Today we sit down with Linda Poole, a rancher and the working lands director at Western Landowners Alliance. As working lands program director for the Western Landowners Alliance, Linda is responsible for the implementation and coordination of initiatives to support on-the-ground stewardship, public policy and economics of working lands.  

Prior to joining WLA, Linda worked with nonprofits (The Nature Conservancy, NCAT Soil for Water), agencies (Washington Department of Wildlife), research institutions (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Oregon State University) and landowner-led groups (Ranchers Stewardship Alliance) to advance practices beneficial to the lands, water, wildlife, people and resource-based economies of the West. 

Linda grew up horse-crazy and wildlife-obsessed on her family’s cattle ranch in north-central Washington. She holds Bachelors (Environmental Science, The Evergreen State College) and Masters (Wildlife Science, Oregon State University) degrees. Still wildlife-obsessed but now sheep-crazy, Linda and her border collies and livestock guardian dogs care for colored finewool sheep, laying hens and sometimes cattle on a prairie homestead south of Malta, Montana. 

In 2023 Linda was awarded a Field Work Project grant from the LOR Foundation. This grant allowed her to experiment with different ways to use waste wool to combat water scarcity and improve soil health. Let’s dive in to hear what she learned from these experiments. 

Listen

Links from this episode

Field Work Projects from the LOR Foundation

Best management practices: Johnson-Su composting bioreactors from New Mexico State University 

Watch: Johnson Su Bioreactor how-to video

Regenerative Agriculture Podcast: Microbial Communities for Carbon Sequestration with David Johnson

Nicole Masters, founder of Integrity Soils

Transcript

Linda Poole: I think I’m about to make a new word, bio allegiance, you know, just being allegiant to and aligned with how nature would do things and how to put that into the context of bio allegiance.  The future, what’s ahead of us is, looks like it’s going to be so different than what’s behind us. 

Christina Wernikowski: Welcome to the On Land Podcast, the voice of stewardship in the American West. I’m today’s host Christina Wernikowski with Western Landowners Alliance. I recently had the pleasure of speaking with my colleague, Working Lands Director Linda Poole.  Linda has a small sheep operation just south of Malta, Montana and in 2023 she was awarded a Field Work Project grant from the LOR Foundation. This grant allowed her to experiment with different ways to use waste wool to combat water scarcity and improve soil health. Let’s dive in to hear what she learned from these experiments.  

Linda Poole: I’m Linda Poole, and I’m the Working Lands Director with WLA, but in time when I’m not doing that, I also have a small sheep operation in North Central Montana that I call Prairie Shepherd.  

Christina Wernikowski: And Linda, tell me a little bit about the LOR foundation field project you’ve been working on. 

Linda Poole: My LOR foundation field project, I called Sheepish Solutions to Water Scarcity, and it’s because when I run sheep on this place, what I recognize is that the single most important thing is soil health. 

It’s catching and holding more water and soil, and I do that first and foremost through the management of the sheep on the property to build soil health, but that only goes so far. Towards, um, being able to resolve issues that have to do with long-term management of this property. And so, what I did in this project is on beyond what I can do through good management with my sheep. 

I investigated using wool, waste wool, from my fine wool sheep to create high fungal compost that can build soil health.  

Another part of it is making sure that I reduce the inputs that come from outside, especially anything that’s petroleum-based. And one of the situations with the type of compost that I’m building is that you use weed barrier cloth, and that’s is typically based from plastics, petroleum products.  

It has to be bought. It’s manufactured overseas. Is there a way to use my waste wool to do what that would do? Same thing with erosion-control cloth, which is something that’s used a lot of times when we are doing low-tech, process-based restoration. We will use some of this fabric to be able to control weeds and stop erosion until plants can take the place of it. 

And so really what I was trying to do, my goal was to create wool-based products that could replace anything that I had to buy from other places.  

Christina Wernikowski: So, when you’re using the waste wool to do just that, are you putting that wool through any sort of process or are you just using the waste wool as it comes off the sheep?  

Linda Poole: Yeah, well, it depends. When I’m building the Johnson Su bioreactors, I’m using the wool as it comes off the sheep. And the dirtier the better to incorporate into the materials that are inside the compost. That’s pretty standard. And like I say, the dirtier, the better. We call them tags. It’s what comes off the back of a sheep or on their bellies when they lay down. 

I also, though, use the loose wool to create a sweater around the compost heap, because that’s part of what that petroleum-based weed barrier cloth would do is it holds in the compost. It also helps with the management of airflow.  and moisture retention. And wool is far superior.  In terms of both those things to anything that I can buy, they just don’t make anything that’s as good as wool for being able to both allow air to move and moisture to stay steady. 

That was an important piece of what I did. With that, with the wool that went into the Beaver dam analogs and the post-assisted log structures that I have, I tested several different ways of using that wool, so none of it was run through a machine. Some of it was simply just loose and packed into the wood. 

I used downed trees from right along the stream, mimicking the way the stream heals itself. A tree dies along a stream, it falls down.  It creates a barrier that slows the flow of water. It catches silt, restores the topography back up. And helps with the stream to have stream bank storage of water and, support riparian vegetation. 

Using just loose wool packed into strategic places was one thing that I did. Another thing that I did is there was a lot of old chicken wire left on this place when I bought it 15 or 20 years ago. And so, I dug that out and I made just chicken wire cages that I packed full of the loose wool, and then because the way chicken wire works, I could form it around the plant roots and the branches to further slow the movement of water. 

Not stop it, but further slow it. The other thing that wool does is it is great at catching the higher particulate matter, one thing that I can say, without any trepidation, is any use of the wool that we had is going to increase the rate of silt capture and sediment deposition over and above anything without that wool in place.  

There was absolutely loose wool. There’s the wool that’s inside these chicken wire cages and then I used simple felting processes that have been used. It’s time immemorial of heat and agitation of the fine wool to create felt and I made looser felt, I made tighter felt, I made thinner felt, I made thicker felt and tried all these different things to see what would work best with the least amount of effort.  

It should be noted that a lot of the people who are looking at use of waste wool are using a pelleted system, so and there were other LOR Foundation grantees that did that. That process works fine with all sorts of different types of wool.  A lot of the wool that is considered waste wool comes from meat sheep. 

They’re black-faced breeds like Suffolks and Hampshires. And that wool will not felt.  The process that I’m using is only going to work with sheep that have felting wool. Mine are Merino Heritage and that felts, if you cross your eyes, as you’re working on it, I’m a hand spinner and a knitter and, you have to be careful or it will felt. 

And that turns out to be an important piece of what makes this cost and time effective is start with wool that felts very easily. It can actually felt in place in the structure. Some of the loose wool that I put into those chicken wire cages.  It’s basically felt now after one spring of water running through it. 

It felted itself. It didn’t have heat, but it did have agitation and that was enough to felt it. And so there it stays, you know, so that’s pretty, pretty cool. But the idea with all of this is so much to limit outside inputs and to think about the full life cycle of the energy that’s part of this, because the whole cycle.  

You know, a big part of the underlying issues that we face with water scarcity have to do with how we’ve managed energy in the past.  You know, we can import stuff, we can buy stuff, we can move things from, from overseas over to here for a shockingly low amount of money if you were to really think about what it is. 

And as I’m trying to think about bigger solutions for the West, I always go to what would nature do, or what did nature do, before we started moving things in and out. And that’s the idea of using the trees that would fall into the stream. And the idea of, I can, I have wool right here that is waste. 

It’s over and above the high-quality wool that I can sell for garments and, other woolen-made products, but it’s raised here and how can I put it to the best use? And this idea of trying different ways of using the felt and even the loose wool. And choosing the least intensive option was important and that meant experimentation. 

And that’s why the LOR Foundation came in is because they provided the money to experiment that, I would not have otherwise been able to do.  

Christina Wernikowski: Have you been able to share your successes with other, sheep farmers who are raising garment- quality wool?  

Linda Poole: Yeah. So partly through the LOR Foundation, some of the officers there have been interested in what.  What the work is that I did and that others are doing around waste wool. So, there are a few of us who are talking amongst ourselves about this. 

I’ve been, I’ve been in touch with quite a few of the fine wool growers in the Northern Great Plains, thinking about what can we do with our waste wool. And there is tremendous interest in finding ways that it can be used for soil health purposes to abate erosion. 

You know, a lot of us now are seeing, Increased rates of wildfire, decreased rates of recovery from wildfire. We’re seeing more floods, we’re seeing more droughts, and anything that can help you catch and hold more water. is a solution that we might want to look at. And so, there’s a lot of interest in this. 

It’s just, there’s not a lot of people doing work here in the U. S. There are people doing work in other countries and, pretty intriguing stuff. The idea of making plant protectors, you know, when we are planting, replanting riparian trees and shrubs that have been lost due to drought, wildfire, other things, a lot of times there’ll be a plastic protector that you wrap around them.  

That can be made out of wool. And as it rots down, so for one thing, the tree can grow and you don’t have to worry about it being constricted. When we’re trying to protect those young seedlings, we, we often put like a plastic protector around them. And the challenge with that is you have to take them off or they girdle the tree.  Where they rot and then you have plastic pieces that are around and you don’t want that. 

But if you build something out of wool, it has the advantage of holding the moisture like we talked about, being totally expandable as the plant expands, it just separates the fibers. And as it rots down, it actually fertilizes the shrubs.  So, we have that. My friend Becky Weed, outside of Belgrade, Montana, is, has a build-on, grant with LOR that kind of builds on some of the work that I did. 

She helped me think about what to do with my grant and I’m repaying that by helping her with hers. And it’s so exciting. I created some plant maps, so. Instead of weed barrier cloth around these little things to hold back the weeds on the side, she has created, better than I did, plant mats that go around them, and we’ve planted some chokecherries out using this, and the growth rate of the chokecherries with these little simple mats that, I mean, literally, you can make them in 10 minutes,  with hot water and waste wool and you’ve got, you’ve got your plant mat and it’s like doubled the rate of growth for these little chokecherry seedlings, which is exciting.  

Becky is also looking at what I did with the idea of controlling erosion. I made some mats that I wanted to use to replace, a proper gradient in erosion nick points. So, when erosion comes in these dry prairies, a lot of times what will happen is there will be a nick point that will create a down cut and then it will travel up a stream.  

To fix that nick point, what’s often done is you take a shovel or something and you lay it back so that it’s a gradual slope instead of a drop, a vertical drop, which creates more erosion. You lay it back with a shovel and then you put the weed barrier cloth on there and then you put some rocks on it. 

Anyway, you go through all those things. Well, I made some felt mats, which work great.  to do that and grass was coming up through it. But what happened is that the mice discovered there’s this really cool microclimate place to live, and then the foxes and the coyotes discovered that there were mice under them. 

And so, I would find my mats pulled out, torn apart, and it didn’t work very well. But what Becky did is she took my idea and she said, what if we made little wool pillows that we placed at the base of these, of these vertical cuts.  So, when the water comes down, it hits this kind of a triangular pillow and the sediment catches in the pillow and it hits, runs out slower because it’s running through the pillow. 

And what she’s seen in just a few months of doing this is an astonishing rate of plant establishment in the sediment that’s being captured. So, these are just so exciting to me. And this is where I love the idea of peer-to-peer learning, of people learning together. And the Lore Foundation is trying to do that. 

You ask about, you know, are you sharing this idea with other people? We’re talking about it, but more people talking and thinking, if you just had the mindset of wherever you live, if you’re managing land.  What can you do with the inputs that you already have in place or that you could change simply by changing your management? 

Like I changed my grazing management.  What can you do that would catch and hold more water and soil? And then share those ideas, to just let other people see, hear, think about it, because that’s the key.  Becky thought of what she’s doing because she heard what I’m doing. And now we’re thinking about the next level of what this could be for how to use the wool to help with revegetation after fire, after wildfire. 

How can we use it for that in a cost-effective way? So, it’s really exciting to think about this stuff together. 
   

Christina Wernikowski: That’s really cool. And so just going back to the pillow idea, just to make sure I fully understand. So you place that pillow and then it it’s catching the sediment. So instead of using the shovel as you originally did, it’s catching the sediment and gradually evening that out. Is that correct? And then from there, plants are then coming up. 

Linda Poole: It’s genius.  It’s genius. Yeah, because when you do the thing that I’m doing and what has always been done before in a lot of these systems, maybe most of them, what holds the, what holds the soil together are plant roots.  And when you do this big cut thing, you are, you’re losing what has been helping you hold it together. 

And instead, if what you can do is to let those roots stay there and then have a way that the water is softened when it hits that lower level and any sediment is caught, that manages to miss so that it can restore its own angle of repose. It’s just genius.  And it’s easy, and it’s fun. Yeah. 

Christina Wernikowski: It sounds really cool. And I also wonder, how can you use waste wool and get that into a store? So, gardeners and other landowners who maybe don’t have sheep are aware that there’s an alternate plastic free product and petroleum free product available; that’s also going to nourish your soil. So, is there a future revenue stream there, that with minimal effort could help landowners as well? 
 
Linda Poole: Yeah, and that’s always something that is the next level of what we’re thinking about.  When, when we started this, it was, Becky and I, as we’ve been thinking about it, it was really about how to resolve issues with what we have at hand. Instead of going outside. And so, this is the first level of that. And we’re still making a lot of progress on thinking about the composition of those felt mats. 

The mix, she raises a very different type of sheep than I do. Mine are fine wool, merino type sheep. She raises caracals. which is a double-coated, very ancient breed of sheep. Again, that if you cross your eyes looking at the wool, it will felt, but it’s got a way higher tensile strength and a much longer fiber. 

There are going to be some places where Caracal felt is going to be better and other places where Merino felt is going to be better. And we’re really intrigued at the idea of mixing the two. And in some places mixing in plant fibers. or seeds, so that these things actually turn into seed mats.  I mean, this just general idea of what can two women do with, with wool from their place to catch and hold more water and soil and to build biodiversity that is really foremost in the management of my land. 

That’s what I do with my little 320 acres. It’s all about wildlife and that means restoring biodiversity and hydrologic function. It’s where Becky and I connect. She feels the same way. And so, we’re, we’re coming up with things that work for us. Then if what we can do is think about your question of could this be commercialized in a way that lines up with our basic principles.  

Becky and I both have thought a lot about, about the importance of keeping things local, whether that’s fiber sheds, whether it’s food sheds, we want to keep it within our watersheds as much as we can. And the idea of strong local economies is important to us. So sometimes that works against the idea of, you know, a profitable product that you can ship all over. 

And we’re, as we go along, I’m sure we’ll be thinking about, how to keep our principles in place and also. One of our principles is that agriculture can’t, can’t succeed unless it’s profitable. We have to have black, not red at the bottom of our profit and, and loss statements to be able to continue to do this. 

I’m going to think these are the challenges that entrepreneurs face, right? How do we line up what we want to do? We, what we can do with what’s needed.  And how does that fit in with our worldview and our principles?  

 
Christina Wernikowski: Absolutely. I mean, I think you hit the nail on the head.  In terms of keeping things local. And we’re in such a society now that everything comes from somewhere else. It feels like, and the quality of food that you get is so much better when you eat local, when you eat with seasons. I mean, that’s how we should eat, but we’re, we’re in a time that everything is, is.  Needs to be convenient and needs to be available at all times, but sometimes the best innovation comes from scarcity. 
  

Linda Poole: Yeah, another piece that we haven’t talked about much in what you’re just saying about nutrient value and how we nourish ourselves that is important, and that’s the Johnson Su bioreactor and the compost that comes out of it. This high fungal compost It has an incredibly high diversity of microbes within it, and the higher diversity of microbes result in higher floral diversity, but also it allows plants to access a more complete nutrient diet for themselves in the soil without having to add all these other fertilizers. 

And again, the idea of bringing in imports, just the simple way of how we produce our compost can totally change with the same, with the same constituents that you build it from. The way that we produce it completely. influences the embedded energy in it and the ability of that compost to support life. 

And, and the Johnson Su bioreactors are in my mind and I’m no expert, but, I am just a huge fan for what we can do. I have a fun little test kit called a micro-biometer that allows me to look at the fungal to bacterial ratios and the overall weight of microbes in the soil and in compost and in compost tea. 

And, you know, it’s just been amazing to me. Typical compost.  tested some around with other neighbors and places. Typical compost here will be around 30 percent fungal, 70 percent bacterial. The way that they are doing it is static composting. ou put your compost pile, you clean your corrals, there sits the compost, and then you turn it over every-once-in-a-while with your tractor.  

I don’t have a tractor, so that’s not going to happen with me, and I had to come up with something that’s static. And so, my static compost piles that I built outside of Johnson Su bioreactors are amazingly high fungal.  And I think it’s, I don’t know, I think it might be because of sheep manure and barley straw rather than cattle manure and wheat.  

I don’t know. I’m making that up. But anyway, my standard, just leave it in place for two years and let it age, has about a one to one fungal to bacterial ratio. So. Right off the bat, leaving it sit for so long, I have a pretty good compost, but in my Johnson Su bioreactors that I built with the LOR Foundation, really want them to, to mature for 18 months, and it’s only been a year now, and right now, they are 78 percent fungal and 22 percent bacterial. 

So, I have, three to one fungal to bacterial ratio and a very high microbe, total microbe count.  

Christina Wernikowski: I was just going to ask, can you describe what a Johnson Sue bioreactor is and how you make one?  

Linda Poole: Yeah, yeah. And what I would do is recommend that people do that and I can get you a link to what I think are the best one or two references on Johnson Su bioreactors. But basically the, the standard way that they build it is you have a hoop that’s about six feet across, that’s about six feet tall.  

It sits on top of a pallet. You use PVC pipe to create a matrix of holes as you’re building it. So, when it’s complete and you fill it all up with your composting materials and you pull out those, you pull out the PVC pipes, there is no more than one foot between any piece of that compost and air.  

So, it’s an aerated pile, but you never turn it.  And that’s why it can be high fungal. Every time you turn compost, you’re breaking the hyphae.  So, you’re disrupting and you’re sending it back towards a bacterial type of a compost. The problem with the way that I have done my other compost, where I just put it in a heap and I leave it, is that air can only get so far into it. 

And that means that it takes longer for it to turn into something. Something good. And it can only go so far. With this, the air can get into it. And the other thing that is essential about a Johnson’s Su, and it’s another reason that they put this weed barrier cloth around the outside of it, is managed moisture levels. 

And so, when we’re doing the big heaps of compost, It takes a lot of water, if you’re going to manage it. Most people don’t even bother with that. They’re just like, well, when the rain falls, that’ll be good enough. And when it gets to a certain point, then I’ll turn it.  If what you’re trying to do is to make really high-quality compost in a small space with the least amount of effort, once the doggone thing is built, this is why you would go to a Johnson Su because you put a little sprinkler on the top so that it can just sprinkle the exact area where it, where the compost is and it goes down through the compost. As the compost is created, it heats up really fast. I mean, the next day after I built this, it was 160 degrees. This is northern Montana. It was 70 degrees, and it was just like, wow, that’s hot, that’s fast.  And partly it’s the air, partly it’s the moisture, partly it’s because the way I’m, we mix up and put the materials into the reactor.  But soon, because it gets so hot so fast, soon it cools down, and when it has cooled down, then you put compost worms. into it, which is another thing that sends it towards higher fungal, higher diversity type of compost. 

And in a typical Johnson Su, you try to keep it from freezing. You try to keep it from drying out. You try to, you know, it’s, it’s like tending a baby or like tending a sourdough starter. It has a lot of similarity to a sourdough starter, really. You don’t want it too hot. You don’t want it too cold. 

You don’t want it too dry. You don’t want it too wet. That’s where the wool came in, because the wool evened out all of those things. 
 
Christina Wernikowski: Can I pause you right there? So, are you saying that you replaced the cloth that was originally on there with wool? 

Linda Poole: Yeah, I didn’t put any, yeah, instead of, instead of the cloth, I used wool. I used rebar. What do they call that? It’s concrete reinforcing mesh, so it’s a six by six inch steel thing that was left over from when I built my house, and I made a hoop  out of that, and as I built it, it was wet enough it didn’t come squishing out through the sides,  and then once the whole thing was done, I took another, like, another one of those hoops that was six inches wider all the way around, and then I just  I stuffed it like a sweater. 

Yeah. And then I covered the whole thing with it and it completely let’s alleviate the big swings in temperature and moisture, all this and made it way more doable for me in Northern Montana. The other thing that I’ve done, and I don’t have results on yet because I did it too late, is that those are built so that they’re vertical, which maximizes air flow.  There’s a reason they do it, but in Montana, the real problem is our temperatures two years ago went up to 113 degrees. And the same year went down to 74 below zero.  Temperature is a huge deal. One idea is just, what if you made it horizontal instead of vertical? And what if you let the ground buffer this?  So, you know, back to thinking about how would nature have done this. And so, I built a trench, and I lined it with a foot of fluffy wool, and then I built my Johnson Su stuff over the top of it, put my little, put my little PVC pipes in it, and it’s, and covered it with wool, and it’s aging.  So, we’ll see what it turns into. 

My guess is that it is going to be the superior thing for my situation. But the idea I think that I would like to put out in the world is spend your time in Google and spend your time and talk to neighbors and other people, see what they’re doing, but then really tailor it to what you have on your place, your circumstances, what it is that you have for your major goals.  

And, you know, that’s how come, that’s how come I think my Johnson Sus may be are going to be horizontal things rather than vertical things as time goes along.  

Yeah. And the, the thing about it is how, well, there’s several things about it. One is it’s very space. efficient.  It doesn’t require technology to build it. You have to buy this stuff and, you know, you have to put it together or find it if you live on a place that has a junk pile like I do. 

So, I can repurpose things. Another thing that is really valuable about this is that  a lot of the compost, the way that it is applied is you have to apply the compost itself. And what Johnson Su bioreactor fluid, whether you call it compost extract, it’s really, I think actually should be called tea in this case, um, it can be used as a foliar spray and it’s so power packed and the way that you, the way that you do it, you don’t have to have all these big bubblers and extractors and fancy spray things.  

You get a pound of the, of the. compost that comes out of this and you stick it in a bucket and you pour water through it, you know, like you’re You’ve got some type of a sieve, cheesecloth or something. You pour the water through it. The extract comes out the bottom. It doesn’t have any solids in it. You spray it and it still has the fungal abilities to help with what you’re doing. 

So, you can use it as foliar sprays. In addition to being able to use the compost itself, if you want to do that. And my first adventure in compost applications came in the fall of 2019. Some of my one to one fungal to bacteria ratio, static composted sheep corral cleanings.  Neighbor came and just used a manure spreader and just put it out across, some dry, hay meadows and it was kind of lumpy. 

Yeah.  And it was, pastures had been hayed that year, and so it was chewed down, well it wasn’t chewed down, it was hayed down, so there was like a four-inch stubble.  Compost went across it, and then we got a series of the driest years.  And it just sat there, you know, so much stuff just didn’t do much. 

Well, it finally rained in the spring of 2023.  And from then until now, the productivity on those places where I had just put the compost out. Years ago is more than double what it is on the meadows where I didn’t do that. The leaf widths are twice as wide, pounds per acre at least double, and a lot of places three times. 

And one of the things that’s interesting, it goes back a little bit to talking about nutrient density of food.  Soil guru, agroecologist, Nicole Masters talks about, the bricks levels of plants. So, the amount of sugars that are in the leaf and the higher sugar plants.  are avoided by grasshoppers and along with drought in northern Montana come incredible grasshopper populations. 

And Nicole has said, you know, if you could go out and do some type of a foliar spray or if you have put compost out, something that will boost the bricks-like levels of your plants, that then those grasshoppers. should go there last, that they shouldn’t want it. And it was not until this year that I saw that and where I saw it the most is where I had not put compost down, but I had. 

sprayed twice last year, this juice, you know, just weak juice out of an incomplete bioreactor, sprayed it out there. And it’s like, even now I can go out there and the grasshoppers, it’s like this big, tall, really lush stuff. And the grasshoppers haven’t eaten it.  It’s weird. It looks like the most delicious stuff out there. 

And the grasshoppers are like, no, I don’t like it, but it has to do with grasshopper gut physiology. Nicole could explain it, but it is so much fun to see.  

Christina Wernikowski: That’s amazing. I’m wondering, can you explain, why is it better to have higher fungal versus higher bacteria? What are the benefits there? 

Linda Poole : Yeah, well I’d be happy to try, but I’m no, I’m no soil expert on this. 

What my understanding is on this is that what we’re trying to do in boosting the health and diversity and Climate resilience of northern prairie ecosystems is we’re moving from, more from bacterial-related microorganisms to have a higher rate of fungal organisms. 

And the reasons behind that. are that the fungal microorganisms, the hyphae, the little tiny roots of mycorrhizal fungi, create a liquid carbon pathway. So, the plants capture the sun and they create carbon, they sink it into the soil in the form of sugars, and those hyphae are able to take those sugars and they create an economy of exchange of nutrients, of water, of air, and what it really does is it creates an architecture of life underneath the soil that, that these hyphae are so much more geared to this than a straight, bacterial system. 

What we see with areas that have been heavily impacted, overgrazed, that have a lot of invasive grasses, that are like cheatgrass, that are only photosynthesizing a short period of each year and then, and then the ground sits there fallow, is that you see a very high bacterial ratio in our land.  more diverse systems that have, that have perennial plants and have a diversity of grasses, forbs, shrubs, and trees, there’s a higher fungal ratio. One technique for helping create diversity in your above-ground plant system is to have this higher fungal ratio. bacteria, higher fungal compost that you can apply. 

And it, it really does feel a little bit like magic because the first thing that changes is the infiltration rate. And that is all about, it’s right back to what David Johnson and Weiqing Su talk about the reason for their bioreactors. It’s creating a situation where air and water can contact the soil surface, and then the microbes can be active. 

And whether you’re doing that. through the construction of your bioreactor, or whether you’re doing it in, you know, by the way you manage your plants and your soil that’s in situ, you know, that’s out there on your rangelands, it’s the same thing. And, you know, And the fungal part of this is just, seems like a little bit magic for how it can create this architecture where air and water can move and then nature starts to fix itself.  

Christina Wernikowski: It’s creating a network below the soil in order to spread the love of all of the, the nutrients in the water. It’s the internet of the soil.  

Linda Poole: It is, it is. It’s some, it’s, you know, it’s, it’s an, it’s an internet because there is definite communication. It’s also architecture because. You know, it creates these structures, these airspaces, and these, and these pathways where nutrients and roots and things can, can work. I’m a terrestrial biologist by training and this whole understanding of the complexity and, and the miracle of life that is below soil, I tell you, it’s like, I wish I was 20 again, because I would be a soil scientist, because this is so fascinating. 
 
I think I’m about to make a new word, bio allegiance, you know, just being allegiant to and aligned with how nature would do things and how to put that into the context of bio allegiance.  The future, what’s ahead of us is, looks like it’s going to be so different than what’s behind us. 

But if we’re allegiant to the processes, that will allow us to, to make the changes that we need to make, to be adaptive to this new situation that we’re a part of, because I mean, that’s what drives nature, right? It’s survival, survival of the fittest.  How can we, how can we adapt? And a big part of that, that we have.  

I guess maybe it’s biomimicry too, is that when we have these networks, where we can share this information, and when we have redundancies.  We used to say that, you know, the most important thing was to be efficient.  

The most efficient way to do something is to do one thing and do it really well. And that is to be efficient. like a prescription for not being resilient to changing circumstances. So, I’m in favor of redundancy right now, and the idea of, of sharing the information that we have and recognizing that  the solutions are not going to come from the top.  

They could, but they’re just as apt to come from the side or from way back in history.  And how cool is that? You know, it gives me hope. 

 
Christina Wernikowski: I don’t want to take too much more of your time, but I do want to ask what are the long-term goals of this project and how do you envision it impacting the larger community?  

Linda Poole: I think that’s always the, the biggest question and hardest to answer, but it comes back to what my principles were that I even started it and that is how can we create local, durable, respectful relationships with the animals, the water, the, you know, with anybody that we share this place with. 

And what that means to me is, is fiber sheds, food sheds, within watersheds, as much as we can, to minimize outside inputs. And to always think about the low input high return ways that we can catch and hold more water and soil. And to me, that is always going to start with our on the ground land management. 

How do we run our cattle? How do we run our sheep? When, if we choose not to, recognizing that that sometimes always is going to affect how water moves through soil too. And sometimes it’s beneficial, sometimes it’s not. So really, the long-term goals of the project.  are to think about how we can better live in our environment and when we are shepherds and when we have the core principle is wildlife habitat functionality and living lightly on the ground while benefiting our communities. 

That’s what we’re trying to do with the very humble use of waste wool.  

I love that. So well said, Linda. Thank you so much.  I’m, I’m excited to edit this. I feel like there is a lot of great information that you’ve provided and so many inspiring ideas that are really accessible to a lot of people in the West and how they can help improve their land with something that would have otherwise been discarded, which I think is beautiful. 

Yeah, well, and the LOR Foundation deserves so much credit and, and so much of our respect for having come up with funding this idea of just deal with water scarcity. How can landowners across the West tinker around with 10,000 bucks?  And the time that they have to come up with potential solutions. And then for groups like WLA to be able to share that information.  

It’s little done and it’s genius. And I think it’s critical to us being able to thrive in the future that’s in front of us. I’m so grateful.  

Credits

On Land is a production of Western Landowners Alliance, a West-wide organization of landowners, natural resource managers and partners dedicated to keeping working lands whole and healthy for the benefit of people and wildlife. This episode was hosted by Christina Wernikowski and produced by Zach Altman.  

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