 South Dakota's educational effort to raise awareness about the importance of soil health continues. The USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service entered into a cooperative agreement with the South Dakota No-Tel Association and I grow South Dakota State University Extension for delivering these seminars with the latest soil health and productivity technology to South Dakota farmers and ranchers. Our final speaker this afternoon is Jeff Zimbridge. He is a native of South Dakota. He was born and raised on a green livestock farm in eastern South Dakota. He began his 30-year conservation career in Montana as a student trainee for the Soil Conservation Service in 1983 while attending University of Montana. After graduating with a degree in rain plant management, he worked in three Montana field offices as a soil conservationist and district conservationist. He then transferred to Iowa in 1988 and worked in two Gary office and Des Moines state office. He served as an assistant state conservationist for field operations in southwest Iowa for 18 years, 18 of the 24 years he spent in Iowa. He has served several details in NRCS and national headquarters and also completed a detail as acting state conservationist for Illinois. He has served as a state conservationist for NRCS in South Dakota for two and a half years. Jeff and his wife Kim have one married son and twin daughters in his spare time. Jeff and Julia spending time outdoors traveling with his wife and time with his family. I will tell you this is the site note about Jeff. One thing that certainly I've had about four bosses like him over my 23 year career but his passion for conservation and especially for this topic of soil health is a very impressive Jeff. So that's something we applaud you for and look forward to your talk. Thanks. Is it coming through now? Good. Thank you. Wow. Every time they give that pedigree crap it just kind of scares me. I guess it explains why I look in the mirror and I'm so great headed. We'll talk about that a little bit but the point I guess that it really means to me in a lot of ways is that I've worked for a long time in conservation and I'm probably not going to be able to tell you a lot new from what you have already heard today but I do want to try to summarize it and bring it together a little bit of why I believe this is such an important topic and John is right. This is the subject that I think is probably one of the most important things we all need to keep talking about and doing and it just warms my heart and impresses the heck out of me when I come to a room and it's this full and everybody is interested in this topic and so many good things are happening. I'm going to share a few topics or a few points with you but the key thing of it is is that what these producers are doing out there and learning on their own many times and are sharing with you that's what has to keep happening okay and we at NRCS and I'll reiterate this again we just want to be a partner with you and help do whatever we get to answer some of those questions. The topic that gave me today was to try to make some points about why this is so important so the topic on the agenda like I said is why is improving our civil health so important I hope that when you guys read that question a whole bunch of things already pop into your head I hope that happens I and I heard a lot of these people just now share why they felt it was important to them. I want you to all answer those questions I'm going to give you a few thoughts from my perspective a real really from a an NRCS perspective from a government worker perspective and then also toward the end my grandfather's perspective maybe you could summarize it all by just looking back at a quote that our very first chief of NRCS said take care of the land and the land will take care of you I think that pretty well says it if we do the right things for our soils that are really our base factory for what we do for South Dakota's number one industry agriculture that land will pay us back we just have to keep learning and understanding what those right things are now lots of reasons many of them just I just as a listen to the speakers they brought them up but some of the key things for me are this water management issue increased infiltration reduced runoff for years in my career at NRCS we did things to really address runoff issues and I think that they were band-aids so we're going to talk about that I spent part of my career in Southwest Iowa we built miles and miles and miles of terraces we did it all to control runoff I really think in some cases we were doing the wrong thing we were really addressing the issue and that was to try to get that water to infiltrate into that soil I want to talk about a little bit about increased organic matter not going to get in the weeds with you a lot but I really believe it's just something for us to keep in mind because I think if we could have a goal always have a goal to increase the organic matter of our soils in South Dakota we would be doing the right thing for the future let's talk about productivity those will tie together can lead to that the efficiency of our ag operations I'm not going to go into that topic a lot these gentlemen did that many other speakers probably talked about that but I think there's some key points and then this last fancy word that actually had to get the dictionary out this morning make sure I spelled it right resiliency I want to talk a little bit about that because you're hearing a little bit about that I'm not even a hundred percent sure I can tell you exactly what it means but I want to visit about that because I think it's all these other things are going to help us get at that point so let's talk about infiltration rate and I know the lights here may not point this out well I tried to mess with colors as I put this together see to come through better but just real quick we've got a little infiltration kit a lot of our inner CS employees have now I encourage that if you haven't seen that ask them about that have them come out checking filtration rates same soil right across offense no till on the right side on left side excuse me no till 14 years corn being wheat cover crop the water that we poured in equivalent to about an inch was in the soil in 45 seconds okay on the other side conventional till soil tilled spring this corn in beans took 18 minutes and 30 seconds to get that inch of moisture in so if we get an inch rain and there's water on that field do we have should we be yelling at mother nature that she gives to her rainstorm should we be thinking about how we manage the soil sometimes you can see it when you drive around this is a picture from this year or last year 2014 Brookings County South Dakota this line that looks like it's painted on there is actually a fence two sides one side appears to have quite a bit of residue I can't tell you a lot about its history don't know that this side definitely less residue there's some going on with the water there so if I'm farming on this right-hand side do I be blaming mother nature and giving her a hard time because she gave me too much rain and it's causing me problems or what I need to be thinking about how I'm managing the land I don't know but I think a lot of you folks are starting to figure that out let's think about what that means on a landscape scale what's most important for you is what happens on your farm and I'm all for that that's great but what I also think a little bit about is when I think about the whole state of South Dakota it makes me really want to think about how can the impacts of this farm and this farm and this farm and this farm combined what does that mean on a landscape scale so I got two examples first time I seen the first one just blew me away Mississippi River Basin and then I wanted to bring it really closer to home right here in the lower James Mississippi River let's ask this question if we could increase water absorption of the cropland of that Mississippi River Basin and it's large I will grant you that it's a huge watershed right if we could increase it just by one half inch what difference would that make if we can do that with soil help you really can what would that be that's the amount of water that goes over Niagara Falls in 83 days I don't know how many gallons it is but that's a ton of water way more than I want to face let's bring it home lower James 52% of the land in the watersheds cropland about 30% based on some of our last estimates were that it was no till let's take that remaining 70% of that cropland acres and let's try to improve the soil health and we just really looked at just using no tip we didn't really look at the diversity of the rotations and cover crops and all of those other things we did we have some factors that we can look at that will tell us if we can do some of those things what difference will make on infiltration we figured that by just doing no till we could infiltrate another two tenths of an inch of moisture from a two-and-a-half inch rain fall when I first heard that I was like wow that's depressing that's not very much two tenths of two-and-a-half inches but just think for just a second what that meant on a landscape scale that's 1.1 billion gallons water we put it in semi tankers it's gonna go from Sioux Falls to Rapid City four times over four times actually back to Chamberlain 4.5 times out of modern water ran off is gonna flood 3,400 acres downstream a foot deep there are people in this room that many times visit with me about flooding downstream and they're talking about this issue all the time so the point I want to make out of this little example is is that the things we do at our individual farms that I believe will make things better for you can also make things better for the entire state of South Dakota and your neighbors downstream so let's think about that and how we can put that into practice let's talk about organic matter a little bit this is where the talk it's probably way too technical I grabbed some of these slides from some folks that helped me put together a few thoughts I'm not going to ever stand up here and tell you I can explain this exactly but I'm going to give it to you really simple Zimbrich terms and that I have a simple brain but I seen this slide and it was where they went and looked at Iowa Illinois Indiana Kentucky they looked at years of different tillage systems and they looked at organic matter and all as I know is that on every side on every one of the in every one of those states the no till side is higher than the other and I think that we all think that we can increase organic matter will be good for us I got a few more slides to drive that home complicated chart I'll make it simple to water percent by volume on this side organic matter in this side and we've got the ppwp and the fc line that is field capacity that's how much that soil in this case a silk home could hold and in the gravity wouldn't pull that water through the profile the bottom line that from the voting point is the point where that plant will start to suffer it's too hard for that plant to pull that moisture out of the soil and that plant will start to wilt what I see when I look at a chart is as organic matter goes up the amount of water that I have available for my crops is way larger that's something that we should try to capture that's something we should try to harvest our use the value or organic matter let's convert that now a little bit into some yields this is where I think we need to get better at this too we need to be able to capture some of these factors a little bit hard it's just one of those things we don't do well and we're going to work out that at an RCS to try to do better but it's amazing that if we could increase organic matter one percent we can gain the ability to hold another 16,500 gallons of water and what that means in the term of a potential yield corn eight bushels and you guys can convert that in your head of automatically what that might mean to additional profit per acre it might make the difference between breaking even or having a profit or not and the same goes with let's think about it from a nutrient point of view that was addressed here a little bit again not gonna get into the weeds with you but we know that one percent organic matter in that top six inches is it's a lot of there's a lot of soil there and that one percent can make a really big difference on the amount of organic matter that's there in that carpet and the value that could come from a nutrient value so just that one percent organic matter 824 dollars is how this was calculated when they looked at some of this work part of that's from carbon and part of it's from nutrient that again is to me about how we can make our farming operations more efficient and more effective more profitable going into the future so this is the chart that ties it all together for me this is again back to Zimbridge simple math right something I can understand if you look at the percent of available P and N and water holding capacity they all go up as organic matter goes up so again I would attest to you that what we should all be working together to do is increase the organic matter level of our soils and those producers and others that are working on this are the folks that can help us figure that out and let's go to this resiliency thing now for a second I have a quote that's actually on the wall of my office I found this and when we got in this whole big soil health thing I never had seen a quote that really made hat had it make as much sense to me as this one did that healthy that health in a lot of ways and I think it falls in with humans as well it's really the capacity of the land for self-renewal we uphold here this quote was tying it back to the land and he what he roughly says is conservation is our ability to understand that put it in practice think about that from a human perspective because I always like to take and think about soil health and human health sometimes a lot together I think that if we're overall healthy I got some work to do I was a little way I can do many other things but I think if we're healthy we can fight off some of those bad things that are gonna get thrown at us whether it be the flu or a cold or cancer or anything else if we're healthy the soil is no different and that's resilience the ability to bounce back a few examples not long ago we had some pretty dry conditions in South Dakota and also in parts of really the entire Midwest 2012 you can kind of see a part of the country there that was outlined in blue or gray several groups of people from the conservation technology conservation tillage information center and also some folks from Sayre actually interviewed producers that were using cover crops in their rotations okay this is what they found with cover crops those yields that they had averaged 114 bushel and without cover crops it was a hundred and three that's resilience that's being able to bounce back that was an 11% difference on soybeans I don't have the data for you but it was actually 14% difference in soybeans so again we're developing systems that can handle whatever mother nature is going to throw it at we would all love to be able to say hey give me an inch of moisture this week and wait 10 days give me another inch wait 10 days give me another inch we'd love to be able to have that power I don't think any of us do she's going to give us too much it sometimes she's going to give us a little too little at other times maybe sometimes way too little but the systems we develop I think actually if you want to say fight through it or manage through those times and that's why this is going to be important to South Dakota so when we sit here and think about why we should all work together emphasize that why we should all work together to improve soil health I just give you that list I give you all the things that you've heard earlier today about what the value is I want you to know that NRCS is committed to be a partner in this effort we have a lot to learn our staff I think all of us we can we can say we're behind there's just so much to know I think you guys realize that there's so much that you have yet to learn we have some things we need to forget I actually think that sometimes our biggest problems is some of the things that we thought were right before are holding us back from thinking about some of these new things being right man I see that all the time with my father when I talked to him about some of the things that I would like to do in the small farm that we have in Minnehaha County he talks to me and just tell me that ain't gonna work that's not what I learned that's just not gonna happen it won't work and I think it's those mindsets that's holding him back from letting go it's what you folks have all taught me that's making me think it will work we can make it work it won't be perfect every time that we can do it I just want you to know NRCS is committed to continue to try to work on that stay involved with us get involved with your local field office ask some of these questions see how we can do some things to put together some plots and different trials and try this more learn from the folks around you those are all going to be good there's a lot of people at NRCS that if they would have been asked the question of why doing this is important they would have immediately jumped to something that's on a lot of people's minds lately and that would have been this population growth that we are talking about in the world you see one of our people put together this slide healthy soil is the key to our ability to feed nine billion people and this fact down here I know you can't read it but it's spooky and I've heard a lot of people say it that we're gonna need to produce as much food in the next 40 years as we have in the past five hundred that's I'm sorry this thing's way too small to even wrap my brain around how that's even possible especially in light of some of the land that we've lost development and things like that we want to hold this up but what I would stand here and attest to you is we can't think about we should do everything we can to raise enough food for nine billion people and not try to keep those resources to improve those resources to be at a level I don't want to make it to 2050 and be able to feed the people folks in 2050 likely I'm gonna be organic matter it would be unacceptable to me if we just think we get to 2050 and we fed the population in that year but if our resources actually were degraded in getting us there unacceptable in my eyes why because shortly my granddaughter my first is gonna be a year in 2050 she's gonna roughly be you know 35 years old hopefully I get seared but for me to think that we fed people all the people in the world in 2050 but we were not able to kind of keep it going for her generation for the generations to come to me as just not acceptable and I bet as I look around the room folks that have some hair color closer to mine there's a lot of grandfathers in the room so I think that's our challenge and that's how why I would end with this is why this is really important because I think we can do it I think we can feed the world in 2050 I think we can keep our soil which is our basic factory intact I think have it better than it is today and we'll be able to continue on and do what's necessary to go past 2050 we can't look at 2050 so again I'll close by saying NRCS is in in this together with you we hope that all of our staff have drank the Kool-Aid I drank the Kool-Aid we serve the Kool-Aid at all of our meetings we want to really try to do this we talked a lot today about maybe on the cropland side but what one thing that I am really positive about and know is that it works the same exact way in range if we manage our range land better if we have diversity if we leave the grass that we need to at times and manage it well the same exact same soil health has improved infiltration occurs every time another inch of moisture falls on that range land landscape it goes into the soil and that produces somewhere in the neighborhood about another 200 pounds of grass think about it we captured all that rain that fell in the landscape in southwestern South Dakota and raised 200 so it's a pleasure to have been with you today I wished I would have been able to be here for the whole meeting and here everything that happened this morning but I really appreciate all you folks are doing to help us and we're going to partnership with us to move this whole soil health effort okay any questions for Jeff question was do we have any data to back up how much soil degradation has occurred in this nation or worldwide I sure as that can't pull it out today and say I've got a slide on it but I can tell you that it's fairly dramatic I can tell you that there is there was a brochure that was put together the person that was kind of a sidekick with you haven't been it when they started the sole conservation service in 35 was a guy by the name of louder milk and louder mouth went around the world and he wrote a little simple pamphlet it's really small it's called conquest of the land in 10,000 years and what he found when he traveled around the world in 35 or roughly in that time frame is a lot of parts of the world were in really really tough shape there's been parts of this planet where people have lived a lot longer than they have in South Dakota now we're 125 years old now they're places where they've been living for a long time and a lot of damage has been done so I can't give you that answer I think it's something we need to think about and it's something that I think we actually have to start trying to figure out how we can move back toward where we want to be I think there's a chance to rebuild what it's going to take time thank you for that question okay one more questions okay well with that that does end our formal presentations today we thank you for coming here spending the day with us and make sure you thank your sponsor on the way out