 What we like to do is what we cross the fence comparison and we have a study going on kind of called dynamic soil property study and dynamic soil properties are those properties that change with management. Static soil properties you can't change them really no matter what you do to them but the dynamic soil properties will change. So just as you saw differences in management on the cropland and how they reacted with infiltration versus runoff the same kind of thing happens on rangeland so where we look at sites across the fence that are the same soil in this case it's an opal soil and that would be a clay ecological site, is that right Nathan, is Nathan still around, anyway might be heavier than that okay but it's in that ballpark and so it's the same ecological site regardless and so we compare infiltration on both sides of the fence and then we look at other soil properties and we're going to show you a few of those here in a minute. Infiltration doesn't necessarily measure any specific thing, any one thing, it's kind of a conglomeration of all the other properties and it gives you a gauge of how all those other properties are working, that can be your soil structure, the mycorrhizal fungi, the bacteria, all the things that go together to form that soil ecosystem that's kind of what infiltration is showing is how they're all working together so you can't say any one thing about how an infiltration test comes out other than that the soil is functioning well from a hydrologic standpoint so that's why we do it, it's shown in our dynamic soil property studies to be a very, very good test, it's very sensitive to changes in management so Jeff why don't we, anything else you want to add there? I just want to describe the community a little bit more in between. So on this side of the fence this has been rested for a while Dwayne I assume and we've got pretty good diverse plant community in here, western wheatgrass, green needlegrass those are on a clay site those are the two dominant grasses that you want to see and so that's showing us that it's in pretty good condition. On the other side of the fence where we've had probably season long grazing over quite a long period of time, when we walk up close to the fence take a look at it but there's a lot of buffalo grass in there, blue grama, there's still western wheatgrass but it's diminished quite a bit so the short grasses have moved in and have replaced the taller green needlegrass and western wheat. So it's really come back through their management. Here's some of your green needlegrass right here, these long green leaves like that, it's a bunch grass, western wheatgrass is rhizometous, it's the blue green stuff all throughout here and there's some Kentucky bluegrass and some other things in here as well. Anything else you want to mention? Why don't we go ahead and... Mostly just a little bit of suppression and rest, we'd like to have done more grazing. Any kind of disturbance can kind of throw off that soil ecosystem and long term rest is a kind of disturbance as well or removing livestock from a system is a type of disturbance in a way. So the right amount of livestock grazing is what these sites formed with and that's what they're used to so that's where you want to be. So why don't we go ahead and run an infiltration test. You can try to come in a little closer if you want, we're going to go ahead and... So as Jeff mentioned we've got these infiltration rings back at the shop down there. If you want to do some of this on your own, basically what you do is clip off an area down to the ground so you can get the cellophane down. Jeff's going to do all the work for me here. It's like sitting in the passenger seat versus driving the car so you don't have to open the gates. Now we're kind of at the tail end, definitely at the tail end of when you'd want to be doing an infiltration test on your rangeland. The biological activity is starting to taper off this time of year and the soils, especially clay, so I'll start to crack and you'll see that on the other side of the fence even more where it's more exposed. So that's soil cracks kind of throw off in a test like this. So basically after you drive the ring down into your, about the second knuckle on your finger, about two inches showing, you put the cellophane in there and I can tie it for you if you want. And you put the water in, you put the cellophane down so you can start the water and the timer at the same time is basically what you do. Did you tell me to put 444 milliliters? Thank you, yeah, 444 milliliters. In the infiltration kit there's a cup that measures it out for you and then once you got it in there, just say go Stan. Go. And the reason 444 it calls one acre inch. There's 27,154 gallons in an acre inch. Everybody should memorize it by the end of the day. There's a test later. That's a test. 27,154. That's why we do 444 and we adjusted for that six inch ring. Let's say it's done. Just a little bit over there and he's a splitter here. Okay. All right, 35 seconds. That was the first inch. And yesterday we put another ring in over here. It was 43 seconds. So it's really very similar. Do you want to try a second inch on that one? And let's do that. If you read the instructions, which some people I know are bad about that. It's really the second inch we're interested in. What's that? We're really interested in the second inch. Yeah. The second inch is really kind of what we gauge. We do our measurements on this one. Yes it is. That's what it's out here. Good for you. Remember when we talked about that last night. I was so late. I was here. By the way, this is not exactly rehearsed, but we've done this a lot. And we put the plastic wrap on top so that you can pull it so you don't want to instantaneously push the water all and disrupt it. So what you want to do is gradually just pull the plastic away. Okay, stand your hand again. Okay, go. And we typically, you expect the second inch to take a little longer than the first inch. But that's more of an even test because then you've wetted the soil, pre-wetted the soil, and that gives you a better comparison on your samples and whatnot. Then you can download a sole quality kit manual for free on NRCS. And on page 62 it tells you the infiltration rate. So what was the reading that you got? Let's tell them. 35 seconds. 35 seconds. So it's more than 20 inches per hour on this site. That's what it's telling you. So if it's less than three minutes per inch, if it's less than three minutes, you're talking about an infiltration rate of 20, 40. That's what, so you got, you can get this manual and you can get it on free for online. Okay. The second inch here was 40 seconds. That's very similar to the first one. You want to go ahead and run this other one. Sure. So it's refreshing our mind. You don't have to come over the fence, but you can come up to it if you want. Jeff is going to run the second inch over here. Well, I'm going to go on the other side of the fence. I'm going to tell you guys. Oh, yeah. I think he's already got it. What about the plant community above ground? What do you see here compared to the other side? The plant community or the soil surface? What kinds of things do you see? Shout it out. Don't be shy. Yeah, it is. It's grazed. If you look around, especially I know right up by the fence over there, there's pretty big patches of buffalo grass, that short little hairy grass. There's more bare ground and more trampling going on, which trampling in and of itself is not a bad thing. It's like everything I guess else in moderation. So we probably have some compaction going on. How much time right there, Jeff? I've got it here. That's a minute forty-five right now. And you can see these seed heads over here. This is blue grama right here. So there's a pretty large component of our short grasses on this side of the fence. And that's through season-long grazing. The plant community is shifted from being dominated by western wheatgrass and green needlegrass shifting to those shorter grasses. And numerous studies over the years have shown that that's negative on hydrology when you shift to short grass community. And that's just through management over time. We're going to look here in a minute. We might have to just come back and get to catch this. We'll check out some soil profiles here. Did we bring a shovel? He's got the shovel over there. So we'll come back to this. It's going to be a little while. I'll just leave this here. Sorry to make you keep moving there. It grazes with horses, which is a little different than cattle, too. Yeah, if you didn't hear Dwayne, this pasture is grazed with horses. And so they graze a little bit differently than cattle. Thank you. Jeff said it's going to be 20 to 30 minutes, so we have some time here. We're not going to wait. Jeff, let's take a look at these. One of the things I mentioned was one of the components that makes up that soil ecosystem or some of the components are your biological, your mycorrhizal fungi, the bacteria, nematodes, some of the insects that somebody mentioned. And then I'm right in the sun, aren't I? So then some of the other characteristics of soils that influence infiltration are the soil structure and organic matter. We're going to look at a couple of those right now. So here, which profile do you want me to... It doesn't really matter which one you want to start on. You want to start on this one? Okay, so is this this one here? Yep. All right, maybe you should... You can actually see that what we're looking at here is that, and we'll break it up a little bit, so you can see that there's granular soil structure down to about three inches, at least that's what I'm seeing, and you're going to have to come closer to actually see that. But then we actually start getting into prismatic structure. And the interesting thing is, of course, these are right across the fence from each other, and the cool thing for me as a soils guy is really starting to look at those differences in soil structure. Now, I talked about that before, but here I've got granular structure down. You've got granular structure down here about three inches, and you can actually see that within that profile. But, you know, we go right across the fence, and all of a sudden it's gone. That granular structure's gone. I have subangular blocky structure in the very surface, and that prismatic structure carries right to the soil surface very quickly. So that breakdown in that soil structure because of that differences in management is really apparent in that profile, and very apparent when we actually started doing what? Some of those analysis. We started looking at bulk density. We started talking about macro pore development. The test that we actually just ran here today, this infiltration, is very indicative of what is that biological activity in that soil surface. That plant community, that interaction makes a huge difference in what we're visually seeing, and the hydrology, and the reaction that we actually have. And to me, it's like I say, from a soil standpoint, we look at that profile, look at that soil structure, and you go, wow, that's just a huge difference. Unbelievable difference in just over-the-fence comparisons. So from my standpoint, from a soil standpoint, you come out here and you look at this and go, there's phenomenal differences associated with management in that plant community within that visual of the profile. The interesting, like I say, getting back to me, it's exciting that we started talking about that biological community. We can't really see most of that biological community, but we can see the effects on that structure. We can see that effects on some simple analysis that we can run in and out in the field. So I think that we can start to get a better handle on that and really start to compare systems in the field very quickly from one to the next. That's an excellent point. People say, well, what test should I run to check on the biological activity? What we found, the most consistent things that we found in these dynamic soil property studies are really the field measurements that we're doing right here, looking at structure, organic matter, as you can tell from the color of the soils, and also infiltration. So these field measurements are some of the most indicative tests, really, and you don't have to send off to a lab for expensive tests. Those just haven't been quite as consistent for us as just the stuff you can see in the field. What about the color there in the different profiles? You can really see that radical difference between those two profiles. I mean, you can stand over here and look in the sun and you can see those differences. You can see the browns, especially associated with that larger amount of organic matter within that soil profile up at the front. You don't see that back here. And in fact, you can see that graying or glaying is very, very indicative of that subsoil material. And that carries on to that soil surface as we have this overgrays condition. Like I say, as we really started looking at some of these differences over long-term management, to me it's just phenomenal on those changes within that grass community that we actually see based on how we manage that plant community. So have you depleted that organic matter resource? Yes. Is it as productive as it could be? No. You can visually see that in that profile. I think it's really something to take home. And we get to do this. I get to do this all the time. And I find this is the most interesting part of my job is we get to do that across defense comparisons. I think producers can do that from one field to the next. You need to start really paying attention to what that soil structure looks like, what that soil biology looks like. The MAC report is starting to look at some basic analysis so that you can come up with better systems and change your management for the better. You think about how much more water was in the jars in the front compared to the back down there. And if we had some grassland samples, which we had back there, we didn't run them, you would see the same difference between the heavy continuous season-long grazing versus rotational grazing and better plant community diversity. Just a stark difference. The runoff jar on the overgray stuff will be full and the infiltration jar will be empty and vice versa on the well-managed. But you think every inch of water that runs off of a piece of rangeland is somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 to 200 pounds per acre of production. So for every inch you lose, you're basically sending a couple hundred pounds of production down the hill to the neighbor or somewhere else or not on your place anyway. So the idea with managing for granular soil structure and managing for organic matter and the things that make for better infiltration, that's money in your pocket really because that's more production on your place and it's not going somewhere else. Anything else? I want to tie a point on here. Okay folks, we're going to do a little activity. Now everybody, I want everybody to get on their knees. I mean seriously, let's get on our knees. I'm going to show you something. Because I want you to see every, when you go out, when you go out on the, when we go to the no-till field in the crop field, you're going to see these spheres present. Every ecosystem throughout the world that has plants, you're going to see these spheres present. I want you to start identifying. I'm going to show you the five spheres that we should have in our range ground. You should have it in your cropping and you should have it on your note, you should have it on your no-till fields and you should have them on your pasture. Okay? They're all connected. Now, once you come in here, I'll help you. I'm going to show you. You guys all stay ready. I'm going to show you how to look at it. Good. Can I use one of these? Sure. Absolutely. Okay. Everybody get ready. Everybody's going to dig around. Now, every one of you part the grass and dig right into, you get it to that. What do you range? People call this little, they call it a duff layer, right? Yeah. What else do you call it? Batch? Litter. Litter. That is called the detritus sphere. So, colleges call it the detritus sphere. Every ecosystem, a good healthy soil ecosystem should have it present. You will have it in a good no-till. It should be covered with that on a no-till. That is the skin of the soil. It is precious. It regulates temperature. You have these little mezzofana, these organisms breaking it down. It has to be present. Is it present, Pam, in an organic field? No. Why is it not present in an organic field? Tillage. They bury it. Conventional. It will be buried. It will not be there. It is the indicator of way too much disturbance. This thing will help regulate the soil temperature. It is rain impact. Regulate soil temperature. That is called the detritus sphere. So the first thing when I do get a shovel full, I want to see that present. If it's not present, I know you're dealing too much. Too much inversion, it's not there. You will find it in pastures. You will find it present. This beautiful layer that we were talking about, you know what this is called? The agratis sphere. Scientists call it the agratis sphere. I call it cottage cheese. I want to see cottage cheese. If I do not see cottage cheese in a no-till field, it's telling me one thing. You know what it's telling me? You're not feeding it enough. Not enough carbon. It takes huge amounts of liquid carbon to feed back. That is converted sun. I'm not doing enough covers. I'm taking too much carbon from the system. These aggregates only last 27 days, folks, in natural agroecosystems, 27 days. That means they are feeding on that house. So you leave that there on fellow. What do you expect? Are we going to have a lot of cottage cheese? No. We're not. We've got to remember the plant and soil are one. I think one of the biggest disfavors we ever did in our agriculture schools is to separate the plant and the soil. Class, if I take the plant out and if I take the microbes out, what do I have, Dale? You got geology. You got geology. So it's the biology and the plants that formulate this aggregation. They change the system. So I want to see lots of aggregation. Scott, do you think we'll see aggregation in a very heavily organic farm? No. You won't see a lot of aggregation, but you may see a lot of humicolors because they're hauling in carbon like crazy to offset the damage. Am I opposed to organic farmers? No. I'm not. They don't misunderstand me. I'm telling you how to look at your soil when you walk in there. So we've got an aggregate. So what's inside the aggregate, class? What's the other sphere? The porous sphere. Where air and water, what Jeff was talking about. So I want to see the rhizosphere. Did you try the sphere? I want to see that. And I want to see aggregates. I have megapores, macropores, and then micropores. Tillage cannot destroy the micropore because the microbes cannot get into that and eat the polysaccharides, the organal mineral complexes, the cementing agents created by biology and plants. Okay? So we've got residue on the top. I want to see that in all my agro-ecosystems. I want to see it in my pasture. Now what happens if this layer starts building up that the rhizosphere builds up a lot and it does not disappear? What is that telling you? What is that? You got it. It's not cycling properly. Your residues should not be celebrating its fifth birthday. It should not be there for five years. So that tells you that cycling. So we got to see residue. I want to see cottage cheese. Inside the cottage cheese, I got pores. Then rhizosphere. What's the rhizosphere class? The roots. We got to have living roots 24-7. Our job in all of our systems, living roots 24-7. It is a conduit to turn that sun into chemical energy. If you're not doing that, it is costing you big time in your operation. No roots, no aggregates. No aggregates. None of the biology is going to be there. Everybody with us. So how do we mismanage this? This right here. The tool, huh? Can guess what's the first thing we blame? It's the cow. It's not the cow. It's us who have the lack of understanding and understand the ecology and how everything is connected. We're going to look for all those spheres. And we'll switch it over. Because what I want you to do when we go to Dwayne's place and we look at the cropping, I want us to get out of the pickup. I'm going to get out of there. And we're all going to look for all those spheres. The drill-o-sphere. That is Greek for worm. In every one of those passages that slime on that body, it is critical. It is rich in phosphorus. It is rich in bacteria. It is a phenomenal thing to have in your soil ecosystem. Now, some are complaining that they're getting into wooded areas and changing the pH of the wooded areas because those earthworms have the ability to actually eat all the residue on top of the surface and they're changing it. Now, when I go to a good agro-ecosystem down in Dwayne's, I want to see four earthworms per shovel full. That's equivalent to eight hundred and fifty to a million and a half earthworms per acre. And you want to do it in the early spring because they move. I want to see four earthworms and if you want to get really technical, like my buddy here, Jeff, like the splinter, you get a 12 by 12 by 12. You want to see 20 earthworms. I want to see 20 earthworms by foot by foot. That's eight hundred and fifty to a million and a half earthworms which are cycling nutrients and moving the soil. They are the plow we want. We want them. They change the soil. I'll leave you with this last thought. Folks, there's a lot of debate now in the ecological communities and if you get into this what I call the niche construction where they're saying, we used to think if we put organisms they would adapt to the environment. We're saying now, no, they change the environment. Earthworms, do you see these dark colors? Did not happen by themselves. It happened by the biology and the plants. They modify. Beavers modify the environment. You guys modify your environment. So we got to remember the biology and how powerful the biology is. So when we go out in the field in the cropland, I want you to see if all these spheres are present. Ryan, which one is the cottage cheese? What is it called? A gratosphere. You don't have to remember all of it, but remember I want cottage cheese, residue, I want pores, I want to see earthworms and I want to see roots. Hey guys, here you go. At some point, I think, we're going to move to the rest of the tour. So let's head on back.