The Carbon Capture Business with Dr. Jerry Hatfield

Hi friends, this is John. I'm passionate about developing regenerative agriculture systems that improve soil health, produce crops that are completely resistant to diseases and insects, and produce food of such an exceptional quality that we can have a legitimate conversation about growing food as medicine. I've been fortunate to meet many people with incredible knowledge and information about soil and plant systems. However, much of this knowledge and information is scattered all over the place. There are many incredible stories and a lot of knowledge that have not been widely shared. I founded Advancing eco Agriculture in 2006 to bring this knowledge together in a more coherent fashion and incorporate it into products and growing systems that growers can easily put into practice. It's my personal mission to have these regenerative agriculture systems become the mainstream globally, the status quo against which all other growing systems are compared to. To achieve this goal, I want to share the knowledge that we have learned in the last decade and make it available to everyone. These concepts and principles about regenerative systems can be applied anywhere and when they're properly applied, they will increase farm profitability and resilience to climate stress. If you have any questions, suggestions, comments or topics of ideas that you would like for me to discuss, please connect on social media or email me. JohnGenerativeAgriculturePodcast.com Be sure to sign up for our email list@regenerativeagriculturepodcast.com Hope you enjoy and.

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Hey farmers. This is Elizabeth Whitlow with the Regenerative Organic alliance where we believe in farming like the world depends on it. And we know you do too. And that's why we've developed the Regenerative Organic Certification Program, also known as the roc. This is a holistic practice based agricultural certification founded by visionaries from the Rodeo Institute, Patagonia and Dr. Bronner's. The ROC framework provides stepwise Guidance for farming and ranching operations that produce food, cosmetics and fiber. We believe that it is essential to farm in a way that enriches rather than degrades the soil and in a way that values the animals and workers. Brands are already seeking to bring RoC products into their supply chains and we invite you to join us on the journey to rock. You can begin by downloading the ROC Participant Handbook. It's available on our website at regenorganic.org.

Hi friends, welcome back to the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast. I'm very pleased and happy to have back Jerry Hatfield who was with us last year. Jerry is a good friend of mine and we've communicated about various ideas in the field and things continue to change and evolve. Regenerative agriculture is becoming much more mainstream than it was even three to four years ago and we have a rapid development of new ideas, new technologies, new information, and also a rediscovery of old information. A lot of different pieces that I'm looking forward to discussing. So Jerry, very pleased to have you back. You've been working a lot of things over the last year since we've spoken. What has been exciting for you?

Oh, a lot of things have been exciting. I get up every day, John, with excitement in terms of these discoveries about how we have to change our thinking in soil management. How do we have to change our thinking about how plants fit into this whole soil environment? And my whole background, I've worked on this soil plant atmosphere continuum and really this last few years have just been been eye opening in terms of understanding these dynamics of how soil and plant and the atmosphere all come together in terms of a dynamic that move us forward in looking at agriculture from an entirely different perspective, but also getting us to the point of where does regenerative agriculture really pay us dividends in terms of how we look to the future in and agriculture? How do we look at the future in terms of providing this nutritious food for the whole world's population?

You've mentioned a couple of pieces, Jerry, but let's focus on that. Can regenerative agriculture provide enough food for a growing world population?

I definitely think so. I think regenerative agriculture is the key to food production and to food security and I'll just break those apart for you. If we want to think about increasing our production on a unit of land, one of the key pieces in that is how do we enhance our soil so that we can have a greater productivity, but at the same time, how do we enhance our soil and production system so that we are increasing the nutritional quality of that food. And I think that becomes the key in terms of how do we look at this system from an entirely different perspective. And I think regenerative agriculture is the platform that we need to think about going forward in terms of being able to accomplish this not only within the US but around the world.

Jerry, just five years ago, or even less than that, the term regenerative agriculture wasn't even in the mainstream lexicon. And I've been personally very surprised by how rapidly it has gone mainstream just in the last couple of years. How has that shift in lexicon shifted the thinking and adoption? There's been discussions about sustainable agriculture for quite some time, but how have actual practices in the field changed? And how can regenerative agriculture deliver something for us that sustainable agriculture wasn't able to?

Yeah, that's a really good question. But you go back and look at this. I mean, the whole aspect of sustainable agriculture, it was a, a viewpoint that, you know, we're going to build agriculture for, sustaining production, sustaining economics. Then, you know, the National Academy put out the big report on sustainable agriculture. But I think one of the failures in that was it really didn't address how to get there and look at the components of the system. And when we talk about regenerative agriculture, it really is focused on the fact that we've got to improve our soil resource. And here's the ways in which we can do that. Here's how that changing that soil benefits that plant, how does it in terms of productivity, how does it benefit that ecosystem in terms of improving not only production, but also environmental quality, all those different things. I think it's really about the mindset of how these pieces come together. But it really could be just as simple as the fact that sometimes it takes society a long time and a certain level of maturity to understand how these pieces really do fit together and how it will benefit them in terms of their production system, how is it going to benefit them economically, societally, and all these different things that go on this. And so it really is caught on because I think people can begin to see the pathway forward that people just kind of stood at the sidelines in sustainable agriculture and say, well, yeah, it's a nice concept, but it doesn't have a roadmap. Regenerative agriculture is really supplying the roadmap along with that.

And I've made the comment in the past, why would we have any desire to sustain our current levels of productivity and all the externalized costs that we have? So one of the questions that comes to mind for me, when you think about the differences between sustainability and regeneration in a local field, how do those differences really play out in terms of management and results?

You know, that's a good question, John. I mean, you're right. You hit on the target of saying, you know, always had an objection to calling it soil conservation, because in soil conservation you just conserve what you have. I always been pushing that, even back 30 years ago when I first came here in the lab, I said, you know, we need to be talking about soil enhancement. How do we improve our soils, how do we get more carbon into them, how do we get more water into them, how do we get better nutrient cycling, all these different things that go on. And so when you, when you finally got to the point of regenerative agriculture, it was really saying, we're going to build it off of a soil base. We realize that soils are different within fields, that agricultural systems are going to have different, different linkages with the soils and the climate in which they're growing. And so I think we've begun to put it together in a platform that says, here's a unique combination of soils, here's a unique combination that has combinations with what plants we grow there and then the climate that's there. And we've been doing a lot lately on agroclimatic indices, what plants will fit where and get the most sustained, well, sustained production, but the least variable production over time. And when you come back to that picture, it always comes back to the soil and saying, if I want to reduce my variation and make the best expression of the climate that's there, I've got to have that soil in a way in which it is supplying water, nutrients, support to that plant. All those different things that we now begin to know how everything is linking together. And again, it comes back to this maybe level maturity that we've reached in terms of being able to understand some of these interactions. Science is really reticent to dive into a lot of the interactions that we know that go on within an individual field. We've got plants, we've got insects, we've got diseases, we've got soils, we've got weather. All of those are varying in time and space, and they're interacting together in ways in which we can't comprehend at times. And then we try to quantify those and we get even more mystified. And I think that now in regenerative ag, John, we're really admitting that there are a lot of interactions and that we are not afraid to begin to Say that as we change something in the soil, it's going to have some impact on the plant and it's going to have a different reaction depending on what the weather is during the season.

I think that's a key challenge that we have with the scientific method and single factor analysis is that agriculture doesn't lend itself to single factor analysis very readily or even multifactorial analysis, simply because there's an almost unlimited number of factors.

Yeah, that what makes it exciting, there's unlimited number of factors and that, you know, I'll just use an example of this. I mean, rising CO2 levels are extremely beneficial to plants.

You know, Farmers love higher CO2. Absolutely.

Yeah. We love higher CO2, CO2 in the.

Greenhouses all the time.

But it was saying that at the same time as we increase temperatures or make temperatures more variable, or we make precipitation more variable, we negate that CO2 effect. And so these interactions between water availability, temperature dynamics and this rising CO2 level are very critical for us to look at. And I think that we're now mature enough, and I'll come back to that maturity word, mature enough, to say we can't just look at one parameter alone. We have to look at all of these things as a system. Producers have been doing this since they started cultivating. And I think a lot of times they're very frustrated with scientists because we don't look at it as that big system that they manage. We look at it as saying, well, what did you change in terms of nitrogen? Or what did you change in terms of phosphorus? Or what was your row spacing or plant population? They go. But it's all of those things. And I think this becomes where we really going to have to look at this and develop strategies of how we go forward.

When I think about the differences between sustainable agriculture and regenerative agriculture, the approach that we've taken in our work is that regenerative agriculture really is all about helping plants get to peak photosynthesis, produce an abundance of carbohydrates and move those carbohydrates into the soil, where you have a very functional carbon cycle working and you're constantly accelerating plant health and you're constantly accelerating soil health. And what I've realized, when we think about the entire soil plant system as an ecosystem, there's three. There's obviously, as you just said, many different pieces and parts, but the drivers. You have three photosynthesis, which is the way that you bring new energy into the ecosystem. You have the soil biology which processes that energy in the Soil. And that total energy flow, voltage, if you will, is reflected in the carbon cycle, the carbon exchange. So the question that emerges from all of that is how does the carbon cycle shift and change when growers begin managing soils and crops differently with regenerative management rather than present mainstream management?

Yeah, I mean, it's. We'll kind of take this apart and answer it in segments and I'll just use our experiences that we have in our own research that we have underway. And you know, we do a lot of work in corn soybean systems and over the past 17 years, in looking at exchanges of carbon between the plant and the atmosphere and the soil. And even with soil analysis, we've shown that our typical corn soybean system, which is, you know, maybe a deep rip in the fall, field cultivation in the spring, the only thing we take off that land is that is the grain of corn and soybeans is that that carbon balance is losing a thousand pounds of carbon per acre per year. Wow. You think about the average life of a producer, you know, farming 40 years, you know, they've lost 40,000 pounds of carbon or 20 tons out of that. So it's a slow loss, but that slow loss is impacting their aggregate stability, it's impacting their soils. It's happening in such a slow way that I go, you know, where's, where's my productivity gone on, on this field? It's different than it was before. But really don't come to the realization saying it's, it's the cumulative effect of what I've been doing over my farming career. So, you know, that really becomes a dynamic that we need to consider when we talk about, you know, why fields become variable over time. But on the other hand, we can change that system quickly. And I think this becomes the framework that we need to be talking about is that when we go to a system where we add cover crops and we add or reduce the tillage intensity on that by going to either strip till or no till, we found that within one year we can take that negative carbon balance to a positive carbon balance. So now we've begun to put more dividends from that plant, that capture of photosynthesis and back into the biology that you talk about putting that back into the soil. And so we go from this negative to a positive carbon balance in a single year. In a single year. Isn't that amazing?

That is amazing.

Yeah. Even more amazing is that over a two year period, we doubled the microbial biomass in the upper 12 inches of that profile. And these are not plots. These are 160 acre fields and they're sampled at 150 foot grids. So there is a large number of samples coming out of this 160 acres. And so we see that we've improved the biology very, very quickly and we've already begun to change that upper surface of that soil. But I think one of the other pieces going on and why the COVID crops and why the reduction in tillage is there, is that that cover crop is giving us a longer period of time in which we're taking carbohydrate or carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, converting it into carbohydrates, and then putting it back into the soil. In terms of feeding that soil biology, I always tell producers that biology wants four things. It wants food, water, air and shelter. The basic necessities of life, you know, that you and I want. And if we start thinking about biology from that perspective, you know, they want a food source. And just like you and I, we like to eat every day. And so a lot of our systems where we're only growing that crop during the summer, you know, there's a long period of time on either end of that growing season in which we're not feeding them. They have to exist on what's there. And that's a pretty much a starvation diet. You know, if we only ate three months out of the year, we, we'd probably be fairly thin.

We probably wouldn't be actually.

Actually, we probably wouldn't be. But we see those changes in the system and when we start looking at, at cover crops, they're utilizing a lot of solar radiation that if we don't have a crop growing there is just going into the, the surface of the earth. And it really is, at that point in time, it's not doing anything for us.

It's actually having a negative, it actually.

Has a negative impact. I think the other piece of this, John, that we've seen, what we're very excited about is we have small experiments or small chambers within the laboratory in which we've been growing cover crops and no cover crop. A monoculture oat, and then a cover crop cocktail where we have an oat, a legume and a Brassica species. And we see that in within one growing season, that cover crop, we already changed the aggregates in that upper soil surface. You mentioned that, that we influenced the carbon cycle. We're already seeing, we change the carbon cycle because in the cocktail we see a much higher CO2 level indicative of biological activity. We see a better oxygen content in there because we've opened up the pores so we get better oxygen exchange between the soil and the atmosphere. We see that we've changed the aggregates. We're putting more carbon in there after the first year. They're, they're not very stable aggregates. They're already starting to form. The more fascinating thing is that we took those cover crop experiments. We terminated them just by cutting them off, laying the residue back down on the ground, mimic a roller crimper system out there. We put soybeans behind it. And what we found is that we had an enhanced productivity anytime we used a cover crop. But, but we had even a more enhanced productivity when we had the cocktail more beans and a bigger bean on that. Now we went back after the soybeans, we went back to that same cover crop cocktail, that same cover crop mix, grew that for the season, terminated it, and have grain sorghum as our species. That is following that, we're seeing that the plants that are in the cocktail are much greener because we've been running spad meters looking at leaf chlorophyll content. They look like they have bigger heads on there because they've just headed out this last week. And so now we're, we're going to harvest those in about another week to capture all these different dynamics. But more importantly, the, the lower leaves on the, the COVID crop and then the COVID crop cocktail have to remain green. While we had no cover crop, those leaves are already starting to dry up and senesce. So it gets not only the carbon cycle out there, but I think it's influencing now the nutrient cycle in terms of what's changing within that soil that's supplying nutrients to that plant continuously through the whole growing season. It's extremely fascinating to start looking at these things and what's changing in our soils in a very rapid way.

Jerry, you've mentioned a number of different pieces that are exciting and I just want to go back to a couple of points. One is when you spoke about growing in grow chambers, you mentioned that you saw increases in both oxygen content as well as CO2. And this is something worth elaborating on because I've observed the same thing in the field, on a field scale that when we have really healthy plants that are photosynthesizing. Well, the interesting part, many people, I think, have this idea that there is this conflict between CO2 concentrations and oxygen concentrations, and I don't see it that way at all. That when we have higher CO2, I should say specifically when we have higher CO2 being released from the soil and we have good photosynthesis, we get higher oxygen content in the air.

That's correct. Which is counter to our thought process. And you only see that when you start measuring both of those things simultaneously. I mean, I've been looking through the literature on the number of papers that, that actually measure oxygen content within the soil, even CO2 content within the soil. It's really pretty sparse. And it gets back to this, this aspect we talk about interactions is that why are we concerned? It's not, to me, it's not a trade off between oxygen and CO2. What that's telling us is that we've got a biological system that's generating CO2 in there because they're working on this. But now we've changed the soil with more pores, more structure to allow that gas exchange to occur. That keeps that oxygen content high, that then promotes more biological activity, that generates more CO2. And you know, you really start looking at it from that process, you go, well, yes, they do have to behave that way. And so you look at all these different things that are going on. I think it's quite fascinating from that standpoint.

The reality is that soil and plant ecosystems are, they're really cyclical ecosystem that are self perpetuating and they will self perpetuate either in a regenerative manner or a degenerative manner. And the only the determining factor between those two is the decisions that the farm manager makes.

Yep. That's why we use a concept that I've talked to you about before is genetics by environment, by management. And I always explain to producers that management is what they oversee because environment is what they're trying to overcome because genetics is what they're trying to optimize. So you think about G by E by M, genetics by environment, by management. Management is what they're what they oversee. I mean, they're the decisions that they make. The environment is what they're trying to overcome. That could be soil, environment, could be weather, environment. Because genetics is what they're trying to optimize. You really want to take and look at that genetic material and say, what can I do to get the most out of that genetic potential of that crop? What role did my management practices play in allowing that genetics to be optimized and then look at the soil as what's holding them back?

So when we look at management by environment and the soil as what is holding them back. One of the pieces that you mentioned earlier was as you increase CO2 levels in the Atmosphere, you have greater climactic instability and more climactic extremes, precipitation events, etc. How do we build greater climate resilience into our ecosystems?

It's really one of the things that builds climate resilience is water availability. We see water is probably the limitation to biological activity, whether it be you, microbes, plants. I mean, water in addition to oxygen for us is one of our real lifebloods. And if you think about an agricultural ecosystem, it's really about having water available to promote the biological activity. I mean, water stressed plants don't photosynthesize very effectively or much at all. Even though they may have plenty of sunlight, they may have the right temperatures, but if we don't have water dinner, they're just not going to grow. And when we start thinking about resilience within that system, it's really about how do we manage our soils to make sure that that water availability is at an optimum for plants. And if you look at this and go back to our discussion about CO2 and oxygen behavior within that soil, those same pores that allowing oxygen to get down into that soil are the same pores in which we're moving water from any irrigation event or rainfall event down into that soil. I always tell producers that's not how much rain you get in the rain gauge, it's how much rain you get into the soil. You know, you think about that. I mean, if, if we're protecting that soil surface and we've got all those pores open, you know, we can, we can infiltrate a great deal of water. And the more we can make that aggregate stable, the less the forces of water begin to disrupt it. And so we can maintain those channels for longer periods of time or almost forever in terms of moving water within that. Because once I can get water into the soil, I can store water, but if I have my soil surface is in such a way that I've got runoff, I'm not storing any water, I might have an inch of rainfall, but if I only get a half inch in the profile, I only have a half inch of rainfall. I think farmers need to start looking at it from that perspective and saying, is my soil capable of capturing the rainfall events that are occurring out there? Because you talk about the climate disruption. One of the things that we're seeing is that we're shifting our rainfall patterns. You know, we're getting more spring rainfall, we're getting more variable summer rainfall, but in a lesser amount. And those storms are becoming more intense, they're becoming less frequent. Says that if we Want agriculture to be efficient and resilient in the long run, we've got to make sure that it has an adequate water supply for that crop.

I think there's a second aspect to what you're describing is not only making certain that the soil can store water, can infiltrate and store it, but, but then also release it, which is, I think, an unappreciated quality of good soil aggregate structure. Because what I've learned is that you can have some clay soil types which adsorb water so tightly to the clay colloids, you can actually have no available water for plants to absorb at 70% the fuel capacity when you don't have aggregates.

You know, that's a good point. I mean, it really, and this goes back to, you know, the different soils that are out there is that we want those. That soil not only to hold that water, but we want it to release that water back to the plant. If you, if you look at this, one of the things I've been fascinated by in looking at soils that have been improving over time, they're, you know, they're changing their aggregate structure. They've got organic matter around the sides of those aggregates that it's really very dynamic in terms of absorbing water and releasing water, is that when you start looking at how roots are interacting with those aggregates, you find out that root may be growing along there, but the root hairs and even the mycorrhizal fungi just form a web around that aggregate. In terms of taking advantage of all the little pool pore spaces in which water and nutrients can be stored, I think that becomes a real key to how we begin to look at changing soils and this pathway towards resilience relative to some of the weather variations that go on out there in the field.

Scale experiments that you're conducting with growing cover crops on, if I understood correctly, formerly corn and soybean fields where you're getting this carbon gain. I this is a question that some will have is what cover crops were you using and what have you observed there in terms of aggregate development and stability?

That's just a simple annual rye cover crop. In that experiment, we haven't gotten to go to cocktails yet. That's my next adventure with them to go to the cocktails. When we look at this, we see those changes in the aggregate structure and again, that upper inch of the profile and people say, well, you're not really changing that. That profile very much. Well, you think about the upper inch of that soil is the gateway between the atmosphere and the soil. And so improving that upper inch really does pay dividends. And the more stable we can keep that and the less we disturb that, so those aggregates can continue to grow and form, the better off we'll be. So I, you know, we see that dynamics changing all the time. I think we could change it even more because going back to one of the comments that you made earlier about photosynthesis and the reaction with soil biology is that nature loves diversity. Look at a natural ecosystem. Do you ever see a monoculture in a natural ecosystem?

There's no such thing.

There's no such thing. Why in agriculture do we think that monocultures are, are the path that.

Oh, because they're easy.

They're. They're easy. Exactly. You know, but if you look at this, every plant puts off and gives off a different set of exudates that are from the root, you know, into that soil. And that's what the biology is feasting on out there. And I think why we see these increases in CO2 levels when we go to that, that cover crop cocktail is that we've just enriched the diet, quote around diet of that's feeding that soil biology. And so we create a more diverse biological system within the soil. And all of those are playing against each other and they're, they're complementing each other. You know, we understand so little about soil biology. You know, it's really probably the biggest frontier we have in terms of agriculture is to begin to understand what changes our soil biological system and how do we maintain and increase that soil biological system. You know, we understand the principles. You know, they want food, water, air and shelter. But how do those things interact that shift different bacterial species, or the role that they play in mycorrhizal fungi, or the role that they just play in fungi in general, or all the other things that go on within that soil? Because we just can't see into it very well.

And because we can't see into it very well, we struggle to understand how to value it. What really is the value of biology? And I think this is a particularly challenging question in the context of agriculture because our agricultural economics are screwed up. We have a general agribusiness ecosystem that has developed where we have. Our crops generally have really become commodities and operating on very low margins. Combined with the challenge that we have historically externalized many of our costs. We have externalized the environmental pollution that has been caused by some of the toxins and pesticides that we've used, fertilizers, nitrates in water, etc. So when we look at all these factors that play in from a macro perspective. What is the value of regenerative agriculture? What's the cost of it and what's the return?

I've often given talks, John, which people ask about the value of carbon and I tell them it's priceless, but you know, they don't want to accept that, that answer. But I think you've hit on something very well and that's. I think we're at the point in agriculture that we must move away from just talking about agriculture, but begin to think about agroecology. How does agriculture fit into the ecological system and look at that value of, of different ecosystem services? What is the impact of agriculture on water quality, water quantity? What's the impact on the biological services that we see within the soil? What's the impact on the biological activity we see associated with that agricultural field? Pollinators, insects, getting a number of different things that go on from that perspective. How do we even look at that landscape from it from a different perspective as well? So I think when we start looking at that context of agriculture, then we can really become to have a fruitful discussion about the value of regenerative agriculture. Because if you look at the value of regenerative agriculture, just do that simple change in terms of looking at improving carbon. But at the same time as we improve carbon, we improve water. Same time we improve carbon and water, we also improve nutrient cycling within that soil. And it's not only nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, it's all the micronutrients that are out there. You got all of those pieces that now become linked together and you begin to look at that and say those things pay me dividends and say, how do these things fit together from looking at the value of regenerative agriculture? And I'll just use one example and that's if we take a silt loam soil and have 2% organic matter in it and assume a 5 foot profile corn at middle of August, which is using water at its maximum rate. We see across the Midwest we have about eight days of available water. If we got a full profile before that plant begins to be stressed, that's not very much, that's not very much. But if you go to 4% organic matter, you got 13 days. So you got five more days of available water that that plant is not stressed and is going to be performing in its optimum. The probability of getting a rainfall in a five day period across the Midwest is still pretty good. My point is that here's one of the pieces that we'll see just in terms of value relative to productivity. The other thing we see in that value of productivity is that when we enhance that nutrient cycling is that we have that greener plant, we have a more photosynthetically efficient plant, so that we actually are creating more carbohydrates that go into that plant, not only for grain production, but also still continuing to feed that root system down below so that it again is more effective all the time. To me, that's where our yield stability comes from, that variation among years. When we begin to do these things, we see that we are less subjected to this weather variation that's going on these longer periods of time between rainfall events. You know, we see that and I mean, producers see this all the time in fields. I mean, you've got always parts of a field that are low yielding, you always got parts of a field that are high yielding. And if you go back and look, the high yielding parts of that field are always the really good soils. The low yielding parts are always those really poor soils that have low water availability, have low nutrient availability.

In essence, what you're describing, if I'm understanding or hearing you correctly, is we need to think about the value and the cost not just purely in terms of return on the money that we're putting in, but also return on water, return on nutrients, etc.

Yeah. And in fact, I spent a lot of time not only on, you know, profitability is one piece, and you go back to this low and high yielding parts of the field is how many producers change their inputs between those two different parts of the field?

Very few, very few.

I mean, and you can make one improvement in profitability by reducing your inputs on the lower yielding parts of the field. Because here's the other piece of this puzzle is that my contention is that probably our water quality problems, and I know our sediment problems are coming from this. These soils that are degraded because they don't have any capacity to hold it, water moves through them either because they don't have the water holding capacity, either leach through them or we don't have the water holding capacity. And so we get runoff from them. You know, so I think we can improve our water quality. Just very simple dynamic is saying don't put as much on these low yielding parts because you're not going to get a return on it. The other thing is that I've spent a lot of time now looking at water use efficiency. How much crop do we get per unit of water used by that crop? And you'll find out that those low yielding parts of the field will invest a lot of water into growing that plant. But when it comes to the grain filling part, they're water limited their water stress. So even though we had great harvest potential, we don't realize that because we basically goes under stress, goes under early senescence, so we don't capture that sunlight as well. So we also see in that part of the field a very low radiation use efficiency because we've invested radiation into that crop, but we haven't got any return on it in terms of grain yield that we want. When we start explaining these dynamics to producers, not only we're talking about profitability, but now we're talking about what sort of return are you getting for every unit of nitrogen you apply. And you have to couple that with water and you have to couple that with light. And they begin to see that here's the dynamics of systems in terms of utilizing their natural resources, but also flipping it back and saying what are we losing out of that system when we don't capture it? What are we losing in terms of nutrients that impact water quality? What are we doing in terms of any of the chemicals that we put on because we haven't utilized those effectively? And it just trying to open up a different dialogue with producers.

Jerry, I have an important question.

Yeah.

How often are nutrients, specifically nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, a limiting factor in that equation? When you consider water and radiation, all the various components that you were describing, how often is nitrogen a limiting factor?

Rarely. If you want to be honest about it, nitrogen is rarely our limiting factor. Although we put most of our importance.

On nitrogen, in my experience, I think I could safely say the word never. I've never seen nitrogen be a limiting factor because it's the one thing that growers surplus supply all the time.

See, as a scientist, I never use the word never, but you're right, I mean, rarely do we see, and you know, it could probably be in that never category, that nitrogen is not our limiting parameter. We, we always make it that way and we think about it that way, but it's never the limiting factor that's out there. I mean, I just use another example for you. And trying to get producers to realize this, that how they're managing their soil and managing their water. If we look at high water tables early in the season and this shifting rainfall pattern where we have more spring precipitation and we don't have that soil in a condition that allows drainage through that or the aggregate structure to allow the oxygen within that, you know, our root system may be limited to the upper two feet of that soil profile because that's all the deeper that the plant's going to grow. And then when we get into the grain filling period, we, we can do this shift from adequate rainfall to less than adequate rainfall. The plant at that stage is no longer going to grow any roots. And so we actually have a two foot profile in which that plant has to exist, not a whole five foot profile that the plant could potentially use. And so we see that is a water limitation to that plant. I've often made the statement that water trumps nitrogen. That's not always the most popular statement to make because, you know, people don't want to realize that water drives a lot of this process and is the factor that really is influencing productivity more than, than nutrients out there.

Jerry, we're talking about a complex ecosystem with lots of moving pieces and parts in terms of climactic inputs, soils, et cetera. I'm a farmer in Iowa. Where are the trigger points? What are the pieces that I can influence with the least amount of input that will have the greatest productive changes to the total ecosystem?

Two things. One is you have to reduce your tillage intensity, because anytime we stir that soil with tillage is that we're releasing carbon, we're allowing those aggregates to be exposed. We just see puffs of CO2 coming out of the soil. So we really disturb that soil in such a way. So if we reduce our tillage, it's one piece. The other piece is you can go one or two ways. You can diversify your rotations and say, well, I'm going to look at the diversity of rotation that's out there. Looking at saying, all right, do I add a third crop into my corn soybean system? I can still keep a monoculture within that field, but I'm just spreading out its rotation or putting even hay alfalfa into that. Or I can go to that corn soybean system and figure out how to efficiently add a cover crop. And one of the very fascinating things across Iowa, when we looked at how much sunlight was available to grow that cover crop, just assuming from say, black layer on corn or total leaf drop on soybeans from that point in time until the first frost, and then from the last frost until we had a emergent corn or soybean crop, is that we found out that we have about a third of our solar radiation that we get through the whole year is available within those two time periods. So we have a lot of solar radiation available to grow plant material and put it Back into that carbohydrates in the soil and the soil biology. And so for producers in Iowa, it's really quite simple in my opinion. One is, let's figure out how to capture more carbon out of your cropping system to put it into not only something that you want to harvest and put it into that soil biology, the other one is to begin to reduce the tillage. I'm a big fan of strip till just because a lot of people don't want to no till, strip till. It's just a form, you know, where we only disturbing that small amount of soil in which we're putting our seed or fertilizer or manure down into that system. You know, farmers have shown that there's big advantages to that in terms of improving their soil carbon, improving their stands. All those different things that we've seen in terms of research as well and they've, they've seen on their own farms. So I really believe that we can change this. I mean we've seen advances in cover crop area across the state. You know, we haven't seen as much advance in terms of reducing tillage intensity. But I think that here becomes our challenge, John, is how do we effectively manage a cover crop as part of this system? And then the other one that we have to address is what is the potential for an economic return from, of a third crop. I mean if you, if you look at, you know, what's the value of putting wheat in that rotation, Farmers will say I don't have a market for it. If we go to a rotation with, with alfalfa and what's in my market for hay. I'm excited about the fact that we're talking about industrial hemp coming back and being approved in here. You know, what can we do with industrial hemp in terms of paper products, a renewable resource from that perspective and how do we, how do we manage that? So I think that here's a lot of things that we need to be thinking about. But there are a lot of nuggets and the nuggets of gold that producers who are doing these things have shown that it, you know, it works across different soils, different climates within the state, across the Midwest. And so to me, they're the bright shining examples that yes, we can make these changes and it is profitable, but it requires some management into that aspect as well. It's no longer just a simple system, but requires management, investment.

Yeah, there is a greater degree of management intensity for sure. And you raised a couple of questions that we need to be thinking about in terms of how to manage cover crops, etc. And that leads me to what is the question that growers should be asking? What's the question they should be thinking about?

That's a really good question. You know, what, what question should they be thinking about? I think a lot of this, if you go back to cover crops, is what's the optimum time to put that cover crop in? I mean, a lot of disruption goes on in our system. 2018 is a really good example of this. Very wet fall, hard time getting that cover crop established just because we couldn't get in to the fields if they wanted to wait until after harvest. Contrasted that to 2017, really dry fall, able to get in there, but we had no water at the soil surface to germinate that crop. So all we did in a lot of cases was spread birdseed. The question I think for producers is how can you, within your management system, management capabilities, begin to look and say, what is the pathway towards improving my soils? And work with those individually to say, here's the options that you have in terms of making these changes. Because, you know, we've shown you that improving your soils is going to, you know, add resilience into your system. That is going to increase your efficiency, the use of, of your resources out there. And so the question is, is for the producers is really quite simple, is, how do I do this? And each one of them is going to be tailored. There'll be general principles with, but each one is going to be tailored to their own system.

Well, there you go, friends. Thank you for listening. We spoke about a lot of different pieces that I hope you found valuable and useful. And if you did, please share it with your friends. Share the podcast, send the episode around to other people. The information that we're discussing is very valuable and very important, I believe, which is why I put this podcast together. And the sincerest testimony you can give to that is to share it with your friends. So, Jerry, thank you very much for being here and for sharing your thoughts and wisdom, and I look forward to having you back at some point in the future.

Great. Thanks, John. I always enjoy these conversations we have.

Thanks, Jerry. The team at AEA and I are dedicated to bringing this show to you because we believe that knowledge and information is the foundation of successful regenerative systems. At aea, we believe that growing better quality food and making more money from your crops is possible. And since 2006, we've worked with leading professional growers to help them do just that. At aea, we don't guess. We measure, we test, we analyze, and we provide recommendations based on scientific data and knowledge and experience. We've developed products that are uniquely positioned to help growers make more money with regenerative agriculture. If you are a professional grower who believes in testing instead of guessing, someone who believes in a better, more regenerative way to grow, visit advancingecoag.com and contact us to see if AEA is right for you. Thank you for listening and we look forward to working with you.