 want to listen to you. But hopefully we'll be able to work together to be able to keep you awake and to be able to keep you from starving between now and lunch so that we can get some information out there on how you may be able to work with your systems. As in the introduction was being discussed, I came from a family, I come from a family farm, in fact I drove over from that farm today in southwestern Minnesota. My dad, I will say, I've modified this because I used to say he bought the farm, which some people think he died. But he purchased the farm the year I was born. So my whole entire life, my father has owned the farm that I grew up on. And so when I went to school and got an education and learned about many of these things, I would come home and I would talk to my dad about soil biology and all of these principles and I would be so excited. And my father is a farmer. I love farmers. I think farmers are the most incredible people that are out there. They are Renaissance people. You are mechanics and marketers and chemists and pathologists. And you have all of these different skills that you're utilizing and to be a farmer and utilize those skills and get paid which you don't get paid because you don't really get paid for what it is that you do. You are the most stubborn people I have ever met. So my father, who I love dearly, I would go and talk to him about all of these things that I learned and how excited I was and I'm a microbiologist so I'm talking about things he can't even see and I'm like, oh yeah, this stuff that's in your field and it does all this really cool things and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he'd be like, well, what are you doing for me and how is this gonna help me and when are you going to be able to get me to have a higher yield? And I was like, well, I can't really answer those questions. Don't know what to say to you. And so after I finished graduate school, I went to, I got a job in North Dakota and I had the privilege of being able to work with some very innovative farmers. I was in Burleigh County in Bismarck, Mandan and working with some very innovative farmers and got a really good education, this really solid great education from working with these farmers and really being able to see some of these things that I had learned about in school and some of these processes that are going on and I could see how this was actually happening in the real world and in their fields. So I go home and I talk to my dad about all of this and all of these things that I'm seeing with these really great innovative farmers in North Dakota. And as Lee was talking as well, I was thinking about this and but that's in North Dakota. I'm in Southwestern Minnesota. This doesn't work for me. This can't happen here. And besides that, I'm his daughter and I'm a girl and I don't know what I'm talking about. So he came up to visit me in North Dakota and I sort of secretly planned the timing around when I said that he could come up and visit me around a field day at Burleigh County. So we go out to the field day. I take him out with me out to the field day and he's talking with these farmers and seeing all the things that they're doing and this is true, literally. We are on the phone after we left the field day and the man is ordering cover crop seed because I don't know anything. But he goes there and he orders cover crop seed and the next weekend, again, literally, I am driving that cover crop seed that he had bought back home so that he could plant it. But I don't know anything. So I'm hoping that we can work together and you can get a little bit of an understanding that although I don't know anything and I will admit to you that I really don't know anything. Sorry, came here today to talk to you and I'm gonna keep you from lunch and then I'm gonna try and keep you awake after lunch but I don't really know anything. Because I will tell you that I went to 12 years of school to become 100 times stupider than when I started school and I wake up every day now and tell myself, what am I gonna learn today and how is this gonna go forward and then I go to bed every night and I realize that I'm at least 100 if not a thousand times stupider than when I woke up. Because this is a very complex world that we're dealing with and I want you to get an understanding of this complex world. I don't know what all of the organisms that are there. As I said, I found out that I was 100 times stupider when I finished 12 years of education because when I started, we thought we knew about 10% of the organisms that were in the soil. By the time I finished, we knew about 0.1%. That number continues to go down as our knowledge grows, we learn more about the complexity of this environment. But I want you to think about the fact that you have the ability and the capability to be able to implement at least the labor-intensive forces of quadrillions of organisms on a per acre basis. They don't take breaks, they don't sleep. All that you have to do is work with how you can manage the system to get these organisms to function. You don't have to know who they are. You don't have to introduce yourself. They don't care. I've spent my life, my adult life, studying these organisms on a per acre basis. These organisms, they don't care about me. I'm extremely passionate about them. I included a discussion of them in my wedding vows. My wedding ring is the diagrams of amino acid chains because I studied a protein that they produced and that's what my wedding ring is a diagram of. My spouse knows the ranking and hierarchy of the order of things in our household. Obviously. And it's because I have that passion for them that I know that it's possible for you to be able to tap into this. The issue with all of this is that we think, we take the knowledge that we have in the way that we perceive the world and we think that that's the way that these quadrillions of organisms actually work and function and these are the things that they're gonna do. Yes, all biology follows certain paradigms. We are all pre-programmed to eat and reproduce. That is the job of every organism. That is why Koshia makes the number of seeds that it does. That is their job. They are there to eat and reproduce. In that process, every organism is also pre-programmed and this is a good thing, you'll like this. We're all pre-programmed to be lazy. Don't tell your kids because you don't wanna let them know this yet. But we are all programmed to be lazy. It's called conservation of resources. So what these quadrillions of organisms have done in these systems is they have designed mechanisms and optimized their efficiencies over hundreds of millions of years to be able to do this and do a better job of managing these systems and working together in these complex relationships than we could ever think of ways to design tools and chemicals to replace them. So why do we do that? It doesn't mean that I'm not telling you that you can't assist them. But why do we wanna replace the efficiencies that they've figured out for themselves? They're lazy. There are quadrillions of them in every acre of soil and they're lazy. But they will do the jobs that need to get done if we look at managing the system. So what we're trying to do with biology is to build up resilience in our systems. We're trying to create systems that will thrive no matter how salty it is, no matter how much rain you get, no matter how cold it is, no matter how hot it is, nothing will disrupt their abilities to actualize their potential if we allow that to happen. So what we're gonna do, all right, my fault. I think this was my fault. So we'll see if this works. Yeah, all right. So we discuss a lot soil health and the ideas and concepts of soil health. And this is the accepted definition of soil health. And at first when we were discussing this and we came up with this definition of soil health, I was really excited about it because I thought, yeah, you know, we're now talking about soils. It's not just a tabletop that you put plants in. It doesn't just hold your plants up. It's actually part of the entire system. It's part of what you're focusing on. And we're gonna try and get ways to improve the health of that. And that's focusing on the organisms that are in that system. But as I looked at this definition, this definition, the continued capacity of soil to function as a vital living ecosystem that sustains plants, animals, and humans, this is about us. This is not about the soil. This is not about, this is sustaining us. This is what soil can do for us but not what we can do for soil. Not how we can work with it. So no wonder we're gonna continue to impose upon it various types of tools that are gonna make it work better because we know better. Cause I'm a hundred times stupider than the 12 years of education taught me but I know better, right? That's not the way this works. We are continuously in a chess game with nature. We always have been and we always will be in our agricultural systems. As farmers, that is what you're doing. No, I don't play chess but the idea behind this is in playing this game, what we've done is we're continuously the player that sits here and essentially has only taken a few pieces off the board but is losing the game, is currently in check. And the reason is, is because again, nature will always figure out a way. There's always gonna be kosha that's gonna still be growing. You're not gonna get every one of them. You never, ever, ever will get every one of them because that's not the way nature is designed. Superweeds are not a new thing. It's not that all of the sudden kosha became super kosha. It was always that way. What it does is it keeps throwing out different variations, minor variations on a theme, which allows it to respond or not respond to whatever chemical or mechanical tool we apply. Cause that's what it's supposed to do. It's programmed to eat and reproduce. If you're programmed to do that, you're gonna vary themes of that programming in order to be able to continue to do that no matter what it is you're confronted with. That's how we build resilient systems. Kosha is a resilient system. Do you not want your crop systems, the plants that you're choosing to grow for your own profitability to be as resilient as kosha? The way in which we're gonna be able to do this is working with nature and with that understanding instead of playing this chess game where we continue to lose, and all that we're gonna do every time we lose is we wipe the board clean and we restart the game. And we wipe the board clean and restart the game with a new chemical or mechanical tool. But every time we have to restart the game, it's like losing a layer of soil. We are incredibly blessed because we live on some of the best land on the planet. You're trying to grow food on some of the best land on the planet. And instead we have decided because of the way, and it's not your faults, but because of the way that we've created our system, we don't grow food on some of the best land on the planet. We grow industrial products and low quality feed. Think about it. That's what your marketing is something that's gonna get converted into an industrial product or low quality feed. If we wanna feed nine billion people, we can't do that with industrial products and low quality feed. Now again, this isn't your fault because we have a system that has pushed you into that, but there are ways in which we can work with changing the system. You're not powerless. And if we continue on the path that we're on and continue to waste that resource, our soil, we're not going to be able to produce anything other than low quality feed industrial products. And that's not valuable. You are the most valuable people on the planet and you're in a system that produces something that isn't valuable. We need to change the system. We need to look at how we can implement different choices. To be able to build up the resilience and the resistance in our system to improve the nutritive quality of what it is that we're producing. I'm an American. As an American, I am obese and malnourished, like roughly about 85 to 90% of us. That is what we are. We are a first world country that for the first time in our history, children that are born today have a shorter life expectancy than children that were born yesterday. For the first time in our history as a first world country, our life expectancy is going down. Where we rank as a first world country in many categories, including infant mortality is below Cuba or a first world country that's below a country that has been under embargo for 80 years. We need to produce something different on our soils. And we have the potential to do this, to produce higher quality food, not industrial products and low grade feed. If we do this, this will improve our overall profitability because we're not talking about yield anymore. You don't take yellow grain to the bank. Yes, you take a check that you got from delivering that yellow grain to an elevator. But what the bank notes, what's in your bank account is how many checks you write against that check that you brought in. The bank doesn't care what your yield is. The bank cares how many checks you wrote against that. I can grow, we can grow anything anywhere. Colonizing Mars isn't about the fact that we can't grow food there. Colonizing Mars is about the fact that it's too expensive. What your income is, is what you write checks for. How much you spend. It's not about yield. If there is one word that I wish could be eliminated from agribusiness as a whole, it is the why word. And throughout our time together, I may talk about words that you may not want to hear. I may mention an O word, organic. I'm not talking about necessarily organic as far as how we define organic agriculture and organic standards. It's about working with biology. It's about working with that system. It's about creating an environment in which you can be more profitable. Cause that's what it is that you want. Not yield, but profitability. So what is it that we can do? We currently have an incredibly resource intensive agricultural production system. On some of the best land on the planet, we spend billions of dollars on inputs. Not just chemical inputs, but also water. Irrigation is continuing. The amount of irrigated land is continuing to accelerate. We're looking at these systems in which we could actually figure out ways to manage these issues. And we're gonna manage these issues by not focusing on the issues, but focusing on the problem. What we do is we spend all of our time putting band-aids on issues. And running out there and trying to figure out, I've got a weed issue. I've got a disease issue. I've got water issues. I've got fertility issues. We put band-aids on issues. The bigger checks that you write to put band-aids on issues, the bigger checks you're gonna continue to have to write. Because you're not solving the problem. Our soils are hemorrhaging, carbon. They're hemorrhaging the ability to be alive. Organic and carbon is what it means. Organic is carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. It's the living components of dirt that then become soil. When you have those living components to dirt, that creates soil. We need to have and focus on the problem. The problem is, is we need to recarbonize our dirt because we need soil. If we recarbonize our dirt, if we focus on the root of the problem being the root of the solution, which is essentially to get more carbon in the soil, which is this first trophic level of the Soil Food Web. It's having more plants growing. The more plants we can have growing, the more carbon we can put below ground. The amount of carbon that we need is astronomical because almost all life on planet Earth is carbon-based. I say almost all life because there are silica-based organisms called diatoms. But pretty much every organism beyond that is carbon-based. Every cell, every molecule in your body has a carbon matrix to it, has a carbon backbone. The quadrillions of organisms that are in every acre of your soil have a carbon backbone to their bodies, to the molecules that they produce, to the enzymes that are utilized to fix nitrogen, to solubilize and release phosphorus, to make sure that things like micronutrients, copper and iron and zinc can be made available to the plants. That all takes carbon. For the carbon to get into the soil directly or indirectly, it has to come from photosynthesis. So the more photosynthetic activity, the more we can recarbonize our soil, the more we can have a food web. You notice people who look at this diagram oftentimes focus on this stuff. This stuff does not exist without that, without a plant. How many of you are from South Dakota? How many of you are from out of the state? How many of you are from further north of Mitchell? How many of you are from further south of Mitchell? Wherever you are in the upper Midwest, I was in Brandon, Manitoba recently and I told them the same thing. Wherever you are, you have to have a plant growing a minimum of 280 days out of the year. A plant growing a minimum of 280 days out of the year. There's 365 days. To actualize and solve this problem, we need to take the plant, take CO2 from the atmosphere and the energy from the sun and converts that through photosynthesis into basic sugars. And those basic sugars is the carbon and the energy from the sun between the carbon bonds that actually will provide for the building blocks and the energy for all of this life. The sun shines 365 days, correct? The sun comes up. We may not see it, but you do get solar radiation whether it's coming through clouds or not and you see the sun or not. The sun does come up unless you are way far north, the sun comes up 365 days. Why do we think that we can only grow a plant for 120 at most? Why do we minimize ourselves? If our problem is, is that we don't have enough carbon in our soil and we wanna solve that problem, we need to get more photosynthesis. Again, astronomical in the amount of carbon that's needed because off of those acres that you have that the plants are growing on, you have to feed quadrillions of organisms in the soil, the organisms that are on the surface of the soil, insects and other organisms. You have to feed the animals that are living off of the plants that are growing and the organisms that live off of the organisms that feed off of those things. That's a lot of carbon. And if you're only growing something for at most 120 days, which is far more than most of us are growing something in our crop field, correct? How do you expect to solve the problem? We need to be focusing on optimizing the use of the most efficient solar energy collectors ever designed. We need to maximize solar cells. Put as many of those suckers out there that you can possibly get. Keep them going as much as you can possibly do it because that is going to be the thing that is going to stop the bleeding. Your fields are bleeding. They're bleeding carbon, they're hemorrhaging. And what we do is we slap a few band-aids on and slow the bleeding down and when the band-aids get soaked we're going to slap a few more band-aids on. We're going to put this pesticide on, we're going to put this fertilizer on because that's going to be able to stop the bleeding. We cannot, one, stop the bleeding that way, but we're also missing the point in the fact that the soils have been hemorrhaging carbon so much that again they're dirt and not soils anymore and we won't give them a transfusion. We will not carbonize our soils because our concern is always about the why word. The why word, again, if I want to write big checks I can solve the why word problem but that doesn't keep money in the bank. We need to start looking at things differently. Snoopy nose, Snoopy smart. Sometimes we have to learn from the animated characters. We need to do eco-functional intensification. And Lee talked about this not in a direct way but in an indirect way because what he was talking about was looking at these places in your farmscape that are non-performing places. Why do you want to utilize them in the wrong way so they continue to be non-performing? You get them out of the tractor, you give them a broom and then you teach them at the same time how to drive the tractor appropriately. You don't just give them the broom and think that that's gonna make you money. It's nice, you gotta get them out because he was losing you money before so you gotta get him out and you gotta give him the broom but at the same time you gotta teach him how to drive the tractor better. What we wanna do is we wanna utilize every part of your farmscape to its greatest level of production which doesn't always mean that the greatest level of production is you growing a grain crop on there. The greatest level of production can sometimes mean being a shelter belt of sorts for various types of insects that are going to help to manage pests and diseases on the rest of the acres that are going to introduce diversity that's going to help to manage weed populations. They're going to help to manage the issues that you're confronted with. They're gonna help you to manage water. In a prairie pothole ecosystem we don't need to farm every acre. We shouldn't be farming every acre. Which doesn't mean that we need to be super wildlife tree-huggery people that are gonna go out there and convert all of your fields into wetland areas but it means that you need to look at how you could redesign your farmscape to get the most out of every acre, the highest level of value. You need to maximize the efficiencies. This is not about getting less. This is about doing more and getting more off of the system. It's intensification. If we need, if we know that the problem is not enough carbon, we need to intensify to get more carbon into the soil. We're not entirely trying to mimic nature. We're trying to utilize the concepts that we've learned from nature but nature has taught me and if you look at a natural ecosystem it functions at the lowest level that it could possibly function at. It's lazy. Just like I said, we're all programmed to be lazy. It's focused, it's functioning at its minimum level. What we wanna do is we wanna intensify those systems. We wanna get them performing at a higher level all the time. So they're firing on the highest number of cylinders we can possibly get. We need to get this going. We can't continue to treat our systems in the way that we have because we're not optimizing their potential. If you wanna be profitable, you have to optimize the potential of every employee that you have. That's the way any company works. Look at their potential and try and optimize it. If you wanna make money, that's what you wanna do. Your employees are quadrillions of organisms in the soil and thousands of plants. Those are your employees. You need them to be working at the highest level that they can possibly do. That will help you to redistribute risk. It'll improve the quality of what you're producing and it will be able to take the costs of that production and spread it among a number of different organisms. The economists will tell you that's the secret. Those are the keys to profitability. That's what that list is. It's an economic major's list of profitability. My spouse has a BS or an MS in accounting. An economics, sorry. And that's what we discuss from an economics point of view. Why don't we treat our farm that way? Why don't we treat our system that way? You wanna make money, this is what you need to do. So we're gonna take the principles that we've thought about for soil health. And I've put them in this pyramid design. And I did this for a couple of different reasons. One, this is not hierarchy, first off. What's at the top of the pyramid is no more important than what's at the bottom of the pyramid. The reason the pyramids have been around for thousands of years, the reason that their structure is stable is because every layer in the pyramid is important. When the pyramids were built, the foundation that they had, the way that they structured that foundation, the layers that went on top of that, how it put pressure and forces on the layers below in order to keep them stable and in place, but not too much pressure. It redistributed the weight, the risk on the layers below. But it put enough pressure on them so that they had to be stable. This is what it is that we wanna design, is to be able to apply these principles and figure out what tools we can utilize to optimize the efficiencies of what can happen here. And what I wanna focus in on is this foundation having something green and growing as much as possible and the diversity that can happen within that. How that then can contribute to reducing the inputs that you have, to reducing your costs, the number of checks that you write, the size of those checks. It doesn't mean that things are free. The microorganisms that are in the soil that we're gonna talk about, those organisms, again, as I said about my ring and my wedding vows, don't care about me or you or anybody else. They're there to eat and reproduce. But their jobs in doing that, if we allow them to do those jobs, again, are efficiently managing risk, providing fertility, helping with pest and disease issues, helping to manage water. All of these things to make sure that they can thrive in that environment. If it's good enough for them to thrive in it, it's good enough for the plant to thrive in it. That's what they're gonna design. So when we're talking about that foundation, again, I discussed this before, of the fact that we're not gonna be talking about looking at the number of days that you can grow something. Growing degree days is a made-up thing. It really is. It's a made-up idea. We made it up and created a concept around this idea of the temperature that a plant needed to grow. Plants do not have a nervous system. They do not sense temperature in the same way we do. They do not know what temperature it is. Yes, temperatures can give them cues for biochemistry, for doing certain activities. But again, chemistry happens at a really wide temperature range. The issue that we have with growing degree days and temperature is because we've put the constraints on the system. Because one of the things that we're trying to grow to the highest level of productivity in yield is a perennial tropical grass in South Dakota. It's a perennial tropical grass. No wonder you're not gonna get 300 bushel yield. It's a perennial tropical grass in your in South Dakota. Give me a break. We choose the wrong things. If we're gonna want to be able to get something, I said you don't have an excuse. 280 days. If you want your system to perform, that's the minimum of how many days you need something growing. The sun shines 365. At 280, I'm giving you 85 days off. I know what it's like out there. There's probably not something that's growing right now very easily, a green growing plant. In some cases, I have worked with some farmers that they do have green growing plants under the snow. When the snow melts away, those plants will start growing again in North Dakota. But the point of this is, again, 85 days off. Your system can take a vacation for 85 days. Let's quit talking and thinking about what we can't do, but what we can do. We design systems in which we focus more on the stick rather than the carrot. This is more about you being bad and doing the wrong things than what you can do. If you're always focused in thinking about what you're limited for, you're gonna be limited. You chose to live here in South Dakota, or wherever it is that you chose to live. If you choose to live here, these are the things. I'm not gonna say that your soils may not have a high water table and get salty. I'm not gonna say that those things can't happen. There are issues. Soils are sandy. Soils are heavy and high in clay. There are issues. It doesn't rain enough at the right times. There are issues. I can't get rid of the issues. But if you say I can't to things, you're never going to be able to. It's up to you to decide how to do this. Now I don't know all of the plants that you have the possibilities to grow. As Leah was saying, the number of plants that we have in cover crops, other plant options that you could have is huge. When I talk with farmers sometimes, they're like, well, what could I grow here? And I said, you know, one of the things that you could do is look at old plants. Go look at the old extension center records. Like the really old ones. From 1910, 1930, 1940, 1950, the 1800s. And see what people were growing here. When my great-great grandfather came over from Ireland, when my great-great grandfather came over from Ireland, he wasn't just growing corn and soybeans. Oh, yep, I got a battery light. I'm gonna switch to this. Okay, this'll work. I will double up myself. There we go. All right, so we're looking at the opportunities that we have to the different types of plants that you could possibly be growing. There's a question and discussion about things like relay cropping, double cropping, polycropping. I don't care what you wanna call it, companion cropping. I don't care what you wanna call it, but get something growing. The other big element with getting something growing is the fact that when you have something growing, when it is putting carbon below ground, because that's what we need to be feeding is the soil. We need to recarbonize our soils. And we need to do that by having a plant be in the vegetative growth stage, because when it goes into the reproductive phase, it is allocating carbon above ground. Reproduction takes a lot of energy. It takes a lot of resources. Your resources, your energy, and your building blocks, i.e. carbon, have to be above ground. So keeping something growing, not just 280 days, but having something in the vegetative growth stage for most of those 280 days. Because that's what's gonna be putting carbon below ground. And you have options on the different plants that are there. And what it is that we might be able to do to get the system performing at a higher level. If you don't choose your companion crop, your relay crop, your double crop, or whatever it is, if you don't choose what that is, your cover crop, whatever, nature will choose for you. Because nature says, I have a carbon demand. I will figure out how to fulfill that demand. A weed is nature's way of saying something's gotta grow there. Yes. Relay cropping is where you would be having a multiple, it's almost like double cropping, where you have multiple different types of crops that you could harvest at different times. So there are people who are relay cropping where they'll grow buckwheat. And they'll harvest the buckwheat. But in the understory, they're growing beans. And then they can harvest the beans later. So you basically have something there that you're growing. So it isn't something Lee brought up having flax and peas together. And those that you could harvest at the same time. And that's not the same thing. That's more like a double cropping. Whereas relay cropping is that it's one thing that's harvested at a different time than another plant that you're growing. But at some point, for both of their growth phases, they're growing at the same time. And that's what's keeping something green and growing for a longer period of time. Yes. And so, Jason Mock's got some videos of YouTube videos where they're doing that and showing that skit. So a lot of this, again, is about creating tools for us to be able to do it. Again, nature wants to optimize the number of plants that are in the vegetative growth phase. If you go and look at a native system, or quote unquote native systems, because they don't really totally exist in a native way. But at a relatively undisturbed or natural system that you have, there's something green growing all the time. There's something in the vegetative growth phase. Because that's what nature says needs to happen. How do we get that to go on? I've done research work in North Dakota and Minnesota, and I've been out in fields in December. And as long as there's not snow on those fields, there could be something green and growing. Because again, that's what nature does. Many of the farmers will look at and say that's a weed and I'll look at and I'll say that's carbon. Your choice is, do you want nature to choose kosher for you, or do you want to choose something else? Because nature will figure out a way to do it. It doesn't care about you. You're inconsequential. It's solving the problem. So we need to grow soil organic matter. That's what it is that we're trying to do. Organic matter is carbon. Again, that's what soil is. It's organic. No, it's not the scary O word. It's organic. It's carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. It's living. Organic matter may be a very small portion of our soils overall, but it controls the majority of the functions. The ability to be able to release nutrients on demand, that's the other thing that we don't think about. We don't apply nutrients when the plant needs them. We apply them when it's most convenient for us, for our time and for our equipment. The plant has its highest level of nutrient demand when it's in the reproductive phase. How many of us are out there adding fertility to our soils when the plant starts to go into the reproductive phase? Anybody? Bueller? That's what we need to do if we wanna optimize the check we wrote. But because we can't do that, or we tell ourselves we can't do that, because we haven't designed all of the right equipment, because we haven't thought about when we could do those things, because we haven't thought about the other options, because we haven't put those nutrients into other plants that could make them available to the growing plant at the right times, we don't optimize the check we wrote. So we wanna figure out how to be able to work with this diverse community of organisms. And they may be incredibly small. Maybe organisms that we don't even think could possibly have a role for what's happening. We know that the amount of biological nitrogen fixation that happens in our soils is at least equivalent, if not higher, than the amount of nitrogen fertilizer that we add to our soils. And that's without us really trying to optimize that process. That's free-living nitrogen fixation, and it's nitrogen fixation that will happen with symbiotic organisms associated with legumes. They're teeny bacteria, and they can do that at this level that's going to allow them. Those are the orange things here. This is the head of a pin. The orange things that are on here are colonies of bacteria. These microscopic organisms can actually change the way that your system looks. They are ecosystem engineers. Those aggregates that Lee showed us, those aggregates are the things that are created as the habitats, as the homes and the communities of these organisms. So we need to optimize their processes. We're gonna break for lunch and we're gonna come back and we're gonna take a look at these various organisms and what they do.