 Dr. DeSutter received his BS and MS degrees at South Dakota State and his PhD from Kansas State. After completing his postdoc with the USDA ARS, he was hired on in 2006 as an environmental soil scientist at North Dakota State University. His primary research interests are saline and sodic soils, reclamation, extraction and impacted soils, and interpretation for measuring soil physical and biological parameters. He teaches the soil and land use and environmental field instrumentation. Okay. Well, thank you. Thank you very much for having Zach and I give a talk. I don't know if... So, Zach is one of our newest North Dakota professional soil classifiers, and so his number is 78, right, 78. So kind of a historical kind of a thing. I don't... Has anybody seen that movie, Talladega Nights, The Legend of Ricky Bobby? Okay. So, Zach was actually one of the young actors in that movie. And you remember when the grandpa said, I want you boys go dig a hole and I'm gonna go get a beer? Zach's been digging holes ever since. And so it's been a wonderful watching him grow up and being in that... Just being around him has been so inspirational. All right. So, one of the things that when we talk about reclamation, I like to think of it more as a holistic approach. And so to do that, oh, first things first. So Chase is a PhD student. He just gave his talk next door. He is asking that we... People take a survey. He has a class that he's taking. And this would actually be part of his dissertation research. So I'm gonna pass the QR code around. It'll also be up at the end as well. But I'm sort of begging, not asking, but sort of begging. If you don't mind taking the survey, that would be very appreciated. And so one of the things that we like to think about a lot is this holistic approach to reclamation, which if you think about soils, think of it as a three-legged stool, physical, chemical, and biological properties. And you can't really study soils without sort of thinking at all three at the same time. Otherwise, the stool will tip over, right? And so one of the things we're gonna focus on today, Zach will talk a little bit about the biological properties. We're gonna assume today that the soils we're talking about are balanced chemically well, not any issues per se. And we're gonna talk a little bit about the soil physical properties, specifically the organic matter and the soil water. And so Zach, you wanna... So when we think about soils, the ideal soil, which rarely occurs, but it does in fantasy land in a sense, is 45% mineral, 5% organic, and the other 50% are pores, meaning that the pores can be, have water, they can have air, but it's just a very functioning type soil. And so the mineral portion of this is made up of sand, silt, and clay, okay? So the sand particles are the large ones, we can see those. The silt particles, if you can kind of squint with the lighting, it's a little bit bigger, but the clay particles are really the small ones. And so when we think about the properties of soils, it's oftentimes the clay content that drives much of that. And so you gotta think about the... So a US penny is two grams, okay? And so with clay, there's three million centimeters squared in a gram of soil. So three million centimeters squared in a gram, whereas the silt is 1,500, okay? So what drives the properties, the clay? It's because of the surface area to volume ratio of that. And so if you mix all those together, you end up with this beautiful textural triangle knowing the percent clay, the percent silt, and the percent sand. So let's go to the next one. And so when you think about like the mixtures of these sand, silt, and clays, that's what really drives soil water. And so in the upper left-hand corner, you have a soil that has... It's at saturation, meaning that if you take a sponge, you squish it and you drop it in water and you move it around, and then you pick it up and you let it drip. The last drip that comes out is still at saturation. When that drip stops, it's at field capacity, okay? So tile drainage, if you take that sponge up and it's dripping, that's the water that will go through a tile drain. But when it stops, it's at field capacity and no more water will go into a tile drain, okay? So that's the same thing that's around our houses, the same thing that's in agricultural fields or for reclamation. And then when the soil dries out, that becomes what's called the wilting point. And so the wilting point is where the last bit of water is where a plant can take it up, okay? And so that's what we call the wilting point. And so the different textures though, sand, sandy loam, loam, so on and so forth, have a different ability to hold on to plant available water. And so when we think about reclamation, which side of this do you think would be have a greater probability of success in our region, the sand or the clay? Think about how much water is available at the plant available water, the clay, right? Bigger area, you have a wider differential between the field capacity and the wilting point. And so when we think about reclamation, you always want to start with the best product possible, if you can. Don't try to start a project when you have sand or sandy loam, when in fact you can get a different texture and gain some headway when you're thinking about a plant available water, okay? So why is that important? This is a really good graph and it's really telling. Inches of water on the y-axis, year on the x-axis. Potentially, evapotranspiration is what the atmosphere demands, like is asking for. Rainfall is what we actually get. There's a huge discrepancy between these two, right? This is almost a 5x difference. This is why reclamation becomes difficult, is because as soon as it gets done raining, the atmosphere demands water and water moves up into the atmosphere. And so the key in all reclamation is to manage the soil water. Keep soil water there and keep it from evaporating. And so when we think about like the soil texture part, if you have a sandy soil in an area that has a lot of evaporative demand, that soil is going to dry out very quickly. If you have closer to that loam or clay loam, that plant available water is going to be a little bit thicker, that's going to help you with the reclamation process, okay? So if you take a typical landscape in the Williston area as an example, you have different what we call soil series across the landscape. Each of these has different soil properties, okay? So which of these do you think just by guess and by golly would be the most productive soil on this landscape? Who wants to start? Tonka, we have a vote for a Tonka. What else? Yes, sir. Williams, one more. Where do you think water moves on the landscape? Up or down? Down, that's why our gentleman up here said Tonka, what happens when you get a little too much water? Then you get some drowning out, right? So if you go through this, if we rate these soils on their productivity index, bull bells is one of our state's most productive soils. Why? It kind of sits kind of in that saddle, not too wet, not too dry, does it really well. Williams, go the next one. So which of these do you think is the lowest productivity index? Wabak, yep, let's go ahead. So these are what landowners pay taxes on. They pay their taxes on based on the productivity index of those soils. And so a bull bells is going to be a higher tax, higher tax than a Wabak. But if you're a farmer or a rancher, you want a lot more bull bells than you do Wabak. Believe me. Okay, let's go to the next one. Okay, so if you look at the sort of on a Katina, sort of on a landscape ways, you can see that at the upper, look for just the darker, darker colors. So up on the top, you have the Wabak, very thin topsoil, right? Very thin topsoil. If you go down to the bull bells, man, it's looking pretty good. And that's why the productivity index is greater. Not only does it have better soil properties, but it has more soil organic matter. And your soil organic matter then is what drives a lot of our productivity. But okay, so so organic matter. This is what we want to get back into our soils. This is one of the greatest drivers of our productivity. And so as you start with plant litter or roots or whatever, it goes into this big cycle. You have, you know, everything's going on. But at the end of the day, this stable organic matter is really where you're at. And through this whole process, nutrients are released for plants to use or for other microbes to use. Go ahead. And so one of the things that if you, the soil on the left has all of its organic matter in it. The soil on the right, we took it all out. Painstaking, right? You have to pick them out with like tweezers. No, actually we use hydrogen peroxide. We heated it up and then we burned it off. But the organic matter is really what drives a lot of our productivity. Okay, go ahead and hit the other one then. This is a study that was a big global collection of data. One of the things that came very clear in this study was that when you get to about 3% organic matter, anything above that, your yields don't really change. But when you get less than 3% organic matter, that's when your yields start to really decline. And so when you think about reclamation, it's not just soil, but it's the organic matter that is there and the contribution of that to plant productivity. So a really good study that was done by our friends in South Dakota and South Dakota State, Gojaks. And so we were, one of the things is that they had a lot of eroded landscape. And what they did was they moved soil from that bottom area, that bow bells type soil to the top. And what they determined was that at the severely eroded site, addition of six inches of top soil increased coring grain yields by up to 50% and soybean yields by up to 60%. Okay, what happened? They brought that organic matter, that top soil to an eroded site and it did better. Okay, so that's the concept that we're going to talk, that Zach's going to talk to you about with some of the data is about soil blending or soil mixing. And so that's the act of taking a soil that is not very good and blending it with soil that is pretty good just to achieve results that we can get similar to what the study that they did here. So, Zach? Thank you, Tom. That role in Talladega Knights actually propelled me into holes too. I was an extra. Right. No. Thank you for that. Segwaying into the, maybe the idea of soil blending and its effects on soil biological properties. You know, what happens if you don't have a site that you can bring soil from the bottom of the hill and bring it up top? If you have a limited top soil source on a reclamation site but you have a lot of excavated fill material, you're not going to probably grow productive crops on there. What can you do? Using that idea, Tom and my fellow graduate colleagues conducted a study with subsoil taken from an active reclamation project of contaminated subsoil contaminated by crude oil, thermally desorbed it, which is just using briefly using heat to disorb hydrocarbons from the soil particles and it's blown away and in that process, the heat kind of destroys a lot of any organic matter that's there and subsoil inherently has low quantities of subsoil of organic matter already and then combining that with topsoil at different ratios. So on the x-axis, you have TD staining for thermal desorption that's 100% thermally desorbed subsoil. On the far right of it, you have 100% topsoil and in looking at a trial in a greenhouse with different ratios ranging from 90% thermally desorbed and 10% topsoil to 40% thermally desorbed and 60% topsoil, you see that the greater amount of topsoil you can have in that blend, the greater amount of crop biomass and yield you're going to get. And this was with no nitrogen added and it really shows how vitally important that organic matter is to enhancing because there is nitrogen in the organic matter to be available for plants to use. But when you add nitrogen, we do see an effect where if you have a 50% mixture of each, your yield and your biomass is already reaching the control level of just topsoil showing that there is a potential use for this method on these sites where you don't have a large availability of this topsoil. And there is a unique finding of thermally desorbed subsoil reaching the same yield as topsoil but really that was because there was the addition of fertilizer and thermal desorption has a lot of properties that can release nutrients right away but that effect isn't going to occur over the following years. Next slide please. And so that same soil concept was put into practice in a field scale study. This is the same soils taken for that study is here in this field study as well. So you can see on here the atop soils, the darkest color of the plots there, rich in organic matter and the TDU which is essentially the same as TD is also shown there. There was blending one to one between the TDU and A and the SP which it was naturally degraded contaminated subsoil blended with topsoil and then also grown just with the subsoil alone and compared to also just the thermally desorbed subsoil grown alone. Next slide please. And there was a cropping system put in place for this study. It was over four years and it included hard red spring wheat and then a peas hard red spring wheat and then sorghum in 2019. And this the results from this study next slide please. Here you can see looking at these charts that the blended soils again reflected the same findings in that greenhouse study where with proper nutrient management which was conducted across these four studies the yields and or biomass production level was not was similar to the topsoil treatment and everything that did not have topsoil was significantly lower than the topsoil alone. And it's important to just remember that this is with proper fertilizer management program because without it that subsoil even though it's mix of topsoil just doesn't have the readily available nutrients that fertilizers provided to crops in 2019 and 2017 there was actually no grain to harvest. So we had to harvest biomass but this regression on the upper right hand side of the screen shows the importance of topsoil if you could press one more button that red marker shows that line that Tom was talking about that 3.44% soil organic matter. This shows soil organic carbon but that line represents that critical level that anything beyond it will not really enhance crop growth but getting to that level is important for maximizing that crop growth and yield. And the atop soil is about there but even by mixing it with or blending it with the subsoil materials crop growth is reaching there and it's economically a viable option to do it if you can provide the fertilizer management next slide please. And so knowing and understanding better how that blending technique can enhance the biological properties enough to enhance crop growth and hopefully reach reclamation success. It's also important to understand what's going on in the soil to that involves the microbes that are important in rebuilding stable organic matter and breaking down the present organic matter and the crop residues into plant available nutrients. And so this was soil taken from that initial greenhouse study that I talked about when I first started speaking and the authors measured CO2 respiration which is a good proxy for measuring the activity of soil microbes. And over the course of the study you can see the topsoil which is the black triangle achieved the greatest CO2 respiration from the soil which is expected and as you move down the treatments with diminishing topsoil percentages activity really is stunted comparatively and it's especially interesting to look at the bottom two lines on this chart they almost go flat line at the end of the study and that is due to the lack of available sources for microbes to consume and to actually be able to respire CO2 and the next chart on this slide goes over the relationship it has with soil organic carbon and again soil organic matter with the red line marking that critical threshold the atop soil above and beyond it and that 50-50 mix is the next best thing to that and you can see as the clumps of our treatment measurements go down negative to the bottom left that really signifies the abundance drops off as you hit that below that critical threshold. Next slide please and this relationship was further explored at this study site that I was talking about with the different treatments in the field and this was the second time that we were able to measure the abundance or sorry the first time that we were actually able to measure the abundance of the microbes we looked at the respiration in 2016 but this allowed us to look four years later what the community looks like in the soil and again without repeating myself the importance of soil organic matter is really shown here with the regression on the left and that red marker on the line showing that critical threshold thank you Tom and the atop soil again is there and without having the empirical analyses to back it up that mixture is still just even closer to that atop soil as far as the spread goes and the abundance is also equal across this study and it's like a synergistic process here the abundance of the microbes was run with the regression across compared to the relationship that it had with above ground biomass production and again we have a positive correlation a little more variability between the different treatments but it almost helps us show that you know blending topsoil is importantly is important for providing that nutrient base for the microbes to start their nutrient cycling and continue stabilizing organic matter and hopefully enhancing the reducing the reclamation timeline. Next slide this was a knowing that it is important and blending can help naturally keep those microbial populations there and keep them to levels comparable to the topsoil we were looking at other ways that we could enhance that activity and enhance their abundance so this greenhouse study used another blend of of soil collected from an active pipeline project shout out to stealth for collecting the soil and the mixtures range from 100% topsoil TS 100 and TS 50 which is 50% topsoil down to 0% topsoil and 100% subsoil and this was subsoil of quality meaning it's not sodic it doesn't have excess other nutrients and it's really just kind of calcareous again we see that 50 50 mix was producing comparable yields to the topsoil and we analyzed it against control and two bio stimulant biological amendments that were treated on these soils as well one included a liquid inoculant and then one was like a mulch product that had some bark fiber and some inoculants in it as well to not get too deep into that and we did see that there was a significant effect on above ground biomass production with one of the treatments. The next slide goes over just again in this study the importance of organic matter and microbial abundance and just leaving this up and leaving some anecdotes these biologicals while they did produce there was a greater respiration in one of the treatments not the treatment that produced the greatest above ground biomass it shows that it kind of increased the activity of the microbes but it doesn't necessarily reflect an increase of above ground biomass production since we had different bio stimulants that were doing different things but it is a kickstart to the microbial activity helping remediate if there is contaminants helping reduce contamination you know just kickstarting that activity that's so important for getting plants to grow on their claimed soil and we don't always want to recommend blending subsoils and topsoils but when it's really needed when you have that shortage of topsoil it could be used in circumstances where it's better than just putting subsoil down on the ground and hopefully using just growing crops on it is going to hopefully just return it to proper use well if you can and you have available topsoil you can blend it and hopefully just shorten that timeline to successful reclamation and I'll hand that back the mic back to Tom now to finish this up okay so we'll go ahead and go to the next slide and so one of the things that go back to this sort of holistic approach right and so we have again our so physical biological and chemical properties what we sometimes you might start on the left where you don't have a very good soil structure it's kind of it's kind of just just soil right but there's no organic matter in it the thing of it is is when you think about this from a textural organic matter standpoint don't start in the hole meaning that don't start with such a low organic matter or don't start with a sandy or sandy loam type of soil that doesn't have good plant available water potential capacity to do that and I can't stress that enough is that it's really it's a lot more difficult and most of you know this to get plants to establish in sandier soils than it is in more of a loam or clay loam soils and so don't start in the hole so blending that we've shown that it actually works there are going to be regulations across the state the public service commission those in the in that fall under that purview may not be able to mix soils in that way and so but we've we've shown that it that it does work we've we have a lot of data that shows that it can work that doesn't mean that you should that should be the number one tool off your off your shelf if finding quality topsoil that is noxious weed free is the primary goal right but if in fact it's short we have shown that it that it can be can be amended do amendments work we've you know I think there's every time you open a magazine that's reclamation related there's there's amendments and there's biologicals being advertised Zach's study showed that the biologicals can enhance microbial activity we don't know how long that'll last but we do know that it can give a a kickstart so it seems at least in the short term amendments you're going to see amendments like gypsum and you know we've talked about calcium acetate at this meeting before other amendments I think it's it really depends it shouldn't always be the first thing that you have to go to that you think but they are available and there there has been studies that have shown that you know amendments do work depending on which ones you're choosing right and so I think that's it go to the next one for me and so again you know we've been doing this for quite a few years you know we've we've had a lot of really good students being trained the data points towards that blending seems to work okay but again follow the regulations within your purview and and I think that's what we wanted to make sure we stated on that so so with that I'm going to send up put up the QR code real quick if you did not get a chance to do it please please take that survey and for that we'll take any questions so the question was this young gentleman was referring to the study that I showed that was done in South Dakota and they did not see an effect of the reduced yield in the bottom probably because they didn't take out the whole organic matter profile they just took out six inches of it and so that that you know it's a valid question you don't want to steal from Paul to feed Peter right and that's part of the the issue of finding good topsoil is that you don't want to take it from somewhere else and make that area worse don't make don't make the the the solution greater than the problem right and so but it's a valid question we don't have a lot of topsoil in the western part of the state bow bells as an example it's kind of in that lower area it does have some of our best but that doesn't mean that it should be sold on the market either so so the question was if we why do we think the increasing the microbial activity helped increase the my increase in the microbial abundance or activity increased plant plant yield right so the so the the the biologicals that we use is that what you're asking yep you want to answer that I mean I can comment on so one treatment was successful in significantly increasing biomass but one wasn't that was kind of an interesting point to because that one that did not contain fertilizer at unknown proprietary rates but it's a good question and I on our paper I don't know if we were really able to fully explain it but I think part of it was just the the bias bio stimulant was had so much readily available nutrients that maybe the microbes were competing with the crops for the nutrients and they outcompeted the plants is maybe what my best hypothesis would be but good question Tom if you have any other points okay yeah so he was asking if it was a liquid or a dry product and how many different species may have been in there we did not include that in the slides but if I recall correctly the SSB product was it it was a liquid inoculant that was mixed with our initial watering and when we blended the soils the other product was a dry mulch that could be hydro mulch John or it can be mixed in with a material so we dry we mix that in dry and then when it was watered it was wet and the SSB contain about 10 different bacteria and our muscular mycorrhizal fungi and and the proganics mulch I think maybe contained a few different bacteria and maybe one fun fungal species oh right yeah I kind of mentioned that the the dry mulch product had proprietary parts of the ingredients that we just didn't know and it was hard to compare it objectively across different studies with biologicals but the SSB did have a pretty clear label that showed what was in it and I can send you know you can look up these labels to and I can also send you the study music