e150. Unveiling Soil Secrets for Better Farming Outcomes with Dale Strickler

Transcript generated by Podium.page Help us spread the word by tweeting about us at @podiumdotpage and including us in your shownotes! https://podium.page NOTE: There were 2 speakers identified in this transcript. Speaker separation errors can arise when multiple speakers speak simultaneously. 0:00:05 - Cal And we'll start with the Fast Five. What's your name, dale Strickler, and what's your consulting company, called Regenerative? 0:00:15 - Dale Wisdom. And where are you located? So we are based right now in Wichita, Kansas. Well, okay, Right in the middle of everything. 0:00:26 - Cal Oh, yes. And what year did you start grazing animals? 0:00:31 - Dale Oh, my Well, I grew up doing it, so I'm not sure when you can claim to have any sort of responsibility. If having a responsibility means you get blamed when things go wrong, that would be at a very young age. There you go. But as far as my own livestock, I bought my own herd for the first time in 96. Oh, yes, Well, actually I had some sheep. I bought sheep in fall of 90 and bought cattle in 96. Okay. 0:01:10 - Cal And that kind of leads into the next question what livestock species have you grazed? 0:01:14 - Dale Cattle and sheep, predominantly cattle, but I have a major interest in having multiple species Dying to get into goats, dying to get into pastured poultry and pastured plants, oh yes, and I'm like, where can we go? I'd love to do pastured alligators, but my wife, she put the no alligator sign up. She said nothing that eats toddlers. 0:01:46 - Cal Attention ranchers. Are you ready to boost your ranch's profitability in 2025? Join Noble Research Institute for Noble Profitability Essentials in McKinney Texas, this January 28th 29th. This transformative two-day course will help you unlock the full potential of your land and livestock. Noble's experienced advisors with over 200 years of combined experience will guide you through proven strategies to enhance your bottom line. You'll learn how to improve soil health, maximize forage quality, reduce costly inputs and optimize stocking rates. This course is designed to address your unique challenges and build lasting solutions for your ranching operation. Through hands-on activities and interactive conversations, you'll gain valuable skills to create a more resilient, productive and profitable ranch that will thrive for generations. Don't miss this opportunity to learn from the best and secure your ranching legacy. Register by December 30th to save $50 with our early bird discount. Visit nobleorg today to enroll in Noble Profitability Essentials in McKinney, texas, january 28th 29th. Invest in your land, livestock and livelihood this January. 0:03:17 - Dale I think when you look at the status of US agriculture, I mean we are completely, totally dominated by corn and soybeans. Oh yeah, I mean, that's where most of our land, how most of our land, is used. And what are those corn and soybeans used for? Pigs and poultry, yeah, pigs and poultry, yeah. So even if we do pastured pigs and poultry, I mean, grain farming is inherently destructive to soil and we'll get into that later, but it is, in isolation, a corn-soybean rotation. Your soil slowly just gets worse over time, even with no-till. No-till slows the destruction, but it doesn't really stop it. And you can add cover crops and make it better. But if you're grain farming without interventions like that, you're destroying soil and so our entire country is destroying soil. Perennials build soil oh yeah, about later. But I'm very, very interested in creating pasture systems for pork and poultry that displace, not, not just have them on grass, and you bring them in corn and soybean from outside so that you're enriching this spot of land but impoverishing a farm somewhere else. Yeah, transferring those nutrients. The feed is being produced on site, the concentrate feed is being produced on site. I'm very, very excited about that prospect. I think it's an absolute game changer and it's something that people talk about scaling up. You know well, you can't scale that up. You can't do that on 10,000 acres. And I'm like is it really desirable for every farm to be a million acres? Oh yeah, and we have 200 farmers in the entire country, right? I mean, would it be desirable if Bill Gates owned every piece of farm ground? 0:05:50 - Cal in the. 0:05:50 - Dale United States. Is that progress, right? Yeah, I don't think it is, and I think you know Thomas Jefferson said that one of the greatest achievements I believe it was. Jefferson said that one of the greatest achievements in society would be creating the ability to make a living off a very small acreage. Oh yeah, and it's not about how many acres you have, it's about having a good life and a good lifestyle and being happy, and I don't think owning a million acres creates that. You just, at some point, you just I mean, I have worked for a farmer that did farm a million acres, oh yes, and not in the US. But you know, I don't know how you could possibly be happy with that level of stress in your life. 0:06:54 - Cal Right, yeah, I agree with that. 0:06:57 - Dale Yeah, I think it's more important to have systems of agriculture that we can scale down. Oh yeah, Can we make a living on. It's like name that tune. Can I make a living on a thousand? Well, I can make a living on 500. Can I make? no, and I think that maybe we ought to, to flip our thinking upside down and said what's? How do we want to live, what kind of food do we want to produce and what's the minimum amount of acreage it takes to accomplish that? Oh yeah, and if you're trying to make a living with corn and soybeans like it's going to be tough, you know it might be tough if you're losing money on every acre, more acres is not better. On every acre, more acres is not better. And so I think margin per acre and having an enterprise that's actually difficult to scale up can be a good thing. 0:07:57 - Cal Oh, yeah, yeah Well, and you know my dad and I talk about that our land base here is probably not changing too much because of the cost of land. So how do we and I don't like the term maximize, but how do we optimize what we're doing here and bring in more profit for the farm? 0:08:19 - Dale I think that's a great conversation to have a great conversation to have. Before we dive a little bit more into soil and restoring soil and doing a better job on managing what we have, let's talk about your background a little bit, yeah well, I grew up on a diversified family farm outside of Colony, kansas, population of about 300, about 500 at the time One of those generic towns, I guess Colony, but still there. Its claim to fame is they put a railroad station there because it was the highest point in elevation between Kansas City and the Gulf of Mexico. So if a train stopped there. it was downhill both ways, so the train could go with the gravity each day. So it did get started. 0:09:16 - Cal And is that on Highway 75? 0:09:18 - Dale No, that is on Highway 169. Oh, that's, oh 169 goes up and jogs over um. 75, goes through bartlesville, but it may jog over in kansas, okay, yeah, yeah yeah, it goes on up through yates center and then, uh, burlington and up to topeka. So yeah, but yeah, and and here and it's kind of odd because in in high school last thing I wanted to do in life was farm oh yes, farming to me was just mind numbing, boring hours on a tractor, stirring dust and choking, and just misery, and it I didn't find it interesting at all. And then I go to college and I'm I had no idea what I wanted to be, but the military rejected me because I had allergies. So I had something, and so I said, well, what's the highest exit salary? That's engineering. So I'll go do that and got in my engineering classes. I was doing well as far as grades, but I wasn't thriving. Oh yes, I wasn't interested. And my roommates were all agriculture majors and they'd come home and they'd have the neatest discussions they're all like well, this is way more interesting than what we learned in calculus today. 0:10:55 - Cal Oh yeah. 0:10:59 - Dale So I said I'll take a few ag classes, and so one of the first classes I took was crop science. 0:11:11 - Cal Oh yes. 0:11:12 - Dale The professor. After I turned in my first test my professor wrote on there read big red up at the top see me after class. I'm like, oh oh, no, sure I top. See me after class. I'm like, oh oh, no, sure I got an A on the test. He must think I cheated or something which is kind of hard because it's an essay test. 0:11:35 - Cal Oh yeah. 0:11:36 - Dale Hard to cheat on an essay test or be accused of cheating, unless you've got someone cheated on me or you know, right. So I went into his office and he handed me a magazine called New Farm Magazine. He said somehow I got double subscribed to this so I always get duplicate copies. Thought you'd like this. Said I'm reading the answers on your test. I think you'd appreciate this. Oh yes, so I read that. And you know, growing up we did things very conventionally Corn beans, wheat, cattle, everything you know, full tillage and just very conventionally, Right. And here's this book, or this magazine put out by the Rodale Institute. Oh, okay, organic gardening yes, very much into the organic gardening Aimed at broad acre farmers and it was about cover crops and pastured poultry. And Joel Salatin was in there and you know all these guys. I'm like, wow, this is fascinating. Yes, I mean, this is intellectually challenging. This is, you know, integrating all these systems together. And you know, and as a kid I love nature and you know I'd find a really cool place out in the woods to play. And next thing, I know dad has a bulldoze down and it's growing corn and beans. I always saw agriculture and nature, as you know, being the complete polar oh yeah, each other. And that agriculture is something where you destroyed that cool place where I could find salamanders, or this neat place you know that had all these neat snakes, or you know, birds or whatever. And here is this completely foreign concept to me that you could have a system of agriculture that used nature to solve its problems. And the very back page of that magazine, it had an excerpt from a book and I started reading this excerpt and I'm like this is the most fascinating concept I've ever come across. The book called tree crops, oh yes and it was basically, you know, just like we were talking. You know corn and soybeans that just dominate our landscape and you think about the eastern us was oak, hickory, oak hickory, chestnuts two carbohydrate producers, and and then hickory would be protein and fat. And we went and, with hand labor, chopped all that down. You know, oak, hickory and chestnuts perfect pig foods. That, oh yeah, big food at zero cost, zero inputs. Every year provides shade and it provides protection from the wind. And then, in our infinite wisdom, we use hand labor, cut all that down so we can grow corn and soybeans. Oh yeah, you, what feed pigs, right? Yeah, so this book tree crops is all about using trees to feed livestock, oh, yeah, and it's a system of agriculture that doesn't require inputs and rebuilds soil, rebuilds ecosystems, no pollution, no soil loss. No, you know, eutrophication of water, any of the other problems that we have with agriculture. And, best of all and the book was written by a geographer who traveled around the world and saw these different types of systems oh, yes, said that every civilization that uses trees to feed livestock and there are very many, but they were happy and throw, yes, yeah, and all these civilizations based on grain ended up with ruination, but financially, and you know. So you really started my thought process going. You know, thinking about possibilities. I'm like, wow, we've been doing things the wrong way for centuries and maybe we ought to think about, you know, looking at nature and how does nature do things and how are we doing things different? I know that, oh yeah, you know, if you fight gravity, you're going to get real tired and you're going to lose, right, and you can't. If you fight nature, you're going to go real broke and you're going to lose. Yeah, going to go real broke and you're going to lose, yeah. So you know, we just need to, if we can, harness nature to nudge nature. I think, first of all, when we ask nature, what would you God, what would you have? What would you have us do? Oh yeah, yeah, what? What would you have us do? Oh, yeah, what would you like us to do? If we are in this for our own selfish purposes, then we probably are going to fail. If we're in it as stewards of, you know, stewards of the land placed here by God, yeah, I think we're probably going to have a better outcome, oh, yeah. So and? And how have we approached the land historically? It's what can we get out of it for? For our own selfish purposes, obviously, I mean we need to. You know you can call it selfish. We need to live, we need to make a living, we need to provide for our families and provide for our fellow people. But the manner in which we do that, you know, if we're after just a quick buck, that's a whole different thing than if we're trying to provide healthy, nutritious food for our family. Oh yeah, you know, it's there's. Whenever you get into the exploitation, mindset and greed, bad things are going to happen and bad things have happened. I mean, that's in the middle eastern grain-based agriculture. Once it's spread out from, you know, abu horea, which is, you know, where they think the garden of eden was located, where biblical scholars, archaeologists feel that was. As it spread out from there, I mean, the sahara desert's only about 4,000 years old. Oh yeah, it's a man-made desert. Yeah, and what caused it? You know there wasn't people burning fossil fuel 4,000 years ago. Oh right yeah, we're trying to plow up. You know, cut down trees and growing wheat instead of the vegetation that was there and so, yeah, so tree crops very, very profound impact on my life and completely changed the way I think, Completely changed way? 0:19:41 - Cal I think Did tree crops really cement that in your mind that, hey, engineering's not for you and you want to go into agronomy or a related field? 0:19:52 - Dale Yeah, yeah, so yeah. And as far as agronomy, you know, my goal then was to raise livestock and then I went to beef science class and they, we did a break even oh yes, I think, to raise a, you know a calf to maturity and you know. Here's the expenses. And so now you'll notice 80 percent of these expenses are feed cost. This is why we would make you animal science majors. Take an agronomy class or two. Wait a minute. All these animal science classes, all the classes the animal science majors take, make up 20% of the difference, and the classes the two agronomy classes make up 80 something's oh yes, this pyramid's inverted right. So seems to me. If I want to raise livestock, I should learn more about agronomy. So that afternoon I went, switched my major into agronomy oh yeah, rate profitably raise livestock. I still took enough animal. I finished my undergrad two classes shy of an animal science degree. Oh yes, yeah. I did get an agronomy degree. I got a certificate to teach science, high school science, and so we got a bachelor's in that, then gotten a master's in agronomy and rangeland management emphasis at a junior college for 15 years, then went in private industry and bounced around different jobs within private industry seed business, working as an agronomist, seed business working as an agronomist and then a couple years ago I kind of made the decision that I really want to basically provide information, for lack of a better term. You know, I don't like selling products. I like, I like helping people. 0:22:11 - Cal It goes back to that teaching that you did for so long You're teaching others. 0:22:16 - Dale Well, I mean, that's that's where I feel I always enjoyed the teaching process. I did not enjoy dealing with administration and administrative duties and keeping up with state required record keeping, which is just not, oh, I imagine. So you know, 15 hours a week teaching and 60 hours a week proven to the state that I was teaching. 0:22:44 - Cal Right. 0:22:45 - Dale And so just mind numbingly frustrating and so. But now I get to. You know I have clients that I come to their farms or I. I basically come up with plans to solve their, their problems, or at least what I believe will solve their problems. People have been very happy so far and it makes me feel, you know, I can go give the guy some ideas that can solve some issues. That has been a thorn in his side and he can sleep at night, he can make more money and he can be happy and he can make that money in a more ecological fashion. So not just he benefits but everybody around them also benefits. Oh yeah, it gives me a good feeling. It's something I really enjoy. 0:23:41 - Cal Now now, throughout your your teaching career and your private industry career, did you also have livestock on the side? 0:23:50 - Dale For the yeah, pretty much during that entire time I did Livestock one or my or another, mostly cattle, and had my, my own land, my own pasture. I was up by Cortland, kansas, until gosh, wouldn't I live from there. Four years ago, five years ago, somewhere around there, I had an operation. I bought an irrigated corn and soybean farm and can build all into irrigated pasture, which is the not the route most people choose. Most people go the opposite direction. They'll plow up grassland to make crops and I thought crops. I did that for a few years and made an incredible amount of money and gave 110 of it away to the fertilizer dealer, the chemical dealer oh yes dealer, the fuel dealer. You know there was nothing left for me at the end. I'm like this is ugly. You know I'm cashing big checks but I'm writing bigger ones. Oh yeah, this would have been. You know I'm cashing big checks but I'm writing bigger ones. Oh yeah, and this would have been. You know the early 2000s, which probably the darkest. I mean, we talk about the 80s, but I think 2000 to 2005 may have been uglier than the 80s, other than ultra straight. But as far as relation between crop prices and input prices, I think the early 2000s were worse than the 80s. If we'd had, you know, 18% interest, it would have been an absolute one back. But you know, interest rates were pretty low at that time. So we could, we could kind of hang on by our fingernails. So I, I made the decision. I said you know, input prices are killing me and I'm not making any money with the corn and soybeans. I'm gonna put everything to pasture and everything's gonna get grazed and I'm gonna build this one. Oh yeah, and if, if nothing else, if all I can do is keep my payments made, someday my kids are going to end up with one really nice piece of dirt. 0:26:13 - Cal Right, yes, leaving it better for the next generation, yeah. 0:26:17 - Dale I said, I have a job on the side, all I need to do is make payments, and they're going to end up with a little piece of black gold. Make payments, and, and they're going to end up with a little piece of black gold, and I, I developed a really good grazing system. I was grazing those hundred pair 10 months out of the year. On that, oh yes. And then you know, for the other two months there was corn stalks and, uh, in abundance, a big irrigated area. So there's, there's corn stalks everywhere, and so it's. I mean that that's pretty productive piece of ground. 0:27:12 - Cal Oh, yeah, it is. 0:27:13 - Dale And, um, I had a sequence and my my best weaning way. I always did delay. I. Well, always I I moved into delayed weaning rather than early weaning, which some people preach. I did delayed weaning because as long as you can keep quality feed in front of that cow, why not extend that lactation period and and make her work a higher person a year? I mean, you've got to feed her anyhow. Now, obviously, a lactating cow needs more feed and of higher quality than a dry cow. But if you've got an abundance of high-quality feed, that's cheap, that you can graze. Now if you're hauling alfalfa hay to her, that's a different deal. You're no longer cheap feed. But if you can have high quality grain seed, cover crops and corn stocks or stockpile novel, undefined fescue, all these different high quality late fall, early winter options, then there's really no reason to wound early. So I actually ended up weaning it at 10 months of age, oh yeah. And. But even before that I was having at eight months I was weaning 800 pound calves oh yeah, fairly large, large frameaning 800 pound calves. Oh yeah, fairly large, large frame cattle. but still 800 pound calves in eight months. And, and doing that by keeping from the time they hit the ground until the time they were weaned there was good quality green feed. Oh yes, they weren't eating brown stuff, they were eating green that entire time. And so it took. And the secret to that is I had multiple pasture types. I had cool season pastures, cool season grasses, I had warm season grass pastures, I had annual pastures, summer annuals, winter annuals. Oh yes, crop residues. I had all these different things all sequenced, so the animals moved. What was good at that point in time? Oh yes, yeah. And so, and everything was able to be rested during critical periods, so that there are times where severe grazing is extremely detrimental to a plant and there are times where severe grazing is not. And so if you know when those periods are, you can put a mob of cattle out there for a short period of time. Oh yeah, doesn't hurt the grass at all, you know, if you take it down to bare dirt, obviously it does, but there are times when the grass is more resilient than others. So, if you, if you know those times when you need to rest, when you, when you can, when the optimum nutrition periods are, when the times where grazing is not detrimental and you, you can. It's pretty amazing what you can accomplish oh yeah so you know, 100 pair on 135 acres and doing that for 10 months out of the year, yeah, that's. And you know the normal stocking rate in the area was from six to eight acres of native grass for five months. Oh yes, a couple months of corn stalks and then four months of hay. That was normal and you know. So you know they're six to eight acres for five months. You know that's in 1.2 to 1.6 acres per per pair per month and I was doing that for essentially a year. Oh yeah, and so that, and you know that's 10 to 12 times the normal the area stock area. 0:31:20 - Cal Now I had irrigation for two months out of the year, but still only two months out of the year yeah, yeah, but so you had irrigation, but you only had enough for two months out of the year to use it, which of course being in the water was delivered down the canal and oh yeah, the water deliveries were based on the assumption that everybody's growing corn. 0:31:45 - Dale So, yes, the corn tassel. They started delivering water, oh okay. And when the corn, you know the end of the end, or black layer, they shut the water off. Oh, interesting, so I could water most years, july and August, oh yeah, which is very helpful, obviously. Oh yeah, yeah, usually the times you need it most, but Right, that's when I would like to irrigate, yeah. If you had to pick two months to irrigate, yeah, those are the ones I'd pick. But you know it's if you're trying to, you know if you're dry at other times of the year doesn't do you that much good. It's sure better than nothing, oh yeah, yeah, it was. There were times where it was an absolute lifesaver. But the funny thing is that once I got my irrigated pastures really up and going, really didn't need that irrigation. Oh yeah, I mean I really did not have a lot of water drought stress, at least not on my warm season grass pastures. Now, on my cool season grass pastures I still applied irrigation water. But my plant in the field of Eastern Gamma, my book managing pastor, the cover photo, oh yes, that that's one of my Eastern gamma grass pastures and you know it it never showed drought stress. And trying to think, I don't believe I irrigated that for the last, at least not for the last five years that I had that oh yes, and that maybe 10. 0:33:34 - Cal Yeah. 0:33:36 - Dale I went a long time without irrigating that field because it just never showed stress. Now, the cool season, grasses and the annuals are still irrigating, still irrigating. Yeah, when I was raising corn and soybeans, you know we were originally. When I bought the place it had a 17 acre inch allotment. The next year it got cut to five. The first year I bought it it got cut to five. It's just kind of catastrophic. Oh, yeah, that that would be, and so when I went to pasture, I went, made two changes, planned everything pasture and then replaced all my open-ditch irrigation with subsurface drip tape drip tape. 0:34:35 - Cal At one time I was told that I had the only subsurface drip tape pasture in the world. Oh yes, Dale, let's switch gears just a little bit into our overgrazing section, sponsored by Redmond. At Redmond, we know that you thrive when your animals do. That's why it's essential to fill the gaps in your herd's nutrition with the minerals that they need. Made by nature, our ancient mineral salt and conditioner clay are the catalyst in optimizing the nutrients your animals get from their forage. Unaltered and unrefined, our minerals have the natural balance and proportion that your animals prefer. This gives your herd the ability to naturally regulate their mineral consumption as they graze. Our minerals won't just help you improve the health of your animals, but will also help you naturally build soil fertility so you can grow more nutrient-dense pasture year after year. Nourish your animals, your soil and your life. With Redmond, Learn more at redmondagriculturecom. We're going to take a deeper dive into building soils and you were talking about even your farm you had there in Colony. Was it Colony? No, it was in Portland, kansas. You were able to build some soil there. Before we actually talk about how should a farmer build soil? What is the ideal soil? 0:36:07 - Dale Well, you'd like a soil to do what you ask of it. And what do we ask of soil? Well, it has to grow plants. It has to be capable of growing plants. What do plants need? They need moisture, and so the soil has to be able to absorb rainfall and hold it and supply it to the plant when it needs it. And the root has to be able to grow down to a depth in that. And the limiting factor to root penetration in the soil is oxygen penetration in the soil. So the soil has to be porous to allow oxygen to diffuse down to a depth in the soil, and the soil has to provide mineral nutrients when the plant needs it, in the form that they need them. You know nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, sulfur, magnesium, calcium all those essential nutrients. So and a lot of people think of soil as being, you know, inert particles that we dump fertilizer onto and plants grow. That's really how it works. Every nutrient that a plant takes up has been probably passed through a microbial body multiple times. And so when we are managing soil, it's not so much about managing rock particles, it's about managing microbes. Oh yes, managing microbes, oh yes, and that's one, once you forget the the idea that you're managing little ground up rocks and instead you're managing microbes. Then you start to begin the journey of understanding how to build better, and that's really you know. When people talk about soil hell, you know that's such a vague term. What does soil health mean? 0:38:04 - Cal Right. 0:38:05 - Dale You know, really, soil health is just, like, you know, having a healthy body. It does what it's supposed to. You know, get out of bed in the morning, you've got energy to do things and free of illnesses. Things and free of illnesses. Soil health you're basically talking about having a good, functional microbial population in the soil, because that's really where the action takes place. Everything the plant needs, microbes can provide other than moisture, but even again, there are microbes that help plants take up moisture, and so it does need to rain, but your plants can be much, much more resilient to drought if you have the proper microbial populations. 0:39:02 - Cal So what I'm hearing you say, Dale, is I should have paid closer attention in microbiology. 0:39:08 - Dale I think we all should have paid more attention in microbiology class. When I took soils class undergraduate soils my professor said we're going to spend today talking about soil microbiology and the reason we only spend a day on it. Well, he said this is the single most important study on the planet. He said because this is what life depends on. Oh yes, soil microbiology. All life on this planet depends on microbes in the soil and so this is probably the most important study on the planet, he said and I'm going to apologize in advance because we're only going to spend one class period on it. Oh yeah, not because it's not important, but because I only know what I was taught, and I was only taught about one class period's worth. 0:40:06 - Cal Oh yeah. 0:40:06 - Dale That I was taught about nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium and moisture and I can tell you what the mineralogy and what a clay particle is, but I can't tell you anything about microgreens. But this is the single most important study on the plant and I'm like wow. So I ended up taking a soil microbiology class. 0:40:30 - Cal So, dale, talking about the managing your microbes, how does a farmer out here improve the health of their microbes in their soil? 0:40:41 - Dale Same way you improve the health of your livestock. You feed them. You feed them, you give them a nutritious diet. You know diet's everything for us, it's everything for our livestock and it's everything for our. And you shelter, shelter. You don't let them get too hot and you try to keep them warm in the winter, and so you do that with keeping a roof over their heads. Have a layer of protective crop residue on top of the soil and we used to think that microbes fed primarily on crop residue. Now, the crop residue, now the crop residue, is basically there for shelter. Oh yes, microbes eat root exudates and a lot of people don't know this. But of all the glucose that plants produce in photosynthesis depending on the plant species, whether they're perennial or annual from 25 to 50 percent of that glucose is leaked out of the root system and feeds microbes. Oh yes, that is what soil microbes, the beneficial soil microbes that we want, that's what they eat. Now you think about, about now, in a perennial ecosystem, those microbes are being fed 12 months out of the year, because the roots are alive. You know, maybe the tops aren't growing but the roots are still alive, Right? But in our annual cropping systems corn, soybeans they have roots that are alive maybe four months out of the year, and the first month the root systems are pretty tiny, Not very much there. Yeah, so we have covered our country with an agricultural system that does not feed microbes but about one-third of the year, and so that's why our soils tend to become depleted in annual cropping systems. 0:42:50 - Cal You know, Del, in my reading and my thinking about it, I had never really thought about it from that point of view, that when we're farming ground, I'm thinking about tillage doing such damage to the structure and there's no protection on the soil. I hadn't thought about it from the point of feeding the microbes because, like you said, there's not living matter on there with roots that are living to feed them. 0:43:16 - Dale Yeah. And so you know I'm a big proponent of no-till, have been for years. But when you know, organic farmers come to me and they say, well, I till and my organic matter is going up. Oh, you're mistaken. But those organic farmers, even though they're doing tillage, they're also growing cover crops for a nitrogen source or, you know, for weed control. So they're, they're tilling these under and they say, well, I'm incorporating that top growth into the soil. No, that's not the benefit. It's the growing of this, it's the root exudates while that cover crop's growing, not the incorporation of it at the end oh yeah, it's the, it's the root exudates while that cover crop's growing. It's really doing the heavy lifting of soil improvement. Organic matter increases. And now when people tell me that, I said well, just think what you'd have if you didn't do all that. Tillage too. 0:44:22 - Cal Oh yeah. 0:44:22 - Dale And so if you really want to improve soil, you have to stop tilling. I mean, tilling is destructive, I mean it just is. There's no question about that. I mean that's I hate to use the term settled science, but that's settled science. Oh yeah, yeah, and the less tillage you do, the better. And. But the second piece of the puzzle is the elimination of fallow. You want every. All of agriculture really is converting sunlight into something useful through photosynthesis and then adding value through a chain of events. And so if you have sunlight hitting bare soil, that is sunlight going to waste that you can't ever go back in time and recover. The goal should be to utilize every photon and put it to use, and if you're not turning it into corn or a cow or whatever, a papaya, then it can be used to feed microbes that perform all sorts of essential tasks, oh yeah, including just soil improvement, and that's how you build soil. And now, if it's amazing, you read a gardening book. I, you know, they tell you, you know, go get your wheelbarrow and dump on all this compost or whatever on the soil and said, well, that's fine and dandy, I. I was speaking at a conference one time and um, and the audience was mostly farmers, but we had a suburban gardener oh yes and I was talking about cover crops and all this and she just says I don't know. She stands up and says I don't know why you farmers are so stupid, you can't figure this out. She said here's what you need to do. You just need to do what I do. I go to the city dump and I scoop out their leaf pile and their composted leaf pile and their composted leaf pile and I fill up a pickup bed and I haul two loads two pickup loads every year and put it on my garden and I said well, how big is your? garden right and so we calculated out and I said, did the math in my head, I said, now you realize that this guy over here that farms a thousand acres to do what you do on your garden it would take 250 000 trips to the dump with his pickup. Oh yeah, said number one, he can't possibly do a thousand trips a day, right? Yeah, 50 days out of the year and there's not that much stuff there, you know. You take the entire city and oh yeah all this stuff, here it's. It wouldn't cover 1 000 acre farm with compost and you cannot it. I call that the musical chairs method. You're not really increasing organic matter, you're just moving it from one place to another. Just moving it somewhere else yeah, you're impoverishing all these city yards to enrich a few gardens. You can't do that at scale. You can't do it on a planetary scale. If you really want to increase soil organic matter, you have to do it by capturing the sunlight that falls on that piece of land and move it underground, that's through photosynthesis. That really is the only way you can truly enrich soil. Any other method basically involves burning a lot of fossil fuel to move stuff around. So that, in a nutshell, is basically how you improve soil. 0:48:34 - Cal So what I'm hearing? Just to feed the microbes, you've got to manage your grass and obviously when we're talking about grazing we're not doing too much tilling but a lot of people out there are grazing cover crops and other things. In my area it's pasture, so managing those pastures better. 0:48:54 - Dale Yes and so like your area and you're. So let's just say that you've got Bermuda grass and you've got tall fescue. Bermuda grass is a warm, very warm season grass, tropical grass, that really photosynthesizes about four months out of the year. Four months out of the year. Now the roots are alive the other eight months but you're really not getting that pumping that big massive input of sugar moving to the roots and feeding those microbes, except for about four months out of the year, and if your Bermuda grass is grazed down to where it looks like a golf putting green, even those four months are not. So there are a couple things you can do there. One is to extend the period of photosynthesis by adding cool season species into the mixture. Now, that can be cool season annuals like cereal rye or annual ryegrass, or some arrowleaf clover, crimson clover, that can also provide nitrogen, or maybe it can be something like alfalfa, another perennial out there. Oh, yeah. That would extend that period of photosynthesis. And then you want to leave enough leaf area after each grazing episode. Now, if you're continuous grazing, animals, especially horses, tend to go back to the same plants over and over again and so you have bare ground. Then you got big, tall rank stuff that's all turned brown because it's become over mature and no longer photosynthesizing and is shading out what's below it. You get this patch grazing. One of the values of rotational grazing is that you can manage how much of that leaf that you take at a time. And so they. You know, if you, if you're grazing below about four inches, you're, you're letting sunlight hit bare soil, oh yeah, and that solar energy is going to go to waste. And if and then you manage the rest, you want to have enough rest because the first thing a plant does after it's lost leaf area is try to reestablish those leaves. It has to invest usually some root reserves, some carbohydrates, to rebuild those leaves. And if you graze those leaves too quickly, then the plant is is in this constant state of rebuilding. It's it's not moving sugars down to the roots, so it's it's not feeding microbes. You want those leaves to be in a in a constant state of generosity. Oh yes. You want those plants to be generous, and they can't be generous if they're on the brink of starvation themselves. 0:52:07 - Cal You have to have that, Right. They've got to be healthy to be generous with their blue cloves, Right? You know yeah. 0:52:13 - Dale You board an airplane they say, you know, in case something happens, put on your own oxygen mask before you put it on someone else's, because if you pass out you can't help the person beside you. And a plant that's on the brink of starvation because it has inadequate leaf area from too much defoliation, too much grazing, can't help itself and it can't help the microbes. And so, just you know, managing that grazing and and it's not necessarily lighter grazing, and that's a real misconception. You know, I I work with people who have, just by managing the timing and doing rotational grazing so that they, you know, no individual plant gets grazed too low, but all plants get grazed, and then all plants are uniformly rested and come back and and then resting it at critical times and then coming back and taking half of it as dormant season grazing. Coming back and taking half of it as dormant season grazing. I've got clients that have increased their stocking rate fivefold. 0:53:28 - Cal Oh, wow, yeah. 0:53:32 - Dale Increasing it that much will make a difference on the bottom line. Everybody assumes that, oh, you have to sacrifice economically in order to manage pastures correctly, and that's absolutely not the case. You can actually increase your stocking rate while treating your grass better, if you know how to do it. Oh yeah, but fescue, that's a cool-season grass. It barely photosynthesizes in midsummer. That's a cool season grass that barely photosynthesizes in midsummer does. If you go out into a fescue patch in august, that ground is rock hard because microbes reverse compaction and if those microbes aren't getting fed, your soil gets hard, hard. Oh yeah, you know, I've worked with some of my clients. We are drilling summer annuals like sedan grass or sunflowers or soybeans or even corn, into fescue during the summer, to fescue during the summer. Now, if they have to have an alternate source of grazing during the summer, it is absolutely amazing how loose and mellow that soil becomes, oh yes, and how much more productive the field becomes every year. 0:54:58 - Cal You do that, so by doing that, you're generating more feed, but you're making better soil as well oh yeah, and so by doing that, you're getting increased production. 0:55:07 - Dale Now your fescue when it is growing and then you're getting this other whatever you planted in there to forage for mint yeah, and I, you know, first time I saw this practice I thought, oh, that's got to be really hard on your fescue. And I mean back in the 70s, first time I ever saw it, before I even went to college. 0:55:28 - Cal Oh, yes, on your grass. 0:55:31 - Dale No, no, take a look at this. And you know I went down into a broom grass field where we were doing this in September and I could take a brome grass leaf and stretch it up and touch my bell. 0:55:46 - Cal Oh yes. 0:55:47 - Dale Now, I'm not very tall, but that's still three foot plus. 0:55:53 - Cal Oh yes. 0:55:55 - Dale And so it's like wow, I have never seen the fall growth cycle of browing. And this is not a seed head, this is a hay mat. They planted this after the browing was hayed off in June, and so this was fall growth cycle of that browing 30 some inches tall. Oh, wow, I've never seen that before. I'm like there's something to this and you, it's modifying the microclimate, creating a cooler microclimate where cool season grass can can grow without being heat stressed, and adding root exudates from additional photosynthesis. 0:56:43 - Cal Now one thing going on that path a little bit more, doing a pasture drill and putting some of that else, some other species, in there. What if you don't have a pasture drill? Is there some species you could broadcast to get the same type of result? I know broadcasting is not going to be effective as effective. 0:57:01 - Dale Yeah. 0:57:01 - Cal But there's not. Not everyone's got a pasture drill or the capability to use one. 0:57:06 - Dale Sure, there are some species that have broadcast as far as summer annuals. Teff grass is one that broadcasts really easy Crabgrass Crabgrass works great into cool season pastures like that for a summer annual. Now, having some perennial legumes and forbs out there Red clover, white clover, your annual lespedesis, not sericea, yeah, the ones that cattle actually eat, yeah, not the noxious weeds. Sericea and chicory plantain are very, very beneficial species. You get some diversity out there. Now, if you continuously you put those into endophyte-infected fescue and you continuously graze, well, you've got a plant that tastes nasty, with a few scattered plants of these really good things out there. I mean, oh, you know what's going to happen. Animals, yeah, crazy. Well, so that's another big benefit of rotational grazing. Is that? That's another big benefit of rotational grazing is that every plant gets bitten once, but not twice, and then you move, and then you keep moving them around so that, and if you can provide an alternate grazing source in late summer, you can allow all those legumes to produce seed. You know, give them a 60 to 90 day rest in late summer. 0:58:43 - Cal Oh yeah. 0:58:44 - Dale All those legumes to produce seed and then come back and graze them in the fall and you know, every cow pie is full of seed now. Oh yeah, and it's new plants, and so you can keep those legumes. People say those legumes don't grow in my area. You know they only last a year. I said, well, are you rotational grazing? No, well, that's why it's not anything unique about your area that you're not grazing in a manner conducive to their survival and receding Right, not getting rest. Induce them to their survival and receding right, not getting rest. They're getting bit off over and over and over again and they're not allowed to recede. 0:59:26 - Cal And if you do that, you can maintain a good, balanced stand indefinitely well, I I will admit that's one area of my grazing management I have to do a better job on is giving some rest time there for those legumes to go to seed. You know, we we used to have a lot more vetch than we do now and I was saving one pasture that had really nice. I wanted to go seed in that pasture and my neighbor sprayed and and using an airplane and they got like 400 yards over on our side and killed all that vetch and clover I had been protecting so I could get it to go to seed. Because we don't have as much, because I haven't been aware of that on my management and that's one area I've got to improve is let those clovers, vetch go to seed so that seed bank is really filled with seeds for it. Because those cows, you turn them into a pasture with vetch or clover. That's the first thing they go eat. 1:00:30 - Dale Oh yeah, why wouldn't they? Yeah, low in fiber and high in protein, especially if they're in a grass-dominated system, that's low in protein. 1:00:41 - Cal That's what they're craving, oh yeah, yeah. Now something I saw on one of your videos, I think, with NCAT soil for water. You showed a picture that I thought was really interesting A canola where that had been growned, the root space from it, oh yeah. Then you grew some soybean after that and the soybean root used that canola root path to send down roots. 1:01:12 - Dale I thought that was very interesting yeah. So, like I said, the limiting factor to root penetration in the soil is lack of oxygen. Roots have to have at least 10% oxygen in order to grow, and that's pretty much true of all plants. But some plants have evolved mechanisms to allow them to root deeper and one mechanism is eryngoma tissue, like cattails yes, in the growing ponds, cattail roots. If you've ever taken a cattail root, they're spongy and the cattail stem is all spongy. Well, as long as any of that green part of that cattail is above water, oxygen can diffuse into that and go down that spongy tissue and reach the roots, which is how cattails can grow in standing water. Most plants can't. Eastern gamma grass has orankema tissue in the roots so it can tolerate standing water. Reap canary grass has orancuma tissue. Another thing is, if you understand, most of the oxygen that's used in the soil is used by microbes, and the warmer the soil gets, the more microbes, the more oxygen microbes use. So in the summertime we're very oxygen deficient, oh yeah. In the wintertime, however, when the soil temperature is below 50 degrees, microbes in general get warm but cool season plants can grow below 50 degrees even though microbes can't. Oh yeah, 50 degrees even though microbes can't. So there's a window in there where cool season plants. All of a sudden there's oxygen in the soil and there wasn't before, and so you need to. If you have the plants that grow roots between 50 degrees and 32, when the soil freezes, you can poke holes through those hard pans and then the next year, when those roots decay, warm season plants can use those passages to grow their own, oh yes. So you can just create a deeper rooted system. 1:03:39 - Cal Very interesting, dale, I appreciate you coming on. It is time for us to shift gears and do our famous four questions. Ken Cove Farm Fence is a proud supporter of the Grazing Grass Podcast and grazers everywhere. At Ken Cove Farm Fence they believe there's true value within the community of grazers and land stewards. The results that follow, proper management and monitoring, can change the very world around us. That's why Ken Cove is dedicated to providing an ever-expanding line of grazing products to make your chores easier and your land more abundant. Whether you're growing your own food on the homestead or grazing on thousands of acres, ken Cove has everything you need to do it well, from reels to tumbleweels, polytwine to electric nets, water valves to water troughs, you'll find what you're looking for at Ken Cove. They carry brands like Speedrite O'Briens, kiwitech, strainrite, jobe and more. Ken Cove is proud to be part of your regenerative journey. Call them today or visit KenCovecom, and be sure to follow them on social media and subscribe to the Ken Cove YouTube channel at Ken Cove Farm Fence for helpful how-to videos and new product releases. Same four questions we ask of all of our guests sponsored by Ken Cco Farm Fence. And our first question what is your favorite grazing grass-related book or resource? 1:05:10 - Dale Oh gosh, you know the tree crops is a favorite of mine, even though it's not specific to grass, it's the concepts. Oh yeah, even though it's not specific to grass, it's the concepts. Oh yeah, jim Garrish's books have been very influential for me. The Management Intensive, grazing, kick, the Hay Habit those were very influential to me early on. Need to plug my own book, managing Pasture, but I don't know Right. I'm not sure if I'm allowed to claim that as one of my favorites. Yeah, so those were probably the watershed books. 1:05:50 - Cal Oh, yes, yeah, Great, excellent resources there. What's your favorite tool for the farm? 1:05:58 - Dale Laptop. 1:06:00 - Cal Oh yes. I'm not sure we've had laptop, as I answer before for that question. Really We've had YouTube and maybe more specific sites. I'm trying to think back right off, I can't think of it. 1:06:15 - Dale Yeah, I mean the ability to access information. Yeah, I mean the ability to access information. Oh yes, you can make intelligent decisions, it's just critical. 1:06:25 - Cal There is so much information out there, it's become an issue of making sure you're finding the right information. 1:06:34 - Dale Yeah, that's true. There's a lot of conflicting information there Right, especially in the last 10 years, yes, especially. 1:06:41 - Cal Right, Especially in the last 10 years. So oh, yes, especially yeah, Hopefully it's calming down now and things can get kind of back to normal. 1:06:53 - Dale Our third question what would you tell someone just getting started? Educate yourself. You know the. There's a saying that one of my favorites you can. You can either learn from others. You know books, reading conversations, or you can pee on the electric fence yourself and you educating yourself is so much cheaper and takes less less time than making the mistakes yourself. So so, learn all you can, uh, before you do, before you do anything, learn, oh yes, self-educate, best advice I can give anybody in any field Constantly learn. 1:07:38 - Cal Yeah, excellent advice there. And lastly, dale, where can others find out more about you? 1:07:44 - Dale You can go to my website, regenerativewisdomcom. We have excellent material on there and we do on-farm consultations, we do speaking events and we have some material there on the website. So Dr Elizabeth and Halman and I, that's our company, and so check us out, see what we have to offer. 1:08:08 - Cal Oh, wonderful. Now you all had a grazing school just not too long ago. That I really wanted to go to and I didn't make it up there. Do you have one planned for the future? 1:08:20 - Dale We will do them in the future. We don't have one in the works right now. 1:08:25 - Cal Oh yeah, very good, dale, appreciate you coming on and sharing with us today. 1:08:31 - Dale You bet. Thank you very much for the time. 1:08:33 - Cal Appreciate the opportunity to talk to you. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Grazing Grass Podcast, where we bring you stories and insights into grass-based livestock production. If you're new here, we've got something just for you. Our new listener resource guide is packed with everything you need to get started on your listening journey with a grazing grass podcast. Gives you more information about the podcast, about myself and next steps. You can grab your free copy at grazinggrasscom slash guide. Don't miss out. And hey, do you have a grazing story to share? We're always looking for passionate producers to feature on the show. Whether you're just starting out or have years of experience, your story matters. Head over to grazinggrasscom slash guest to learn more and apply to be a guest We'd love to share your journey with our growing community of grazers. Until next time, keep on grazing grass. Transcribed by https://podium.page