 Alright, well thank you everyone and I'm glad to be here in the condition that I am in. I'm glad to be anywhere. I don't know if you saw me earlier, but I'm kind of hobbling around with this walker. As I told some of you last night, I had a bad accident. I fell down the steps at my house and got my legs tucked up underneath me and so I blew out the quad muscles in both legs. So I am recovering. It's just going slower than what I'd hoped, but I am glad to be here and to be part of this conference. What a great organization that you have and again as I expounded on last night, I think it's a wonderful organization and I think it's something that a lot of other states are going to take notice on. So just a little bit of background on myself first before I kind of jump into the topic here. We farm in South Central Nebraska, as you can see on the screen here, just 20 miles up off the Kansas border. Our farming background is we've been no-telling for 30 years. Two-thirds dry land and about a third irrigated there on our farm. Corn bean is the typical irrigated rotation. Corn beans in some sort of cereal, usually wheat would be a dry land rotation. But since we started down this path towards soil health, we've added a lot of other things to what we grow ourselves. So now we're growing rye and triticali and oats and barley and vetch and sunflowers and buckwheat and things like this at that part of Nebraska, you know, it really gets the guys in the coffee shop talking when you've got a whole field of buckwheat and it's in beautiful white blooms and nobody knows what the heck that it is. They probably talk about those burns boys growing another crop of weeds out there. Ten years ago we started Green Cover Seed in response to some research that we did on how much moisture that cover crops would use. We convinced ourselves that it would be something that could work in our area. As a result of doing this project, we also discovered that seed was really hard to find. So we made the decision to go ahead and start selling cover crop seed in 2009. And again, as I mentioned last night, we started pretty slowly. We sold enough seed for about a thousand acres in that first year in 2009. Ten years later in 2018, we moved enough seed out the door to cover about 850,000 acres. And so that's how fast this whole thing has grown, the whole soil health movement. But even as much as it's grown and as fast as it's going, we're still only covering a very small percentage of the acres that need to be covered. So there's a lot of work to be done. And so that's why groups and meetings like this are so powerful. This is just a picture of our seed facility there in Nebraska. So one of the cool things that we've been a part of a couple of years ago, the Soil Health Institute came to us and they said, hey, we're putting together this Soil Health documentary. And we want you guys to be a part of it. And we send a film crew out to be a part of this to videotape you guys. And we said, yeah, that'd be great. So one of the things that they wanted to get is they wanted to show us in the field planting the cover crop. As you can see here, we're out in the field with the air seeder at the same time that we're harvesting corn because that is a practice that we try to do. We want to get something growing in there as soon as possible after we take the other crop out. So if you have not seen this Soil Health documentary, it has been released now for a couple of months maybe. It's free for anyone to watch. It's online. If you go to livingsoilfilm.com, livingsoilfilm.com, and you can watch us, it's about an hour long documentary, very, very well done, very professionally done. And so I just wanted to share this one little clip with you to kind of show you how well they did it. So let me see if I can get it to run here. So they sent a film crew out. And of course, they sent the big drone out. And so I had the hired man go hook up the air seeder. And it was a beautiful day in October. And I was thinking, man, this is great. So I jumped in the tractor. And I took off and was shifting up, getting up to speed here. And I turned around. I could see the drone right there and thinking, this is cool. We're going to be part of a movie and a movie star. How could it get much better than this? And you've got to be careful when you start thinking about that. Because about the time you think, how could it get much better than this, the hitch pin literally falls out of your whole project. And there you are. So I show that because it gives me instant credibility as a farmer. Because most of you are groaning in sympathy because something like that has probably happened to you. But I would dare to venture that none of you have it captured on high definition drone footage that you can share with your friends and family. And so we do like to share that because things like that happen. So that's not part of the movie. The movie is way better than that. I would encourage you to watch it if you get a chance. I want to start with this slide because I'm not here to tell you how to farm. I'm not here to tell you what cover crops to plant. I'm not here to tell you what methods you need to use. What the speakers today, what Dr. Alan Williams did a great job of talking about. And I will and Dwayne back as well. We're going to be talking about the principles. And I love this quote by Emerson. He says, as the methods, there may be a million. And then some, but the principles are few. And the man who can grasp the principles can successfully select his own methods. But the man who tries the methods, ignoring the principles is sure to have trouble. And what this means is you can't do the same things that I'm doing. I can't do the same things that you're doing. You know, we can't have the same production system that Alan is doing down in Mississippi. That's okay. Those are methods. But the principles, the soil health principles that we're going to be talking about, they are the same whether they're in Mississippi, Nebraska, or South Dakota. Those same principles will work and they will apply. It's up to you. Your challenge is to figure out how to select the methods to make these principles work on your own farm. So what I want to do here this morning is I want to try to give you kind of a big picture overview of one of the most complicated systems in the world. And it's this whole system of what's going on in the soil. The whole soil system, it's extremely complicated, but I will attempt to explain it in a way that will help you understand it better. And the way that I'm going to do that is I'm going to compare it to another equally complex, but I think it's a system that we understand better and that's the economy of a country. And you may not realize that you have a good understanding of economics, but because you live in an economy, you do. And so we're going to look at these economic principles and I don't know if you remember from high school or college econ class, there's basically seven keys to a healthy economy. I'm going to go through these very quickly and then we'll look at how they apply to our soil system. So first of all, if we're going to have a really strong healthy economy, we have to supply. We have to produce something. We have to manufacture, we have to grow. We have to have something that we can offer for sale because if you don't have something to sell, you don't have much of an economy. And the phrase at the bottom there where it says diversity is very important, Alan Williams talked about that. I'm going to talk about it, it's so very true because think of it in an economy. If we only produced one thing, how strong would your economy be? It would not be strong at all, it would not be stable. So diversity is very important on the supply side. And then after you supply or produce or manufacture something, you have to sell it. Somebody has to buy it. You have to have demand within your economy and strong economies are going to have a high demand for products. And again, diversity is very important. Number three, you need currency. Currency allows the consumers and the producers to make quick, efficient and fair transactions between them. And it allows these transactions to happen very quickly, very seamlessly, good currency has to be universally desired and accepted and it has to have different forms and it has to flow back and forth through the economy very easily. Once you have currency, when you have excess currency you can store it, you can save it and you can turn that into capital. Capital is a very important part of an economy. You need it for growth and stability and in order to expand your economic base. Energy drives the system, but it's usually fairly expensive and resources provide a base for the growth and expansion of our economy. Number six, infrastructure allows economies to grow beyond the subsistence level and the two most important infrastructures that there are and that we're going to talk about are communication and transportation. And then finally, defense and protection because strong economies will always be under attack by those who want to consume without producing, those who want to take without giving anything back. And if you're going to protect your economy from that it requires investments of capital and you have to do that if you want to defend your economy. So real quickly, there's a whole semester's worth of econ right in like five little minutes there. So don't you wish all your classes could have been like that? But those are the keys to a healthy economy. Now let's look at how these same things are happening in the soil. When you're walking out across your fields these same seven things are happening out in that economy. And if you want to have a really strong, healthy soil economy, we need to figure out how to make these things work. So first of all, within our economy, our soil economy is based on solar energy. We know that as farmers, but we're taking sunlight and turning it into things that we can sell. And so within the economy that we're talking about with the soil, there's three main players. The soil obviously, the plants obviously, but the thing that sometimes escapes our attention because we don't always see them is the animals. And Alan talked a lot about the large animals, the grazing cattle and sheep and poultry and those things. And those are all important. I'm not going to talk about that in this talk so much, but what I'm going to focus more on is the microbiology, the little critters, the bacteria, the fungus, the mycorrhiza, Alan did a great job introducing that. I'm going to talk more about that in even the earthworms. So they're one of the things that we can see, but what role do they play within this economy and why are they important and why as a farmer should I care about them? So let's take a look at how this is all working. So on the supply side, within our soil economy, plants are supplying their manufacturing, they're producing carbon. That's what plants are bringing to the table with this and then economy. You all know this, this is photosynthesis. I know it's not a balanced equation, but it's a simplified version. So photosynthesis occurs when plants will take CO2 out of the atmosphere, which some people consider a waste product. I consider it plant food, but if they want to pay me money at some point in time down the road to take that out of the atmosphere, I'm happy to take their money. So they take CO2 and water. That's why water is so important. The energy of the sun, the chlorophyll cells and the green plants and the leaves of the green plants and they will convert that into C6H1206, which is glucose. It's a simple carbohydrate, sugar, glucose molecule and oxygen. Oxygen is a byproduct, but it's a very important byproduct for anyone who enjoys breathing. But the real key here is that C6 molecule there on that sugar molecule because that becomes the carbon that's gonna drive this whole system. So in this economy, plants are manufacturing carbon. The soil, what is the soil bringing? What is it providing to the economy? Well, it's providing nutrients through minerals. If you look at this table here, this is a list of the main plant nutrients that a plant needs to grow. Ignore nitrogen for now. We'll talk about that later. But most of these other ones, potassium and phosphorus and calcium and magnesium and iron and manganese and boron and so forth and so on, these are all things that plants need to grow. Our soils contain these in sufficient amounts. Most of our soils do, but the plants can't get them. So we'll look at how that whole system works, but the soil is providing these nutrients to this economy. It's also providing a habitat for roots and biology. Plants have to have a place to grow. Biology has to have a place to live. That's part of the soil's function. And thirdly, a very important part, it provides water storage. The more water we can store, the more crops we can grow. Every percent of organic matter that we can add to our soils will add 25,000 gallons of additional water storage. And that's so important because, everybody talks about how much rainfall you get. It does not matter how much rainfall you get. There's only two things that matter when it comes to rainfall. How much can you get in the ground? That's infiltration. And number two, how much can your soil store? Now, I heard last night that Dan Forge's soil can store 18 inches of water. That's impressive. I knew Dan was a good farmer, but that's amazing. But the more water we can store, the more crops we can produce. So that's a very important function of what they're bringing to the economy. And then the biology, they're producing nutrients through fixation. We'll look at that process. They're making the nutrients available through cycling and some other processes. We'll look at how that works. But they're bringing these nutrients to the table that plants can't get on their own. They're also providing some pretty incredible defense and protection mechanisms in this economy as well. So on the demand side, plants need nutrients, plants need water. We know these things, but they also need services. They need to be protected and they need to be supported. I think as farmers, we understand what plants need pretty well. Soil needs carbon. If your soil does not have sufficient carbon, it is not gonna function properly. It's not gonna look right. It's not gonna smell right. And it's not going to work right. Soil has to have carbon, but it also has to have services, particularly protection, because soil cannot protect itself. And you've all seen your soils erode when you don't have enough cover. You've seen your neighbor's soils. You've seen pictures of the dust bowl. I shared some of that last night. Of all that erosive forces, we have to protect our soil. And that has to come from other members of the economy because the soil can't protect itself. And then the biology, their demands, what they want, they need food, they need something to eat, and they need a place to live. And if you can give them these things, they will work very, very cheaply and they'll do some pretty amazing things for you. So in a human economy, one of the best indicators, the leading economic indicator in my opinion is unemployment rate. When unemployment is low, that's a sign that you've got a good, strong, healthy economy because everybody's working, everybody's contributing, everybody's buying things. And that's kind of where we're at as a country today. We have very low unemployment rate and that's an indicator of a very strong economy. And it's the same way in our soil system. We want to have zero unemployment within our system if we want to have a strong economy and we have to get everybody working. The soil, the plants, and the animals, the biology all have to be producing and consuming in order to make this work the way that God created it to work. And again, diversity is very important. We don't want just one kind of plant, we don't want just one kind of root structure, we don't want just one kind of biology, we want as much diversity as we can possibly get. But here's what's happened, folks. And on our farm in Nebraska, we're just as guilty of this as anywhere else. And if we're talking about this in terms of the economy, we have to talk about welfare. And we all know what welfare is, but you may not know it, but you are one of the biggest welfare providers around. We are too on our farm because we provide welfare to our plants because we're providing it with everything that it needs from the outside. No, maybe not everybody, but a lot of us, the way that we farm, we farm in such a welfare system that we're providing the plant with what it needs from the outside because, in particularly fertility and crop protection inputs, and we have to provide those because we've farmed in such a way that we've ignored the biology, we no longer have the functions of the biology, and so now our plants look sick. Now they look yellow because they're nitrogen deficient. And so we have to step in from the outside and we have to give these handouts to the system, which is welfare, because it can no longer function on its own. I love the quote that Abraham Lincoln said, he said, you cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves. And one of the reasons I like this so much is he's not saying you shouldn't help people, not saying that at all. He's saying we can't help them permanently if we continue to do for them what they could and should do for themselves. And I think it's the exact same thing with our soils. We're not gonna build our soils, we're not gonna grow our soils, we're not gonna add to our profitability if we continue to do for the system what the system is designed to do for itself. And so mainly what we need to do, we need to allow the system to work the way it was created to work and the biggest thing that we need to add back in is the biology. How can we get the biology more involved? And we don't have all the answers on our farm in Nebraska. I'll just tell you that right now. But I think we have the right questions. We don't have the answers, but we're at least asking the right question because now when we consider a crop input, whether it's fertility or chemical or whatever, we're now at least asking, how will this affect the soil biology? We never asked that before. We didn't care, we didn't know. But now we know, we don't know all the answers, but at least we're asking that question. So we want to farm in such a way to have the biology more involved because the more biology that we have, the less welfare I have to provide and the more profitable our operation will be. Okay, so supply and demand. The third thing that we talked about was currency. Currency is needed because it allows goods and services to be exchanged more efficiently within the economy. And when you have standardized currency, everybody accepts it, everybody uses it, everybody wants it. And in our economy, in our soil, we have the perfect currency. And the currency that we have is carbon. That's why this talk is entitled Carbonomics. And that's why carbon is such a key and crucial part of this whole system. And so the photosynthesis, as we talked about, is producing that glucose molecule, but it doesn't stay in that glucose molecule. We'll look at how it changes and what happens with that. But what happens is the carbon being produced through photosynthesis is being leaked out through the root system, through root exudates. And the biology is picking that up, they're feeding on that, Allen had some great pictures of that. They're actually consuming those carbon root exudates. And I've got a really cool picture later on here that will actually show that carbon leaking out of the root system. And they're picking that up, they're eating it and in exchange they're providing services back to the plant, sourcing nutrients, delivering nutrients, protecting the plants. Because guess what, plants aren't stupid and they are not gonna be exuding this carbon out through the root system if they're not getting a return on their investment. So if the biology doesn't show up and produce, that plant's gonna shut the tap off and say, no more. And the experts will tell us that as much as 50 to 60% of all the carbon that a plant produces through photosynthesis is not used to grow plant tissue, it's not used to grow root system, it's not used to put pods or seeds on, as much as 50 to 60% of that carbon can be leaked into the soil system and fed or traded or paid to the soil biology in exchange for these services. So carbon is the perfect currency. Look, carbon is essential to all life forms. You and I are 19% carbon. Carbon can form over 10 million different chemical compounds. It's the most important but the most overlooked of all plant nutrients and it's the main food source for soil biology. When we have more carbon in our soil, it helps normalize our soil pHs. So whether you're too high or too low, the more carbon you have, it helps buffer that. It increases our cation exchange capacity, it increases the availability of all these essential nutrients and it can help reduce the availability of sodium and aluminum. Think about it in terms of currency. It can be collected through photosynthesis. We can spend it, the plants are spending it when they're trading it to these soil organisms. It can be saved through soil organic matter which we'll look at here next. And it's desired by all members of the economy and it's got different forms, it's got different states. We've got CO2 which is the gaseous form of carbon floating around in the atmosphere. We've got liquid carbon which is moving up and down through the plant and through the soil and then of course it gets turned into solid carbon when it's consumed by these organisms. When we eat a carbon based product, we can turn that into solid carbon and it can change states very, very quickly. Again, the experts will tell us that it's a very short period of time where you can have a carbon molecule that's CO2 in the atmosphere. The plant will pull that in, turn that into some sort of liquid carbon, move it down through the plant system, leak it out through the roots into the soil. It will get consumed by some sort of biology and turned into solid carbon and this process can happen very, very quickly. Carbon moves through its states very quickly. That's why it is a tremendously great currency. So you've probably all either said to your kids or maybe you heard from your parents growing up, money doesn't grow on trees, okay? But in our system, it literally does grow on trees because our money is the carbon and it can literally grow on trees and corn plants and bean plants and wheat plants. So it's the perfect currency and we can't ignore it. So when you have excess currency now, now we can convert some of that. If we have more than what we need for just the basic transactions, we can convert that to a savings account. We can invest that in equipment, we can invest that in land purchases. And in our soil system, our capital is organic matter. And so when we have excess carbon in the system, now we can start to build soil organic matter. Soil organic matter is about 60% carbon. There's more carbon in organic matter than anything else. Now, there are other things that you need to make organic matter, particularly nitrogen and other nutrients. But if you don't have the carbon, you're not, it doesn't matter what else is out there. So when we have excess carbon in the soil, we can start to build organic matter levels. Now we can spend the rest of the day just talking about the benefits of soil organic matter. We don't have time to do that. I think people have a pretty good understanding of why organic matter is important. Here's a slide that I stole from Jennifer Moore Cuchara who's a NRCS consultant. And she just talks about some of the different functions of soil organic matter. And if you think about it in terms of capital, the United States has been one of the most productive economies the world has ever seen, partly because we've had access to capital, relatively easy access to capital. And that has made our economy very productive, very stable, very resilient, and very efficient. And it's exactly the same way. In our soils that are higher in organic matter levels, and I'm sure you've experienced this on your own farm, your soils that have the highest organic matter levels, they're gonna be the most productive, the most stable, the most resilient, and the most efficient. They're the last ones to show signs of a drought. They're probably more resilient to diseases and insects because you've got that capital there that you can draw on and that you can pull on. But just like you can't build a savings account, if you're not earning more money than what you spend, I mean, that's a financial principle that applies to everyone except governments, evidently. You can't build your capital or your savings unless you're bringing in more than what you're spending. You also can't build your organic matter levels if you're not bringing more carbon into your system than what's going away. And the way that carbon goes away, it can go away in a truck, it can go away in a hay bale. Some of it can go away in an animal, although a lot of it's returned to the soil. Some of it is lost back to the atmosphere as the crop residues decompose. So we have carbon leaving the system. If we wanna build organic matter, we have to have more carbon entering than what we have leaving. And that's why cover crops are so very important to building organic matter levels and building them more quickly than in a system that do not have cover crops because cover crops are putting carbon into the soil and we're not exporting that out through a truck or a hay bale in most situations. Now, Christine Jones, who's one of the leading soil microbiologists, she says that carbon that enters the soil through the liquid carbon pathway, or in other words is leaked out through that root system and is consumed by the biology, that carbon is five times more likely to become part of organic matter than the carbon that comes from when your corn stalks or your wheat stubble is laying on top and it is decomposing. It's being consumed by microbes and it's being cycled. Some of that could go to organic matter, but she says the liquid carbon pumped through the root system and into the soil five times more effective at building organic matter levels than the decomposing carbon from residues. So that's why cover crops are very, very important. And if you're serious about building your carbon, building your organic matter levels, you have to have cover crops and much more diverse rotations. One of the reasons covers are so great is I can throw a whole bunch of diversity into a cover crop I would never get into my cash cropping system. Okay, energy. Energy drives the system. In our system, it comes from the sun, so we're not purchasing that solar energy. Fortunately, the government has not figured out how to tax this on solar energy yet. So our energy to drive the system, especially the photosynthesis process is free. Alls we have to do is collect it. And so as farmers, our solar panels are so much easier, so much cheaper than these manmade solar panels. Alls we have to do is go plant seeds, out pop these cool little green solar collectors. We start collecting solar energy. Solar energy can turn CO2 and H2O into C6, H1206 and O2. Boom, all of a sudden we've got products now that we can sell. And so a healthy soil economy should not need significant purchased energy inputs. And I can say that because the soils here in South Dakota and Nebraska and Kansas, short grass prairie, mixed grass prairie, tall grass prairie, these soils were built over thousands of years without any outside energy inputs. And it was just the grass and the forbs and the legumes growing together in this native ecosystem. And the only energy came from the sun. Now, once we start exporting things, once we start sending grain trucks down the road, yes, we're gonna have to add some things back in because now we're not a closed loop system anymore, but a healthy soil economy should not need significant purchased energy inputs. And if you were to look at the energy input of your farm, the energy budget of your farm, it's not gonna be diesel fuel, it's not gonna be propane, it's not gonna be electricity, it's not gonna be any of those things. The biggest energy expense that most of us have on our farms is nitrogen fertilizer. And I'll show you why that is here in just a second. And so if we wanna be serious about decreasing the amount of energy that we use on our farming operation, first thing that you need to look at is nitrogen. And I don't know if Dr. Beck will talk this afternoon, I think Dakota Lakes has set some goals on being kind of an energy neutral farm by a certain date, he may talk about that later. But if we're serious about decreasing that, we need to look at nitrogen. So from the resource side of things, we've looked at carbon already, it's the number one thing that plants need, but number two is gonna be nitrogen. It's number one in what we spend our money on, it's number one in what we spend our time worrying about. Now if you look at this pie chart, this is a pie chart of atmospheric composition. I don't know how well you can see it, but at the very top of that chart, there's a tiny little pink sliver, okay? That is the amount of our atmosphere that is made up of carbon. Carbon dioxide 0.038, this is probably a little bit old. Most experts would say it's probably around 0.04. 4.100 of 1% of our atmosphere is carbon dioxide. That's not very much. That's a tiny little sliver, yet I can grow a 300-bushel corn crop in all the carbon that I need for that, the plant can pull out of that tiny little slice of the atmosphere. Now the big blue part, 78% of that atmosphere is nitrogen. I spend $0 on carbon, I spend way too much money on nitrogen. And as an industry, we spend billions of dollars on nitrogen, yet there's 30,000 tons of nitrogen sitting above every acre of crop and range land in the United States. 30,000 tons of nitrogen, but yet we spend billions of dollars to get it. So what's the deal? Well, there's good news and there's bad news when it comes to this. The good news is we're not dead, okay? Because if you've ever had a whiff of anhydrosemonia, you know what nitrogen can do to the human body. And if you were to be breathing that, there would be no life on this planet as we know it. The atmospheric nitrogen is held as dinitrogen. As you can see, there's two nitrogen molecules. They're held together to each other with a triple covalent bond, three bonds, holding those two molecules together. And it is such a strong, strong bond that it reacts with nothing else. It's inert. We can breathe it in. We breathe it right back out. It does nothing to our body because those nitrogen molecules are bound together and they're not gonna react with anything else. So that's the good news, is that we're not dead. The bad news is, is that the plants can do nothing with that either. They're not filtering the nitrogen out when they take in atmosphere to get the carbon dioxide. They're taking that in too. They can do nothing with it. They have to expel it right back out because just like our bodies can't react with nitrogen, which is a good thing, plants can't use it either. So in order to get this into a form that plants can use, it has to be fixed or made available, combined with hydrogen and oxygen and put into forms like ammonia and ammonium, which then can be converted to nitrates and all sorts of things. Whole chemistry lesson that we're not gonna talk about, but the atmospheric nitrogen, dinitrogen is inert. People don't get killed by it. Plants can't use it. So, when we build these factories, these nitrogen production factories, the Haber-Bosch process was developed to pull that nitrogen molecule apart. And they used these factories in World War II. They made a lot of bomb-making materials because once you pull that nitrogen molecule apart and it's very reactive with other things, it becomes very explosive and very powerful. So it was a bomb-making material. And if you remember, I think last year it was the 25th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombings. Timothy McVeigh blew up the federal building there in Oklahoma City. What did he use for a bomb to take out that huge concrete building? It was a rental truck full of ammonium nitrate. They went around and they bought lots of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, had a crude fuse in there and a timer, and that's all he needed because nitrogen is very powerful when you can pull it apart, but it takes a lot of energy to break that bond. To pull those two nitrogen molecules apart takes a lot of energy. And that's why when you're paying for fertilizer, you are not paying for nitrogen. There's 30,000 tons above every acre. You're not paying for the nitrogen. You're paying for the energy that it takes to pull the nitrogen molecules apart and put it into a form that your plants can use. So what takes man, billions of dollars in these big factories to do? God created these tiny little bacteria to do the exact same thing. So at a microscopic level, rhizobia bacteria will form colonies that will essentially build these same sort of nitrogen manufacturing facilities and they will build it on the roots of a legume plant that is willing to host it. And as cool as rhizobia are because they can pull that dinitrogen molecule apart, combine it with hydrogen and oxygen, they can't eat nitrogen. They can't survive on nitrogen and they also can't eat CO2. The plant has to put the carbon into a form that that bacteria can consume and that bacteria is not gonna do this job unless it's getting paid. And the plant has to pay for it with carbon. Carbon is the currency and when the plant is willing to give up some of its carbon, the bacteria are willing to produce the nitrogen and it's a very cool symbiotic process. So if you hear people say legumes can produce their own nitrogen, that's not true. The legume plant is not doing that. They are hiring the rhizobia to fix that nitrogen and give it to them in exchange for the carbon. But it's not limited to just legumes. There are other free-living, associative, diazotrophic organisms out there and these guys can also take dinitrogen from the atmosphere and they can pull it apart and they can make it into a form that plants can use. So organisms like azosparillum, azodobacter and there's others, they're discovering new ones all the time. But you know, again, the experts tell us that they know very little. They know there's a lot of things in the soil, they just don't have an identified them all and so they're discovering new things all the time. And so, you know, when we discover this and why don't I just put a whole bunch of zodobacter on my corn and forget about putting any fertility on there. Wouldn't that be the way to go? Well, there's a little bit of a problem with that. These guys, rhizobia, are incredibly productive. If I'm growing 75 to 80 bushel irrigated soybeans down in Nebraska and you guys can grow some really good bean crops up here, a big crop of alfalfa, that is requiring huge amounts of nitrogen. Seven to 800 pounds of nitrogen is what would be required to produce 80 bushel beans. How many guys are gonna grow soybeans if you'd have to put 700 pounds of nitrogen on? Nobody would, you couldn't afford it. Rhizobia can produce five, six, seven, 800 pounds of nitrogen per acre in about a three month period of time. They're incredibly productive, they form these colonies and they can produce vast amounts of nitrogen. These guys, they're more independent contractors, they're not union, if you will. They're working by themselves and so they're not nearly as productive, 20, 30, 40 pounds of nitrogen produced per year per acre. And so can you grow a corn crop on 40 pounds of nitrogen? Well, maybe if you're doing lots of other things and some guys are doing that, but in most situations it's not gonna be sufficient to do that. But think about this, how much difference does 30 or 40 pounds of nitrogen make in a forage crop? How much difference does 30 or 40 pounds of nitrogen make in a cover crop? It makes a huge difference. And so when we can get these things involved in some of these parts of our rotation that don't have huge nitrogen requirements, they can be incredibly productive. How many, you know, when you're driving down the road during the summertime, have you ever looked in the ditch or the median, you look at the grass there? How often does that grass show signs of nitrogen deficiency? It never does. It always looks fine. You know, maybe it's drought stress, but it's never nitrogen deficient. Now that's not because the state of South Dakota is out there at night fertilizing the ditches. At least I hope not. You know, I don't think they are. The reason is, is that they've got associations with some of these guys and 20, 30, 40 pounds of nitrogen is sufficient in a closed loop system, like those things are, to make them look just fine. But these azosporellum and the zodabactors are just like the rhizobia. They have to associate with a plant. They have to trade that nitrogen to the plant for carbon. And this is not gonna happen if there's excess nitrogen in the soil because plants aren't stupid and they're not going to pay for something that they can get for free. So if we're out there providing the welfare payments and we're putting this free nitrogen, free to the plant, not to us, it costs us a lot of money, but it's free to the plant now, they're not going to put out all these carbon red exudates if they can get that for free. And so you have to be thinking about how you're applying your fertility and how is that affecting the biological systems. Okay, all these other mineral resources, you know, calcium, magnesium, iron, manganese, zinc, copper, all these trace minerals that, you know, or consultants come and say, well, you need to put this, this, this and this on, our soils have those in them. We just can't get to them. The plants can't get to them directly. So like Alan talked about earlier, we have to employ tiny little miners to go out and extract those minerals out of our soil and bring them to the plant. I love this article. It was in Scientific America a few years ago. The title of this article is Mycorrhizal fungi run the largest mining operation in the world. How cool of a title is that? When you think about a large mining operation, you don't normally think of a fungus, but here's what it's doing. Look at the picture on the right. You see, this is a piece of feldspar. Just think of this as a tiny little grain of sand, highly magnified, and you see those brown kind of tunnels or shafts. Those are actually mine shafts, if you will. Those are bored out sections of that feldspar, and it's where the Mycorrhizal fungi can excrete the right chemicals that will actually dissolve that solid rock material. It will liquefy it, and it will bring it back to the host plant. And so it's actually mining and bringing that back, but as cool as they are, and they can dissolve solid rock and liquefy it and bring it back, they can't eat that. They can't survive on that. And again, just like the bacteria, they can't produce their own carbon food sources. They are completely dependent upon the plant to give them that carbon that they need to feed them, to nourish them, to make them grow, and in exchange, they'll bring these other services. So it's a symbiotic relationship, and the plant has to be willing to pay. The Mycorrhizal has to be willing to work for the root exudates that the plant is giving it. Here's another picture of Mycorrhizal. Mycorrhizal actually starts in the plant root. Those little black dots that you see, those are the arbuscles. They're actually growing inside the root tissue, then the hyphae will extend out through the cell wall of the plant root, and it's what goes out and explores the soil. The author of this article, Jennifer Fraser, she says Mycorrhizal mined the soil for basic things like nitrogen and phosphorus, but also the hard to come by things like copper and zinc and manganese, which plants need for strong immune systems and survival. Oddly enough, many of our soils are rich and important nutrients, but they're often locked up in a physical form which makes them unavailable to most plants. And so most of our soils have enough of these. We just need to get the biology involved to unlock them. And we always talk about, well, but we're mining our soils, at some point they're gonna run out. And that is a concern. It's something we need to think about and address. We had a soil health field day, a couple of them in Nebraska last summer, and we had Dr. Christine Jones from Australia who I think is one of the top microbiologists. And then Ray Ward, Ward Labs has a booth over here, but Ray Ward was at the same field day. And of course Ray has the soil testing lab there in Nebraska, but he also has farmground, so he was at this. And so she got, Christine was talking about mycorrhiza and phosphorus and all this. And so she said, Ray, how much phosphorus do you have in your soil? And so Ray, being a soil scientist, he knew his soil tests, and I don't know, 15 parts per million or whatever the Bray test showed. And she said, no, that's just showing plant available phosphorus. How much total phosphorus do you have in your soil? Now, most of us would have no clue how much total phosphorus we have in our soils. But again, Ray, having a soil testing lab, he knew that because he'd tested for that. And so I don't even remember what the number was, but he told her, and then she said, how many years worth of crop production is that? And then he kind of got his paper and pencil and started doing some calculations and some figures. And he kind of looked at it and he's like, oh, I can't be right. Just doing a little more calculating. The room kind of got really quiet. And finally he looks up and he says, that's enough phosphorus for 10,000 years of crop production. 10,000 years. And it's not like he has super special soil. It's just a regular silt loam soil there in Nebraska. 10,000 years of crop production just from the phosphorus. That's not even all these other minerals. The point is, folks, is that our soils are rich in many of these nutrients, but just like plants can't take atmospheric nitrogen and do anything with it, they can't take those nutrients from the soil. They're immobilized to the plant, but the biology can go out and get them. So again, that's why it's so important you ask yourself, with whatever you're doing to your farming operation, how will this affect the biology because it affects all these other things. Okay, infrastructure. Infrastructure is defined as a basic equipment and structures that need for a country to function properly. And the two most important infrastructures in any economy are transportation and communication. We know these are important because in times of war, this is a very, very effective war strategy. You go out and you try to destroy the infrastructure of your enemy. You bomb the bridges, the airports, the rail lines, the highways. You would try to take out any communication systems that they have because if you can disrupt transportation and communication, you will literally cripple an economy and bring a country to its knees. So it's very, very important. So as I was thinking about the transportation infrastructure of the United States, I think one of the reasons that the United States has been one of the strongest economies in the world, in the history of the world, is because we have one of the best transportation infrastructures. Now if you don't think we have a great transportation infrastructure, you need to travel more to other countries because compared to most other countries, we are so much better off than other people. So if you look at the interstate highway system here, these are huge transportation corridors and we can move vast amounts of goods and services across the interstate highway system very quickly and very efficiently. It's a very efficient system. But there are people, like myself, we're down on the Nebraska-Kansas border, so I'm about 60 miles to interstate 80. I'm about 100 miles down to interstate 70. I can't take advantage of the interstate if I can't get there, okay? So we have to have more than just the interstate system. So if you overlay the major highways, now we have not very much of our population base is very far away from a paved road that takes you to a better paved road that'll eventually get you to those interstates so that now I can access those large corridors and I can transport goods and services. It's the same way in our soils. These are very famous pictures of mycorrhiza. The picture on the left is simply a plant and just the roots. And it's like the highway, it's like the interstates. It's large corridors. It can move large amounts of water and nutrients and liquid carbon up and down and through there. But look at how much of the soil is being touched by those plant roots. Very little of it is. The second picture is that same plant that's been colonized by mycorrhiza. They grow from the roots. They extend that hyphal network out into the soil. Now that becomes the feeder system. It's the highways. It's the good gravel roads. It's bringing everything into the interstates. It's sending things back out. Now I'm touching most of the soil and we can access all the nutrients and all the water that are in the soil. Mycorrhiza transports phosphorus, nitrogen, potassium, all these different things. And again, like Alan said earlier, they even help supply water. And in dry times, if you really want to make a drought tolerant crop, don't worry so much about the genetics. Worry more about the biology because any crop that's colonized with mycorrhiza is going to be far more drought tolerant than anything that's not. Now, mycorrhiza aren't the only thing to be concerned about for our transportation infrastructure. Earthworms are hugely important as well. They help transport water through all these worm channels that they leave. Huge infiltration rates are found. You've probably all seen videos or heard stories about like Gabe Brown, for example, had a 13 inch rain and I think he took most of that in. Huge infiltration rates come where you have healthy active earthworm populations. Oxygen transfer is very important. That's part of the transportation infrastructure. Worms will move around a lot of surface carbon residue and other biology. If you go out and dig in your field and one of the most important tools you can use is a spade, go out and do some digging. If you're digging in your soil and the soil is not bone dry and you're not seeing earthworms or at least evidence of earthworms, they're tunnels, if you're not seeing that, it's probably a pretty good indication that you have a very low biological activity soil. Because if you don't have earthworms, you probably don't have a lot of the other things as well. And I can remember as a kid growing up, we were conventional farmers. If I wanted to go fishing, there was one place on our whole farm where I could go and dig up worms to go fishing. That was where the sewer dumped out and all these weeds grew up around it because it was so wet you couldn't do anything with it. That's the only place on the farm that had worms. Now I can literally go out and dig under any plant red as long as there's some moisture there. And I can find worms in every spade full of soil. It's a huge transformation and it's because we've changed the way that we farm. So farm in such a way that is not damaging but it's assisting your biology. The other infrastructure I want to talk about quickly is communication. How does the plant communicate? What's going on in the soil for communication? Because if you remember, I talked about mycorrhizae can bring phosphorus and nitrogen and boron and iron and copper and water. How does the plant know how to tell the biology what it wants? Because think about how wasteful it would be if the biology is bringing things to the plant that the plant doesn't need or it doesn't want. It could actually hurt the plant because some of those things could build up to toxicity levels and the plant wouldn't want that. So the plant has to tell the biology what it wants and it does that by communicating through different types of root exudates. It's not, you know, it's forming glucose from photosynthesis. It is not putting glucose out through the root system. That glucose is getting changed into many, many, many different carbon compounds. Remember I said carbon can form 10 million different chemical compounds? Well, here's some of them here. There's flavonoids, there's amino acids, there's oils, there's fats, different kinds of sugars and as they leak out different carbon compounds that is a signal to the biology that the plant is requiring or requesting different things. And so this is kind of a busy diagram of a bunch of words I can't even pronounce but you can look at it. But that's how the plant communicates. Here's kind of how it works. Here's this picture I was telling you about earlier. This is a picture and I've never seen another picture quite like this. This was taken by Jimmy Emmons, a good friend of mine down in Oklahoma. This is the cereal rye root. This is a cover crop cereal rye. The projections that you see coming out from that root, that is not mycorrhiza, that is just the root hairs of that cereal rye. But look at all of the droplets. Look at the droplets of liquid that are on all those root hairs. That's the liquid carbon that that plant is exuding out into the soil system and the biology will come, they will consume that and based on what it is, whether it's a carbohydrate or sugar or a protein, a fat, a lipid, an oil, that is the signal for what the plant is calling for and so the biology, different biology will respond differently but they will know what the plant wants. Now the reason he was able to get this picture and the reason that you almost never see a picture like this is because, and he actually took this with his iPhone, okay? If you're interested in taking pictures like this, if you're interested in the soil, you can buy a little deal, it's called a ProScope, it's about 150 bucks, clip it right onto the back of your iPhone and it essentially turns your iPhone into kind of a poor man's microscope but you can be right out in the field doing it. So he had a ProScope on his iPhone. This root was growing sideways through a worm channel, okay? So what we're seeing here is the portion of the root and think about how the diameter of a worm burrow, it's not very big. What we're seeing here is the portion of that root that was actually growing through open space in the worm channel because it came in one side, went through the channel and went right back out because when you pull these roots up, you'll either break off all those little root hairs or if you do a really careful job of doing a root wash, you'll wash off all the carbon. So you never see this but he was able to see this because that thing was growing through, literally through open space in that worm channel and he zoomed in on it and that's what he got. Now think about, Rye has a tremendously massive root system. That's why it's such a great cover crop. Think about how tiny of a little fraction of the root system this is. Just, we're just looking at the part that's going through that worm channel. Look at all the droplets of liquid carbon. Now multiply that by thousands of times for just that one plant and then multiply, you've got a million plants per acre. Think about how much carbon is being pumped into the soil through these cover crops and other crops as well but cover crops in particular, think about the amount of carbon that's going into the soil because of this and that's why, again, cover crops are so very important if you really wanna increase your carbon levels. Christine Jones goes on to say, Mycorrhiza fungi extend quite a distance from the plant roots, they form networks, they can communicate with each other through messages through these networks. Mycorrhiza are both the highway and the internet of the plant soil world. And very, very true. Just a couple more things on communication here. Plants can communicate through Mycorrhiza like she was mentioning there. There's lots of experiments. This is just kind of a little graphic from one. This is a plant that has been infected by aphids and it is sending signals to its neighboring plant because when a plant gets infested by aphids it will ramp up its defense mechanisms. Physiologically it will do some different things to help ward off these aphids. The plant on the right is ramping up these defenses even though aphids have not hit it yet because the plant on the left that has aphid infestation has communicated chemically through the Mycorrhizal network because the Mycorrhiza is tying those plants together. It can send a signal through the root system and warn its neighbors about impending attacks. Pretty cool stuff. Now, it's not just through the root system that it can be tied together as well. Plants can emit these volatile organic compounds or just think of it as a fragrance or a perfume and you've all walked out in fields and you can just smell the plants. You've, that fresh mown grass smell, you know? That's not a good smell to the plant. That's a plant crying for help because it's being attacked but they are emitting these chemical compounds, these fragrances. Other plants can pick that up and they can communicate that way but also insects can pick that up and they literally will call in an airstrike against an aphid attack if there's anybody out there to be communicated with and this is an article from the Sciences Magazine that details all this out and that's why it's so very important that we have a healthy population of predatory type insects. Alan had the picture of the ladybug. You know, if we just had more ladybugs we'd have far less other insect problems because the plants will signal them in. They'll say, hey, I've got aphids right here come and get them but guess what? That smell does not travel hundreds of miles. It doesn't even travel miles. You have to have some populations of these predatory insects somewhat close in order for them to be beneficial and so that's why we need to farm in such a way that we are thinking about those insects as well. Okay, the last area, defense and protection. We talked about how this economy needs to protect it against all these things. There's even water which is very crucial. When we have too much and Alan had great pictures of too much you've all seen pictures of too little but it's not even just too much or too little it's sometimes it's just how it comes. You've all seen the destructive impact of a raindrop. It looks like a bomb hitting bare soil so we must protect against that from wind, from heat, from cold, compaction, weeds, insects, diseases. So many things that want to attack our system that we need to try to protect them. So just a few basic things here. The first line of defense is to keep that soil covered. Rolf Derp, who is one of the godfathers of the soil health and cover crop, no-till movement in South America. He says almost all the advantages of a no-till system come from the permanent cover of the soil and only a few of them come from not tilling the soil. In other words, he's saying there's more benefit by having the soil covered than by the fact that we're not breaking it up and tilling it. There are benefits from both but he's saying it's more important to keep the soil covered. And I totally agree, if you can't keep the soil covered just about anything else that you try to do is gonna be extremely ineffective. But number one, if you don't keep the soil covered it's gonna wash away or blow away and you really can't do much with soil you don't have. So you got to keep it covered first and foremost. Number two, the whole plant signaling thing. We talked about it a little bit. I wanted to give one more example here because part of the plant signaling is part of its defense mechanism. So look at this example. This is an experiment that some students at the University of Delaware did. They used this plant, it's called a rock crest plant and they infected it with a pathogen called pseudomonas syringea. And when a rock crest plant has this particular pathogen the leaves turn yellow, they start to turn black, they'll eventually fall off and the plant will die. So the plant on the left is infected with pseudomonas syringea. The plant in the middle is infected by the same pathogen. They introduced it into that pot. The same pathogen is present there but the other thing that they did is they introduced this beneficial bacteria called bacillus subtilis. So now it's got both the pathogen and the beneficial in that pot. So when that rock crest plant detects pseudomonas syringea trying to attack it, that plant starts sending out signals. It starts calling for help. And the way it's communicating is through its liquid carbon root exudates. Bacillus subtilis will pick up on those signals, it will ramp up its populations. The picture on the right that looks like a root that is covered with this green slimy substance is actually a root that's covered by a green slimy substance because that is a biological film that is produced by Bacillus subtilis in response to the plant's cry for help. And when the plant root is coated in this biological film, pseudomonas syringea cannot get through that to attack the plant roots. And so this plant is growing perfectly normally, perfectly healthy even though that pathogen is in that pot because it has called in its defenses and it had to pay for them, had to be willing to give the liquid carbon root exudates not only to communicate, but also to provide the food source needed in order to ramp up those populations. This is but one example, plants do this all the time. They will form these associations with beneficial biology, but guess what? If that biology isn't there, that plant can signal all it wants and it will do absolutely no good at all. A third line of defense is that healthy plants produce complex compounds which give some natural resistances. This is kind of a complicated slide from Willie Durham who's an NRCS health soil health specialist in Texas. And basically he's just showing that as plants get healthier, as they get a little more mature, they will take that simple carbohydrate, that glucose molecule, they will start turning it into more complex things like proteins and fats and lipids and oils. And one thing about insects, insects love glucose. They love those simple carbohydrates because insects have very, very simple digestive systems and that's about the only thing that they can digest. Once the plant starts turning some of those into more complete proteins and fats and lipids and oils, insects cannot digest those. They will taste that plant, they will move on because they can't do anything with it. And so what you see, you'll see the most healthy plants have far less insect and disease issues and you can do a BRICS level test and there's a number of different things you can do to see how complex your plant metabolites are being. But in essence, plants that are growing in healthy soil are gonna be healthier plants. They produce more complex metabolites and that leads to some natural resistance. A fourth line of defense is symbiotic relationships. Similar to what we talked about before, like this is an endophyte fungus. It's not mycorrhizofungus, but it's doing some similar things. This lives completely inside the plant roots. This is from the Noble Research Institute and it is a beneficial fungus to that plant. It's providing a drought and disease resilience and then in exchange the plant is providing carbon for that organism to live on. And then finally, the fifth line of defense is just simply diversity. Diversity, diversity, diversity, because most insects, most diseases, most other things that are gonna attack are only gonna attack one or two things. And so if you have this big, wild mix out there, even if I have an insect or a disease come in, it's not gonna take it all out. It's gonna take some, but not all. And the more diversity we can build into our system, the more resiliency we will have. And it's very difficult to do this in our cash cropping system. Most of us are not gonna grow multiple things together, although there's more interest in doing that all the time. Most of us aren't gonna have eight, 10, 12 different things in our cash crop rotation. It's really hard to do that. So when you plant a cover crop, if it makes sense at all, get as much diversity in there as you can. And it has to make sense. If you come to me and it's in October, you say, well, I wanna throw cowpeas in because that's diversity. I would say, no, that's not diversity. That's stupid because they're not gonna grow. It has to make sense. But I also, what I don't like to see is somebody that comes in June and says, well, I wanna plant a cover crop, give me some sorghum sedan. It's like, and what else? Oh, just sorghum sedan. Now, that's the opportunity that you have. So you need to change your rotations a little bit to figure out when can you get cover crops in where you can get the big diversity because that makes a huge difference. So there's the seven keys to a healthy soil. Very quickly, I'm just gonna give eight quick takeaway points here to kind of summarize. Economies are intricately interconnected and interdependent and you can't start messing with one part of it without affecting the other parts. And largely in American agriculture, that's what we have done. We have farmed in such a way that it has hurt, depressed, taken out our biology and that has a huge impact on the other parts of the system, particularly the plants, because without the biology, they're not getting the nitrogen, they're not getting the other nutrients, they start to look sick. So what do we do? We come in with the welfare payments. We come in with the jugs and the sprayers and we add all these things from the outside to help get our plants healthy again. And we need to do that because we have to raise a crop. But the goal should be, how can we reduce the amount of welfare that we're giving to our system? Because welfare, it's not costing the plants anything, it's costing us something, okay? We need to get to where the plants are paying for those services. We need to get everyone working the way God created it, particularly getting the biology involved again. Number three, increase your cash flow. Increase your cash flow of this carbon currency. Remember, your money is literally growing on trees here, grow more of it. Get more plants growing more of the time. Corn-soybean rotation is less than 50% efficient in collecting solar energy and producing liquid carbon. We can do better than that. We can add cover crops. We can add some cereal crops. We can add some livestock. Diversify that rotation, get more green plants growing more of the time and take advantage of the solar energy that you have. And then once you have more of that cash flow, turn it into long-term investments. Turn it into organic matter. Again, properly managed livestock can help cycle that and help that organic matter levels grow quicker. I love the slide that Alan showed where he had three inches of soil on top of that sand. It was incredible. Beautiful dark soil. Get those long-term investments going. And then once you have those, when you make a long-term investment, you're not gonna turn around next week and sell it off, but yet guys do that all the time. So if you're trying to build organic matter levels and then you come in and do something like this and you don't have to, whether it's tillage or vertical till, because that's okay, or if you're baling up that residue because, well, that's worth 30 bucks a ton, that is selling off your long-term investments and I don't know why you would wanna do that if you're really trying to build for the long-term. Number five, take advantage of these free, tiny workers. They'll manufacture, they'll mine, they'll transport, they'll communicate, they'll protect. They do all these wonderful services and they work extremely cheaply and it doesn't cost you anything. It's costing the plant, but the plant can make as much carbon as it needs through photosynthesis so it can pay for these services if those guys are out there. So get as much biological diversity as you can. Number six, build and do not destroy your infrastructure and you'll really see your economy grow. Get the micro-riser, get the earthworms, do whatever you can to encourage these and once you have that infrastructure built, don't do this because remember, when you are destroying the transportation infrastructure, it is declaring war on your enemy and if you're doing this unnecessarily, you are literally declaring war on your soil. Number seven, protect your economy of soil armor. I'll just stress that again because if you can't keep it covered, just about anything else you do is not gonna be very effective and lastly, diversity is so very important for healthy economy. We want diversity of plants, diversity of roots and when we have that, it will lead to a diversity of soil biology and soil animals. So that's carbonomics.