Gabe Brown - Midwest Soil Health Summit 2021

welcome to the 8th annual midwest oil health summit everybody and thanks for attending this year we've taken our signature event to three separate sessions and uh it's intended to enable a deep dive into our topics and lots of times for lots of time for questions and discussion this summit was made possible in part through the generosity of our sponsors and exhibitors and i think you if you logged on a few minutes before you saw them but they include the minnesota department of agriculture's agwater certification program compure financial north central sustainable ag research and education minnesota grown albert lee seed minnesota farmers union applied ecological services natural resource conservation service nrcs agriculture resources inc so we really appreciate that support it has enabled us to have the speakers and programming that we do so tonight we're going to have an opening session featuring gabe brown and we are reprising our gab with gabe session that we had at one of our first soil health summit gabe's going to present and then we encourage you to pepper him with questions and comments a few rules for the road if you will please put your questions in the q a don't put them in the chat we would like you to use the chat to talk to each other or to make comments as you see fit use the q a to ask gabe questions kent solberg who is sfa's senior technical advisor will be moderating kent and his wife linda run seven pines farm near verndale and we're just so lucky to have this event tonight i would like to welcome everybody and turn it over to kent turn it over to gabe okay we we can do that thank you very much it's a pleasure to be with you this evening i always enjoy presenting to uh sfa uh minnesota and the midwest soil health summit it's uh always enjoyable when i can visit with producers in the upper midwest so this evening i'm going to cover a wide variety of of topics a little bit on on soil health and a little bit on livestock nutrition and then get into one of my favorite subjects uh gardening and vegetable production so we're going to cover a wide array of topics so i like to always ask producers what do we have in common you know what is gabe brown who's ranching near bismarck north dakota have in common with a kansas wheat grower or minnesota corn grower or an illinois soybean grower what do we have in common well the answer of course is soil and i often get asked as i travel around how can you be so confident that the principles you're going to share and have shared will work anywhere in the world well that's because they're simply the principle of nature and these principles work anywhere in the world where there's soil and we all have that in common so the question i have for you this evening is are you satisfied with your soils take a look at these three soil pads here one of these pads was from a field that a cropland field where you're not seeing your screen yet if you're showing if you're sharing your screen whoops well let me rewind i apologize okay so question i have is what do we have in common as i said and the answer of course is soil everywhere where there's dry land production agriculture there's soil and and that's how we can be so confident that the principles which i'm going to share with you and with with which kent and jared and doug and all the others have shared with you will work anywhere is because we have soil in common so the question i have for you this evening are you satisfied with your soils take a look at these three soil pads one of these pets was collected from a farm field with very little cr crop diversity that farmer basically grew two types of cash crops no cover crops no livestock integration one of these peds is from a very diverse crop rotation the farmer actually grew eight different cash crops cover crops between every cash crop no livestock integration and then the third soil pad is from the edge of a field no real management it was driven over by tractors and there's some perennial grasses growing there maybe occasionally grazed by wildlife but no management so which is which well the answer is the pet on the top was from the edge of the field the pet in the middle was from the very diverse crop rotation and cover crops the bottom pad was from the field with where the farmer only grew two different cash crops now you might say well that makes sense but what you don't realize is that all three of these are the same soil type and they were all taken with a within a hundred feet of each other so in other words stewardship or management took soil that was really even healthier than the soylent top head and caused it to regress to that on the bottom the beautiful thing though is by applying the principles we can take the bottom soil and get it back to where it's even healthier and functioning at a higher level than the soil on the top so the question i often get asked is where do you start well without a doubt it starts with webinars such as this it starts with sfa it starts with education you have to educate yourself one of the hardest things we have when we go out and consult on a farm or ranch is to get people to realize that regenerative agriculture is not a prescription it is not a destination it's a journey and it's in a journey in which we're always learning and it's also a thinking person's game it requires a lot of thought building resiliency and profitability starts with living plants harvesting solar energy i am not telling you anything new here we all know this but it amazes me though how we've gotten so far away from that in our current production model as we learned back in middle school biology plants take in co2 out of the atmosphere photosynthesis occurs that then energy from the sun is converted into all these different carbon compounds a portion of it is used for growth and the remainder is translocated to the roots where it's exuded into the soil this is the picture of a root tip of a plant exuding those root exudates into the soil now a large part of that what's exuded by uh the the plants is consumed by microbes and and they use that as their energy source they they feed on those where it exit aids then after bacteria consumes that protozoa then consumes the bacteria this is a photograph of protozoa trapping bacteria around that air bubble and they're consuming that bacteria of course we all know when they do that they excrete excess nitrogen that's the start of the nitrogen cycle then yet how many of us really put that into play on our farms and ranches how many of us really focus on that we need to you see it's biology that supplies the nutrients to the plant it's not the fertilizers that we're buying it's it's biology it has to go through biology i hear this over and over again as i go visit with farmers but gabe we have to fertilize we just have to well do we real really i'm going to share with you a project that understanding ag is working on that really drives home the fact that we need to change the way we think of plant fertility and change the way that we we farm and ranch quite frankly first of all we have to start with proper soil testing the current soil tests being used today by and large are not doing in my opinion a good job of capturing what we really have available in our soils most soil tests are simply a snapshot of the inorganic fraction of nutrients that are available the day that sample was taken 95 plus percent of the soil test being used in the united states and quite frankly around the world are doing just this they're only looking at the inorganic or in other words for lack of better term plant available fraction of nutrients agronomists then make those recommendation based on that snapshot of inorganic nutrients well i'm going to show you how they're missing the mark okay what we do is a test called total nutrient extraction total nutrient extraction think of it this way it's the soils bank account it looks at both the organic and inorganic fraction of nutrients in the soil so in cooperation with general mills we tested 45 farms in manitoba saskatchewan and north dakota and i know what you're going to say oh but you didn't test minnesota we have tested dozens of farms in minnesota and it's not going to differ from what i share with you listed on the left is are the nutrients we tested for this needs to be a test that's done on every farm and the beauty of it is you really only need to do it once now we tested down to a 12 inch depth here's what we found the average nitrogen on those 45 farms just in the top 12 inches was 9 000 pounds per acre okay now think of the soil tests that you may have taken on your own farm what did they tell you for nitrogen i'll guarantee it was a lot less than nine thousand pounds per acre that's because they were only testing the inorganic fraction of nitrogen they weren't looking at the organic fractions how about phosphorus 2300 pounds per acre that is a lot of phosphorus potassium 11 000 pounds per acre every single one of these 45 farms we tested in this project had plenty of npnk and also micronutrients look at the total pounds of micronutrients in the top 12 inches of the soil profile on those farms plenty for any crop production so what's the value of that and you can plug in your own figures you know what what is your local co-op selling nitrogen for i plugged in 50 cents a pound here that's 4500 worth of nitrogen then figure phosphorus potassium all those all those trace minerals it's a huge value okay but why why do we continue to write checks then now think of it this way how deep do your plant roots go they certainly go deeper than 12 inches or at least they should you know we we oftentimes when we dig a soils pit we're finding annual roots down to four feet if it's healthy soil maybe beyond so how much nutrients do you have available in that profile so what's going on here we're not deficient in nutrients it's an availability issue those nutrients are not available now i want to make this perfectly clear i am in no way telling you to quit applying those nutrients if you do you're going to have a wreck okay if you've been applying them soil is kind of like a drug addict we got to wean it off slowly what we have to focus on is biology we're not short of nutrients we are short of biology so biology is our silent partner it is the interaction of life yet how many farmers and ranchers really focus on the biology in their soils if you want to make money be profitable have healthy soil have nutrient dense foods we better be focused on biology plants rely on that biology for nutrient acquisition protection from pathogens and gene regulation it's an interaction it's a symbiotic relationship that's occurring this is the rice salvaging cycle dr james white at rutgers discovered this a number of years ago i hope you all have seen it it it's absolutely amazing when you get talking to dr white what he discovered was this depicts the plant root and the root tip over there on the right hand side of the screen microbes actually enter in to the root of the plant where through a reactive oxygen process that plant then has the ability to take the nutrients out of that biology once it's does that it that biology is then expelled out the red hairs in the lower left hand corner that is a picture of the biology being expelled out of those red hairs this is a much more synergistic process than one might think this is a root hair of a plant and that cloudy material all the way around it is biology being expelled out and what the plants doing then is telling that biology go out collect more nutrients now i'm going to go back here in just a second what else is amazing is that dr white discovered that during the reproductive phase of the plant that biology then moves up the genetic material of that biology moves up and is placed on the seed that that plant is producing that way when that seed is either carried away by an animal or falls to the ground the biology is already on that seed to start this process over again think about that for a minute then what so often occurs in production agriculture today are we not using seed treatments what does that do to the biology on that seed are we not just fighting nature think about it another thing that's very important that scientists have discovered is that plants have the ability through mycorrhizal symbiosis to utilize the organic fraction of nutrients in this case particular nitrogen so when you're getting a soil test taken and it's only showing you the inorganic fraction of nutrients they're missing a large part of the pool so to speak that's available to you we are over fertilizing as a rule in agriculture by a great amount every year because we're not taking things like this into account this photo ray archuleta and myself are standing on a solid rock there okay yet we're pointing to that clump of grass growing out of that rock how does that happen is there a pocket of soil in that rock no what happens is that grass seed landed on that rock it was wet long enough for it to germinate through photosynthesis that plant started pumping root exudates out some of those root exudates combined with water to form a mild form of carbonic acid and that's the acid that breaks down the parent material so i often get told gabe you're going to have a wreck yes you can get nitrogen in your fields by planting legumes but you're going to run out of phosphorus and potassium and all of these other micronutrients no i'm not it'll take billions upon billions upon billions of years for me to farm all the nutrients all the way to china it's not gonna happen as long as we focus on the biology we'll be able to cycle nutrients there's just a close-up of those plants growing out of that rock that's how that occurs so how do we get more biology the answer is relatively simple we need to grow a diversity of plants take a look at native ecosystems where do you find monocultures usually only where human intervention has caused them to be nature is very very diverse ray archuleta said it best when he said plant and soil are one we cannot have healthy soil without a diverse community of living plants this is a photo courtesy of uh matt van stellent in canada okay take a look at this photo this two quarters of cropland boy that on the left looks pretty tough right but look at that on the right the only difference between these two is management one it one farmer grows very diverse crop rotation cover crops integrates livestock the other is monocultures with heavy tillage that that's just mind-blowing to me yet what do we see over and over again on the northern plains water is becoming an issue too much water salinity uh issues ponding isn't that due to management one must have a diverse crop rotation okay corn and soybeans is not going to cut it and i hate to step on people's feet there but that is not near a diverse enough rotation to keep soils healthy plain and simple this is proof of that this shovel full of soil was taken that's a corn and bean rotation there and look at that what do you notice notice the capping on the soil surface notice the platinus how much biology is going to be in that soil how much water is going to be able to infiltrate in that soil and we wonder why when we get a half inch of rain there's ponding on the soil surface not enough diversity not enough diversity feeding biology building soil aggregates now many people will go out and seed a cover crop following a cash crop i'm not going to discourage you from doing that because anytime we can take energy out of the atmosphere and put it into the soil it's a good thing but realize that's not enough we're kidding ourselves if we think we can cycle enough solar energy by seeding a cover crop following a cash crop we must provide enough time for diverse cover crops to grow and cycle energy that often means diversifying the cash crop rotation to allow that amount of time this is a warm season cover crop that i seeded following an oat pea crop but i harvested that oat pea crop early enough where i was able to grow this diverse cover think of the amount of energy i'm cycling there and then when we integrate livestock into that we will advance soil health further i know a lot of people don't care to run livestock and i tell them that's fine if you don't if that doesn't fit your context you don't want to do that that's fine but isn't there some young people in your community who would really like the chance an opportunity to be able to graze livestock on some of your covers it would benefit the soil on your farm and it would certainly help them i'm going to talk a little bit about the power of stock density this is one of the things that that's oftentimes hard for some producers to grasp but we absolutely need to use high enough stock densities to get the proper bite on plants along with a good trample and dung and urine distribution we want the livestock on there a short time and i often hear people say oh i don't have time to move cattle that often well how many times do you check your cattle chances are they go out and check them every few days there's no reason not to move them any every few days then preferably more often than that and then we have to allow adequate recovery time after we move those cattle off i'm going to talk a little bit about manure distribution and what that does and how we we help the nutrient cycle so on the left hand side of the screen that's rotation frequency so for instance the top line there continuous grazing if we're going to continuously graze a pasture it'll take us 27 years to get one manure pat every square yard now look at the bottom if we're rotating those livestock once a day if we're moving them we're going to be able to get one manure pat every square yard in one year okay that's a huge difference now why does that matter so much we'll take a look at this this is the amount of nutrients excreted by one cow per day almost a quarter of a pound of nitrogen 0.15 pounds of foss and half a pound of potassium so you wonder why you should get livestock on your field take a look at that then multiply times a hundred pounds that's a hundred cows excuse me that is a lot of nutrients per acre plus what's every bit as important is the biology the biology and the rumen of an animal is very closely related to the biology in the soil it's a benefit to that soil to have that biology coming out of these animals part of that biology is fungi one of the things we see over and over again in cropland fields all over the united states and the world for that matter is a real lack of a fungal component in the soil look at all these new seedlings that are germinating around that manure pad why is that it's because that manure pat has more optimum one-to-one fungal component it's optimal for germination of that seed we need to take that into account the beauty of this then is we get the diversity in our ecosystems that's why minnesota was once a tall grass prairie you know it it was from all those grazing animals moving across it depositing all that dung in urine moving on allowing adequate recovery time this is a really striking photo this is a cropland field the farmer seeded a cover crop on it and then he divided up that cropland field and on a part of it he moved the cattle once or twice a day and on the other part he moved them once every two days this is after only one year one season look at the difference obviously on the left was the more frequently moved livestock were on that part of the field on the right once every two days look at the change in those soils that's all due to animal impact dung urine hoof action that's pretty stark pretty amazing i show this often but this is some of dr tillman's work university of minnesota plant biomass on the left species diversity on the bottom as we increase plant biomass on the left as we increase species diversity on the bottom look what happens to plant biomass okay does it make any sense for us to grow monocultures really look at that same can be said of functional diversity on the bottom in other words grasses forbs legumes trees shrubs as we increase that functional diversity we're also going to increase plant biomass they go hand in hand scientists have known this for some time i i just am perplexed as to why farmers and ranchers have a hard time with this this is a book i strongly encourage everyone to read nourishment by dr fred provenza dr provenza in this book talks about how animals have the innate ability to select plants based on their nutritional needs animals nutritional wisdom is very different than what we think it should be plants are very good at cycling nutrients plants have the ability to send out root exudates to attract bio biology to bring them different nutrients the animals then have the ability to select those species of plants that'll supply their nutritional needs given the opportunity herbivores leave 30 to 60 different foods daily now are we giving them that opportunity this is a photo i took last year in one of my paddocks i turned these group of grass finishers onto new paddock there was this russian olive tree growing there immediately they walked over it and started grazing all the leaves off of it that tells me that they were selecting for a specific nutrient that deeper rooted tree shrub had the ability to cycle those nutrients yeah what are we doing in agriculture today often you know we're growing monocultures of alfalfa or some type of a grass is that going to meet the nutritional needs of our livestock one of the ways around this then is to get more diversity in our paddocks we call it the rule of disruption nature has tremendous resilience and just responds well to challenges we as stewards of the land need to have planned purposeful disruptions in other words we need to come in there with higher stock densities and then longer periods of rest we need to vary the stock density from year to year vary the season of use from year to year vary the recovery time for year to year from year to year that creates a host of positive compounding effects we have to be very flexible we cannot do the same thing year after year how many times do we go out to a farm or ranch and we see that they are turning the livestock into the same paddock at the same time every year adaptive stewardship is not a rigid routine you have to be flexible i'm going to talk a little bit about bricks because a refractometer is one way that we can measure how good a job we're doing as stewards of the land research has shown that we'll increase average daily gain on our livestock and increase milk and milk components if we're grazing dairy animals high bricks forage are more drought resistant they're more freeze tolerant they're more resistant to plant diseases and pests this is well documented as a general rule of thumb if you test forages in their five percent bricks or less your average daily gain is going to be one pound a day or below now yes there's variation according to breeds and and body type etc class of livestock but this is a general rule as we increase bricks content in our forages and this is directly related to health of the soil we then are going to get higher gains in our livestock a rough rule of thumb is for every one percent increase in bricks we'll increase average daily gain in beef cattle about a tenth of a pound per day so think of this if we can move our bricks from 3 to 13 that's an extra 1 pound per head per day we're going to get in those cattle that's significant this is the way to add real dollars real profitability to our farmer ranch on the bottom line here is percent bricks reading on the left is average daily gain dr ellen williams put this together look at that as we increase br uh bricks of the forages look what we're doing to average daily gain this is the way as i said to make money this is a group that's a picture of a group of grass finishers and and a warm season cover crop mix i had uh on my farm we grazed that warm season mixed we averaged 4.05 pounds average daily gain on those animals and we took them right off this directly to kill and they killed at 1176 pounds they were mostly made up of heifers there were some steers in the group that's significant average daily gain that will certainly rival most feedlots at a much much lower cost and look what i'm doing for the health of the resource the health of the ecosystem not to mention the health of the livestock putting a dollar figure to it uh 107 finishers there 4.05 pounds average daily gain we figured that at live weight worth a dollar 10 a pound i was just using a commodity price there and then you take out all my seed cost seeding labor costs land cost that's almost 350 dollars an acre just from one graze on that warm season cover crop mix that does not take into account all the other ancillary benefits of how what i was doing to soil health improving soil health aggregation nutrient cycling fertility for the next cash crop that's pretty significant how many corn farmers are are getting that kind of net profit okay changing gears just a little bit uh we're hearing a lot about carbon sequestration we're hearing a lot about greenhouse gas emissions so i thought i would just put it in here uh there's some real work underway where uh we're using satellite imagery to uh be able to quantify the amount of carbon that we're putting in the soil the amount of greenhouse gases and then we're ground truth in that on particular farms and ranches this is some work dr alan williams did looking at different grazing strategies and the ability of those grazing strategies to cycle carbon so uh in order to be in this study ranchers had to be using adaptive grazing practices for a minimum of five years and then we used uh dr williams did some high level conventional in other words it was a slow rotation the farms he looked in had been using that type of a management scenario for 50 years and then there's what's called a low level conventional in other words it was pretty much continuous grazing these were all the same soil types okay they dug soil pits random location on each farm each pit three feet deep three foot square and then they collected samples every six inches in depth here's what they found okay and you can see the years one through five this is increase in soil organic matter using amp grazing techniques in other words the multi-paddock high stock density adequate recovery time look at this doesn't matter whether you're in any of those six states going all the way from alabama to north dakota look at the increase in all of those states by moving to that type of a grazing management scheme now soil carbon the horizon number one uh signifies zero to six inch depth two would be six to twelve three would be twelve to eighteen and so on look at the difference though and this is the amount of carbon per acre no matter what depth significantly more carbon per acre in the adaptive grazing strategies so what this shows us is that we are able to cycle or as some like to call it sequester more carbon if we use proper grazing strategies now we ran some math and if we would convert the grazing acres today in the united states to an adaptive strategy we would be able to mitigate 50 percent of the carbon emissions annually in the united states that's significant it frustrates me why we just can't get our elected officials to realize this you know agriculture should not be vilified it's part of the solution it's not part of the problem also by moving to this type of a grazing strategy look what happens to microbial biomass so your one is in yellow your your five is in green every single state significantly higher microbial biomass so that's going to improve nutrient cycle improve soil aggregation improve the ability of those plants to cycle the nutrients that livestock need for health that's significant this is what it comes down to then on the left-hand side of this picture are some soils from my cropland uh with diverse cash crop cover crops livestock integration on the right hand side of the photo that is from a perennial pasture that has been rotationally grazed but look at the difference same soil type the only difference is stewardship which of those soils is going to infiltrate more water which is going to have more biology which is it going to be able to produce food that's higher in nutrient density the answer is pretty simple i think now i'm going to talk about one of my favorite subjects vegetable production and a lot of people don't know this about our farm but but we do produce vegetables every year for sale this particular photo here that looks like a weedy corn crop but it's really not it's sweet corn peas and green beans and i'll explain more about it the key to vegetable production in my mind on a large scale and being able to do it without the use of synthetics of any kind including herbicides and fertilizers fungicides and pesticides is right here what did you do the year before so i showed a photo earlier on in this presentation of grass finishers grazing a very diverse cover crop that is the residue from that diverse cover crop the following spring and if you look closely this has already been planted and this was planted to my vegetable crop so i rely on the residue of the previous year's cover crop grazed by livestock and i showed you the income i'm able to make from that in order to inhibit weed growth and to provide the soil health for a healthy profitable vegetable crop so here's what we do we go in there and i i have a 30 inch roll planter we seed our sweet corn on 30 inches and then i come back and through the use of gps and auto steer i plant peas one side of the cornrow 15 inches green beans on the other side and we've do done this with a wide variety of vegetables we've done it with pumpkins and cantaloupe and squash zucchini you can do it with about anything and and it tends to work real well but take a look down in that canopy under there how many weeds are germinating under there okay that's the key to being able to do this at scale we'll plant 10 to 15 acres of vegetables like this now we are hand harvesting this so being in monoculture rows allows us to ease to hand harvest but we also get the benefits of the diversity with the legumes and grasses growing i'm going to talk about one other thing which i kind of enjoy doing i have a number of these on our farm i'm going to show you a series of pictures here of me building a hugelkultur if you don't know what a huge culture is [Music] indigenous peoples in the southwestern us used huge cultures when moisture was an issue so i'm building one at a little larger scale we had some trees that died on the farm we took and cut them down and here i just built a frame so i built a frame this is approximately 150 feet long by about 12 feet wide and i just use those logs as kind of the frame to hold everything then what i did i i went and dumped on the bottom smaller logs inside that frame and those are going to decay down i then mixed i took some soil i took some compost and wood chips and i mix them all together and this is simply showing me do doing that i mixed it all up just another picture of it there i'm pretty lazy i'm not going to do that by hand so we just use the loader tractor but you can do this at any scale you can certainly do it small scale you could build a huge culture two feet by a foot if you wanted to size doesn't matter here's what that mix looked like then a mix of as i said compost soil and wood chips and then i simply dumped it over those larger logs and and we buried the larger logs then i came back and i added more smaller branches to it sticks come back and added another layer of that mix right on top of it and buried those branches this is what it looked like as we were doing it then i covered the whole thing with wood chips so realize when i started this particular huge culture that's about seven to eight feet high in the middle okay and what'll happen over time those logs branches sticks that'll all uh be consumed by biology it'll start to rot down that's the carbon then that fuels the system it also holds the moisture okay we do not water these hugels at all and being in central north dakota where we you know get about 10 to 11 inches of rainfall per year plus some snow this allows me to produce vegetables without having to supplement water this is what it looks like when it's done then we go in this is another huge culture right here that that's been used for a number of years and then i plant diverse mixes of vegetables flowers etc on there we have never ever tilled any of our gardens we at least for the last 25 plus years i should say and we have never used any insecticide pesticides herbicides fertilizers of any kind on there now as those hugo cultures decay down and become smaller you can simply add more branches and then add more compost on top of them now i want to show you what i do in the fall of the year after we're done harvesting all the vegetables from these just another photo of the diversity there it's kind of like uh you know christmas day every morning when you go out there because of the diversity but look how healthy everything looks in that mix and i think that's really key so often uh i see gardens where they're focused on monoculture production well we need to realize that that diversity is good you can still have your rose monoculture but get the diversity there to attract all the pollinator and predator insects that's going to be very very beneficial to the garden as a whole so once we're done harvesting everything then we go in there in the fall of the year and i blanket everything with a uh alfalfa hay crop so all we're doing is taking alfalfa hay i buy second cutting alfalfa hay and roll it on top of the entire garden on top of the hulu cultures you might wonder why the feed bunk is there that's where we actually have our micro greens just saves fat ol gabe from bending over so much and what i found was that it's about carbon nitrogen ratios you know i'm sure kent and and jared and doug can talk to you about carbon nitrogen ratios and soil is approximately 11 to 1 carbon nitrogen ratio so as we have those wood chips and that wood in the huge culture high carbon we're balancing that by putting this alfalfa hay over it that alfalfa hay then i mean it's just a feeding frenzy for all the earthworms and microorganisms and it'll they'll break it down over winter it also though is a great way for us to conserve moisture so in the spring of the year all we do is part that hay more or less and then either our transplants or our seed we can plant in there and what i found is it's a very regenerative way to garden this is what you end up with then after a few years in that hugelkultur you end up with some very very healthy soil look at the aggregation there you can see the earthworm castings in there uh you can almost taste the tomatoes that'll come out of that garden my whole point to this presentation is your farm your ranch is a reflection of you you know as i travel around i often hear people say and i know can't chair a dog jerry everybody's heard it yeah but you don't understand my soils aren't like that you don't understand my soils are too sandy too wet too cold too much clay well that's a direct reflection of you you can change that i've seen tight clay soils be changed through stewardship and the adoption of the six soil health principles into very very productive well-aggregated dark soils so my question to you is is will you be ready there's a real change occurring in agriculture right now where consumers and businesses are looking to source products that are grown in a regenerative manner that are growing using the principles are you going to be able to meet that demand and the way to do that and to capture value from that is start looking at your soils treating them as it's the live ecosystem that they are with that kent we're ready for questions very good sir thank you gabe always appreciate your insights experience and knowledge and just the opportunity that uh to get to learn and listen from you so first one gabe's from blake and blake says what replenishes the phosphorus 75 of the world's source of phosphates come from comes from morocco how is it possible to grow nutrient dense food while managing nutrients like phosphorus i'm curious about the natural processes that return the phosphorus so blake thank you that was a very good question and as you will remember back i showed the results of those 45 farms we tested and we've actually tested probably triple that amount or more and we are seeing significant phosphorous levels in every farm we've tested we have not found a single farm that we've tested in the united states or canada that's deficient in phosphorus now that's both organic and inorganic so you ask what replenishes it it's in that parent material it's in the in the rocks it's in the you know the parent material in the soil what replenishes that is those diverse living plants those root exudates through that that combining the root exudates with water mild forms of carbonic acid breaking down that parent material and then it's in a cycle and that's where it uh why it's important if possible to get livestock on the landscape now are you removing phosphorus when you remove a grain crop absolutely but realize that if you do a good job of crop rotation and diversity preferably with livestock integration you won't run out of phosphorus in a billion years you'll be able to cycle it we're good our next one comes from sarah sarah says i know this is a complex question but how does a conventional soybean or corn farmer take the first steps in transitioning to a biodiverse regenerative operation can you provide a general road map or overview of what that journey might look like in the long run yeah that is an excellent question sarah and so uh how we do that is realize it's important to take every farmer every rancher where they're at we're not going to come in there and tell you to sell all your equipment buy specific no-till equipment no we start with where they're at and that's different for every farm every ranch so what we do is proper soil testing we do a haney test h-a-n-e-y we do a plfa test phospholipid fatty acid test those will tell us the amount of biology that you have in your soil and how your soil is set up biologically in order to cycle nutrients we will also do that total nutrient extraction test and then what we do using those figures we start to move down the regenerative path we educate as far as the six principles and then how are you going to diversify a corn soybean rotation so that you can feed more biology so you can cycle more nutrients so you can start weaning yourself slowly off of all these synthetics and what we tell people is the success of your farmer ranch in going down the regenerative path is a direct reflection of you how willing are you to adopt these practices and move down that path and that's going to be different for every farmer ranch but that's how we start moving them in that direction next one's from jeff jeff's planning on seeding a multi-species forage mix on his pasture land that will include a few annuals warm and cool season grasses and legumes the pasture is unimproved and is mostly bluegrass he raises hair sheep and plans on rotationally grazing the seed provider suggested not to spray the grass determinated or till it but in my usda and nrcs my usda and nrcs agents are worried that without terminating existing plants my new seating will struggle due to the competition i have attended two previous sfa soil summits and i've read your book and this all makes oops jumped on me this i'm having problems with my screen jumping around here apologize i've attended two previous sfa style summits and i've read your book and all this makes a lot of sense to me i feel like i should not be spraying and should use a no-till drill as i do not want to kill off the biology that has started to grow on my land as i have not used any sprays for over eight years i plan on using a no-till and i am having a difficult time understanding what direction to go what would your recommendations be that's an excellent question and in order for me to really answer that i would need a bit more context and and perhaps the best route there is for you to contact sfa and to visit with them because that's going to depend a bit on your location it's going to depend a bit on how much diversity you have in those pastures i understand it's primarily bluegrass but is that just recent or for how many years has that been there is a real good possibility there's a latent seed bank there that could be stimulated if we use that disruption that i talked about in this presentation so i really don't care to to make a blanket recommendation here i would rather you get a hold of sfa and talk to one of the specialists okay next one from anonymous what do you do if you have an insect infestation on your crops instead of using a pesticide and realize that for every insect species that's a pest there's 1700 that are beneficial or neutral meaning they won't help you they won't harm you so think of that why we have to look back and ask ourselves then why why was there a proliferation of that one certain insect species and then ask ourselves okay have i done a good job as a steward to provide the home and habitat for all these beneficials and these predators that had consumed that pest i can honestly say that that for the past 25 years plus i have never ever worried about any insect species becoming a pest that doesn't mean i don't have them i need some of them because you got to feed the predators so you have a population of the predators but it comes back on us then because if you you know to do a good job providing the home and habitat so often in production agriculture today what do we see we see fence road a fence row with monocultures okay where where are the beneficials supposed to survive where are those predator insects supposed to provide where's the habitat for them we have to be the ones that provide that home and habitat so they're there when they're needed sue writes do you buy gmo alfalfa for use in your huge culture no but definitely not no gmos on this farm at all yeah realize that all of our hay i'll just add if i might can't i do put up some hay because we run a lot of livestock uh we've got it down like this year we've hardly fed any hay at all because we've had basically no snow all winter but our hay crops are very very diverse perennials well over 20 plus species and you don't want to use that as a garden because in the garden because there's a lot of seeds in it and so that's why we go out and purchase some second cutting alfalfa next question from climate reality chicago why aren't more farmers doing this yeah that's an excellent question one i get asked almost every day a number of reasons one is fear you know fear of the unknown you don't know what you don't know ask yourself this where are farmers going to learn these principles excuse me yes they can come to organizations such as sfa to learn them but they're not learning it from the land grant colleges they're not learning it from extension services by and large i'm talking in generality uh nrcs is teaching a little bit of it they're certainly not learning about it from chemical or fertilizer dealers so it's a fear of the unknown the other thing is and probably the biggest driver is the current farm program the current farm program through risk management agency dictates more or less what farmers are and ranchers plant and seed because farmers and ranchers need that operating money in order to plant a crop every year and the lending institutions are not going to loan that money unless they take part in the current farm program okay next one's in relation to uh the kiss the ground film uh the question is you often mention inputs what can a new up-and-coming farmer without resources do to get an operation started oh great that's a great question so you know for 25 plus years my family had brought in interns every year and had an internship program and one of the first lectures so to speak i gave those interns was do not straddle yourself with debt we need to treat farming and ranching like a business you have to determine what can i do better than anyone else at a low enough price point cost of production that i can make a profit and then what can i sell that for and what you do is you then produce that product and you sell it and you take that money and reinvest it but not in land you grow your operation uh with cash without borrowing money until such a point in time where you have enough collateral and enough money to be able then to buy a piece of land or rent a piece of land whichever the case may be too many young people straddle themselves with that that's exactly the wrong thing to do and then also too many young people they and not just young people i don't mean to pick on young people too many farmers and ranchers enjoy doing one thing like i want to grow raise just beef cattle i want to grow just corn or soy beans well that's all well and good but it's not well and good if there's not a profit in it so you need to treat the operation more like a business know your cost of production know the demand out there do your homework what is their demand for and then fill that market void so don asks can your livestock system work with other species than cattle so on our ranch here we have beef cattle we raise grass-finished beef we have a flock of used we raise grass-finished lamb we pharaoh sows out on pasture we raise pastured pork we have 1400 lands on pasture we raise boilers we raise turkeys we have bees yes it works for all of them and as you stack enterprises that's where you really see these compounding positive effects that dr williams talks about and you really see synergies develop and and you're able to increase profits substantially mark asks how can you make an area with cat tails more productive mark i live in central north dakota we don't have cattails ass can't sober [Laughter] sorry i can't help you with that one mark this one's from judy where do you suggest to go for a soil test okay this is a this is a question and and kent knows me well that gabe's if it's asked to gabe i'm an answer honestly so at understanding ag realize we take thousands of soil tests every year in the past year we were realizing that we were getting varying results at different soils labs so we went to a multitude of different farms across the united states and canada and then from that farm we took a sample so we got a five gallon bucket with sample of soil we sent it to multiple soils labs a sample from in that bucket yes it's not the identical sample but it's close because it was all mixed up unfortunately we found variations from eight percent to 93 percent and we went to dr haney himself sent samples to him also and used that as our template because he developed the haney soil test and what we came to the conclusion that the one that matched his test results the closest was regen ag lab in pleasanton nebraska and that's where we're sending all of our soil tests for that reason sue writes in the 15 acre mixed field who do you get to do the hand harvesting yeah so i'll tell you a little story about that great question sue so a few years ago we had interns and i was a little frustrated how slow they were at at filling a five-gallon pail with green beans so i told them okay i said we're gonna see who can fill this five gallon pail of green beans the fastest well gabe filled his pale and then i went and collected eggs and did all the chicken chores and on my way back i realized who's the dumb one here i was done had my pail full and they're still out there so the answer is we do it ourselves we just do it with with our labor hannah writes do you think there's an advantage to forages made of native grasses oh love that question and my answer to that is absolutely absolutely yes you know it amazes me how we we no longer feed any salt or mineral to our livestock i'm not recommending that for everyone but as we advanced soil health over the years mineral salt consumption just kept going down down to where it was no longer necessary to put it out but it always amazed me how when our livestock didn't matter the species were on native prairie and our we've documented over 140 different species on our native prairie there was no assault or mineral consumption and goes back to what dr prevenza said in his book nourishment animals have the ability to select so why native versus a tame cultivar the answer is simply that synergy that those native species evolved over time with soil biology to cycle those nutrients also many of the native species have much deeper rooting depths so they can they can reach nutrients deeper in the soil profile all right anonymous asks some criticisms of these pre of these practices claim there are no peer-reviewed studies surrounding regenerative agriculture has this changed recently if not what is holding us back uh dr richard teague in 2016 published a paper on uh the benefits of adaptive multi paddock grazing that that's peer reviewed uh dr stefan van vliet and dr fred provenza uh with along with dr scott cronenberg just released a paper as far that outlined the nutritional density increases seen in regenerative practices dr jason rountree at michigan state university has published papers that show greater carbon sequestration with these regenerative practices dr jonathan lundgren and claire lacan released a paper i believe that was four years ago now that showed that a significant decrease in pest pressure and a 78 increase in profitability on regenerative farms and ranches i could go on but it's out there but it's out there it's being shown next question is from tom we'll see what we can do with this uh how do you get a different type i'm not following that one ken no i'm not either tom if you could give us some more information there we'd be happy to try and answer that so type in another a little bit more detail on your question diane writes do you graze chickens over your garden in the fall oh diane so two years ago we used i call them eggmobiles they're retrofitted old stock trailers where the hands go in and out we pull them around the pasture gabe thought he was so smart follow the year before i put down the the alfalfa hay in the garden i pulled seven egg mobiles onto our smaller permanent garden which is probably i don't know 300 feet by 300 feet and i let the chickens go on there and they just tore it all up had a good time pulled them off and we put our hands in a hoop house for the winter and covered it with alfalfa hay the next spring i brought the hands down and i put them it was over a quarter of a mile from the garden we released 1400 hens into the egg mobiles out there the next morning i looked out of my kitchen window and i had 1400 hens back on that garden they walked a half a mile because they knew where the worms were i did that once and once only yeah as there was no keeping them off there it was a battle anatomy anonymous ass you mentioned forages that produce higher bricks can you name some varieties of forages that produce higher bricks amounts okay that's an excellent question and i maybe didn't explain myself clear enough it is not the forage variety yes there will be a difference somewhat in forages but it has more to do with the health of the soil now typically warm season grasses so species such as sorghum sedan grass or grazing corn will typically have a higher bricks but we've measured you know bricks is a re is a reading from zero to 31 and we've measured smooth brome grass with bricks in the upper 20s on healthy soil so it has more to do with soil health than anything else if you want to really create a stir at the farmer's market take your refractometer and start measuring the bricks on vegetables you will get some people upset with you judy writes how do you get seeds to grow without fertilizing first after being told we need to fix np and k first okay that goes back to that total nutrient extraction and understanding it's about biology soils have plenty of nutrients they are lacking in biology so the way to do that is you have to focus what we tell people is you have to think like a microbe you got to start thinking like biology what does biology need just as us humans need shelter right you need the soil covered you can't have bare soil it absolutely drives me crazy why a lot of gardeners would go out and till their gardens that's absolutely the worst thing you can do for a healthy garden and for a nutrient-dense food so you got to quit tilling you have to cover that garden keep armor on it because you've got to protect that biology biology lives in and on thin films of water in the pore spaces between soil aggregates your soil is a sub-aquatic ecosystem you have to have those pore spaces soil aggregates only last about four weeks and then they break down and new ones need to be built if you don't have the biology and the mycorrhizal fungi to build soil aggregates you're not going to have the home and habitat for that biology and then you have to provide food and the food is provided by root exudates or plant material from both living and dying decaying plants so just think like a microbe and provide it realize it's not going to happen overnight but it can you can make dramatic changes in a year jolene asks if you have suggestions for companies who are knowledgeable on plant diversity and offer a good selection of warm and cool season mixes there's a lot of them out there right there in minnesota albert lee seed house does a very good job i'm sure can't you at sfa have a have a list of seed suppliers there's a lot of them who do a very good job i i don't want to get to where i'm i'm favoring one over another next question uh the writer asks that they they saw you testify before congress about soil health what do you feel the government's involvement in soil health practices will be going forward will it remain voluntary with incentives for change or will certain practices become mandatory in the future that's a million dollar question isn't it i wish i knew um although that was an interesting experience it was extremely frustrating to me and the fact that i i think there's an opportunity missed here you know i don't care where your interest lies if it lies in climate change what better to put carbon in our soil than than living plant plants and grazing animals would that that'll put more carbon back into the soil than anything else if your interest lies in clean water regenerative ag will do that if your interest lies in farm profitability and revitalizing rural communities regenerative ag will do that if your interest lies in human health and this health crisis we're having regenerative ag has the ability to produce nutrient-dense food it's extremely frustrating to me why we can't unite to work on this simple uh adoption of regenerative principles that have the ability the ability to benefit so many facets of society i find it extremely frustrating why we can't come together on that i honestly don't know what direction i think it varies with what direction the wind blows next question what can a small operation do with cover crops or in other words what's your best advice for cover crops for small operations i've seen cover crops work successfully in a flower pot on a deck in new york city i've seen them work successfully on you know in backyards all over the united states or anywhere for that matter in gardens there's no place where cover crops don't work because all they're doing is transferring solar energy and so you have to look at your context where you're at what season is it what works in your environment use those species that grow well in your context in your environment and grow a diverse mix of those and when you do that you'll be amazed at what will happen next question is from jim how to cope with a soggy wet soil with less than adequate fall i think they mean slope to installed community drainage did they say they installed drainage uh to the installed community drainage it sounds like it's existing and there's not a lot of slope there like they're kind of at the bottom of the bottom of the hill yes i will never forget what dr dwayne beck i heard him once say if you have too much moisture you need a diverse plant community diverse crop rotation diverse cover crops if you do not have enough moisture you need a diverse plant community diverse cover crops as dr rick haney says plants fix dirt the only way you're going to build aggregates the only way you're going to move water is with that diversity building soil aggregates so you get water to infiltrate and then move throughout the soil profile realize though some context like here even on my ranch in central north dakota as semi-brittle as we are as i've advanced soil health i now have what i think were once um seasonal wetlands developing because we've healed the water cycle to the point these low areas and the increased organic matter is just holding on to so much more water and i'm not going to change that why would i want to fight nature i'll use that to my advantage and just use crops there grow crops that are higher water use crops julie writes how can we improve the health of our hay field it's alfalfa clover grass instead of having the fertilizer truck come interesting question last week i was in idaho working with on a very large operation and they were spreading copious amounts of phosphorus and potassium yet the soil test showed we didn't they didn't need to spread any there was plenty there realize though i want to make this point perfectly clear hand is extremely detrimental to soil health not as bad as tillage but close so the way to do that i'll just tell you what we do on our ranch may or may not work on yours we put up some hay every year because we're going to feed some every year but what we do is the field we put it up on it's fed right back on that field in bale grazing and we only put up hay about once every four or five years on a particular field we're rotating the fields because think of it your hand that field you're removing all the armor remember what i said think like a microbe you can't do it year after year and expect to maintain soil health the other thing we really need to realize is carbon nitrogen ratios way too many uh hay fields are way too high in legumes and what happens in that scenario for every one molecule of of nitrogen that soil needs 11 parts of carbon okay you're removing all the biomass where's it's going to get that carbon your infiltration rates will decrease if you have too much legume in the mix naturally occurring ecosystems are probably only 10 to 15 percent legume we're using way too many legumes in our hay fields next question from isaac gabe you mentioned seed treatments and fertility fertility was compared to a drug addiction is it the same for seed treatments how long does it take to go from a conventional tillage farm with just corn and beans to being able to start cutting seed treatments and reducing fertility once you start adopting regenerative practices excellent question again it's context i'd have to know more specifics i can only tell you round numbers what we're seeing though is the vast majority uh 80 plus percent easily if farmers are over applying nutrients typically we can start cutting back on fertility immediately not on all farms but on the majority of them as far as insecticides you have to provide some habitat first you've got to build populations of the beneficials but realize as long as you apply seed treatment you're not going to be able to build those beneficials and i should have brought it with me i i wish i would have i got upstairs a little pint jar this pint jar so we all know what a pint is filled with uh treated soybean seed and i always ask people what what is that that and the number 72 million 350 000 have in common a pint jar full of neonicotinoid treated soybean seed has enough insecticide to kill 72 million 350 000 honeybees okay just think of that so what you need to do is ask yourself every time you go apply that you dump in a 50 pound bag how many millions of bees are you killing and then think of what it's doing to the biology microbiology in the soil uh one of the things we do with our clients right away and this was proven in by dr jonathan lundgren in insecticide are just they're just bad in so so many ways and uh treated seed is one of the things we can pretty much remove we need to remove immediately if we want to go down the regenerative path because if you're going to kill the biology in the soil how are you ever going to be regenerative where does it end so uh that's a decision each person has to make but boy i i sure don't want to see it used if at all possible lauren writes have you seen any correlation between high nitrogen and high aphid fist infestations or is that a myth sure and and realize that what most people consider weeds those forbs their high nitrogen users they only thrive in situations with high nitrate nitrogen and what you will see is a correlation with some of the pest aphids that means your plant community is sick and it often is because there's too much nitrate nitrogen in the system again over fertilization etc we need to move away from that we need to do proper soil testing and understand what that means as we move to more ammonia instead of nitrate we're going to see those typically drop off significantly mike writes could you talk a little bit about problem fungi ground rust for instance in an old crop we know that beneficial fungi are critical and something to be encouraged how do we deal with some of the less desirable fungal issues without the use of an of a fungicide yeah and a good question realize that all that relates to an unhealthy soil ecosystem just what you need to do is focus on adopting the principles all those things tend to go away they're simply symptoms you know if you have a weed growing out there what you consider a weed if you have a fungal disease if you have a pest those are symptoms of something we did wrong and so we have to look at our management and determine okay what did i do that encouraged that or proliferated that mark asks is the information on the differences in the lab results i'm presuming this is on the haney is that information available no no and the reason being realize as an organization we would really be opening ourselves up to we'd open a big can of worms there and our intent is not to be little any lab they're they're all good they're trying to do the right thing we just had to go with the lab that we feel the most confident in and we are continually doing this type of testing so uh no we're not gonna put that information out there i maybe spoke too much tonight but i was asked a question i'm gonna be honest so jill says i'm urging state programs to provide more farmers more options to try regenerative practices the reply i receive is that the first year there is improvement and then there is not and it takes three to five years to get high yields i know that you focus on profits not yields is it just there there isn't enough diversity in the second year or there just isn't adequate recovery what might be the issue oh that's a great question and and i i have seen that often where you know the first year following a cover crop they they have a good response but again it's about context okay what else did they do did they start backing off on nutrient applications did they start backing off on pesticides and fungicides did they diversify their crop rotation realize that a big part of the problem is we've got this mindset you know and we've got bumpers on you know we're kind of tunnel vision we want to fit regenerative ag into the current production model it's totally different as you said it's about profit not yield one of the problems is though the current farm program is based on yield it has nothing to do with profit it has nothing to do with nutrient density has nothing to do with ecosystem health and function it's based on yield and we need to get away from that plain and simple carla asks with writing rising feed costs do you recommend a fodder fed pasture poultry and if so what blend i've read sunflowers and peas we raise meat broilers on pasture or would you recommend like your sunflower and cornfield oh that that's a very good one um you know obviously the main street project there in minnesota is doing some fantastic work with with sprouted uh germinating grains being fed to their their laying hands and you could do the same thing with broilers we prefer a mix we use barley oats peas and flax but that's because that fits our context and it grows well in our environment that's what we prefer to use out on a diverse pasture realize that during the the spring summer early fall those laying hens and broilers are going to get a decent amount of their of their nutrient requirements from insects and green forage um laying hands more so than broilers depends on how big an area how often you're moving them etc what i say is the more diversity the best you know the better so so try it see what works in your environment deborah asks do you process your own animals um realize that that with the size we are and with direct marketing yes we process some of the broilers but in north dakota we're limited by law to 999 or less well last year we sold over 8 000 broilers so they have to be processed at a usda inspected facility as do all of our meat animals so so we're shipping semi-load lots to be processed deb asks i cannot get rid of smooth brome in my garden do you have a brown problem to deal with in your garden yes and how we did it is i actually went around this isn't the 15 acre pieces those are being done in a cropland field and we rotate uh which field we're doing that on but our permanent gardens we laid some landscape fabric around the whole thing a four foot wide strip and that has helped significantly uh other than that that is one of the benefits of covering with we use a pretty thick covering of alfalfa hay and that keeps it keeps it back but uh realize uh birds and wind and everything else smooth brome is always an issue allie asks how do you maintain healthy soil structure with pigs when their innate behavior leads them to root up ground yeah pigs are good at putting speed bumps in our pasture and you know what i found what really works well at least for us is okay we we bale graze on different paddocks each year now we do not bail graze on native rangeland all of our baylor grazing occurs where we put up the the hay from so it's it's very diverse tame grass paddocks what we found works well is wherever we bale graze during the winter that's where we'll rotate our pastured pigs through and then you you know you always have this thick layer of thatch where the bale set well the pigs will root that all up and and they just love it and spread it out as long as we're moving those hogs about once a week the rooting doesn't get too bad but boy if you wait much longer than that look out they will they'll really tear up a piece sarah asks for gardening and huge culture do you recommend a specific type of wood chip in other words are there any tree species that should be avoided yeah the great question the conifers and and species like that probably should be avoided you can put some in but not large so we prefer to use the hardwoods and go that route anna asks do you think spraying raw milk on pastures helps boost biology there is zero doubt anytime you are spran a natural amendment that is a food source for biology you will get some boost in production is it economical or that i have tried a few on my farm and we're not seeing a benefit but i could certainly see a benefit as you advance down this path it may be something that you'd want to consider i tell everybody try just do a test strip and try if it interests you i don't care whether we're talking biochar or milk or a biologic you know compost compost tea try it see if it works you know don't gamble the farm on it don't spend a lot of money but do some experimenting that's one of the joys of regenerative ag is trying new things anonymous ass i'm starting a new garden on virgin ground how should i start yeah and uh depending on what's there again where we start is we cover that area depending how big it is if it's possible to cover it either with a tarp i don't like using plastic just for the sake i don't like plastic for what it does to the environment but cover it uh more or less solarize it you know and and terminate the the living species the perennial species that are there doing that and then what i recommend is just whatever you do don't till it but just going in and and seeding into that you got to make sure it's terminated now that's where you could spread after you you remove the tarp or whatever the case may be you could go in and put a a covering of for instance alfalfa over it and then plant through that into the soil all right jason says i love you gabe thank you for all you do for soil health you give me so much hope the question is have you heard of old timer spraying raw milk on pastures or hay ground we touched on that uh does it increase bricks what do you think about this yep and dr alan williams has done quite a bit of work with that and yes you will see a benefit to bricks an increase in bricks it'll be very live though so is it economically viable that's something you will have to determine i like you too jason next question what do you do with cover crops after they die leave their roots in the soil what happens to the part above ground absolutely as i showed in that picture the material that's left above ground when we graze our livestock on there during the winter i want to make sure i've got a a thick matter residue remaining to protect that soil now it's very important to realize as you move down the regenerative path you're going to have to work and balance your carbon nitrogen ratios if your soil is not biologically active you're going to have too much residue building up so then you adjust carbon nitrogen ratios you have higher nitrogen lower carbon crops in there to cycle that amount of residue once you get a more advanced so to speak soil biologically speaking you're gonna cycle residue very quickly i showed that photo with that four inches of residue we will go from four inches of residue to bare ground bare soil in about six weeks because of all the earthworms and biological activity giving adequate moisture so you need to through the power of observation uh determine where you're at biologically how fast is it cycling how much residue do i want and you use that to your advantage use that to armor the soil to protect it now as far as roots below ground approximately two-thirds of your organic matter increase will come from roots the more roots you put in the soil the more you're going to increase organic matter the more you're going to increase organic matter or carbon the more nutrient cycling you're going to have the more biology you're going to feed that's all a win-win-win the tabards say you have an excellent direct marketing model what are your recommendations or tips for someone starting out with direct marketing especially in rural areas yeah and and i have to be very honest i a hundred percent of that is our son he started with um chickens 150 land hens selling eggs out of the back of his pickup in a kmart parking lot word of mouth spread he had literally no advertising in it then when when we uh started uh harvesting beef animals at a state inspected at first now federally inspected facility he was able to market that and word of mouth just uh keeps spreading um first of all i would ask you what can you grow or raise and sell at a profit it doesn't do any good to direct market if you don't know your cost of production and if you're not going to make money at it direct marketing is not easy it's very very time consuming but you can make a healthy profit at it if you invest the time but you start out you sell to aunts uncles everybody and the key to it is you have to have a quality product if you don't have a quality product it's all for naught you're not going to retain customers plain and simple and then know your cost of production it absolutely befuddles me how many producers are selling direct marketing and they don't know their true cost to production my son can tell you down to one tenth of one cent how much it costs to produce a hot dog how much it costs to produce a hamburger a a beef stick whatever the case may be you have to know your cost of production and you got to take all costs into production your labor we we keep track of all labor costs of all packaging of waste by that i mean you sometimes have a package that that you know is tor doesn't look quite right you've got to keep track of that because it'll eat into your bottom line how about electricity costs fuel costs you've got to know everything next question how do you bale graze sheep in the winter with snow cover uh sheep they're they're the same as cattle that that's not an issue they'll fight their way through it we're typically most winters we won't start bale grazing until snow gets much deeper than 30 inches even sheep can go through about 30 inches of snow once we get much deeper in that depending on temperature and ice will will determine when we start bail grazing but sheep all you got to do you know sometimes you might have to walk a path to a bale but those old using rams they they'll get through there audra asks have you looked at the key line design we have we have studied that quite a bit and there is some benefit to that in certain circumstances i personally believe i can do every bit as much with plant roots as with keyline but that's my own opinion i have not used it i haven't seen the need for it on my ranch but realize i'm a flat lander we don't have a lot of slope or anything so yeah judy asks with an old field would you spade harrow and seed the first time or would you plant directly with a no-till cedar for a vegetable garden yeah i'm not going to disturb those roots that structure underneath that soil aggregation i mean if it had been tilled just prior then one more tillage pass what's it going to hurt but if you have undisturbed soil don't disturb it anonymous asks can every farmer in the united states really practice regenerative agriculture if the argument about yields is to meet demand for various products food etc can regenerative practices really scale up to meet the needs of a rising population when and how do we cross that finish line wow that's a great question and and uh actually realize okay let's take corn for instance how much corn is in the united states is for human consumption the answer is less than if you take all the corn fructose if you even want to call that a food everything else really only about three to five percent um 42 goes for ethanol you know um we already have the ability to produce enough food there's this misnomer out there that we're not going to be able to produce enough food if we go down the regenerative path now look what i explained to you this evening okay i produce corn wheat barley oats rye triticale vetch a myriad of other cash crops grass finished beef grass-finished lamb pastured pork land hens are eggs broilers turkeys honey who's producing more food per acre i am producing probably i haven't i haven't sat and penciled this so don't hold me to it but multiples more nutrient dense calories per acre than any of my surrounding neighbors multiples because i'm stacking all these enterprises so uh and i'll just say this uh i am uh my average corn yield is 27 percent higher than the average in the county so if the average in the county is required to produce enough food what are you going to do with my extra 27 right that's just a totally false statement that is blown out of proportion by people who do not want to uh realize the fact that regenerative ag is the answer next question what type of cattle do you have for grass-fed efficient ones and and the reason i say that is i believe that there's good doers and poor doers in any breed of any species of livestock so as long as our cattle produce red meat i like it but they have to thrive in my environment now in saying that uh we have a lot of black angus red angus and some british whites but i don't pay attention to breed it's type and kind they they have to make me money in my environment karl asks your thoughts on rotating hay pasture cover crops with vegetable production beds irrigation very so small seeds some tillage necessary or very shallow tillage okay i i've been doing it for years with no tillage we've been a hundred percent zero till since 1994. i don't think uh tillage is necessary uh obviously some will say yeah but you're tilling when you're harvesting root crops etc okay i'll give them that you know when we pull potatoes or or carrots etc but we don't have to go in and use any tillage implement as far as a rotation what i'm doing it with the larger scale vegetable is we're planting diverse you know cash crops in a field followed by a very diverse cover crop and as i showed you that's the armor then that we will no-till the vegetables into the following year realize that in that large scale 10 to 15 acres of vegetables i'm only producing those vegetable crops that i can plant with my planter which is primarily sweet corn beans peas pumpkin squash zucchini etc i don't plant with that the very very small uh species like collards we we can plant we have the capability to plant radishes but uh but i don't that's just too many radishes sarah asks what do you think about using a power harrow is it any better than tilling yeah i would have to know specifically what she's talking about but but i doubt it realized that the vast majority of biology lives in that top two to three inches of the soil profile and i often hear that well i'm going to only till shallow well you're destroying the home for the majority of the biology so what what good is it hannah says thanks for testifying to the house ag committee in february are there any bills or policies being considered that you think farmers should be supporting yeah and unfortunately i i i don't keep good track of that as i said that was one of the most frustrating things i've done in a while uh i'm glad i did it but again extremely frustrating i haven't followed that close enough it seems that washington is in such disarray that that uh gabe doesn't have the patience for it to be honest with you judy asked can we hire you or the sfa as a consultant there you go well there there's a really good crew at sfa i would certainly look them up and give them a call and judy also asks what do you use for a no-till cedar yeah so for my large grain operation i have a 1590 john deere 20 foot drill i've had this particular one since 2007. the only thing i cannot get a crop established in is cement and asphalt i'm going to get a crop snail for my planter i have a mono sim planter and the reason i went with a mono sim is because it has the plate sizes available that allow me to singulate down to even a carrot seed you know so it was the best planter out there i thought for vegetable production next question you've already touched on this a bit gabe on bricks but they're just asking for a little bit deeper explanation about what bricks is so yes uh bricks is a measurement of solids in liquid so in order to test bricks say for instance in a pasture you the first thing you do is go out there and you observe what the livestock species is grazing it doesn't do you any good to test it if they're not eating it so you test you say they're out there and they're grazing out just a brome grass plant and they're eating the leaves off the brome grass so you go out there and you collect some leaves off the brome grass plant now we prefer to do this in the afternoon be and preferably when it's sunny because that's when the plant is photosynthesizing the most and then you you take those leaves and you roll them in your hands until you start to feel your hands get moist and then you put it in like a garlic press and you squeeze that liquid out onto the frame the lens of the refractometer hold it up to the light and it'll give you a reading between zero and i believe i said 31 but it's 32 and and the higher the bricks the more dissolved solids in liquid and it gives you a good indication of the nutrients in that particular uh plant species that you test adam asks do you know of any good no-till techniques for small-scale production there are a number of small planters available you know it depends how small but there's actually if you google online no-till planters for small farms a number of different sites will come up uh the amish community has done a really good job of developing some implements for smaller farms and ranches then and they're out there you just have to do a little searching and carl asks what was the name of that planter again that you have monosem adam asks could you compare huge culture to back to eden gardening a lot of similarities a lot of similarities and i think it's about context where you're at you know hugelkultur is a little more common in a little more brittle environments or where there's not water available but it it's really no different than composting both those back to eden hulu cultures it's all about soil biology and feeding soil biology all right with that jared do you i'm not seeing any more questions in the q a piece yeah have any more somewhere that i've missed well i think most people were able to post them in that q a and that was a great rapid fire questions it could work to both of you keeping on top of that uh one thing i did want to ask you gabe is to talk a little bit about regen ag 101 and just for a little bit of info to all of our participants we actually do have a discount code available for sfa members if you send me an email and i'll post my email in the chat jared at sfa-mn.org we'll get you that that discount code it's for sfa members only and um maybe gabe if you just want to talk a little bit about what that is sure thank you jared so so soil health academy which is a 501c3 nonprofit educational arm of understanding ag realized that there was not everybody can attend one of our three-day soil health academy schools so uh it was you know fortuitous of us to get that up and running with kovid and and what it is it's an online course self-paced [Music] you are able to go online and and access this course it is a nine module course which goes through all the the six principles of soil health the four ecosystem processes the three rules of adaptive stewardship and it teaches those to you now you can go on and off and and turn it on and off at your leisure you can go back to it for up to a year uh also along with it there's a large amount of augmented materials so links and and and uh other material that you could resources that you can go learn from and we found it it's a very good tool to get people moving down the regenerative path soil health academy did offer a discount to sfa so sfa can sell it to anyone and in that regards then sfa benefits also so we think it's a win-win situation for all awesome yeah thank you so much that uh that's great i don't know we are just about at the time here uh again my email is in the chat and if you do have an interest in getting that discount code um just send an email to me and we'll confirm your membership with sfa and get that sent right over to you but i think that's all we've got um we're right at nine o'clock great timing thanks so much gabe for your time and for uh sharing a little bit with us of your your information your education experience we really appreciate it so my pleasure thank you everyone yeah thanks everybody thank you you

Channel: Sustainable Farming Association

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Length: 115min 19sec (6919 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 02 2021