 In 2013, the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service entered into a cooperative agreement with the South Dakota No-Till Association and IGRO, SDSU Extension, for delivering the latest soil health and productivity technology to South Dakota farmers and ranchers. This event was held in Mitchell. All right. Well, thanks, Jason, and thanks, Ruth. I'm sorry I can't be there. In person today, I've had a few things that demanded my attention that just prevented travel for the next couple of days and everything. But I do want to spend a little bit of time talking about soil health and its foundation for efficient crop reduction and climate resilience. And basically, the bottom line is that without soil health, you're not going to be able to cope with some of the things that are going to happen. Here's my contact information. And as has been said, I do direct two things. I direct the National Lab for Agriculture and the Environment. And then I direct the Midwest climate hub, which basically covers everything from Ohio through Iowa and from Minnesota down to Missouri. So those eight Midwestern states that are synonymous with the corn belt and everything. Basically, what that means is I work two jobs for the same amount of pay. So I do have a, I've taken a cut and paid with two directorships. But I do want to spend this time going through a number of different pieces on why soil health is important. How do we talk about soil degradation? How do we talk about soil enhancement and then finally building climate resilience and we'll leave time for some questions and all of this. We start out with why soil health is important. And we can get a lot of different things. The economic value of this is one piece of that puzzle. And we've seen anything from $75 to $100 per acre as the value of improved soil health. I was on the phone with a producer this morning that said that basically he thinks is probably in that economic range and all of this in terms of the different things. And I'll weave some of that together as we go through this. And just to start it off, we'll start with this piece of it. And it's a study that we did back in 2013 and 14 in which we looked at county yields. Each one of those points on that graph is the average of three years of data. Corn, this is soybean data. Excuse me, soybean data in this. You can imagine that there's a large amount of variation in this. Those county yields are plotted against the National Crop Commodity Productivity Index, which NRCS has in their database. So it's readily available for all the states. It's part of their whole structure. But the piece of this that becomes very important is that as we improve the soils, we improve the average county yield for soybeans in this. And you get down in those dark circles that the Kentucky yields, we have a lot of poor soils for water holding capacity. There's also, in a lot of those, if you look at average county yields, there are sometimes those yields go to zero. And so there's a large amount of variation. But interestingly enough, as we improve the soils, we improve the mean county yield. You can ask what's wrong with Nebraska. All of those data points lay above that. They have higher average county yields. And that's because in this study we went through when we only selected the irrigated counties out of Nebraska. Bottom line is if you can supply the water when that crop needs it through the growing season, soils really don't have a major impact. So basically a consistent yield across the whole range of different soils. The other piece of this is we... Start your slides show. So the slides are bigger? Yeah, they're on full screen. On our screen we're seeing the left-hand side with your slides. And then the center screen is the slide. I just wanted to increase that. That's fine. Let's see if that... Because I'm showing them full size here. Let me see what I can do just a second. I'll trim it down just a second. Now with that I can take it up just a little bit more. One of the things we find when we start working with producers is that they manage their crop as if they had higher quality soils than what they actually do. And so one of the things in this whole climate resilience piece is really to start getting producers to understand what their soil resource looks like. And if you look at this, this just happens to be corn yields or maize yields. We see the same thing in terms of the crop commodity productivity index, the better the soils, the higher the average county yield. And we see that with individual producers as well. And so we got very curious about what this looks like across the Midwest. You see that those darker areas in there, the high quality soils, parts of Indiana, Illinois extending into Iowa into Minnesota. And then as we get the light colored soils as we go around that. One of the things that we see as we move across counties in the Midwest is that we're changing the average county yield as a result of what soils are there and how resilient they are to the different extremes of weather that we have within each growing season of mass standpoint. Also as we extend into Corn Belt into North Dakota and South Dakota, we're moving it into areas that have soils that will have limited productive capacity unless the growing season is absolutely perfect. And so a lot of things that we've been looking at and just to put it in a pictorial piece for you. This is a soybean production field that's just west of Ames here. The left hand side is that field with a aircraft image taken in early August. And you can see there's a few light spots on that, but for the most part it's pretty green. It's supposed to saturate that index that we use. That same field is on the right hand side. Three weeks later in late August, you can see a lot of different areas in that. And basically what is denoting is in those light colored areas that's leaf drop, really early senescence on that. I did put on there that dark colored area in the center. It ran about 65 bushels in the acre. Those lighter areas are the yellow areas about 25 bushels in the acre. We lost 40 bushels in the acre because it didn't rain in a three-week period. And so what we're seeing in a lot of this is that soils really do have a major impact late in the growing season because of the amount of water that they're holding, amount of water that they can make available to that crop. And if that water is not available, then we find out that that's really causing a problem in terms of being able to achieve these high yields. And we see the same thing. This is just a yield map that's been smoothed and everything with geostatistical techniques. Those green areas are the low-yielding areas, purple areas, the high-yielding areas. We've looked at this field over the whole period of time, and we see that those green areas, the low-yielding areas are pretty consistent in that field, mainly because they're water-limited. If the soils have limited water-holding capacity, and when we get into that grain-filling period, they basically become water-stressed. It may not show up in terms of leaf rolling or leaf tipping in terms of soybeans, but physiologically they're having an impact in terms of the overall process. What this has led us to is a whole concept where we really begin to look at why are crops behaving the way that they do relative to the conditions that are out there. This just happens to be corn or maize from Story County. That upper line across that straight line is what we call attainable yield. That's the yields in which weather really wasn't limiting factor during that period from 1950 through 2012. That's the straight line, the jagged line below that is the actual county yields. Then that dashed line at the bottom is the yield gap, the difference between that straight line and the actual yields. You see in those big drops of 1978, 88, 2012, 93, you've got flooding, you've got drought, all of those other things that cause yield gaps, but what's been more important is the graph that's on the lower right-hand side. That is when we take a look at the fraction of attainable yield, and that's what that x-axis is relative to the frequency of that yield gap, is what we're finding is that we're losing 20% of our yield, 80% of time, because of the interactions between what the weather is within that season and the soil. One of the things that becomes very important in all of this is that that 20% yield loss is well within our capabilities to think about how do we improve our soils. If you would think about smoothing out 20% of your yield loss over time, it becomes a different value looking at the economics of what soil health is really worth. If you look at this, this is for Story County. This is Christian County, Illinois. We've actually computed these yield gaps in these relationships for all 677 counties across the Midwest, so we have a pretty good idea of how these are responding. You can see that they change patterns and quite look the same as the Story County yield. This is soybeans from Story County, again looking at different crops. You see where those drops occurred in all of this, and then here's Christian County, Illinois, soybeans as well. These are quite instructive to us. When we look at a county level basis, we've been doing this at field scale as well, where we can get a sufficient length of record to start looking at things and just really why is yield disappearing within fields, and we begin to see those dynamics as part of this. If you look at another piece of this puzzle which shows you the value of soil, and this is crop insurance claims, and we've been looking at crop insurance across the Midwest. This is all of the aggregate. We find that the top insurance claim is excessive moisture and precipitation, means that it's wet in the spring. We're either drowning out spots or we have so much wetness that it's reducing growth that limits yield. The next one is drought. Those two claims, excessive moisture and excessive precipitation or drought, account for 55% of the insurance claims across the Midwest. The third one is actually frost, and you can see how low that is relative to the rest of them. The third piece, if we look at drought and excessive moisture in terms of crop insurance claims, becomes another facet of how do we look at the conditions of the soil in this, and we can begin to relate it back to the National Crop Commodity Productivity Index from that perspective, and we get it for soybeans as well. We see the same types of things, excessive moisture or drought, are the top insurance claims for soybeans from that standpoint. It really puts a different framework on how we're looking at soils, how do we look at the variation of weather within a growing season, and what does that mean? So all of this really has gotten down to a point of which a little bit, and what I started with is this whole aspect that I call the soil degradation spiral. And if you look at this, and really in a factor of how do soils degrade, how do we move from really high quality soils to more quality soils, and what does that mean for us? You start out with something that's what you might call poor land management. You can put your own definition to that. One of the first things that we see when we begin to institute something as poor land management is aggregation begins to degrade. The very surface of that soil in terms of the aggregate stability begins to change. We end up with compaction of crusting because those aggregates that sand silt and clay is no longer held apart. And so we begin to see that soil begins to puddle very quickly. Then we end up with water wind erosion in there. It makes it extremely susceptible to the extremes that are out there. Extreme events in precipitation, which are becoming more common. We see a lot more erosion coming off of fields. Then as we have water wind erosion, we reduce plant growth because we no longer have the soils available to it. If we don't have the plant growth, then we begin to reduce the soil biology or how we're feeding that biology. We ultimately end up in reducing yield and then we end up with reduced soil productivity. And that latter part, we get negative responses to weather variation. The more variable the weather, the higher the yield variation is among years or within fields because it's no longer that perfect growing season that we need to make that all happen and everything. So if you think about it just from that perspective, we begin to see all of this. You see erosion occurring on these fields. These are typical scenes across the island, 2013. When we had lots of rainfall during the spring, we see the same thing in 2014. We've seen the same thing in 2015. A lot of wheels, bellies, a lot of svelting on the edge of the field, a lower right-hand corner. We basically have eroded everything down to the planar track in that. So you can see that there's a lot of corn that got washed down with that as well. So I mean erosion tends to be one of our bigger problems in terms of protecting the soil surface as well. And if you think about this because there's always this discussion, well, there isn't that much erosion. We only talk about four tons per year, which is 25,000th of an inch on that. On a yearly basis, that's a pretty small pile. But if you look at 40 years and you get 160 tons or one inch of soil loss, that becomes a fairly large pile of soil loss at one acre. And you think about this is that in 2015, because of some of the intense storms that we had, we had estimated soil erosion losses that were anywhere from 50 to 100 tons per acre. And so we're losing way more than what is even tolerable from a standpoint of really what does it take to replace that soil and everything else. So we have to be honest with ourselves in terms of really that as we move soils around, we're having real problems in terms of this. And the other piece of this that you all know in South Dakota and North Dakota more than we think because we're not supposed to have wind erosion, but this is a scene that is actually just south of Ames. This was in the spring of 2014. That stump that's on the edge of the field there, it's covered with about two inches of topsoil. And so we've blown a lot of high-quality topsoil nutrients off of that. We estimate just back-calculating from the size of that soil, the size and the depth of that soil that's over there, probably anywhere from three to four tons per acre lost by wind erosion. And this is from a stage in which wind erosion isn't a big factor for the water erosion. So all of this, and so we have to think about this aspect of soil and soil resilience as a removing soil, whether causing a problem in terms of the dynamics that are going on. So when we think about this degradation process, we think about it from a standpoint that how do we begin to change all of this. And so you look at the fragile nature of our soils, the aspect of what it takes to degrade a soil is that slippery slope, the slippery side that heads down there. We can go down that fairly quickly. But the other one is what I call the soil degradation climb in this because everybody keeps asking how you build soils back up. And if we think about building soils back up as a stair step in there and I just use a simple diagram of a stair master because it is going to take work and it's going to take some energy to make that happen. But the first one on that improving soils is biological activity. Is that we build soils through biological activity, not by chemical or physical manipulation. It's not something that we add to the soil. It's not somehow we kill the soil. It's really how do we create a home for that biological activity to work. And you think about this. One of the things that biological activity does is increase the rate of organic matter turnover. It increases organic matter turnover and improves nutrient cycling. And all of this is what I term the invariable and dynamic processes that are going on because they're below the soil surface. We often don't think about them but the reality they're working. And then what they do is we move up that ladder as we begin to improve the soil structure. We improve water availability. Those are the visible outcomes and all of this. And all of a sudden you end up with improved efficiency, water use or nutrient use. You improve the yield and ultimately you improve the profit. The individual I was talking to this morning in terms of understanding this process he's producing well over 200 bushels of corn per year with less than 140 pounds of nitrogen applied. In fact he thinks he can even reduce that more because of this improved nutrient cycling in all of this. And so it's really about understanding these dynamics and what goes on. And so in this whole puzzle, this biological activity is really something that we need to think about how do we manage ourselves to create a favorable system for our biology to work in all of this. And so you think about this in terms of benefits of clock residue and I'll just explain what I mean by that because if you think about this simple clock residue on the surface the first thing that it does is basically stabilize that microclimate because what does biology want? So biology wants the same things that you and I want. They want a nice shelter. They want food. They want water. They want oxygen. And you think about what your desires and life are. Food, water, shelter, oxygen and all of this. And so that residue layer on top of that soil surface is really modifying that microclimate. So it's not going through extremes. A bare soil surface in June and Central Iowa here will reach 120 to 130 degrees Fahrenheit. At the one inch depth it will reach over 104 degrees Fahrenheit. Protein begins to denature 104. So a lot of times we just really cook the biology out of our soil. And without that biology we don't have the mechanism to make those stable aggregates and to keep them in a stable form over time because that poor land management, that first step down there we see aggregation, aggregates to grade within a one year period as we begin to abuse the soil and everything else. So this thing is very, very quick in terms of changing. So a stabilization of that microclimate, that residue layer also protects that soil surface from the forces of rainfall so it infiltrates the water a lot quicker. It suppresses evaporation so that it maintains a healthier water environment. It protects those aggregates so that there's gas exchange between the soil and the atmosphere as well. And when you think about this, when you put it into perspective the left hand side is a passive protected blanket that would just be the residue on that surface and then there's an active protected blanket that has a cover crop on it. And from the physical aspects that cover crop and the crop residue basically behave the same. The difference between them is that an active protected blanket with its root system that's going into that soil profile is continuing to feed or supply sugars and exudates into that biological system longer than the root residue and the other parts of the corn residue system or the passive residue system effect. So cover crops have an advantage in all of this. If you go back and you begin to think about how quickly soils respond when we begin to change or go to a cover crop cocktail that's where you see the most rapid increase of soil organic matter. And my hypothesis in that is that the reason we see that with the cover crop cocktails is that we are promoting a more diverse soil biological system. And so it's not only diversity above the surface, it's diversity below the surface that's causing a response as well. So you have to think about this soil as a living organism that it's not really a passive system and it's not driven just by the bacteria that are there but you've got everything from mammals to earthworms to insects. You've got micro fauna, micro flores, and a mighty bacteria, algae, fungi, all of that. And so those are a combination of nature's plow. They move the water soil back and forth. They're a living soil team. A lot of this, they're all working together in terms of this total soil factory that we have out there. And so if you think about a really, really healthy soil, lots of biological activity, you have the equivalent of two African elephants per acre out there. So you've got 10,000 pounds of biological material that's underneath of that surface that's doing all sorts of different things as well. And so that becomes a very interesting piece of this program in terms of how do we look at managing that to maintain its biological component from that standpoint. So residue and cover crops. The first piece of this is really about stabilizing that microclimate. So it provides the shelter aspects of what the biological needs are. Everything it does is provide the food source to the microbes. It supplies that food need as well. It also provides the source of nutrients to be recycled in the sand. And this aspect really becomes an important part of this overall dynamic of what we look at. And just to give you an example, this is a comparison that we've been doing looking at it. The dash line is super-use. That's the stabilized urea that is an enhanced efficiency fertilizer. Perfect blend is a composted chicken manure. It has three different strains of bacillus in it. So it's a biological fertilizer that we put with this. This is just we've measured leaf chlorophyll throughout the whole growing season. One of the things that we begin to see when we start changing the biological system is that we improve the greenness of that crop during the grain filling period because the grain filling is about just about one day, one ninety-five in this graph here. So the plants are greener and longer during the grain filling period. What we found is that that translates into improved yield because the better we can make that biological activity late in the growing season is that we can improve the yields and all of this. So we've actually built a little index. We just integrate under the curve of leaf chlorophyll readings just during the grain filling period. And so it gives us a way of looking at just really how effective that biological system is in maintaining greenness and then translating that into yield. The yield component on corn happens to be the weight per hundred grain. So we're actually making each kernel bigger because we just have more and more carbohydrates to put into that leaf. But when we really think about soil health, we just can't think about the nitrogen dynamics or anything else. It's a carbon cycle because we're cycling organic material. It's a water cycle and how we influence that. It's a nitrogen cycle because of how we decompose and how we mineralize all this. Realize it in a crop production system. We're driving it by solar radiation out there. But too often we try to separate these out. But in reality, when we look at farming systems, we're talking about the combination of these three things all together. And just look at this from a standpoint of a study that Sal reported on about ten years ago on what happens in continuous no-till systems and the phases that the soil goes through. And I just want to call attention to a couple of different pieces of this. On that initial phase, what we're really doing is reestablishing the microbial biomass because we're maintaining that stable microclimate. And as we increase the stability of that soil microclimate for the biology to work, is that we begin to rebuild the aggregates. Then you start increasing residue. You change all of this. And then finally you get over to that 20-year period. You've got extremely high nutrient cycling and all of this. Actually reduce the N and P use by that crop out there and still get the same yield. So when you look at the economics, as you go across this from a five-year to a 20-year time frame, pieces that we begin to see affected. And particularly during that 10 to 20-year period out there is improved water availability. So we have greater resilience of that soil to variations of weather. That 20% year loss that we see, we can begin to overcome by how we increase the organic matter content of that soil. We get an economic advantage because of this improved nutrient cycling is that we can get the same yields or higher yields with less nutrient input because we're cycling them a lot quicker. We get better crop performance, so we have higher yield potentials in this whole system as well. So all of these things are working for us throughout this whole dynamic and all of this. The unfortunate part is that in its initial phase is when a lot of people get to that point and then they give up on it as well. Why this is becoming important is a couple of different reasons and why climate resilience becomes part of this. We've been looking at the changes in climate across the upper Midwest that just an example for Iowa. This is the annual precipitation on a statewide average. In 1895, we were just a little above 30 inches. We were just shy of 35 inches, so over that 120 year period we increased the annual rainfall by about 5 inches. But more importantly, why this becomes important and this is what we see across the upper United States in the upper Midwest and extending into North Dakota and South Dakota is that this lower part and that is that we're having more and more of our precipitation comes as spring precipitation. Summer is sometimes trending down, sometimes remaining even in all of this. But also you see the variation is beginning to increase as well. So if we think about more spring precipitation and our soil is not set up to handle high intensity events, we end up with a lot of runoff, we end up with a lot of erosion, a number of different things that have bad consequences as we go on. Everything we see in all of this is that we're just looking at a simple change. May-June precipitation, which we pass by as spring versus July-August precipitation, which would be in summer at the left hand quadrant would be dry springs, wet summers. Lower left hand would be dry springs, dry summers. This is all the data, again from just from Illinois, 1895 through 2013. The point I want to make is that all of these data are pretty well clustered. But the recent years, and this is what we see across the Midwest, is that our 2010, 11, 12, 13, 14 have been planted on here are all out on the fringes of what we've seen in the past. Our weather is becoming more variable. It is becoming more unique combinations of weather events in terms of what the precipitation regime looks like, in addition to intensity of precipitation, the decreasing frequency of some of our precipitation events, and more variable center of precipitation really needs us to ask ourselves how do we manage in this condition, which is there. This happens to be Minnesota. They're 12 and 13 at the bottom, 2009 was on the other side, 2010 was on the fringe, and this is 2011. It actually had to be in the center of that. 2014 was on the fringe as well. So what we see across the Midwest is that we're becoming more variable. Here's really what concerns a lot of us in this, and this is the longer term projections in terms of precipitation. Winter precipitation is going to increase all of us relative, and if you think about this, it will have our precipitation in the winter, so even a 10% increase isn't a whole lot. But the bigger factor is the more we're seeing in the upper Midwest, more spring precipitation. The southern part of the United States are expected to decrease, but the one that should concern us is this lower left-hand one in terms of the sum of quadrants, is that all the models are agreeing and we're seeing the trend already in the data is that our summer precipitation is decreasing and becoming more variable. You think about the implications of that just for a minute, and that is that we built our agricultural systems on reliable summer rainfall, and we're going to be moving into a pattern in which we have less reliable summer rainfall. And so it really gives us the point that we need to really think about how do we manage our soils to be much more efficient water reservoirs, much more efficient water capture systems in all of this from agriculture's perspective. The whole change in climate and climate variability is really about water management, which says that soil management becomes part of this overall puzzle. And in the fall, the Great Plains States and the United States were rejecting a fall decline and fall precipitation as well. So you think about all of this in terms of the dynamics, it really gives us the point of just how do we think about soils as part of this aspect. And if you think about this from a different viewpoint, one of the things that we see with this changing temperature regime, changing precipitation regime is really what's going to happen with the soil of biodiversity out there is that we're going to have to put our soils into position to be able to protect and maintain that shelter aspect of soil biology to create conditions in which that biological system can be maintained. And again, it's back to food, water, shelter, oxygen, all of those things that we need to survive are going to be disrupted by just the signals that we're already seeing in the changing weather and climate that we have out there as well. So if you think about the science of soil health, we often assume we can change soil health without considering that we need to use soil biology as a first step. A lot of people would say, well, you know, I can add this to the soil, I can do this to the soil. But in reality, first we need to stabilize that soil biology to allow us to do the thing and then recognize that biology is linked to all the attributes that we consider soil health. It's the biology that builds those stable aggregates and it's the biology that maintains those aggregates as well. We see erosion events occurring in soils that have as little as one inch of rain over a 24-hour period because our soils are not in capacity to take those rain events, even small rain events, without causing ponding and runoff. So if you think about this last part of the system out there in terms of climate resilience, there's all this emphasis right now on climate smart agriculture. How do we build agricultural systems that are resilient to the climate? And the first piece of that is really about building organic matter. It's about how do we take minimum tillage, conservation tillage, build that in terms of reducing the tillage piece of it or increasing the residue aspects in terms of diversifying crop rotations or changing that. But that's only part of this overall puzzle. We have to integrate it with nutrient management practices that allow that crop to respond to what it does. If we look at this, how do we begin to think about improving water and nutrient use efficiency as an output of this? How do we get the most crop for a unit of water? How do we get the most crop for either the nitrogen out there? And I do believe that we've got to integrate livestock management practices. But the key of all of this is climate smart agriculture is going to be a result of putting improved soil and water management practices into practice. And not just talking about them but actually putting them into practice because that will become the attributes of climate smart agriculture. If you look at this, the water soils, the results from Hudson over 20 years ago showed that organic matter content and available water content in the soil were linearly related. The higher we can make organic matter content, the more water we have available. Also, if you think about this standpoint, as we reduce our organic matter, we reduce the capacity of that soil to infiltrate water. And we see more and more of these events as we see in this upper left-hand graph with water running off the fields and causing reels and gullies. And again, it's back to this field right here, is that as we've looked on field scale basis is that our yield variability comes from the soil's inability to supply water during grain filling. That fooling bristles was the fact that our soils did not have the capacity to supply the water when that crop needed it. So you end up with a lot of only leafshed diminished efficiency of that crop from that standpoint. So climate resilience is really derived from a soil's ability to supply water nutrients to that crop throughout the growing season. So health is the ability of that soil to supply those fundamental needs of a plant. A staple home, a root anchor, food, air, and water. One of the things in this that we see, and I'll go back now to this excessive moisture claim. The excessive moisture in where we see a lot of the yield decreases early in the season are really the soil's inability to exchange, not carbon dioxide but oxygen. And you see plants that are in waterlogged or near waterlogged or higher than field capacity soils. What we see is that those soils or those crops, you know, they're yellow. Everybody says that that's due to the lack of nitrogen or the nitrogen leaks too. No, it's not really. It's due to the lack of oxygen. We get a very stable soil aggregate surface in there. Same soils. So the types of everything, you see that those same amount of rainfall are not causing near that visible damage that are out there. So oxygen becomes a major part of this overall puzzle. Water obviously becomes part of it. Degraded soils are not climate resilient. They are climate dependent. The productivity out of a degraded soil is only going to be a function of how good that weather is during that growing season. The more variable that weather, the more variable that productivity will be in the year. And so you think about that 20% yield loss that we have. We start looking at yield gaps is that we can begin to close that by how we improve the soils and all of this. So our challenge, and when you think about the upper Midwest and you move into the South Dakota and the more rainfall limited area, is really to enhance the soil resource through soil health to increase the water availability of that crop. Think about what an extra inch of water during the growing season would be worth in terms of economic productivity. That's what we often derive at $75 to $80 an acre. The individual from Indiana has been in improving soil health, putting in context of $90 to $100 an acre increased profit across that. And he farmed 6,000 acres. So you can quickly do the math and see what that's worth to you. What we have to do and all of this is how do we begin to increase the biological activity to increase the organic matter cycling and nutrient cycling through a stable microclimate at the soil surface. Is that we can't expect this to work if we continue to disrupt the soil surface, disrupt the biology. We have to protect the soil against extremes and climate extremes of precipitation that we see occurring in this. Because in addition to this shifting signal in terms of seasonality, we see that this is already beginning to become evident. Is it more and more rainfall events are coming as heavy rainfall events? We get very intense storms in all of this. So we've got to protect the soil against this otherwise we end up with more erosion in all of this. Producers often ask me, what's the best measure of soil health out there? And I've really come to realize that it may come down to simply this. What's the surface of your soil look like after a two inch heavy rain? Go on your field and look after heavy rainstorm. And if it's all puddle, you see water running off, you really have real aggregate stability at the surface. But if you don't see ponding, you've water infiltrating, then you're never set up in terms of well aggregated soil from that standpoint. So with that, I'll entertain questions in all of this. There's just two things to think about and I left out a few minutes for questions and everything. So Jason? Okay, CRP for 20 years. I've got almost no residue on the field. I've got some heavy rain and of course the surface, you know, I consider that almost to be like a recently tilled field because of the rain. So how far of a step back did we take? You know, we had 40 years in and now it's like I said, the surface doesn't look good. How long will it take us to build back to where we probably were? What are you going to do going forward? I mean, if you go back to, you can try to put that back into a corn soybean rotation system or is it going to be in a more diverse rotation? It's cover crops and options. If you can get that then back into a corn bean wheat rotation and protect that surface because it keeps that residue on the surface just to begin to diminish the impact of the rainfall. The two years in soybeans is probably what hurt you the most. If you can put it back into that corn wheat soybean rotation, you probably see healing within the first, actually I've seen changes under a wheat system within the first year right at the sole surface. And because the small grain wheat system really does seem to remove a lot of biological activity. It stabilizes that. You can go to very reduced tillage and maintain that residue. And even on the wheat stubble is really allowing that stubble to stand so that it captures snow. Surprising, even, you know, you don't think there's much residue out there on a standing wheat stubble. But that whole aspect of having that standing residue modifies that microclimate near the sole surface. It changes the whole temperature regime. Those standing stems absorb rain drop energy, do different things. Corn stocks as well absorb that energy. So, things will come back fairly quickly on that. So, you know, just be patient with it. But, you know, you go out there after that first year and I think as you look at that upper core range, you'll see the changes already beginning to occur. Okay, hearing none. Thank you Dr. Hatfield for joining us today. It was really good presentation. Give him a hand.