After obtaining a PhD in Biology from Syracuse University in 2002, David moved to southeastern Colorado to study the National Grasslands with the US Forest Service. Today, he is a landscape ecologist with the USDA Agricultural Research Service studying cattle production issues in the shortgrass prairie. He has expertise in plant-herbivore interactions, the ecology and management of semi-arid rangelands, and conservation biology.
 

The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Steve Rosenzweig: Explain to me what you see when you’re walking through the shortgrass prairie.
 
David Augustine: So as we walk across the prairie here, what I'm looking at is the mixture of the cool season and the warm season grasses and what we have here is the state grass of Colorado. This is blue grama, the dominant plant of the short grass steppe, and you see this is intermixed with a community of cool season grasses that are what we might call the over story and a really diverse community of forbs. But this mixture of short grass, the warm season short grass and the cool season mid-grasses is really what I think of as the typical short grass steppe plant community.
 
SR: What roles do these warm season and cool season grasses play in the ecosystem?
 
DA: So I think it's the mixture of these grasses, these 2 types of grasses that really give the shortgrass what you might call its function. This blue grama is one of the most drought tolerant plant species in the plant community and the ability of blue grama to tolerate droughts of all kinds – from short-term droughts in the middle of the summer to multi-year droughts over an entire decade. This ecosystem’s ability to survive through those droughts and the ability to produce when they are little bits of rain are what I think gives it resilience and really makes it differ from dryland agriculture. And then just as important in terms of being able to survive droughts is the ability to respond when you have wet periods. We have this really nice layer of cool season mixed grasses over top of the blue grama understory, and so the ability of these grasses to respond when you get those wet pulses, when you get those deluges, that's what gives the system its productivity. So if it was just up to blue grama the system would not be very productive it would just be resilient to drought but when you have the blue grama mixed with the cool season community then you have both that ability to tolerate droughts and the ability to respond and be productive in the wet years.
 
SR: What do you think dryland producers can learn from this ecosystem?
 
DA: So I think the main issue that dryland agriculture in this region has to contend with is: how do you produce a crop with so little rainfall and also such unpredictable rainfall from year to year? And really that's what the species in this ecosystem have evolved to deal with. They have a whole suite of mechanisms for dealing with the fact that they can't predict what kind of precipitation they're going to get from year to year. First of all it's a perennial community here in the short grass steppe, and that native perennial community stores a huge amount of biomass below ground each year and that below ground storage is what enables it to persist through droughts and to persist with a lack of predictability. And that's the contrast with dryland agriculture where you don't have any storage belowground; we have to reseed in the source of propagules every year. Most of our agricultural systems are not based on perennials and that's a real challenge for agriculture. But the prairie is no-till, and it's perennial, and it's diverse. And like I said, the two components that are really important for diversity are 1) having this component that can really do well under extreme dry conditions, and 2) having a separate component, these cool season grasses, that can be productive under wet conditions. A single plant species can't do both of those things. You have to have more than one plant species to be able to respond to both of those conditions. So I think that's a big lesson for agriculture out here.
 
SR: What role did bison play in this ecosystem?
 
DA: In this ecosystem, we have a whole suite of different strategies for dealing with herbivory. And that diverse suite of strategies is what's evolved with bison over the past 10,000 years. For instance, blue grama is the dominant plant and it contends with grazing by allocating a significant part of its productivity below ground every year. Every time it rains, blue grama is shunting a whole bunch of its photosynthate below ground. Its innate strategy is to constantly be doing that. You also have annual grasses out here. Here's a native annual grass, six weeks fescue. It's evolved to avoid grazing because its roots are so shallow that when a grazer bites a clump of that grass, most of the roots will pull up, and if the animal were to ingest that clump it's going to take a lot of soil into its rumen. They'll actually spit the grass out and stop grazing it because they take in too much soil. So that's a totally different strategy for avoiding herbivory. You've got cactus out here that's an important part of the plant community. Obviously that is avoiding herbivory by using spines, and it's able to photosynthesize under very dry conditions.
 
SR: What do you find interesting about the shortgrass prairie?
 
DA: Driving down the road, I feel like so many people, their only knowledge of the short grass is driving across I-70 going 75 to 80 mph and they just think it's this low diversity, homogenous expanse of never-ending grass. But if you stop and get out – and you really have to get out and be 1 foot tall and really look around – you realize how diverse and interesting it is. Even here in this conservation area, the Soapstone Prairie Natural Area, they have cattle grazing out here so it is producing food for all of us. And that's what's great about them. They can do both. They can conserve biodiversity and produce meat through ranching. It's just when you plow it and turn it upside down you lose that biodiversity.
 
SR: Can you find a plant for me that not many people know lives out here?
 
DA: This is a wild onion. If you dig this up there's a bulb down there and it smells like onion, tastes like onion. You could use it on your sandwich.

​Steve Rosenzweig is a PhD Candidate at Colorado State University. This interview was conducted as part of a film project to document emerging innovations in dryland agriculture, which can be viewed here.

Curt is a fourth generation farmer. He left farming in 1973, and graduated from the Florida Institute of Technology with a Bachelor's Degree in Ocean Engineering. He worked in research and development in the oil industry in Houston for a few years before growing tired of city life, and leaving to buy a farm with his brothers in eastern Colorado in 1987. Over time, his brothers left farming so Curt took over the operation of the farm. He has been continuously cropped and no-till since 1995.
 
The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Steve Rosenzweig: How has the ecology of the shortgrass prairie influenced the way you graze cattle?
 
Curt Sayles: My understanding is that the large bison herds would come through here about once every 3 years, and they kept moving all the time, so it was a way different grazing then we do now. What we're trying to do here with our cover crop – grazing cover crop – is we like to take about a 1/3 of the plant biomass and leave 2/3, and keep the cattle moving through. In some way that is duplicating the way the natural herds used to graze this part of the world.

John grew up on his family’s dryland farm in northeastern Colorado. After coming back from University of Nebraska with a degree in Economics, John decided to completely revolutionize the farm. After only 5 years back on the farm, John has grown peas, oats, rye, wheat, sunflowers, milo, lupin, and a variety of diverse cover crops that are grazed by cattle. He has done all of this on a farm that had only grown wheat for decades.
 

The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.


Steve Rosenzweig: You’ve made some pretty drastic changes on your farm recently, right?
 
John Heermann: Previously, my dad had been growing wheat for 40 years on a wheat-fallow system so it's just been the last 3-5 years that we grew different crops and eliminated the fallow period.
 
SR: What is your motivation for moving some of your fields into a perennial system?
 
JH: It mimics more what Mother Nature is doing. She doesn't just grow one plant every three years, she has a diverse mix of things. Even if your crop rotation is wheat-corn-fallow, that's only one different species every three years. Whereas here, I have seven different species all at once. So if I can keep that going I think that will help build the soil better. I don't see the sense in converting this perennial pasture back to a cropping system that's all annuals, so ideally I'd like to use grazing and some specific crops to try to keep this living perennial system here as a cover crop. Sequester carbon and build soil structure year round, and maybe try putting peas or a legume in here that can still maybe be combined and grow with the grasses. And use the cattle to set back the grass enough that I could maybe get peas in here after the cows knock the perennial grasses back, get the peas a chance to go. And then once you combine the peas, you have the opportunity to come back and graze the perennial grasses again.
 
SR: What do you think that system will do for your soil?
 
JH: I'm feeding aboveground livestock here, but there's also a whole host of livestock underground that need fed. All your soil organisms need fed, and if they don't have a diverse diet, essentially then your only feeding them one root exudate or one small fraction of the food they need. If you want to build healthy soil and build a functioning soil I think you have to have a diversity of root exudates and a diversity of food aboveground, which will equate to diversity belowground, which will ultimately improve the function of the soil, which will improve the quality of the grass, which improves the quality of the beef, and ultimately the quality of us.
 
SR: We noticed all the water ponded up in the middle of your neighbor’s field. What was going on there?
 
JH: It didn't rain an awful lot in that particular field, it just rained enough and that soil was so poor that it could not hold the rain that came. We live in such a low rainfall environment that it's vital to utilize the moisture that you get efficiently. And if your soil's not covered and if you're not using no-till practices, it's hard to utilize that moisture and get it in your soil. I think we need to change our view that it's not how much rainfall you get, it's not what's on the calendar at the end of the year, it's what rainfall infiltrates your field and what you can use for crops. It doesn't matter what falls from the sky, it matters what ultimately infiltrates your field and isn't stuck in a lagoon or ponded up in the middle of your field.
 
SR: How do you prepare your soil for this unpredictable weather?
 
JH: I've been using no-till and I also have a tremendous amount of residue to protect that soil. And I've been trying to build the soil health to try to accept rain events that come very rapidly. It's hard to tell what the future will bring but I think if you can prepare yourself now for events down the road… so the moisture I am getting now I'm growing as many plants and as diverse plants as I can to build that soil. So if we do come to a very dry time, hopefully I've built my soils enough and raised my organic matter and still have my soils covered that I can better make it through that dry period because my soils will be more resilient. And if it’s a wet period, my soils will still be resilient because they are able to utilize and have that water infiltrate the soil better. By having different root depths and feeding different soil biology, it builds that soil so that when a rain event does happen, whether it be a small one or a large intense one-inch rain that comes in 15 minutes, my soil is prepared to capture and utilize 100% of that.

​Steve Rosenzweig is a PhD Candidate at Colorado State University. This interview was conducted as part of a film project to document emerging innovations in dryland agriculture, which can be viewed here.

Steve is a dryland farmer in Venango, Nebraska, where he also serves as the fire chief and county commissioner for Perkins County.
 
The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Steve Rosenzweig: You seem really motivated. What are you chasing, Steve?
 
Steve Tucker: Diversity. That's what we're after. Diversity to feed the system. It used to be monocrops. That was the big thing: monocrop after monocrop. Now we're getting into diversity, where we have more things competing with each other, but when they compete, they do better. It's no different in society when we have competition, great things happen. When you get it out here in Mother Nature, you got a diverse environment, better things happen to the soil. When the soil is better, the impact goes up and down the line, whether it's the soil biology, or the wildlife out in the field, or the end product that's going to a consumer to eat – diversity helps feed the system.
 
SR: And what does diversity mean to you?
 
ST: Diversity out here on the farm is having many different things. It's that simple, many different species in one field, and a diversity of crops across the spectrum. This country used to be wheat-summerfallow, which is nothing, so we could store moisture for more wheat. Well that system presented all kinds of problems. Now, I've got 10 different crops I'm growing, including a field of a multi-species plant mix out here. And when we put livestock into the system, that's more diversity into it. That's why we've got chickens, we've got pigs, we've got cows. The more diverse we can be, it spreads out the risk. One event happens - we have a hail storm come through - we can move on to the next thing. It's real simple. I don't know why we make it so complicated.
 
SR: So you’re about to start integrating livestock in your system. What’s that going to look like?
 
ST: What we're going to do is rotational mob grazing. Basically what that is, is doing just like what Mother Nature did years ago, when the bison came through this country. They came through, they ate half of it off. They didn't mow it to the ground, they just ate the tops of it off, and they moved onto the next where there's more green plants. And our grazing out here in this neck of the woods, it's so much different. We just throw them out there and give them an area and say, ‘that's what you got to eat.’ But what we're gonna do is start them on one area and gradually move them across the field. Once we get to the other end, we're gonna bring them back down, let that stuff regrow, and start over again. This stuff is durable, it's fast, it's gonna grow fast if we don't mow it to the ground, or let the animals eat it to the ground.
 
SR: So you’ve pushed the diversity in your system pretty hard these past few years. Have you seen any changes from that?
 
ST: Oh I do. We are starting to see more beneficial insects, things that we never saw before, things that are flying out here, we're starting to see less disease pressure, less insect pressure that are harmful to the plants. One thing you'll find out here is there's a lot of holes out here. When we no-till and when we have it diverse like this, the environment for all the natural wildlife habitat increases, and that just creates all kinds of different things going on out here. You know those things burrow in, they benefit the soil on top of it. There is all kinds of things that are really starting to evolve once we do no-till, once we do cover crops. Things are just getting better in just the short time we've been doing this – I don't know what's in store for the future. The question is what's next? I don't know, but it's exciting because you just keep asking questions.
 
SR: Is it scary trying new things?
 
ST: You never know if it's gonna work. And so some of these things you just gotta put in and try. And that's why we start small, but once you see the benefits, you see that it can work, we just go from there. The greatest challenge we face here in this is water retention and dealing with long spells of hot and dry, high heat. Times like that just stop production. But if we can keep the soil covered, we can do things with no-till to keep the soil covered, keep residue on it to help water retention, and that helps keep the soil surface cool. There are so many benefits to doing it the way we do it, because we know we're gonna face high temperatures, high heat, and drought conditions for extended periods of time. If we keep doing things like we are, the benefits are gonna be huge. And we're seeing that. I've never been more excited for what's coming in the future than right now. Every time we turn around there's more questions we can ask, and we search for answers trying to find out what's the next thing that we can do out here.
 
SR: What’s your ultimate goal?
 
ST: To build soil health. That’s what I'm about is building soil health, and what that looks like to each individual farmer, I don't know. But for me, it's about benefitting the soil microorganisms, because that world is so unexplored. But if we can get more things going in the soil, to benefit the plants, that system right there is fascinating. The biggest goal I have is trying to find a way to move away from all the synthetic things that we put into the system. I don't know if that will ever go away, but the more that we can move to that, and produce more nutrient dense food, that's better, higher quality - that's gonna tell me that the soil is in better shape, that's gonna tell me that we're headed in a better direction of food production for this country and for this area.

Steve Rosenzweig is a PhD Candidate at Colorado State University. This interview was conducted as part of a film project to document emerging innovations in dryland agriculture, which can be viewed here.

Pete recently retired as a professor at Colorado State University after teaching for 30 years. He served as the president of the Soil Science Society of America, and spent his career researching ways to apply the principles of soil science to better manage dryland agroecosystems.
 
The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Steve Rosenzweig: The Dust Bowl was a major disaster for farmers in the Great Plains. How did it happen?
 
Gary Peterson: The people that came out to the West were accustomed to farming where there was plenty of water, and so they used tillage methods that left the soil bare. Bare soil in an environment like ours with wind and with intensive rains when they do come is subject to vast erosion. It actually caused them to go broke. Many of them had to move off the land. They lost everything they had, and it was a socially very upsetting time.
 
SR: Why should we care about soil erosion?
 
GP: Well soil erosion decreases soil productivity. The surface of the soil is the most fertile part. So when you lose that in a dust storm, it decreases the value of the land. And once you're in a dust storm on the Great Plains some place, you don't have much trouble understanding why you don't want it to happen. It's unhealthy with the dust in the air, it decreases the value of your land, and your neighbors don’t like you… it doesn't take much to figure out you don't want erosion. And if you happen to have a water erosion event, and your topsoil is on the neighbor's field, it makes for unhappy people.
 
SR: What lessons came out of the Dust Bowl?
 
GP: Well the lesson is that you need to keep cover on the soil. The biggest step has been the no-till system where you actually use herbicides to control weeds instead of tillage. And as you use the herbicides, you don't till, you keep the residues on the top, you save enough water that you can put another crop into the system like corn or millet or sunflower. And as a result then you get better use of the water and avoid that wasteful time.
 
SR: Why is crop residue cover on the soil surface so important?
 
GP: It does several things. First one is with the residue on top, you decrease raindrop impact so you get a better chance of getting the water into the soil. The residues take the energy out of the raindrop. Then the second thing is the mulch on top decreases the evaporation rate, and so as a result then you get a better chance of conserving the water there when you want to use it for a crop. 
 
SR: You said that by conserving the water, you are able to put more crops into the system. Why would you want to put more crops into a crop rotation?
 
GP: The major challenges are still about how to make a profit in a very risky environment. Because 2 years out of 10 in many cases you're going to get a zero crop and there's also hail hazards, so the biggest challenge is how do you keep going? So you have to have some good years in between. Corn requires it's water at a different time than wheat, and sunflower different than either of those, and so if you have more crops in your system, the chances are that you're going to get one crop at least is pretty good. In the old days it was only wheat, basically wheat-fallow. So with extra crops in the rotation, you reduce risk.
 
SR: Much of the research you conducted over the course of your career concerned fallow periods in crop rotations. Can you tell me what you’ve learned after several decades of studying fallow?
 
GP: Well, fallow is anytime you don't have a plant in the field, but the biggest challenge in dryland agriculture is summerfallow. You have periods of time during the hottest months when you don't have any cover on the land, and that's the worst part of fallow. It started as a way to reduce risk. When the farmers first came here and they didn't have no-till techniques, they were only able to grow one crop every other year by saving enough water in the fallow year to decrease the risk of crop failure. But summerfallow is very inefficient. For example if you receive 16 inches of rain during a fallow period, you might be lucky if you saved 1/4 of that in the soil. So, 75% would be lost to evaporation or to weed use, so it's a very inefficient system.
 
SR: What would a resilient dryland cropping system look like to you?
 
GP: To me? Oh that's a big question. I would like to have system where wheat would only appear in the system every four to five years, and in the meantime then I might use crops like corn, millet, sunflower, and then forage crops. Annual forages that you can plant, harvest, and get off in time to plant say another wheat crop. A lot of people don't want to bring animals back in the system because it complicates life, but the forage crop doesn't hail out very easy. If you're depending on a grain crop and you're depending on it to set seed, the forage crop doesn't do that. It doesn't have a high water demand period of flowering or anything like that, so you can do better with a small amount of rain. And if you get one of those intense hails, it just knocks it down a little bit but you've still got something. Forage crops are more forgiving in a system because you don't have to try to produce grain at a particular time so you're not as sensitive to rainfall timing.
 
SR: When you talk to producers, how do you convince them that diverse crop rotations are the way to go?
 
GP: Oh it's easy. ‘How would you like to make better use of the water that falls out of the sky? How do you get more plants, how do you get more production from every drop of water that falls on your farm?’ And right away the lights go on, and the benefits are that you get the biodiversity and you also get erosion control. And everybody wants erosion control, but they don't want to pay for it. But if you can make money, that's the way to do it. I don't think it is just farmers. I think the way to the heart of every businessman is how you make profit. And in this case, it's like you're making money while you're improving the situation.

​Steve Rosenzweig is a PhD Candidate at Colorado State University. This interview was conducted as part of a film project to document emerging innovations in dryland agriculture, which can be viewed here.

Nolan grew up in rural Illinois. He studied Atmospheric Science at the University of Michigan and the University of Illinois. He moved to Colorado in 1977, where he’s been a climatologist for over 35 years.
 
The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Steve Rosenzweig: What made you want to be a climatologist?
 
Nolan Doesken: I got interested in climate through my dad, who loved to keep weather records in his journal. He let me look in his journal, and he kept track of things all the way back, well we just found one of his earliest journal entries from when he was a teenager back in the 1920s. But weather statistics to me were just fascinating, and so from a young age I loved keeping weather statistics, loved doing probability calculations for recreation on hot summer days as a teenager. But I also grew up in an agricultural area where the conversations that took place in the community were almost always weather and climate related, and that was the language that I loved to hear spoke, and I participated in that as soon as I could. 
 
SR: Has the conversation about weather and climate changed much in agricultural communities?
 
ND: Much about weather and climate conversation in rural conversation to me as I hear them today have not changed that much. People were always thinking that the climate was a little bit different than it had been in the past. They were thinking that it's becoming a little more variable and extreme than it has in the past. The main different thing is that now there's a lot of scientific evidence to show that climate on a global scale is in fact changing, at least in the temperature part – that is the most obvious one that we can see that we are warmer than we used to be. The weather records here on our campus weather station show that relatively clearly. But the natural variability in climate - the big storms that occur one year and not the next, the droughts that occur every few years - That still is the dominant part of conversation. And the question that comes up is are we getting more of those or are we getting less of those? And are the droughts worse? Do they come on more surprisingly? Are there cycles that are predictable? Do they relate to something or do they not? Now there's so much more science behind climate than there was when I was having those youthful conversations with the farmers of our community 50 years and even longer ago.
 
SR: What can you tell me about the climate in this region?
 
ND: The Western Great Plains have an amazing climate. It's the part of the country that has the largest year-to-year and day-to-day changes of almost any other part of the country. What's amazing about the Great Plains - the Western Great Plains in particular - is that temperature gradients vary. It gets cooler as you go north, gets warmer as you go south, quite dramatically. Precipitation has a perpendicular gradient. Precipitation gets greater as you go east, less as you go west. The rain shadow right in the immediately of the Rockies is the driest, then right as you hit really close to the foothills then you increase again. But the main character of the Great Plains is wild swings, big changes day-to-day month-to-month, large seasonal cycles. It's an area of natural extremes to begin with, and that's even before you add the next ingredient, which is climate change in action.
 
SR: What effect is climate change going to have in this region?
 
ND: Climate change is an interesting thing to try to track in the Great Plains, because there's already so much variation that it's hard to detect small trends. For example, precipitation. We've decided that based on what we've seen in the variability in our precipitation in the Great Plains, it would probably take another 50 years to have any hint at all whether there is an upward or a downward trend. Temperatures are a little more systematic, especially in the summertime when the variability is smaller. And there it doesn't take as long to be able to detect trends. And we have been detecting warming trends in most seasons of the year. Not yet hugely profound and dramatic, but measurable, i.e. a couple of degrees fahrenheit.
 
SR: So, we’ve already felt the warming effects of climate change, and they will continue to go up, but it’s harder to detect how climate change will affect precipitation. Is that right?
 
ND: In terms of precipitation, we're not exactly sure how that would play out in the next 50 to 100 years. It's just so naturally variable. The role of extremes, however, will probably play out. This is something that I wanted to say about the climate of the Great Plains to begin with. Semi-arid climates are ones where there are relatively few precipitation events – it's dry most of the time. You're total average precipitation is less than 20 inches per year. Much of Eastern Colorado is more in the 12-16 inch range. But, again, variability and extremes. Just a few storms will make the difference between a wet year and a dry year. And what the evidence related to climate change suggests is that we will probably have fewer storms in total, but possibly larger storms when they do occur, which makes for an interesting situation for managing water. It may end up as the same amount of precipitation, but distributed in fewer and larger events. Temperature is a little bit more predictable – and in fact a lot more predictable. All evidence says that the warming trend is going to be clearly detectable, indisputable, and on the warming direction for the next 50 years.
 
SR: What will climate change look like to a farmer in the Great Plains?
 
ND: If you're a farmer on the Great Plains, you will have trouble separating climate change from climate variability when it comes to precipitation. It's just masked. There's just so much variability already. But when it comes to temperature, we are warmer than we've been in the past and we are getting warmer. As we're seeing in this month's weather records, we haven't had a single day this month so far with below average temperatures. And most days have been considerably above. And that's the direction we seem to be going with temperatures. And that plays out in all other aspects of the climate because when it's warmer and dry, the water that you do have evaporates quicker, the growing season starts a little earlier in the spring, may last a little longer, that may mean more consumption of what little water you do have. But then it tells you that when you do get storms – and you will, and they may be really big when you get them – that you gotta work really hard with your management and your vegetation to try to capture and retain that moisture as much as you can. Anything that causes there to be warmer weather with possibly fewer precipitation events and possibly larger precip events and possibly quicker onset drought, will require some different approaches to how you manage your biological resources in your soil.
 
SR: You said the growing season is going to start earlier?
 
ND: What warmer temperatures mean when you're engaged in agriculture is that vegetation will begin to use more water earlier in the spring. Depending on what you plant and how you manage it, it may consume more water over the course of the growing season, and the soils will have the tendency during dry spells to dry out more quickly. Again, between the storms – and a few big storms will still dominate the annual precipitation accumulation – your ability to retain moisture from large and intense storms is critical in order to have the most water available in the soil when you need it. 
 
SR: A lot of people are very worried about climate change, but you seem like a pretty optimistic guy. Are you hopeful for the future?
 
ND: Of course. You can look at climate change as a doomsday scenario. You can look at it as an inconvenience, or you can look at it as an opportunity to see what we can do better. Agriculture is in a position where they can affect not only how they respond to the climate as it may be changing but also how the atmosphere's composition of carbon may in fact change over time as well. Agriculture can influence both sides of the climate system.
 
Steve Rosenzweig is a PhD Candidate at Colorado State University. This interview was conducted as part of a film project to document emerging innovations in dryland agriculture, which can be viewed here.

Lucretia Sherrod is a soil scientist at the USDA Agricultural Research Service. She has researched dryland agricultural systems for over 25 years.
 
The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.



​
Steve Rosenzweig: Your research is largely focused on how to move beyond wheat-fallow into more intensified and diversified crop rotations. What is the secret?
 
Lucretia Sherrod: No-till is what allowed to get cropping intensity going. When we till the soil, we're automatically having more surface area opened up to evaporation. We're losing water just by tilling. So, no-till, by not tilling and having a surface armor of residue, allowed us to add other crops to the rotation.
 
SR: What sort of impact do these intensified rotations have on the soil?
 
LS: When you are diversifying your cropping systems and you have more than just one type of residue base out there, you have a lot more biological diversity as well. It's definitely bumped up from your traditional wheat-fallow only. Microbes are the pump. It's the heart of the soil. We're always going to have respiration going on, and in a wheat-fallow system we get no inputs during that fallow, so we're taking deposits out of the bank, and not putting anything in.
 
SR: You’re talking about carbon inputs – like organic matter, right?
 
LS: That’s right.
 
SR: And why should farmers care about microbes?
 
LS: You have more bacteria and fungi that are able to stay and colonize the system and create aggregates, and these aggregates are very important to soil structure. It gives us porosity. Your ideal soil is going to be one that has 50% pore space. Half of the pore space is air, the other half is water. And then 45% of your soil would be in mineral fraction, and 5% organic matter. When you have that kind of ideal soil, it is resilient to extremes in climate. It will withstand a few harsh years. But if you're already in a system where you have no aggregates, and you have no real biology that's active cause you've used up all the organic matter, it's hard to be able to overcome the forces of erosion that come onto those soils in that kind of environment. It's all about the water in the West.
 
SR: What’s the next step for dryland cropping systems?
 
LS: Our hope is that we can introduce cover crops – whether it's a multispecies or single species crop, something that can cover our acres when it's in a fallow period, so that we can build up aggregation, so that we can build up water infiltration. Farmers push back on this to a certain degree based on the wheat yield hit that they perceive or have experienced by putting in a cover crop. But with this new collaborative that we've got going on with CSU in extension of what we've already been doing, we're introducing cover crops to the wheat-fallow system in these long-term rotational experiments in Sterling, Stratton, and Walsh over a catena of soils. We will be able to directly compare over a 6-year time frame, the wheat yields that you get from wheat-fallow no-till vs. wheat-corn-fallow no-till, vs. wheat-summer cover crop... actually I should say that it's a fall planted cover crop, but it's in place of that summerfallow. It's stubble that will be in the field to act as armor and slow down evaporation.
 
SR: And you mentioned there’s resistance to cover crop adoption out here because of the water limitations, right?
 
LS: So that's the biggest resistance to accepting cover crops in any big way, because wheat yields are what makes the payments. And they've got to be able to keep their operation economically viable. That's what their concern is.
 
SR: So what are you hoping to achieve with this research?
 
LS: I think the answer to this will be when we look at a few years of data across these locations that I've been working on my whole career over 25 years in dryland systems. But I think you'll find from the data we've collected and looked at up to date is that anything is better than just wheat-fallow, even in the dry years. 12 years of our study was in above average temperatures, and the second half of our study was predominantly - say 8 years out of the 12 - drought. Heavy drought. Even through wet and dry years, if we take averages over Sterling all the way to Walsh, everything is beating wheat-fallow. And I think once we figure out what kind of cover crops to recommend, if they're spring planted, fall planted, multispecies, single species… there's so much research that still needs to be done. It's one thing to say that's good for the soil, but the producers have to make the payment to the bank, and we want to have that synergy work together, where the right practice at the right time is going to benefit everything: soil health and the farmers' bottom line.
 
SR: So you’re hopeful for the future of cover crops out here?
 
LS: We're seeing really cool ideas come forward that traditionally would have been laughed out of the conference room, right? Cover crops in dryland? uhh out West? And to some degree there is push back to that, but I think it will be exciting to see what we can do. Maybe have systems where we're forage based and we can use cattle or sheep or something where we're mixing it up between just wheat-fallow, but I do believe we gotta keep in mind that this is wheat country and respect why it is wheat country.

Steve Rosenzweig is a PhD Candidate at Colorado State University. This interview was conducted as part of a film project to document emerging innovations in dryland agriculture, which can be viewed here.

Cole Mertens runs a farming and stocker cattle operation with his family in northeastern Colorado. As far as anyone can tell, the tradition of farming has been in his family for seven generations. As a dryland farmer, Cole grows crops like wheat, corn, and millet without any irrigation in a region that only averages 15 inches of annual rainfall.
 
The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Steve Rosenzweig: If you weren’t a dryland farmer, what would you be doing?
 
Cole Mertens: Probably something where there's less stress about rainfall.
 
SR: How do you deal with the stress of not being able to count on rain?
 
CM: I guess it's something that I've grown up with my entire life - it's something that we're really used to. It's that uncertainty that's pushed our farming systems to be able to store water. We use systems like no-till that enable us to plant crops like corn, so we can store the water through the wintertime and use it in the summertime. Honestly, the early years of my farming career were a lot drier than what we've been experiencing lately so I think I got broke in pretty good from the beginning. We just didn't have rain for about 5 years in the early 2000's and 2002 we never harvested any fall crops whatsoever. That really opened my eyes of what this country can be, and then when you do get years where you get good moisture, you're that much more appreciative of it.
 
SR: You mentioned no-till is an important tool for you as a dryland farmer. When did you make the switch to no-till?
 
CM: Honestly, I wasn't motivated to switch to no-till. My uncles and father switched long before I was involved in this farming operation, but I could see the benefits as a young kid. I've just always been on board and this is the system that we're going to have on our farm as long as we can make it work. We would have some land that has been in no-till production for close to 30 years.
 
SR: What changes in the soil have you noticed over that time?
 
CM: The organic matter in the soil is going up. You can see when you pull this up it’s just really dark black, wet, cool. That organic matter is like a sponge to hold water in the soil for later crops. The other thing that we're seeing is that we saw benefits at 5 years and 10 years, but some of our land hasn't been worked for 20+ years and now we're really starting to see yield gains on those fields that have been no-tilled the longest. It's a long healing process. All that tillage through all the years definitely broke down, did away with any earthworms or anything that was living in the soil. But it's like it's almost like a fine wine, it gets better and better and better as time goes on, so we don't really know if 50 years what this soil might be capable of.
 
SR: You’re part of the younger generation of farmers. What are the biggest challenges your generation of farmers will face?
 
CM: I think the big thing for my generation is to climate-proof ourselves I guess against the hot, dry years that we know are coming back as they always do. We have to build on the no-till legacy, and figure out more crops to introduce to the system and how they work.
 
SR: Tell me about your crop rotation.
 
CM: Our crop rotation mostly involves wheat, corn, fallow, and millet. We're either growing 3 crops in 4 years or 2 crops in 3 years.
 
SR: Tell me about the fallow period.
 
CM: This field behind me is what we call summer fallow. It's where we just leave a field lay with no crops for an entire summer, and then plant it to winter wheat that fall. Part of the reason we do that is to store moisture, and part of it is we just see more productive capacity out of fields that have been summer fallowed. We always have seen a yield drag when we continuous crop our winter wheat. Fallow kind of evens out the highs and low in terms of the uncertainty of rain. And the other thing that we're accomplishing with the summer fallow is we're growing a really thick heavy winter wheat crop that produces good residue to start off our rotation when we go into corn and millet.
 
SR: What benefits do you get from having multiple crops in rotation?
 
CM: What we gain mostly from having diversity in our crop rotation is that you never know what the weather's going to do or when it's going to do it. Sometimes our rain might come in one 4"rain one afternoon and we won't get any for a couple more months. We need to be able to put that rain in the soil where we can use it for later and not watch it run off, and that's one of the huge benefits of rotation. We benefit from diversity in our crop rotation, even though it's maybe not as diverse as what it should be. But we're always looking for new things to add to the system. Corn is a completely different type of plant than say a wheat, for instance with the roots that it puts in the ground and the channels that it creates. It helps increase the water holding capacity by infiltrating and opening up pore space in the soil so the water can get in when we do get our rainfall events. The field that we're in this corns planted into last year's wheat residue and that wheat residue will break down as the corn's growing and this residue acts as mulch just as in your garden or anything else. It protects that soil. We just dug this up. This soil is completely wet and cool and we haven't had measurable rain here in almost three weeks and we've had a lot of near 100-degree temperatures in the last three weeks.

​Steve Rosenzweig is a PhD Candidate at Colorado State University. This interview was conducted as part of a film project to document emerging innovations in dryland agriculture, which can be viewed here.