Yeah.

O- o- one of the objections is that this is just an added cost, and then there's no thought given to some of those benefits.

Because I think farmers have been inculcated to believing that if you cut back on any kind of chemical inputs, you're gonna have a disaster on your hand.

If you're a farmer and you're not penciling in a profit, and then you're being told by somebody with a funny accent like me that cover crops are gonna help you, you're saying the guy's lost his nuts.

He's lost his marbles, because he's asking me to spend $30 on seed, an acre on seed, and then I still gotta drill it in, and then what do I do in terms of terminating the cover crop and planting into it? So it would be the added expense.

I think the other concern many farmers have had, and it's been met with so much YouTube stuff, is, "How do I plant into 10,000 pounds of residue?" 'Cause when that cover crop, warm season cover crop, cool season cover crop gets up to about shoulder height, you've got about 10 or to even 18,000 pounds, dry pounds per acre of residue.

How do you plant into that? So there are a lot of guys who plant in green.

Given your chemical engineering background and chemistry background, do you have any thoughts on this? Termination of cover crops with an herbicide, is there any sort of comparison in terms of the soil on a herbicide-terminated cover crop versus in an organic system which uses, say, a mechanical means to terminate that same cover crop? In other words, is, are the soil microbes being affected at all in your studies? Have you seen anything like that by that herbicide?

It is a lot of backing off a little bit and letting nature more take the reins.

Yeah.

We, we need to distinguish between practices and principles.

So a practice would be a cover crop.

A practice might be no-till, or a practice might be a certain kind of tillage, uh, or even livestock fencing.

So practices are the details that we can implement once we understand the system.

The princip- the, the five principles of soil health as I remem- uh, as I learned them was, number one, keep disturbance to a minimum.

Sure.

When you think about what data you're getting from a soil test, considering it doesn't have any sort of biological measures on it, it's really just measuring what is there now, can you actually get valuable information off of that to work with, or is that kind of a flawed test just given what it is measuring?

Y- yeah, that's, that's a good question, and that extends to biology as well, I think.

I guess the, the most valuable thing I can contribute to that, 'cause I used to model water quality, and I stole from the water quality modeling people, but I basically have a maxim that says, "All soil tests are wrong, some are useful." And s- so first of all, we need to recognize that there are so many different ways of extracting nutrients from the soil.

So you've got Mehlich one, Mehlich three, Morgan, Bray, and the list goes on and on.

The Haney extraction as well.

Some of them use harsh acids, some of them use organic acids.

The biggest beef that many people have with some of the newer things like Haney is, well, where are the calibrated soil tests? The implication being that the other soil tests, uh, uh, from many land-grant universities, uh, h- are calibrated.

Is amendment-less, input-less farming possible, or would it fall back to that kind of conventional wisdom of you're mining your soils, and if you don't add, eventually you're going to run out?