Can you increase organic matter in your soil?

00:00 Can you increase the organic matter percentage in your soil? The answer is yes. And that's why I'm talking 00:05 to people that know how to do this. Kevin Matthews, Chad Henderson here, both with Extreme Ag and Stephanie Linco with aggro liquid. 00:11 They're all three farmers. She obviously works for agco, but farms significant number of acres 00:15 with her husband up in central Michigan. All right. I was on this farm in 2021 for the first time, and you said, I've been farmers for 14 years now. 00:22 We're at 16 years on this farm. You said something I'm proudest of. I increased the organic matter on this piece 00:28 of property from when I took it over. How'd you do it? So we did it with the irrigation was a key because it allowed us to grow big crops 00:35 and then we kept cover crops on it. We just kept building huge biomass and roots. And the more biomass we build roots, 00:42 the higher the organic matter became and the less irrigation and fertility that was needed to maintain the crops, 00:48 but yet continue to build that organic matter in The soils. Chad said the same thing. You said big 00:52 crops create big crops. The thing is, big crops also extract a whole bunch of fertility. 00:57 Organic matter kind of equates to fertility in some regards. So why is it that a big crop helps it? 01:02 Well, you're just putting that matter back in. So ours, a lot of what done ours was three crops in two years. 01:07 And what I mean by that is we'd have a corn crop and then we'd come back with a wheat and a bean crop and double crop. 01:12 Yep. And then we'd never pulled anything off. We don't do any, you know, chopping of, of, of any corn or we don't do any bailing of any straw. 01:19 And we put that back in. Now ours wouldn't no till. Ours is conventional tillage, but we just work that matter back into soil. 01:26 Stephanie, there's a, a thing that I never knew as a kid, but it makes a lot of sense. You burn up organic matter with excess tillage 01:31 because it, it's, it's good for the first year you're taking all this stuff, putting it back in, but then it sort of burns through it. 01:36 So speak about how tillage the, the relation between tillage or no-till and organic matter appreciation. 01:42 Well, a lot of it just comes back to like that plant matter and where it's at. And so when you work it in, it is going down 01:47 to the microbial life and breaking down. And so, you know, it's being used by, you know, the microbes and things in the soil and then not there for that plant 01:56 or for that soil plant, uh, relationship. So, you know, like these guys both said, you know, more plant matter. 02:01 We have a good fed fertility plant is gonna provide more plant matter and that's gonna increase that plant person 02:07 That's watching this that says, okay, I'm not fully no-till maybe Kelly is or Lee ERs is, but you're not, but you still had the gain. 02:14 Is it, did you do reduced tillage to help get that? Nope. It's conventional Till, Nope, I'm completely, I'm telling you, it's, 02:19 everything that I've done is completely off the books of everything they say don't do, but a hundred percent everything off the books. 02:24 Okay. Another thing, chicken lit use chicken lit. Yes. That, that certainly should help on organic matter appreciation. Yeah, it, 02:29 Yeah, well we had to balance the soil to get the nutrients available and so we started out with extremely high mag 02:34 and very low calcium and we had, that was our limiting factor. So we adjusted our pH 02:39 and during that process we adjusted that calcium, the mag ratio. And once we fixed that, then we was able 02:45 to really explore new horizon. So the person's watching that says, how can I grow, uh, grow the organic matter percentage, certainly fertilize, um, 02:52 manure chicken, litter, beef, any kind of manure. Oh, You gotta feed the crop. I mean you, you just can't go out there 02:57 and think you're just going to do it in one year. It's a matter of years. It's, it's kinda like, it's sound like putting money into 03:02 an investment keeps coming back to Yeah, but it's speaking of the investment, um, how much, why do I want to grow the organic matter? 03:07 The person that's being skeptical out here saying, I still get big crops. I don't fool with any of that. There's a, 03:11 there's the utilization of resources that gets more efficient. I'm, I'm, you're the agronomist, I'm not, the utilization 03:18 of nutrients gets more efficient with increased organic matter. I think I've read It does, you know, organic matter is gonna hold those 03:24 nutrients in the soil and make them more available to the crop. It also holds moisture, which is a big key. 03:28 You know, it's probably the number one nutrient that our plants need is that moisture to get a good growing season out of it. 03:34 And so having that organic matter, it's able to hold more nutrients and let's be able to get more for that plant. 03:39 Chad, it's 90 plus degrees in north Alabama where you farm today, it's not that here in North Carolina, but where you farm. 03:44 Can you, you say I absolutely use less irrigation now 'cause I've increased my organic matter in my soils than I had to 15 years ago. 03:54 I don't think. I don't think, for me it don't really work that way. I haven't really seen that part of it. 03:58 But for me, what it does do is it's more plant available nutrition and that's where it's all about. 04:02 It's, it's not about how much fertilizer you spend out or what you do, but it's, it's the forms you use, you know, mixing it up all the time. 04:08 You may have to put some drought because you may need a km mag source. Mm-Hmm. You know, like me, I'm low ma, low mag a high cow. 04:14 So I may need a K mag source for Kevin. It wasn't. But the chicken lit is huge in building organic matter. Any kind of, any kind of organic fertility, you know, 04:23 Organic matter percentage across your acres. I know it varies from field to field. Uh, in general went from watt 04:28 to watt in the last 20 years, went From half a percent when we was growing cotton to now it's 2.8 to 3.2, something like that. 04:34 Organic matter percentage on this cooling me farm for you from 16 years ago to today. Yeah. We started wheels at about 0.8 0.9 04:41 and now we're about 3.6. And can you, can you confidently say to the person watching this, it saves me money on fertility 04:47 inputs or I get, or I can use the same amount of fertilizer and get bigger yield, I think is probably the right thing. 04:52 Yeah, the yields has been extremely well here on this farm and the biggest thing with our drip irrigation is we know 04:58 how hard it was to keep up irrigating years before when that high mag was really fighting us. Once we got the soils more balanced, the organic matter, 05:08 more capital areas in the soil from the decayed roots, that's when we realized, hey, it's not taking near as much water for us to do it. 05:15 You know, 18 hours we can water the whole farm and we're good to go. Where before we run 24 hours a day, 05:20 seven days a week is trying to keep up. Stephanie, the person that wants to increase organic matter, we've sold 'em on the reasons to do it. 05:25 They wanna do it on their farm. What's your first bit of advice? Second bit of advice, it's third bit of advice. 05:30 Uh, it's gonna come back to that, that good balance between your fertility program and then what your soil can do. 05:36 And so you need to make sure you match that fertility, what the crop is. You grow a bigger crop, you're gonna 05:40 eventually increase that organic matter, Be patient and be patient, be patient, stay, stay. Absolutely. Stay the course and be patient. 05:47 I like it. You can increase the organic matter percentage on the soils on your farming operation 05:51 and you just heard how to do it and there's a big benefit to doing so. It's a dividend it seems like on yours like this 05:55 with fertilizer being where it is and then commodity pressure being where they are, every little bit helps. 05:59 And that's where organic matter would probably help you out a bunch. It can't beat it.