(rhythmic rock music) (music fades) - Welcome to "A Shot of Ag".

My name is Rob Sharkey, I'm a fifth generation farmer from just outside of Bradford, Illinois.

As a farmer, I know what's important: Dirt.

We all stand on it, we all love it, but do we know much about it?

Well, today we're gonna talk with Bob McLeese.

Now, he is from Monticello, Illinois, and you're a soil scientist.

- I am.

- Okay, what does that mean?

- What does that mean is I study the dirt, but we don't call it dirt, we call it soil.

- When I was in FFA, my freshman year in high school, Mr. Owen sits a class down and gives us a piece of paper and he says, "I want you to write the definition of soil.

The only thing is you can't use the word dirt."

It's not fair.

- Well, he was a smart man.

So what did you write?

- That's debatable.

Huh?

- What did you write?

Can you remember?

- None of us got it right, I remember that.

None of us got it right.

And I, to this day, the definition is like, it's a makeup of minerals and I don't know what dirt is.

- Do you want me to give you a definition?

- I would love, yeah.

- This is from a soil scientist, soil classifier definition.

Not an agronomist or a farmer or an engineer.

So soil's a collection of natural bodies that occupy portions of the Earth's surface and support plants.

And here's the important part, and whose properties are due to the integrated effects of climate and organisms acting on parent material conditioned by relief over periods of time.

And if you know that, you know soils.

- You lost me like in the first three words.

- I know I did.

I know I did.

(both chuckle) Dirt is misplaced soil, there you go.

- Dirt is misplaced soil.

- There you go, yeah.

- Okay, like a weed as a misplaced plant.

- Yeah, exactly.

- Wish I would've known that when I was a freshman in high school.

You were soil scientist for 35 years.

Why did you get into it?

What was the catalyst?

What's the love of dirt?

- Well, dirt could be sexy if you look at it the right way.

(Bob laughs) - [Rob] Like in the moonlight?

- Well, kinda.

No, I always love maps as a kid and I was gonna major in geography.

Went to Northern Illinois University, and in the geography department there was a professor who taught five different soil classes.

I took intro to soils and fell in love with it.

- Okay.

- And decided that's my major.

- Like, were you a farm kid?

- Well, no, I grew up in a little town, Towanda, right on the edge of town.

My grandpa farmed just a mile outside of town.

So I, you know, worked on the farm, walked banes, baled hay, shelled corn.

- [Rob] Yeah.

- And those farm, you know, jobs back as a kid, but I didn't grow up on the farm.

- So when you graduated from college, did you go right into being a soil scientist?

- Well, my plan was to get a job with the Soil Conservation Service as a soil scientist in their soil survey program.

But President Nixon at the time had a hiring freeze on for federal employees, so I was lucky enough to get an assistantship to go to Michigan State University to get a master's in soil.

So I went to MSU then and then after I graduated there is when I started mapping.

- With the USDA?

- What's the USDA?

United States Department of Agriculture?

- Well, I think so.

Yeah, that's who you were working for.

- Yeah, so one of the agencies in USDA is the Soil Conservation Service.

- Yeah, but you were working with the USDA.

- Right, I was a USDA employee.

- Okay.

When did you work with the South Dakota?

- Oh, the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Oh, that was back in the '70s.

Actually, I need to take back what I said.

When I first started mapping soils, I was with the Michigan Ag Experiment Station, then I was with Bay County, Michigan County government.

Then I went to the BIA, and then I came back to- - What's the BIA?

- The Bureau of Indian Affairs - Oh, okay.

- out on the Rosebud Indian Reservation.

I was a soil scientist with them putting in an irrigation project.

- Okay.

- So it was pretty cool.

- Yeah, it sounds cool if you're into dirt.

- Yeah, exactly.

(both chuckle) - When you're drawing the maps, do you ever just make stuff up?

- No, you can't do that.

- Well, you can.

- You could, but ethically, morally, I couldn't do it.

It was like, I think I know what's over there without putting my hole down, but I need to go over there and just to confirm that what I'm thinking is right.

And yeah, that's just the way you do it.

- So the maps, these are soil maps?

- Soil maps.

- Explain what those are.

- Well, you open up the soil survey report and there's maps.

We have one for every county.

These are the hard copy maps now, and it's just you got an aerial photo background or base, and then all the different soil types are outlined on that map.

So if you wanted to look at your farm, say a quarter section of 160 acres, you could see what soil types are on your farm.

Now, that's all digital now.

You just get on the web soil survey and all that stuff's on the internet.

- The USDA, did they do all the probing or is it like a combination of probing and like the topography?

- Yeah, good question, because what you're doing is reading the landscape.

I like to say that as we were soil scientists, soil classifiers, soil mappers, we were observing nature, putting nature to the question and investigating the phenomena of the natural world, and we're doing that by observing how soils occur on the landscape.

So that aerial photo was our base that we used as a base map, and then we were making observations of the different soils, and then knowing those five soil-forming factors in the definition, that's what allowed us to make the maps.

- So this, is this an example of the probe?

- It is.

Well, this is a profile of a wet prairie soil.

- Yeah.

- And this is the topsoil here and you can see that it's what?

Six, 12, about 12, 14 inches of nice black topsoil.

Then it gets into a gray subsoil.

This happens to be a profile of Drummer silty clay loam.

And you know why that's significant?

- [Rob] Yes.

(Bob laughs) - You should have learned it in FFA.

Well, no, you're too old to learned it in FFA.

Your kids probably learned in FFA.

It's Drummer silty clay loam is Illinois' state soil.

- [Rob] We have a state soil?

- We have a state soil.

- Okay.

I remember in grade school we voted on the state fish.

- And it's what?

- The bluegill.

- Bluegill, exactly.

- Should have been the bass, but anyway.

Did the grade school kids vote on this?

- Well, yes and no.

The Illinois Soil Classifiers Association, a professional group that I belonged to, back in '85 we were looking at all the state symbols.

You have a state bird, state tree, a state fish.

- [Rob] Yeah.

- State flower, and there was one state symbol missing, and that was the soil and that ties them all together.

So the Soil Classifiers group nominated some soils and Drummer ended up winning out.

But through the years, it took till 2001 to get it officially approved.

And FFA kids voted on it, 4-H kids voted on it.

- Really?

- And finally it was approved in 2001.

- Was it hotly contested?

- It was.

- Was the Muscatine crowd really upset?

- There was a Ipava crowd that was really upset, so you know your soils a little bit.

- Well, I'm not a farmer, but I play one on TV.

(Bob chuckles) Something like that.

Okay, where are we?

(chuckles) I know a lot of this stuff because my father-in-law was actually a soil scientist.

You worked with him.

- I did.

- Yeah, Steve Zwicker.

And so, yeah, kind of get it.

Now, you are retired.

- Yes.

- But I think you were doing what he was doing too, so like someone in the country puts in a house, they need a leach field.

We used to just put the sewage line into the field tile and it was great, never had to worry about it again.

- Yeah, yeah.

- But apparently that's a no-no.

- They don't like that anymore.

- No.

- But that was done, you're right, a lot in the country back in the day.

But now, yeah, the soils dictate the kind of system you can or can't have and then how big your leech field needs to be to work properly.

- Yeah, so if the soils are, they won't take in water, nutrients, more compact, then it has to be a bigger leach field.

- Or an alternative system where you can't have a leach field.

An aeration system.

- It's an outhouse.

- Or an outhouse.

- Yeah.

- They work.

(chuckles) - I suppose they do.

(both chuckle) Are you just getting like private calls, people calling you up and saying, hey, because you can't call a government agency to get that done.

- No, and this wasn't something that soil scientists in a government agency did.

It was always a private sector job, and when I retired, I didn't expect I would be doing these, but the guys that were handling Central Illinois retired.

One or two of them died too early, a couple moved away, and I started getting calls maybe five or six years ago to do them.

So professionally, you know, we have to provide that service.

- Yeah.

- And so I do them for installers or private homeowners.

If they're building a new house or they have a septic system that fails, the first thing they need is this soil evaluation to decide what kind of system can you or can't have, and how big the leach field needs to be.

- Okay, as a guy building, and I've gone through the process, right?

It's annoying 'cause I'm like, I just wanna put in whatever I need to do and go.

How important is it to really know the soils when you're putting in a leach field?

- It's very important.

It's either pay me now or pay me later.

If you don't pay attention to what the soils will allow you to do, down the road, you're gonna have that effluent popping out somewhere in the yard, backing up into the tank and into the house and you don't want that to happen.

- No, no.

- So pay upfront what you need to do.

Especially on Christmas.

- That's a unique tie.

- Thank you.

- Did you actually pay for it?

- I did and I don't get dressed up for everyone, but Shark Farmer.

- What do you got on there?

- Well this is a steelhead trout tie.

- Okay.

- Which I've had for probably 40 years, but this is a tie tack.

- That's a tie tack.

- It's a tie tack and it happens to be a whitetail deer dropping tie tack.

I call them scat tacks.

I make them and sell them.

(Bob chuckles) And if you need, you can use them as lapel pins.

Emily, I got a Alaska moose poop lapel pin that would look perfect on a lapel, yeah.

- On my wife.

- Yeah.

- Yeah, or your daughter.

Or you mother in-law.

- Or anybody.

- Your father-in-law probably has one.

- Okay.

Let me collect myself here for a second with the next question.

Okay, how did you get into this?

- Okay, go back to mapping soil.

So you're out there walking across the landscape.

- Yeah.

- Five or six miles a day, cutting across the drainage patterns, drilling 50 or 60 holes, observing the soils, making that soil map.

Well, if you can imagine being out in nature, you're coming across all kinds of interesting stuff.

- [Rob] Crap.

- Crap.

- Yeah.

- And it's like, well, I wonder who left this or what left this?

So you got into scatology, which is the study of excrement or dung.

- You study it?

- You study it, just like animal tracks.

- Yeah.

- Those are two ways to identify animals, animal tracks and animal scat.

- Yeah.

- So, you know, just as our crew's out mapping the soils, we would talk about, well, I found some beaver droppings today, or whitetail deer.

- [Rob] I thought that was always in the water.

- No, no.

- No, the like to- - Where they chop down, cut down their trees, they leave some there, do some.

Anyway.

- Sounds woody.

- Back in the '80s I was working in Vermont and I met a soil scientist from Virginia at a meeting who had some whitetail deer dropping tie tacks.

I thought that was one of the greatest things I'd ever seen, so I bought some from him.

He was selling them a dollar a piece.

And then I bought more from them.

I got home, gave them away, had fun with them.

- Yeah.

- And I called him and said, "Hey Dean, send me some more."

And finally I said, "Dean, do you care if I start making these myself?"

He said, go at it.

So I started a little enterprise called Scat Tacks.

(Bob chuckles) - There's no trademark on?

- I should have.

- Okay.

- I should have.

- I mean, do you lacquer it or what do you do?

- Yeah, yeah.

So you collect and I get people sending me boxes of inventory from all over the country.

- Poop?

- Poop.

Alaska moose, Ontario moose.

- Every once in a while, somebody sends us something nice and we really appreciate it.

You, you get boxes of poop.

- And I appreciate it.

- Okay, but it's not lacquered when they send to you?

- No, it's just that they found it and they send it to me, so I dip it in polyurethane a couple times.

Air dry it, dip it in polyurethane, and then I buy the hardware, the jewelry hardware.

and I just glue it to that.

- [Rob] Does it hold up?

- Well, this one I probably did five years ago or longer.

- That's a fine-looking turd you got there.

- Well, thank you.

(both laugh) - Oh, we talk about a lot of things on this show, okay.

But when they send it to you in a box, I mean, it's poop, right?

Does it like, get bustled around?

- Well, it's a little bit.

If you don't- - You gotta pack it?

- They pack it pretty good usually.

And if you don't take care of it pretty quickly, it can start disintegrating on you.

- [Rob] What's the most unique piece of jewelry that you've made?

- Oh my.

Well, tomato horn worm.

You know what a tomato horn worm is?

- [Rob] They're the big green ones?

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- Have you ever seen their poop?

- I can't say that I have.

- Well, it looks like a little itty bitty corn cob.

(Bob laughs) - You know the problem with you Bob is I never know if you're pulling my leg or not.

- No, I'm not, I swear.

And I've done, well, my daughter, I think I might have mentioned this at one time that when she was maybe two or three years old, she came running in from the garage and goes, "Dad, dad, there's a toad in the garage and it's pooping."

Now, I would've never known what toad poop looked like and as we've actually saw it happening, so I've done toad before.

- [Rob] I bet you were excited too.

- Oh, I was (laughs).

- This toad is poopy.

Get the lacquer!

(Rob laughs) - My kids were great inventory specialists because they would come in all the time with different- - [Rob] Okay, and this is?

- Those are different.

- This is different- - They're all dipped in polyurethane so you can handle them.

- I'm guessing I can.

I mean this- - Well, okay, that's a unique one.

That's dinosaur.

- Yes, it is.

- That's dinosaur poop.

- They're like snowflakes.

- That's dinosaur poop.

- This is dinosaur poop?

- Coprolite it's called.

That's in there, it's got a little, I think it's called coprolite.

- So, okay.

With some of the stuff you can see what they ate.

- Yeah, well that's what scatology is, is it's the study of animal excrement - Should have dipped this one three times.

- to look at their diet.

That actually is a mule from the Grand Canyon.

(Rob chuckles) - Jackass poop.

- That's Alaska moose poop.

- I mean that's a- - That's a neat-looking one.

- It's a good shape.

That's solid, and then it's all put together here.

- Right, yeah.

- Yeah, that's fine-looking stuff you got there.

What's this black one?

Oh, that's raccoon, you got it labeled.

- Yeah, I got them labeled, yeah.

- Filthy little trash bandits.

- They are.

- All right, before we run outta time, do your thing.

This is really cool.

- It is cool.

So and it's a demonstration I've used for years and love it and it really sends a good message.

So if this was planet Earth, how much of planet earth is ocean or water?

- [Rob] A bunch of it.

- A bunch of it, about what percent you think?

- Is it 70?

- Close, it's 75 actually.

- Okay, I didn't know we had a quiz, Bob.

I would've studied.

- So what I do then if I don't cut myself.

- That knife's been around a while.

- It has, and you notice what kind of knife it is?

- Is it Purina?

- It is.

My dad worked for Ralston Purina for 42 years.

- Nice.

- Yeah.

So 75% is water.

- Just throw that out.

- Throw that out, what's left?

- Well- - You gotta be good at math.

- It'd be 25%.

- 25%, now if we- - Again, you're eventually gonna ask something I don't know.

So we should stop this now.

- I'm getting close.

I'm getting close, I think.

- You're damn close.

- So if you took away Antarctica, the Arctic, the mountains, and the deserts, how much would you be taking away of this?

- I don't know, 50%.

- Exactly right, good job.

So you take away 50% of that.

- D'you hear that, Will?

I got it right.

- Here's where it starts getting difficult though.

How much is left?

- Well, 50%.

- 50% of what?

An eighth or a quarter.

So that leaves an eighth.

- See, this is where I didn't wanna get.

- I know.

- Yeah.

Just keep cutting up your apple.

- Okay, so we've got an eighth left.

- Yeah.

- Okay?

Now, if I take away those areas that are too wet, too rocky or already developed, how much of this would you think I'd be taking away?

- Looks like you're cutting off half.

- I'm taking away three-quarters.

- Okay, or three-quarters.

I mean, your cut was not exactly right either.

- It wasn't exact, it was close enough.

So the point is, this is what's left to feed the world.

But it's even worse than that, because if you really look at what's left to feed the whole world...

It's that.

- [Rob] 'Cause you don't plant the mantle.

- Right.

- Yeah.

- You just do the dirt.

- Yeah.

- You're even aggressive.

We don't have that much top soil, but that's- - This is Illinois, it probably does compared to a lot of the places.

(both chuckle) Anyway.

- It is a great example - It is.

- to, you think the entire apple's Earth and literally this is what feeds all the people on there.

- And most of our population doesn't appreciate and understand that.

- No.

- Which is sad.

- Yeah, exactly, and in order to feed people correctly, we gotta have good dirt.

- Right, and we got it.

It's the best in the world right here in northern and central Illinois.

- So, you know, farmers, they completely understand that stuff.

What do you wanna tell people that aren't farmers?

And, you know, honestly, it's not gonna be something you think about every day, but what's important about dirt?

- Well, it does feed the world and we do have the best soils in the world right here and it's a quirk of nature that allowed us to have that.

So just appreciate our soil resources and try to help take care of them.

- How's the books going?

(Bob chuckles) - I was hoping you wouldn't ask.

I've added a couple little more stories to the folders since I talked to you last.

- You're writing one book or multiple books?

- I got a couple working on, works in progress.

- And how long you been working on the books?

- The first one I started, I wrote the preface in June of 1990.

That's a long time, 33 years.

- Okay, is it a long book?

- (chuckling) It's not really.

It's very interesting though.

- Okay.

We had you on the XM show and I told you I think you might wanna, you know, get working on that.

- I need to get my butt in gear.

- Yeah.

You got seven grandkids.

- I do.

- Holy cow.

I've had people on shows before that says the whole purpose of having kids is so that you can play with the grandkids.

Is that true?

- I would mark that up as a yes.

- Really?

- Yeah.

- Are they close?

- Two of them live 200 yards down the road.

- Nice.

- And the other five are within five minutes.

- Oh, wow.

- And our house is like, they're growing up as siblings more than they are cousins.

That's nice.

- Which is really cool.

And their age, the youngest is seven, the oldest is 12.

So we got seven of them in that time span there.

- My gosh, that probably keeps you busy.

- It does.

- Yeah.

- We've got, I think, three ballgames to go to tonight.

- Oof.

(both chuckle) Do you see their eyes glaze over when you start talking about soil?

- Oh no, they come out on these soil evaluations with me.

- Really?

They're into it?

- They love it.

- Yeah.

- That must be genetic.

- I pay them 1% and then maybe an ice cream cone.

(Bob chuckles) - Nice.

Well, I tell you, if people want to find more about your books- (both laugh) or maybe more importantly more about the scat jewelry or just to get a hold to ask questions, is there a place I can go?

- I don't have a website.

- [Rob] You don't have an email?

- They have to show up.

I got email, r.mcleese@yahoo.

- McLeese has three Es in it.

- It does, M-C, capital L, E-E-S-E. - Yeah, generally they put it on the bottom, but you can never trust it, so it's good that you, yeah.

Okay, you've had a very unique career and, honestly, as a farmer I know how important what you do is, right.

So it gives a good understanding of literally how a person like I can do a better job at growing crops.

You're kind of like one of those people that's the unsung hero of the world.

- No, I don't know about that.

I'm proud of the legacy that I helped leave though of these soil reports, because as you say, the farmers use that information and with your GIS systems now being able to bring your soil map on top of your yield map and your fertilizer map, it helps.

- Did you know that when you were doing that, that eventually someday a farmer's gonna look at those maps and then when it gets to a different soil type, their planter's gonna automatically change the population or we're gonna automatically change the rate of fertilizer?

- I think a lot of people thought that that's what it was gonna come to and it has come to that because that's just the way technology advances.

That's just where it had to go.

- Think about the technology advances in scat jewelry that's gonna come.

(Bob chuckles) It's gonna be amazing.

- My grandkids are gonna do wonders, I think.

- Do you ever do a whole, like the cow pie?

- Oh yeah, yeah.

I had a guy bring in, there's bison that are raised close to Monticello and a guy brought in a couple bison droppings for me and I made door stops out of those.

- [Rob] Sounds lovely.

- Thank you.

- Bob McLeese from Monticello, Illinois, thank you for all that you did 35 years as a soil scientist.

Very, very interesting.

Bob, thank you, everybody else, we'll catch you next time.

(rhythmic rock music)