 Hi, my name is Doug Beseek. Thanks for joining us today. I'm out here with the NRCS personnel and we're going to do some things with soil health today. We're located in Walworth County, South Dakota. We're in the north-central part of the state. We're about 10 miles east of Missouri River and we're about 30 miles south of the North Dakota border. What we're doing today is looking around at some different things we've been doing with the soils. I started using cover crops and no-till in the past years. We've been doing no-till for 15 or 20 years and we started using cover crops and full season cover crops starting about four or five years ago on the full season cover crops and about seven or eight years ago on the post harvest cover crops. The first thing we're going to look at today is the soil structure test, the slag test. And basically what we're doing here is we've got two soil samples. One came from a field of mine over here that has soybeans in it that we just harvested and last year it was corn and two years ago it was a full season cover crop. The other soil sample is coming from a conventionally tilled field, sort of a wheat summer fallow rotation kind of a setup. What we're looking for here is how well does the soil hold together and how well does the water soak in. First thing you notice is in the conventionally tilled sample it's starting to fall apart already. It didn't take any time at all for that soil structure to start collapsing and to drift down. It would do the same thing in a rainstorm. It started to fall apart and drift down. You'll notice over here not much is going on. I can see a few air bubbles coming up and if you were here you could see them too and what that tells me is that there's there are pockets in that soil. Aggregate stability is what we're looking at. When we go out and look at soil when we dig up a sample we want to see something that looks like cottage cheese and structure and when we go into a no-till situation and especially one that's been using cover crops we see a lot of that cottage cheese type texture. When we go into a conventionally tilled field we dig it up we see more of a texture like modeling clay or sand that you'd buy. It's it's compressed and there aren't any air pockets in there. So what's going on over here where we've got the no-till and we've got the cover crop history we've got more biology in the soil. We've got more microbes and bacteria feeding on each other and doing all the things that they do and a lot of the things they do we don't understand but they're doing it. And they're they're giving off like little waxy substances that are coating the soil down there. So when the water comes in not only does it flow through the air pockets and the porous parts but the the stuff that is there holds together and doesn't wash away. Look at how fast this has fallen apart over here and this this is a really a typical example when we run this test. It doesn't take any time at all. Now you think about for a long time we thought that when we were tilling we were doing a great thing for helping water to soak in the soil. We went out with our chisel plows and we'd worked that ground and and a chisel plow has a kind of a sweep on it and stir that soil back and forth and we'd dig it up and we thought boy this is a good thing. It turned out we were totally wrong. If you think about when when you watch and build a road or build a building how do they pack the soil? If you watch they'll take a road grater and they'll move that soil back and forth and the fines drop down in and they plug up all the holes and that's why that ground gets hard. We're doing the same thing or we were doing the same thing when we're doing conventional tillage. When we move that soil around and we were filling in all the little air pockets and all those porous places where the water would soak in and why is this a big deal? You know obviously we get about 16 inches of rainfall in in this area so we're a long ways from a wet country and what we want to do is get as much of that water to soak in as we can and as little to run off. We want to become selfish with our water is kind of the way we say it. That's a big deal for water quality. If if I've got a soil setup like this conventional tillage and we get rain and it's a let's say it's a one-inch rain which is pretty common you know we get a one-inch rain and it starts washing off and going down in the ditch and it goes down and it ends up in a communal water source of some sort of a pond or a lake and that's where all of our nutrients end up and that's where all of our soil sediment ends up. It keeps trickling down you know you go all the way to the Missouri River and then it flows down and you see it down in the Gulf of Mexico. All those problems that are that are associated with water quality you can trace back to the land okay if we've got the water soaking in instead of running off about 95% of our water quality issues go away. If you look at this this cover crop no-till combination field here that's the kind of field where we can get an inch of rain or we can even get two inches of rain and that will soak in okay the stuff's going to go in it's going to go down if if it goes in if it soaks in the ground and saturates the soil we get the benefit that year obviously for more production but the real test comes along because our precipitation isn't consistent we run into a dry year we run into a wet year maybe two wet years maybe a dry year by by treating our soil different and then doing a better job of getting the water to infiltrate we can smooth out some of those bumps okay we can smooth out the bumps when we get the heavy rains and we can smooth out the bumps when we have the dry years because we build a savings account of water down underneath. We're we're about done falling apart over here you can see the the soil sample from the conventionally tilled field there's just a little bit of soil there a little bit of root structure holding it together if you look over here we haven't we haven't lost hardly any soil hardly any of this soil is going to wash off the field in a typical rainfall event it's just holding together and that's because of the the glues the bacteria and the microbes have formed these glomulins and the glues are holding things together in there just almost exactly opposite of what we thought when we're doing it the other way