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Jerry Hatfield, the retired director of the National Laboratory for Agriculture and the Environment, says farming is not rocket science.
Farming, with all of its interactions and inputs, is much more complex than a physics problem.
At an event held by Iowa’s Southfork Watershed Alliance, Hatfield explained how water, tillage, nutrients and weather fit into the puzzle that is today’s ecological and industrial agriculture system.
In this episode of the Strip-Till Farmer podcast, brought to you by Terrasym by NewLeaf Symbiotics, Hatfield shares data indicating how strip-till increases soil organic matter, what’s an ideal water infiltration rate for soil, his advice on when you should get into carbon markets and more.
The Strip-Till Farmer podcast series is brought to you by Terrasym.
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Full Transcript
Michaela Paukner:
I'm Michaela Paukner, associate editor of Strip-Till Farmer. Welcome to this episode of the Strip-Till Farmer Podcast series. I encourage you to subscribe to this series wherever you podcasts. Subscribing allows you to receive an alert about new episodes when they're released. Thanks to Terrasym by NewLeaf Symbiotics for supporting this podcast series. Want to do more in 2022? Now available in convenient planter box application, Terrasym by NewLeaf Symbiotics is proven by Beck's 2021 PFR to improve yield by 2.7 bushels per acre in soybeans, and 4.6 bushels per acre in corn. It also nets $20,000 more in incremental income with every 1,000 acres planted. To calculate your ROI and purchase Terrasym for only $4.35 cents per acre. Visit NewLeafSym.com/2022. That's NewLeaf, S-Y-M.com/2022.
Michaela Paukner:
Jerry Hatfield, the retired director of the National Laboratory for Agriculture in the Environment, says farming is not rocket science. Farming, with all of its interactions and inputs, is much more complex than a physics problem. At an event held by Iowa's Southfork Watershed Alliance, Hatfield explained how water, tillage, nutrients and weather fit into the puzzle that is today's ecological and industrial agriculture system. In today's episode of the Strip-Till Farmer Podcast, we bring you Hatfield's presentation. You'll hear him share data indicating how strip-till increases soil organic matter, what's an ideal water infiltration rate for soil, his advice on when you should get into carbon markets, and more.
Jerry Hatfield:
I don't know how many regions I've given on carbon markets. My one word answer is if you are thinking about getting into it, don't. It's still too much of a wild game and nobody knows what's going on. Let it settle out, and then we'll figure out what the rules of the game are. But right now, it's just a little bit unclear as to what's going to happen.
Jerry Hatfield:
The other piece that I decided to do once I retired was that people said, "Well, besides golf," as Andy said, "What are you going to do?" is really to figure out how to help agriculture, how to help agriculture achieve its true potential in what it can do. So over the past couple years, I spent a lot of time looking at this, a lot of time thinking about how we're going to improve agriculture, to the point of being able basically to say, "There are things that we do, that we shouldn't do. There are some things that we ought to try, and then there may some things we ought to just abandon."
Jerry Hatfield:
You look at all of this, and I come to realization about, oh, a year ago, that when we talk about, and I've built this concept I call genetics by environment, by management, by E, by M. Basically, management is what you oversee, environment is what you overcome because genetics is what you're trying to optimize. In thinking about that, and more and more I worked on it, I came to realize that there's one piece of that management aspect that we need to start thinking about, and that is change. That's becomes the most difficult part.
Jerry Hatfield:
So in the past six months I've been working with sociologists on how does agriculture adopt change? How does any industry adopt change? And really began to think about this. This is probably one of the most difficult pieces that we have in thinking about how do we think about changing behaviors, practices, anything else?
Jerry Hatfield:
So I'm going to take you through a little bit of this tonight and show you different aspects of going on because I truly believe that we really do need to think more holistically about our problems. We talk about the carbon market, but in reality, I can make you more money by putting carbon into the soil and what it does for your operation that you'll ever get from a carbon market.
Jerry Hatfield:
The other piece of this is that I do not understand why we don't think about agriculture in an ecological context. That is the fact that agriculture fits in a very large ecosystem. We tend to think about agriculture in what we produce, but in reality, agriculture is what we produce, not only in that field, but what we produce off the field, the whole landscape that's out there. So we need to be thinking about how do we view agriculture in much more of an ecological context and the value of agriculture in our ecosystem. That is often considered very radical thinking.
Jerry Hatfield:
But it's a way we're going to have to think about it because when that question was asked about sustainability aspects of what companies want, companies are thinking about sustainability from an entirely different perspective, in which agriculture is one sliver of their world piece.
Jerry Hatfield:
Another little moment of truth is we'd interviewed a lot of companies about their sustainability goals. These were all the companies that had ... This was sustainability on the piece. We went through and we asked them about their sustainability goals and everything else. They all had a list of what their sustainability goals were. Then I asked them, "Well, what's the path to getting to your sustainability goals?" That is yet to be determined. Everybody has done sustainability as a major goal out there, but has yet to figure out the path to get there. That's where I really began to think about how do we begin to look at agriculture from a different perspective? How do we begin to put it into this industrial complex that we think about?
Jerry Hatfield:
So we really began to look at this overall aspect of agriculture, what we can do, what we can't do, what our opportunities are. I do not believe that agriculture is at any better position right now than it has been to be able to really capture in a lot of different pieces and a lot of different ways that are going on. The carbon markets are basically chatter in my opinion. There are a lot of things, and Jack brought up the idea of nutrient density. I think the quality of food safety issues, the food security issues, all those other things are out there. We need to be thinking of how do we begin to convince the public that here is the role that agriculture plays and why you depend on it?
Jerry Hatfield:
So there's a lot of different pieces that are along that way. We'll talk a little bit about water quality, tillage, nutrients, weather, all those other things that's going on in that piece of the puzzle. We deal with complex systems. Complex systems require innovative approaches. We've got to move past main effects. Most of the time in agriculture, we deal in main effects. We talk about the effect of nutrients. We talk about the effects of pesticide. We talk about the effects of tillage. We talk about genetics. But we don't really realize that it's a complex set of interactions.
Jerry Hatfield:
Some of you've heard me say that farming is not rocket science. Farming is much more complex. What's it take for rocket science? What's it take to launch a rocket in the air? You need payload. You need a force of gravity. You figure out how much stress you need to take to overcome that. It's a physics problem, pure and simple. Farming is like so six or seven simultaneous differential equations. If you ever took math, higher level math in there, is that most people get really stumbled at two, maybe three differential equations.
Jerry Hatfield:
But farming is complex. We got to look at all these different interactions that are going on. The environmental imports of trade off is in a lot of this. We're talking about water quality. We talk about soil health. We talk about all these other things. We talk about air quality, all these issues on greenhouse gases and everything else, all these different aspects. All these solutions are going to be based on interactions among soils, weather and management. Soils is what you have, weather you can't control. Management is what you can begin to do in all of this. But what management solution works the best every year is often weather-centered. So it's not a simple solution that all these different pieces that go on.
Jerry Hatfield:
I'm going to start off with tillage practices in all of this. I'm getting the background on this. Intensive tillage is basically your number one robber of soil carbon on the soil. Every time we till, we put carbon back into the atmosphere. You want proof of that? Look how they build a road bed. What's the biggest implement you see when they build a road bed? It's that big 30 inch disc behind the four wheel drive tractor. They drive it back and forth and back and forth. Basically take the structure out of the soil. So intensive tillage in there. We take the carbon out there. We take out our water storage capacity. We decrease infiltration, and then we decrease the water supply that increases the potential for nitrogen leaching. There is a linkage between all of these aspects that we do and water quality.
Jerry Hatfield:
This is the interactions that we begin to think about all these different ways that go on and on. If we think about this, and this is a long term study that we have, because we've actually been in the Walnut Creek Watershed longer than we've been in the Southfork Watershed. We've been there since 1992, and we have the longest record of carbon influxes over corn and soybean systems in the world. So we did an analysis, oh, after about 2018, looking at the carbon balance of corn soybeans and native prairie, because we also have the Needlesmith area [inaudible 00:10:24] as well with carbon fluxes. So we know what's going on in the native prairie system as well.
Jerry Hatfield:
But what we see in the bottom line in all those graphs is that our typical corn soybean system under conventional tillage, loses about 1,000 pounds of carbon per acre, per year. Corn accrues a little bit, soybeans loses a whole lot, but in the essence, we're always losing carbon out. So you farm 40 years, you've lost 20 tons of carbon out the soil. We see that in terms of all these different dynamics that are going on from that standpoint. So we see all this different piece.
Jerry Hatfield:
The good news is we took another field, after all of these data and we put it back and we switched it over from conventional to a no-till cover crop system. Within the first year, we went from a negative carbon balance to a positive carbon balance of 300 pounds. We've continued to change that in the first year. We've continued to add carbon more and more each year. We see these different dynamics that are going on. So we can reverse this very, very quickly because we take tillage out of the system, we see this.
Jerry Hatfield:
Another piece of this is we have one of these instruments that measures carbon, and it's mounted on the AT&T tower that's on Highway 17 and it oversees all of that valley below that. So after harvest, it's quite interesting because the carbon dynamics, the carbon in the atmosphere pools out at about 400 parts per million until everybody starts tilling. Then the carbon values in that just go off the chart. They are on the order of maybe 600 parts per million in the atmospheric average. If you back calculate, that means that we've lost about every bit of carbon that was taken up that whole year, in all the tillings that we do in the fall.
Jerry Hatfield:
So it's pretty remarkable, in terms of the dynamics that are going off. Now, if you're an intensity tillage, we can chat. But you're continually destroying your base as you go through this. Here's the other piece of this. This just doesn't speak to the long term data from the Sanborn Plots and the Morrow Plots. The Sanborn Plots in Missouri, the Morrow Plots in Illinois, they've been in the corn oats, hay rotation, corn oats rotation, then a corn soybean rotation from '54 onward, and then continuous corn. This is just data into the 1980s. We're trying to get the Sanborn Plots to go through and redo a sampling again. We talked to them about doing that, to see where they're at and leveling it off.
Jerry Hatfield:
But you look at that continuous corn is that from where it was at the beginning until the 1970s, they lost 70% of their [inaudible 00:13:07]. Illinois, the Morrow Plots, they only lost about 60%. So we see these changes that are going on, all these different dynamic from that standpoint. This intensive tillage is reducing that carbon. It leads to more instability of the aggregates in the soil surface. It basically limits that infiltration of precipitation because the lack of soil aggregates and exposure to direct [inaudible 00:13:31]. So we see all these different dynamics that are going on in these systems as well.
Jerry Hatfield:
Here's just another example of why organic matter pays. This is a field that's out by Dana and it's a field that we've observed for a long time. We do a lot of remote sensing work. That picture on the left is an image that was taken with one particular index in August. You can see how uniform that field was, except for the waterways. That picture on the right is taken three weeks later because we had no rain for three weeks and you see all that leaf drop that's going on. That's all you're picking up with that image.
Jerry Hatfield:
We see all this disappearance of what's going on. That green area yielded 65 bushels. The yellow areas yielded about 25 bushels. So in three weeks, we lost 40 bushels per acre in a lot of parts of that field just because it didn't rain, and the soil couldn't supply that water. So you see these different dynamics along. We see these in lots of fields across this.
Jerry Hatfield:
The other piece of this, stopping back to this field in Williams that we have, is that we went through in 2016 and we did a very intensive grid sample. We sampled that in 150 foot grids down to four feet across that whole field. This is just half of the field. It's 160 acres. There's another 320 acres that are another 160 to the south of it. But after two years, we basically doubled the microbial biomass because we used the tillage intensity. You can see these rapid changes are going on. So the bottom line is soil changes more rapidly than we think. We're talking about changing carbon within that soil. We're talking about changing microbial biomass. We see all these different things.
Jerry Hatfield:
In fact, we run another experiment lately, in which we were changing stable aggregates within 140 days after a cover crop was on there. So we can see all these different things that are going on within our soil and all of this. So we begin to see changes that are out there.
Jerry Hatfield:
So here's the current state of our soils across the Midwest, not just Iowa, but across the Midwest, is that we've made them very vulnerable to extreme weather. We've made them very vulnerable to the variable weather that's out there. We've made them dependent on external nutrient supply because we've taken the organic matter out. We've taken the water out. We've made them dependent on this. So the functionality of soil is we really want that soil to hold the plant up and we'll supply everything else. So we really got to think about how we're going to reverse this trend in terms of this.
Jerry Hatfield:
So basically, we've just made soils that can [inaudible 00:16:16] plants. With the current price of fertilizer that might gain different attention of how we think about managing our systems as we go forward. I'm going to take you through a little experiment that we've done. This is with Wayne Fredericks up in Mitchell County. Wayne and I have been working together for a number of years. That red star is about where he's at in Mitchell County, as Wayne explains it.
Jerry Hatfield:
He and I do a lot of tag team presentations on all of this. Wayne says I'm one county short of a tundra. So you think about this in all of these different pieces. We're seeing all of this. It's an area of the state in which no-till, strip till cover crops isn't supposed to work because it's too cold and it's too wet. You're really in a tropical area compared to Mitchell County. So a little bit further.
Jerry Hatfield:
But anyway, 1992, he went over to no-till soybeans because the weather prevented him from getting any tillage done. He'd been a full tillage up to then. Because it froze up, he couldn't get any that full tillage. So he went to no-till. It worked so well, he never goes back. It worked so well, he switched over to the strip-till corn in 2002, based on the success of no-till beans and looking at all the aspects that are going on. There's a strip-till system for corn in all of this. This was before he tried putting cover crops into that system. Now all the beans, as you see, are all planted green and everything. So everything is just going through, just planting green in it and then terminating it afterwards.
Jerry Hatfield:
That's working so well, in terms of this aspect. So then I wonder why he didn't do that sooner in terms of this process. So I'm not going to belabor some of this, but I do want to share some pieces with you because here's three fields, in which they've measured the organic matter, starting in 1984. Going on to 2015, you can see those changes in that. Organic matter, that 2.3 is now up to 4.3. The 3.3 is up to 6.1.
Jerry Hatfield:
Here's where we started the whole aspects of improving that. Actually, I have all of these organic matter data across all the fields that we've worked in. We've seen that same increase in terms of organic amount content because we reduced the tillage aspects and then we've added the cover crops into it as well. There's been a 2.5% increase. So roughly what I figured out, it's roughly about 900 to 1,000 pounds of carbon, going back in every year to get that level of rise of organic matter.
Jerry Hatfield:
The fencerows were sampled in 2016, just for curiosity sakes, to see what the potential was. Fencerows around that area somewhere between six to 9.5%. You can see that one field in six isn't getting too far away from where it was originally. In all of this, we're interested in what the plateau is. That's the graph that's out there and we see that aspect. But that's not what excites me about this data set.
Jerry Hatfield:
This data set that we got from Wayne is 10 fields, 18 years of yield monitor data across all those different fields. I do make [inaudible 00:19:51] point, in terms of where these organic matter has gone to. It's looking at the available water holding capacity, just a simple graph in there. That lower line is a permanent willing point. That's the point of which water can no longer be extracted by a plant out of that soil. The upper line is field capacity. Anything above that just drains out. So that space in between is what the plant has available to it. If we reduce organic matter, reduce water holding capacity, but if we improve it, we increase it. If we take and improve the organic matter content from two to 4% on the soybean loam soil, what you see is you've got about five more days of available of water during the grain filling period, and five more days in which you don't have stress can pay a lot of advantages, to see these different aspects that are going on.
Jerry Hatfield:
So as we've improved the organic matter on this field, we've improved the water holding capacity. We've improved the water storage capacity, a number of different things that are out there. The other piece of this is that those stable aggregates that we've created allows that continual infiltration rates. If you've got an unstable aggregate, as soon as rain drop hits it, it dissolves. That silt moves down through it, clogs up all the pores, just like a drainage pipe that doesn't have free flowing in it. So we get infiltration rates that are pretty low.
Jerry Hatfield:
In fact, across the Midwest, it's not unusual to have infiltration rates that are less than one inch per hour and sometimes half inch per hour. So if you get a half inch infiltration rate, and you one inch rain in an hour, simple math tells you lost a half inch. That's where we see a lot of our runoff. We see a lot of conversion pieces going on, but if you got stable aggregates, a stable aggregate withstands that rain drop energy. It doesn't dissolve. It allows that infiltration rate to continue.
Michaela Paukner:
Before we get back to the conversation, I'd like to thank our sponsor Terrasym by NewLeaf Symbiotics for supporting the Strip-Till Farmer podcast series. Want to do more in 2022? Now available in convenient planter box application, Terrasym by NewLeaf Symbiotics is proven by Beck's 2021 PFR to improve yield by 2.7 bushels per acre in soybeans and 4.6 bushels per acre in corn. It also nets $20,000 more in incremental income with every 1,000 acres planted. To calculate your ROI and purchase Terrasym for only $4.35 per acre, visit NewLeafSym.com/2022. That's NewLeaf, S-Y-M.com/2022. Now here's Jerry Hatfield again, talking about how many inches of water per hour is a good infiltration rate.
Jerry Hatfield:
I'm going to talk about Lorne now because I was having a conversation with Rick Clark out of Indiana about three or four weeks ago. Rick and I were talking about his operations and the things he's made and changes he's seen in soil and everything. He said, "Well, our infiltration rates on our farm, we measured them this late fall and they were at 12 inches hour on our fields." Well, I happened to be talking to Lorne about three or four days later because he and I were on a panel together and we were prepping for it. I said, "So Lorne, Rick was telling me his infiltration rates are about 12 inches around." Lorne says, "That's nothing" because Lorne says his infiltration rates that they just measured were 20 inches per hour. Yeah.
Jerry Hatfield:
You think about this, in terms of 20 inches per hour, we can handle just about any storm that's out there. So now I've come to the conclusion that if we can get people interested in soil health, we won't be bragging about yields. We'll be bagging about infiltration rates that you get on your soil out there. So we'll just have to come up with some rules about how it's measured and everything. But I think it's a pretty good metric to say 20 inches per hour in terms of infiltration is a phenomenal rate. 12 inches per hour is a phenomenal rate. Four inches per hour is a pretty good rate as well.
Jerry Hatfield:
But you think about these dynamics that are going on and how we've changed our soil and the capacity that we have to put things out there. You think about this rescue cover that's out there. There are three pieces of that are going on. First, that residue protects it against raindrop energy. So it allows that infiltration rate to continue. We reduce soil water evaporation. We don't often think about that, but that residue layer prevents that water from evaporating back to the atmosphere. So we can make use of it as well.
Jerry Hatfield:
Then the third piece we found when we dig in that soil underneath of that, is that those roots of that crop are very near this surface. So we can take advantage of light rainfalls. That half inch rainfall doesn't have to penetrate very far, so the root intercepts it. So we see these different dynamics that are going on as well. This occurs the first year. As soon as you have that residue layer out there, you see all these impacts. So it's not something we have to wait on.
Jerry Hatfield:
So the impact of Wayne's data is that we began to see as we changed the system and we analyzed his yield monitored data by soil pipe within the 10 fields. So it took us a long time to analyze that data. But what we found is that as we were improving organic matter, we were changing the yield distributions in that. We took all the low yielding spots of each soil type out. So what we were doing is basically taking all those low yielding parts of the field out, making it more profitable, making it more advantageous in terms of the inputs that we're using and everything else, and we were getting tighter and tighter [inaudible 00:26:14]. Plus, there's less variation among the years. So across those 10 fields, we started tightening down around all that. So we were making it more resilient. We're taking and making it more profitable.
Jerry Hatfield:
The other piece that we saw in this aspect, because I went back and looked at Mitchell County, because here's your tribute for the night. The top two insurance claims across the Midwest are excessive moisture and drought. That accounts for almost 60% of the crop insurance claims. Both of those can be handled by improving the soil. You take care of the excessive moisture part when you take care of the drought part. So you look at all this in terms of the debt. I've been pushing RMA to do what you asked [inaudible 00:27:03] is that if you're in conservation practices, you're less risky and you don't have reduction in premium. I think we're pretty close to being able to get the actual RMA to do that. I discovered one truth about the RMA and any insurance company, is you've been given an actuarial table that doesn't insure anything.
Jerry Hatfield:
They just need to know the potential for profit and loss and risk from their perspective. But what we found in looking at Mitchell County was that yields are negatively correlated with April and May rainfall. The more rain in April and May, the lower the average county yield. We delayed planning, we got all the stress going on, and it's pretty remarkable because then we ran it across the Midwest, and we see the same thing. These wet springs are costing this yield because a lot of different aspects are out there. But where you begin to see this, and we looked at Wayne's data over the past five years, is that that correlation no longer exists because with the cover crops and the traffic utility he has, he's able to find that plot and see all these different aspects that are going on.
Jerry Hatfield:
Yield positive to the correlation relies on September rainfall. The more rain in July and September, the higher the average county yielded. That's our highest water use period that's out there. We need the water and everybody knows this. There's nothing better than a good office rainfall. We don't use the word "million dollar rain" for nothing because that's really where it pays, because that's the highest water use period. It's the lowest precipitation period that we have. It's the most variable period that we have, and we're relying on what's stored in the soil water. So we see all this aspect. We see an alleviation among years and a lot of these different pieces.
Jerry Hatfield:
So what we see as yield stability across yields. We see less variation among years. We see increased water use efficiency. We come back and looked at this data, in terms of water use efficiency, you've increased water use efficiency on that farm by about 40% to 50% on corn and soybeans, both. So we're making better use of every drop water that falls on that crop as well. So we broke that correlation.
Jerry Hatfield:
But here's our opportunities that we need to be always thinking about, is that we need to change our management systems to increase water storage with tank [inaudible 00:29:33] and production. Production is really related to how much water we put through that crop. We can increase resilience on our cropping systems to weather variations. We see a lot of this as we go on. You see a much tighter distribution around that long term mean in everything, and looking at this.
Jerry Hatfield:
Long term no-till, as I've looked at this, your increase in yields is basically about 20, 20% higher than the average county trajectory on yields because you're taking and making advantage of this aspect of water that's out. You can increase the production of water quality at the same time because you're making more efficient use of the nutrients and making more efficient use of all this, not only run off in all of this. Wayne has not changed nitrogen rates throughout that whole period. So his nitrogen efficiency has gone up as well here.
Jerry Hatfield:
Some strip-till observations because I've spent a lot of time on strip-till. Corn soybean yields have the highest yield that we've looked at across these systems. They have the lowest variation of years. We ran an experiment across five locations in the state of Iowa with strip-till for three years, finding that's the aspect. It's really due to early season [inaudible 00:30:51]. I really like strip-till for the fact that everything emerges at the same time. You can do emergence counts in one day, good into conventional tillage. Sometimes we're doing emergence count for five to six days as they each come up individually.
Jerry Hatfield:
You get deeper root growth early in the season. We've measured that as well. It's the zone where the most effective water and gas exchange is going on. The aspect that we don't talk about enough is the oxygen content. We're hitting that oxygen down. That's where the vigor is coming from in terms of this. So we see more a uniform plant production across years.
Jerry Hatfield:
But here's our challenge. Well, your challenge. My job is to deliver the challenge and run away. We need to understand the linkage between management practices and genetics [inaudible 00:31:44]. I think we need to really grow down and look at these interactions. Where do we see some of those? How many people were surprised at the corn yields that we got this year? A lot of this genetics, a lot of this timing of events and everything else. We need to be starting to look at even more in conducting on-farm experimentation.
Jerry Hatfield:
There's an international group that I belong to called On-Farm Experimentation, OFE, and really spends a lot of time thinking about how we conduct on-farm experiments more effectively. The leaders in this are not the United States. They are in Europe and Australia, and a lot of these different pieces that are going on. So it's a pretty fascinating conversation to have. It's also a bugger to do a Zoom call around the globe in terms of this, in these dynamics as well.
Jerry Hatfield:
The other piece is that we need to start thinking about these multiple inputs that include all of our ecosystem services. We think about production, but we don't think about environmental quality and profitability as closely as we should at times. We're going to have to start thinking in a different aspect. So here's the reality. I came up with a diagram that nobody could take apart because what this is, some people look at that and say, "Well, that's a Mickey Mouse diagram." But it really has got the four pieces of ecosystem services.
Jerry Hatfield:
Secretary Nag talked about the fact that people are now looking and paying for ecosystem services, and coming down and that's as controversial as carbon markets right now. But we think about provisioning in that upper quadrant. That's basically what we produce. That's how we've often thought about agriculture. But we've got the other piece of this in terms of the greenhouse gases and water quality. I really believe we were close to getting this.
Jerry Hatfield:
There's a very exciting thing that's happening on wall street these days. There's now groups that are forming what they call natural resource asset companies. They're looking at how they're thinking about putting a value on ecosystem and services. Their estimated economic impact last week was in excess of four trillion dollars. Don't tell me that there won't be money in this because the groups that are thinking about that have some very deep pockets. So we're trying to figure out how to take advantage of that.
Jerry Hatfield:
The other piece of this is supporting. That's basically the pollinator habitat and trying to figure out how can we get pollinator habitat paid for as part of the ecosystem service and value that? Because customers are working on that piece. Then the cultural. How do you really view that landscape from a different perspective? Water quality, the societal benefits, and everything else.
Michaela Paukner:
At this point of his presentation, Hatfield took questions from the audience. The first question was if there have been experiments about how changing carbon levels in the atmosphere are affecting crops.
Jerry Hatfield:
Oh, yeah. There have been tons of experiments on raising carbon in the atmosphere. It works really well on soybeans. People have run carbon levels. In fact, we've even run some of our own up to about 700-800 parts per million. That's where they estimate it might be by 2100. But you and I aren't going to care about that. But you know that you get a doubling of plant growth in this aspect, not so much on corn.
Jerry Hatfield:
I think the other piece with the wildfires was probably much more of a diffuse light. It dense penetrates through the canopy differently than does direct light in all of this. A lot of these different pieces, and I haven't analyzed all the phenomena going on this year in terms of why we got some of the yields that we got. I think some of it's a testimony to the genetics we have. They're getting a lot more resilient.
Jerry Hatfield:
If you look at all these different pieces, I think that there are some aspects of crops being able to withstand stress a lot differently than they did before. It's a phenomenal piece of this. I think it is a testimony to all the different things that are going on. Environments is part of this. We didn't suffer from an abundance of rainfall this year, but we did have some timely rains at times.
Michaela Paukner:
To follow up, the audience asked how lowering atmospheric carbon dioxide would impact yields.
Jerry Hatfield:
We're at 400 parts per million right now, 410, something in that area. If we can take carbon dioxide levels down, I think the bigger pieces will be if we change nitrous oxide, we change some of the dust dynamics in all of this. I don't think we're going to reduce carbon levels enough that it's going to impact productivity because corn saturates out of 290 parts per million. Because we've seen that as we run experiments. We're never going to lower the levels right now to that extent anyway. So I wouldn't worry about corn production. Bean production will be plenty high enough right now that we won't see an impact, at least in the near future.
Michaela Paukner:
Finally, how do cover crops impact soil carbon?
Jerry Hatfield:
So we put the cover crops into that. We see another bump going on. You look at some of the work that Gabe Brown has done in North Dakota, South Dakota is that when he added the mixtures of cover crops, he really took his organic matter levels up.
Speaker 4:
Oh, even more?
Jerry Hatfield:
Even more. Think about cover crops analogous to a retirement account, continually putting carbon into the soil without reducing tillage, you're not taking it out. You're going to diversify your portfolio, where you just start doing some of the mixtures and everything else with diversity. You don't pay much attention to it. That's what my financial advisor says. Don't look at it every day.
Jerry Hatfield:
But we did see an increase and we see, and in fact, here's the story from 2021. Wayne called me as he finished harvesting his one field because he has one field that has a lot of sandy spots in it, really poor areas and everything else. He called me and he says, "We've been talking about all the variation and reduction of variations." He says, "I couldn't even find those sandy spots this fall." It was running 220, 230 across the whole field. So he said, "This is really beginning to fill in where we think it's going and everything."
Jerry Hatfield:
So that was a testimony. I haven't seen the yield market data on it yet, but visual observation.
Speaker 4:
Did he have just rye or did he have-
Jerry Hatfield:
Yeah, he's still just running rye.
Speaker 4:
Okay.
Jerry Hatfield:
I haven't got him to diversify yet.
Michaela Paukner:
Thanks to Jerry Hatfield and the Southfork Watershed Alliance for today's conversation. Let me know what you thought about this episode by emailing me at mpaukner@lessitermedia.com or calling me at 262-777-2441. If you're looking for more podcasts about strip-till, visit striptillfarmer.com/podcast, or check out our episode library wherever you get your podcast. Finally, many thanks to Terrasym by NewLeaf Symbiotics for helping to make this Strip-till Podcast series possible. From all of us here at Strip-Till Farmer, I'm Michaela Paukner. Thanks for listening.
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