Above and Beyond: Redmond Agriculture, Soil Samples, and the Human Factor

This is a really cool story that I wanted to share with all of you readers.  It would normally be a really mundane thing that I wouldn’t bother sharing because most people don’t care about soil tests, but the human element found its way in and that changed things a bit.

The mundane thing that is part of the story is ever since we started our farm, we’ve been doing things as regeneratively as possible so that we can improve our soil health, increase our grass yield, and provide better meats for the local communities.  We bought the property in December 2022, and the property was previously used by horse breeders and enthusiasts and so part of the property was stomped almost bare except for the roughly 5-6 acre hay field.  That hay field came with records of fertilization from the previous owners who were meticulous in their record keeping.  They fertilized twice per year with NPK (nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, for those in the audience who are not farmers), and they also sprayed weed killer to keep stickers out of the hay field.  The hay field was last fertilized and sprayed for weeds in February of 2022, and then hayed 2-3 times before we bought it.  No chemical fertilizers have touched in the last 3 years.

In March of 2023, we added our first Dexter cows and grew our herd to 8 by May 2023.  We let them free roam and didn’t do rotational grazing with them the first year, but we did rotationally graze our first 2 batches of chickens (100 total for the year).  We also had a small herd of 5 goats and 3 baby goats for 2023 just for weed control, grew out 3 hogs, and then added 7 piglets mid-year to grow out 4 for breeders, and 3 for the next batch of meat.  Everyone was allowed to free roam fenced portions of the entire 10 acres with no restrictions.  We didn’t fertilize the hay field, but we did cut it and got a whole 5 and ½ bales off of it.  In comparison, the previous owner would get 25 bales at each cutting with fertilization.  In March of 2023, I used a water test kit and tested for various contaminants including pesticides and fertilizers in the stock pond and in our well water.  Everything came out clean, and so I felt confident in what we would be able to offer as clean meat.  (My previous career, I was an Environmental Health and Safety manager and testing is just a part of me that needs to know what’s going on).

Now, our first year, I didn’t conduct any soil testing, but in January 2024, I did and that established our baseline after basically resting the soil for a year from any inputs and just adding a small handful of animals.  I selected Redmond Agriculture for the affordability of their test, the scope of the test, and because I like their myriad of livestock products, and their Real Salt for cooking.  Our first soil test showed us to be extremely high in Calcium, Phosphorus, and Potassium, which is to be expected after so much fertilization.  We were deficient in Iron, Sulphur, and Boron, and everything else was in an optimal range.  Nitrogen was ok, and the pH of the soil was optimal, but could be better.  In January and February 2024, we seeded for cover crops with about 10 different species of plants and seeded for tetraploid rye grass (a breed of rye grass that just seems to grow out of thin air during the cool season).  In March, we started rotationally grazing the cows and the meat chickens behind them in May.  

We had SO MUCH GRASS take off last spring, it was unreal.  The cover crops did their thing, and man the cows LOVED it.  Our property was so thick in forage, I really hope to see it happen again this year, but I think I’m getting ahead of myself.  We raised 200 meat chickens and 26 turkeys for the year, and rotationally grazed them.  For raising so few birds, we really were only able to utilize about an acre or so of our property for them over the course of their lives.  Our laying hen flock of about 100 was just allowed to free-roam our backyard and the adjacent hayfield as much as they wanted, roughly about an acre or two total. 

When the summer heat hit in about mid-June, I noticed our cows really starting to struggle out in the sun without any shade (there are literally no trees on our property except for one corner with 1 giant oak tree), and we didn’t have the funds to build a mobile shade shelter for them at the time, so we decided to end the rotational grazing for the cattle for the summer and just let them seek out the pond and the shade in the corner for the summer and fall.  We continued the rotation of the meat chickens because they were under mobile chicken tractors with misting systems.  The piglets that grew up from the previous year were kept in grow out pens in our barnyard (roughly ¾ of an acre) and were rotated between pens every 2 months.  We hired an organic fertilizer contractor (Dave from Big Little Farm in Fort Worth) to spray twice in the fall with his organic compost tea mixture using fish emulsion, sea kelp, and molasses.  The fish emulsion is a slow-release nitrogen food source for plants, the sea kelp helps replace lost minerals, and the molasses feeds the soil bacteria.  Ever wonder why dirt smells like, well, dirt?  Why it smells earthy?  That's a bacteria species you smell called Bacillus megaterium.  In college, when I took Microbiology and we did our lab one day with Bacillus megaterium, the whole lab smelled like soil, and there wasn't a pot of dirt in sight!  I also know what E. coli and other bacterium in mass blooms smell like and know when we have a sick animal based on the smell coming from them.  Things you never thought you would learn or ever use, much less on a farm!

Now, my curiosity was starting to get to me and I couldn’t wait to do another soil test in January 2025 to see what, if any changes occurred in our soil from the previous sample.  We didn’t expect much, especially because we hadn’t done more than a month and a half of rotational grazing with the cows.  But something we had noticed was that the first year in 2023, using our electric poultry netting around the meat chickens, it was nearly impossible to get the metal spikes of the netting posts into the ground because the soil was so severely compacted.  We had to use a mallet to drive EVERY single spike into the ground and do it again every day as the birds were moved.  However, the 2^nd year in 2024, we noticed that we didn’t have to use a mallet at all, and the spikes glided right into the ground with very little effort.  Another thing we noticed in 2023 was a huge amount of Mare's Tail and Thistle (types of weed with a large taproot) took over the property.  Those taproots helped to break up the soil and alleviate the compaction and increase air flow to the soil and grass roots, as well as some of the cover crop species we planted had taproots as well.  The reduction in compacted soil was our first inkling that we were on the right path to repairing the soil on our property.

We were already noticing multiple improvements to the soil after a year.  Lots of other weeds moved in during 2024 including Wooly Croton (aka Dove Weed) and Ragweed.  If you've been following regenerative agriculture at all, you'll know that weeds are your friend and not your enemy because they're there to repair your soil.  Just let them grow, and they'll go away with time.  Our problem was, we had so many weeds take over in 2024 that we noticed their canopy was restricting too much light to the grass below, and so the grass died, especially in our back 2 acres. We added more goats to our herd and even with now 18 goats, we still didn't have enough mouths to keep the weeds trimmed back!  We wound up mowing the back two acres late in the year and letting the weeds decompose on the ground, also a strategy to improve soil health because those weeds draw up nutrients with their deep roots and then they can decompose closer to the surface and feed the grass later on, as well as add decaying organic matter.

When I gathered my sample in January this year, I also noticed that the soil sample was a heck of a lot darker in color than the previous year.  That was a sign that we were improving the amount of organic matter in the soil, or carbon.  The sample I collected consisted of 7 samples from all over the property, dug 6 inches deep, mixed together in a bucket, and a small scoop was used to place the sample for the lab.  At this point, I was really starting to get excited, especially after seeing the color change in the soil from plain red sand to much darker brown sand!  I shipped the sample off, waited a week, and got an email that our results were ready.  I excitedly opened the email and read the results.

We were now deficient in EVERYTHING across the board except for 3 nutrients… and not just a little… A LOT declined.  What the heck happened?  This was supposed to be a regenerative operation and adding nutrients back to the soil, not completely zapping them in a year!

Great, now what?

The explanations started running through my head… was the test mixed up with someone else’s at the lab?  Did the 10 species of cover crops we planted require such a diverse amount of nutrients that it zapped it all in a year?  Was the very fist sample we took in 2024 incorrect and is this new result what it actually was like the previous year?  I needed to get some feedback from someone who had been doing this longer than I had.  I called Dave, our organic fertilizer contractor, and shared with him the sample results.  He was stumped, too.  Nothing added up.  He took a look at a few resources and got back with me at a later date.  More on that later.  I was terrified that I was going to have to add some major soil amendments to correct the new issues, a big one being pH because the new sample showed that it had dropped so severely that nothing would grow.  That meant adding about 10 tons of lime, 1 ton per acre to get the pH back to where it needed to be… that was enough to give me a heart attack!  Lime isn’t expensive, but figuring out how to spread THAT much was going to be a challenge.

While Dave was doing his research, I did my own as well.  I couldn’t find anything online that gave me any answers, so I made a post in a Regenerative Agriculture group on Facebook with 10’s of thousands of members.  Let me rephrase… I held my nose and made a post to the group asking for ideas.

I hate making posts to online forums, especially Facebook.   Facebook groups, once they reach a certain number of members, seem to become a cesspool of bots, trolls, and just plain old degenerates, and I had seen many posts in this group over the last year that indicated that it was a pretty toxic group of individuals with no admins or moderators to keep it civil.  So I posted anyway, and hoped I would get some insight from a small few.  The overwhelming answer was that the test was likely wrong and I should send in another sample to a different lab or have Redmond re-run the sample if they still had it.  The other 20% of answers were just trolls and over-inflated egos that made me waste 5 minutes of my time reading each of their dumb responses.  The number of responses became overwhelming and I turned off comments after a day because every single member wanted to beat the dead horse with the same answer: get another soil test done… or troll me.

To my surprise, an employee of Redmond (the company we sent the soil sample to) saw my post and sent me a private message with their cell phone number.  Karson was his name, and he was an absolute pleasure to speak with.  Since he worked for Redmond, he offered to contact the lab and have them analyze my sample again, or send me a new soil test kit and run the sample again free of charge if they didn’t have any of the original sample left.  After about a day, he contacted me again and let me know that a new test kit would be mailed to me.  I received not one, but TWO free sample kits in the mail about a week later (soil test kits are $40 apiece).  Karson had gone above and beyond, and I was more than thrilled with this company that I had already really liked because of the quality of their mineral products for our animals.

I still had the sample I had collected and sent last time, so I put together another scoop of dirt and sent it in to the lab.  Another week goes by, and I get an email with the results.  It turns out that this sample was much more in-line with what we were expecting with very few changes, very little decline, and a couple of tiny improvements to other nutrients in our soil.  All of it is within reasonable error from my collection locations from last time, all of them were approximate to the locations of the first samples in 2024.  At least it wasn’t the drastic, oh my God, the world is collapsing around our property results that I saw in the first test I sent for the year.

I called Dave and let him know that things were not nearly as bad as we first thought.  He was relieved because he was afraid I was going to drop him as a fertilizer contractor because his product was hurting and not helping.  I explained that I knew for sure that this wasn’t the case because if the soil had developed these deficiency issues, it was over the course of the full year, and not in the 2–4 months at the end of the year that he had done fertilizer applications for us.  He had also done some research on his own, taken another certification course, and hired some consultants just to double-check his product.  He had to make some minor tweaks to his operation, but nothing major. 

If anything, from this whole thing I have a couple of takeaways to help us continue to improve our operation.  First, if things are off, always do another test.  That’s pretty easy.  Second, an organic matter test might be something to consider in the future, though from what I can tell from just an eyeball of the sample I collected, our organic matter has increased for sure and might be 1-2% compared to last year.  A healthy goal is 8% and will take years to build up the soil to acquire.

Changes that I do need to make to how we manage our grazing include moving our laying hens into the rotation behind our cows.  It’s something I didn’t do the last 2 years because I thought that meat birds behind the cows would be enough.  We haven’t had an increase in demand for our chicken enough to justify adding more to build soil behind the cows, so this year in order to accomplish that, I will be adding the laying hens in the rotation instead of letting them free roam the backyard and adjacent pasture.  We also plan to add our meat pigs in rotation behind the cows and in front of the chickens.  This was also something we didn’t do last year because we only had 3 meat pigs and there was plenty of grass for them in the barnyard pens.  This year, we have 6 pigs, plus another litter of 4 we just had this week, so we’ll have plenty of pigs to rotate.  The last big additional change this year will be keeping the laying hens rotating through the winter on pasture as well.  This winter, they’re being rotated on our 1/3 acre garden in quarter sections where they are spending a month at a time until mid-March.  Our garden has been the most deficient area of the property (as we found out from our neighbor last year that it was previously intended to be a sand arena for horses by the last owner) and literally nothing has grown in it 2 years in a row.  So, we’re letting 120 birds camp out there from November to March and hopefully that will supercharge the soil and we’ll have a decent veggie crop this year.

One last thing about Redmond.  This whole post is intended to be a shameless plug for them and for Karson, and it’s well deserved.  I already really liked their products, and I had heard great things about them as a company and that if you could choose a company to work for, it should be Redmond.  Karson showed us just what that meant, and taking care of your customers on your own without them reaching out to you for customer service, is the pinnacle of true customer service.  I am proud to use their products and services and I love the quality of their Redmond Goat Mineral (I switched to it, and it solved issues we were having with our does short-cycling and unable to get pregnant this past fall), the Redmond Conditioner volcanic clay solved our fly problem in our cows (thanks, Steve Campbell!), and we use their Redmond Real Salt in our own cooking.  I even make my own electrolyte water using their salt and it’s the best substitute for Gatorade there is, and I can work outside in the “100 and hell” temps and not get exhausted if I’m sipping on this salt water mixture.  Also, all of their products are mined in the USA in Utah in ancient sea salt beds, so no need to worry about contaminated minerals for yourself or your livestock from China!  (We made our cows sick last year on cheap mineral blocks that were tainted with toxic levels of cadmium, we later found out were from China).  Thank you, Redmond, and thank you, Karson for being the example of a good company with a superior product.  Hopefully, this write-up can help return the favor!