 What we're trying to do is illustrate the structure of the soil here aside from the smearing of the spade. I'm going to try and pull it apart and understand that there's a lot of root systems that have been working in here for thousands of years. But look how this soil just crumbles apart like coffee grounds with chocolate cake. So this is what I want to emulate in our crop ground because the way we've cultured our crop ground since the country was opened up in the early 1900s, we've basically done nothing but destroy or tear down this structure. This is a perfect system. Mother Nature intended it to be this way and it works. This is the kind of system I want to get our crop ground back to. We can learn so much by just looking at some of these prairie soils. There's a whole litany of life that goes on in this that nobody can see, but there's literally hundreds of thousands of organisms in this little chunk of soil doing what they need to do to survive and creating a relationship with the plants to exchange nutrients from the plants, the nutrients in the soil. Okay, so what we're looking for here are earthworms in the soil. They're very important to have in a healthy soil in that they create large macro pores or tunnels in the soil and they do that because as they come up, they come up to the surface to feed on the residues and then they go back down into the soil and those macro pores, those tunnels that they create allow water from the surface and oxygen from the surface to penetrate into the soil and that creates a much healthier environment for all the other organisms that may be living in the soil and there are literally thousands and thousands of species of bacteria and fungi that live in and around the root systems of the plants. We're going to talk about the relationship between the root system of a plant and it doesn't matter what crop we're talking about, it can be native grasses, it can be corn, it can be wheat, it can be alfalfa, it doesn't really matter. The point is we have a living root established in the soil here and in and around that living root we're creating what we call rhizospheres and that's where large quantities of different kinds of bacteria and fungi colonize themselves in and around root systems and the reason they do that is because the plant above is a sugar machine. It creates from sunlight carbohydrates and sugars that it pushes down into the soil and then it's exchanged with the microorganisms around the root system. They exchange those carbohydrates and sugars for nutrients such as nitrogen, such as phosphate, such as potassium, boron, manganese, all those elements are exchanged in this rhizosphere around the root. So the healthier the soil the more organisms we have in the soil the healthier the plant becomes and the more efficient everything becomes and we've learned this through observing and watching the native prairie soils because they've been doing it for thousands and thousands of years without any cultivation or tillage or application of nutrients and so with no-till technologies and the technologies that we have in place with our seeding systems we're able to incorporate some technology along with the science of the no-till and the understanding of the the healthy soils and we can create a very healthy crop with very low inputs and at the same time encourage more biological activity in our soil and to get healthier soils and as we continue to do that year after year after year the soils become healthier and more vibrant every year so that we can continually improve it and continually pass it on to the next generation in a healthier state than it was when we started. That's the goal so when we're looking at native prairie soils like we did this morning understand that in the native prairie system there's a diverse range of grasses both warm and cool season grasses and a diverse range of broadleaves both warm and cool season and so when we bring that theory back to the crop technology and the no-till systems it's very important to have similar diverse systems in our cropping systems so in other words just doing corn and soybeans is not enough diversity and mother nature will soon figure that system out and start incorporating things in that we don't like diseases insects and so forth but by implementing diverse rotations such as cool season grasses like wheat and oats into a warm season grass like corn or milo and then to a warm season broadleaf like a soybean or a cool season broadleaf like pea and continuing and stretching those rotations out we can add more diversity to the soil profile and improve long-term the viability and the health of the soil. Many years ago in 1991 we we went 100 percent no-till and at the time the reason we did that is because it was a management issue it was more time it was more cost effective for us to do we really didn't understand at that point in time the importance of the soil health aspect but as we got into it we noticed a little bit of production drop but after we got three or four years of no-till history things started to improve and improve very quickly and then we started to see the efficiencies take place the soil characteristics changed they got more dynamic they got healthier you could tell that there was life in that soil and as that happened then we began to understand the correlation between that and the native prairie systems and then the light bulb started coming on and then we started improving it by adding more diversity more crop rotations to the system and then cover crops and less fertility and things got better and better as we did that so one of the things that we want to really try and do is incorporate more and more cover crop into our rotations right now the cover crop is fitting in behind the winter wheat which is really a great place for it but it's a fairly short season it's going to be from basically august until the killing frost so one of the things that's really important is maintaining a living root system for as long a period as you can in the soil just like in the native prairie system so what we're doing in this example is we we actually did an experiment by hand throwing some cover crop seed into the growing corn crop and what we're seeing here after one week is we're starting to see the small seeded clovers starting to emerge just from the moisture on the surface of the soil and that's a very positive thing we don't need a lot of vegetation but just enough to create a living root system to carry on that rhizosphere for the biology and the bacteria and the fungi and the soil to live on the goal here is to establish a cover crop in the growing corn because i want to be able to after this corn is harvested in in september or early october i want a cover crop that's already started it's already growing and it's got a living root system already established and that's going to elongate that period time that the soil has a living root in it and it's just going to help it get healthier and healthier cover crops are utilizing those nutrients and then we bring the cattle into the picture they're going to graze those residues and they're going to cycle those residues out and they're going to spread those nutrients back on the crop ground to me it's a perfect system it's as close as we can get to a native prairie system as anything else that's out there the challenge then for us is to understand how to emulate that across everywhere how do we manage not only the native prairie soils but how do we manage the crop ground to get our soil structure back to where it should be that's the real challenge that we have i think the first step is to understand and gain an understanding of what we're dealing with in the native prairie soils don't be afraid to dig them up don't be afraid to investigate them look at them my goal and my challenge to do now is to carry forward this same management practice to other people to teach them and show them that there are better ways of doing things there are more holistic ways of of making a living and still be good for the land