed like or owned.

15:42 69,000 acres? Yeah, he had a lot. That blows my mind back in that time. Right. So he used cover crops. Yeah. So we look at like using cover crops, the manure, to compost, to everything he was doing then and what he was saying. And fast forward, you know, 200 years, 250 years now and thinking, what shape are our soils in compared to then? Like, holy cow, if we had degraded them then, we have exhausted them.

16:18 Yeah, that's a great point. We were at Mount Vernon a number of years ago and you know, saw documentation of a lot of what you're talking about. Yeah, it was cool because they had different little cover crop plots growing of, you know, these are some of the things. I'm sure he didn't use it across all his acres, but hey, a lot of his farmers don't use it across all their acres either, but they definitely understood the concepts of diversity and crop rotation and integration of livestock and all of that. So, yeah, very cool to look at some of those historical things. And a lot of what we're trying to do now is it's not necessarily earth-shattering. We're just going back to the way. So I like to say regenerative agriculture—it's combining the best of what they would have done generations ago with the new technology that we have today that allows us to take a peek through a microscope and through other assessment tools that we can see a little bit of what's going on and combine the old technology with the new technology and really have a far superior system to both.

17:24 100%. Right. I think we got to take a chapter out of grandpa and great-grandpa's playbook a little bit. And I've been telling guys that's what, you know, if we can take something that they knew and implement it into what we do now and with the technology—I, it floors me when guys are like, well, I just don't have time. You know, in the eye states, we're going to get rain in the fall time. Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, those guys are, you know, hitting that fall. Like to be able to use a drone and spread a cover crop is going to be kind of hit and miss. But here, I mean, we could be flying a cover crop on in late August and have a really good stand and not take away time during harvest, you know. It's just an operational challenge or change really. Yeah, and when you're going that early, you can have some diversity. You know, when you're doing it the middle of late October, well, you know, cereal rye is a great option, but there's not a lot of other things. Maybe throw some hairy vetch in, but that's about it. But man, if you're going late August, you can do some cool things.

18:33 Oh, yeah. Yeah. I flew on some with a drone into some corn here at my house, and if we would have caught some rain, it would have been great to graze this fall. But now it looks great out there, you know.

18:43 So, what types of things did you fly on when you did that? I did some annual rye grass, some winter barley, some oats. 50 pounds an acre, right? Lesson learned. Lesson learned. No. It was only like 8 pounds an acre. Everything else was pretty low. You know, the oats and the barley were, you know, like five and 10 or something like that. I did some forage collards. I really like them. And some buckwheat into it. I was actually shocked that the buckwheat was the first thing to really germinate after a little bit of rain. And took off and grew really nice and then a little bit of red clover in it as well.

19:30 Yeah. Nice. Yeah. I tell people, you know, because buckwheat will die with the first frost. But I tell them if hey, if you've got 30 days, maybe 5 weeks before you think it's going to freeze, I would throw a couple pounds of buckwheat out there because it grows so fast and it does so many good things for the soil. You know, it doesn't have to get all the way to maturity to still give you a lot of the benefits. And so, I'm glad you included that because it's just a great way to add that diversity in there. Yeah. So David, I want to go back a little bit here to, you know, back to the erosion issue and, you know, again with this tragedy, you know, there had been tillage done but it had been in the past because you know things were growing but we've seen here and I just I'm curious what you've seen in your area. We've had neighboring fields that have

20:22 Blown like crazy and they were 100% no till. Yeah, but they came in and they mowed the corn stalks and they came in and they raked them up and they hauled everything that they could possibly get off to a feed lot. And part of it is they're probably paying top dollar cash rent. And so again, they're having to capture every little bit that they can in order to try to pay that top dollar cash rent. And we've seen long-term no till fields just blowing like the dust bowl. Yeah, even though there was no tillage whatsoever done, but there was also zero residue out there because it was all removed. And so, have you seen do you see that in your area? And what are your what's your perspective on that?

21:07 Well, we don't have as much of the bailing corn stocks here. Again, we just don't have the livestock. I guarantee if I jumped over into Iowa, you're going to see a lot more of that. You might not see the cows out there as much, but they're in a building somewhere too. Whether it's a bedpack barn or whatever, but and it's hit and miss. But I will say that there's been a lot of guys going to chopping corn heads and that really blows. I mean even in the fall it's we get these prevalent 20, 30 mph winds and that residue just fills up the ditch. Fast forward to the spring when we get all these big rains and all that residue builds up the ditches, and plugs up all the culverts and everything else. I mean, I'm not a big fan of the chopping corn heads. I think we've got enough technology on our planters now that we do not need that.

22:12 There's guys that go out and BT stocks in the fall, you know, to enhance the breakdown and everything. You might as well disc them and get some soil on them so they don't blow at that point in time in my opinion. I've got some guys that run a Valmar cedar on a Salford or some type of vertical tillage tool and use that to seed cover crops. It's a win. That's a win in my opinion. You know it'll hold it. We're not going deep. We're just getting enough to incorporate some seed into that soil and it works really good. I do like that.

22:50 See that cost much for the cover crop. I mean, they're probably just throwing some rye out there. I mean, they can probably do that for, you know, 8 to 12 bucks an acre would be my guess.

23:00 Yeah. I mean, if they're not into a CSP or equipped or some type of program, you know, 20 pounds an acre is enough cereal rye. I mean, we do not need to be going out 60 pounds an acre all the time. You know, depends on what a guy's goals are. But really especially guys that are probably going to terminate it early, you know, they don't they're not going to graze it. They don't have the means to graze or just cash ground. 20 pounds an acre is plenty.

23:30 Yeah, and that will eliminate that erosion issue. What how do you see that because I know in our area a lot of guys resistant weeds, you know, the weed control thing, cereal rye can be pretty effective at that. How do you see, you know, cereal rye playing into the mindset and the rotation of someone who's really trying to go after some of these tough weeds?

23:52 Yeah, it definitely suppresses it. I've got some pictures of where one of my guys who strip tilled into his cereal rye in the early part of April planted some non-GMO beans in it and in that strip water hemp broke was the first place it broke, in between the strips. Were there still rye residue? Hardly any at all, you know. But where we removed that residue, we had water hemp issues. And we fight a lot of water hemp. Starting to see more Palmer amaranth in places too. You go out west, you got kosha and some other problematic weeds. And everybody's got their own weeds issues. Ironically, I kind of feel like in the conventional, you know, not GMO or GMO, it doesn't really matter. We fight more the small seeded weeds compared to an organic system. They don't seem to fight, you know, the water hemp as much or at all really. Grasses and large seeded broadleaf tend to be their issues.

24:55 Dr. Carla Gage from SIU at Carbondale, Southern Illinois University. She's been doing some research with Arkansas and Purdue on winter barley and showing that winter barley actually can suppress more of those amaranth species than what cereal rye can. So I've been kind of leaning guys, especially guys that are just starting out with cover crops to go that winter barley route.

25:27 Because it doesn't get 6 foot tall, you know, it's not that intimidating to them. And from my experience with winter barley is you can go at a lower rate and it loves to tiller out. If you get it in in time, you'll tiller out and it'll look like a really thick stand come that next spring. And because it stays shorter, even if it's a wet spring and he lets it grow and mature, he doesn't have to worry about it plugging up his radiator with pollen. So I've been kind of pushing guys to that a little bit. And plus, if you're going into corn, it's a little bit more forgiving, I think, cereal rye, just because of that carbon to nitrogen ratio and the sheer amount of biomass that you produce is a lot less as well.

26:17 Yeah, 100% agree with that. You know, most guys that experience yellow corn, you know, planted into a cover crop. They'll say, well, see that cover crop was allelopathic to the corn, but no, it really wasn't because true allelopathy is that it affects the germination, but they're just seeing the nitrogen tie up, the nutrient tie up. And that would still be somewhat of a risk with barley, but not near as much as, you know, like you said, with rye that wants to get five or six feet tall if you blink your eyes twice.

26:49 Exactly, 100%. Yeah, and I think that's one of the biggest things that scares a lot of guys from cover crop is that big biomass. And everybody has a story that they talk to, right? So they said that this happens, they said that this will happen, they said that this yield was bad. Well, I think that one of the things that we've got to get away from in this whole soil health mindset, cover crop, whatever you want to call this type of regenerative farming or whatever, is that the cover crop as an overarching term can be a lot of different things, but it always seems like cereal rye the first thing we talk about, and go to, and there's a lot of guys that probably just need to start out with an oats and radish and winter, and go about it that way. But we need to start understanding more about species and what they do. Carbon to nitrogen ratios need to be talked about and discussed a lot to understand that. And there's a lot of farmers that never have heard of carbon to nitrogen ratio discussion in their life.

27:57 Yeah, and we talk about that a lot and I know you talk about that a lot. Just briefly describe what that's representing and why that's so important for the cycling of nutrients or the prevention of weeds because you might want it really high, you might want it really low. Just talk about how that works with the goals or the context for an individual farmer.

28:20 Yeah, I usually tell guys, you know, starting out, your cover crop needs to complement your cash crop and not compete with it, right? So if you're planting corn, you want to understand that corn requires a lot of nitrogen. And the cereals, the triticale, the barley, the rye, those will take up a lot of nitrogen. They produce a lot of carbon, which can be a good thing, you know, if we're trying to clean water, whatever. But it doesn't release back out that nitrogen for maybe 15, 18 months or longer. So it's well after that corn crop is removed. So we need to focus on those lower carbon and nitrogen plants like either terminating the grass species out early with some select or clethodim or FOP type chemistry. If we got legumes in there like a crimson or balansa clover, the peas or the hairy vetch, maybe we let them grow and produce nitrogen for us. You know, everything that that plant grows above ground as a legume is basically a warehouse for nitrogen. Yet we think about the nitrogen production in the soil system there with those legumes and the nodules. And that's true. That's where a lot of that chemical action and biological activity is occurring there. But it's the above ground biomass that is a warehouse that's storing that nitrogen as protein if we think about it in terms of like alpha. So the more of that biomass that we can grow out there, the more nitrogen that we can have that after we terminate it will slowly release back out into that soil system. But it all depends on rain, you know, it depends on rain of when that nutrient's going to get mineralized and released back out. But also we need to be kind of meteorologists at planting time and look at what the weather's been like since we planted that cover crop.

30:20 And what the weather ahead of us is looking like for the next two or three weeks. You know, if we've been here, we're below on moisture. If we didn't catch, we don't catch a lot of moisture come, you know, mid-March, we might be thinking about terminating that cover crop early because it is going to be using moisture as well, you know.

30:38 So we still need to raise a cash crop here, but we want to then look at like those grass species. That's in my opinion, those go in front of our legumes as much as possible. So we can put a higher seeding rate of those out there in front of those legume species because they make their own nitrogen, right? So we can starve that system a little bit of excess nitrogen and pull it up through that grass and produce a lot of carbon out there through root exudates and that above ground biomass.

31:11 In that cover crop residue. I tend to tell guys it's kind of like a fire, you know, especially when we start talking about biological activities of that soil profile is that if we're taking the right soil test, it's measuring, you know, just simple respiration to tell us how active that soil biology is. And given our rainfall for our environment or our region, you know, that'll kind of determine how much carbon and nitrogen we can afford to build up into that residue or that biomass and not tie up those nutrients.

31:49 But if we have, you know, four or five foot tall cereal rye out there and we're going to go plant corn, we say, well, we've got nitrogen on the planter. We're going to side dress nitrogen. You know, it'll be great. But then our respiration rates, our microbial activity is low. Basically, what we've got is we've got a small fire that we started in that soil with those microbes. Now, that biomass, we threw a big three-foot log on it. That kind of snuffs out a fire. Then, if we come back on and we throw on nitrogen, that's like pouring gasoline onto a fire.

32:21 So we get a huge burst of energy. The microbes are going to use that nitrogen because they've been starved nitrogen in that system, but they have all of this carbon that they need. So bacteria, you know, three to one, five to one carbon to nitrogen. So for every three or three parts carbon, it's going to need one part nitrogen. So the more carbon you have out there, the more microbes are going to use that synthetic nitrogen that we're putting on to feed the crop to break down the residue, but it's not going to give us back the nitrogen until much later in the season when we can't use it. Or maybe even next season.

32:57 So that's where I tell guys, you know, we got to understand where that biological activity is of that soil to manage that seed to end so we're not snuffing it out and we're not wastefully spending our nitrogen dollars ahead of corn as well. Once that thing starts rocking and we've got high respiration, then we can start throwing the kitchen sink at it because it's going to eat up everything out there really quick, you know. But until we get to that point, the more big carbon that we just keep throwing onto it, we actually just kind of plateau that respiration and it's really slow to increase. At least that's been my experience even here in Illinois with my rainfall environment.

33:39 No, I think you're right. We've seen some very similar things. You know, one of the biological products that we've been kind of playing around with this past fall was the decomposer type product. And you know, they've been out there for a long time. And I was always under the assumption that you put those on there, you know, you're adding biology, it's, you know, breaking down the carbon of your corn stocks or whatever, but it's pulling nitrogen out of the soil in order to do that. And you know it breaks it down but it can kind of tie that nitrogen up in the process.

34:14 Well, this particular product is very interesting because it has a bunch of free living nitrogen fixers in it and so it's actually producing nitrogen pulling atmospheric nitrogen out as it's breaking down that carbon. Which is great. But one of the things that I think we're going to try this year, you know, as you roll down or spray down or smash down, you know, tall cereal rye, I wonder what would happen if we put some of that same product on, speed up that decomposition and not be pulling nitrogen out of the soil away from the corn, but be adding nitrogen into the system from the atmosphere because of the type of bacteria. So, I don't know. If that would work, that would be really cool. That's been my thoughts here for the last few years.

35:02 Is that you know there is a role for a lot of these biologicals out here and

40:10 He's saying is you can't just go out there and just pull the plug without doing something else to kind of put yourself into a position to replace all that. And for most people, you can't do that all at once. It has to be a scaled down effect, and you need to be doing some trials every year of, you know, put a strip out there with zero nitrogen, one strip and just see what it did or, you know, 30 lb, 60 lb, whatever it is. But you have to earn that right before you start pulling that back. I do believe that many systems can get there, but you have to do it smartly because you can't afford to lose the farm just in order to improve your soil.

40:48 No, we can't die on that hill, right? I mean, and that's kind of where I look at a soil as a biochemical physical system. A sandy soil is going to function differently than a clay lump, and it's going to have different nutrients that are tied up or released. And I think that we need to look at nutrient interactions even in that soil within our soil test which are not 100% accurate by any means. But it can give us an idea of when we need to apply nutrients even to avoid that antagonism by other nutrients in that soil and to make sure it adequately gets into the crop.

41:26 A fertilizer is a pure cost. It does not ever become an ROI until it gets in the plant and actually does something for us. And I will die on that hill. But yeah, it's a small percentage that ever makes it into the crop.

41:44 Yeah. I mean, you think about phosphorus, it needs to be within 1 to two millimeters of that root to be able to actually be taken up. Well, if you're broadcasting 150 lbs, divide that, you know, take that times 46 and divide that by 43560 and figure out how many actual grams you're putting on per square foot to raise a 200 plus bushel corn crop. I mean, and potassium is 5 to seven. And potassium is one that I think that we, you know, it needs more focus on just because of what it does with nitrogen into that plant, and it's five to seven millimeters from the root hair per interception. And when we get dry soils and everything wants to tie up potassium, we just can't get enough of it to be efficient with nitrogen utilization.

42:32 Ironically, and I know you've been out to the Morrow plots here at University of Illinois, I'm on an advisory committee for the University of Illinois looking at an alma mater plot where we're going to look out 150 years from now because the Morrow plots now is 150 years back and saying what's the future of agriculture? What should we be looking at and you know there's 70 acre plot and it's 1.2 2 acre plots that are going to be replicated. Right now they've been this past year they did nitrogen trials which I feel like we've been beating nitrogen to death, but like zero pounds of nitrogen made 160 bushel granted that's Illinois right, well 240 lbs of nitrous only made 230 or 260. Like okay, that was kind of wasteful. I bet 50 pounds of nitrogen would have been your maximum or your optimum there and I think we especially when we get into economics and talking about the farm economy, we are over applying even on conventional acres.

43:37 Yeah. So that's really interesting. The what did you call it? The alma mater pod. So are they going to start looking at different cropping rotations, different inputs, different, you know, like robotics and things? Are they looking at all these types of things for down the road? Because that's really interesting. Yeah, we're trying to figure that out. We're trying to figure out kind of where the farmer mindset is, what they're thinking. We just had our first meeting here back in November. We're kind of looking at like what's the crop rotation going to look like? You know, if we look at the world's supply of phosphorus, there's only 30 40 years left of phosphorus to be mined. Do we need to be looking at things that release that phosphorus out of the soil more? Do we need to look at going back and using more animal integration or even if it's within confined feeding, you know, applying that manure back onto that landscape? Or byproducts that phosphorus could be extracted from. Looking at crop rotations of maybe corn's not going to be king. And if we are going to raise ethanol or fuel source because let's be honest the bulk majority of the crops that are produced in this country of corn and soybeans, majority of it goes to fuel first more than animal feed or even human consumption. So looking at fuel of what other crops could be oil seed crops or

45:06 Whatever could be raised on a kind of more of a broad acre from Minnesota to Texas that could help supplement that. I wish maybe the technology will come about where we could have ethanol and biofuel plants that can take sunflowers this week or this month and switch over to canola and go from milo to corn or soybeans or whatever, and not just be corn ethanol and that's it. Milo ethanol, that's it. That would allow us to at least have more diversity of crop rotation across the entire country.

45:42 If we're going to demand a 15% blend in ethanol, let's do that. Let's not focus on raising more corn and having more carryover of corn because everybody right now is upset about the report that just came out. The last couple days have proved that we don't need more corn.

46:02 I would hope that one of the things that the team there at the University of Illinois would look at is what could we grow, not across 90 million acres like what we're doing with corn, but what could we grow as either smaller farmers or as a portion of the farm, that people can directly eat. The Midwest used to be the leading producer of all the vegetables in the country before California came on board and developed irrigation and all that. Agronomically, we can do it. I think it would be really interesting because I think that farmers fundamentally would farm differently if they knew what they were growing was going directly onto someone else's plate or even their own plate, versus well, this is just going to be to the ethanol plant or to a feedlot or something like that.

47:09 I would hope. I've said this several times that farmers don't even feed themselves, but we claim we feed the world. There's a lot of farmers I know that don't even have a garden or that don't raise livestock. They raise corn and beans and that's it, and they go to the grocery store for everything. We don't feed ourselves. Everything that we buy at a grocery store is a byproduct of corn and soybean or soy or rice. When I start thinking about the canning industry and what was in Illinois, there used to be a really big industry for canneries and a lot of that has even gone across seas, across the ocean now. Not because they can raise it cheaper than what we can, but the cans themselves are cheaper than what we can put them in. You're putting in a can that's cheaper and you can ship it from India to here and that's gonna be cheap. I mean that just doesn't make economic sense to me. When you think about this whole carbon footprint thing, if we were really to have a discussion about that, well shipping food from India to here doesn't make any sense at all. Why isn't America feeding America?

48:30 To be truthfully honest, Keith, when you start looking at the phosphorus and potassium even worldwide, I hear farmers all the time saying we need to demand a better price for that fertilizer. The US is not the number one consumer of phosphorus and potassium. We're like the number three and five. And actually in the US, we're using more phosphoric acid in the food and beverage industry than the ag industry is using. Other countries are now feeding themselves. They're raising better crops. They're increasing their yield substantially. The US, we've kind of plateaued really. When we look at global demand and export market and everything else, maybe we need to be a little bit more selfish and just focus on ourselves and feed ourselves.

49:16 For sure. Hopefully, you know, advancements in technology and AI will allow us to put in food processing facilities that can be much more automated, much lower cost of labor and much more efficient. I think farmers, if farmers could grow tomatoes and make money and have a market to deliver it to, Illinois farmers would be doing that. I promise you they would because they're desperate to grow something that's profitable.

49:51 There was a young man here, a guy that did a meeting with a local soil water conservation district last spring and it

49:58 Was called Kegs for Conservation. He was a brew master. So he took the spin on agriculture and its role in beer making and in the history of beer, which is really cool. In how much barley was grown worldwide and even in the US where it was grown and how much it has shrunk into a small portion of the country now. And I think about all these other crops that we could grow, you know, besides corn and soybeans. We could grow about anything we wanted to and a lot, especially in that corn belt here, that we just don't have the market to do it or maybe it's the crop insurance that has pushed us to corn beans. But I think it's kind of funny when you look at these government payments that just were announced and you look at the top three crops that were paid on a per acre basis was cotton, oats and rice.

51:04 Well, in my opinion, oats and rice pretty much go direct to human consumption first. The cotton is pretty much to close, right? Then you look at where it breaks down from there. Corn and soybeans kind of fall in that middle of the pack to the lower part of it, and wheat's pretty low, which kind of shocks me a little bit too. But maybe that was telling us that they're willing to pay more for food.

51:36 Well, they should. You know, we should be putting our dollar where the food is. So yeah, I just find that to be a fascinating conversation and, you know, we're guilty as anybody of, you know, not really doing that. But we have gotten back into livestock and we'll be trying to grow grass-fed beef to direct market here eventually. So I think everybody should just be thinking about how they can do that because think about what would happen to American agriculture or the major movement if we converted just 10% of the crop ground over to direct food production for people.

52:20 I did the math on it here this fall one day and if we took like the bottom 10% of acres on corn and beans and said, you know, hey, here's the national average. Let's take the bottom 10% of those acres that weren't producing as high of yields and not as productive and we put them to something else. What would that do to the corn price and the national corn yield average? I mean, it shot the corn yield average high, you know, an extra, I think, 10 to 15 bushels over what we are today, but the price of corn then jumped up to $8 to $9. I mean, it's just crazy.

53:01 Yeah. And that 10% it could be planted to a diverse cover crop and you could background cattle on that. I mean, they'll do incredibly well on that. And once you do that for a year or two, those may not be your bottom 10% of the ground anymore because you may improve them so much that something else would be.

53:21 Oh, I agree with that. I think that's something that a lot of guys, I've been seeing more and more guys talking about giving up acres that are not profitable and some of these big heavy yield hitters are giving up some serious acres because they're not profitable. They're really looking at their bottom line here. And sure, somebody's probably going to come in and rent it out and pay whatever, but I think if we were to convert that and give it a rest and focus on some livestock onto that, integrating it, we could see some nice value out of it. Honestly, I think right now you could probably pencil out a better ROI on grazing cover crops on a per acre basis than you can on corn and beans right now.

54:13 Yeah. Well, that's a pretty low bar to get over the top of right now, but yeah, I think you're exactly right. And I think too, you know, with again new technology coming out with, you know, the grazing collars, GPS collars, and you know, now they're kind of still pricey, but I think that price is going to come down because there's good competition now within that marketplace and innovative ways for, you know, other types of fencing and water. It's just going to there's better tools out there to do it now than there's ever been.

54:44 Yeah. There just needs to be a want, right, and a drive.

54:48 Yeah, that's right. Well, hey, David, this has been a great conversation. I always like to kind of bring things to a close by just asking you to just think about, you know, if you're working with a new farmer, maybe there's a new young farmer who's just starting up and says, you know, I really want to do regenerative ag or maybe it's an experienced farmer who wants to change the way they're doing things, want to be a faithful steward of the land, not just maximize yield, but really take care of that land. How do you what advice do you give them to get started? Where's the best place for someone to get started if they're really starting to think about this?

55:29 I mean, you know, there's a ton of different podcasts out there, a lot of YouTube videos, but you can go down a rabbit hole on a lot of things. I think you have to look at everything with kind of an open eye on all aspects. Again, I really, really like that Soil Owner manual book. It's easy to read. It's small. It's not like you're reading a 300-page book or a textbook. It's written to a level where a sixth grader could understand it.

55:59 There's actually a new edition of that out. I don't know if you realize that or not.

56:04 I saw that the other day. Acres yeah, so it's newly revised and even more up to date.

56:10 Yep. So I think that's a best place. There's some depending on the state. I will say that there are some states that have really good soil health specialists that could be a very good resource. Several states have a soil health coalition now. I know Nebraska has one, pretty sure South Dakota, North Dakota has one, Minnesota has one, Kansas has one, and probably others out there too. And they've been putting on a lot of good meetings and good place to network. I think the best thing that a farmer can do is network with peers within their own area to just have a support group. And I think that we need more of those support groups within farmers to when they're going in and implementing this or just to bounce ideas off of. I know Howard Miller down there in Hutchinson, Kansas, has done a fantastic job with his group down there and I think we need more of that out there. I really advise guys to start small, you know, and understand that everybody has a different aversion to risk. You know, some guys playing into six foot tall cereal rye and not blink an eye and other guys freak out about a 2-inch tall cereal rye plant out there. Starting out with something that winter kills is okay. You know, do that for a few years. Understand what it's doing to your soils and get out into your fields with a spade and actually look and analyze your soil system and then go to the roadside or go to that ditch or go to an old fence row or something that's been there for a long time and dig up the soil there and just look at it side by side. That will tell you exactly what your soils could be. Cuz I've seen guys that have taken soil samples and dug up 10, 12 feet away from each other and the field looks like moon dirt for lack of better terms. And the stuff that's in that fence row looks like it came from some of the best central Illinois soils you ever seen, and it's literally the same soils. It's just the biological activity. And we need to understand that. Take a spade and learn a little bit.

58:40 But be humble. Be willing to be humbled.

58:44 Yeah. So get started. Start small, but do something and get out there and get your hands dirty essentially. I like that advice. So thank you, David, so much for taking time to visit with us here on the Green Cover podcast. We just pray blessings over you and your wife and that new baby. So thank you.

59:02 Thank you again for visiting with us and thank you everybody for listening to this episode of the Green Cover podcast. My brother and I started Green Cover in 2009 because we understand what it's like to be a farmer starting out on the journey to improve soil health. We saw the power of plant and biological diversity on our own farm here in Nebraska, but we found that it was difficult to get the right cover crop seed mix. We also learned that there was a big learning curve in successfully implementing cover crops. That's why we built Green Cover so that farmers like you can access the highest quality cover crop seed put into the right diverse mixes along with the technical advice and the educational resources to help you successfully implement cover crops on your own operation. So contact us today and we'll help you with the right cover crop mix for your farm or ranch so you can regenerate your portion of God's creation for future generations.