5

Raising Expectations

A Team’s Refusal to Accept a Degraded Resource

When walking a stretch of North Dakota landscape under a withering summer sun, one’s thoughts turn to moisture—or rather, the lack of it. So, when I and other participants in a farm tour kicked up indicators of cool, shady places while traipsing across a hayfield, it seemed like a mirage. Green-and-black leopard frogs were smoothly zigzagging out of our way, adding life to a field that had not gotten a decent rain in eight weeks. This part of south-central North Dakota was historically prairie pothole country, but no wetlands were in sight as wheat and corn stretched to the horizon.

“I’ve never seen so many frogs so far from a slough,” said a fellow tour participant as we tripped through the field. “What’s going on there that would bring them so far from cattails?”

When we reached the edge of the field where the couple who farm this land, Todd McPeak and Penny Meeker, were standing, they made it clear we weren’t imagining things. “I hope you didn’t step on any of my leopard frogs,” Meeker said, smiling. We smiled too, and were especially relieved we hadn’t injured any amphibians after she related a childhood story of using a stripped horse weed to “whip the crap” out of her brother and a cousin when she caught them shooting birds on their family’s dairy farm.

Meeker and McPeak enjoy seeing birds, mammals, and frogs on the acres they produce grass, hay, cover crops, and beef cattle on. But these critters are also barometers of how the sustainable farming methods the couple use are affecting their business enterprise. As McPeak explained it, more frogs in a field connotes a healthier landscape that retains moisture in the soil more efficiently, which in turn translates into better-quality hay and grass that’s drought tolerant. Such a healthy ecosystem is money in the bank when you’re farming in a place that gets only around sixteen inches of precipitation a year. “From bees to badgers to beef, I see it all working together,” he said.

While visiting McPeak and Meeker’s livestock operation a few years ago, I was struck by a couple of things. For one, a wildly successful farm isn’t just about thriving flora and fauna above ground—agroecology begins beneath our feet. In addition, when we raise our expectations of what a natural resource and the people who manage it can accomplish, the possibilities are wide open. Finally, true teamwork can be an incredibly powerful force for good, both on the land and in the communities that land supports.

In fact, it was because of an extraordinary team of farmers, conservationists, and scientists that I found myself in that frog-filled hayfield on a baking day. McPeak and Meeker belonged to the Burleigh County Soil Health Team, one of the best examples I’ve witnessed of how such a partnership can bring resiliency back to the land as well as the community. This group has spawned similar initiatives in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Indiana—as far away as Australia. My visit to the McPeak-Meeker operation was a follow-up—I had first spent time with the Soil Health Team the year before, and now I was back for more.

At the core of the Soil Health Team’s work has been the promotion of practices that protect and regenerate the soil as much as possible. But it wasn’t so much what innovative practices the team had successfully advanced that piqued my interest. Rather, what impressed me was how the team itself had managed to work together, providing a rich seedbed for testing, implementing, and supporting whatever creative sustainable farming practices were being tried. They had built a template for innovation and mutual support, which can be a critical tool for farmers who aren’t exactly following the conventional path. New farming techniques come and go, but Burleigh County’s Soil Health Team models the kind of environment needed to ensure that the roots for future innovations will always be deep and thriving. Every truly effective interdisciplinary team is made up of members who bring their own motives, skills, and worldviews to the table. To get at the heart of the Burleigh County Soil Health Team’s success, let’s look at it from the perspective of three members: a conservationist, a farmer, and a scientist.

The Frustrated Conservationist

At the core of this story is a change in attitude toward soil—perhaps one of the most taken-for-granted resources around. Consider, for example, how Jay Fuhrer used to do his job. For many years, Fuhrer was the Burleigh County district conservationist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). Burleigh County lies near the portion of the Missouri River that passes through the south-central part of North Dakota. Here the flatness of the state gives way to a more rolling landscape—a landscape known for wheat, hay, and “wild” pastures that contain native species such as big bluestem. During the 2000s, corn also become a bigger part of the farmscape here. Water is a dear resource in these parts, so for many years Fuhrer and other resource professionals focused on short-term efforts to get more water into the soil profile and keep it where plants could use it.

“We had accepted a degraded resource,” Fuhrer recalled as he sat in his office in Bismarck on a September afternoon. “And when you accept a degraded resource you generally work from the viewpoint of minimizing the loss. And so we would apply a lot of practices.”

Fuhrer’s specialty during the 1980s and early 1990s was putting in grassed waterways in an attempt to keep water from running off so quickly. It helped, but didn’t get at the core of the issue: why was that water not infiltrating the soil in the first place? What farmers and soil scientists in the area were starting to figure out was that the production system that had come to predominate—extensive tillage, low crop diversity, no cover crops, livestock kept out all season long on overgrazed pastures—was compacting the soil to the point where little water could make its way beneath the surface. It was also sharply reducing the amount of soil organic matter that was present. That’s a big deal: organic matter is the energy-rich portion of the soil profile that’s made up of plant and animal residue, along with the tissues of living and dead microorganisms. It controls everything from how much nutrition plants get to the amount of water that makes its way through the soil profile. Since organic matter is around 58 percent carbon, it also determines how much of that element is present in the soil; that makes organic matter a major player in sequestering greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. In short, organic matter drives the entire soil food web.¹ Unbroken prairie soils can have as much as 10 percent to 15 percent organic matter. But because of intensive tillage, midwestern soil organic matter levels have plummeted to below 2 percent of total soil volume in some cases.² This means the soil has little opportunity to cook up its own fertility via the exchange of nutrients, making it increasingly dependent on applications of petroleum-based fertilizers.³

To deal with the water infiltration issue, the Burleigh County Soil Conservation District’s supervisors eventually formed a team that consisted of farmers and conservationists. From the beginning, the team promoted no-till, crop diversification, and simple cover crop mixtures. It also worked to get farmers to replace the traditional technique of turning cattle out into large pastures all season long with rotational grazing systems. These farming techniques have proven to be a vast improvement over intense tillage, monocropping, and overgrazing. Thanks in part to the Burleigh County Soil Conservation District’s soil health work, at one point 70 percent of the county’s farmers had adopted no-till cropping systems, which has to be one of the highest percentages in the country. But Fuhrer and others were finding that even with these conservation improvements, soil was still lost, precious water ran off increasingly compacted fields, and the quality of crops and grasses being grown kept deteriorating.

What was needed was a way to test out new approaches to building soil health while spreading that information among farmers as quickly and effectively as possible. One way the District has done this is through experiments at Menoken Farm, a 150-acre educational site started in 2009. Replicated trials on cropping practices that build soil health are done at Menoken and the District shares the results through field days, workshops, and a website.⁴

But Fuhrer and others know that farmers need to see these practices put into action on real working farms, ones that share the same soil type, geography, weather, and even economic conditions. So the District started promoting “25-acre grants” for seed. The farmers used the grants to establish cover crops and in return for receiving the free seed, the producers would serve as one of the stops on the Soil Health Tour, an annual end-of-summer event. Those twenty-five-acre test plots were popular, with the District overseeing thirty to forty a year from 2006 to 2008. With the price of cover crop seed at thirty to thirty-five dollars an acre, it was a bargain in terms of the harvest of real-world results it produced.

“So part of the bargain was a willingness to speak at the tour stop—what worked, maybe what didn’t work, their observations,” said Fuhrer while going over test plot results in his office. “And then at the same time it gave people like myself the opportunity to take a look at those soils, maybe do an infiltration test on them. It allowed us to kind of ride along and monitor that and really kind of look at the benefits.”

That created a whole lot of on-the-ground results with a relatively small financial risk on the part of the farmer. It also developed an environment where farmers were comfortable sharing their experiences—both good and bad.

A combination of results from the Menoken Farm and the fields planted using the twenty-five-acre grants showed that cover cropping—a system where non-cash crops such as cereal rye and tillage radish are grown in fields between the regular cash crop growing seasons—could build soil health year-round, not just during the spring and fall. The Soil Conservation District and the farmers also learned that diverse seed mixes that went beyond the traditional cover crop plantings of small grains and brassicas built up an impressive amount of carbon while feeding microbes. This makes soil naturally fertile and less reliant on chemical inputs, as well as increasingly erosion- and drought-proof. In other words, the soil is more resilient. And this resiliency can be attained relatively cheaply by seeding cover crops—plants that, by the way, can serve double duty as livestock forage.

One cover crop breakthrough Fuhrer and the other Soil Health Team members had was to ignore old ideas about plant competition. One year the soil conservationist was monitoring eight different species of cover crops planted on test plots. In one plot each species had been planted as a monoculture, and the other plots contained various combinations: two-way mix, three-way, etc., all the way up to where all eight species were planted together—something called a “cocktail mix.”

“And then we had one of the driest years on record,” recalled Fuhrer. “And I just thought, ‘Oh, everything’s failed and we’re just not going to learn anything this year.’ And I was so wrong.”

What they learned was that the monocultures failed, and the mixes involving just a few species didn’t fare much better. But the eight-way cocktail mixture didn’t seem drought-stressed at all, and in fact yielded quite well. “It really taught us a lot from the viewpoint of how plants won’t necessarily compete with each other—they can actually help each other,” he said.

The idea that diversity is strength takes a page out of nature’s notebook. Ecologists have found that in planted prairies, greater diversity results in a similar synergistic effect—making the entire system more resilient.⁵ Fuhrer and his colleagues started thinking that the key to creating more resilient soil was to build more organic carbon down below. It’s been said that soil without biology is just geology—an accumulation of lifeless materials unable to spawn healthy plant growth. That biology is driven by organic carbon, and socking it away for a rainy day (or a very dry one) pays big dividends. Those eight species of plants growing above ground may appear to have the potential to be in competition, but all the while their roots are interacting and serving as the basis for an incredibly diverse subterranean ecosystem.

Fuhrer and other soil conservation experts in the region were particularly impressed with results some farmers were getting by combining cover cropping, livestock impact, and no-till agriculture in a way that soil health could actually be improved, not just maintained at a high enough level to grow a stand of wheat or corn. For Fuhrer, taking such proactive steps couldn’t have come at a better time—he had grown frustrated with applying practices that simply maintained the status quo, if that.

“This isn’t a situation where someone is trying to sell a concept,” Fuhrer told me. “It’s based on information and education. And as we share that with each other, we’ve learned how to build that soil back. You can’t help but become excited.”

The Failed Farmer

On a crisp morning in September, Gabe Brown held a clod in each hand and searched for signs of life—theoretically not a difficult task considering one teaspoon of soil contains more organisms than there are humans in the world. But many of the bacteria and invertebrates that lurk in the dark underbelly of our farm fields exist visually only in the world of high-powered microscopes. So Brown, a compact ball of energy who can somehow combine references to soil biology, farm policy, and animal husbandry in the same sentence, used a less scientific assessment method to compare and contrast the two handfuls—one from his field, the other from a neighbor’s.

“When you grab this soil there is no structure,” said Brown, referring to his neighbor’s soil. Indeed, it had a slabbed, compacted look to it, indicating there wasn’t much room for worms and roots to facilitate transfer of water and nutrients. It was also a lighter color than Brown’s darker soil, which was the consistency of cottage cheese. “If you have this dark color, you know you have organic matter. I look at it as an investment.”

It’s an investment in a good crop—just a few feet away stood a field of corn that had emerged from Brown’s rich soil, and it was thriving, a rarity in a year when this part of North Dakota had been hit especially hard by drought. But to Brown, that healthy soil represented more than increased bushels in the bin. It was also an investment in his farm’s long-term viability and the future of his entire community—human and natural.

During the past decade or so on the 5,400 acres he farms, Brown has put in place an innovative system for building soil health utilizing extremely diverse mixes of cover crops (as many as twenty species at times), no-till cropping, and a type of rotational grazing, called mob grazing, where cattle are put in pasture paddocks for short bursts of intense feeding, often leaving as much as half the plants uneaten so they can feed the soil biome. Brown has more than doubled the organic matter in some of his fields, raising it from less than 2 percent to nearly 6 percent. He has also improved the health of his water cycle, meaning precipitation infiltrates the soil profile instead of running off the surface.

And it’s paying off financially. Brown has not relied on commercial fertilizer since 2008, which is significant considering that each 1 percent of organic matter holds the equivalent of $680 in soil nutrients per acre, according to calculations done a few yeras ago by Ohio State University’s Extension Service.⁶ (Of course, the economic value of organic matter can vary depending on the price commercial fertilizer is going for at any given time.)

These days, Brown’s success with building soil health has been so significant that one would be forgiven for thinking he’s an anomaly. He’s a rock star in the soil health field, and is in big demand as a speaker and YouTube video subject. Walking Brown’s farm or viewing one of his PowerPoint presentations can generate a lot of excitement about the potential for linking long-term financial sustainability and soil health. But Brown, whose cherubic face and down-to-earth manner don’t quite fit the image of a cutting-edge maverick, is the first to say that he’s not special, just, well, more outgoing than most.

“There are people all over doing this. They just don’t have the mouth I have,” he told me with a laugh while we drove past his crop fields and pastures—many being grazed by cattle—just outside of Bismarck. He added emphatically that all this innovation means little in the bigger picture if farms like his are seen as isolated examples. Brown believes it’s also important to remember he didn’t attain this level of soil health overnight—it resulted from trial and error. In fact, he’s the first to admit that at first it was mostly error.

He and his wife Shelly bought their farm from her parents in 1991, and in 1994 they went 100 percent no-till as a way to save moisture in their cropping system, which at the time produced mostly small grains like wheat. Brown liked the no-till system, but bad weather produced a string of crop failures during the late 1990s. It made things extremely difficult financially, to the point where the Browns were having a hard time borrowing enough money to purchase fertilizer. This forced them to start planting more legumes such as field peas, triticale, and hairy vetch that could fix nitrogen and provide more homegrown fertility while feeding their cattle herd.

“I was using cover crops but I didn’t really grasp soil health,” recalled Brown. What he did grasp was that his wheat often did better when planted into ground that had just produced a cover crop. His soil’s color and texture improved, organic matter levels were rising and precipitation seemed to infiltrate the soil profile, rather than simply run off the surface.

“We had four crop failures in a row, and I tell people today that was absolutely the best thing that could have happened to me and my family, although we didn’t think that at the time,” Brown said.

I’ve met a lot of farmers who strike upon a breakthrough way to manage their agricultural enterprise through a combination of trial, error, and in some cases, desperation. What sets Brown apart is that he isn’t satisfied to simply put this fresh paradigm in place, making it the new normal for how he manages the land. Perhaps being so close to financial ruin has humbled him enough to realize he doesn’t have the ultimate answer. He wants to know why he was able to raise organic matter levels and how he can raise them even further, for example. What’s the next step? Brown is also truly creative in that he doesn’t care where he gets his ideas. He recalled with excitement a time when he and Fuhrer were both at a conference and saw a presentation given by a Brazilian scientist about intense multispecies cover cropping systems.

“I turned to Jay and said, ‘That’s the next step.’”

The Humbled Scientist

There is a photo that has acquired almost legendary status in Burleigh County. It features one of Gabe Brown’s fields after thirteen inches of rain fell in twenty-four hours. The picture shows no standing water on this low-lying field, even though plots on neighboring land are inundated. Brown has created a soil ecosystem that allows water to infiltrate quite efficiently. And unlike a field that’s been drained through artificial tiling—sending water at rocket speed through the profile and eventually downstream—Brown’s fields retain that moisture underground, meaning plants can access it during drier periods. Such a healthy water cycle requires a healthy biological food web.

I first saw this photo in the cramped basement office of Kristine Nichols, who at the time was a soil microbiologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Northern Great Plains Research Laboratory in Mandan, across the Missouri River from Bismarck (she has since gone on to be the lead scientist at the Rodale Institute in Pennsylvania). Nichols, who for many years was on the Burleigh County Soil Health Team, told me this photo is a prime indicator that farmers like Brown are able to increase their soil’s organic matter to the point where it is able to, for example, make better use of water. As soil organic matter increases from 1 percent to 3 percent, soil’s water holding capacity doubles, she said.

During her early years as a soil scientist, Nichols was taught that a farmer couldn’t have a significant positive impact on soil organic matter in a typical lifetime. “We were told this was something we couldn’t change, except in a negative way. Now we realize we can change organic matter.” That’s important, she added, because in the case of organic matter, “You have something that’s less than 5 percent of the soil, but it controls 90 percent of the functions.”

When Brown and other farmers started seeing positive changes in their soil that weren’t supposed to be possible, they approached scientists like Nichols. The microbiologist admitted to me that when she first visited Brown’s operation, she wasn’t quite sure what to make of what was happening. But for a scientist in a specialized field, Nichols has a refreshing attitude that appeals to practical-minded farmers.

“I’m less concerned about what soil organisms are, and more about what they do,” she told me. “We could really learn a lot more about functionality of these organisms.”

The first time I met her, Nichols was noticeably energized by the fact that farmers in Burleigh County were sending her “back to the textbooks” when questions came up she’d never confronted before. For example, farmers like Brown seem to be able to raise a good crop of corn with less rainfall than one would expect. Why? Nichols had been poring over plant physiology texts looking for clues. Situations like this make it difficult to determine who is pushing who in terms of cutting-edge innovations in building soil health.

“Just like they challenge me to ask questions, I challenge them,” said Nichols. “These guys are so innovative, and they so have the desire for challenge that I don’t want them to stop, and I don’t want them to allow me to stop. Innovations on the part of farmers are forcing us to come at this from a systems approach and ask deeper questions.”

That “dirt” is much more complex than we once thought is becoming increasingly evident as advances in electron microscopes (thanks to medical technology) and DNA testing offer unprecedented glimpses into this fascinating world. But Nichols pointed out that in a way soil is a “big black box” that’s just becoming blacker as science unearths new information about what goes on beneath our feet.

“The chemistry happens the way the chemistry happens. But when you throw biology into the mix, it gets complicated,” she said while flashing microscopic images of soil organisms on her computer’s screen. “In some ways, it’s a step backwards—we thought we knew 10 percent of the organisms in soil, now we realize it’s less than 1 percent.”

But that may not necessarily be a bad thing. It’s when farmers begin seeing soil as the heart of an extremely complex and oftentimes mysterious system that they can start taking steps to get at the problem, rather than just treating the symptoms. “We addressed some of the symptoms, which was great, but did we address the bottom line?” Nichols asked.

An example of the bottom line being addressed is when microorganisms do something called “habitat engineering,” which has huge implications for not only cutting erosion, but also making sure soil can create its own fertility while staying in place. When soil does not have good aeration and plenty of pore space, it loses its ability to stick together and form strong aggregates. As a result, the water coming in during a rainfall can actually cause weakened soil particles to, in a way, explode.

But soils with more carbon feed themselves, and extra “food” goes into developing a waxy glue—called glomalin—that holds aggregates together, creating a habitat where water can’t build up explosive pressure. “They’ve actually engineered an environment that’s safe, that has food, and has the ability to produce carbon to self-perpetuate,” Nichols told me. “The more of these aggregates there are, and the larger they are, the less susceptible to erosion the soil is. We’ve found management can impact this.”

Being able to improve soil’s ability to engineer its own healthy environment has huge implications on and off the farm. Soil provides at least $1.5 trillion in services worldwide annually, according to the journal Nature. For example, soil stockpiles 1,500 gigatons of carbon, more than the Earth’s atmosphere and all the plants on the planet.⁷ And it’s the organic matter that does the heavy lifting: it can hold ten to one thousand times more water and nutrients than the same amount of soil minerals.⁸

In recent decades, great strides have been made in reducing soil erosion to “T,” or “tolerable” loss rates—that’s the rate at which soil can be lost and still be replaced. This is thanks to conservation tillage and structures such as grassed waterways and terraces. But in recent years, the NRCS has made it clear that to make further reductions in soil erosion, and to in fact start building soil’s health and resiliency in the long term, we need to start managing for carbon or “C.”⁹

Teaming with Microbes

This goal of “C” means little if the benefits of healthy soil can’t be applied on individual farms that put innovative practices in place on a daily basis. Each farmer must apply some big-picture thinking to her or his own situation. A lot of the impetus for the Burleigh County Soil Health Team’s approach comes from the popularity of Holistic Management in the region. Developed by Allan Savory over three decades ago, this is a decision-making framework that has helped farmers, ranchers, entrepreneurs, and natural resource managers from around the world achieve a “triple bottom line” of sustainable economic, environmental, and social benefits. This framework is built upon the idea that all human goals are fundamentally dependent upon the proper functioning of the ecosystem processes that support life on this planet: water cycling, energy flow (conversion of solar energy), and biological diversity.¹⁰

I should point out that Savory has his detractors when it comes to his strident ideas about how livestock can be used to bring back lands hammered by overgrazing and other damaging land uses. Some grassland experts and environmental scientists argue that he overpromises and that many of his claims don’t stand up under empirical scientific scrutiny. Savory and his supporters argue that such criticisms are based on outdated ideas of the relationship between animals and the land.¹¹ My small contribution to this debate is that it is hard to argue with the positive results—many of which I’ve witnessed firsthand—that have come about on farm and ranch operations that adopt Savory’s way of utilizing holism to balance environmental health, economics, and quality of life. The fine details of what farming methods are used within such a system are almost immaterial—it’s the big-picture approach that Holistic Management supports which counts.

“The Holistic model has helped get family members and business team members on the same page, helping them all pull in the same direction,” Joshua Dukart, a Holistic Management certified educator who has worked with the Burleigh County Soil Health Team, told me. Another important fringe benefit of Holistic Management is that it puts producers in the driver’s seat, providing more creative control over what they do out on the land. During a couple of Burleigh County Soil Health Team tours I participated in, I got to see firsthand how such a holistic approach was making itself felt on the land and in the community.

“Take a closer look—anything you tramp down is just carbon in the soil,” instructed Fuhrer on a sunny late-summer afternoon during one of these tours. As he said this, he beckoned some 120 farmers and others to follow him into an impressively diverse, chest-high stand of warm season plants: cowpea, soybean, sorghum-sudangrass, pearl millet, graza radish, rapeseed, and sunflower.

This was the first stop on that year’s tour, an event that brings farmers, scientists, students, and conservationists from across the Midwest to south-central North Dakota at the end of each summer. As the name of the tour implies, they come to see thriving soil, and the land did not disappoint. Spadesful of fragrant organic matter were unearthed, the results of impressive biological and chemical tests were shared, and crop fields and pastures thriving on that soil were put on display. At one stop at a cornfield, a large jar of water sat next to a six-foot-deep soil profile pit that provided a firsthand look at how deep plant roots penetrate. Suspended at the top of the jar in a wire cage was a fist-sized clump of soil that came from the cornfield. Even though it had been immersed in the water for several hours, the clump was intact and the water remained relatively free of dissolved sediment—a sign that the soil’s health was so high that it had been able to engineer its own aggregate stability.

At one point during the tour, Kristine Nichols and Jay Fuhrer used a precipitation simulator to compare the impacts of a one-inch rain on trays of soil representing everything from native rangeland and rotationally grazed pastures to cover cropped no-till fields and conventionally farmed plots. The surface of the conventionally farmed tray was muddied, but little water was in the jar underneath, meaning hardly any moisture was percolating through the compacted soil. A jar that caught surface runoff from the conventional tray was heavy with muddy water, a sign that this sample was prone to erosion. When the conventionally farmed pan was flipped over onto the ground, it was clear only the first half inch or so of soil was wet; the rest was a gray powder.

“You’ve just made a drought,” concluded Fuhrer.

In contrast, the trays growing grasses and cover crops were sending little water running off the surface. Rather, the liquid was percolating down through the soil and dripping into catch jars hanging underneath. It was relatively free of sediment.

“Soil biology is like us—it has to eat,” said Fuhrer as he churned up a shovelful of North Dakota earth at another farm stop and held it up for the participants in the tour to see. One way to feed the soil, he explained, is to allow cover crops to be stamped into the ground while cattle are browsing them. This is a pretty radical concept in a line of business that prides itself on taking every last bit of plant material off the land at harvest time—anything less is considered slovenly. That plants can serve an important role as food for microbes and aren’t only useful if they can be harvested by machines or animals is just one of the counterintuitive messages emphasized by the Burleigh County Soil Health Team. There are other head-scratchers: planting corn may not always be the best bet financially and agronomically; cattle don’t need to spend a long time in grazing paddocks; you don’t need as much moisture as you once thought to raise a decent crop; no-till cropping systems alone don’t save soil; fields with more varieties of plants, not less, are more resilient in the face of drought.

One farm I visited during a tour was owned by Sanford Williams, who, along with his son Seth, operated a crop and livestock operation. The sixty-eight-acre field that was on display at the Williams place had grown alfalfa during the previous six years. Two months before this particular Soil Health Tour, which was held in early September, the field had been seeded to an eight-species cover crop mix of warm season plants. Timely rains before drought set in during the summer helped produce a vibrant stand, which had resulted in a huge amount of biomass and a build-up of fertility. The Williams family planned on letting their cows calve in the small pasture next to the field, and then turning the animals into the eight-species mix to graze—and stamp biomass. Such a strategy is a long-term investment in the land’s, and farm’s, overall health—a tough sell at a time when quick applications of fertilizers and chemicals can produce an extremely profitable crop in short order. At the time of this particular tour, corn prices were at record highs.

“I want to plant corn—you can probably guess why,” said Sanford while standing in the chest-high mix of cover crops. “Seth wanted to plant cover crops. With crop commodity prices where they are, I’m probably the hard one to convince to do that.”

But even the elder Williams conceded that this investment was paying off in ways high corn prices never could—tests showed organic matter and fertility were being built up to impressive levels in the field, all without adding extra fertilizer. Later in the tour the father and son showed off pastures that had been mob grazed. Sanford explained that a lot of his pastures had been full of unpalatable gumweed before.

“Now I can’t believe the grass that’s growing there,” he said. “I’m not a guy who knows his grasses, but I’m seeing species that are producing more feed. But it didn’t turn around right away.”

Fuhrer backed up that last point by talking about how although diverse cover cropping and mob grazing can rev up the biology of the soil considerably, farmers must take the long view. “We didn’t get poor soils in one year and we won’t solve this in one year,” he told the tour participants.

What was striking about the farmers working on soil health in Burleigh County was that, in a way, doing things in service of microbes had provided them a flexibility not present on conventional farms. At each tour stop, host farmers were invariably asked about future plans for this crop field or that pasture. The majority of them were not set on one concrete choice. They were open-minded—willing to see what nature threw their way before deciding. For example, Seth and Sanford Williams talked about the future of their cover cropped field. After the cattle mob graze it, then what?

“We don’t have a definite plan,” said Sanford, adding that it depended on how much moisture the area received in the following months—adequate precipitation may mean corn will be a good fit for the field next spring, while droughty conditions could call for a small grain like wheat, which doesn’t need as much moisture. Either way they had procured cheap cattle (and microbe) feed from the current stand of cover crops at a time when dry weather had made forage hard to come by. A version of that think-on-your-feet attitude about the next planting season was heard more than once on the tours I participated in.

“It gives you flexibility when dealing with drought,” said cattle producer Ron Hein while standing next to a thirty-seven-acre field that used to be all one pasture—in recent years he had broken it up into twenty grazing paddocks. He pointed out that while one paddock is being grazed, nineteen others are resting and rejuvenating, which is particularly important when moisture is short. “It keeps me from having to sell cows.”

We also toured the Darrell and Jody Oswald farm near the tiny town of Wing. Using a combination of cover crops, no-till planting, and mob grazing, the organic matter on the Oswald operation has been raised to a respectable 4 percent. Darrell, a long-time cattleman, talked about how working on soil health has made something he never really enjoyed—raising crops—interesting for his family.

“Pretty much everything we do and the decisions we make are based on improving the resource,” he said while standing near one of his cornfields, just across the fence from the farm’s pastures. “Raising annual crops is exciting for us now.”

Such positive energy is infectious and can help attract and keep another important resource, the younger generation, in farming. Gabe Brown and his wife Shelly are thrilled that their son Paul joined the farming operation after finishing college. He’s helping perfect their integration of crops and livestock while experimenting with enterprises of his own.

Seth Williams likes machinery and raising crops, skills integral to his family’s goal of improving soil health through diversity. After attending a grazing conference, he became convinced animals play a key role in building healthy soil, and he talked his dad into sharing their cattle enterprise with Ron Hein, who is a cousin. Joshua Dukart, the Holistic Management educator, said this kind of teamwork has allowed the Williams and Hein families to concentrate on individual strengths and interests, while contributing to the overall goal of improving the base resource: soil.

“Any given acre, Seth would like to crop it, Sanford would like to hay it, and Ron would like to graze it,” quipped Dukart. “But they are able to concentrate on their interests and talents and abilities in certain areas and they’re able to complement each other with those. They don’t segregate themselves from any other parts of the operation, and [they] still stay very involved with the decision-making as a whole, but basically take the leadership in one area or another.”

People involved in the Burleigh County Soil Health Team like to say that if you put soil at the middle, then everything else will follow. It’s like handing control over to a powerful, somewhat secretive force that has an outsized impact on all aspects of the environment. And ideally, under the general umbrella of improving the life in our land’s basement, everyone upstairs gets a takeaway. In simple terms, Fuhrer and his colleagues can say they are reducing erosion and improving water management, and Nichols gets to see scientific theory and research put into practice while she is given new questions to ponder. But just as important, farmers like Brown who are involved in improving soil health also benefit in some very significant ways. It’s a community-based approach to improving a resource that touches on everything from environmental protection and economic viability to the future of rural communities and quality of life.

When I’ve talked to Fuhrer about progress being made in advancing soil health in Burleigh County and beyond, he’s willing to tout statistics on the amount of land growing continuous living cover, the resulting reduction in erosion, and how it’s helping reduce input costs and thus increase profits. It’s the kind of stuff that looks good in an official progress report or farm magazine feature. But what really excites him is the increasing willingness of farmers to, as he puts it, “speak for the resource.” They are not shy about standing before their neighbors and talking about the inherent value of the soil itself—not just what kind of profitable yields it can produce. They are willing to put that resource at the center and work out from there.

And every vibrant community requires a few residents who aren’t quite satisfied with the status quo, who keep nudging and questioning even in the midst of success. Brown, for his part, thinks a lot of the practices that have been proven to work on his land will stay limited in scope until farmers learn to observe the land closely, and not rely on cookie-cutter solutions such as chemicals.

“One of the problems I see is a lot of the farmers and ranchers today—and I’ll just be blunt—they’re disconnected from the land. They oftentimes hire crop consultants, and the farms are so large and the equipment so big they don’t get off the tractor and feel the soil and see what’s happening,” he told me, while holding a handful of his own soil and watching two whitetail deer browsing grass a few hundred feet away.

For Nichols, that kind of close observation and constant questioning can help agriculture, conservation, and science exceed expectations. After all, look what happened when people stopped selling short farmed soil’s ability to build organic matter.

“Gabe did something I thought was impossible and instead of telling him, ‘Good job,’ I said, ‘What more can you do?’” Nichols told me during one of our discussions about the team. “I don’t know how far we can take it, but I like the idea of not putting limitations or constraints on a system. Can we take it a little further?”