From Barren Fields to Thriving Pastures: Our Soil’s Transformation

Written by Jules Corr

While I love looking at our animals on pasture, I spend a great deal of my time looking down. Assessing how much forage (the grasses, legumes, and various plants on our pasture) has been consumed by our animals in their latest move – and gauging how much forage is up ahead for their next move. It’s a delicate balance between moving our animals too quickly or too slowly. Too quick and we’ve missed an opportunity to provide our animals with lush, nutritious growth that would fuel their bodies and help them to grow bigger. Too slow and we overgraze the land which leaves the soil bare and vulnerable. Animals are a powerful tool to improve and regenerate land. But just like with any tool, it can cause more harm than good if you use it wrong.

Our Soil Health Past

As a regenerative farm, we anticipate that the soil health of our pastures will continuously improve as we graze our animals responsibly and as the seasons go by. In order to gain a better understanding of the soil’s condition before introducing regeneration, Justin and Jenni tested Rebel Pastures’ soil in the Spring of 2022 - just after the Bajema family had purchased the land.

Above 👆 Spring 2022. Last year’s corn stalks were still uniformly arranged in the rows that had been sown by the farmer who sold the property. They were hollow, jagged stumps that served as a metaphor for the depleted health of the land that had been conventionally farmed for several decades.

The Soil Evolution

The pasture was allowed to rest that first year and then were seeded with a mix of grasses. Animals began grazing the following Spring of 2023. Now in 2024, after two seasons of regenerative management with livestock, we were curious to see if the soil had begun to rebound from that first test. We tested the soil again this summer. Spoiler alert – the soil health has improved! 

Healthy Soil = Healthy Pastures = Healthy Animals

One of the leading motivations for testing the soil in 2022 was to reveal the Organic Matter Percentage in our soil. Organic matter is the broken down material from dead plants, manure, urine, and deceased animals after it becomes incorporated into the soil. Organic matter is one of the most important aspects of soil health to the regenerative farmer.  

So, why do we care about it so much? 

• It acts as a sponge that holds nutrients, water, and creates habitat for both visible and non-visible soil life.
• A higher organic matter percentage indicates a healthier soil.
• Healthy soil means we’ll have healthier plants.
• Healthy plants will result in strong, resilient animals.
  
  

Organic Matter(s)

The initial soil test in 2022 revealed that the organic matter was as low as 1.1% in some areas, with an average of 1.4%. Our soil test from this summer showed we had increased our organic matter to an average of 2.4% across our pastures! 

The image above shows  our pastures in 2022 before the ground was seeded with a mixture of grasses and restored with grazing animals. The land in this image averaged 1.4% organic matter.

This image above is of our cattle herd grazing on restored pastures during summer of 2024. The same land in this image now has an average organic matter of 2.4% after two seasons of adaptive grazing management.

How does a 1% increase in organic matter affect the land?

A 1% increase may not seem like a big deal. However, a 1% increase in organic matter allows every acre of land to capture and hold up to 25,000 more gallons of rainwater (USDA Forest Service). 

This is especially important when we get a downpour with inches of rainfall in a short period of time. Soil that is low in organic matter cannot soak up much of this sudden burst of rain. A lot of it will run away into the ditches and nearby streams. Soil that is higher in organic matter will quickly absorb and hold onto that water before it has the chance to leave the property.

To put things into perspective here’s a few key facts:

• One inch of rainfall across One Acre = 27,143 gallons of water

• A 1% increase in organic matter increases the water holding capacity of One Acre by 25,000 gallons of water

• THEREFORE, every 1% increase in organic matter allows our land to capture one additional inch of rainwater during a storm event!

The land we manage is low in our watershed, meaning it can collect a lot of water from adjacent land! It is in our best interest to capture as much of that water as we can before it drains away from our fields. The sloped hills of our pastures direct water towards the lowest valley and eventually, into the drainage ditch. The lowest area on our pasture is actually marked as a waterway on Google Maps (below) and can even be seen via satellite imagery.

 

 

This ‘waterway’ is not actually wet or full of flowing water as these images would lead you to believe. It’s likely that this was a wet, mucky spot in the field when the land was conventionally farmed. With our regenerative practices and increased organic matter, our land absorbs water quicker than it did historically!

Our Soil Health Future

We’re pretty geeked about these soil test results if you can’t tell. We don’t have irrigation on our pastures, so our farm is dependent on the rainfall we receive. This year we experienced drought-like conditions from the middle of summer through early fall. We had to start feeding our cattle hay much earlier than we had hoped due to our pastures being exhausted and thirsty. As our organic matter continues to increase and our soil health thrives, we believe that droughts will have less of an impact on our farm in the future.

Now that you have a better understanding of organic matter and its importance to the regenerative farmer, you can see why a 1% increase is a victory for us! Next we’d like to try a biological soil test to get a look at the microbial activity going on underground. This will tell us how fast organic materials (such as manure, straw, and trampled grass) are breaking down and being incorporated into the soil as organic matter. When we have a better understanding of our soil health, we’re able to make better informed decisions about the way we manage the land.

And that leads us to these images of our grazing animals enjoying phytonutrient-rich forages on our pasture. Summer 2024.