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In the latest edition of the No-Till Farmer Podcast, brought to you by NewFieldsAg, Jill Clapperton, a world-renowned soil biologist and rhizosphere ecologist, helps farmers better understand what lives — and must thrive — below the soil surface to regenerate and maintain healthy soil structure.

The No-Till Innovator, No-Till Living Legend and 2-time National No-Tillage Conference Presenter of the Year breaks down the characteristics of healthy soil and goes over the crucial steps to creating and sustaining productive soils for improved no-till operations.

         
           

         
           

The No-Till Farmer podcast is brought to you by NewFields Ag.

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Full Transcript

Welcome to the latest edition of the No-Till Farmer Podcast. I'm John Dobberstein, Senior Editor of No-Till Farmer. In the latest edition, brought to you by NewFields Ag, Jill Clapperton, a world-renowned soil biologist and rhizosphere ecologist, helps farmers better understand what lives and must thrive below the soil's surface to regenerate and maintain healthy soil structure. The no-till innovator, no-till living legend and two-time National No-Tillage Conference Presenter of the Year breaks down the characteristics of healthy soil and goes over the crucial steps to creating and sustaining productive soils for improved no-till operations. With that, let's listen in to Jill's discussion.

I should start by saying that I guess you haven't heard from me for a while, because for at least the last four years, I've been in the Boston area. I've been working at, I co-founded a company called Edacious, and I built a big food lab, with the idea being that we would be able to look at how we are producing food and link that back to the nutrition in the food, because intuitively and innately, we all believe that when we have healthy soils, we grow very nutritious food, good food from healthy soils, and healthy people, and a healthy world, so I did that. I built the lab. It's functioning. We have 17 employees. I needed to leave because I needed to get my hands back in the ground. I needed to come to meetings like this, and I needed to get refueled. I wrote my LinkedIn post that I needed to feed my soul and make my heart sing, so thank you all for being here today to help me do that, but without further ado, let's head down the wormhole, shall we?

I thought I'd start with a fun fact, because too many times, I've been in the field, and farmers go to me, "I don't think it's working right. I don't have those dreadlocks that everybody talks about." Thing is that not all plant species actually form rhizosheaths, because that's what the dreadlocks are actually called. Grasses tend to do more of that, but our broadleaves tend not to. You'll see them on corn. Corn forms and warm season species form really beautiful dreadlocks. You notice there that I don't have any, because the whole point was to show you that not all plants actually have them. That's just a fun fact, but soil health is in the hands of all our farmers. Growing the foundation for food and wellness, that's what soil health is really about. We hear a lot about regenerative agriculture, too.

I've been on a quest a little bit to, what exactly is regenerative agriculture? I know that when Gabe Brown first talked about it, he was like, it's this hybrid. You're not really organic and you're not conventional, and you're not this, and you're not that. I also spent some time with Temple Grandin. She said, "It seems to me, Jill, you know a lot about what it's not, so isn't that just okay? You know that regenerative agriculture is not this, and it's not that, and you know soil health is not this and not that, but we all inherently know what it is," but soil health underpins every different system that we use. No matter what we want to call it, it's all about soil health, because if we don't have healthy soil, we've got nothing. That's really what it amounts to. The six core principles of regenerative agriculture are the same that they've always been for soil health, the same that they've been for conservation agriculture.

This is not new, but I'm going to talk about this in this way. We're just going to go through about it. I put the last part in quotes. "It's life." Gail Fuller, a farmer from Severy, Kansas. When I was asking everybody that I knew about, what is regenerative agriculture? He talked a lot about it. He said, "Jill, it's just really life. It's all about life. Life in your soil, your life, the life in your community. It's about life," so let's talk about life. We're going to start first with context because I want you all to be thinking about soil health in the context of your own agroecosystem. Everybody has their own agroecosystem. One size fits no one here, or as Bob Quinn actually told me, "One size fits someone somewhere," but the whole idea here is that every one of you is unique.

There's no pigeonhole. What you do is unique for you. It's unique for your area. It's unique for the equipment you use. It's unique for the soil types that you have and the crops that you grow and the sequence you grow them in. Whether you have integrated livestock or not, it's all about you, but you need to be able to give that pitch in three to five minutes. You need to tell me what you do, how you do it, and why you do it. This is my context. Soil biology integrates the chemical and the physicals and the properties of the soil, because we don't recycle anything unless we have soil biology. Soil biology also integrates the physical properties of the soil. We can't have good soil structure. We can't have water stable aggregates without all the stuff that's leaked out from the bacteria and the fungi and the plant exudates.

Then in the end, we call that soil productivity. Soil productivity, most of you would say you would measure it in yield. I want you to measure it in food quality. I want you to make sure that all your nutrients are going into that food and we're not leaking anything. We don't want leaky systems. We need to use everything you've got and we need to put it all together. Ultimately, that affects our health and the health of our animals, our livestock. When you put something through the ground, you are destroying the infrastructure that everything in the soil has built, including the roots. You're destroying it, and that takes energy to rebuild. It's just like you have a fire. It takes energy to rebuild that. We don't want them to use a whole lot of extra energy in order to rebuild what we've destroyed.

What we want to do is take advantage of everything that they've used, all that beautiful infrastructure and take advantage of it. There are many ways, and I haven't even talked about the robots, because I'm letting Lauren do that. Healthy soil is a habitat, so I want you to think about your soil as a habitat. Think about it as this place where all these things live under your feet and plant roots, too. You're thinking about carbon. A lot of people talking about carbon and whatnot. Roots are what feed the soil, roots. It's all about the roots. The soil organisms that live off the roots, the soil organisms that are fed by the roots, and they create this beautiful soil structure, a continuous soil-pore network. We put a till in the ground and we destroy that network.

You might as well go rip up a map, because that's what you've done. You've destroyed all the tunnels, all the roads, everything that they've created. There's a lot of things, and we're going to go through those things, that can't move without those tunnels. They can't work for you. They can't make your system work if they haven't got the infrastructure. Soil structure is number one characteristic of having a healthy soil because you have to have enough oxygen, you have to get the water in and you have to hold that water. Let's look at this. Now, from some of you who don't know me, I believe that plants can solve most of our problems.

In the tomorrow session, we're going to talk about planting with purpose because, like I said, I believe that plants can solve most of our problems, but you look at these two plants you see up on the screen there. One of them's in a healthy soil, good soil structure, all those lateral roots. All those lateral roots are leaking out lots of good stuff. They're building microbial communities around them. They're building in predator-prey interactions. They're recycling all those nutrients and they're creating better soil structure in the whole as they go. On the other side, that plant is using all its energy to just get what it needs so it can survive. Sure, it's building up the soil as it goes and it's going to help make the soil better, but in the meantime, it's using a lot of resources just to make it through.

That's not what we want because ultimately, we want yield. We want good quality crops, and I'm going to get more nutrients in my crops, too, if my roots can access more of that soil, if more of my soil is a habitat, so they're recycling nutrients in and around my roots. Let's look at. This is the difference in that structure. I want you to be looking for really good structure and thinking about that. My context, soil biology, which I include the plant in there, integrates the chemical and the physical structure of the soil. Healthy soil is well-structured and it doesn't run off. It runs clear water off, as we saw with Jeremy's soil. It goes through to groundwater, and we are not leaking sediments into our waterways. When I'm up in the Northeast and I'm up in Indiana and a number of the places around the Great Lakes, it's not just the nitrates that are in the water and stuff.

It's also the sediment. We carry sediments into our waterways, which is losing our valuable resource as farmers. We're also polluting our waterways, so it's a double whammy. It's a double negative. Not only do I lose my soil, but I pollute everything. Not good. We need to stop the soil erosion. If we can do one thing, let's stop soil erosion. One of the ways we can do that is by reducing the amount of disturbance we do. There's a simple test for this. We saw it in the field, checking the water, whatnot, but you can just recycle your drink bottles. Cut them in half, turn one side upside down, put some soil in and run some water through. Do you have sediment in the bottom or not? Very simple.

Diversity was the next thing on our list, on our six principles. Every different plant leaves these different compounds and they create this microbial soup and all the predator-prey interactions that go with it. We can recycle all sorts of nutrients. We can destroy soil structure. We can create soil structure, and it doesn't take that long to do. What's good for pollinators is also good for soil. I thought I'd throw some onions in here. I work in the Columbia Basin with an organic onion producer. We're growing allicin, which is something that a lot of people put in their pots out on their decks and whatnot. It works great for pollinators. It's a great strip. It's low-growing, and we just don't get any strips on the onions. These are simple things. Not only that, now I have diversity in the field, so if I have every so many strips, we started doing that because of John Lundgren talking about putting pollinator strips in potatoes to try and protect from insects.

Again, there are things that we can use plants for and all those things that are good for looking at insects and for helping with the insects are good for the soil, too. Think of your soil as a habitat and start stewarding because you're stewarding these, guys, and biodiversity. It's not just about biodiversity of plants. Yeah, biodiversity of plants builds biodiversity below ground, too, so all the organisms that are below ground, it stimulates a whole bunch of different ones. All of a sudden, we get biodiversity below ground. What that does is increase your resilience and your resistance. The more services that your soil can provide, the better off you are. Fungi, big nets, all those silk strands that are in the soil, they hold the soil structure together. They make small aggregates into bigger aggregates and the mycorrhizal hyphae, another fungi, actually glue them all together and make it resistant to water. Now we start making soil structure. Actinomycetes, a lot of people have seen this and they go, "Oh, I saw mycorrhizae."

You cannot see mycorrhizal fungi, people. It's not possible. You can on trees. You can see the way the roots, the form of the roots change into little forks, and that's ectomycorrhizae. That's different. This is actinomycetes. Actinomycetes are highly antibiotic. They actually prey on other bacteria and fungi. They're mostly bacteria, but if you have them on a Petri plate, they actually go around consuming bacteria on the plate. They're a great thing. They also, people talk about that smell of soil. That smell of soil is geosmin, not jasmine, but geosmin and linalool and a couple of really other complicated terpenes that give you that beautiful soil smell. The other thing that's really cool about that, when you get that beautiful soil smell and you're handling that soil, it's actually good for you. The bacteria in the actinomyces, that actually produce it, can get into your skin and actually protect you from a number of diseases, not a bad thing.

Good soil has its own individual health benefits. Mycorrhizae can't live without a host. Because they can't live without a host means that they protect their host and they protect their host with all they've got. They bring nutrients in. They bring water in. They build a microbial community around the roots that is very plant growth promoting, and they're actually living within the root. They actually form, they actually weave themselves into the membrane of the plant cells, and they form structures called arbuscules, which are like those trees in there. Then they actually exchange nutrients. They're the first carbon traders. Mycorrhizae are the first carbon traders. They trade photosynthate for minerals and water and disease protection. That's why plants want them, and they're there right from the beginning. Protozoa and nematodes, Elaine Ingham did this work quite a long time ago and showed that their grazing is responsible for 45% of the nitrogen remineralization that goes on in and around the rhizosphere.

We cannot afford not to have these predators. I talk about predator-prey relationships because none of this works without them. If we don't have good soil structure, we cannot have predator-prey relationships. That means we can't recycle anything because we have to think about it like this. The bacteria and the fungi are our primary producers. They're the food. They go in and they use the root exudates. Sure, they exude a lot of really complicated chemicals, et cetera, et cetera, but they are food for all these guys, and these guys recycle them. I remember being in Russ Zinner's soils in Genesee, Idaho. He's like, "I keep fertilizing." He said, "My soils are running out of fertilizer. I'm fertilizing and fertilizing and fertilizing. I don't know why." When I did the microbial biomass and phospholipid fatty acid analysis, it was the highest microbial biomass I think I've ever seen, but he had no predators. That was a soil structural issue.

Once we dealt with a compaction layer happening, seeding a little too early, wet springs and things like that, all of a sudden, the predators came back and we started recycling. Once again, it's not just enough to have no-till. There's all these other practices that go with it that all add to our ability to have good soil health. Collembo are actually insects, and they actually have little eye clusters right here, and they're the little guys that jump away. When you see leaves on the ground and they're eaten out, and all you see is the veins and the infrastructure of the leaf, that's due to Collembo and they jump away. You can see the springtail there. These guys are detritivores along with the mites that I showed you earlier, and they actually eat up your aboveground organic matter and then make it and have that interface and work with the interface in there to recycle the nutrients.

They also eat out holes in the tough residue. If you think about your corn stalks, they eat holes in that that allows fungi and bacteria to get in and mostly fungi to degrade, but in allowing fungi to go in, those Collembo that I showed you and the mites love eating fungi. They love it because fungi actually accumulates nutrients. In accumulating nutrients, they're a really rich food source. They don't turn over like bacteria that can turn over in 18 to 24 hours. They take days to weeks to turn over. The mites and the Collembo love eating it. Wait a minute. Don't diseases also on the leaves and the roots and things like that? These guys love eating that. They don't care that it's a saprophytic fungi. They'll eat disease organisms, too. That's what makes having soil health so important, because now we bring in the disease and we can reduce the amount of disease we have by actually having these guys eat up.

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When no-till first started coming in, I remember a young scientist at the research center, 20 years of no-till at the Lethbridge Research Center already. That was when the Noble blade was actually developed. They were telling me about the earthworms and some of the changes they've seen. Farmers were complaining. They said, "Oh, we have to till. We have to bury the residues because if we don't bury the residues, they don't degrade and no-till will never work." I was working with the pathologists then, and we showed really clearly that that wasn't the case. We didn't have the same disease problems when we had no-till as long as we were doing no-till with crop rotation and doing it well, because the soil biology started to take over and we started to eat up all those diseases and we started to have earthworms burying the leaves and burying the residues, so we started to have decomposition that way.

Goodness knows, if you can even have 300 earthworms per square meter or even per foot, what that means, or three feet, what that means is that you can actually be burying residues really quickly. Enchytraeids are tiny little earthworms, but they're actually earthworms. They're related to earthworms, and they're really important for also concentrating nutrients in and around the roots. Then of course, earthworms. Then that little round thing you see at the bottom there is actually an earthworm cocoon.

Earthworms, we can improve our earthworm populations really easily. One of the best ways to do that is by growing broad leaves and increasing the amount of protein that we grow with our companions or that we grow in our covers, because earthworms reproduce when they get to a weight, so they're very weight-oriented. When an earthworm makes a specific weight, and this is different for every species, they become sexual. That means they have a bright orange saddle on them. When they do that, then they can reproduce a lot. If they have enough protein, they'll make weight quicker. They'll stay sexy for a longer period of time and produce more offspring. This is another way. You can actually have control over the number of earthworms you have by just doing a few simple plant things.

Now, I'm going to dive into the rhizosphere because I've talked about all the organisms that live in and around the roots. Now let's talk about the roots themselves. In 1904, Hiltner coined the term rhizosphere, and it's the area that is the root. It's the area of soil around the root, and it's the area that's influenced by the root. This can be a huge distance. We're not talking right next to the root. It can be millimeters away from the root. Here I am talking in metric in the United States. How can you tell I'm a scientist and that I still have my Canadian roots? It would be, I think we can talk about an eighth of an inch. It can extend out an eighth of an inch even to a quarter of an inch and much farther in sand dunes. I'll show you how that works, but the zone of influence is what's really important.

We need to be aware of rhizosphere dynamics because that's what makes all this work, and we are going to dig into that tomorrow. You can see how this looks a lot like my context, right? Soil, physical, chemical, the plants influencing all this. It begins with the seed. I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to have good seed. You need good seed that has a lot of nutrients, and it's easy to test. You need some paper towels and you need a plastic container. Wet them up. Grow them out. They should be able to grow for 14 days without any kind of nutrition, and they shouldn't be all covered in black mold, necessarily, but some things will grow and some things will leak out and things like that. As long as the plant doesn't keel over and die, it's all good, but try this.

Look at your seed. Think about your seed. Every different seed creates its own unique spermosphere, which then morphs into its own rhizosphere because they're all leaking out different chemicals. If I'm a bean, I'm a legume, I want different things, right? I'm trying to get rhizobium, GRAVY rhizobium. I'm trying to get the things that I need to grow properly. I'm trying to get microrhizome. I'm trying to make sure my embryonic root doesn't get chewed off by something. I'm trying really hard to make sure that I coat my roots with something really positive. That is actually in the seed, believe it or not. That's why having that little test, that germination test, is really important because eventually, these bacteria that are in your seed, the good seed actually become your rhizosphere. Good seed, good rhizosphere.

Let's talk about seeding the rhizosphere. Every different seed you put in the ground, every different one, and now I'm building up to tonight's session where we talk about intercropping and whatnot, because you can see that this is a peaola seed harvest. What I got here is, every different one leaks its own unique assortment of not just carbon. Everybody, when we think of carbon, everybody immediately goes to sugars. When plant people and scientists talk about carbon, we are meaning carbon-based substrates. That can mean amino acids. It can mean lipids or fats. It can mean terpenes, smelly things, things that deter things.

It can mean carbohydrates and it can mean organic acids as well, so all these things are carbon-based. They all have carbon chains that are all cobbled together with bonds that make them into big molecules or make them into little tiny molecules, but all of them have a food role or have a role in the rhizosphere. Some of them can actually create soil structure, and some of them can take away soil structure. If a plant needs more soil structure, it will exude the compounds that actually make a better soil structure. If it's trying to work through tight soil structure like we saw earlier, it's going to exude a lot more acids and things that will break up that hard clay or some of the bonds, the chemical bonds that are holding everything together so it can get through that. What we don't want it to do is have to leak out any of its reserves, really, in order to do things that we could do for it by having healthy soil.

There's some dreadlocks for you on a banana root. We want to look for things like that. We want it necessarily. You should see that there's soil attached. It can be clumps of soil attached to the root, but you just want to see that the root is interacting with some soil. More roots means more root exudates. It means more habitat for predator-prey relationships. You want to be looking at stuff like this. Your seed providers should have some of these things. This is from DSV Seed in Germany. When you go to the German National Field Day, every seed producer has these things in their booth and they are showing you the root architecture of their cover crops. They are showing you the root architecture of their crops so you can understand how well they root or how they root.

Cover crops. Just having a look here, fibrous Persian clover. Persian clover is also very drought tolerant. Woollypod vetch, resistant to almost everything. Sun hemp, great nitrogen fixer, awesome deer food and fava beans just producing nitrogen like crazy, having a big fat root system even when they have a little tiny shoot. We want roots that look like this. I'm just giving everybody a quick view of what root structure looks like because I'm going to talk about this in a little bit more detail. Again, this is from Kris Nichols. You can see the effect of the rhizosphere, and that's glomalin, just what's gluing everything together. That's how far away from the root it actually goes. What's going on in there? Nitrifiers, all the nitrogen fixation, all the antibiotic activity, all the predator-prey relationships and the plant sucking up. Now we know from James White, we also have rhizophagy. The plant is also cultivating bacterium in their to feed itself.

Offense, the mycorrhizosphere versus the rhizosphere. Plants that are mycorrhizal, we know that almost all of our land races were mycorrhizal. We know that lupines, for example, and canola and brassicas are not mycorrhizal, but those plants are like Red Bull for soil fauna. They love it. They grow like crazy. Population, the idea with multi-species is to blend mycorrhizal plants with non-mycorrhizal plants so that you have, again, all these soil surfaces. Look at the sand, sandy soils. You can see the hyphae in there from the mycorrhizae all holding the sand particles together. How we can structure what we think is unstructurable soil. We can use phacelia as well as a cover crop. It has beautiful, fine roots. Persian clover, also very mycorrhizal, to create better soil structure. Here's another example. You can actually see the hyphae coming from the root and binding all the soil particles. Then just diversity of spores from mycorrhizae.

Weeds are highly mycorrhizal, a lot of our worst weeds. In this case, knapweed, highly mycorrhizal, taking advantage of it. Yellow roots are a great indicator. A lot of people have seen this. Light sensitive, if you leave them out for too long, the color disappears, but this has been known for years. This is the way you can see mycorrhizae, but you can just see it in here, the yellow on that root, and that's the mycorrhizae. Onions are highly mycorrhizal, by the way. So are potatoes. Here you can see the yellow. This is actually alfalfa mining a corn stalk. Yeah, they also mine a lot of the old residue for the plant. Who knew? They increase the rate of photosynthesis because they want more food, but that's good for our plants. They reduce the amount of transpiration. They grow more roots, all good things, all beneficial for soil health.

They really integrate the plant, the soil structure, the chemical aspects. They are the rhizosphere. The rhizosphere, if you want to think about it, is just a place where everything parties together and they actually party. They like each other. Let's think about this. When you're thinking about this, think about the rhizosphere. In fact, when you're putting plants in the ground, think about the fact that you are growing soil health. There are loads of things that we can do in the rhizosphere by changing the plants that we grow. We can affect weeds. We can benefit the plant. We can do soil. All of it will benefit soil health in the long run. Healthy soil is the foundation of agriculture. I don't care what you call it. You can call it regen. You can call it organic. You can call it organic regenerative, but it's the foundation.

Without healthy soil, you've got nothing. You've got dirt. We don't want dirt. We want soil. Forage and cover crops also feed the soil. Not everyone is going to have integrated livestock, and I get that, but if we can find a way to integrate livestock, it can be to your advantage, as Jimmy talked about today, and a number of others have talked about. I make my cover crops profitable by feeding them with livestock. I also make my companions profitable by feeding them to livestock. There's a lot in the future that's to chance, but I think that we can actually make the future, to a certain extent, by what we do today. I think it's important to be teaching our young people and helping them and stewarding them along. It's also important to join farm communities, have peer groups, share with your neighbors or share with the people that you trust.

We use a lot of seed treatments on our seeds: corn, beans, and even inoculants on some of the cover crop seeds. Tell me the good, bad, and ugly about the effects of those.

All right, inoculants on cover crop seeds. Even though the inoculants are designed so they're specific for the nitrogen fixing species that you're using, nitrogen fixing organisms are plant growth promoting rhizobacteria no matter what. Inoculating your legumes is good insurance. The other thing we know is that in no-till systems, they persist. In Brazil, they found them 20 years old, first strains. We know that these nitrogen fixing organisms are very persistent in our no-till soils. I never hesitate to inoculate your plants to make sure that they form nodules. That's never a bad thing.

Seed treatments, a lot of the seed treatments have been proven to be of marginal use, at least some of the chemical seed treatments. I don't research that, but I read the papers and the scientific literature would definitely support that a lot of the seed treatments do not work all that well. Sometimes, they're really necessary, depending on what conditions you're going into. I can see that, but they do inhibit the colonization of the roots, and you can imagine that, right? Now, some things just can't go in and around the roots and they can't work. It's about weaning. I think when Jimmy talked about change and how we change, and I know a number of the speakers have talked about change, this is about thinking, if I go into a healthy soil, then this is what I can do.

A number of people are using tea, compost extracts and biological seed treatments that are working quite well, again, to inoculate the seed. You think about it. It's more like a rhizobium inoculant, but it's an inoculant with beneficial bacteria and fungi, and those can be really valuable, too. If you don't grow them, I know there's lots of people that produce really good inoculants for seed that you can use instead, and a number them have been proven to work quite well. The one caution I would say there is always look for things that are registered. If somebody won't tell you what's in it, don't buy it. They should tell you what's in it, because there shouldn't be any secrets like that. It's like, I need to know what's in it. If it's a bunch of things from Israel, how do I know they're going to work here? I don't know that, so think about it that way.

I have a couple of questions about rhizosheaths. I remember you saying that certain plants are able to create them. Do you find that there are specific functional groups that do that? Of those functional groups, about how long does it take for them to make a rhizosheath?

Okay, rhizosheaths. Yeah, there are. A lot of our serials are really good at making rhizosheaths under certain conditions, and you'll see them more when the soil's a bit dry than when it's wet. Also, it's about digging plants up in an appropriate way other than yanking them out of the ground and pulling everything off them. The rhizosheaths tend to be more on the first primordial roots as opposed to the later, deeper roots. Some of that's just because of the initial. They're also feeding on old root cells and the fungi have colonized the old root cells, and then things are building off of the old root cells and then off of what's colonized them. That's part of what builds those rhizosheaths on the older roots.

Serials are definitely more prone to that. That, actually, in the book on the rhizosphere, Lynch and Whipps talk about rhizosheaths and what's produced rhizosheaths. It's very clear that it's serials. I was looking at an old book from the 1930s and they talked about rhizosheaths on serials as well. Now, part of that is also, and the reason diversity is so important is because our serials actually are more prone to sucking up what you call monovalent ions, cations and anions whereas our dicots, when you think about dicots meaning two or our broadleaves are actually good at sucking up divalent ions, so that creates differences in pH and differences in the microbial community that make the rhizosheaths, so that's part of it.

Okay, interesting. Do perennial plants have a better association as well, or does it really matter?

Actually, corn is really good at having rhizosheaths and a lot of the warm season grasses tend to have more rhizosheaths. I think that's because they leak a lot more carbohydrate out of their roots than the cool seasons do.

Is there any negative effect with glyphosate on soil bacteria and fungi?

The new research would suggest, absolutely. I think that glyphosate is a really controversial chemical because of its water solubility and whatnot and because of its pervasive use, and there's two camps on it. I see where it really affects bacteria and fungi and then I see another camp in the literature where they say it doesn't. Do I know what to believe? No, I'm not going to tell you I necessarily do, because I see both of them are, there are good scientists doing both sides, looking at both sides of the coin. I think what it is is that when we use herbicides, when we use any chemical, we take a risk> Chemicals that are water-soluble are a problem. For me, insecticides are the worst thing, because they affect us, too, and they can have dramatic effects on our bodies as well. That doesn't mean glyphosate won't, but I'm not a chemical expert in that area.

I can tell you that, yeah, there are some real strong effects of glyphosate and anything that we use in the soil, but I will also tell you that when we think of glyphosate, glyphosphate, that what you have is you have a carbon chain attached to a phosphorus molecule. In soils that are phosphorus deficient and in soils that are really healthy, if you're using glyphosate in the way it's intended, they'll break it down like that because they'll cleave off the phosphorus and leave, and eat the gly part of it, and they'll use both parts of it, so your microbial community can actually degrade glyphosate really well as long as you're not overusing it, and the literature does tell you that, too.

When do you determine when to use mechanical means to fix compaction?

Sorry, I need you to repeat that.

Can all compaction be fixed with plants?

I heard from a man today that he did fix a lot of his compaction with plants. It just took a lot longer. I would tell you that depending on your patience and where you are in your farming context, you might want to do a tillage operation to break that compaction, but if you do, fix it. This is the one thing that I will say is that people do these operations and then they never actually fix it. If you're going to break through that hard pan and you're going to break through your compaction, then put a cover crop in. Put something that has deep roots. Put something that has roots and start structuring your soil appropriately, but if you have a little patience, plants can do it for you, but you have to choose them right.

Along with the glyphosate but more on nitrogen applications, does that affect the rhizosheath, the fungi, the nematodes?

Absolutely. The first thing you see is anhydrous. Anhydrous was used to build airstrips. Anhydrous burns you. It burns everything else in its path. Eventually, things come back in and they work the soil again, but it destroys a lot of things. The other thing is that too much nitrogen can compete with a lot of other things. We put a lot of nitrogen in the plant, then we need to have more sulfur. That means, more nitrogen means that our potassium goes down, so it's about this balancing of nutrients, too, to help the plant to produce the root exudates that feed the microbial community. Now, microbes need nitrogen, too. They need amino acids. Absolutely, they need it. One of the things that some of a lot of our beneficial microbes need is iron. A lot of the pseudomonads in the soil and a lot of organisms in the soil require iron in order to actually work properly, and nitrogen can also inhibit iron uptake.

This is a game. It's always about finding that balance about what you're using, and using, I think Jim Hoorman talked about it, finding that balance where you're using things in balance. That's not an easy thing to do. Like I said, one size fits no one or one size fits someone somewhere, but you need to find your balance where you can see that everything is going really well and you've got that balance hit. Then with the next crop, you're going to find the balance hit. Every year, you're going to look for a new balance, unfortunately, but that's farming. We're always looking to find that balancing point. Does that help?

Oh, the other thing with nitrogen is that legumes, really watch your nitrogen with legumes, that the rhizobium forming a nodule is a carbon cost to the plant. If you have lots of nitrogen in there, they won't form nodules. Nodules have these other benefits because they change iron dynamics, zinc dynamics. They change the dynamics of the phosphorus, so we want nodules. If we're using nitrogen instead of nodules, we're changing the whole mineral nutrient balance and the dynamics of the soil, so we want to really think about that nitrogen and we're using it. Other than anhydrous, there's really no direct effect.

That's it for this episode of the No-Till Farmer Podcast. We'd like to thank Jill Clapperton for her outstanding discussion about the power of soil health. We also want to thank our sponsor, NewFields Ag, for helping make this podcast possible. A transcript of this episode in our archive of previous podcast episodes are both available at No-tillfarmer.com/podcasts. For Jill Clapperton and our entire staff here at No-Till Farmer, I'm John Dobberstein. Thanks for listening. Keep on no-tilling and have a great day.