 Today's event is a joint effort of the South Dakota No-Till Association, the Mitchell NRCS off-field office, SDSU Extension, and the NRCS. And one of the first things I'd like to do is thank all our sponsors that helped us put together and provide input and money for today's event. I'm going to just read through the list. South Dakota Wheat Commission, Farm Credit Services of America, Wheat Growers, Mustang Seed, Monsanto, Prairie State Seeds, Next Level Ag LLC, Millboard Seeds, La Crosse Seeds, Dakota Best Seed, Adronomy Plus, Farmers Eliacs, Mitchell, First Dakota National Bank, C&D Operations and Davis and County Ampliment, Scott Supplier, Crop Tech, Ducks Unlimited, Aurora County, Conservation District, Davis and County Conservation District, Hanson County Conservation District, South Dakota No-Till Association, SDSU Extension, USDA and NRCS, and Pioneer Hybrids of DuPont. So let's give them all a welcome round of applause. Our second speaker is Lance Gunderson of Ward Labs. Lance started the Soil Health Division of Ward Labs in 2011 and he's going to talk about some of the new aspects of Soil Health, corporation of the Soil Tows, Lance. Good morning everybody. I'm really glad to be up here today. Unlike Jay, I had to come north for this trip and it's 70 degrees in the Nebraska right now where I'm from. I kind of thought I'd see all the snow drips in the snow piles, but luckily it's been a little warm up here last week, so I see a lot of water. You guys kept all the snow. We didn't get anything this summer or this winter. I think we've had about an inch of snow in Central Nebraska. I've been at Ward Laboratories out of Carney, Nebraska for about 16 years. I started there when I was a college student, so I've got a real good opportunity to learn a lot from Ray Ward and if any of you know Ray Ward, he always says he learns everything he knows from going back. So I'm a good company that way. I have an opportunity to learn from these guys and I'm going to come up here today and kind of talk to you about some of the different testing opportunities we're working on. I say working on because they are a work in progress. We're still trying to develop these as we give feedback from producers and universities and other growers. So today I want to talk to you a little bit about the hanging test. I used to kind of go through talking about what the test was and what it isn't. I'm going to do that very briefly, but I want to focus more on results and what can you learn, what can you gain from it. How can we use it and what should we not do with it? That's the other important thing, right? It is a tool, it's a different tool in the toolbox for you, but you have not to use it properly and avoid areas where you shouldn't be using it. So by quick show of hands, how many of you have heard of the hanging test? Every time I ask that, I hear one more. How many of you have tried it? Okay, about a few. So I'm going to try to do a little bit for both audiences. We'll go through a little bit about what it is and then how some of you can use it if you've already got it. So I want to talk real briefly about what is the approach to hanging soil health testing. Traditional soil tests, conventional soil tests, we focus a lot on soil chemistry, right? Fertility, how that relates to yield and crop production. But when we start getting into soil health, we talk a lot about the physical, biological and chemical property. So we need a soil test that is going to start looking at some of those other aspects of soil. Now, I went out and run over here. I stole one of these. Jay said it was okay. I took one of these because this is something that is very difficult. I'll say pretty much I might use word impossible to measure a laboratory accurately. This is a field type test. I'm so focused on the laboratory part. I've got a huge farm in the central Nebraska. I've got 12 acres. One acre of that is a house, nine acres of that is trees, creek bottom. So I've got about two acres I get to play with. But I do. I put 70-way pigs out this summer. Native grasses, forks, lures. I don't have to worry about terminating. I don't have to worry about what's going to happen next year. So I get to play a lot more than the rest of it. But I'm interested to take that home. Now, I will say this, if somebody wants one of these and they run out, come find me. I'll give you this one. I'm not going to take that out of your pocket. If you want to take that home and do it, I'll steal one from somebody else some other time. So on this hanging test, we're going to focus on a few different aspects. We're still going to look at soil in PK. I say soil in PK, we're going to expand on that. But we're still going to look at the chemical fertility of the soil. That is part of soil health. That's not going away. We're also going to start talking about these microbes. How can we start measuring microbial biomass? Can we get an indication of what these different practices are doing for that microbial community? Then we're going to talk about some of these other aspects of carbon and nitrogen. We often focus on soil organic matter or we talk about nitrogen fertilizers. But we're going to look at these different pools and we're going to really talk about the balance between the carbon and the nitrogen and why that's important in an healthy soil system. Finally, we come over and we start to take these things and we try to address different aspects of soil health. Now there's obviously things missing from this list. Both density, aggregate stability, ferocity, water infiltration, all of those things. But we can address some aspects using this test. And then we're going to try to provide you with some management recommendations. Notice I didn't say nutrient recommendations. That's part of it. But we want to look beyond the nutrient part and start talking about management implications on your farm. So I'm going to step through each one of these a little bit. Jay mentioned one of my favorite words, exonates. I heard that word probably 30 times yesterday. Root exonates. So when we are growing a living plant, living roots, we think of roots taking things out of the soil. But it's really a two-way street. So the plant is taking up nutrients and moisture and water out of that soil. But at the same time, that plant is leaking different compounds back into that soil to feed the biology. And that does a couple of different things for the plant. Number one, it helps change the pH right around the root in that rhizocere. So where that soil touches the root, that helps solidify certain nutrients that the plant can then take up a little easier. Number two, those organic acids and those different compounds and amino acids and organic acids, they act as a readily available food source for microorganisms. So those bacteria can't get up and move around and the plant is helping supply it to the microbes because the microbes are going to help bring nutrients and things back in return. So the idea behind this test, when we're analyzing for soil fertility, is we're using an extract in the laboratory that is supposed to mimic that process. So Rick Heaney simply calls it H3A. If you've heard of malic or ulcin, nothing different there. He just named this extract and he's using three of the most commonly produced organic acids in that extract. And we're extracting the soil that we're analyzing right now for these nutrients. So you'll see nitrate, ammonium, phosphate, potassium. One of the things, you'll notice right away that you're missing things like sulfur, maybe zinc, manganese. So these are things that we'll talk about a little later, but we're going to remedy that problem a little bit. We're also going to measure what we call total extractable phosphorus. Because phosphorus in your soil, we understand a lot of the smell of it. There's a lot of phosphorus out there that's not plant available. So we're going to start measuring that fraction as well. We want to know how much phosphorus is there. And finally, what are we looking at on the organic phosphorus? This is the stuff that's in solution in your soil. And the microbes can influence that and try to make some of that plant available. We'll talk a little more about that. So when you have a living root, don't pay attention to the bottom half of this stuff. But this living root, we get all these plant root exudates that come out into the soil. The microbes that can feed on that, these are the different classes of exudates, the organic acids and the amino acids. But when the microbes feed on that, it starts all of these processes, all of these cycles down here that have to do with nutrient movement and nutrient cycling in your soil. And eventually, the plant is willing to give up some of that carbon into the soil so it can take up some of the nutrients that the microbes make available. It's a trading system. No such thing as a free lunch. So the plant is going to do this because it's going to get something in return. Now, we take that crop and now the crop is not living. This is a non-living system. We get crop residues that go in and we talk about decomposition. Well, part of this decomposition process, the microorganisms take oxygen, they decompose these residues and here's another really great word that everyone likes to use. Humus, humic acid, that's kind of a buzzword. Humus is kind of the staple stuff that stays behind from decomposition. The other by-products of decomposition for carbon are we generate CO2 and water and then that CO2 can go back up to the next crop. The part of that cycle that happens in the soil takes place down here where we will build up humic acids and that's this immobilization part. So if you go up to, well, we'll go up to the tundra, about 100 miles north of here to about north of here. There's not a whole lot of microbial activity taking place this time of year, right? That's part of this immobilization phase. That's where carbon and nutrients are staying in the soil because the microbes kind of slow down here. Decomposition slows down, all of this kind of comes to a little bit of a halt. It doesn't stop completely, but it's sure hard to watch. Jay got more than two hours of watching that water infiltrate. He'd stand out there for three weeks and I'd see a whole lot happen. But as this continues, the microbes produce proteins and polysaccharides. Those are the glues that we talked about holding those soil particles together. So that's part of the aggregate formation, part of decomposition and the biology. This is the part, this mineralization part is the part that producers really should pay a lot of attention to. Because feeding your biology, we'll talk about covers and we'll talk about renewers and brazing and all of this information. But feeding all of those things, ultimately, you get a little return here out of the soil. You put good in, you get good out. And you start to get nutrients turning back over in that soil. That's what you're really after when you get around to growing your next crop. So the point is how do we kind of measure this and how do we measure decomposition? Well, a really easy way for you guys in the field is to watch. Don't stay in there for four days, but when you come by, look at how fast is that residue turning over? I hear this all, I usually hear this one more often than the other. I've got important stocks that I've been seeing in my field for three years. Okay? Very little. See, I've got a residue problem, right? You don't have a residue problem, you have a soil biology problem. The build-up of residue is the same, but that's one way to gauge the opposition. You get to the other extreme, I've got a few people who call me and say, I can't keep residue on my field, right? That's the other extreme of that problem. You still have a biology problem. They're eating everything more than you want to. Jay talks about trying to keep the ground warmer and covered, and you'll hear that over and over, and that's a goal. But once you build the system up, that goal gets to be a little more difficult than the other at times. So what ways we can kind of gauge how fast this is occurring is we can measure soil respiration. I mentioned here that when decomposition takes place, we give up carbon dioxide. So when we look at respiration taking place in the soil, that's one of the ways that we can kind of see how fast this is happening. So in the laboratory, there's a laboratory technique and a field technique today, so there's many others dealing with respiration. In the field, you are dealing with conditions that you're dealt at a time you go out and measure. I mentioned that if you wouldn't try this now, decomposition would be a lot slower because the soil temperatures are cooler. Now in the laboratory, we're going to correct that. We're going to take all the soils, we're going to dry them down to so they're equal moisture, and we're going to re-wet those soils, and we're going to incubate those at a constant temperature. And that temperature is supposed to be kind of the optimal temperature, so we talk about soils not wanting them to be too hot or too cold or too wet or too dry. That's what we're trying to get at. Those conditions typically happen on average about four times per year in a growing season. That's just kind of the nationwide average on it. But that's what we're mimicking in the laboratory, that drying and re-wetting process that happens. Some years it never tends to dry out, in other years it never tends to rain. So that does happen, and that affects mineralization, but this is kind of the average. Now, when a soil, so if I have a soil that produces twice as much CO2 in the same amount of time as another soil, which soil is harder, working harder? Which soil is more applied? The one that breeds are, right? This is just measuring how hard your soil is breathing. Gas exchange goes in, oxygen atmosphere goes into your soil, microbes are like you and I. They eat, which we get to do, I think, shortly when I'm done, right? They eat, and when they eat carbon, what are you breathing out? Carbon dioxide. So microorganisms are doing the same thing in that soil. The more food we can provide them, and the more microbes there are, the more CO2 your soil can produce. Wind conditions are right. Now if your soil is as dry as concrete, they're not doing right, or it's frozen. But under those conditions we get this generation of CO2. So when we set everything equal, we can look at two different soils, or two different management schemes, and we can look at the effect of grazing, and we can look at the effect of cover crops on microbial respiration. The higher that number on average, the more microbes you have in the soil, which leads to more activity, nutrient cycling, soil structure building, aggregate stability, all of those things. So this is how we can look at some of these. It's also related to a soil's fertility, and its texture of life. Different soils have different potentials, right? So that's something we just keep in mind. Now there's a lot of text on here. What I'm showing you, and I think you've got this in your handout, I believe, is that this is how we would kind of look at the soil, the soil respiration scores, how we would kind of rank these when we get our results back. Sorry, I know it's one of the pages that are on color. Coffee. So we look at these rankings, and I want to point out that you'll notice when you look at these, we go from very low, low, little below average, little above average, high and very high. First thing somebody usually points out to me is, well there's no true average. Correct. There is no true average. Is the soil that scores a 40 from New Mexico technically the same as the soil that scores 40 from Central Iowa? No. That soil in New Mexico, I might say, was low organic matter, it's respiring 40. I'm going to say that's probably getting above average for that area. But if I was in Central Iowa, I'm not picking on anybody from Iowa if you're here, but if I was in Central Iowa, I'd say that's probably on the low side. You've got to take some of that into account. It's really difficult to give a range for nationwide things, and hopefully in the future we'll be able to break this down a little more and make it regionally specific, but right now we don't have enough data. But what this means for you? So I got my score, what does this mean? How do I grade it's low or grade it's high? What do I do? Well, typically soils that are very low, these are the characteristics they have. Little potential for activity, very slow decomposition, they're metnutrient cycling. If you're planting high carbon crops, corn, wheat, milo, or high carbon cover crops, your residue might stick around for three years. And we also have usually a tie up of nitrogen in that system, because microbes have a lot of carbon to eat, but they have very little nitrogen to use to break down their carbon. And they need the nitrogen to break down their carbon. Now if you take the other extreme and you say, okay well I've got scores consistently above 100, I've got very high, you're nutrient cycling and your residue decomposition are taking place very quickly. So from a management perspective, this will kind of influence you, or it could guide you a little bit on, well what am I going to put out there for, you know, if I'm going to sit in covers, what am I going to go with? You know, we see, if you Google cover crops and you get online and you see guys standing in cover crop fields that are this tall right in there, or they're holding rashes out of Dave Brand's picture, that radish is like 16 long, is that really what you want? If you've got really low respiration, probably not. Matter of fact I'll just say no, because you're going to be really, really upset with whoever got you convinced you don't plant a cover crop. If you've got a really small fire, think of this as fire, and you go dump a truck load of logs on it that are all this big around and that long, you smother your fire. Okay? So we want to start small, we want to start with stuff that has a low seeding ratio, we want to start with cover crops, it'll break down quicker. Now if you have cattle as a tool or livestock, you can get away from growing something this tall, because then you change how long you're going to graze it and win. And then you talk to somebody smarter than I am, and figure out how to make that work. I don't run a lot of cows in my tall neighbors. I've got an Alaska Malibu and 15 Coyotes and a wild cat. They don't like to graze much. So, you know, when you see what I'm saying, this is how we can use some of this information. If you come back and say, well I've got a really big fire, that question of grazing before, how much do you take, how much do you leave? Well, leave half. If you're in a really bad situation where you've got a really small fire, you might graze it down, you might take two-thirds, and see if that residue still disappears. Because you don't want to bury yourself in it. So this is how we can use respiration. Any questions on that? I'll take questions in the middle. The third part of the HANY test is a water extract. So, I mentioned that we evaluate and play nutrients on what's called an H3A extract. The other part of the test is you do a water extract. I need a little water right now, actually. Now, I asked, you know, people ask me, why water? You know, what I mean. They think of the lab and we're playing with chemistry and chemicals and all this stuff and why water. And I asked for a HANY and he said, why water? And he said, well, believe it or not, it actually rained water. I couldn't argue with that logic. So, he's using water as an extract because he wants to know what the microbes are exposed to and what they see in that soil environment. Now, obviously, when that water gets into your soil, there's other things that get mixed in with it. But part of that is what we measure, the stuff that gets mixed in with that water. So, here a little bit, we're going to have lunch and unless Ruth really set it up beautifully for us, I imagine we're going to have to get up and walk out there and get a plate of food. I tell you, it's tough, tough work. Microbes don't have that ability, right? Bacteria don't have legs, they don't have arms. And I'll take you down memory lane, think back, again, that high school biology class that we were talking about earlier. I know you didn't pay attention to the so-called odd thing because I went through that 10 or 12 time test. That's tough. But you remember when you took pond water and put it on a microscope slide and you're looking through there and you see stuff dart around and swim all over? That's what we have locked in our head up here that's going on. We think microorganisms are just swimming all over the place. They do not do that in soil. Bacteria and fungi live in colonies and groups and they're here to soil particles and around organic matter. They don't just move around. So, they need a food delivery system, a really good one. They can't move around so water is that food delivery system. So when it rains, we wash residues, we wash carbon into the soil. As that passes by, those colonies of bacteria and microbes they can take, they can grab on to that and use it. When it moves laterally in the soil, same thing occurs. Or how about when your soil starts to dry out and the water starts moving back up? Same thing occurs. So this is why we're looking at the water extract because we want to get an idea of what's in that water, what's in the soil that can be in the water that the microbes can utilize. And what we're going to measure is we're going to measure organic carbon. Now, we talk a lot about carbon and I want you to keep in mind this is how much carbon we can extract with water. It's not the same thing as organic matter. I'll mention that again. We're also going to measure extractable total nitrogen. So we normally focus on things like nitrate when we talk about soil fertility and that's what we measure in a lab. But a microorganism would rather eat protein than take it in a pill, right? So we're going to measure nitrate in ammonium but we're going to subtract that from the total nitrogen and that gives us this fraction of organic acid, soluble organic acid. Then this is the balance we're looking at. We're going to look at how much seed in and what the balance is of that food for the microbes. And we're going to talk about mineralizable in it and organic in release and finally where it gives you what you call the soil household. So I promised you I'd give you a quick mention of soil organic matter versus water extractable. The best way I can describe this is that soil organic matter is the quantity of carbon and it represents the house. So the higher that percent soil organic matter the bigger the house. The bigger the house the microbes you can have, you can hold, right? Water extractable organic carbon represents the amount of food in that house. They're related but I've seen soils with one and a half percent organic matter have really high watersoil and carbon numbers because those soils typically have a large input, if you're trying to fix them they have a large input of maneuvers. They be compost, compost teas, those are all sources of organic matter and they're grown in covers if they can. And I've seen soils as high as six and a half percent in soil organic matter that basically have less than a hundred per million soil and carbon. Great big house, no food. So a follow-up question. How many of you have kids? Nobody wants to admit it. Well I doubt why she's eight months old and if she keeps growing I don't know how I'm going to feed her because she's from daddy's stock, right? What happens if you have a bunch of teenagers in the house and you don't have any food in it? Doesn't work real well, right? I heard that in the news. Microbes will starve, okay? Microbes are teenagers. Another way I describe them is the mafia. They take their cut, okay? The point is if you don't keep the refrigerator stock if you're not constantly this goes back to what James talked about if you're not constantly putting carbon into the system the microbes will burn the house down. And they have to to survive. And you can relate that to cattle grazing. How many of you see moving directs apart? Anybody have a fence around their pasture that looks like the one they have for T-Rex? If you build one and you put your cows out there and never move them they eat everything. Eventually they would eat it and try because they have two choices. Eat it or starve. If you are feeding hay or if you're doing that type of system when it gets cold out you dump a semi-load of hay bales into the bunker and you just say, all right, see you in five months. No, it's a constant input, right? Soils are the same way. You've got to have more of a constant input. When we grow annual crops with nothing behind it or in front of it we end up with, well, you guys have got two week growing season in North Dakota. You get about four weeks down the road. So you get, what, three months, four months, five months of growing season. And that's your input. That's your card input. And then we take a whole bunch of that card and we haul it to the elevator and say good luck. So my point is, is that if we put low energy in here this is the energy, the soluble stuff and we're feeding this, they start burning the house down. We see organic matter numbers drop. They've been robbed. So keep that in mind. The other part of this is that we have water soluble nitrogen. Your organic nitrogen is tied with carbon. They're not independent. They come together in a package. So I'm going to go back to the kids. Why did, I'll say mom, I'll say why did mom say his dad doesn't care, right? But why did mom say you can't give the four-year-old a can of coke and a pixie stick for lunch. It's all carbon, right? Real high energy. And they run around the house, you know, for 30 minutes, I mean in circles and then they slam it into a wall and they sleep for four hours. It's real high carbon. No nutrition. Okay? So let's take the other extreme. Why can't you just feed them a bunch of multivitals? No energy. You need both. The doctor keeps saying, gotta eat a panel tonight, right? I'm probably a little too high on the energy side. That's okay. Don't tell the doctor. Your soils, most of your soils are really high on the nutrient side. They're really low on the energy side. Carbon is where we struggle the most. But if they are tied together and when you think to feeding your cattle again, why do you care about what you're feeding them? Wheat straw versus alfalfa bags. Different feed values, right? Different gains, different energies, different meaning. So what we put into the soil has an effect on what the microbes are able to do for us. So we start looking at this soluble organic nitrogen. This is the pool of nitrogen that's available to your microbes and you'll notice when I list these sources up here, ammonium nitrate, UAN, ammonium sulfate, those are not direct sources of organic hint. It's these things. You do get some on your soil organic matter. Cover crops, your other crop residents, plant residents, the newer compost teams, animal residents. I got an email this morning where a gentleman had a two-year-old bug lay down in his cover crop field and died this spring. And he said, I got a micro crop. He sent me the picture and there's nothing left but little tiny four corns in it, a couple of ribs. All of those things are actually sources. Now I'm not telling you to go shoot a bunch of deer and spread it on your field. You don't like that. But all of those are sources of protein in nitrogen. So that's what we're looking at. So here's some ranges. This is one of the handy tests of us. This is what we're seeing. Overall, the range for carbon, usually somewhere between 50 and 1,000 part per million, nitrogen somewhere between 5 and 100. Typically, though, on average, most soils are falling, especially row crop situations are falling between 1 and 300 and 10 and 30 for carbon and nitrogen, respectively. Perennial systems tend to score higher than row crop systems. Why? I mentioned you only have a four-week growing season up here. Animals don't have a lot of opportunity to put carbon back into that soil. So that's why we typically see that. In general, the higher these numbers are, the better. With one big caveat. They've got to be balanced. We can't have real high energy and low nutrition or vice versa. We've got to have a balance. I want to mention that this fluctuates throughout the year. And that makes sense. And the further north you go, the more... Well, I shouldn't say the more it fluctuates, but the higher the peaks and lower the balance. Because it's much more intense for a shorter amount of time. And we know that. I've been able to actually track that now. So we kind of have an idea of how this will move throughout the year. But that has implications for sampling. You've got to keep that in mind when you decide to do some of these, and you want to try to meet the system. Okay, so this is that seeding balance we talked about. On the test, we mentioned that when we see a seeded ratio of about 20 to 1, we will give you no credit for mineralization, for nitrogen. Nitrogen is limiting in that system for bacteria. Now this 21 seeded ratio is not the same as the seeded ratio of your cover crop eggs. It's not the same as the seeded ratio on your organic pad. This is somewhere in between that. This is what the micro-direction is eating on. But bacteria have a seeded ratio, anyone want to take a guess? Coronetating to 1. Usually in maturity. Bacteria have a seeded ratio of about 3 to 1. That's been revelational. Everyone just look at it. What that means is that bacteria bacteria really create nitrogen. Every 3 carbons that they need, they need 1 nitrogen. Soybeans are what 30 to 1 in that way. So what I'm saying is that nitrogen is limiting in that system. In their food, the organic in, they tie up nitrogen and keep it from the plant. So that can be detrimental. Ideally, we like to see this to get between 8 and 15. That's where we like to get it. And crop rotation, crop rotation plays a role in it. So just inherent soil properties. Some soils tend to have a higher seeded ratio than others. But 30 years of continuous corn like I've been sampling in northern Nebraska on some of the Sandhill stuff, that seeded ratio is in the 40s and 50s. They got Jane's attention. Yeah, continuous corn for 30 years and that's what, you know, now that doesn't happen all over because I mean, I've done continuous corn out of Iowa and their seeded ratios are 18 to 20. But they had more nitrogen in the bank to start with. That organic matters higher in those soils than the Sandhill's in Nebraska. So we can influence that with management. Now when we get that number down into those ranges, we start to turn nutrients over and we start to kick nitrogen back out to the next crop. So again, a lot of text here. I'm going to leave this with Ruth. I think this is also a handout. So this is your management implications when you're looking at these. So if you look at your seeded ratios above 20, pretty easy. You've got too much carbon or not enough organic nitrogen. So what do I do? If I order my cover mixes, I reduce my high carbon inputs and sometimes say inputs, that's even your crop. You know, instead of going corn, corn, wheat, beans or something, try to stick something else in there. If you're grazing, graze longer to try to let the tadle help you reduce that carbon that's going on the surface. Now you don't want to graze it there. You've got to leave some out there, but you can graze it a little longer and then take a little more off. Same thing on the corn side. You've got a little energy, so you've got to look at doing the opposite. Increase high carbon inputs, graze a little shorter. There's other things you can put on this list. You'd be a little creative. Once you get into these ranges here, 8 to 15 is good. 10 to 12 is absolutely ideal. Once you balance that ratio, the goal is to drive up those numbers together. Intensity becomes a name of the game. Increase the amount of carbon inputs going into your system. Increase that cycle and keep that, drive that system up together. So now, we take all that information and we compile it together and Rick gives you a score. Everybody wants a score or a number. So what's the next question, right? What's the number mean? Nothing. I bet you like hearing that. The number itself doesn't mean anything unless you put it in context. If I were to sit up here and say 74, 29, what does that mean? Nothing. I've got to know what a context is. So Rick 80 says we like to see the score above 7 and I always tell people this because I hate getting yelled at for it. I ask him why 7? And he shrugged his shoulders and said, why not? It is just a starting point. But go back to our example, New Mexico and Iowa. Anybody here from Iowa? Oh wow, just one? Okay, somebody hold on to him. Two? Okay. He's by the back door. I might have a good running start. So here's the example I'm going to give you. So somebody called me up. They were actually from New Mexico. This is why I give this example. I found out in New Mexico they farmed just like we do. He had an organic pecan farm. Everybody's doing that, right? But the trick was is that he was growing covers in his orchard. And he was great as a machine. He'd been doing it for about 12 years. And he ran one of these tests where Rick Haney said you need to score something above 7. He scored 6.96. Real close. And he was impressed and he called me up and he said, I don't think this is working. I thought it was, but now the numbers tell me they're not working. I said, go find me what you think is the worst soil that you can find by your own definition. He said, that's easy. That's my neighbor's fault. Well, don't tell him, Matt. I said, what's he doing? And he said, well, he's an organic pecan farm too. Except he uses three to four tillage passes between his trees. And he's doing nothing else to keep everything as clean as a tabletop. High inputs. We ran it. Scored a 1.2 still to this day the lowest soil I've ever tested. It looked like crushed up concrete. Now I said, okay, well then go find me what you think is the best soil that you can find if you can find soil. He went out and he went about a mile down the road and he found a native area that's never been managed and he pulled a sample and it's where he's 7.3. Is it realistic for him to think he's going to score a 20? No. But that gave us context. Now that number meant something and his attitude changed overnight that he was doing a good job and he was doing the right thing. He was seeing progress. Now the reason why I picked on Iowa is because I've done this in Central Iowa and we ran a lot of samples out of Central Iowa. And when I put this slide up there you should have seen it. Everybody's high-fiving each other. We're doing real good now. And I don't pick on them too much but they were blessed with some pretty good soil to start with. And their average score, their lowest score was almost 8.3 that they had in that producer group. The absolute worst soil I could find would have been a continuous corn for 36 years. I don't care what it yields because yield is not a measure of soil health, in my opinion. It's been till average two passes per year for over 60 years. It's sort of 7.7. But when I found that best soil I could find in Central Iowa, it's sort of 29. So suddenly 8.5 isn't looking too good anymore. But I tell you that story because so many people are interested in what this number is and what it means but you've got to put it into context. And you can do that on your own farm really easily. You go find a soil that you think is really good or one that you think is really great. Try to look beyond yield and you don't need to spend a lot of money doing it. You don't need to run 100 samples. You run two. And once you kind of establish that range it gives you an idea of where you're at and now you can track that change over time within your farm. Okay? So that's how we kind of use this. So what am I going to do first if I hit this? I'm going to balance the seeded ratio first. That's my goal. I usually tell people this. The way I think of that is that I've got a friend of mine who's a real car. He's a mechanic. He's a car guy. He came to me one day. He says, man, you should see. I got this Corvette I bought the other day. You should see how fast this thing goes. I said, no kid. He goes to start at the whole start. And I said, yeah, it goes zero. That's great. I don't care how fast you think it goes or how high the speedometer says if you don't get the engine started you'll never find out. Balance in the seeded ratio is what helps you get the engine started. Once you get it started then you can fine tune the system. But until you get that process going you know, Jay talked a lot about the transition. You know, you do things a little differently those transition years that you do at year seven and eight and nine because your soils build up resilience they become more resilient to drought, compaction, disturbance. So it's during those transition years you're going to work on balance in that ratio. So I mentioned to start with the soil health score. The soil health score immediately. If I've got two samples under different management I look at one and it's 15 and I look at the other and it's eight that tells me something right away. Without digging into it any more it tells me something. Now if I use that equation that you all have in that handout I believe you can actually go through and determine okay where am I doing well and where do I need a little help. I'm balanced on my ratio or I'm not or my carbon's pretty low I should increase that. And if you do those things your respiration should go up because if you provide microbes more food in a better habitat they'll reproduce and they won't act. So I just talked about establishing ranges on your own farm. Again it's more with neighbors if you've got neighbors that are interested I wouldn't advise off the fence to your neighbor because you think he's got the worst soil. That's a pretty risky but work with them. Work with them, see what you can do. The last couple slides here is when and how do I use it? There's two major ways you can use a hanging table. One of them is just tracking different soil than you can. That's probably the most popular way of using the tester right now and that's probably what I would recommend. You can sail with this anytime of the year. If you want to get out of a snow shovel and scoop 60 inches of snow out of the way or have Jay do it, he's a professional then get out and drill a hole and go for it. You can do it anytime of the year but that means that you've got to do it at about the same time over here. When you're tracking this change over time you've got to be consistent. You don't want to compare samples in January or June. How often do I want to do it? I put up here once per year or every other year. I would even tell you every three years depending on what you're doing. I tell guys in Central Nebraska they, you know, well I'm really excited about soil health and I'm going to try to do some different stuff. I'm going to go note it. Is that it? Yup, I'm going to go note it. That's fly. That's a great place to start. But there's no reason to run this test every single year if you're just going to stick with your corn bean rotation and go note with all the higher because this test won't tell you anything that you're ever learning. So I'd be looking at at least three. Now if you get really excited and you leave here and you say I'm going to do it all in. I'm doing the whole wax. We're going to get livestock integration. I'm doing different cover mixes. I'm changing my whole rotation. I'm parking all the equipment. We're going to do all this up. Test one two here. One two. Because you're going to start seeing changes occur much quicker that way in that type of system. You don't want to waste your time and money. The other way there's bumps in the road not just watching them in your field. We'll see that on the test. A lot of times the first year you're using cover crops these numbers go down. And it makes sense. Because now your soil is trying to support more plants than it's had to support in a hundred years. So some of these numbers go down and it's kind of a shock to take that one step forward, two steps back approach from here. And eventually you're taking two steps forward, one step back and then after three to five years depending on what you're doing you just see more of a steady trend out. But we do see that on here. The other way of using the test is for nutrient management. Now I say nutrient management right now it's really nitrogen management. We're still working on this. I actually just got back to this place a week ago. It was 88 degrees or something like that in the typical Texas. So it's coming. I think they're playing a corn next week. It's pretty bad. But nutrient management will talk about it. It makes sense prior to your fertilizer application what you're trying to reduce and input cost and then if you're using that you've got to sample every year. But I want to talk just briefly a little more about nutrient management. So I'm going to focus on nitrogen right here on this slide. Excuse me. On a conventional soil test most soil tests from any lab you were going to get nitrate as a credit. So when you call and say how much nitrogen is in my soil generally we measure nitrate and we give you enough. Excuse me. And I'm going to say this that works to a point in what system you're in it works. But as we get away from as we try to get on board and get everybody together and move away from those conventional paradigms of well I'm going to grow this crop and this is what it needs and I'm going to put on this much because I already have this much in my soil. So as we get away from some of that we can't just measure nitrate. We probably can't just measure these three things either but this is where we're going to start. On a any test evaluation we're going to look at that same nitrate but we're also going to measure ammonium and then we're going to calculate or estimate it is an educated estimate how much of this organic nitrogen pool is going to become available to you in that growing season. That's the magic question, right? How much nitrogen can I get out of this? Well, the way we're going to do that is we're going to look at three things we've already talked about. Seed-in values if your seed-in ratio is really high the answer is zero. That's the credit we're going to give you. None. So that's the first thing we look at. Now if the ratio is balanced the second thing we're going to look at then is how much organic nitrogen do I have in that water extract? From the test. If you've got 10 pounds of organic nitrogen in that water extract guess what your maximum credit is? 10 pounds. We will not give you a credit any higher than that because we couldn't measure anything higher. The third thing we looked at is microbial biomass. That's solvita respiration. I told you before that if you have really low microbes really small fire what's your potential for decomposition? Really low. If you have really low potential for decomposition and nutrient cycling we can't very well give you a high credit for nitrogen out of that. So those three things get factored in to this estimate of mineralization. So what happened in 2012? Nobody likes to talk about 2012. I had a guy call me from Kansas and he said there is no way I got that much mineralization this year. It's too dry. And I said so? Did you grow a crop? Well no I didn't have any water. Well then what difference does it make? Do you understand what I'm saying? Is it, we are estimating this and when conditions are really bad and you don't have water, yes we are probably going to overestimate but if you are in a dry land situation water is probably going to be your limiting factor, not my most situation. On the other hand we get a really great year, weather year and we are probably underestimating a little bit on how much of that is going to become available. Because if you are getting good times in the rains and your temperatures are not too extreme so we can get some pretty big numbers out of this. So on your report what we are showing you, this is actually off of the soil report we show you what a traditional evaluation would be, that's nitrate only we show you what the heating test evaluation is and then what the pounds of the indifference is. That difference sometimes is in a school, it's 5 pounds to the acre. The guys crossed from the lab in Carney I think they do about 6 tillage passes a year, still life in Indian hygris corncourt in Indian rotation and I'd run one of their soils just to see it and the pounds difference was about 2.3 that they needed it. So this test I would tell them don't even run they didn't try to help me it just tells you what we already know. Now on the other stream who's who's who's South Dakota's soil producer here. Who's a big native South? I always throw out Gabe Brown but I don't want to do that because I'm here, I don't even know who or his. Alright, nobody's going to volunteer. Gabe Brown we run some of his soils the difference that we see on his is about well he's about 85,000,000 about 150 pounds of difference. His nitrate numbers are typically below 4 pounds in the acre credits. So if we were giving him a nitrogen recommendation for 150 bushel corn we'd tell him he needs to put on 150 units in because he has no nitrogen in his soil. But then he turns around and grows a big corn crop with no nitrogen application that's coming from somewhere. A traditional test doesn't show us any of that the heating test tries to show us some of that. Now it doesn't always work and I certainly wouldn't tell you to go out and reduce your nitrogen application 150 pounds just because the test sets the scope. Gabe's a little different monster and he's pretty confident in what he's doing and he takes that as a challenge so he's going to try it out. The point is, this is what we're trying to do as the soil gets healthier that credit gets larger because most of our soils we're in a conventional system and they're not very healthy what we have is an inorganic nitrogen pool organic nitrogen pool but as we get healthier this starts to flip okay? That's what we end up seeing. So you build up the organic pool and keep the inorganic stuff down. Who fertilized the prairie? Buffalo biology did it for us right? Distributed nutrients. Now the one big difference is that in an agriculture system we're exported more so than prairie. If you measure a prairie soil the level of available nutrients is pretty low. They always tell you what's some of the worst soils on the planet. Rainforest don't have the Amazon look at the soils down there how productive is that soil? Look at all the stuff that's growing. All the nutrients are tied up in that biomass. Agriculture systems don't work that way we want it all tied up in the biomass for a shorter amount of time we just want it to sit there in the soil to wait. And that's what we've got to get away from. Keep it tied up in the system to let the system be more productive. That's part of this here. Last thing that we try to generate what we call modern-day recommendations so one of the things we need to consider if you're using the H&E test for nitrogen management you've got to start looking at subsoil nitrogen in most rapid situations in this part of the country subsoil nitrate don't run a H&E test on your subsoil it's a waste of money unless you're really interested but save your time run it on the top soil run the cheap $5 test on the subsoil we're going to start including all the other well I should say all most of the other plant nutrients I mentioned before that right now you don't get sulfur and zinc and manganese those things again we're just going to toss them on the report for you and Red Ward who is much smarter than I is going to be we've been working on this together we're going to start providing fertility recommendations for all of those plant nutrients if you give us a crop and a yield mold and we're not just going to be looking at NPK we're going to use the H3 values from the test the way we're doing that real quickly not to get into too much detail you heard of mainly three phosphorus you heard of Olsen Phosphorus Bright B1 Phosphorus Z-Golms all three of those tests are analyzing the exact same thing but they're just using different chemistries to do it so you get three different numbers well in this case we're using the same exact techniques to measure potassium and calcium and iron and all those things but we're using a different extract so we get a different number what we've been doing for the last three to four years is we've been compiling a database of samples where we run all of these nutrients and we also run a traditional test and we're running on the same sample so we can start to correlate how these are related to each other for example, potassium the Hainey test will be two to three times lower than it will be on a conventional test using a Monimax state we've got around 14,000 samples to say that's true from all over the country so now that we have an idea of how that works we can start using the current recommendation equations and using these numbers in those equations we just adjust that before we put it in there does that make sense at all so we're going to start offering this we're also going to be changing the factors how many of you has anybody ever figured out how much nitrogen you need to grow a partial corn if you ask ten different people you get ten different numbers usually universities tell you different things labs tell you different things we ran into a great example of this with some data that you can say that Duane sent us here recently on some Milo stuff one of the big problems is that Hainey's using a different value for nitrogen on crops than South Coast State or Ray Ward so we're going to eliminate that problem too we're going to make those the same and hopefully that will help make recommendations a little better beyond the fertility recommendations this test allows us to make some recommendations to you about managing cover crop mixes I'm not going to tell you what species to plant but I can give you kind of a ratio of grasses and the humes brassicas to kind of get you started based on some of these results do you got a big fire, a little fire do you see any ratio out of that so that's what we're working on I think I got maybe just two minutes for questions if anybody had any yeah that's a great question so the question was specifically what kind of variation we start to see between different laboratories a lot I wish I could tell you better no, unfortunately here's what happens Rick Hainey takes his test and he will let anybody who asks him run then those laboratories run home and they say well we can't run it the exact same way that lab's run we need a repetitive edge we're going to change this and every lab starts doing that pretty soon you got it and that's incredibly frustrating for even a guy in a lab because it takes validity away from the test now I can tell you that what we're doing is what Rick is doing that's why we called the Hainey test we have changed the name of it I'm stamping his name on it we're doing it the way he's doing it now I went down the temple and talked to him about adding in these other nutrients and he gave us that okay he was doing that work five years ago he just never included there's a couple other labs that are doing a really good job as far as I know there's a few the question was if you have a high seated ratio one of the recommendations is to lower the carbon inputs and he asks would it be better to increase the amount of in to keep that carbon and build the solar energy back it depends how you're going to add in would be my answer if you just say well I'm going to add nitrogens I'm going to buy a bunch of UAN that's not a really good way of adding nitrogen to the system in my opinion now if you're going to put that out there with covers to tie that up right away incorporate it into the system and yes I think that would work to do that the reason why I don't tell people to just add more in is because that's the first thing a lot of individuals think of and then they want to just go buy more put on more nitrogen but really it's the form of it we want it in the organic form so as long as you're going to get it tied up right away it's converted through the system then it will work not necessarily because that stuff in the soil the microbes will tie up some of it because they'll utilize some of it as they're raking down that carbon residue but depending on how much you're going to be putting out there when you start talking about organic matter about a thousand pounds of organic in and a percent of organic matter so if you're talking about putting it on amounts that are going to really make a difference those are really high amounts I don't think the biology can handle that much at once you have to kind of spoon feed it to them over time you might answer to that and I've seen people have a great response by spraying on little nitrogen on corn stocks I've also heard people say that doesn't work at all and I'm guessing that probably has more to do with a moisture and temperature factor you know sometimes it works sometimes it does kind of like flying on cereal ride sometimes it works great other times it's a total bust I wouldn't eliminate my high carbon stuff but I would keep an eye on it I would go to corn and I wouldn't want to go into the cover crop that's 100% rye every year and let it grow really tall and you can still grow rye if you terminate a little earlier so the question was about nitrogen mineralization rates and based on precipitation areas of higher precipitation lowers you can change in that rate the answer is yes if we end up in areas that are getting 50, 60 inches of rain nitrogen mineralization is going to be much different than what it would be on 15 but one of the ways we get around that is if we don't look at basal respiration so basal respiration is that in the field method where you're just using the conditions of the soil on a year long basis well basal respiration is much higher in the southeast than it is in the north because of that factor you're talking about recalculating nitrogen mineralization based on the burst response and the burst response has to do with significant drying and then re-wetting and I don't remember the exact definition on how much rain that is but it's an actual breakdown per event so it doesn't matter to get 50 inches of rain a year or 20 at that point necessarily basing strictly on the number of rainfall events that are over I believe an inch and a half or an inch growls but that would be what he considers significant now they're breaking that down what he's working on right now is changing some of that to be more regionally specific so I said there's an average of 4 of those per year but that is across the country and you're going to get a lot more 2 inch rains out east but you've got to have the drying period in between it so if you get a 2 inch rain and then 2 days later you get another 2 inch rain that doesn't count because you didn't have a drying period in between so that's how they're doing it basically mind the weather data from all over the country to come up with that yeah, they're still working on regionalizing it a little more now ok, thank you very much