Veteran agronomist & author Dale Strickler shares his most memorable soil health success stories

Hi, friends, this is John and this is the Regenerative Agriculture podcast where we talk about the agronomic science and the cultural management practices that regenerate plant health, soil health and public health. My guest for this episode is Dale Strickler from Green Cover Seed and from many other places as well. Not just Green Cover Seed, but I think when we look geographically at all the places Dale has been, then it would make for an interesting map. So, Dale, thank you very much for joining us. I've been really been looking forward to this conversation.

Thank you for having me.

Yeah. You have lots of experience on cover crops and on regenerating soil in lots of different landscapes and ecosystems. Can you tell us a little bit about your personal story and kind of the background, the context of your work and what you're really passionate and inspired about?

I grew up on a farm, southeast Kansas. I actually recently moved close to where I grew up. It's a little town named Colony, Kansas. Father was a basically a sharecropper for a long time and then eventually bought land and, and so we had hogs and cattle and crops and occasionally sheep, ducks, goats, the whole old McDonald thing. So we were very diversified and went to school at Kansas State University and got a couple of bachelors there and then a master's and then taught agronomy at a community college for 15 years and thoroughly enjoyed that experience, but found it's hard to raise a family in the manner I'd like to on a teaching salary. So I, I entered private industry, work for Land o Lakes Agroliance. You know, all, all these different, you know, permutations of, of Land o Lakes that they had in agronomy at the time. That was a great learning experience as well. Got to learn, work with a lot of really good people and worked for Starseed for a while and Valent usa And now I'm with Green Cover, which is. I don't know if I could write a job that really fit me better personality wise or, or interest wise. I, I've always been fascinated by cover crops. I've been fascinated by soil, what makes soil better. Number of experiences early on in my life that made me very interested in soil. And when I went away to college, it was, you know, every summer where I live now, we get about 36 inches of rain, but which was. Should be fully adequate. But every summer our crops would just burn up.

Wow.

You know, I just thought we didn't get enough rain because all summer long, boy, we could use the rain. Boy, we could use a rain. And just like Yesterday I was driving through and the area where I live now, we only got into the field to start planting seven days ago. And yesterday, 100 degree day, the corn is already rolling.

Wow. And that's seven days after being saturated.

Seven days after being too wet to plant. We've got corn that's suffering. And so they say here we're always one week away from a drought. And it's true. It's like I just grew up assuming that's normal. You know, this is, this is how it is everywhere. You got to have a rain every week or you're in trouble. And then I moved away and went to places where they have this stuff called soil.

And.

And like, you mean you can go a whole month without rain or two months without rain? Your crops don't just die. I think, wow, this, this is great. And so I looked at our really heavy clay soil. I mean, brick making has historically been a huge industry in this area because the soil is better for making bricks than it is for making crops. And it's like, I don't like just accepting that's the way things are. And so it's like, how can I fix the soil? What can I do? Well, the answer obviously is organic matter. How do you increase your soil organic matter? Well, if you open a garden book, it says, well, you import, you know, all these lawn clippings or leaf mold.

Or what you can do if you're farming 100 acres.

Right. It's like, you know, and what advice is that on a planetary scale? You know, are we going to go to different planets and take all their organic matter and bring it back here? If we're going to seriously impact agriculture with organic matter, where's it going to come from? And so that makes it necessary to grow the organic matter on site, and each and every acre gets enriched with more organic matter. How do you do it economically? How do you do it in an environmentally responsible manner? How do you do it without taking from one field and robbing one field to enrich another? And so that kind of became my challenge.

So you've been working with that challenge for a number of years now. And I'd like to hear a bit about the results that you've experienced. What have you observed with this soil that is better for making bricks than growing crops?

Well, I, I just moved back here for a while, but my brother has been farming family ground along with my father, who now in a nursing home. But a couple of the practices that I really promote. One is really minimizing tillage. No till where you can. And the other is continual flow of root exudates in the soil. With COVID crops or perennial crops, it's hard to get quantifiable results. And sometimes measuring soil organic matter doesn't always measure soil function. You know, it's like a savings account. The most important thing is, is that savings account getting bigger or is it getting smaller and what's your cash flow? Things like that. But I can relate an experience at the farm I had where I previously had a small ranch for 20 years. When I bought the place, it was an irrigated corn field. One field had been continuous corn for 42 years prior to my buying it. And then within, I instituted no till and some other things, cover cropping. And then I decided that I would convert it to an irrigated pasture. I was told subsurface drip irrigation. It was furrow irrigated, converted it subsurface drip irrigation. And I was told at one time I had the only subsurface drip irrigated pasture in the entire world. I have no idea if that's true or not, But I got my irrigation equipment from NetFM and one of the NETFM executives said there is no drip tape irrigated pasture anywhere in the world. So I guess that was rather unique. But that the drip tape allowed me to eliminate tillage and also to put a perennial crop out there with, you know, on the flat. I didn't have having the, the intentional gullies out there.

I'd like to talk about drip irrigated pasture for a little bit. I'm of the persuasion that if people manage their pastures as well as they manage their cash crops, their pastures would be more profitable. They would be more profitable than their cash crops, particularly in the case of corn and soybeans.

I agree.

You mentioned that you're doing drip irrigation pastures to eliminate tillage. How do those two dots connect?

Well, furrow irrigation was, I remember, you know, I was so excited when I bought this farm and I began farming just like everyone else in the area. You know, furrow irrigation group soybeans, decided to grow soybeans because it'd been corn for 42 years and said, well, I'll start rotating. Did the irrigation, the furrow irrigation, setting the siphon tubes. And I went down to the bottom of the field to see, you know, where the water was coming out the bottom end of the field. And there was a big pile of soil that was there. And then after my first season, all that soil was now in the county ditch. And a county crew came along in the Wintertime and scraped the ditch and took trucks and put it back out in my field. Like how often do you guys do this? Oh, every few years. I'm like oh my gosh, wow. How devastating is this furrow irrigation to my soil quality? And I grid sampled the field and the phosphorus test just stair stepped down away from, I mean all my soil was moving downhill and it was, it's really impactful. So I decided first of all I got to get rid of the furrow irrigation. When I bought the farm, I had 17 acre inches allotted of irrigation. And then that year, the year I bought it, we had a water dispute with Nebraska. The river got my irrigation from the original source, dried up, my irrigation allotment got cut back to 5 acre inches and I, I mean that's essentially two waterings. With fur irrigation, it's useless. I said, well this, this is the future. So I'm going to learn to stretch my water. That involves no till. The subsurface drip was more than sufficient. And the neat thing about putting that to pasture and drip irrigation, pasture is great marriage because I mean perennial vegetation just, it was great. But one of my goals was, was to restore my soil. The furrow irrigation, the tillage, you know, it just, it doesn't do soil any favors. When I planted the pasture and the pasture was eastern gamma grass, alfalfa, chicory, tree foil, a whole complex blend, my soil organic matter was 1.9% which is fairly typical for tilled fields in the area, around 2%. I took a soil test just recently and after I sold the farm it was of course tilled and put back to, back to corn production. And yeah, it's a hard swallow.

Let's go back and mine it again.

It did provide me an opportunity though because the ultimate measure of land quality in a farmer's eyes. Well, how many bushel corn can this acre grow? It's like the 100 meter dash for, you know, how fast are you. Well, how fast do you run the 100 meter dash? How productive is this soil? How many bushels of corn can erase? So I'll have an opportunity to find that out. But it also gave me an opportunity to soil sample it because eastern Gamma grass is, it's very clumpy, has an extremely dense root system. We tried to soil sample it, actually used a hydraulic probe, stuck it in the ground and the truck went up in the air.

Wow.

The probe would not go in the soil, it was so dense with roots.

Sounds to me like you had compaction issues.

No, no, it was not compaction it was. It was roots. And, you know, it's like, oh, my gosh. What. What is the organic matter on this place? Well, once it was tilled up, and I don't know how many tillage passes it took, but it had to be a lot, I went out there and grabbed a sample and 8.7% organic matter in 15 years.

In 15 years. So that's a.

So 1. 9 to 8, 7 in 15 years.

So 6.8% gain in 15 years. Round up to 7. It's roughly a half a percentage point per year.

Roughly a half percentage point a year. And that's just the surface. Six inches. I dug a trench in there. I had to repair a leak. And I said, you know, while we're at it, let's just see how deep these roots go. So the backhoe operator went nine feet. He said, that's all the farther I'm. I can go. We've got safety things, you know, collapse, you know, we have to start. And I said, well, I don't want to stir. Step down. So just reach in there, dig a little hole. And there were roots in abundance nine feet down on this Gamma grass. I know you and I have both been told that it is impossible to raise your soil organic matter. There are still soil scientists today who will say, hear that story I just told you and call me a liar, said that that is impossible. So why did it happen?

It's very common for people to say. There are different opinions, of course, but there's still the prevailing perspective that you can't increase organic matter beyond what the native original profile was. And pick a number. Let's say that native profile was 400 years ago or whenever it was. And yet there are any number of farmers who have had a very different experience from that.

Yes. And native in this area runs 6 to 7% organic matter. So in 15 years, I was able. Not that I'm anything special, but a C4 perennial grass with very productive legume, companion crops and biodiversity and managed grazing, you know, daily moves and so forth. Yeah, you can accomplish some amazing things in soil quality. And I'm sure you know the math a lot better than I do. But if climate change is an actual thing that we're facing from too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, you can do the math. It would not take a whole lot of acres worldwide to make this change, to suck all the extra CO2 we've put in and the atmosphere in the last 200 years and put it in the soil. And then whether you believe in climate change or not as a threat. All that carbon in the soil is a good thing.

All that carbon in the soil is a good thing from an agriculture's perspective. I think different people have different perspectives on climate change. But leaving that hot button topic to the side for the moment, the one thing that all of us as farmers need do care about is water and water cycling. And when we recognize that, as Walter Yenny and others have so brilliantly described, that once we restore the carbon cycle and we store organic matter in our soil, it's not just about water holding capacity in our soil, although that is also interesting. What is even more important, I believe, is restoring the small water cycle, restoring local rainfall consistency. You know, I'm still a very young man, but in our local region where I grew up, I remember 15 years ago, 20 years ago, rainfall being consistent every eight to 10 days, unless there were occasional severe drought years. There was some annual variation, but I would say six years out of eight, we had very consistent rainfall. That is gone. I remember this quote from Jerry Brunetti. He used to say that we don't have a climate anymore. We just have bakeries of the weather. And that's come about. We don't recognize this because many of us aren't meteorologists and don't connect all the dots, but this has really come about as a result of a dysfunctional carbon cycle.

Yes.

So when we restore soil carbon, we also restore the rainfall cycle as well.

Yeah, I agree. You know, I tell people when they ask me to, who are not familiar with Kansas, you know, what's the weather like in Kansas? Or what's the climate like in Kansas? I say, oh, I. It's a desert where it floods a lot.

Wow.

You know, and that's true. We, like you said, we used to have gentle rains in spring and fall and then thunderstorms in the summer and it used to snow in the winter. Now hardly ever snows in the winter. We get thunderstorms punctuated by long periods without rain. You know, intense thunderstorms, long periods without rain. It seems like in old time farmers say, I don't think the climate's changing, but the weather sure is getting funny. It does.

Yeah.

It does seem to be making. You know, I don't believe in climate change, but this weather sure is getting funny. Yeah. And I think that's true. We do seem to be seeing more intense rainfall with less frequency. I don't think many people would argue that.

I haven't found anyone that would yet at this point. And in fact, even if they would desire to argue that the data indicates differently, as Jerry Hatfield has eloquently pointed out. So in addition to the experiences on your own farm, you've also had the privilege of working with lots of different growers in many different types of environments and ecosystems implementing cover crops. What are some of the memorable moments or remarkable experiences you've had that really stand out in your memory?

Oh gosh, I've had so many. I remember Keith Thompson, I spoke at a little farmer meeting about COVID crops and Keith Thompson spoke about no till and then we spoke just a little bit about marrying the two practices. And this was a long time ago and years and years ago and I was just starting to make these changes on my, my own farm and, and Keith told me, he said, you know what you'll find out about combining no till and cover crops. Said your ground is going to stay wet longer and dry out quicker. Keith, that's an oxymoronic statement that's mutually exclusive. That doesn't work. He said, you will know what I mean in about five years. And sure enough, I discovered what he meant. This soil does hold moisture longer, but it also becomes, it doesn't dry out quicker, but it does become plantable quicker.

Because the COVID crop pulls moisture out of the surface.

Yeah. And it, it, you know, all the bad things about planting in the mud, the sidewall smearing the seed furrow, the seed trench cracking open, you know when it dries out, the compaction, all the problems with planting too wet just kind of diminish over time and oh wow, that's cool. And another opportunity thing that I saw, I went to visit Shane New, who's now with Understanding Ag and Shane's good friend of mine for a while and he just called me out of the blue one time I went over to visit him and he showed me this pasture, fescue pasture where he had taken essentially he had summer annual cover crops and he had some seed left over in his drill. I don't want to feed mice with this and it's too late at night. I don't want to run the shop back and, and clean that drill out. I'm just going to make enough passes that it empties the drill. Here's this fescue pasture here. So he just drilled it out in the fescue to get rid of it and not expecting any results. And it was just a winter grazed fescue patch close to the house for wintering animals. That stuff grew and grew like crazy and made a huge amount of biomass. And then you'd think that would choke out that fescue. No, the fescue grew so much better under that canopy. So it just really, really changed the productivity of that pasture. It got me thinking about sunlight and sunlight capture. I think we really, really overestimate our ability to capture sunlight. And so much of our agronomic systems just don't capture sunlight at all. If you look at corn, soybean rotation, how many months out of the year do we actually capture sunlight?

It's only 60 days or so of peak period actually for corn, it's 45 days of peak photosynthesis.

Yeah. I mean, you said a pasture can be more profitable than a cornfield. Oh, no, it can. Well, the unfair advantage of the pastures that you can design that pasture to capture sunlight over a much longer period of time. You can operate at peak photosynthesis for a long period of time. You can't on a cornfield. If you are growing corn in a monoculture, no cover crops, no companions, you are not operating at peak photosynthesis, but just a small fraction of the year. And that experience really made me start thinking about our solar efficiency. And of course that, you know, a cool season grass does not operate at peak efficiency in July and August. So what Shane did was he introduced some C4 warm season species that could make better use of that sunlight in the heat of summer, period. You know what people on in fescue pasture areas called summer slump. Why not let a more productive plant species get first crack at that sunlight? And then it got me thinking about temperature relations. How come that fescue grew better underneath that canopy than it did in full sunlight? Well, fescue grows better in October than it does in July. Even though there's half the sunlight. I don't know the actual fraction, but there's far less sunlight in October than there is in July. So by putting that canopy over that, it essentially, as far as the fescue is concerned, it changed a July day into an October day. Less sun, but 20 degrees cooler. And it was amazing.

There's lots of dynamics in play there. And I think your comment about combining different species, warm season grasses, I shouldn't say species, but different types, warm season grasses, cool season grasses, legumes and so forth, is an important framework to keep in mind when we think about developing different combinations and so forth. But when we think about photosynthetic efficiency, I've been beating the drum for a decade that our plants are only photosynthesizing at 15 to 20% of their inherent photosynthetic potential often enough that people they understand intellectually that that's the case, but it hasn't really penetrated what that actually means for plant performance. And you're describing a couple of different aspects. One is having plants present during all the days where photosynthesis is possible that are capable of capturing that light. So it's extending the. The window, if you will, of photosynthesis.

The duration of photo. Yeah, yeah.

And which is very important. And then there's also. What you described with fescue, is that you can increase the photosynthesis of a plant based on the environment that it's in. And based on its nutritional profile, it.

Sure added to the productivity of that pasture, I'll tell you that. And that was a real eye opener there. You assume it's like the elephant.

The.

You know, when you take a baby elephant and you tie it to a stake and it pulls and it pulls and it can't get away. And then that elephant as an adult, you just put it to a little stake in the ground that it could pull out in a flash. But it doesn't because it assumes that it's impossible. And I think we are. We are so often elephants tied to a stake. I love that because we have put limitations on. That's the maximum we can do with this. And you hear that said, well, that's the best we can do around here. Like, and everywhere you go, farmers use that term around here. And that won't work around here. That won't work around here. You can't do that around here. And like, the laws of physics change, you know, within 30 miles of their house.

Yeah. And if a farmer five miles away is successful in implementing something, oh, it rained more over there, or. Or less or whatever.

Yeah. And it's basically just a rationalization of the mental limitations that we put on ourselves. I've finally found, and I do this in presentations sometime, I give them a map of where. Where around here actually is. I've looked for the place for years and years. And around here is one side of the property boundary is a left ear, and the other side is right here. That's where around here exists. And that, that, that is. You are right. That is a place where nothing ever works because we have put those limitations on ourselves. And you talk about the guys that win the national corn yield contest and like, oh, gosh, you can't do that around here. You know, it's like, you know, none of those guys have neighbors that are producing 600 bushel corn. I'm sure their neighbors are saying, oh, that won't work around here either. And then you think how amazing 600 bushel corn is. And then you realize, like you said, corn plants only operating at peak photosynthesis for 45, 60 days out of the year. Like, how much more can we derive from our land? And I think one of the biggest mental changes a farmer can make is stop thinking about, I raised corn, or I raised soybeans, or I raised cattle or oranges or blueberries or whatever your crop is, and say, my goal, my job is to harvest sunlight and harvest rainfall and extract nitrogen from the atmosphere and have gas exchange in my soil, you know, pull oxygen into my soil and exhale carbon dioxide out of my soil and, and to capture that carbon dioxide back in your canopy. When you start thinking of your goals as optimizing your ecosystem function, you know, maximizing photosynthesis through solar capture and carbon dioxide capture, harvesting rainfall, biologically fixing nitrogen, then all of a sudden you start seeing all the tremendous waste that we currently have in agriculture, and you think, what percentage efficiency are we operating at now? It's ridiculously low. And when you see all this waste, you see opportunity.

It's ridiculously low. I think if we were to look at our production and productivity from a global macro perspective, we get caught up in what are our yields per acre and the marketing mantra that has been developed by agribusiness to use farmers to do the marketing for them, that we are feeding the world. But in fact, if you started looking at measuring yield and measuring productivity in terms of calories per acre and grams of protein per acre, all of a sudden you would realize that we are actually doing a very poor job of harvesting sunlight and converting that into calories and protein, and that there is a lot of untapped opportunity left on the table. So it's a different perspective than looking at it purely in terms of bins and bushels per acre.

You grow up thinking, you know, we're Americans, we're the most efficient people in the world. We put a man on the moon, you know, yeah, we have some, some exceptional technological developments, and we see ourselves as the most efficient farmers in the world and think, well, how are we measuring that efficiency? Well, I drive by the billboard all the time. One Kansas farmer feeds 155 people plus you. So we're efficient because one farmer feeds all these people. But when you look, like you said, when you look at calories or grams of protein per acre, we're miserably inefficient. We're not harvesting sunlight, we're not harvesting rainfall. Every time it rains, the river comes up. And so how much of the rainfall that I know in my area of our 36 inches, a miserably poor percentage, actually gets in the soil and stays in the soil to grow crops?

I think because we are in this developed country, in this Western civilization here in the United States, many of us readily lose sight of what agriculture looks like in the.