 I'm proud to be here on behalf of the Coal Lakes Research Farm. It's something we take quite a bit of pride in. This is our main station right there. We have both dry land and irrigated facilities. If you're not familiar with us, it was started by, of course, a group of farmers. This is what it looks like from our property. We're a typical middle of South Dakota thing where we only have trees in major drainage ways. Ruth and I are going to go to Australia here in a few weeks. I showed this very slide in Australia the first time I went there. Somebody in the audience said, where did the trees go? Because they have low rainfall areas, but they have lots of trees because the rainfall comes in the cool part of the year. I just flippantly said, well, Paul Bunyan cut them down. They had no idea who Paul Bunyan was. So you've got to be a little careful when you do these things. The movie The Revenant was actually a true story that happened in western South Dakota. If you went to the movie, there's all these trees. There's no damn trees at Lemon. And that's where the guy got mauled is at Lemon and he crawled to just north of Peer and took a boat down the river to Chamberlain. There's no trees in there. But they had a film that where there's trees. So you have to be a little careful with your audience. Last night, and some of you weren't there, but last night Keith Burns talked about leaders. These are three leaders. I don't consider myself one of them. On your left is Colin Seiss. He's a guy from Australia that does the grain and graze or pasture cropping system. And then next to him and looking very cold in my coat is Rolf Derps. And I think Keith Burns talked about Rolf some today. And the guy on your right, far right, is a guy we call, I call Duracell. His name is Dersu Gasani. He's from Brazil. And probably one of the first guys that talked about some of these natural insecticide type insect control things. Dersu unfortunately left us this year, but they all showed up on a day similar to today. Several years ago at the farm because they wanted to visit. And Dersu really got into it. He's like Dersu. He's always going. Everybody else kind of wanted to stay in the truck. But we get down to the river and there's ice. Dersu had never seen ice. And he went running out on the water and he says, I'm like, Jesus, like I walk on water. So a couple of years ago, five years ago, a fact in my wife Ruth, none of what I have done would have been possible without Ruth helping along the way. And she kind of has really taken the no-till association and kept them going through a lot of years. And they've done a wonderful amount of work in the past. A few years ago we took a trip to France. It was actually right after the Charlie Hebdo thing, but we weren't close to Paris. And we got an English-speaking GPS system on a car and we traveled from town to town doing no-till meetings. And we do the meeting from eight till noon, course through a translator, and then we leave at lunchtime because it takes about two and a half hours to eat lunch in France, which is not a bad thing. It just doesn't mean you can't get to the next spot very easily. So we take off before lunch and travel to the next town and see the tourist spots on the way and somebody would meet us there and fill us in, have dinner, and then the next day we'd do it again. But they all had to show us their castles. And we'd go and see the castles and they had their grain bends and they looked really nice and every town had a castle. And you say, where did you produce the grain that went into the grain bends? Well, around the castle. Well, the only thing they could produce around the castle now is a few shrubs. And if you look at the land that they had there, that is their good land. And they do an incredible amount of tillage. They till up and down the hill. Sometimes they go to places where they can't actually go up the hill and they can't go across the hill because they tip over so they drive up and then plow down. And so not long after we went there, I started telling them that my ancestors left Europe because they had degraded the soils so badly that they weren't productive anymore and they had to go find some new soils and then they promptly started to degrade the soils where they went to. And we've done a really good job of it, okay? So it's not one of these things that we just lately have realized or re-realized in the 2000s. It's something of it going on forever. South Dakota was quote-unquote discovered. The Native Americans have real reason to not like that term. But the Lavre Andre brothers came from Winnipeg and went across the continental divide in North Dakota. There is one there. It's about five feet high, sometimes some place between Jamestown and Bismarck or Jamestown and Valley City. There's a continental divide. And they got into the Missouri River system and they were claiming that area for France. It was 1743 and they buried a lead plate above Fort Peer claiming this area for France. And that's why we bought the Louisiana Purchase from France and not from somebody else. And before we did that in the late 1700s, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and all the leaders were talking back and forth to each other that if they continued to degrade the soils on the eastern seaboard, as badly as they were, they were going to have to move west further. And George Washington said, well maybe we should try to do a better job of taking care of our soils than we've been doing. I mean really? Maybe we should start now. It's been 300 years and we're still talking about it. And for the reason that they had to move west, they kept degrading the soil so they bought the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and came through Peer, South Dakota right across our property. But Lewis tried to cross our property in 1804 because I went back to the journals. And what were they doing? They were coming out there looking for land to degrade and they're also looking for beavers. Allah the Revenant, that's what they were doing. They came and killed the beavers. Sometimes look at the records of how many hundreds of thousands of beavers they took out of the Missouri River system. Prior to those being gone, those beavers were building dams that kept the water from flooding the Missouri River. All the little draws and tributaries had beaver dams on them. So when you got big rainfalls, you didn't have lots of water and you also had trees in those draws. The only place that we have trees. So once we took the beavers out and then we brought in the settlers and they started to overgraze and season long graze and do tillage. We had floods. So what's a white European male response to that? Not to put the beaver back. Let's put in big dams. So we have fourth dams in South Dakota, one in Montana, one in North Dakota. One of the really interesting things about the Lewis and Clark's journey is early on in our talk about diversity in no-till, I was doing a meeting in North Dakota and I suggested they really needed to do corn in their rotations in North Dakota to no-till and do corn. And one of the ARS scientists jumped up right in the middle of this meeting and said we can't grow corn in North Dakota. And my response was that Lewis and Clark stopped at Bismarck and bought corn from the Native Americans for their journey. And that maybe the USDA research should try to get as advanced as the Native Americans were in 1804. He did talk to me again here about five years ago. So we put in big dams instead of doing what we should be doing and then farmers, they're going to take water from eastern South Dakota to central South Dakota in the Redfield area to irrigate. And Darryl DeBoer, who's sitting here, was involved in some of that research at Redfield and also some of the stuff that subsequently followed when farmers along the Missouri River decided they wanted to take that water out of the reservoir and use centerpivots to put it on. The reason they're going to take the water to Redfield is somebody had not invented a centerpivot at the time they designed it. So they were going to put it on the La Custry and Lake Dakota Plain. They didn't think that you could grow corn at Redfield without irrigation. They didn't think you could grow soybeans at Redfield without irrigation. When I went there to run the farm at Redfield in 1983, there was 1,900 acres of soybeans in Sprink and Brown County combined. And I almost didn't pass my orals on my PhD because I made the statement, not real bright, that I thought we could probably do fine without the irrigation at Redfield if we just no till. And they didn't think that that could possibly be true and I hadn't thought it through very well. But what happened out at Cronin's place, and this is actually Ralph Holesworth's pivot there, high pressure system put on venture water in about 20 minutes or 25 minutes, and it would run off like this. That's a Cronin pivot. Well, that's not acceptable. And so we were looking at ways along the Derral De Boer. We had a project and we were looking at ways of making water go in the ground better. Under center pivots, especially if we switch from high pressure to low pressure, we put the water on faster. And a group of farmers got together and formed the Dakota Lakes Research Farm. And they own that place and they work with SDSU to run it. And I think it's the only one that I know of that really runs that way. And Southeast Farm China is getting there. But elsewhere in the world, it's the government owns the research farms. And therefore, it's driven by the government and not necessarily by the grassroots. And I think we've been very successful. Very difficult thing to do, but I think we've been successful. In 2014, we met with the Board of Regents and they were kind of wondering what we did. We came up with this thing here, the comparison of corn, soybean, spring wheat, winter wheat, whatever. In the North region, North Central, Central and South Central, South Dakota. That area from probably 281 out to Missouri River or Highway 83, roughly. It had increased by $1.6 billion an acre between 1987 and 2014. They just produced that much more crop because they made more efficient use of the water. They better use the resource. We didn't achieve this success because we set out and said we're going to make things better because we've been doing that. Been trying to make the wheat varieties better, but guys are doing wheat and summerfowl on part of those areas. So they're doing spring wheat and barley at Redfield. We didn't set out to do that. We just said, hey, we're not doing a good job of getting the water in the ground. We're not doing a good job of keeping the water and whatever. So let's see what we can get done. And what we found out with Darryl de Bourne and I is if we did no till, we made the water going to ground better. Surprised everybody. This approach is sometimes called a transformational or systems approach or holistic. There's lots of terms. It's kind of like everybody comes up with new terms. I like this analogy better. The light bulb was not the result of incrementally improving handles. And a lot of our ag research is incrementally going to make it a half a bushel better, half a bushel better, instead of going back and looking at the prairie and say how did the prairie work? Because the prairie worked pretty dang well before we got here and started screwing it up. Most present systems that we call no till are only incrementally different from tilled systems. People still take a big tractor, hook on to a big implement and drive up and down. Right? That's not really transformationally different. Now what we have done in Central South Dakota and people talk about that is we've stopped the bleeding. We used to have the highway closed between Oneida and Peer when the wind came up. That actually happened in 1977 or something like that was one of the days. Two years ago Governor Dugard came to visit in the fall and I took the Oneida paper where they talk about the 30, 40, 50 years ago. That was the week they'd closed the highway. They had pictures of that in the Oneida paper and we just said if you want to know what we did this doesn't happen anymore. But we have a lot of work to do yet. President Kennedy didn't say we're going to make rockets a little better and hope someday that we can develop a space program. He just said no we're going to put people on the moon in the end of the decade. I want us to make a commitment today that we're going to stop this dam erosion now. We're going to stop that. We're going to stop the water quality degradation now. Now we're going to try to do a little better. We need to stop it now. A farmer manages ecosystem and takes sunlight, water and carbon dioxide and makes them into products he can sell. Strive to become the best harvester of water and sunlight. Not necessarily the best corn grower. Ecosystem processes, let's focus on the processes not on the results. Water cycle, are we managing or water cycle the way it's supposed to be managed? If we do it the way Mother Nature did it, we don't have water quality issues. If we screw it up, we send a bunch of nutrients to the Gulf of Mexico or to our lakes or we cause saline seeps. Energy flow, how much energy do we capture? And Keith talked about that day. Mineral cycle, are we cycling the nutrients appropriately and the community dynamics do we have the diversity that we need? The rain feed plants will recharge the groundwater, does it runoff? Deep percolate, degrade water. We now can put two inches of water on in nine minutes at Dakota Lakes Research Farm without runoff. We will walk people behind those irrigators after we've done that. It's a fun thing to watch when I try to get them to step into that field. Because their paradigm says I'm going to sink up to my knees. And it's just like walking on a carpet. And once you do that, I think we kind of have people and especially irrigators. But that's how it is on the prairie. You can walk in the prairie anytime you want to after rain. You don't sink in. You don't have water standing on the surface. No runoff. We have the armor. We have the macro pores. Keith Burns talked some about that highway. The macro pores, the breathing that soil needs to breathe when you take any kind of tillage tool. Like a vertical tillage machine. We'll cut our infiltrate one path. We'll cut our infiltration in half. We've done it. Makes no sense. It increases our weeds. We have the earthworms there. We actually had a graduate student that worked on planting earthworms at one time. He looked at us kind of goofy. But if you don't have them, it helps at least speed the process of getting them. If you've ever been around irrigation, you know you get wheel tracks. And they're as deep as you do tillage. So if you don't do tillage, you don't get the wheel tracks. It's kind of a nice logical thing. So there's 20 years of wheel track. And when the guys from the first Dakota Lakes boards came to visit us at Redfield, they were all irrigators. They were all conventional tillers. And the thing that they noticed the most was the wheel tracks. When I get a group of irrigators from California, for instance, the first thing they noticed, the first thing we show them is how deep our wheel tracks aren't. Because that gets them. Take the E out of ET and irrigation will use the term evapotranspiration. Evaporation is water that goes away that doesn't do you any good. Transpiration is water that goes through a plant. Somebody asked the question earlier today, how do I get more of this or that in my soil? Increase the amount of water that goes through your plants. Increase the amount of plant growth, make the water grow through the plants. Don't allow the water to evaporate. Maximize the water into the soil with those macropores and maximize the water holding capacity of the soil. When we've decreased our organic matter by the levels we have, and Keith talked about it today, Alan Williams talked about it today, we really change our water holding capacity in the soil. And that means that we get water logged more and we get dry more. Because the bucket is smaller. Make the bucket bigger. Now this good for irrigation is great for the dry land guys. So the impact of Dakota lakes on the irrigators is that most of them quit irrigating. Dan Forge talks about his dry land corn yields. He has awfully good irrigate corn yields and he has very low left so he still irrigates. But anybody with over 250 foot of left is kind of quit. Ecosystems harvest sunlight. And that gives us energy and Keith talked about that today. If we remove products from that ecosystem, then our bugs don't have the energy. So when you take hay off and haul it into the buildings, you rob the ecosystems of energy. Guys in North Dakota that do hay yet have hayland, they have started to hay and leave the bales on the land. They harvested them on and bring the cows to the hayland and feed the cows on the hayland. So they're cycling the nutrients and the energy right there on that hayland and they've actually increased by a bale or two the production of the hayland. I used to have friends that come from Argentina where they did everything with their cattle in terms of grass fat cattle. And they'd see all the balers in South Dakota and they go, so Dwayne, the cows in Dakota have no legs. So when I see somebody hauling hay or something, I say, well, so your cows don't have any legs. And we went into an operation in France where they had the cows hauling the building. And I'm saying to Sarah Singla, one of the Nuffel scholars from France, I said, Sarah, the cows have legs. And she's telling me to shut up because they understand English. Is the energy used constantly for night? Is it benign or potentially harmful? Well, the sunlight that you can harvest is free. It's constant. It's going to come up tomorrow, right? It's benign other than for us light-skinned caucasians that don't wear proper protection. And we can get some cancer, but other than that, it's benign and it's internal. If you look at fossil fuels, you have to buy them. It's external and they're potentially damaging. Are the nutrients available for plant growth? See, and you ask yourself these questions. And when you're starting to do a tillage system, you can't answer these well. Are the nutrients available for plant use in environmental services or have they been leached, eroded, transported from the landscape, sent to China or to the ocean? Ecosystems that leak nutrients and one of those would be carbon turn into deserts. Desertification is loss of nutrients. And what we do all the time is we look at these ecosystems like Israel and whatever that were once gardens of Eden and all of a sudden they're deserts. Man is very good at that. A 120 car train of soybeans contains 400,000 pounds of phosphate. Everybody loves these big unit loaders. A load of unit train in a way it goes takes 400,000 pounds of phosphate with it. And they're not going to send it back. Sailing seeps are when we don't have the water nutrient cycle working and the water exceeds the water-holding capacity of the soil, takes the nutrients are in the soil and takes them down in the saline seep. SDSU and Watertown, Jim Clinton Denon's here someplace, he'll tell you this is a true story. When they bring students to my farm, I'll ask them, what's in a saline seep? And if they say salts, they get in trouble. Not the kids, the instructor. Because what's in a saline seep is fertilizer. Number one thing is nitrates. Now you've got calcium sulfate which is gypsum and calcium carbonate which is lime. What you're doing is losing your nutrients. We use cover crops to help us better balance the water nutrient cycle. And the question came up last night about what happened to the corn that was growing where there wasn't cover crop yield of the corn where there was. Most likely that was a nitrogen problem because the nitrogen got sequestered into the cover crop. And I don't think they took account of that. Where the nitrogen is when you're doing a cover crop is the nitrogen is sequestered into the organic material which is exactly where you want it. If you're going to build organic matter you have to have both nitrogen and carbon. You just made some organic matter. When you till ground you decay the organic matter and produce nitrogen for your crop and that's what my grandfather came to South Dakota to do was to till the prairie to take the nitrogen out. And he didn't really know or care about the organic matter at that time. We often do different mixes of things. We try to do a mix of perennials and annuals. There's some alfalfa growing between rows of corn. One of the little tricks we do to have a deep-rooted guy with a legume in there will do about four years or five years of alfalfa in those rows like that plants corn between them and move the alfalfa row. So we've got 20 inch rows so we have one row of alfalfa every 60 and two rows of corn every 60 inches so we're basically the same as a 30 inch row corn guy. Why do we want to do that? Well the root systems of corn and beans and whatever about this deep and they're only this deep for about a month. Most of you there are like this. We're not cycling the nutrients like those tall grass and mixed grass prairie did. We have one of these deep water things for a frost-free drinker that doesn't need electricity. It has to be buried seven feet. And I buried one in a switchgrass pasture a couple of years ago switchgrass area and at seven feet I still had roots going down. Corn and beans not even close. So I don't think we're going to get by without using some perennials. But maybe we're going to do it like Colin Seist does where he grows switchgrass in the summertime and he grows these other crops in the wintertime, grazes the switchgrass in the summer. I don't know. I don't know how you're going to do it but we have to do that. We don't have a choice. We've done some things with coated seed and flying things on and all kinds of different stuff with cover crops. And the idea is to try to match that water and nutrient cycle. Jeremy Wilson, a friend of mine from North Dakota that's a no-tiller came up with this explanation of cover crops, his catch and release nutrients. And I just went up after he did his talk and said, Jeremy, I'm going to steal that and take the South Dakota rights to that because that's what you're doing. You're putting them in a form they're not going to get in the water. They're not going to get in the drain tile. Our fertilizer program is fairly simple. Some starter pee with the seed, other nutrients are placed near the row at seeding time. The most important thing to do with corn is put some nitrogen near the seed at seeding time. And we can put it on the surface in strips after crop canopy and we do that at times with wheat. Broadcasting fertilizer before or at seeding encourages weeds. You need to know your available nutrient, your moisture and your roots. Keith was talking to you about this big, huge root system. And so was Dr. Williams. This is mycorrhizae, root systems, huge root system. If I have a huge root system, I can have less available pee. And soil pee tests, Olsen, Bray, Malik, any of those you use are really a measure of solubility, not how much. And Keith mentioned that too. And so we can run very low levels of available pee and still get enough into our plant if we have the mycorrhizae. The way you kill them is you do tillage. It's very simple. If you do tillage, you don't have them. Weeds and diseases are Mother Nature's way of adding diversity to a system that lacks diversity. Another way of saying that is Mother Nature is an opportunist. If you have a problem, you have provided the opportunity somewhere in your system. So when you have a problem, don't try to figure out how to kill it or get rid of it, figure out where you let it into the system. What we do now with weeds, for instance, in the corn soybean area, get a new weed and we just look for a different herbicide or a different technique to whack it. And then you whack it and then something else pops up. And I call that whack-a-mole farming. When my kids were little, they used to have this game where you had to whack these moles. And they keep thinking, if I just whack one more mole, it would be gone. Until you put diversity in the system, you're not going to have that. Does the action address the weakest point in the life cycle of the weed or the insect or whatever? Weed spray or weeds after they're up. That's not the most vulnerable time. It's already established. Getting a plant to start growing, I mean, once it's up and growing, your crop is up and growing, you feel really good about it. The weeds feel pretty good about themselves. They're the hardest to kill at that point in time. The best thing to do is not allow them to have seeds, not allow them to be in the field, not allow them to get a good start. This photo was taken in the early 1990s. It's a pursuit-resistant kosher growing in some chickpeas. And it resulted because, as I animated, come up with what they called at that time, Emmy corn or pursuit-tolerant corn. And I had a young grower say, I'm going to do corn and soybeans now. I don't have to worry about weeds. I can use pursuit in my corn and pursuit in my beans, and I'll never have a weed again. And I said, well, you'll have weeds and you'll have resistant weeds, and they'll be resistant to other ALS herbicides and whatever. And I got a letter from Cyanid wishing to have a retraction. And John wasn't here yet. He wasn't in on this. The dean and the director both got letters, too, wanting a retraction. John was here. Ray Moore, at the time, gave me a call. He said, I think I know the answer, but is there any chance you'll retract? And I said, I'll handle it. And I called the Cyanid guy and said, if I don't have resistant kosher at Dakota Lakes in three years, I'll retract. And then all I did is had Leon Reggie put a plot out. And I went and got my neighbor's lean, resistant kosher and grabbed one of them and shook it over top to plot. Pretty easy. And I called the Cyanid guy. He said, I'm busy. I've got all kinds of complaints to go take care of. Nature's efforts to add diversity can be countered by adding diversity of your own. And that's really the best way to handle the problem. We've had no need to apply broadcast insecticide at Dakota Lakes in 16 years. I never thought that that would happen, but we have lots of predators. Number one thing that kills aphids is fungus. Number two thing that kill aphids is ladybugs. Then you've got the minute pirate bugs and all these other guys love minute pirate bugs. Don't really like the bug that much, but I love the name. Little pirate bug. You imagine the little one patch over his eye or something, I don't know. But now imagine you know that and somebody says we're going to put some herbicide on your beans or weed and let's just throw a little fungicide and insecticide in with herbicide because it surely can't cost very much. Well, it might because you're killing all your predators. Ralph Holesworth, like one of the guys I mentioned before, he always, when guys would say to him, you say I want to be a no-tiller, he said the first thing you need to do is to go down to Dakota Lakes to learn to think of things differently. No-till is not about lack of tillage but about managing the soil, the water, soil structure, soil mileage, carbon compounds in the soil, the thing that everybody's been talking about today. It has nothing to do with quitting tillage other than you can't do it if you do tillage because you can't manage it, you've got everything all screwed up. Strives to produce a crop which is healthy, not a crop that does not get sick and I don't see anybody here that's sick. But if we hopped on bicycles and went for a 40-mile ride, there's difference in health amongst us and the ones, the crops that are going to do the best when things get tough, get too dry, too hot, too cold are the ones that are healthy. It means that you have to look at all these things around this wheel and you can't just look at any one thing because if all you do is take tillage out and don't change anything else and that's what's happened in the corn belt. Still want to do corn beans which is not a rotation, it's a two-crop monoculture and it's a two-crop monoculture that doesn't have enough carbon. Think of the native prairie with 80 or 90, I mean 90 or 98% grasses with big roots and lots of carbon and you put that winky little soybean in there. So I think about that whole circle in terms of cultural practices, technology and management. You can't replace, you can't replace what you did with tillage, that cultural practices with technology because if you try to do that there's not enough technology available, resistant weeds. Even if it was available, you probably can't afford it. Look at the price you're paying for GMO seed and the chemicals that go on it. You probably can't afford it and if you could afford it and if we're available you gotta sell it to the consumer and frankly they don't want it. Whether that's right or wrong, they don't want it. They don't want it. Okay, let's do something else that figure out a way not to use it or at least to be able to defend why we're doing it and to understand it ourselves. So let's look at tillage, rotation, sanitation, competition. That's the cultural practices. If you take tillage out because in nature, tillage is a catastrophic event. Remember we set out to mimic what Mother Nature was doing. Mother Nature doesn't do tillage unless it's a volcano or a landslide or a flood or something silly like that. It's a tsunami, okay? Tillage is the agriculture what fracking is to petroleum. Both increase the speed of the removal of compounds from the ecosystem and leave the ecosystem or the system exhausted. That's what you want to do when you mine. That's what my ancestors did. They were miners. Okay? We can't do that anymore. If you could know only one thing about a soil what parameter would you want to know? I talked about that earlier today, organic matter and Keith gave these numbers when they were on textural classes one to three percent you double the water holding capacity. It's all about holding more water. If your soil only holds four or five inches of water you're not very resilient if it holds 10 or 12 or 14 and that's what we've done. Short-term studies are not accurate in evaluating things like crop rotations untilage systems and that kind of stuff. We've never run a rotation study that went less than 10 years but you can't get grants to do that and we have a real structural problem in our experiment stations right now because the funding is all short-term whereas in old days we used to have formula funds. That's on the federal government side. So Dakota Lakes allows us to do that. Crop rotation allows time for natural enemies to destroy pathogens of one crop while another crop is growing. Proper intensity. Use the water you save by no-tilling. You're going to save water but you've got to use it. If you don't use it, it's going to cause you problems. Adequate diversity. You don't need to have like Dan Forge, 14 different crops or something. We do because it says research on the gate. My guys say, why are we doing all these things? It says research on the sign out there. So we have to do these. But if you're a real farmer, you don't have to do those and then you'll get stable and stability out of the thing. Native vegetation is the best indicator of the range of intensities which are appropriate for location. Whenever I travel, the first thing I do is look at the native vegetation. That tells you what you can do and then from then on it's easy because the native vegetation has already integrated the climate and the soils and those kind of things. It's already integrated all those together and it tells you this is what you can do here. Most of the plant growth problems blamed on no-till or the result of inadequate diversity or improper intensity. We just haven't gotten that mix right. We're trying to do what we want to do and not what Mother Nature wants us to do. You've got to put that water you saved by no-till to work. You've got to buy water, use crops and then if that doesn't do it you use cover crops and double crops and those kind of things. At least three crop types, long intervals of two to four years are needed to break some of the cycles and we've got lots of stuff you've received a copy or should have of managing agriculture ecosystem should be in your thing and it explains a lot of that stuff. But you should have a situation like this where if you did what I did there where I had my auto-steer auto-steer better than that and you leave a gap but there's no weeds there and that wasn't apparent to me either till people would come and visit and they'd walk out and they'd find a gap in the field and there wouldn't be any weeds and they're going why isn't there weeds in your gap in your skip and we control the weed seeds. Organic matter makes a difference. Here's a wheat field in 2006 the year before that wheat was peas the year before the peas was corn in that field doesn't look very good, it's a dry year but if I turn around and look to the other side of the road there's a wheat field that the year before it was peas and the year before that was corn as well. They were both the same for two years before we planted the wheat. What's the difference? Well for ten years we had done two different rotations one was corn pea winter wheat that's the one that looks good nice and red in an infrared photo and the other one was soybean corn pea winter wheat. Every other year broadly if there's not enough carbon in that system you can't add organic matter without adding the carbon corn soybeans and peas don't have very much carbon you just don't have the right carbon and nitrogen ratios okay so I call that my Canadian where they do wheat, canola, wheat, pea or my corn, soybean, corn, soybean rotation those are the same kinds of rotations so does that happen every year well in 2006, 60 bushel versus 29 7.9 inches of rain between the time we harvested the peas and we harvested the wheat in 2005 when we had 23 inches in that year 92 versus 57 and if we look at 2000 to 256 versus 28 but we didn't see that for the first ten years you could see the soils weren't as good but you didn't see the yield differences we still see that difference, here's some stuff from 2016 the good rotations are like 95 and those kind of numbers and the other ones are dropping down into 60 and such okay how about under high rainfall conditions, we have irrigation the same thing happens with irrigation corn, soybean, we average about 63 bushel an acre up until this is until 2013 if we did a corn corn soybean wheat soybean more diverse rotation the first year soybeans 76 bushel the second rotation in the system after the wheat cover crops swing 82, 81.2 so if I look at those two we got 62.9 and an average of 78 on the other one if I had a real farm of 5000 acres let's think about that and I got corn in there if I do continuous corn I get about 200, if I do corn soybean I got 217 and if I do that corn-corn the first one is like 240 or 50 or a little better 237, something average between those two corn so the corn is doing better as well with more diversity and if I had 5000 acres I got over a million bushels of corn but I have a big dryer and lots of semis if I do 2500 acres of each then I got less you know just under half a million bushels of corn and I get 157,000 some odd bushels of beans if I do corn corn soybean wheat soybean I get more bushels of soybeans on 2000 acres then I did 2500 acres of corn soybean I get less corn but I get 120,000 bushels of wheat so do you think it makes sense to trade 72,500 bushels of corn for 120,000 bushels of wheat and 350 bushels of soybean but all the time in the corn belt I have guys go I can't do any but corn beans I can't afford to grow that wheat you can't afford not to grow the wheat because you have time to do cover crops and time to get rid of the weeds and weeds and get rid of ses nematodes and all those things that whack-a-mole stuff you've been doing you don't have to do that anymore as citizens of the US and the world you need to decide what you would like agriculture to look like in the future the Coal Lakes Research Farm looks too in 600 years in advance we try to have that exercise once a year where we sit down and think about if we keep doing what we're doing what the heck is it going to look like do we want our communities to totally go away nobody looks at that stuff anymore the university should be looking that far in advance in some of the research governments aren't going to corporations aren't going to because they have short term goals Native American culture based decisions on their potential impact for the next 7 generations that's 280 years at 40 years per generation then pulled this one out I still use it never in history has all of mankind not only faced this type of impending catastrophe with a change in soil and the pressure on food and the change in the climate research needs to be transformational not transitional or incremental 80% of the total impact costs in agriculture right now non land cost variable cost can be traced directly to energy average price of weed in 1970 was $1.37 a bushel average price of a barrel of oil was $3.39 what's that today we're taking something that's going up in price to produce something that's going down in relative price doesn't make any sense okay we're getting better at it right takes the energy one gallon of diesel fuel to manufacture transport and apply five pounds of N and Keith referred to this issue 150 pounds of N is equivalent to 30 gallons of diesel fuel there's probably very few people in eastern South Dakota and Minnesota that use less 150 pounds of N per acre just think of going out there and throwing 30 gallons of diesel fuel in every acre fossil fuel input in agriculture 120 years ago was essentially zero in 120 years and probably less it'll have to be zero again have we started to think about that somebody really means to think about it we don't change our eating habits until we've had our first art attack right maybe we should start before then the Coal Lakes Research Farm would be fossil fuel neutral by 2026 we cold press our oil seeds flax canola soybeans but especially flax and we use the meal for our cows and the flax oil we can sell and sunflowers another one we should be addressing the problem instead of treating the symptom I hate to be hard on NRCS but they spend a lot of years building terraces which are treating a symptom and waterways people always ask me if I know Gabe Brown and I always tell them well I know both Gabe Brown and Jay Fuhrer and Gabe Brown was a conventional tiller when I met him and Jay Fuhrer brought him down Jay had just won this award for building most terraces and waterways in North Dakota and I ruined her whole day but they've now become famous so that's what terraces do they don't treat the problem I've learned more from observing nature than trying to change it Mother Nature has been managing ecosystem better and for longer than anyone else she harvests a maximum amount of sunlight she leaks very few nutrients including carbon which is a nutrient from the system she recycles things she makes maximum use of water and nutrients by having webs of mycorrhizal fungi and other tricks she uses animals big ones and little ones as part of the system in dry or brittle environment this is Alan Savry's statement soil biology slows during times of low soil moisture and that's why he thinks you need to have the animals I think it has to do with the rumen of the grazing animal remains moist during those periods of dryness continuing biological processes and in cold climates I think we have one of those here soil biology slows during periods of low soil temperature the rumen of the animal remains warm continuing soil biology so we think the animals are part of the reason they're important is they bridge us through the cold and whatever so we're using our cover crops especially on our more humid areas our irrigated areas we grow cover crops so oats and barley and peas and whatever that's what you see here we swath them and then we will leave that swath in place into the winter that crop was growing after we harvested a wheat crop so that rotation I showed you where we had wheat in there we also had that cover crop so we get this nice 4-H crop stays nice and green cows are fine today under the snow that's not a problem stays nice and green under there and they can find it if it's in a swath if it's just in and there it gets snowed under there's some really good work in Alberta I think the Dean might know something about some of this stuff he's from Nebraska he probably reads their neb guides and things and then we use our we move fence every day to make that easier whenever we can we put it on the irrigators and move the irrigators it's easier to move the irrigators and pull posts out and move them Gabe Brown told me one time he said I don't want to move in fence he said I like moving fence he's welcome to come do that for me today he wants to but I think Gabe goes to meetings and his kid moves the fence anyway we move it like that the nice thing if we're moving them every day and really keep them track of them they spread the residue back out we've thought through that quite a bit where do you get wind protection well we don't need our big tour trailers for people in the winter there's not a big bunch of people who want to tour today so we built these little wings on them and that's our calf shelter because we're fall calving and so we got babies out there not real babies they were born in August and September but look at the quality of that stuff 18.2% we'll get three and a half to four tons of dry matter RFV of 121 and then we they have access to that and then also access to corn stocks so that's how we balance their diet how are we going to feed 12 billion people 9 billion all these numbers I hear well we're not going to send food to them because they can't afford it well I went to Ghana a few years ago after we went to France I went to Ghana and warmed up quite a shock to go from France in the winter time to Ghana it's just but it was great but they make three bucks a day they can't afford our food and they can do a good job of feeding growing their own if we help them do that get the heck out of the road how are we going to take this marginal land and turn it into human edible food high level protein we got to use rumen and animals we're not going to do it all organic vegetables we're going to have to use animals on these fragile soils 40 million more cows more goats and more sheep the number one meat eaten in the world is the world's supply of minable fossils will be exhausted in less than 120 years use of perennial sequences or perennial cover crops will probably be necessary what mother nature does not do she does not do tillage unless it's a catastrophic catastrophic event and she does not export nutrients now we used to export a few nutrients down the rivers and the salmon brought them back they were sturgent and the bear ate the salmon and the nutrients were cycled and we put in dams so the salmon can't get there anymore oh we're so smart commonality amongst tillage tools all tillage tools destroy soil structure I wrote this because somebody had given a 45 minute talk on different kinds of tillage tools and I was going to be the next speaker so I made this slide up and I was looking at it and somebody snuck up behind me and said what are you doing with that and I said I'm trying to figure out if I'm enough of a butt head to actually show this and that person closed their computer and walked out of the building so it made it easy all tillage tools destroy soil structure all tillage tools decrease water infiltration all tillage tools decrease organic matter and all tillage tools increase weeds we got data for every one of those bureaucracies, governments and corporations are operated by people with limited tenure or short term goals that includes the university John is not going to make his living being here he's going to go somewhere else or he's going to move up or whatever that's where our system works there are very few of us college professors that last a whole career in one spot and you have to be mentally challenged to do that society farmers and farmers deserve to have long term research so we're going to have to we as farmers have to run it the climate will change in the next 600 years but by studying Lewis and Clark yeah the climate's changed but we've had much more impact on the ecosystem with man's activity on the land than the impact by what's happened to the climate degradation of the ecosystem will have more potential impact farmers and ranchers harvest sunlight carbon dioxide and water produced products we can sell some of this as human food we need to be aware of nutrition issues and offsite impact I got a call from Cargill the director of sustainability and whatever the other day they want to source food that they can sell to the consumer as being regenerative sustainable healthy whoopee whatever and the new one Patagonia how many people know what Patagonia is the company yeah the girls all know they want organic regenerative in France I kept getting the question can you do organic no till and it's hard to answer that question through an interpreter so after the first day because I thought about this after the first day I said yeah I think we can but it's going to take seven species of animal and they were fine with that they went okay and let me go ahead so I get back to the United States and Gabe Brown comes to this meeting I'm at he and I are both speaking yes I said yeah I said that he said what animals I said it depends on what your problem is and he said I got Canada thistle I said well it takes goats or horses he closed his notebooks I don't want any goats or horses on my farm but the funniest part of that is Ruth she would come to some of the meetings and some of them not when she's in France she had better things she could do it than listen to the same talk in French and we got back and I was telling somebody about this and I said just came up with this number seven they were good with that and she said don't you know what it is I said I have no idea we got to do the research but I think it's seven might be it you know it's I don't know peak oil is when half the oil is gone we're past that peak phosphorus we're past that peak soil we're probably past that over half of it's gone what the heck are we waiting for Keith last night we were at the meeting and showed Iowa we started this organic matter soil was this deep and then 20 years later it's this deep and then 20 years later it's this deep and they still got this much left after a hundred some years why is that even acceptable we should throw them in jail or something we can't be doing that anymore take the E out of ET take the T out of Kant doing the right thing environmentally is almost always the correct economic approach in the long run thank you