[Music] [Music] thank you yes it was a waste to come up here but I'm an old Minnesota guy I got my start in Winona Minnesota I'm actually a dairy nutritionist guy from Wisconsin and I taught Winona Area Technical College for seven years taught farm operation and management which is a two-year post-high program and so I'm self-taught in soils I'm really a dairy nutrition guy everybody thinks I'm a soil sky so I left I started consulting with Brookside in the late 70s and I left Minnesota went back to Wisconsin and bought a farm because I said I was over educated undertrained and I was trying to figure this thing out called agriculture and so I got involved with them starting a business and got involved in agriculture scene I was an educator I've written this my third book and this is just came out last year it's now 500 pages takes me that long to say what you're gonna hear in 30 minutes and so anyway it's the second book called advancing biological and they're available from Amazon it's probably easy to read if you're into science and chemistry why this one covers in a great deal and on that aspect of it I'm gonna try to paint the picture out here and I tell people that I'm pretty convinced that we've got this thing all figured out I gotta make sure that I know which my little dot no matter I guess I can't find it is that we really have agriculture all figured out I've been at this for 40 years I left the teaching at the tech school trying to figure in this whole system out and it was really complex yeah we don't have all the details ever we have really developed the farming system that's pretty sane out here and not whether it be through I was involved with the land stewardship project and all some of these other things in whatever direction I went we got a lot of those aspects that has figured out all the way down from nasaw so I started a business in early 80s after I got back in Wisconsin called Midwestern bio egg and we called it biological farmer because we wanted the farmers to focus on soil biology not just soil chemistry and so we've now presently the dark green ears are big clusters we got a facility at Utica Minnesota we got one in Wisconsin we just moved into South Dakota Indiana Illinois Michigan I was in Michigan all week in Ohio that's our strength areas and we work with almost every kind of farm imaginable we started out with dairy farmers all the other light green areas are areas that we've done business over the last number of years and I said we're with about 4,500 farms and our whole tagline is better farming through better soils that's what Midwestern bio egg is all about and I tell people this year comes from Australia my first book came out in 2000 I've been whipped around this planet about ten times and and got quite actually to see a lot of different things it's pretty educational a week ago I was that spoke at the Nuffield scholarship group which is a wonderful wonderful organization started by Henry Ford Arista Serna field it was about an exchange of ideas in agriculture around the world mr. Henry Ford showed mr. Newfield wishes the more scars how to make a production line and mr. nothing took the advice and start putting on agriculture this year is really interesting because that's virgin land in Australia never saw get your magnesium levels you saw high and your ground to get really hard and these are common Lawry's that find this farming there it's just verging ly cleared I'm pretty convinced that's what your ancestors found when they broke the prairies looked like a chocolate cake and it could sink into it six inches deep it was just beautiful biologically active soil but I want to tell you I told comma larry's I'll be showing up every ten years I want to see how long it takes them to destroy it I know how long it took to build it but now can you imagine if you were that kind of a sols what you started with now you gotta admit that obviously I know some of the guys down and by st. Louis that their grandfathers cleared the prairies and they tilled it about ten times three times three times the first year had to burn up all that carbon we can't blame tillage for all the problems we got out here but there certainly was an issue they had to get it down to manage it they're growing soybeans on that land as a cover crop as a soil building crop and the cotton is in the growth but it's a vegetable farm they're huge virtual environments Sydney Australia but in that amazing of our saws look like that we wouldn't have these erosion problems the water would soak into the ground and we'd have this huge resilience built in farming that we don't have today when I farmed years ago we started when I was teaching everybody just kind of farmed and now we got about 17 methods of farming I used the word biologically I said because I want people to focus on biology the one out of Australia South Africa called a theory a constraint I really like also they're very very very good at this game and they try to find your limiting factor they got a whole bunch of consolidate goes through everything on that farm say what is your limiting factors that are traced who knows the tillage is that soil biology is that lack of diversity of plants and so that's the system out here regenerative has been around a long time I like that term but now it's not really a system of farming cuz it's it's been around a long time and now someone's trying to label as a system of farming just like organic NRCS soil health study in my career I was just absolutely shocked I thought I was on my own forever I never thought the government agencies would get into this business called soil health it's actually really exciting time in agriculture and I tell farmers and they don't always like to hear it I said to the corn and bean guys you don't deserve to get paid more because if you did it'd be fenced through a defense real corn and beans and you'd ruin our environment you have to learn how to farm seen maybe before we can pay you more now they don't like to hear that but that's kind of the truth you think about it for our more chemicals more nitrogens the price of corn went to seven dollars look what happened and so anyway they saw health the guy is really good sustainable I never did like that word because I always say what do you want to sustain a mess can we fix it no-till is not a system of farming system of planting organic it's not a system of farming it's a system and not doing I don't do this and don't do that I don't do this my family farms certified organic I work with a lot of farms and we farm about 1500 acres in southwest Wisconsin we were under 80 cows and and we grow a lot of different kinds of crops and we've been organic since the mid 90s I got introduced that when I was teaching here and so anyway they're different systems of farming this picture actually came from a pasture raised poultry operation in Australia but I think this is really true you never change things by fighting the existing reality you want to lobby in law against what's existing you're never gonna change anything I'm totally convinced that's buck Minister for to change something we need to build a model that makes the one that's out we had obsolete and how we have that Molly know what's driving it the guys growing foreigner bushel corn I started this business we built the firt we rented a fertilizer facility in Northern Illinois and then we took off we came back into Wisconsin and left Illinois why that big old rich paragon knife in Samantha hydras ammonius 150 bushel corn unless you forgot to put seed nopper well you see now we're back we pull a brand new facility at Millersville Illinois because they're chasing 300 bushel corn these guys going for 500 bushel corn you can't believe the train running across Illinois so I get a little annoyed but how are we gonna feed all these people a 40% of our corn goes to make ethanol number one which might not be energy efficient but it's what's there and the other thing is that we can double our heels so now what we can do with all the stuff we can produce and that's the kind of fun I was heading out I mean what we're gonna do with that so I think we have the Model S created I don't want to just talk about yield because see if you you can't get more yield by putting on more n P and K or we'd already be there our heels came out and out of equipment and genetics the farmer soils haven't really changed so now to get the three four hundred bushel corn to double their heels they're gonna have to change their soils and that means other minerals they haven't been dealing with University of Illinois Fred beetle last year 379 bushel corn they never were close to the county average before but it's trace munoz its carbon fertilizers its soil health its reverse' T of plants is putting on compost is all the things that we're kind of missing in our farming system it's not doing more what they were doing so biological firing is really business of Ireland actually has an approach to food and production that respects the natural process that farmed to get top quality products like I said if you fertilize for quality you can't stop the heal if you do everything you can to get quality what's quality a balance the minerals in a healthy plant that does not need intervention so biological really deals with a three-tiered thing the chemical the nutrient chemistry plans I saw the physical part and the biological part I saw everything comes in as well everything returns it's a living live system with trillions of things living in it so when I did this whole thing biological five of these are the rules I've written for biological farming and it covers those three aspects I want a test and balance your saw I want to look at more than just n P and K I want to look at different sources I want to I said the dumbest idee a man ever came up with is to put nutrients in solution they sell fertilizer on price and ability and then not expect him to get in your water I think about that wasn't that kind of dumb well I didn't if we had see grandfather bought a fertilizer that we had more things attached to it it was more slow release it wasn't so soluble they started selling fertilizer on solubility and now we're back adding things to these Dave take us so they're not society well we had carbon we had molasses to liquids we had humates we had compost where digestate fertilizers and now we changed it back around and the other thing that pesticide herbicide and nitrogen are necessary evils but boy oh boy and I add biotechnology and everybody made me take it off they're necessary evils for some people but they're all they're just like to say all the chemistry that we take as humans to stay functioning but they're there because we have a system as though things are not healthy within it so I need a maximum heights like I need to minimize my negatives I need a maximum diversity of plant life and tillage I have a whole different system on tillage that we looked at we developed a tillage system out here because I'm not big on no-till just not that I would you tell if you didn't have to but no-till and that was brought up this morning and by Brian Assisi this no-till did not stop erosion I was out at Beltsville Maryland at the speaking at the thing about the Chesapeake Bay watershed district thing and I got up and a University's insane I mean a really bad mistake first I said I asked the question is the Chesapeake Bay getting cleaner oh it's getting worse and I said when are you gonna recognize that forcing no-till is not gonna solve your problem you'd hear a pin drop on the room and from then on I think I lost a crowd but form forced them to go no-till on hillsides like this to the ground as hard as before you're sitting on and what happens for nearly all the chemicals all the criminal and all the fertilizers on top the ground in the rains or the snow melts what do they happens why wouldn't you be forced to place it in the ground why would you put it on top and not till unless you've got healthy so the focus should be none of those things the focus should be healthy mineralized soils and then if kill if you have to but don't tell if you don't have to and I'm a real believer and some other things I'll show you as I go along I'm trying to paint that picture and so then I want to feed my soil life that's our farm Otter Creek organic farms were southwestern Wisconsin and we have a dairy farm and we're in the hills and if we're in the breeding fantasy cattle my dad was a real fancy my uncle donated the first bull cat that went and stood it an artificial service thing in the 1940s in the state of Wisconsin if the first herd to make five hundred pounds of that way back in the 1940s amazing but anyway that's the fancy registered Holstein offer if I'm Sheila to be 17 years old on our farm and she produced ninety thousand pounds of milk in her lifetime so I tell people just buy one cow put it in the barn and milk it and then when your kid gets ready for college 17 years later you got the money saved up on the right hand side your seasonal I'm a dairy nutrition guy these two systems are almost identical if you look at the dairy side of it over here years ago we fed baled Hale I do you guys might some of you focus me it came from farm systems we fed baled hay cob card we fed different kind you know dye Cal trace mineral salt nobody feeds cows that way anymore he used to make two cuttings a year we make five now we manage this nutrition in our balanced into our cows we feed tmr's who mix it all together to get maximum efficiency feed chelated trace minerals and I expecting direct fed microbials and online the list goes and we doubled our production now you gotta be careful are these guys you can push a cow over the end now the turnover and the kill rate on cows is pretty high because they burn them out and our soils if we go back 40 years how did we do soils cheaper source of NPK inline to a six five pH what's different today nothing and that's why we can double our yields we're gonna do the same thing to those saws that we did to the cows 40 years ago that's what's happening out here land prices expect everything to touch the expression you can't get more land these guys are going after high yields and they're gonna have to do it by getting healthy saw so it's kind of exciting in that respect there's not gonna be a chemistry farming system this is one of my students did this way back in the 90s out here we did this Mike loved ones on it he'll is a tell tour he's one of our consultants now but anyway we compared 16,000 feed samples with our biological farms I like to look at that calcium sea calcium is kind of a real key to this farming system I'm talking about it's sad to see the commencement I said 1.1 percent calcium in their hay and UCI we're always taught if your pH is 6.5 you get all the calcium you want then how did our guys get up 47 percent more calcium and that's why calcium is a trucker of all minerals and that's why calcium is key to plan account the more calcium the more pectins the warp it puts calluses on the moreless insect troubles it's huge in the health of a plant and nitrogen gives us a lot of trouble I did my graduate work on sulphur and I understand some of those things really well so we go after those highly mineralized feeds in our XY called calcium the trucker of all minerals and more on the steering wheel so we can change speed I don't care what kind of crop not how many farmers are in or you're involved in whatever crop the grow see and this this is taking this formula around the world it's never failed I actually dropped all the fungicide some bananas and Australia and larger seven or eight consultants I'm doing consulting work on bananas and they were spraying a fungicide every five to seven days and haven't done one in ten years it's all about getting enough available calcium and boron this calcium is the hardest mineral to get in a plant because commercial fertilizers and things wipe it out and it just cause it's a type just because you got a high pH doesn't mean you got available calcium you need more on to get calcium uptake phosphorus everybody attacks I'm trying to tell you phosphorus is the good guy not the bad guy it's a good guy for the farmers to get fire meals you see but why is everybody attacking it I said if you're from another planet can you look down on earth and you watch the fire and every time there was a fire you would watch it eventually you're gonna have to blame the firemen for the fire because they're always there phosphorus is exactly the same it's getting there by erosion not leaching what leeches as nitrogen and salts and all the other things - versus erosion so if we stop there or it's a triple negative charge of the tracks really well to the song and if we combine it with a carbon source and place it in the ground it really is essential for plant health it's the Krebs cycle against the tripod you need phosphorus you need magnesium magnesium is really hard to get into a plant because potassium interferes what I don't care if your cells are high in magnesium you need to have add sulfur because it makes up some sauce I get all over the plant I so people give me a tissue test or plant tests petioles on potatoes I look at the test I can tell them exactly how they fireman by looking at those four minerals if they were really high I'll guarantee you don't get fostered you can't buy your way into phosphorus you got to have as a biological mineral you don't buy your way into magnesium you fire me away into magnesium so those minerals are huge on plant health in production this is on our farm and we're real believers and shallow incorporating residues you see the fence post rots up at the top and I'll show you a picture in a minute but see this is a big limpkin this comes out of Germany yeah we look at all like I think that actually a green bean craft at the canning factory rejected and it waited and waited and witness all under irrigation we grow caps for the canning factory and then they finally said we could take it down so we took it down and and that's kind of how we farmed I say shallow incorporating but see I'm a real believer in it you never hurt saws by running on residue hurt sauce by do tilling bare ground that's why you're damaged saws not one as a lot of residues on here and I said that was right next to the highway the neighbors are all laughing for those weeds and everything in and I said I do that just to keep him out of the organic market we like getting paid what we paid and we don't like competition you know anything I wanted a couple inches and that's why under no-till the dilemma is this just cuz thing lays on top the ground you can get a huge crust on that ground and that's one thing is run over I'd rather and shallow incorporate those residents the fence post rots off right there and that's your biological active zone that except you fix this all from the top down here when the water hits it you got protection on the ground because you left a lot of residues on top which also got a wicking action to get that water to soak in and so I don't have to have you got to keep yourself aerated and part of it is feeding then you got to feed your soil like so and so then the other thing is that the number one yield limiting factor on crops is carbon dioxide it's not nitrogen it's not some chemistry it's carbon dioxide here we saw are carbon oxides all-boy mismanagement of nitrogen and tillage if you go on the fall these guys are knifing in there ammonia in the song or boiling off carbon dioxide what do you think the guys that grow anybody go giant pumpkins you figured out you're gonna use dry ice carbon dioxide greenhouses in Canada they object inject carbon dioxide you go in a cornfield on a high yielding corn from the middle of summer carbon dioxide levels are almost zero the first guy to grow four and a bushel corn said in order to grow four and a bushel corn you're gonna have to follow for it I push the cord and every time you put nitrogen on you boil carbon dioxide off and that's what drives your yields it's about its sugars carbon oxygen so anyway we like to shallow incorporate and then manage our nitrogen and I asked was to release it because the Semana on the bottom of the leaf of a plant that's to absorb carbon dioxide carbon dioxide huge to make this thing work so everybody's worried about oh we can grow this crop nasai mismanagement of carbon dioxide mismanagement of residues and so this year's a field that I showed you at $1.00 taking that Lemkin I was taking that mismatched thing down and then we grow these cocktail mixes the advantage about being organic we only buy a tiller radish and clover and Oates's we're tight old Germans are weeds make up our diversity we get enough weeds were organic that you can see those weeds and things in there so that'll be seed corn next year we grow a lot of seed corn we had the highest quality seed corn going into Beck's hybrid situation now to Indiana huge seed corn County and in the top 10% of the yield comparing conventional and organic and so we got their attention about how we farm on our farm out in June you see the green on the ground cuz after we take the male's out we put a cover crop in we're always trying to put something back into the soil and the other thing as organic farmers got a huge advantage we have to transition it from conventional to organic and it takes two growing seasons in those two growing seasons we fix soils we just transition 300 acres last year some we get land from very very wealthy people that want it farmed organically and we don't make any money in transition and they want their farm organic they don't get paid rent during transition but once it is organic we share the profits so they do really well they get to make it up we don't make any money so we spend two years putting oats and clover and working it down taking the salt test adding all the men would spend $3 nake on remineralizing the land starting with calcium and phosphorus and we get poultry manure dairy manure available this is a field by a rate law in Wisconsin rivers it's a half mile to the to the north of this to the right and that's the second year transition next year that'll be seed corn so we did that two years in a row now we put manure on it we grow that cover crop and get that back up in there and I can change the soil in two years you'll not recognize what I started don't tell me it takes 20 years to change sauce now it's not perfect this one looks like in the spring when the clovers and things that come back that didn't winter kill and we can see the wheel track Center we've spread manure see if you're spreading manure on a land see there's a lot of things we can do to change agriculture that's why I was talking with Scott with your organization we've been talking about meetings out here see I say the policy I want to do in agriculture is really quite simple and everybody's not gonna like it I want to pay the farmer for something science corn and beans take the sub stays away from corn and beans subside that third crop I was over at Cambridge University speaking at a think-tank group on sustainability and you don't mind stainability oh how are you gonna feed all these people in the world I said come on first of all they're gonna shoot one another the second thing you know and the second thing is I said we already 40% of our corn goes to energy we can double our yield and they don't eat corn and beans why don't we grow that third crop let's say it's wheat their oats lentils I don't care something that the world we can feed the world with and now we can put it me changed agriculture I just need one more crop because of wheat and suffers harvested in July I can plant this beautiful cover cow following it and get cut mine I turn you down - I think improve my saw health and now airing put my manure on it now the manure we spread on there sucks up into those plants can't leave can't erode can't get away and that's biological farming I had dick I thought to our farm last fall after the first year last spring I had a trainee here from Czech Republic I got practicode out of Eastern Europe but she was here we couldn't find a worm on that farm six months later after doing what we did there they are so where were they we're the little cocoons waiting for the day what we're worthy couldn't I find them before now they're just cousin how we created an idea home we quit poisoning and we're feeding them it's pretty simple I tell farmers this is we run a real tight rotation most farmers would look at that say wow that's a nice heythere first I tell the farmers you got a bill to get a crop like that and then you got to build a well to sacrifice a crop like that see we feed our crops like you feed cows anybody got dairy cows anymore my we're a dying breed out here I know that or not many of us left anymore and they're going down like flies out I hate to see that but that's the reality so if you fed that kind of a feed and that kind of a stand to a dairy cow Union hundred thousand milk a day you can also put that back in a saw and grow corn two years ago we had a project with the University of Wisconsin look in a genome study on corn for an old genetic some years ago we had 580 varieties of corn on our farm we had six or eight varieties one over three and a bushel corn hit the same plot was at the University and I'm a seed corn farm and then it never got publicized because they were wonder how in the world is an organic farm grow 300 bushel corn well why wouldn't I it's billed as mineral sunshine and water I can grow a lot of things I can manage the system we're a higher yielding organic farm some are silence corn we try to intercede but it's really difficult because that court is about 12 feet tall and I got shaded out as my son we're mooring down that rye grass and we're working at rye grass in and we do some rye and we drive kind of crooked you see that winner over there but anyway we grow arrived for seed and you're I think Brian you are absolutely right you we're so far north it's hard to fit cover crops into our rotations they don't intercede very well they might work better on a conventional time inner-city because you can do it earlier than us Organic guys and we have to cultivate late and then the other thing is that you see even this crop right here we use it for seed on our own farm so we have acres that will grow this for seed on our farm and then following that we'd grow soybeans and we plant our soybeans into June we plant them really late that was 84 bushel beans we do this is on our organic farm you know so many weeds in it but see this intensive management when we plant it late and we we manage our weed say when I got that big tall right crap it's sucking up all the nutrients from the weeds so biological farming is really doing anything you can do to get your song he'll the--and mineralized just like this here's a vegetable farm we we actually tell yes in the Frank Lloyd Wright foundation we farm that farm we have 35 acres of vegetables on that fireman and we got the visitor center now serves all food from the farm and they got it's a chef training program at the school and we're gonna start Agri tours and we want to get the universities and researchers involved to study the whole nine hundred a core a state and there's about three and a KERS of crop I've been farming it since 2000 I've been on the board for ten years now it's been a slow move to get things changed I tell people I'm getting old you better speed up you can't drag this out forever this year in Virginia a million dollar CSA in Virginia where's all that warm climate rid of disease and insects no no no one year saw building and one year of production they're gonna grow a high return crop like that it's one year saw building and one year of production this farm does the million dollar CSA on 50 acres so NRCS I think Brian you brought that up or a minimum disturbance maximum soil cover maximum biodiversity and the presence of living roots nobody can argue against that the question is how do I achieve that and that's why I see no it doesn't say no-till and it doesn't say how do I get my ground covered and how do I get there's biodiversity out here and then I cost my living roots and the other thing is this is soil this is soil health from I expanded upon the NRCS model just a little bit and see health is really the capacity to function I added the word without intervention I'm in my mid 70s and you can say am i healthy or am I not healthy I don't take any kind of medication not that I don't need any because I go to the doctor to find out if I do or not see if I don't know my wife says it's irresponsible it probably is irresponsible but I feel good why would I go then that has something to worry about now I don't worry about it it that's being a man compared to a woman I think partially my wife doesn't agree with my little plan but you were right water he's got a soak in the ground and that water soaking in the ground means I got to stop all barriers I think you talked about the vertical horizontal erosion well I went to our aims last night I saw a brown snow in a lot of places well that's that little fine silty stuff when it percolates through your ground it creates those little hard pants and that stops water so we chalk will run our deeper imprecision we have to a nutrient recycling isn't about sucking the back up out of my groundwater that's about through plants and biology I can't do all that disturbance I can't have a question top the ground that's why we like the shallow incorporate I got a lot of diversity I kind of living roots and again I manage decant residues and I wrote the word minerals up there you know what's wrong with this whole system see if you're a conservation person you can go to anybody say man you know growing a cover crop or minimum tell or no tell a wonderful wonderful you said look I think we got these minerals all mixed up every saw sized apartment in North America every fertilizer company you just attacked I have beers with the guys that run with soil conservation that started this whole little program about saw health and they can't be key we need minerals we need minerals what minerals we need not more n P and K style salt fertilizers we need calcium we need trace furnace we need other things to get this outfit and I tell people are do we do a salt test to measure minerals you don't need a salt just immerse your health look at it you can tell that's all you can tell that sauce and put it on good shape just look at it I'm your left over there that was Frank lyric that was Taliesin when we took over two years later that's what it's all looks like in two years went from that crust on the ground stocks not riding down velvet leaf growing in two years that's what it looked like after our to yourself very same field same soil and that's what you can do it's amazing how fast salt change this it's the crust on the earth is the six inches between people's ears it's not the soil so soil health is really that capacity to function its organic matter and soil fertility as that exchange of nutrients and that exchange of nutrients has to come through carbon and biology so the regenerative egg movement which I little pushback we're having a little pushback here it's about no-till and it hide the fact that you can't go no-till without chemicals and you can't get rid of your residues without cattle I'm in southern Ohio and we're having this discussion that's where the fight came because I had a real good friend of mine lived up by Duluth he moved down to Ohio I said the most miserable move in his life see you go to North Dakota where game Brown is it freezes in November and the thaws in April you can panic it's 20 inches of rain here we got 50 inches last year they get 60 inches in someplace in Ohio and it's mud every month of the year you can't turn your cat out to destroy your fields they sink in 6 8 inches deep they destroy them you can't turn cattle in that land now I say why do we need cattle we all got soil eyes so I can use iron and shallow incorporate my residues and cover crops we all agree with it but how do you manage them you get to that whole group out here with Gabe brown and Ray Archuleta and Alan Williams Alan Wilson well you have to have the cattle to do your tillage see prairies were tilled folks by the wolves because the lows herded the bison and the Bison peed and pooped the SOT that he tilled the ground and that's what they want to do with their cattle just win us a little bit of mud on top you don't want to do a 6 inches deep shadow incorporating your resident with cattle that's how the birds got tilled and of course livestock we're not gonna fence this Midwest if you want to have a livestock farm go to Nebraska the laws you have to fence your neighbor's cattle out there's no fences they're not gonna fence southern Minnesota we're not gonna fence Illinois Ohio in Indiana that's not gonna go very far there's not gonna change the agriculture I'm sorry that's where my pushback comes and compost is wonderful but it's not a complete program and I want more salt tests than that so these cover crops this is a fire mountain and Alamosa Colorado used to grow potatoes every four years now it's every other year one year soil building one year potatoes no insecticides no herbicides fungicides and 20 units and outages neighbors use 200 that's this cocktail mix now they have two more now if you ever know anything about potatoes they're not a no-till farming system they're more lit then they're gonna work them in then they're gonna put on compost they're gonna make sure it's clean can we plant your potatoes and your fire it isn't even a hill and you're gonna color bait them again and you're gonna dig them now if you go to a sperm in spy Alamosa they only get five inches terrain it's sand there a lot of sand dunes out there they render four with us on they have straw bales sitting on the end of their fields put to fill in the trenches because the irrigation rigs sink his rig runs right on top the ground his soil structure has changed that much all that tillage he said don't tell me tillage destroys us all tell me my nitrogen and my chemicals and things I used to do destroyed my saw now that I've been telling and growing all these cover crops my saw is just fine there's more to us you've got a lot of things well maybe a cover crop should be your nitrogen should be your nutrient story should be your time release depending on the digestibility it should be an erosion protection and it should be a carbon sequestering on your soils and it should be your insect control of your disease prevention should be your resilience in your soil and it should be your water holding capacity if you ask a farmer about cover crops it's all just added another cost to my farm they didn't know how to take advantage and that's what we got to demonstrate that I take advantage of all these things I should be able get rid of my section of my fungicides my best thing about technology and cut my nitrogen half and we'll all be better off on this planet but I gotta include those in my rotation that was this is what was in that mustard that was growing on that farm see it's a it's a bio fuming if you look at the nitrogen to sulfur ratio there my graduate was three to one we normally look at ten to one to build proteins that's why it stinks when it rocks just like tiller radish and so all those minerals that are in that yellow plant and reason we did the testing as yellow plants course the biodynamic people think that's because the yellow flower is higher in calcium and it is high in calcium there's a lot of nutrients in fairly high digestible as to feed test I'm just on the mustard alone so those nutrients can't leave scanty road can't get away that's just potatoes just like mob grazing you read the reports on this if you're in my world mob grazing did not increase soil organic matter just like when I was a kid we put fertilizer on corn grew 12 feet tall we're really gonna build organic matter uh-huh 40 years later we cut it in half then he's always all your tiller University Wisconsin finished a study two years ago 20 years of no-till did not increase the organic bear not one speck what's the trouble nitrogen balancing carbon to nitrogen ratio so now you're just burning up our carbon it's not everything else so anyway composting is what it is and I don't mind putting nutrients at the Health Study is really about do it I'm not so keen on this thing it's about measuring a water soluble nutrients and all that because you see this is that big gunsmoke farmer Pierre South Dakota General Mills project I'm in the middle I'm the agronomist on this farm 34 thousand acres that's Wisconsin guys 50 miles just to go look at it all General Mills are gonna put 4,000 acres of butterfly and BT habitat see they want to label this is their model farm this is just one of them they need about a hundred thousand acres of hard red spring wheat out here so they didn't soil health studying that ground is as hard and dead as the floor year I'm gonna soil health study said perfect because they took that old dead dry drought so and put it in a lab and they added water in the biology started to flourish well that's that really emerging what was going on in the field that was emerging after you watered it it couldn't get the weeds control this kosher its thistle and it's cheatgrass 34,000 acres has gone one more year for us organic I said now don't laugh at us just give us time we got financial people running the checkbook so I was trained by Albrecht and that's about soil balance and I was trained if you get your minerals right this is a farm by a Monticello Iowa it has never done a cover crop look at that saw earthworm castings are the little things around the top by the roots you can see up there and that beautiful chocolate cake that's all about changing minerals and they went to strip till farming there's no cover crop has ever been growing on this farm look at those beautiful soils so minerals that's what I was taught you know minerals make a huge difference out here here's another farm at supplements in that Jackson Minnesota and I bet with him for about 30 years and his beautiful sauce never had a cover crop on it that's just mineral changing so anything I think we know I stay out here we got it all figured out we understand minerals we know there's 20 plus minerals known to grow the crop and we know there's different sources those minerals we know if plant calcium is essential for us to go we know there's ratios between those minerals and we know there's sufficiency levels of those minerals and we also know there's different sources of those minerals and we know as an organic farmer I can use any minerals anybody else can and we know minerals belong in that carbon our fertilizer belongs and the minerals in a carbon biological cycle I shouldn't be dumping on the ground hope a plant gets them and then worry about when they run in my water it should be locked to something oh dear boy that's a plant or we do all carbon-based fertilizers and so solve Corrections you're adding what's missing and organic is about a prevention I won't go through this but I divided Sol's down into three categories what kind of soil is that where your peas in case where's your calcium magnesium what about your traces and how is a uniformity other so we use Omaha Midwest labs and we do a completely elaborate salt test perfect salt test ready to go perfect crops you see that with all those bracelets at top three or four inches you know anything you want up there but don't you dare tear up middle zone a chisel plow on a mow bored pile both do the same damage and the oils compare no-till to plowing see those little breathing channels the strip till guys came up with this they place it and once you get that roots growing in your saw you got breathing channels and you got channels for the next route to follow your earthworm channels there it's not the damage you don't do up on top there we run big rippers make sure you don't of any compaction but assault doesn't touch doesn't tell you if the plants are available it doesn't tell you the biology and it doesn't tell you the physical properties so calcium is our king out here and this is a study down at Purdue University about adding calcium and sulfur in the morning and by nighttime the water running off those little pots was crystal clear it quit getting dirty it's the only chemistry you can add to a salt you didn't change biology in 12 hours you change chemin you change chemistry the physical properties so better soil structure better water holding capacity water penetration and better tilth there's we dumped the pile of calcium in the insects you're eating the rest of the field so calcium protects your plants just like these us a solid stemmed alfalfa University Minnesota has been testing what's in those plants that's pectins and just like when I started this fertilizer business there was n P and K and I wanted to add more stuff and that's why we choose whole bunch of different sources and are different calcium sources I've washed in the clock over I'm pretty good at hard for me to do a half hour meeting when I do full-day meetings I really got to realize that I'm trying to paint my picture this one here you got to be well aware of because this is what I I'm 75 years old and I had three partners one died the other two retired and I built a thirty five million dollar company now what I brought on Financial Partners and we got something that's going to revolutionize agriculture as you know what today and one of your farms in Minnesota has been involved with this this is Fair Oaks Indiana that large farm south of Chicago and amend the Fair Oaks a milk 16,000 cows they'll never spread another pound of manure it's over we got a 16 million dollar fertilizer facility sitting on their farm the feed comes off runs through a cow for 24-48 hours goes in the anaerobic digester comes out of the bedrest we take the water and a fiber out and then we separate out and precipitate the minerals out we get 95% of the phosphorus we don't get all the nitrogen and potash and then we add other members to it we pelletized fertilizers the next we want to add it one year and we've had a lot of troubles nobody's ever done this before and the next ten are already financed as soon as we got this one up and working and we've had a lot of success because now we've added it's a biological thing with it and it's really dead bodies the bugs that we got in here and it's really about biologicals and it's about humates and it's about growth regulators and enzymes and plant protective compost all coming out of those bodies the bugs food for biology and there's extra minerals involved in the thing and then of course we manufacture fertilizer side of it this is a test spot on trace mills at the university wisconsin see in the background that corn is kind of green and you're left this kind of brown now it's a little greener that's where we put on tration less nothing but trace wasn't one on the right size traceless so we're going to get rid of insecticides no we went to buy trace minerals they're expensive you know of NPK well you can't keep going to hundreds of quarks they get removed from your farm and they're the ones that give you the plant health you can't ignore the trace but they don't want to pay the money but they got a buffalo their dollars is what that's about this up in Chatham Ontario that's big Gerber's baby food squash this one's conventional and this one's organic for your ferret of milk and compost tea that's conventional fungicides every five days and this was organic don't tell me we can't grow healthy crops at 1,700 acre organic farm vegetable farm in Canada this is wheat you can see the difference in the diseases we cut down on wheat and we like to add molasses or sugars and we're real big believers in that little cluster mix we put biology we put fish Mia we put kelp put all kinds of things right down next to the seed when we plant it I don't need other seed protection and so we can get some pretty healthy-looking crab so biology you can see it you can smell it it's got to do with soil health and soil fertility and it's not it's not only livers and so about how many so our life wants this food on top and it wants to be left alone plants determine the soul that that's why you have the diversity of plants in store life it's it's different plants that different maturities and cows are similar calcium is king so I've talked about all these things already that's dr. Elaine Ingham she was the one that brought on a lot of soil biology for a lot of people and she taught me something every saw you got your sauce to fungal Tommy we've what you feed is what you get and so how I get my high yielding corn cob the bacteria got a real close nitrogen to phosphorus ratio and so the fungus got a much lower one so if I feed them complex carbons I don't get enough nitrogen I can grow my Mariam I got a feed bacteria food I got a bacteria food in this whole system so I divided it out I spent my career trying to get things simple green carbons green succulent stop Brown carbons old mature things and black carbon is a human and I think Brian you might have talked about now the liquid set come down Christine Jones out of Australia our organic manner soil is not built from putting residues in the ground is built by the liquid exodus from the plant feeding the bacteria and about they had the curve upside down for the last forty years it'll take two generations to change the education model so it's not the same as that used to be that was wrong all those years penn state university one on the left was hairy vetch with a lot of measures and credits the one on the right was young succulent green crap and he said we don't understand it that one's yellow and this other one's green I said well one wasn't digestible be like making your a the fourth of July and try to get milk out of it so we third through all the word digestibility in there you want to take this crop right here you see this if you went out took a soil sample you wouldn't measure this that had two hundred years of management credit we entered the growing season or three hundred units in on an organic farm now our nutrients these wouldn't be an assault test they're enough time to release fertilizer you see why this system we you got to figure out how to get this thing to pay for people where we grew this tall Rai that's where we're gonna grow soybeans here's where we're gonna grow corn I want the soybeans to be starved in nutrients this is out in cholera Idaho this farm here is a Snowville the ground is white from salt and he can hardly grow crops so the first guy to fertilize the cover crop mix and we had radish and tell her things in there always nutrients get put through the compost pile you can't add fertilizer to our 9ph salt at fourteen percent sodium and expect to get a crop he doubled his potato yield he's not only six hundred sack potato cover you just never got over three hundred sack potato crab before the nutrients are bypassing the soil see they're either coming through the cover crop or they're coming through the compost they're not you're not adding minerals of the salt hope the plant gets it out here so my last sections on tillage and Hill not the till that's the question out here and I say you can have healthy soils with tillage absolutely you've been around long enough go to a lot of Amish guys got no I think you know it's team Orson plow they don't plow 12 inches deep they don't plow ten miles an hour and boy they got some pretty healthy so they don't plow her every year either and they got dairy manure they got things in a rotation there's a lot of guys with tillers they got pretty healthy sauce neutering sitting on top the ground is like putting feet on the other side for cattle that's my arguing about no-till guys they said bugs in the soil can't jump up guys I like I have some on top that's why I like the lightly I'm in the ground and and I got a look at what I'm working in the ground if you're gonna go after aggressive till it's like plowing or chiseling you better have a really good reason like I got all this extra manure I put need to put on lime there's some kind of a problem with that thing and then no tilling plowing or extremes there's common sense in the middle I like the shallow incorporate I want to leave my residence near the surface and we did a bunch of no-till all the stuff on the left was no TLC we plant down and furrows look at our soils we leave a lot of residues on top you go by our farm and it's just residues everywhere and so we did the rolling and crimping yeah it's a fairly firing system folks summer station I spoke down there and yesterday Irish farming University Wisconsin's finally backing down when it works it's beautiful but it fails as equally many times as it works and that's where the struggle is because whatever it does is set back those beans I got irrigation on this field just there's more weeds where I rolled and crimped than where I didn't there's ten bushel beam difference out there this is the Arlington University of Wisconsin see the yellow stuff that's rolled crimp ride it suppresses the beans to attend bushel line I like the fact that we don't have to do tillage we're developing minimum till like a strip till system for organic SAS University Wisconsin ten bushel beam yet now that straw looks nice and all that looks pretty out here and then sometimes it looks like that and then you buy a $60,000 weed zapper and you zap those little guys off and you see I think you brought it up Brian you see the compaction layers this is a ruinous University of Illinois that's a really lousy soil and the compaction is caused by poor soil structure and vertical leaching of silt fine silt is making those compacted zones just like this is plowed soil without a common sense I like running my rivers cutting that slot in the ground we're about 12 inches deep so the water can soak in and we're not disturbing the soil I'm a real big believer in stripped Hill this was developed by Mike Bauer Faribault Minnesota he was a customer of mine for years now it's environment technologies is down nearby Rochester they make these somewhere and then you see they put all that little stuff into the strip but now we can have a concert of nutria so we can fix rented land and grow really good crops that's how I think we ought to be farming if I was conventional I'd be farming that when I'm trying to develop that for organic farming and we planting these furrows out here and so anyway my last ones are the same thinking they brought us this far as created problems that the same thinking can't solve and I think we have a system of farming called biological farming if everybody got involved with it will radically change agriculture because we wouldn't need all the nutrients so my method is this I told Scott yeah wherever that conference call about this I want to subsidize that third crop and it could be a cover crop and do nothing but a cover crop failure quit subs and corn amis and tax nitrogen because it is the problem so high that they have to carefully use it or not use it at all and that's all you have to do to change that's the only policy I want and watch agriculture change if you radical tax that it catch the cigarettes to clean up lungs less that matters in a clear part carbon that's telling us in the French playwright foundation we farmed that farm you got is some knowledge you gotta move the negatives you got to have calcium salt from born balanced fertilizers and carburetor biology so I know I covered a lot of stuff and I always get to any sides I tried to paint the picture what this is all about I hope I got some my message across this I'm yourself thank you I can speak a thousand words a minute one gust up to 1500 that's a date [Music]
