Transcript

BRAD NEWBOLD 0:00
Hello everybody, and welcome to We Measure The World, a podcast produced by scientists, for scientists.

DR. JAKE MOWRER 0:07
The reason that the company we worked with wanted this done is because the government that they were working with thought that this approach of heating the soil was going to destroy the fertility and function of the soil. Because a lot of research had been done that showed that, and they were wondering if we would go ahead and sort of recreate some of that in a comprehensive way and see what really happened, if it was true or not. And so we did that, and we found that under certain circumstances, particularly degraded soils or soils that weren’t that great to begin with, once that petroleum hydrocarbon was turned into char, the soil adj performed better than it did before.

BRAD NEWBOLD 0:46
That’s just a small taste of what we have in store for you today. We Measure The World explores interesting environmental research trends, how scientists are solving research issues and what tools are helping them better understand measurements across the entire soil, plant, atmosphere, continuum. Today’s guest is Dr Jake Mowrer. Jake Mauer received his bachelor’s in environmental health science and his Master’s and PhD in soil chemistry and fertility, all from the University of Georgia. Now a professor with Texas A and M Agrilife Extension in the department of soil and crop Sciences at Texas A and M University. His research includes projects focusing on the intersection of water smart and climate smart agricultural practices and how they enhance or undermine desired outcomes regarding nutrient and carbon cycling. Jake works with clientele across the state of Texas on issues related to soil nutrient and water resource management. And his daily work ranges from applied field research to public outreach and education on best practices in rural and urban settings. And today, he’s here to talk to us about how soil management practices like compost and biochar amendments, thermal remediation and smart irrigation strategies are shaping the future of sustainable agriculture. So Jake, thanks so much for being here.

DR. JAKE MOWRER 2:01
I live over here in College Station Texas, and I came from Athens, Georgia, so that was quite an adjustment for me, because I expected to find another college town. And no offense to College Stationian’s, but it’s not a college town. There’s not much of a music scene, art scene, but people are doing it. People are doing it. If you get in the community. People are very passionate about it. This town has its charm, and if you live here long enough, you can find your way into what you need. What I have always liked about working here in College Station is the support of this department, my department head, David Baltensperger, my associate department head, Larry Redmond, have been so supportive. Most of my appointment is extension, and I go out and I teach people a lot about soil, about managing water, about ways you would cultivate or manage this soil to improve your chances at holding on to water, capturing it when it falls, not letting it go to evaporation or leaching and that kind of thing. And so I’ve done a lot of work with METER equipment to sort of I’m not the kind of guy who just goes, I’m not going to read a book or another extension article or a paper and go out and tell people what I read, right? So I need to live and breathe this stuff. I go work on farms with farmers. Let them show me where my thinking is dead wrong as often as I can, I come back. I rethink everything I’m doing, and it’s made me a much better scientist by listening to our stakeholder clientele, the farmers of Texas, the homeowners of Texas, who are having questions about their lawns or difficulties. And we have so much drought here, and then this year we’ve got so much rain. Either one causes a problem for water management on a farm or around the home on a corporate campus, on an athletic field, whatever METER Group’s equipment has really helped me get some of those answers I’m looking for. And so towards that end, I’ve used the HYPROP system. We’ve got KSAT, the PARIO, which actually something. We have a publication out of those coming up really soon, with one of my grad students who’s graduating any time now, like everything’s done, she just has to walk. Two people got out this year. Layla Jaharzada did so much hard work with the PARIO, and it paid off because it was really related to what she was looking at, which was phosphatase activity, and that being able to fractionate things within the silt bin was the difference. I mean, if we only have three things, sand, silt and clay, we lose something we’re not granular enough, right to tell what’s happening and some of those sub fractions, and using the PARIO system, and separating the sands by hand and then the silts by PARIO, it really illuminated a relationship that we were or didn’t make any sense at all, with just silt as a large bin. I’ve had a lot of fun with this equipment and the technological approaches to getting the job done that METER has used. That’s me, and I enjoy the work that I do, working with farmers, doing a lot of remediation work in the Permian Basin. Also, these equipment has come in handy with that stuff. You know, it’s not just about agriculture, it’s also about the environment and all the things that make Texas an economic powerhouse. There’s a lot of money behind doing things better, fixing any problems we create. So it’s a fun place to work, Texas A&M, I’ll say that.

BRAD NEWBOLD 5:28
Well, good again. We’re glad to have you chatting with us today. What first sparked your interest into soil science, and how did that path lead to Texas A&M?

DR. JAKE MOWRER 5:39
My mom’s has this picture of me, a shirtless four year old boy with the biggest grin possible in our backyard garden, which in Georgia, was iron bearing clay soil, Kaolinitic soil, probably a sea silt clay I’m holding like a pitch fork or something. And just biggest grin possible. She dug that out and, you know, and it’s like a Polaroid or something, because I’m a 53 year old man, she dug it out and sent it to me for like, one of my job interviews, and said, See, you’re always a soil scientist, so I guess I always dug in the dirt. You know, there was something to that. I did enjoy gardening, maybe not weeding, but there’s always something about digging in the dirt and making mud pies. And then someone put some science behind that, right that these mycobacterium vacci are making us happy when we touch soil. They’re increasing endorphins. And I’ve got a podcast coming out on that. It’s called, feeling all right. I guess from there it was a natural progression to chicken farming. Our family chicken farmed, which then I went to environmental health science. See, I wanted to be a print journalist. And let’s all thank goodness that that’s not the degree I got. I did not make it into the University of Georgia journalism school. So like a friend of mine was in environmental health science, she said, You should go there and whatever. So I transferred there, and actually I started doing physics, water microbiology, chemistry, food safety, occupational safety, like it really opened my eyes to what a scientist could do in the world, rather than a journalist, right? And the physics was super cool, because all of a sudden I rediscovered something that always made sense, right? There are rules, there are laws in physics. And that was really, really cool. So I got out of undergrad. Know what I want to do? Soil class didn’t really grab me in undergrad, or anything like that. So I went worked around for a little while. I was playing in a bluegrass band and touring around, and that was making me really happy. So like, having a full time job wasn’t my first priority. Then, you know, I fell off a ladder doing a carpentry gig. My mom suggested maybe I do something with my degree. Look back into that. And okay, I applied for some jobs, and I got a job at the soil lab at the University of Georgia. We used to take our samples there when I was a kid, but I never like it was just two big brown doors, the same doors. You know, a decade later when I went to get a job there, and I finally got to see what happened inside there. And it was great. And I started asking more and more questions, and my boss noticed all these questions, instead of squashing me. He said, a couple of years down the road that, you know, maybe you should look at going to grad school. And I was like, Well, I wasn’t that strong a student in undergrad. He said, give it a try. We’ll see what we can do. Took the SATs. I got up 1520 on my last that’s what it was. If anybody remembers the SATs, I don’t know. That floored me. I was like, Man, that’s great. And then I got in and I started taking and I was a much better student in grad school. We got me in the soil fertility, or soil programs for soil chemistry, soil fertility, and I just took one class a semester while I worked full time. Had my first child together with his mother. She did most of the work of the birthing. Then, you know, I was just plugging away. It took me a little over four years to get a master’s. We went on vacation for the summer, and I was right back in school. We took two weeks off and went down to Destin, and I read this great book called The fellowship. It’s about Isaac Newton and Samuel peppis and Christopher Wren and Robert Hook and the the men who they didn’t allow women to science back then, that was just really bad policy. But the men who created the royal Philosophical Society of London, they call themselves natural scientists, they established what we know now as the scientific method. How do you do scientific inquiry? Right? So there’s steps they established that, and it’s just a crazy story, like we lionize these guys, especially Newton, right? But hook spring law is no joke. That’s that’s a piece of beauty. But anyway, these guys, during the plague in London, escaped to one of their all rich they escaped to one of their country houses up near Oxford. They start playing around. They’re like dissecting dog cadavers and throwing rocks off towers and then throwing rocks down wells and poking each other to see how skin. I mean, they’re doing dangerous things. So it was just like a bunch of college kids essentially pranking each other. That was the way it reads to me, but writing everything down, like, how did that react? And that’s the basis of, like, all the scientific inquiry. Not to throw any shade on the Conservatoire de Paree. They had some great stuff going on too. They are the keepers of the kilogram, you know, no doubt about it. This is a great story, and so I give it to all my students to show them that you don’t have to be a stuffy so and so when you’re a scientist, you can use humor, okay? You can take risks and be safe. Don’t be like these guys, but you can take risks. You can not be afraid to be unorthodox. Use your personality, be yourself, right? And if you can use humor, if it’s your natural way to be, please do it. That’s how I got to be a soil scientist. So then I took a PhD. It took less time than the Masters, because I knew I knew where I was going. I had a mentor, Harry Mills, passed away a few months ago. Was former department head of horticulture at UGA. Ran micro macro international laboratories, where I worked for a few years as their lab manager, more of a mentor to me than anybody else who was a formal mentor. I mean, he shined a light on all the dark corners of how you get a job, you know, how you publish what kinds of jobs you might have. And he told me, Jake, you got a talent for this. I wish you’d keep on going. So that’s what I did. I took two weeks off, and I went back to school, did the dissertation, started looking for jobs, and wound up here. And so I had a few years off in between where, you know, I played in that band, and I was a carpenter, and I was a chef at a French New Orleans restaurant. And so I’ve done a lot of things, and they all served me well, because the carpentry gig yesterday, I was at my home using a drill press and a forstner bit in a plastic block so I could create a test tube holder that just doesn’t exist. You can’t buy one anywhere, right? And so using all those tools, I know how to eat healthy, not because I worked in a French New Orleans restaurant. I don’t use a pound of butter and a gallon of cream and everything, but I know how to cook, and I know how to prepare very nice food and all that stuff ties together with what I do in the laboratory and how I teach it like it’s all just one big smear in my brain, like how my life works and how my research works

BRAD NEWBOLD 12:36
With your role there, with Texas A&M AgriLife, with extension, we’ve had a couple people on who have been involved with Extension programs. But if you could give a little background as to purpose of extension programs, you know, you’re out doing research, doing public outreach, doing, you know, field support, all that kind of stuff. Can you give us a little background into what day in the life might be?

DR. JAKE MOWRER 12:58
Extension is one of the three legs of the three legs of the university system. If you have a three legged stool, right? It stands up. You take one away, it falls apart. So the first congressional act that established teaching agriculture The Moral Act, right? And that was during President Lincoln’s time, which was also during the Civil War, then realized that farmers away from the campuses, you know, this established, this is why we call it land grant. The federal government granted land to each state that was federal land to build a teaching institution that focused on agriculture. Then the next act that was important was a couple of decades later, was the Hatch Act that established research in agriculture to innovate, but also to place research centers away from campus in areas where farmers weren’t getting met by the campus directly, and so they were meeting the needs of regional farmers. So it’s a little drier out west in Texas and El Paso than it is where I live, right big state, lots of different crops and different climate pressures and different needs for research. So in 1914 was the Smith Lever act. And so Hoke Smith from University of Georgia was a congress person who co sponsored that act, and it established extension, which then one way you can look at is it extended the campus professors, the lecturers away from campus and out into the public sphere. So they also call them itinerant lecturers, or something like that. So this person would wander around the state and go teach farmers, learn from farmers, about how to do it better, whatever that means to you, more efficiently. There was the father of extension in the US. Shaymin Knapp famously came to Texas to solve a problem with a cotton disease. He has this statement that says, if you tell a farmer something, he probably won’t believe you. If you show a farmer something, he might believe you, but if you do it with him on his land, he’s gonna believe you. And so that’s what Extension strives to do is to get out there and touch every farmer on their land as much as possible. So we have county agents that are just like your fire chief, your judge, your preacher, whatever, in every community, in every county of this state, just about and in many states still, and they fulfill the role of science educator in agriculture. We also do 4H that’s extension, which is head, heart health and hands for kids to get involved in agriculture, science nutrition. We have family and consumer sciences that help families do their lives better, get more active, design better nutritional plans for them and their families. Balance their books, plan their finances better, and so extension does all of that kind of stuff. Okay. We also in Texas have a group that is just about disaster response, like really getting on top of a disaster right away. And so these things started happening so fast and furious. Who knows why we got tired of mobilizing people, I guess, and it made more sense to just have a group that was ready at a hat, drop of a hat. And so now that we have them, and they are fantastic, they’re former county agents and other admins around the state who are ready to respond as soon as something happens. So they were involved in the floods, the tragic floods in Kerr County, Texas. They were involved in hurricane recovery the fires up in the panhandle. So it’s things like taking care of animals that are stranded, whether it’s livestock or dogs or cats, advising farmers on whether to try and restore the land and replant now, or to do something else first or wait. So after Hurricane Ike, there’s so much salt water inundated the land, and people wanted to plant right away, but it was too salty. They were going to lose all their seed and their fertilizer. So what we advised them to do was wait until the rains and then that seemed to be that was a very simple fix. It was before my time that one. But I’m just really impressed with these people. I’m really impressed with the 4h people too. I mean, just getting kids involved to know where their food comes from, where their clothes come from anyway. So that’s what extension does. And so what’s a typical day for me? There’s no such thing now I’m like, up to my shins and rice, and we got organic cotton, and so we’re looking at reducing methane emissions from Rice through reducing water this intermittent alternate wet, drying irrigation. It hasn’t been really studied well in Texas. So some farmers do it by necessity. Other farmers say they’re not going to be able to do it at all. We’re trying to suss out those threads, tease them apart, and advise people, based on their soil type, what to do, when to re water, those kind of things. What are the benefits going to be? What are the potential drawbacks? What do you need to look out for? And then, organic cotton is very difficult because defoliating cotton so that you can pick it with mechanical harvesters, you know, the leaves won’t fall off on their own in our part of Texas. So we’re looking at a lot of those kind of things. But also, how do we make those soils long term sustainable with living mulches or cover crops in between are adding compost, biochars, that kind of thing making a difference for us, and it does seem like here and there, that kind of stuff’s doing good. I’m trying to get a paper submitted this week by one of my former PhD students, where we actually increased corn yields with biochar, we found better total carbon and active carbon under biochar and composts than we did with no tillage or cover cropping alone. There was an additive effect. It wasn’t always significant.

BRAD NEWBOLD 18:36
Well, I think that’s a great jump into some of the research that we’d like to talk about today. You mentioned, you know, some organic amendments, soil amendments, like biochar, composting, other things like that. What drew you to that topic initially, in your research?

DR. JAKE MOWRER 18:50
Being efficient was drummed into me by my stepfather, who was a command sergeant major in the army, and he ran the family that way. Rest his soul. I so still at home, I turn off the faucet in between when I wet my hands and soap them and when I rinse them, you know, all the things he trained me to do, you know, I try, when I’m putting a fence together, I try not to waste pieces of fence, you know, that kind of thing. So all the things we did on the farm, I still do today. That kind of ethic is just in me. And so I’m thinking about, you know, people are land filling, massive amounts of vegetable waste from farms, from food processing. All this can be composted the way that we treat cow manure, just stacking it, poultry manure. My entire dissertation, I grew up on a chicken farm. My entire dissertation was on chicken litter, the analysis and release and analysis of nitrogen from poultry litter. So I think about all these things, and are we using them correctly? And we’re not the short answer. Spoiler alert, we’re not, but we can always do better. And so I thought I looked around at what other people were doing here. Then one track record I had, and street cred I already had, and so I started looking at manures and compost. Composting manures, bio char seemed to be interesting because a lot of people were interested in it, but nobody else was really working around here on biochar. So I took it up and started playing with it. I was adjacent to some work at Georgia, and I think the group that worked on that really came away from it with the idea that biochar wasn’t was a fad and wouldn’t do anything. And what I have come away from over the years is that biochar is a spectrum of things. You should never just say biochar, because that doesn’t tell anybody anything except for this material was paralyzed instead of combusted. Otherwise. I mean, it’s like, how many different types of roses are there, right? If you say cheese, are you telling somebody, would you like some cheese? You know, would you like a soda? Someone might. What kind of soda. Do you have right? So I don’t have kids. I don’t advocate the drinking of sodas. I just want to be clear, I do advocate the eating of cheese and the sniffing of roses. It’s not one thing. It is a spectrum of things. Some of them are actually going to harm plant growth or harm soil function. Some of them are going to improve it. Some of them are going to be somewhat neutral. So we’ve been playing around over, having a lot of fun, creating it under different temperatures, different durations, using different feed stocks or source, you know, original vegetative sources, and just looking at what happens based on these things, and trying to group them into groups, right? And so I’m aware that structural things that start very structural, like hardwoods, with their honeycomb cells, you know, and the lignaceous tissue, the woody tissue when they’re done. If you do it in a certain way, you don’t overdo it, you’ll have preserved that structure right and condensed carbons down to graphene rings and other aral structures. Ring like structures that are more long lived, they don’t break down as fast, and so in that case, you might have a chance of having some porosity that really does grab onto some water. You start with something that’s not so structural, like waste paper, wheat straw, chicken manure, you’re not going to have that. And so trying to understand what you start with leads to this. And the process in between has the biggest influence on it, where we’re trying to get to with all this stuff so and same thing with compost. I mean, what you start with has a lot to do with what you end up with. You can’t create. There’s no such thing as alchemy, right? You start with something, it’s going to be part of what you end up with. So you’re not going to make anything magic. I started calling it char, because then I realized that in the 80s, the guy from Cornell, I won’t say his name, he coined the phrase biochar, right? And there’s a lot of talk. I think this is why the people from Georgia reacted so strongly. In the other direction, is because it was being held up in the 90s and 2000s as a way to save the world through soil amendment, right? It didn’t really live up to all of that. It’s okay throw out the baby with the bath water. It’s got a lot of benefits, and we’ve been able to show that. And I do think if you can save the use of fossil fuels, don’t burn dinosaurs to make your biochar use this year’s fixed carbon, then the stabilization of that stuff outweighs any input of energy, I think, and the processes become more and more efficient. And there are so many benefits to soil. I see roots grow more than in controls whenever I add bio char and composts, but depending on the bio char again, so, and I just started calling it chars, because that’s what it is. You know, humans 1000s of years ago, they would cut trees around their villages, right? And they burn them for fuel, cooking, warmth, whatever. Well, there’s a concentric ring of missing trees, right? And so they go out and cut another ring of trees. And 10 years later, they’re walking quite a ways, and they’re hauling logs back to the village quite a ways, right? And that’s a lot of calories to spend to get fuel. Now, the amount of calories that they get a fuel starts to become less than they’re spending on it, right? And so somebody figures out that if you just burn the logs out there underground, you know, not combust them, but parallelize them. Somebody figured out, if you can paralyze a log, you can come back out there and get it later. It’s a lot easier to carry back, right? It’s lighter, it burns hotter and longer, and so that’s technology, right? That’s char, that’s charcoal. One thing that annoys me about soil science is we always rename. Things that have existed for 1000s of years and pretend we reinvented it. So I’m careful to tell all my students that, especially the people from India, because somebody was trying to sell neem oil as a new technological advancement, they’re like, No, my great grandmother brushes her teeth with that. They’re trying to patent it. How can they do that? You know, the water saving techniques that are being used in New Mexico, Chile, Mexico, those are from the people who lived there long before the Colombian generation came through. So it’s important for us to hold on to knowledge and not pretend we made something up when we just rediscovered it.

BRAD NEWBOLD 25:40
I’d love for you to get into some specifics of some of the research projects that you’ve done with organic amendments, you’ve worked with cotton residue, you’ve worked with some other ones like you’ve mentioned. Not all char is created equal. Not all char works the same. I’m sure there’s, there’s impacts on your water use factors of you know the soil characteristics, you know soil types and characteristics and and the type of crop that you’re working with. Can you go into a little bit more detail about about kind of the complexity and and some of the results that you’ve seen that kind of address or get at that complexity of being able to use soil amendments in overall final yield or health of crops.

DR. JAKE MOWRER 26:20
Think it’s really important with bio chars and compost that you, they stay close to home. You use something that’s locally available, and you you go take it through a process that is appropriate for that starting material to get to the end with what you want. I’ll talk about the paper that previewed. The lead author was Samir Haddad on that one. He’s Egyptian scientist at many a university, which is right there on the Nile. And he came very excited to work with biochar, and I had already had some experience with it, but I want to smoosh his enthusiasm, or, you know, his wide eyed, magical view of the world. So, you know, we talked about, where would you source stuff? I mean, it’s Egypt, so there’s a lot of desert, and they’re using a lot of water for fava beans and soy beans soil. Beans are almost all used for animal meal, but fava beans are an important part of the Egyptian diet, and so we grew both of those and soil cemented with compost. It was just one with cotton compost and cotton derived bio char. It was gin, basically gin trash derived biochar, which is a waste and it’s landfilled around here because they use herbicides to defoliate. You can’t land apply it as is, or even compost it, because it’s got an herbicide and it will kill whatever you put it on, but bio charring it solves that problem. So that’s pretty good. They do grow historically. They’ve grown cotton in Egypt, they have a real need to save water in their irrigation. There’s no rain fed agriculture in Egypt. So we set about looking at like, how much biochar or compost would it take to really improve the growth and decrease the amount of water that we needed for these plants? And we had some decent results there, but we really need to look at whether we’re actually holding on water. Because you keep using the term water holding capacity, it’s going to increase the water holding capacity. So we can measure that directly with the HYPROP system. So we did that. We had two soils, one was very sandy, and one was a little bit sandy loam. Application amounts, what is equivalent to 20 megagrams per hectare. It was close to 20 tons per acre. We had only a significant difference in the very sandy soil in terms of increasing the water holding capacity and the sandy loam, which should also be low hanging fruit, no difference. No significant difference at all. And so if you have to start putting more than 20 tons per acre of biochar out, you’ve already lost. I mean, biochar is about 0.2-2.3 grams per centimeter cubed in terms of density. And water is one gram per centimeter cubed, if soil is 1.2 of the low side to 1.6 right in agricultural soil. So depending on how you measure it, what kind of soil you’ve got? What happens with biochar is put it on top of the soil and the first one blows it away, or you incorporate it to avoid that. And if you put it into two inches, good, heavy saturation will make it so buoyant that it works its way to the top. I mean, it’s crazy stuff. It’s really light, it’s really floaty. So you have to really incorporate it. And the idea of putting out 20 tons of this very light material, which is equivalent to an entire semi truck load spread out on one acre, then you got to incorporate all that in before the wind kicks up again and you lose it all. So, you know, we think about the practical sides of this. And again, I’m I take the good with the bad. So I’m not going to just, you know, have a knee-jerk reaction say biochar is bad, but the things that I’m learning tell us you need to incorporate this stuff, and if you need to put more than five tons per acre out. So it’s probably not worth your while, right? What benefits are we seeing in agronomically responsible biochar applications and then the salts that they might contain? You know, the research that claimed all these water holding capacity increases were the equivalent of 100 tons per acre. It was the first thing that jumped out at me when I started reading up on this 10 years ago. So that’s never going to be agronomically responsible or possible. So that’s what we found. We found some benefits in rooting, which is going to be very important for water acquisition and nutrient acquisition probably increase water efficient use efficiency just from having more roots stimulated by the biochar without any deleterious effect to the plant top. Matter, if photosynthate is being directed to the bottom, and you’re not you losing yield or plant biomass, that’s a great thing, and it’s going to result in better water use efficiencies. While we didn’t get a direct effect of better water holding capacity, we did see some other things, and those are the things that we need to communicate when we talk about biochar.

BRAD NEWBOLD 31:00
I’d love to talk really quickly about thermal desorption and some of the research that you’ve done with that, and what you’ve seen with with those things?

DR. JAKE MOWRER 31:07
A lot of your listeners will be aware that oil exploration and extraction happens around the world, and sometimes accidents occur, unintended releases. The soil is impacted with oil. A lot of companies view it as their responsibility to clean up after themselves, and one of the ways you can clean up after yourself is to take that soil and heat it really high. But diffusion of oxygen into the soil matrix isn’t always as fast, right, especially in some kind of oven where you’re pulling off gasses to make sure the toxic gasses from the petroleum hydrocarbons isn’t going in the atmosphere just because you’re burning it, right? So you have to be careful, mindful, and take all the waste gasses off and treat them. And so what happens is you get a lot of pyrolysis, just like biochar in the soil. So whatever organic matter is there, whatever petroleum hydrocarbon is there, they start to char. In fact, I’m preparing another manuscript on some proof of that with nuclear magnetic resonance now, but we found that up to a certain temperature, the reason that the company we worked with wanted this done is because the government that they were working with thought that this approach of heating the soil was going to destroy the fertility and function of the soil. Because a lot of research had been done that showed that, and they were wondering if we would go ahead and sort of recreate some of that in a comprehensive way and see what really happened, if it was true or not. And so we did that, and we found that under certain circumstances, particularly degraded soils, or soils that weren’t that great to begin with, once that petroleum hydrocarbon was turned into char, the soil actually performed better than it did before, and certainly a lot better than it did when it had raw crude oil in it, right? That was really some of the first stuff that showed that this actually could improve soil function, and even if it didn’t make the soil better than it was before, it didn’t ruin the soil’s ability to grow. And we showed what you need to do to rehabilitate that soil. In fact, we were the first to sort of show in a paper that if you incubate the soils for six weeks that any of these like real high salt effects or release of divalent nutrient metals that also can be a little bit toxic in high amounts, or high changes in pH, like we had some that were jacked up to 10.5 you’re not going to grow anything in that very well. You incubate for six weeks and simulate what happens with rainfall and sunlight and rainfall and drying out the soil goes back to something that’s actually really fertile, and those toxic constituents are reduced just from equilibrating after that really traumatic experience of being heated up. And so one of the things we looked at in that was with the HYPROP system, doing water release curves on soils and whether they changed or not after this. And sure enough, they did. In many cases, we were seeing what we think was a fusing of clay particles. So we saw a shift of the smaller fraction of clays towards silts and sands, we believe. And we did some scanning electron microscope work to look at that, that the some of the clays were fused together, creating one larger single primary particle, where before, there had been two smaller ones, and that in some cases improved, hydraulic conductivity didn’t necessarily improve water holding capacity. If we were between 350 and 450 Celsius on our treatments, we actually did pretty well with root growth and plant growth. We got up to 550 in some cases, we started to see some hydrophobicities and that kind of thing. So we thought. Really interesting things on water release curves based on temperature treatment of oil impacted soils. One thing that’s coming out used the HYPROP and created these little two prong probes to measure electrical conductivity at the same time to look at during simultaneously with the simulated evaporation method, the change in electrical conductivity as the water level went down, and we got those two tensiometers at different heights in the HYPROP, so we put our probes at the same height, and we measured the solution, and as the tensiometers average that, we averaged the two out right, and then put them on the same curve, and some very cool stuff. So had a lot of fun with that. And again, Layla is going to produce a manuscript on the PARIO divide out sub fractions in the silt and sand and making them meaningful to what we’re seeing in phosphatase activity changes in soil so.

BRAD NEWBOLD 35:57
What are the logistics of a soil remediation projects like this when you’re dealing with thermal desorption. So you have soils that are, you know, quote, unquote, impacted by oil. What is the whole process? Is that soil that then removed from site and just basically baked and then brought back onto site?

DR. JAKE MOWRER 36:14
Yeah? So, of course, they’re looking at things that don’t involve a lot of fossil fuel based excavation, right? Because you’re going to burn a lot of diesel pulling up. It’s a lot of energy to excavate, remove to a facility, even you got to build a facility on site. They’re looking at that, but I haven’t seen anything convincing right now. The gamut runs from like microwaves probes placed underground, like to shoot microwaves in between and heat up the soil, maybe just taking a shovel full and putting it onto a pad right next to the pit and creating a smolder front. So you’re not able to really heat the soil with this pad as much, but you can get a smolder front going to keep the temperature up so that the smolder progresses through the entire soil and burns it that way. It’s called smoldering, strangely enough. And then this thermal desorption is high heat that’s being used in a lot of places. So they’ll bring or build equipment out there, and it’s basically like the square shaped oven with a conveyor belt, and they’ll come take a load on it and spread it out. And then, of course, there’s a depth component, so the heat’s not getting all the way to the center of the pile. So they remove it, and after one pass or two passes, and they re invert it, and they make it through another pass. And these are closed systems, except for where they dump the soil, so that they’re pulling the gasses off, so that there’s no atmospheric contamination. And then once it’s gone through a certain part of the process, based on their observations, they’ll pull it off and stack it somewhere, and then they’ll return it back from once it came. So it’s, I mean, it’s energy intensive, it’s labor intensive, it’s equipment intensive, fuel intensive. But we need to fix our problems, so that’s what these people do.

BRAD NEWBOLD 37:59
The goal is to revitalize, you know, ecological function of those soils, and hopefully making that soil fertile again.

DR. JAKE MOWRER 38:08
That’s an excellent way to put it. We want to restore the ecological function of the soil, yeah, and make it grow things again. Now, of course, a lot of this happened out in the desert, where there’s no vegetation.

BRAD NEWBOLD 38:18
And not going to be growing much out there yeah.

DR. JAKE MOWRER 38:21
But we know that life, microbial life, roots that bring all the microbial life with it, they really do go hand in hand with a high functioning soil. And so even in places where there wasn’t any vegetation before, even in Far West Texas and New Mexico, the rule is that you have to grow something on it, which means you’ll have to irrigate it, restore something with a native plant, if possible. And so a lot of that restoration is going on even in places that weren’t growing those kind of plants to begin with, before they showed up and poked a hole in the ground.

BRAD NEWBOLD 38:52
With the research that you’ve been doing in the projects and your interactions with folks there in Texas, what gives you hope when it comes to the future of sustainable soil and water management in agriculture?

DR. JAKE MOWRER 39:04
Seeing students who care and get passionate about it, I know that a lot of people come into the program with a lot of dreamy ideas about what’s going to change, but seeing them still want to do it, when they realize that it’s going to take more hard work than they can do in a lifetime, that it’s going to take generations of hard work to fix. You know, when they realize that, and that is small, incremental things, just keep don’t stop. Keep doing it. Keep doing it. Keep making small advances. When I see that come into their mind, I realize that, you know, there’s they’ll train another generation, and so forth and so on. That’s what gets me excited. Also making seeing a new piece of data that’s got a cool outcome, I get really excited by that.

BRAD NEWBOLD 39:49
What are the next big questions that you’re hoping to tackle?

DR. JAKE MOWRER 39:52
Water is a big thing in Texas, as my boss, Larry Redmond, says, Every drop of water in Texas is already spoken for. We need to get very serious about water infrastructure. The legislature has passed, I think, $20 billion over the next 10 or 20 years. I need to get those numbers straight, but it’s a very recent thing for water infrastructure. And so there’s going to be some water storage, some engineering solutions and all that. But our rice farmers. Rice is a big thing in Texas it takes a lot of people don’t know that, but these are five generation, six generation families. It’s not like other diversified farmers. These people just want to farm rice, right? A lot of farmers will go through whatever rotation works for them. These people, these people got rice in their bones, right? We’ve gone from 600,000 acres less than 20 years ago to 150,000 this year. That’s massive loss, and it’s all because of water rights, access to and cost of water. So a lot of people always relied on rivers, but rivers have been shut out for three or four years now. And so if you got a well, $600,000 per well, if you got a working well, you can grow rice this year. And so that’s why our acreage has gone down. And finding a way to reduce the need for water without reducing yields. A combination of approaches, you know, breeding high yield rice that can use less water, stress resistance, finding the right cultivation practices that go along with alternate wetting and drying policy and decision makers who give you know about rice farmers who were here long before that cookie cutter subdivision outside Austin needed two rice farmers worth of water. Making Sense across the board would be pretty good finding ways to help them do better. Rice is just such a cool crop. We had peanuts and soybeans and cotton and corn in Georgia, but, yeah, I didn’t grow rice when I was working there. I certainly didn’t grow up on a rice farm. Grew chickens. You got to plant them deep to get them to grow. Anyway, rice is a flooded crop, so now this is what’s exciting to me. You’ve got reduced conditions, no oxygen, and really cool things start happening compared to all the other crops, when everything’s submerged in water. And then if you introduce an aeration period in that you know, it’s like flipping a light switch off and on for a little bit. I always think of it like a black light. Right when you turn off the regular light, turn on the black light, all of a sudden, you see things that weren’t there in the room before. That’s the way I always see redox conditions. You start to get soluble iron. You get solubility changes in toxic heavy metals, which can be taken up by plants and those kind of things. So for good or bad, that’s what I’m committed to studying for the next three years, because we have funding for it, and graduate students committed to it. I’m still waiting to see my first Gator out in the field. But as a chemist, I’m excited to look at these redox changes and how they’re going to make a difference, because it won’t happen in the other crops.

BRAD NEWBOLD 43:01
With all this research and other projects, where can our listeners and audience be able to follow up on what you’ve been doing, both in and outside academia?

DR. JAKE MOWRER 43:10
So I have a web page, soilcrop.tamu.edu forward slash people, because I am one. Forward slash, mower, dash, Jake, forward slash, and my last name is spelled M, O, W, R, E, R, so at the bottom of that page, you will find some select episodes of my song or the soil podcast, where I combine music with soil science teaching and we cover interesting things like vertisols, which are shrink, swell, clays that are black. And I pair it with song black land farm, or 1959 number one country hit. I went and interviewed Frankie Miller, the author and first performer of that song. It’s been covered many times over the years. We talk about vertisols. Then there’s forensic soil sciences. Episode Two, we talk about how to solve crimes with soils. And it goes all the way back to Sherlock Holmes, but it’s all the way up to, you know, this mud was in the guy’s tire. He had to have been at that quarry. Doo. Doo doo and I pair it with digging in the dirt by Peter Gabriel, and then extraterrestrial soils where, where there’s a whole big, huge area of soil science opened up into studying soils on the Moon and Mars and other planets, because pretty sure we’re gonna wind up getting out there and messing those places up someday, too. And so we need to know how to grow our own food out there. And what’s, what’s the science behind that? And it’s not very easy, because turns out, there’s no organic matter on the moon. We’re going to need that, right? Did anybody read that story of The Martian? Don’t the amount of potatoes he could grow with just his own fecal matter? That’s never going to work. So he would have died. But. Everything else was technologically accurate. All right, so that’s it. Come to my website, soilcrop.tami.edu./people/Mowrer-Jake/. Listen to my podcast too. If you enjoyed this at all, that’s on you.

BRAD NEWBOLD 45:16
That is an amazing plug. And definitely, we would invite any in our audience to go check out Jake mauer’s own podcast, Song of the soil. Is that correct? That’s song of the soil. All right. Well, I think that’s gonna wrap it up for us today, Jake again. Thank you very much for your time. I appreciated the chance to chat with you and this discussion.

DR. JAKE MOWRER 45:36
Yeah, well, thanks for inviting me, and if you want me to come back and talk for another hour and 10 minutes, I’ll do it

BRAD NEWBOLD 45:43
100% and if you in the audience have any questions about this topic or want to hear more, feel free to contact us at metergroup.com, or reach out to us on x at meter_env and you can also view the full transcript from today in the podcast description. That’s all for now, stay safe and we’ll catch you next time on We Measure The World.