Allen Williams and John Kempf discuss how livestock are vital for restoring landscapes
John Kempf. Many people struggle to have a clear perspective of an ideal to strive for. Most of us don’t actually know what really healthy plants look like anymore. We’ve never really gotten to see plants that are vibrantly healthy, that are just glowing and radiating. That’s true not just of plants but also of ecosystems. It’s true of landscapes. It’s true of livestock and grazing management systems.
If we want to really motivate people to change and to take action, we inspire action by portraying a very clear image of an ideal. This is what’s possible. This is the opportunity. This is the potential that we can all strive for.
Allen, I know you have spent a lot of time studying and thinking deeply about ecosystem restoration in the context of livestock management and ecosystem management. What does an ideal look like? What really is the opportunity? What is possible? What should we be striving for?
Allen Williams. That’s an outstanding question. Like you said, most of us have never seen it or experienced it. I’ve traveled to many countries and worked in a lot of different areas, and I’m yet to see perfect soil and perfect ecosystems. It’s degraded everywhere.
But we do know what is better. We’ve been able to monitor and measure that, and track that. And when I see something that is clearly better, there’s going to be a handful of key components there, no matter where you are in the world.
The first key component is soil that is highly functional. I’m talking about soil that has high levels of aggregation deep into the profile aggregation, so it’s able to function. It’s able to infiltrate water and infiltrate oxygen to cycle nutrients. And it’s able to absorb impact from animals and equipment. That’s first and foremost.
Now, we can do a shovel test and very quickly detect the level of function of a soil. We know that from the aroma of the soil. The aroma teaches us a lot about the biological profile — the bacterial-to-fungal profile or ratio that exist in that soil.
The second thing I look for that is highly indicative is plant species diversity. Whenever I see low diversity, I know there are issues, and I know there are limitations. You cannot escape it. There is no way that in a low-diversity system you aren’t limiting yourself. I’m not just talking about individual plant species but also plant functional groups or classes of plants.
I don’t just want to see, for instance, lots of grasses. It’s not really a highly diverse system if it’s just a bunch of grasses. I also want to see other functional groups like legumes and forbs, and even woody and brushy species, somewhere in the mix. All of those bring core components to biodiversity of the soil.
Then the next thing I look at is the level of insects, and the diversity of insects — particularly pollinators. How noisy is it? Really thriving ecosystems are not going to be silent; they’re going to be noisy because of the level of insects and birds and other species that are there. I call that the symphony of nature. I want to hear nature’s symphony playing for me, not silence. Then I look at birds — another key indicator species. If I’m hearing and seeing a lot of birds, that’s a very good sign.
Whenever I step foot on anybody’s farm, anybody’s ranch, anywhere in the world, those are the first few things that I automatically am looking for. If there’s a lack of those things, we’re facing a situation that needs a lot of help. But if they’ve already begun to build those, then I start to converse with them about what practices have been in place to build that diversity to that degree. And then we talk about how to not only continue those practices, but how to take it to the next level and the next.
Kempf. You described soil aggregation deep into the profile. How significant aggregation; how deep? What does that really look like? What does an ideal soil look like in your mind?
Williams. We often encounter soils that are plated, compacted. They have distinct hard pans; they have multiple compacted, plated layers, and very shallow aggregate. Often we see either no aggregate at all or a very shallow aggregate — only two, maybe three inches in depth. And oftentimes, that’s comprised of micro-aggregates and not macro-aggregates. Micro-aggregates are like little, tiny beads or BBs in the soil. A macro aggregate is going to be more the size of a cheese curd. I call it the cottage cheese of the soil, or a crumbly, chocolate cake look.
So, that’s really what we want to see. But way too often, when we stick the shovel in the ground for the first time on a farm, we don’t see that at all, and so I immediately know that the biology is way off in that soil. That soil is going to be highly bacterial in nature, with very low fungal and protozoal presence. This is usually confirmed through the laboratory tests. Soils that are pretty much dominated by bacteria are low-functioning soils. They will be compacted; they will be plated; they will have significant issues with nutrient cycling, or lack thereof, and water cycling — both will be subpar. What we have to understand is that one of the jobs of soil bacteria is to actually consume nutrients as they leach down through the root zone, pushed down by rainfall infiltration.
And that’s purposeful — that’s intentional. That’s to hold the nutrients in the root zone, within reach of the plants and mycorrhizal fungi. But bacteria are not a time-release capsule. Once they consume those nutrients, those nutrients are locked inside the membrane of the bacteria, and they can only be released two ways. One is protozoa- and bacterial-feeding nematodes consuming the bacteria to degrade the membrane and then release the nutrients. The other is rhizophagy, which Dr. James White describes so well, where the bacteria are drawn into the root itself. Powerful enzymes are released by the root to degrade the bacterial membrane, and then the nutrients are released inside the root, and then the bacteria are spewed back into the soil.
But neither one of those occurs when we have a significant lack of mycorrhizal fungi. A lack of mycorrhizal fungi significantly impairs both protozoa in the soil and the consumption of bacteria by the protozoa, and it significantly impairs rhizophagy.
Kempf. I really like the way you framed and described this, Allen, because there is this conversation around bacterial:fungal balance and that many of our degraded soils are bacterially dominant. But I think what gets lost in that conversation sometimes is the realization that when you have a fungal-dominant soil, or when you increase the fungal population, that doesn’t mean you decrease the bacterial population. In fact, in many cases, as I understand it, it means the opposite. You increase bacterial populations and fungal populations to much higher plateaus.
Williams. You are absolutely correct, and we have the data to substantiate what you just said.
Let me give you an example. We use the PLFA test — phospholipid fatty acid — as a biological marker test to measure total living microbial biomass in nanograms per gram of soil. What we often encounter our first time out to a farm or ranch is PLFA somewhere in the 800 to maybe 2,000 nanograms per gram range. That’s pretty common in a lot of soils before they start implementing regenerative principles and practices. However, what we have found is that once you start implementing really good regenerative practices, over time, you build both that bacterial and fungal — and protozoal — presence to staggering degrees. We don’t yet know how high we can go. We don’t know where the threshold is. We keep measuring this, and we haven’t hit a threshold that we have found that microbial growth cannot go beyond.
We have recorded over 16,500 nanograms per gram of microbial biomass. If you think about going from an average of about 1,000 to 1,500 to over 16,500, that’s exponential growth in microbial population in the soil. It’s a staggering amount of microbes in the soil. In other words, we can build literally trillions and trillions of microbes per acre, and that’s where we should be.
We took a subset of farms and ranches that we’ve been working on and tracking through the first four years of their progress. The average aggregate depth that we measured in year one on these farms was only about two inches. By year two, with implementation of regenerative practices, they had increased it to just a shade over four inches of aggregate depth. By year three, they had increased it to 6.7 inches in depth. And at that point, again, because of our experience, just the decades we’ve been doing this, I knew that they had built the microbial biomass to the point where they were poised to explode into exponential growth. And by year four, that is exactly what happened. The average aggregate depth had increased from a mean of 6.7 inches to almost 15 inches in depth.
That resulted in a whole array of other beneficial things that were occurring. Water infiltration rates improved dramatically. Nutrient cycling improved dramatically. The plants were far healthier, far more vibrant. And we saw a lot more biodiversity resulting from the latent seed bank. The animals were performing a lot better relative to gains, milk production, etc., but reproduction and health were also significantly better. Each of these farms noted that the health and reproductive performance of their livestock was radically improved.
Kempf. The sequence you’re sharing reminds me of the golden ratio — the phi series — 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13. The further down you go, the more rapid the progression becomes; it appears as it’s nonlinear. I’m persuaded that most, if not all, plants and organisms, and populations, grow along this pattern. The only difference is the time sequence. For some, it’s a time sequence of a few days, or a few weeks, or months. There are differences in how long it takes to get from one stage to the next. But that growth pattern seems to be almost a universal pattern for biological organisms.
Williams. I think you’re exactly right. I have spent a lot of time in Genesis and in many other places in Scripture. We’re given pictures of what abundance looks like and what thriving soil is like, and should be like. Every time we encounter truly healthy soil in Scripture, that always results in abundance above the soil. So again, if we’re lacking abundance, we have issues in the soil. Plain and simple.
Kempf. So far, the largest cluster of grapes I’ve encountered weighed about 15 pounds. That’s still quite a stretch from requiring two men to carry it!
This pathway to developing macro-aggregation to a deep level in the soil profile — what are the primary drivers of that ecosystem development? We all know that this is very multifaceted and that it’s context dependent, that there are many different pieces that play a contributing role here. But some are greater than others.
Williams. Let’s first talk very briefly about how that happens, and then we’ll talk about the fundamentals to cause that to happen.
Number one, aggregation cannot happen where you don’t have roots in the soil. If your roots don’t go deep, you’re not going to have deeply aggregated soil deep into the profile. Just not going to happen. Almost every one of the critical microbes that we deal within the soil live in association with the plant roots. And it is these microbes, and especially the mycorrhizal fungi, that produce these biotic glues that glue the tiny soil particles together to form the bigger aggregates.
So, we’ve got to have that microbial activity and the mycorrhizal activity in the soil to have the degree of biological glues needed to create the aggregates. And again, all of that lives in association with the roots. We’ve got to drive root growth deeper to drive microbes deeper, to drive aggregation deeper. That’s the principal way that this happens.
Now, how do we do that? Well, we don’t do it by lots of tillage. We don’t do it by using lots of synthetic chemicals, which are antagonistic to building mycorrhizal populations. With the tillage, it’s obvious. If you think about mycorrhizal fungi like a giant roll of gauze — if I were to take a giant roll of gauze and roll it across my field, and take any piece of tillage equipment and run it across that field, what’s it going to do to the gauze? It’s going to chop it all up, bundle it all up, destroy it.
That’s what we’re doing with the mycorrhizal network underneath the soil surface — we’re just chopping it into little itty-bitty pieces and jumbling it all up. It’s now non-functional.
When we’re using fungicides, they’re not target-organism specific. Yeah, they may be effective against the disease-causing fungus, but they’re also going to kill the mycorrhizal fungi and the saprophytic fungi. Many herbicides greatly diminish and harm mycorrhizal populations as well.
We’ve got to look at how we can significantly reduce and minimize tillage passes and use of synthetic fertility and chemical pesticides. That’s our first start to repairing and rebuilding the mycorrhizal fungi population.
Secondly, we’ve got to increase plant species diversity. There’s more than 200 different species of mycorrhizal fungi, and each species has different classes of plants that it associates with. The more diversity in plant classes, the more mycorrhizal species were tapping into and colonizing in the soil, which is exactly what we want to happen.
The next thing that matters, particularly if we have livestock, is the way that we graze those livestock. If we’re continuously grazing, and we’re overgrazing routinely, or if we’re coming back too soon, we’re lowering plant species diversity — which, again, is not good for building mycorrhizal colonization.
In the warm months, uncovered soil surface temperatures are heating up radically — to 130, 140, 150 degrees in our pastures — and we’re killing mycorrhizal fungi and soil bacteria and protozoa. We’re literally baking them in the soil. So, we have to be cognizant of the way that we graze — that we’re grazing in a manner that is promoting plant species diversity, not narrowing plant species diversity, and that we’re always keeping our soil protected and covered from sunlight so that we’re not heating the soil up and losing the soil moisture to evaporation.
Kempf. What really crystallized it for me was the realization that there are 200 different mycorrhizal species. We’ve known about mycorrhiza for several decades now, and as time goes by, I continue to learn new things about them that just amaze me. Several years ago, this video started circulating showing a micrograph of mycorrhizal fungi channeling bacteria into plant roots. There’s this pipeline, and it’s a high rate of speed; these little bacteria are not just crawling along through this pipeline. They’re moving fast. And I watched that for a bit and I just marveled. And I’m always asked the question, why? How does this work? How is this possible?
And a year or two ago, I learned, to my amazement, that each mycorrhizal fungi is a single cell. So, you have this fungal hyphae network that is in many cases dozens of feet — or can even grow to be hundreds or thousands of feet across in diameter — and who knows how deep into the soil profile. And that is all one single cell. And the fact that it’s a single cell — this is the explanation for why bacteria can flow through that hyphae as rapidly as they can, because they don’t need to transfer from cell A to cell B to cell C. It’s just laminar flow. It’s remarkable to watch.
Williams. Mycorrhizal fungi are the original worldwide web or internet. It is amazing how rapidly they transfer bacteria, transfer nutrients, transfer signals from plant to plant to plant. When you do radioisotope studies, it’s within seconds that you’re transporting and moving things. Mycorrhizal fungi are jacks of all trades and masters of all trades in the soil, as an organism.
Kempf. The largest single physical organism that is known is a fungi in the Pacific Northwest. The exact same fungal hyphae network, with the exact same DNA, is like 300 miles in diameter. This thing is really large. And they used radioactive isotopes and put them into the fungal hyphae on one edge of the network, and they showed up 300 miles away in 0.3 seconds. We’re no longer even talking about transfer of a physical substance from one side to the other at that point. This is a quantum leap. It’s quantum entanglement, networking, whatever you want to call it — it’s rapid, rapid transfer. And that’s just remarkable.
Williams. It absolutely is. Mycorrhizal fungi actually perform more than 100 different functions in the soil. They’re this amazing microbial species that is critically important to our systems.
One of the ways I tell farmers and ranchers to think about mycorrhizal fungi is as an IV tube. If we have an indwelling catheter hooked to an IV tube, that IV tube is hooked to a bag that is feeding nutrients into our body 24/7, on a continuous drip. We’re always being fed whatever’s in that IV bag. Mycorrhizal fungi are just like that IV tube, except instead of having one tube, they’ve got many, attaching all over the plant roots — lots and lots of IV tubes.
Kempf. Taking it one step further, you have all these thousands of IV tubes, but they’re not just bringing nutrients. They’re bringing the equivalent of stem cells. There is this constant regeneration and youthful longevity energy that is being added as well.
We work with lots of orchards and vegetable crops — a lot of different high-value crops. These crops are managed very, very closely. We pay very close attention to plant expression and physiological behavior. And one of the things that I continue to remind people of is that when you change the way a plant gets nutrition, and it starts getting nutrition from biology rather than from solution ions in the soil — from fertilizers — the best way that I’ve found to express it is that plants begin behaving differently. All of a sudden, you’ll see different types of growth patterns, and trees will need to be pruned differently and crops will need to be managed differently, because they have this much higher, more vibrant, level of health, and they begin behaving differently.
You described this rapid progression of soil aggregation. What does that progression look like? What is the tipping point — the threshold — where things start to really take off? What does that look like for plants? What does it look like for livestock? And how do they begin behaving differently?
Williams. When we have much stronger mycorrhizal colonization, there’s a whole host of things that begin to occur. Again, one of the principal factors is that mycorrhizal fungi produce and release a lot of these biological or biotic glues that hold together the soil particles to create aggregates. We can now infiltrate water and oxygen better, and protozoa are subaquatic organisms. To build our protozoa population in the soil — to consume bacteria, to release nutrients for plant uptake — then we have to first build the mycorrhizal population and the aggregate because the protozoa swim on those films of water in the soil to trap bacteria to consume them. Think of protozoa not like a wolf, but like a dolphin in the ocean, swimming to track down and consume schools of fish. They’re a predator, but more like a dolphin than a wolf — an aquatic creature rather than a land creature.
Aggregation has to come first — before we can build the protozoal population, and the mycorrhizal fungi colonizing, building aggregate, infiltrating more water, more oxygen, building the protozoa population, consuming more bacteria, releasing more nutrients for plant uptake, plus the mycorrhizal fungi performing many other functions including transfer of nutrients. If you have a high level of nutrients in one portion of a field and a lower level in another, the mycorrhizal fungi, in a matter of mere seconds, can transmit or transfer those nutrients from one area of a field to another. Where you lack mycorrhizal fungi, that does not occur.
So, if a pest insect moves into a certain area of the field and starts eating on plants, the plant sends a signal to the mycorrhizal fungi. It then sends a signal throughout every plant in that field to say, “You now need to produce compounds that this pest insect does not like,” and it’s going to ward this insect off. But again, in the lack of mycorrhizal colonization, that does not occur.
It does the same thing in warning plants throughout the field about fungal pathogens in the soil and producing compounds that produce immune responses against those fungal pathogens. So again, when you’re having pest problems, you’re having fungal disease problems, you’re having plant nutrient deficiencies, that tells me you have a lack of good mycorrhizal colonization and function, because otherwise that would not be occurring.
Now, how do we see this manifested in plants and animals? Well, if these plants now have access to more water and more nutrients, and especially a broader array of nutrients, you’ll see a number of positive benefits. We’ve been taught, and it’s been ingrained upon farmers for the last several decades, as if there’s only three nutrients that exist in the world: N, P and K. And what a wrong way to think. That would be like us eating only lettuce every day. We would soon be nutrient deficient.
So, these plants begin to react and respond in a way that is really pretty remarkable. First, we note a change in the morphology and physiology of the plant. The exact same plant species, all of a sudden their morphology will be very different. You will see wider, bigger leaves. You will see a different coloration to these leaves, and it’ll have a totally different texture. When you feel the leaf’s surface, it’ll have a much more velvety texture rather than a very rough, coarse texture to it. And it’s the same plant species. You didn’t change species.
Kempf. In the same vein, you mentioned wider, larger leaves, but we’ve noticed changes in leaf width-to-length ratio — they become wider relative to their length. You see much sharper definition of the leaf edges; it’s less amorphous there. They’re much sharper and cleaner.
And in many cases, you can also see plant structure change. The classical example is one of the widespread “weed” species that is in found in tilled soil — lambsquarter. I started asking people in a room what their lambsquarter plants looked like, and on some farms they’ll grow seven feet tall and 12 inches in diameter. On another farm two miles down the road, they’ll be a 24-inch round ball. But it’s the exact same plant species.
Williams. We see that all the time now. A lot of farmers don’t believe that, if you just tell them that. They have to see it to believe it. But when we’re able to show it to them, particularly in their own fields, they just say, “Wow, I never ever knew that this could happen.”
You mentioned the sharpness of the edges of the leaves, but another thing that we have noted too is the venous structure throughout the leaves. It’s formal prominent and functional. It’s clear from the venous structure in the leaves that they are receiving more nutrients. It’s sort of like a river with very few tributaries versus a river with lots and lots of tributaries. That’s what we begin to see in these plants. We see lots and lots of tributaries now developing in the veins of these plants that are continuing to feed these plants better and better.
The other thing we note about the plants is that they’re far more resilient. Anytime you have stressors or challenges, whether it be heat, cold, dry, too wet, whatever the conditions are, the plants are far less bothered by that. They’re still vibrant and productive in those more challenging conditions. And my goodness — don’t we want that on our farms?
Kempf. When we think about plants from a biophysics perspective, they’re fundamentally an electrical antenna that’s plugged into a magnetic grid that we call the soil. As an antenna, one of the things that we observe is that as plant health improves, their antenna function improves, and that’s an expression of this vein structure that you’re describing, and also of the leaf edge definition. And what many may not be aware of is that the quality of that antenna functionality has an effect on dew formation.
In a really healthy plant, where there is lots of energy flowing through this antenna, the dew drops form on the very tips of the leaf serrations, and they stand straight up. Dew doesn’t form on the bottom of a leaf; it forms at the top of a leaf or the tops of these tips. Only when it’s struck by sunlight and loses some of its structural energy does it begin to collapse and flip to the bottom side of the leaf.
We’ve observed that when we have these really healthy plants that have their antenna function thriving and functioning really well, we get much stronger dew formation. And these plants are actually capable of collecting very large amounts of water.
Williams. I am so glad you brought that up because that is one of the things that we have noted over and over, and that many graziers and many farmers dismiss. They dismiss the value and power of dew. Dew can be an incredibly valuable form of moisture on a day-in, day-out basis. You can actually not receive rain for a long period of time, but if you’ve got really good dew production, you can still have vibrant, thriving plants.
In plants that don’t have this structure, you first get far less dew formation. But then, particularly in fields that are monoculture or pastures that are overgrazed, as soon as the sun starts heating up, the dew is quickly evaporated. It’s not captured by the plant and the soil. We want that dew to be captured to be utilized by the plant and the soil.
Again, here I have to go back to Scripture. It didn’t rain until the flood. And the flood occurred in the year 1651, when you really trace the timetable through the 10 generations from Adam to Noah. For that period of time, man did not experience rain. Everything was watered from dew. So, man thrived with just the presence of dew and the watering from the fountains of the deep. We think only rainfall is valuable now, or applied irrigation; not so.
Kempf. Yeah, not so. One of the other pieces I want to speak about is when we have soil that has macro-aggregation at a significant depth — where is the threshold? What defines significant depth? And, is such a soil compactible by livestock? Is it compactible by heavy equipment? How resilient is such a soil compared to what we are familiar with?
Williams. That is a fantastic question. What we find is that soil that is highly aggregated — no, it’s not compactible. It’s compressible like a sponge. I can take a nice thick sponge and I can squeeze it down; but then what happens the moment I release my hand from that sponge? It returns right back to its original shape and function. And the soil does too. As we build aggregate in the soil, our animals no longer are pugging that soil. They’re depressing it, and as they move on, it returns to its original shape.
The same thing with equipment. The tires or tracks compress the soil. But as it moves on, the soil comes back up. So we don’t see the rutting in the fields. You’ll see the depressions for a short period of time, and then they’ll disappear. That is exactly what we have experienced with highly aggregated soil. The function is just so much better.
So, that means that when it’s wet, if I’m grazing, I can still get livestock in there and graze without pugging it all up. Or if I’m cropping, that means I have much broader windows for planting and harvest because my fields can be wetter. I can still get in them and plant without rutting up and mudding up my fields. Or I can harvest without rutting and mudding up my fields. That is precisely what we have seen with many of our clients and on our own farms.
What’s funny about this — and I’m sure you’ve seen it as well in your experience — is that our clients will go out in the fall to harvest, and it’s wet, and they won’t have any problem. Their ground is holding their combine up. But their neighbor sees them doing this and thinks, “Oh, well, he’s harvesting. I’m going to go get in my field.” And then boom — he sinks his combine. And the neighbor is confused; he has no concept of aggregation in the soil and the power that brings to restoration.
Kempf. Yes, it’s a common experience for farmers to describe their soil changing completely, and the ability to move machinery around. We now have this entire domain of science where researchers are looking at how many days it’s possible to be out and working in the field. And of course, they’re looking at it from a tillage perspective, and they’re really asking the wrong questions.
Williams. Absolutely, they are. This greatly expands those planting windows, harvest windows — any field work window that you want to talk about.
We have so confined ourselves to thinking, “Well, if I plant corn, I must plant it within this window or it’s going to be a failed crop.” I see way too many farmers trapped in that mindset. Our federal crop insurance program is designed to accommodate that as well. But when we’re able to build this aggregation and this function in the soil, those windows are no longer applicable. The things that we think are proven and true and time-honored are not. We created those situations.
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Kempf. I’d like to just expand on that point. What I’ve observed is that you can change the quote “requirements” in both directions. First of all, if you plant later, seeds will germinate and come out of the ground and take off like they’ve got an injection of jet fuel. And on the other end, you can also plant much earlier.
This idea came up in conversation a few days ago — what would happen if we planted seeds in the fall? I know Steve Groff is experimenting right now with planting hemp seeds in the fall. We see volunteer corn coming up in fields, but not everywhere. I see volunteer tomatoes in my garden all the time. What other seeds can be planted in the fall and will then germinate the following spring when the time is right?
But in this conversation, you would’ve thought that I had uttered a heresy. The immediate reaction was, “Well, we plant corn and soybeans in the spring all the time, and they rot in the ground if they’re planted too early.” But seed rotting in the soil, in my opinion, is an expression of two things. A, it’s an expression of crappy seed quality, and B, it’s an expression of where that soil is. We absolutely see some seeds that are planted in the fall that germinate in the following spring. So, let’s just go all the way to the far edges of that heretical idea and say, “What would happen if we planted thousands of acres of corn and beans in the fall?”
Williams. I love this conversation. We have created our own constraints on what we believe to be true. If we continue with our current practices, we’re right. But if we radically alter our practices and radically alter the health and vigor and vitality of our soil, and that aggregate depth and profile in our soil, then we’re wrong.
To your point, yes, we have seen that when we have much more highly aggregated soils, number one, they’re far more functional. Number two, there is far more insulative capacity and protection for the seed, and the seed responds when the conditions are correct without the seed rotting and degrading in the soil. When we graze regeneratively and we intentionally plant no seed, yet we see enormous response from the latent seed bank year over year — in many cases, this is from seed that people haven’t seen germinating and growing for either decades or centuries. Seed can stay in the ground for a very long period of time until conditions are conducive.
Kempf. You mentioned a key phrase: grazing regeneratively. There are many graziers, both dairy and beef, who have an authentic desire to do the right thing. They’ve implemented holistic management, they’re doing the best they know, to the best of their ability. Yet they listen to the conversation you and I are having, and they say, “I’ve been doing this for years, and I just haven’t gotten there yet; what’s missing?”
What is missing? Where are they missing the targets? What are they not understanding or not implementing well?
Williams. First and foremost, it truly is a lack of understanding and education in regenerative principles and practices. They’ve heard it. They may have read it; they may have gone to a conference, but they don’t really understand how to implement those principles and practices within the context of their individual farm. That’s one of the key things that I see occurring — that lack of awareness and education. Just because you’re a farmer doesn’t mean you automatically know how to regeneratively farm. You must learn this.
Secondly, we see incredible amounts of peer pressure. Everybody that sells you something. Family members, friends, neighbors, our universities, our extension service, on and on and on, can exert influence and peer pressure. And farmers often succumb to that. We like to call ourselves fiercely independence, but we’re not. We are worse about succumbing to peer pressure than the kids on a school playground.
We don’t want to admit that, but we don’t want our neighbors thinking we’re doing something radically different and potentially stupid. We don’t want our family thinking that. And then, if you’ve been surrounded by fertilizer salespeople and seed salespeople and chemical salespeople and on and on, they like to become your buddy, right? Then you’re influenced by them, and they’ll tell you, “No, no, no, no. Why are you thinking about this regenerative stuff? I know so and so that tried that stuff and completely failed. Had a train wreck. So no, don’t try it.”
The third is debt load. Among the farming community today, it’s the greatest it’s ever been. How many farmers have to have annual operating loans? Out of the cash flow of last year’s crop, they can’t even afford to fund the purchase of next year’s seed, fertilizer, whatever else they may need — fuel and all of that. They have to have an annual operating loan just to get by. You’re teetering on the verge of an insolvency when you have to have annual operating loans.
Kempf. And with that, of course, come requirements for insurance and an addiction to the system. You’re hooked at that point.
Williams. The hook is set, and unfortunately the system is designed so your lenders will discourage you because they are not educated in the regenerative principles and practices. They’ll discourage you, and your lender will tell you, “I’m not going to renew your operating loan if you’re thinking about doing it that way. I’m not familiar with that. I’m going to call your loan in here if you go that route.” Your insurer for federal crop insurance does the same thing.
The lenders and insurers are all tied into this and all are facilitating the wrong type of behavior from these farmers and are also keeping them ensnared in this debt that the farmer can’t get out of. The beautiful thing about being out of debt is that you’re free to make far, far better decisions, and to make your own decisions without the influence of the lenders, the insurer, whoever else may be putting pressure on you.
The other thing is that nine times out of 10, graziers have turned what they’re doing into a prescriptive approach rather than an adaptive and regenerative approach. Prescriptions, recipes, formulas always ultimately fail in nature and in biology. They may work initially. You got some initial results that were positive because you introduced a disruption. But when you make that one disruption, what you do from that point forward, you turn it into a prescription — after a period of time you’re going to hit a threshold, a wall, and quit making progress, and then start trending backwards again.
That’s what we see happening over and over again with a lot of people. The key here is being able to remain adaptive in your mindset, and this is where the three rules of adaptive stewardship really come into play.
The first rule is the rule of compounding. You have to recognize that everything that we do, every decision we make, everything we apply or don’t apply, creates a whole series of compounding, cascading effects. Nothing in nature in biology is ever static or “sustainable.” You and I, every day we live, we’re a day older and we can’t stop that. We can’t sustain being 40 years of age or whatever. Neither can you out on your farm. You can’t sustain anything. You’re either moving forward or backwards. Changes are never neutral.
The second rule is a rule of diversity: the greater the diversity that we have in every type of organism, the better. Microorganisms in the soil, insects, pollinators, birds, plants — even the crop rotations that we do, the cover crop species we plant, the livestock species we have on our farm — diversity matters. The greater the diversity we have in every form and fashion we can have it, the better everything’s going to function.
And then the third rule — this is where the rubber meets the road if you want to make continuous, ongoing progress without hitting that threshold — is called the rule of disruption. What that means is that we can introduce planned, purposeful disruptions year over year to continue to make progress.
So, if a person is an athlete, they know that to progress as an athlete and to perform at a higher and higher level, they cannot do the same exercise routine at the same duration and intensity day after day. If they do that, they know they’re going to hit a wall and their athletic performance is going to threshold and then start going backwards. They know that the only way to continue in their athletic performance is to alter their exercise routine, routinely. In other words, they have to introduce planned, purposeful disruptions to trigger growth in their body.
The same way on our farms — we need to plan purposeful disruptions. The rule of disruption is where we make that ongoing progress — and this is what most people lack. They hear somebody say something or see something somebody did, or they did something, and they say, “Oh, I got a positive response, so I’m now going to do it that way from now on.” They turn it immediately prescriptive. They lack disruption, and they lack growth from that point forward.
Kempf. That’s a perfect analogy.
Livestock in this ecosystem are a fundamental tool, but secondly, for many operations, they’re also a primary source of income. How do you use the livestock differently? And also, how do the livestock begin behaving differently as the overall ecosystem health improves dramatically?
Williams. Both very good questions. To the first, there are several ways that we use the livestock differently. Number one, we have to recognize that they are not just a revenue-generating source for us, but they are also a tool. I’ve got to also use them as a tool to build soil, to build organic matter, to build fertility, to build carbon, to build microbial populations and diversity. And that only comes through adaptive grazing principles and practices — again, the three rules of adaptive stewardship — if I can intentionally graze my livestock in a way where I’m altering my disruptions.
One type of disruption is altering stock density. Never just pick a stock density and stay at that. That’s wrong. That’s a prescription, and you’re going to hit a wall. I call it pulsing of stock density — routinely changing my stock density impact. So, if I was at 40,000 pounds per acre in this particular field, then maybe the next time or the next year that I’m back in that field, I’m going to significantly alter that stock density. I may go up to 200,000 pounds or 500,000 pounds, but I’m going to make sure I alter it.
Another one is to alter the rest period. We see way too many graziers who try to come back every 30 days, every 40 days, whatever the rotation is, and they do that over and over and over again. When you do that, you’re limiting what your livestock can do for you in terms of building soil, building productivity, building biomass and diversity. And then, secondly, you’re narrowing the plant species. You will always see a diminishment of plant species diversity, not an increase.
Too short a rest period is going to always be very detrimental to your progress. And that is particularly among dairy graziers — that is really one of the reasons they have such a hard time making progress — because they fail to alter that rest period. You’ve got to introduce that disruption of altering rest period, and there’s very functional ways to accomplish that even within a dairy and to keep production up.
Another one is to alter paddock configuration or the shape of the paddock. A square paddock can have the same stock density and encompass the same acres, but you get a very different biological fertility and plant diversity impact versus a paddock that is long and narrow. If I want a higher impact, I’m going to build a paddock that is long and narrow, not square. Animals move in a circular pattern in a square paddock; in a long, narrow paddock they’re always moving back and forth. It’s a totally different impact, even though they’re covering the same amount of ground.
Besides altering configuration, you can also alter paddock direction. A lot of graziers say, “How in the world can that make a difference? What does it matter if I’m running my paddocks north and south or east or west?” It makes a radical difference. How does the sun move across every plant — east and west. With your trample impact and everything else, coupled with the overall grazing impact, you’re going to get a different impact north and south versus east and west.
Another one is leader-follower — moving one species in first and immediately moving another species in after that. I can use that as a disruption and make that work very well. Alter species order if you’re doing multispecies grazing.
Bale grazing can be a disruption. Planned burns can be a disruption. What we call “contour grazing” can be an excellent disruption. Instead of building paddocks up and down slope, build them following the contour of the slope and move the livestock. Start at the bottom — never start at the top — and move them up. Always start at the lower areas, the bottoms, and move up the contour of the slope. Over time, biology, diversity, carbon and organic matter gradually erode into the bottoms, and it’s higher in the bottoms. If I want to move that organic matter, I can use my livestock to transfer all of that using contour grazing — start them in the bottoms, build my paddocks along the contour, and move them up. You can move all of that diversity, biology, carbon and organic matter up the slope again.
So, those are some key disruptions that we can put into place. And then, note whatever disruption you used on a particular area of your farm this year, and next year, when you go back to that area of the farm, change it to a different disruption.
This is not hard. It’s actually pretty easy. And it’s a whole lot of fun. When you really get into this and you’re actively doing it, it becomes a heck of a lot of fun, and you see radical differences occurring. You become encouraged, your confidence level goes way up, and you keep wanting to do this.
Kempf. That was awesome, Allen. Thank you for this. In some ways it is easy for us as humans to fall into habitual behavior. We do things because they are habits, and habits are easy. We don’t have to think about them. And what you’re describing, in essence, is, “Don’t develop any habits when it comes to grazing management.” In that context, your analogy of an athlete who wants to develop superior strength and athleticism is a perfect example because they have to be very deliberate first about avoiding bad habits, but then also about not becoming habitual in their exercise regime or whatever it is that they’re seeking to develop. There has to be a constant evolution of the patterns that they are using, and that’s exactly what you’re describing so well. It requires a great deal of mental flexibility, but also being very deliberate and very conscious about avoiding habits. I love that.
Williams. Yes, and it requires a great deal of observation. You must spend the time. Don’t just go out there and move your livestock and then leave. “Job done. Okay, checked that off my task list for the day.” Once you move them, really, your job has just begun. You want to then intentionally spend time in making keen observations. Go back to the prior paddock that they were in and observe what the grazing impact there was. What do I see? What does the manure look like? What do the plant species look like there? What was my degree of trample? How much residual do I have left protecting soil moisture and soil temperature? What particular species do they tend to favor that day in that paddock?
Then I want to watch them as I turn them into the new paddock, and I want to look at the animals themselves. That’s the beautiful thing about moving your animals very frequently — you get to see every animal every day. You get to detect if there’s an injury, illness or whatever. You detect it much earlier, and you can take care of it much earlier.
But secondly, observe what their gut looks like. What does the sheen on their hair coat look like? How are they moving? How are they behaving? Are they content or not? And then, as they move into the new paddock and start to graze, I want to observe how they’re grazing — what they’re grazing initially. Oftentimes what you’ll see is that when you move them into a new paddock, they’ll target certain plants first, and that’s intentional. That’s not accidental. Then they’ll transition to other plants.
The plants they target first teaches me a lot about their nutritional or medicinal needs. They’re needing that. That’s why they’re attacking that plant first, and you’ll notice that they’ll only eat to the point that it satiates them for that need, and then they’ll get off of that plant and go to other plants.
Once we start observing that, and noting that, and understanding that, we then begin to make far better decisions. Constant good observation leads to keen intuition. Once we develop keen intuition, we are better decision-makers day in, day out.
Kempf. I love that. Constant keen observation leads to better intuition. That’s perfect.
And then, how do livestock begin behaving — and performing — differently?
Williams. So, again, we’re moving them frequently. We’re using adaptive grazing practices. We are introducing disruptions. Then we are creating all of those benefits that we talked about earlier — the mycorrhizal colonization, the soil aggregation, the diversity of plant species, the far greater nutrient cycling.
Those animals are doing several things that is of huge benefit to them. Number one, they’re consuming a much broader array or diversity of plant species. They’re consuming a much broader array of nutrients and medicinal compounds, antioxidant compounds and antiparasitic compounds. They’re self-medicating; they’re self-deworming. You’ll notice in the animal a far higher level of contentment. You’ll notice in their appearance, particularly their hair coat, that it’ll be much slicker. They’ll have this very nice, oily sheen to the hair coat — that is highly desirable. When the sun hits them, their coat is bright in appearance.
You’ll notice down the top line — down the spinal top line of that animal — you’ll see a nice oily buildup, and it’ll be darker. The hair color will actually be a little bit darker right down the middle of that spine. If it’s not, that animal is not performing up to par. Another thing that we notice — we call them happy lines. You’ll notice these coming across the ribs, almost like long, thin fingers coming across the ribs horizontally. When you start to see happy lines on these animals, that’s a change in hair pattern growth. That’s what’s creating that appearance — like somebody took their fingers and raked them across the side of that animal. It’s actually a change in hair pattern growth that is triggered by an optimally functioning pancreas in that animal. They’re functioning better hormonally.
You’ll see other places on the animal that are clear indicators that they have optimal hormonal function. You’ll notice it in the manure of the animals. You’ll have a nice, dense manure that is the consistency of a thick pancake batter or a pumpkin pie, with a dimple in the top. And that’ll be consistent, day in and day out — the consistency of the manure pats that you see in cattle.
Another thing that we note is the overall health status. They are far, far healthier. They maintain much better body condition throughout the year, year in and year out. Their fertility is higher. They’ll breed on the first heat cycle much more readily, and they will not lose pregnancies. They’ll breed quicker. They’ll maintain a solid pregnancy. The calves that are born are epigenetically stronger. They’re more vigorous at birth. This applies to pigs, lambs, whatever — they’re much more vigorous at birth. You’ll see them get up and start nursing a lot quicker and moving about a lot quicker and a lot better.
Another thing that we notice, if they’re dairy cows, is an improvement in milk component production and higher milk components; as a dairy producer, you want that. But secondly, that’s a direct sign that your cow is actually healthier and performing physiologically and metabolically better. If she’s low on milk components, she’s got a problem. You may not notice it, and it may be subclinical, but she’s got issues.
In dairy, you’ll see significantly longer lifetime lactations with that reproductive capacity, that health, lower somatic cell count — the months will be within the ranges they need to be in. They’ll have fewer mastitic infections. If they’re beef cattle, you’ll see better gain performance while staying very healthy. And all of this is because they’re consuming a far greater phytonutrient profile in their diet.
Those are some of the key things we look for in livestock performance. They basically become trouble free.
Kempf. They become trouble free, and they become — I’m hesitant to use the word — management free. They don’t require close handling and management to constantly give them injections, vaccinations, etc. — they become management free in that sense.
But the overall process is actually much more knowledge intensive. It’s more knowledge intensive, and you could say maybe more management intensive in some ways — but maybe more consciousness and intention intensiveness. There’s more deliberate intention required. You can’t do it mindlessly, but, in reality, as a net, you actually have much less physical energy invested in the overall process.
Williams. Yes, absolutely. You do. I’ll give you an example. Years ago, we made the conscious decision to quit deworming our sheep, to quit trimming hooves, all of that. And did we have some fallout initially? Yes, we did. We had to do some culling and some epigenetic selection and to continue to improve plant species diversity and so forth. But now we don’t touch our sheep. No one gets treated for internal parasites. No one ever gets a hoof trimmed. We have far, far less labor input into our sheep. That makes us a lot more net profit on them. We don’t spend money on pharmaceuticals for the sheep. You do begin to produce these animals that are much more problem free, and they’re much more hands off. That saves money in a whole host of ways.
The other thing we’ve noted is as we radically change soil functioning and nutrient uptake in the soil and into the plants, we’re able to radically lower and eventually eliminate the need for supplemental mineral in our livestock. Mineral is always costly. If animals can get more of it from the pasture every day versus having to feed it to them, then I’m saving money. I’m not advocating that people eradicate their minerals. But you’ll notice mineral consumption steadily diminishing as they obtain more of the mineral from their daily diet on grazing in their pastures.
Kempf. Allen, you have perspective across thousands of different operations in a lifetime of experience. What remarkable experiences really stand out in your memory?
Williams. Wow, there’s so many things, and that’s the beauty of this. I guess my first one would be my own realization, growing up on my family’s farm, which was a pretty diversified farm in the sixties and seventies. It’s been in the family since 1840 and has supported multiple generations. When I was growing up, we were not using all the synthetics and the chemicals and the pharmaceuticals, and I never thought anything about it because that’s just the way we did it as I was growing up.
We were pretty diversified as well. We weren’t one of these farms that was just beef cattle or just dairy cattle or just corn and beans or whatever. I went away to college and got “educated” and became indoctrinated, and became convinced that to feed the world, we had to do what we now call the conventional way. I thought we needed to have a heavy alliance on fertilizers and synthetic chemicals and pharmaceuticals. And then I was convinced to go on and get a Ph.D. So, for a period of time, I became a researcher and a professor at the university. And for a period of time there, I thought I was doing a lot of really good stuff.
I was getting a lot of research dollars brought into the university, pumping out a lot of peer-reviewed articles, making a “name for myself” as a researcher and professor. But over time, I started realizing what we were doing in all of this research — that the soil wasn’t getting healthier, and our animals were not healthier or performing better without all of the inputs. I kept going back and thinking about my experience growing up on the family farm and asking myself, “Well, wait a minute. How were they profitable? How did they support multiple generations for all of these generations without all of this stuff? How did they do it?” I had to really have a serious discussion with myself. And I came to the conclusion that our academic research was treating the symptoms and never the root cause. I now call it putting a band-aid on a gushing wound. I also discovered that’s actually the way that everybody wanted it within that system, because that’s the way you make a heck of a lot of money — treating symptoms and not solving the real problem.
So, I then had a decision to make. I was 15 years in, and I was a tenured professor, with all the benefits. I sort of had it made in that world, but I had this decision to make. I either stay in that world, knowing what we were doing, and that I really wasn’t making the difference I thought I was making, or I leave it. I made the decision to leave. That was in the year 2000. I went back to farming and ranching full time and doing this consulting.
And I have to tell you, I was scared to death when I made that decision. I kept thinking, what if I fail? But that also spurred me to be far more innovative in what I was doing farming, because I now realized I didn’t have any of that to fall back on. I had no income from the university anymore. That was all gone. I either made it on my own or I failed on my own. I had to support my family, so I had a very strong incentive to figure this thing out.
At that point, I began to realize I had to do things radically different — doing them conventionally was not going to work. I was going to spend way too much money for far too little profit. I knew I had to figure out a way to cut out a lot of inputs, cut out a lot of cost, but yet do it in a way that built my soil and built my resources and productivity.
So, that’s what started me down this path. And every single day since then has been an incredible learning experience. That’s the beauty of this. We are truly learning every single day. Being able to go to thousands of different farms and ranches in every conceivable environment and in many different countries around the world — we see things that most farmers and ranchers never see. We experience things that they never experience. And when I see things like what I talked about earlier — taking aggregate depth in year one from two inches, to by year four to almost 15 inches — that just spurs me on even more because I’m like, “Wow, if we can accomplish this, what else is there out there to accomplish? This is not the end of it.”
Kempf. You see something like that happen once, and then you see it happen again, and then you see it happen 10 times and 100 times. Your reality — your worldview — changes as a result of cumulative experience, and all of a sudden you realize that your worldview is very different from that of many of the people around you.
I was doing a presentation yesterday at an event, and it just occurred to me that our team thinks that putting nutritional applications on high-value crops and having insects disappear is the way the world works, because that’s what we do all the time. And yet that is a reality that’s fundamentally different from what most farmers get to experience.
Williams. It is.
Kempf. You’re fairly vocal and straightforward about your perspectives, Allen, and so I’ll let you choose to answer this question in the way that you think best fits. What is a topic that you haven’t yet communicated about very often, or that you don’t speak about frequently, because you perceive that many farmers may not be ready to hear it yet?
Williams. I think one of the areas is that we can radically alter our position. I still see way too many farmers who are not diverse enough in their enterprises. If you’re principally a dairy, you have dairy cows, and that’s about it. If you’re a beef cattle farm, you only have beef cattle. If you grow crops — it you’re a corn and bean farmer or whatever — we’ve got to take them where they’re at and help them make improvements with what they’re doing, with those existing enterprises.
I understand that, but really what I want to do, if I could, is move them down the path quicker on diversifying, because once we add in other species, we really do begin to make more exponential progress rather than linear progress. And again, we’ve experienced that ourselves, and we’ve seen it over and over on many, many of our clients’ farms and ranches. But they’re not ready for that in the early stages. They’re so tuned in and focused. “Well, I’m a dairy farmer. I’ve got to make a living dairying.” Yeah, but there’s a whole lot of other things you can produce on your dairy farm — chickens, pastured pigs, sheep, all of these types of things.
Kempf. You mentioned a word that I suspect many farmers don’t appreciate well enough, and that’s the word “exponential.” When we talk about exponential growth opportunities, this is not linear. This is not 1+1=2. Tell us a little bit about when you think that the impact of diversifying and adding poultry, hogs, sheep, beef — or adding these different livestock groups together — what are the opportunities that you see? What does exponential really mean?
Williams. Exponentially means that instead of increasing in little increments, you radically alter soil health and performance. When you increase diversity, you radically alter diversity in everything. We see far more plant species diversity in our pastures. We see far more beneficial insects, bird species, diversity of wildlife — and all of those are good contributors to our ecosystems, and our ecosystem benefits. We see a radical difference in the performance and health of our livestock as we increase diversity.
A lot of people are fearful. “Oh, if I bring other species in, I may be introducing disease to my current species of livestock.” That’s the way they’ve been trained to think. No, it’s the exact opposite. You actually create far greater immunity and strength against disease when you have more diversity out there. And then we see radical alterations in the amount of biomass that we can grow. The same pastures are able to increase forage biomass production by up to 4.5 times. That’s an incredible difference in biomass production on an annual basis.
And then, finally, net profit per acre increases. As we increase diversity in enterprises, we see significant improvement in net profit per acre and in the total amount of food we’re producing per acre, versus a monoculture system. I’ll use our farm as an example. Compared to all of our neighbors around us, we are producing, depending on the neighbor, anywhere from four to 11 times more food per acre every year than any of our neighbors. And they’re all conventional.
Exponential to me means exploding! Continued abundance. That’s what I think about when I think about exponential. That’s what we begin to see when we begin to introduce greater diversity into our operations.
