 In 2013, the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service entered into a cooperative agreement with the South Dakota No-Till Association and IGRO, SDSU Extension, for delivering the latest soil health and productivity technology to South Dakota farmers and ranchers. A series of two local events were held in South Dakota, in Lemon and Fort Pier. You've probably heard something lately about soil micro-organisms, and I'm guessing they sound like legends, the legends of the soil microbes, because you can't see them, but you hear how important they are and how they're ready to just save the world, and really all that's true. In fact, they've been doing it for a long time, running the world, making it habitable for us and for others, but what I want to do is put a little flesh on that image, that legend that micro-organisms may have in your mind. So a famous author said, we live as we've always lived in the age of that bacteria, and one reason he might have said that is bacteria have been around for about three and a half billion years, three and a half billion years they've been running show on planet Earth. Modern humans arose about 200,000 years ago. Big difference, three and a half billion years and 200,000. So they're old hands. And then you may have heard about the numbers in a teaspoon of soil, there's a billion bacteria. You might have also heard about the diversity, that same spoonful contains thousands of species, so numbers, diversity, but it's not just bacteria, besides the bacteria in that spoonful, you've got millions of fungi, algae, protozoan, nematodes, but what makes them really hard to appreciate is their microscopic, so no one ever sees them. The only guys that see them are guys like me sitting in a dark room with a microscope looking at them and you know what, these images here, the nematodes protozoan, they look like they might have a little distinctive character, but the bacteria, one billion thousand species on a gram, they're either all going to look like a basketball or a rod. They just are nondescript, and so therefore no one really knows what they're doing and so what I want to talk to you today about is what they're doing and how they are helping producers. So I also want to give you an idea about how much there is of these microorganisms. If you piled every living thing that you can see on the surface of the earth on one side of the scale, so I've got elephants, cows, people, grass, trees, you name it, insects, pile it all on this side of the scale and pile all the soil microorganisms and by soil I mean as deep as they go on the earth. We've found viable microorganisms two miles in the earth, so you can imagine if you took all that volume all around the earth, even if there's not very many at that depth, it adds up quick. In fact, it adds up so much that people have calculated that the weight of all these invisible soil and deeper organisms is more than all the visible life on the surface of the earth and you guys, you know, a lot of people never even think about it. I think about it because I study it, but even I, when I learned this I was kind of blown away by this whole whole thing. So we got numbers, diversity, overall weight or mass, those are some, we got three and a half billion years, those are some pretty impressive attributes, right? But when I think about what makes soil microorganisms so special, it's really the diversity of their lifestyles, what they do. And in short this is, how do they get their carbon and their energy? What are their metabolic products? And then things like where do they live? Well, in fact they live everywhere. You cannot find a sterile place on earth and if you try and make one, you will spend a lot of effort keeping it sterile and ultimately you will fail. Who do they live with? They live with every living being. They live with every living plant and animal. They are mixed in among us, all over our skin, inside of us, same with plants. They don't just live in the roots, they live on the stems. They live in the roots. They live on the leaves. In short, they are everywhere, soil, water, plants, humans are all teaming with billions of microorganisms doing their thing. And what their thing is, is living and reproducing by getting carbon and energy and producing metabolic products. So when I talk about metabolic products, people kind of glaze over. So I'm making it simple here. If you're a scientist or so on, we can talk later about the details. But if you're a plant, you need sun and water to make energy. You need CO2 to get your carbon so you can grow more plant. That's your essential needs. And then you also breathe just like we do. We need oxygen to breathe. If we don't have oxygen, we'll die. Plants are the same way. They actually respire using oxygen. So in essence, their basic metabolism requires these things. And they produce oxygen, and they produce CO2, and they produce water, and they produce carbon compounds. And the rest of us, which are heterotrophs, means we eat preformed carbons, which I'm saying, I'm giving an example of glucose. You can think plant matter, you can think animal matter, it doesn't have to be sugar. It's anything that's already been made by a plant. We need that, and we need oxygen. We need those things. And if we do those things, we get carbon, we get energy, and we have something we can breathe. In other words, dump our electrons on. So that's all visible life uses one of those two modes to survive and to reproduce. Microbes, on the other hand, have a much different set of things that they can get their carbon, their energy, and they can, in effect, breathe. Microbes can get their carbon and energy from the same things we do and the same things plants do, carbon and the glucose, but they can get their energy from hydrogen, they can get their energy from different sulfur molecules, they can get their energy from methane, they can get their energy from iron. They can get their energy from ammonia, okay? All these things. And this is an exclusive list. This just gives you some examples. And they can breathe oxygen just like us, but they can also breathe nitrate. They can breathe a different form of iron, you know, as rust. They can actually breathe CO2. They can, this is manganese oxide. They can use that. And it sounds unimportant, but it's very important in the soils in terms of nutrient availability. They can breathe other organic compounds. When they use this compound and this compound, that's called fermentation. And many of you are familiar with fermentation because your whole silage runs on that, whether you drink beer, it runs on that, you eat bread, it runs on that. But essentially what they're doing is breathing part of this organic compound. No one else can do that. This is tetrachloroethylene known as PERC. It's a chlorinated solvent. They can even breathe that material. It's amazing. This again is sulfur. They can use different sulfur species in place of oxygen in their metabolism. So what all this does is they're changing the form of everything continually. They're changing rust into iron here, or iron into rust. And they're changing these forms from one to the other. And all this is happening in the soil. And it's changing what nutrients are available, what nutrients are even there. Like if you take ammonia and you apply it to your soil, are the plants going to take it up? Plants can take up ammonia, but oftentimes nitrate is a much faster pickup for them. So when the microbes do one of these transitions, it changes the availability of nitrogen to the plants. So they're doing this all the time with iron. And then what happens is a lot of trace nutrients that plants needs and phosphorus actually bind to these kind of things in the soil. And as the microbes move it from one state to the other, those nutrients become available for the plant to take up. So in short, microbes are the primary ecosystem providers. They enable all life on earth. They decompose all the carbon. They cycle all the nutrients so they can be used again. They form these intimate relationships with every living being. Here's nodules on a soybean root. The microbes in here fix nitrogen. Nearly all the nitrogen that this may be all nitrogen that soybean plants needs. Fix that nitrogen from the air. There's no other living being on planet earth that can fix atmospheric nitrogen and make it into a plant available form. Just these microorganisms. And they provide all this to the growing plant, of course, in exchange for some sugar to keep their bodies alive. And then, of course, they live inside all these animals, greatly affect the nutrition of things like cows that you're familiar with, but also things like honeybees and flies. They live inside of us and maybe you've heard later news that's been highlighting these incredibly complex communities that live inside of us and control our metabolism, provide our nutrition, but also affect our mood and our emotions. The microbes live inside us. It's unbelievable. So a couple years ago, a very famous group of scientists put out this production, how microbes can feed the world. And they can. And they have been doing it for years. And what I would like to try and impress you with is how they affect nutrient dynamics in your soil and how they can help provide more soil fertility based on the nutrients that they bring in the system or that they mobilize from the soil. And so I'm using this rock as a surrogate for the soil. And this water here is a surrogate for the soil, the moisture that's in the soil. And basically what happens in the soil is nutrients are contained in the soil particles or they're attached to the side. And in water, some of them dissolve out here and they become more bio available for plant roots. So this on your left is your chemistry set. And you can predict how much of this will be available by measuring this. This is reality. Reality is there's microbes all dispersed in the soil, in the water. And why they can't change what's considered this equilibrium concentration, what they can do is greatly change this rate of replacement as some of these nutrients are consumed by plants, they can greatly change, increase this rate of replenishment of them. This is a chemistry set. This is reality. These things are very hard to measure, but this is what is actually happening in the soil. So in a close up view, I want to give you a conceptual image of a bacterial cell. Now these are one micron in size, which is about 125,000th of an inch. So they're really small and you think, well, that's teeny. But remember, they're mixed in with everything. They're thoroughly mixed. They're not just over here, they're thoroughly mixed in all the soil and water. And one micron actually is more of a relevant dimension for a plant root that is looking to take up a nutrient at the molecular level. So things are happening at this guy's level. And what this guy's doing is it's taking in nutrients and it's doing its metabolism like I mentioned before, but it's also sending out chemical signals to the plants. Chemical signals to the insects, chemical signals to the other microorganisms that are in the soil. It's sending out things called enzymes that go and degrade, say cellulose to make it into sugar so something else can pick it up. It has secondary metabolites like antibiotics that fight off other microorganisms. So all this is happening, every single one of those billions of organisms at a micro scale, which is a scale relevant for plants taking up nutrients. And so here's another one of these cartoons. Here's your cell. Here's your reality of, let's call it soil. Here's your nutrients in the microbes and how do they actually do this? They do this by producing the enzymes that I mentioned. Say you have a carbon with some phosphorus attached to it. They produce an enzyme that breaks that phosphorus off. Now that phosphorus is available for the plant to uptake. They produce acidity and alkalinity and that changes this equilibrium and may push more available nutrients into the water phase where they become available to the plant. They produce things called complexing agents, which is pretty much just how it sounds. The thing goes and grabs a nutrient that's stuck on a soil particle and brings it into solution so the plant can take it up. And then sometimes they directly transform these. If this was an iron oxide that the phosphorus was absorbed to, one of these microbes might breathe that oxide, changing it into an iron and releasing this molecule phosphorus that can be taken up by the plant. So they're doing all these things all the time in the soil and not only that, they've got nitrogen and phosphorus in their bodies too. And they produce these kind of slimy, sugary coatings on the outside. You might notice as slime on your shower curtain or something like that, a lot of that's microbes. And what they're doing is they have nutrients and other molecules are embedded in this. And so these are like little fertilizer packets that are in the soil. And because they're organic, they do two things. They get turned over regularly. The life cycle runs a course. The thing dies. It releases them. They're not available for plants. And the other, since they're organic and they tend to aggregate, they are less likely to be lost from the system. So they're their own source of nutrients for plants as they turn over. And they greatly turn this wheel so that nutrients can be replenished from the soil. So when I think about analogies, I'm going to use this analogy here. Let's say you're going to a social event. And you're interested in networking. Or maybe you're interested in finding someone to ask out on a date, right? And you enter the room, you don't know anybody, you enter the room and it looks like this. Everybody's sitting down. They look like happy people. They're going to have a fine time. But you're going to have a hard time operating in that environment trying to network or find someone to date, right? Now, how about this? What if your social event looked like this? There's a lot more opportunities to interact with people, to move around. They're moving around. They might be over here, they might sit down, they might move over here. And this is a sense, the difference between the chemistry set view of what soil fertility is and what the actual view is with all the dynamics. This is what microbes do. They create this kind of movement. And with the movement, there's access by the plant for the nutrients. So that's kind of all general introduction. I'm trying to flesh out the legend of the microorganism. And what I'm going to tell you a little bit is about our research specifically and how we promote these activities in these soil microorganisms using cover crops. We've done a lot of work at our own research farm with replicated plots and we've done some on producers' fields as well. So cover crops, the essentials will be in this in the next slide. It's a no-brainer. It's free energy. If you've got something growing there on the land, you're collecting free energy, not five months out of the year. You're using them all, 12 months. You're pumping carbon and nitrogen into the ground. You're reducing erosion. You're creating better soil structure. You're retaining water. You're increasing water infiltration. It's wind all the way across the board. As a producer, you just have to figure out the economics of doing so. It's a huge wind any way you look at it. What about the organisms? Well, it's really easy to see how visible organisms take advantage of soil that's covered with something. What it's not well known is that soil without plants is not good for the microbes. There's no food. The plants aren't injecting all this carbon into the soil. They're not producing residue. It gets hot. It gets dry. In short, you're short changing that engine that keeps all that movement going and you're going back to that situation where everybody's sitting in their chairs and there's no movement. You want people up. You want them circulating. You want the nutrients circulating becoming available for the plant. You don't want a static system. Did you know that plants fix carbon from the atmosphere to make their structures, but 10 to 40% of that carbon that they fix actually just goes out from the roots into the soil. They never actually build stems or roots or leaves or fruit or anything like that. It just leaks out. So you think while they're inefficient, well, let's think about it. Land plants have been around a half a billion years to evolve. If they needed to have that photosynthetic, they would have figured out how to retain it, not be leaky, right? No, it all comes out of the roots into the soil. What happens to it there is it feeds the soil microorganisms, again produces all those reactions, that variety of reactions, and moves nutrients around, makes them available in the soil to the plant. So I'm going to take a couple examples. Nitrogen phosphorous, nitrogen microbes are, of course, fixing nitrogen. They're converting it. They're also taking organic nitrogen sources and metabolizing it, so nitrate's free to be picked up by plants. They're converting ammonia to nitrate. They're doing all these things. And then with phosphorous, I showed you earlier, they're actually solubilizing it by complexing it or producing an acid or an alkaline product. They can store it in their bodies. They can mineralize organic pee. And then there's these organisms called our muscular mycorrhizae that actually transport the phosphorous from the soil directly into the plant. So the first set of experiments, I want to talk to you about involved nitrogen mineralization. Of course, nitrogen is the major nutrient in plant production. On our farm, we had a soybean spring wheat. When the spring wheat was harvested, we had a cover crop. In the spring, before corn planting, this was terminated chemically. And corn was planted, and we followed the amount of nitrogen that was mineralized with an in-situ technique during 10 weeks of the corn growing season there. And so this is the in-situ technique. You have to take cores and cut out the bottom, put a little resin in there that'll attract the nitrate and ammonia and bury it back in the ground. We had no cover crop, rye, vetch, sweet clover. And we looked at how much nitrogen is mineralized in these soils available, say, for the corn plant following termination of the cover crops. And so what we found is with clover, we got the greatest amount of nitrogen in the 10 weeks. Not surprisingly, vetch was second. These are both legumes that harbor those symbiotic nitrogen fixing. Rye was slightly more than fallow. And as you know, rye doesn't have nitrogen fixers. It has a very high carbon to nitrogen ratio compared to these two. But I want to remind you, this is only 10 weeks after we terminated the cover crops. So don't count rye out. Rye's not a total dog. Rye still has nitrogen that it just hadn't released in those 10 weeks. It may keep releasing that again. So don't say, oh, I'm not going to use rye. I won't release nitrogen. It may not release as much nitrogen over this time frame. And it will be limited by the ultimate amount. But it will release more than fallow over a longer period of time. So then the second sort of illustration I would like to make has to do with our muscular mycorrhizal fungi. This is one group of soil microorganisms, one group of fungi that live in the soil. They are what's called obligate symbionts. They need a plant host. They cannot reproduce without a plant host. And they live in the soil in spores. And when a plant germinates and starts extending their roots, there's chemical signals that are exchanged between the plant root and the spore. And the spore germinates and sends a filament to the edge of the root where it forms this structure and then actually enters the root and forms these other structures called arabuscles inside the root cortex. So this fungus has part of its body outside in the soil and part of its body inside the root cortex. And if you look under a microscope, this is what that arabuscle looks like. And if you look a little closer, it looks like this. And what I always imagine is a lung or a kidney, although arabuscle relates to tree. It also looks like a tree. But I like thinking about it as a lung or a kidney because that's exactly what it does. It maximizes the surface area of exchange between the fungus and the plant inside this root. It's just like a lung. It brings in nutrients and water into the arabuscle, passes it through this arabuscle to the plant. And the plant passes some sugars back to the fungus through that same structure. It's an exchange mechanism, very much like a kidney and a lung. So if you look at a little bigger level, here's the seedling sending its roots out into the soil. Or they're able to explore some volume like this, given the root hairs that might come off of it. Another seedling, similar root. But all these different colors represent different species of arbuscular mycorrhizae that have colonized this plant and greatly expanded the sphere of soil that that plant can explore. It's a lot bigger volume. These filaments are a little smaller than roots so they can get into small pores. They have very small diameters. They increase the surface area that's available to bring in nutrients and water to the plant by about 1,000 times. Who wouldn't want that? So among their benefits, I mentioned nutrient uptake, drought resistance, because they provide water. But they're also pest and pathogen resistance. They are obligate symbionts. They need their host to survive so they can reproduce. It will not do for them to have their host killed by a pester pathogen. So they do this in a couple ways. One is by physically colonizing the roots so a pathogen can't. And the second way is by chemical warfare. And so they have a vested interest in keeping this plant alive. So we did a little experiment here on forage sorghum in the lab. And we grew five plants here with mycorrhizae and five plants we denied them. These mycorrhizae we actually recovered from Brian Jorgensen's farm. Brian won the Leopold Award this year. Brian, no tails, cover crops, minimal inorganic phosphorus application. He's been doing all these things for decades. His soil has the highest number of mycorrhizae that we've measured on any farm. So we extracted his mycorrhizae. We didn't want to use some mycorrhizae in a box. We wanted to use the live South Dakota stuff from a producer that has been encouraging them. And this is just, it's just a snapshot. It gives you a kind of appreciation with mycorrhizae without mycorrhizae. Which one do you want? Okay, it's pretty simple. But at a larger view, you know, you see pictures like this and gully erosion and windy erosion. You don't often think microscopic, but actually these organisms, so bruscular mycorrhizae, mycorrhizal fungi can help with erosion. If you have an aggregate, it is stabilized by these filaments called fungal hyphae. Here's a picture of a root with some spores and this sort of amorphous material on here is called glomalin. And it's a type of protein glue that these mycorrhizae exude and they promote soil aggregation and can reduce erosion. So they can have effects at larger levels. And why do you care about that? Well, you do care about soil loss, right? Everyone cares about soil loss. But soil aggregation promotes microscopic structure, which promotes water infiltration and storage. Who wants saturated ground? Nobody wants saturated ground because plants need oxygen and you don't have oxygen. So if you promote soil structure, you will end up with soils that can infiltrate more water and store more water. So what's the big problem? This sounds great, let's have it, let's cheer them on. Well, the problem is some of the agricultural practices that we've been using reduce mycorrhizae. Tillage is one because their filamentous, continual aggressive tillage will chop them up and that's not good. If you don't have a plant, that's no good. They need a plant host, otherwise they can't complete their life cycle. Simple rotations, inorganic fertilizer application. If you dump a bunch of phosphorus on there and the plant is supposed to be relying on the mycorrhizae for phosphorus and it has a free lunch, it's not going to pay the sugar fee to the mycorrhizae to bring in the phosphorus. It's gonna lose the pest and pathogen and drought resistant benefits that the mycorrhizae gives as well. So this is just typical prairie agriculture, big difference in the amount of mycorrhizae. How am I doing on time, Ruth? Perfect, thanks. Okay, so we went back to our replicated plots. Again, we have soybean, small grains, harvested, let's say August, early September, cover crop planted, terminated, corn planted. And here we grab soil samples and look at the number of mycorrhizae in these soils. And we did this for three years and we compared no cover crop against canola oats and vetch and then various combinations of these. Canola is what's called a non-host. It's a plant that for some reason doesn't get colonized by mycorrhizae. But if you look at the data here, every single cover crop with a couple exceptions in a given year, well actually these were above the first year of none, every single cover crop had higher numbers of mycorrhizae than no cover crop. And canola didn't seem to inhibit them at all either. The oats perform well in all years and I think part of this is when we plant the oats in the fall, they usually grow great. They just give them a little water and they grow great root structure. So I'm not convinced totally that it's the type of plant as much as it's the amount of growth that we have in the fall. Again, vetch and then mixture. This is oats, vetch, canola. So we had some good response there. So you can boost the number of AMF in your soil simply by keeping a plant there when you otherwise wouldn't have anything growing. We also went down to Brian's farm and Brian uses a really complex rotation, seven years and he changes things. He's adaptive in his management, but he has no till, low inorganic pee and diversified crop rotation and about half of his acreage that has where he's harvested wheats, he plants cover crops. And this that year was this mixture, I think it varies depending on price and seed and availability, but it's a mixture. And we looked at paired sites on his property between following wheat that had cover crops and that had none. Again, here we're sampling in late fall. In fact, I had a person with me who had moved from Florida and they said it was the coldest day she ever experienced. We were sampling, that was like mid-November in ideal South Dakota. But the bottom line was more micro-Rizy found at Brian's farm than anywhere I've seen, other than a native prairie and his cover crops boosted the numbers by two times. So you can affect it with your management and you can get some of these benefits. So most of our work, and we also have some work we did at Dave Gillan's farm in White Lake that shows very similar results. We only did that one year, but again, Oats-P mixture increased the number of micro-Rizy compared to no cover crop. So all those are usually soybean, small grain, corn, like a three-year rotation that has small grains and you're getting the cover crops one year. You're getting it after the small grains because that's the best year for you and you have time to get it established. Well, that's great. And we're making our measurements just right after the cover crops. We're not measuring every year. We're only measuring the years after the cover crops. So what we started to do at our research farm was use a modified planter that intercedes into corn and soybeans. So we're just looking at corn, soybean rotation, but it gets cover crops every year and they're interceded and the seeding and the killing of the cover crops is being managed adaptively depending upon the weather and what's going on. So this year, I think we had cover crops, something growing in that soil all, but well, there was always something growing in the soil, but there was only three weeks, I think, where there was no cover crop this summer. So there's a lot of overlap. Here's, this was the first year. This, these pictures are from the first year we did this, this has been the second year that just passed in the corn and in the soybean. This is in the fall when we sampled and then in the spring in the corn and soybean. So they, you know, they did all right. But we looked at something called the CO2 burst test. The NRCS has been using this test recently to look at soil quality called the Haney-Britain method. Basically take dried soil, moisture, measure the amount of CO2 that comes up. This CO2 is proportional to microbial biomass activity and potentially mineralizable nitrogen. So again, back to that room analogy, this is proportional to all things you want those microbes to do to shake things up and make the nutrients available for the plants. Here they used a color metric device to measure the CO2. I have a lab, so I used a different device, but we measured samples, we took samples in the fall and used that technique from no-till and till. All the covers and soybeans had much higher activity, biomass, potentially mineralizable nitrogen than no cover. And there wasn't much difference between the till and the no-till. Okay, this is after the very first year of interseeding. Then in the corn, we didn't see any effect of the cover crop, but we noticed that the till was a lot lower. So again, it's one year, we're just getting this interseeding thing going. I feel like perhaps there was no effect of the cover because it took a longer time to get established in the denser corn canopy, so that's one possible reason. I don't know why we didn't see an effect of tillage in the soybean, but we'll see how this bears out over the next several years. But the data here favors no-till, favors cover crops. So we think you can manage these things. And it really comes down to very simple things. Food, if you have cover, if you have plants growing there, they're injecting food into the soil for the microbes, the residues are providing food for the microbes. If you have a diverse set of plants, you have more diversity of food, and you need to preserve habitat, and you can preserve habitat by reducing tillage and incorporating a diversity of plants. So it's really quite simple to actually manage for these things and create conditions that allow them to protect the plants, to increase their drought resistance, and to provide nutrients at a much better rate than otherwise. And so as a scientist, I'm continually dealing with a lot of technological challenges. They're invisible. It's really hard to measure what they're doing. So we're always bumping up against the edge of the science in terms of what we can measure and what we know. And so we have a lot of challenges in front of us to make sure we're making measurements that actually reflect biological health so we can unequivocally promote practices that have positive functions. And mostly, so we can quantify these benefits to things that are more near and dear to the producers and the ranchers. And all these are a set of challenges, and essentially this is my job description. And with that, I'd like to acknowledge funding from the USDA ARS and the South Dakota Corn Utilization Council and ask for questions. Down in the South-Eastern part of the state over the last five to 10 years, our fields stay under water for days, sometimes weeks, crop obviously is destroyed and then we really push to get cover crops or something back on that soil. What happens to these microorganisms, long-term flooding like that? We talk about trying to bring those things back to life. What actually happens to them when they're under these conditions? Yeah, well that's a good question. The bottom line is a lot of them are killed. Oh, the question was, how does prolonged flooding affect the soil microorganisms? In short, that was the question. In short, it reduces the activities, the numbers, the diversity. It kills some. Others think it's great. I've been waiting for this and so they grow. So no matter what, you're gonna have something growing but the numbers and diversity that you would like to have is not gonna return for some time. The mycorrhizae, they need oxygen just like us. They need the plants just like us and so they're gonna take longer to re-establish. There's continual colonization from the wind and other routes and I would say it's a matter of keeping something growing and time. There's no real magic recipes for flooded land but if you go into a wet land and you take a core from underneath the surface of the water, I mean that sediment is teeming with microbes but they're doing different things. They're actually breathing a lot of sulfur and they're producing methane and they're doing much different things and they're set up to function in that environment whereas the environment that you'd like in your fertile crop land is not the environment at the bottom of the slu where they'll start to dominate so it'll take time and plants. Brian's place, yeah? He had cow pee, winter pee, millet, turnip, radish. But I think he does change that quite a bit depending upon availability and price of the seed. How would you do that there? That's a great question. The question was about a grazing system. How do you increase mycorrhizae? And I don't have any personal data of my own from a grazing system. We have data from native prairies and I've been working with this group. We're trying to get research funding for looking at rotational grazing and part of that is the effects and we'll measure the effects of mycorrhizae but I don't have any data to show that. My gut feeling is having cows on the land and grazing provided it's done in a positive manner is going to just be a good thing all the way around. Well, I mean, what you're enhancing there is organic carbon and I think that's the master variable. I mean, if you enhance organic carbon and provide preferably organic nutrients, I think you're going to get your best situation. To continue this question, I don't have any data on that. What's that? Put that as part of it. What lining, because they used to line soil is quite bad in native grasses to increase, I don't know if that's good. Where's Jason? What's your answer to that? It depends on pH, I mean, places where they line a lot where they're low pH, I suspect, and when your pH is on the range land, you're probably the mid-sevastous, the, you know, I mean, the pH tolerance of microbes is really wide. I mean, it goes from basically zero to 14, but for mycorrhizae, you know, it would be more in the five to nine area. In terms of, I know there's research done on just purely pH effects, but I don't know in terms of agricultural settings adding lime and how that would reflect what you'd measure. Oh, I'll bet he did, yeah. Yeah, he probably would have grazed it. I mean, I'd have to ask him to get a for sure answer. The question was, did Brian graze this cover crop mixture and I would be betting that he did. Yeah, so the question was, how does phosphorus application method affect mycorrhizae and can it be optimized? And, you know, those are the real hard questions. I don't think we can give a recipe for what is known as that inorganic phosphorus applications say a lot will inhibit the reaction, but when you try and say a particular number, then it comes down to soil test, you know, the test you choose and the soil type, and then it also varies with all these other variables and the small amount of sites where this work has been done. So I don't think you can give a real number in our plots where we did the research. We draw this down to single digit Olsen and we've never seen any phosphorus deficiencies. Notice Shannon is Osborn's agronomist and then she's never noticed phosphorus deficiencies in the corn there, but we haven't added inorganic phosphorus there for I don't know, six, seven years and Olsen's run in single digits. And then at Brian's place, I don't think he adds any, he adds a fairly low amount of manure every three or four years. I wish I could answer the question because that's ultimately where we gotta end up is, okay, how much? What number? So I'm afraid I can't answer that. We run single digits on our area, that's because we have lots of micro-riders. If we didn't tell it, we'd have response. And it really comes down to the way I explain it, Mike is, any nutrient, whatever you're doing, you look at how much is available, how much root system you have and how much moisture all in the same place at the same time. And what you have with micro-ids is massive root system because they become part of the root system. And so you can get by the variable phosphorus because you have a big root that's too offset each other. And in no till you have moisture more than you do with conventional tillings. The fallow syndrome in what everybody hears about fallow syndrome is because the land was flooded or you did tillage or you had fallow and you had no micro-risey, that's where the term comes from. And then you get a phosphorus proficiency even in high testing soil. So that's really what you gotta look at how much root system you have. And you're right, eventually we're gonna have to get down to where we work on that very little p-level. The question of p in the soil could test total phosphorus. The soil test of Olsen or Gray or Bailey or whatever, only tests availability and not. They don't really test what's totally there and tell them how soluble it is. And if you're working on a water quality, you don't want it soluble. Well, yeah, I agree 100% with those perspectives. Any more questions?