Reversing Soil Degradation with Dwayne Beck

Hi friends, this is John and this is the Regenerative Agriculture podcast where we talk about the agronomic science and cultural management practices that regenerate plant health, soil health and public health. My guest for this episode is Duane Beck, a name that I'm sure many of you know. And for those of you who don't know, you certainly deserve to know his name. And very honored to have you join us today. Duane, thank you for being here.

Well, thanks for having me.

You've conducted a lot of research. You were one of the pioneers of innovating no till agriculture on the high plains in the North Dakota region. For our listeners who haven't heard of your history and background, can you tell us a little bit about your history and what brought you here?

Well, I'm just a good farm boy that went to college because that was better than the alternatives at the time. I was the youngest son, so you don't get to have the farm as your youngest son. But went to college, got a degree in chemistry because I didn't really know what I wanted to do. Didn't realize you could do science and agriculture. Taught chemistry in a high school at Gettysburg, South Dakota for three years and serendipitously met some people who got me back into graduate school at South Dakota State University working on a PhD degree in soil fertility at that time. And most of that work was with irrigator people. And in that process of doing my work out there again around Gettysburg and Pier and along the Missouri river, the irrigators were having fits with runoff. This is late 70s. They spent a lot of money because Earl Butts told them to farm, fence row, to fence row and produce everything they could. And so they spent a lot of money putting in irrigators to pump out of the mainstay reservoirs on the Missouri river and and then proceeded to run the water right back to the reservoir. So that's kind of when we started to look at ways of making water go into the soil better. And kind of in that transition from when I was doing my PhD work until I became a real person, we had some projects that started with oh, Darrell DeBoer and people like that from Ag Engineering on, on looking at low pressure sprinklers and stopping water runoff under them, which was even worse than under high pressure. Lo and behold, we through this research we figured out that if we didn't till the soil, the water went in better. And that wasn't common knowledge at that period of time. But the second question then was, okay, if you don't do tillage, then how do you control all these other things if, if you don't have a whole suite of tools that basically we didn't have then, that we do have now. And so we started looking at trying to do no till, a little bit reduced till, and then full low disturbance, no till, and using some of this technique that I probably learned from my grandfather and my father in terms of how you manage pests and, you know, diseases and weeds and insects through crop rotations and cultural practices and those kind of things. And when I finished my PhD, the university hired me to manage the research farm at Redfield, South Dakota, which was designed to be the. The place that the water from the Wahe dam was supposed to go in a big canal to do gravity irrigation, flood irrigation type techniques on the Lake Dakota plain, which is a glacial lake bottom similar to the Red river valley. And they put me managing that place because in this period of. Of time, the, the local farmers, the irrigators that we were working with in terms of stopping runoff from their irrigators had started an organization with the goal of having a research farm more out toward the Missouri river to address irrigation problems. Because the station that was at Redfield, that project didn't look like it was ever going to be built and it never was, which was a good thing. And that the water, if they were going to use it, would be done more out here. And the reason for that disconnect is when they designed the, the dams and whatever that was in the 30s and 40s, nobody had invented the center pivot. So you couldn't irrigate the soils in this area because they were rolling land. And you can't do gravity irrigation on that. You need something perfectly flat. So that's kind of how it started. And then, you know, once we started running the Redfield farm, they. They got the money together and the organization together to start this farmer owned facility out along the river. And Redfield farm shut down. And we came here and I think it was a mistake to shut that one down, but it was a good thing to come here. So that. And I've been here since, so it's. And we just done a lot of work in looking at dry land, crop rotations predominantly. I mean, by the time we'd come here, we realized that we'd realized that the irrigation thing was going to work okay. But the lifts were so high that the cost associated with pumping water is limiting. And so it was going to be a limited amount of irrigation here. And this saving the water Making water go into the soil was actually a real big deal for the. For the dry land guys here. So we did a lot of work on dry land crop rotations and a lot of work on fertilizer placement and equipment development. Like the. All the little spiky closing wheels that everybody uses. Those. The Mae west version of that, which is one of the first ones, was put together here. And the idea of putting a vertical wheel and a transfer push the seed in the bottom of the trench on a corn planter. We were kind of one of the first people to do that. So some of our ideas you saw come out through exacta, some through other people. We never, we never tried to really patent those. We were just trying to get them to the farmers. So we let everybody do whatever they needed to.

You've touched on a lot of pieces quickly that I'd like to dig into a bit more deeply. But the first one that comes to mind is we still live in a world today where there is a lot of irrigation across the Midwest with center pivots. And we see the water levels in the Ogallala Aquifer continuing to decline. We still have lots of irrigation happening in desert regions in Arizona and New Mexico and California. And water infiltration continues to be a significant issue. I can't describe how many pivots I have walked into that behind the pivot, the water is running away from the pivot rather than infiltrating into the soil. I think there are still many people who aren't aware of the work that you have done historically. And I'd like to just open it up by asking the question, how much can water infiltration be improved by not tilling and by managing the soil differently? What really is possible and what's the pathway to getting there?

Well, it's a bit soil dependent, but we have some very challenging soils here. And we can put on. We in our normal practice at Dakota Lakes is we. We have them designed to match the worst case scenario for farmers in this area. So they will put on 1.2 gallons per minute per foot, which is equivalent to the very outside end of a standard center pivot quarter section, center pivot, putting on 900 gallons water minute. You know that. And that's where the water goes on the fastest. So we do that all the way across our machines or three of our machines that are lateral moves. And that's the reason, that's the reason we're using lateral moves. So we can have that high intensity everywhere. And we run these very low pressure sprinklers on them, which means we put on two inches of water in nine minutes when we come across irrigating sometime. And one of the. One of the. Yeah, it's pretty fast. And one of the things we do that is the most effective thing that I do is if we have people visiting in the summer, we will just always. The guys know that when we have a group, they know we're going to have show and tell. So even if we don't need to be irrigating, we'll turn something on just. Just to show off. And we'll have a machine running that fast. We'll throw a pan down so they can see how fast the pan fills up. And then we walk them behind the machine. And they will not get their feet muddy, which will totally drive them crazy. And, you know, it's so dramatic that then the argument is pretty much over in terms of, okay, I can't do that in my place, or whatever. Now, the soils we have here, probably two thirds of the ones we irrigate are true vertisols. There's these really heavy clay soils that developed in an ocean bottle. And so they're 75 to 80% Montmoreland nutty clays. The other day I was going through some stuff and I looked at the soils analysis of one of our experts at SDSU when we looked at this site, and he had made the statement that the northern part of the farm, we would never be able to irrigate because we couldn't get good enough infiltration while we can get that on these soils. And then we have these lusterized soils, which would be similar northwest Iowa or something, where they tend to seal up north really easily. Ukraine has the same kind of soils because all the particles are the same size. And so if you hit them with a raindrop, they'll seal up. And we get that kind of infiltration on them as well. So it doesn't really make any difference to us. But the important part is we get that same infiltration on the dry land. And so when we do get a big rain, the water goes in the soil instead of running off. And with irrigation, you can. You got enough money, and if you have enough time, you can pump more water maybe, but on dry land, you don't get a second shot at it. So. But you're right, they have a huge problem. And I've, you know, I've worked with people in different areas, and this whole idea of somebody doing intensive tillage in the area where they're pumping the aquifer dry, whether it be in California or in Oklahoma or Texas or whatever. It was just insane. And I'm not sure that we can expect to be allowed to continue to do things like that future without somebody calling us on it. It's not a responsible thing to do because that water resource belongs to lots of people. Even though I may have a water right, which, whatever, but it's one of the things we do at the farm here, which is somewhat related, is the farm is owned by a group of farmers. So I work with 11 member board of directors that represent 500 and some farmers that have these long term goals. And so we tried to look further down the road as far as, you know, 100 years, 50 years, 100 years, 600 years. If I continue to do what I'm doing now, what's it going to look like here in South Dakota? You know, our statehood was 1889, so there wasn't much here before 1889. Lewis and Clark came through in 1804 and we've degraded the ecosystem pretty dramatically in the US in 200 years. It's not just infield nutrition, it's just is that the right thing to do in the long run is to degrade the soil.

There are several issues that you raised that are worth addressing. There's the soil degradation. And think about in your comments about continuing to pump water out of the aquifers. Perhaps in the short term it's a question of do we have permission to continue doing this? Kind of social, societal permission to continue doing this. But if you go a bit longer term, a single generation or less, it will no longer be a question of permission. It will only be a question of if we keep doing this, there will be no water left in the aquifer.

Yeah, no, it'll be gone. That's right. And then what's your plan B? You know, we don't have a plan B. And it's not just the U.S. you know, Argentina's got some real challenges with what they're doing right now. And I have a slide that I use in my presentations that I say that ecosystem and soil degradation is not a problem. It's the symptoms. And the problem is greed and hubris and, you know, inattention. And there's a whole list of things that indifference and whatever. I mean it's, it. Tillage is one of the tools that we do, but it's not the problem either. The problem is all these societal things, the farm policies and whatever. But the short term, short term thinking and thinking that we're smarter than the ecosystem. So we can. If we damage something, then we can turn around and add something, and it's better. And I don't think that that's true. You know, if we're not mimicking the natural ecosystem processes, we. We have issues.

I think the. The piece that I'm really intrigued with, what you described, is when you have two inches of infiltration capability in nine minutes. Actually, I do have to play Angel's advocate for just a moment here. If they don't get their boots muddy, is that because the soil is covered with crop residue and never had soil contact in the first place?

Well, yeah, it's covered, but the big difference is macropore slope. So it's more similar to your lawn. I mean, you could put 2 inches of water on your lawn and walk out there, and you never get mud either. It's because the soil particles are in a structure, so the structure there that supports you. And then the macropores, these big holes formed by worms and termites and roots and whatever, when the water falls on the soil and it is cushioned a bit by the residue that's there, it will go down that hole. And when it goes down that hole, it will find the dry spot in the soil and soak in from the side. So what you've done is magnified your infiltration area by several orders of magnitude. That's a real secret to a lot of things that we do is the macropore flow. And it took me a while to figure that out because it doesn't happen overnight. But when you do tillage, then everything has to go through the matrix in between each of the little particles. And every time it hits a discontinuity, it stops. Like, if you have clay over silt someplace in there, or if you have a plow pan or whatever, that's more of a discontinuity. And when that water gets there, it has to stop and saturate some areas, and then it can start to flow into the next layer.

Have you ever measured your maximum infiltration rate on the heavy clay soils, the vertisols that you were describing?

Well, we have it. We have an experiment with phosphorus because doing a lot of things with phosphorus because we don't want our phosphorus to go to lakes. And that's maybe a whole nother conversation, but we've been trying to do an infiltration thing on fields where we've got these phosphorus treatments. This spring, my guy put on over 20 inches of water in an hour before he got some water to run. You kind of go like, okay, well.

What I'm really intrigued by is in for the last couple of decades, the conversation around water has really revolved around water infiltration. And we've forgotten or we haven't often discussed that. There's more to that story. There's also percolation. You can infiltrate 2 inches in 9 minutes. But what happens if you filled up the upper layers and you can't percolate downward? And then the third aspect is, does that soil have the capacity to lift that water back up and deliver it to the crop? Water delivery and water infiltration.