 In 2013, the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service entered into a cooperative agreement with the South Dakota No-Till Association and IGRO, SDSU Extension, for delivering the latest soil health and productivity technology to South Dakota farmers and ranchers. A series of two local events were held in South Dakota, in Lemon and Fort Peer. Thank you for having me out. I'm glad I get to follow Jay this morning because he brought up some of the testing I'm going to talk to you about this morning. Although I will say I'm not quite as courteous as Jay, so I try to leave time for questions, but I usually don't do a very good job of it because I'll keep talking. As long as you don't get up and walk out, I'll keep talking. So with that, I'll need a little help. Ruth, make sure to holler at me when I'm running up on time. That's fine. And if you have questions about this, there's a lot of information I'm going to throw at you fairly quickly. I always enjoy if you go ahead and raise your hand. Like I said, I try to leave time for questions, and I will try my best to do so. But if you have a question about what I'm talking about at that time, feel free to stop me and ask because that's usually the best time to do it. So I'm just going to jump through some of the different testing options. We offer award laboratories. Jay mentioned the first one I'm going to talk to you about. If I can get this thing to work here. All right, so the first test I want to kind of talk to you about. And I'm not going to, I don't want to get bogged down in the details. I'm going to cover just a little bit about the test, what it is, how it works. But then when it's appropriate to use the test and then what we think we can learn from it. So the first one I'm going to talk about is the phospholipin fatty acid test or PLFA. So Jay showed some of the numbers about this, how they were using it on some of the different ranches he works with. I just want to tell you a little bit more about it. So phospholipids are a type of fatty acid. They're in cell membranes. Every organism then has these. Bacteria, fungi, your dog, you and me. So the nice thing about fatty acids is that we can use those then to study the microbial community in the soil, okay? We're able to quantify these. So instead of just pointing out what these different groups are, the different organisms, we actually can measure them and quantify them in the laboratory. Very similar to measuring things like nitrate or phosphorus. They also represent living biomass because when a cell or an organism dies in the soil, which happens all of the time, the cells break open and these fatty acids are used by other organisms in the soil as a food source, okay? The nice thing about that is it means they don't stick around very long in the soil. So they change over time, okay? They are influenced by environment. So some of the things that we necessarily can't control. Soil frozen five feet down, as Jay was saying, is going to have a very large influence on the microbial community. But they can also be influenced or changed with land management. And we saw some examples of that. And then the important thing to remember when we talk about these tests is that they represent a snapshot in time. So because they change, we are looking at that exact snapshot in time of that community. It doesn't mean tomorrow it's going to be dramatically different. It just means that we can use it as a management tool and monitor change over time, okay? The way the test works, what we're actually going to measure. So we pull all of these fatty acids out of the soil, okay? We extract them out of the soil, just like nutrients. We're going to measure those. There might be 100 different fatty acids in that soil, okay? We call that a profile. So now it's my job to take all of those different fatty acids and categorize them into these different groups. And we call those functional groups, okay? Bacteria, fungi, protozoans. Those are different functional groups. So that's what you see listed on the right-hand side. It's a description of all the different functional groups we're going to look for. The first thing you'll notice is that the test is not specific, meaning that we can't tell you what species are in your soil, okay? Almost 90% or more of what's actually in the soil for microorganisms is new to science. We don't know what it is, and I can't grow them in a laboratory. No matter how hard I seem to try, I've got soils that have sat around for two or three months, two or three years, and I can't get anything to grow. So we have to break them down into functional groups, okay? We do that, when we talk about that, we use biomarkers to do that. So out of that 100 fatty acids, I'm looking for very specific ones and we categorize those basically into those groups. What's left is what we call undifferentiated. So when you get a report, if you run one of these tests, you'll see that number, and I just want to point out what that is. It's all of the different fatty acids we can't categorize into a group, okay? We like to couple this analysis with some other soil tests. I mentioned soil moisture, environmental conditions can change the results for this test dramatically. Soil moisture is one of those, pH is another one, of course soil temperature. So be mindful of when you're taking tests. If you're trying to track change over time, you certainly wouldn't want to be taking tests in February and then I don't know who'd go out there and try to soil test in February, but you'd be surprised. And then comparing that to July, so we'll talk a little bit more about that. So on the results, what you would see if you ran one of these tests, number one is you will see the living microbial biomass. This is the number that you heard Jay mention a couple of times in his presentation, the 8,700 nanograms per gram or the 1,000 nanograms per gram. It's a measure or representation of total living biomass, okay? Just tells us how much. That's one of the most important numbers on the test and we'll use that to track those changes over time. As Jay did with his, on some of those ranches, changed the management. He established baselines, changed the management and then tracked that over three to five years, okay? We also calculate a functional group diversity or functional group diversity index. This is what we saw when we were looking at the different groups and we had some zeros show up on the sterilized potatoes. We're able to actually measure those different groups and we calculated diversity index, okay? It's not the same as a species diversity index, but the idea is the same. The more the diversity, the better representation of those groups. So it's a number we can kind of watch. We also provide a breakdown of all the different organisms as a percentage of total, so as a percentage of the total biomass. You can quickly compare two different soils or two different management practices and see what percentage maybe of mycorrhizae is there, if that's what you're interested in. And we also provide some of the community composition ratios, so fungi to bacteria, predator to prey. When I say predator to prey, I'm talking about protozoans and bacteria. Protozoans graze on bacteria in the soil. When they do so, they're gonna release nutrients and mineralize nutrients and turn those back into the soil. Same process as that we kind of heard of this morning with livestock grazing, except on a micro scale, okay? So same idea as things that are happening in your soil. We're also gonna look at a few of the others, gram positive to gram negative. It tells us things about moisture, soil moisture conditions, soil temperature, potentially soluble salts or salt stress. So these are some of the things we can look at with the test and get some numbers for. So I just wanna show you kind of what we do when we step through and interpret some of these results, because there's a lot of numbers on there. So we wanna highlight just kind of the main points. I mentioned this before, we wanna look for the biomass and the diversity number. Those are the top, the first two numbers on the report. The higher that biomass, the higher diversity the better. Everybody wants to know, if they get a single number, is it good, bad, high, low, medium, ideal? That's very difficult to establish with these types of tests. So I will say that we don't have, there's no standard value. You can't find a literature book or an article or a university and find out what that value should be. To try to accommodate for that, we've put together this table, which is made up of almost 5,000 different samples, soils that I've received across the country and we've analyzed those samples. So I've just kind of put together some ranges to give you an idea of where you would fall to start. So using some numbers that Jay was mentioning earlier on the potato farm, 1,100 nanograms per gram. We would look at this total biomass. That's gonna fall in the almost poor to slightly below average category. The 8,000, the top end of this I've got is greater than 4,000. 8,000 is off the chart, okay? We don't typically see soils that are that high. Now I might have to start reworking some of these numbers as the soils get better, but that's how we would use this side of the chart. The diversity is the same idea. To get an overall score, you would take your biomass and look at the rating and take your diversity and look at the rating and average the two together, okay? So if we've got very good or good biomass and poor or very poor diversity, we have an overall average rating, okay? That's how we would look at that chart. It tells us a couple of different things. I've seen a lot of soils with high biomass and very poor diversity. High intensity, grain agriculture can produce a lot of microorganisms. It can produce a lot of bacteria. But without the diversity in the plant community, we tend to isolate those microbial groups that can function or survive under a monoculture, okay? So our diversity drops, we can maintain a high biomass. We'd like to see a balance of both. And so this is why we focus both on diversity and biomass with this test. It is, I mentioned this, but it is dependent on soil type, climate, etc. So you need to keep those things in mind. Certainly this type of table is built looking at soils all across the country. So it may not be a completely fair comparison, but it's a place to start. Because we know that soils are gonna be drastically different, right? So when and how to use this test, really it's a comparison tool. As I mentioned, there's no standard book value of what you should score or what the biomass should be. So we wanna compare two different systems, okay? You can do that directly at the same time or you can do that tracking change over time. When I say change over time, we wanna talk about, I usually mention three years. If you're making some pretty drastic changes, going from a conventional corn-bean rotation, you're gonna try to take some information home and you're gonna integrate cover crops and livestock and all of those things over the next three years. You can see some of these changes much faster than that. But if you're just maybe going to convert or switch over to maybe a no-till system, it'll take a lot longer time before you start to see changes in that community. Three to five years, generally. So keep that in mind when we're looking at change over time. We also can use the test when we're trying to troubleshoot specific problems. I typically would still recommend using, if you're doing other types of soil testing, to focus on those first. Because a lot of times we can adjust, we can see things that are issues that this test isn't gonna monitor. We're not looking for pH problems or looking for salt problems. So make sure you're using those types of tests first. But if you've done those steps and we're still having trouble looking for differences, this is one of those tests you can step to. And then also try to run this test when we've got an actively growing plant community, okay? We want plant roots out there. It doesn't mean that we can't run the test other times. But we do know that the plant community has such a strong influence on the microbial community, that we might as well test that when the plant community is present. So that's what we try to focus for, for PLFA. So that's a very quick overview of PLFA. We have examples of what the reports look like online. We have more specific information about sampling. As far as taking a sample goes, because that's usually one of the big questions, it's a zone sampling or a composite sampling scheme. We're not gonna grid sample any of this, of course. And really the area you're interested in, we try to keep the area under 20 acres if we can for this type of testing. 10 to 15 cores, if you're using six inches or eight inches for your topsoil stick with whatever depth you've been using, okay? That way we can try to make some comparisons back to what you've already been doing. Yeah, go ahead. You do this, you see a handle like you've got four inches of old residue. I mean, you scrape that away first. Yeah, that's a good question, Dan. The question was, is if you've got a lot of residue on your soil surface, do you want to count that or remove that before you take your soil sample? For uniformity, remove that, okay? This is a soil test. So push that residue to the side, take your soil core. And then make sure to push the residue back over because we don't want to leave any bare soil, right? So, yeah, certainly cover that, but yeah, keep the residue out. And if you get residue in it, that's fine. We'll take it out of there, but that's a good question. Lubricants, that's another good one. The question about lubrication on the probe, no WD-40, right? Silicone, try silicone spray, if you can, because we're testing fat. We're testing oil here. I've actually gotten some samples in that have had WD-40 on them. And I really wish I wouldn't have wasted six hours running those samples because they don't mean anything, okay? You don't have to sterilize a probe. You don't have to sterilize a bucket or anything. You can touch the instruments. It's a microbial test, but it's not that specific. So you don't have to worry about those issues. But yeah, try to use silicone, stay away from any kind of grease or oil-based lubricants. Can it affect a normal soil sample? Not enough, typically. What it would, it could influence some of the water soluble carbon stuff, but we're not typically doing that on a traditional soil test. So the one that would probably affect would be organic matter, and you'd have to really, really soak that stuff. The whole soil would have to be saturated, I think, before you notice it. So, go ahead, Jay. Last, when you do have a zero, you like speaching or? Yeah, certainly. So this is a good question as well. So, Jay asked, what happens if you get a zero on some of those different groups? Doesn't mean that you might still have them there. We didn't read them. That's exactly the case. When we get a zero, for example, for protozones, that doesn't mean that across that entire field, there's no protozones in your soil. They're just below the detection limit. They're too far in between. We couldn't find them. As sensitive as this is, we're trying to measure such a small world out there that we're going to miss things. So, they're generally there. They're in such a few number or the conditions weren't right, especially this time of year. Protozones aren't going to be, they're not ice skating through the pore space in your soil. So, they're there. They will be there. The plant community will help bring those things back. I've mentioned protozones because they're typically the ones that go to zero first. But yeah, they are there. We can help keep them, you know, keep the numbers high enough where they'll show up more often with some of that. So, yeah, yeah, I can. So, right now, with this PLFA test, I don't know of any other laboratories that are running this commercially yet. I think there's a few labs that have the capability. Microbial identification incorporated out of Newark, Delaware, they will run these samples for producers. But that's not their job. They're an R&D lab. Where we start to really run into problems were things where like Solvita, and I'm going to talk about that one next, Solvita, the Haney test or the Soil Health Nutrient Tool. Solvita has entered into proficiency testing with NAPT and ALP. So they are now working on that, the variability, and it's great because what they found out is that there's a lot of variability between the labs. And so that's, but they're working on those issues and trying to correct them. The Soil Health Nutrient Tool or the Haney test, I haven't seen that show up in proficiency testing yet. The individual components of the test, we do a lot of proficiency work with already, nitrate, phosphate. So I can speak for ourselves. We do a lot of in-house comparison to, you know, that's how we are making sure the instruments are running correctly, but between lab comparisons, I haven't seen a lot of that yet. But I would imagine it's coming down the road. So if we have any other questions about PLFA, feel free to find me. I'm going to jump into Solvita really fast. I've just got a couple of quick slides on Solvita. So the Solvita test or Soil Respiration Test, I just want to quickly point out that there are two different methods. There's a laboratory technique and there's a field technique. Now when Solvita first came out, it was mostly focused on the field technique and that's the way it was marketed. And what they talked about was measuring microbial activity through soil respiration. Soil respiration represented that microbial activity. In the field, that's more true than it is so in the laboratory. When we measure Solvita in the laboratory, what we're really measuring is microbial biomass. Now the higher the biomass, the higher the potential for activity. So when we monitor Solvita or we use PLFA to monitor the biomass, you can watch activity. You can see activity. Number one, residue turnover rates. There's a pretty good correlation between low Solvitas or low PLFA scores and long turnover rates for residue. So we can see that directly in the field. But I want to point that out because if you're doing Solvita on your farm and you've tried one on your farm, in your shop, in your field, whatever, that's different than what we're doing in the lab. So we're going to measure the same thing in both cases. We're measuring CO2 soil respiration. But as I mentioned, the laboratory technique is a representation of microbial biomass and potential activity as it relates to nutrient cycling. It also is going to be related to a soil's overall fertility, its texture, and its organic matter content. When we take these soils in the laboratory, we're going to dry them down like any other soil. We're going to grind them. And then they're rewetted through capillary action. So from the bottom up, and what Solvita calls field capacity. I laugh at that because what happens when you send a soil through a hammer mill? Hopefully, if the hammer mill does its job, you don't have any aggregates really anymore. But if you're doing a good job, hopefully when we get the sample in, it's full of aggregates. So there is a disconnect there. The point of the laboratory test is to do something exactly the same way every single time. We need to repeat that. So still with Solvita, we're going to be doing comparison type testing. So if you send us a really good, well-aggregated, healthy soil, odds are we're going to get a pretty high Solvita score even though we're shoving the soil through a hammer mill. On vice versa, if we get a poor soil, we're going to probably see pretty low scores through a hammer mill either way. They are working on standardizing this and changing this a little bit more to kind of go back to your question. They're finding that when we started doing the proficiency testing, if you've ever seen a proficiency sample from ALP or NAPT, they have the consistency of flour or talcum powder. So they do that to help homogenize the sample. But when we talk about destroying aggregate stability or aggregates, they're taking it to a whole new extreme. When we go to rewept these samples, it's very difficult, and we get a lot more variations. So they're working on changing that procedure as well. The soil respiration system or scale, this is from Solvita's website. This is how we would interpret those results. The range on the results typically runs anywhere from zero, theoretically, all the way up to 180. Solvita just recently in the last two weeks is actually up that to 450. That doesn't change the scale. Once we get above 100, the interpretation is relatively the same. Most soils are not scoring above 180, but in some situations, six and a half percent organic matter, lots of livestock integration, cover integration, perennial systems, we can get scores up in the 250 range. It does happen. So they just increase that top end. So we don't like to basically tie this together with in mineralization. How much nitrogen are you gonna get out of your soil, essentially, that old question of, I've got this much organic matter, how much can I get out? I don't like to look at it that way anymore because if you're pulling nitrogen out of your organic matter, you're not building organic matter. You're destroying organic matter, okay? So some of these numbers are incredibly high. They don't actually put a number on this table, but the calculation of how this is done, if you scored around 150 on the solvita respiration, you might get credit for over 120 pounds of nitrogen mineralization that year. The problem with that is that you maybe didn't have 120 pounds available to mineralize, that the microbes could access. So we're gonna take this solvita concept a little step further, and I'm gonna jump into the Haney test or the solar health nutrient tool. Just a quick background on it and where it kinda came from. So Rick Haney helped put together the laboratory methods for solvita with John Durand out of UNL, and then Will Brenton and Woodson Laboratory in Maine. Basically, the problem that he had with solvita was just what I was mentioning. If you take a bunch of microbes and feed them just pure sugar, they'll generate a lot of CO2, but sugar doesn't have any nitrogen tied with it, so what's your mineralization rate for nitrogen? It should be zero, we're pretty close to it. So he wanted to investigate some of the other properties in the soil so we could get a better handle or try to get a better handle on nitrogen mineralization and at the same time monitor other aspects or indicators of soil health, okay? So these three questions that are up here, these are questions we've been trying to answer for decades in soil science and soil testing. What condition is your soil in, but we wanna look at that beyond just fertility. Is your soil balanced, and it's more balanced from a microbial standpoint? Not thinking so much of different nutrient ratios and those things, but balanced from a microbial standpoint, and then what can we do to help? And those are all, a lot of the reasons why you guys are here, what can we do to help, okay? Redirect focus of soil ecology, no till, covers, livestock integration, all of those different tools that are available to try to help change or influence these numbers. So overall, the approach to this test is a multifaceted, so I call it a test, really it's, we're measuring 30 or 40 different things, so it's a package of different tests, but we're gonna monitor, we're gonna evaluate soil fertility, and then a microbial component, which is the solvita portion right now. We're gonna look at water extractable organic carbon on top of measuring traditional organic matter, right? We're looking at soil organic nitrogen and phosphorus, and then we're gonna look at this balance idea, the seed and ratio that we talk about in grazing, we talk about it in residue that's left on the soil surface. So we're gonna actually measure the seed and ratio in the soil. Then we're gonna try to bring all that together to address some different issues. So we're gonna use those numbers to tackle trouble spots, areas that we're doing very well in, formulate a plan, carry that out, and then we're gonna re-evaluate over time. That's the approach that we're trying to take using this test. So I'm gonna start with the nutrient portion really quick. What are we measuring and why? We're using what's called an H3A extract. H3A just stands for the four different individuals who came up with the extract, so it's nothing special, it's not a neat scientific name or anything. It's just a nice short version. It's really a weak acid extract made up of three commonly produced organic acids that plant roots leak out into the soil. The idea there is that we're trying to mimic soil solution. This has been done before, there's other extracts that have done this for decades. This is just a different version of it. We're gonna measure plant available nitrate and ammonium, phosphate, potassium, calcium, iron, and aluminum. So the first thing I wanna point out is that there's no mention of essential plant nutrients like sulfur, zinc, manganese, some of those different plant nutrients of greater concern in different areas, but we're not including them on this test. We're hoping to, okay? We're really hoping to add those on to the test. And I'll be happy to say we'll do so at no additional cost. But until we know what the numbers mean, I can't just throw numbers at you, it doesn't do a lot of good. So we're working on that. Right now we're still providing what Rick, originally, what Rick Haney and his team originally were providing it. Totals, this is what he calls totals, phosphorus and organic phosphorus. Okay, remember it's still extractable, total extractable. So you're gonna get three different phosphorus numbers on this one test. And I'll talk about why we're measuring all three of those in just a minute. The second extract we're gonna do is a water extract. So we do two separate extracts. The first one's for plant nutrients. The second one is to look at the microbial habitat, the microbial component, okay? So we're gonna measure organic carbon, total nitrogen. We're gonna re-measure nitrate and ammonium. We're gonna calculate organic in so we take total nitrogen, subtract out nitrate, subtract out the ammonium, and we're left with organic in. We're gonna put together the organic seed in ratio. Using the ratio, how much organic nitrogen you have present in that extract and how high your solvita score is, how many microbes you have, that all comes together into a calculation to estimate mineralizable nitrogen. That question of I tied up this nitrogen in my cover crop or I've got it in my residue, how much can I get back out of this soil, okay? That's what we're trying to address with that question. We'll talk about that in more detail. The organic in release is part of that and then ultimately there's a soil health score, okay? And the soil health score is kind of a summation of the test and I'll talk about that one too. Quick word on soil organic matter versus the water extractable organic carbon. The water extractable carbon is such an important part of this test. It's often confused with the more traditional organic matter measurements. The way I've been taught to kind of look at these with this test is that organic matter is a measurement of the quantity of carbon or the quantity of habitat that the microbes have to live in. It's the house, okay? Soil's house. Higher the organic matter, the bigger the house, okay? The water extractable organic carbon for action is the food inside that house. It's the house's refrigerator, okay? So, mentioned earlier about, I think Jay, you mentioned something about kicking teenagers out of the house when they were 14 or 15 years old. I'll tell you what, I actually just threatened to leave because my dad couldn't keep the refrigerator stocked. Right? If you don't keep the water extractable organic portion, the house's refrigerator stocked, those microbes are gonna be like teenagers and they're gonna try to eat you out of house and home, okay? They're gonna burn the house down. So they'll eat the organic matter, the stable organic matter in order to survive. It's the same idea of the cow faced with the choice of don't eat and starve to death or eat plastic acid and nitrate and die anyway, okay? If you're forcing that microbial community to make a choice, they'll eat whatever they can get to. So, typically what we've been seeing is organic matters across the general consensus, the organic matters and they're going down. When you move away from that perennial system, when you've got living roots for 12 months out of the year, even though they're probably not really active today, they're still there and they'll support that community better than feeding a microorganism for four months out of the year with our annual crop system. So they're fed really well for four or five months and then they start to starve and they have to eat everything else. Now relate that back to the more mouths you have to feed, the more food you have to keep in the refrigerator, okay? So in those systems where you start to build that microbial community up, you also have to compensate by adding more carbon in the system and you'll see that with residue turnover on your soil surface, okay? That's how those things are kind of related. So I wanted to point that out about the organic matter and how that's different. But I should step back, one other quick note, you don't have to have a great big house to have a lot of food in the refrigerator. That's the other thing, you don't need 5% soil organic matter to have five or 600 part per million in that water extractable fraction, okay? That has to do more with the inputs that you're putting in and when I say inputs, I'm talking crop rotation, covers, manure, all of those things are gonna help keep that refrigerator stock regardless of what you started with with organic matter levels. Coupled with the carbon is the organic nitrogen. So that's the other portion of this. This is the pool of nitrogen that the microbes are gonna have access to. Okay, you've probably heard before that organic matter, 1% organic matter has 1,000 pounds of organic nitrogen in it, okay? We're measuring a very small fraction of that. This is just the water extractable portion. But this is the portion we want the microbes to eat. We want them to leave the rest of it alone. If you're trying to conserve or build organic matter, we need them to leave that alone. Yeah, so the question was, when does the residue stop being part of the refrigerator and start becoming part of the house? Okay, that's a great way of looking at it, Rick, because that's exactly what we're trying to do for building organic matter. Micro-organisms have a hierarchy of things that they'd like to eat, very similar to us and cattle grazing and all of those things. So the answer to that question is, the sooner you can put something back up here that is more preferable for them to eat, they'll leave this stuff alone and it starts to become part of the house. So if we've got a hierarchy of things, I mean what I mean by that is fresh plant animal residues. You know, first, humic acids down here, okay? Humic acids are very important for microorganisms, but they don't want to eat them. It's really essentially microbial waste product. And it's very difficult and it's energy costly for them to break those things down. They want to start with the simplest sugars and the organic residues up here and as those progressively get more complex or the energy is taken out of those, they become less beneficial for the microbes. So in situations where you've got lots of input into the system, if you're using a, I'll use Jerry Doan for an example, just because we talked about his farm ranch here a little bit ago. He's doing that annual cover crop but he's doing it as part of his rotation, right? So he's putting a lot of residue right back into the surface very quickly. If he does that every year, well not on the same field, but if he's doing that across his farm every third year, whatever it is, the intensity will determine how soon that becomes part of the house. If you do it once in 10 years, very, very little of what you put into that cover crop or what the cover crop put into your soil will become part of the house, if that makes sense. So I know it's kind of a long-winded answer but I'm a long-winded person, so. But yeah, it's very important. Yeah, you eventually want them to let that stuff become part of the house and that's what we've seen. So individuals that you maybe hear about that are increasing their organic matters on their farms relatively quickly, I mean, one, two percent every 10 years, they figured out how to dump enough stuff into their soil that the microbes eventually will eat what they need and the rest becomes part of that house pretty quickly. So, and it's easier to do the further north you get, right, because of climate and things like that. So how much you have to put into that system varies. You go to Texas, they'd have to constantly be putting stuff in because the temperatures are too warm. So that's a good question. So with the organic nitrogen, I was mentioning that's coupled with your carbon, the water is soluble organic nitrogen, even though it's water soluble or it's extractable, it will move in the soil. It carries a lower risk of loss compared to nitrate and ammonium alone. So the nice thing about tying up this residual nitrogen into the organic form is that we keep it in the soil system and then your microorganisms are gonna kind of be the key to turn that stuff back out because we don't wanna just tie it up. If you paid for the nitrogen, you paid for the cover crop, well, now you've paid twice to hold that, or you say, well, my cover crop produced 80 pounds of nitrogen, that just paid for your whole cover crop. But only if you can get the nitrogen back out of it, right? And that's usually the question is when am I gonna get that credit? And we'll talk about when and how that's gonna happen. Part of that, when or how fast that'll occur has to do with the seed and balance. And when we have a high carbon residue, corn, wheat stubble, some of those items are very difficult to break down in a timely manner that's all carbon, okay? I'm not sure what we're having for lunch, but I imagine it's gonna be delicious. And if it's just rice cakes, I'll see how many people actually eat rice cakes today. Pure carbon, no diversity in the diet, those types of things become difficult to break down. You get tired of trying to eat that stuff, right? Microorganisms, they can't just pick things up and chew on them like you and I can. Very, very energy costly for them to eat. They have to exude enzymes, proteins. Proteins are full of nitrogen, full of nutrition, right? They exude those into the soil, they break down these different carbon-based substances and then they take this stuff in. So because of that, bacteria have a seed in ratio of about three to one. Very, very nitrogen rich. They're just little bags of fertilizer, really. And when the seed in ratio of your soil, of the residue that they're consuming is greater than 20 to one, the nitrogen becomes limiting for them and they'll tie it up. They're not gonna give that to the plant for free if they need to hold on to it. So ideally we wanna get this ratio down below 15, below 20, ideally somewhere between eight and 15. So stable soil organic matter, the house that they live in typically has a seed in ratio between 10 and 12, okay? The food that we put into that, if that's where they're gonna eventually take that down and get it to that 10 to 12 range, we'd be best if we could feed them something that was at least closer to that than 80 to one like we see in corn and wheat stubble. That's the key. So when we talk about grazing a system and changing that seed in ratio or monitoring high carbon versus low carbon residue, when Jay mentioned the turnover of residue and he likes to keep a seed in ratio a little lower to turn that stuff over a little faster, this is what we're talking about, is monitoring that seed in ratio and you can adjust this with the types of covers you use or how long you graze or how long you let the cover mature. That's sometimes that's difficult if you're trying to put it in after a cash crop up here, but those are different tools you have. So that's the idea there. So I wanna talk real quick about the soil health score. I'd like to say that I wish it wasn't called a soil health score because soil health involves so much more than what this test is measuring, right? So keep that in mind. It is a, we call it the soil health score, that's what it is, but we're not measuring anything about aggregate stability, water infiltration rates, bulk density, all of those things that the physical aspects that help make a soil healthy is not taken into account here, okay? That doesn't mean that the score is useless, it just means take it with a little grain of salt, keep that in mind, it's just a number. Okay, the calculation for the soil health score, it's, I put it up here because I wanna show you that it involves solvita, so microbial biomass, the CDN ratio, how much organic carbon and organic nitrogen you have. It doesn't have anything to do with residual nitrate levels or pH or phosphorus, okay? It should, in my opinion, all of those things, like I said, need to be taken into account, but because this score is relatively simple, when you receive, if you run a test and you get a score, you can take that score and look at these individual components and determine where maybe you need help or where you're doing really well, and so you can use that equation to kinda guide you for management. We like to see the score above seven. It ranges anywhere from zero, the highest score I've seen's been about 28, so I say 30. Seven is an arbitrary number. It's just seven sounded good. I asked Rick, I said, Rick, why are we starting with seven? What am I supposed to tell everybody? And he just said, well, why not? Okay, so the point is, is that there's no benchmark for PLFA test, there's no benchmark for Haney test, right now. They're working on that. They're trying to establish some ranges, okay, so for different soil types, different climates, what are the typical numbers we can expect to see? Point is, right now, that's where we like to start, but I'll tell you this, a score of seven in New Mexico is not the same as a score of seven in Pierce, South Dakota, and it's not the same as it would be in Georgia. Okay, they're all different. So just keep that in mind. When I look at these tests, I wanna start by looking at that seed in ratio. If that's out of balance, I wanna try to balance that. Okay, starting up the seed in ratio, getting the seed in ratio balanced is like starting the engine. It's getting the engine running. We don't care how fast the car can go if it never starts. So don't put nitrous on the junker that's sitting out back that you haven't run in 40 years. We gotta get the engine running, okay? So that's the point there. The cover crop recommendation, this is incredibly general. This is for individuals who have never considered using them before, it's just percent grass, percent legumes. If your seed in ratio is above 20, obviously we're gonna recommend a higher percentage of legumes. The further above 20 you are, the more legumes we recommend. If we dump a bunch of carbon on top of that system, you're gonna have cover crop residue until your kids take over the farm. You know, it'll be there for decades. So we gotta balance that ratio, that's how we're gonna use it. If the ratio is below 20, then we will use the soil health score, the higher the soil health score, the higher percentage of grass we're gonna recommend. If that soil health score is really high, odds are your system's running and it's running pretty fast, it's running well. Your residue's turning over, your nutrients are cycling. Takes a lot of fuel to keep that system running, okay? Look at Solvita like a fire. When we are mineralizing CO2, you're getting kicking off carbon back to the atmosphere. It's just like burning a fire. The bigger the fire, if you want to sustain that fire, the more fuel you gotta put into it. But at the same time, if you have a very small fire and you go dump a bunch of two foot diameter logs on your fire, you smother it and everything goes out, okay? So you gotta build that up slowly. I just mentioned that when I'm interpreting these, I start with that soil health score. I use that equation to determine the high and low points. What are we doing well? What do we need to work on? Balance the seed-in ratio first if needed and then increase the intensity. So that's the idea of increasing the inputs. Once you get things running, things are going. If possible, this is the big one. If possible, try to establish some ranges on your own farm. I always give this example. Last year an individual from New Mexico and when I say this everyone kind of usually chuckles. He's on an organic pecan orchard for the last 20 years. Nobody even laughed, that's just good. Good, I get in Iowa and people laugh at that. They don't know, I say pecan orchard and they, I don't know, they just kind of scares it. He went, listened to Rick Haney talk and he ran one of these tests and Rick said, well, we'd like to see a score above seven. He scored six to point six, six and a half. So he was pretty depressed. He thought he was doing better and he called and asked me what he should do and I said, well, pull one off your neighbor's farm. Because his neighbor, he said his neighbor has the same situation but he just, he doesn't care, he just does it the way he's always done it. So he pulled one off there and it scored a 1.2. We were talking sandy, dry conditions. I think he had 0.6% organic matter, so not doing real well. The other guy had 2.3. That's pretty good for down there, doing all right. But I said, find what you consider to be mother nature's best. Or what you consider the best soil to be. Now everybody's got their different opinions of what best is, highest yielding, the one that requires the lowest input costs, the one that we've never touched in agriculture. It's mother nature's managed, right? Run that as well and when he did, that soil scored a 7.2. So it's pretty unrealistic for him to expect his organic pecan farm to score a 24. Or a 15, right? But I've done the exact same scenario in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and the upper end range is 28 and the lowest stuff I could find was 14. So it does depend on region. So if this is possible and you don't have to run hundreds of samples to establish some kind of range to give you an idea of what the bottom and what the top. What's realistic? Because the score in between is arbitrary. It's just a report card of where you can try to move to. But you have to know a goal in order to know if you're doing yourself any good. You gotta know what your goals are, right? One last thing here, nitrogen management. I got about five minutes maybe, okay? Nitrogen management, this is the big difference you'll see with the Hainey test versus a traditional test. We talk about traditional soil testing. Typically you're gonna see a nitrate evaluation. Hainey test is gonna measure nitrate and it's also gonna measure ammonium and then it's gonna measure this organic in release, okay? That's that mineralization portion. And what I say measure, we're gonna calculate this. So based off the other measurements. But what you'll see on a report, this is straight from the report here. The traditional evaluation had about 14 pounds. The Hainey test evaluation is giving you credit for 38 pounds. Now this is residual credits in your soil. The difference of almost 24 pounds or about $15 an acre. So the idea here is that you can start to see these numbers change. The healthier the soil system gets, the larger that difference becomes, okay? When I run this test on conventionally tilled flat, you know, right across from the lab at Hainey where we've got guys pumping 40 inches of water and you know, because they just destroyed their soil. That difference is like three pounds. Because their soil is not alive. It's not functioning. It's not working properly. You take the other extreme and look at some of the numbers that we see on the Minokin farm and some of the other producers, some of them in this room and you'll see differences as high as 100 pounds per acre. That doesn't mean I'm suggesting you automatically go out and reduce your input or your infertillization rate by 100 pounds. The point is is that you can see this and you can start to see differences that don't show up. If you just keep doing that same traditional test, you're gonna keep getting the same recommendation back for fertility every time because this type of stuff doesn't show up. So that's how this test is really different. So two ways to use it, soil management or soil health and then the nitrogen management. It says nutrient management. I don't like to look at it really beyond nitrogen right now. Too many questions to answer still. We're still trying to answer those. If you're looking at it for soil health really any time of the year you can sample, just be consistent. I've got samples coming to the lab right now in the middle of winter because that's when it's convenient for some of those guys to sample. That's okay, just make sure you're consistent if you're gonna be doing your comparisons. After making your big management changes, I wouldn't run the test any more than once a year or even every other year if you're just starting out. There's no reason to run this thing all the time. It's not cheap, but it can give you some good information. Track change over time, especially three years. So if you're just gonna get started on something, establish a baseline, maybe give it a year or two, I'd probably give it two years, run a test and then give it another two years because it does take time to get this system going. Okay. Nutrient management, of course, prior to fertilizer application, if you're doing split application, you can, you know, I've got some people sampling in the fall, some in the spring, some before side dress or top dress on wheat. You can do any of those. Also when trying to manage input costs, if you wanna know if it's gonna be a tight year and you wanna know, okay, I'd like to reduce a little bit this year on my nitrogen application, how much can I realistically think I can go for? You know, you just wanna give yourself a cushion there, you can use it for that, once every year for that. So I guess with that, I'll open it up if we've got just two minutes real quick, Nan. Yeah, zero to the depth, we do stick with whatever depth you've been using. Yeah, for the Haney test itself, we're ignoring the subsoil nitrate, okay? It's not worth the money to run the full Haney test on a subsoil nitrate. Ideally, what you should probably do is if you're gonna run a Haney on the zero to six, pull a six to 24, but just run subsoil just like you would do on a traditional testing protocol. Yep, yep, absolutely, that's a good point because if you're trying to manage the entire profile for nitrogen, you'll wanna account for that. The other thing right now, Rick, the way the calculations work, it doesn't account for depth. That's why we tell everybody between six and eight, he's automatically assuming that's the depth you're sampling from. We're changing that as well. So it will become more precise just like other labs, just like we do with our regular testing, right? That's why we wanna know what depth you've sampled from. We're changing that on the Haney test as well. Hope to have that done in the next couple weeks, actually, so. No, he doesn't. And we're running on that H38 extract, we're running Sulfur, but we have to run it on the ICAP and we've got just a shotgun pattern of all kinds of data. So we're trying to run Sulfur, Zinc actually works really well, Sulfur we can't. So if you're, yeah, that's one or the other, we'd like to package all of this stuff together, right? Makes it real easy to run everything on one test. But it's difficult to wrap all those things in. So you need to still run Sulfur, run it on a different test, you know. If you're grid sampling, make sure you're running those types of things. Run one of these or two of these to see supplemental test. Well, thank you. I'll be around if you have other questions.