 So this is The corn belt you can see this is corn production across counties in the United States and you can see that there's an awful lot of corn grown in North Central Sare and There is My clicker working Yeah, there we go. Okay, so has the corn belt lost a third of its topsoil This is not the question is not whether it has lost a depth of one-third of the depth of the topsoil whether it has lost all of the topsoil over a third of the land and a couple of researchers from Massachusetts Took a lot of satellite data and a little bit of on-the-ground data and they decided that every place that has a slope like this sort of a hill has Lost a fair amount of its topsoil and every places a trough is lost generally less But some of those troughs have lost a lot because they wrote water is flowing through those troughs And so in the picture on the left here the red areas Like the red thing are the tops of little hills and the blue areas are the bottoms of little hills and the spaces Outlined in black. They think have lost all of their topsoil And So if you're if the slope if you see this arrow that dropped over here Yellow arrow is showing that if the slope on your soil is two and a half degrees You've lost like 50% of that soil has lost all of its topsoil There's not a lot of slope involved here to get to that point so if you're on these really level places you're farming in topsoil and but if you're in those high High slope places like three or four degrees of slope. You're probably farming in clay Probably not optimal so You know if you repair that slowly you're kind of risking everything as you're not gonna is not gonna be easy to keep up with the degradation the way we Are farming and so the dirt erosion of civilizations famous book if you haven't read it We'd probably enjoy it and then dirt, but you know, even though you have dirt you can move on to soil So gay brown has shown us that you can Move from dirt to soil. So gay brown if you don't know his story. He I had four catastrophic years trying to farm property in North Dakota He had two years of hail which destroyed everything in his that he had planted after it had sprouted And then he had a year of drought and then he had another year of hail And at that point he couldn't get loans from the farmer from the bank anymore And so he would like turn the cattle loose in the fields to graze down sorghum because he couldn't afford a bailing water and bailing twine. He was broke and That began his regenerative journey. He couldn't till anymore. He couldn't Apply for light he's broke and This work so But that takes a while. It's that's four years of disasters for gay browns three years for conversion to a officially to a organic process or, you know, organic label process, so I was interested in Can you do this like really really fast and you do this in a year and you do this in a season? Like what would it take to do that? so this is a proposal to repair degraded soil in one winter season and I don't know that this works, but this is a talk about ideas and it's a work in progress talk will be Producing final results next year at this time. I hope so You know about the soil damage soil damage comes from a lot of physical activity Tilling and rain and wind and stuff. There's also a bunch of chemical impairments from Organic matter oxidizing for harvesting minerals. We're eluting minerals. That means that they're getting dissolved in the water and flowing away herbicides pesticides and waste and and so That's all the physical and chemical stuff, but then there's these biological effects the biological effects are really interesting So if you have a monoculture, then you lose all the symbiosis between the plants if you've oxidized the soil organic matter That by telling now you have hungry microbes all over the place. Remember the kind of Mental image is that there are two elephants worth of microbes in every acre of soil And so you're not feeding them when you've degraded all the soil organic matter. You have two hungry elephants dying of starvation fertilizer also starves the microbes because Plants have this fascinating ability to request Nutrients from microbes and they actually produce sugars that they send down into the roots They also produce hormones that go down in the roots and they tell the fungi and the Microbiome done there what they need so if they need zinc They'll send different stuff into the soil and ask for a zinc and then microbes will send it back And then they have enough zinc they'll ask for whatever is limiting now So there's this incredible on-demand system This is an economy that works better than any human economy you've ever seen in history. It's a fantastic achievement and yet We interfere with it by adding fertilizer that tells the plant I've got enough zinc I've got enough magnesium. I've got enough of whatever I don't need to talk to the plug to the fungi I don't need to build that economy I don't need to have these partners that are reaching six feet into the soil to reach whatever they need and so I'll just starve them out because I'm already happy. I've got my You know universal basic fertilizer income here, and I don't need anything else so Anyway, the fertilizer is starving the microbes herbicides are poisoning the microbes and also farmers and pesticides are killing beneficial insects and also Beneficial farmers so is there an affordable exponential way to fix this instead of like Going out and finding soil from someplace else in the world and trucking it in can we do something else to make this work? and so my previous management trials have been Taking these plots of land that red stuff in the front is Amaranth There's also corn and soybean or corn and cowpeas and okra back there And I've been using scads of coffee ground leaf mode leaf mold Compost and putting that down. I've also used a lot of trace minerals at different times So I've been adding cobalt and molybdenum and copper and whatever else the soil assays told me I needed and Comparing that to a basic NPK fertilizer regimen as directed by University misery extension. Sorry and And and then raising the same crops on both sides That's what the pairing is there and then with minimal watering There's not a irrigation system here and then doing an elemental survey of the edible stuff that came out of those plants because remember I'm a physician first and I'm supposed to heal people and I don't think that metformin is quite cutting it so All this compost and this is a pile of coffee grounds and leaves Getting till turned by a little tractor and my my nephew So the soil organic matters risen from like two percent or less to five percent or more And so that's great. The oddball thing that's happened Which is we've lowered the nickel level in most of these plants So the nickel level is actually at a point where it would be toxic for some people some people have a sensitivity to nickel and For those people I have crops that if they're grown on the NPK side They're toxic and if they're going on the commit their regenerative side, they're not toxic because they threshold the nickel drops below the threshold that would cause trouble If I see heavy metals, it's always on the NPK side. So I see cadmium or antimony or some Crazy thing that we don't want. It's always on the NPK side it's never on the organic side the regenerative side and I have a better microbiome and now I have a better microbiome and But this is a half inch of compost annually, which is 13,000 gallons per acre per year That's 30 tons per acre and that's not really a very practical plate to scale up So can you grow the compost from seed? So there's occasionally done the cover crop thing so this is a cover crop wheat and Cover crop wheat is growing much more densely on the the near side of this picture I actually couldn't cut that with a with a mower. I had to go out with a scythe Slice it down and then in the till it in That's the regenerative side. The other side is the NPK side. It was flying with a mower We just cut through it with a mechanical mower So If we do grow the compost in place, of course, we're not destroying disturbing the soil anymore and that's one of our you know five principles or six principles of Generative management according to Gabe Brown and The cover crop is going to block the wind and rain channel the rain into the soil shade the soil from the sun add soil organic matter first from the root mass second from the leaf mass, but then extra Benefit pretty important also the microbial mass. So those microbes that it's going to grow while it's Harvesting unlike even in the winter are going to add to the soil organic matter It's going to suppress weeds or microbes and even maybe tap into mineral reservoirs down deep But will that work me make that will that work quickly enough and grow enough material if the soil is already half sterile from the previous management strategies of dumping pesticides and herbicides and fertilizer on it Will there be herbicide residues that cause trouble and Would it help to have to harness the power of epigenetics? so These are ideas that are going to come together in just a minute In the teaming with series of Books from Jeff lo and fells who seems to devote a lot of time to the cannabis This this particular latest addition in the series Describes endophytic bacteria. So an endophytic bacteria is involved in a rhizophagey cycle. There's a lot of big words Rhizos are roots page is eating the plants are eating the bacteria through their roots They strip off the outer wall of the bacteria. That is an important nutritional source for the plant the bacteria changes from being You know some rod shape to being a blob because it's lost its cell wall. It's no longer being held together the way it used to be That enters a plant cell it reproduces in the plant cell kind of like It's also benefiting from having all these sugars and things shipped down to it And so the bacteria is reproducing in the plant invades all through the plant goes up into the seeds and the fruit and leaves in every place and then some of those bacteria make it back down to the root and they get shoved out of the root and Guess what happens when it gets shoved out of the root? You get a root hair. That's how root hairs form Practically all of our plants as far as we can tell and this is a more general thing than in mycorrhizal fungi So brassicas like cabbage and broccoli and stuff. Those are all brassicas. They don't have relationships with sit with our muscular mycorrhizal fungi Amaranth doesn't have relationships with mycorrhizal fungi, but all these plants are gonna have relationships with endophytes The endophyte is all through the plant Help it plant plant can shove it out and make it do interesting new things. That's a significant source of nutrients So you got a garden who's also One of our hosts here today And a different track his PhD thesis is about training bacterial communities To digest atrazine So he's got an herbicide and he thinks that if you expose a compost pile to the herbicide The compost pile will learn or select for or something something happens that Ramps up the ability of that compost pile to digest that herbicide Okay, so that's interesting too. Maybe we could use that and then You can organically create a genetically modified organism. This is the Epigenetic idea so epigenetics is a process where when you stress an organism whether it's a starving mom in Netherlands in World War two or a plant in the field But the DNA on that plant will get changed cytosine residues get methylated So there's actually a change in the DNA or there's a change in a protein that's a near the DNA That turns off or turns on genes So it's genetically modified in place and when you raise a plant in your garden and Take the seeds from that plant Those seeds are genetically modified to work really well in your garden If you buy your seeds from Maine or Oregon They are not going to be genetically modified to work Well in Nebraska or Missouri so the closer you can raise those seeds to the place where you're going to plant them the more Genetically modified. They are going to be to for your setting All right, so Next interesting idea is that seed pellets can carry microbes you could infuse a seed pellet Which is going to be a seed with a wrapper of clay and compost around it. Maybe other things biochar, maybe and You can infuse that with some of these microbes So we've just given you a bunch of microbes to think about and special seeds to think about So there are issues with it. So the pellet has to stay together while it's waiting to be planted. This is an issue it turns out The pH of the pellet and the salts in the pellet can kill the microbes So you don't want to kill the microbes you wanted the microbes, right? I'm trying to try to use those and the seedling has to be able to get out so if you oh and and you don't want Slugs and mice to eat your thing So you want to protect it but you have to protection in a way that allows the seed to emerge this evening to emerge So this is all tricky. So the fast region materials were to take coffee grounds and leaves and Mix them up in a tumbler composter and then every week we'd give it to a more and more toxic dose of four different herbicides that my partner farmer is using on his nearby fields. So we're exposing this Compost pile to 2 4d Atrazine we fascinate and glyphosate. I kind of thought we'd kill all the worms, but they didn't Plenty of worms growing in this compost pile this time in this tumbler. So they're anyway You got this tumbler full of compost. It's been exposed to a lot of stuff And I have no idea if it's really digesting atrazine or not, but it's been exposed to a lot of atrazine Next set is a symbiotic compost So I thought I'll take coffee grounds and leaves and we'll put those in a compost pile and then when I harvested Some cover crop that I'm going to use I'll put that in there, too And it'll carry in with it the endophytes those bacteria that were supposed to be added And now I'll have a special wheat a special pea and a special Camelina Compost so the wheat the winter wheat I have the winter pea that I have in the Camelina That I have will live through the winter no matter what happens This two degrees cold spell is about to hit. It's okay. They'll be fine And then we have a big kiln that make biochar. We'll talk about that more tomorrow But anyway, you take the biochar civet get some ultra fine material And there's really fine material that you could use to hold things in the in the seed ball And so then the intervention plan is to add these locally grown seeds So we've also planted the Camelina harvest of the seeds And so now we're going to take those put them in a mixer make seed balls and make the seed balls using Kind of water run through each of those compost to try and grab some of the endophytes This is not quite the best possible plan, but this is what I proposed And then there's a bunch of treatments and so there's different strategies for you know, whether to put down nothing put down the seeds with the With spray on our seeds with the pigment or So a bunch of different strategies and we're trying to figure out something that's affordable, right? You want the farmer to be able to walk into buckeyes by everything he needs Leave with 50 pound bags not have to do any other darn crazy thing with amazon or You know, nothing else should have to happen. You should be able to do this as simply as possible So there's a bunch of technical problems that emerge. Of course, once you get into the details The biochar of the pH is from 9 to 11. This is easily alkaline enough to kill everything that I'm going to add to it Including the seed So you can neutralize that with sulfuric acid But this changes the whole nature of the project fair amount It's no longer something you would do with, you know, turn your children loose with it No, you need to glove up and have protective personal personal protective equipment Uh, you know, that that's not gonna work The clay is also all the clays that I had except for cat litter cat litter is neutral But if you go by bentonite clay like Wyoming bentonite sodium bentonite clay or vol clay, which is calcium bentonite, which you can get in 50 pound bags at buckeyes But those pHs are more than 9 too. So those are also too alkaline Uh, it turns out you can buy a very expensive Red sea ball clay from amazon, but it's expensive. That's not going to scale well I'd also started by saying well, we're going to take these plant residual plant Plant residues and put them in the compost to get the endofites As a dumb idea the much better to grow the plants in the compost just let the plants Raise them up in the compost so you have a compost full of plant with piece Plants compost full of camalina plants Compost full of wheat plants and the endofites are necessarily in the compost all through the root system They're all around the root system. So that's a much better way to make sure that you're actually growing them into fights Uh, the camalina seeds are too small to be the center of a seed ball So you have to put them on the outside so it makes them more of a seed bomb Um, the seed pellet integrity is difficult to maintain. It's into fracture Other people have managed to do this, but they don't tell you How they do it usually there's very little literature about how exactly they do this But what there is suggested you need more than 50 clay And so we've got to figure out the clay thing and the clumsy there's a You can choose the wrong mixer. It turns out I tried that once so, uh And then there's all these other binder problems. So Anyway, uh, you can try and deal with those We got some logistic problems the drought delayed The drought killed soybeans that were supposed to be growing in the two-acre field where our trials supposed to happen the Death of the soybeans caused the farmer to lose interest in maintaining other things happening in the field with the result that we grew a lot of polymer amaranth and um And crabgrass and they went to see before they got sprayed with five percent so So we had like, you know a number of ugly problems happening in the two-acre field And so I wound up adding a lot of very small Parallel plot trials on my farm to try to fill in what we're going to be gaps in our experience here and then, uh And then the predation issue turned up the amazon to see if all the thing Works so the first trial was these three bins on the on the left got Plant residues thrown into the bins that are supposed to be composting. Don't do that do this instead This is camelina and in wheat and peas and stuff growing in the compost pile. That's a good idea. That's going to work Um The tiny camelina seeds that there really are too tiny to be the center of a seed ball The seed seed bomb clay works great. The voids predation is just expensive and it doesn't isn't going to scale um At least not purchased from amazon Um, the mixer if you decide you need a mixer, you don't want the big blue loaves mixer. It's great for Crushing biochar in the powder, but it's not very good for mixing a seed ball The yard mix is great if you decide you need to make seed balls use that the power button is on the front It's got a nice big flat space underneath. You can take out the mixing paddles that would use for Um mixing cement or mortar and it's a good size. You can make hundreds and hundreds of maybe thousands of seed balls in there pretty fast and you just Put in some clay put in some compost put in the seeds Start it tumbling and then start spraying water at it Little misty water and it'll it'll work Um Before the mice after the mice so the seed bomb clay is what worked so This uh tray full of all kinds of things that I was trying. I thought you know, i buy our charl Discourage the might no they hate it all So that's that that was over one night of uh, you know observations. So they just destroyed it. Now I got another um uh The ball clay I mentioned the calcium bentonite ball clay This is really good for batching your pond if you've got a leak in the dam You pour this stuff in there it swells up to like 10 times its original size and plugs all the leaks That's great for plug for the dam is terrible for a seed ball And it actually stopped anything from growing it's a little bit hard to tell in that picture but There are a few wheat plants On the picture on your right But there are no peas so this whole this whole at least there's two rows here of Ball clay and there's nothing going on there um This side is with an anti herbicidal tea and this side is without an anti herbicidal title tea This is on a small plot that I where I had Just drenched this thing with 2 4d And uh turned out not to matter so those post-emergent herbicides Really are post-emergent you put them on and then plant the week later. They don't do anything so So, you know, maybe the simple solution is Just spray stuff that you want on there instead of trying to make the seed pellets so if I Revising my plan to start again right now, which I probably will I would add radish as a cover crop because the camelina is so tiny such a tiny delicate plant that it doesn't provide any Significant root mass and so it's not going to add much carbon to the soil So if I'm really trying to repair soil in one season, I would put radishes in there Even though they're probably going to get killed Overwinter, but if you plant them in the early enough in the fall, they'll make some radish and then um I'd go to the cover crop and local soil for epigenetic seeds like I did We got a cover crop in compost for symbiotic microbes, which I didn't but I'm doing now Evaluate the herbicide residual issue which may or may not be an issue I use a seed drill or shallow planting Uh To get the seeds planted. I would use the compost tea sprays. I would carefully select my weather Now try a plant when there's going to be rain and crimp the cover crop and plant crash crop into it So we'll be doing that um this spring lord willing and Go from there