 One of the first benefits you'll see in a soil when you stop tilling is that soil hydrologic function returns and Simply put soil hydrologic function is about water going into the ground and being held there for the next crop This will be the subject of the next few videos In helping us understand soil hydrologic function. Dr. Tom Schumacher begins with the d-word You're familiar with the word dirt. I'm familiar with the word dirt. Yeah, it's a it's offering a no-no for a soil scientist to use but I Believe that there is such a thing as dirt But the dirt is the solid part of the soil Okay, it turns out that only 50% of a good soils volume is actually made up of solids But what does that look like? After all soils don't behave like pie charts Then to make it a functional soil one needs to really have some sort of a structure Of the soil and I like to use the analogy to a building So the building materials would be equivalent to Things like it would be equivalent to the dirt the solid part the nails the Concrete and so forth the wood and so on the building itself is more Than just those materials. It's it's put together in a certain way and that has Rooms it has closets. It's got corridors. It's got water pipes going through it's got vents and it's got doorways and and so forth those soil is analogous to that building It also has on the surface. It's got doorways and windows to the outside the makeup of that those holes That go out to the out there is very important as far as getting water into the into the into the soil and preventing water from running off or preventing soil from detaching and going away and As far as inside the soil We have to think about there's we talked about poor size distribution. So we've got macro pores We've got micro pores. We've got mezzo pores We've got all these pores of different sizes. They have different functions a macro pore will not hold water against gravity But we'll allow drainage And also allows water into the soil as long as the pores open to the atmosphere The mezzo pores basically will hold water that a plant can use a Micro pore will Will the water held in the micro pores not available to to a plant all these different What we would call poor spaces in the soil they those different sized areas have different functions and they're all interconnected It really doesn't do any good if I have a macro pore in the soil It's not connected to anything. So what we have here in terms of architecture a healthy functioning soil is like a well-designed building every space has a purpose and everything is actually interconnected can this architecture be destroyed and also a Another but thing to look at is if I take a wrecking ball to the to the building I still haven't changed any of the components of the building But I definitely changed the functionality of the building and the livability of the building Things could still live in it, but they're not the same things that are living in the building How does the wrecking ball analogy relate to a living functioning soil? We're gonna end with a few thoughts from dr. Dwayne Beck Mother Nature doesn't do tillage. I mean when Mother Nature does tillage. It's a catastrophic event It's a flood of volcano and earthquake or something. That's her form of doing tillage and so Way back whenever I used to say, you know tillage is a nature tillage of the catastrophic event What's natural about taking a big tractor and a bunch of iron that's manufactured in a Plant and taking it out and start doing things to your land and call it a natural system. That's not a natural system so Once you have that mindset, this just is not an option then you do better You do way better Join us in our next video as dr. Tom applies these basic principles and compares infiltration in three different tillage systems See you soon