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Root exudates from maize feed beneficial soil microbes, forming a protective rhizosphere that improves water retention and supports drought tolerance under diversified crop rotations. By Buz Kloot I’ve had the good fortune to spend time with Natalie Sturm and, before that, to follow the work at the Dakota Lakes Research Farm (DLRF) for more than a decade. Long before her thesis made the rounds online, what struck me was not just the data, but the patience of the body of work at DLRF itself — decades of asking the same simple question in slightly different ways: What happens when we let diversity do its work? That question resurfaced again recently in a lively discussion following a post about Natalie’s work and the podcast we recorded with her. The comments will sound familiar to anyone who spends time in soil health circles: debates about no-till versus tillage, roots versus trees, microbes versus mechanics, plants versus animals. Lots of passion. Lots of partial truths. What’s helpful is when we can step back and ask: Are others, in other places, seeing the same thing? Two recent peer-reviewed studies suggest the answer is yes. A long-term experiment in Canada 1  found that diversifying maize rotations reduced yield losses under drought by roughly 17% , even when no-till alone did not make the difference. The key wasn’t a single “silver bullet” practice, but the cumulative effect of diverse rotations that build soil organic matter and improve how plants experience water stress under dry conditions. More recently, a 20-year rotation experiment in China 2 showed that higher crop diversity dramatically increased maize drought tolerance at the seedling stage . What stood out was how  this happened: thicker roots, more stable rhizosphere microbial communities, and enzyme systems that didn’t collapse under drought. In other words, diversity didn’t just help plants survive drought — it helped the soil system stay functional while stressed.   That should sound familiar to anyone paying attention at Dakota Lakes. What Natalie’s work keeps reminding us — and what these studies quietly confirm — is that drought resilience is not something we bolt on in a crisis year. It’s something we grow, slowly, through intentional crop rotation diversity that feeds roots, microbes, and soil structure over time . Different continents. Different soils. Same direction of travel. And that, to me, is where the real confidence comes from. 1. Long-term rotation & drought resistance (Canada) Renwick LLR, Deen W, Silva L, et al. Long-term crop rotation diversification enhances maize drought resistance through soil organic matter. Environmental Research Letters.  2021;16(8):084067.doi:10.1088/1748-9326/ac1468 2. Crop diversity, roots, microbes & drought tolerance (China) Jia R, Chen M, Zhou J, et al. Diversified crop rotations strengthen maize seedling drought tolerance by modulating rhizosphere microbiota and enzyme activities. Plant, Cell & Environment.  2025;48:8604–8615.doi:10.1111/pce.70150 __________ Visit these “Growing Resilience Through Our Soils” information pages: 1. Podcast page for drought planning fact sheets, Q&As, news, podcasts, and more. 2. Video page to watch videos of other ranchers’ journeys toward improved rangeland/pasture. 3. Follow Growing Resilience on social media: Facebook - Growing Resilience Twitter - @GrowResilience_ Instagram - growingresilience.sd 4. Our homepage: www.growingresiliencesd.com

Dillon Co. SC Farmer, Sonny Price with our very own Barrett Self in a Freshly Picked Cotton Field By Buz Kloot When I think back to the first time I stood with Sonny Price on one of his Dillon County, SC fields in the fall of 2013, I remember the wind rustling in the just-harvested cotton plants, now dry, and Sonny looking out as if he were listening for something beneath the surface. He had just planted his first cover crop, Austrian winter peas as it turned out. Nothing dramatic—no perfect stand, no easy triumph. Just seed, soil, and a man with questions. In places like the South Carolina Coastal Plain, the land has a way of humbling anyone who believes they’ve mastered it. The sands run deep. The summers run hot. And the conventional wisdom, passed along like an article of faith, said: “ You can’t build organic matter here! ” Not really. Too sandy. Too hot. Too dry, people said. But Sonny never much cared for blanket statements. He cared about the land in front of him. In one of our interviews, he said: “We were told you can’t increase organic matter in the South… I couldn’t promote something I didn’t know anything about. I just needed questions answered.” At the time, we had just started a Conservation Innovation Grant (CIG), sponsored by the USDA-NRCS, with him and four other farmers in the southeastern coastal plain of South Carolina. What we wanted to see was whether cover crops could change soils over a three-year period in real farm ground. What Twelve Years Revealed Over the next decade, and past the three-year CIG, I watched Sonny and his brother, Tony, move through the kind of slow, considered experimentation that defines genuine stewardship. His rotations were already diverse: corn, wheat, double-cropped soybeans, cotton, and, where economics were good, winter peas, rapeseed, pink-eye peas. He introduced cool-season cover crops, then started working with warm-season cover crops behind the corn (harvested in August in the Southeast). He brought in chicken litter, then cut nitrogen back. He let go of phosphorus and potash altogether. And he parked the subsoiler—first by conviction, later by hard evidence from the field. When he quietly tried subsoiling a few spots again, “just to check,” the yields didn’t budge. The ground didn’t need it anymore. So the subsoiler stayed parked. By 2022, we had gathered eight years of soil tests, yield data, and input records to see what the land itself had to say. The full story is here: 👉  https://www.soilhealthlabs.com/projects/cotton-country-conservation What the data showed was what the fields had been whispering for years: Organic matter increased. Inputs fell: fuel, fertilizer, lime, and subsoiling. Yields held or improved. Costs dropped...significantly. And all of it happened on 6,300 acres of Coastal Plain ultisols, with sand, loamy sand, and sandy loam textures. This was not about a miracle product or a perfect recipe. It was about paying attention, year by year, and letting the land teach. For Those Who Still Say “It Won’t Work Here” Every region has its cautions—ours perhaps more than most. But Sonny’s experience stands as a quiet counterexample, revealing how much becomes possible when we work with the land rather than against what we think it is. Sonny didn’t begin with certainty . He began with curiosity , and the humility to test what he’d been told. Twelve years later, the land has given its answer. So if you’ve ever found yourself saying, “It won’t work here,”  I invite you to walk through Sonny’s case study. Not as a rebuttal, but as an opening. Because in Dillon County, on soil once written off as too fragile, too fickle, too Southern, Sonny found that it did  work. And if it worked here, we owe it to ourselves to wonder where else it might. __________ Visit these “Growing Resilience Through Our Soils” information pages: 1. Podcast page for drought planning fact sheets, Q&As, news, podcasts, and more. 2. Video page to watch videos of other ranchers’ journeys toward improved rangeland/pasture. 3. Follow Growing Resilience on social media: Facebook - Growing Resilience Twitter - @GrowResilience_ Instagram - growingresilience.sd 4. Our homepage: www.growingresiliencesd.com

Jesse Hall showing Joe Dickie Soils that were once in Wet Spots By Buz Kloot Back in July, 2016, Joe Dickie and I were standing on one of Jesse Hall’s fields in eastern Kingsbury County, trading the usual insults — he was picking on my hat, and I was picking on his camera angles — Jesse cut through the noise with a line that stopped us both: “We tried fixing wet spots with tillage for years. It never worked.” If you’ve ever fought those stubborn low areas — the ones that stay soggy no matter how many times you chisel, disk, or rotary hoe them — you know the feeling. The conventional wisdom says: “Open it up. Dry it out. Work it black.” But Jesse’s story doesn’t follow the old script. For decades, he and his dad did exactly what most of us were taught. They plowed every low spot, field-cultivated in the spring, and hoped for a miracle. It never came. The wet spots stayed wet. The crop drowned. And the weeds loved every minute of it. Then Jesse added something that, on paper, shouldn’t sound rebellious — but kind of is: a small grain. When he shifted to a three-way rotation with oats, his infiltration rates increased, his soil structure changed, and — almost unbelievably — most of those long-troublesome wet spots began to disappear, not from horsepower, but from biology. Meanwhile, Joe and I exchanged that familiar look — the one we’ve shared with several South Dakota producers this year — because once again someone was demonstrating a truth that runs against conventional wisdom: You don’t fix water problems with tillage; you fix them with biology. Jesse and his friend Jim added the next layer: livestock integration. Ten heifers. Five goats. A handful of polywire. And the kind of neighborly skepticism that turns into bragging rights once the grass comes back thicker. The goats — God bless them — "slicked up" everything the cattle didn’t want, including bull thistles stripped clean to a stick. Jesse laughed, telling that story. The man loves data, but he also loves a good thistle-eating goat. And here’s the real call to action Jesse wanted other farmers to hear: “Don’t be afraid to try something new. But if you experiment, do it right — and start small.” You don’t need to switch the whole farm to no-till next spring. You don’t need to buy a herd of cattle. You don’t even need to own livestock — your neighbor might be glad to run theirs on your cover crop. But you do  need to take one field, add one small grain, plant one cover crop, and give the biology a chance to work. The worst that happens? You learn something. The best that happens? The wet spots finally tell the truth — and they start to go away. So the real question is: If tillage fixed wet spots, why are they still there? Maybe it’s time — field by field, season by season — to see what biology can do that iron can’t. __________ Visit these “Growing Resilience Through Our Soils” information pages: 1. Podcast page for drought planning fact sheets, Q&As, news, podcasts, and more. 2. Video page to watch videos of other ranchers’ journeys toward improved rangeland/pasture. 3. Follow Growing Resilience on social media: Facebook - Growing Resilience Twitter - @GrowResilience_ Instagram - growingresilience.sd 4. Our homepage: www.growingresiliencesd.com

The mission of Growing Resilience Through Our Soils is to help ranchers and cropland managers maximize soil health to deliver profitable farming and ranching and well as soil resilience. This educational platform–led by passionate researchers and storytellers—uses videos, photos, and words to showcase the trials and successes of ranchers and farmers as they continue along their soil health journeys. Recipes Filter by Level Number of recipes found: 0

Your one-minute challenge to see what you know about keeping South Dakota’s grasslands healthy. Your one-minute challenge to see what you know about keeping South Dakota’s grasslands healthy. Resilience Rodeo - Finish that Thought! Match your thinking against Centerville, SD producer John Shubek to see if you can finish his thought on rotational grazing. “I just got really interested in sustainable practices and how to maintain the land. It’s enhanced our profitability. Rotational grazing worked great. We’ve been doing daily moves, just trying to better manage what they’re eating and manage the grass, give it an opportunity to recover. You see how the more you move the cows, the better the cows stay in condition, ____ ____ _____ ____ ____ _____ ___ _____ ____ .” the more the cows will eat their favorite grasses. the better the grass and ground stay in condition. the better my whole cow herd will like me. the better cows remember where to eat good grass. Enter details to submit answer First Name Last Name Email I heard about this from: Submit! The Finish That Thought challenge is brought to you by Growing Resilience Through Our Soils in partnership with the South Dakota organizations below.

We get together with ranchers Drew Anderson (Lemmon, SD), Bart Carmichael (faith, SD) and Harold and Jodie Gaugler (Grant Co., ND, also ranching near Thunder Hawk SD.) to discuss their experiences with bale grazing. Bale Grazing Podcast Bale Grazing Resources BALE GRAZING FACTS Click here to download! BALE GRAZING Q&A Click here to download! Play Video Share Whole Channel This Video Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tumblr Copy Link Link Copied Now Playing 14:12 Play Video Now Playing 03:07 Play Video Now Playing 02:35 Play Video Now Playing 01:20 Play Video We get together with ranchers Drew Anderson (Lemmon, SD), Bart Carmichael (faith, SD) and Harold and Jodie Gaugler (Grant Co., ND, also ranching near Thunder Hawk SD.) to discuss their experiences with bale grazing. Special thanks to Drew Anderson and Jodie and Harold Gaugler for additional still images and explanations which were so crucial to this story. Bale Grazing Videos