 Hey, my name's Jim Hormann and we're going to talk about the biology of soil compaction. We've got a few problems here this morning, but I understand this may go off at noon, so I'm going to speed it up just a little bit. You know, we talk about ideal soil composition. Roughly 50% of the soil is what we call solid material. About 45% of that is the mineral portion and in an ideal soil we have about 5% organic matter. A lot of farmers don't know this, but as much as 50% of the soil can actually be pore space. However, when we compact the soil, a lot of times we don't have that much. So let's take a look at a compacted soil, look at some different bulk densities. If you look at an uncultivated, undisturbed wood lot, typically the bulk density is any worse from 1 to 1.2 grams per centimeter cubed. And what we're looking at is we're looking at the weight and basically the weight over a volume of soil. And so that would be ideal. If we had 1.2 grams per centimeter cubed, that would be an ideal soil. We have about 50% pore space in that. But as we get into cultivated clays and cultivated sandy loams, you'll notice that the bulk density increases and that means we have less room for air and water to move. And so if you look on my right hand side there at the bottom, once we reach a bulk density of 1.6 grams per centimeter cubed, it starts to become root limiting. That's somewhere around 250 pounds per square inch. If we get up to 1.8 and then the roots are totally restricted and you can't, the roots can't get through there. So that's real important on a lot of our soils. We're actually limiting the roots and how deep they can go. So let's take a look at what is typical in our soils. We generally talk about the plow layer. And this may be any worse from 7 to 8 to 9 inches deep. And you'll notice that we have, as we plow that soil, the bulk density goes down. It's like around 1.4. And then we reach this limiting layer there about 7, 8, 9 inches deep where it's very hard for the roots to get through the soil. We've seen this in almost all the soils that we've looked at. There's a limiting layer there. And a lot of times, especially on corn roots, they'll go off at a right hand angle, also on soybeans. So what we're doing with the cover crops and the no-till is we're trying to break up these compaction zones. The very fine roots can get through, planes of weakness, and they can decrease that bulk density so that our main crop, the green crops, can get deeper into the soil to get moisture and also nutrients. Soil organic matter, if you look at some of the characteristics, why we want to increase soil organic matter contact, look at the bulk density of soil organic matter. It's about 0.6 compared to, say, 1.45 similar to that range for where we have a tilled soil. So soil organic matter has less density. And the soil has more room and more space for air and water storage. And here's an important characteristic. Every pound of soil organic matter can hold 18 to 20 pounds of water. That's why we like to say that soil organic matter acts like a sponge. And here's a picture of that. You can see the little black areas in there. If you look at soil organic matter, it's not nearly as dense. The color tends to be light to dark brown. And it has room to store water and also to store nutrients. You also notice that the surface area is quite large. So that allows water to get trapped in between those particles. It also gives structure to our soils. When we looked at a compacted soil, the density could be between 1.6 to 1.8. Compacted soils kind of have a much higher density, less room for air and water storage. They tend to act like roads or road payment. A lot of times result in flash floods. It was interesting this year. We had a drought. We had a couple of one inch rains. But the majority of that water ran off the soil surface, even though the soil was extremely dry. It's because we turned that soil into road payment. I like to say we turned it in whenever you do excessively till the soil, you turned it into a road payment. We've all probably seen a farmer, maybe your neighbor, really tilt the soil. What happens when they tilt it and get it very fine? As soon as it rains, it turns into concrete. So dense soils also have less microbial life. That's really important for nutrient management. Here's an electron microscope of some of the clay minerals. This is where the water and the nutrients can be trapped. Generally, this clay mineral will put an organic film around there and the nutrients get trapped in between the soil organic matter and the minerals that are in the soil. Three soil compaction factors. We all know that heavy equipment due to its weight will compact the soil. But did you know that rain and gravity will also compact the soil? We can have rainfall when it comes down. It can reach a terminal velocity of 35 miles per hour. It almost looks like a mini nuclear explosion when it goes off. So that can move soil and water, but it also tends to have a compacting factor. Is there a visual way to measure soil compaction? Actually, you can go on your farm and you can probably see this. If you look at a fence row and look at the elevation difference between your field and where that fence row is. We've measured this in Ohio. Some said that this was due to wind. Others said that a lot of the soil had eroded and had piled up in a windrow. But actually, we've measured this on the lee side of a woods and we saw anywhere from a six to nine inch elevation difference. If 50% of that is void space, that equals an additional three to four and a half inches of additional water that we could store in that soil. If you really want to see this, if you've got a wooded area, you can see the difference here in northwest Ohio. A lot of times the woods that we had were actually very low and that's where the water stood. Now often the water is standing on the headlands and we can see water standing there. It's because that soil is much more compacted. Here's the water available. The available water capacity of soil organic matter, that first inch of additional soil organic matter can gain you anywhere from one to almost two inches of additional water. If we get it up to five inches or five percent soil organic matter, you can see we're gaining on a 70 soil 2.5 on a silly loam four inches and on a silly clay loam three inches of additional water. It starts off at one to two inches of water per foot of soil and after we get up to about five percent organic matter, we're down to about a half 2.8 inches of additional water for every one percent organic matter that we're adding to that soil. This is extremely important in dry weather or in climates that don't have a lot of rainfall. Here's what happens. We've talked about this and where we've got a compacted or tilled soil, it tends to set up like the road. Where we have good vegetation throughout the year, we increase that pore space so it slows down the water runoff and it increases water infiltration. Here's what happens if we speed up or double the velocity of water. The relationship is two to the six power for every time you double the velocity of water. This tells you how many more nutrients that that water can carry. The faster the water flows, the more energy it has. If I go from one to two mile per hour, I can carry 64 times more nutrients. If I get up to 16 to 32 mile per hour in a flowing stream, I can carry a thousand times more nutrients with that water. What we're trying to do now is we're trying to slow the water down so that it drops its load, keeps the nutrients in the soil rather than running off. We have a lot of problems with hypoxia and nutrification. Hypoxia is too much nitrogen and phosphorus getting into the Gulf of Mexico. Nutrification is mainly where we've got too much phosphorus causing a lot of algae blooms. For water uptake, if you're looking at where the roots absorb most of the water, it's in that top half. If you look at each one of these lines is about six inches, so 40% of the water by that plant is absorbed within the top six inches. The next six inches will absorb about 30%. So 70% of the water is absorbed in the top foot. This kind of explains why corn can actually do quite well with maybe only eight to nine inches of rooting depth before the roots start going off a right angle. It actually has almost 70% of the water. But if we can get those roots to go a little bit deeper, especially in a dry year, we can gain another 20 to as much as 30% more water as we get into that subsoil. Same thing goes for nutrient extraction, exact same relationship, 40, 30, 20, and 10. And you can see the depth there. So same relationship. Also, when we look at a soil, there's a big difference between no-till with the cover crop where we have live plants. Notice the temperature difference. It's about 87 to 85 degrees over here where we have conventional and maybe we have started to try to do no-till. You'll see that there's at least 20 to maybe as much as a 30 degree increase in the temperatures. This year, when we had a drought here in Ohio, we measure soil temperatures up around 130 to as high as 140 degrees Fahrenheit. And what impact does that have? Notice here, the soil bacteria start to die at 140 degrees Fahrenheit. We get our best moisture somewhere where the soil is around 70 to 95 degrees. Once it gets over 95, notice we're only using at 100 degrees Fahrenheit, 15% of the moisture is used for growth, 85% of the moisture is lost through evaporation and transpiration. So if we can keep that soil covered with live plants and keep a nice layer of residue on there, we can conserve moisture. And that's the key thing that I wanted to talk to you about. Also, for hot dry summers, how much more water do we need when the temperature goes up? At 75 degrees Fahrenheit, we need about one inch of water per week. Raise that by 10 degrees. We need two inches. Raise that by another 10 inches. And now we're up to four inches of water a week. So your water requirements double for every 10 degree increase in temperature. Heat and drought together, they're linked together. They quickly increase yield losses in your soil. This information came from Dr. Elwin Taylor out of Iowa. If we look at the soil and look what's going on, when we do subsoil tillage, where we add an extremely large amount of oxygen into the soil, it acts like a firmness, almost like a wood stove, you might say. Adding oxygen to the soil actually causes the soil organic matter to go up into the atmosphere. So we start to lose soil organic matters. And the more aggressive your tillage, the more soil organic matter losses you're having. Matter of fact, in the last 50, 25 years, once tillage starts, you'll see that you will lose as much as 50 percent organic matter. In some places, we've seen as much as 60 percent losses in soil organic matter. Notice though that once we started doing permanent sod and adding, we can start to add organic matter back to that soil. But you notice that we didn't reach the same level. You might want to think about that. Why didn't we get back up to where we were? And the answer to that is quite simple. It has to do with the amount of roots and how tall we let that grass grow. We tend on our permanent sods will cut off the top growth. Top growth is related to root growth. The more root growth you have, the more healthy that plant is, the more organic matter you're going to add to your soil. Matter of fact, most of the organic matter in the soil comes from the roots. As much as 65 to 70 percent of the organic matter comes from roots. So the more roots we get into the soil, the higher our soil organic matter levels. Let's talk a little bit about compaction. Here's a typical tire. And you notice as you're putting weight on that soil, the forces are down. And then what actually happens is the soil moves to the side and will actually get kind of a lip there around that rut. You'll see that the soil is actually forced upward. And so what happens then, if we take, say, a disc and we try to take that lip off and we try to fill in that hole, you'll always notice when this happens that you never quite fill it in. And why is that? Because we're losing the void space. When you break up the soil and you lose all your soil structure, you have less room powder. And so what we're doing is we're breaking the soil down and the mineral portion is very solid, very dense. And so what we need to do is now lift it up and keep it in shape. We need to have better soil structure. And one of the ways we can do that is with a root. You might see this root here. It's expanding the soil. Where that man is pointing, you'll notice that when this big oil seed radish, these can get as big as your leg and get any worship three to four feet deep in the soil, although mostly the tuber is at the soil surface. But what it does is as it goes down and it expands, it's forcing the soil down, forcing it to the side, and it's physically lifting it. And so what roots actually do is they actually compact the soil, but they reorientate the clay particles. And then what they do is they form aggregates. So we're going to take some of the polysaccharides and the exodus that come from these roots, and we're going to form nice aggregates, which will give us some structure back to our soil, so that our soil doesn't collapse on us. And it's not quite as dense. Here's what the bacteria do 90% of the bacteria are linked to the clay. 40 to 60% of the soil microbial biomass is associated with this clay. And that's how we form something called a macro aggregate. And what we do is we take these micro aggregates, which are less than 250 microns, and we're going to form macro aggregates. Now, if you want to know what a macro aggregate looks like, when you go home, just take your shovel in your lawn, dig up some soil in your lawn, and then shake the turf a little bit. And you'll see these what I'd say pea size, small pieces, almost the size of a small piece of gravel, little pads, those are the macro aggregates that are forming. So what we're doing is we're allowing that soil to start to set up so it has more structure. So it has more room for air and water. And by that, by doing that, we can store more air and water in that soil and it's less dense. And one of the key fungus that we have in the soil are these micro rhizial fungus, they actually infect 80% of our plants. And they give off something called glomalin or glomulin, some people call it. That's what gives us some of the glycoproteins and some of the structure that helps to cement soil together to form these macro aggregates. And here's what micro rhizial fungus look like. You'll notice on the top, we have this brown root. The fungus are actually either white or yellow. And in a handful of soil, we can have as much as 20 to 25 miles of these filaments going into soil. What these fungus do is they bring back water, nitrogen and phosphorus to the plant. In exchange, the plant is going to feed that micro rhizia, some of its carbohydrates. As much as 25 to 40% of the total carbohydrate reserves in the root go to feed these fungus if they're available. It's a very beneficial relationship. And then when these fungus die, they give off the this glomulin that's inside their cell structure. It's kind of sticky. It's kind of like a glue that helps to glue our soils together. So we want to keep these micro rhizia healthy. They need to have live plants year round. In order to do that, tillage and excess fertilizer tend to kill off the micro rhizia fungus. And here's what happens. This shows that sticky substance being surrounded. It surrounds the soil particles. And that's what gives us those nice macro aggregates that we were talking about. Building soil structures like building a house. It starts with Mother Nature. We've our carpenter is our plants. And we're going to start with this sand silt and clay. The roots are kind of like how we would frame up a house. Some of the nails and the lag screws, this humus is very hard, very tough. It's been around for hundreds, thousands of years. It's been broken down. So it sticks around. But what we're really lacking in the soil is some of that glomulin or some of that active carbon. Some of the polysaccharides are missing. The nitrogen and sulfur also act like braces. And then that surface residue, that's kind of like the roof on your house. So here's a picture of a house. And see how we started let's take a look at how we build this how we start off with the foundation. We add the wood and so look around the room where you're maybe you're sitting at. Notice that there's a lot of space in a building like this or in a house. The reason we have that is because the wood or the soil organic matter in the soil is giving structure and the nitrogen and sulfur are acting like braces. And now we've got room for air and water to move. The lag screws I'd like to say is how soil organic matter attaches to the clay particles. And a lot of times we'll have phosphorus we'll have some other nutrients in between there that will give that will attach that clay particle and that organic matter together. The humus again is like nails. And then this glomulan kind of acts like the glue or house wrap it helps to insulate this house. And then the roof is is helps to keep on a roof on a house will help keep out water. What's interesting in the soil the roof actually acts to help keep out too much oxygen. Imagine what would happen if we had a tornado come through on your house and every other year took your roof off. We get too much water in there and that water would start to rot out the wood and pretty soon this whole house would cave in in the soil. If we get rid of the residue, you get too much oxygen in the soil and it burns up the soil organic matter and the whole house starts to compact and starts to decay and everything falls in. It works the exact same way in the soil. Too much oxygen, oxygen and carbon dioxide are opposed to each other when one increases the other decreases. So carbon dioxide is heavier than the oxygen. So they're inversely related. So if we get a heavy rain where we have a micro aggregate, you're not going to get as much water infiltration. And a lot of the water will run off. One of the things that farmers have talked to me about is saying, you know, I've been in no till for five or 10 years. And some farmers will say that my soils are cold and wet. Other farmers who have been in no till will say my soils are warm and moist. So which one is right? Well, actually, let's take a look at this. Probably when you started into no till, did you get rid of all the soil compaction? And so that's probably one of the reasons why our soils are cold. Compacted soils hold more moisture. So coming out of the winter, we're going to have water which holds the cold and hold the cold and the heat. And so your soils will tend to be wet. And they also tend to be cold. As you start to get into no till and you start to break up that soil and get more macropores, you get the water to drain from your soils, that soil will start to warm up quicker. Matter of fact, you've probably seen this in your own home, windowpains, a lot of times are triple double or triple and they use air as an insulation. So now when you start going, let's say you've been in no till for one to two years, we're starting to get more residue at the surface. What is the color of residue when it breaks down? It actually turns black. And does black surfaces warm up the soil? Or do they cause it to get colder? They tend to draw heat. And so they'll actually help to warm up the soil. So as we get more residue on top of soil, your soils will start to warm up. And then as you get a thick layer of residue, a lot of farmers think that this is not a good thing, but it actually is. What happens is, think about a compost pile. If I have one to two inches of residue on my soil surface, what happens in the middle of that compost pile, there's biological activity, and that will actually warm up the soil. Most farmers who are doing no till with cover crops are fighting to keep residue. They have so much microbial activity and so many earthworms, they're actually fighting to keep the residue rather than trying to break it up. If you're having a hard time with residue, if it's causing problems to your tires, we see a lot of that here in Ohio. Chances are that you don't have a lot of microbial activity or a lot of earthworms in your soil, and you need to make it get your soil more healthy. Here's where we're measuring soil compaction. We can actually do this in the field and we're finding out that right next to that root, soil compaction levels decreased by as much as 30% Why do our soils compact? We'll look at your crop rotation. Typically, we, at least here in Ohio, we're drilling most of our soybeans, drilled soybeans are planted very close together to have a very poor root system. I would rather see soybeans planted in 15 inch rows or spaced a little wider apart. They have a much healthier root system and they can help to break up some of this soil compaction. Also, if you look at corn, it has a very thick root and it tends to be limited by the plow layer. We saw that in Minnesota last year. We visited Minnesota. Their plow layer was down there about eight inches deep. That's where they plowed every year. Those roots could not get through. Even though they had beautiful soils, they were only reaching about 125 to 140 bushel corn yield at some of the prettiest soils I've ever seen. Dark, rich, black, but the soil was compacted. So that was limiting their yields. What percentage of the time do we have live roots? Typically in a corn soybean rotation, only maybe four months out of the year, maybe as much as five months, about one third of the time, if we can add a cover crop to that, we can greatly increase the amount of soil organic matter that we have in the soil. And one of the things that people have asked me is why does no till really have more live roots than conventional tillage? The answer is not really. It's not until you add the cover crop that we start to gain soil organic matter. So what's missing in no till is those live roots. Soil compaction is a biological problem. It's related to a lack of living roots in the soil. So I've got about 15 minutes left. Let's start looking at some things that we can do to get rid of this soil compaction. So if we're looking at subsoiling, here's some research that was done in Ohio. Subsoiling yield gains or losses. If you have conventional tillage with subsoiling, we found out that the corn yield gained about one to three bushel or about 3% about a three percentage increase on soybean yields. It was just a little bit more. We gained anywhere from two to five bushels or about 10% yield increase. What happened when we had long term no till? It actually went the other way by the same amount. Our corn yield loss, we lost anywhere from one to three bushel or about 3% soybean yield losses were around 10%. So what does subsoiling do if we're comparing subsoiling versus cover crops? The subsoil, what does it do? It gives you immediate change in soil structure as down as deep as what you're going to subsoil it. If you're going down eight inches deep, however, those changes are not permanent. And it actually leads to greater reliance on tillage in the future because we're losing that soil organic matter. It will increase infiltration in that top 18 inches because you're fluffing up the soil. It leaves the soil susceptible to compaction later. The first trip across that field, you're going to compact that soil 80% of that soil will be compact almost immediately with the first trip. What can cover crops do? Well, the change is a little bit slower, but it's a little deeper. We can go three feet deep or even deeper with really deep rooted cover crops. It increases the infiltration, but it may take a little bit of time. Generally, cover crop roots can go through about one foot of soil of compacted soils per year. So if you have a very heavily compacted soil, it may take a little bit of a time. Think about your grain carts and your your combines, a typical combine is going to compact that soil 18 inches deep about 26 tons of compaction for axle load. It'll compact it down to eight inches deep. One of the things that cover crops do is they protect the soil from erosion, they add nutrients in organic matter, they tie up the nutrients, they fit into a continuous no till system, they really make the no till work much better, and they help to protect against soil compaction. If you want to think about this, just imagine if you had two bricks, and you put a sponge in between them. What happens is as you add organic matter, if you were to compress those bricks, that bricks would come back apart, the sponge helps to alleviate some of that compaction, it doesn't allow those bricks to get too close together. So if you imagine these bricks, bricks are made out of clay, they have a negative charge. We take these two bricks, and we get rid of the organic matter. Now you put a positive ion in between there, something like calcium or potash, that's going to set that, those two bricks up and it's going to set up like a brick wall. That's what happens. I like to call it cement mix, that's what happens when we till the soil excessively. We need that organic matter in there to cushion the soil. Here's some of the soil resistance, and here's the rankings. And we'll start from the bottom, I'm going to go back, subsoiling deep rip, full surface tillage, you're adding a lot of oxygen into that soil, it will help you, but the problem is it's a short term solution. We can moldboard plow, or chisel plow, and then when we finally create a fine seed bed, but the problem is again, the more you disturb the soil, the more organic matter you're losing, and so you're going to be dependent on that system year after year after year. We can subsoil with white space shanks, and that will help, so we're not doing quite as much disturbance. We can get into strip till where we only fill up just a small portion of the field and then we leave the rest of the field untouched, and that will help. We can do shallow tillage, things like the airway and the Phoenix Herald. A lot of people call this vertical tillage. The problem with this is, now we've changed our compaction layer. We've seen this time time again as we do the shallow tillage, your compaction layer, rather than being 8 to 9 inches deep, now maybe only 2, 3, 4 inches deep. However far that you go down, the bottom of that tool creates a compacted zone. We can do intermittent no-till, which is tillage every other year. Typically in a corn-soybean rotation, they might till the soybeans and then go to corn because the corn has such a thick root, it really benefits from having well aerated soils. Or we can start to go to continuous no-till, where we get light residue on the soil. Again, now we're building up that organic matter, we'll have less compaction. We get more residue, that's better, with no cover crop. Once we add the cover crop, now we're starting to cushion that soil. Then the best situation is where we have continuous no-till, cover crop, and controlled traffic. Now we're limiting that zone that we're compacting to a very small portion of the field. If we do that year after year, now we can make our soils much healthier and have a lot less compaction. How to establish cover crops? Add diversity to your soils. You can reduce your crop maturities. Basically on corn we're looking at a shorter maturity. If you can reduce that by 5 to 7 days, that will really help you. We can also grow soybeans, grow an earlier maturing soybean. One of the key points is we need to give that cover crop time to establish before winter sets in. Most cover crops need anywhere from 60 to 90 days of growth. One of the ways we can do that is we can intercede, we can either fly it on or broadcast it. A lot of our farmers are now investing in these high-boy applicators. They have a 90-foot boom on them and they're using an air cedar with drop-down tubes that they'll go in between the corn and they can seed cover crops into their corn or even into their soybeans and get them started. Then when they harvest them, a lot of times these cover crops may be two, three inches tall, starting to grow. That gives them a head start going into winter. We let that cover crop grow longer in the spring and intercede our next crop into. We like to do this with soybeans. We'll use cereal rye. We'll let that cereal rye grow in the fall, let it grow in the spring. In Ohio, we have a problem with excess moisture, so if we let it grow through respiration, it will allow a lot of that through transpiration. It will allow a lot of that water to get out of the soil by putting it up into the atmosphere. So we can actually get onto our fields anywhere from seven to ten days earlier. We'll actually let the cereal rye grow up, plant our soybeans into it, let the soybeans come up, then kill the cereal rye. If we kill the cereal rye too early, it'll lay down and then if we have some wet weather, that soil will stay real sticky and then it may not dry out till late June or even July. So what we like to do is let it grow up, either drill or plant our soybeans into that cereal rye. It will not hairpin as much and it won't tend to bind as much and so it's much easier to do that. We can also use legumes, things like winter peas or crimson clover and we'll plant those with oil, seed, radish and do that before corn and that's been very very successful. We've seen as much as six to eight bushel yield increases on our soybeans and with our corn, it varies quite a bit depending on how good your soil structure is but we're seeing 10, 15 bushel, sometimes even more yield increases by doing this practice. Here's some of the best cover crops to fight soil compaction. Grasses have a very fibrous root system. I'm a real big fan of sorghum sedan grass. You can let your sorghum sedan grass grow a little bit. In Ohio, we tend to plant it after wheat or we have winter wheat so our wheat will come off in July. We'll plant the sorghum sedan grass. If you can let that sorghum sedan grass get about three feet tall and either harvest it. In some cases guys don't have livestock so they'll just mow it off. When you mow sorghum sedan grass you get anywhere from five to nine times more roots being grown and so it's really tillers out and it's all about roots in the soil that really helps to keep your soil really gives good soil structure to your soil. annual rye grass is another really good one. It can be a little harder to manage. Cereal rye and oats can also be used. Very fine roots. They can find those planes of weaknesses. They can really help you with soil compaction. They also go fairly deep in the soil and the rye grass will go five to six feet deep unless there's water or limiting layer. Cereal rye tends to go about 30 to 36 inches in similar numbers for oats. We can also use Nebraska's things like the oil seed radish or the turnips. Oil seed radish especially be some of the daikon varieties such as tillage radish or the ground house radish. They get a fairly good size of root system. They're white. They're very sweet. The earthworms absolutely love them and they do a very good job in loosening up soil. Matter of fact if you're going to plant oil seed radish never plant them by themselves on a hill with a greater than a three percent slope. We've actually seen some of the soil on these slopes start to move if you get a heavy rainfall. We like to plant them with another grass or plant them with another legume to get more roots and to have more biomass here. For legumes you want a large root network. Herribech, cowpeas, red clover and winter peas are some of the ones that we're using that gives you the relationship. If you've got a problem with surface compaction buckwheat is excellent and also facility. That's a new one that came out of France. They work quite well. Buckwheat is very beneficial for insects and it also helps if you have low phosphorus. It has a lot of organic acids in it so it will release phosphorus into the soil. So if we're looking at and I'm getting low on time so I'm going to go through this fairly quickly. I've got about six more slides. If you look at the new concept that we're looking at we're calling it eco-farming or ecological farming. We're trying to keep the soil covered with live plants year-round. Again if you only have plants out there four months outside of the year you only have about a third as much fuel and energy going into that soil. The plants give energy to the microbes and the microbes keep those nutrients recycling and also improves your soil. If we can keep those year-round we've got a hundred percent of the fuel and energy going into that soil. Here's what happens under conventional tillage. You have a smaller microbial population. We've got this brown combined, rusty combined. You notice we have a lot of carbon dioxide going up into the atmosphere. Here where we have the eco-farming we're not disturbing the soil. We have a much larger microbial population and they're going to keep more nitrogen and phosphorus recycling in the soil. And here's the relationship. Every one percent organic matter can give you as much as eight hundred and fifty dollars of nutrients that it's going to tie up per year. A thousand pounds of nitrogen and roughly a hundred pounds of phosphorus, potash, and sulfur. That adds up to about eight hundred and fifty dollars for every one percent soil organic matter. How do we lose these? Well when we do tillage you'll see these whirlwinds there. That's the carbon dioxide going off. And you'll notice that we can't tie up as much of the nitrogen and the phosphorus because we have less organic matter in the soil. Anywhere from fifty to seventy five percent of the phosphorus is tied up organically and right around ninety percent of the nitrogen is tied up in an organic form. Here where we're doing the eco-farming we're carrying those nutrients forward. These plants that are alive in the winter even though the soil may be cold it's much warmer down below. Being around fifty degrees there they can below the frost line they can actually take up nutrients all winter long and they're turning that into soil or organic matter something that we'll turn into. Here's what happens when we do too much tillage. Tillage to the soil more microbes is like the worst hurricane, the worst earthquake, worst forest fire and the worst tornado all wrapped up into one event. It really disturbs them. They don't like to have this disturbance. You'll have a much healthier microbial population if you stop doing the tillage. And where do we lose these nutrients? Most of them are lost in the winter. They're lost to the air into the water because we don't have plant roots there to absorb them. So a lot of times in late winter early spring with the snow melt a lot of these nutrients are lost. Here where we have the ecofarming we're keeping those nutrients tied up and we're carrying them forward to the next crop. Finally in summary I think I might have a minute or two for questions. Soil compaction is related to the biology of soil and how the soil was managed. Organic matter in microbes influence soil compaction. If you have cold no-till soils it's probably a result of soil compaction and poor soil structure. If you can add cover crops and no-till to that system you'll actually improve your soils and they shouldn't be warm and moist. That's an ideal place to plant corn and soybeans. Active living roots in the microbes are acting and working together to improve your soil structure. That equals this ecological funding that we're really promoting no-till plus cover crops. So I think I have maybe a minute to go we may get cut off. Any questions I did that pretty quick that's about as fast as I've done that so if we get cut off that's fine. Sorry for some of the technical problems we had and delays but I hope you guys enjoy your conference. Can somebody tell me about how many people we have there? 230 well great I wish I could be with you but okay I'll see if I can answer it. How do we get cover crops to grow all year? Is that what you're talking about? Okay one of the one of the benefits as you go a little further north is especially cereal rye it originated in the mountains of China. Those roots are active all year round even though they may not be growing snow actually protects a lot of our cover crops. You may have a much more beneficial growth to some of these cover crops what's really detrimental to cover crops is the wind. And so if you can protect that crown of these cover crops and keep some residue over there even though it looks like they're not doing you may not see a whole lot of top growth they can do a lot of benefit from just the roots growing down through the soil. Cereal rye is a really good one after corn probably in South Dakota. I mean it grows up into Canada so that's probably one of your best ones. In a dry spring yes there can be and what you want to do is if you have a dry spring and you see that it's that you're going to go into a drought you want to conserve moisture. What you want to do is you want to build your organic matter but you don't want to hurt that next crop so and it's hard to predict this but if you see that the soil is excessively dry and you're getting a lot of uh transpiration going on you can kill that cover crop early. You guys don't have as much problem here in Ohio we have seven out of ten years it's wet and so we're trying to dry out our soils you probably need to manage your soils a little differently you might want to kill that cover crop in order to conserve moisture and then plant into it when the conditions are right but it should make the soil much more mellow that's at least what we've seen here in Ohio especially when we're using these oil seed radish we used to worry about we'd have too big of a hole there but you'll also find and I didn't tell you this cover crops will give you more moisture because you're going to trap more snow. We've seen this time and time again if you put up it's almost like a a snow fence it traps so that it's not blowing across your field and you'll actually gain some moisture by having a cover crop that's maybe a couple inches tall it'll trap that snow there and you'll gain basically what you're losing. All the recent information that's come out says that cover crops are really adding water to the soil and even though we're losing some from transpiration if we see that that's a problem just kill them early. Does that make sense? Quick one until we get cut off here a story from Nebraska they had some guys this idea of fallow soils that's the stupidest idea we ever come up that's my personal opinion I'm just going to tell you that in Nebraska some guys started doing no-till long-term no-till with cover crops they found out that they were they were using two feet of irrigation per year they reduced it down to six inches per year by going to no-till and cover crops the reason being is they were trapping more snow and they're adding organic matter to their soil so now they could store more water. Remember that that chart that I give you was the inches of water per foot of soil so if you can get these cover crops to go very deep into the soil and add a couple percentage points of organic matter to each foot of soil you can greatly increase your water storage capacity and then if you have that residue on the surface you're not going to have as much heat you're not going to have as much evaporation going on you're going to store a lot more water in your soil. Rain makes grain but also going along with that more water holding capacity in your soil is going to equal higher yields. I wish I could be with you folks but I've got another meeting here in Ohio yet tonight that I have to do so thank you for inviting me it's been a pleasure. Thank you.