 This is north-central South Dakota, just a typical day up here. The wind's blowing and we're trying to hold our hats on and not tip over. We're located in Walworth County in South Dakota. That's the north-central part of the state. We're about 10 miles east of the Missouri River and we're about 30 miles south of the North Dakota border. We get about 16 inches of rainfall a year, give or take. We've got kind of a clay soil around here, rolly hills. Then you go down the road a little ways and you've got pasture land. It's a combination of crop land and pasture land interspersed depending on the water system. What we're working with today is we've dug some soil samples out of some different kind of fields and we're going to run a rainfall simulator over it and we're going to show what happens to the soil and the water infiltration and the runoff as we apply a typical rain, maybe a little faster than a typical rain but a pretty typical rainfall event. Starting on the sap, the closest to me, we have a conventionally tilled field. This is a wheat summerfowl rotation and that's what I grew up with. We used to do a lot of wheat summerfowl. We'd plant wheat the next year, the landsatfowl and we'd go out with a chisel plow and we'd take care of all the weeds. We'd stir that soil back and forth. The next field over is a no-till field that's been no-tilled about 15 or 20 years. It was a full season cover crop three years ago, corn the year after that and soybeans this year, got a little residue on. The next piece over is a pretty typical post-season cover crop mix. You can see some radishes, some turnips, a little bit of field pea. There's some oats and there's some sedan grass. The sample next to that is a rangeland sample of a highly compacted area, mostly accrested wheatgrass plant population and kind of abuse. It came off of my pasture in a lane that the cattle travel on. The next sample over is a big blue stem, pretty much all big blue stem sample. So we're going to turn this water on and we're going to see what happens. Bring on the rain! So what you're seeing here is we're imitating an inch-and-a-half rainfall event, an inch-and-a-half of rain per hour. We're bringing this on and if you watch, you'll notice that the conventionally tilled sample has the least amount of armor on the soil. It has the least amount of cushion. If you watch the white bangboard behind it, you're going to see that as the rain particles come down they impact that soil the hardest and there's actually a ricochet effect where you're seeing soil particles bounce up and hit that white board behind there. As we move across on the other samples, you'll notice we've got pretty good armor on the soil. You don't really think about it, but when that rain is coming down that drop's been falling a long time and it's built up a lot of velocity. When it hits that bare ground, not only does it pack it, it also ties up that soil and it bounces with the rain. That just starts the reaction rolling for it to run off. If you look at the conventionally tilled sample in the jar in front, you can see that there's already water running off that and soil going with it. As you work your way down the line in the jars in the front, the no-tilled fields in the rotationally grazed big blue stem field, there's hardly anything running off. As you get into the more compacted rain soil, you're seeing the same kind of thing that you would see on the conventionally tilled ground. When we used to farm, we'd go out and we'd till the soil and we'd dig it up and we'd stir it and we thought we're really doing a good thing here. We're going to make it so the water soaks in. We didn't realize that we were actually sealing that soil surface. The cover crop is an interesting thing because soil microbes and bacteria need living roots to thrive on. When we were doing the summerfowl rotation, we'd try to keep that field black as long as we could all summer long. We were mainly concerned about building up moisture. We didn't realize how everything was connected. Now, we're trying to keep a living root out there as long as we can. We found that living roots are what microbes and bacteria need in order to thrive and flourish. And the bacteria and the other microbes are what break down the old plant matter into plant food. So what we're trying to do is grow more nutrients instead of buying them and spraying them on. If you think about it, the atmosphere is 78% nitrogen. We should be able to do better than buying it in town and hauling it out in a truck. We should be able to harness that and grow it. And when we put in a cover crop mix and we incorporate some legumes and get a mix of plants out there, we're doing that. We're stimulating the soil, we're stimulating the microbes, we're stimulating the bacteria and we're trying to grow our own plant food rather than ship it in. Okay, let's take a look at what's going on here. As you look at the bangboard behind the highly vegetative samples, you don't see hardly anything bouncing off there. You don't see much soil on the back. When you work your way down to the conventionally tilled one, you can see the surface of that sample is glossy. It's getting even finer than it was when we started. And there's a fair amount of splashback going back on that white board. We've got a pretty heavy breeze today. If we didn't have the breeze, you'd see even more of that. Look what's going on with the jars. As we go down the line, the conventionally tilled sample and the heavily overgrazed sample are filling up with water pretty quickly. The jars beside it are not. Now, if you look at how this is set up, those soil samples are in what are basically cake pans that have perforated bottoms. The jars directly underneath are catching the water that soaks in and goes all the way through the soil sample. The jars in the front are catching what's running off. If you look at the samples, they're sloped just a little bit. There's a funnel apparatus in the front. So the front set of jars are measuring runoff and the rear set of jars are measuring infiltration. It's really interesting to notice that the properly grazed grass, the properly grazed rangeland, the cover crop sample and the no-till sample that had cover crops on a couple of years, none of those are accumulated in hardly any runoff. So what's the deal? What do we mean by properly grazed pasture land? The sample that you're looking at right there is part of what we call intensive plant rotation. So that's used in a system where we'll cut a pasture into paddocks, small chunks kind of like a checkerboard and we'll give the cattle one or two days worth at a time and then we'll move them to a new piece. So the sample you're looking at right there had cattle on it for two or three days last year. Oh, they're the water stopping. Let's see what we've got over here. We've put on just a little bit under two inches of rainfall. When we look down the line, look how dark the water is on the conventionally-tilled sample and how dark it is on the hard grazed, the overgrazed sample. Notice we don't have hardly any runoff in the no-till cover crop field, in the full season cover crop field or the well-rested rangeland. When we look at the back jars, you can see the corresponding almost no runoff on the conventionally-tilled. We've got a fair amount of runoff, most of the runoff went through on the no-till. It infiltrated really well. That's because of that aggregate cottage cheese thing that we were talking about with the soil. In that no-till soil, when we dig that up, it's going to look like cottage cheese. It's going to be chunky and it's got a lot of air pockets in it. When we look at this conventionally-tilled sample, if we dig up a shovel full of that, we can see a definite, platey structure, almost like a stack of pancakes of different thicknesses. It's real fine and it's sealed up. We work down to cover crop, the full season cover crop, we see most of the water infiltrated. Same story there. If we dug that soil up, it would be real cottage cheese-like in structure. When we get over to this overgrazed piece of pasture land, when we dug the sample up with that, it's back to the cottage, to the pancake type deal. I'll do that over. When we get over to this heavily grazed or overgrazed piece of range land, when we dig up a sample of that soil, we see a real definite plate structure again. It's like thick layers of pancakes or bread stacked on top of each other. They're fine structured. They're not coarse. They don't have the cottage cheese appearance. When we dig up a sample of this range land that's had adequate rest, we're back to the cottage cheese type structure. The same as we have with the no-till crop land. We've got a lot of air pockets. We've got a lot of air spaces in there. We've got a lot of root passageways that the water can follow down. We've got all that armor up on the soil. When that water droplet comes dropping down out of the sky going as fast as it goes, it's going to hit the structure on top of the soil. This is going to cushion the blow, so that soil is not going to get packed from that raindrop pounding on it. That's really a big deal. It's a no-brainer that when you pack the soil, it's not going to soak in as much. The goal here, once again, is to keep the water soaking in instead of running off. We can't do anything about control and rainfall. We can't increase it. We can't decrease it. But we can do something about what happens to it when it comes down. Maybe the droughts and maybe the flooding are a little bit less of a natural disaster. Maybe they're a little bit more of our responsibility of not managing the water properly. I'm not saying that we can equalize every huge rainfall event, but we can do a lot better job of getting this water to soak in. We can do a lot better job of storing the water so that the dry periods aren't as devastating as they are right now. So we've ran the rain. We've put an inch, a little bit over an inch and a half, just about two inches of rain on this ground. Once again, we've got the no-till sample here. This has been no-tilled for a long time. The next sample over is the conventional soil, wheat-summer-fallow type rotation. The next sample is the over-grazed range land, and the far sample is the properly-managed graze land. Well-rested, a well-rested grassland. The first thing you notice again is on the long-term no-till, there's pretty much zero runoff. A little bit, but not much at all. On the conventionally-tilled ground, you can see the runoff jar is half full. So let's take a look at what happens. The raindrops down here came down. Hit this cushion. Look at that. It's soaked all the way through. Look at how we've got a lot of structure to this soil. It looks like cottage cheese. It looks like worm bedding. It's very easy to crumble apart. Even when you crumble apart, there's a lot of gaps in that soil. That's what we're looking for. And this is a result of a rotation, a crop rotation that utilizes no-till. We're not in there digging up the soil. And we're not disturbing the microbes and bacteria in the top layer. This has been no-tilled for maybe 15 years. The next sample over, you'll notice again how much runoff. This is the runoff that came off the front of these trays, typical to runoff on a field in a typical rain event. Notice the structure, the surface structure on this sample. It's smooth. It's shiny. It's been packed by the raindrops. Once it started raining, it didn't take any time at all for this conventionally-tilled soil to seal up. The water started running off into this jar almost immediately. So let's see what happened with this sample. Wow. Look at that. Did you see the dust fly off there when I flipped that over? Bone dry. Just about two inches of rain and it didn't soak in hardly at all. We lost almost all of that rainfall. It went downstream, it went into the creek and it took soil with it. We didn't only fail in capturing the moisture, we sent nutrients downstream. Look at that. And that's a typical example. When we run this test over and over, that's what happens. Now we'll go around to the other side. The first sample we're looking at over here is a well-rested, well-managed piece of grassland. It's a mixture of big blue stem and a few other plants, mostly big blue stem. It's been exposed to long rest periods. You'll notice almost no runoff. Two inches of rain and almost no runoff. Let's see what it looks like underneath. We take a look at that. We can see the cottage cheese structure again. We can see the aggregate thing going on. We've got soil that's a lot like the soil sample where you drop in a slate test and not have anything disappear on. You dig through that. It crumbles apart. It's really nice soil structure. Now we're going to go over to an overgrazed piece of grassland. You notice again the runoff. Almost all the water ran off. Even more water ran off this than ran off the conventionally tilled piece of ground. You notice it's dirty. We lost a lot of nutrients with this piece too. We've got a lot of bare ground. When those rain drops came down there was a little bit of armor protecting the soil. But there was a lot of bare ground. That soil got packed a lot from that rain. I think I saw dust again. It's bone dry down here. You can see the dust blowing on me. We've got a lot a lot less of the cottage cheese look that we had over here. We've got a lot more of a platey structure. A little bit of the situation like you had pancake stacked on each other. It breaks apart but when it breaks apart it still stays in fairly dense chunks. When I look at this piece of soil I don't see any place for the water to soak in. I see something like if you took a ball of clay and you squeezed it in your hand. It just it's there, it's got roots but the water is not going to soak in. So look at what we've got here. We've got basically very similar soil types this managed a different way and they're not hard changes to make. What we've really done with the grassland is we've extended the rest periods. We're still running cattle on it. We're running as many cattle as we ran before but we're using longer rest periods shorter durations. On the cropland side we made some radical changes there. We quit tilling the soil. We started doing less we started doing less to disturb the surface layer. That top layer of the soil is where the microbes and the bacteria thrive. Whenever we till that soil we screw up their environment and when we screw up their environment we end up with soil that's real fine and doesn't have the aggregate stability. When we nurture the bugs when we focus on soil health and we try to take care of the soil the microbes and the bacteria thrive and when they're thriving when they're doing what they're doing that's when we get the cottage cheese structure that's when we get the porous openings in the soil that allow the water to soak in and when you get right down to it it's all about water storage and water quality. The more water we can soak in the more money we can make as producers the more water we can get to soak in the less pollution we have downstream everybody wins urban people win we all drink water we all want it to soak in better we want it to soak in so we can make money off of it too we're building up a bank a water bank I don't know any way to demonstrate it better than this