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The recently-retired manager of Dakota Lakes Research Farm, Dwayne Beck has spent decades studying ways to improve soil functionality.
Operating in a relatively dry environment, his early research was focused on irrigation, but it shifted to no-till systems when he came to understand the error in the common belief that conventionally tilled systems created less runoff than no-till systems.
He has since gone on to challenge many of the generally accepted practices in ag and his talk at the 2022 National No-Tillage Conference focused on what he calls the broken water, nutrient, and carbon cycles in agriculture.
For this episode of the No-Till Farmer podcast, sponsored by Bio-Till Cover Crop Seed, we followed up with Beck about his time at Dakota Lakes and how he came to develop some of his controversial beliefs. He explains why he’s not interested in signing up for a carbon sequestration program, ways farmers can help repair the broken ecosystem services, how Dakota Lakes Research Farm intends to achieve Net Zero energy by 2026 and more.
No-Till Farmer podcast series is brought to you by Bio Till Cover Crops.
Bio Till Cover Crops, a pioneer and leader in cover crop seed, represent a complete lineup of seeds suitable to a wide range of soils types and growing conditions. Bio Till Cover Crop vendors are committed to your success and provide local resources, education, guidance, and all the tips and tricks we know, to ensure your plantings have the correct foundations for success. The original producers of Bounty Annual Ryegrass, Bio Till Cover Crops continue to add new and improved cover crop and forage varieties, including Enricher Radish, Bayou Kale, Shield Broadleaf Mustard, African Forage Cabbage, and Mihi Persian Clover. With over 30 years of experience in production, processing, packaging, and shipping, you won’t be able to find a better fit for your farm anywhere else.
Full Transcript
Julia Gerlach:
Welcome to the No-Till Farmer Podcast, brought to you today by Bio Till Cover Crop seed. I'm Julia Gerlach, executive editor for No-Till Farmer. I encourage you to subscribe to this series, which is available in iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, Stitcher Radio, and TuneIn Radio. Subscribing will allow you to receive an alert about new episodes when they're released. I'd like to take a moment to thank Bio Till Cover Crop Seed for sponsoring today's episode.
Julia Gerlach:
Bio Till Cover Crops, a pioneer and leader in cover crop seed, represents a complete lineup of seed suitable to a wide range of soil types and grow conditions. Bio Till Cover Crop vendors are committed to your success and provide local resources, education, guidance, and tips, and tricks to ensure your plantings have the correct foundations for success. The original producers of Bounty Annual Ryegrass, Bio Till Cover Crops continues to add new and improved cover crop and foraged varieties, including Enricher Radish, Bayou Kale, Shield Broadleaf Mustard, African Forage Cabbage, and Mihi Persian Clover. With over 30 years of experience in production, processing, packaging and shipping, you won't be able to find a better fit through your farm anywhere else. Learn more at biotill.com. That's B-I-O-T-I-L-L.com.
Julia Gerlach:
The recently retired manager of Dakota Lakes Research Farm, Dwayne Beck has spent decades studying ways to improve soil functionality. Operating in a relatively dry environment, his early research was focused on irrigation, but it shifted to no-till systems. When he came to understand the error in the common belief that conventionally tilled systems created less runoff than no-till systems. He has since gone on to challenge many of the generally accepted practices in ag, and his talk at the 2022 National No-Tillage Conference focused on what he calls the broken water nutrient and carbon cycles in agriculture. For this episode of the No-Till Farmer Podcast, we followed up with Beck about his time at Dakota Lakes, and how he came to develop some of his controversial beliefs. He explains why he's not interested in signing up for a carbon sequestration program, ways farmers can help repair the broken ecosystem services, how Dakota Lakes Research Farm intends to achieve net zero energy by 2026, and much more.
Dwayne Beck:
Dakota Lakes started as a response to farmers on the Missouri Riverfront having huge problems with runoff under irrigators. I mean, and that was the people who started it, and we were trying to address that. And the reason they were getting runoff is they were doing tillage, but I'm not sure I realized that was the main culprit right at the beginning. But they were told that to grow good irrigated corn, you had to do a lot of tillage, which they were okay with. And this is in the seventies and going up into the eighties when the situation was a little bit like now. Commodity prices were very high and interest rates were low and fuel costs were low, kind of like it was a year ago or something. And then all of a sudden the interest rates went up and fuel prices, Arab oil embargo happened, we had huge increases in very quickly in the price of fuel and fertilizer and stuff. And interest rates went way up and they were just going broke. And they were trying to irrigate, and the water was just running back to the river.
Dwayne Beck:
And so we started trying to address that, me and one of the ag engineering guys and one of the extension people, and we were doing rippers and dikers and balers and all kinds of stuff. And we put in a no-till thing, because I was interested in no-till type systems from the standpoint of stopping the dirt from blowing on the dryland things. We put in no-till as a check, because everybody at that time in the industry said that no-till produced the most runoff, not the least. And, surprise! So it was one of those things, and we were doing that work at Gettysburg, north of here, out of either Brookings or Redfield eventually. So it's at least a two hour, and usually a four hour drive to do stuff.
Dwayne Beck:
And we had a field day one day and showed them a bunch of different irrigation sprinklers. Because the other thing they wanted to do was put on lower pressure irrigation sprinklers to save pressurization energy. And when you lower the pressure, you increase how fast you put the water on. So they were putting on an inch of water in probably 40 minutes and it was running off. And they wanted to put an inch of water on in six minutes to save energy, but it was going to run off even more. And so we started doing some things with rippers and dikers, and also with the no-till thing. And we had an irrigator that we changed all the sprinklers four times going through the field. And so we had all these different comparisons, and we had a field day. And after the field day, we all went to Bob's Steakhouse and got smarter and smarter as the night went on, and everybody thought we should do more of this research. And I said, "You can't really do it from away from here. You're going to have a rudimentary site that you own, or somebody owns, that we can have for own to do the research year after year."
Dwayne Beck:
And one of them had a good friend that was a legislator, and they all knew the governor, and they said, "Well just get money and give it to the university and they can start that." And I said, "Well, you really don't want to do that. You want to own it yourself so you can control it." And that's what they did. I mean, there was really four of us by the end of the night that were sitting there, conjuring things and writing stuff on napkins. And it started from that and it took them 10 years to put it together, because it was the eighties and nobody wanted to have anything to do with agriculture in the eighties and whatever.
Dwayne Beck:
And I don't know, just serendipity. The guys kept at it and we finally got a good governor, and he happened to be the cousin of one of our board members and they had a family reunion. And he was up for reelection. I mean, there's all these little things came together, that it's an interesting story to the people involved. But the fact that it's farmer owned is unique. And then they cooperate with the university to run it. And we had a director of the experiment station at the university that was in favor of doing this. And if he wouldn't have been in favor, I don't know where it would've had gone. Now there's another group that's trying to do this in the Jim River Valley. Like I said, we were in the Jim River Valley doing this stuff, and a lot of the no-till things started in on those layered soils in a wet environment.
Dwayne Beck:
So people that tell me, "You can't do it in a wet environment and on these kind of soils." They lie, because I did that, that's where we started. But when we left, unfortunately, because of politics. When this place started, they closed the station at Redfield. And so that whole center part of the state has not had good research in the last 30 years. And that's why they have a lot of salinity and stuff, because nobody was there to show them how stupid that was. And the salinity there, they were going to take a bunch of water over there and irrigate. That salinity would've destroyed that whole river valley within 30 years, if they'd had done that. But all the dams they built in the west and whatever, everything progress, you couldn't really say "You can't do that." That's progress, you had to, you had to do that. Well, the first thing you need to do is look at the water you're getting for free.
Dwayne Beck:
So I feel good about that part of the deal. I hope those guys are successful. They don't have as benevolent a university right now as they did we have.
Julia Gerlach:
Is that a different university system, or the same?
Dwayne Beck:
Well, it's the same university, but the way research is funded in the United States is to totally stupid now. That's a problem that we're running into nationwide. The research is not a visionary at all. I call it chasing the soccer ball.
Julia Gerlach:
It seems to me like, I keep seeing "We're doing this study." But it's just a reiteration of a study that was done-
Dwayne Beck:
It's already been done.
Julia Gerlach:
Yeah. Why are we studying this again?
Dwayne Beck:
Because there's money. In the old days, the Land Grant University, the states got a Formula Fund. They got money from the federal government based on a formula, and they used to call them Formula Funds. They went directly up to the state with no strings attached, and then the state legislature would send it on to the ... The idea was they'd send it on to the ag experiment station at the university, and they would design research programs. But you had this solid money that you knew would whatever. And so now you're trying to think long term, "I know I'm going to have this money every year for whatever, and we're going to do some things."
Dwayne Beck:
And that started to change with Ronald Reagan. For some reason, he didn't like that or his people didn't like it, and I think it was his people from California that didn't think they got a big enough Formula. Because they produced so much stuff, they think they should get more. And so they changed it to this grant based thing that we have now. And that's the soccer ball. You throw a grant out and everybody lines up, they throw the ball out and everybody follows the ball. I mean, nobody guards the goal, there's nobody to pass to cause they're all right behind the ball. And that's what happens, and so you get no creativity involved. And so that changed. But now, Dakota Lakes, where we can keep our own income, we have some sources of income for doing things that aren't related strictly to grants and whatever. And we do get some basic support from the university for staff and stuff, because we host their small plot research and a lot of their variety trial stuff, and whatever.
Julia Gerlach:
I see. And so who are the other three who got the whole thing going with you?
Dwayne Beck:
Well, two of them are dead.
Julia Gerlach:
Oh, okay.
Dwayne Beck:
Red Paul was one, he was Darrell Red Paul. He was an extension irrigation specialist, doing that with an animal science degree. So probably the best extension guy I ever knew, because if he told the farmer his corn was pink and I told him it was green, they'd believe Red every time. So he just had a lot of juice with the farmers. And then Anne Cronin was one of the farmers. His grandson is on our board right now, so that tells you a bit about the philosophy of this organization, because it goes ... That's a nice thing about Sam, because he's part of that fraternity, so to speak.
Julia Gerlach:
Sam Ireland, you're saying?
Dwayne Beck:
Yeah. Yeah.
Julia Gerlach:
[inaudible 00:11:28]
Dwayne Beck:
Well, his dad's on the board. The fourth guy in that meeting was Ralph Holsworth, and he still farms.
Julia Gerlach:
Oh, okay.
Dwayne Beck:
And with his sons now in the business. But I took Sam up there yesterday, and of course Teddy's about Sam's age, maybe a few years older, maybe 10 years older. And they got over in the corner and they were talking. And Teddy's going, "Yeah., when we started this everybody was laughing." He said, "I don't even remember when we started. I was just ... " And he didn't, he was just a baby. But he said, "My sisters talk about everybody was picking on him, because their dad was a goofy guy that wasn't doing tillage and didn't know how to farm." And whatever. And now, everybody there is no-tillers.
Julia Gerlach:
So yeah. You had mentioned about discovering when you were working on the irrigation projects that no-till had less runoff. So I'm just curious, how long did it take you once you started doing those studies to figure out that no-till was not running off as much?
Dwayne Beck:
Well that happened right away, because since you're dealing with irrigation, we had runoff plots in there. These bigger areas where we had stage recorders and plumes and all this stuff, and you direct the water and you have to bring the machines in there as the irrigator is coming. And then go in with your raincoat on and pull the paper off, and take it down to the next one. It was God awful. But it measures runoff. And once we realized that, it was a really good idea for irrigators but it's a better idea for a dryland guy. Because an irrigator guy, if he has enough money and time, he could pump more water. But dryland guy, if he loses it, it's just gone. And so that's a reason we have the adoption here. I mean, if you come here and you can drive all the way to Bismarck and out to Beach, and to Havre, Montana, there's just not much tillage done out there anymore, and cross Canada. So yeah, that saving the moisture is really good for us.
Dwayne Beck:
It's really good for a guy in a more humid area, he just has to figure out how to make it a positive thing, not negative. Which is really cranking up the intensity of what you're doing. But for us, it was easier. And most of the guys, like Ralph had seven irrigators and his cousin had three or four, and we drive by all these places that used to have 10 or 12 irrigators and whatever. And I said, "They don't have any." Because it's too expensive, pump the water up there, and it doesn't give them enough of a yield increase. And so you make more money per dollar invested on dryland as compared to the irrigated. So the irony was, it was the irrigators that started this place.
Dwayne Beck:
And most of them have quit irrigating. Cronin still have irrigators because they have low left. They only have about a 100 feet left, but Ralph had 400 feet. So he had to pump the water 400 feet up the hill, and then he had to put some pressure on it to ... Whatever. So I don't know, 20 years ago he was paying a hundred dollars acre for electricity. So it takes your breath away, especially when you have $6, $7 corn, maybe not so much. But the difference is, for him on his soils, is probably only about 20 or 30 bushel advantage.
Julia Gerlach:
Oh.
Dwayne Beck:
And it's a pain in the butt. You got to keep those machines running and then, whatever. We have them here because, whatever. But that was the epiphany. And one time the first name was Dakota Lake's Irrigation Research Farm. It had irrigation in there. And so then I had to get them to take that out of there and, just call it Research Farm so we could do all the dryland stuff too. Because by the time we got here, we were pretty well sure that the biggest value is in the dryland. I don't know, I'd probably show those numbers. But in 2015 we did an analysis of our economic impact, and we take the middle part of the state here, the center, let's say, fourth. All the way from North Dakota border to ... The slice, from North Dakota borders to Nebraska border, right down through the center. And compared to 1986, before any of the stuff had started, we increased the value $1.6 billion of grain production in that area. I mean, it's just huge. And at today's prices, it'd be twice that at least.
Dwayne Beck:
And so as we were driving around yesterday I pointed out to Sam all the new houses and the new grain bins and the big machine sheds, and stuff that were there that weren't there before. And it's because they have this productivity. The bad part is that productivity is based on exporting stuff, and we have to close that loop. I think I talked about that at the National No-Till, was closing that. Making it a circular system and not a linear system of in and out.
Julia Gerlach:
Yeah. Yeah. When you were at the No-Till Conference this year, of course you'd spoken there many times, but you had some very strong words for the audience. You titled your presentation Doing The Wrong Thing Better In 2022.
Dwayne Beck:
But that's what we do, it's not the right thing. But we're getting really good at it. We're very, very efficient.
Julia Gerlach:
I want to say, because I thought the way you introduced it was so interesting. You reminded everybody that we've been talking about carbon and no-till for decades. You said that 30 years ago, you predicted that by this time there'd be no need for a No-Till Association because everyone would be no-tilling. And bottom line, you just said, "The system is broken." And you talked about the need to fix the research system, subsidies, the water cycle, all of that. So I'd love for you to talk about that. What has gone wrong? How do we fix it? And if you want, we can start with the research and describe how we could manage that research model better.
Dwayne Beck:
Yeah, well it's all interrelated. I mean the research people tend to try to treat symptoms that occur, we really aren't very good at trying to look at root causes and say, "How do we fix that?"
Julia Gerlach:
Mm-hmm.
Dwayne Beck:
And we're just part of that big cog. And I'm not sure who's making the decisions on what we're doing, but there's no grand plan involved in terms of how do we fix ... I told some Senate ag advisor people if they did everything that we talked about, they'd save so much money on flood control in the Mississippi River and dealing with hypoxic zones in the Gulf of Mexico, and we'd fix all those things. And they don't really believe that. But that's the kind of look it's going to take, is to get 200 miles high and look down and say, "How do we fix all this stuff?"
Dwayne Beck:
And I addressed that at the beginning. I'm sure some place where I talked about the Europeans came here to mine our our soils because they had mined theirs out. And there's a good book I've read in the interim between then and now about the Haber-Bosch Process. The guys, Haber and Bosch, the Germans that developed the ability take nitrogen out of the air and make ammonia. And they needed that to make fertilizer, but also to make explosives.
Julia Gerlach:
Right.
Dwayne Beck:
Right. And there was a British head of the Scientific Society in England at the time, that predicted that most of the developed world was going to starve in the next two or three decades, that was in early 1900s. Because the supply of minable nitrogen is pretty much gone. The guano islands off the coast of South America and nitrates in the deserts of Chile, and they're pretty much gone. And so we were all going to starve to death because we were dependent on that nitrogen. And Haber and Bosch came along and developed ammonia and allowed us to keep fighting wars unfortunately, but also fertilizer. So what do we do? It's such a big energy demand, making that nitrogen from fossil fuels, but that's how they do it. So how do we get rid of that?
Julia Gerlach:
I'd like to ask you about this. I mean, there's various organizations working on green ammonia-
Dwayne Beck:
Yeah.
Julia Gerlach:
... making it from wind or solar.
Dwayne Beck:
Yeah.
Julia Gerlach:
What's your thought on that?
Dwayne Beck:
That's all right. I mean, Ron Elverson and I years ago, he was working on an ethanol plant and they said, "Well, the problem you have ethanol plant is you put out a lot of CO2." What do you do about that? And I recommended that they developed some wind and solar capability to make their own nitrogen, and then combine it with their CO2 to make urea. What urea is, is actually ammonia connected by a CO2 molecule. So you stick the ammonias on where the oxygens are and the CO2, so that's what urea looks like. So you would then take your CO2 that you're putting off from your ethanol plant, make it into fertilizers, send back to the farm where the corn came from. And they actually looked at it. And the technology, this is at least 10 years ago, the technology was there. It's just cheaper to do it the other way.
Dwayne Beck:
The green ammonia is all right. It's complex, and that's fine. That's the kind of thing we need to do. I mean, we're destined to be fossil fuel neutral here by 2026. So we're in line to get our electric Ford pickup and put up our solar panels. And I mean, that's the biggest thing you can do is cut out your carbon use. We need to think of things that do that locally is fine. And the idea of putting solar panels over every piece of ground, that makes no sense to me. But I think solar panels in every farm building makes lots of sense, and every house. But the industry doesn't want that because they want to control it. They want the big wind farms and the big whatever so they can control it. They can't control it because all of us heathens out here have our own solar panels, for God's sake.
Julia Gerlach:
Right. But there is still the issue with the batteries and the heavy metals and whatnot, that takes to make those components. Right? Or is that not as big of an issue as some people-
Dwayne Beck:
Well, the bottom of the ocean's got all kinds of that stuff just laying there and just [inaudible 00:23:15]. But you don't have to mine it, just pick it up. But we're going to come up with better batteries. Hydrogen is a good battery. Hydrogen either as a fuel cell, or hydrogen as a drop in fuel. I mean, I worked on hydrogen as my senior chemistry project when I was in college. Which was not long after the Vietnam War, right at the end. So it comes down to who has the money. And the thing is about fossil fuels is they haven't been required to pay their full cost. They haven't had to pay for their unintended consequences, and just simply because they had developed such big political power and we'd let them do that.
Julia Gerlach:
Sure.
Dwayne Beck:
Right. But we're all afraid if we don't have gas to go to the grocery store that we're going to die
Julia Gerlach:
We've become very dependent on fossil fuels for sure.
Dwayne Beck:
Yeah. But they denied this whole thing using a lot of the same techniques as the tobacco producers did. So it's unfortunate. And we haven't been very good, even in agriculture, at pointing to the good practices as compared to the bad practices. We don't want to call out the guy whose dirt is [inaudible 00:24:43]. And that kind of happened here now. I mean, it used to be that, when we first started this, that was just considered cost of doing business. So the ditch would fill with dirt and things like that. And now the norm, the social more, is that you don't have your dirt in the ditch. And so the guy who has his dirt in the ditch is shunned to a certain extent. Which is kind of interesting, but that's not the way it is in most of the United States. That's the way it is in this area.
Julia Gerlach:
So right around Dakota Lakes, you guys have had a huge impact in that area.
Dwayne Beck:
And it goes further than that. I think it goes quite a ... There's Kansas and whatever, those guys all just raise hell about people having dirt blowing. But yeah, legally they don't do anything to them, and they don't take money away from them in their farm bill. But still, that's the strongest thing you can do is the social side of it. And we haven't really done that very well in lots of areas. Stuff into drain tiles, that's not acceptable either actually. And what gives you the right to dump your nutrients in my water?
Julia Gerlach:
Yeah. So you're saying people shouldn't be allowed to use drain tile?
Dwayne Beck:
Well you can use drain tile, but don't put your nutrients in my water. So you figure out how to handle that. I mean, I saw a thing somewhere that the guy was going to start this list of "This is what you have to do to be sustainable." Or whatever. And his first thing was, "If you're going to put in drain tile, you have to have a catchment that's capable holding three years of runoff, and then reuse the water."
Dwayne Beck:
In Iowa, where the nitrates are higher than drinking water standards, so at Des Moines they have to take nitrates out of the water in order for people to drink it. It's not naturally that way. I mean, it that's coming out of the drain tile. And they all kind of get together, the judges and everybody, and they "Oh, just let them do that. They have to." No, there's other ways of doing that. You go back must have been 12 years ago or so at least, last time they were in Des Moines with the National No-Till I talked. I was a lead off guy. I said, "Welcome to Des Moines. Don't drink the damn water, whatever you do."
Julia Gerlach:
Yeah. And it's amazing, isn't it? That it's not gotten any better in 12 years?
Dwayne Beck:
Well, my daughters are all water engineers. Right? You probably knew that.
Julia Gerlach:
I think you told me that.
Dwayne Beck:
Yeah. And, and so Deedee was at this workshop conference, whatever. And she does stuff with both water and waste water. And she came home, but it was in Pierre, so she stayed with us when she was here. And she was talking about, they'd spent the whole afternoon talking about what they're going to have to do with drain tiles. Because if people start using water out of these ... The amount of stuff you're allowed to put in a water body is determined by what that water body is used for. So if this river is not used for anything, you can dump a lot of stuff in it. But if people start wanting to swim in it and use it for drinking water downstream or whatever, then it changes the regulations on what you can dump into it. And so that impacts cities and municipalities and stuff that are treating the water and then taking the bad stuff out. And then how concentrated can the stuff that they dump back in there be.
Dwayne Beck:
And she said, "A lot of the waters in South Dakota now are changing, because more people are using them for a water source for drinking and for swimming and stuff." So people that have drain tile are not going to be allowed to put the same amount of stuff in that water. And she said, "They're all trying to figure out what the hell they're going to do about that." Because nobody wants to tell the farmers, "You can't do that." But I mean, why not?
Julia Gerlach:
Yeah.
Dwayne Beck:
And these bioreactor things they have aren't very effective. They look good and they're expensive, and you have to keep filling them with stuff. And if you get a big surge of water, which is what you get, then they can't treat it fast enough. And it's putting a bandaid on a knife wound. So yeah, I don't know. And the thing I said in Des Moines is "Why would you want to put your fertilizer in the people's water?" It was a very entertaining, little beginning that I did there.
Julia Gerlach:
We'll get back to the podcast in a moment, but I want to take time once again, to thank our sponsor Bio Till Cover Crop Seed for supporting today's episode. Bio Till Cover Crops, a pioneer and leader in cover crop seed, represents a complete lineup of seed suitable to a wide range of soil types and growing conditions. Bio Till Cover Crop vendors are committed to your success and provide local resources, education, guidance, and tips and tricks to ensure your plantings have the correct foundations for success. The original producers of Bounty Annual Ryegrass, Bio Till Cover Crops continues to add new and improved cover crop and foraged varieties, foraged varieties. Including Enricher Radish, Bayou Kale, Shield Broadleaf Mustard, African Forage Cabbage, and Mihi Persian Clover. With over 30 years of experience in production, processing, packaging and shipping, you won't be able to find a better fit through your farm anywhere else. Learn more at biotill.com. That's B-I-O-T-I-L-L.com. And now, back to the podcast.
Julia Gerlach:
Well since we're talking about water, I mean one of the other things you talked about is the broken water cycle. And I just wonder if you could talk about that a little bit. Explain that.
Dwayne Beck:
Well I mean, you take where you live, and where it's normal vegetation trees, right? Native vegetation trees that's got a different water cycle in a cornfield by a long ways. An that tree takes the deep water and the nutrients, and takes it up and puts it in the leaves so leaves fall down and replenishes the nutrients on the surface. I mean, that's how that whole system works in areas where the precipitation exceeds these [inaudible 00:31:26] transpiration for appreciable amounts of the year.
Dwayne Beck:
So you have trees and there's a cycle. Whereas here we have the deep rooted grasses. In all cases, we're not using that. So now we have to put lime on, because you know, when nitrates go into the drain tiles or go out, they don't go alone. They're negative charged. So if they went by themselves, there'd be lightning bolts coming out of that water, because it's all negative charge. So you have to have a positive of [inaudible 00:32:01] ions go out with them, and that's the calcium and the magnesium and the ammonium, and all these things that are fertilizers. Copper, iron, whatever, that's the guys that go out there when the nitrogen goes out. The nitrates. So what's supposed to happen is those get picked back up and taken to the top and put on top of the ground.
Dwayne Beck:
And so how do you handle that? And since you're not mimicking that, you're not taking the water out of that deep part of the soil profile where the tree roots are, then all of a sudden that becomes full of water all the time. And you're only dealing with the top three feet of the soil, that as soon as that gets full, you're too wet. And as soon as it gets dry, you're too dry and you get too low in nitrogen. I mean, none of that works. And if we don't fix that, it's going to turn it into a desert. Or all the nutrients are going to go away, and organic matters one of those nutrients, but the other nutrient ... I mean, that's the definition of the certification, is a exporter of the nutrients.
Dwayne Beck:
And we've been doing it, and not only do we export them with the grain and whatever, we're exporting them out to tile lines in a way. I mean, you got to ask Ray Ward how much calcium comes out of the tile lines in Illinois or wherever he's got to contract someplace, in the east, to test all the drain tile lines. And he just said to me [inaudible 00:33:36] "There's just a lot of line comes out of there when those drain tiles run." Right? So now you got to buy more line, and then that means hauling it in and whatever. So that's fixed in the water cycle and associated very closely with the nutrient cycle, and both of those are associated with the energy cycle.
Julia Gerlach:
And you had mentioned salinity earlier. And so that whole water cycle-
Dwayne Beck:
Yep.
Julia Gerlach:
... leads to the salinity problems?
Dwayne Beck:
Well, what's in a saline seep?. This is my favorite question to college students, right? They come to visit, "What's in the saline seep?" And if they say salt, they just get their butts kicked. Because there's lots of different kinds of salts. Chemistry, you take an acid and base, you mix them together and you get salt. So lime is salt, right? Sodium chloride is salt, but lime is a salt. All these things that where you took an acid base and combined them. And the answer to that is fertilizer. What's in that saline seep is the nutrients of the ones the trees didn't pick up, or the grass didn't pick up, and put back on the surface. Those are going somewhere now.
Dwayne Beck:
And since that bottom is full, they hit an impermeable or someplace. If they don't hit an impermeable layer they go into the aquifer directly, which is a problem too. But if they hit an impermeable layer of some sort, they go sideways. And then they come back to the surface in most spots, and that's where you see them. And in the Hawaii project, they would've built it, they would've had drain tiles 20 foot deep to get rid of all the salinity but they would've ruined the James River doing that. And they'd stuck all that salinity in the James River, which goes into the Missouri River, which goes into the Mississippi River, which goes into the Gulf of Mexico.
Julia Gerlach:
And isn't there a biological component also, that's missing in these salinity issues? Because you don't have the right soil biology to deal with the nutrients that are in there and washing away?
Dwayne Beck:
Well mostly it's the biology component, because you don't have plants that are taking up. It's not a soil microbiological problem, as bad as it is though. Just not having the roots where they need to be. Like in Australia, I don't know if you've been there, but almost all the areas where they farm were trees at one time. Big trees.
Julia Gerlach:
Oh, okay.
Dwayne Beck:
And you think Australia's being dry, but they have big trees. And the reason they have big trees is their rainfall comes in the wintertime when it's cool. And so if you're not using much water when it's cool, and if you only have wheat out there or canola, it's not using much water. So a lot of that water sneaks out the bottom and moves sideways, and becomes a saline seep there.
Julia Gerlach:
Mm.
Dwayne Beck:
But you lose a tremendous amount of nutrients, and the pH goes down. I mean, one of the symptoms of moving nutrients out is pH is going down, and that's happening every place in the Corn Belt. And that happens in Australia. But even things like potassium, which you don't really think of. I mean, potassium is one of those. And we had had an example years ago, when I went there and they were trying to grow sorghum. And they said they couldn't cause it was too dry. We went out to a field and, yeah most of the field had drought symptoms and wasn't doing very well. But right around the lone tree in the field, the sorghum look great. So I said, "Why does the sorghum look great there?" And the guy said, "Well, because the tree cracks the ground and the water can move back up." And whatever. "No, I don't think so." Because normally, the plants around a tree look shitty, right?
Julia Gerlach:
Yeah. Right.
Dwayne Beck:
[inaudible 00:37:43] needs. And what was happening there was a potassium deficiency. A potassium deficiency is a drought symptom. When you have a drought, you get potassium deficiency, because it's too dry for the plant to get the potassium from the soil. And so that's one thing my good mentor, Paul Carson, told me. That was his favorite deficiency symptom, was potassium. And so when we tested the soil around the tree, it was like 200 parts per million potassium, and away from the tree it was 5.
Julia Gerlach:
Wow.
Dwayne Beck:
Yeah. No, it was just very dramatic. But yeah, it was very common to see that. And you see that everywhere, that we just sleep. There's a guy from Ontario called Wheat Pete. Can't remember what his full name is, but he does a lot of speaking. And he came to the South Dakota no-till meeting, and then we went out for steaks with a bunch of farmers afterwards. And I wasn't being a jerk, he was saying, "How far do you guys have to go to get lime?" And I said "3 feet." And I wasn't being an asshole. I mean, I was serious. I was in the conversation, "Well, it's only like three feet away." And he was thinking how many miles you have to drive to the lime mine? And I said, "Well, 3 feet." Then he looked at me and ... Whatever. But nobody thinks that way, "Where can I go buy it, and bring it in?" Same way with fertility, "How do I get the fertility?"
Julia Gerlach:
Yeah.
Dwayne Beck:
But the biology associated with salinity is just fixing the water cycle.
Julia Gerlach:
So if I understand what you're saying about the lime, you're saying that it's there, it just needs to be unlocked basically?
Dwayne Beck:
Yeah. If you come someday, we'll dig a post hole or we'll take a soil sample, we take a soil sample here at three or three and a half feet, there's all these white concretions in there. White specs, it just looks like freckles.
Julia Gerlach:
Yeah.
Dwayne Beck:
And what that is free lime. But if I put a drain tile underneath there, that lime moves right out and into the drain tile, and goes down the river. Now I don't know how the hell to go get it. And in your environment, the lime would be there and the tree would bring it back up, and drip it off. In Australia, that tree is not a deciduous tree, but it drips off of the branches and the leaves and whatever, back on the soil surface again. Otherwise, everything would be a desert by now. I mean, in the rainforest with all the rain that they get, that's just not an issue because they're using it all the time. Because they have all that warm weather and they just constantly have water going up and going out into the atmosphere and ...
Julia Gerlach:
And then you also have talked about the energy flow being a problem in ag.
Dwayne Beck:
Yeah, especially this year, it comes from Russia and Ukraine.
Julia Gerlach:
What do you mean?
Dwayne Beck:
Yeah. I mean, I don't know if you know Darrin Qualman's name or not, but he's got some really interesting stuff. He's from Canada. He talks a lot about energy and I use quite a bit of his stuff in my talk at Louisville. And we have to capture all the sunlight, as much as we can, and utilize it. And if you do corn and soybeans, you look at how little of the sunlight in a year. You're not really kept capturing the sunlight until sometime in June, and then you're done by mid-September. So let's say mid-June to mid-September, that's three months out of 12 that you're capturing sunlight. And what are you doing with the rest of it?
Julia Gerlach:
Yeah.
Dwayne Beck:
And you turn the ground black so it can't capture any sunlight, and the cover crops do a bit of that, that's a new thing. But we're not quite getting there. We have a lot of months where we're not having things grow, we have winter too.
Julia Gerlach:
Yeah. A lot of winter.
Dwayne Beck:
And we have sunlight there, though. But that's the energy cycle. How you cycle. And if you take that, when you take the corn off and sell it, energy went with that corn and nutrients too. So we have an ethanol plant here, and we do pressing, we press our own oils on farm. But in the area we have an ethanol plant. And when they were going to build that, the thing I said to them is "If you do this and you ship the ethanol out, what's left is sunlight, carbon, oxide and water. That's what's in the ethanol." And so yeah, there's some energy, some sunlight, that went away, mother nature will bring you sunlight back. She will bring you carbon dioxide back. She'll bring you water back. But if you ship the distiller's grain and it goes to China or it goes to Kansas, or I don't care, to be used for feed, then your minerals go away.
Julia Gerlach:
Right.
Dwayne Beck:
And so if you can get guys to feed the distiller's grain here, or the meal from the soybean pressing or canola pressing or whatever, then you've closed a lot of those loops in terms of capturing the energy. Because the energy is in that grain too. So if you've fed that corn here to your cows, and you've captured that energy here and done something with it here, that turns into a benefit on the landscape. So just shipping it out is not necessarily the right answer. But it's to just push it one step higher to where you have the oil and you have the ethanol, and keeping the meal back and using those locally is better. It's closer.
Julia Gerlach:
You're very critical of the subsidies, of course. Which, I think, with good reason.
Dwayne Beck:
Yeah. The well-intentioned crop insurance, which is subsidized [inaudible 00:44:19]. But I got a call the other day., And of course if they're going to do some of these things underneath the insurance deal, they have to have a quote unquote expert that writes a letter and say, "Yeah, this is a legitimate step."
Julia Gerlach:
I see.
Dwayne Beck:
And they used to only have prevent plant for being too wet. But now they have a prevent plant for being too dry also.
Julia Gerlach:
Oh.
Dwayne Beck:
So if you do something really stupid, like [inaudible 00:44:49] grow sunflowers and planning on planting spring wheat the next year in Central South Dakota, your chance of being too dry is pretty high. And so they wanted a letter from me that said that, "Yeah, it's reasonable for it to be too dry for a guy to plant weed into there." And I wouldn't write the letter. I just said, "No." If he'd no-tilled and whatever, and done the right rotation, he wouldn't be too dry.
Dwayne Beck:
But I could see why he wanted to do it, because if he could prevent plant because he dry, he's got sunflower [inaudible 00:45:23] in. We've been in this drought, he could get 66% of his payment, and he had to wait 25 days until after the last plant date for spring week. And he could plant forage crops there, and harvest those forage crops for forage this year and still get his wheat payment. So if he had $200 on it, he's going to get $120, $132 just for being too dry, and then be able to raise all the forage he wants to for his cows. And I just said to the guys, "If I'm in the farm program, I'm going to do that one every year."
Julia Gerlach:
Right.
Dwayne Beck:
"Because I got cows, screw it. It's always too dry to plant spring wheat behind sunflowers, so I'm going to do that and you're going to give my money." And he was the agent. He didn't really have a dog in the fight, but he wants to keep the guy happy because he paid him money for premium. So it's not his money that he's given to the guy. It's not like it's a company where you've got to make it pay, it's just, well, yeah, government's going to pay him off and away we go. But yeah, it rewards really bad behavior.
Julia Gerlach:
Well, I'm going to bring up another topic that people disagree about a lot. I wanted to ask you about the carbon markets. I'm going to assume that you have some familiarity with the Chicago Climate Exchange, which was a voluntary carbon credit marketplace back in the early 2000s, and it closed down on 2010. And just curious what your thoughts are on today's carbon sequestration programs, and how they're different from what the Chicago Climate Exchange was all about?
Dwayne Beck:
Well, the Chicago Climate Exchange actually grew out of the mind of Carl Cooper's, [inaudible 00:47:26] grain guy.
Julia Gerlach:
Oh, is that right?
Dwayne Beck:
Yeah. And that was his little ... And that was a lease. You were leasing carbon. You weren't selling your carbon, you were leasing carbon. That was the premise of the Chicago Carbon Exchange. We had a really good no-till conference on carbon in, I think it was 2005.
Julia Gerlach:
Okay.
Dwayne Beck:
Way before anybody else was talking about that. And we had people that were doing the leasing, and people at time were trying to do the verification and whatever. And we had Jerry Hatfield and Ricasky and all these guys there. And then in the evening, we had all the people who were trying to buy either Chicago Carbon or Permanent Carbon, or whatever. A panel discussion. And the guy who moderated the panel was a lawyer, who was also a farmer. And so every time they present their thing, "And this is what we're going to do and here's our agreement." I'd say, and Doug had looked at them all before this thing, and I said, "Okay, Doug. Are you going to recommend anybody do that? And what are the ramifications?" And whatever. And that evening session, it was like 10:30, and it was still just going wild. And it was just time to quit, and I just kind of walked up and I says, "What about the word permanent don't you people understand?"
Julia Gerlach:
Yeah.
Dwayne Beck:
And that's really what it comes down to, the permanent. If you sell somebody your carbon, that's a permanent thing. And so if I'm chairman of Exxon and I'm going to buy carbon, I want it to be permanent. I don't want to have to watch it, so I'm going to buy this stuff that they're going to take in that pipeline, which is an incredibly stupid idea. Take from those ethanol plants in that pipeline up to North Dakota, and pump them into a well. Are you familiar with that pipeline?
Julia Gerlach:
I'm not sure.
Dwayne Beck:
All the ethanol plants in Iowa, Minnesota and Nebraska, and South Dakota, probably some further out, take it out together. Because they just put off a huge amount CO2, and that negates them to being good guys from the standpoint of a carbon market. So they're going to build this pipeline, pump the carbon dioxide all the way up to North Dakota, and put it in one of those wells they've been taking oil out of. And then cap the well. So that's permanently there. So it's permanent. So if I'm the chairman of Exxon, I'm going to buy that car. I'm not going to buy ... Whatever, Dwayne Beck's carbon. He doesn't have any. But Dwayne Beck's carbon where he's got [inaudible 00:50:28], and then as soon as she gets bad at him, she gets half the land. And then she's going to marry some guy, and he's going to get his plow out and start plowing, and there goes my carbon.
Julia Gerlach:
Right.
Dwayne Beck:
I mean, how do you assure that it's permanent?
Julia Gerlach:
Yeah. Right.
Dwayne Beck:
The only people that really make money on this whole thing ... And I said that night in, year on years ago. The only people that make money on this thing right now is the aggregators, the verifiers and the lawyers. So you got all these people like Indigo and whatever, they're running around trying to get farmers to sign up and you sell them carbon, and then they're aggregated and they're going to sell it to somebody else. And their way of verifying it is they're going to put one stake out there someplace that they take a picture of every year to make sure you're keeping your carbon. I don't know how in the hell that tells them anything.
Julia Gerlach:
Right?
Dwayne Beck:
So that's how they're going to verify it. Somebody has to verify that you're doing what you said you're going to do. So the make money. And the farmer, I don't know how much money he makes. And so instead of trying to sell it to the government ... And that's what the Chicago Climate Exchange is basically selling it to the government. Says "Sell it to the government." Or some ... "Why would I sell my carbon to Boeing or to Delta airlines? Why would I sell my carbon to them?" Because I got to watch it. And then the other thing that comes in there is people don't understand it, biological carbon.
Dwayne Beck:
But if you remember the Glasgow Conference a few months ago. The climate thing, they got together in Glasgow, Scotland, and they agreed that they would try to keep the temperature increase to one and a half degrees Celsius or less. So what happens to everybody's carbon if the temperature goes up one and half degrees Celsius? Well what happens is everything starts to gas off carbon. The organic matters and soils in Wisconsin, where it's cool or higher than they are if you go 200 miles south, at the same rainfall, same way in Nebraska and North Dakota and South Dakota and Canada, you have this change in organic matter, gets higher as you go north in same rainfall. So what's going to happen if we raise everybody's temperature, the ocean's going to kick out a bunch of CO2, and rainforest are going to kick out a bunch of CO2, soil is in the rainforest. And the soils here, unless I change and become better, they're going to go down and [inaudible 00:53:28] unless I do something better.
Julia Gerlach:
Right.
Dwayne Beck:
So I sold all my carbon to somebody, and they come back and go, "Where did my carbon go? You told me you were going to keep my carbon here, and it's gone." "Yeah, no. I'm not selling ... The carbons for me. See, I want to keep the carbon for me."
Julia Gerlach:
Yeah.
Dwayne Beck:
It makes my soil better. It makes everything work better. I want to keep for me and I'm not going to promise anybody else I'm going to keep it for them. I'm going to keep it for me. No. We have one of our board members that got a bunch of grassland out west, and he got $20 an acre for his grassland last year and $10 an acre for the next whatever years if he just leaves it in grass. And I'm not sure they're trying to measure carbon there, they just want it kept in grass. Well, that's okay.
Julia Gerlach:
So that's more just a practice based, kind of-
Dwayne Beck:
Whatever.
Julia Gerlach:
Yeah.
Dwayne Beck:
But yeah. How do you ... I had a zoom with Ernst & Young, you know that term? Who they are?
Julia Gerlach:
Yeah.
Dwayne Beck:
They're a big accounting-
Julia Gerlach:
Company.
Dwayne Beck:
Yeah. Big accounting people, right?
Julia Gerlach:
Yeah.
Dwayne Beck:
There were people there from Eastern Europe all the way through the US, Australia and New Zealand, and some from Hong Kong and whatever. Just this huge 500 people or something on this Zoom, talking about carbon things. And I started talking about this kind of stuff and they weren't very happy, because what they were wanting to be is the verifiers and the aggregators, right? They thought this was a great business model and I'm just going "Well, yeah. But what about the word permanent don't you understand? You've got to try to worry about, is the stuff permanent?" And the guy who's pumping it in the ground is permanent, maybe. But to put it ... Hans Jenny he said ... Hans Jenny, spelled with the J. Old soil scientist. And his work is free on the web, because everybody thought it was so good that somebody paid for it and put it on the web.
Julia Gerlach:
What was the name?
Dwayne Beck:
Hans Jenny, J-E-N-N-Y.
Julia Gerlach:
Oh, okay.
Dwayne Beck:
But he said, "The value of organic matter comes when you use it. Use it to hold water, use it gives off nutrients." Or whatever. I mean the active, organic matter. I mean the best way to store carbon is to take a bunch of coal and bury it.
Julia Gerlach:
Right. Interesting.
Dwayne Beck:
Well I mean, you take these cities, they're taking their yard waste and stuff and then they're composting them and thinking it's a good thing. If you really want to get carbon out of the atmosphere, just bury that stuff.
Julia Gerlach:
Yeah.
Dwayne Beck:
Don't don't cycle it, bury it.
Julia Gerlach:
So getting back to the whole concept of doing the wrong thing better, what would you like to see happen in the next few years that would give you the sense that we're no longer doing that, changing course and starting to do the right thing?
Dwayne Beck:
Well, I don't know. There isn't one ting. Thing is, it's got to be a ... I talk about this brain transplant thing. It's got to be ... Agriculture's, and society maybe, has to just say, "Okay, we're not doing this shit anymore."
Julia Gerlach:
Yeah.
Dwayne Beck:
And the first thing we got to do is try to get the carbon out, and the fossil fuel up. It should just be almost like a World War 2 effort, to try to stop using fossil fuels. And once that's your goal, then I think a bunch of other things become real obvious. Because what we're doing right now is saying, "Well, maybe if I just do this different, or maybe if I sold my carbon, makes me ... " and Darrin Qualman did this thing for the Canadian Farmers Union, where he's saying that "Every farm, if you follow it all the way through, is a net emitter, no matter what they're doing. No matter what they claim they're doing." And whatever, they're a net emitter.
Dwayne Beck:
Now you could get to the point where when you hit the gate, you might be [inaudible 00:57:58] whose work you do. You might be a net zero or something, but then you've got to send that stuff off and somebody's got to make it into something. Bake the bread or do whatever, and then it becomes a net user of fuel. So to try to wrap our minds around ... I mean, that's why we have this goal of being zero net energy by 2026. It's like when we started no-tilling, we just started no-tilling. And said, "We're going to do this." And Ralph was heavy in that decision. But if you just start no-tilling, then you have to figure out ... But if you're in that situation, you've got to figure out how to handle things. And if we just got to commit. You got to commit to just not using fossil fuels. Instead of saying, ""Can we scale back? Can we scale back?" I mean, it's like a diet. You keep trying to scale back, and it doesn't work all that well.
Julia Gerlach:
Well, Dwayne. This has been really good. Is there anything else you wanted to add, or that I didn't think to ask about, that you would like to talk about?
Dwayne Beck:
Well, I mean the thing is that we've only started. I mean, I wish that we could have, on every level, not just agriculture. We had research and science that really was focused on long term things, versus short term things.
Julia Gerlach:
Yeah.
Dwayne Beck:
And all we've really done is stopped the bleeding of ... I think I probably said that. Well, all we've done is stop the bleeding, that healing the patient still has to happen.
Julia Gerlach:
Thanks to Dwayne Beck for sharing his thoughts on fixing the broken ecosystem services. To listen to more podcasts about no-till topics and strategies, please visit notillfarmer.com/podcasts. Once again, we'd like to thank our sponsor Bio Till Cover Crop Seed for helping to make this no-till podcast series possible. If you have any feedback on today's episode, please feel free to email me at jgerlach@lessitermedia.com or call me at (262) 777-2404. If you haven't done so already, you can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Spotify, or Google Podcast to get an alert as soon as future episodes are released. You can also keep up on the latest no-till farming news by registering online for our no-till insider daily and weekly email updates, and dryland no-tiller eNewsletter. And be sure to follow us on Twitter @notillfarmr, with farmer spelt F-A-R-M-R and our No-Till Farmer Facebook page. For our entire staff here at No-Till Farmer, I'm Julia Gerlach. Thanks for tuning in.
