How NRCS Sizes a Natural Farming Piggery

1:21:04 Vincent Mina: We have NRCS in the house today, and this is really exciting for me because as being the chair of the National Committee on Regenerative Agriculture and Local Food, recently in Washington, D.C., with all the committee members on that from around the country who sit on that committee, got to hear a lady by the name of Bianca Moebius-Clune, who is the senior advisor to the Secretary of Agriculture on a new soil health division on NRCS. And so when I mentioned this to Adam, he said, oh, yeah, Bianca, and it's this new program.

1:21:52 And so Adam is all about soil health and all about fixing broken soils.

1:22:00 Adam Reed: All right, thank you very much, everybody. It's good to be here. Okay, so let me tell you a little bit about myself. I grew up on a farm in Missouri. We raised cattle, we raised sheep, we had hogs, we had chickens, and we also had a lot of row crops. So it was a pretty big operation, a lot of diversity, got a lot of good experience growing up. I'm kinda lucky, a lot of my coworkers didn't grow up on a farm, so that's kind of a nice field to connect with producers in Missouri when I was working there and now also here in Hawaii. I've been working for NRCS for 20 years.

1:22:32 I've been here in Hawaii for five years. And my role here in Hawaii is I'm the state agronomist and water quality specialist. So I've been on a few of your farms out there, but my main role, my main customer is our field office staff. So when they run across a technical problem or a situation, they want to bounce some ideas off someone, they give me a call. So I work with our staff a lot. But I do get the opportunity to come to farms as well, and I always enjoy that very much. So with NRCS, for the first 75 years of our existence, we were really focused on soil erosion. That was our mission.

1:23:05 But we've kind of changed with the times. And we were really good at talking about erosion. We're good at talking about soil physical properties. You know, the sand, silt, and clay, the structure, the texture of the soil. We're really good about talking about the chemical properties, the N, P, and K, the pH, the electrical conductivity, all these things like that you see on your soil test results. But soil health is a little more than that. It's also the biological component. Now that's new to us, but we're getting better at it fast.

1:23:32 It's our new mission. And so when we talk about soil health, there was a big debate within the agency. We call it soil quality or we call it soil health. And it kind of went back and forth for a while. But we solved the problem and I think I can use this illustration. If I hold this pin up and I ask you to describe some of the qualities of this pin, you could say, well, it's about six inches long, it's round, it makes a little clicking sound when you push this button, put it next to paper, blue ink comes out of it. Those are some qualities, right?

1:24:00 Now if I ask you how would you describe the health of this pen? That gets kind of hard, doesn't it? Because you know why? It's not alive. But the soil is alive, so we really can talk about the soils in a health manner and it makes a lot more sense. So that's what we're going to talk about, soil health. And there's really four principles I can teach you in just about two minutes. The principles of good soil health. Number one, keep the ground covered. That's easy. Number two, reduce tillage. Simple enough. Number three, maintain live roots in the soil as much

1:24:37 as possible. And number four, add diversity to your crops. And if you can do those four things, your soil become healthier. But it's one of those things, something easy to know is sometimes not easy to implement. Because I know for a fact that if I were to eat healthier and exercise more, I'd lose a few pounds, right? But that's that takes a real commitment, that takes management change in my own life. So knowing something and implementing it's not always the same thing. It's easy to know something, sometimes hard to implement. So let me go

1:25:11 ahead and get started with my presentation, Kori. So the United States, our soils are pretty well broken in a lot of respects. We've really abused them over the years of farming. Intensive tillage for decades and decades and decades has caused a lot of broken soils. Okay, Kori. And you know, Hawaii is no exception. Now I'm not saying anybody in here is breaking your soil, but you're probably on land who has been farmed in a manner in the past that has caused a lot of problems. Okay, Kori? So the farmer in me, when I see this photograph, you know what I see?

1:25:50 I kind of see a nice field, weed-free, ready to be planted. Man, it kind of looks good in some respects, right? Not a lot of clods in it. It's worked down nice powdery. Good seed-to-soil contact. Crop's going to do good. Now, if I were to ask the soil, how are you feeling? How do you think the soil is feeling. Not so good? Alright, Kori, let's go one more. It might say, I'm naked, I'm hungry, I'm thirsty, I'm running a fever. You know, this is not the way the soil really wants to look, but this is the way a lot of soils get, how they're treated from time to time.

1:26:29 So to understand how to fix a broken soil, you've got to think outside the box. I'll tell you a little secret. Just the fact that you're probably in this room, you're already outside the box. You know, you guys are thinking at a different level than a lot of producers in Hawaii and across the country. I'd say you're so far out of the box, Kori, that you probably don't even know what the box is and you've kicked the box out of your life. Now I'll never tell you how long it took me to figure out how to make this animation work and I certainly will never tell my

1:27:00 boss how much time I spent on that, but I think it makes a nice illustration. Okay, Kori. So what do I mean by a broken soil? Okay. What I really mean, the soils aren't functioning as they should or as they once did. And there's a lot of ways the function, the soils function for us. Kori. Okay. First function is the water cycle. It's very important, the very first step of the water cycle in relation to the soil is you got to get the water into the soil. So we got to get soil infiltration. That's why the soil cover is good. It reduces the impact of that

1:27:37 raindrop coming down at 30 miles an hour. I've been to Hilo many times and every time I come to Hilo it's a beautiful day. But I have been told it rains here from time to time. And when it rains it's significant. So it is very important to keep the ground covered because when the ground is not covered the rains hit it, breaks up the soil structure, get crusting, breaks down the pores, more runoff. And that's where the battle's won or lost, right there where the raindrop hits the soil. The next function is the carbon cycle. Ideally, we'd like to keep the ground covered with plant

1:28:15 residue as much as possible. This is an example of a cornfield that's been harvested. I don't know whose cornfield is, found it on Google. But the residue is left on top of the soil surface. That's nice, right? And it'll slowly break down and be recycled into the soil. Now on our farm, ours didn't always look like this. This is kind of the way our farm looked like at planting when crops came up. We disked in and plowed in most of the residue. We didn't know better at the time. But there's great advantages of leaving the residue on the soil surface. Okay. And lastly, the nutrient

1:28:52 cycle. And it's really related to the carbon cycle. Because as those plants take nutrients up, You harvest a part of the crop, but the rest of the plant stays there to be decomposed. And as it's decomposed, those minerals that brought it into the plant are being released back into the soil. So you should really look at your plant residue. It's almost like a slow-release fertilizer. As it's breaking down, the minerals and nutrients are being mineralized back into the soil for your next crop. Okay? What do we got now? So how do you fix a broken soil?

1:29:21 Does anybody have a child in here about age 5 or 6? Okay. If their favorite toy is broken, how do they want to fix it? Huh? But, band-aids, tape, my kids were always asking for glue. Always, I gotta glue it. I'm like, well you can't glue a stuffed animal. But they always thought glue was going to fix everything, right? Okay. And that's exactly what... You can go to the next slide. This slide also took me a little while to figure out. This also is what we're talking about the soils. They aren't glued together.

1:30:01 And that's how we're going to have to fix them. And did you know our soils are glued together with a substance called glomalin? Okay, one more. And this glomalin is a substance that's excreted by fungus. Okay. That's all right. We'll just keep moving. That's all right. And so this is what sticks the soil together. But when you start tilling the soil, you get rid of the fungus and it starts breaking down the glomalin and everything starts falling apart. Kind of a death spiral. So here's my friend Ray. Has anybody ever seen Ray before? He's here and he's did some soil health

1:30:34 workshops in Waimea, some other places. He's kind of crazy and he talks a lot. So I muted him out so you can listen to me and not Ray. So he's got the same soil. The only thing different is there's a fence line between the same soil and one farmer has chose to farm in a no-till operation for like 30 years. Very little soil disturbance and no till. The other farm across the road farms growing very similar crops, but intensive tillage. And there's a huge difference. He's going to be putting both of these samples of soil in these columns of water. And as the water rushes in to

1:31:08 fill the pore spaces, one's going to hold up a lot better than the other. Which one do you think? The no till, right? Yeah, you're right. Okay, Ray, quit talking. Put it in there. Go on. And some people say, well, those are Midwestern soils. Those aren't Hawaii soils. But it's the same principles no matter where you're at. Yeah, he talks a lot. Okay, here we go. So you can see right off the bat, the one that's been tilled intensively, it's breaking down quite fast. You see the particles falling down. It's filling the column. The pore spaces are breaking down.

1:31:48 And if this happens out in, you know, on the field and the raindrops hit it, the pore spaces get sealed off. The water can't infiltrate the soil. More runoff, more erosion, more nutrients being lost, more problems. And I think it goes to 20 minutes or 30 minutes later. You can see that, you know, the one soil has completely disappeared. It's all fallen through the little mesh. The other soil is well intact. And then he's going to talk a little bit more about some stuff. And then 24 hours. Look, the one is still talking. So the one's still there, right? It's still intact, doing really well.

1:32:27 The other one's completely disintegrated. Okay, Kori, we can move on. Goodbye, Ray. So glomalin is an organic glue excreted by mycorrhizal fungi. Does everybody know what that is? What does it look like? Spider webs? I think that's kind of what I heard somebody talking about. When you collect it, that's what you want to see, this white mycorrhizal fungi. Okay, so we need to do things to benefit this organism in the soil, so it'll increase and start gluing the soils back together. And this is a picture of it, you know, through a low-power microscope.

1:33:10 Okay, Kori, one more. So how are we going to do it? Go ahead. Well, we have, like any organism, you've got to have food, right? You know, if you want to promote any kind of life, you've got to provide us some food. And the food it wants is carbon. All the microbes in the soil, the food source is the carbon crop residue. So we have to have food. And the other thing is live roots. You I heard Elaine Ingham's presentation one time, and she said, the roots exude exudates. Exudates, what's that? Then she dumbed it down for me and said, it's like cookies and cake.

1:33:49 It really stimulates the microbial activity around the roots. And then also you have to have water. I don't think that's much of a problem, at least here in Hilo, but not much of a problem anywhere in Hawaii. We've got water. And lastly, habitat. This is not a good tillage practice if you're trying to promote good soil health. Not only is it you know whipping the soil up pretty good, it seems like this person operator is trying to balance it up and down from time to time, even make it dig deeper. But you know so if we can do things

1:34:19 to reduce tillage, increase the carbon, add diversity, those four principles I talked about, those are the things we need to do to improve soil health. Okay and if we were to do that, that, maybe our soils will look a little more like this. Keep them covered. You can see there's a lot of diversity here. We started with a wheat crop, which is the grass, and then we went to a broad leaf. A lot of diversity there. The ground is covered, minimal tillage, and there's live roots. Okay, so I'm going to end it there. We're kind of trying to get back on schedule a little bit,

1:34:52 and we've got Sally Bredeweg next, and she's going to talk about planning considerations for piggeries. Thank you.

1:35:03 Sally Bredeweg: Well, thank you for your time. And I really am excited to have come here and to have been able to meet and work with Adam and Kori. And if you have questions later, Kori is a great resource for Hilo. She's got outstanding staff and they will be more than happy to help you. So I am an environmental engineer and I am from Portland, Oregon at the West National Technology Support Center. So the Pacific Island area is in our area. And I've worked with Mike.

1:35:49 We met last summer at another conference and talked about the inoculated deep litter systems. We have assistance in our agency to work with people on different structures and resource concerns. That's our goal is to address resource concerns. And in that process, the staff, which covers a wide technical expertise, can bring to bear solutions to the problem. So as an engineer, what I bring is usually structural design. So I'm going to just go through a little example here of what I would look at in the design considerations for an inoculated deep litter system.

1:36:38 I've got to get used to the queue here. So in sizing a piggery, it's similar to what we do also for confined bedding for other livestock. And the piggery is a confined feeding operation, so your pigs are going to be in that area. The basic parameters for planning and design fall into the categories of the animals, the management, and your site. So in planning, one of the big elements is the animal numbers.

1:37:24 This is a really important variable for the landowner's goals. And in the animal numbers, it's going to determine the effects for the overall size of the facility and the management that's going to be required for the natural resources you're impacting. You'll need to know the maximum number of animals that will be in the facility and the largest size of the animals planned during the confined feeding and growing period. And the animal groups planned for the pen areas. Basic overview of your layout. Under management, the feeding frequency, your food sources, what kind of feed hauling equipment

1:38:17 you have, where your feed storage is located. For your livestock water, you need to know your source, the quality, if you've got adequate supply and how it's going to be provided to the livestock. And access. These need, you've got to have access for good feed delivery for the land owners or operators access throughout the facility for management and the animal movement route in in and out of the facility, and particularly housekeeping activities. Your site limitations, it's going to affect your land availability, your foundation material,

1:39:05 rainfall frequency and intensity, direction of prevailing wind, the ambient temperature, range and humidity, distance to any surface waters, and the depth to groundwater. So designing the size, do we size for the animal or in the inoculated litter system do we design for our microbiological processes? Yes, both. The IDLS processes must require a habitat for the chemical transformation provided by the organisms there.

1:39:51 Bacteria, fungi, actinobacteria, and other organisms have got to be healthy for it to operate properly. Facility design can limit the development of odorous compounds and ammonification of the nitrogen by the microorganisms by providing ventilation to make sure that the aerobic conditions are maintained in the litter. The area is sufficient for the carbon needed by the microorganisms and the growth to incorporate the nitrogen provided from the animal waste into new cellular material. And water, you need a water source to manage the moisture

1:40:36 content for the litter if necessary to support any chemical reactions in the range of probably 40 to 65 percent if we're looking at a composting level anyway. The facility needs to meet, again I can't stress, the maximum intended purpose because once you build the structure it's fixed. It's not going to get, you can't pump it up. That's what you've got to work with. If the number and or size of the animals in the facility is less than the design, the facility will still work effectively for managing the animal waste.

1:41:17 If the number or animals is larger than the design capacity, then the manure is going to overload the capacity for the bedding to absorb the waste material. a broken record here. No matter how good the facility is built or how well the deep litter system is installed, if it is not well managed, it will not work as intended. Every livestock operation, no matter the size, needs good management to succeed. So to estimate your building size, I've listed here about seven steps that I would recommend.

1:42:09 First one, calculate the pack space requirements for your maximum number of animals and size. Calculate the feeding and watering space required for the system and your equipment you're going to have. Determine the alley width for feeding access, considering the size and mobility of your feeding equipment. Expand the desired pen layout, single row or double row. Select the truss width or roof system span desired. Calculate the building's square footage. And based on the selected roof system, determine any other features for ventilation, roof runoff,

1:42:50 curtains or additional ventilation, heating or water. So just a quick example, for my landowner, we're going to figure the calculations for the space requirements for our first piggery. And the maximum animals planned by my landowner is going to be one boar, three sows. Those three sows, we're going to figure two sows are in gestation, one sow will be in lactation with her litter. And there will be 10 grower pigs that will keep up to 125 pounds and 10 grower pigs will

1:43:36 keep up to 200 pounds. Now the NRCS has a, in Pacific Island area, has a sizing tool for these operations I've posted there. So we're going to use the space that they are recommending. So for our one boar, we're going to have 60 square feet. For our two gestating sows, we'll have a total of 96 square feet. For the lactating sow, we're going to have 60 square feet pen area. For our 10 125-pound pigs, we'll have 10 times 15 or 150 square feet. 10 200-pound pigs will have 10 times 18 or 180 square feet for those pens.

1:44:28 So we've calculated the pen area. Now we need to calculate our watering and feeding space. And the particular operator I'm working with has some plans for providing feed and water where they're going to have, it's going to be located along our center alley. And the pens for the mature animals are going to have a feeding area that is six feet deep. The pens for the growing animals will have a feeding area that is four and a half feet deep for 125-pound pigs and five feet for the 200-pound pigs. All the feeding areas slope to drain to the center walkway and away from the bedded pack

1:45:08 so we can manage the moisture content in our bedding. We're going to calculate the space for our feeding areas and then we'll combine that with the space for our bedded packs. So for the boar we have a total of 84 square feet. Two gestational sows, we've got 126 square feet. A lactating sow, we've got 84 square feet. The 10 125-pound pig pen, 177 square feet. And the 10 200-pound pig pen, 210 square feet. So we're going to determine the alley width for our feeding area.

1:45:57 Our landowner is going to be utilizing a wheelbarrow. It's three feet wide and six feet long with the handles. So we're going to have an alley that's going to have 6.5 feet. And because he's going to have a center alley, we'll be using a double row for the facility arrangement. And we're going to select our truss width and roof system span. Some of our decision factors are going to be ventilation because this is vital to maintain our aerobic conditions for our microorganism. And for ventilation, the recommended ridge opening is three to six inches per ten feet

1:46:45 of barn width. So three inches is the minimum, but in high humid areas, a six inch span for ten feet is recommended. We also need to prevent rain in and we need to meet our space needs. It needs to be affordable. So we're going to look at different truss system options. We have a hoop structure which has no center ventilation and only open access from the ends. We have a capped ridge which has limited ventilation. There's an overshot roof style which has ventilation but only from one direction.

1:47:34 There's an open ridge which has good ventilation from all directions but then you have rain in problems. And then there's an open ridge with a cover which gives us ventilation from all directions and we don't get rain in. So for our facility and our space, we have an open ridge with a cover and the ridge, the span for the truss is going to be 35 feet. We work backwards. We'll figure out our pen depth, subtracting a three-foot overhang for our rainfall and our six-and-a-half-foot alley and a wall width gives us a nine-and-a-quarter-foot pen depth.

1:48:20 It also gives us a building width of the footprint of 25 feet. And our ridge opening is going to be 18 inches. So that's going to be our design target. Then we'll calculate our length of the building. We're going to use the maximum needed space for both of our grower pens. And we'll calculate the building length as 51 feet. The roof area is a total of 1,785 square feet, and the footprint of the building is 1,305 feet. All of these mean that the grower has thought a lot about how they're going to operate,

1:49:09 what they need, how they're going to run the animals through the facility, and how they're going to meet their goals for their piggery. It's a good thing to do and requires good planning and I encourage you to work with the field office staff if you're interested in their assistance. We didn't need any, we're not going to use any extra ventilation because we have the open ridge and we won't need curtains. We may put up gutters so we can collect the rainwater for our water supply. And if we need extra heat, the landowner's going to put that in for the litter pen.

1:49:56 So, Kori?

1:49:59 Vincent Mina: Okay, next up is Kori. She's going to tell us about NRCS programs, okay? Give a warm aloha to Kori.

1:50:13 Kori Hasashima: Hi, everybody. So we started a little bit late and I'm trying to catch everybody up so we're going to jam through this thing real quickly. But the good thing about it is that if you guys have any questions about anything that's in my presentation, we have ten field offices within the Pacific Islands area. We have seven within the state of Hawaii. We have one down in American Samoa, Guam, Saipan, Palau, the Northern Marianas. So if you have any questions and you need to talk to anybody about any of our programs,

1:50:44 You go find your local service center and you knock on their door and tell them you need help. So we're part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. And our job is to help people conserve and maintain their natural resources and the environment. So basically, in a nutshell, we help people help the land. We go through a planning process where we'll meet you on-farm, try and determine what your problems are, try and see what kind of practices we may prescribe to help you solve those problems and come up with a plan of how you're going to get those problems solved.

1:51:22 This is some of the resource concerns that we typically address on cropland. Soil quality degradation, as Adam mentioned before, is a big push for us in NRCS now. So we're doing a lot of work in that department. We have a lot of farmers that we try to work with that could maybe be farming up and down the hill or maybe not leaving enough residue on the soil and we're trying to help them to manage that. And this is some ways that we are helping our farmers with erosion. That's a vetiver planting there. We use it to try and divert the flow of water or slow the flow down.

1:52:10 Here's some examples of a cover crop. It helps with organic matter depletion, degraded plant condition, and undesirable plant productivity and health. Putting in some windbreaks will help with protecting your crops and retaining your soil moisture. Doing a crop rotation, not planting the same thing over and over, provides diversity and breaks up that pest cycle. Keeping the soils covered. This is a couple of ways that we keep the soils covered by doing a cover crop in between rows and using mulch. We also do other practices like multi-story cropping and seasonal high tunnels.

1:52:54 Seasonal high tunnels were intended on the mainland to extend the growing season. We kind of have a year-round growing season, so a lot of the farmers, especially here on the Hilo side, are using these to protect their plants from the rain that we have. Some ways that we're helping our grazers out there with some of these problems that you see up here on the screen. Helping them with some of the issues that they may have with livestock trails and erosion by putting in a livestock water system so that they're not going to the same source all the time.

1:53:33 Spreading that herd around and doing a prescribed grazing plan. We help weed control in many different ways and hope to get to something like this where we're doing forage and biomass planting and planting maybe some better forages for your livestock. Like everything else, management is the key, so if you are implementing a good prescribed grazing plan, that's where you're going to see the most success. This is a few pictures of some of our clients doing monitoring. We also work with people in forest land, mostly to bring back wildlife habitat, help with

1:54:21 out those cute little pests on the bottom there. And I'll just kind of go quickly through this so that we can get to some of the piggery practices. So you can see something. Nino and Otto, they are in the room today. They are our model farmers for doing IDLS piggeries. And for those of you who have signed up to go and see their farm tomorrow on tour, you'll be very pleased to see what they've done there. But this is kind of the problem that we're trying to solve here, is people raising pigs and making a mess, and it's pretty much degrading the quality of our land and our surface and

1:55:13 groundwater. So Mike DuPonte came back from Korea, brought this great idea back with Korean Natural Farming and NRCS kind of adopted this style of piggery as one of our practices and we're now using it in our planning process. These pictures are all from Nina and Otto's farm and this kind of takes you through the construction process that they went through. A lot of concrete work, a lot of brickwork. And the end product is pretty fabulous. So here's some of the programs that we have

1:56:04 readily available through our department. Biggest one that we have is EQIP. That's That's where we get the most of our funding from. And we can help with a reimbursement program for some of the practices that we may prescribe to our farmers and ranchers. We also have a national water quality initiative. It kind of takes care of the area that drains into Hilo Bay. And so we get separate funding for that area. We've been using a lot of those fundings to do these IDLS piggeries. These other programs are also available. They kind of treat and target different things.

1:56:45 So if you're interested in learning more about them, like I said, you can contact your local NRCS office. There is basic eligibility for our programs. You need to have an existing problem or a resource concern. You need to either have a lease or you need to have owned the land and you need to be engaged in some kind of agriculture production or non-industrial private forest land. You need to have control of the land for the proposed contract time, which is normally between two and three years. And you need to have the land, if you are leasing, you need to have landowner concurrence

1:57:22 to make sure that they're okay with you installing all of these practices on your land. You need to be in compliance with the highly erodible land and wetland conservation compliance, and we can talk you through that. And you need to be within the appropriate payment limitation requirements, which means you cannot make more than $900,000 adjusted gross income over the last three years. Yeah. If you have a problem with that, then I think you got it. And then if you're applying for any irrigation practices, which we hardly do here, it needs to be irrigated for two out of the last five years.

1:58:01 There is a higher payment payback rate for people that may fall in these categories of beginning a farmer or rancher who hasn't been farming or ranching for 10 or more consecutive years. If you fall into the socially disadvantaged category, any of those ethnicities there. Limited resource farmer and rancher for the county of Hawaii need to be making less than $33,746. And if you're a veteran farmer or rancher, which you also need to be a beginning farmer or rancher, you'd also qualify for a higher repayment rate.

1:58:36 We work together with the soil and water conservation districts, and if it's something that we may not necessarily be able to help you with federal funding, they may still be able to help you to do a conservation plan. And we always use the Cooperative Extension Service to help you with what to grow, doing soil analysis and providing some on-farm training. If you have any questions and if you think this is for you, come check us out.

1:59:01 Vincent Mina: Great, Kori. Thank you very much.

1:59:03 Kori Hasashima: Thank you.