Winter Workshop 2025: Roy Pfaltzgraff on Soil Health and Context

In 2017, Roy Pfaltzgraff was forced to decide between his parents selling the farm and his return to help in turning the operation around. Like so many other farmers, this choice isn’t an easy one. He discovered new outlets, transitioned the farm to serve specialty markets, and is now seeing more profit than ever before. Roy has also found profitability in soil health, without livestock, without cover crops, leaning on no-till and extremely complex crop rotations with continuous cropping in a difficult 14” annual rainfall environment. Roy says, “don’t tell him how to do soil health.” He is making it work on his farm, building soil in his context, with the resources he has available, so don’t tell him it’s impossible either. Roy is a wealth of knowledge, with hours and hours of topics to present on that we did not even scratch the surface on in our workshop. Between growing real and nutritious food, soil health, financial breakdowns for conventional and regenerative farms, plus technology and his work as a research farm, Roy is taking his broad range of experiences and data gathered over generations and breaking it down for audiences to enjoy. This is the first of two videos we are making of Roy from a single workshop, and he still had more to give. At Cheney Lake Watershed, we are farmers and landowners working in partnership with the City of Wichita to protect Cheney Reservoir - the primary source for Wichita's water supply. Through this unique rural-urban partnership, farmers provide the outreach to their friends and neighbors and the City of Wichita provides funding for conservation work in the watershed. For more information on the Watershed: https://www.cheneylakewatershed.org/ For more information, Contact Cheney Lake Watershed at: https://www.cheneylakewatershed.org/c... Chapters: 00:00 Introduction to Roy and Pfz Farms 15:00 Dryland Farming in Western Colorado 22:50 Soil Health Principles 24:32 Mycorrhizal Fungi Function in Soil 28:21 Tracking the Effects of Disturbance on Soil Organic Matter 33:56 Value of Covering the Soil 44:40 Living Roots as Long as Possible 48:43 Crop Diversity and Rotation 48:27 Farming into Residue 52:12 Continuous Cropping 54:01 Perennial Cover Crops 55:40 Questions