Delivering Soil Health Knowledge to the Farmer

Cristine Morgan, Chief Science Officer; Soil Health Institute; Tex A&M Author

11/07/2023 Added

26 Plays

Description

The Soil Health Institute aims to incite management change using relevant examples of how improved soil condition and functioning can lead regenerative agricultural production. In this seminar, I will show how the Institute and its partners are combing geographically relevant observations of soil condition with web apps, phone apps, and storytelling to translate relevant soil health knowledge to farmers and their advisors.

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[00:00:00.780]The following presentation is part
[00:00:02.670]of the Agronomy and Horticulture seminar series
[00:00:05.790]at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
[00:00:08.880]All right, well good afternoon, everyone.
[00:00:11.550]Thank you for joining us.
[00:00:13.230]It's my honor to introduce Dr. Cristine Morgan.
[00:00:16.770]Dr. Cristine Morgan serves as the Chief Scientific Officer
[00:00:20.420]at the Soil Health Institute,
[00:00:22.200]where she establishes research priorities
[00:00:24.780]and to advance soil health
[00:00:27.420]and develop the scientific direction, strategy,
[00:00:30.090]and implementation for soil health research programs.
[00:00:33.570]Dr. Morgan is also an adjunct professor
[00:00:36.180]of soil science at Texas A&M University,
[00:00:38.430]where she earned tenure
[00:00:39.510]and was promoted to full professor
[00:00:41.298]for her research emphasis in the area
[00:00:43.830]of soil hydrology, pedometrics, and global soil security.
[00:00:47.732]She's also an editor in chief at "Geoderma,"
[00:00:50.700]a Global Soil Science Journal,
[00:00:52.290]and a founding editor in chief for "Soil Security."
[00:00:56.130]Dr. Morgan has served on the board of directors
[00:00:58.260]for the Soil Science Society of America, or SSSA,
[00:01:01.170]and she is also a fellow of SSSA.
[00:01:03.930]Dr. Morgan earned her MS and PhD in Soil Science
[00:01:07.260]from the University of Wisconsin-Madison,
[00:01:09.900]and her bachelor's degree in Plant
[00:01:12.000]and Environmental Soil Sciences at Texas A&M.
[00:01:15.300]Thank you for being here with us today,
[00:01:17.430]and we will be learning about scaling soil health
[00:01:21.240]and carbon measurements and assessment.
[00:01:23.160]It's all yours, thank you.
[00:01:24.990]Thanks, Aaron.
[00:01:29.370]You might as well come in.
[00:01:35.010]Anybody else?
[00:01:36.630]Okay, we're good to go.
[00:01:40.080]All right, well, it's a pleasure to be here.
[00:01:42.810]This is my fourth time at UNL and it never fails to impress.
[00:01:49.140]This is a great institution, a good university,
[00:01:52.620]and I'm always impressed by the collegiality
[00:01:56.400]between departments at UNL, and the facilities.
[00:02:00.600]So, it's always great to be here,
[00:02:02.730]and it's always a pleasure to hear
[00:02:04.620]what you all are up to and doing.
[00:02:06.390]So, thank you very much for having me here,
[00:02:08.820]and happy to reciprocate by sharing a little bit
[00:02:11.940]about what's going on at the Soil Health Institute.
[00:02:15.501]I like to start out, of course,
[00:02:17.550]because I'm a soil scientist, I'm infatuated with soil,
[00:02:21.240]so I always have to start out
[00:02:22.470]with a nice little clot in the middle of my talks.
[00:02:27.150]But over the years, my first page has the pictures on,
[00:02:32.910]the first page have changed,
[00:02:34.110]and you notice that there's people,
[00:02:36.810]two people in this intro, because Soil Health is really
[00:02:41.910]about the culture of agriculture,
[00:02:45.630]and we are trying to change the culture of agriculture.
[00:02:49.620]And you know, culture is really about people.
[00:02:52.170]And so while I'm really good
[00:02:53.910]and a lot of our scientists are really good
[00:02:55.740]at measuring soil and measuring management
[00:03:00.480]and linking those two components together,
[00:03:02.520]that's pretty much what we dedicate most
[00:03:04.470]of our 40-hour weeks to, or more.
[00:03:09.390]But what we really are learning at the institute
[00:03:11.640]and what we've been practicing
[00:03:13.380]and implementing is how to translate
[00:03:16.050]and how to communicate our measurement to affect change.
[00:03:20.490]And to, you know,
[00:03:21.480]also just when change does happen understand,
[00:03:25.080]when management change happens,
[00:03:27.060]understand whether or not the soil is actually,
[00:03:29.430]soil functioning is changing or not.
[00:03:31.710]And sometimes it doesn't,
[00:03:32.760]and that's okay to communicate as well.
[00:03:36.015]Soil Health Institute is a small nonprofit.
[00:03:38.970]We're headquartered in North Carolina
[00:03:41.520]in the Raleigh Durham Triangle Park,
[00:03:43.800]Research Triangle Park area.
[00:03:45.900]This is a picture of the crew last year
[00:03:48.750]at the Tri Societies meeting.
[00:03:50.250]So, we're coming up
[00:03:51.150]on the next Tri Societies meeting a year later.
[00:03:54.420]And if we took this picture again,
[00:03:56.100]there'd be double the number of people.
[00:03:58.680]So, we have grown a lot in the last year.
[00:04:02.370]We are 100% soft funded,
[00:04:05.460]and so the doubling has really just been,
[00:04:07.710]there's more work to do, which is a blessing and a curse.
[00:04:12.240]We're very happy to do the work
[00:04:13.770]and very excited about our projects
[00:04:15.600]and our theories that we get to try to test.
[00:04:18.540]But also doubling in one year has
[00:04:20.610]also has its administrative hardships.
[00:04:23.100]And that primarily what I've been doing
[00:04:24.690]all year is hiring people and writing policies,
[00:04:28.743]because we have no policies at our institutions.
[00:04:32.010]So, anyway, it's a great group of people.
[00:04:34.920]We're fairly diverse for Soil Science.
[00:04:37.260]We're 50% female, and I think about 20% non-white.
[00:04:45.955]And this is, I always start this picture off like,
[00:04:50.490]I speak not to many scientists these days.
[00:04:54.060]So, I indulged a little bit today in changing my slide set
[00:04:58.650]to showing data slides.
[00:05:00.390]Normally when I give a talk, I have to limit,
[00:05:02.250]I'm allowed one data slide.
[00:05:04.333]And so that also means that I'm generally talking to people
[00:05:08.940]that really don't understand the concept of soil health.
[00:05:11.970]In fact, a lot of soil scientists will say,
[00:05:13.657]"Oh, there's no such thing as soil health.
[00:05:15.150]You can't measure it, blah, blah, blah."
[00:05:17.490]I fundamentally disagree.
[00:05:18.870]We measure it every day, and we've published on
[00:05:21.000]how we measure it and how we compare it.
[00:05:23.025]I think what really is meant
[00:05:24.900]when folks say they can't measure soil health is
[00:05:27.750]that they don't know how to assess the measurement.
[00:05:30.202]And I'll show you some examples of that.
[00:05:33.120]But anyway, this is, I think South Dakota,
[00:05:36.030]this photo was taken by someone in NRCS many moons ago.
[00:05:40.590]But it's a great picture.
[00:05:41.850]All these like, you know, different sides of the fence.
[00:05:44.610]Pictures are great pictures of soil health.
[00:05:46.980]I actually like this one.
[00:05:48.450]Same soil, right?
[00:05:49.470]Same landscape, same topography, different management.
[00:05:54.300]That's what soil health is, right?
[00:05:56.280]It's the change in the functioning of soil due
[00:05:58.620]to the change in how it's being managed.
[00:06:00.780]It's anthropogenic impact on soil functioning.
[00:06:03.750]And this is, you know, a no-till corn soy field.
[00:06:08.550]And on the left hand side is a,
[00:06:12.450]probably a conservation tillage field and its grain.
[00:06:16.470]And being a soil physicist, I love this picture,
[00:06:18.540]because it just essentially exemplifies the water cycle
[00:06:22.110]when your soil has structure
[00:06:23.460]and when it doesn't have soil structure.
[00:06:25.500]And I don't think I need to go into this for all of y'all,
[00:06:28.590]but what we recognize here is that one side of the soil,
[00:06:32.100]from an ag engineering point of view, it's trafficable.
[00:06:35.970]And from an agronomic point of view,
[00:06:37.920]we have a very uniform plant stand.
[00:06:41.040]And from a soil science point of view,
[00:06:42.900]we have an example of erosion and deposition surface ceiling
[00:06:46.890]and no erosion deposition and surface ceiling of soil.
[00:06:51.510]So, at the Soil Health Institute, we want,
[00:06:53.820]our mission is to safeguard and enhance the productivity
[00:06:56.760]and vitality of soil through research and other activities.
[00:07:01.440]And the way we do that is we have this
[00:07:03.180]comprehensive strategy to increase adoption
[00:07:05.880]of soil health management systems.
[00:07:08.370]And this comprehensive strategy is really tied
[00:07:11.670]around this producer decision.
[00:07:14.460]That's the decision that has to change in the United States.
[00:07:17.730]Our agricultural soils are privately owned,
[00:07:20.400]so we can't tell people to change their practices,
[00:07:24.210]we have to entice them
[00:07:25.620]or convince them to change their practices.
[00:07:27.960]And so we want this adoption
[00:07:29.670]of soil health management practices.
[00:07:31.590]But we understand to do that,
[00:07:33.210]that first you have to have a business case.
[00:07:34.980]It has to make financial sense.
[00:07:37.650]If you treasure it, you measure it.
[00:07:39.480]You have to be able to measure change.
[00:07:41.790]And then also, we need some education.
[00:07:45.420]And then once the adoption takes place, it gets back to,
[00:07:49.170]if you treasure it, you measure it.
[00:07:50.580]We have to be able to quantify impacts and change.
[00:07:53.970]And then if we can do that, we can help inform policies.
[00:07:57.360]We work a lot with agricultural companies
[00:08:03.270]that buy agricultural products.
[00:08:05.340]And then we also do some basic research and development.
[00:08:07.920]And I'll share some of that with you all today too.
[00:08:10.830]So, those of you that came here wanting a lot
[00:08:14.490]of extension materials, I'm not gonna show those today.
[00:08:17.940]I'm really focusing on measurement
[00:08:21.270]and research and development.
[00:08:23.490]But all of our business,
[00:08:24.750]all of our economics work is available online,
[00:08:27.780]either in a PDF, a pretty picture, or a video.
[00:08:31.770]That's kind of how we put out all of our economics work.
[00:08:36.330]And we also have a lot
[00:08:37.530]of landing pages on our education and training program.
[00:08:40.920]But what you'll see today is a lot of the stuff
[00:08:42.870]that you don't see on our website,
[00:08:44.610]and you haven't yet seen in the peer-reviewed literature,
[00:08:46.770]'cause we haven't published it yet.
[00:08:50.370]But the first thing just to kind of back up
[00:08:52.680]and tell you, like from our measure,
[00:08:55.080]if you treasure it, you measure it part
[00:08:56.670]of our comprehensive strategy is that this,
[00:08:59.880]I've been at the Soil Health Institute now
[00:09:01.680]for almost five years, come February.
[00:09:04.830]And so it was five years ago to the month
[00:09:08.130]that the Soil Health Institute attained a grant
[00:09:10.410]from the Foundation for AG research, FFAR,
[00:09:15.225]almost forgot it there for a minute.
[00:09:17.490]And we affectionately call this Project NAPESHM,
[00:09:20.850]the North American Project
[00:09:22.110]to Evaluate Soil Health Measurements.
[00:09:24.210]And what we did is we had scientists from across Canada,
[00:09:27.330]the United States and Mexico,
[00:09:29.017]volunteer their long-term research sites
[00:09:32.610]for us to come and take measurements.
[00:09:34.980]So, these were long, the goal was
[00:09:37.080]to identify the most effective indicators of soil health,
[00:09:40.440]'cause y'all probably know there's a lot
[00:09:42.030]of different ways to measure soil health.
[00:09:44.640]We looked at 124 of these long-term sites
[00:09:47.430]that had paired treatments like tillage,
[00:09:49.260]cover crops, crop rotation, organic amendments.
[00:09:52.207]And we only looked at the top 15 centimeters.
[00:09:55.350]We had to kind of cut it off.
[00:09:57.660]You know, we had to focus on how are we really going to,
[00:10:00.660]you know, be able to measure change.
[00:10:02.730]So, we're not trying to quantify any particular functioning,
[00:10:06.420]we're trying to figure out what measurements
[00:10:08.604]can pick up change, and what the change is, right?
[00:10:13.710]And so we did over 30 exploratory soil
[00:10:17.430]and common and exploratory measurements.
[00:10:21.394]And the interest, the cool thing was is we had scientists
[00:10:25.560]all over the U.S. and Canada,
[00:10:28.320]and they got all these measurements done in the spring
[00:10:30.510]before mechanical and fertility
[00:10:35.670]and any of that stuff was done.
[00:10:37.440]So, we got in pretty early and got out.
[00:10:40.050]We had seven soil scientists collecting data
[00:10:43.590]at all these sites.
[00:10:44.940]All the data was sent to the same set of labs,
[00:10:47.490]same set of measurements, everything was very standardized.
[00:10:51.690]It's kind of cool data set.
[00:10:55.022]And then that's about the time I started at the institute.
[00:10:58.410]We were sampling, and I'm thinking,
[00:11:03.607]"Okay," coming in as a soil physicist,
[00:11:06.240]not really very indoctrinated in
[00:11:08.250]all these soil health measurements.
[00:11:09.630]So, the first thing I'm like,
[00:11:10.957]"What's enzyme activity and why do we measure it?"
[00:11:13.710]You know, trying to figure out all of those things,
[00:11:15.540]'cause there's a lot of really innovative
[00:11:17.310]and creative methodologies
[00:11:19.200]that have happened since I was a undergraduate student.
[00:11:22.530]But the whole time I'm sitting here thinking,
[00:11:25.200]probably thinking the same thing that folks say,
[00:11:28.846]"I don't know what soil health is."
[00:11:32.197]'Cause I'm thinking, "Man, we're gonna do all this work.
[00:11:36.360]We're gonna recommend these measurements.
[00:11:39.330]And then somebody's gonna go measure them
[00:11:41.490]and they're gonna bring them to me and say,
[00:11:43.320]'Hey Cristine, is my soul healthy?'"
[00:11:46.020]And I'm thinking, "Oh my gosh, we're gonna be in trouble."
[00:11:49.530]Because you can't just look
[00:11:50.880]at someone's measurements and go, "Yeah, your soil's great.
[00:11:53.550]Or hmm, this needs some work," right?
[00:11:55.500]It's pretty hard to do.
[00:11:57.420]It's all relative, right?
[00:11:58.770]It's context-driven, it's soil property-driven.
[00:12:02.280]So, I was starting to think about this,
[00:12:04.020]and then I'm thinking,
[00:12:05.377]"Well, so what if we have 10 measurements?
[00:12:09.180]If we're really wanting to affect measurement at scale,
[00:12:14.610]then it's not really about all the measurements we can make,
[00:12:18.300]it's about how few can we make."
[00:12:20.880]So, that, and are they cheap?
[00:12:23.400]Are they accessible?
[00:12:24.660]Can you get them done at a commercial lab?
[00:12:28.560]Could you ask a commercial lab to do it?
[00:12:31.200]Would they offer it, even if they weren't offering it today?
[00:12:34.317]And that is a huge different way of thinking
[00:12:36.810]that I thought when I was an academic,
[00:12:39.090]'cause you know, as an academic, first of all,
[00:12:40.590]you take it for granted that you have a lab,
[00:12:42.810]measurements are fairly cheap.
[00:12:44.670]And you know, you have graduate students and technicians
[00:12:47.850]and undergrads that you can train
[00:12:49.860]and they can do your measurements in your lab.
[00:12:52.020]And you know what your quality control is.
[00:12:54.090]But we have to work with commercial labs,
[00:12:56.400]'cause at the institute we're not necessarily interested in,
[00:12:59.970]what we wanna do is translate what academia creates,
[00:13:03.480]but we need it to be translated at the commercial
[00:13:06.300]and at the continental scale and really at the global scale.
[00:13:11.100]So, the first thing we did is we looked at all this,
[00:13:15.010]you know, we looked at the literature,
[00:13:15.843]used a little common sense, and said,
[00:13:17.467]"Okay, which soil measurements
[00:13:19.440]of these 30 measurements actually reflect soil health?"
[00:13:22.380]And guess what?
[00:13:23.213]Soil texture generally is not a reflection of soil health.
[00:13:25.920]It doesn't change with management in the human timescale,
[00:13:30.090]the surface texture.
[00:13:31.440]And so those are the inherent properties.
[00:13:33.720]And probably some people don't agree, but we took pH out too
[00:13:37.680]because we think that yes, pH is going to determine
[00:13:41.220]how productive your soil is and how nutrients are available.
[00:13:45.570]But pH is something that you can change pretty easily.
[00:13:49.380]And the same with fertilizer.
[00:13:50.700]We took NPK out of our soil health measurement suite,
[00:13:54.240]because we thought, "Well, first of all,
[00:13:56.430]NPK recommendations are very local.
[00:13:58.770]They're based on your state extension recommendations.
[00:14:01.964]And that's probably not the place the Soil Health Institute
[00:14:05.400]really can make any useful information transfer."
[00:14:09.480]And so we took out inherent properties,
[00:14:11.670]fertility-focused properties,
[00:14:13.680]also things that were under development
[00:14:15.570]like Vis-NIR and things like that.
[00:14:18.390]And then we looked at the data
[00:14:20.220]and actually looked at the results from the NAPESHM
[00:14:22.560]and said, "Okay, which of these are responsive
[00:14:25.830]to management practices?"
[00:14:27.780]And you know, some of them were good,
[00:14:30.060]but they were really effective for local practices.
[00:14:33.210]That's where some of the, some,
[00:14:35.910]I can't remember exactly what properties came out here,
[00:14:38.310]but they had to go.
[00:14:40.380]Then we started thinking applicable at scale.
[00:14:43.260]I'm a soil physicist.
[00:14:44.550]You ask me, "What's the most useful measurement
[00:14:48.060]you can make on soil health?"
[00:14:49.590]And I'm gonna tell you, infiltration.
[00:14:52.650]Saturated hydraulic conductivity of the soil surface.
[00:14:55.860]That's what I wanna know.
[00:14:57.750]But guess what y'all? (laughs)
[00:14:59.403]You can't take enough at a reason, it's too expensive.
[00:15:04.800]It's a hugely variable project value.
[00:15:09.120]We took three replicates,
[00:15:11.670]three repeated measurements per plot, or per treatment.
[00:15:16.260]And usually we had four replications of each treatment.
[00:15:21.540]So, that's four times.
[00:15:22.410]So, we had 12 infiltration measurements for each treatment.
[00:15:25.800]We couldn't even get statistical differences
[00:15:27.780]for infiltration.
[00:15:29.280]So, very sadly, I was like, I had to acquiesce and go,
[00:15:32.857]"Okay, let's take infiltration out."
[00:15:35.430]But the other things about applicable
[00:15:37.260]at scale is price and availability.
[00:15:39.660]My other most favorite soil health measurement is the
[00:15:43.290]Cornell aggregate stability test.
[00:15:45.990]Not only did it just nail it in the NAPESHM results,
[00:15:50.310]but it makes sense.
[00:15:51.390]You take some soil, you do a little rainfall simulation
[00:15:54.330]on it, you see what stays together and what falls through.
[00:15:57.540]Huge fan of Cornell.
[00:15:59.490]But when we went around and asked labs,
[00:16:02.617]"Would you do this, how much would you charge?"
[00:16:05.220]They looked at us and they looked at the labor
[00:16:07.185]and the space involved to do that measurement.
[00:16:09.720]And they said, "Sorry, Soil Health Institute,
[00:16:11.970]we wouldn't even consider offering
[00:16:14.190]that measurement at a commercial scale."
[00:16:17.042]And so though Cornell offers it, and they do a lot of them,
[00:16:20.730]they also have a commodity called space
[00:16:23.490]that's very free for them, right?
[00:16:25.320]And so these are kind of things
[00:16:27.270]that just really gut check you when you're thinking
[00:16:30.000]about what is this minimum suite that measure at scale.
[00:16:33.360]So, we took my favorite measurements out, and then we left,
[00:16:38.070]we were left with some measurements,
[00:16:39.900]and we were looked like, "Okay, what's not redundant?
[00:16:43.980]How many different fractions of carbon do we need
[00:16:46.830]to measure to say that our carbon has changed?"
[00:16:50.370]And you know, everybody loves POXC.
[00:16:52.950]There's a lot of papers coming out now.
[00:16:54.810]They're like, "Eh, POXC's not so consistent.
[00:16:57.775]It's not such a great measurement."
[00:16:58.770]But our POXC was literally correlated
[00:17:01.050]with soil organic carbon with a P value of 0.88.
[00:17:04.802]And so if we have to choose, do we wanna measure POXC
[00:17:09.270]or soil organic carbon,
[00:17:10.830]let's measure the real McCoy, move on, right?
[00:17:13.380]So, that was kind of some of the decisions
[00:17:15.120]that we had to think about.
[00:17:16.980]And so what we ended up with are these minimum suites,
[00:17:20.700]A three soil health measurements,
[00:17:22.743]soil organic carbon concentration.
[00:17:24.720]Notice we're not including bulk density,
[00:17:26.460]'cause again, we're trying to go to scale,
[00:17:28.650]carbon mineralization potential,
[00:17:30.480]and aggregate stability via slaking image analysis.
[00:17:33.660]I like to throw this one in,
[00:17:34.920]because we actually have a whole paper
[00:17:36.851]that just compared and contrasted
[00:17:38.880]all the aggregate stability methods.
[00:17:41.430]And we really landed on slaking image analysis,
[00:17:43.740]because by image analysis,
[00:17:45.750]because it was just as good as all the others.
[00:17:48.300]Sometimes as a scientist, you know, it's not as compelling
[00:17:53.400]as something like the Cornell aggregate stability test,
[00:17:55.830]but it works just as good.
[00:17:57.300]In fact, it worked better than Cornell in some places.
[00:17:59.430]So, you know, just live with it.
[00:18:01.830]But the other cool thing, when we think about going global
[00:18:04.350]with the minimum suite of measurement,
[00:18:06.450]all of these measurements can be made outside
[00:18:10.860]of a wet chemistry lab.
[00:18:13.020]So, soil organic carbon concentration could be measured
[00:18:15.900]with MIR, could be measured with Vis-NIR, less accurate.
[00:18:19.980]But MIR is pretty accurate.
[00:18:21.900]Carbon mineralization potential is kind of
[00:18:23.940]what I call a kitchen table method.
[00:18:25.980]You can get these fairly inexpensive colorimetric readers,
[00:18:31.590]they're like 300 bucks.
[00:18:33.390]And then you can get a colorimetric response
[00:18:36.180]to carbon concentration,
[00:18:37.830]and you can get pretty accurate carbon concentrations
[00:18:40.124]in the little jar thing
[00:18:42.586]for easy kitchen table kind of stuff.
[00:18:46.950]And then aggregate stability via image analysis.
[00:18:50.220]You just need a picture of the aggregate
[00:18:54.810]before you put it in water
[00:18:56.190]and 10 minutes after it's been sitting in water.
[00:18:58.560]And you just take the area
[00:19:04.110]of that aggregate before and after,
[00:19:05.700]and you have your slaking by image analysis.
[00:19:08.790]And on December 5th we're going
[00:19:10.530]to release the new SLAKES app
[00:19:13.320]that is a lot more stable and more user-friendly.
[00:19:15.930]So, we'll also just be able to do it with a smartphone,
[00:19:19.123]for free on a iPhone or an Android.
[00:19:23.010]And then we also have this
[00:19:24.510]predicted available water holding capacity,
[00:19:26.220]which I'll show you some of the data behind it.
[00:19:28.290]But essentially you need the soil texture
[00:19:30.600]and you need soil organic carbon concentration.
[00:19:33.060]And now you can also look
[00:19:34.470]at the change in your plant available water.
[00:19:36.720]But this one is kind of like in italics and caveated,
[00:19:41.753]because it really only work, it doesn't work in Oxisol,
[00:19:43.560]it doesn't work in amorphous soils.
[00:19:46.290]It really works in the kinds
[00:19:48.120]of soils we made the measurements in.
[00:19:49.620]Soils found in the United States, Canada and Mexico.
[00:19:55.740]But anyway, if you're interested in all of that,
[00:19:58.200]the wrap-up paper is in "Soil Security Volume 10"
[00:20:01.440]and it's open access.
[00:20:04.350]Actually, all the papers are open access.
[00:20:06.870]This is the wrap-up paper.
[00:20:07.980]If you ever wanna look at any of the data,
[00:20:09.570]you can just go to our website and you can download
[00:20:12.360]any of the papers that we published.
[00:20:14.460]There are about five of them.
[00:20:17.250]And so now we're thinking,
[00:20:18.727]"Okay, we have this minimum suite for less than 50 bucks.
[00:20:22.380]We can do a nice suite of soil health measurements,
[00:20:25.620]but what are we gonna do?"
[00:20:26.760]Someone's gonna wanna take a measurement and say,
[00:20:28.507]"Okay, tell me how healthy my soil is?"
[00:20:31.080]And this is where we have to do a little pedology,
[00:20:33.330]a little bit of soil science, and think,
[00:20:35.737]"Okay, well, this is a picture of like,
[00:20:38.940]which side of the fence are you on?"
[00:20:40.950]So, here's a picture of a soil
[00:20:42.660]that's under conventional management.
[00:20:46.260]You see the shoe of the soil scientist,
[00:20:47.850]she stuck her foot in there.
[00:20:49.380]It's just sloppy and wet.
[00:20:50.730]It had rained the day before
[00:20:52.140]and it just hadn't done anything.
[00:20:54.000]But here's the same soil, same day,
[00:20:56.510]that's in a perennial grass and it's got good structure
[00:20:59.460]and it's not having these water problems, right?
[00:21:01.980]And so that's kind of the concept
[00:21:03.480]that we started thinking about for each of our sites
[00:21:06.000]that we did NAPESHM on, for almost all,
[00:21:09.600]for some of them we had a reference, which is some sort of,
[00:21:12.810]you've maximized the soil health management, right?
[00:21:15.330]You're keeping living roots on it,
[00:21:17.520]you're keeping it minimally disturbed,
[00:21:19.980]you're keeping it armored, those kinds of things.
[00:21:22.770]And generally that's some sort of perennial system.
[00:21:26.010]So, that could be your reference.
[00:21:27.870]And then you have a baseline,
[00:21:29.220]which is whatever the business
[00:21:30.780]as usual looks like around Nebraska.
[00:21:33.450]Business as usual is no-till, right?
[00:21:35.640]So, that could be the reference.
[00:21:37.200]And then you have some question of like,
[00:21:39.307]"I'm implementing some sort
[00:21:40.650]of soil health management system.
[00:21:42.690]Are these markers, are these measures doing any better?"
[00:21:45.840]And this is just data.
[00:21:47.010]I mean, it looks really good.
[00:21:48.090]It's like a 15-year study where the baseline is wheat,
[00:21:52.200]wheat, wheat, wheat, wheat and plow.
[00:21:54.570]The soil health system is a wheat rotation, no-till
[00:21:57.540]with cover crops and the reference is grass.
[00:22:01.530]And this is kind of what the data looked like.
[00:22:03.930]And so the idea is like we can't do this
[00:22:05.910]for every soil series, right?
[00:22:07.470]You couldn't just go collect baselines
[00:22:09.900]and references for every soil that's farmed.
[00:22:12.780]But since we're just looking at soil health,
[00:22:14.700]we're just looking at the surface.
[00:22:16.346]So, what are the things that drive
[00:22:19.290]how a soil is gonna respond to management
[00:22:22.620]with respect to these measurements?
[00:22:25.170]And you know, soil scientists would tell you,
[00:22:27.727]"Surface texture and probably drainage class."
[00:22:32.250]So, we made a map of soil texture and drainage class
[00:22:36.990]for the United States, looks like that.
[00:22:39.840]And then we start thinking like,
[00:22:41.107]"Okay, you know, you could pick a state and see,
[00:22:45.090]okay, here's where they grow cotton in this state.
[00:22:47.790]And then these are the soils that cotton are grown on."
[00:22:51.000]And really within a cotton growing area
[00:22:53.520]of an MLRA and a state, we have about two to four,
[00:22:59.910]we call them soil health sampling groups.
[00:23:02.730]And our hypothesis is, for a state in an MLRA,
[00:23:07.710]looking at these soil health sampling groups
[00:23:09.900]and you can kind of see the colors,
[00:23:11.880]if we were to measure baselines
[00:23:13.620]and references for a given group,
[00:23:16.710]we think we could have statistical separation
[00:23:18.960]of our soil health indicators.
[00:23:21.000]So, that's the question, could we do that?
[00:23:23.610]Because if we can, this is a
[00:23:24.930]very scalable continental assessment of soil health.
[00:23:30.090]So, we did it.
[00:23:31.800]We went and we call it our benchmarking project,
[00:23:35.250]but we're going out and we're looking,
[00:23:36.750]like this is a vertisol from Texas.
[00:23:39.210]I had to show this one, 'cause I'm from Texas.
[00:23:41.970]So, here is a vertisol from Texas growing cotton.
[00:23:45.360]In different managements you can see,
[00:23:47.280]you know, conventional,
[00:23:48.720]maybe this is strip till, here's no-till
[00:23:51.330]and then here's our references.
[00:23:53.190]And here we are, in Texas, what are our references?
[00:23:55.980]Fence lines.
[00:23:59.700]This is a pecan orchard,
[00:24:02.070]and this is some sort of grass.
[00:24:05.490]That looks like some sort of winter grass
[00:24:08.100]that's probably well-managed hay fields,
[00:24:10.620]well-managed hay fields, things like that.
[00:24:13.740]And the idea is that again, we could go out if in
[00:24:17.490]an area we have the four productive farm soils
[00:24:21.270]in that area baselined and referenced,
[00:24:24.750]and even if we had some soil health observations,
[00:24:27.480]we can measure a farmer's soil and go,
[00:24:29.467]"Hey, here's where you are today
[00:24:31.740]and let's work with someone
[00:24:33.480]and let's set an achievable soil health goal, right?"
[00:24:38.670]And now we have realistic local goals that can be achieved.
[00:24:44.670]And we know they can be achieved,
[00:24:45.840]because they are measured in that soil health group,
[00:24:49.020]probably in that county or in that major land resource area.
[00:24:52.380]Farmers really like this.
[00:24:55.860]And so this is where we've kind
[00:24:57.300]of done this work in Texas cotton,
[00:25:00.690]we have funding to do, test our hypotheses in cotton.
[00:25:04.230]So, here's some three MLRAs of Texas,
[00:25:07.200]and you can maybe see the counties
[00:25:09.180]that we went and we took measurements
[00:25:10.800]of baseline reference in soil health.
[00:25:13.020]And we've done this in Arkansas, and Alabama,
[00:25:16.650]and Georgia, and Mississippi.
[00:25:19.890]Actually, this year we did Alabama,
[00:25:23.340]and Mississippi, and Georgia.
[00:25:25.500]Yeah, we did all of those.
[00:25:26.640]And we're doing the Carolinas next year.
[00:25:30.150]All right.
[00:25:30.983]Oh yeah, here it is.
[00:25:32.718]In 2021 to 2023 we've sampled 850 locations.
[00:25:38.400]So, here's some highlights.
[00:25:39.660]So, this is Texas and Arkansas.
[00:25:42.750]We get a really wide range of,
[00:25:44.430]so this is just the texture triangle
[00:25:46.530]and you can just kind of see the range
[00:25:48.090]of soils that we sampled, pretty big.
[00:25:50.910]Okay, I'm gonna skip the soil science lesson.
[00:25:55.080]Here's the actual data.
[00:25:56.100]So, for this example,
[00:25:57.210]we're just showing organic carbon stock.
[00:25:59.310]But remember, we also had aggregate stability
[00:26:02.610]and respiration, and aggregate stability works really well.
[00:26:07.980]But I think organic carbon is something
[00:26:09.960]that people are familiar with, so we show this.
[00:26:12.420]So, here are those three MLRAs.
[00:26:14.250]We have the Blackland Prairies of Texas,
[00:26:16.080]those are Vertisols, Gulf Coast prairies of Texas,
[00:26:19.950]more Vertisols, Mississippi Alluvial Plain, silty stuff,
[00:26:24.090]but nothing like what you guys have.
[00:26:26.070]And Southern High Plains, sandy-ish stuff, sandy loams.
[00:26:30.030]And so what's the first thing we see?
[00:26:32.820]We see that in some major land resource areas,
[00:26:36.660]even in the baseline, remember that's conventional ag,
[00:26:39.570]we have some really strong response to clay content.
[00:26:43.290]Not a surprise, right?
[00:26:45.150]But we've stratified our sampling
[00:26:46.800]by clay content by using those groupings.
[00:26:49.957]And the other thing that you see is sometimes there's a lot
[00:26:52.680]of variants, right?
[00:26:54.090]Little scary when you're trying to test a hypothesis
[00:26:57.540]and you kind of did a Hail Mary to begin with
[00:27:00.270]by looking at pretty big areas.
[00:27:02.550]So, what do we get?
[00:27:04.610]So, these are the soil health management systems
[00:27:07.830]in those same areas.
[00:27:09.300]So, very interesting, in the Blackland Prairies
[00:27:12.390]we got a significant response to soil health management,
[00:27:15.570]but not a strong response to clay content.
[00:27:19.191]You know, you can see the slope's pretty small.
[00:27:22.890]Gulf Coast Prairies, I just laugh.
[00:27:25.749]Those soil health management systems we measured
[00:27:28.740]in the Gulf Coast Prairie,
[00:27:29.820]so, like, oh, we did cover crops
[00:27:31.950]for two years and did they come up?
[00:27:34.800]I can't remember, were there cover crops? (laughs)
[00:27:38.130]So, I'm not super confident that
[00:27:40.710]that actually represents soil health management.
[00:27:42.870]But we're gonna stick with it for now.
[00:27:45.390]We're doing interviews right now
[00:27:46.830]to do indices rather than
[00:27:48.360]categorical soil health management.
[00:27:51.000]Mississippi Alluvial Plain.
[00:27:52.620]We have some separation.
[00:27:54.330]And really interestingly,
[00:27:55.740]the separation occurs at higher clay contents.
[00:27:58.920]And then the Southern High Plains,
[00:28:00.679]we probably had the best strongest separation
[00:28:05.400]and it was just kind of some interesting action
[00:28:07.470]at high clay.
[00:28:08.580]But anyway, we're getting some separation there too.
[00:28:11.820]Then we really get the separation
[00:28:13.590]when we pull in the references, right?
[00:28:15.780]So, now the references are green
[00:28:17.490]and they're behaving exactly the way you expect them to.
[00:28:21.030]Here's my question.
[00:28:22.050]We can pretend like I'm teaching a class
[00:28:23.730]and you can wake up for a minute.
[00:28:25.440]Why are the Southern High Plains,
[00:28:27.540]why are the references not Southern High Plains
[00:28:37.530]of Texas compared to more humid regions?
[00:28:44.850]It's dry, right?
[00:28:46.980]Yeah, so, our references are not irrigated
[00:28:50.130]and our soil health management
[00:28:51.420]and our baselines are irrigated.
[00:28:53.910]So, you would expect there to be less differentiation.
[00:28:57.000]And that's fine for carbon.
[00:28:58.590]But you look at aggregate stability, they're very separated.
[00:29:04.440]So, okay, so that's science, right?
[00:29:07.020]We can do these regional reports
[00:29:08.820]and we can help companies that wanna source like,
[00:29:12.517]"Oh, where would the soil health management?"
[00:29:14.640]We can look at what the soil health management is today
[00:29:17.370]by mass and we can make some projections,
[00:29:19.530]if there was 90% adoption, what that might look like, right?
[00:29:22.980]We can start making some quantitative estimates
[00:29:28.170]of how soil health might change in these regions
[00:29:31.290]based on this data that we have.
[00:29:33.330]But guess what?
[00:29:34.163]Not going to convince a farmer of much of anything.
[00:29:37.380]So, now we have to think about,
[00:29:39.217]"Well, we've done this for the region,
[00:29:41.282]but how do we communicate this with the farmer?"
[00:29:44.550]And so, here is an example for how we're setting the target.
[00:29:48.630]So, here is organic carbon, aggregate stability,
[00:29:52.260]and mineralization for the three managements
[00:29:54.660]as a function of clay.
[00:29:56.460]You give this to a farmer and you tell them
[00:29:58.290]which dot's theirs, not gonna happen, right?
[00:30:00.840]Not a good idea.
[00:30:02.580]So, what we can do is we now we're at a farmer's field
[00:30:06.570]and we measure their soil, and we have a line,
[00:30:10.590]and then we need to translate that.
[00:30:12.360]So, we just do some Bayesian regression is
[00:30:16.440]what I call it.
[00:30:17.670]Just so that we have some nice confidence intervals
[00:30:21.000]based on our regression lines.
[00:30:22.980]And now what we can do is we can say,
[00:30:26.077]"Okay farmer, here's your three soil health measurements.
[00:30:30.420]This is where the other fields were
[00:30:33.660]under different managements.
[00:30:34.920]And here, so here's our references,
[00:30:38.064]here's our soil health management systems,
[00:30:41.250]and here's our baselines, and here's your soil, right?"
[00:30:46.290]And so, and this is a real farmer's field.
[00:30:48.330]This is real.
[00:30:49.920]These are the reports that we're giving to the farmers.
[00:30:52.410]And now we can start communicating.
[00:30:54.120]And this comes with some,
[00:30:56.497]"Hey, here's our technical specialist in the area.
[00:30:59.910]Here's some farmer mentors.
[00:31:01.260]Look how good their soil looks.
[00:31:03.503]And these are the practices they do."
[00:31:05.520]And you can get some very regional help and information on,
[00:31:09.757]"If you wanna make your soil look better,
[00:31:11.430]this is what you might do."
[00:31:12.900]And you can imagine even if you're a farmer
[00:31:15.810]and you're asking the question,
[00:31:17.733]"Should I engage in a carbon sale?"
[00:31:23.250]And I wouldn't, unless I was gonna convert my row crop
[00:31:28.440]to a perennial system, right?
[00:31:30.600]So, this is the kind of information that you could get.
[00:31:34.230]This is, so we've done this for a lot of areas,
[00:31:36.570]this is my favorite one.
[00:31:37.800]Like, you know, every year we get a little bit better at it.
[00:31:40.380]And this year I encouraged our dairy team,
[00:31:44.550]I said, "One page, you get one page
[00:31:47.130]to report back to the farmers."
[00:31:49.410]Our old one, this one was an eight-page report, okay?
[00:31:52.230]So, we're learning.
[00:31:53.460]I don't wanna hear any hisses from extension.
[00:31:56.700]So, now this is our newest one.
[00:31:58.260]And so this is for our work in dairy.
[00:32:01.140]So, you can see this is done in New York.
[00:32:03.750]You can kind of see 22 farmers participated,
[00:32:06.390]37 fields were sampled, 94 soils were sampled.
[00:32:11.700]Here's a little information
[00:32:13.260]about the measurements that we took.
[00:32:15.840]Here are the ranges of those soils, and here's your soil.
[00:32:19.920]And here's some pictures of kind of
[00:32:21.600]what those managements look like.
[00:32:23.460]And now we're not trying to save the world here,
[00:32:26.460]we're trying to get the farmer interested
[00:32:28.650]and understanding where they are today
[00:32:30.960]and where they might be if they change their management.
[00:32:36.420]But as you can imagine, buyers of products are interested
[00:32:41.910]in the whole major land resource area
[00:32:44.280]and what kind of shifts in soil health management
[00:32:48.210]can do for a whole region.
[00:32:49.620]So, we have two stakeholders, let's be honest, right?
[00:32:52.890]We are funded by Ralph Lauren
[00:32:55.050]and people that buy cotton products.
[00:32:56.878]And then we're also trying to get the farmers to change.
[00:32:59.910]So, we need to be able
[00:33:00.743]to communicate this information to two stakeholders.
[00:33:05.310]And so this is where we're doing all of this work.
[00:33:08.790]The red areas is
[00:33:10.260]where we're quantifying soil health baselines
[00:33:12.990]and changes for a cotton belt.
[00:33:16.620]The blue is where we sampled for dairy.
[00:33:20.370]So, Wisconsin, New York, Texas, Idaho.
[00:33:23.790]We're going into California in December.
[00:33:27.330]Corn and soy we're kind of all over the place.
[00:33:30.510]And we do that with our partner Truterra.
[00:33:33.000]They take thousands of samples, it's a lot.
[00:33:38.130]It's 239 farm sampled.
[00:33:40.170]But there we're sampling many per farm,
[00:33:42.840]Finney soils per farm.
[00:33:44.820]This is farms, not fields and soils.
[00:33:47.760]And then, yeah, so we have dairy, corn and soy and cotton.
[00:33:52.890]And then we, oh sorry, I forgot our northern neighbors.
[00:33:56.370]We're also doing this in the green belt of Ontario, Canada.
[00:34:00.150]Those results are really cool.
[00:34:01.800]I was really not expecting much, because it's so cold,
[00:34:05.190]but there's really, it's probably our best looking data.
[00:34:08.700]And I looked for it last night,
[00:34:10.020]but I think Jenny, our scientist, has hidden it from me,
[00:34:13.110]'cause she's not ready for prime time yet,
[00:34:14.970]so she hides her pretty graphs from me.
[00:34:17.640]I couldn't pull them out.
[00:34:19.230]So, that's just kind of, that's like,
[00:34:21.450]that's the big thing we're investing in right now
[00:34:23.580]in measurement, we wanna cover the ag soils
[00:34:26.160]of the United States, that's our goal.
[00:34:29.113]And we're pretty much,
[00:34:31.440]at this point most of our expansion is gonna
[00:34:34.380]be under the Climate-Smart Commodities grants.
[00:34:37.770]But we also get funding, Wells Fargo,
[00:34:41.070]Ralph Lauren, VF Foundation,
[00:34:43.050]Levi's, Dairy Management Inc.,
[00:34:47.250]Cargill, Truterra, Land O'Lakes.
[00:34:49.950]Those are kind of the people
[00:34:50.970]that are investing in this concept currently.
[00:34:54.720]And the federal government. (laughs)
[00:34:57.210]Oh, and Greenbelt.
[00:34:58.140]Yeah, Greenbelt is also doing it too.
[00:35:01.380]So, some of the other work that we have done,
[00:35:04.140]and I think this is my best extension talk here
[00:35:07.493]that I have today.
[00:35:08.880]But again, what I told you is that we went out
[00:35:11.460]and we measured available water holding capacity
[00:35:13.440]of intact cores for that NAPESHM data.
[00:35:16.290]And we actually found that there was a real response
[00:35:19.350]of plant available water
[00:35:21.360]as a function of increasing in carbon.
[00:35:25.140]Uh-oh, here we go.
[00:35:28.530]And let's see how we're doing on time.
[00:35:31.950]What time did I start?
[00:35:34.380]Okay, thanks, almost done.
[00:35:36.630]This is an interesting story,
[00:35:38.760]because I know there are a lot of ag engineers in here,
[00:35:41.970]and there is some seminal work
[00:35:43.980]that ag engineers have done in soil science.
[00:35:46.350]Walter Rawls, and can't remember his first name, Saxton.
[00:35:51.360]They're both ag engineers,
[00:35:53.220]and they had some of these pedo-transfer functions.
[00:35:56.640]Saxton Rawls 2006, probably very highly cited soils paper
[00:36:01.440]where they did pedo-transfer functions.
[00:36:03.360]They looked into the NRCS database
[00:36:06.090]and they made functions of field capacity,
[00:36:10.830]wilting point, I think another one,
[00:36:13.590]as a function of soil texture and carbon in soils.
[00:36:17.520]And they're just multiple linear regressions, you know?
[00:36:19.860]Put in sand, put in clay, put in carbon,
[00:36:22.440]get out, whatever soil water holding capacity you want.
[00:36:25.290]I think they even did it for KSAT.
[00:36:27.600]And it's something that we all use a lot.
[00:36:29.910]I used it as a modeler all the time.
[00:36:33.090]But then when I was at A&M, and I was starting to think
[00:36:35.340]about this management change and how it affects soils,
[00:36:39.870]I pulled out old Saxton and Rawls,
[00:36:41.670]because organic carbon is one of the inputs into the model.
[00:36:46.440]And so I was like, "Well, what happens in Saxton Rawls
[00:36:50.220]if you increase organic carbon by 1%?"
[00:36:53.280]Turns out absolutely nothing.
[00:36:55.225]It's statistically significant, but it's not actually,
[00:36:59.580]it doesn't actually change water holding capacity.
[00:37:01.680]It's like, you know, 0.35 to 0.355,
[00:37:07.260]and that's a 2% change in organic carbon,
[00:37:09.330]which is not gonna happen, right?
[00:37:11.430]And the interesting thing is, why is that?
[00:37:13.590]Because in soil science we always know,
[00:37:15.510]we've always, the trope that I learned is
[00:37:17.583]that if you improve the structure
[00:37:19.680]and the carbon that you're going
[00:37:20.820]to get more plant available water.
[00:37:23.160]Well the problem with the Saxton Rawls,
[00:37:24.990]it was based off of the NRCS data, very good data.
[00:37:28.890]But what's the experimental design?
[00:37:31.290]Soil survey.
[00:37:32.886]So, the experimental design is,
[00:37:34.920]I'm in a field and I'm gonna grab a bulk density
[00:37:37.710]and water content sample down here
[00:37:39.780]at the bottom of the landscape.
[00:37:41.010]And I'm gonna do it at the top of the landscape,
[00:37:42.690]'cause I wanna know how it changes across the landscape.
[00:37:45.848]But the management is the same.
[00:37:47.970]So, I have a paired sample and the soil texture's the same
[00:37:52.290]and the carbon is a little higher,
[00:37:54.180]'cause we're at the bottom of the thing.
[00:37:55.920]And maybe there's a slight change in water content
[00:37:59.730]at fuel capacity, but not much of one.
[00:38:02.670]And so my increases in carbon are associated
[00:38:05.820]with the landscape position.
[00:38:08.100]And the North American project
[00:38:09.480]to evaluate soil health measurements,
[00:38:11.640]our increases in carbon are associated
[00:38:13.980]with reduced tillage cover cropping.
[00:38:18.120]So, now we have an increase in carbon
[00:38:20.700]that is associated with changes in soil structure.
[00:38:24.300]Because in the North American project
[00:38:25.920]to evaluate soil health measurements,
[00:38:28.020]these sites were 15 years old or older.
[00:38:31.800]So, they had had time to rebuild their structure,
[00:38:34.920]the no-till and the minimum till sites
[00:38:37.230]and the cover cropping sites.
[00:38:38.820]Those treatments had been there a long time.
[00:38:41.490]And so now we have a pedo-transfer function,
[00:38:44.040]and in fact, you can put this pedo-transfer function
[00:38:46.830]right on top of Saxton and Rawls,
[00:38:49.080]and it follows the 1% carbon line beautifully.
[00:38:52.680]So, we know that this is
[00:38:54.210]actually a pretty decent pedo-transfer function.
[00:38:58.320]But now we can use this function
[00:39:01.110]and now we're thinking, "Okay, go back to what I know
[00:39:05.190]about communicating with farmers."
[00:39:07.320]We need to communicate a benefit relevant change, right?
[00:39:13.440]And so, you know, we think about
[00:39:15.720]from an economic point of view,
[00:39:17.707]"How much more money you're gonna make
[00:39:19.110]if you go to no-till?
[00:39:20.700]What does that have to do
[00:39:21.570]with water holding capacity, right?"
[00:39:23.460]Drought resilience, but increased yield
[00:39:28.170]or increased money isn't a
[00:39:29.490]very direct benefit relevant indicator.
[00:39:32.460]The benefit relevant indicator is, how many more inches
[00:39:35.970]of water per acre are you going to have to grow your crop?
[00:39:40.890]And a farmer can convert that information.
[00:39:43.560]An irrigation scheduler can convert
[00:39:45.690]that information to yield for their field,
[00:39:49.080]and they can convert that to value for their system.
[00:39:54.240]And so what we wanna communicate to farmers is,
[00:39:56.400]how many more inches of water are you going to hold?
[00:39:59.670]So, we're working, so we took a model
[00:40:02.400]that I actually wrote in my master's degree,
[00:40:05.760]and it just uses first stage, second stage evaporation,
[00:40:09.750]and you know, on daily time steps
[00:40:13.350]and then it's got a corn LAI curve in there,
[00:40:15.870]and it allows for drought stress and things like that.
[00:40:18.360]And it's just a biophysical model
[00:40:22.020]that estimates water and a profile, and it was published.
[00:40:27.540]And so we took that and we said,
[00:40:29.287]"Okay, what if we just take that model
[00:40:31.950]and we run it forward for the last 30 years of weather data
[00:40:35.520]for a given soil on a map, and then we do it again,
[00:40:40.110]and we just change the plant available
[00:40:42.060]water holding capacity from the pedo-transfer function,
[00:40:45.000]and we run it forward again and we look at the difference,
[00:40:47.760]we could come up with this graph,
[00:40:49.650]additional inches of water available for growing your plant.
[00:40:53.400]And now a farmer can hold their phone.
[00:40:57.630]GPS tells it where it is,
[00:40:59.160]so you pull the soil from SSURGO,
[00:41:01.191]and you parameterize the plant available water curve,
[00:41:05.340]and then the farmer can go,
[00:41:06.487]"My organic carbon's at 2% and I'm gonna change it to 3%."
[00:41:11.010]And then they can just piddle around and see like,
[00:41:13.777]"Is this benefit relevant to me to increase my carbon
[00:41:16.620]and hold more plants available water?"
[00:41:19.320]So, we've gotten funding from Cargill
[00:41:21.000]to turn this whole concept into an app.
[00:41:23.940]And so what we kind of have done to begin with is just look
[00:41:26.610]at different places around the U.S.
[00:41:28.890]where we had good data on the effects
[00:41:31.290]of no-till on soil organic carbon.
[00:41:33.780]And then we can just make these little,
[00:41:35.670]okay top six inches of soil,
[00:41:38.340]here's an organic, this is generally
[00:41:40.140]what organic carbon looks like in concentration.
[00:41:43.170]And we have these different values,
[00:41:44.902]and now we can just model for it.
[00:41:49.530]I plant my corn in May, I harvest in September,
[00:41:53.190]here's tassel based on degree days.
[00:41:56.130]And now I have these different lines
[00:41:58.590]of plant available water.
[00:42:00.300]Notice there's never any at the end of the year.
[00:42:02.755]And then you can answer questions like,
[00:42:04.957]"What percentage of the growing season did it increase
[00:42:07.410]in soil organic carbon result?"
[00:42:09.240]And at least five millimeters more of additional water.
[00:42:12.120]Or you can just add it up and say,
[00:42:13.957]"On average I had an extra inch
[00:42:16.260]and a half of water to grow my crop."
[00:42:18.060]And that's a benefit relevant indicator,
[00:42:20.760]a decision support tool.
[00:42:22.650]And in fact it turns out that the sustainability people
[00:42:27.900]that are trying to figure out their LCAs and their LWAs
[00:42:32.700]and all of these things, I think this is
[00:42:34.650]actually a pretty good tool
[00:42:35.730]to run across a major land resource area
[00:42:38.610]to figure out if they source from these kinds of practices,
[00:42:42.690]how much more water is available
[00:42:44.610]for transpiration versus maybe going into the ditch.
[00:42:48.810]You know, so, there's different ways to think about
[00:42:50.970]how this quantitative information can be used
[00:42:53.250]to estimate benefit relevant indicators to the farmer
[00:42:56.520]or benefit relevant indicators to a buyer.
[00:43:00.990]And then I had to do this last talk a little bit
[00:43:03.960]about this last project.
[00:43:05.705]This is a project that one of the co-PIs is Yufeng,
[00:43:09.665]so UNL faculty.
[00:43:11.640]And there's actually four institutions,
[00:43:14.850]and I affectionately call it DeepC, as in deep carbon.
[00:43:19.590]And it's a project that's funded by RPE.
[00:43:24.450]So, this is more one of our fundamental
[00:43:26.250]kind of R&D programs.
[00:43:29.564]And the concept of our DeepC project is,
[00:43:33.240]we have all these tools and all these pieces,
[00:43:36.060]but how do we really affect the integration
[00:43:40.080]and the use of technology
[00:43:41.784]by carbon developers if they want cheap,
[00:43:44.970]reliable estimate, measurement-based estimates
[00:43:48.510]of soil carbon in fields at a development scale,
[00:43:52.680]which is like big, and over time?
[00:43:56.280]And so the conceptually we're like,
[00:43:58.627]"Okay, well you need a proximal sensor
[00:44:01.320]where you can measure soil organic carbon deep.
[00:44:04.020]You need it to have some sort of easy acquisition interface.
[00:44:07.770]You need a optimal spatial sampling strategy.
[00:44:10.680]You gotta do some what's it with computers
[00:44:13.650]to come up with carbon stock estimates.
[00:44:16.020]And our proposal was over two years
[00:44:18.030]to put all of this together.
[00:44:19.620]And the really unique thing that we had is that Yufeng
[00:44:22.639]and I had worked on this penetrometer,
[00:44:25.290]VisNIR mounted penetrometer
[00:44:27.570]that also had penetration resistance to it.
[00:44:30.120]And we had published a paper that made us think that,
[00:44:32.167]"Well, if we push this thing down in the ground,
[00:44:34.530]not only do we get soil organic carbon,
[00:44:36.720]but it's possible using Vis-NIR
[00:44:38.550]and other information that we could estimate bulk density."
[00:44:42.060]And just as a reminder,
[00:44:43.500]we need carbon concentration in bulk density
[00:44:45.630]to get stock, carbon stock.
[00:44:48.660]Which is something that these days has a value.
[00:44:53.070]And so then the other kind of cool thing
[00:44:54.630]about this is working off, Yufeng and I's expertise,
[00:44:58.800]we had a engineer come in and say,
[00:45:01.507]"Okay, what if you didn't wanna haul a four-wheeler
[00:45:04.530]or a hydraulic press out to the field?
[00:45:06.570]Couldn't you just put this thing on a drill?
[00:45:08.760]And Yufeng and I are like, "Yeah, you could,
[00:45:11.670]but you got this fiber optic
[00:45:13.320]and you're twist the fiber optic off."
[00:45:15.450]And the engineer's like,
[00:45:16.560]'No, we'll just put the spectrometer on the drill
[00:45:18.420]and it can swing with it."
[00:45:20.310]And at that point Yufeng and I were like,
[00:45:22.087]"That's a great idea, we'll write it into the proposal
[00:45:24.780]and you can figure out how to do it."
[00:45:26.880]And they have figured out how to do it.
[00:45:29.730]And so now this is just a drill that they buy at Lowe's
[00:45:33.150]and they put all sorts of gear on it.
[00:45:35.700]Here's the spectrometer and all the sensors,
[00:45:38.340]and then here's the little probe and anybody,
[00:45:41.040]you just hold this thing and you hold the drill handle
[00:45:43.410]and it pushes itself in the ground.
[00:45:45.270]And then you do the reverse
[00:45:46.410]and it pulls itself out of the ground.
[00:45:48.630]And the idea that we had is we had this one paper
[00:45:51.780]by Yufeng and Nuan that showed that if you push,
[00:45:54.240]you know if you measure resistance,
[00:45:56.250]you can get bulk density.
[00:45:57.870]And we were wondering, "Well, if we measure torque,
[00:46:00.480]can we get bulk density?"
[00:46:02.160]No. (laughs)
[00:46:03.734]But anyway, here's the drill.
[00:46:05.910]This is like, these are yardsticks fancy pictures.
[00:46:09.270]Here is just the little window and the fiber optic,
[00:46:12.251]and I just put this up for the engineers.
[00:46:16.500]It's pretty, it's very nice engineering,
[00:46:19.350]commercial kind of great engineering.
[00:46:22.350]And those batteries, depth sensors, spectrometer control,
[00:46:26.070]electronics, drill shank, GPS.
[00:46:30.150]That's all the engineering I'm doing today, y'all. (laughs)
[00:46:34.950]And so we took one of the RPE fields
[00:46:37.920]where we already knew the carbon stock of the field
[00:46:41.040]and Yufeng and Omar went out
[00:46:43.530]and pushed the white locations with their penetrometer.
[00:46:47.760]And you see, there's fewer white locations
[00:46:50.340]than there are black locations,
[00:46:52.080]because the handheld guys could go out a lot faster
[00:46:55.170]and get a lot more soil samples.
[00:46:57.750]And we know the concept of proximal sensing is,
[00:47:00.840]you don't have to measure something as accurately,
[00:47:04.080]because when you're using proximal sensing,
[00:47:05.970]your costs are fixed.
[00:47:08.100]And so you can have something a little more expensive
[00:47:10.620]that measures things a little less accurate.
[00:47:13.434]But you can measure, get more measurements fast.
[00:47:17.100]And as long as there's no bias in the estimate,
[00:47:20.970]you can just take more measurements
[00:47:22.500]and you're still gonna get the mean, right?
[00:47:25.380]You can take more measurements
[00:47:26.640]and get the mean and we can take more measurements.
[00:47:29.700]So, now all we have to do is be able
[00:47:31.560]to estimate carbon unbiased, 'cause this thing's fast.
[00:47:37.020]We don't have to send any samples to the lab.
[00:47:39.600]We can do it in the field.
[00:47:41.670]But we did send samples to the lab,
[00:47:43.230]'cause we didn't know how good this thing works.
[00:47:45.510]So, I'm not showing
[00:47:46.343]any of Yufeng's penetration resistance data.
[00:47:48.540]I'm only showing the handheld data.
[00:47:51.000]But essentially here are the two components
[00:47:52.830]of stock we need.
[00:47:53.760]We need carbon and we need bulk density.
[00:47:56.760]And so we used torque, we used everything we could get off
[00:47:59.460]of that sensor to try to predict bulk density.
[00:48:02.880]Not a good job, pretty junkie, but there's no bias.
[00:48:08.921]And then we already knew that we could get,
[00:48:12.600]and kudos to the yardstick team.
[00:48:14.280]There was a lot of engineering
[00:48:15.450]that went into getting this graph
[00:48:17.850]that would take me days to talk about.
[00:48:20.340]But they have predicted soil organic carbon
[00:48:22.590]from Vis-NIR versus measured.
[00:48:24.870]And we have a very small bias.
[00:48:27.090]We don't do so great at the ends,
[00:48:28.950]we already knew that with spectroscopy.
[00:48:31.110]We're trying to make sure that we can get
[00:48:32.910]an unbiased estimate, and it's pretty good.
[00:48:35.340]But now you're thinking, "Okay Cristine, if you want stock,
[00:48:38.220]you gotta get bulk density,
[00:48:39.390]and there's no bulk density, right?
[00:48:41.430]So, we did a little game and we said, "What if,
[00:48:46.050]what if we're really bad at estimating bulk density?"
[00:48:49.470]So, we did, we'd said, "What if we had,
[00:48:54.305]what if we had really good bulk density from the lab
[00:48:58.410]and we had soil organic carbon from the probe?
[00:49:01.448]I don't think, I think I switched these, I'm sorry.
[00:49:04.920]So, these are now carbon stock, not concentration.
[00:49:07.320]So, we're multiplying bulk density
[00:49:10.620]by carbon concentration.
[00:49:14.910]And these two are showing, what if we did stock,
[00:49:19.080]if we had really good bulk density
[00:49:23.190]and probe-based soil organic carbon
[00:49:26.010]or probe-based soil organic,
[00:49:27.690]or really good soil organic carbon,
[00:49:29.730]lab quality soil organic carbon,
[00:49:31.650]and probe-based bulk density.
[00:49:34.170]Did I do that?
[00:49:36.951]I don't know how to undo that one.
[00:49:41.730]Thanks, and what we can see here is that the contribution
[00:49:46.890]of the air of bulk density is, it's not very much,
[00:49:52.353]because what's really important is that we get
[00:49:55.920]that change in soil granite carbon concentration.
[00:49:59.640]If you go back to this graph,
[00:50:01.680]look at our range in carbon concentration,
[00:50:04.260]it's like one to 3%.
[00:50:07.170]And look at the range in bulk density.
[00:50:09.810]Relative to the numbers, it's pretty small.
[00:50:13.710]And so we can do a pretty shoddy job
[00:50:15.960]of bulk density and do okay.
[00:50:19.020]And so this is when we have a probe-based bulk density
[00:50:21.960]and a probe-based soil organic carbon.
[00:50:24.510]And not happy with that bias
[00:50:27.151]where bias is starting to get a little bit big.
[00:50:29.850]But we're doing okay as far as generally being able
[00:50:33.030]to predict soil organic carbon.
[00:50:34.830]And this was one site and one test.
[00:50:36.750]But it made us think like,
[00:50:38.317]"What if we just did probe-based stock?
[00:50:43.110]And if we do that, it's pretty good.
[00:50:46.080]So, I'm not showing you all the analysis,
[00:50:49.230]but essentially our conclusion here is,
[00:50:51.630]is we don't need to worry about bulk density
[00:50:53.940]and we're not even gonna predict bulk density
[00:50:55.860]or soil organic carbon.
[00:50:57.630]We're just gonna use the Vis-NIR, the depth,
[00:51:00.900]and the moisture and we're gonna measure,
[00:51:03.270]we're just gonna predict stock.
[00:51:05.370]And that was just a decision.
[00:51:06.840]And as a soil scientist it hurt a little bit.
[00:51:09.180]I had to do, we had to do a lot of graphs
[00:51:10.680]to convince Cristine it was okay,
[00:51:13.410]because Vis-NIR shouldn't be able to predict bulk density.
[00:51:17.430]But it can measure clay content really well.
[00:51:20.220]It can measure clay mineralogy really well.
[00:51:23.130]And if you're careful about your calibrations,
[00:51:25.577]I think you can get decent stock.
[00:51:28.320]And actually Omar has shown that and he's been,
[00:51:31.350]Yufeng and Omar have tried to convince me
[00:51:34.230]that we should just go for stock for about three years.
[00:51:36.600]And I've been kicking and screaming
[00:51:38.460]and now you see he's smiling
[00:51:39.870]like the Cheshire Cat over there.
[00:51:41.310]He is like, "I told you Cristine, just gotta listen to me."
[00:51:46.380]You were right, Yufeng.
[00:51:49.320]And so then what we did is we went out with multiple probes
[00:51:52.200]because if you can scale this thing, you gotta be able
[00:51:54.660]to go with multiple probes fast across a big region.
[00:51:58.350]And so we went to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 farms.
[00:52:02.070]Each of these farms had multiple fields.
[00:52:04.740]And we went out with the probes
[00:52:06.630]and then we took some soil cores and we said,
[00:52:09.277]"Okay, this prediction is again just soil organic carbon
[00:52:14.040]because now we wanna know, 'Can we predict carbon?
[00:52:16.350]If we can get carbon, we can get stock.'"
[00:52:18.990]And these are whole field holdouts.
[00:52:21.390]So, this is the validation for 441,
[00:52:25.437]and 441 was not in the model.
[00:52:28.500]And the models are simple PLS, these are not AI models.
[00:52:32.550]So, these are the most basic models.
[00:52:34.560]'cause we really wanna know does the concept work.
[00:52:37.380]We're not asking ourselves,
[00:52:38.977]"How good are we at machine learning?"
[00:52:41.640]That's another question.
[00:52:43.170]But anyway, we're getting soil organic carbon pretty good
[00:52:45.770]on these six farms in Illinois.
[00:52:47.850]We're acting like we're developers, right?
[00:52:50.820]And if you're a developer, all you're really gonna do is
[00:52:54.150]you're not gonna give people maps of carbon,
[00:52:56.160]you're gonna say, "Here's the stock of the 20 fields
[00:53:00.000]or the six farms that you enrolled in this carbon project."
[00:53:03.900]And so we're like, "What if we did that?"
[00:53:05.937]And what we found is that here's our Root Mean Error
[00:53:10.950]of stock, and here's our bias of stock.
[00:53:15.420]And we're doing pretty good on the bias,
[00:53:17.340]except for this field right here.
[00:53:19.530]And this is a field that was really high in carbon.
[00:53:22.080]And again, if you remember, we don't do so good,
[00:53:24.143]Vis-NIR are saturates at high carbon.
[00:53:27.060]But we have seen some papers,
[00:53:29.406]and Yufeng has worked on this too,
[00:53:32.010]that you could get better at this high carbon
[00:53:34.470]if you do some fancy machine learning stuff.
[00:53:37.650]So, we're feeling pretty confident,
[00:53:39.570]we're going back rerunning the models,
[00:53:41.820]trying the fancy machine learning stuff
[00:53:44.010]to try to get rid of this bias.
[00:53:46.500]And if we do, if we got rid of
[00:53:48.210]that bad little number right there,
[00:53:50.340]we would be at a zero bias pretty well
[00:53:53.160]and feel pretty confident at the development scale
[00:53:57.210]that we can estimate soil organic carbon stocks.
[00:54:01.230]This is not plot research, this is large scale stuff.
[00:54:05.220]So, when you start scaling the assumptions
[00:54:08.010]and your needs become a little bit different.
[00:54:11.850]So, that's it.
[00:54:12.683]That's the end of my story.
[00:54:14.362]And that's a Longhorn from Texas.
[00:54:17.280]That's just to remind you where I'm from. (laughs)
[00:54:21.690]So, thanks for your attention.
[00:54:24.900]Any questions?
[00:54:26.220]I'll have you speak into the microphone
[00:54:28.110]so the folks online can hear.
[00:54:31.470]So, when you settled on the four main parameters
[00:54:34.593]of soil health, what I hear is that you have
[00:54:38.160]to do things that are quick and easy to do-
[00:54:41.823]Yes. And maybe not the things
[00:54:43.233]that you would intuitively think are essential?
[00:54:46.876]You wouldn't do the things
[00:54:48.210]if you were doing a process-based scientific investigation.
[00:54:52.170]But that said, I'm quite surprised
[00:54:54.360]that microbial activity is not up there
[00:54:58.618]as a major indicator of soil?
[00:55:00.590]It is, it's the second one.
[00:55:02.790]24-hour respiration is our microbial activity indicator.
[00:55:06.245]Okay, the respiration, yeah.
[00:55:07.440]And that's done with a carbon dioxide measurement?
[00:55:10.964]Yeah.
[00:55:11.797]Is there a more quicker way to measure microbe content?
[00:55:17.370]Is there? I don't know.
[00:55:18.653]I don't think so.
[00:55:20.207]Not that I'm aware of,
[00:55:22.710]and certainly not one that we tested.
[00:55:24.990]Another one that was really good too is
[00:55:27.690]just microbial biomass measurement.
[00:55:30.480]But the problem is it's quite expensive
[00:55:32.400]and it was no better than respiration.
[00:55:41.130]Simple question.
[00:55:41.963]Hi, my name's Tanya Hague.
[00:55:43.050]I work with the National Drought Mitigation Center.
[00:55:45.240]We're also on East campus here.
[00:55:47.040]So, of course I'm very interested
[00:55:48.240]in the drought resilience app.
[00:55:50.580]And I didn't, I'm sorry,
[00:55:51.750]I didn't catch if it was operational or in development?
[00:55:54.150]It is in development.
[00:55:55.620]The model is done.
[00:55:57.300]The getting it into an app is in development.
[00:56:00.330]Okay. Yeah.
[00:56:01.163]I'll be very interested.
[00:56:01.996]What is our goal?
[00:56:02.829]We would like to have an app in a year.
[00:56:04.830]Okay.
[00:56:05.663]Released for free.
[00:56:07.140]Fantastic.
[00:56:19.800]This question may be premature,
[00:56:22.046]but you talk about microbial activity
[00:56:26.130]and all the soil health indicators,
[00:56:29.816]to what extent do these factors influence the performance
[00:56:36.216]of these biological aids that farmers are using
[00:56:40.824]to fix nitrogen or increase yield?
[00:56:47.400]That's a great question.
[00:56:49.170]I don't know.
[00:56:51.370]I think there could be two hypotheses, right?
[00:56:54.540]One hypothesis is if you have a healthy soil with a lot
[00:56:59.550]of biological activity in good soil water, you know,
[00:57:03.360]air, water porosity, you might not need one
[00:57:07.590]of the biological accelerators.
[00:57:10.020]Another hypothesis could be is even if you added one
[00:57:12.960]that it might die pretty fast
[00:57:15.960]because there's some, a lot of competition,
[00:57:18.600]healthy competition going on.
[00:57:20.700]Or another one could be that could be they work great.
[00:57:25.079]I think the first thing is we need science
[00:57:28.680]that says they work great.
[00:57:30.810]And I don't know that we have much of that.
[00:57:38.790]All right, we have one from online.
[00:57:43.530]Let's see.
[00:57:44.970]It says, first of all, it says, "Nice talk,
[00:57:48.360]and great to see you are tackling the questions
[00:57:51.150]of how to measure soil health."
[00:57:53.280]And this says, "How would you interpret the slide you showed
[00:57:56.566]regarding the one paper on dairy soils in New York?"
[00:58:01.495]Oh, I probably chose the wrong farm.
[00:58:09.840]So, first of all, I have no idea
[00:58:11.850]what this farm's management was.
[00:58:19.320]I would say their soil organic carbon is quite low. (laughs)
[00:58:24.300]and they have, there's a lot of room
[00:58:26.370]for improvement in their aggregate stability.
[00:58:28.710]So, my interpretation is it's very likely that they have,
[00:58:34.860]they are not a soil health management system right now.
[00:58:39.300]Interestingly, oops, I did not say this,
[00:58:42.300]but in dairy we actually measured
[00:58:44.790]available water holding capacity,
[00:58:46.350]because our pedo-transfer function did
[00:58:48.030]not cover dairy management.
[00:58:50.040]And dairy soils are compacted as heck.
[00:58:52.890]But you'll look, there's not,
[00:58:54.665]water holding capacity is better in the tilled fields
[00:58:57.840]because I think that the grazed
[00:58:59.400]and the reduced till are compacted as heck.
[00:59:02.880]And so I think I interpret this,
[00:59:05.760]that this is a conventional dairy.
[00:59:09.510]Yes, yes, heavy, heavy, wet silage.
[00:59:12.930]Absolutely.
[00:59:15.810]But isn't it pretty?
[00:59:17.040]I thought they did a really good job.
[00:59:21.180]And then there's a follow up real real quick on,
[00:59:23.400]it says, "Overall a healthy soil, good or bad?"
[00:59:28.050]There's no soil is a bad soil.
[00:59:31.230]I would say this soil has a lot of room for improvement.
[00:59:39.870]Great presentation, Cristine.
[00:59:41.705]Probably you are aware these big debate of the Haney test>
[00:59:46.933]HENEY test is a very popular tool for farmers
[00:59:50.540]and for them is easy to send their samples
[00:59:54.006]to the labs and get one number
[00:59:56.535]that will tell them healthy or unhealthy.
[00:59:59.310]Exactly.
[01:00:00.150]But in the scientific community,
[01:00:02.100]there's a big debate about these Haney tests,
[01:00:04.980]that, you know, probably now we need
[01:00:07.170]to probably discuss a little bit more, right?
[01:00:09.780]That when we are trying to get
[01:00:12.120]to know if our soil is healthy,
[01:00:13.950]people are expecting to hear one number.
[01:00:16.710]So, the Haney test comes handy in that regard.
[01:00:19.350]So, what are your thoughts regarding these tests, thanks?
[01:00:21.798]So, we did, scientifically the Haney test
[01:00:28.490]is a lot of co-coordination in all the measurements
[01:00:31.110]that are made.
[01:00:32.340]And of the measurements that we recommend,
[01:00:35.460]carbon mineralization potential is in the Haney test.
[01:00:39.330]Unfortunately, if you're going to spend money
[01:00:42.090]and you get the Haney test, you don't get carbon.
[01:00:45.270]So, that's kind of not useful.
[01:00:52.170]And then you don't get my favorite of the three,
[01:00:54.510]which is aggregate stability.
[01:00:56.250]So, I mean, I honestly tell people,
[01:00:58.297]"This is our minimum suite."
[01:01:00.030]The Haney test was included in NAPESHM,
[01:01:02.520]and we looked at it very carefully.
[01:01:04.320]And this is our scientific recommendation.
[01:01:06.976]So, there's no need to say anything bad
[01:01:09.180]about the Haney test.
[01:01:10.590]It's like, "Well, Haney test has
[01:01:14.190]carbon mineralization potential,
[01:01:15.750]and that's our measure of microbial activity.
[01:01:20.520]But I would rather spend my money
[01:01:23.040]on getting the other three, all of it.
[01:01:30.390]Thank you for the insightful presentation.
[01:01:32.490]I would like to ask regarding,
[01:01:33.840]if we want to build a baseline of soil health for farmers,
[01:01:38.220]we need to choose the reference, right?
[01:01:40.170]So, in terms of choosing the reference,
[01:01:42.120]do you have any like the criteria to choose the right one?
[01:01:47.119]Especially like for another crops
[01:01:50.520]rather than soybean and maize, maybe the perennial crops,
[01:01:53.640]and also in the tropical area and also subtropics.
[01:01:56.910]Is it gonna be the same criteria that we use to choose that?
[01:02:00.240]Is there any like certain numbers
[01:02:02.310]because it's always like, "Give me a confusion
[01:02:06.240]to choose certain number that indicate like,
[01:02:08.940]okay, this is the good soil health,
[01:02:11.040]or it is good enough or not good enough, thank you.
[01:02:14.220]Yes.
[01:02:15.270]So, you, so the question was about references.
[01:02:17.850]What's the reference, how do you define it?
[01:02:20.010]And I will tell you that
[01:02:21.210]that when the science team gets together at SHI
[01:02:24.480]and that comes up, we probably have spent a cumulative time
[01:02:28.860]of 400 hours talking about references
[01:02:32.100]and what they should be.
[01:02:33.420]And when we're thinking about just corn soy,
[01:02:37.500]it's super easy.
[01:02:38.790]NRCS has defined a reference,
[01:02:41.160]and the reference is in the soil health practices.
[01:02:43.830]Maximize those soil health principles,
[01:02:45.990]and you got your reference.
[01:02:47.820]What do you do about dairy?
[01:02:50.580]'Cause dairy, they're loading tons of poop on the soil
[01:02:53.373]and generally they're irrigating if they're not in New York
[01:02:56.700]or in the east coast, right?
[01:02:58.830]And then you're like, "Man," so if you go,
[01:03:01.225]what's a reference for a dairy?
[01:03:04.590]What we chose and there was a lot
[01:03:06.960]of conversation, not saying it's perfect.
[01:03:08.880]What we chose as a reference
[01:03:10.290]for a dairy is in a grazed alfalfa field.
[01:03:14.520]A, because in Idaho we could find them.
[01:03:17.940]And in Idaho, if you're gonna compare,
[01:03:20.190]you gotta get an irrigated system,
[01:03:22.080]and the irrigated system is going to be harvested.
[01:03:25.170]And so we're looking, okay, perennial alfalfa.
[01:03:28.451]But in Texas we actually chose CRP land.
[01:03:32.880]And that was me kicking and screaming, thinking,
[01:03:35.017]"This was a really, really, really bad idea."
[01:03:37.680]But it actually worked out just fine.
[01:03:39.510]There was more carbon in CRP land,
[01:03:41.220]even though it wasn't irrigated.
[01:03:44.461]So, I would say that even at SHI
[01:03:47.850]we do not have a very clear definition
[01:03:54.900]of what a reference is,
[01:03:56.100]other than we want to maximize soil health principles.
[01:04:00.300]And so I could imagine like palm, what is the reference?
[01:04:04.140]Well, palm is a, it's a tree based system, right?
[01:04:07.590]And so probably you're looking
[01:04:08.940]at an undisturbed tree system.
[01:04:13.059]Yeah.
[01:04:16.050]Yeah.
[01:04:19.740]Yeah, and you're adding nitrogen
[01:04:21.240]and other sorts of things going on.
[01:04:24.120]But this is where having, you know,
[01:04:27.060]Carol, you said everyone likes to index.
[01:04:29.370]Oh yeah.
[01:04:30.203]But I think farmers actually like looking at the three,
[01:04:33.090]because this is where aggregate stability tells the tale.
[01:04:37.920]It does not matter where we go,
[01:04:40.350]aggregate stability is like old faithful.
[01:04:43.139]It always tells the soil health management system.
[01:04:47.490]Carbon, there's different nuances based on cropping system
[01:04:50.670]and different things people have done.
[01:04:53.010]And honestly, if I could take one out,
[01:04:55.590]I would not measure carbon mineralization potential.
[01:04:58.410]But shockingly in Canada, carbon mineralization potential,
[01:05:03.450]that was the story.
[01:05:05.610]So, it was a reminder like, "Cristine, don't get hasty.
[01:05:08.756]Let's keep all of these three in
[01:05:11.790]and get some data and learn from the data."
[01:05:15.480]So, no one agrees, I think there is at least five to 10
[01:05:20.580]to 20 PhD papers investigations
[01:05:24.000]that could be written on what is a reference state.
[01:05:28.470]Thanks, Aaron.
[01:05:30.210]Really good presentation, Cristine.
[01:05:32.360]Two questions, What's the next steps for SHI,
[01:05:36.420]you've been there five years coming on it.
[01:05:39.270]Give us your crystal ball
[01:05:40.260]where you're headed from what you know.
[01:05:42.270]And if you had a subset of organic, you know
[01:05:45.420]how people are trying to find the holy grail
[01:05:47.010]between conventional, regen, and organic.
[01:05:51.360]If you had a subset of data for organic,
[01:05:53.937]can you say what's actually going on for organic soils
[01:05:57.960]'cause of the tillage component?
[01:05:59.997]Organic agriculture?
[01:06:00.830]Yes, yes.
[01:06:02.220]If there was a subset of data?
[01:06:03.870]Aggregate stability tends
[01:06:06.930]to tattle a lot on organic agriculture.
[01:06:10.410]Organic agriculture has generally
[01:06:12.120]very low aggregate stability and great respiration values.
[01:06:15.900]Carbons, hit or miss, because they're tilling.
[01:06:20.760]The weed control is tillage.
[01:06:22.830]So, interesting.
[01:06:24.900]I don't know what, I think always the answer is moderation
[01:06:28.380]and being judicious.
[01:06:30.870]But there are so many, there is a preponderance
[01:06:34.080]of data out there that says tillage is bad
[01:06:36.660]for soils in microbial communities.
[01:06:39.753]There's very little research that supports
[01:06:42.390]that herbicides are bad for soils in microbial communities.
[01:06:45.780]Now, pesticides can be bad for human health,
[01:06:48.900]but there's not a lot of evidence
[01:06:51.060]that they're bad for soil health.
[01:06:53.760]I know that's very provocative, but it's the evidence
[01:06:57.960]that we have based on the measurements that we make.
[01:07:01.800]We work with some organic people
[01:07:03.720]and you know, we agree to disagree on a lot of things,
[01:07:07.115]but it is really interesting.
[01:07:08.970]I mean, there's not a lot of literature
[01:07:11.130]that herbicides are negative on soil health.
[01:07:15.450]And I know that's not gonna change the organic industry.
[01:07:18.570]And frankly, I don't wanna eat spinach
[01:07:20.400]with a bunch of herbicides or pesticides on it.
[01:07:23.700]So, I'm not saying organic is bad,
[01:07:27.390]or conventional is bad or good,
[01:07:29.100]but you know, when you look at the whole picture,
[01:07:31.110]there are trade-offs.
[01:07:32.880]Where is SHI going?
[01:07:34.230]I kind of showed you like we're just
[01:07:36.540]at the beginning of baselining.
[01:07:38.122]We're going global and we're really thinking about
[01:07:43.230]how we translate the science into apps.
[01:07:46.110]We're going accessible.
[01:07:47.340]To go global you have to be accessible.
[01:07:49.890]We can't be living in our spoiled North American bubble
[01:07:53.580]on measurement and access to technology.
[01:07:59.100]All right, we got time for one more question.
[01:08:03.480]Thank you for the presentation.
[01:08:04.680]It was very interesting.
[01:08:06.660]I noticed, or I know that you guys measured in Canada,
[01:08:11.910]United States and Mexico, That's where you are.
[01:08:14.430]Yeah.
[01:08:15.263]And I'm pretty sure these three countries have
[01:08:18.600]very different temperatures and other characteristics.
[01:08:23.400]So, when it comes to especially temperature changes,
[01:08:27.210]have you seen differences, especially with the soil health?
[01:08:30.540]'Cause for example, south like Mexico,
[01:08:33.270]central America south, we tend to be a lot,
[01:08:35.850]it's tropical, so it's warmer all year round.
[01:08:38.640]There's cropping all year round.
[01:08:41.640]So, have you find anything interesting
[01:08:43.860]in comparison to more colder?
[01:08:46.380]Yes, we did find some very interesting things,
[01:08:49.350]but I can't pull them out of my head.
[01:08:51.360]But they're particularly in the soil physics
[01:08:54.754]and in the soil carbon manuscript.
[01:08:58.200]So, the manuscript by Dan Liptzin on carbon
[01:09:00.327]and the manuscript by Dianna Bagnall
[01:09:03.120]on the soil physical measurement, especially Diana,
[01:09:05.730]she really got into the interactions,
[01:09:07.770]and temperature was a driver in the interactions,
[01:09:09.900]so go look at that.
[01:09:10.980]But the careful thing we have to note is
[01:09:13.890]that in our sampling regime temperature was
[01:09:16.140]also a proxy for Ultisols.
[01:09:20.280]And so they're sandier.
[01:09:22.230]And so it's really hard to tease out like,
[01:09:24.660]was it the change in mineralogy in the sand,
[01:09:27.000]or was it the heat?
[01:09:28.440]So, but anyway, have a look, and you know,
[01:09:30.780]with a grain of salt.
[01:09:35.190]And I wanna say, there are no Oxisols
[01:09:38.690]or Andisols represented in NAPESHM.
[01:09:42.629]And so, I have struggled, 'cause we talked to Brazilians
[01:09:46.770]and we think about how does this translate to Brazil?
[01:09:50.130]And in the literature the Brazilians are taking the
[01:09:52.740]same measurements of soil health on their Oxisols
[01:09:55.320]and one-to-one clay soils.
[01:09:57.120]So, I feel fairly safe that these same indicators will work,
[01:10:01.230]but we have not gone in and tested it the same way.
[01:10:08.043]Everyone for being here today.
[01:10:11.506]Thank you, Dr. Morgan for visiting us.
[01:10:13.428]It's been fantastic, and see everyone next week.
[01:10:15.873](audience applaud)

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Delivering Soil Health Knowledge to the Farmer

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