And that's kind of what agriculture is focused on, is that we kill everything else except
for the one plant that we got there.
And these farmers that start to get into soil health, they start to realize, well, it's
not about death, it's about life, and it's about building this ecosystem, and that soil
is alive, and it's not just a medium that we top in some chemistry to, and then watch
a plant grow and harvest it, that this whole system is built on a living ecosystem.
And those farmers get really excited when they start to realize that they're part of
this life.
Welcome to the 352nd installment of Ear to the Ground, the Land Stewardship Project's
podcast on family farming, regenerative agriculture, community food systems, and local democracy.
I'm Brian DeVore, editor of the Land Stewardship Letter.
No doubt about it, bringing soil back to life is the bedrock of regenerative farming.
All well and good, but sometimes when I'm attending a workshop or field day and the
folks start talking about building life in the soil, I'm not so sure if I always understand
just exactly what that means.
It can be especially frustrating when soil scientists start talking about microbes, microinvertebrates,
macroinvertebrates, nematodes, bacteria, and mycorrhizal fungi in a way that it's assumed
we all read the same textbook and looked through the same electron microscope as they did.
It doesn't help that I got a C when I took a soils class in college, and that was a bit
of a gift.
If the regenerative ag movement is to become more mainstream, it's critical that farmers
have ways to assess the life in their soil without always relying on complex testing
systems that only someone with a PhD can decipher.
That's why what someone like Stephanie McLean does is so invaluable.
Stephanie is a state soil health specialist for the Minnesota office of the USDA's Natural
Resources Conservation Service.
Before working in the Gopher State, Stephanie focused on soil health for the NRCS in Indiana.
This summer, I had the opportunity to see her present at two field days.
In both cases, she provided farmers in-depth and yet easily accessible descriptions of
what to look for when trying to determine if they are indeed building soil that's
full of life, or are instead undercutting its ability to be productive and resilient
in the long term.
Stephanie shared some basic monitoring techniques that can be done with a shovel, some water,
and a few red solo cups.
She also emphasized that we should be looking for life not just underground, but above ground
as well.
After a presentation she gave at a southwestern Minnesota crop farm owned and operated by
Jerry and Nancy Ackerman, Stephanie chatted with me about how to go about looking for
signs of life in a crop field.
She warned, gaining knowledge about a farm's ecosystem can significantly alter how you
approach managing it.
As Stephanie makes clear, whether it's microbes beneath our feet or insects buzzing above the
surface, once you start looking for life, you begin seeking ways to prevent death.
There are so many things to get excited about when we think about life in the soil.
Even when we talk about the definition of soil health, you know, the last part of that
definition talks about a living, breathing ecosystem, and that ecosystem is built on
all of those living, breathing organisms that are thriving or hopefully thriving in our
soil.
So some of the biggest things that I like to look for if I'm going to go out into a
field and dig a hole and start talking to farmers about what I see, first thing that
I really like to talk about are earthworms.
Just kind of looking for those earthworms and identifying that they're there or whether
they're not there.
I'm always so interested by the fact that you can walk out into a field and say to people,
do you see the earthworms here?
And often they just look around at the field and they say, I don't see any earthworms.
And the whole surface of that field can be littered with earthworm middens, right?
All those tiny little mounds of residue that they've pulled over the caps of their tunnels
to protect that earthworm channel as it goes down into the soil.
So those middens are everywhere.
So finding those first right away and just identifying these earthworms are here and
that part of what they're doing as they pull that residue over that hole is then they're
pulling residue down deep into that soil.
And then as they're skimming the bacteria off the surface of that residue to consume
that bacteria, they're then also redepositing that bacteria in other places of the soil.
So not only are they moving residue around and providing that tillage in terms of making
these macro pores and those channels in the soil, but they're also putting bacteria throughout
the soil profile.
So they just play such an important role.
And I look at them as like those keystone or those capstone species, like, oh, we have
earthworms here.
This is amazing, you know, especially like that first field day where we met Brian.
That field is a really sandy field.
So we don't see a lot of earthworms that like to live around in sandy soils because it just
doesn't feel good on their skin on the outside to have that grainy texture.
So you know when you see earthworms in more sandier soils that you're starting to see
life and function come back.
So that's the first thing that I like to look for.
But the other thing that I like to look for sometimes isn't as much about the organisms
themselves, but what the organisms are doing.
Lots of times I like to look in the soil for what the aggregates in the soil look like.
And when we look in that soil, to try to look for those aggregates is another thing that
I like to do.
And when I talk about a soil aggregate, we're really hitting on, you know, that it's not
just sand and silt and clay, those mineral particles, but it's all the life that comes
together to help bind and bond the sand, silt, and clay together with organic matter and
plant roots.
And it's the fungal hyphae and the bacteria all working together to create this amazing
thing that we call an aggregate that when we have high functioning soil and we have
life in our system, we see aggregate formation occurring.
In highly tilled soils or in soils devoid of life, we don't see the aggregates like
we do in high functioning healthy soils.
And so I really like to look for those things because that indicates to me that there's
a population in the soil of bacteria and fungi that their main work as workers in our soil
is to coat those aggregates with biological glues so that they stay water stable, so that
when it rains they hold together and they maintain those pore spaces and everything
like that.
And so that's one of the other things I like to look for a lot is worms and aggregates.
But there's other things you can look for as well.
The other thing I like to look for besides worms if you don't always see them is I love
looking for earthworm eggs.
A lot of people don't know what an earthworm egg looks like.
So finding these tiny little cocoons is what they're called.
And they almost kind of look like a tiny little white bean and they're slightly squishy.
And to see an earthworm be born out of those cocoons is kind of an amazing thing.
So those are other things I look for.
Going back a little bit to the glues, is that the glomulin that people talk about?
So glomulin is one of the main things that we find that's coating those aggregates and
other things like that.
But glomulin isn't the only thing.
One of the things I like people to think about is do we ever see a dry earthworm in the soil?
And we don't, right?
If we see a dry earthworm, that's a dead earthworm.
So earthworms constantly are pumping mucus out of their skin as well.
Like when you get an earthworm out of a field, lots of times they're coated in mucus and
the soil where they were sitting is full of mucus as well.
And so those things that they're putting out of their skin as well is helping to build
aggregates.
So they're coating those soil particles and helping to keep them stable.
And those earthworm channels, they almost are then kind of maintained because the earthworm
has burrowed into the soil and created that channel.
They've lined that channel with a little bit of that mucus from their skin.
Then they then lined that channel again with castings, worm poop, that they've lined that
worm channel with.
And so all of a sudden we have this macro pore that's maintained so that when we have
excessive rainfall events and our soil pores start to get saturated, earthworm channels
play a really important role for a very rapid air and water exchange so water can go in
those channels really quickly.
And then as that water soaks in, it can also pull oxygen back into the soil really quickly.
So earthworms play a role in building aggregates as well.
But it's mostly our bacteria and our fungi that are doing that.
And one of the things I always like to think about when we talk about those aggregates
is that bacteria and that fungi, they're working to build a stable home.
So those glues are keeping those aggregates stable.
And that's not just benefiting infiltration and plant rooting depth and many of the other
things that we talk about, but it also is sustaining their habitat.
If their habitat is loose soil and they're constantly trying to coat glues around it
and it keeps getting tilled over and over again, that home becomes something that's
not able to be maintained or it takes more work than they have energy to build that home.
So they're constantly coating those soils with glue because they're building a home
for them to thrive and then continue to do their jobs, which in many cases are continuing
to recoat the soil because water stable aggregates, those glues on the surface of those aggregates
only last for maybe a month at the most because it's a carbon source.
So as a carbon source, that becomes a food source for some other microbe.
And so those organisms that are coating those aggregates with glues are doing this all the
time.
Building an aggregate is not a one and done thing.
It's a lifelong process of continually maintaining aggregates.
It's a continuum.
Yep, exactly.
So building those aggregates and then other things that microbes do in the soil, which
is cycling nutrients, right?
Helping to break down residues, saprophytic fungi and other organisms like that to help
break down or simplify those residues so they can release plant available nutrients.
All of these functions that occur in the soil are microbially driven processes.
And so having those organisms in there functioning at a high level makes that whole process become
more efficient.
I was struck by, you had talked about this at the field day we were at a couple weeks
ago how this year in particular, this has been a big issue with all the heavy rains
we've been getting, how much crusting we've been getting.
And if you can build that good aggregate structure, because what is it, the pound force of poundage
that a raindrop can have, it's pretty heavy duty.
And it really can lead to crusting.
And then it kind of builds on itself the more it crusts, the more it just runs off and it
doesn't soak in.
I couldn't agree with you more.
So I've been in fields up and down Minnesota this year and even into Iowa a little ways.
They actually let me go into Iowa for some field days.
And I'll be heading over to South Dakota next week for a few other field days as well.
And every field that I dig in, I keep finding that surface layer maybe an inch, maybe a
little bit deeper.
And it's just this hard packed area.
And right above that, it's just very crusted.
And even in some of our highest functioning soils, we were running into having this slight
crust at the surface because of when the rain was coming this spring, we had a lot of bare
soils or maybe we did have some cover on there, but maybe we got planted and then some of
our residues broke down.
And so we just had soils that were really sensitive at a time of year this spring and
they just got pounded with rains.
And then we kind of are seeing an increased crusting because of that.
It is something to be concerned about, right?
That crusting.
But I also realize when I go into these high functioning systems, these soil health systems
where we have a lot of active soil biology, that this snapshot in time where we might
see some crusted soil there, I know that that farmer also sees it as well.
And part of the thing that that farmer is thinking about is how can I get cover back
on that soil to protect that surface and get that crust to go away and get the biology
to come back up to the surface and re-coat those soil particles with glues and re-aggregate
that soil.
And even, I've even done some slump assessments where we compare aggregates from one field
to the next and even in some fields that looked, had a look of crusting at the surface, but
it came from a soil health system.
We put them in the water and we did the slump assessment and they still held together well.
Better than again a field of same soil type that was in a full width tillage that was
highly crusted.
So we do see those things because again when we look at soil health and soil function,
we're always looking at a snapshot in time and that snapshot in time is extremely influenced
by the local conditions that's occurring right there at that time frame or like the extreme
rainfall events that we had this spring.
And when we have those driving rains like you said, they can be hitting the soil surface,
those raindrops at up to 20 miles an hour.
And so that can create surface compaction and nobody can deny that.
And even in highly functioning soils, we can have some of that happen.
But the important thing is that we have that soil biology there.
We have that resiliency so that when the time is right, when the conditions are there, when
we get that cover back on that area, on that soil, that those organisms can go to work
to restore that function, to rebuild those aggregates.
And that's the amazing thing about the resiliency of these systems is that we might have a year
or a part of a season where something happens and it has a negative impact, but that system
is able to recover.
And we see that resiliency time and time again.
And that resiliency is the exciting part of soil health, right?
That it's like the ability of soils to recover and continue to function gives us hope that
we can rebuild all soils and restore function on every soil out there.
The first time I was kind of introduced to this idea of soil glues and aggregate structure,
it was at a field day in North Dakota, and they were talking about this idea of these
glues that sometimes you can have erosion that's not the classic hitting the surface
and running off of erosion, but sometimes soil can kind of almost erode from inside
a little bit.
Can you think...
I find that fascinating and I think that's something people don't think about at all,
what damage that can do and how that can happen.
When I think about that, like you said, we have wind erosion, we have water erosion,
and often those times...
This might be my little bit of a soap box here, but we'll go back into the story, the
thing that you're asking about.
So often those things about erosion, we talk about those as the big problems that we have,
these wind erosion and this water erosion.
But I always like to argue just a little bit that those are just the visual cues of other
problems that we have, which is a lack of infiltration.
So if we don't have infiltration, we have erosion.
So is erosion the problem or is the lack of infiltration the problem?
And the reason why we don't have infiltration is because we don't have water stable aggregates.
So if we take the time to kind of almost peel that onion back a little bit and really think
about what is our root cause problem on some of these landscapes, problem isn't erosion.
Erosion is the result of other problems, which is the inability of a soil to function and
infiltrate that water.
I mean, seriously, in high functioning systems, we want that rain drop to soak in where it
lands.
If it has to travel someplace to go soak into the soil, it's probably taking soil with it.
It's probably taking other things with it.
Ideally, we want that water to soak in where it lands.
And so if it can't soak in where it lands, the result is, again, weakened aggregates and
then that water getting carried off with, or that soil getting carried off with the
water or then that system dries and we have that powder at the surface and it gets blown
away.
When we think about other forms of erosion that we have out there, that thing that you
were talking about in North Dakota, I like to think about it in terms of vertical erosion.
So when we have that rain drop impact right on the surface of our soil, if that water
can't soak in, it's sitting at the surface of our field.
And so our sand, silt, and clay particles, if we don't have aggregates, we just have
individual grains, right?
And so those sand, silt, and clay particles will get hit by that rain drop impact at 20
miles an hour and then the sands and the silts will go flying.
And then wherever those sands or those silts kind of land, they land somewhere else in
the field.
Sometimes they say those sands can even fly up to feet away from where that rain drop
impact is.
And wherever they land, they then go into solution and then they start to soak into
the water or soak into the soil surface with the water and start to plug up the pores.
And so I think of it as vertical erosion.
If those soil particles, especially if we don't have a hill slope, we have a field that's
maybe a little bit more level, that water doesn't run off right away.
It just sits there in ponds on the surface of our field.
And then so those pores that are at the surface of our field, the silt particles, even the
clay particles will start to kind of go into those pores and plug them up and then restrict
infiltration even more.
And we're seeing that to be a really big problem, right?
That vertical erosion, that we're not having runoff, we're not seeing anything happen like
that, but it's eroding the soil right where it sits and plugging up those pores, restricting
infiltration.
And I think that's a bigger problem than anyone ever thinks about is vertical erosion.
I guess that explains a little bit why no-till definitely is going to help because you're
protecting that surface, but you can see erosion sometimes in no-till fields because it doesn't
have that soil life there maybe if they're not integrating cover crops into that system.
Absolutely.
And so when we start talking about practices, I think that each of these practices that
we talk about are really, really important, but the synergy of building a system comes
from adding a lot more practices together.
So looking at minimizing that disturbance or taking out disturbance altogether by doing
a no-till practice, we're eliminating disturbance.
So we're not stirring those aggregates every time and we're not breaking them down and
weakening them and taking away soil cover.
We're taking out that disturbance, but we're not adding any plant roots back into that
soil.
And when you start to add things like maybe rotational diversity with different types
of crops out there, but also adding cover crops, when we have more plants out there,
we just are inherently putting more carbon into the soil by having those root exodus
come from the out of the plants roots to feed those microbes.
And if we're feeding those microbes more, then they're able to work for longer times
of the year and do their work, like we said earlier, for coating aggregates or breaking
down residues or other things like that.
They need to have a constant food source and those plant roots are where they get their
primary food source from, is that carbon exuded from those plant roots.
So the more that we can put those plant roots in there, the better off we'll see that system
go.
So individual practices are really, really important, but building that system is where
we start to see that synergy really take off.
Synergy is so key because it doesn't do you any good to know all this unless you can know
what you're looking for.
So you go out, you dig up a spade full of soil.
Obviously you're looking for earthworms.
What else are you looking for that's showing you that you're on the right track here as
far as building that soil life?
The aggregates, I like to look for aggregates.
The other thing that I really like to look for is I like to look for different parts
of soil structures.
So again, that aggregated soil surface, but if we can dig out like a little shovel pit
from our soil, maybe 12 to 12 inches is good.
I was going to say 12 to 15, but let's be honest, if we're sticking a shovel in the
soil, we probably aren't going much deeper than 12 inches.
And if we can dig that out, I like to look for horizontal planes.
So that would be like evidence of compaction layers.
So those horizontal planes in nature, you don't see straight lines in the soil.
Typically soil horizons change and they're kind of wavy horizons or other things like
that.
So if you dig some soil out and you kind of gently bang that shovel on the ground a little
bit to get it to fracture naturally, and you see a paper straight line that's going horizontally,
that indicates to me that that's probably a tillage pass or a compaction layer from
repeated tillage at the same depth over and over and over.
And so that's something that I look for.
We will see that horizontal plane, that historical tillage layer or evidence of tillage, even
years after someone has stopped tilling.
And by years, and I emphasize years, even 10 or 15 years, you can still see that.
But what I like to see, especially in these soil health systems, is if we see that horizontal
fracture, I like to open it up and look at the faces of that horizontal plane.
How many holes do we see in it?
How many earthworm holes?
How many bug holes?
What are the plant roots doing?
Are they growing between that horizontal plane and unable to push down to the next layer
of soil?
Or are they actually pushing through?
Because that indicates to me that is that compaction root restricting or not?
And slowly over time, what I like to see is that our soil life, our insects and our other
organisms and our plant roots are degrading those compaction layers.
Because once we've created them, they don't ever really go away.
But if we can turn it into Swiss cheese, so to say, so all those holes are punching through
there and they aren't restrictive anymore, then that compaction layer is degrading.
And the life in the soil and the plants and the plant roots are doing that.
To switch gears a little bit, today you gave a really nice presentation on looking at life
above that soil.
And people, again, may not make that connection.
It may not be intuitive to them to make the connection to insect life in a field or in
an area where the soil is being built and connection to soil health.
But you made it clear that that's a really important piece.
And one thing that I thought was really striking is you said that often when people use the
word insects, they use pests in the same sentence.
That's not necessarily true.
In fact, it's actually pretty surprising kind of the ratio of beneficial insects to harmful
insects in a field.
And a lot of this is based on a lot of the work.
And I've talked to Jonathan Lundgren about this too, the agroecologist out of South Dakota.
He talks about this a lot.
And I think it's a really important message about the role insects can play in this whole,
not just building soil health, but the regenerative ag, kind of sustainable ag, whatever you want
to call it, ecosystem out there a little bit.
Absolutely.
And having conversations with Jonathan Lundgren is probably the best person to talk to about
these things.
Some of the things that I kind of talked about at this field day today are things that I've
heard Jonathan say.
And I've not heard anybody else say these things.
And I keep thinking, well, somebody else has to say these things.
And so I usually try to say them, but I always make sure to reference appropriately.
This is what Jonathan Lundgren said, because I myself have not done the research that he's
done and the time in the trenches of looking at these things.
But when he says things like, for every one pest that you have out in a field, there's
1,700 beneficial or insects of no consequence to your crop out there, that's mind-boggling.
We spend so much time focused on that one pest, right?
That one pest, whereas there's so many other things out there.
And if we can work to improve or cultivate the more beneficials out there and have more,
even, again, insects that don't cause any negative consequence to the crop, having those
insects out in the field, maybe we can push out the pest.
Maybe there doesn't need to be a space for the pest.
But every time we go out into a field and we treat it on a broad basis with insecticides
or treatments before we've reached economic thresholds, we're not just killing that one
pest, we're killing all of those other beneficials or other insects that live out there.
And what we know is that those pest species, they're pests for many reasons, right?
They like to eat our crop, but they also live in a way that makes them pests.
They reproduce very quickly.
They have multiple generations within the same year.
They have many, many, many young.
And so they can recover quickly from disturbances or other things like that.
Whereas our beneficials are ground beetles and other insects like that that are predators
that eat soft-bodied larva insects that are some of our pests.
Some of those insects, ground beetles, will maybe have five to 10 eggs a year is what
they lay.
And so if we wipe out a population of ground beetles because of a management system, right,
heavy duty tillage, we don't have cover for them, and then we're using, prophylactically
using insecticides, we're going to wipe out that population.
And it's going to take them years to recover to the levels where they can actually have
an impact on pest populations.
And so it's just really something to think a lot about that every time we go out there
and we do those treatments, it's not just taking care of the pest.
It's eliminating all of those others.
And the first thing to come back is the pest again.
And so in these high, in these systems where we're using a lot of these insecticides prophylactically,
that starts to be the only thing we see out there.
So that's a big concern.
Insects play a huge role.
Some of the insects that we don't think anything about are mites in the soil, these tiny little
red mites in the soil and spiders and other things like that.
Many of them are predators, but the other thing that they do is they're shredders.
So they shred up residue.
So they like to size residue because the smaller the residue pieces are, the more bacteria
gets onto that residue to start to simplify the carbons and decompose that residue.
And then those mites and those spiders, they eat the bacteria.
So they're predators, but they're consuming bacteria.
So this food web is thick with the microbes that we talked about earlier, bacteria and
fungi, but also the insects and the role that they play in breaking down those residues
and then being food for something else.
And that insect diversity and population numbers are something that we need to pay a lot more
attention to.
A lot of our insects need cover and food and a place to live.
And so if we can provide that in our fields and in our systems, we're going to see those
populations thrive.
And so when we think about having soil cover here at Jerry's Farm, one of the practices
that he has really worked to get really good at on the operation is interseeding his corn
into some type of a cover crop mix.
And having that cover between the rows of a field along the surface of the soil plays
a huge role in allowing those insects to come in there and thrive and do their work and
other things like that.
So that's really important, that cover.
And then we think about, again, having that cover there.
Sometimes that cover can provide food sources.
Plants like buckwheat have nectar areas on the sides of their plants.
Not only can insects get nectar from the flower of a buckwheat plant, but they can also get
nectar from the leaf tips.
Not the leaf tips, but parts of the plants.
They actually exude out nectar out of those every morning to feed beneficials.
And I think one of the things I mentioned is that the protein content of the pollen
of a buckwheat plant is able to sustain ground beetles when they don't have pests to eat.
And so it's really interesting that a lot of these plants out there in this diversity
allows these ecosystems to thrive so that they can continue to grow and do their thing.
Even if there's not a pest to eat, they can be there so that when a pest shows up, they're
ready.
So that cover plays a big role.
Rotation and crop diversity plays a big role as well because the biggest thing that we've
learned from watching our pests is that they adapt to our rotation.
And so if we have a rotation that's drawn out or long enough or diverse enough, pests
can never settle into that.
But as long as we have locations along in a farm and an area where different beneficials
can go to, if they're in a field one year and then the next year it plants to a crop
and they're like, well, this doesn't provide me the resources that I need, to be able to
have a location nearby that they can go to that has the resources they need allows that
population just to continue to thrive.
Again, those practices really play together to create that synergy of the system.
And kind of going up the food chain, one of the sponsors of this field day was Pheasants
Forever.
And now I understand why.
Part of it is he's set aside some habitat specifically for wildlife.
But on the rest of his farm, that's working lands conservation, that's a working part
of his farm.
Having those beneficial insects out there, you had talked about, I think, baby pheasants
are, the chicks are obligate to, they need those insects to survive.
And there's so many grassland bird species that are the same way, bluebirds, I mean,
you name it.
Yep.
Baby pheasants, I don't think that's the correct term for them.
What is it?
A brood of pheasants.
That brood is obligate insectivores, which means that they must have insects to live
and survive.
And so if they are in a field that's devoid of insects, there's no habitat there for
them.
And as we look across the upper Midwest, it's unfortunate but true that we don't have a
lot of other habitat besides corn and soybean fields.
And we're working really hard.
There's many people out there that are doing a great job to build up and restore that habitat.
But we need to stop thinking about corn and soybeans as a location of a non-habitat, right?
We need to think about those as how can we create habitat in those areas and having that
cover out there, increasing those insect populations so those birds can go through there and be
protected from predators, from having extra cover in them.
But then also having a food source that's readily available for those young chicks as
they're growing and developing.
It makes a big difference on the strength of that bird population.
And I think if you talk to Jerry later, he'll talk about just what he sees in his farm.
And who knows if someone went out and measured it, if they'd say, well, we don't see a difference
if we measure fields or whatever, but we know that there's a difference time and time again.
We see more and more birds in fields where there's greater cover out there.
Speaking of measurement, you've been busy.
You did some trapping here.
Yes.
So you described, first of all, the system you used to trap and what you found.
It was kind of the proof is in the pudding a little bit.
This isn't just theoretical.
You did observe some interesting trends there.
Yes.
So what I did is I set up some pitfall traps.
I did not follow any type of like, I didn't set them up in some type of scientific rigor
or anything like that.
So it wasn't like a research-based project.
But often what I find, especially when you're working with farmers and the general public,
is that no one's really interested in doing a big research project.
But if we can anecdotally show by having some rigor about where we establish things and
what we're looking at, that we can show with anecdotal evidence that these things are changing.
And that's what farmers want to hear about.
That's what the general public wants to know.
Are these practices making changes?
And yes, they are.
So what we did at Jerry's farm here today is we set up the pitfall traps.
And we had three different management systems.
So first we were in the CRP.
And then we were in Jerry's cornfield that has the interseeded cover crops.
And then the last field was just a conventional cornfield.
So no cover crops and full-width tillage.
So those were the three systems.
And then at each location, I installed two pitfall traps.
So not just one trap.
I did two in each location.
I did combine them at the end when I collected them.
But I did do two pitfall traps.
And to explain, this is real simple.
You did use red solo cups and buried them up to their mouth there.
And so you don't have to get anything high-tech equipment to do something like this.
No, no.
It was super low-tech.
And if you Google pitfall traps, I'm sure you could find an example of somebody installing
a pitfall trap.
If you get really interested in to do this, the best tool to have, and I don't have one,
but I think I need to get one, is a golf hole cutter.
Because it's the perfect size for making the hole.
And then the solo cup can fit right into that.
So usually I like to do, when I set those solo cups or red solo cups in the garden,
I like to do two cups and get it in there so that you can do repeated sampling over
time.
So you can take the one solo cup out, put a new one in, and then you have a cup with
what you've collected and put a date on it.
But what we did on these three fields is we installed the solo cups and we did that on
Monday afternoon.
And then this morning I collected them.
And so this morning is, this is Wednesday.
Yes.
So 36 hours or something like that.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking.
About a day and a half or something like that they were in there.
And then I just combined, I took the two samples from each treatment and I put them in a Tupperware
container and then we looked at them.
And what we saw is that in our conventional system, we had some insects out there.
We had some ground beetles and a couple crickets and maybe a spider or something like that.
But when we compare that to Jerry's field, which I called the soil health system, the
numbers were dramatically greater, like statistically greater, I would say, if we did some research
on it, but much, much greater in terms of what was out there in terms of numbers.
So a lot of ground beetles, like the first one, the conventionally tilled field, I think
it was maybe five or six.
And then into the soil health system, we are probably close to 20 beetles.
But then we also saw some other things there too.
We saw crickets just like the other one.
But the other thing that I saw in Jerry's field was I saw a lot of roly-polies or isopods.
So those are decomposers.
And so they play a really important role in helping to shred residues and decompose them
and simplify those carbons and other nutrients to make them plant available.
So I saw roly-polies and a few other things.
I'm not good at identifying them beyond what I can actually see.
And then in the CRP, the amount of diversity was even greater in that field.
So we saw some ground beetles.
We actually saw some carabid beetles as well.
So they are the beautiful iridescent green color.
Carabid beetles, along with the other ground beetles as well.
But they're known for consuming slugs and other soft bodied insects.
So they're great predators.
Even their larvae that live in the soil are predators of slugs and other insects.
And others, well I suppose a slug isn't an insect.
Slugs and insects that are soft bodied.
Soil critters.
Yes, there we go.
So we saw some carabid beetles like that.
I also saw a parasitic wasp in the CRP.
I saw a couple different types of spiders.
There was a centipede.
There's just a lot more diversity that you saw in that pitfall trap.
And so as we, what's the word that I want to, as you simplify the system, you lose diversity.
And you lose numbers as well.
And so that's one of the things that we were able to just even visually assess by looking
at those is that there was quite a bit of difference between those three sites.
Time and time again we hear farmers talk about the benefits that their system, their synergistic
system has provided them or allowed them to be able to do.
Whether that's taking off seed treatments, not spraying an herbicide pass in the second
half of the season, not spraying for aphids, not doing those things like that.
Those things add up to these farmers.
As we think about the farming population as a whole, are we able to, have we yet gotten
every farmer to think about this in that same way?
And we haven't.
And we just got to keep working on doing that.
I will say when you had kind of laid out what you had collected from each land use and showed
how the difference in insect populations, the farmers were really interested, Jerry
was very interested.
He's very, you could tell this is something he's proud of maybe.
And so I think that's an important starting point for folks to say, oh yeah, this is something
that I can have an impact on.
It's a little bit like soil health.
This is something I can have an impact on on my own piece of ground.
I've worked for NRCS for about 20 years now.
It always tends, there always seems to be something.
What's the next shiny thing that agriculture is working towards or other things like that?
I hope and what I see is that soil health starts to become not just some movement or
some shiny button, but a mainstay in viable production agriculture systems.
So that we're not just talking about it as like, oh well, that's the soil health system
and this is how everybody else farms.
But my hope is that someday when we talk about conventional agriculture, conventional agriculture
means no till and cover crops and crop rotation and those things like that.
That's what I hope.
I think the reason why it sticks around so much is because it's focused on life.
I've always heard Gabe Brown say, before he started doing the things he was doing on his
operation and diversifying and getting into soil health, he got up every day and it was
like, what do I kill today?
And that's kind of what agriculture is focused on is that we kill everything else except
for the one plant that we got there.
And these farmers that start to get into soil health, they start to realize, well, it's
not about death, it's about life and it's about building this ecosystem and that soil
is alive and it's not just a medium that we top in some chemistry to and then watch a
plant grow and harvest it, that this whole system is built on a living ecosystem.
And those farmers get really excited when they start to realize that they're part of
this life.
They're part of building that life, but they're also part of benefiting from that life of
harvesting higher protein grain or regeneratively sourced grains that have higher nutrient content
or nutrient density in them.
So I think that as a movement, I don't think it's going anywhere.
I think that, and it should be here to stay, as we talk about this as systems in agriculture,
that we should be focusing on trying to build everyone into a regenerative, resilient system
because we're going to need a more and more resilient agriculture to continue to successfully
farm in the 21st century.
In Ear to the Ground episode 351, I interviewed Jerry Ackerman about how his use of no-till
and cover cropping systems has helped bring his farm back to life.
To listen to that podcast and for more on building soil health profitably, see the podcast
page for Ear to the Ground episode 352 at landstewardshipproject.org.
If you have comments or suggestions about this podcast, contact Brian DeVore at bdevor
at landstewardshipproject.org or you can call 612-816-9342.
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Thanks for listening.