Why Soil Health Can Be a Sustainability Game-Changer, with Lizzie French

Having their hands in the dirt is nothing new to farmers in North America. But it turns out they're not the only ones "working the field." In every cubic inch of soil, there's a miniature ecosystem living, breathing and feeding—and the health of that ecosystem can have a vast impact on crop yields, water retention and even the overall success or failure of a given planting season. So in this episode, we're talking to Lizzie French, a principal scientist at Nutrien Ag Solutions' Champagne, Illinois research lab, for a critical year-end overview on ensuring next year’s soil health, and how that can reduce our reliance on other inputs. We'll talk about soil sampling, cover crops and other critical tools to ensure that your soil is working for you, plus hear about her incredible background as the daughter of missionary parents that sparked her interest in soil management practices. Plus, Tom and Sally discuss equipping growers with the terminology and tools they need to discuss sustainability practices with consumer products groups, and why that's so important in 2022.

Episode Transcript

Lizzie French:

We're talking about soil health. We're thinking about all aspects of soil. We're taking the whole system together where we're looking at the chemistry and the physical aspects of the soil and layering in the biology on top of that from the microbes that live in that soil, the plant roots that are growing into that soil. And so it's really important to think about this as a whole system when we're talking about soil health.

Dusty Weis:

Welcome to The Future. Faster., a sustainable agriculture podcast by Nutrien Ag Solutions, with our very own Tom Daniel, Director, North America Retail and Grower Sustainable Ag, and Dr. Sally Flis, Senior Manager, North America Sustainable Ag and Carbon. This is your opportunity to learn about the next horizon in sustainable agriculture for growers, for partners, for the planet. To us, it's not about changing what's always worked, it's about continuing to do the little things that make a big impact.

Dusty Weis:

On this week's episode, we're joined by Lizzie French, a Principal Scientist at Nutrien Ag Solutions’ Champaign, Illinois Innovation Farm to talk about soil health and soil organic matter. We'll discuss how to be more precise in soil sampling, how to optimize your soil organic matter, and how healthy soil can decrease reliance on certain ag inputs to maximize your sustainability portfolio. But if you haven't yet, make sure you're subscribed to this podcast in your favorite app. Also, make sure you follow Nutrien Ag Solutions on Facebook and Instagram.

Dusty Weis:

I'm Dusty Weis, and it's time once again to introduce Tom Daniel and Sally Flis. And Tom and Sally, growers have always done right by the soil that they work. But now that sustainability is a hot topic to consumers, farmers are facing more questions from consumer products groups about the sustainability practices that they use in their fields. And the thing is, while the growers might be utilizing these practices, they're not always equipped to have that discussion. The terminology, the best way to measure it, the best way to present themselves, all of these have to be a part of that discussion. So Tom, what do you tell a grower in that position?

Tom Daniel:

Well, Dusty, it's funny you ask that question because just this morning I got a call from a grower from Georgia who was specifically raising cotton and peanuts, and this particular grower's part of our traceability program around cotton. And so his question to me was, he says, "Tom, I need to figure out how to get in front of this sustainability thing," I think is what he termed it. And I said, "Okay, what are you being asked for?" And he said, "Well, look, I sell peanuts, and they go directly into the peanut processor. And they're going into different companies that are buying those peanuts for their particular products." He said, "And I'm being asked, what are the sustainability practices or what are the things I'm doing on the farm that would be of interest to a consumer on sustainability."

Tom Daniel:

And I said, "Well, is it only on the peanut side?" And he says, "No." He said, "You know, I'm participating in your guys traceability cotton program, so obviously we're getting questions on the fiber side with cotton." But he said, "The one that really surprised me," he said, "was the chicken producer." He has chicken houses on his farm, so he's producing chickens for, for I don't know which company, but he said he's starting to get lots of questions around sustainability.

Tom Daniel:

And Sally, one of the first things I told him was how much data are you collecting off the farm that is in a usable form that could be shared with somebody that's asking for those things? And we've said this a hundred times, but how important is it that you have a system to collect data on the farm?

Sally Flis:

Data is the backbone of anything we're going to report on sustainability. So we can't report on anything and it's not going to be acceptable to these consumer package good companies, or CPGs, as lots of us call them in the field, to not have data backing things up. I've just been spending the last couple of weeks working on our responses for generating our carbon credits. And it's data heavy. It's evidence heavy. They want to see proof that what we're saying happened in the field with these growers happened in the field with these growers.

Sally Flis:

I think I would add to that, Tom, for growers that are diversified like this, some of it's just telling the story of that diversification. A grower that's got cotton, peanuts, and chickens is doing some pretty, probably, unique stuff on the farm that, yes, there's data behind it, but it's not necessarily always a yield thing that we'd want to talk about. There's biodiversity, there's water use, water quality. I think we say this all the time too, we tend to focus a lot on this discussion around carbon, but there's a lot of other sustainability metrics out there that are important to these companies and talking about that whole story of what the grower is doing. And I think one of the things that we can help growers with is understanding on an operation level, what are the things that are important to their individual sustainability story because, Tom, it's going to be different for every grower. It's different for every field what the sustainability story is there.

Tom Daniel:

Sally, I totally agree with you that it all starts with the data points. And every grower, we've stressed this so much on this podcast it sounds like a broken record, but you have to have a system in place for data recording. There has to be something. And it's got to be more than a notebook that we stuff in our shirt pocket or some loose-leaf papers that we keep general notes on. It's got to be information that can be used. Not without the grower's permission, but the grower has to have a way that when he's asked to supply data, he has the ability to do that.

Tom Daniel:

And Sally, totally agree with what you just said. All stories around sustainability will be local to the farm operation themselves. Each farmer's going to have different technologies that he can implement on the farm that can help him. He's going to have different practices and things that he's implementing on the farm. And each story has to be told according to that local grower.

Tom Daniel:

So data is the most important thing that I could tell anybody today. But on top of that, this particular grower this morning asked me the question, he said, "I'm a cotton, cotton, peanut rotation. How do I need to look at that when it comes to implementing sustainable practices on the farm?" He said, "What are some things we can look at?"

Tom Daniel:

So I'll give you a couple of them, maybe get you to comment on them too. But specifically in Georgia, so in that geography, he can actually participate in carbon programs around nitrogen reductions in his cotton crop. So he can possibly generate credits for carbon, which is a good indicator he's doing sustainable practices. And the second thing I told him was could he look at the use of cover crops in that geography? Typically, not a big cover crop area, but he could use cover crops that would help not only with erosion and things of the soil, but also help in capturing some of that excess nitrogen, some of those things.

Tom Daniel:

What are your thoughts around practices that a farmer could look to participate in that would show him to be headed in a sustainable direction?

Sally Flis:

Cover crops are always a good one, Tom, like you mentioned. They can soak up some of those nutrients left over from the growing season. They help hold the soil in place through the months that your primary cash crop isn't growing.

Sally Flis:

But I think crop diversification is another one too, adding something else to that rotation. What it is going to be, again, location-dependent. But we've got partners that are looking for some very unique dry bean or grain products now that could provide an opportunity to a grower like this to add something really unique and different to their rotation that's going to have some soil health-building qualities but also offer them a different market to get into beyond the markets that they're already participating in. So it provides some diversification for the operation as well.

Sally Flis:

And as I was listening to your comments there, Tom, I got thinking about our ESG report that we've talked about a couple times on here, which is the report that we publish once a year across a whole wide range of environmental, sustainability, and governance metrics within our company. And so some of the things for growers, and I know we've seen this in the cotton programs, that they're also probably going to be asked about, because that's what all these CPGs are looking for is data to answer the questions in their ESG reports, are things like labor and use of equipment and safety and all those types of things play into this ESG report.

Sally Flis:

And so that's why it's important to think about data beyond just your field data as we're looking at helping those growers tell those individual stories about what makes them overall a sustainable farm.

Tom Daniel:

So Sally, you mentioned ESG, which it's important that we as a company, we're very attentive to how we look at ESG reporting. Why is it that we're suddenly seeing pressure on farms today from different corporations that are buying the outputs that are coming off the farm? Why are we suddenly seeing a lot of questions around it? Are the CPGs, or are the consumer products groups that are buying these, the quality products, are they seeing pressure today? And where do you think that pressure's coming from?

Sally Flis:

So the pressure's coming from consumers, but probably I would say at this point the pressure's coming from investors. And so there's a drive from investors to want to know what companies are doing to meet these sustainability and environmental goals across their whole supply chain. And so that's where the farmer comes in, is the biggest part of any food or clothing company is the product coming off the farm. It's not the operations that they do to that product afterwards. It's the operations that happen on the farm are the biggest environmental impact that that company can have.

Tom Daniel:

Yeah. And I think a lot of these, Sally, have made claims in the recent years that they would have a certain sustainability goal reached by 2025, 2030. I've seen actual claims all the way out to 2050. I believe we're starting to see some of those companies today are under pressure to deliver, and obviously they're looking at the grower where they get their original sourced food products from to meet some of those needs. And I say food. It's not just food. We call it the four Fs. It's food, fiber, fuel, and feed are all the different market areas that we're seeing pressure today around sustainable measurements.

Tom Daniel:

One other thing that I'd finish with on this too though, Sally, is there's a lot of push. These sustainability things that we're trying to work with on the farm, of course, water and water efficiency are important, but one of the key components today is soil health and what is soil health and what does it mean and what are some ways that we need to be thinking about soil health when it comes to measurements and practices that we do on the field. So when I use the term soil health, what do you think of?

Sally Flis:

I think of the organic matter, water holding capacity, limiting erosion are probably the three biggest ones that I think about in soil health. And those are all managed through the different practices that we've talked about today. Cover crops, tillage, diversified crop rotation, the use of animal manures as part of your system are all things that are going to impact those three metrics.

Sally Flis:

Now, it's bigger than that because you can't have a healthy soil if you haven't figured out what the nutrients are that you need to provide beyond nitrogen to the crops that you're growing. So it's a pretty complex system. I think the baseline discussion is it's looking at the physical, chemical, and biological aspects of that soil to determine where you rank in a soil health metric.

Dusty Weis:

Well, Tom and Sally, we certainly started a discussion last week as we look ahead at the soil sampling that we can do after harvest about soil health and maintaining that good soil biology. This is certainly an area where Nutrien Ag Solutions invests a solid amount of its attention. And so after the break here, we are going to talk to Lizzie French, a Principal Scientist at your Champaign, Illinois Innovation Farm, for a critical year-end overview on ensuring next year's soil health and how that can help reduce our reliance on certain inputs and improve those sustainability metrics. That's coming up in a moment here on The Future. Faster.

Dusty Weis:

This is The Future. Faster., a sustainable agriculture podcast by Nutrien Ag Solutions. I'm Dusty Weis along with Tom Daniel and Sally Flis. And we're joined now by Lizzie French, a Principal Scientist at Nutrien Ag Solutions in Champaign, Illinois and a leading expert on soil biology and soil health. So Lizzie, thank you for joining us.

Lizzie French:

Thanks. I'm glad to be here.

Dusty Weis:

Lizzie, the topic of soil health comes up often on our podcast. So to get us kicked off here, can you give us your definition of soil health? How do you see soil health?

Lizzie French:

I'm going to start with the National Resource Conservation Services definition because I think it's a good starting point to start to unpack. It's kind of the framework that I like to think about soil health. So their definition is the continued capacity of soil to function as a vital living ecosystem that sustains plants, animals, and humans.

Lizzie French:

And I think what's really important about this to pick out is that in contrast to thinking about soil in terms of soil quality or just soil fertility, we're talking about soil health. We're thinking about all aspects of soil. We're taking the whole system together where we're looking at the chemistry and the physical aspects of the soil and layering in the biology on top of that. And the biology is what's critically important for actually all of the nutrient cycling, the carbon cycling that happens in the soil. That's all primarily done from the microbes that live in that soil, the plant roots that are growing into that soil. And so it's really important to think about this as a whole system when we're talking about soil health.

Lizzie French:

And the important aspects of soil health, I think, that come out of that then are the things that soil does for us, starting with that productive capacity of being able to produce a crop, but then also we've got the important aspects of being able to store water and filter water, being able to capture and store carbon. And then just from the perspective of soil being an ecosystem in itself, it's the most diverse ecosystem that exists on our planet. So preserving that ecosystem in itself is just really important since that diversity is what provides the functionality of the soil.

Tom Daniel:

So Lizzie, I understand that definition. Well, maybe I don't, but I understand it for the most part. I would ask you this: As we work with crop consultants, and you've had a lot of crop consultants come through the Innovation Farm there at Champaign and you've talked to them through the different groups coming through our Waypoint offices in Champaign, how do you see a crop consultant having a discussion with a grower around soil health, and what are the important factors a crop consultant needs to really have that close discussion with a grower about?

Lizzie French:

I think the biggest important thing is talking about it in terms of it being really critical to the long-term success of not just their farm, but also their whole community because the soil provides such important services both on the farm and off the farm in terms of being able to filter water and being able to provide that basis for so many of the living things, provide the food for us and for the animals.

Lizzie French:

I think the starting point is that it's really important for considering both on-the-farm success and their community as a whole. And it's not just thinking about yield, although that is an important component. The soil health is an important factor in soil fertility and in yields. But then when you think about resistance to stress, that's I think been especially important this year with all of the different problems with droughts and other abiotic stresses or pathogen stresses. A healthier soil is going to help protect from those stresses and help protect your yields when your farm is experiencing that kind of stress. So in that aspect, that soil health is a really critical conversation to have.

Sally Flis:

Lizzie, you clearly have a deep background in soil health and all the different things that go into impacting soil health and looking at soil health in the field. Can you share your background and how you ended up as a principal scientist focusing on soil health with Nutrien Ag Solutions and kind of what persuaded you to pursue this path in your career?

Lizzie French:

Yeah, absolutely. So I have wanted to be a scientist basically my entire life. I have memories of being three or four and being like science, that's where it's at. So basically, as long as I can remember I've wanted to do science.

Lizzie French:

And then as far as my background, I actually grew up mostly overseas in developing countries in Central and South America with my parents work as missionaries. And so seeing their work instilled a very strong desire in me to work towards improving the world around me. And as part of those experiences, we saw a lot of poverty. And I remember specifically this one community that we worked with. It was families living in a very remote area where there used to be a sugar cane farm. Because the company that had managed that farm had managed the land very poorly, had just run that soil into the ground to the point where it had no functionality left, and when the sugar cane stopped producing, that company left and left all of those families there with no way to support themselves and their family.

Lizzie French:

And so that story has just been something that's really stuck with me in terms of how important soil health is for land productivity, how important it is for communities. And so that really set me on this path of what kind of science I wanted to do. So after I went to undergrad, I got a degree just in biology. Then I went and got a PhD in plant pathology at Purdue. I was working with soil amendments and looking at how they could improve soil health, reduce disease severity. And then after that, I worked as a postdoc for a little while. And then last April, April 2021, I started working for Nutrien Ag Solutions. And here I am.

Tom Daniel:

That's a great background, Lizzie. And really soil health to you is more than just, as you said, we talk about productivity on the farm and making more yield by increasing soil health, but it's really about sustainability and existence. Right? As we think about soils that have been depleted, and I think farmers in North America do a relatively good job of maintaining their soils and working to make them better over time, but you hear a lot of these terms around regenerative agriculture. What does that term mean to you, and how should we be thinking about regenerative agriculture?

Lizzie French:

Oh, that's a great question. And yeah, I think it's super important in places like that community I was talking about where the soil's gotten to a point where it's just not productive at all. So if it's going to produce any kind of crop, something needs to change in how they're managing that land.

Lizzie French:

And so how I would see regenerative agriculture is that you're managing the land in such a way that you're, like you said, growers here are really great at maintaining it, keeping that productivity over time. But in situations like the one I was talking about, you need to be able to improve your soil and not just keep it at the same level. And that's something that could be important across the board in terms of maintaining long-term productivity is actually how can we do even better? And that's the real goal in regenerative ag is you're trying to regenerate your soil health.

Lizzie French:

And the practices, honestly, that are recommended for regenerative ag are basically a full overlap with soil health practices. It's cover cropping. It can be including grazing animals in that rotation, no till, all of those sorts of things in order to build up that soil organic matter and make that land have a higher productive capacity.

Tom Daniel:

Yeah, Lizzie, one thing that bothers me sometimes around the term regenerative is the regenerative that we have in what we deal with in North America versus what you described in Latin America where you had a soil type or whatever that was completely depleted. Our soils here, growers are doing a relatively good job of not only sustaining them as they are today, but in most cases they're doing soil improvement pieces. So sometimes I get the feeling that when we use the term regenerative ag, we're referring that all farmland has been depleted. And that's just so not the case in the U.S. Would you agree with that?

Lizzie French:

Yeah, I totally agree. I think there is a narrative out there that tends to look negatively on large-scale agriculture and there's a narrative built around the land being depleted. And it goes back to dust bowl type stories where you saw huge losses of organic matter due to erosion and those sorts of things. It's just a classic example of stories being told that aren't rooted in information directly from farmers. They're the people we should be listening to about what's going on on the farm. And yeah, and as you pointed out, our growers do a really great job of maintaining their soil and improving their soil health.

Sally Flis:

So Lizzie, there's lots of different ways we can look at the soil, and I think a constant thing we've all heard in the field talking to crop consultants or growers is how do I know if I have healthy soil? So what is the difference between those soil fertility samples that we take on a every three-year basis and determining where we sit for soil health in a field?

Lizzie French:

Yeah, that's a really good question because at the moment, I would say our understanding of soil fertility is such that you can take a sample and you have pretty straightforward information about what you do when you get your soil report back, you put X number of pounds of nitrogen and phosphorus out based on your soil report, versus soil health where the field is young enough that we don't really know exactly what do we do with this information when we have it. What does this mean? What do I do with it? That makes it a little bit more challenging to tie together.

Lizzie French:

And I hope, I think I see us moving in that direction, but I hope we're moving in the direction where we can integrate all of these different measures of soil health, including the soil fertility, where we're integrating all of these different measures to have that fuller understanding of what's going on in your soil because soil fertility is a big part of soil health. And it would, in my mind, be wrong to separate those things. But right now, because we don't have as big of an understanding of how to measure soil health quantitatively in a way that we can then build a recommendation off of that, then it makes it a little bit more difficult to try to mesh those together.

Sally Flis:

I know I've heard in the field, and Tom, you probably have too, why do I need to test for soil health? I get organic matter on my soil samples. Isn't that enough to tell me whether or not I've got good soil health? So kind of just curious some of your thoughts or opinions on just looking at a measure like soil organic matter as our index of soil health.

Lizzie French:

Right. That's definitely a measure of soil health that is part of the picture. But as we discussed, there's so many other functions that soil provides and you don't necessarily get that from just that soil organic matter measure. Two of the big things, especially on the physical aspects of the soil, and that really plays into how it interacts with water, is looking at measures of aggregation and of soil structure. So I think that's an important thing to consider. And you're not going to get that from a soil organic matter measurement. And the other thing is soil microbial activity. That's the engine that drives nutrient availability in the soil. And so having a measure of that doesn't give you exactly the same information that just total soil organic matter does.

Tom Daniel:

In sustainable agriculture, we look for opportunities to create efficiencies, right? Optimized nutrition, uptake, efficient delivery systems, all of those things are part of what we would consider a sustainable ag type program. You just talked about the chemical features of a soil. But we also know there's a living system within the soil too. And that living system has a direct impact on how we can optimize inputs, whether it be fertilizer or available nutrients that are already in the soil. Kind of give me an idea from your point of view, what relationship does a healthy soil have to nutrient availability?

Lizzie French:

So healthy soils support large, diverse microbial communities, and it's that microbial community that provides, I used this term before, but I really like the analogy, that it's the engine that drives nutrient cycling in the soil. So it's phosphorous solubilizers that are going to be taking that phosphorus that became unavailable the second that you put it on your field. And it's those microbes that are going to be the ones that wrench it off of those mineral particles and bring it back into solution and make it available for plants to use. And it's going to be the microbes that break down the organic matter, make that organic nitrogen available, that make other organic nutrients like phosphorus as well and other micronutrients available to the plants. So the more that you can support healthy soil biological activity through healthy soil practices, the more you're going to be able to improve nutrient uptake, nutrient efficiency within your system.

Sally Flis:

Lizzie, one of the practices that, like you were mentioning, overlaps between sustainability and this regenerative ag definition we talked about a little bit, the use of cover crops. So how do cover crops impact that organic matter, soil health, microbial activity nexus in the soil as we implement this as a practice on farms?

Lizzie French:

So, I mean, the most obvious thing is that they're providing living cover over your soil over larger portion of the year. And through that, they're providing additional plant material that will go into that organic matter. But even more importantly, it's that living root in the ground and that living root that's pumping carbon into the ground, feeding those microbes, increasing that microbial activity, and those microbes as they cycle and go through their circle of life, that material is also becoming part of the soil organic matter. So that carbon pump, as I like to think of it, is active throughout more of the year when you're adding cover crops instead of it just sitting there inactive during the portions of the year after you've harvested and before you've planted the next crop.

Tom Daniel:

Lizzie, have you seen any interaction between certain types of cover crops and how they can impact the soil health aspects? I mean, in certain areas of the country, we see a lot of cover crops are just cereal rye or winter oats, for instance. And to me, winter oats can even be another issue because they terminate when cold weather hits, right? The idea is to keep a green and growing root even through the winter months. And so do you see differences in the value to soil health by using biodiversity in your seed mixes for cover crops?

Lizzie French:

Yeah, absolutely. To some extent, we're still trying to figure out what the best mixes are for different purposes, but I think there's a lot of interesting work going on there to figure out. And it really depends, I think, on what your goals are as well because there's some cover crop mixes that are going to be better for weed suppression, others that'll be better for breaking up compaction. And then obviously, including a legume is going to be really important if you're trying to build up those populations of nitrogen fixers in your soil and increase that organic nitrogen that's going to be available in the next growing season.

Lizzie French:

So yes, I do think it's important. I don't know that I have a specific example of a specific cover crop in mind. But yeah, short answer, yes.

Dusty Weis:

Well, Lizzie, I've got to say, everybody in agriculture has a story about how they got into this field and why they're passionate about it, but your story of traveling around the developing world with your missionary parents is one of the better ones that I've heard in a while. But also, it's a great reminder that the soil that we work isn't just a thing. It's not just a tool that we use for growing crops. It is, as you said, a living ecosystem and needs to be supported as such. So we appreciate your insights, the tips that you've shared, for doing that today. Lizzie French, Principal Scientist at Nutrien Ag Solutions, thank you so much for joining us on this episode of The Future. Faster.

Dusty Weis:

That is going to conclude this edition of The Future. Faster. The Pursuit of Sustainable Success with Nutrien Ag Solutions. New episodes arrive every other week, so make sure you subscribe in your favorite app and join us again soon. Visit futurefaster.com to learn more. The Future. Faster. Podcast is brought to you by Nutrien Ag Solutions, with executive producer Connor Erwin and editing by Larry Kilgore III. And it's produced by Podcamp Media. Branded podcast production for businesses, podcampmedia.com. For Nutrien Ag Solutions, thanks for listening. I'm Dusty Weis.