Soil Health Orchard Grazing - Walk n Talk

In this video Chuck Schembre is in one of Burrough's Almond Orchards discussing the importance of cover crop biomass management and its implications on building deep soil aggregation. He provides insights about making key observations to determine how much cover crop biomass to graze, and he looks at two orchard blocks illustrating the cover crop before and after the graze with a herd of 700 sheep. Chuck also discusses how to interpret soil health in the field by using a shovel test - analyzing soil aggregation, evaluating residues and root systems, and he provides examples of contrasting soil health found in the cover crop middles which are completely terminated for the nut harvest vs the tree row which has vegetation and very little disturbance year round.