Jon Stika discusses the power of observing soil as a biological system | Regenerative Ag Podcast

Hi, friends, this is John. And welcome back to the Regenerative Agriculture podcast, where we talk about the agronomic science and the cultural management practices that regenerate plant health and soil health, and ultimately, of course, livestock health, and our own health as well, and the health of the entire ecosystems. I'm very pleased for this episode to have as a guest John Stika from North Dakota. John has authored this very interesting little book that is titled A Soil Owner's Manual. And it is very seldom that I've read a book that contains as much information in as few paragraphs as this one does. It's something that I really highly recommend to all of you to take a look at, and we'll link to it in the show notes and when we put it out there. So with that introduction, John, can you tell us a little bit about your background and history and story and what has brought you here and what led to the book and to the work that you engaged in?

Well, I currently live in North Dakota and gained a lot of experience here. I'm originally from Wisconsin. I grew up on a dairy operation and questioned a lot of things back then about the way that we did things in the field, the way we grew our crops. It was in 1992, as an employee with Natural Resources Conservation Service, that I was presented with a soil quality test kit. And at that time, I was working as an agronomist, and none of the soil scientists were really interested in the soil quality test kit because it didn't relate to soil classification, which was primarily what soil scientists with nrcs were involved with. So I said, well, I'd be interested in looking at it. And I began to look at it, and it made me start to think about how the soil functions, because we never really talked about that. We talked about how to classify it, how to test it chemically, all of these things, but we never really looked at, well, how does it function? How is it supposed to function? So that led me on the path of exploring that. And in 1992, I actually gave a presentation to a group of producers here in North Dakota talking about soil quality, which we now refer to as soil health. And I explained to them how destructive tillage was. And I only got to about my second slide in my presentation, and the rest of it just turned into a big discussion, which was very good. But then we went through a period here in western North Dakota where we were primarily looking at controlling wind erosion. And so we started looking at no till as a way to do that. And no till progressed from controlling Wind erosion to conserving moisture, to improving soil health. And we started to talk to more soil biologists and plant physiologists and began to realize that we're actually restoring the soil. This is actually taking us on a path that's restoring what's been degraded. And then I taught a soil health training with NRCs across the country for a number of years before I retired in 2015. And since then I've been involved writing my book, talking to groups that are interested in soil health to stay in the, stay in the loop on it. And I also haven't tilled my garden or applied any fertilizer to my garden for probably close to two decades now, just so I could see for myself and learn for myself from my own garden.

I'm really interested in your perspective on the question of how our soils supposed to function and where you started with that first presentation back in 1992. For the last decade or more, actually a decade and a half, I've been talking about how we should consider soil function from the perspective of biology. And we have been perhaps blindered in our perspective by using primarily chemistry based analysis and just taking a very chemistry based approach. I'd love to get your perspective. How did this start for you in 1992, and how is soil supposed to function?

Well, I guess the big epiphany for me was that it is a biological system. And looking at aggregate stability and how aggregates are formed was kind of one of the starting points. But as I was exposed to various soil biologists, Takon Caesar, who is a retired soil mycologist, Christine Nichols, Joe Clapperton, Elaine Ingham, all those folks that told me very matter of factly how the biology in the soil drove the majority of what we expect the soil to do as producers. And it was at that point that I thought, okay, I have to throw away almost everything I've learned about agronomy because this is a biological system. And that's a whole different perspective. That's a whole different understanding in how we approach this.

I think that's a key realization that is often missed when we really appreciate the impact of biology. I think it has been the case that many agronomists who've approached this biological approach or this regenerative approach to soil health want to continue working with what they learned in agronomy. They want to continue working with balancing soil nutrients and so forth. There's not enough appreciation that in many cases that may become largely or completely irrelevant.

Well, there's always been an acknowledgement that there's certain bacteria in the soil that run part of the nitrogen cycle, but that was, was just kind of a tip of the hat to, yeah, there's a few bacteria that play a role in the nitrogen cycle. And then the discussion and the thought process would go right back to chemistry again. And as I've learned, it's the biology that cause all of these changes in the soil to happen, that cause the nutrients to be available to the plants. Not just that this chemistry is present, but how do the plants actually associate with the biology to get what they need? That's a whole different ball game. It's not just plant roots lapping up nitrate nitrogen that happens to be laying right next to them, which is what a lot of agronomy had been based on. And it was very wasteful and very disruptive. But understanding things like rhizophagy and all these other ways that mycorrhizal fungi, etc. Work with plants is a whole different paradigm.

At the time your book was published, you offered a very, a neat and very concise summary and overview of kind of the science that was available up to that point. I'd love for you to expand just a little bit on fertilizer efficiency, let's say nitrogen, for example, or phosphorus applications. What really happens to soil biology when we put on these synthetic fertilizer applications, and how does that influence the capacity of the soil to regenerate?

Well, by applying these nutrients in the forms that we've been applying them, I think we basically sideline a lot of the soil biology. They get shoved to the side or ignored because the plant has this excess of nutrients that's right there available it. And even though it's terribly inefficient, it still is the easiest path at that time for the plant to absorb some of those nutrients. But that lasts for such a short period of time that the plant then misses the opportunity to create these relationships with the soil biology. So when that quick flush of chemical fertilizer is gone, it's now left with having to spend a lot of energy and time to create these associations and begin to be able to acquire nutrients in the form that it really needs. And if we're talking an annual plant, we start running out of time. You know, this plant is always going to be behind trying to make all of that happen in a short growing season.

When you were speaking about the absorption of this flush of available nutrients from fertilizer applications, you mentioned that even though this is an energy inefficient, they still do that because it is the most available form. Can you expand on that a little bit? What does it mean to be energy inefficient? How are these fertilizers inefficient for plants.

To absorb the forms of nutrients that soil biology can prepackage, so to speak, for the plants saves the plant having to spend its own energy to get those nutrients from very simple form to a higher form. So the plant can pick up that very simple form like nitrate, nitrogen. But then it has to do all of this work to move it along the line up into amino acids, proteins, etc. That the soil biology will do a lot of that for the plant ahead of time, will prepare those things for the plant ahead of time to save the plant the energy that it would take to make that happen in the plant.

As you've been assembling all of these different pieces and putting this nice little booklet together, what did you discover that surprised you? What was unexpected on this journey that.

You'Ve been on that myself and a lot of others in the world of soil science and agronomy were ignorant to a lot of these things. I received a bachelor's degree in soil science. I worked as a conservationist and agronomist for several years and didn't know a lot of this. And that really surprised me at shocked me. And I could see it was going to be an uphill battle trying to get other people on board, trying to get other people to look at this because we were so ignorant of all of these things for so long up to that point.

How has that shifted over the years? You started down this pathway now almost 20 years ago, and I understand you retired five years ago or six years ago, but is that still the case within academia and within the USDA and nrcs and so forth, that many people are unaware?

There's a lot more people aware now than there were 20 years ago. And I think there's a lot more people that are aware that. But not understanding, not taking it seriously, the progression of going from understanding to realization and actually applying this. And I think a lot of it is we have too much invested in the chemical approach to managing soil, that for someone who spent a career developing soil test recommendations based on chemical sampling and analysis, to suddenly say, yeah, I guess that was all wrong and I need to start looking at this from a biological perspective would, would and is very difficult. We have a lot of industry that's built around that, and that industry funds a lot of research, it funds a lot of things. There's a lot of money involved. And so it's very difficult to discard that, to move away from that, at least move away from it quickly. But as producers begin to understand how to manage soil as a biological system and head in that direction, and that's what they're willing to spend their money on, I think that will move things in that direction, but it's not going to happen overnight.

You have a unique perspective in that you have some history of observing this transition over time, over the last 20 years. What is a reasonable expectation for growers during this transition process? I'm reminded of this quote from Charlie Walters. He used to say that people leave their senses as a group and they come to their senses one at a time. For us as growers, as we come to our senses one at a time, and we want to begin managing our soils differently, how rapidly should we expect to be able to regenerate soil health and fully embrace a biological rather than a chemical perspective?

I think the regeneration, when we made the transition to no till, we could see some pretty significant things, positive things happening in the soil in about three years. By the time we got to six years, we could see some very significant changes, and that's in the climate in western North Dakota. In other parts of the world, I think that can happen faster. In drier, more brittle climates, it might take a little longer, but it's not something that takes 100 years. It's something that's very doable in an individual's lifetime. It took us about 15 years here in western North Dakota to make the transition away from tilled fallow and tilled cropping systems to no till systems. And now we have a generation of farmers that are in their 30s, early 40s, that if you mentioned tillage to them, they would give you a puzzled look and ask, well, why would I want to. Why would I want to do that? All that's going to do is cause a bunch of weeds and, you know, a lot of other bad things. It's, you know, I. Why would I want to do that? So how quickly the soil can change can be a matter of a few years or less than a decade for people to get on board and really understand and do that, maybe 15 to 20 years. And economics is really the driver. We had producers here that were doing about a third fallow, and so they would only crop 2/3 of their land every year. Once they went to no till and conserved moisture, realized we can crop this land every year, we're conserving enough water, our aggregate stability is improving, Our water infiltration is Improving we can crop this land every year. Well, once they realized that, the economics of that was. Was huge. And so it didn't take long for others to realize that also and move in that direction.

I think it's worth noting that the perspective you describe is a very different perspective from the, perhaps the pedalogical view of that it takes centuries or millennia to build topsoil, and this has been a common refrain from guests I've had here on the podcast, that in fact, it doesn't take that much time to build topsoil, to regenerate topsoil. Do you have any additional perspectives on the differences between building soil from the foundational bedrock versus the activity that we're engaged in today of regenerating soil?

If you look at the poster that NRCS put out several years ago that says it takes 500 years to form an inch of soil. And I looked at that as a soil scientist, and I said, well, well, it does take a long time for a soil to develop in raw parent material. You have glacial till or you have lacustrine material, whatever that is then colonized by plants. It takes a long time for a soil profile to develop, but it doesn't take that long to restore a soil that already formed. It has just been degraded. The soil is already formed. We just degraded it. Now we can restore that. We can overcome that. We can regenerate that in a much shorter period of time than it took for the soil to actually form.

I think that's a key and important distinction that is often lost or not really realized as you've been on this pathway of looking at all of the science and developing a different perspective on soil systems. What has been something that you've found very rewarding or very exciting, personally, to.

See the lights come on in people's eyes as we talk about some of these things and see them become students of soil health, soil biology, and head down that path and begin to do their own experimentation and so on and so forth. That first soil health presentation I gave back in 1992, it was a group of maybe 40 people, so a couple dozen farmers and their spouses. And by the time that whole discussion was over, I think most of the men were a little disgruntled with me because I was saying that what they had been doing for the last hundred years was not a good thing for the soil. So afterwards we had some coffee, some cookies, whatever. Afterwards, it was the wives that came up to me and said, you're right, the soil is a living thing. We have to take care of it, this isn't just something we can beat up and throw chemicals at and pull yield off of. You're right. This is a living thing. And so that was encouraging that they saw that. They understood that right away. But it takes time for people to realize that.

You just mentioned an important observation. That is something that's really. I've really come to appreciate and value, and that is the. The engagement of the ladies in agriculture as well. And in this process. And I've observed distinct differences in engagement and energy when we have conferences where the ladies come along as well and don't just come along, but actually actively participate. And I think we would do well in the agriculture space to actively encourage that and invite that further engagement rather than. I've been to entirely too many conferences where the audience is 90 or 95% men. And it's. The ladies have a different perspective, a more feminine perspective that is really needed because agriculture over the last however many decades has really adopted an ethos of domination, if you will, of subjugation and bringing agriculture and bringing these natural ecosystems into our subjugation. And. And this is a very different ethos than the more feminine perspective of nurturing and supporting and caring for.

And if you listen to a lot of what is said in modern agronomy, you hear the word control over and over again. Weed control, insect control, pest control, nutrient management, you know, everything is controlled and managed to our liking for our outcome, which is usually measured by yield, which is usually a pretty poor metric to measure any kind of success in agriculture. But yeah, it's. Once people understand this is a biological system, this is like raising an animal, you have to care for it, you have to provide for it. If you expect it to grow, if you expect it to become viable and productive and profitable.

John, with the different perspectives you have developed over the years, what is something that you believe to be true about mainstream agriculture, or I should just say about agriculture that is different from the mainstream view?

I think getting back to that, the soil is a biological system.

John, when we look at this different approach to agronomy and the way that agriculture is evolving in general, with interest in different markets and so forth, different product, different types of products, where do you see opportunities for growers in agriculture today?

I see one of the things that even the producers that have been on this path for a while still need to improve on is the diversity of the plants that they're growing. So I see a lot of opportunity with growing a greater variety of crops that diversify their operations, which is a little more Work takes a little more management, but that diversity also stabilizes their income.

John, when you think about the different areas of opportunity that growers have to diversify and to look at crop diversity, there's this question that comes up or this challenge that comes up in the context of COVID crop diversity and the argument that having a diversity of COVID crops doesn't actually help to build salt organic matter faster and so forth. This is coming from folks who have a more mainstream view, if you will. Have you observed any science or research on this topic that offers a different perspective?

Not specifically. There's some work that's being done at ARS in Mandan, North Dakota. There's some that we've been doing here in Dickinson with a cropping and grazing study. But there hasn't been been any real specific testing or examination of how is it affecting soil biology other than more nitrogen availability and better water infiltration.

Well, you say other than those are both two very significant pieces.

Yes, they are. And the study that we're doing here at Dickinson, we've measured water infiltration that has changed from a fraction of an inch an hour up to about 8 inches per hour. And our conventional soil testing does not show the need for nitrogen fertilizer anymore. So we're not applying fertilizer anymore on those studies. And that's a study that includes several crops in rotation, along with a couple different multi specie cover crops that are then grazed. So it's a very diverse no till system.

Tell us a little bit more about this. How much nitrogen is being generated in this? If you're not applying any nitrogen anymore, what types of yields are you producing and of what types of crops?

There's wheat, sunflowers, corn, peas in that rotation. And I don't have all that data in front of me, but a certain part of the production in that system is measured in pounds of beef in these, these steers that are grazing on this, you know, that are weighed going in and coming out. So there's not the wheat yields and the sunflower yields are those are harvested conventionally and those yields have been very comparable to yields in the area surrounding them in, in the county and Dunn County. But some of the yield is measured by pounds of beef in the livestock that are coming off of that system.

Yeah, it's been our observation and the observation of many growers we have worked with that as soil biology develops, they can supply 100% of a crop's nutritional requirements. And of course, this is as you've described, looking at rotations and looking at incorporating Livestock into the landscape. That's one way, not just reducing input costs, but it's easy to talk about nitrogen. And nitrogen by itself is not such a significant input for many farms, but there's much more that comes with that. You also regenerate the soil's capacity to deliver phosphorus and to deliver potassium and a whole bunch of other nutrients that you need to buy less of those as well.

Right. And in a lot of our systems, in our no till systems, we've documented reducing nitrogen in cutting nitrogen in half, cutting fuel in half, and North Dakota State University in their fertilizer, Their soil testing Recommendations include a 50 pound per acre per year nitrogen credit if the land has been no tilled for at least five years. So they're recognizing that there's at least a 50 pound increase in nutrient availability from a soil that's not disturbed with tillage for at least five years. They don't have that tied necessarily directly to biology. You know, they'll acknowledge that that's probably where it's coming from or that's probably why it's happening. So that's significant just in and of itself, that without the soil disturbance, the biology can respond.

When you think about all of these various improvements, the improvements in soil health and the improvements in profitability and the economic drivers that you described from being able to crop soils more consistently and more often, it is interesting to contemplate why these production models have not become mainstream much more quickly. From your perspective, what would have to happen or what would have to be true for these production practices to be more widely adopted?

Well, and relating back to this, this big paradigm shift we went through from tilled systems to no till systems, we had to work our way through getting everyone educated and getting everyone on board. We had to work with absentee landowners. There were people that owned land but were retired from farming, lived out of state, lived elsewhere and rented their land out. And we had to educate them on how stopping tillage would regenerate their soil and not degrade their soil, so that they would communicate that to their renters and say, you need to do this in order to regenerate my soil, not allow it to continue to degrade. Then we also had to work with lenders because the bankers were very skeptical of moving away from a system that had been proven for many years, this fallow system and tillage. We had to educate them so they would be willing to lend these producers the money to buy different equipment and take a little bit more risk up front to make this transition. So everyone needs to be involved. The producers, the landowners, the lenders, and then obviously the extension and agronomists and others all need to understand how this works and that managing the soil the way it was designed to function as a biological system is the lowest risk way to, to farm, to produce.

As you went through this process of trying to bring all these different stakeholders on board and, and developing a different perspective, what were the roadblocks that you encountered? What were the. Where were the barriers to res and the significant resistance.

Initially? It's a very, it's a very delicate thing to tell someone, to explain to someone that your father and your grandfather degraded the land that you're now farming. And I always would approach that with, they did not do that intentionally. They were using the best information that they had at the time to do whatever it was that they did. It just so happens that what they did with all the tillage and the fallow and the lack of rotation, diversity, etcetera, degraded the soil. And now that we know that, it's not a matter of pointing fingers at someone and saying, you did these bad things, it's now that we know better, let's do better and let's restore what has been lost. So it's very difficult and delicate to point out where someone's family ancestors basically degraded the land that we have today. But they did that with the best knowledge that they had at the time. It was not to degrade the land. And we can acknowledge that when we.

Consider the tremendous potential that farms have for regeneration and that each one of us individually is on our own journey on this pathway. As you describe, what most limits farmers from achieving the potential that they are really capable of and that their farms are really capable of? What holds them back?

In some ways, I think the greatest block to learning is knowledge.

Isn't that an oxymoron?

When you think you know how something should be done, it often prevents you from questioning and examining something different, something more. So if you grew up on a farm where things were done a certain way, for you to examine doing them in a very different way, you have to overcome that. You have to shift that paradigm, you have to shift that thinking. If you come into this, I just spoke to a group of beginning farmers here a couple weeks ago, and most of them had no agricultural background whatsoever, other than maybe planting a vegetable garden or something like that a few times. So to describe to them, soil is a biological system. This is how it, this is how it needs to be managed in that regard, they just look at that and go, oh, well, that makes sense. Yes, that's. That's how we'll approach. But if you already have a paradigm based on conventional economy, you have to overcome that. You have to deal with that before you can move on to the next way of thinking. So it's actually a bit of an obstacle.

That's an interesting perspective, and not a surprising one when you were to think about it. I wasn't sure where you were going after when I responded to your first comment. But yeah, it is interesting that existing knowledge is actually the barrier to advancing. And I guess I suppose that's true in almost any scientific pursuit, isn't it? That it is the existing knowledge that the kind of the status quo that prevents adoption of new ideas from spreading.

Rapidly, and we become comfortable with.