 So what I want to do this morning is I want to talk very specifically about what we call adaptive stewardship. So my partners and I in the Soil Health Academy, this is one of the core things that we teach. We talk about regenerative practices, regenerative agriculture, rebuilding and restoring our ecosystems, but underneath that is the ability to be able to properly steward everything that we have been blessed and charged with. And as farmers and ranchers, we control the vast majority of the land that exists here, not just in the U.S. but globally. And therefore our responsibility runs very deep, very deep. Oh, I got to turn it on. That would help. There we go. So I want to start by telling you a little bit about what we do now. My partners in Soil Health Academy, all of you know who they are. It's Gay Brown, Ray Archuleta, Dave Brant. We formed that about two years ago. And I do have to say that that is going extremely well. We're teaching quite a few academies across U.S., Canada, Mexico and have been invited to many other countries to put on academies as well. So there is an interest. There's a large interest in being able to educate and help people move in this direction. So in terms of what I do outside of my partnership with those guys in the academy, we have a meat and poultry company. It's called Joyce Farms. And we produce and market pastured proteins basically from Boston down to Miami and as far west as St. Louis. And our predominant market that we target, and this is very important, many of you in here today either have already developed some markets or you're thinking about it. And I even had some conversations about this last night. But one of the things that we do as farmers and ranchers is many times we don't know what we need to know about marketing and being able to actually sell our products in an efficient and effective and profitable manner. So that's one of the things that one of our core principles and you always have to have a specific market focus when you are marketing and again ours is restaurants. So we do a lot of ranching to produce these pastured proteins and a lot of grass finishing. And we produce a very high quality grass-fed beef. We harvest 52 weeks out of the year every week and load lots. And every week of the year all of our product is USDA federally graded. And every week 52 weeks out of the year we are now able to average 85% and up USDA choice and prime grass-fed beef. And what you see on the slides here in the pictures is an example of that beef. You absolutely cannot tell it from a highly marbled feedlot finished product in that regard. We also do a lot of past report production at any given day. We'll have about 3,000 or so hogs out on pasture. And just like we move our cattle very frequently our pigs are moved daily as well under single strand polywire. So they are very well trained to the polywire to the electricity. Pigs love to forage. It is something that they just absolutely are thrilled with and every day when we turn them into new paddocks they're just jumping and squealing with the light, all of that. Just moving into those new paddocks and we plant very complex annual mixes in a lot of our fields for these pigs. And what we find is that when they're moved every day then you have very little rooting, very little destruction. We're not interested in doing that. We also do pastured lamb, pastured sheep. We use hair sheep down where we are. That works very well. We also produce and market grass fed bison. Our bison by the way are managed the same way that we manage all the other species of livestock. They are trained to a single strand of polywire and trained to daily movement. So I've been told many, many times that you can't do that with bison but absolutely you can and we are doing that very effectively and very efficiently. We also do a lot of poultry production. So we produce pastured eggs and we have different structures. On this slide you see a hoop house structure but we also take advantage of materials that we have that are fairly cheap. Does anybody recognize what that is there? What did that used to be? It's now a poultry caravan but what did it used to be? It was a cotton wagon, exactly a cotton wagon. Nobody uses these down south anymore, right? Because everybody's gone to modules and balers and so these cotton wagons have become obsolete. We can pick them up for a couple of hundred bucks a piece and turn them into an excellent poultry caravan. That particular wagon there can house five to six hundred birds. So it's a very cheap way and we can build them out, buy them for two hundred and build them out for around a thousand to twelve hundred total cash in them, not bad at all. We also produce a lot of pastured poultry. We do pastured chickens, heritage Spanish black turkeys, guineas, pheasant, duck in those types of things and market those to our restaurants. Last year we sold forty thousand Spanish black turkeys for an average of a hundred dollars a piece, okay? So now that's when, now think about that, think about that. You can go to any grocery store, anywhere around Thanksgiving and buy a frozen turkey for what, thirty to forty cents a pound, right? And we sold forty thousand heritage turkeys at an average of a hundred dollars a piece. So don't tell me the consumer only wants to buy just cheap food. That is absolutely not true, but we have had that ingrained in our minds as farmers and ranchers that everything has to be cheap. They will pay for true verifiable value. They absolutely will. We have our own USDA poultry processing plant because with the numbers that we harvest, you know, your big vertical integrators, they're not going to welcome us into their plants. You know, Tyson or Sanderson Farms, anybody like that, they're not going to slaughter our poultry for us. So we had to build our own plant, and so we do poultry processing at scale. But what we have done within that plant, we also do all of our own further processing for our beef, pork, lamb, bison and all of that. So we bring in that box product and combo trim and so forth from all of that from another plant and then we do all the further processing, portion cutting, grinding, patties, those types of things and producing hot dogs, jerkeys, sausages and so forth. Again, we market predominantly to restaurants, and when you do that, you've got to do things that are very appealing to them. That's part of the marketing process. And so what you see here are pictures of our showcases at various food shows. And again, these types of things are critically important because you've got to recognize who your target audience is and be able to market appropriately to them. Now we're very transparent in our program, so every year in both the spring and the fall we harvest, we host multiple farm days tours. We call them our farm days events, and we do a lot of things with our visitors, our guests during those. One is we have receptions where they are able to sample many of our products, our protein and other products that we produce from our gardens and so forth at these receptions in the form of orders. Then we host a dinner for them, one of the evenings. Most of these events are two-day events, so that first evening we host a dinner. And again, everything that they eat on that table that evening, we produced on our farms. 100% of what they're consuming, we produced on the farm. And then we serve them lunches while we're out on the farms, and you see the center picture there, yes we do, we call that Couchon Delay down south, but whole pigs, and we do a pig picking, and everybody is just fascinated by that. And then of course we take them out on the farms, and we take advantage of this. We don't just say, here's our pigs, here's our chickens, here's our cattle, here are our fields or whatever, but we actually give our guests, these chefs, these distributors and consumers and so forth, we give them a mini lesson in soil health. So we're out there, we literally dig in the dirt, and we show them what soil aggregates look like, and we show them what healthy soil smells like, and so forth, and how to recognize it. And I will have to tell you, my partners and I speak to farmers and ranchers literally all over the world, and I'll have to tell you very straightforward that when we bring in these outside folks that don't have a direct connection with agriculture, and we show them what soil health really means, do you know that they get it that quick? It resonates with them, and yet many farmers and ranchers want to fight it, you know, and deny it. And I don't know that I believe that, but you bring in chefs, you bring in consumers, you bring in distributors and so forth, and when they visually see this, it immediately resonates. So that's very powerful. We as farmers and ranchers folks, we have to do a lot more of that with a consumer, because they hold the purse strings. That's what we have to understand. It's not your grain elevator, it's not your feedlot, it's not your packer. Those are the people we've been catering to, but the people we really need to cater to in agriculture are the people that buy our products and put them on their tables. They're the people that are going to influence change above and beyond anybody else. So that's why we do this. We have multiple enterprises. We're a big believer in the fact that we can produce multiple revenue streams from every acre every year. Why am I confined to producing a single revenue stream from a single acre? If I am, that is nobody else's fault, but my fault. Why do I think that I can only grow corn on that acre this year? Or I can only grow soybeans, or I can only produce a calf that I sell at Weenie. We have far more things that we can do with every single acre on our farms. We are literally sitting, folks, on an incredible resource. If you own land, if you lease land, every acre is tremendous in what it can do. So we have timber, we have woodland grazing, silvo pasture. We have organic vegetable gardens. We produce specialty and heritage crops, such as purple straw wheat, bloody butcher, and Hopi blue corn, Carolina gold rice, indigo, ginseng, mushrooms, turmeric, all of those types of things. We produce a specialty breed of cattle, and we have a lot of black angus, red angus, and all of that in our grass-fed program, but we also have a specialty breed called the piney woods. We produce seed-stop piney woods, market those. We produce a lot of replacement heifers for sale. They're in high demand. If you have grass-tight replacement heifers, there is a huge demand for those type of cattle. We do recreational opportunities beyond our farm tours, so we offer hunting and fishing and agritourism opportunities in classes and workshops on the farm. And we'll be doing a Soil Health Academy in May there on one of our farms that is directly related to adaptive grazing, multi-species grazing, and marketing. So that's going to be the focus of that particular workshop. Some of the other things that we do, we offer internships. So we always have interns on our farms and at our meat company. These include students, beginning farmer and rancher folks, farmer veterans, all of that. We have international interns and apprenticeships. We've got a couple coming over from South Africa here in a couple of months that will be with us for the rest of the year. We also do an old farm business incubator. We want to be able to give back and it's very important for us to be able to help revitalize our rural economies. So one of the programs that we started is sort of a shark-tight deal. And anybody that works for us on our farms, they can come to us with a business plan. They have to write it and they have to develop a pro forma, cash flow projections, all of that and what their capital needs are. But if they have a viable business idea that they can implement on our farms, then we consider that. And if we think it is a good idea, then we will give them the acres and we will provide the upfront capital for them to develop that. With the hope that within three to five years they have built a business for themselves and have built enough equity and marketing savvy that they can leave us and start their own farm, start their own operation. So that's our farm business incubator. And again, I mentioned the farm days events and we have like a fall harvest party and spring on the farm and that type of thing. I want to show you a few quotes here and then we're going to dive into adaptive stewardship. I really love this quote by Wendell Berry, Wendell says agricultural choices must be made by these inescapable standards. The ecological health of the farm and the economic health of the farmer. And Masanabu has this wonderful quote, an object seen in isolation from the whole is not the real thing. Now he is sort of the Wendell Berry of Japan. Okay, to give you an idea who this guy is. When I was in academia, and this is still occurring in academia, unfortunately, what we spent a lot of time doing was viewing objects in isolation. And we were isolating ourselves from the whole. That has caused us through a lot of our agronomic research, our academic research. And I'm not going to pull any punches in this. I've been there, I live that world, okay, but we must reorient ourselves in our academic research. We must quit looking at things that are just simply putting band-aids on a gushing wound that are addressing symptoms rather than root calls. We must think about research that is highly interdisciplinary and we're not having these little turf wars and everything else that so frequently occur at our academic institutions. And instead, we are truly trying to solve the real problems that we have and looking at them holistically. That's very important. Rick Warren, pastor out in California, the best leaders make the best decisions when they have the best information. Even if you're a good leader, if you don't have the best information, you will make a bad decision. And Sam Bass, a real good friend of mine, he's a farmer down in Oklahoma, and Sam's just sort of a very down-to-earth guy, former Navy guy, and he says, what if I could tell you something that would completely change the way you farm a ranch? And that is, there is a God and you're not him, okay? We got to realize that. We got to recognize that. We're not in control. Nature does always win. So how can we work with her rather than against her in trying to fight her? In the Norman Wars, but to live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, and reverently, it's a sacrament. But when we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, and destructively, it is a desecration. In such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness and others to want. So here's what it's all about for us. It's about the why. Why do we do what we do? So let me give you some resources to help you with that. And many of you in here are doing amazing things. I know that and I fully recognize that. Many of you are aware of these resources, but for those that you are not, these are outstanding resources. One is the Soil Carbon Cowboys Film Series. We started this back in 2013, 2014, I think, with Peter Bitt. He's the filmmaker. We have nine of these films out now. The latest one is now out on the SoilCarbonCowboys.com website, and it is called Herd Impact. It is a very powerful film. So watch them all if you haven't, but watch that latest one. It will blow your mind. Okay? It's called Herd Impact. Our Soil Health Academy website, we have a number of resources available for you there and we're continuing to build that out. So as we go, we will continue to have more and more resources on that website. And one of the things that we have started doing and it's been met with really, really good positive feedback, and we do monthly Q&A sessions where anybody that's been through an academy can dial in and we go for two hours and they can dial in and we're having people from all over the world dialing in and we always do it in an evening and they can ask questions and we answer questions and anybody can have input. Additional resources. I've been working with the Windrock Foundation on a project called the Paster Project and within this project we have put together a lot of different resource materials that are very good. One of the things is we're doing ongoing farm trials on cover crops and grazing and adaptive grazing and those types of things so all of that data and those findings and summaries are posted on the pastorproject.org website. We have decision calculators that are available for you there. We have webinars and numerous PowerPoint presentations. Most of what I'm presenting today is available on the pastorproject.org and we just finished a 42 video series on how-to videos for adaptive grazing and cover crop utilization. So we've got that 42 video series. They're all short films averaging anywhere from about 4 minutes to 10 minutes. GrassFed Exchange is another very good resource. Every presentation that has ever been done over the last several years on our GrassFed Exchange conferences is available to you on the GrassFed Exchange website. We're also working heavily with an organization called Kiss the Ground. We have a new film out that was released about four or five months ago called A Regenerative Secret. You can just Google that and you can easily pop that up but it's a very good film and then a very recent film with Farmer's Footprint that will be released in February, early February and we actually have the stars of that film sitting in the room today Grant and Dawn Breitkruitz but this is, it's an outstanding film, it's going to be a series and there will be multiple episodes to this. And Dr. Zach Bush is one of the primary people that has put this together to look at things from a human and medical perspective. Now one of the things that I want you to understand when we talk about adaptive stewardship, why do we care? Why does it matter? It matters because nature is incredibly powerful and incredibly wonderful. If we just take the time to notice and if we'll take the time to understand how we can work integrally with her. So I want to ask this question, why as farmers and ranchers have we evolved into a way of farming and ranching that ignores the very thing that makes life subsist and thrive on this planet? And over the last several decades we've done a good job of ignoring that. Take a look at this creature, it's called a sea sheep, it's actually a sea slug but look at that, look at that. How incredible is nature to be able to create creatures like that? This is another creature that is incredibly powerful in agriculture and we're seeing less and less of them in a lot of farm fields but I am seeing a huge return when we develop diversity and complexity we start to see a lot more ladybugs appearing. What about a corn that acquires its own nitrogen? This is a big area of research right now, the discovery and this is not some kind of genetically engineered deal actually this corn has existed for more than a thousand years. It's just a recent rediscovery, it's so old it's new but a corn that can acquire its own nitrogen. Some other things and why am I showing you this because it's important, we need to understand what's going on beneath our feet every day so that we can more fully understand how we need to manage what we're charged with managing every day so this is a very recent discovery a phenomena carisophagi and what we have found is it's the ability of plants to be able to take in soil bacteria that exist around their roots in other words the plant roots act almost as a vacuum and they suck in this bacteria and bacteria, soil bacteria what's one of their major functions is to consume nutrients as they leech down through the soil through rainfall and all of that to keep them from leaching out of the reach of the plant roots so then those nutrients are contained within the sailor membrane of the bacteria but the bacteria is not a time release capsule so something has to happen to break down that sailor membrane to allow those nutrients to be released for the plant uptake and this is one of the things that happens. Bacteria being eaten by protozoa is another but this rhizophagi so they suck in the bacteria internal to the root endo and then powerful root enzymes dissolve that membrane it releases those nutrients the plant can take them up and use them and then guess what happens they spit the membrane less bacteria back out into the soil and they reform a membrane and repeat this process all over again how powerful a system is that pretty darn incredible that's a picture of this occurring so that's a fragmites root and it's in the process of absorbing these soil bacteria I love this quote by Dr. Christine Jones when we're standing on soil we're standing on the rooftop of another world this is another incredibly powerful and wondrous microorganism my carousel fungi and it seems like we just continue to discover all of the different things that my carousel fungi do for us you know but these are tiny filamentous organisms that attach themselves to plant roots so let's talk about what they do first of all they're far far better at picking up and absorbing nutrients minerals in the soil than the plant roots themselves and then transfer them to the plant roots they solubilize bound nutrients they produce enzymes they're like expert miners and they can solubilize bound nutrients in the soil even in solid rock and make those minerals available for plant uptake they extend the reach of the plant roots themselves many times beyond the roots and they significantly increase the absorptive surface area of the plant roots from hundreds to thousands of times so they greatly extend the reach of plant roots they interconnect plant roots so if we have diversity in the field then they interconnect all of that diverse array of plants and feed nutrients and transfer nutrients one to the other to the other and they not only transfer those primary nutrients that we think about but also those secondary nutrients we call them secondary metabolites and Dr. Fred Provenza that I'll talk about here in just a minute a little more has done a lot of the seminal research in this area my carousel fungi also can transfer organic nitrogen in the form of amino acids to plant roots so it's another way for nitrogen to be fed from the soil into the plants and they mobilize many different minerals and feed them they preserve and supply water to plants in periods of drought did you know that if you have an extensive mycorrhizal system underneath the soil you are far more drought resilient and that's beyond just the biotic glues that they produce to aggregate the soil they also transfer water molecules into the plant roots that are stored there for periods of drought a water reserve so to speak that won't exist without the mycorrhizal association they are also nature's principle immune system against fungal root disease what's happened with the incidence of fungicide applications over the last two decades is it increased or decreased we're applying a lot more fungicides aren't we well why we have neglected the principle immune system for our plants if we reestablish these very powerful mycorrhizal associations our plants now have a lot more immunity conferred upon them disease and pest this is a picture of mycorrhizal fungi transfer amino acids picture where you see basically the pink or red color and then this is a picture of mycorrhizal fungi putting water molecules into the root of a plant okay so now we're going to talk about the three core principles of adaptive stewardship these apply no matter where you are in the world no matter your soil type no matter what you grow and no matter your climate none of that matters what matters is the application and understanding of these three principles and they are the principle of compounding the principle of diversity and the principle of disruption so the first thing we have to remember in the principle of compounding is that nothing is ever singular in nature nothing if we apply any synthetic fertilizer any chemical it never produces a singular effect it always results in a series of compounding and cascading effects and these effects are never neutral they're either positive or negative we as managers of the land are the determiners of whether this is it's going to be a positive or negative effect that's up to us and how we manage our land so everything that we do creates this whole series of compounding cascading events and if we start asking ourselves that okay if I apply this or I'd implement this practice or I do this type of tillage or whatever not just as what that what is that going to do immediately but what is that going to create in terms of ripple effects down the road for me is it going to be positive there's it going to be negative and how do I deal with that it also creates epigenetic effects and that's a whole other topic so I won't dive into that today second principle of diversity we want highly diverse and complex pastures and annual mixes not monocultures not monocultures we have become a monoculture society and yet that is led to the severe and tremendous degradation of our soil and to the myriad problems disease and pest issues that we have not just with our plants but also with our livestock so we created those problems by creating this vast system of monoculture so we've got to reintroduce diversity into our farms and ranches and we've got to consider the three primary functional plant groups for that for a field system and those are grasses legumes and forbs so diversity is key we absolutely want diversity and what we find is that when we can foster this and facilitate and create this then our systems start to thrive and they start to really work in close harmony with nature and with what we're doing so why do we want complexity and diversity well we want it because it creates positive compounding and cascading effects that first principle the number one principle secondly different plants produce different secondary and tertiary compounds nutritive compounds that are highly medicinal in nature both to other plants and to livestock and wildlife and many of them produce anti-parasitic compounds that if we have diversity for our livestock to forage on they are literally deworming themselves in the process of doing that if we have diversity that's the work of dr. fred prevents a fred just has a brand new book out called nourishment and we're actually going to do a series of workshops with fred uh relative to that but read that book if you haven't yet it's again it's called nourishment but he talks a lot about this and relating it to human health and nutrition and so forth diversity in our plant species also creates diversity in microbial species beneath the soil surface it creates diversity in the macro organisms that exist above the soil and in the soil and it produces exponential rather than linear impact so we should have legumes forbs and grasses present in our pastures on our rangeland in warm season annuals and cool season annuals we work a lot with grazing dairies and grass fed dairies and this is just a simple example of some of the diversity that we encourage and develop in their perennial pastures for our grass fed dairies you'll notice some things in there that you may say well that's a weed folks there is no such thing as a objective definition of a weed it doesn't exist any definition of a weed is purely subjective and i'm going to submit to you that every plant that's growing there whether you like it or not is growing there for a purpose and it's growing there to heal something that we caused to scab on the soil that we caused that's why it's there they're not growing there to aggravate us into confound us they're growing there to heal something principle of disruption the third principle nature has tremendous resilience and responds well to challenges so we need to be able to introduce planned purposeful disruptions one of the things and this is just sheer human nature but one of the things that we like to do is we like to have a recipe a formula a system and once we settle into that we want to do the same thing every time every year year in and year out well this particular cover crop mix worked real well for me so i'm going to use that mix every time or you know last year i did this type of tillage and boy it just seemed to really work so now that's what i'm going to do all the time year in and year out or i planted this variety of corn and it worked well last year so i'm going to plant that variety from now on but somehow all of that never quite works is good the next time the next time the next time does it and you wonder why well the reason it doesn't is because you're doing the same thing you just stagnated nature think about it i like to use this analogy of an elite athlete you know we're biology aren't we our bodies are biology nature is biology so we all respond the same to external challenges and stressors an elite athlete to become an elite athlete what do they have to do did they do the same exercise routine at the same intensity year in and year out no they had to constantly change their exercise routine duration intensity to constantly challenge their muscles in their mind so that they could grow they could get bigger faster stronger have greater endurance you never develop that doing the same routine over and over every day well if our bodies respond that way and we get better with challenges with stressors why do we think nature does not nature does nature responds very well to planned purposeful disruptions challenges that allow her to build her resilience to build her diversity to build her ability to be able to make it through very stressful periods so this in and of itself these planned purposeful disruptions create a whole series of positive compounding effects so as you notice here the principle of compounding is the first principle but the principle of diversity and the principle of disruption all contribute and build the principle of compounding so flexibility is the key here okay don't do things the same way every time adaptive management is not a rigid routine and this is just a very short list there's many many more things you can do but what are some of the things you can do to be disruptive in crops okay rotate your crop species cultivars and no corn and beans is not a rotation okay corn and beans and corn and beans is not a valid rotation you got to be much more creative than that all right livestock row crop rotations we're doing more and more of this all over the country reduce reduce reduce tillage and that disturbance rotate your cover crop mixes okay do not plant the same mix day in and day out time in and time out introduce things like roll down great if you're grazing how can you be disruptive in your grazing alter stock densities we've got a whole series of videos that talk about these types of things that you can watch on pastorproject.org and we talk about it in the soil carbon cowboy series but alter stock densities don't move through the rotations in the same pattern you're in and you're out if you start in pasture a and then go bcd and e every year change that this come and spring starting d not an a you'd be amazed what a profound difference that makes alter grazing heights on and off from time to time alter your rest periods if you do multi species like we do alter species order as they're moving through your paddocks then alter the time of season or year that you're grazing a particular paddock or pasture so what is the best tool in your toolbox observation as farmers and ranchers we have gotten to the point that we spend way too much time with our butt planted in the seat of something a truck a utv a tractor a combine a sprayer or in a chair doing this right or doing this we're not a whole lot better than our kids and grandkids are we with all of these types of devices we're not doing enough observation of the world around us that we need to pay attention and use all your senses that god gave us use your sense of sight of sound of smell of touch and even taste i taste things while i'm out there i taste the plants taste the soil you would be amazed at what you can learn by using your senses and the one thing that we have found is that who we renew our powers of observation on our farms and ranches then we start to develop our intuition and intuitively our decision making on a day in day out basis becomes far better because now we're relating things to each other we're understanding the why we're understanding the whole the entirety the holistic system that exists in front of us and now we're able to make decisions that are that are far far better so adaptive grazing for instance it allows a practitioner to develop multiple goals or address multiple goals and objectives it's not a rigid routine of practice and neither should it be and it allows us to constantly adapt to changing conditions you know down where we farm in ranch in mississippi and alabama you would be amazed you know over the last 20 years we have clearly developed into a pattern of a dry season and a wet season our winters in early springs are very very wet as i mentioned to you earlier and then our summers can get exceedingly dry if we don't have tropical activity to interrupt that all the way through the fall so we have a wet season and a dry season but do you know that our farmers and ranchers haven't adapted to that they haven't adjusted to that they still think oh no this summer it's not going to get dry and i'm going to have grass to last through the summer and end of the fall and then they find themselves inevitably feeding hay by august and september in mississippi okay in mississippi feeding hay by august and september because they've already run out of grass because it was too dry and they don't pre-plan for the wet muddy conditions in the winter in stockpile and create areas that'll hold cattle up in the winter and so they create these enormous mud bogs i mean i can show you mud bog after mud bog down there right now with cattle belly deep in mud in the deep south in the deep south and guess what you deal with that a relatively short period of time up here in your spring thaw down there if you don't do things right you deal with it from december through april mud it's not pleasant so we're trying to recreate and restore the carbon cycle it's goal oriented predicated on stock density not stocking rate management and flexibility or key as our frequent movement and rest we pay close attention to plant root system recovery and in many parts of the world it's highly reliant on temporary fencing technology but done right it produces very positive compounding and cascading effects all we're trying to do is simulate nature that's it and recreate what nature used to do for us here in the tremendous fertility that the wild remnants once created in north america these are recent pictures of uh in in africa and they show you know what's still occurring in some part unfortunately this is diminishing tremendously in africa but we still have some massive herds that are still able to create some fertility in the soil so we're creating my bio mimicry and eco mimicry and we're just translating that from the planes and the serengeti and all of that to our pastors to our fields this is a flock of sheep okay doing the same thing with sheep creating incredible density and diversity and impact on the land uh this is holding sheep even our sheep we contain under a single strand of polywire you don't need fancy systems and setups and multi strands and net wire and all of these other things you can train any species to work and re and respond well under a single strand of electrified polywire and so what we have found is this is we move along the continuum on our grazing from continuous grazing to adaptive grazing we get a myriad of benefits we get significant benefits from heightened fertility from far more even manure and urine distribution across every acre versus it being concentrated as it is with continuous grazing and slow rotations around your water and shade we also move along the continuum of diversity and soil health and root depth and mass and we work a lot with autobahn and what we have found is that we've been able to significantly improve and increase bird populations because of this same thing with cover crops grazing cover crops in between our cash crops as we move along this continuum we're able with better grazing with adaptive stewardship practices we're better able to elicit the type of response that we want so I'm going to finish up this morning with a couple examples of adaptive stewardship in practice in real life and I'm going to show you a couple of extreme circumstances earlier I talked about nature is resilient and I said nature has the ability to be able to respond brilliantly to challenges I'm going to show you how she does that okay this first farm North Carolina Adam Grady one of our clients Adam's only been practicing regenerative farming and ranching for just 2018 was just his second year they're multi-generational the farm's been in their family since 1880s four generations farming on that land today alive and farming but up until two years ago they were doing everything very conventionally high tillage high synthetic use conventional grazing on and on so it's called dart branch farm so for the last two years no till cover crops livestock integration planning non GMO instead of GMO crops they didn't use any glyphosate at all or any other herbicide in 2018 they were able to totally remove themselves from that in 2018 they planted everything into a standing cover crop that was rolled down his absolute next door neighbor and the reason I'm bringing this up it's important they did they tried no till for the first time in 2018 but they've been very high cultivation prior but they're still highly dependent on synthetic inputs chemical inputs all of that no cover crop or livestock integration so this is what Adam does Adam raises grass fed beef and pastured pork so he's got them all integrated heavily on the pasture he does roll down so he goes in and rolls down his cover crops plants into the standing roll down and this year in 2018 this is what happened or last year 2018 this is what happened so he and his next door neighbor immediate next door neighbor the very first week in April planted their corn they were planting the exact same days side by side you can see the difference this picture was taken May 29th May 29th okay so approximately two months after the corn was planted Adam's corn immediately next door the next door filled his neighbor's corn Adam ended up yielding 189 bushels per acre dryland corn with no inputs by the way okay and his neighbor yielded 134 bushels his neighbor had to replant he had a failure on the first plant and had to replant that's why it looked but what do you notice in his neighbor's field water standing water right there was none at Adam's field immediately next door because Adam had far greater aggregate aggregation and water infiltration rates just immediately next door a few feet away now here's the challenge here's where we discovered that even after just two years nature's resilient showing herself hurricane Florence with the same power in fury as hurricane Harvey the year earlier that hit Texas hurricane Florence hit and dumped 35 plus inches of rain on Adam and all of his neighbors just kept churning and churning so this is September the 13th when Florence is just making landfall okay September the 13th and this is Adam rigging his power had already gone out in his house this is not legal but this is how he powered his house okay so uh this is the morning of September the 14th you can see flooding is already occurring okay that's some of his farm buildings in the background this is the afternoon of the same day so from that morning to that afternoon by that afternoon he had eight to nine foot of water across his farm you only see the eaves these are old turkey houses that have been repurposed and you only see the eaves of those present that white building there is floating okay it's no longer attached to this foundation it's floating in the flood waters this is the morning of September 15th by the way every one of these pictures was taken from a boat that was the only way he could get around on his farm the morning of September the 15th you can see the flood waters are still pretty high and again you can see what it looked like there uh his father's house is that red roof house that you see there they just barely barely avoided completely flooding their house by September the 16th the flood waters had started to uh subside a little bit you can see they're going down that's a church that's on the edge of their property unfortunately that church building hat was completely condemned and has to be torn down now by the morning of the 17th you can see the waters have subsided a little more by the 19th still some water covering the ground but he could now get around on a tractor rather than the boat to show you what happened he was able luckily to harvest all of his corn ahead of the hurricane getting in but the soybeans weren't ready so this is his seven-year-old son standing not kneeling in his soybeans August the 30th immediately following the flood that's what all the soybeans look like that's what eight to nine foot of water will do for you so it killed them all this is what his summer annuals look like you see the ears and heads of cattle in their grazing so that's how tall it was and he was stockpiling a lot of this for fall and winter grazing that's what that stockpile looked like immediately following the flood so what do you do when something like that happens and everything that you have there for your livestock to eat is all of a sudden gone every bit of it nothing is there anymore well this is what it looked like just one month after the flood and let me tell you what happened two weeks after the flood water subsided in just two years he built aggregate to to such an extent and he had built his biology to such an extent that it had this tremendous infiltration capacity two weeks after the flood water subsided he was able to get on there with his tractors and no-till planter and replant just two weeks his neighbors couldn't even begin to think about that they would have sunk their tractors or combines to the axle in their fields so their fields held him up they were able to get in and plant this these pictures are two weeks after planting the incredible response of those complex cover crop mixes that were planted following that flood event was absolutely phenomenal and he's long been back grazing in spite of that all of his neighbors are still brown still feeding hay still supplementing he's actively grazing their eastern North Carolina very sandy soils look at what he's built look at what he's added on top of that sand in just two years pretty powerful so the last thing I want to show you now run through this very quickly what about a very fragile environment now North Carolina is not a fragile environment but it was subjected to an incredible force of nature and you see how resilient the other nature responded but what about the Chihuahuan Desert of Mexico so we're doing a lot of work down there we'll be teaching another academy down there next month in February they get less than eight inches of rain annually a true desert temperatures can sort 105 degrees or more most ranches down there require 300 plus acres per cow wrap your mind around that 300 plus acres per cow but with adaptive stewardship they are these guys are now greening the desert and and we've got a team of them that's going to be presenting at the grass fed exchange and I'm very in California coming up in April I'm very excited for our audience to hear these guys and to hear their story because it's it's absolutely fantastic this is what the Chihuahuan Desert looks like under conventional management conventional ranching management now do you understand why it takes 300 acres this poor cow I got to walk a long way between bites okay that's what it looks like and you see that what looks like a dry riverbed there that's not a dry riverbed that's erosion caused by less than eight inches of rain did you know that you can have significant erosion with very low rainfall absolutely you can and let me show you even more significant erosion with less than eight inches of rain a year that's not a natural canyon that is erosion you see the bottom middle picture the old fence suspended in mid-air that's where the soil used to be oh a void eroded and created this canyon and that's some of our our our regenerative ranchers that you see standing there that were showing us this and I ask them if they were trying to compete with us with our Grand Canyon they were building a new Grand Canyon down there but uh so can the desert be transformed what can we do about that or is it hopeless let's take a look lost Thomas ranch and there's many others that we can show you but I'm going to use lost Thomas this morning look at this that's that exact same desert doesn't appear to be does it you now see a sea of grass before you and thriving mesquite and all of that just look back very briefly no grass in the mesquite in the background is spindly low-growing struggling but look here big mesquite okay thriving thriving full of life grass everywhere in the middle of this exact same desert look at the abundance that's been created where did it come from it came from the latent seed bank these are vast remote ranches there's no irrigation they're not going to plant anything they don't fertilize anything how was this created simply by the way they managed their livestock their fences their water and when I say water water for their livestock to drink not to irrigate none of this was irrigated or is irrigated now okay so all of this came from the response from the latent seed bank so what's the result they've reduced acres required per cow from 300 plus to now only requiring about 30 to 40 acres per cow year round a 10 fold increase they just gain free acres free acres they don't have to pay any more taxes they didn't buy any more acres no more insurance nothing free acres they're producing significantly more pounds of beef per acre their net profits have increased more than three times already so absolutely phenomenal we're doing the same thing in new mexico this is a randy ranch in new mexico and we're getting this was back in november uh getting very similar results that sort of white bushy type stuff you see growing there is called winter fat and when the original settlers moved into that region that was a very important forage for them in the winter and then it was just so overgrazed in that country that it killed a lot of that out but now all the winter fat is coming back and they didn't plant it the ranches didn't plant it it's coming back from the latent seed bank the seed is still there and that's what we're finding globally not just here in the u.s but globally there's a thriving seed bank that's available for us if we'll just find it so i'm going to leave you with that but think about those are two extreme conditions they clearly show the power the resilience of nature the ability of nature to be able to take those challenges and to be able to produce something profoundly positive that benefits everybody so thank you i tremendously appreciate the opportunity to be here again i'll be here all day and looking forward to talking with each of you so thank you very much