 All right, does everybody have any questions ready? You want to find a share? I have a question for you. Yes, I do. We've got some mics with the directors that they're going to pass around out there. So raise your hand, get their attention. But have your questions ready. We're going to start off here. I think Tom has a question. I do? We'll start with him. Okay. This one is for Dr. Christine. Having to do with the core microbiome within a seed, you talked about earlier? Can you hear me? There we go, there we go. Now we're live. Having to do with the core microbiome within a seed, if I buy seed that was produced from seeds that had insecticides on it, will it affect the seed that I'm planting that has not been covered with insecticides or chemicals? If you buy seeds, it's got insecticides. Yeah, if I bought the seed, and that seed was produced from a plant that had the insecticides on it, will it affect my seed? It'll affect your seed. Anyway, sorry. Yeah, I'm just trying to get a question for you. Yeah, I'm just trying to get a question for you. Understanding the core microbiome of the plant has huge implications, right? Because it's in the seed. Right. So people who keep their own seed and seed that's like adapted plants that are adapted to the way you grow things will find that over time that your seed will actually produce better and better results because the core microbiome is improving. If you're doing things that improve soil health, there will be more microbes that are free-leaning in the soil that will enter the plant and end up in the seed. So you're going to increase the number of microbes in the core microbiome in the seed. Whereas people who are putting insecticides on the other side of the seed are reducing the core microbiome in their plants. Over time those seeds are going to get less... That's much bigger. ...act with this. Okay. And the plant will still germinate and grow, but it won't have very good stress tolerance. It won't be as tolerant to stresses like grout or frost or water logging or any variation on that. Right. It won't be extreme. And it also won't be as resistant to pest and diseases. Okay. So we've bred out a lot of those times inspired reducing the core microbiome without even realizing we're doing it because we've had several generations of selection under very high chemical levels, particularly in world fertilizers. You know, most variety trials where people are selecting varieties of crops are grown, you know, undertaken on a research station somewhere and they'll be able to live in lots of soils. And even that has a big effect on the core microbiome. And so they find that modern varieties of these often times are not fit for purpose, really, in terms of being able to communicate with microbes in the soil. And in my classic example, that is many modern cultivars don't form a relationship with mycorrhizal fungi, for example. Because they just don't see the ability to do that. Thank you. So it's a great question. Or Christine? So do you think your answer is good? Yeah. So do you want to make a comment on that? And I'll give you one of the improvements by the time we're taking your answer. So, any other questions about your Jones? But can the soil be self-sustaining without having removed the risk of grain, obviously? Can the soil be self-sustaining? The question was, can the soil be self-sustaining with removal of nutrients? Is that the same? If you remove nutrients in the grain, without adding any additional nutrients. OK. So can I ask you a question? What is your soil made of? So let's talk about the top width, say, 50 centimetres, what's the width? 18 inches. Yeah. The top 18 inches of your soil. 60 would be 20 inches. 20 inches. There you go. 20 inches. Can you tell me over one... I'm going to get confused here with that. One acre of land and the top 20 inches of soil, can you tell me what you've actually got there? You've got thousands of tons of something, right? I can't tell you how many thousand tons but I can't do it in that interior. It's not soil that you said. But... For 20 centimetres of that air, 25... OK. 30% of it that is soil is going to weigh several thousand tons. You've got several thousand tons of something per acre. What is that something? Not the air, not the water. What is that 50%? And there's tons of it. There are several thousand tons of stuff that you're going to grow plants in and it's called soil. What is it? Minimals. Minimals. So what are those minerals going to be? For example? Bosphorus. Bosphorus. Calcium. Magnesium. Sulfur. Tasic. And lots of... And other things like iron and aluminium and silica. Silicone. I should say. So if you look at the total amount of minerals that were in one acre of land and you look at the amount that goes out the farm gate in your product, it's a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the total that's there. The problem is that 99% of what's there is not land available in a water-soluble form. The issue is that a soil test is going to tell you how much nitrogen is water soluble, how much phosphorus is water soluble. It's not going to tell you what the ability of microbes in your soil is to fix atmospheric nitrogen and the atmosphere is 78% nitrogen which means, I think, in imperial terms, you have something like 33,000 pounds per acre or something floating around above the ground, which is a lot. And that you just need to have the microbes in the soil that are able to fix that and turn it into a plant available form. With things like Bosphorus and potassium and calcium and magnesium and sulfur and all of those things, they will be in your soil, but they need to be made plant available to them. The only way they can be made plant available is with microbial activity. The only way they can be made microbial activity is with plants. The plants don't take from soil, plants build soil. There's only one thing that can build soil and that's the microbes that are supported by plants. The first step is to have the plants and then we have to look at how many microbes are around those plants because plants they have got lots of chemicals online and they do what plants can do without those chemicals. So there's a few things that we have to change to function, but the amount of product that goes out of the farm gate or the amount of mineral that goes out of the farm gate in your product is a tiny, tiny fraction. A tiny fraction of what is actually in your soil. And in order to make what signals are available, you need microbial activity. And this way the signal is made out of sweet plants. I mean how do the prairie work? As sure, the the minerals weren't being exported in that case because things lived and died on the prairie, so that everything got recycled. And that's the argument that it will be now as well that's all very, very, very good about the prairie but now we're taking things off. Like we were taking off a tiny, tiny percentage of what's there. The other thing is that if you're managing your own plants and you go to the first year plants and you'll manage them in such a way that there's lots of redis in there that actually will stimulate the microbial populations in the soil. Remember, my posts are modified really quickly. Remember that the air is 78% nitrogen. So the air is free, the water is free, sometimes it comes when we don't want it, sometimes we don't get it when we like to, but basically it's free, the sunshine is free. So what we're doing is encouraging green plants to photosynthesize and to carbon dioxide on the atmosphere into themselves, to build themselves the cellulose that they build from carbon from the air is the most common compound on the planet. Probably because plants constitute 450 or 550 gigatons biomass, that's why cellulose is so common. But they build themselves from the air, they build themselves from nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen and carbon from the atmosphere. Only a very small percentage of what they're made of comes as minerals from the soil and those minerals that they do take from the soil become available because they feed microbes in the soil to make them available. And most of what grows on your farm doesn't actually lead, only a very small percentage of that goes off in product. The rest of it, you know, I give you half a skin brain or something, it's only a portion of what you grew, isn't it? It's not all of it. So you grow a green plant and it produces rain and you take that rain away. The rest of the plant and all the exudates came out of that plant roots are at bones. If you had bare ground with nothing growing in it you're not adding anything to it at all. If you grow a green plant it gets almost everything it needs from sunlight and the air builds itself from things from the air. Photos exercises feed microbes in the soil, soil you're actually ahead by having a plant even though you've usually took half of it and sold. You know, even half of the weight of it went off as great. You're way ahead from having that run and having not having a plant. That whole thing about stuff going at the farm gate is an absolute myth. It's totally agree if you do the math on it it's the other way around. The more plants you grow the more soil you're going to build and the more assets you're actually going to have. I've got a quick question we're here for either any of you in corn production systems we're all about, you know, or can be about Infro, a pop-up fertilizer are we seeing is it true I guess that when we're applying especially any sort of synthetic we are having a disassociation with the fungi with the roots and not being able for them to communicate in mostly corn production that might make a question but just what have you guys seen if you've ever done that? I will say this we're using less and less pop-up none for our summer crops cotton, corn, soybeans we don't use any at all we're still using a little bit in wheat trying not to use any but we're doing it more for a problem with acid acid soils, low pH the further we go along the less that's a problem and I've even found as far as pHs are concerned that the longer I've been in no-till the less I really have to worry about a pH of even five and a half that really becomes a non-issue I'm not sure why, maybe you could explain that a little bit more but I use very little phosphorus anymore, very very little and part of the reason that I've gone close to cold turkey on that is because of listening to you a couple years ago at a no-till in the plains you gave a great talk on how phosphorus can inhibit microbiology activity right around that seed so I'm not using much anymore and I just don't need it a good friend of mine long-term no-tiller grew continuous corn for years and years on the same property and he was a geologist from OU don't hold that against him, I do don't have to, from Oklahoma University and he said why in the world are you using phosphorus? I said well my soil test tells me to he said well I don't, my soil test tells me the same thing but I know that I've got 3,000 so many pounds of phosphorus per acre he said if I stay no-till and I keep a healthy soil then the soil is going to supply it he said don't ask me why but he said I know how much I have and I'm not going to buy anymore I've had the best yields that I know of but anybody in the county on corn I was just going to tell a little story about Ray Ward because he's not here but that's fine, I know it's me I don't know if that's not me but he's been tagged Ray knows that we really have him he's not here but that's Ray Ward who bought the moratoriums in the Bravescom and I was giving a talk last year with I think it might have been there with green gut seas and Ray was quite happy like sitting there not in the green with all the stuff about green plants and the unsold food and everything and then when I got to the bit about phosphorus it's like ah he says I'm sorry Christine he says but that's not right what he was saying about phosphorus is not right Ray's got a ranch and he's always conducting soil tests for and he's like I said do you know on your own ranch how many parts per million of total phosphorus do you have and he said yes I know how many parts per million of total phosphorus I had and I said okay so and you know how to do the math I said you sit down and you work out and tell me how many parts right how many parts the phosphorus are going out of the farm gate and what that relates to in parts per million of phosphorus and how many thousand years worth of phosphorus do you have and he's like oh yeah thousand you know so he sits there and does the calculation and then he hasn't made eye contact with me he didn't take me very long to work out and he's just looking all around the room and he's not looking at me but I'll sit there for a little while about 10 minutes later I said so Ray how many thousands of years worth of phosphorus do you have on your ranch without adding any I think it was like 70 pounds per acre or something that's going out of the farm gate there was a lot going on he said 17,000 years I said well you've probably got enough for a while and you may not need to add any did you so I think that pretty much satisfy that argument the point is you have a huge amount of phosphorus in your soils but it's a very very reactive element if any of you did chemistry in school and you fiddle around with phosphorus I mean it's something that can explode it's like it's a very reactive element things that are in women's women's and like marine bacteria that shine blue things like that or probably I don't know where to blow worms and those kinds of things I don't know if they use phosphorus but a lot of women's lightning bugs maybe I don't know I would guess they did it looks like it's a very reactive element and it's not just going to be floating around in the soil as phosphorus because it's reactive it's going to leak up with something else it's got a negative charge it's going to leak up with something that's got a positive charge like calcium or magnesium or iron or aluminium or something and it's going to form an insoluble compound like iron, copper, aluminium phosphate, calcium phosphate depends on the pH of your soil which one of those things it means something and once it's banned because it's not on the subject it's not an available form of phosphorus anymore so if you want to break that bond that's formed with calcium or iron or manganese or aluminium now you call them aluminium aluminum aluminum, aluminium we call it aluminium we'll leave that one out I think even calcium is a common example so if you hear calcium phosphate forms it's called calcium out of solutions phosphorus out of solutions and plants can't get either of those things so what do you need to actually break that bond? you need an enzyme enzymes are capable of all kinds of extraordinary things, microbes produce enzymes, that's one of the reasons that microbes are very very important for releasing elements in your soil microbes can produce an enzyme called phosphatase phosphatase enzyme breaks and bond with phosphorus is bad and then you've got other microbes that are able to transport like mycorrhizal fungi the main thing that mycorrhizal fungi bring back to plants after water and maybe they go back to plants as water second most important thing they bring to plants is phosphorus through that using that phosphatase enzyme or providing power to the microbes that use that phosphatase enzyme or maybe after that phosphatase enzyme and then the third most important thing is that you wouldn't see phosphorus deficiency, some zinc deficiency is going going together so in Australia where we see farmers put a lot of phosphorus fertilisers onto cereal crops for example knock out the microbes fungi, then there's the interferes you apply phosphorus in any way of the deficiency or you apply phosphorus and you'll have a selenium deficiency we see those kinds of things all the time being able to fly the selenium what you really need to do is in the first place stimulate the microbes in the soil by putting biostinones on the seed instead of putting phosphorus in the seed but there it used biostinones you'll use in vermi liquid and compost extract and those kinds of things and when I was lucky enough to be on your farm last year it was last year, it was only six months ago actually it wasn't that long ago we saw amazing riser shifts on your plants and beautiful things like happening in the soil so I don't know if you want to make a comment about how you've kind of moved a little bit away from I mean you're still using some fertilisers but you've reduced, I mean you mentioned in your talk about how you've reduced it I mean do you want to say anything about what your, I know you showed us some great photos of what's actually happening biologically around you Sure, sure, so what we're doing now we came from a low salt starter that was what we were using prior and then when we got into the vermi these liquids are the compost extracts and furrow four years ago, three years ago now I guess it is four years ago we made the switch and yeah we've been monitoring our microisophage since then and I mean they're as good as they have been I guess like for a fertilizer comment I guess closer this is better okay I'm getting the move it closer to your mouth motion yeah so we made as far as fertility reduction and we just keep lowering it I mean we started higher than we are today but we just keep backing down we use a little bit of ammonium sulfate ahead of our cereal so if people want to know what we're really using that's the form of N we use we started at like 120 pounds of product and then I just kept going lower and lower and we're at 80 pounds of product ahead of our cereals which is basically half of our farm now so it's like 16 units of N and from what we're seeing in our SAP results we'll probably start doing well I did do some zero trials this year so that'll show up in next year's crop we'll apply it in the fall just for a workload perspective for us and then that's as far as synthetics go that's what we're using and in our liquid that goes in furrow is just some micros and they're all it's just a salt free micro whatever micronutrient I guess right so anyway that's what we've been using and we've been seeing is the change in the Rajashees it was something that I struggled to wonder if we're ever going to see them but now it's we're seeing them quite regularly last night at dinner you said that I heard this before Christine touched on it but you always like to plant your own seed back would you expand on that this little bit it's something that we've seen it again this year so we're pedigree seed growers besides the there's some things I have to buy I can't use my own so when we get a new variety we have this Maverick Barley is one example that we grow and I have to buy foundation or breeder seed that's super high level and then we'll grow it from there and then all the way down to certified and when we get that stuff certified again this year it was if I have a low yielding disappointing crop that's the one there we always try to keep our seed and grow down as many generations as we can from there but it was noticeable again this year something we've struggled with and we've tried even different seed growers but I mean most conventional seed growers have the same practices so from yeah that's what we do so we just try to buy as high a generation as we can and once we become select growers we'll be able to get seed right like the 5 kilograms and start at a higher generation so we can get it into our system sooner but yeah that's something we've seen and even the one barley I even wonder about we should, Tannis did we look at mycorrhizae on the, we didn't this year on the Maverick, no we need to do that because I've got concerns about that because that one really sticks out as a bad one for us where everything else seems to perform pretty well on our system that one was it really stood out as a poor performer so we should be able to get buy across to the consumer that it could be healthier grain yeah so the comment was yeah we can get across to the consumer that it's healthier grain and that's something we started measuring you know and there again we don't know what you know we're just measuring mostly sort of for starting point right because we don't know what is good we just know that this is what we have on our farm and we're going to continue to measure and hopefully it continues to get better and one of the things that Jill talked about was a baseline for Zinc you know that sort of somewhere in the 30 ppm range was good and we're seeing our cereals kind of in the 40 somewhere so we're higher than that and you know I don't know there again I mean there's so many questions to that it's that's its own conversation but yeah it's something we've been measuring and we like to use that too as sort of a scorecard for how we've been doing you know in our nutrient balancing back to our plans so we'd like to add warm sheets and grasses into our location just for increased diversity and I'd like to expand on the exporting question that was asked earlier about the grain we do not have livestock currently we plan to add something that we would never add enough or acres sort of have that warm sheets and grasses and I think I can think of this problem to bail it off we're exporting the biomass is that going to be the similar answer to your grain exporting that's not a big deal because a lot of people seem to think this is yeah why are you planting a warm season grass for diversity just for diversity and it'll be a blend I'm sure but we only want so much corn on our farm so if you get a warm season grass on a larger acreage you know the only option I see is paying or grazing it can only raise so much well with your corn you have a warm season grass correct but I only want a small percent of my farm to that so if we're going to have more if you want to increase diversity you could intercrop on the corn that you have and then have a cash crop to sell but if you want to do warm season grasses we do a lot of it but we have a lot of cattle so we're going to try to run that through cattle but I have warm season grasses that I've planted let's say I'm too late to plant corn like this past spring and I have preventing planting acres I went in with you know eight way blends of warm season grasses and then I didn't you know I had planned on taking some of it for hay or forage of some kind but if I couldn't get cattle to it and I didn't need the hay which I didn't I planted directly back into it I was planting through 12 foot tall probably 14 to 16 ton stuff I just planted back into it and I just let that stay for armor in my part of the world I need it I have to have armor on the soil it's the most important thing I think of the five principles I think armor on the top of the soil for me tends to be the most important because we get so hot and we get really dry and because we have built up a biological population they tend to consume that very very fast so I need a lot of lignin type type surface cover just to get through the next summer so I don't mind leaving it and so but to answer your question if you already have a warm season grass you want more diversity I would want to inter crop try to get something else growing in with it we're already inter seeding in the farm we've had for quite a few years but still the farm is only 12% here we're totally good we'd like to get warm seeding grass to do that and pay the bills it seems like we're now going to sell that well one thing to answer your question I think that whenever Christine was talking about it there's so many tons of parent material there she said take half the plant it wouldn't hurt I think if you're not going to do it every year year after year like they do in some of the plane stuff where they're going out in the hay meadows for 40 years you see a loss of production but I think that has more to do with decreasing diversity in native planes because if you keep cutting it off at the same time every year you're going to lose diversity you're going to lose some of those forb species and legumes that are thriving out in the rest of your ranch but for you I would say if you're not going to do that every year year after year it certainly wouldn't ever tap into your total amount of parent material would you agree with that I was just going to say that without having seen your operation already it's very hard to comment on it but as Tom pointed out you already have more seeds of grass and diversity is incredibly important for your soil market so if you were going to plant something else I would recommend a mix of maybe you need to have your grass in it and you could maybe throw some flax or something you needed to give you a bit more because Derek was talking yesterday about a flax will grow with those other things so some providers got some shade so you put some clouds and things in that have big days to provide shade there was a email from a farmer in Zambia the other day actually he was looking for someone to go to Zambia and talk about soil health if anyone is interested in growing the Zambia but he has just cropped land he doesn't have any livestock and he has been growing an eight-way mix that included things like cowpeas and soybeans and sun hair but those kinds of things on one third of his land no livestock and his total profitability has improved as a result like he's rotating the land because he's got a massive improvement in infiltration and they're in a low rainfall area just fifteen, sixteen inches about sixteen inches of grain if they get sixteen inches of grain so they've had three years of drought and they haven't even got sixteen inches of grain he's been the only farmer in his region that's grown over cash crop he's been able to go over cash crop because he has this multi-species cover of bore leaf plants that he rotates around so even with your corn do you grow it on the same area every time or do you move that around? No I rotate but it will take like it's less than ten percent of our total acreage so we'd like to get up to at least 25 percent so that every three, four years we've got a warm season full season Can you say you only grow some of that corn? You mean you grow full season crops? Correct I was wondering why you had all that crop land in your only crop this morning I'm thirty miles from Catholic This is not my fault I see Just very similar to Derrick except I'm further east we could certainly we don't have LRA now bring in enough to do that so I'm just wondering what your thought is because then we could sell it for a profit is it a small thing or is it a big thing? Just to give you an example just from Australia on that the people that don't have livestock wanted to grow covers wanted to build soil there's been some experiments done not by research stations but people doing experiments on their farms where they've grown a diverse multi-species cover and they've failed it to make hay out of it and sold it compared to just letting it go right through the maturity and then just leaving it on the land like a farmer on the soil they've actually built a lot more soil by failing that because what happened then is it regrows provided you plant things that will regrow up and then it's in that regrows stage where it produces a lot of species they have built like three times a small carbon with the exidates and they've still taken the material off so now remember these hay fields in the United States they have lost structure and lost carbon over time because people are haying and they're taking everything and they're only mostly like it might be well in Canada you'll see Timothy and things like that that's been grown or Timothy and alfalfa grown together or something for haying and that's all that's in it and now alfalfa you haven't got the diversity there and then you're removing all the biomass so you're losing diversity and you're losing biomass like you're just taking everything away if you have a really diverse mix you can hay it and you can actually build more carbon by haying it or raising it then leaving it vegetative very kill it which is over hopefully so it would be again in several kinds of plants you have in there too as to whether they're going to recover from being cut so again there seems like alfalfa or obviously Timothy that you can cut that will regrow so you need to look at what kinds of plants you put in there are they going to regrow after they've been cut he said thank you so it would not be a continual one year stripping one off my question is could you touch on how about neonicotinoids a little bit after John put your hand up ah what was the question again could you talk a little bit about the neonicotinoids and the dangers of them yeah well John is in mind we're going to be able to talk about that you're aware of his research and also the other work that's been done I think Derek you might have mentioned someone mentioned yesterday about the I don't know if he also knew about the study in Montana with the white Taldian that oh Candace you mentioned that maybe in your talk so was that white Taldian that affected the fetus or something or the birth defects in my Taldian a large buildup in right so it was accumulating in the spleen of the deer and I mean there really haven't been that's the obvious study I'm aware of in you know in mammals but I'm sure that if the studies were done whilst at times there is never any money to do those kinds of studies because people don't want to see the results like the certain species that don't want to see the results but certainly I think John has a mother in search on the effect of neonicon of these populations and things it's fairly yeah pretty obvious but I mean why are we applying to go back to why are we applying these things or any kind of set aside or policy why are we using those things why are we obviously there's a need to use them but why are plants not having their own inbuilt ability to deal with pests and diseases because we have taken away the ability of the plant to defend itself of its own associations that if it has enough microbes around it to protect it and also the microbes when they reach a core can switch on genes in the plant to enable it to protect itself so the things that we've done that are stripped away those microbiomes in human bodies as well as in our agricultural soils we've just you know look at human what are our new disorders in the human population at the moment you know we're not getting infectious diseases anymore why did six Americans have some kind of an autoimmune disorder in other words your body is just not functioning as it should and it's not functioning as it should because it's all been linked now to the gut microbiome nearly all of those disorders are linked to the gut microbiome it's exactly the same and so on so that people are using things like neonics because there is a void in the microbiome in other words not enough microbes there to actually do the things that they they should be able to and using neonics just makes it worse because if they go on to the sea then that core microbiome of microbes that are in that sea which gets less and less and less over time in the season being the plants you know as the derivatives of talking about you know you buy a commercial like a um seed it was barley it is not as deep as it it just hasn't got the fitness because of the way it's being grown and that's why people are using neonics I have one little comment I have one little comment on Dr. Christy Morrissey is a research doing something at the University of Saskatchewan where I'm from and there's a really good TEDx talk that she did a research on that consumed small amounts of canola seed that are treated with neonics like we're talking one or two seeds and it's affecting their weight which is then affecting their migration ability so we look up her TEDx talk it's quite good her research was all on birds but yeah Dr. Christy Morrissey I'm probably butchering it sorry Christy if you're watching this but yeah it's a really good TEDx no you have the next question I'm interested in how we can control on the seeds as we make the transition to this soil health oh boy oh boy I guess I'll take a stab at that so interestingly something we've noticed on our farm since we've made changes and we're not sure if it's adding diversity or using less synthetic and or what exactly we're doing less disturbance obviously with lower tillage with our no-till system if we're finally getting to maturity point but weeds aren't nearly the problem that they used to be for me and it's an unexpected benefit our weed spectrums definitely changed things that used to worry me aren't the weeds that I have today but we don't have any real yield takers like we used to we still spray, don't get me wrong we still use herbicides and we are using some like those chaff liners it's something that I'm really happy with it's a mechanical form it's one more tool in the toolbox something that we're going to continue to use so it seems to help with us I heard someone say I don't remember who it was said that pigweeds are just pigweed until they come resistant and then they're a palmer I can't imagine the thought of a redwood and the thing is pigweeds for me aren't always bad because cattle absolutely love them so there's times whenever I can use cattle to manage some of those that's a different operation and that's down in Oklahoma but we do have incredible infestations in areas of pigweeds rye is probably my number one go-to if I've got a field that has a problem with pigweeds I'm going to use a rye blend rye, barley, few brassicas I'm going to get some diversity in there in the fall before I go into my summer planting whenever I might have to worry about those we also still use herbicides I rely on some residual herbicides I would love to see the day when I didn't have to but the interesting thing is in our native grass you can drive around all over you can drive for 30-40 miles out there and find a pigweed and we don't ever spray for pigweeds in our native grass ever we don't spray any herbicide for at least 10 years or more in our native grass I don't find any pigweeds out there so it's definitely a management issue resistant weeds is a management issue it's not that we need to go and find another magic bill of the chemical because what's going to happen within two generations of a pigweed it'll be resistant again so that's what they do so it's a lack of diversity all I have that's incredible on my native grass that I don't have that's incredible on my farmland is diversity so I would say we increase diversity, figure out a rotation that works a little better and just keep it guessing keep those pigweeds guessing mother nature is amazing at that and if you can confuse that system a little bit that works so my great take home for you all is I can say that I have an area of Oklahoma that has incredible amounts of pigweeds that's right across the river from the Arkansas River from native grass that has no pigweeds so there's something going on with management it's not necessarily a chemical problem it's a management issue so if I'm going to just add to that so it's a great answer and we see that all the time of comparisons that might just be a fence with certain weeds on one side and the weeds could get to the other side and the weeds could easily be there but they don't grow within some reason so a seed is an incredibly aware being really too I didn't say anything about seeds but when you think about seeds again if you close your eyes and imagine you're a seed you can't see you can't hear you can't speak so you're a little bit like a micro and you're there in the soil and if you look at the native prairie there are some seeds that will germinate at a specific time of the year but that's the time of the year that they will come up and they don't come up with any other time of the year except that so how do they know what time of the year it is do you have to think about that in fact and how do they know how close to the soil they are if you take a viable seed and plant it 10 feet down in the soil it's not going to germinate it's going to sit there for years some seeds are viable for a really long time so in a few years time you could take that seed and now you're going to have made it like half an inch from the surface of the soil and water it or something and it grows but how did it know whether it was half an inch from the surface of the soil whether it was 10 feet down the seeds are very aware of the oxygen concentration in the soil like the light the waylings that are coming to them they know whether they're on the surface of the soil whether they're very they know what kinds of plants are around them because they're picking up on all those molecules that I've shown in the diagram that there's chemical signals going on all the time around the seeds and the seed knows whether it's in the native prairie or whether it's in all the cornfield probably knows a lot more than what we do and the seed in the native prairie and the seed was like there's a lot of diversity around here and lots of different kinds of plants and there's a microbial environment that's not familiar for me or something that likes to grow in a cornfield that's got a very simplified environment there's only one kind of plant I've got to deal with and I think I'll just sit here so you could actually take some of that prairie soil that's across the road and you could spread it out in a tray somewhere and water it at the time of the year when anarans would come up and you'd find there's over 100 seeds in there but they're just not coming up in the prairie so why they're not coming up there and they're coming up across the road it is all about management and it's how we manage the soil environment so if we make that soil environment more complex and we confuse plants by having lots of weeds by having lots of signals in there lots of microbial diversity there and lots of cover as well so that you're not creating because they're picking up on wavelengths of light they know whether they're in their soil they know whether there's lots of different kinds of plants seed is a very, very intelligent thing and it's how we actually manage the soil and determine whether those seeds germinate or not I have another thing I'm here in Eastern and South Dakota I've been pulsing in corn so I've been in rotation to ask you if availability is a big issue for me are there some plant species or tools that I can use to improve my available it's your turn it's your turn to potassium he's looking for potassium availability what I said before about availability of mineral supplies like all minerals it's really a matter of you know what do you rotate the soil into did you say? so you have two species in soil that was originally created with five to seven hundred species so there would have been a lot of different communities of microbes before that aren't there now and it's like lack of microbial diversity that whatever microbes you need to make potassium available obviously aren't there for some reason so you might look at having diverse colours between some of your crops either seeding from now you know polycrop or even just planting something before you harvest to have it in that short you know of some kind of diversity and if you're going to do that I wouldn't see any different kinds of plants in there like 20 species or something and you might be amazed at how that might actually affect the availability of minerals in the soil you know one thing I didn't get back to on my story whenever I was talking earlier was this particular field that I told you I had such a hard time planting and I had so much different stuff in there and I finally got it all planted out there to put in a perennial and it was very diverse what I didn't say was that we didn't put on any phosphorus other than what we had to to try to make it feed which really wasn't that much it's mainly wheat and what was amazing about that crop was that whenever it got towards harvest all these wheat plants were becoming mature and I thought well there's plenty out there to harvest it's thick it looks pretty good but there's also quite a bit of brome grass that was wanting to head out and all kinds of different stuff there's a lot of red clover there's even some canola out there that was trying to head out and I thought well we'll get a stripper header we'll go out there and strip it that field which had never made more than 25 bushels in the history that I could remember and really in the data going back 15 bushels a week in combination with all those other plants it beat the county average by about 15 bushels with less nitrogen and an incredible amount of what was considered competition by anybody that would have looked at it so there's this incredible benefits that we can have from diversity that we're not seeing and I don't think I've seen it yet I don't think I'm anywhere near I think this is increasing my soil quality and we're 21, 22 years in and a lot of that has to do with diversity I'm not saying you have to go plant a 16-way blend maybe I do but I try to keep my cost pretty low too especially now commodity prices are pretty low but I do think that there's something to be said for diversity I think it's huge We have seen massive improvements in drought tolerance in diverse uses compared to monocultures I usually have those slides in my presentation where I look at it but anybody who's seen the videos that I usually have they just go into like a monoculture of a crop to like a cocktail mix or a multi-species mix in a very dry year the monoculture has failed and the multi-species mix is like what can't just no symptoms for any moisture stress at all I'm not sure how many different kinds of plants you have to have to achieve that and I'm not sure how many different functional groups obviously you want to have a wider diversity of functional group in other words really different types of plants something in the daisy family something in the pea family something in the grass family there's many different kinds of plant families as you can most of the work I do these days I'm talking to people of every kind and things like that with pastures and with my like to really get different kinds like chicory and plantains and things not just having grass with some clover in it that's not enough diversity and if you look at the prairies and look at the flowers that were in them I remember the prairies were about 10 to 15% grass the other 85% was non- grasses I think flowers lots of daisies and things like that things in the daisies obviously are some flowers but probably not so many in their industry so starting to think of some things that are not grasses and not leading to something is a challenge to find ways to get into that category we like plantain plantain and chicory are very important we use quite a bit of it but that had a lot to do with my son and he knows how much deer like plantain and chicory so we're going to throw some of that in there and it's been really beneficial not just for the white tails but for all wildlife and the soils I'm sorry this might be a little unconventional but this morning I had breakfast with a fella so you're sitting right there and you had a really good story about this would you mind sharing that again with the group about the corn and the multi-species cover before the corn I don't remember the details but I remember it was awesome and there was big changes right can someone get him a microphone I don't know if I'm ready to go public oh okay sorry it was really good anyway it was diversity plus corn equaled really good it was a cover crop before right we leave it at that okay didn't mean to put you on the spot there he isn't far enough away from home to tell a story okay sorry we've got to be a hundred miles to be an expert or is that any mess just cut that out my question does lead into the cover crop before a caps crop and fertilizing and Christine you're talking about you want to stress the cover crop so that it puts more in the soil so do I not want to fertilize that or how much do I fertilize and then on the caps crop I've got to fertilize that too right I can't rely on the cover crop to put all the nutrients there or can I I would really recommend using a biasing unit I would never put the synthetic fertilizer on a cover crop because you do want to stress it and it will actually build more soil if you can get more exidates you want to really make that plant work don't put it on welfare on something or synthetic fertilizer you're putting on welfare to make it work that's what you're putting a cover crop in for you want it to work so you want as many different functional groups, different leaf shapes you want to harvest as much light as possible and you really want to pump as much of that carbon that's been accumulated during photosynthesis into the soil you're not interested in buying this you're not interested in having the biggest body cover crop in the world you actually want to build soil last week putting it there for make it work, make it build soil for you above ground growth doesn't necessarily equate to what's happening underground you'll find that something that maybe that's really struggling and working hard to stay alive will have a really big root system provided you didn't put fertilizer under it and maybe not that many leaves that don't be put off by the fact that something didn't grow so well above ground to take over the roots really spend a lot of time getting some holes looking at what's happening in plants but if you did put a bio-stimulate on it on the seed perfectly or in fire is an expending you will see better root growth, you will see more riser sheets that's an indication you're getting a lot more exhumation the plant will be more ground tolerant if it happens to come into the situation of being efficient in water or in a water well in situation where water is supplied better or water well in a better supply ground in other words the thickness of the plants will be hugely improved the bio-stimulant is going to make a few more soil not less whereas chemical fertilizer will definitely result in less soil limit so if you could make your own bio-stimulant or just bio something cheap it just depends how much time you want to put into doing that milk is a great life in them for example you might be able to get a bio-stimulant somewhere or buy out of date milk powder skim milk is fine out of date you can buy it by the ton in Australia so just look up bio-stimulants try and find something cheap and then you might find that if you use the bio-stimulant as a diversity in your cover and you've really made it work really made it a good soil that's going to help a lot with your cash crop too and sure you can't go cold to a deal on N particularly if you've been using it before you can't just cut it out and speak and you're still going to get the same yield because you won't have the nitrogen pieces in about three years to actually build up sufficiently to be able to supply or end make your crop needs you can go cold to a deal on posse if you're using that so diversity of bio-stimulant and then with your cash crop just start experimenting a little bit on cutting back on things not in all of it just in part of the field all rates don't cut things out all together just go lower and see how you go if you've got a yield monitor if you've got a yield monitor is that a common one a weak difference if you've got a yield monitor you can see straight away on the yield map what's happened in terms of having units fertilizer that you've used it's very hard to apply because by eye we can't you know humans can't actually even detect a 20 cent you can't see that by eye but you want to bring that up so if you haven't got one of those you might have to cut some some areas and weigh them or something see what effect it's having on your grain and then of course you're still going to get your total yield and then you need to look at profit it's more important than your yield like I couldn't say that often enough your profit is more important than your yield and you might find you can cut back on some of those inputs that you'll have less need for other things too less need for you take the sites and herbicides herbicides and you know university and building your soil microbiome and really making those colours work for you is going to mean less input and more profit and that's really the number that you want to be looking at it's how much do I make not how much yield you know it's not going to be that close to being open I would make one more comment on that I think yeah that's absolutely on the right track I think everybody has the ability to do their own you know trials cut your fertilizer back to be full of cedar but on our farm most of the gains that we've seen in profitability in terms of reduced inputs has come from on-farm trials what I can do on my farm and it's been eye-opening and that's probably what's advanced us as fast as it has is setting up actual what's it called so you have replicated trials right so you do it right so you're not lying to yourself because there's nothing worse than that and doing the trials cutting it back and taking the time and it sucks at harvest because everybody just wants to go back and forth but you take the time and that's super powerful information so if I just comment on that having come from a lifetime of research and having done things like go into a field and say oh I'm just going to put this down here or have a different rating for this year and I will remember where I quit this because this was you know five posts from the gate or something and it was that post on the next one on the next one and I'll remember that I did that and you come back in six months and you go is it the fifth one or the fifteenth one you just maybe it's just my brain I don't know but you need to use some kind of markers or if you start putting on files or keep really good notes write it down somewhere I just can't emphasize that enough of really you do have to know exactly where you did something and when you did it and how much of it you required and all that you had to have good records we do that with our 2630 monitor we do quite a few acres of research every year 500 to 700 acres a year in our place is going to have some kind of research large block trials 30 to 40 acres at least a piece and we take the time to stop and plug that into the 2630 monitor then we have it on our as-planted maps it doesn't take very long it's pretty quick you absolutely will not remember it and by the way my biostimulant has four legs and four stomachs that's what I use for a biostimulant and I have those suckers running around out there I don't like buying more stuff I'm tired of buying stuff and if you could make your own awesome awesome but be very careful with bugs and a jug be very very very careful with that because they'll promise you anything they'll promise you anything to get you to write that check so be careful with that I just happened to I want to use a biostimulant that has four legs four stomachs and then I do buy some chicken litter I buy some chicken litter at times and I found that that really helps ahead of my soybeans don't know why, that's where it really really shines I put that on my my cover crops in the winter anytime in the winter I don't care when it is we don't have a foot of frost on our ground like you all do but if it's dry enough we run it and that's a great biostimulant I think for our area I'll just add to that Tom when you have livestock or any kind of animals really, chickens or wildlife or anything on soil the soil microbiome is able to detect as well as the fact that the manure has certain MPK etc. things in it, urine has like you can analyze and see what will be saliva like an animal grazing a plant has a different effect to cutting the plant and then up to a 20% increase in regrowth rate from the saliva because of the enzymes and everything so the plant is responding to that remember plants know stuff seeds know stuff, microbes know stuff they're all the time detecting all the signals that are coming to them that's what's impacting on their growth so you have animals there that manure and that urine and the hair skin like the shit that's going on of their skin all the time you know like soil is aware of the fact that there are really many animals there it's not just the nutrients that are in the manure so it is a very, very effective biostimulant for soils that aren't meant to have animals in contact with them soils have co-evolved with plants and animals or integrated into that funding but having said that there are some people that don't have livestock and not in a situation where they can particularly in some parts of Europe if it's just not possible they'll be surrounded by huge highways or whatever and the area that they have they're just going to get animals in there or out of there so it's obviously possible to have them so there are some places where you can't have animals on the land and for those reasons there are other things that you can use like Derek and Tanner's make their own biostimulants there are more and more people down there that aren't making their own biostimulants and that's not necessarily something you have to buy and it is a great way of definitely improving the increasing the diversity of the life of the land and it can pay you to do it especially like Derek and Tanner's being able to talk about biostimulants biostimulants I don't know where you wanted to comment on this We keep mineral out I think it's more habit than anything doing it for so long they know when they need it and it's somewhat of an indicator of my soil health they don't eat very much at times certain times a year they won't touch it for long periods of time as far as the mineral is concerned it's the same way a cattle are amazing at choosing what they need they know what they need like your soil biology knows what they need and you give them a diverse ration out there then there's not much need to feed them anything else the worst thing you can do on a good diverse let's say winter rye barley mix you got a good diverse mix out there the worst thing you can do is go feed them a a bale of straight hay or a bale of oats you can back them up pretty quick you can stop them from a half of their gain by giving them a straight oat bale at the wrong time so you want them out there grazing what they want you don't want to have an oat bale and bring the cattle in you don't have to and force them to eat oats you're going to kill their gains cattle are an amazing deal and really the way creation is it's just amazing how if you get everything in a balance how things start working I will say this that the first five years that we were in no-till we were still planting a lot of stuff we were still running cattle but we didn't have near the diversity we were still planting just wheat we would follow that with double crop beans we would follow that with corn whenever I was in the middle of it I actually spoke at no-till in the plains it's been probably 15 years ago Dwayne Beck beat me up again he said you got 10 years it's going to fail it failed in 10 years didn't have near enough diversity in it okay everybody got the question no okay so the question was okay I already forgot legumes and cereals legumes and cereals legumes and cereals gotcha and then if we use polymers on our cover crops or the seeds that we mix with our annual crops okay so we'll start with the legume cereal mix it doesn't work for us and I'm not sure why I've tried about every combination that I can think of that would still allow a somewhat of a weed control option every time I add a legume if I get 10 bushels of peas I'll get 10 bushels less cereal and I'm not sure why but that's what we've basically even seen that so if we're if we're separating I mean I got enough things to do without having to do that so we just gave up on it and that's where I got the whole idea of putting our interceding our covers into our standing cereals like that's out of our diversity there I guess was sort of how the idea came yeah the legume for like the flax whatever flax those all work those have been proven long term those we always get a benefit out of that lots of ways yield you know improved health all those things but then as far as adding polymers to the we have never done any of that I mean like to do the delayed seeding or the delayed emergence we haven't done anything with that generally I wanted to grow like if we seed it in the spring we do want it to grow at the same time and we'll just select things that will work in the herbicide program that way or else if we don't want it to later we'll we'll just seed after like we try to seed the diverse cover crops after the short like as soon as we harvest I guess we'll try to seed right behind on those I guess in that situation not sure if that answers we use a lot of legumes in our wheat but ours is winter wheat we're planting in the fall we're going to graze it so we've got radishes and canola that we'll throw in there buckwheat we're planting early enough we can have buckwheat blooming in the fall before we even get a frost so but we do a lot of that with no intention of harvesting any of that for seed we're going to just harvest our wheat seed so I have no intention of harvesting that stuff for seed but I am going to harvest some of it with cattle and give my cattle diversity in the winter and I hate to keep harping on that but if you don't have cattle there's somebody close to you that does work a partnership I mean you can actually make a little bit of money back off of that off of that crop and maybe that would be a better option than haying it I guarantee you if you get enough cattle out there and you graze it hard you're going to build more soil than if you even mowed it what do you say maybe 20% there are people that have cattle and I love this cattle exchange that South Dakota is doing something like that what's it called? grazing exchange man we need that in Oklahoma I would love to have that in Oklahoma but we don't not yet not yet amazing idea get on there and say hey I've got all this stuff to graze one thing I would try to keep in mind especially first few years in the hotel maintain the right to tell them hey we need to pull the cattle off for a couple days because not so much that I'm not worried about compaction with cattle at all what I am worried about is disturbing my seed bed for my next crop I'm going to plant and I have seen issues with that but that's the only issues I've had with the disturbance directly from cattle and that was only in the first few years today I've got cattle running out on wheat if we get a big grain and I know that I've got some real flat heavier soils I might pull them off for a day or two I think very long at all they're right back out there so that's what we do we do use a lot of legumes red clovers vetch it's awesome to get a whole lot of vetch in your grain tank whenever you're out there harvesting wheat you know why because the vetch is worth 80 cents a pound and the wheat is worth 10 you know it's worth so much more money so clean it out and sell it we had the opportunity of harvesting a bunch of rye with barley because we thought we were going to spray it out and plant cotton we couldn't permit any planting we go out there and harvest it it's worth $12 a bushel my wheat is worth 3 or 4 it's an opportunity I never thought about clovers yeah so we totally do that sorry if you were thinking about clovers instead of large seeded legumes so we do yeah like I'll put a sweet clover for us which maybe doesn't work for everybody but it's a tough, it's just the one great grandpa used right the old one we tried all the fancy exotic clovers I'm back to red clover and sweet clover because they work and they'll actually they'll work herbicide wise and they'll also they'll keep up enough and when we strip sometimes it's nearly as tall but if it strips it doesn't seem to interfere and if we want to kill it later we can but it'll grow back great in the fall so those are the ones we use yeah and that won't affect yield but if we put a faba bean or a pea and then it'll hurt us yield wise so it increases my yield having those legumes in there increase my yield significantly sorry yes today I have a question when you said you couldn't get the legumes cereals would grow together when agriculture started people started growing crops in Australia which 100 years ago clover and cereals were always growing clover and that was in the days before we had some 903 miles and cereals were always growing so I thought I had a novel idea because you know they started using them like in the end and clover just dropped down and I guess I live in a bubble because I thought it was rather novel of me a few years ago to start putting this stuff in there I come to a deal like this and find out how half the country is doing sorry so just to clarify with the clovers it works great small seeded legumes those work great but if I put in the big ones that's the one that hurts me and I think for me it's just I run out of rain usually we end the season super dry and I'm sad because it didn't rain enough but that's I think what gets us at the end that those legumes just run out of gas I got a question for internal external parasites and lifestyle are you treating for that? if you are what are you doing trying to help your life it's really hoping no one would ask that question yes I am on my native ground and I think it's a problem I really need to do more work in that on my cows we use Psydectin we use Psydectin we don't spray for flies very often but my head guy my cow puncher so to speak amazing guy pretty smart guy man he just loves those cows and he sees flies on him I did it three times sometimes before I know he did it yes this year first time first time we started putting garlic in the mineral but you got to get them to eat the mineral you know what I mean they are not wanting to eat the mineral very much so you really have to get them to consume a certain amount of mineral so that they eat the garlic so that it has an effect so we didn't have a lot of effect with garlic lick tub molasses based sounds good I didn't know about the sound of it let's find out I like it Psydectin we use Psydectin from what I've read it's less toxic than some other things so we use Psydectin we have run a lot of stalker cattle and I don't always know how clean they are coming in but now that we've identified our sources better and we're developing relationships with the herds that are coming in I can get a lot better at that but that's something we've really started doing heavily in the last two years is that we're going to stick to certain herds there's about three or four herds and I hope to have gained one here so that we can monitor that back to the cow a little better yeah we do that I think it's like an ounce of prevention my dad always did it it's the same old story well that's what my dad did he turned them in the damn cows and I probably don't need to we still have dung beetles but not a massive amount not like I can remember seeing whenever I was young whenever I was a little guy I thought they were the coolest all things you'd watch them scoot this poop around it's amazing I don't see them like that but we still see them but there's definitely not as many today as there was 30 years ago 40 years ago I was going to ask you about that there's no technical support you're not going to go that's not a bad side of things right and the other thing is do you feel that it counts I was going to no I need to so fecal it counts pretty straightforward you can learn to do it yourself just to see where you actually need this because you could be affecting your family oh I know we have we used to have them for 10 years I didn't see any I got a third crop of small grain in with the corn and beans in an old-tailed cover crop rotation problem is the small grain after a wet year was just zebran, mojo lots of weeds and so what could I do this spring when I plant another small grain or what could I not do give me a better chance oh that's a really hard question that's a really hard question that's a good one for you thank you for that so there's so much context here that I don't understand like your rainfall and your small grains are going into what kind of stubble what kind of small grains oats and corn okay what can you do cool these smokers yeah that one are you growing it with the intention of harvesting that crop for that same seed are you using covers behind like are you interceding you sound like you're too wet right so are you using all your water I mean that's something I learned from Dr. Beck are you going to balance our water use if that's out of whack then it's hard to balance anything I mean I have the opposite problem I want to grow more stuff but I'm short of water I mean it's a good place to start if you can get more things growing before you get to that point because it's hard to fix it you know what I mean it's like the same problem I had with not spreading my residue you got to start with the combine we got to spread our residue and then we can do a good job of seeding the next spring so if you can kind of get prepared to that point that might give you a lot more success where were you located again right around here what's your rainfall oh wow hit 30 this year you think you would have had 80 by the way we get 34 inches of rainfall and we just use maybe higher seeding rates and more diversity within your blend who's to say you don't have to plant and I don't want the competition but Ryan Barley together with 5 or 6 other companions right along with it and planted at a high seeding rate and get some diversity in there and try to use that to help your plants be healthier so that they can combat the disease and use up more of that moisture you know and I would if you're not able to fly it on then I would have that I would have the drill in the same field I don't know how many times I chase my son around or have somebody chasing him when he's got the combines out there and he gets all stressed out because we are literally right on his ass sometimes to keep something in there because I hate that there's a lot of time when you don't have something green growing yeah so that's where the companion planning I talked about so like if there was a clover with beans or something that would bridge that gap and then it's growing and the downside of those is they're not wicked awesome for biomass producers but it's something that's using water and something to drive on so then maybe you could get a cover into that and then start using your water or seed a fall crop into that yeah I've been doing that like this spring field I mean so can you just mix in a few species with that small grain maybe we're too far north for winter rags oh that's a yeah there's a million things that we can talk about yeah but one of the things that we've noticed too with small grains and we're not super wet but I noticed going to wider rows that I think my cereal crops are healthier and I'm going against it what everybody else says about yield what not with row spacing in cereals but we've gone to lower seeding rates in wider rows and I'm happier so on air movement sunlight penetration to the bottom leaves all those things happen so I'm not sure what spacing you're on but that might help because if you've got a lot of fusarium in your system I'm guessing so I mean oats into that could be a problem, oats into corn there's a whole bunch of things that can be going on there I'm going to get you guys can beat me up on this okay because I'm going to expose myself please don't I'm a flavor of what you're saying okay so we had a what I'm going to call a full season come across well speaking so what it was going to do was we planted the first of July grazed in July for our herb counts so it's a it's really an experiment for us it's 160 acres we left strips in it with no nitrogen nitrogen strips the rest of it I put 25 units again on by soil sample the field before we started we had 15 pound of air jet trouts double 4.8% organic matter that time was 25 years in no till where we put the 25 25 units of air on we had 1600 pound more biomass and 1% more protein now I understand that's supposed to be drinking the Kool-Aid if I would have cut back and not put anything on that cover crop we would have lost probably 4 days grazing on that portion section okay you put the money to this so did I do the right thing I think there comes a time when a little bit of fertilizer until maybe I'm not active enough we've got covers on that field and then really start planting covers until 2005 and so we've got covers on it in the rotation I rotate my covers these behind leaves so I mean how do I do that so I go cold turkey and tell the cow they don't quite have enough to eat and there's always heavy breath to do on it there's always soil cover on it I do the same thing I do put some nitrogen on I do the same thing I do put some nitrogen on I like ammonium sulfate a lot I don't ever put on over 30 pounds per acre on any acre and I can say ever now I've been doing that a couple years I don't ever put on more than that in one application but I occasionally will do another one I just depends on the crop and what I've got going on because my goal is sustainability and I'm not sustainable without profit and I think that everybody has to understand that everybody's system is different my system in Oklahoma with all the heat that I have and the amount of moisture that I have is different from a system here so I am still using some commercial fertilizers I don't like it I hate writing a check and I hope and I think that there is a biological answer to every problem that we're currently using chemistry to fix I believe that's true maybe I'm not smart enough to have figured it all out obviously yet but I'd like to get to that point and I would have the exact same response that you have in my multi-species summer blends if I put nothing on they're not going to grow as well I'm probably building better soil I probably am he's got a good ground Dan can I just go back to what you said before you put 25 units of M what kind of M was that it was urea so you mean like 50 pounds per acre correct and you put it on some of the land and some of it you didn't put on we left strips in the field the majority of it was fertilized you left strips in the field you could visually see it you could visually see it that's fine I think you've got more animal production from where you have your biomass how do I know that's a good question that's a good question because I've seen places just to give you an example here in the United States what's that broam is it sweet that's I think people say it needs a lot of in and I've seen where it's been because this was the ground like this high we've been on it and then people have cut the end and it's like I've only been this high and it actually got more animal production from it when it was this high because it had much higher nutrient density and when it was this high it was because the end has elongated the cells that made it grow taller so you've got more biomass that doesn't necessarily equate through to animal lightweight counties and we know for certain that it does not equate to more milk if it's empty basically with milk production where people have cut the end and got less pasture growth like a rising plate meat will say you've only got half the grime out of here but you're still getting the same or more milk because it's very nutrient dense because now it's got a better root system so you're saying where I didn't put the end on I've got less biomass my question is did you actually get less animal production because that shorter biomass could have had much higher nutrient density so did you fence those off and graze them separately what it was, it was clipped this is NRCS helping with this so it was clipped we had two samples this is four yard and it was clipped right at the ground we got a complete biomass carbonate nitrogen and everything so we know how much nitrogen is in it but do you know how much secondary plant compounds were in it how much what? polyphenols, flavonoids how much percent of nitrogen how much secondary plant compounds were in that yeah, so there's a relative fee value to it which would just be acid, detergent, fiber and metabolizable energy in other words those measurements that the lab doesn't actually tell you how well your gas would do on that it'll just tell you the main things like the protein the energy, crude fiber like those kinds of things acid, detergent, fiber whatever they're the sorts of measurements that if it does a feed analysis that's what the lab will do if you have a look at Fred Provenza's work Professor Fred Provenza here in the United States he wrote a book, published a book last year called nourishment he's very well known he was a professor at Utah State University he's now retired he looks at secondary plant compounds the secondary metabolites that are in plants things like flavonoids and polyphenols and all those sorts of things that are really important for feed conversion efficiency for how the rumen actually works and they are much more important for animal production for live weight gain than how much protein I mean protein and energy yes they're important you have to have certain levels of them but your secondary plant compounds are going to be higher in the plants if you didn't have the energy to put on them so the test that you will now just do unless you actually fence those troops off and looked at live weight gain in those different areas the biomass is not a very good indicator unfortunately of really on your live weight gain as I said before you could have a crop of something like this high, like irrigated and lots of air on it when you're going this high doing nothing for your soil the best thing for livestock production either to something shorter that's really high in secondary plant compounds in fact like even for human health there's a guy called Dan Kudrich who's been working over in Massachusetts and he's been analysing things like carrots and spinach and those sorts of things like for human function and he's found a 200 fold difference in the amount of secondary plant compounds or polyphenols for example specifically that's what he's looking at in like a carrot grown in an industrial type system like lots of fertilizer compared to one grown in a soil that's biologically rich the one grown in biologically rich soil can have 200 times more secondary plant compounds which are never going to show up on a lab test that just measures protein and energy that carrot is going to be far more beneficial for somebody to consume so those shorter plants that may be very rich in secondary plant compounds that actually improve the conversion efficiency so that yes they still don't have a certain amount of protein and they still don't have a certain amount of energy there's minimum levels of that and fiber and all those things they have to have so if you've got nothing there you can't feed animals or nothing but what I'm saying is you can still have half the biomass and produce more lightweight gain and I've seen it it doesn't necessarily weight the bio but I've seen it more and more and more when doing the science on it now and seeing more and more and more why it is okay yeah Bricks will tell you so yeah did you do Bricks yeah Bricks will tell you for sure did you do Bricks levels on those plants what's that Bricks use a very great comment that measures the Bricks levels on those plants what do you have to take the idea did you measure Bricks levels on those plants no no no well that will tell you more than that okay we're not that bad yeah next time do your Bricks levels yeah and if they're higher that means that the animals gain more nutrition from those plants in fact there's almost a direct line relationship between if you look at a graph of Bricks percentage above the bottom and lightweight gain along this axis it's formed it's almost a straight line of increased percentage Bricks these increased pounds of lightweight gain and Alan Williams has got that comment okay I know for one last question sorry to catch up over a run out of time I'm doing some fail-free my intentions are to do a lot more of it but of course just okay so the idea that I'm going to build organic matter and import nutrients am I right or am I wrong let's see who's going to import you're going to import nutrients for sure but but I don't I think you could be disappointed by the amount of organic matter you really gain because organic matter is grown through the roots of the of the growing plants that's where you increase your organic matter the fastest you know what would you call it liquid carbon almost as a cow reach down and bite that plant has an amazing response of liquid carbon because it knows it needs nutrients that's why it grows 27% faster so I think that you could import nutrients you could import some residue on top I think it's a wonderful thing it's better than you know feeding them in a pen all winter for sure a lot better but I don't know how much organic matter gain you're going to get in that area I'm probably not the best person to ask that because we don't do it so what I have seen where people think about raising is that you can see where the vials you can see where the vials lead of course you get more plant growth because you get a short term what we call labile carbon in other words the organic matter breaks down and as it's breaking down and it's feeding the food web eventually all the hay that you put there will decompose and go back to your farm dog so while it's breaking down it's feeding the soil food web and plants will go faster and there's plants that grow faster in that area where you have the hay will produce lots of food space so they will really end up with building soil because the plants benefited from the organic matter from the hay so the thing I didn't talk about in my talk is there is a beauty difference between organic matter which is like hay or straw crop residues all those kinds of things they break down and decompose and become carbon dioxide whereas you really see that it's start off as very simple she was another carbon compounds and they polymerise and you know as they build they become bigger structures stable carbon in the soil they start with something simple and build it into something complex and it's very stable with hay and other things like that they start with complex carbon high rates that soil food web breaks them all down into simple and simple ones they end up being carbon goals so they go back to the atmosphere it's good for the soil while it's there but when you see there's green areas where you have the hay that grass that grows more it's going to build your soil so you still will get soil building there but it will come from the acides from the grass for example makes sense we're done we're done one bit, thank you I think Ruth had one was she? one more? one more here let me slide see where it beaver is it's right in front of a blues blue jeans really? do you want to meet him? so I think they'll come off the stage and maybe they'll let you come up and visit with them a little bit here and there and grab a drink of water I do want to remind you please fill out your surveys either if you have a a smartphone you can scan that and fill it out or just fill it out on the paper but that's the only way we can improve I better go grab at least what's going on it really does help us a lot let's go meet him we're going to go meet Dr. Beck you can ask me if you want to I don't have any more questions I just wanted to say thank you again for coming safe travels thank you very much