Event ID: 2602462
Event Started: 6/2/2015 2:44:17 PM ET
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Welcome to today's webinar. My name is Evelyn Johnson and there webinar coordinator is -- your host for this presentation. This webinar is being recorded in all participants join the webinar and listen only mode. You received the webinar audio to your device and speakers. There is no telephone dial in. If you're having audio difficult tees, please check the various ways the volume of your computer can be adjusted including the volume adjusted available in Adobe connect menubar. Please take a look at the webinar room layout. We of content that allow you to download today's slides and you can comment or ask questions by typing them into the Q&A pod. Our moderator and participators will interact during Q&A period to answer questions. To a larger view of the webinar presentation, use a for arrow icon in the middle of the presentation slide pod to enter and exit this full-screen view. Hover at the top of the full-screen view to see a menu that allows you to exit it or go also there are a few messages in the Q&A pod that can assist you if you're having problems with the webinar interface. Today's webinar offers American forest and grassland Council what hour credit. One hour CCA credits and one hour conservation planning credits. If you selector urgency in use when registering for today's webinar at the science and technology training library, a conservation webinar.net echo after the webinar has ended please return to your open browser window to complete step two. You will take a brief test editor your certification credentials and receive your participation certificate by email. We will submit your CEU's directly to the professional societies at the beginning of the month. You do not need to submit them yourself. Please make your conservation planners CEU's as you need to meet your local certification requirements. The on-demand recording of this webinar will be available at the science and technology training library by tomorrow. Please feel free to let your colleagues know about this training opportunity. Please note the topic for the dates on your screen. I want to thank the southern region are extensions or history for partnering with NRCS to offer webinar at the NRCS science and technology training library and conservation webinars.net. Sarah is an organic conservation specialist for NRCS and education director with organ tell the cooperative agreement. Sarah wedges three speaker Giulio Feruzzi at the West national Technology Support Center. Sarah, the floor is yours to introduce Giulio.

Thank you, Evelyn and greetings and thank you to everyone for joining us today. This webinar is part of her annual organic series that is supported through a partnership with organ tell. As you can see on your screen we have some upcoming webinars to put on your calendars. The specific webinar with -- in response to a number of conversations that happen at NRCS and with the larger organic community about soil helping conservation inorganic forms. As we all know, there are many different approaches to soil health and assessment and on diverse operations our specialty crop operations can become incredibly complex and difficult to do. So today will explore some the opportunities for mitigating soil disturbance inorganic systems. Giulio will be guiding us through this.

She is a -- and Portland Oregon the West national Technology Support Center he provides the Western NRCS state offices was support for all agronomy needs. He specializes in -- which are tools that the NRCS uses for assessments of various practices and supports organic organ culture as well. He is a agency lead for Russell to so he was ideal person to have working with the centuries webinar. What that, I will turn over to you.

Thank you very much, Sarah. Welcome, everyone and we will get started today. With figuring soil disturbance inorganic systems. Before we going to that, I would like to speak your -- some of the statements that sometimes they are made and ask you guys are these factor fiction. Soil disturbance in a typical organic system is greater than a typical conventional system. Is a factor fiction? Also another statement that sometimes -- since organic systems are typically relying on tillage for we control, soil loss is always higher than a mulch still or even a conventional system? Lexical look at the statements and see if we can determine whether they are factor fiction. For the first one there are no typical systems. Organic conventional or otherwise. What we really need to do is we need to look at what common activities are in the system and assess those activities. And not worry about -- and what might be called typical.

For the issue of tillage for weight control and -- inorganic systems they rely on many practices and activities for we control. A lot of prevention and important second go into managing weeds inorganic system. It is true that tillage is a primary depression -- we do recognize that an if it gets the point of meeting suppression that is one of the main tools that we have. So that leaves the question is organic no tell even possible? The answer is yes. That is not the topic of today's presentation that was a topic of some previous presentation and if you're interested in that I do recommend you go to the conservation webinars website and look at one of these two presentations organic no till systems. Those are very informative as to how to reduce till in our organic system. Today we are going to focus on how to mitigate soil disturbance and would potentially weight reducing is not an option. That is a little bit more of an involved process than just getting rid of tillage and replacing it with chemicals as in a conventional system.

Let us look at the steps that we would have to take to mitigate soil disturbance in organic systems. Most of you will recognize these. The first one is you have to get field management details. You need to know what is going on in the field. Then taking that information and writing it through our soil loss programs and either WEPS or Giulio. You need to identify when the soil loss is occurring during rotation. Then you need to identify potential mitigation alternatives if the soil loss is too high at any given point. Venues SS affects of those alternatives to determine which of those alternatives might be most effective and also prevent those alternatives to the client so that they can choose what systems -- what alternatives that practices in their system.

What the client is takes those alternatives is time to implement that practice then of course I evaluate to ensure that it is performing as planned. So let's get right into that first step and go a little bit more into the details of getting the field management. It is essential that you know the details of all the field operations that are occurring in the field to actually determine what the soil loss rate is an to know what parts of the year/rotation of the soil loss is most prominent. That is going to be important because that will give you an idea of more alternatives you might use.

Commonly what we had discussions with our client they may give us a description of what they do in the field and it may look something like what you see on the screen. Where they tell you that they prepare and fertilizes the bed sometime in the spring and in this case were looking at a corn, tomato, plug-in, P rotation in the Northeast. They tell you that they prep the field for the [ Indiscernible ] they planted sometime in April or May and take the corn in the summer. Then they start all over again the next year in the spring for tomatoes with the tandem disk and then they lay out the plastic mulch and plants. As you can see this is a description of what is going on in the field from a general point of view. Not detailed enough for us to actually know how to run this and whatever tools to tell us what the soil loss is.

During the inventory and evaluation phase of the conservation planning process, the Potter must actually go into the details.

It is good to know what the producer dies so plowing, disk, plan, weeding, harvesting we also need to know when the producer is performing these activities so if there plowing we need in other plowing on 15 November and then they are coming back in the spring and they are disking on April 1 and then two weeks later, they plan. That is the kind of information we need. On top of that, not only do we need to know what they're doing and when they're doing it, but we need to know how they are doing it. The importance of these three when and how are so that we can correct -- select the correct operation in RUSLE2. We need to know how the producer is doing what he's doing. If we know he was plowing on November 15 we also need to know what depth -- depth is a plowing. MIB important to know in what direction in the field that tillage is occurring because and went prone areas tillage can have an effect of soil loss. Not an important factor for water in terms of direction in fields but more so in comparison to the field slope.

We need to basically know what they're doing, when they're doing it, and how they're doing so we can select the right operation. When all is -- with all the information is at hand, then the planner can put that information into RUSLE2. As you see here in this particular screen, we have all the information the day in the first column, the operation that is occurring, what vegetation is being planted, what they yields are in this common -- column, and if there are any additional compos in the field. For this study that we are going to look at for this presentation this corn made up of squash MPs -- peas where applying manure to the corn and compost to the tomatoes and the squash. We also have an additional column here for some additional results at the top right-hand corner of your screen. We see that we have crop your results so the STIR for the corn year is 127 for the 20 -- tomatoes 92 we have squash at 150 and STIR for the peas is coming nine. We will get into STIR in a minute.

So getting the field management details right is actually very important to demonstrate exactly what that means I decided to take the tomato portion of that for your rotation by itself and just look at if we were to run continuous tomatoes out of the field in RUSLE2 what would happen if we started changing some of the operation? The benchmark condition is what you see appear is this list of operations that are in front of you and if we were to make some changes, so if I were to change this tandem disk heavy primary operation and just tandem operation -- which is this case the soil loss would drop about 20%. If on the other hand I switched those disking operation to a have your disk, it would actually be 16% more soil loss. So and sharing that you get the right information from the land owner as to not just the size of the disk but the depth about -- of operation is going to be important. About 15 to 20% difference in your soil loss. If we were to substitute the first two hand plowing operation and we swapped those out with the flame leader, the soil loss would drop about 8%. If on the other hand and set up flame weeding we put in some plastic mulch underneath the tomato vine soil loss drops 33%. Just to show you that the -- each of these alternatives are not literally additive I created an option here where I put plastic mulch and switch the disking to lighter and we have a 45% drop in soil loss. If you look at the lighter disking was 20% and the plastic mulch was alone 33% when you add those two together's is not added so they don't add up to 53 is actually 45% soil loss. So RUSLE2 figures out the soil loss for you .

Also you need to be very careful when you use our programs that you entered the information completely and correctly and if you're going to lay plastic mulch you have to remember at the end of the season especially for added producers synthetic mulches have to be removed. If you forget to remove the synthetic mulch in RUSLE2, it will maintain that plastic mulch in there all year long until you go back on May 15 and put in that first disk. It will tell you that the soil loss in that case dropped down to 94% over the benchmark condition. Which of course sounds like a very great way to reduce soil loss, but that's not what's actually happening in the field it would be wrong.

You have to make sure that you use operation that removes plastic mulch. There is a another webinar that discusses how you actually go through RUSLE2 program specifically and determine what the depth of tillage is an soil disturbances of each operation, and this gives you an idea of how to correct -- correctly select the operation that you need for your particular instance. So I recommend you visit that RUSLE2 webinar if you want information on that.

For those of you that may not be familiar with the RUSLE2 tool , there is a information -- a document on today's webinar download handouts and it is this particular document echo is a six-page document and there are three pages that discuss information in this particular screen capture is for the management and it asked several questions. Are the selected operations correct? Each question in this particular document is also -- business specifically for RUSLE2 but similar questions apply for WEPS. Each page is linked to a screen capture of RUSLE2 and with each question being highlighted by one of the red arrows and an associated number. So since this is management questions is highlighted by the red arrow within letter M1 on it. We go through all the information that is required for accurate RUSLE2 run. -- It depends on which template use. This document was created for use with the RUSLE2 NRCS summary tab steps which is also available on the RUSLE2 website. It did not make it on the last RUSLE2 install , but it is available on the RUSLE2 website. Like I said even though the screen capture does not apply to WEPS the question and the information needed is applicable. So if you can answer the question, you can then check in WEPS also to make sure that information is correct.

So once all the information is in the next thing to do is to run our tools. In this case with RUSLE2, I will apologize right now for the resolution of the screen capture. It is an important to look at anything on the left side of the screen in any great detail. What I really wanted to show is the graphing function in RUSLE2 . You will see these three drafts -- grass near the center part of the screen. The top graph is soil loss per day over the length of the rotation. The middle graph is the amount of aboveground biomass in pounds per acre. The last graph at the bottom is the total surface residue during the rotation. They are all on the same axis scale. What you will notice is that in the area of the periods of the highest soil loss is also associated with the period of the lowest amount of aboveground biomass or -- and the lowest amount of residue on the surface. Also noticed that if you look at the lowest soil loss values on that first graph it is associated with either a large amount of above ground biomass or a large amount of total surface residue for both. That is what I want you to focus on in determining where we might come up with some ways of reducing the effects of the soil disturbance of that we are seeing here.

Let me go back for a second. I want to put up the fact that at the bottom right-hand corner of -- what a must-have quarter of the screen you have what is the soil conditioning index box that is available and it gives us a couple of pieces of information that we will discuss. The average annual soil tillage intensity rating that is amount of soil disturbance that we get an for this particular situation the value is 112. The soil condition index which for this situation is a -.48. We will get into what that is here in the second.

So soil conditioning index. It is a quick way to characterize the organic matter dynamics of a farming system. So we look at three separate factors amount of organic material or biomass that is being produced and the -- we look at the field operation factor and that takes into account the tillage type and the intensity. Then how much of the soil is be disturbed at that rate. How that impacts degradation of the organic matter and the Roshan factor is how much erosion is occurring and how that impacts the loss of organic matter.

So for working with organic systems the SCI is a pretty good rough estimate. If the SCI is positive , that means that the system is training to maintain organic matter in the system or increasing so the larger the SCI value , the more likely that the system is increasing in organic matter. At the SCI is negative, that means that the system is tending to degrade in organic matter. It can definitely improve. So as the SCI gets larger, it improves the system .

So tillage intensity rating is basically how much soil disturbance and what kind of soil disturbance and how widespread the disturbance is in the system. So we look at the speed of the tillage equipment, the type of tillage equipment, is a inverting are shattering or inverting like a pile which is aggressive or is it just shattering like a chisel. Is it lifting dashes that Ms. -- mixing like a disk. We look at the different disturbances and also how much of the soil is be disturbed. We given a rating. The larger the disturbed the more aggressive the disturbances and no -- therefore the more detrimental it is to organic matter and potentially soil loss.

Let's look at -- we have seen the what getting into the details of the operation looks like. We see what running the information into RUSLE2 to know when the soil losses happening. Now we need to come up with some soil loss mitigation alternatives. We can mitigate for the effects of the soil disturbance. How to do that?

Let's first look at some of our off-site soil loss impacts. Mitigating those and we to pay do that with some of our personal practices. So putting in field borders or filter strips or forest buffers are one of the most visual practices that we can put in that shows that we are trying to minimize off-site impact. These practices work well at preventing some of the sediment that gets into them from escaping. Specially Enrile design. We have a sediment basin. They can also hold and retain some of the coarser materials and finer materials if you have a long enough resident time in the pond or in the basin. That we also have grass waterways. Even the grass waterways are typically not designed to actually hold or trap sediment in them coming from the field. They are design to prevent further erosion in the low spots. In that case, that is why a put them here in the selection of mitigating off-site soil loss impacts. It prevents the goalies were they have been installed to stabilize. They have supervisors low areas.

So let's look at some soil loss mitigation techniques for infielder mitigation. When we look at what we can do in the field, we do have some NRCS practices such as strip cropping were we can alternate the rotation spatially in the field. We can put a divergence in terraces to shorten the length and which the water will flow before it reaches a divergent. We can also put in midsole offers -- midsole buffers -- mid-slope buffers. It is effective at stabilizing the soil where the buffers but also capping sediment coming into the buffer. Of course that usually is done in conjunction with contour farming although not necessarily always. Planting on the contour has a significant impact on soil loss also. So as we come up with these alternatives, we also the need to assess alternative. So what I have done is I have taken a benchmark condition the corn, tomato, squash, pea rotation that we saw earlier that is described in that RUSLE2 management that we saw. I call that the benchmark condition. So we can see here that the benchmark condition had roughly about a little less than 8 tons per acre soil loss. That the soil condition index so in other words, where that rotation stood and whether it was degrading soil organic matter or improving it so that it was pretty good at degrading the organic matter in that particular situation and location. By adding a sediment basin at the bottom of the hill, you notice here that the soil loss for conservation planning is the same. That is because the soil loss in the field is still the same you just put a sediment basin at the bottom however, notice that putting that at the bottom the delivery dropped by an order of magnitude. So in terms of off-site water quality maybe sediment basin is a good idea but in terms of on-site soil quality not really effective. It doesn't have any effect on soil loss and no affect on SCI.

By just planting on the contour we nearly half the amount of the erosion and we certainly improved our SCI and we are turning a little bit -- training towards the positive side of the spectrum. Although not quite there yet. If we were to combine cover cropping and strip cropping, we drop the soil loss a little bit more. Clearly, we are not quite there yet. The colors that you see in these cells are the indicate -- to indicate the soil loss relative to the tolerable soil loss for this particular situation. In this. Situation the tolerable soil loss for the soil I showed was three times. For planning purposes, the original value of seven is definitely greater than twice the value of T so it is marked as read. When we get down to the one time the value of T -- anything that gives us soil loss of less than T is colored in green. We see that by putting in -- by planting on the contour and putting in a mid-slope die version or a buffer we can get to soil loss in terms of soil erosion but in terms of soil health the SCI is still in the negative category. We begin to approach zero we truck starts take land out of production and putting into permanent vegetation as with the mid-slope buffer and the filter strip. Both of those options start to give us if you add value to approach zero. But still in the negative category.

Just on the side the SCI as I said earlier the more positive to get the better the rotation and these numbers should just be looked at as relative. So certainly the -.19 is better than the -.48. I have covered these cells yellow because the accuracy of the SCI is very very good at values of points -- Nedra point to a blow we know for sure that when we calibrated the SCI the field that gave us a negative point to an lower always were associated with a measured drop in soil organic matter. Also in the SCI of point to in the greater we are always associated with an measured with them measure increase in soil organic matter. Somewhere between the minus point to and positive point to the SCI is less accurate. Sometimes it will tell you that it is minus when you have measured increases in organic matter and sometimes it will tell you that is plus when you actually have decreases. That ensure area is marked in yellow in these columns.

Let's look at some more situations on how to we go about -- we've done the alternative and looked at the alternatives. Now how do we mitigate and what do we do? We've seen the soil loss and now how do we go mitigate cracks --? In organic system since we can't swapout tillage with [ Indiscernible ] we have to look at changes in the management. So one thing that we can do is we can look at the timing and tillage events. We can look at if there any fall tillage occurring. Switching from all tillage to spring village -- tillage can be effective. It can incorporate cover crops in the rotation. We need look for times when there is little cover residue in the field already. We need a look for opportunities to go cover crops simultaneously with cash crops. So maybe -- there is a lot of flying on cover crops in the Midwest and flying on price grass in the soybeans before harvest. That we are done with the harvest, the right grass Stan is there. And swallow -- in smaller scale some of that can be done manually. Fighting which cover crops in which cash crops combinations you can find in your system is definitely an exciting thing to try and put together. The other thing that you might want to incorporate more high residue cash crops in the rotation. Look for situations where maybe some of the highest soil loss is coming from some of the lowest residue cash crops that you have and maybe swap those out with high residue cash crops if possible. Also including strip cropping with perennial hay crop in the rotation also helps because those strips of perennial hay if they are laid out on the [ Indiscernible ] act as Ms. soil buffers during the growing season.

So remember our benchmark condition and again, don't focus on the left side of the screen let us focus on the grass. If we focus on the graphs, we can see and remember that our highest soil loss came from the periods where we had low aboveground biomass and low residue. If we then look at some of the alternatives and look at the results of those, we can see that if we were just to add cover crops to that rotation and the cover crops that I've added for this to the rotation were overstating the squash with the right cover crop and then putting in a cover crop after the letter P that pretty much has soil loss. If you then take the same rotation and is in a planting it straight up and down the hill like it was originally, we planted on the contour. Now we can see that the soil loss about an acre and our SCI is in the positive territory although not be on the point to thresholds yet. Now we are in the positive territory. So just by adding cover crops and planting on the contour we greatly improve the system over the benchmark condition. Aboard to add just an additional 1 ton of compost and add that to the letter P now we are below 1 ton of soil loss per year and we barely hit the point to threshold putting us in a situation with planting on a contour and cover cropping before and after the P and adding additional 110 of compost we are now in the system that the organic matter is for sure -- stable and not increasing over time. This is a nice way especially if you are served fire trying to find a way to determine if someone's rotation is meeting requirements of maintaining organic matter if you're SCI for that rotation is a point to or greater, that is a pretty good indication that [ Indiscernible ] requirement has been that.

We can also look at the effects of replacing the P with cabbage. Without going into too greater detail this table is similar to the previous one with exception that the pea has now been swapped out and cabbage is being put in the rotation. You can see the soil loss about the same. There are numbers for soil loss is a little lower and the value for the soil condition are a little higher. We can see that cabbage is definitely an option for the client. If they so choose, they can improve the rotation marginally over peas. If we try to cover higher mass crop like hay in the rotation so similar to the previous one for we are still adding cover crops after the squash and after the sorghum. And a girding -- growing sorghum hay. Just by doing that and replacing peas and cover crops we met the soil level of have a positive SCI. If we go one step further and plants the field on the contour, we drastically reduces soil loss again. And greatly increasing the SCI. If we were to similarly add additional 1 ton of compost as we did before, at this point the soil loss is so low and the SCI is so high that we get marginal returns on that additional work.

Reevaluate those systems and in this graph, I just want to share that these blue bars are the soil loss event from our benchmark condition so this was the corn, tomato, squash, pea rotation. The gill bars of the soil loss from the corn, tomato, squash, cover crop rotation. So for your rotation same length we just cover crop. This is a corn year and this is a tomato year soil loss here is low because we had plastic mold chair for a period of the year. Here's the squash soil loss and immediately we have a cover crop coming in here and then we replace the peas was sorghum then we have the cover crop in the fall here and so you can see that the soil loss is drastically different. So we drastically before the benchmark condition the highest soil loss occurred during the pea and corn year and now the higher soil loss occurred in the sarcomere -- sorry the squash your. -- Year.

Everything with that looks like here is the run for the cover crop after the squash the two parts of sorghum hay and the cover crop after the sorghum hay. If we look at the times of the year were we used to have the highest soil loss, we now see that we have either significant aboveground biomass or residue on the surface and we dropped the soil loss as you see here to where now the greater soil loss is in the squash year. Just to give you a perspective of what that looks like compared to the benchmark condition you can see the big difference here in the large amount of above ground biomass compared to the pea and also the very little residue pea after the P compared to the residue on the sorghum hay and the cover crops. At this point, I would like to take a little break before we go into showing you where all that -- were you get all this graphing functionality and RUSLE2 NCF there are any questions on the line.

So this is Sarah again. I would like to encourage everyone to type their questions into the question box on the screen. I will be reading through some of those at this point for Giulio to answer. One of the first questions I guess before I even get into the is the audience for this webinar is quite diverse. We have attorneys from NRCS as well as other professionals and farmers. I think a bit more just general background on RUSLE2 might be helpful. Like one of the some of the details that are used to interact and if your producer how you might go about using it or fighting help from NRCS.

Okay. So for those of you that are not familiar with RUSLE2 , the best way to get that program implemented for your situation is to essentially have a interview with NRCS employee that will ask you a bunch of questions as to how you operate it -- operate. What you do cracks when you do it and how you do it so that we can plug that into the program. The program based on the information and amount of soil disturbance and on the amount of biomass generated from your crops based on your particular yield will calculate the estimated soil loss. Later on in the presentation we won't get into little bit more detail as to how you can see when that soil losses occurring. Generally speaking will get a average annual soil loss for a summer to what you see on the screen right now. Soil loss for conservation planning and then that is what we plan for. We try and hit the planning criteria of at least the tolerable soil loss for the particular soil in your field. In this case, if the soil tolerable soil level is three the planner will choose to develop a system that soil loss not exceed 3 tons per acre per year. The questions that will ask our really equipment that you have and how you operate that equipment and how often you operate the equipment. We will double check with you also make sure that we are getting the right effects in RUSLE2. So after you run a piece of equipment you have 50% residue on the surface will make sure that we get the piece of equipment that produces that similar or close to similar result.

Just to reiterate when you are using RUSLE2 it is very site-specific so if you enter the soil on your form -- climate in your area so that as close as possible. Julia, maybe can elaborate on this. It is an estimation. It is a lot of information to do these calculations.

Correct.

So there was a question about plastic mulch and someone thought it might be higher because the water would run off the plastic mulch and then cause more runoff in the pathways, but I assumed if somehow that has been calibrated and not necessarily the case.

That is absolutely true or go if you notice in RUSLE2 predicted that if you put a plastic mulch, that you would reduce sheet erosion. That is actually to. You to reduce sheet erosion what it doesn't tell you and it doesn't Cogley is going. View of now concentrate the flow in the furlow and all that water that is concentrated in the furlow is no longer sheeting. It is actually going essentially. So plastic mulch can cause froze to erode emigrated rate. That is coaling erosion that is channel flow. So since we don't -- since RUSLE2 doesn't Cogley that , we do -- we don't capture that in RUSLE2 but we do capture a in punctuation planning. The planner should note if there is significant portion of the field covered in plastic, that she erosion is no longer than primary concern. It is concentrated flow erosion. That should be dealt with.

Okay. One more question before you continue. The difference between crops and impacts but those have on the rotation is the primary variable that Russell two -- RUSLE2 is using. It is the the residue from those crops or is or anything else it is looking at?

RUSLE2 looks at the above ground biomass so the growing crop and the residue that you're standing on the surface and an looks at also additional input like if you save their is [ Indiscernible ] on the surface a use that information. It takes biomass and the residue and rocks and also any added mulch. If you were mulching with plastic or with strong that is treated as a residue and RUSLE2 and that is treated as surface residue and is used by the model to protect the soil. The soil disturbance is taken into account. The timing of the event. At models rain event and so based on that particular day when an event is happening it will calculate the soil loss.

Great. Okay. With that, why don't you continue. We will take more questions at the end.

Okay. So just briefly where you get the information that I was showing it to graph is through these two tabs in RUSLE2. If you use the user template that I described earlier, right your RUSLE2 will look at this . Most of the views have these tabs. You should be able to find these tabs regardless of what user template you are using. At this point, I would like to switch over to my desktop to show you exactly how in RUSLE2 we do that.

So if in the profile view here is -- I took a scream shot of this earlier. In the track of biomass and detailed erosion results are some tables. So here is a detailed erosion result. If you take your cursor and you right-click, you have a menu twice. You can click on graph. Russell -- RUSLE2 will draft the information in that column. The column to graph have been highlighted in red so UCB color is red for the value. That is what you want to graph. Here is a live biomass graph that we looked at earlier. We expanded to the same size, the access will not -- will match. We can see the information and compare it. So then we can luck visually and we can then see where we are getting the high soil loss. This is our benchmark condition. You can see that it is -- it corresponds to low biomass and no residue period. So you yourself can use these three simple graphs to make a good conservation planning decisions. You can also -- the worksheet is where you can build all your alternatives. So in this case this -- these were my cabbage on the content or and cabbage on the contour with one ton of compost and then this is a three things of sorghum. You can compile them into one worksheet. That is one way to do it relatively quickly. Just another way of showing you how to make profiles in RUSLE2 and for those of you that want more training on this I recommend you to work with your state are gonna miss and they can train you on how to do more of this high-level worksheet work.

That is really all I wanted to show you. Make sure that you click on these tabs the track tile mass and erosion results. Click on the parameter you want and click on graph. That pulls of the information that you need.

I am going to go back to my presentation. Let me finish up here. So to review the steps that are needed to mitigate soil disturbance in organic system especially if you can't reduce the amount of tillage what do we do? First we need to get the details of what is happening and what is happening and how it is happening. We need to then put that information into one of our soil loss tools RUSLE2 or WEPS . We can then determine how much soil losses occurring and when it is occurring. Then based on the information we need to identify the potential mitigation alternatives and that may include changing are substituting tillage implement a possible or the timing of the implements being operated. We can include cover crops it may be just as simple as adding more compost or more mulch to the system. Or it could involve changing crops in the rotation or it could involve all of these. Then we to assess the effects of those alternatives that we come up with with our tools and determine and present that to the client and determine which alternatives work well for them and will actually work for their system that they can actually implement. Of course, we want them to implement the agree to alternatives. We need a evaluate the system to make sure that it is operating as we expect.

So with that, that is a presentation. Are there any other questions?

Right. Please remember to type your questions into the question box and I will rebuild out for 1011. -- Giulio. There was a comment/question about the different methods of cover crop termination. Just how big of a difference it can make on erosion and SCI. I don't know if you have any thoughts to add to that.

Sure. Tillage -- RUSLE2 takes into account the tillage that is used for incorporating cover crop. That tillage will have an effect as you saw earlier in the SCI . Tillage is a subfactor of the SCI. So the more aggressive the tillage, the quicker it will break down the organic matter. So the important thing and cover cropping is making sure that you have enough biomass in the cover crop that your are planting to overcome the impacts of the tillage for termination and incorporation. It is a balance. Not all tillage is bad especially if the reason that you are doing tillage is counterbalance or counterbalanced by the large amounts of biomass that you are trying to work in. In terms of overall organic matter that is what the SCI balances for .

There is another question about how the addition of compost offsets erosion. I know in one of the scenarios that you went through you did have a compost addition. Did make a significant difference. I can't remember -- I think to apply to tens. -- 2 tons. There is also problems in overplaying compost. What you see as the value are the opportunities and using compost in organic systems quite

I think it is a very great way of -- aside for the erosion aspect of it is also in terms of providing nutrients. I think it is a good way to cycle those back into the feel. Than on top of that you get the added benefit and the SCI shows that that you are adding organic matter back into the system. So regardless of how much organic matter may have been lost due to tillage you are actually putting organic matter back into the system notice plant matter that is growing, but additional to the plant matter that is growing. So the SCI takes into account also. If the compost is less on the surface RUSLE2 will treat that as service residue and so if we are talking about large amounts of compost like when you're mulching around trees RUSLE2 will treat that as mulch essentially. If there is to 3 inches of compost, the soil underneath it is protected. If on the other hand you are applying mulch and a much lesser rate where the soil coverage isn't as great, you will get some soil erosion benefits but most of your benefits will just come from the added organic matter to the system.

Great. All right. Are there any other last-minute questions? I would just like to point out that the fight on your screen today Oregon Tilth has a resource library with a number of publications on cover cropping and nutrient management in organic systems that have been developed they collaboration in NRCS as well as other upcoming webinars. So please check that out. I think that will conclude our webinar today. Thank you for joining us and thank you Giulio for fantastic presentation.

Thank you, everyone.

[Event Concluded]