Episode #287
James Cassidy: Soil, Civilization + The Future Of Farming

James Cassidy traces the relationship between soil and civilization, beginning with the deep, fertile grassland soils that made large-scale agriculture, political power, and modern economies possible. He explains how rocks, plants, microbes, grazing animals, water, and air combine to create a living habitat beneath our feet. He and Real Organic Project co-director Linley Dixon also cover nitrogen fixation and the origins of mollisols, as well as rotational grazing, organic matter, soil testing, tillage, and the limits of farming by “recipe.” James also reflects on the Oregon State University student farm he helped build, where thousands of students have learned that agriculture is not merely a technical system, but a practice rooted in observation, place, community, and continual experimentation.

Our interview with James Cassidy has been edited and condensed for clarity:

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Linley Dixon interviewed James Cassidy in the early summer of 2026

Linley Dixon 0:00
Yeah. Let’s just get started right into that because I loved how you were saying how the U.S. and Ukraine… Where the mollisols are. Could you just start with what healthy soil is and how that even relates to the rise of civilizations? That seems like a great opening.

James Cassidy 0:20
Sure. Are we rolling?

Linley Dixon 0:22
We’re rolling.

James Cassidy 0:23
Oh, great. There’s about 20,000 different named soils, at least in the USDA system, and there, of course, are other systems, international and indigenous systems of soil classification. But we think of it in the U.S., anyway. About 55 other countries use the USDA system, so it’s a well-known system. But it has 12 different soil orders, and Mollisols and Alfisols are these very important agricultural soils because they have all the good stuff.

James Cassidy 0:58
They have high organic matter levels, and they are thick soils, and they can store a lot of water, and they have a lot of nutrients, and they are created by this relationship between grazing and grasslands. Grass mostly is underground. The roots go down meters or further, and that is really what makes those soils so incredibly productive, because they are thick, have lots of organic matter, and they have just the right amount of clay and just the right kind of climate. That’s what a Mollisol is.

James Cassidy 1:39
The human invention of agriculture is a technology, basically, and Mollisols just kind of have it. In the U.S., 21% of the land mass of the United States is made up of Mollisols, and Mollisols are the reason for the season. That’s why there’s agriculture writ large, Big Ag, and all that. Corn, beans, and the big staples, the big seven, however you want to count them.

James Cassidy 2:12
Twenty-one percent of the United States land mass is covered by those kinds of soils in the Mississippi Valley, and worldwide it’s seven percent, and many countries have none. That’s all you really need to know about why the United States is a superpower. Actual power, the real stuff, comes from capturing energy from the sun and fixing it into chemical energy and carbon-to-carbon bonds and storing it underground. That’s where all the political power comes from.

James Cassidy 2:35
You look at a map of the world showing the basic 12 soil orders, and you’ll see where the power is. Historically, what we think the Cold War was all about. Mother Russia, that’s probably second only to the U.S. The original USSR has as many Mollisols as we did. The agricultural revolution, however you want to call it, when it started 10,000, 20,000, or 30,000 years ago, begat the Industrial Revolution.

James Cassidy 3:24
The Industrial Revolution, sadly, begat the Information Revolution. But the Industrial Revolution – without agriculture – there would be no Industrial Revolution, and there probably would be no thermonuclear weapons. That’s who controls the planet. Those with the good soils have the good agriculture and have the ability to project power, and those who do not even know where that political power really comes from really have no business having it, in my opinion.

James Cassidy 3:58
I’m sure there are many leaders that we could talk about who have no idea where it all comes from and where it all goes. Soil is everything. It’s all about soil. Every atom in your body was once inside of a rock. I happen to have a rock here.

James Cassidy 4:20
What is a rock? A rock is a collection of minerals. What are minerals? Minerals are made of atoms, and atoms are the building blocks of the elements. There are 118 elements, depending on how you count. That’s what everything is made of. Rocks dissolve in water, and that’s what nutrients are. They dissolve out of the rocks. Every atom in your skeleton is a secondary mineral that’s inside of you right now.

James Cassidy 4:48
There’s a lot of calcium in there. Where did the calcium come from? It came from a rock, and the rock dissolved. When that dissolved out, it became a nutrient that was taken up by a plant – calcium – and then you ate it. Or your mom did, or you ate an animal that ate that plant, and that’s why you’re here. Every atom in your body, sooner or later, becomes the soil.

Linley Dixon 5:14
It’s going back to soil.

James Cassidy 5:16
It’s going back. Every atom in your body has been through the soil system billions of times already. The fact that you are not soiled at this moment is not even real. You are soil now, made of the same thing. A four-dimensional, complex habitat, a self-organizing natural body, a living thing, made from minerals, organic matter, air, and water. That’s what soil is. Soil is made from those things, and it’s those four things plus the space in between the particles.

James Cassidy 5:46
That’s where the action in soil is. It is in the pores. That’s where the air is. That’s where the water is. That’s where the creepy crawlies are. That’s where the bacteria are. That is the habitat. The habitat is in the voids. The habitat is not inside of the sand-, silt-, and clay-sized particles. It’s in between them.

James Cassidy 6:08
As an organic farmer, what you’re really managing is the space there, and you’re ranching microbes, and the plants and everything else comes along for the ride. Everything else comes along for the ride. Every moment of your existence that you are conscious of, all of that is because of soil and plants.

James Cassidy 6:33
Plants are made from carbon from the atmosphere. Plants have figured out a way to use dissolved mineral nutrients to build structures, to store information, and to use the energy of the sun to capture carbon from the atmosphere. They’re capturing the carbon from the atmosphere to build the tissues in a tree, or in a seed, or in a root, or in a petal, or a flower, or a pumpkin, or whatever.

James Cassidy 7:06
All that is carbon that was harvested from the atmosphere using the energy of the sun through photosynthesis. I didn’t learn that. I probably got an A on the test…

Linley Dixon 7:18
But it didn’t click. How amazing that is. They eat the air.

James Cassidy 7:25
Tell the plants eat the atmosphere.

Linley Dixon 7:30
They don’t eat the nitrogen, which is interesting because our air is mostly nitrogen, and they cannot access that without the microbes. We have always been told organic farming cannot feed the world, and nitrogen is the reason. I’m curious about your thoughts on how nitrogen plays into this.

James Cassidy 7:53
The Industrial Revolution begat the Haber-Bosch method of harvesting nitrogen from the atmosphere using a lot of fossil fuel energy, high pressures, and high temperatures. It was a revolution that transformed, or destroyed, the world. I do not know. You tell me.

James Cassidy 8:15
But in nature, that process happens, and it’s biology that does that with much less energy required. At normal atmospheric pressure and normal atmospheric temperatures, that happens. There are these bacteria, as most of your farmers probably know, that are called Rhizobium. There are other ones too in other systems, in forest systems, and in tropical systems.

James Cassidy 8:40
But these Rhizobium bacteria have formed a symbiotic relationship with legumes, and they’re not even the same. They’re completely different critters. One’s a plant, and one’s a bacteria. The bacteria historically did it themselves for themselves. They exist as free-living forms of bacteria that can take N₂ gas, which is 78% of the atmosphere – nitrogen gas – which is not available biologically. It’s actually a triple bond, and it’s very hard to tear that apart.

James Cassidy 9:21
Somehow they figured out a way, using complex chemistry and enzymes, to break that triple bond and make that nitrogen available in a form that they can use, and consequently that plants can use. They’re using the energy of the sun to do that, and enzymes. What are enzymes? Enzymes are proteins, and proteins are made from assemblages of amino acids, which are mostly nitrogen-based compounds. They have to have that.

James Cassidy 9:55
Where did it begin? Where did it first start? There’s, I’m sure, a lot of wonderful books on that subject. But they take that nitrogen gas and break it apart, and then they either use it themselves, or they’re doing it external to their bodies, and that nitrogen then becomes available to plants.

James Cassidy 10:15
Over millennia and millions and millions of years, those plants have figured out that if they could cultivate those microbes by, for example, building them a little tumor out of their own tissues, made from carbon from the atmosphere and energy from the sun, which is what a nodule is, they would find each other through some chemical signaling, and they build this little tumor within which the microbe can live.

James Cassidy 10:49
Then what the plant can do that the bacteria cannot do is take carbon from the atmosphere, use energy from the sun, make sugars that store energy from the sun in the carbon-to-carbon bonds, and feed the colony living inside of the tumor. Then they reproduce.

James Cassidy 11:09
Under anaerobic conditions, those bugs can take apart N₂ gas and turn it into a biologically available form. They’re doing that in the free-living form, probably inside a tiny little aggregate where all the oxygen has long been gone, and it’s an anaerobic environment. Under anaerobic conditions, they can use the chemistry to take apart that nitrogen.

James Cassidy 11:34
But if the plant builds a little tumor, and that colony is living inside it, and it is getting pumped full of sugar water, and it is reproducing, there’s another chemical that the plant has figured out how to make, and it’s called hemoglobin. It is sometimes referred to as leghemoglobin, but it’s similar to the hemoglobin that’s in your blood.

James Cassidy 11:59
What is that? That’s a gas exchange molecule, and under the right pH, the conformational shape of that molecule will sequester oxygen. Inside the tumor, there’s a colony that’s being fed carbon captured from the atmosphere using energy from the sun, delivered by the plant.

James Cassidy 12:23
The plant is also providing leghemoglobin, which sequesters the oxygen and makes the inside of that nodule an anaerobic environment. Under those conditions, the bacteria produce biologically available nitrogen, and the plant gets that from the colony. That’s the ultimate symbiotic relationship. The bug does not even know there’s a sun.

Linley Dixon 12:53
James, are these rumors true then, that organic can’t feed the world because it depends on synthetic nitrogen? We’re at eight billion people right now, and they’re saying that by 2050 there’ll be 10 billion. That’s one of those things where it’s like, organic, it just can’t do it. Do you agree with that?

James Cassidy 13:16
In this world, the way it is, I do not know. There’s only a small percentage of the land on this planet that is suitable for growing crops, and large sections of it are frozen or deserts. There is a carrying capacity for the planet, and we’ve probably passed it because of the Haber-Bosch method. We just have so many people. How could we possibly feed 12 billion people? I just do not know if it’s possible. Twenty years ago, I said, “Of course, it’s possible.”

Linley Dixon 14:01
Were you thinking 12 billion, or is this number so much higher than it is? They say it’s leveling off, and even it will decrease because as people become more educated – like I only had one child. I was in graduate school till I was 30, and that sort of took away the time to have more children. They’re seeing these trends that usually higher education leads to fewer children.

James Cassidy 14:27
Certainly. I think that one way or the other, the population is going to drop by half, and hopefully through attrition. But we’ve built an entire economy on the idea of growth. If you’re not more than replacing yourself, we do not have the workers to feed the economy. The thing is, though, the economy should be here to serve us, not the other way around.

James Cassidy 14:55
It’s gotten to be, because of the concentration of power that the invention of agriculture allowed us to do. I just think things are going to have to change. I have hundreds of students every year, and I’m so optimistic when I teach them. It’s just so much fun to think about. They think this is what the world is. I knew the world 20, 30, or 40 years ago, and I’m sure that people at that time felt the same way, like, “Oh my God, what have we left these young people?”

James Cassidy 15:29
But they’re going to have to figure it out. Humans are quite inventive. Maybe there’s a way to capture that nitrogen in a form that doesn’t rely on fossil fuels, and maybe there’s a better understanding of how the microbes are actually doing it. I’m sure people are working on that sort of thing. But man, 12 billion people – it’s a finite planet, and so it just can’t grow indefinitely. We’re never going to live on Mars.

Linley Dixon 16:04
Oh, I agree. What are the soils like on Mars? Are they like acid or something?

James Cassidy 16:10
We can’t even live here, and we have Mollisols. My point with the students is that change can occur quickly. It typically doesn’t. Your protest has to be sustainable if you want things to change. You can’t expect them to change overnight. That’s a hard sell for young people because they want to see change, and the system is resistant to change. But if enough people – and there are a lot of people – suddenly get it, things could change really fast.

James Cassidy 16:56
Are we going to be eating the same way we’ve been eating? That would have to change, I think, if we truly were going to try and rely on natural systems. We just have to eat less meat. I’m a meat eater. I was a chef for many years and stuff. I did an experiment where I only ate meat that I raised myself for four years, and it’s hard, and it takes a lot of resources, and it’s awesome, but not everybody can do that.

Linley Dixon 17:30
That kind of leads us back to the conversation around Mollisols because I was surprised, personally, when I was learning this, that the grasslands are what create these deep soils. I pictured forests creating deep soils, but it’s really the grasslands. Could you describe how the process by which grazing actually creates soils works?

James Cassidy 17:53
Absolutely. Because the reason we think of forests is because they’re big and thick, and there’s a lot of biomass, and it just seems like, “Wow, that’s got to be important.” But grasslands are vast, and the carbon is underground, so it’s just not intuitive to the untrained eye to really see that.

James Cassidy 18:13
But there’s a wonderful researcher, Greg Retallack. I do not know if you have ever heard of him before, a professor at the University of Oregon. He claims to have invented the concept of a paleosol, meaning soils that formed under different conditions than are present now. Oxisols being one of those things that we see…

Linley Dixon 18:45
Explain that. What’s an oxisol?

James Cassidy 18:48
An Oxisol is a highly weathered soil, meaning it’s been exposed to the elements for a long time. What soil is, is rock that has been dissolving over time, and then those dissolution products get taken up by plants and are cycled through the ecosystem using the energy of the sun. There’s this cycle. But the minerals themselves can be transformed from primary minerals, meaning rocks that are formed at high pressure and high temperature beneath the Earth’s crust.

James Cassidy 19:23
But at the surface, rocks are actually very unstable. Add a little bit of water, and they start to dissolve. Add a little acidity from organic acids from decomposing organic matter, and that rapidly dissolves mineral nutrients. Those mineral nutrients can then reassemble into what are called secondary minerals that are actually quite stable at the surface of the Earth because rocks are unstable there. They kind of fall apart and then reform into things like rust.

James Cassidy 19:53
What we’re really getting to is what a Mollisol is. According to Greg Retallack, a wonderful friend of mine, he says it’s the dream of a dog. I’m like, “Okay,” because I heard him give this talk a couple of times. He says that before there were canines, which are mammals that hunted in packs, herding behavior was not really known. That’s a really important part of why there are Mollisols.

James Cassidy 20:32
The herbivores that were around before hunting in packs kind of just walked around. They just ate whatever they wanted to eat, and so there were a lot of trees and stuff around. But as soon as there was a predator that could hunt in an organized fashion, what happened is the herbivores that were maybe paying a little less attention were getting picked off, and the ones that were selected were those who hung out in groups and figured out that there was selection pressure to kind of push the old and the young off to the edges and kind of hold the center.

James Cassidy 21:13
There was this herding behavior created because of this pressure of predation. Now you’ve got herbivores moving around in large groups, and when these large groups settle – say, 100 animals or something settle over an area – they eat everything to the ground.

James Cassidy 21:31
That is a selection event on the types of plants that can survive intense herbivory, which includes grasses, because the way grasses work is very different than the way a typical dicot or monocot works. Grass kind of sends up new growth like an antenna from just below the surface or at the surface. You can mow your lawn, and it doesn’t die. Then it grows back.

Linley Dixon 21:58
Yet, if your tomato breaks at the stem…

James Cassidy 22:00
If you mow your garden, it’s not going to grow back. So this intense herbivory, that’s what animal agriculture these days is trying to do. They’re trying to create these herding environments with electric fencing to get this intense herbivory because a lot of the animals that have been bred for meat have kind of lost their instinctive herding behaviors. In fact, it’s been bred out of them, frankly, in the 20th century or so, because we wanted them to be more domesticated.

Linley Dixon 22:34
It’s so fascinating. I have to add on to this because we have an interview with Glenn Elzinga, who herds his cattle on BLM land. Most ranchers just put the cows out there, forget about them, and walk away. They were totally eroding all of the waterways because the cows were just hanging out, and there were no dogs, as you said, or no wolves that were out there to get them.

James Cassidy 23:05
Wolves have been systematically removed, the predators.

Linley Dixon 23:09
Right. They started to reintroduce them, and he was starting to lose cattle by just leaving them out. He’s got this whole system now where he herds them, and then he doesn’t lose them to the wolves. But it also is so healing to the grasslands because it can keep them out of the waterways, which, when the cattle were grazing in there, was totally destroying the trees that like to be along those riparian areas. It’s so incredible, those cascading events that happen in the ecology of the system.

James Cassidy 23:36
One selection event begets another selection event, it gets the next one, and pretty soon you’ve got these vast savannas, and you’ve got…

Linley Dixon 23:45
We’re talking what? This is the Eocene. How many…?

James Cassidy 23:49
Twenty million years ago?

Linley Dixon 23:50
Twenty million years ago is when grasses evolved.

James Cassidy 23:52
Yeah. Before then there were no Mollisols. There wouldn’t be what we would consider agricultural soils today, which are these big, thick, deep A horizons, and all that organic matter, and all those thick soils. That behavior… I’m kind of stalling here for a second.

Linley Dixon 24:18
Yeah, because we’ve got to describe what a Mollisol is. It’s shocking to me that it’s building soil faster than a forest. I still can’t believe people don’t understand how.

James Cassidy 24:32
On this continent, this was the relationship between bison and grasslands, and also the people who were here, who were using those systems to live off of those bison themselves. What the bison are doing is they’re eating the grass down, and about the time it gets a little too tender or too close to the ground, they move on, and then they poop, and so they’re cycling nutrients through.

James Cassidy 25:00
That’s going out in an intensive way, and so it comes out kind of blotchy. There’s different topographies, and different soils start to form because of that. But all of this agriculture, which begat the Industrial Revolution and all this stuff, really is because of the dream of a dog.

James Cassidy 25:21
They hunted in packs. Probably in the Triassic Period, dinosaurs were known to have hunted in packs too, but the herbivores were not as mobile. It was just a different time.

Linley Dixon 25:39
We’re totally off subject, but I love it. Why can’t this be the dream of a cat? They’re not in packs like dogs.

James Cassidy 25:47
They don’t hunt systematically. They’re kind of individual hunters.

Linley Dixon 25:52
That changes the way the herbivores move.

James Cassidy 25:55
Dogs are organized. They create the herd. The herding behavior is in them. They have these kind of social networks that are very hierarchical. There’s a leader, and then… I’m just kind of talking out of my ass now about it, but that is an interesting question. I’ve had cats, and cats are not cooperative. They live in prides, and they have structure, but they do not take down something big by working together in that way. Interesting, though.

Linley Dixon 26:34
it’s not the fact that it’s a carnivore that has created hurting behavior. It’s the fact that it’s a pack animal and a carnivore.

James Cassidy 26:40
That they are hunting in an organized fashion in such a way as to actually create herding behavior.

Linley Dixon 26:47
James, can we farm like this? First of all, the grasslands, we’ve tilled them all up, and we’re growing mostly corn and soy. When it gets more arid, we’re growing wheat. We’re growing wheat where it’s a little drier, but…

James Cassidy 27:09
In drier climates and stuff like that, for sure. But that is what modern organic and sustainable agriculture is. I had a friend come from Paraguay up here to kind of look at these farms around here, and he just said to me, “This isn’t a farm. Where are the animals?” You’re trucking in feed on an animal farm, and then you’ve got this grassland farm, but there’s no animal interaction.

James Cassidy 27:51
All those processes have been siloed off into industrial parks, and it’s not working as a single thing. That’s what people are doing, just reintroducing herbivores into the landscape as part of their larger rotation. You put animals out there, and then you get the benefit of that. You get the benefit of refreshing the soil, distributing the manure, and then, of course, you can sell the meat or do whatever you want with that.

James Cassidy 28:29
Down in southern Oregon, right on the coast, around Brookings, or somewhere near Langlois, actually, there’s this family down there, the Wall family. They are really into grazing sheep down there, right on the coast. It’s the bluffs just going straight down to the ocean, and they have hundreds. They move their sheep every day, by the hundreds, into these paddocks with electric fencing.

James Cassidy 29:04
The grass is shoulder high, and they move them in there. It gets down to about knee high, and they say, “We’re going to move them.” It’s like, “What? Yeah, it’s time.” They’re building soil, and they have this whole system where they take the sheep through, and they bring in all this manure and all this stuff from other places. They build compost, and they’re spreading it out, and the whole thing is just amazing. But that’s what modern grazers do.

James Cassidy 29:08
They’re trying to mimic those behaviors of intensive herbivory and then move them to different paddocks. That’s what organic milk production is about, especially grass-fed production. They’re moving animals around in these kind of intensive herds. It’s a lot more work, but…

Linley Dixon 29:34
What’s going on under the soil when that grazing event happens?

James Cassidy 29:38
What it does is it stimulates the grass to kind of dig deeper, and so it’s putting more resources into below-ground resources to be able to… It’s in there genetically, but a grass won’t do that unless it sort of has to. If you can kind of beat it down, it will dig back into its genetic history and say, “Oh, it’s time to put down roots and hang on because hard times are coming.”

James Cassidy 30:09
But then you’ve got more resources below ground, which can then push growth back up after the animals have moved on. Essentially, it’s stimulating the whole carbon acquisition process from the atmosphere. Then there’s natural selection. It’s selection, and so the genetics that don’t have those abilities are selected out of the stand.

James Cassidy 30:27
You start to shift the population more towards deep storage, more carbon acquisition, but they’re also getting the benefit of that manure. That’s normally diffuse, and all of a sudden now it’s a concentrated plop there, so those grasses can benefit from that.

Linley Dixon 30:57
That is speeding up the cycling because otherwise the grass kind of outcompetes itself and just produces all this dead material around it unless it’s grazed and chopped up, and that just kind of promotes the cycling.

James Cassidy 31:07
Exactly right. It stimulates the whole system to try harder, if you will. To try harder means that the plants have to try to get more energy from the sun and capture more carbon from the atmosphere. But that stimulates the animals to have more feed, and so it’s this kind of positive sort of feedback loop. Fascinating. That’s why there’s agriculture – the kind of agriculture we think of as agriculture – because that concept happened 20 million years ago.

Linley Dixon 31:41
How much of the land was grassland? Is that your vision? Because it’s certainly mine. I do not know if it would work to feed the world, but is it your vision to revert grasslands back to grasslands and put livestock on them? Is that a better use?

James Cassidy 31:59
I think that livestock could be employed in current systems more effectively, even in large agricultural systems in the Midwest. Right now we gather them up, put them in these giant feedlots, and then we truck in all the food for them. But it is a matter of scale and the number of mouths to feed, and there’s a reason that it’s done that way because it would take 10 planets of grasslands to feed 12 billion people.

James Cassidy 32:35
Not all land – in fact, very little of the land – is actually suitable. Only 10% of the Earth’s ice-free surface is suitable for agriculture, and it’s all in full production now.

Linley Dixon 32:49
When you say agriculture, do you mean with the plow and the seed, or do you mean livestock grazing?

James Cassidy 32:55
I think more about the plow and the seed, kind of large-scale industrial agriculture. People do agriculture without that in small-scale agriculture. Before all that, people used to have a cow at home, and they had some land, and then they would sell the surplus, and they would have a little left over for themselves, and that’s what a farm was.

James Cassidy 33:33
But then the industrial model was applied to it. They said, “Well, why doesn’t somebody become the expert at growing the meat?” It’s all about cheap energy in the 20th century, the discovery…

Linley Dixon 33:41
Not paying the costs for all of those carbon emissions.

James Cassidy 33:44
Yeah. In the early Industrial Revolution, it just didn’t seem plausible that we could have an impact on this thing called the Earth because it was just always this overwhelming, giant thing, and it just seemed impossible. Whole economies were built on that idea, that we could just continue to expand. There was still land to conquer and all that stuff, but that time is over.

Linley Dixon 34:17
You’ve got the university farm, and I’m assuming it’s more bio-intensive vegetable production on that farm. Is that right? Then a lot of students are excited about going out and replicating what you’re teaching.

James Cassidy 34:30
We’re growing students. The vegetables have kind of come along for the ride. We’re squatting on the land here, and they tried to get rid of us about 26 years ago. They said, “What are those kids doing out there? They’re just growing weeds. They’re probably even growing weed. And what happens if somebody falls down?” All the reasons to be a fuddy-duddy.

Linley Dixon 34:50
Haven’t we figured this agriculture thing out? Who would ever have to learn about it? I remember that one.

James Cassidy 34:56
Those fuddy-duddies that we saw as fuddy-duddies, and they were all on the gravy train of the Green Revolution and stuff, and all their grants and stuff. It seemed to them like maybe we were just feeding these kids a bunch of hooey, and the real agriculture is right here. If they want to study agriculture, they should be studying…

Linley Dixon 34:57
Inputs, fertilizers, and pesticides. I took those classes. Tell me about the the farm and the students and what they’re excited about learning.

James Cassidy 34:57
There were those students who complained. I had just finished my master’s degree in soil physics, and I was working for Dr. Maria Dragila in the Soil Physics Lab. She was kind

James Cassidy 35:04
The other half of the time, I hung around the department, and I met these three students who were complaining that they didn’t get any experiential learning, and there was no organic anything in the program. This is 26 years ago, and this is a relatively conservative institution. Most universities are…

Linley Dixon 36:12
The year 2000?

James Cassidy 36:14
Yeah.

Linley Dixon 36:15
That’s not modern. Maybe I’m old, but not…

James Cassidy 36:18
The sleepy little backwater of Oregon State University back then. It’s a much bigger, more sophisticated university now.

Linley Dixon 36:27
To have no organic programs, that was the norm as recent ago as 2000.

James Cassidy 36:32
Yeah. None of it was in their classes. I said, “Well, maybe we should just start our own damn farm.” They said, “Who will help us?” There were a couple of sympathetic land managers who knew about… There was already an organic program down in California, a well-established student farm down there. There were people who were allies. In fact, my boss at the time said, “Yeah, do it, and I’ll defend you,” and he did. Russ Karow, he defended me.

James Cassidy 36:52
We started our own damn farm, and we didn’t know what we were doing, so we started really small. We started really slow, and it took 26 years to really learn how to do it. We had to teach ourselves. But it makes the students better students because they’re actually doing it, and they understand why things are the way they are because weeding is hard. Maybe they gain an appreciation for chemical control, even though they might not want to.

Linley Dixon 37:33
They’re not willing to apply it because they don’t want to touch that stuff.

James Cassidy 37:36
But they get it. I’ve had over 30,000 students at the student farm in the past 26 years, and over 200 paid internships. No material support from the university, other than they do not try and throw us off the land anymore. The people who tried to get rid of us 26 years ago are all either retired or dead, and that’s a fun story to tell students because then they feel like they can make change.

James Cassidy 38:05
My students – I have 11 paid internships right now through the sale of fruits and vegetables on the little land that we’re squatting on – and that’s what it is. It’s completely self-funded through the sale of fruits and vegetables. The students like that too, and we feed them.

James Cassidy 38:21
In fact, tonight is Thursday night work party, 4:30 to dark, with hot supper served at 7 o’clock. We’ve done that for the last 26 years. I’m cooking it over here right now. During the school year, we’ll have 70 to 90 students out there on a Thursday night.

Linley Dixon 38:36
Wow! This is a popular program. Are you spinning off farmers from it. Kids are learning how to farm.

James Cassidy 38:43
Dozens of students, even though it’s 30,000 students. Some of them only come for one term, or maybe only once, but some of them have been coming for seven years or more. Some of them have gone out to have their own farms, or they work for the local farms, and now they are in positions of management and call me when they say, “Hey, you got anybody who would be good for this company that’s doing wholesale?”

James Cassidy 39:12
Now it’s a thing. I’d say two or three times a month I get requests for somebody, even just to work in a home garden or something. “Do you know anybody that would be willing to work for 25 bucks an hour, maybe just for six hours a week?” It’s perfect for a student. It really has just kind of become this institution, but we’re still self-funded through the sale of fruits and vegetables. That’s how we pay the students and buy everything.

James Cassidy 39:46
But over the years, we’ve developed these relationships with former students who now work at fertilizer companies and stuff, or can help us get donations and stuff like that. At this point now it’s as big as it can possibly be with me just being a volunteer myself because I don’t get paid to do this. It’s all weekends, and…

Linley Dixon 40:10
You do it for the good food and the community.

James Cassidy 40:13
I love the students. They amaze me, and they know, and that’s why it works. It’s because it doesn’t feel like school. It feels like reality.

Linley Dixon 40:26
What do the soils look like on a veggie farm? That’s very different than grazing grasslands that we were talking about. As maybe bio-intensive annual crop farmers, how do we maintain healthy soils?

James Cassidy 40:44
We actually have two farm sites now, and they’re both on these very different basic types of soil that we see in the Willamette Valley here in Oregon. The Willamette Valley is a valley between two mountain ranges: the Cascades, which are all volcanic, on the east side, and on the west side are the uplifted marine sediments from the Pleistocene.

Linley Dixon 41:07
Oh, interesting! You got a nice mix.

James Cassidy 41:09
Yeah. Then there’s this valley. Historically there was a deep valley there with an ancient river. But 15,000 years ago, the largest floods on Earth happened here at the end of the last ice age, where there was a 500-cubic-mile lake behind an ice dam in Montana that broke free as it was melting, and 500 cubic miles of water emptied from that basin in 24 to 48 hours.

James Cassidy 41:32
Millions of cubic feet per second were carrying boulders the size of the building you’re in in suspension at 100 miles an hour across the landscape, pounding rock to dust physically. Grinding…

Linley Dixon 41:55
Do we think there were people here when this happened? Is this where Noah’s Ark came from?

James Cassidy 41:59
I’m saying that because the person who reluctantly came to the conclusion that this is indeed what happened… There’s a thing called the Columbia River Gorge. It was gouged out by water, and when they asked him at the Geological Society, they said, “Where did the water come from?” He said, “I don’t know.”

James Cassidy 42:16
This was in the 1920s and 1930s, before people accepted plate tectonics, and the age of the Earth was still a raging debate, and nobody knew about ice ages then. But he said, “No, this boulder is 100 tons, and it is rounded because it traveled, and I can tell you it traveled 1,000 miles to get here by water.” “Where did the water come from?” “I don’t know.” They just said, “Okay, whatever.”

Linley Dixon 42:50
I’ve heard that this event happened multiple times too, right?

James Cassidy 42:53
Yeah, about 100 times in a 5,000-year period. It was kind of just ice dams, and there were cascading events. There were lakes that size on top of ice sheets in Canada that catastrophically failed and would trigger other events. It’s a very complex story. About 100 of them, and they’ve been mapped very well.

James Cassidy 43:05
I’m a former president of the Soil Science Society of Oregon, and I know all these people who did all that work, and it’s just super interesting. We go look at the stuff on our summer tours.

Linley Dixon 43:25
Serious detective work to figure out how this all happened.

James Cassidy 43:28
Oh, amazing! But most of that water went down the Columbia Gorge and went out into the Pacific Ocean. Where Portland, Oregon, is now, there was a particularly hard, resistant piece of basalt rock there that deflected the entire river to the north, and enough of it kind of went south that it just gouged into that valley. It filled up that valley as a temporary lake to a 400-foot elevation.

James Cassidy 43:59
The big stuff had dropped out, so it was mostly sand-, silt-, and clay-sized particles that remained, and then they settled out over about a one-week period. That took about a week for it to get to 400 feet, and then it settled out, and then it drained out, and that happened repeatedly. In some places in the Willamette Valley, the sediments are 2,000 feet deep of sand and clay. This is incredible.

Linley Dixon 44:23
About endless fertility…

James Cassidy 44:26
It’s seriously one of the most amazing soil landscapes on the planet, just because it’s this unique sort of cosmic event that happened here. Then the modern-day Willamette River, which flows north into the Columbia at Portland, has been kind of moving across that landscape and resorting those particles, washing away clays and silts, and leaving behind sandier soils where the topography is more lumpy-bumpy because the river has kind of moved around.

James Cassidy 44:57
But the original Missoula Flood deposition – called the Missoula Floods – is laser-beam flat because it’s a lake floor, and it’s silt. We have these very silty soils that are flat and are really good for seed crop production, grains, grasses, and that sort of thing, and perennial production like hazelnuts and hops and things like that.

Linley Dixon 45:22
Wine, grapes…

James Cassidy 45:24
Yeah, and grapes.

Linley Dixon 45:25
Yeah, It’s a little too fertile for grapes, right?

James Cassidy 45:27
It’s a little too fertile for grapes. The uplands are these old Oxisols and Ultisols that are ancient, that are above the Missoula Flood. There are these old soils that are red because of the oxides. They’re well drained, they have southern exposures, they’re low fertility, and under those conditions, a grape plant will express its genes to try and make good grapes so that an animal will eat them and disperse the DNA somewhere else where the living is better because they’re under stress.

James Cassidy 46:05
When grape plants are stressed, put together tightly, pruned heavily, tied to wires on slopes in nutrient-poor soils with a lot of southern exposure to sunlight, the plants dig back into their memory and say, “How are we going to get out of here?” They say, “Oh, remember how we did that one time? We made really good fruit, and birds ate it and deposited the seeds somewhere down on the Mollisols.”

James Cassidy 46:29
What a grape plant wants to be is 40-foot-long vines, leaves this big, and not have to worry about making grapes. But under stressful conditions, they make really delicious grapes.

Linley Dixon 46:42
That’s terroir. We have someone who’s into wines, and he’s like, “You need to get better at marketing the terroir of a tomato or beet.” It really depends on our point of view in terms of what we value. For some reason we do this for grapes, but we do not celebrate it for all of these other crops, and we need to start to figure out what makes a tomato taste incredible.

James Cassidy 47:15
That is true, but people want the tomato… There’s only so much bandwidth for differences in tomatoes. There are different kinds of grapes and the style of wine, and there’s just a lot…

Linley Dixon 47:32
Because if you ferment it, you can go so much further. Is that the point?

James Cassidy 47:37
The pallet is so much wider for…

Linley Dixon 47:40
I don’ know. I got a lot of tomato varieties.

James Cassidy 47:42
Right. Challenge accepted.

Linley Dixon 47:45
Challenge accepted.

James Cassidy 47:46
But then there are these resorted soils where the river has gone, and they’re sandier soils, and that’s where the student farm is because it’s more well drained. It’s sandier. We can work it in the winter by hand here. I’m from Minnesota. Let me tell you, winter never comes here.

Linley Dixon 47:47
Winter’s wet and summer is dry.

James Cassidy 47:52
Yeah, it’s just wet, cold, and dark. I love it. I prefer it. Then the summer’s dry, and it cools off every night here. Where I’m from, Minnesota, it’s just like the Arctic. It’s just death. Then in the summer, it’s just buggy and super hot. [inaudible 48:19] love that, and they’ll sell crops too. We have these two different soils, and there’s two different kinds of agriculture because of that.

James Cassidy 48:29
Then on the slopes, we have a third soil where the wine and the timber are because trees, particularly Douglas fir, and the wine grapes, have mycorrhizal associations to deal with the low-nutrient soils. We have kind of all these different amazing soils here, and it’s one of the reasons it’s such an amazing place.

Linley Dixon 48:56
When we interviewed Dan Barber, who’s a chef in the Hudson Valley, he was saying that we have this opportunity. There are so many different unique soils and climates where we really could celebrate local cuisine, and rotations that work in that area could be part of the culture more.

Linley Dixon 49:26
He was just saying that’s lacking here in the States, and it really is celebrated in Europe, and we need to find that. Like you just described, the history going back 15,000 years, and you could probably go back even further with the volcanism and the geology of the region. We need to have that knowledge and share what works in this climate.

James Cassidy 49:19
In our around here, and particularly in Portland, those stories are being told, and the food culture there is…

Linley Dixon 49:54
Celebrated.

James Cassidy 49:54
It’s also an extremely diverse and dynamic story here. Kansas has a story, but it has one or two. It’s flat…

Linley Dixon 50:01
It might depend on how far you go back geologically, right?

James Cassidy 50:04
That’s true. The reason there is a Columbia River is because about 17 million years ago, cracks opened up in the Earth, and lava flowed out with a consistency like water. It was so hot, white hot, and it flowed, and it blobbed out for millions of years, layer upon layer, and it weighed so much that that part of the continental plate was deflected down by the weight of it, and then it stopped.

James Cassidy 50:31
Then that’s all basalt, which dissolves pretty fast in geologic time. It dissolved away, a lot of it, and there’s a basin there that captured the Snake River Canyon and the Columbia Plateau, all that stuff. The Columbia River Basin is because of that, and that’s why there’s a Columbia River, and that is why the Missoula Flood, when it was released, went this way because [inaudible 51:04].

James Cassidy 51:08
There are events that predate that, of course. There were similar ice ages where that happened in this part of the world too. But probably it’s hard enough to tell people any story that they haven’t heard before or want to hear about.

Linley Dixon 51:28
I think you’re full of them, actually.

James Cassidy 51:30
I am, of course.

Linley Dixon 51:31
The beautiful thing about soils is that it’s this combination of deep geological time with the biology of right now that’s making things happen in the cycling. One of the biggest questions we get, and we touched on it earlier, is, what kind of soil testing do I need to do to make sure that I’ve got healthy soils? First of all, what is a healthy soil for annual vegetable crop production?

Linley Dixon 52:01
We are in there, we’re working those soils, and we’re exporting a lot of fertility every year. How do we do this organically, and then how do we make sure, in terms of soil testing and reading the tests right, that we’re staying on it and keeping them healthy?

James Cassidy 52:18
Certainly I was this way when I first started. I thought, “Well, if I just do the things that you’re supposed to do in organic, the soils will take care of themselves: annual cover cropping, manuring, and all this stuff.”

Linley Dixon 52:31
Mulching, yeah.

James Cassidy 52:32
You can do that too much. You can overapply manure to the point where you have excessive phosphorus and potassium, and to the point that it’s pollution, destroying surface waters and groundwater. Out here they say, “It’s all good.” No, it’s not. It’s not all good. You have to know things, and do not just guess. It’s hard to make a living and eke out a profit if you do not really know where your resources should be spent.

James Cassidy 53:56
If you have unlimited amounts, a neighbor with all this manure or something, that’s fine. But if you do not, there’s nothing sustainable about going out of business. You know what I mean. As a soil scientist, and as an advocate for soils, you have to know what you have, and you can do that quite easily, at least with a baseline sort of soil test. Finding out what type of soil you have – it’s been mapped.

James Cassidy 53:57
There’s an app for that, and it’s called the SoilWeb App. It’s free, and you can get it right now. If you get it right now, the first person who gets it, I’ll send you a gold star. I can tell you, for example, under this building right now, where I am, which is about 300 yards from the Willamette River, we have something called Willamette soil. There it is. It looks like that, and it geolocates and tells you what your soil type is. It’s called the SoilWeb App, and you should all have it.

James Cassidy 54:18
If you’re in the United States of America and you’re farming, this is free information that has been gathered by your government and your taxpayer dollars over the last 100-plus years to get this information to you, so you can make better decisions about protecting the basic resource, which is the source of all value and all of the economy. All of it comes from the soil.

James Cassidy 54:45
Willamette soil is a Pachic Ultic Argixeroll. It ends in -oll. That means it’s a Mollisol. You can passively learn just by walking around your farm. You know where there are different soils. You can tell there are wet spots here.

Linley Dixon 55:02
It’s that detailed. It’ll change around your farm

James Cassidy 55:07
Yeah. Knowing what your soils are mapped as is a good start, and they’re mapped on a scale that may not be close enough for you to make management decisions on a foot-by-foot basis, but at least know that these are associated soils that are likely in this area, and they’re pretty close, but there might be things that are missed there. Then have that information, start learning it, and get a soil map.

James Cassidy 55:37
It’s not hard to ask an extension agent to just help you find it, or just figure out how to do it yourself. You just go to the Web Soil Survey and put in your address, and you can make a map. Then you should take a probe, and you should dig a hole somewhere and start looking around. I know farmers just never do that. They just never dig a hole, that kind of thing.

Linley Dixon 56:01
How deep do we need to dig?

James Cassidy 56:07
Some soils are really thin. Trying to turn a thin soil into a Mollisol, you’re going to spend your entire life doing that, and you’re going to say, “Wow, it doesn’t matter how much I’ve done to this.” You have to know how you’re going to spend your life. Are you going to spend it trying to make an inherently low-fertility soil into a high-fertility soil? It could take several lifetimes, and you’ve only got one.

James Cassidy 56:37
You should find out what your soil is, how thick it is. You should take a proper soil sample. There’s a way to do that with a probe. You do not really need to go any deeper than the area that you’re probably going to be farming. If it’s annual agriculture, maybe six to 10 inches, depending on what you’re growing. You take a composite sample so that you get a random, yet representative, sample.

James Cassidy 57:02
If you know your field well enough, you say, “Well, this looks all about the same. I’m going to get 30 samples, put them into a bucket, mix them well, take a subsample, and send it to a lab.” It’s the best $50, $80, or $100 you’ll spend because you will get back a soil report that will tell you whether you’re high, medium, or low in various nutrients, what your percent organic matter is at the beginning of your life with this soil, and whether it is high, medium, or low.

James Cassidy 57:29
What is the cation exchange capacity? What that is, is just a measure of the soil’s ability to store nutrients. That’s what soil does. It’s one of the functions of soils. You put on some fertilizer. It does not just wash down through the soil and end up in the groundwater because soil has a negative charge on the clay particles, and clays and organic matter can hold nutrients against the force of water and store them there.

James Cassidy 57:56
When you put your tiny little root in there from a tomato, by the time it’s August, it’s got a giant root system, and it’s there waiting for it because you’re not going to be able to add that later unless you’re doing liquid fertilizers or something like that. You need to find out where you’re at, know what soil types you have, and take some soil samples and send them into the lab and get a recommendation. They’ll give you a recommendation.

James Cassidy 58:24
These days the labs know. You just have to say, “I’m farming organically,” and they will give you the recommendations from an organic standpoint. Twenty-five years ago that did not exist. You’d have to use the standard labs, and they would give you the recommendation, but it’s stuff that you’re not going to use. You’re not going to use urea and nitrates like that.

James Cassidy 58:45
Everybody should do that. Every human on this planet should know what the soil types are where they’re living. You can do that, and it’s free. In the United States it’s free. There’s an app for that. This might be the only reason to have a smartphone: to geolocate yourself and find out how your soil is mapped.

James Cassidy 59:11
Then you know so much more right then and there to really get serious about what should I be growing here? Because this particular area is kind of thin, and it’s got a high water table, and you’re just never, ever going to turn that into a Mollisol. But that does not mean you cannot grow cool stuff there.

James Cassidy 59:33
You just have to change your idea of what is the vision for you as a farmer, or maybe get a different place, or lease some land, or just do not get hooked on one vision, like I see students do all the time. They learn all this stuff from me, and then they want to get some land, and they want to do a market garden, and they want to sell at the farmers market, and you can’t. I did that as a student.

Linley Dixon 1:00:02
I’m doing it.

James Cassidy 1:00:03
But it’s hard. You should think about what the market kind of needs, and you should maybe focus on learning to do one thing better, at the same time as doing other stuff. Maybe it’s basil, and you can find a market for that.

Linley Dixon 1:00:20
It’s because of the marketing. You learn to grow, but marketing is another learning curve.

James Cassidy 1:00:27
Listen to the market. Go to restaurants and talk to chefs and say, “What’s the hardest thing to come by around here?” They might be saying, “Yeah, the reason it’s so hard to come by is because it doesn’t grow well here.” Don’t kill yourself trying to grow something that doesn’t really do well there. But you have to do a little research on that.

James Cassidy 1:00:49
It can kind of seem like a killjoy, but it’s not as much of a killjoy as working for 20 years and then losing the farm anyway because you’re still sticking to the dream of an 18-year-old.

Linley Dixon 1:01:00
Or working for one or two years and not being able to sell what you grow.

James Cassidy 1:01:05
Exactly. Go work for somebody else for a while and learn what they’re doing, and you’ll just learn more, and you’ll have a better shot at it. Having the baseline data at the beginning is a way to track your success. Like the student farm on the other side of the Willamette River here, which historically flooded periodically, it’s a sandy loam, which means it has more sand than silt and clay.

James Cassidy 1:01:39
A sandy loam has a relatively balanced mix of sand, silt, and clay, so it has a range of pore sizes. Small pores hold water against the downward force of gravity. Large pores drain under the force of gravity. But this is a sandy loam, so it has better drainage. Well-drained soils warm up faster because the heat capacity of water is so high, so clayier soils take a lot longer to warm up. It’s just basic thermodynamics.

James Cassidy 1:02:09
The reason is that germination depends on minimum soil temperatures. You should measure the soil temperature with a thermometer before you put your seeds in, or you’re just going to be like, “Ah, it didn’t work. I don’t know why. Maybe the seed’s no good, or maybe I just suck as a farmer or something.” When really, maybe you do because you didn’t measure the temperature of the soil.

James Cassidy 1:02:33
That information is well known. It’s not exotic, magical stuff. It maybe sounds kind of old-fashioned, but really these are boilerplate things that we know about soil. We know what high, medium, and low concentrations of certain nutrients are for growing certain crops.

James Cassidy 1:02:54
People have done that work. They’ve grown the crops with high, medium, and low nutrients at different pHs, and they did it all. They did all that work, and they reproduced it dozens of times over the last 80 years, and that information is known, and you should be using it. Then dream, and then think about how to incorporate animals into the landscape and get some herbivory going, and find out whether you really need more organic matter.

James Cassidy 1:03:24
Once you get to four percent organic matter, depending on the type of soil and what you want to grow, putting a lot of resources into having more may not be the best investment. It just sounds cool. But you could be doing market research instead of just, “Oh…”

Linley Dixon 1:03:44
… is working. If at that four percent you’re keeping things moving.

James Cassidy 1:03:47
Yeah. As long as you’re not going backwards, you’re doing it right. Just as long as you’re not going negative, even if you’re only going slightly positive. That’s fine. What happens is, especially with young farmers, they get a system. Finally, they figure out how to get cover crops working, where to get inexpensive manures, and they do this thing, and there’s soil building.

James Cassidy 1:04:13
But the thing is, the soil-building phase for some people never ends because they’ve spent so much energy developing the soil-building phase, and they think, “Now I can do other stuff.” But what you have to do is recognize that you’ve attained something. Now you’re just in the maintenance phase.

James Cassidy 1:04:32
“I’ve spent 10 years developing this soil, and now I’ve got to change my system?” That just sounds like a lot of learning and mistakes to come, but you’re starting from a place where you have four percent organic matter or five percent organic matter, and you’ve minimized tillage to the point where you have pretty good structure. It isn’t that hard to dial back and start thinking…

James Cassidy 1:04:58
There’s a famous local farm here that’s been farming for over 40 years, and they’ve just been dumping compost on for 40 years, and manure and stuff, and they’re just so proud of their 10% organic matter level. They’re still fertilizing and stuff.

James Cassidy 1:05:13
One time, a colleague of mine said, “Hey, how about this? When you’re spreading your fertilizer, why don’t we just tarp off 300 square feet of it, leave it covered, and then peel that off, and you couldn’t see it.” It’s like, “Huh, so we don’t need it?”

Linley Dixon 1:05:32
There’s no difference.

James Cassidy 1:05:33
We’ve been doing that for 30 years. I say, “Yeah.” You can just stop.

Linley Dixon 1:05:41
I remember talking with Tim Bowles. He was saying you’re just measuring – usually with those soil tests that you’re talking about, the basic ones – the nutrients that are readily available, and 95% of them are locked up in biological proteins and storage. You might be just fine, even though it looks like you don’t have a lot. It’s about to become available, but you might still need to apply more.

Linley Dixon 1:06:11
I’m curious what your thoughts are on some of these newer tests on proteins and biomass, fungal-to-bacterial ratios, and things like that. What are your thoughts on some of these fancier tests?

James Cassidy 1:06:23
There’s not a huge body of science there. There’s a much larger body of science, certainly more than there was 25 or 26 years ago.

Linley Dixon 1:06:27
There’s still more unknown than known.

James Cassidy 1:06:38
There is a bit of a kind of “bug in the jug” sort of mindset, maybe, among people who make money off of those tests.

Linley Dixon 1:06:50
That happens.

James Cassidy 1:06:51
Yeah, that happens. Their expertise is something you have to pay for, and that means they need them. That’s kind of what’s happened, I think, in the conventional world too. You get a soil test, they come out, they take it, they tell you what to put on. You just write the check.

Linley Dixon 1:07:13
Right. The farmers don’t even learn how to read it for themselves and question how to apply.

James Cassidy 1:07:19
Exactly. I think those same impulses are there in a market economy like we have. Find out the fundamentals first before you’re starting to play with the fungal-to-bacterial ratio. Does your parent material, from which the soil is formed – the mineral soil is called the parent material – contain low amounts of molybdenum? Here, it was brought in by a flood. It could be volcanic material. It could be old marine sediments.

James Cassidy 1:07:43
What is the basic foundation of the parent material of your soil, and does that parent material have low amounts of molybdenum? That’s not sexy, but you have to know that. If you’re low in molybdenum, that’s super important for flower production and all sorts of things without which….

James Cassidy 1:08:16
Yeah, the fungal-to-bacterial ratio, you can play with that, but if you’re low on something that’s important for biology to exist, that’s fundamentally more important. Even though I started out thinking these things myself, like, “Oh, we should be learning about the new stuff.”

James Cassidy 1:08:44
You can’t break the rules until you know them. If you don’t know what’s been done before you, you really don’t have the right to be critical of it without understanding it. I learned that in grad school. But you have to know how to measure the stuff that’s fairly well known before you can start playing at the edges. I think that’s a good piece of advice.

Linley Dixon 1:09:17
I know a lot of it, we thought we knew what was happening, and then we… I do not know if you know the history of that ACE test, where we thought we were detecting glomalin from mycorrhizal fungi, and then it turned out it was actually detecting something else. Everybody was like, “Whoa, mycorrhizal fungi are everywhere. Look how much is there.” Then we were actually testing for all proteins being extracted through this process.

Linley Dixon 1:09:42
It was more than two decades where we just got it completely wrong, and have only very recently discovered that we were measuring something else. That fungal-to-bacterial ratio thing, I was like, “Well, if you double the life in your soil, you still might have a similar ratio, and you’re not measuring that. Or what are they doing? You do not even know what they’re doing.”`

James Cassidy 1:10:07
There’s enough of them. I become a little more conservative in that regard because…

Linley Dixon 1:10:17
They’re expensive. Farmers are trying to make it work, so if you’re going to get a test, you want it to actually…

James Cassidy 1:10:25
You buy some bacteria that’s in a jug, and you spray it on there, and it’s supposed to do these things. It’s just one thing, and who knows if it sat on a loading dock in the California heat…

Linley Dixon 1:10:40
If it’s going to like the microbes in your soil right now, they might just outcompete it immediately, right?

James Cassidy 1:10:45
The microbial diversity… But shoot, you put on something, and it just eats it. It’s resistant to change, if it’s healthy soil.

Linley Dixon 1:11:00
There are a lot of studies that show when you inoculate – and I’m sure rhizobia are different because that’s pretty intimate, since you’re inoculating the seed with a plant that wants them there – many studies have shown that the inoculum often just goes right back to the life that was there before. That skepticism is important.

James Cassidy 1:11:21
It becomes NPK.

Linley Dixon 1:11:23
Yeah, it’s true.

James Cassidy 1:11:25
I don’t if it’s microbes or something, but they just die and get consumed. It’s a really expensive fertilizer of what it ends up being…

Linley Dixon 1:11:34
I’ve got one more kind of important question. I know I’ve kept you forever, but about tillage. A lot of California organic farmers have tried to experiment with reduced tillage, and they’ve found that they’re growing all this fertility in cover crops, and if it stays on the surface, they’re not able to get that slow-release fertility for the next crop.

Linley Dixon 1:11:55
The organic farming community is really struggling, especially in drier climates where the cover crop stays on the surface. How do we get that fertility into the soil without tillage?

James Cassidy 1:12:09
This is my opinion, but I think some tillage is allowable. It cannot just be all or nothing. It has to be what is right for the system you’re in. The whole world cannot be farmed with no-till. There are places where it makes a lot of sense, and there are places where you have problems, and they’re starting to see them. Especially with legumes, the above-ground biomass is where the nitrogen is. It’s not in the below-ground biomass.

Linley Dixon 1:12:59
Explain that.

James Cassidy 1:13:00
Even though the nodules and the bacteria and all that stuff are part of the symbiotic relationship below ground, the nitrogen is being sent up to become plant tissues. There’s a gain of nitrogen that wasn’t from the soil – it came from the atmosphere and is now in the above-ground biomass. You cut that, and if you don’t incorporate it, eventually, of course, it’ll rot down into the soil. But if you’re not incorporating it, you can’t count on that nitrogen being available for your following crop, just as an example.

James Cassidy 1:13:49
We know that excessive, or even just what we call normal, tillage is damaging to soil structure. But with no-till… I got gophers right now in my no-till area, and there are other negative results. People get kind of fixated on the recipe. They look at the book, and they say the book says do this, and they follow it. If you’ve ever just cooked with a recipe, you know what I’m talking about.

James Cassidy 1:14:27
You do it, and in the end, it just looks terrible, and you realize, “Oh, they switched cups and tablespoons when it went to print.” But knowing how to cook is a different thing. You learn by doing and experimenting, and pretty soon you say, “Oh, I always sweat the mushrooms after I do the onions or something. Don’t do them at the same time, otherwise the mushrooms are just steamed,” or whatever. You just learn it, and you could probably find that in a book somewhere.

James Cassidy 1:14:58
Farming by recipe is a disaster. You have to use your own intuition, and you might be wrong, but I think just slavishly saying no-till is the answer, I just think it isn’t the answer. There is no magic bullet. There is no silver bullet. People will try and sell you the idea that it’s either this bad outcome or that one, so you should probably go with this one. Somebody who is doing that is trying to influence you, and really, there’s another way.

James Cassidy 1:15:44
If you just observe for yourself and experiment. Don’t do the whole garden or the whole farm as the experiment, because then it’s not really an experiment. It’s just a decision. Who knows what happened? But take half of it, and say, “You know what? I’m going to just at least till this in and grow the crop across it, and just see what happens.”

James Cassidy 1:16:08
Minimum tillage is minimum tillage, just not no tillage. Agriculture is about minimizing diversity. It just is. It’s not a forest with 80 species per cubic yard, or square yard. You’re trying to grow a bunch of corn…

Linley Dixon 1:16:28
Or a grassland we were describing earlier that had a lot more species.

James Cassidy 1:16:33
Yes. But if you’re trying to sell seed, you can’t have all those weeds there. It has to be pure seed. It kind of depends on what your goal is, or what you’re wanting to grow, and what is the allowable tolerance for some weeds. It doesn’t have to be zero. It doesn’t have to be fully, and it’s somewhere in between. And where is the in-between? You’re not going to find that answer in a book because every landscape is actually different.

Linley Dixon 1:17:03
And in every system – what works for you in your system.

James Cassidy 1:17:07
Talk to your neighbors, even your conventional neighbors. They know more about the soil than you might, even though they’ve made a different choice in how to farm. It isn’t just us versus them anymore either. When I first started this 26 years ago here in Corvallis, it was kind of the dreadlocks versus the belt buckles. It was kind of this cultural kind of thing. I think everybody knows a lot more now. It’s not just us versus them. It’s whether all of us are going to make it or not.

Linley Dixon 1:17:44
Yeah. I think farmers want to steward their land. We’re all curious about how to farm into the future, and that knowledge exchange is so important.

James Cassidy 1:17:55
For sure. I know some conventional farmers here who are basically organic farming, but they still do not want to lose a crop, so they do not certify as organic. They think it’s too restrictive for their management system. There are organic farmers that are just tilling the soil excessively, and they’re not weeding at the right time, and they’re just not paying attention.

James Cassidy 1:18:27
They’re dumping a lot of organic matter around. They’re growing a lot of cover crops, but are they really managing the resource better than this other farmer? People like it to be one or the other, and it isn’t. It’s harder than that.

Linley Dixon 1:18:44
How can we all do this better together in knowledge of place?

James Cassidy 1:18:48
I grow organically. Parts of my farm aren’t certified organic, not because I do any practice that wouldn’t be allowed. It’s just that, as a volunteer growing 70 different crops, I can’t manage the information needed to be certified organic. My perennial system…

Linley Dixon 1:19:14
Is it mostly because of the number of seeds that you’re getting? It’s so hard to do that seed search.

James Cassidy 1:19:19
Oh, not only that. Just keeping the records. I have a real good rotation, but every time I do this, I have to note that. I’ve got 90 students out there who are hungry. My goal is different. I have Certified Organic Triple Crown blackberries and table grapes. That’s a perennial system. It’s not hard. It’s not a rotation. That’s the only reason I don’t do it, because I’m doing this as a volunteer, so I don’t have the capacity to keep the records to actually be certified organic.

Linley Dixon 1:20:02
It’s quite tragic that the more diversified farms get the heavier burden when it comes to paperwork.

James Cassidy 1:20:08
If this was my job, I would do it. My job, I teach classes, and I do all these other things.

Linley Dixon 1:20:15
You got to get a student to do it for you.

James Cassidy 1:20:18
They’re no good.

Linley Dixon 1:20:19
Learning experience.

James Cassidy 1:20:20
Sure, that was tough. Actually, I do have a berry manager every year, a different one. But we have a system. What I need is a person. What I need is to professionalize at this point. I’ve done as much as can be done as a volunteer myself. If you go to soilforward.org, that’s where we sell these T-shirts.

Linley Dixon 1:20:49
I need one.

James Cassidy 1:20:49
I have them in Klingon and in Vulcan as well.

Linley Dixon 1:20:54
I love that.

James Cassidy 1:20:56
These shirts I sell bring in about $3,000 to $5,000 a year’s worth of sales. I do a lot of talks, and I push them pretty hard, but that’s enough to fund another intern that I wouldn’t have been able to afford. That’s just one revenue stream. But we’re currently…

Linley Dixon 1:21:12
What needs to be on them is, “What’s the answer?” Then, “Add organic matter.” I’ve heard you say that.

James Cassidy 1:21:23
Mine is, “It doesn’t matter what the question is. The answer is: Add organic matter.”

Linley Dixon 1:21:27
There you go.

James Cassidy 1:21:29
Until you get to five percent organic matter, then it’s really not exactly… But if you have zero percent organic matter, the answer is add organic matter. I promise I won’t go into this too much. But I currently have an endowment campaign going for a half-time position with full benefits, like an actual position at the university, and we need $1 million to do that. But it would be in perpetuity.

James Cassidy 1:22:00
I myself have gone beating the bushes and gotten $660,000 toward that. We’re closing in on it, and I’m hell-bent. It’s the thing that’s keeping me going, because there’ll be a half-time position for somebody. Because there’s never going to be another person who just does it for the love of it for 26 years. That was a unique event. There’s a student farm at Oregon State University because three students complained, and I gave a damn. I spent my career doing that on the side.

Linley Dixon 1:22:33
This is to replace you.To ensure that…

James Cassidy 1:22:36
It could be so much better. We could be more organic, and the job would be to teach people how to do it. I’m just trying to get the stuff in the ground and sell it so that I can pay some interns in the summer and feed them. Thirty thousand students. It’s a social experiment for me, and the veggies kind of come along for the ride. It’s a social experiment in letting students sort of learn and teach themselves and build real community, not the kind of community that tastes like canned spinach.

James Cassidy 1:23:10
Real community is fun, and you want to be part of it. It’s not something like, “We’re going to have a course on building community.” No one’s going to want that, except the kind of people who don’t know how to build community. That’s just the opposite.

James Cassidy 1:23:29
I’ve seen it happen. There have just been parallel universes that have come and gone at the university, with people trying to create their own system, but all official and stuff. This is under the radar. Nobody ever comes out there and sees us, and the students are so excited and cool, and they’re better students because they’re actually doing it.

James Cassidy 1:23:52
My goal is to teach about soil and to tell them what it is, how it works, how it forms, and how to protect it. I run a student farm that is organic, but it’s not certified organic. Parts of it are. But it’s mostly to get the students involved in their own responsibility for learning and getting experience that they just can never get in a classroom.

James Cassidy 1:23:58
Then they meet each other. I can’t even tell you – 30,000 students. I’ve got at least eight couples who’ve gotten married who met at the farm. One of them…

Linley Dixon 1:24:26
They tend to do that.

James Cassidy 1:24:28
Another farm with naked kids running around and stuff, my work is done, really. I have the legacy, and then it’s 26 years of students. But it could be so much more, and it could be a little more mechanized and actually set them up for success in not just running their own little farm, but maybe being involved in organic agriculture generally.

James Cassidy 1:24:51
It’s a massive parallel universe out there of jobs, from ice cream treats and all that stuff, not just growing squash and trying to get someone to buy it from you. I’ve learned a lot just doing it myself. I’m still a student of it, and I’m the longest-running student in the club. It really has been the work of my life, for sure.

James Cassidy 1:25:33
The university allows me to do it. I’m a better soils teacher because I farm, and I’m a better farmer because I teach. Because I have access to hundreds of students all the time, I can recruit. It’s a numbers game. If you get enough people out there, there’s always five or six or 10 of them that are exactly at the right point in their personal academic development that they just want it.

James Cassidy 1:26:04
If you only have six people out there, it might not be any of them for six years. But if you feed them and you cultivate a community, you get a bigger population from which to recruit. You just wouldn’t believe it. Some of these students are just exactly where they need to be for this project. They’re managing the berries because… I just can’t even imagine having that opportunity when I was their age.

James Cassidy 1:26:34
But I had other opportunities that came my way that had nothing to do with agriculture. I was exactly in the right place for things to happen for me. It really is a social experiment for me, and the organic stuff and all of that kind of comes along for the ride.

Linley Dixon 1:26:50
Dr. Cassidy, you’ve done an incredible job of celebrating and teaching about soil. I could talk to you forever. Clearly, I have a million questions I didn’t get to ask. We should probably do it again if you’re up for it. I really enjoyed it, and you’ve got a party to go to.

James Cassidy 1:27:06
I do. I throw a party every Thursday night. Although this term is over, I expect 25 to 30 students tonight. We’re going to weed the tomatoes, and we’re going to make giant herb bundles. We sell all the vegetables through a CSA program. We have 26 customers, and that’s how we pay for the whole project, including the student interns and all of our supplies.

Linley Dixon 1:27:29
Maybe one of these Thursdays I can join you.

James Cassidy 1:27:32
Yeah. Where are you?

Linley Dixon 1:27:33
That sounds like a good time. I’m all the way in Durango, Colorado, in southwestern Colorado. I do visit.

James Cassidy 1:27:40
Yeah. Oregon?

Linley Dixon 1:27:42
I do. My daughter’s a swimmer, and she had a competition in Gresham, so I don’t know how far that is. But I have friends in the Willamette Valley. I’ll have to track you down next time I’m in the area and make it a Thursday.

James Cassidy 1:27:56
Oh my God. Every Sunday morning we’re here too at the farm. Sunday Skool – S-K-O-O-L.

Linley Dixon 1:28:02
I love it. It’s such a better use of time, in my opinion, on Sunday to be in the garden instead of inside a church.

James Cassidy 1:28:11
I would love to. I’d love to see you in person. It’d be really fun to show you what we’re doing. Just for you to meet these students – it’s just amazing. If you wouldn’t mind putting soilforward.org out there somewhere, that would be great.

Linley Dixon 1:28:21
I will do that. Yep, great. Well, thank you so much. We’ll do this again.

James Cassidy 1:28:26
Okay. I hope so.