CTC18 David Montgomery, with David Brandt

we've been in changing equipment you know and with that you know you saw this picture earlier this is just a great five way plan this happened to be Bill after a CRP farm you know we went in and asked NRCS if we could kill what was there about a month and a half or two months before the contract was over and this is what you got to do and I says we're going to plant cover crop and then we're gonna roll that crop we're gonna plant corn broccoli using the herbicides we're not going to use the nitrogen and my NRCS officer says well you're not going to get any corridor nice that's probably not you know but we're going to give it a try so this is how we did it because we didn't clout you know it seems like every time CRP comes out they've either want to till it or plow it or burn it and then they lose more soils the first year than they saved all the ten years that was in the program so this is what we did and here we are in the spring rolling that cover crop getting ready to plant into it you know then there's what's left you know there's there's the hairy vetch the purple flower you know if you visualize back in the 80s when everybody had that thank carpet in their living room but your toes went in and it was about three or four inches deep that's just about what that field looks like you know and we've got lots of things going on we got beneficial insects coming because we've got flowered things there we got the soil cover we're keeping it cool we can plant into it you know it's not a problem I go to Ohio and show this picture there's my goodness he says there's no way you can plant through that you know it's got to be brown it don't have to be brown just learn how to make this piece of equipment work and there it's real simple I flew to Koehler running about an inch and a half deep in the soil see this run about an inch and three quarters to an inch and a half and rubber press wheels you know if you would like to have row cleaners hydraulic down pressure on stuff call me I got it in the shed you know but you know the colder does a nice job you know as we see this thing work it's not moving it's just cutting the residue you know behind look at the plan there's no soil being moved you know this has to be a 15 inch planner but we're third plant and 30 inch rows so that's why you see the little green sticking to those every other wheel but we're accomplishing what we want and no soil speed move so we're not losing anything no dust guess what that slows 58 degrees in four days that corns up we don't have to worry about it can you cut the residue you know yes you can you know doesn't that look nice I mean you couldn't cut it you bear with a pair of scissors you know but there it is again and this is laying over the seat Rams so we don't have to worry about I don't worry about closing as much as I need to because they've got this cover they're holding the moisture they're keeping that from a sweet shrink itself happening so don't uncover the scene you know works really well again you saw this picture I love this picture you know there's four three and a half inches of stash or three inches of thatch five days after the corns planted first true leaves are coming out and look how garden green they are Rabab you know doesn't need anything right there absolutely not you know here it is a little later you know it looks ugly you know my conventional neighbors are just having fish with my landlords mind look at that mess David's got if you just rinse that farm we'll make it all brown and Parikh you know well I Got News for we got to make them look good you know again they're the corn is you've seen this this is a picture I want to show you we spent a lot of time trying to help all the people in our community we have we have a day in August do we invite people to come just to see the farm this happened to be in June this is a bunch of new employees from NRCS we trained three times a year to NRCS employees and here they're walking the field and you see that guy with a shovel we almost give everybody a shovel so they understand how to use you know and they look at this corn in this corn has not had starter fertilizer has not had herbicides on it it has non nitrogen yet but look at the color of it that's what I want to show you look how dark green it is you know yes we can do this you need to do it at a small scale as your start and learn how to adjust to it and reduce your nutrients you know you don't have to bite the bullet and throw it all the way just do a little bit at a time and learn how you do it you know we talked about soil temperature saw this this morning you know here's the field we didn't roll the corn struggles a little bit until it gets up to see the sunlight you can spindly that's why we like to roll it laid down flat when the first comes up we don't have trouble with it you know but there's my neighbor soil you know which is one of those pictures would you like you know would you like this one you know or do you like this one look at the frosting soil look at that leaf with citing that temperature gauge it's yellow guess what if I slip in that field I'd say that field needs nitrogen you know what it really needs is an anhydrous tool bar with no tank hooked to it it's just that air to the ground you know it's going to increasing yield its starving for nutrients like Browns frosty it's hard you know oh here's what I love well I like to go up to Lake here you know I get my big bird for him out and we can go out and catch a 30 pound bass you know it's no problem that point of warm water with the hook you know 1828 earthworms guess how deep the holes are how big around there they're like a write and pencil the water will go in you know that's all right you're doing fine of course here's her soil you know I mean this this tells to me this tells the whole story the others would have looked like when we started and here's where we're at today we have not degraded the soil we've improved the soil we're now not using on that black soil we're not using any bought nutrients you know we're signed in the back of check in nineteen in 2014 we're not signing in the front you know our test weights are up or the decimal protein in the corns up you know we're producing nine and a half to nine point nine protein corn we said a 4% corner my neighbor produces you know you saw this when I go spend much time with this this is the problem people if we don't start as producers to control our soils and we have this problem again and we was lucky this year we had a cool summer so the water never got extremely warm we could have had the biggest algae bloom they ever saw in Lake Erie but the sort of the cool those water never got above 84 degrees so we didn't have the bloom if we have this and the recreational industry and the fishing industry takes it on the chin again there will be rules coming from somewhere to tell us what to do so I'm saying let's try to learn how to keep our soils where it belongs so we can redo this they've reduced this in the Chesapeake Bay if you get around the Chesapeake Bay it's all green you know but you ought to see the notebook those poor farmers have to keep you know every time they get up in the morning you've got to write something down in that book that's how bad it is out there you know I love my conventional neighbor we have a lot of fun together I saw this thing working and I was yelling corner across the road this is a fall picture or two years ago and I've never seen anything so beautiful in all my life I says man I just got it go across and talk to her and brag to him how nice it was he didn't know I was going to use them telling how bad things are but you know here he comes up the road off of the field he's falling a 36 inch deep Ripper 27 inches deep with 42 each cutters on the front 36 inch cutters on the back of rolling masking and four bar hera and he says when he pulled up and stopped he says David he says we have a greater crop in here for six years but we're going to do her this year because we've loosened her 27 inches deep you know and I said that's really nice guess what he hadn't brewed a crop there yet you know he's still trying to use it you know but what he's doing as he adds had oxygen to the soil he's burning up all the carbon you know can you imagine if you went home tonight or tomorrow afternoon and when this is over and your house is gone because the wind blew it away you had a hurricane you had all kinds of problems that can calm would you rebuild it and then three weeks or four weeks later the same thing happens how many times have you removed your house that's why the earthworm's and everything leaves when you destroy this soil you know and this is what we're doing is conventional tillage we're losing carbon dioxide we're losing organic organic matters this is not the moon and Dave's you talk about this particular later he's got a really good picture but this is my uncle's farm he's 96 years old he's not gonna change you know he's down to 13 little beans per acre because he's wrote grazing there for 40 years you know you don't know what's going on there's the reason high bacteria driven soils that take lots of nutrients bought and nutrients look down there he has no fungi yes no nematodes there's no protozoa how does he make the soil work he can't so he's got to buy the products you know oops go fast bill this is what it looks like when we're planting our rows are damn crooked but we get a hell of a population I know but boy we love it you know if you look through close you can see the little mark out there you know we're not fortunate enough to have guidance this happen to be one of our 27 landlords it has less than five acres you know so that's one of those little for April fields little Grove corn you know there's the biomass that's 47,000 pounds that's four and a half inches of thatch corns planted I went home and I'm just eating supper and I'm feeling really good it's green and growed there's a results everybody seen corn here's the real results if you look at the very top right hand forward left hand corner that picture that says 208 motional that's a rolling field average if you've not seen their green or combine that's what it tells us the second second when they're says when I took the picture was averaging 276 guess what that field of corn made me with no nitrogen no fungicides no insecticides no seed corn treatment we had 596 bucks an acre profit do you do that good last fall you know my grandson told me we got to do a better job with a yield map the reason is he's in black lines he says grandpa you got to raise up the hitter and get out of the field we haven't been doing it right for years you know but what we're after do what are these plants have deep roots look at the cottage cheese in that soil you know if you like the cottage cheese large curd we don't like cottage cheese just go buy some open it can't wanting to feel to see if your souls look like that if they don't you don't have healthy soils you know but this is a research that the Ohio State did for me dr. tafiq did this this is a 5-year study and this is why Dave Brandt says he don't need to buy nutrients you know you can all read but look at the amount of nitrogen here look at the calcium to that soil that we're bringing out where does this nitrogen come from it comes from now the atmosphere why are we bearing nitrogen when you go out here and breathe and there's nitrogen in the air you know again let's lose legumes that pulls that nitrogen now the atmosphere let's make them have nodules of nice roots to feed the corn plant The Ohio State finally agreed two years ago that field corn now can grow into a nodule and Hughes organic nitrogen it says it don't need to be an Titleist you know planners are designed to do it that happened to be the soybean plate with winter pieces little red plates you see back there is the reddish plate or a sugar beet plate and that's how we do it precision ly we'd like to see green fields in the fall you know those are peas and radishes whoops you saw that one later on there's our precision radishes picket fence stands four inches apart two and a half inches in diameter 32 inches deep look at the color that soil wouldn't everybody love to have that Dave oh yeah you know again there they are hairy vetch you know crimson clover these are things that can work warm season the goom's why not try some you know you know we know that the cool season the goons won't grow an 18 I agree whether we'd inoculate everything because the souls never seen it before you must have the right bacteria son in this is a great story Tim I'm gonna switch and let Dave talk but I got this about 15 years ago at a meeting like this a nice colored fella stood up from Africa and boy he was a talking and and he was like Dave he can really tell you the stories and he was showing me this stuff and he planned it and a week later it was a foot tall a month later was eight foot tall a month later was 24 foot tall stalks had four inches in diameter he doesn't and had nodulation the size of tennis balls imagine a piece of an oculus nitrogen-fixing document in the soil bigger than a tennis ball I fell in love you know so I called him I said can you give me some of that he said yeah so he sent it to us so we planned it in August this was in September nervous about nine or ten guys come to visit me and they wanted to see the Sun imp and we're standing out in this field and we're digging and we're laughing that we're having fun more laughs than we should be and all of a sudden to statement roles as deputy sheriff comes brought in and filled slaps on the brakes jumps out of the car cons are pulled come out in the field misses who owns this nice as I do he says what is this I says it's an amp he says what do you do with it I said look here and I'm showing him digging I just take the shovel did this look at these nodules look what we got he's just sir you know what this is I said yes son am he looked at me he says are you smoking and I says could I what a chance one more slide here before we get it you know these are the amounts of nitrogen we found on our farm because we could not find a university that could tell us how much pounds of nitrogen these plants would produce in the soil without burying them every time I call the University said you had to plow it in to get to nitrogen benefit you know when you don't own a tillage tool it was tough to plow so we did this for six years and this is what I've determined we can do with these legumes so just imagine we got Sun heap and calpis which is a warm season legume which shouldn't be planted after we they won't work after corn and beans it's not worn out then we've got cool season the gums like winter peas hairy vetch crimson clover we could add that all up and that's 500 pound of nitrogen I had to be wonderful wouldn't it bill my goodness we could just grow six hundred bushel corn was no sweat you know so these are what we found out so that's why we do it that's why you use multiple species and my last slide before Dave takes over again you know this is diversity look at those sunflowers best thing we ever did one pound of sunflowers in the field most of our ladies are from 87 to 96 they have a hard time getting out do you know what you do you put six of them in a mason jar once a week while they're blooming pop on the door smile at em to see have a nice day have them put them on their dining room table and they love you you know guess what we're getting a lot of 86 year old landlords calling this one mr. farm another side benefit so I'll turn things over to Dave and let him go from here and they are a great beneficial insect bringer because they are blooming we've never had them cause a problem with seed to next year you know if they do make seed guess what the birds coming to fall and it's really great they take care of it they take care of it I actually got one of these funny little ear things oh yeah alright and then boy well that was great I was ready to just let you keep rolling on well the owl let them sort of switch I got a few slides together but and what Dave's just walked you through was kind of like a mini mini version of the course that he and other farmers like him gave me when I was going around the world to try to interview people about how to restore and rebuild fertility to land and Ann and I are working now on a new book that picks up from your last slide into looking at whether or not the micronutrient and phytochemical concentration in or density in foods that are grown using these kinds of techniques are actually higher than those grown conventionally and if anyone has data out there feel free to share it with us we're in the data vacuuming up mode because one of the things of the you mentions are to finally of getting a the ohio state out to work on those problems on your farm you know it struck me as interesting one of the most interesting comments I've had in going around and talking about my three books on soil at universities is I'll often get the sort of you're not at a land-grant University are you comment and there's a real dearth of system level studies looking at the effects of combining no-till with cover crop with diversity you look at the studies that have looked at say like carbon buildup in soils and the meta studies the studies of studies that review studies to look at the effects of say no-till will come up with various results you know not building carbon building a lot of carbon but what they're doing is they're only looking at the one practice that is actually part of the three legged stool of the kind of practices that farmers like they've are using but when you parse the data and look at the studies that have looked at farmers that have used but no-till cover crops and growing a diversity of crops it all shows large increases in soil organic matter in soil carbon but it's a tiny fraction of the studies that have been done so in those meta studies the headline always reads you know no-till not necessarily a benefit to carbon what I see is the really interesting potential future of this kind of stuff is looking at the system's level and adapting that to different regions around the world and that's where the kind of stuff that you're doing where you've had to do some of your own research to basically figure out how that works is really leading some of the stuff that's going on at the universities I would love to see far more systems-level collaborations between farmers that are doing conservation agriculture and people at universities I got asked not too long ago to help start a regenerative agriculture Center at the University of Washington but it's like one problem we don't have an Ag school we don't have a crops department we don't have a soils Department we have people in the geology department thinking about soils and when I told my Dean that I'd be glad to do this if I could hire like 10 or 12 people I was kind of told go ahead and find the money yeah but anyway let me move on from the advertising slide to the slide that I wanted to start with because as an academic it's my privilege to be able to do pop quizzes and I want to give you one right now which planet would you rather live on the blue one yeah and why well there's water it's blue there's there's air there's an atmosphere but there's a third thing that we always forget about at a high policy level the soil and maintain the fertility of the soil those three things are what makes Earth and this is what we did I showed this earlier when I was talking about our yard we turned that beach sand like stuff on my left hand on your right into the dark stuff on the left and we did it it turns out using a suite of practices that were not all that different than what David was using on his farm to do the same thing man that color difference with your 1971 soil to your soil today it's not that different the big difference is we did it with gardening and you did it with with commercial farming and if we can actually you can take this as sort of a microcosm for what we could do globally we've turned the dark stuff into the light stuff through our long history of agriculture and our embrace of coal what we now consider conventional agriculture we need to figure out how to turn it around and do it the other way and that's where people like David have shown that it's actually feasible it could be done I've had discussions with very high-level policy people in the Obama administration about whether or not you could actually replace haber-bosch process produced nitrogen with biologically fixed nitrogen and was told flat out it was impossible to actually do enough to make a difference and then I go visit somebody like David who's like shows me that well not only is it possible he can show me that he's done it and as a scientist and as an empiricist i kind of that kind of thing intrigues me because if somebody can show me that something can be done then I'm not willing to listen to somebody who will tell me it can't be done what I want to know is how did you do it and how generalizable are the principles and behind those practices what could you take off of your farm and go to your neighbors farms or take it to Central America to coffee plantations or take it to Canada or other places and that's where I think we've got an absolutely huge opportunity in the academic world is to actually start studying the practices that integrate at a systems level to practices that will rebuild soil fertility and figure out how to adapt those practices to different regions around the world and I think to do that what we've got to do is basically look to the farmers who've already demonstrated ways to do it and build off of their lead and to try and actually bring some of the sort of the rigour of science to the rigour of observations and empiricism that doing something and showing that it works demonstrates that the theory is not simply a theory it's it's it's a solid idea and in terms of that one of the one sort of my roles in looking into all this is not only to interview farmers who've restored fertility to the land but then to stand back and go okay well you know to parse the academic literature since that's what I'm trained to do and I'll show you a couple studies along the way this one that just that came out what a couple years ago now you know the soil organic matter content and herb my talk earlier today that we've degraded the soil organic matter but about half in in the US this is the most recent studies or to come up with that number and when you think about that at a continental scale it's actually a truly phenomenal accomplishment and how if we managed to maintain high yields at a time when we've been degrading than the fuel that fire that drives the native fertility of our land we've done it by replacing the sort of the natural ecosystems cycling processes that and we've replaced them with ones that are very dependent on fossil fuels and if there's one thing that I'm pretty sure of its that the price of diesel the price of things that are made from fossil fuel resources are not likely to greatly decrease over the next hundred years you know you can argue about when the peak oil when peak oil will be and we can change that by changing our drilling practices and our permitting practices but we're never going to change the two simple facts one we will never run out of oil economically we will never be able to canvas at all there'll be some that'll always be an economic to remove from the ground and the second thing is that there's a finite supply in the planet those two simple facts are going to shape the economics of fossil fuel use over the next hundred years whatever we do about climate change and so a very pertinent question is if over the last century we've been using fossil fuels to replace the fertility that we've that our practices have degraded in terms of soil organic matter how are we going to keep farming you know in the world after we hit ten billion people and how are we going to sustain this curve in terms of a stable population you know all the way off to the right if the populate human population does stabilize at ten or twelve million people and as a geologist sort of to me the idea of sustainable farming is something that how do you carry that curve all the way out way into the future and we're not going to be able to do it with fossil fuel intensive farming for the reason that what we won't be able to probably do it we have to also do this profitably and if we're so dependent on fossil fuels as their price goes up in the next century we're not gonna be able to maintain it that's a big part of what motivated me to look to visit people like David and Wright growing revolution and again those three principles from earlier that you just sort of went over demonstrating how they can be done are minimal disturbance keeping the ground covered and diversifying rotations whether that's in what you're growing for sale or what you're growing in between what you're selling and if you'd ask me about these ideas before I started writing growing a revolution when I finished writing the dirt book I really didn't know I hadn't visited farmers who had actually already done it but one of the things you get when you visit people on different continents who have had similar success is at the higher level principles that underpin their practices those are the principles you know plus or minus livestock you can think a livestock as an accelerator on the cycling of nutrients I'm convinced that you don't necessarily need livestock to restore your soil because you did it without them but I'm also convinced that you could accelerate the process by using livestock and reintegrating them into agriculture but the other thing I'm very convinced at at this point is that these general principles underpinning conservation agriculture really do translate into different settings but that the specific practices don't and that's where you know the specific tillage equipment the specific equipment one uses the Pacific crops what to use in a rotation may vary even on different places on an individual farm and what we need to do is invest in figuring out how to do that in different regions of the world and the places that I visited where I saw transformational change on a regional basis were places where the examples of demonstration farms and individual farmers had actually spread and had great impact on their local communities people who had figured out a system that worked for the soil the climate the crops the culture and the technolon sophistication level of these different regions that was the challenge and it's from people who have tried and made I mean I presume you made a few mistakes along the way people who tried and made those mistakes and learn from them can save their their younger colleagues who come along in the next generation or two from repeating those mistakes and it's my view that that ought to be not just something that is in the purview of individual farmers but that's that's one of the reasons universities exist in my view is to actually help spread that kind of knowledge and one things I'm frustrated about is if you look at agronomic research around the country an awful lot of it is focused on incremental increases to either increase the sale of a particular product or the efficiency of the use of a particular product it's not a lot although it's starting that's going into teaching farmers the principles that underpin practices that are learn about that once they learn they don't have to pay anybody to keep using it to me that the intellectual transformative potential of what people like David have been showing lies right there it's the example you know teach a man how to fish that parable is something that I think I would really like to see cloned and I'd like to universities embrace and engage in and do the rigorous science to try and figure out how you would translate that and spread it because there is a challenge going from an individual farm to a whole region but that's a challenge I think we should embrace and we should embrace it both on the practical level and an intellectual level I really think that you know what we're showing here today it's it's a way that don't don't like David doesn't but take the theory of what we're doing the theory works no matter where we've been you know I've been pretty well over in the United States and I've been overseas a couple times and the things we do here they can do over there it's just maybe changing the species to make it work you know and you have to try these species because you know lots of times you'll find one like we tried to find crimson clover ten years ago and when I brought it to Ohio I remember I talked to my grandmas and I talked to my agriculture extension agent and Isis will this grow here well absolutely not David the book says it won't grow north I River well guess what it does you know now it may not be as politically as nice but it's it's a different route we have to learn to put these different routes in to do the things we want them to do because they all give off a different ensign in the soil that breaks down nutrients that's been unavailable and makes them available yeah and that was one of the the real light bulb moments for me having been trained in soil science long ago and graduate school and thinking about well what makes for fertility the idea that the biological part of fertile soil could unlock some of the micronutrients that are in the mineral part of the soil and preferentially mined them and unlock them and bring them into biological circulation was something I hadn't been exposed to I know it was it was a thrill for me when Dave came to the farm he was there I think about three days yeah and stayed with us and you know I didn't have to use a shovel because man he was data I mean I thought I was gonna have to slow him down because it was David everywhere and he was so excited the first day I don't think he slept but these are the things I think that we can do as producers to help our our society I mean to me we even call our banker up on you know if we got a really good-looking corn crop and we want to brag and it's got cover crop in it call him up and have him come out look at you know and then go down the road and poison able to say look what that is it's good he got nothing give me more money you know and it kind of works sometimes but you know if you can share your ideas and pass them around I mean we all can share and get things done and make it a lot better and the other characteristic that was was common among all the farmers that I'd visited who had been very successful in restoring their soil was their tinker's right I mean they experimented they tried stuff for themselves different things and the stuff that worked presumably you did again or expanded and that's a characteristic that I think is also of good academics it's sort of that curiosity driven learning and the willingness to show one of these I've been really impressed with it the concert agriculture community is this desire and willingness to share information and data that's not Universal but it is it is I think that's the way to teach practices it's the way to chain and I'm excited about the idea that if we could switch the way that farmers think about the soil and thereby switch the nature of the practices that they're embracing to the degree that that can reduce input cost while maintaining yields it seems to me like a societal no-brainer that we should be embracing it at a large scale but there is the problem of well how do you incentivize people to share that other than out of goodwill but I think it's it's an it's an idea whose time has come and that seems to me to be very effective but it's a challenge to figure out how to actually do it and spread it one of the most recent examples I've seen of sort of academic where's Jonathan Lundgren and and and clearly I can't quite read your name at distance anymore even with my glasses but they just emailed me a copy of their new their new paper that came out that what you see on that is a plot of profitability on the y-axis versus the amount of soil organic matter in blue and soil bulk density in red and what they were doing is they were doing a systems level comparison of farms that they return to regenerative and conventional farms that were more like David's and farms were more like conventional farms and the more regenerative ones had higher sort of organic matter you notice the slope and that blue line is up the more organic matter the higher the profit the more organic matter the upside and the lower the bulk density I'm sorry the higher the book density the lower the profit the lower the bulk density the higher the profit another soil structure and soil organic matter we're directly translating into better returns for farmers so the idea that practices that could build soil fertility build soil organic matter over time should translate into better on-farm economics over time and your example of 40 plus years of no-till and soil building you know I would love to see that in the year 2050 we look back and saw the same transformation of convention of widespread conventional agriculture into stuff where you're moving that blue line to the right because if there's one thing that all of us who live in cities need is we need farmers to be profitable because we need you all to stay in business so we can eat the other another graph that they showed that Jonathan and Claire showed in that same paper is you have sort of the net cost and income on their conventional on the Left regenitive on the right the white zone is profit the colored bars are expense per hectare which is what two and a half acres per hectare so you've got to convert the numbers if you're used to acres the point being is that that white bar on the right is taller than the white bar on the left it was more the regenerative farms were more profitable and all those colored things are smaller on the right than the left one of the reasons they're more profitable is that they spent less to actually grow but apparently they're growing more because the the total income bar was higher on the right as well so if you can spend less by growing more even an academic geologist can tell you that that's actually a better business model right and what that does also on the bar on the right shows you that a little more diversity in our operations made them more profitable rather than just a corn bean type of rotation yep and finally the the research that Jonathan Lundgren that blue dashed reform has been doing that I think is so informative and potentially transformational is he actually went out and measured pest abundance on conventional fields that had received more pesticide than the regenerative fields that didn't guess which fields had more pests the ones with pesticides applied and there's solid ecological reasoning behind that you're killing off all the Predators that eat the pests same things happening in the rhizosphere we need to disturb it with the plow same thing happens in your gut when you disturb it with antibiotics and the wrong diet our understanding of the ecology of systems is actually progressed to the point where we can understand some of the counterintuitive results that one might get by oh when you apply more pesticides to conventional fields you actually are enhancing the habitat for the pests because you're wiping out the things that eat them and any it's my sort of view that any way that you look at it for the next sort of 50 years and beyond you know restoring soil organic matter will be really important for how we deal with agriculture and sustaining it in a post cheap oil and fertilizer world that world is coming it's still over history's horizon but I turned into an optimist when I realized that farmers like David were making more money than their conventional neighbors by using practices that could actually help us reverse the trend of trends I wrote about in the dirt book because if there's one thing that I'm pretty sure of is that we're all pretty good at responding to short-term financial incentives you know and one of the things that's turning into adopt is as I see the potential for the one of the first times in history for the short-term economic returns to farmers to start to line up with society's long term interest in sustaining and protecting the fertility the health and fertility of our land our and of our soils and if those things can get into aligned and we can get conventional farming to become more organic ish as I started to call some of the regenerative farmers that I met who were not or conscious self-consciously not organic farmers but we're hardly using any chemicals but wanted to reserve the right to use them if they needed them if we can convert conventional agriculture into that regenerative style of organic ish agriculture it could actually really change the world in a way that would alter the arc the great arc of history that I wrote about in the dirt book you know these are some of the benefits that I found in in interviewing David and his colleagues around the world in terms of higher profits reduced input use comparable if not increased yields better carbon sequestration that all those changes of color from light to dark that's all carbon better water attention which translates into crop resilience well less off-site pollution all these things translate across and so how do we promote it the three things that I wrote about at the end of growing a revolution and I focused on we're reforming crop insurance and subsidy programs I mean if you think about people following incentives there's some major agricultural programs in the US that could be realigned to actually reward farmers for adopting regenerative practices I would love to see that happen demonstration farms turned out to be pivotal in the experience of region that had made broad transformations and I actually think it would be a great use of societal resources to help subsidize the transition for farmers moving from conventional to regenerative farming practices because it'll pay off both in the short-term in terms of rural economics but it would also pay off in terms of sustaining civilization at its core which is agriculture and that's basically what I want to say other than one other self-promotional thing which is I've got to fly back to Seattle at 5:00 so if anyone wants to pick up a book I'll be out there right after this talk and then I got to head back to the airport and how close are we on time does anybody know very close but oft minutes okay we're really good yeah got a few times there we go yeah well I'll take it from here and then Dave can add to it if you want to get over ah you know when we when we're trying to help do beginning know tillers and cover crop users we always try to start with trying to get introduce them if they're in a corn bean rotation try and reduce them into rye after corn so they get accustomed to looking at something green understanding they don't need to do that tillage to make that soil loose and then a year or two later take them the next step and say well maybe we can start reducing the P and the K by 10% and see if we still maintain the yield because I think that's how we do it and then can try to convince them that there be better results by using stretching the rotation to a third crop at some point and that don't have to be wheat it could be some other type of small grain or something to work into that situation you know because I think sometimes you have to look around at what's in your community what's going to work you know what would work in your community I mean if you're the only farmer in a 90 mile area you know you used to grow grow pumpkins you know because I just ain't gonna work but there may be something else you could do you know to make that transition and get used to it and I like to have them to put enough out that will hurt their wallet because if they only put two acres out and their farm ten thousand they don't care you know but you got to make sure that you plant enough and start him on a mentoring system where he'll call you or he'll call his neighbor or somebody else that's doing it there's nothing speaks any louder than a group of five or six guys around a coffee shop either bitching about what happened or telling how great it's been you know yeah and I guess I would just add that I think that's one of the big opportunities for academic researchers is to try and figure out how to take this sort of system that people through trial-and-error over decades figured out and how do you actually accelerate the transition and tailor that for the kind of crops and kind of markets that people have in different region so I would look to the experience of farmers have already done in an area but I think there's great opportunities for actually trying to tinker further and figure out what the most efficacious way to do the conversion would be you know sometimes you know it's really exciting to me ice in Pennsylvania three years ago talking to a bunch of dairy farmers and talking about cover crops and I showed him a picture of 20,000 pounds of biomass you know planted after wheat and then I showed no-till in corn into it so about eight months later this this Durham has got 700 cows he calls me up and he says David he says he said we listen to you he says we got her cover crop planted and he says we got her corn planted he says but he says you better come out and look and I said well okay you know so I spend six hours driving out there the same because I wanted to help him because I thought it was important to nothing I go out there and here he's got corn four foot tall and cover crop four foot tall in the same field my says what you doing he says you told us to plant cover crop and then we planted corn you know and I guess I got to do a better job explaining how he did that well all of a sudden about a month later he calls me back and he says we just let it go and he says we put that in a silo and he says now the cows are milking on that cover crop and corn plant and he says we got seven more pounds of milk a day you know you've had more protein in his salad so you know guess what they're doing they're planting cover crop one day plant corn in HD and fill in a silo I mean some of these guys go clear out of the dorm you know another example was an AIA farmer I worked with you know he's on he bought a twin row Great Plains plane or a nice planter so he's planting 32,000 plants and twin rows you know and he calls me up and he says I'm gonna send your picture David I said fine so he sends me this picture and here he's got two of the twin rows missing so the corn rows are actually 60 inches wide this imagine a 60 inch wide corn row and the next picture was here was six different cover crops growing into a 60 inch gap between these corn rows see and the next picture was there was for you lambs walking up the rows you know I says what you doing this is Weber is trying to produce lamps and grow corn and he calls him back at harvest time and he says that 60-inch scorn produced the same as our 30 inch corn did and we got I forget what it was a ton and a half of the lamb per acre feeding them in between the corn rows I mean some of these guys just take a clear off the scale when you're talking to them you know but that's what it takes you have to think outside the norm I mean it's real easy it's real easy to do corn or beans you know you get up in the morning and get plow up and turn over the soils you call you're honest he tells you to put on X number of pounds of n P and K you do that you spray it you go to floor it and come back and you harvest it you know you can't do that when you're using cover crops though it takes more management you know yes I think it's a manageable tool but you just have to learn how to manage it you know you had if you got slug pressure I think you need to leave that cover crop grow a little bit maybe do you lay the planning till that soil warms up enough if that corn plant you know that slug will not work on that corn planter for something else reading and growing if it's actually grown it'll grow out of the damage what happens with it the corn gets soil gets cold the corn slows down gets what it eats all the leaves you know how much damage does it take on a on a corn plant I've seen hundreds of acres of corn in our farm the Volquez cigar as long as I got one glean the leaf coming out on top it's still going to make some you you know but everybody gets excited when they find one little red sharo leaf hole wooden leaf with the red here with a slug I've seen corn right right but you got to get your beneficials there you've got to quit you got to think about quit using insecticides fungicides neo Nix you know neo Nick will stay in a slug guess what happens when a crabbit beetle or lightning bug bites on to a slug the Nick it's in that slug will kill them the beneficial insect you know and it's going to take a couple years to get there to have enough but you need to think about how you're going to do this you know to me a slug is no different than why did you replant that corner when it rounded out you know I mean guys will replant corn conventional guys a replant corn and never think about it like give him a cover crop in the slugs he didn't they're done you know yes sir I think we're eventually seeing some of them come you know are directly neighbors that touch our soils not but the next farm over you know maybe he's a thousand feet or 2,000 foot away they're starting to use covers you know I think I think the some of the movements coming and I think it's going to come right along it better be slow because there's not enough cover crops produced if it catches to get everybody supplied so we need to have grow slow and not fast you know yes yeah I mean the the sort of a common element that I found in farms a rebuilt fertility was rebuilding soil organic matter that the baseline against which they're doing it is different I went down at said of the coffee region in Costa Rica up in the highlands on the central spine of Central America and was astounded in looking at the rivers through there they all flow orange then you go and you look at the coffee plantations and the soil is orange there oxisols for the soil scientists and they're basically iron-rich their nutrient depleted and you look at some of the far at the farms and there's no topsoil it's subsoil to the ground surface you then go into the jungle six to 12 inches of rich black soil chock-full with mycorrhizae that's the soil they started with a hundred years ago grown coffee in they don't have it anymore so some of the farmers I visited are doing things like using biochar they're going into the end of the forest to gather my crazy they then inoculate a nutrient-rich solution with biochar and they're basically doing large-scale inoculation of their soil to try and start rebuilding some topsoil and some of the people who visit we're having very good success with that but it was a minority and in fact when you point out to a surprising number of people had no idea that the soil in the in the forest was what they had once had and we just seemed obvious to me but there's a real problem in terms of long-term land degradation that we just don't know what it used to be like the you know that some of the people that I visited I mean you've brought your organic matter back up to I think you know comparable to or higher than the native forests Gabe brown sent something similar with Prairie soils Neel Dennis did that up in in Saskatchewan the people has visited in Africa I had also brought through soil organic matter back up to about four or five percent which is comparable to the native forests whereas the long-term slash-and-burn agriculture where once you stop moving it around if you're always slashing and burning on the same piece of ground they driven their organic matter down below one percent and you get that in the tropics and you basically are just taking the knees out from underfoot at which point you are utterly dependent on inputs for yield and if you don't have any money to buy inputs you're in a bind so the you can think of the common currency of soil restoration as organic matter and there's different ways to actually rebuild it and you could even argue that in in many circumstances at least initially you're gonna need some nitrogen fertilizer because if you're putting carbon back in the ground you need to get some nitrogen in there too to build the organic matter so you know it's not sort of this simple conventional versus organic argument that we usually have about agriculture there's a lot of contingency to time scale in place and how you think about it but the common element was rebuilding soil organic matter and that's the reason that we use grasses with our our blended cover crops because we don't want to get to carbon nitrogen racially it's so far out of whack that you can't get these plants to grow because you can you can't either get way too much nitrogen and I mean you do that their ground just gets like this concrete or you can go the opposite way and have ninety percent carbon anode nitrogen and not get any root growth you know so as you build your cover crop plans always make sure you have some nitrogen fixers and some grass legumes or grasses in there to go along with it yep same advice for your garden compost most generally not because our soybean stubble is usually all goes to small grains so we don't have any of that leftover well if we were planting back into soybeans from soybeans to corn I would look at corn quarter well if that was the case I would I would look at like clovers winter peas hairy batches and probably either oats or awry and keep those at a lower rate so we don't have a problem with the corn being in the same class as the cereals you use them you know but there's time there's time to get these close they're only going to be 2 or 3 inches tall going in the winter but you have a nice warm spring we've got we've got clover and winter peas now 2 and a half 3 inches tall and it's only been worn for 10 days 8 days you know we're still getting frost but they're growing now you know because this o is warmed up yes sir we got to get him to we got to get them clothes to fly in flower or in bud stage the farther they are mature the better off we are if they're not if they're not in the flag leaf stage or beyond it's tough you can roll them but they'll jump back up and then the only thing you got left is a some kind of herbicide to take them out work out her cow one more question anybody yes well I think what we're going to have to do is if we want to go to a longer rotation you're going to have to try to develop a market you know or find someplace to go with this there's a lot of livestock out there I think we're missing the boat by not looking at barley or Speltz because both of those are a great feed additive to a cow calf operation or to a swine soured they will replace corn so you could create some market there or if you didn't want to I'm looking at the avenues of shortening up your growing degree days on your corn and beans and maybe giving us four to ten day window by moving your varieties shorter turn because we're seeing great yield from shorter term varieties versus 110-120 day varieties you know I wouldn't do all of them but I think 20% of your operation could be 20 you know in a shorter season situation and that give it covered a little longer to grow you know my problem is when you guys have 0 92 or prevented planting you're out there working with a disc all summer long and I think if you're going to get crop insurance on 0 92 the crop insurance should say you must plan a cover crop afterwards boom period where you don't get paid you know sorry that's the way I feel about you know I'd like to get it done but you know because you've already know it's you four are already taking 0 92 in June or July you still got a month and a half that you can grow a crop of something but hell you know or you know I go to Iowa and I've seen these 35-acre ponds where the water laid in a hundred acre field Interop they're ripping it you know I stopped told two guys last summer I said I want you to stop and plant cover crop in there put some peas and registers in there break through that hard pan so that water will get down to that tile there's a standpipe in the center's thing there's water in there guess what there's a hard pan it ain't going down you know to me it's simple okay yes and bills going to take care of that for us alright [Applause]

Channel: Randall Reeder

Views: 8,230

Rating: 4.8666668 out of 5

Keywords: no-till. cover crops. erosion.

Id: iTWXTUKyDyg

Length: 56min 38sec (3398 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 14 2018