Reversing Soil Degradation with Dwayne Beck
Regenerative Agriculture Podcast
AEA Marketing
4.7 • 546 Ratings
🗓️ 3 November 2020
⏱️ 76 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Dr. Dwayne Beck is well known for being one of the pioneers of no-till agriculture in central South Dakota and across the High Plains. For more than three decades, Dr. Beck has been creating comprehensive systems for both irrigated and dryland crop production throughout the region, educating growers on the power of crop rotation, diversity, and other regenerative practices. He currently serves as the Research Manager at the Dakota Lakes Research Farm, a non-profit made up of farmers committed to sustainable land practices.
On today's episode, John and Dwayne discuss:
- Dwayne's background and his earlier work assisting local growers with their irrigation systems
- The continuing decline of the Ogallala Aquifer and how water infiltration can be improved by implementing no-till agricultural practices.
- Addressing the often-overlooked aspects of irrigation, such as percolation and water delivery, and how it affects soil health.
- Dwayne's observations on lake bottom soils, the power of macropores, and the prevalence of summer fallowing in the High Plains.
- Utilizing de-percolation strategies to maintain proper nutrient levels in your soil.
- Using competition, sanitation, and rotation to control weeds, diseases and insects.
- Dwayne's historical research on nutrient cycling and fertilizer placement.
- Dwayne offers up a broader historical perspective on how agriculture, human nature, and mother nature work together.
- A discussion on why moving to no-till options for all crops including potatoes, carrots and sugar beets are engineering and genetics problems.
- The shared vision, but much different methods, between regenerative agriculture vs. organic agriculture.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi friends, this is John and this is the regenerative agriculture podcast where we talk about the agronomic science and cultural management practices that regenerate plant health, soil health, and public health. |
| 0:13.0 | My guest for this episode is Dwayne Beck, a name that I'm sure many of you know, and for those of you who don't know, you certainly deserve to know his name. |
| 0:21.6 | I'm very honored to have you join us today. |
| 0:24.2 | Dwayne, thank you for being here. |
| 0:26.1 | Well, thanks for having me. |
| 0:28.3 | You've conducted a lot of research. |
| 0:29.9 | You were one of the pioneers of innovating no-till agriculture on the high plains in the North Dakota region. |
| 0:37.1 | For our listeners who haven't |
| 0:38.6 | heard of your history and background, can you tell us a little bit about your history and what brought |
| 0:42.8 | you here? Well, I'm just a good farm boy that went to college because that was better than |
| 0:49.5 | the alternatives at the time. I was the youngest son, so you don't get to have the farm as a |
| 0:56.0 | youngest son. But I went to college, got a degree in chemistry, because I didn't really |
| 1:02.0 | know what I wanted to do. Didn't realize you could do science and agriculture. I taught chemistry |
| 1:08.0 | in a high school at Gettysburg, South Dakota for three years. |
| 1:14.0 | And serendipitously met some people who got me back into graduate school at South Dakota State |
| 1:21.0 | University working on a PhD degree in soil fertility at that time. |
| 1:28.3 | And most of that work was with the irrigator people. |
| 1:33.3 | And in that process of doing my work out there again around Gettysburg and Pier and Long |
| 1:40.3 | Missouri River, the irrigators were having fits with runoff. |
| 1:43.3 | This is the late 70s. They'd spent a lot of money because Earl Butts told them to farm fence row to fence row and produce everything they could. So they spent a lot of money putting in irrigators to pump out of the main stem reservoirs on the Missouri River and then proceeded to run the water right back to the reservoir. |
| 2:04.4 | So that's kind of when we started to look at ways of making water go into the soil better. |
| 2:11.6 | And kind of in that transition from when I was doing my PhD work until I became a real person. We had some projects that |
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