 Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to an afternoon session on the second day of the conference as part of the organic grain track of the Growing Stronger Collaborative Conference. I'm Erin Silva. I'm an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the state extension specialist in organic agricultural systems. And it's my pleasure to welcome you today to our workshop, organic row crop management in the biology of soil health. We have three outstanding speakers to share information with you today, both on a broader scale with respect to understanding the biology of soil health, as well as giving some specific information on a research project that's been underway at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for the past three years. So we have joining us today, Dr. Matt Rourke, who is a professor in the Department of Soil Science and the state extension specialist in soil fertility. We have Dr. Teal Potter, who was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is now at Washington State University. And Miranda Secora, who's an associate research specialist in the Department of Soil Science here at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. So I am going to hand it right off to them. They have a lot to share and we are hoping to get a lot of questions from the audience. If you have questions, please type them in the chat function in the CVENT app. We will take questions throughout. We may wait till the pause is between the speaker or address them at the end, but certainly as we go along, ask your questions in the chat. We also have some interactive questions. So be looking out for that. I will let you know when those questions are in the chat because we would like to get your opinion and your thoughts on some issues as well. So with that, I will turn it over to Dr. Rourke. Thank you, Dr. Silva. So first off, yes, I highly encourage everyone to ask questions. So I found that these virtual formats are a little different, right? And it will be a lot more fun with more questions that we get. So overall, the title of our presentation, organic row crop management and the biology of soil health. And today we are going to cover, we are going to have three different sections. I am going to talk a little bit to start on just an overview of soil health and just the perspective on soil health that we know where we are coming from on it. Miranda is going to talk about managing for soil health and organic production systems. So a little bit more specifics on management and based on some on-farm survey work we have done. And then Teal is going to get into a deeper understanding of soil microorganisms and what they do. So the overview of soil health. And so I would imagine, as everyone thinks about soil health, you know, everyone might have a little different take on it. And so I always like to use this slide put together by my friend, Steve Coleman. You know, what does a healthy soil consist of? Right. And I'm sure everyone on this Zoom meeting here can think about, you know, several things of how they would describe a healthy soil. Right. And so some of these might be, might have sufficient nutrients, good tilth, good workability, sufficient rooting depth, good drainage, few pathogens, but plenty of beneficial soil biota, low weed pressure, no harmful toxins to the crop, and resins to degradation. Now, you know, what's interesting about this is none of these are connected to one specific measurement per se. Right. So it's about healthy soil is about what we want and what these bigger characteristics are of the soil. So we all put this together to kind of get at what we've done in soil health from a soil science perspective is we have devolved it a little bit into soil testing. And so, you know, just starting with this idea of the left, this fluffy definition, conception of soil health, we know soil health is good. But really is it about what are the specific things we want from the soil? We had that list before, but I, you know, in theory, there'd be a hundred or more things we might want from the soil. Right. And maybe a better way to capture that is the idea of ecosystem services. What's that service that soil is providing. But what we really need to do, and we're going to work over here on this side of the world, the specific soil measurements, what do we need to measure about the soil that does connect in some way to the things we want from the soil. And then also in a perfect world that these specific soil measurements may connect to agronomic decision making, meaning if you could quantify, if you could get a certain measurement of your soil, what can you know that you're able to achieve higher yields? Would you be able to reduce your nutrient inputs? Would you be able to reduce your need for other inputs to manage pests and disease? Then you have this side of the world with crop management and all these crop management effects that are affecting these specific crop measurements or crop management effects that might be affecting the ecosystem services. So you can see that it can get a little fuzzy in here. So I want to just make sure everyone when we're thinking about it, we do have these things we want from the soil, but we also need to identify if the science of soil health is going to advance, we need to be able to identify what we should be measuring and what would be things that we can measure in a relatively easy way. So we talked about ecosystem services, here's another big example of all these other things that we could list too, the idea of carbon sequestration, flood regulation, foundation for human infrastructure, all of these different things. So there's so many things, but it's hard to capture the idea of is it a habitat for microorganisms? Well, what would you measure to know that? And you might want to measure several things. And that's the thing. So soil health is multivariate by nature. And so there's many properties that can or should be measured and we probably can't sum it up with a single number. So this is our great challenge. So many of you have probably seen this figure. We use it all the time. There's three circles and in the middle, we have the physical aspects of soil, the chemical properties of soil and the biological properties of soil. And in the middle where they all intersect, that's soil health. Okay, so we have all these things and we can kind of break it down. Well, chemical properties of soil, these are well studied. They're easy to measure. Any soil test lab can tell you about extractable nutrients. They're the aspect of soils that we've been studying probably the longest. People have been studying soil chemistry for well over 100 years. And we know what to do with those values. If you get a pH measurement or soil nutrient levels, we can utilize that to make lime recommendations or nutrient recommendations. The physical aspects of soil, things like aggregation, compaction, porosity, they're well understood. They're not necessarily easy to measure because it involves field evaluations, but they're often things you can see. So if you have compacted soil or you have poor infiltration, that's me something that you're going to be able to sense about your soil. So there are things that you can physically see and understand. Then it leaves us with this biological measurement of soil. And that's been the big missing piece of soil testing for a long time. I'm going to say it's not well understood. It's pretty complex. We can say there's certain things that are easy to measure, but we're not quite sure exactly what to measure yet. We're doing a lot of testing of specific measurements to bring into our soil testing world. So as we think about all of these things, connecting that function to indicator, and maybe I should have that arrow going the other way, if we want to manage it, we need to be able to measure it. So if we want to measure those functions, if we want to manage for those functions, we need to pick indicators. You can see there's a laundry list of things here for chemical, physical, and biological. And so we've got to pair down on which ones we're going to use. The other aspect of a good soil health indicator, this is from a paper put out a few years ago, and I thought they did an excellent job in terms of describing what we want. It needs to be evidence-based. We need to have some research on it. It needs to be sensitive to changes in management, meaning that if you're going to change a management practice, if you're going to add a management practice, if it doesn't really, it's not really affected by management, it's not going to be a good soil authenticator. It's not going to give you a sense of if you're going up or down. It needs to be accurate and precise, meaning it has to have good scientific methods behind it. It needs to be cost-effective, which really means it needs to be able to be conducted in a soil test lab. And there's certain tests that are pretty expensive, probably don't fit into our soil testing lab world that easily. So they're probably going to, it's going to be limited in its use. And then lastly, it has value. And that gets the idea of can we connect it to something, some decision-making process, right? It might even just be as simple as, did my yield potential go up? Can it be connected to nutrients? Can it be connected to other decision-making for other disease or pest pressures? So the part that I want to kind of circle in on here is this idea that, well, most of these measurements, one of the big things I want to do is to get at this idea of a specific measure of organic matter. Now, I'm sure a lot of you are already getting soil organic matter by loss on ignition from soil test labs, but it might not be the best indicator of soil health. So because there's different parts of the organic matter and how fast they cycle. So we have this idea that there's this, most of this organic matter is in this passive pool, where it doesn't cycle very fast. The turnover is decades or centuries. We have another pool, that's the slow pool, that's years and decades of turnover. Then we have this idea that there's this active pool of organic matter and that might be something we're interested in. So it represents recently deposited organic material that involves a lot of rapid decomposition and cycling of carbon and nutrients, so carbon which would be available to the soil microorganisms and nutrients would be available to the organisms and the plant. So it represents, you know, can represent anywhere between 10 to 15 percent of the organic matter and this is a turnover that might happen within a growing season. So this active pool of organic matter can be considered an integrator of biology and chemistry and we're going to talk a lot today about two specific ways we can get at that active pool. I'm going too fast. So there's two different ways we can get at this active pool. So the first one is a soil incubation and this is the idea we're going to let the microbes tell us what's going on. So for example in this case we're going to take soil, we're going to incubate it at a standard temperature and moisture, in this case we're going to measure the carbon dioxide production over time. So meaning we're going to let the microbes consume that active pool, produce CO2, we're going to measure that increase in CO2. So that's one way to go but it does take time. In this case this would be a 24-hour incubation. Some incubations might be recommended for maybe three days. So it does take some time to get that. The other idea is, is there a chemical extraction? So can we extract that active carbon pool in the same in the same way we might extract soil test phosphorus or potassium to get at some sort of availability? And there is, there's a there's a permanganate oxidizable carbon sometimes called poxy. You might actually hear it actually called active carbon and it's a quick method and these extractions then can be easily conducted by soil test labs. So we have two different approaches. We've got the, we have the incubation approach and the chemical extraction approach. So there's two interesting papers that have come out recently that I've talked about some of the value of these organic matter and organic matter pools. So the first one on the left is this global meta analysis on the relationship between organic matter and crop yields and that connected organic matter with corn and wheat yields. We're saying that as organic matter increases up to 4% so do corn and wheat yields. So overall there's a benefit to increasing organic matter and especially as it's tied to production, but it's still the big organic matter pool, right? So it's that great integrator. Now the other paper that has come out improved soil biological health increases corn grain yield and here we're saying roughly a 20% increase in soil health metrics, which include that extractable carbon and the total carbon and soil together lead to a 5% increase in yield. So all of our indicators at this kind of gross scale here are indicating that as we improve soil health and build organic matter that's going to help our production systems. So now granted now this is very, this is a broad take on this, right? So what the researcher going to hear today is going to, is going to get this, we've taken a more regionalized approach to understanding that relationship. And then lastly then, so those are the simple measurements and then the question is, is there more value in more complex biological measurements? And so this is one of the big things we're studying in a lot of our research is well there are these more sophisticated measurements we can do such as soil amplicon sequencing that can tell us which bacteria and fungi are present. We can do soil metagenomics, so it gets at what the bacteria and fungi are capable of doing. We can also do soil meta transcriptomics that gets to what the bacteria and fungi are actively doing. Now, and so you might hear some of these terms a little bit later. So we have the idea of like what are these simple measurements? Are they providing value? And then do we, is there something else we can learn by having these more biological, more complex biological measurements taken? And what can we learn from them? So as we kind of have more discussions today, so soil health is a young emerging field that needs refinement. Our angle that it needs soil type and region specific recommendations and that's hopefully what we're going to demonstrate today to a certain extent. It might be crop specific recommendations that might be, you know, to grain crops and vegetable crops may differ in terms of how they're responding to soil health. Certainly we do recommend it should be evaluated over time. You know, I haven't talked about the idea of soil health as a metric, you know, is it something to see where you're going? Are you increasing, maintaining or decreasing? It needs to be connected to all aspects of I should say output, which is yield and quality. So that does tie to vegetable and fruit production as well. So with that, we do have a question that we'd like to pose to the group before Miranda starts to talk. And the question is, if you had funds, make sure this is the right one. If everyone's okay, if you had funds to implement or adjust one management practice to improve soil health, what management practices would you prioritize? And Dr. Silva is going to put that up in the chat and we encourage you all to answer. Yeah, I think I put it in the, I think I put it in the live Q&A so you can see it. And what we'd like you to do, we're hoping to use the upvote function, but I'm not sure if that's going to work. Ideally, if we were live, Teal does an awesome job doing live polls as part of the presentation. But if you can put one of these letters in as a question so we can get a sense of where you might want to prioritize, that would be awesome, kind of a fun way to see what people are thinking. So we'll give that a shot, trying some novel things with the Q&A function. While we're waiting for that for a minute, we do have one other question in the chat. Do you want to look at that right now, Matt? The one that Aaron just posted that says, with respect to biological testing indicators, could you not start with doing biomass assessments of the soil at the root zone for major member components of the soil food web? For example, F2B ratios decomposed, there's symbionts, nutrients, cyclers, etc. So the answer is yes. The problem is I would put those in the category of more complex measurements to get that information. And these are routine, these are analyses that we can do pretty easily in an academic setting, but are more expensive tests for soil test labs to implement, as of now, as of now. So the big struggle we have in soil health and soil health testing is that idea between cost and benefit. So there are places where you could probably get this information, but it's going to be certainly a lot pricier. These aren't rapid tests that can be incorporated easily necessarily into soil test labs. And I think we're going to see some more discussion on those types of measurements later on. People are putting in answers all over the board, which is so interesting, as well as options under clarifying the other of grazing and improving soil texture. So this is awesome, I love the interaction here. So with that, and I hope, I think this is going to be great, I hope we can keep all the comments coming in. So that I'm going to turn it over to Miranda Sakura. All right, thanks, Matt. So Matt gave us a place to start in terms of thinking about what soil health is and how do we measure it and make sense of it, right? We also heard from you all about what management you'd prioritize for soil health, and apparently our list didn't encompass it at all, and of course it didn't. But now we're going to delve into how to answer the questions that we want to know about biological cells. How are we doing that? So we want to know things like how do we design soil health assessments that give us useful information to make farm management decisions, and what management decisions should we make that would give us desired biological functions? Well, I hate to break it to you all, but there isn't a single approach that gives us it all. As Matt said, it's pretty complicated. But researchers, they're taking multiple approaches to understand what's the most important factors for biological soil health. So whether that is related to the cropping system, its diversity, what kind of management is being utilized on the farm by the farmers, and what's going on with the soil and its inhabitants. So each approach has its own strength and weaknesses, but we'll look at three research projects that are happening in Wisconsin as case studies and some lessons learned. All right, so the three research approaches we will look at today cover a huge range in terms of how realistically they represent what would happen on a farm. The closest we can get to reality is the field survey approach. So this utilizes fields on working farms compared to fields on agricultural research stations. So there's no experimental treatments or prescribed management practices implemented. It is more so a survey of management that is already happening on the farm. So with that management that's happening, we can explore and try to explain differences in soil health measurements by the different management practices happening. At the other end of the spectrum, we have greenhouse experiments. So greenhouses are really controlled settings. We can make sure that the crop growing conditions are optimal or at least not limiting so that we can look at microbial community effects and processes that they are performing and how that affects the crops themselves. Also in these greenhouse experiments, we can really limit external factors so that we can focus on specific questions to things like microbial community composition and the functions that they perform. So in the middle of these two are field scale and plot scale experimental trials that occur on agricultural research stations. So these kinds of trials determine the effect of specific management practices or cropping systems on whatever we're interested in. In this case biological soil health. So on one side we have the farm fields which represent the most realistic situation but it's really complicated. There's a lot of factors and variation involved because there's so much different management and different soils on different fields. But this makes them really interesting to understand and identify trends and what's happening on these farms. But as I said they're complex. There's a lot of noise to sift through because of those differences. So it's hard to pinpoint what are the key things happening. So for those kinds of studies, you need a lot of fields to participate so that we can kind of mitigate that effect. But in the controlled greenhouse experiments you get rid of a lot of that noise to answer those specific questions. But then we are limited to the kinds of questions that we can ask. So it's a smaller subset. All right. So first we're going to look at a field survey. So remember field surveys utilize the differences in management already happening on working farms. But also has the field differences in soil characteristics as important characters, factors to identify. So in this case we are interested in important factors for biological soil health. Field surveys don't necessarily look at change over time. But there are more so a survey of what is contributing to differences between fields and what is making those contributions. So an example of this is a SAIR funded project in the southwest driftless area of Wisconsin that is down here in this southwest corner of Wisconsin worked with 16 organic grain and dairy farms. So we worked with them to evaluate how differences in soil characteristics, things like texture and pH, as well as management effect biological soil health. So we visited the farms in 2018 and 2019 to take soil samples at 124 fields. They were taken in spring before the planting of the next cash crop. Each field was following a corn year so that we controlled for what the previous crop was. Trying to mitigate some of that noise. All right. So in the upper right you see that there's an icon that indicates we're talking about field surveys. T.O. will also be presenting results on the field survey. So that's a way to let y'all know. All right. So for the study we obtained a detailed history from the farmers of the previous five years of management. So that's related to the cropping sequence and its diversity as well as the tillage management and manure management utilized on the fields. We also got some more long-term information such as how long have the fields been organic and what was their previous use to organic. To obtain data on field soil characteristics we used the publicly available soil data from NRCS's web soil survey. So you might have seen something like this before if you try to utilize NRCS's tool to look at your own soil. It's an online platform with location-based data that's from soil mapping of the United States. The information obtained from here is primarily soil factors that are outside of the farmer's control like soil texture and its classification. Something we want to know is what soil characteristics are the most influential on biological soil health so that soil health assessments when you send in a sample to get soil health testing those assessments take into account the soil differences that are outside of the farmer's control so we can rate them among peers. You can get more accurate assessments because not all soils have the same capacity for soil health and specifically for certain functions. So we need to include these differences when we rate how well a field is doing. So is a field meeting a less than a third of its potential or is it meeting greater than two-thirds of its potential? You know those are some things we want to know. All right so Matt gave a little intro into some of the indicators that we measure but we're going to talk about four specific ones. So one of those is permanganate oxidizable carbon or POC-C. So this one is related to carbon as Matt was saying and it measures the readily available fraction of soil carbon that microbes can use as an energy source. Basically it represents how much food do microbes have easy access to perform their key soil functions. How much resource do they have? That other method Matt was talking about is mineralizable carbon. So this is a measure of that CO2 release by microbes as a result of their activity. So just like how we release CO2 when we're performing functions we're going for a walk we're going for a run. We release different amounts of CO2 the harder we work. All right we also measured autoclave citrate extractable protein. So this is soil protein and that's the largest nitrogen fraction of soil organic matter in the soil and that fraction the microbes they can convert that via decomposition to plant available forms of nitrogen. So it represents bioavailable nitrogen that might be crop available. Well another measure we use is potentially mineralizable nitrogen. So this measures the rate by which microbes convert that organic form of nitrogen to plant available forms. So also getting that bioavailable nitrogen but asking more so how fast are microbes able to turn over that nitrogen? So this gives us some informations in terms of some biological soil fertility as well as carbon dynamics happening as well. How are we moving towards soil organic matter? All right we're now going to look at a snapshot of the management that's happening on these fields. So in this management is only what was happening in the previous five years before the samples were taken. So a lot of the farmers for utilizing management practices that aim at preventing soil erosion limiting soil disturbance and overall improving soil health. And you know it might be performing more multiple functions like that like providing nitrogen. So 79 percent of the fields had a perennial crop within the last five years and that was primarily alfalfa. So both providing perennial cover and nitrogen biologically. 76 percent of fields had perennial legume cover and 20 percent had annual legume covered. Also you might notice here that the fields were pretty split in their cover crop use. So a little over 50 percent of the fields had a winter cover crop. Less than 20 percent of the fields utilized minimum tillage over the five year period which we defined as a disc implement or shallower tillage implement. And you also see that about 20 percent of fields had at least one year of no till within the five years. And most of the fields applied manure. So that was one of the things that was pretty consistent between fields. But overall you see that there's a lot of different management practices happening on these fields. But does this lead to measurable soil health differences? Does it tell us something about management? We're going to look at a subset of management practice data to tell the overall story. So over the five year period the number of years of legume cover, perennial cover, or a winter cover crop did not produce a measurable effect on these four biological measurements that we measured. The number of manure applications didn't have an effect either. But what about some other practices? It did identify a few management practices, but all of the effects were small. So the biggest relationship identified was with crop diversity. So as crop diversity increased, Poxy, PMN, and ACE increased. However, at most it explained less than six percent of the differences in soil health measurements between fields. And that is seen by these R-squared values. You can take these R-squared values, times them by 100, and that basically tells you the percent that the number of different crops is able to explain in these Poxy values. So what you're seeing is that less than six percent of Poxy differences in Poxy is explained by crop diversity. So there's this leftover 94 percent that is from other factors such as soil characteristics and management. You can also see that how long a field has been certified organic had small effects. So Poxy, as the length that they've been certified organic increased, Poxy increased, and ACE increased. But it was very small. So these small effects, they're a bit disheartening. But let's look at this a little bit more in detail. So we're going to focus in on that duration of organic management piece to kind of think honest more. So in this study, farms, they ranged from being in transition to organic to having over 27 years of organic management. So that's quite a long range. Even with this long range, less than four percent of differences in soil health values, this case Poxy and ACE, were explained by how long they've been organic. So there's a leftover 96 percent. Again, that is explained more so by other factors such as soil characteristics and other management practices that are happening on the farm. Farms are really complex systems, and they're managed differently for a number of reasons. So there's more variation captured on working fields than in regimented experimental trials. Although I don't think, you know, there's still an important message here, right? The important message is that management practices and soil characteristics are more critical than time. There's some young fields that have really high biological soil health, and there's some older fields with low biological soil health. So understanding which management practices contributed the most to the high soil health values is really critical into improving biological soil health. To make things a little bit more complicated, something we should remember is that not all soils have the same soil health potential regardless of management. This is due to soil properties that are outside of the farmer's control. For example, all soils formed under historical prairie cover have higher soil organic matter than several other common Wisconsin soils used for agricultural production. And this is due to the long-term contributions of that prairie's root system, turning over those roots and leaving behind soil organic matter. So soil health assessments need to account for these differences in soil health potential to properly rate current field soil health values. Using the publicly available soil data, we found that the U.S. soil classification system was useful for explaining differences in soil health values. This is important as we can separate soils into different groups by their classification to rate their soil health according to their true potential. So on the screen is a map of the classifications represented in the study we're talking about in the Driflus region. So of the 124 fields in the study, the soils, there's about I think five soil classifications represented in the study, and that makes up a majority of the acreage in the Driflus area. So basically, we have a study with really well represented soils in the Driflus region. So that suggests that we can use these soil classifications for benchmarking soil health in this region. Okay, so that was talking about on-farm studies. Now we're going to transition to experimental plot trials with a focus on long-term research trials. So this utilizes field scale and plot scale experiments with replicated plots. So repeated areas with the same management, and it looks at the effect of management over time. In Arlington, Wisconsin, there's a long-term research trial known as the Wisconsin Integrated Cropping Systems Trial or WICS, and it was established in 1989. So there's over 31 years of data of how this management has affected the soil that's there and other qualities. So this trial specifically, its purpose is to evaluate the productivity, profitability, and environmental impact of organic and conventional agricultural practices in the Upper Midwest. The plots, they're about three-quarters of an acre size, so they're trying to get near to that field scale size to better represent the reality of what would happen on a farm. Now going into what the cropping systems are, there were six common cropping systems of the Upper Midwest chosen to look at their long-term effects. So the first three in the top row, we have cash grain systems. So this is continuous corn, a corn soybean rotation with minimum tillage, and an organic cash grain system which has corn soybeans to wheat and red clover. So the bottom three represent dairy forage systems. So we have a conventional system that goes from corn to three years of alfalfa, a organic forage system that goes from corn to an oats nursing crop with alfalfa and one more year of alfalfa, and then the last one is a highly managed, rotationally graced pasture. So the cash grain systems and dairy forage systems, they differ in their inclusion of perennials. So with dairy forage systems, there's more perennials represented. The inclusion of perennials also inherently reduces disturbance, so these broad categories differ in these two ways. You can also see that especially for the cash grain systems that there's a gradient in crop diversity, so we're able to ask questions about that as well. For both the cash grain and the dairy forage systems, there's an organic system represented. So we're able to ask questions about organic and conventional management. So here's a snapshot looking at year 27 of this project. So in the 27th year, we have PMN mineralizable carbon epoxy measure, these biological soil health indicators, and what was found out is that the dairy forage systems had the highest biological soil health values, and primarily the rotationally graced pasture had the highest out of all of these cropping systems. So the rotationally graced pasture is a much different system than the others as it has continuous living cover with no disturbance. The living mat protects the soil and the roots are constantly sloughing off, and that material, that root is fueling the soil system. So the other cropping systems that had higher biological soil health, the dairy forage systems, they had more perennial color, so also less disturbance and more living roots represented. Yeah, so specifically these dairy forage systems, they had more of that active carbon pool, that carbon source of food for microbes. They had higher microbial activity, and they had a higher rate of converting that organic nitrogen to plant available forms. So the organic systems did not have better biological soil health than the conventional systems within those bins of cash grain and dairy forage. Yeah, but the experimental trial was able to capture this effect of perennial cover, which was previously found in the on-farm study, so that these experimental trials are able to get rid of some of that noise that we see on farm studies to capture more management practices, and that's something we saw here. Miranda, it looks like there was one question about whether you have any plots in the Green Bay or Fox River Valley areas. This study did not, it was specifically looking in the driftless area to kind of, so we have the effect of different soil characteristics to like look at that, but also we didn't want to have super different soils, so we kind of limited it that way, but I know that maybe Matt can talk about this later, that there's been a wider study all over Wisconsin and somewhat in Minnesota, but that's mostly focused on conventional systems, so if that's of interest we can talk about that maybe later. Alright, there's a couple other questions coming in. If there can be more information about the specific practices on farms, specifically if we can give the names, which maybe we can't give the names, but maybe at least specific practices, particularly if there's any doing rotational grazing, I think as these were, I think all, pretty much not all, but most organic dairy farms that many of them would have had rotational grazing as part of their management. Yeah, that's right, so a lot of them are organic dairy, so they did have pastures, but we didn't sample from them. We were more focused on these organic row crop systems and how those specific fields were rotating, but there was a field, or there was multiple fields that was transitioned from a conventional pasture system to an organic grain system, and those fields, it's been like 10 years since they were that conventional pasture system, but they had higher biological soil health values just because they were a pasture. At least that's my interpretation of it. It wasn't many fields, but thanks Miranda. And there's another question, and Matt, I don't know if you want to chime in on this one too from other studies that you have done with at Wix, but there's a clarifying question as to the Wix data that the chemicals that were applied in the conventional forage system versus the organic didn't seem to be impacting soil health in a negative way. In terms of the indicators that we've measured, right, so in terms of the things, so you know what the, so I guess that is correct, so we didn't see a difference in our, the conventional system there is one year of corn with three years of alfalfa versus the organic system is one year of corn with two years of alfalfa. So it's a longer set of perennialization. Those sort of factors kind of work out. The biggest differences tended to be from cropping system, right? So going from the grain cropping systems to those cropping systems. So the nuance of it we couldn't, we couldn't pull out. So it seemed to be the broader carbon input and soil disturbance and manure input effects that had the biggest benefit in terms of the simple biological health indicators. That makes sense. And Teal mentioned that she's going to talk a little bit about that too. So another question related to WICS, the forage systems appear to give better soil health numbers, but how significant are those differences? How significant it, right, what is, you know, I'm sorry, what does significant mean, right? So does it mean that it's, they were statistically significant? Do they matter, you know, what do they connect to in terms of any of these ecosystem services? I don't know. I don't know those sort of, that sort of stuff. We don't have that quite connected. Um, that's not a very satisfying answer. I know the, I know it just gets into such a goofy little trick of this is, you know, one location and it's very soil specific, right? If you're already working on a nice deep mollusal soil that you kind of beat the heck out of, you know, maybe it's just these broader shifts and these subtle shifts don't really, don't really matter. But even the, even our biological health in our grain systems was still probably pretty good. So what does it connect to? I don't have a good answer for that. I'm sorry. That relates to another question, Matt, that's kind of along those same lines. What is the soil type on the Arlington farm and do you think the results would have been the same comparatively on the boon sand of the person asking the question? Okay. So the, what are one of our goals, you know, one of Miranda's goals and one of our goals for other soil health projects is to create these baseline measurements because, you know, obviously as Miranda showed, there's so much inherent, the inherent properties of soil do have a so this controlling factor on, on your baseline soil health measurement. So it really, I would pare it down to even like Miranda's work is some of the best on the subject because it's so geographically and so soil specific focus. Yes, in general, sandy soils will have lower soil health values than, you know, silt loam prairie derived soils. So as we think about how are we splitting these out in terms of what a baseline, what's an expected value and then within each soil texture, soil classification system, how much can you influence it based on, based on measurement? And then at the end of the day, what does it connect to? And so we have all of these things that, you know, I talked about up front that we're still, we are still scratching the surface on it. So right now we have a pretty good handle on the relative importance of inherent properties versus management properties and which direction these management properties or the management might affect soil health. And generally speaking, it fits, it fits the general narrative more carbon inputs, less soil disturbance, although not all those necessarily were found significant in Miranda's work. But then the trick is what does it mean? What does it mean for your cropping system to do this? And is that something you'd want to manage for? Or are you just, you just want to manage because reducing tillage means reducing, you know, fuel costs and reduces, and we know it reduces, you know, soil disturbance and improves the soil. So this, I know it becomes a bit of a circular argument, but that's really kind of where we're at where we haven't fully connected all of these, these measurements, the soil health measurements to some sort of benefit where you talk about those, you want to talk about if it's it's significance is a significant difference for what and ideally be in my mind, one of the big ones would be for plant health and plant production. There's a couple of questions related to soil testing, both, you know, how useful the usual soil tests are for the average organic farmer that maybe they're not very helpful, give a specific recommendation for soil tests and how often an average organic rotation with alfalfa, corn, soy and clover should soil test and specific, not only in terms of what tests, but are there, what are the best soil test labs in Michigan was specifically recommended. So what's the ideal panel of indicators, what should people test for, how often should they test, what labs should they send to, maybe we should have you give another talk mat specifically on that. I don't know all the Michigan soil test labs. I mean, I would always recommend, you know, I was just like a routine test, test your nutrient levels. You know, I think testing over time, I think it's really where the real value is for a lot of, a lot of this. So having, you know, in general, we recommend sampling every four years, but you know, sampling every other year might be good. The more data you can build, and then graph that across time, which direction are you going with your nutrient levels in your soil, with your organic matter, and any soil biologic test. So a lot of these soil biological tests are being incorporated into different soil test labs. So you might be able to find some test labs that are doing something. I kind of like it, especially if you're just sort of looking at stuff over time. Again, you know, I said we don't know exactly what to do with that number. There's some labs that might want to connect it to nutrient availability. I don't know. I don't know. I don't have any data to support that. But I do like the idea of using that to monitor it over time. And I think sometimes in today's world, I really honestly think with all of these climate extremes we're facing, I think maintaining soil health is still as big of a win as increasing soil health. So everything, anything we can do to not further be reducing soil health, I think that's the win for us. So if you can increase, that's great. But even to know you are maintaining soil health with your cropping system and management practices is a good thing to know. Well, there's some more questions, but I think that some of these might relate to what Teal's going to talk about. So what I think I'll do is hold off on the questions. Please keep typing in questions though. These are great questions. But I think I'm going to hold off, have Teal present her information, because again, I think it will inform some of these other questions and then we can go back to the Q&A from there. Sounds good. So can you see my screen? Are we good? All right. So I'm Teal. I have been working on some of the same datasets as Miranda. So you'll see those icons in the corner of my slides as well. But I'm going to talk a little bit more about the biological component of soil health and getting into the details of what we are trying to answer some of these questions of how does the living component of the soil connect to these soil health indicators that we know are sensitive to management, have pretty inexpensive ways to measure, but we still have a lot to do, like Matt was saying, to connect this in and find out what is the useful information that we need moving forward. So microbes are important. They're the ones processing, decomposing the organic matter in the soil to make it available for plants and also storing it in carbon. So we do want to use our microbes and make their function stronger. So the four reasons like disease pressure, reducing chemical inputs, helping get maximum yields in our fields. And it is pretty complicated, as I know you've heard, but I'm going to show you some of my research to illustrate this. So and there are microbes and other biota that can contribute to a lot of different functions in the soil. So in contributing to soil health, disease suppression, plant drought resistance, plant nutrient acquisition, carbon sequestration, nutrient mineralization, so making those carbon and nitrogen phosphorous available to the plants and water use. These are some of the functions we're talking about when we're thinking about the microbial component. And a lot of what you may hear of, a lot of the products that you see that are microbial focus are focused on microbes that have specific relationships with the plants. So you've probably heard about mycorrhizal fungi, which trade plants, plant roots, they trade nitrogen, phosphorus, water for carbon. Saprophotopes are taking nutrients from plants, rhizobia, these are bacteria that fix nitrogen for plants, some plants. Endophytes are microbes, there's a bunch of microbes that live in plant tissues. And then pathogens, you know, we got to remember that pathogens are microbes too, they're part of this microbial microbiome in your soils, their fungi and bacteria. So we're thinking, I'm thinking about all these symbionts that have specific relationships with plants. But then there's a lot that's going on for mediating how they mediate plant responses. And so for an example, we think of mycorrhizal fungi as this great mutualist. So plants benefiting, microbes are benefiting, they're trading nutrients. But in certain conditions, if the plant doesn't need those nutrients, say phosphorus, the microbes and the microbes are still attached, they can steal carbon from the plant. So we do need to understand this microbiome better, because it's not as simple as mycorrhizae are good for your plants, right? They can start stealing your plant's carbon. And what I'm most interested in is thinking about this whole context, most of these microbes are not symbionts, they are free living microbes that are in the soil, they might be associated with plant roots in that they're getting nutrients that those plant roots are secreting into the soil. But they might not be pathogens or mutualists. And they are competing with plants and completing with pathogens for nutrients in the soil. So taking the big picture view is important, but it makes it really complicated when we know that there's, you know, more than 10,000 species in a single teaspoon of soil. So I'll show you how we're getting at some of this complexity and trying to distill it down. And, you know, we do know that there is lots of evidence that farming practices can impact soil biology. So this is important to know there's a lot of studies, tons of studies that have shown this, but it's not always. And the responses vary by soil type and climate. And the responses are not always huge, not even usually huge. So there's a lot of reasons to focus on a small area. But it is important to know in a specific area whether management practices do have consistent effects on biology within a region. Before we ask, does it matter, right? Go to that next step. And so going to our field survey, you can see the icon in the corner that Miranda talked about, we asked how does organic farming change soils over time? And to do this, we use these fields that have been under organic management for different lengths of time. And we measured, does this change soil health indicators? You know, what I'm interested in taking this a step further is can we measure differences in the biological community, the living communities? And we did this with all these fields from across all these farms. And because there's a lot of noise differences among farms and soil types, we did need a lot of samples. So the question here is, you know, no one's done this before just seeing whether organic farming has a consistent effect on microbes. Before we can ask, you know, what are they doing? Is it helping us? And we don't know if that's a consistent increase, they just keep going up or if it plateaus after a certain number of years, or maybe it goes up and goes down, we need to explore this. And so this is what we did on 124 field samples to hopefully see some pattern among the noise. And here's the data right here. So also with biology consistent with some of the measurements or the measurements that Miranda told you about, we just see no pattern. And so there could be high fungal species for just one example, we measured biomass, we measured this for bacteria as well. But there's a lot going on here, right? So there was probably tillage in the past history and there's tillage still happening on organic farms that manure inputs are variable among the farms. Your rotations, a lot of these farms are doing similar crop rotations, but different sequences. And so what to me, this tells me one thing that's definitely different is whatever pesticides or whatever nonorganic certified inputs, those do not seem to have a consistent effect. Either those are breaking down pretty rapidly. And we're not detecting that early on. Or, you know, there's a lot of microbes out there. That's what I'm always thinking about. So there's a lot more that is being influenced at the field scale than specific certified organic management practices. So this is interesting and also brings to the point that these long term field studies are really helpful to seeing like within a region and very precise consistent management, can we see effects? So we can understand when those might be important and what is driving it. Interestingly, this paper just came out this year that shows inconsistent effects of agriculture practices on soil fungi, fungal communities across 12 European long term experiments. And a lot of these have been going for over a hundred years. So this is in Belgium, UK, Hungary and Denmark. And you can see that just on these outer bend diagram loops, there's pretty high, highly different numbers. In the UK, they had 124 fungal species. In Hungary, they had 878, right? So determining whether that matters probably is something you'd want to focus on within your cropping system and thinking about how it changes over time because we see this variability. So with that, I'm going to share a little bit what I found from the long term trial that Miranda also talked about, looking at the biological components from that system, the Wisconsin integrated cropping system trial. And we measured, it took samples from five of the six cropping systems that are represented of the region. And we did also find a lot of Miranda's work showed that there was differences in Poxy and a lot of these indicators. And we also found that among these cropping systems, there were significant differences in the continuous corn, especially between continuous corn, the most of the two extremes, continuous corn and pasture. We also saw this for biomass. So we didn't see it for bacteria, that was significant differences. But for biomass, we saw the same pattern for fungi and bacteria, lowest biomass, microbial biomass in continuous corn, similar for the organic cash grain system, and quite a bit higher. But we had some questions from Matt early on that is really important to address. You know, what do these measure, what do these differences mean? How much change is meaningful? So comparing our pasture versus corn, we can ask, well, what can 68 additional species do for us? Right? And that is too broad a question for a scientist to do anything with. We have to focus in a little bit. So maybe we could ask, does 68 additional species increase organic matter decomposition? And another thing to note here is we're talking about, you know, 68 species. That's, I don't know how to think about that. So I don't know if you can think about that in a useful way. But we are talking about 68 species in a quarter of a gram of soil, right? It's very small scale what we're able to measure in the lab. So these are super diverse systems. I just wanted to make that note because that's what we're talking about. So to answer this question, ecologists think about this two different ways. How, what does increased species diversity mean? What could it mean functionally? Well, one of the predominant ways in which we think about that is more species means more types of microbial metabolisms, which means more efficient decomposition. You have microbes that are decomposers and I had a question about that. There are so many different types of decomposers. There's decomposers that focus on lignin, on cellulose, on proteins, on tons of different things. So if you have more different types of metabolisms, you might get corn stocks turned into salvaging that little bit of nitrogen in them, or at least feeding the microbes more efficiently. The other main hypothesis is that more species, if you have more species, you're in a huge pool of species, you're more likely to have a few that are really good at whatever you want to decompose or whatever your function is. So along with the other soil health indicators, there's this general thinking that more is better. And but here for microbes, here's the thinking behind it. And these are things that we can test. And I'll show you a little bit. But I'm going to briefly bring this back to biomass. So in this case, the question might be, you know, does this difference matter? And probably most of you are not, you know, you want to grow cash crops. So maybe your question is not, how much better is it if I don't tell it all? And I just have pasture, your question might be, if I change my practices a little bit and I want to grow corn organically, does 19 millimoles more of biomass or 38% millimoles of microbial cells, what can that do for us? To focus that in, maybe your question might be, does a difference in six millimoles matter for long term carbon storage? Well, interestingly, the hypothesis here is that more biomass actually does contribute more stable carbon for long term carbon storage. And this is something that I didn't appreciate much until recently. But there is a lot of great science happening recently, that has been showing that a huge contributor to stable carbon in soils is actually the cell walls of micro bodies. So dead, more microbes means more dead microbes that are actually recalcitrant forms of carbon in the soil that don't break down easily. So I think that's pretty interesting that we're finding that they break down less quickly than most plant, plant tissues. So I do want to follow up with this, you know, I asked this question, is an increase better? Can we detect a difference in something we might be interested in? So we actually did this study in the greenhouse, which is pretty rare. But I'm going to tell you a little bit about that study now. So for this study, we're interested in, you know, how does soil management affect soil microbes? And then bringing that back to something we're interested in like plant yields, crop yields. So we went back to some of the fields that we surveyed in the field survey study and collected soils from them. And we use them in a greenhouse experiment. And this can allow us to ask this more specific question, right, because we can get all these soil microbes from different places in a controlled setting and test their function. So the question here was, do soil microbial communities from different farms influence crop growth differently? And we really are interested in whether they affect crop growth differently. But to really see this, we wanted to give the microbes a functional test. This might not be enough to detect anything. So what we did is we give them different forms of organic forms of nitrogen and urea and see if the microbes can decompose these organic sources of nitrogen differently. So we added the same amount of nitrogen, even though it was different amounts of biomass. And we wouldn't expect to see differences in urea because, well, the microbes don't need to decompose that at all. That is readily available for plants to take up. But these other ones, we thought we might see some differences. So here I'm going to share a quick video. This is a 40-second video on the methods on this greenhouse setup. So this is showing we went out to the fields, collected soils. We sterilized soil for the background soil in the pots from a local soil, added that to the back of the pots, the 95% of the volume, added live soil as 5% of the pots, so from the different farms. And then on top of that, we added an equal amount of nitrogen in the forms of urea, manure, clover, and sorghum, Sudan grass. And then we had the microbes decompose that. And then the corn was at a V4 stage. We harvested the experiment and dried the plants and weighed the plants. So that was a very quick method section there. And as we expected, we didn't see that different communities, microbial communities from different farms. We didn't see any effect on plant growth on corn or rye growth in the urea addition pots. Interesting, we also did not see any differences among farms for clover and manure, which had a similar carbon to nitrogen ratio. But we did see that it mattered which microbes, some microbial communities allowed for more corn and rye growth. And so how we were thinking about that is that you actually might need more complex or more diverse microbial communities to efficiently break down the lignin, the cellulose, this tougher form of nitrogen to make that available to the plants. And some communities might do that better. Perhaps that is related to management and what those fields were receiving recently. I haven't looked at that to see if we can detect that. So wrapping it up here. We can say that soil biology does matter. These processes are done by soil microbes. But biology is persistent. If you're in the Midwest, you have a ton of microbes in your soils, so we're really interested in detecting small changes and thinking about small changes, I think. That's my personal perspective. I do think that understanding biology better may be able to help us understand soil health indicators better. But I think a take home I would like to say is that we're not at a point where we can give specific advice on how to manage your microbial community to get these benefits. But the best practices we have for soil health are likely to help your microbes. So if you're having your fields covered more, doing minimal tillage as possible, doing things to build organic material in your fields, those are things that feed the microbial communities. So more diversity and more biomass on your fields is going to get you more microbes and more diverse microbes. So I think that's kind of where we're at. Happy to answer some questions. Thanks, Teal. And related to that last point, there was a question, is there either through your work or through other work that you know an import versus correlation between the amount of tillage and the amount of fungi hearing that tillage is bad for fungal communities and maybe related to that? And again, this may not been measured in this study, but maybe from other literature. If you do have tillage, how fast quickly do those fungal communities recover? How bad is tillage? That is a great question. I'm actually starting some new work in a new post-hoc position that's going to be tilling up some fields that haven't been tilled in 10 years to see if we can measure that on a finer scale. There's been some work on it, and in general, the science we do have is that tillage does decrease fungal biomass. It has maybe slight negative effects on diversity, but there is enough variation among the studies that it's not super consistent. How fast it happens? So that is a great question on recovery. That's exactly what we're going to test and do these fine-scale measurements over short periods of time to try and track that recovery. The thinking behind the fungi specifically is that the fungal bodies are these networks of mycelium, of hyphae, and so the tillage breaks them up, and parts will not recover very super quickly, as opposed to bacteria which are so tiny that the bodies are not going to get broken up by tillage. But I would say that from what I'm seeing, that fungi diversity actually does recover decently well after one tillage event. That's about all I have left. Maybe if you could expand on that a little bit more, Teal, talking more generally about, as you get an estimate of the fungal biomass, how does the general fungal activity differ from AMF specifically in its function in the soil? AMF, being a symbiont that we know helps with phosphorus acquisition, water acquisition, but more of the function of fungal and the fungal activity more broadly in the soil community. Yeah, so the mycorrhizal fungal species, those are dependent on the plant for their carbon. So that's the main difference is that the fungi in the soil, they have a different metabolism, and that they get carbon from breaking down organic matter, some type of organic matter, just like a lot of the bacteria do. And so the symbiont, you can measure, actually something that's interesting with mycorrhizal fungi, the techniques I use are these DNA sequencing techniques to get a snapshot of everybody in the community, and those are actually biased against the mycorrhizal fungi. So I do not feel comfortable looking at my dataset and saying how mycorrhizy are doing. That is a case where you probably want to go look at the roots themselves and do it that way, which is not easy. That is a pretty hard method to do well. But just thinking broadly, the fungi, I think of fungi, the free living fungi in the soil, similarly to what I do with bacteria, they're doing a lot of the similar decomposition functions and are competing with bacteria and plants for some of those nutrients. Thanks, Teal. In this question, maybe it relates, and this could go to any of you with respect to enhancing soil aggregation through practices, but the question relates to armoring the soil against extreme rainfall events. Obviously, more perennials fare better, but what else can we do differently in grain systems? No takers on that? Just collecting my thoughts here, but I'm happy if anyone else wants to chime in too. So this just gives me an opportunity to delve into some soil science, really deep discussion. So the idea of how water is held into soils is driven by the texture of the soil. We all know that, sandier soils don't hold on to as much, but also about the idea of the aggregation and the soil aggregate. So soil that has less disturbance over time is going to be able to build more aggregates and then be able to hold on to water between aggregates. If you have these stable aggregates, it's going to create a better environment. So anything you can do in grain systems, so there's the trick to building aggregates is reduce disturbance, but we also need to bring in more organic matter as well to help basically be the, to build organic matter. I'm going to rephrase it. The idea of building more organic matter that's going to be stable in staying your soils, the idea of you're adding carbon to your soil, but you're keeping it there in that stable aggregate form. So generally speaking, building soil organic matter connects to that process. So then in grain systems, you've got to figure out a way to get more organic matter inputs into our grain systems. So dairy systems have a little bit of a leg up, more root biomass from perennials. We do have manure inputs, maybe more opportunities for cover crop use. If it's corn and soybean focused, we don't lose a little bit of our ability there. So if we have some small grains of rotation that gives us more opportunities to get cover crops. So it's about thinking about your overall system and all the crops they have rotation. How can you, are there places where you can add carbon into your soil through manure or cover crops really based on your cropping system? It is a great, it is a big challenge for us in our organic grain systems. And that's a great segue for this next question, which I think is a really good question to answer in the next 10 minutes or at least give some perspective, which you just mentioned there Matt intensifying cover crops and adding biomass to the soil. But generally from this work that Miranda Teal described, if you had to distill down some suggestions of how this work might help inform farmers to make decisions with respect to enhancing their soil health and their soil, biological soil health, what would be some practice recommendations that you might make? So can you repeat that? So from this work, if you were going to advise farmers what changes and practices that they might implement on their farms to enhance soil health and soil biology, what would you recommend? And you had mentioned intensifying cover crops and adding biomass into the soil, but suggestions like that? Well, the the joke I like to make is the best way to increase your soil health is to start a dairy, right? So because there you're going to have opportunities to use your perennials and manures. I don't know if I have a good answer to that question, Aaron. I think that we have these big shifts, you know, in inherent soil health among soil types, for lack of a better term. And we have these shifts between basically farm operations, grain annual grain based operations versus perhaps animal agriculture based systems that have some level of preneality to them. That's not that's not a very good answer. The otherwise it everything then devolves into really, I think, I think all of the work that we've presented today does support the general push of reducing soil disturbance and keeping the soil covered and increasing the carbon inputs into soil. So what does that look like? I don't know if there's a I don't have a general recommendation for that. You know, usually, and I would probably guess the same thing from Miranda and Teal and even you, right? When you think about different farm operations and chatting with different people everyone has a slightly different approach to management and so figuring out how it works, but working within those processes, working within those, I don't know, principles. Yeah, so Keith, this was not too much different from the five soil health principles, right? So keeping the soil covered, adding, maximizing carbon additions back into the soil and reducing soil disturbance. You know, and I was, I was, yes. And so, and I was always, not skeptical, but because those we generally think that's true. It's just like, how are they, you know, these are general things, how true are they? And I guess most of this work is really kind of cycled back to like, yes, they're they are directionally correct. They do they, they're, they're, those are the, those are the principles. And the work that that then, you know, Teal's getting into is like all those the beneficials and the more detailed work, that's really the future of how to how to specifically manage for some specific things. I agree with Matt about those general principles. I didn't highlight in the management practices I showed, but in our field survey, we did see like we looked at the number of passes from fall to spring. And then there was a relation, a very, very weak relationship again, because there's so much noise, but let the less tillage you had, the less tillage passes you had the higher your soil protein values were. So again, it's like, it's really hard to measure these things, but we kind of have this like, you know, common sense idea of like, what to do, but it's like, how do you implement that within your particular operation, right? Like, you have your own ways. Yeah. And so there's a lot of questions about manure. So maybe, and Matt, I know you've done a lot of work on this on the conventional side of things as well. But questions about how liquid manure applications might differ from other manure via grazing or bedding pack, perhaps, and how if heavy manure could actually decrease soil health, particularly perhaps if that was anaerobic liquid manure. Well, and to Miranda, I don't want to, if you have any thoughts, please. I will. So here's my thoughts on this. And that's, it's about the carbon input. So we, when we apply liquid dairy manure, we're not applying a lot of carbon as much, obviously, as when we're applying solid manure. So it really, if we could ever like balance out that carbon, they're equal. But generally speaking, liquid dairy manure, it's everything's been worked over more, it's more available, it's stimulus, get that quick stimulation. But the long term, you know, there's still, there's some evidence even with long term use of the slow building. So generally speaking, we tend to think about the composted manure, the solid manures tend to have maybe a bigger benefit in terms of maybe long term soil health building. But it might just simply be based on the fact that we're adding more carbon to the soil with those manures. So, and it's a slower, they tend to break down a little bit, a little bit slower, compared to liquid dairy manure. In terms of making the soil go anaerobic, I mean, you would have to apply quite a bit and pack it down pretty tight. Perhaps a person asked the question as a specific. Yeah, I think, and again, I don't know if this came up in any of the literature review for this work. And maybe this is why I'm interpreting it as maybe just the suite of microbes that are in an anaerobic dairy manure versus the microbes that may be part of a other manure management. And maybe this goes back to the mechanism of why manure benefits as more of the carbon additions than the microbes being applied to the soil directly, but is there a difference there as well? And there's a question related to pH too, how pH might drive soil communities. Yeah, I have done quite a bit of literature review on manure effects on microbial communities and soil health. And it is one that's really interesting. It's like adding manure is a great resources to have to get carbon, more carbon on your field to feed the microbes, to build soil organic matter. That does seem to be great. What's interesting is that in different long term studies that are specifically interested in testing the effects of manure, we see different microbial species or taxa dominate in these different systems that are probably more about the soil type and the UK experiment versus the Wix experiment we did. But that is one thing that is coming out of these data is that you have even at the largest scale that we can look at the file a level, there are pretty big differences and who is dominating those communities. So we have a lot of work to do if we're going to understand which of those are decomposers of which types of materials. And is that even is knowing that information going to get us a little bit further in management recommendations? If it is, it's probably going to be small. And there is a clarification to that too, which is really helpful and that this is actually related to a question that came up. I know that you were answering earlier this week on a different topic, but whether that manure could potentially bring in too much nitrogen that would actually more rapidly cycle C. So too much and in the manure burning up the carbon. I need to think about this for a second. So I only have a long complicated answer for that because so in general, I understand the point, right? If we add a lot of nitrogen to soil, we stimulate the microbial activity, the microbes then stop becoming nitrogen limited and then can perform more tasks by decomposing more organic matter. So the trade-off in our agricultural systems is we're also so we're applying the nitrogen and it's feeding the microbes that also can lead to feeding the plant. So as long as we're getting still a benefit in terms of more like in a corn system, if you're able to increase yields with your nitrogen input, so you are still returning more carbon, you could it could have a net neutral effect. So the trouble, but the overall point is interesting. If we're adding nitrogen without carbon, there's a negative effect, but sometimes we can get that carbon through that plant process and that's what we've noticed in some systems as long as we're civil to maintain that. Now, I'm complimenting manure quite a bit here in terms of its benefit on the carbon side, but obviously I want to acknowledge there are some obviously limitations in terms of nitrogen and phosphorus and their effects on the environment with manure that we need to manage. So I would be more concerned about managing for those principles first. I think we're applying within the realm of proper nutrient needs, I think then that's beneficial. Going beyond that is probably where bad things happen all around. Yeah, that's an interesting an interesting question. There's a question related to if anyone is any comments on Rhizofagy, Rhizofagy, can I say that word Rhizofagy and how that just, I know that wasn't tested within the scope of this research, but any comments in general? My work hasn't been at that level of function of the metabolisms of different microbes, so I'm not I'm not super familiar on how management or anything would affect Rhizofagy or eating of roots. All right, so we're at the top of the hour. Thank you all for a really informative presentation on so many different aspects of soil biology and soil health, and particularly as it relates to organic grain and dairy systems. So with that, can I make one final comment, Erin? Oh yeah, of course Matt. Just as we wrap this up, just you know as you think about those three circles and why soil biology hasn't been incorporated, hopefully it's a huge challenge. We've done a lot of work just and our main results are now we feel really comfortable that this is the correct direction and then but we still need more work by Miranda and Teal to get at those very specific things, and that's going to be the grand challenge for a lot of soil science research, but it's not going to come quickly, but we appreciate everyone's patience. It's an exciting area. There's a lot that we still have to learn, but it's exciting to see this this research coming out and appreciate the efforts of all of you.