 What you're going to see here is, I guess, basically just a tour of our farm and I'm going to kind of walk you through how our farm has sort of just a bunch of ripped off ideas that I've got from everybody along the way and made them work on our farm and sort of put them into our system. And really what we're trying to do is build resilience. And I think that I guess you'll see as we go through the things that we do on our farm and how that helps us build resilience because, you know, just like he said earlier, we've gone from droughts to extreme wet years and I haven't experienced quite what you guys did this year. But, you know, we had triple the rainfall that we've ever had in our area this year and we're learning that everything we do to build resilience is really helping move our system forward. So I just want to give you some context. I'm going to just kind of sort of give you some background and then start to walk you through our system. So this is a really big picture of our farm. And my family, my wife, Tannis is here with me today and she's really the brains behind the operation. So all the technical questions, I'll be able to gladly direct to her. And my dad, I always like to involve a picture of my dad because he was with me on that very first trip down to Dakota Lakes and he's always sort of been behind the whole way. He's actually in Lake Havasu City enjoying the warmth right now so I'm sure he'll be maybe catching this on video later. And just sort of a picture, just to give you a bit of background of what we look like. So when you look west of our farm, we farm against 50 miles of native prairie. So we're in super fragile environment, I guess. Maybe that's kind of what led me to start this journey sooner than most. I guess something else I wanted to include, I guess, was the fact that we've become a seed farm. And dad was a seed grower back in the 70s, but with the high dollar grain prices that happened in the 70s, that all got thrown away. And like everything else on our farm, the seed portion has become a recycled idea. Something I wanted to make a mention of is I'm not here to tell anybody how to farm. I just want to tell you or explain what we do, I guess, and share our experiences and what has worked and definitely what hasn't worked. So where in the heck is Mitten, Saskatchewan? We have a saying in Saskatchewan, it's easy to draw and tough to spell. And the little green star here at the bottom is where our town is. We're 12 miles north of the Port of Raymond, and the little red line is the North Dakota-Montana border. That is the rough stats. We're sort of in a 10 to 14 inch annual precip zone. We're at Clayloom soils. We've been glaciated with every glaciation there is. So we've got super rocky, really undulating hills, and we're generally dry. And just a rough idea, sort of the map layout of our farm. We're in two fairly substantial blocks, so for us it's been easy to include the grazing. So this is where it started. Why make changes? So this is a monocrop. It took me a little digging, but this is actually from the year 2006 from when we went down to Dakota Lakes for the first time. At the time we thought that was great, and on the other side we have native prairie, which is across the road from my farm. We wound up by absolute accident in Gettysburg, South Dakota in search of a no-till drill. We thought at the time, or this is as far ahead as I could think, was that if we disturbed less soil, we would lose less moisture, and that was about as exciting as I could make it. And we, our local John Deere dealer wanted to have zero to do with this drill because they look complicated, and he didn't want anything to do with that. So we went on the old Tandy and did our research, and the closest one was in Gettysburg, South Dakota. So that fall, my dad and I jumped in to pick up and drove down to the John Deere dealer in Gettysburg. And lo and behold, made a deal on this drill. And the sales manager said, well, you know, if you're here to buy this drill in Gettysburg, you must be coming to see Dr. Beck, or Dr. Who. You know? I guess, right? For your crowd. I mean, we didn't have a clue who this was. So he gave us a little background on the research farm and where they were at. So we went home with that in mind and seeded that crop that spring and had all sorts of problems, seeding with a disc drill for the first time, and we had no idea what we were doing, or dealer didn't give us any help, and we were, had residue problems, and you name it. So we went back that next summer to the field day. And we actually got there the day before, because we were able to go out a day ahead with Beck, and I had emailed him, and anyway, we get there and get in his golf cart, and we drive out and he's, you know, pointing out all these things along the way, and eventually we get to this irrigator. And he asks us, how much rain do you think that's putting on? And I guess to know this crowd, you guys probably all know, but we all guessed like half an inch an hour. I have one cousin. There's one pivot within a hundred miles of my farm. My cousin has it, and if he puts on more than a half an inch an hour, it's running everywhere. So we all guessed a half an inch an hour. Would you believe two inches in nine minutes? No? No? No, I wouldn't believe that, actually. Because if it did, it would be running, you know, we're parked this far away from the edge of the field, and we get off the golf cart and walk in behind, and you can reach out and touch the irrigator, and there's no mud in our shoes. Well, this is, this is, well, this doesn't happen. So, because I know where we live, we're being hilly and the farming we were doing, if we get a downpour of two inch and nine minutes, I classify that as a downpour, it's running in the ditches, we have washouts, everything goes wrong. So I said, you need to tell me how to do this. I'll do whatever you need, I'll do whatever. And so he starts talking about rotation and diversity and high carbon crops and earthworm channels. It's the first time I'd ever seen someone put a shovel in the soil. I didn't know that was a thing. Nobody carries a shovel where we are. Our agronomist didn't have shovels. So when we look at the, you know, you look at the structure and he talks about infiltration rates, things that I had never, I had never, ever been at whatever exposed to. So I'm a slow learner, so it took me a few trips back to Bex to see that, and one of those trips ran into Gabe Brown. Total freak meeting in Wing North Dakota, and same thing, we got to go to Gabe's and saw his soils, and it was the same thing, it was that, you know, put the shovel in the soil, the structure, the black chocolate cake, and I thought, well, you know, you just, you've been born and your grandpa got off the train in the right place, or you know, this is, you've got good material to work with. We walked across the grid road, and no, it was minting. His neighbor's field that he always shows was the same kind of soil that I had to work with at home. And the thing I like about going to Gabe's for me is it's a five-hour drive. You know, I go into, it's a similar rainfall, and for me, I always thought that it just was a little bit more believable for lack of a better term. So with those things in mind, and the things about other things Beck had said in mind was always keep your native context in mind, you know, so look at your native plants and look at what you're growing, and I mean, we were growing one cereal, and you go across the road into our well-managed native systems and there's 125 different plants. Well, we're a long way from that. I mean, and you look, I used to think this would look good, but when you really look, there's nothing on the ground between those rows. So we had major changes to do. And the other thing that I loved about Beck was how we instilled urgency, and that this isn't, we have to do this now. We don't have to know, I always think that I'm 42. You know, I don't look it, but I'm 42. I've got 40 harvest left. I want to get changes happening soon. So what does that look like? This is just sort of a brief outline of what I'll get into all this. We start with low disturbance seeding. I use control traffic. I'll get into why we do. We use stripper headers, love those things. I'm a big believer in stellar retention. We do not bail straw off. We're big in diversity, and I'll get into how we got into diversity and how we make diversity fit on our farm now. A lot of that diversity comes into cash crops, and we do companion planting, which I'll talk about. Inner crops is a huge thing now. And I'm going to, a little bit about synthetic inputs. I get a lot of questions about this because I might run out of time because that happens a lot. We've reduced our synthetic fertility use by about 80%. So that's on the synthetic side. I've reduced my bill by 80% because we've replaced those synthetics with some carbon base inputs in our compost extracts and some microbes. And I'll get into a little bit into detail about that. I just want to give you a little bit of numbers. We haven't used any seed treatments or any insecticides on our farm in any form in seven years. We treat cover crops fairly pragmatically. I'm in a super short rainfall or a super short growing season. So we struggle, and I'll get into a little bit of how we fit those in. But we really struggle to get anything after harvest. This harvest was a perfect example. But the biggest, most important thing on here for me, and I get asked a lot, interviews or just talking at the bar, you know, if you could do one thing on your farm, if you could pick one thing, and I hate to pick one thing, but for me, it's more live roots. It's more live root days, more diverse live root days. If I could pick one thing, I would do all of that before everything else. And why do I want more live roots? Because on the soil food web, the only place that we really have any control is here. The sun's going to shine every day, we hope. I mean, and everything after the live roots and what we can do in the top four inches, you know, is that's where we have our control. And that contributes to everything that happens after that. And something that I became aware of that I didn't know that we could do, and I'm a big believer and I can't manage what I don't measure. And I was lucky enough to run across Dr. Elaine Ingham at a presentation in Montana, and lo and behold, this is something that you can manage and measure. I know people used to talk about biology. Biology is good. I know I want it. I probably want more. I don't know if I have the right stuff. And she talked about how the fact that this is something that you can measure and manage. And I was fortunate enough to have a very willing and energetic wife who has got a bit of a biology background. So I came home from this conference and got Tannis involved. She took her courses. And at the same time we also stumbled across Dr. Wendy Tahiri. We got invited by Absolute Chance once again. This is why you go visit people and why you go to conferences. We were at Notill on the Plains. Dan Forge was there introducing us to everybody left, right and center. It was awesome. And we met Wendy Tahiri standing around to barrel-eating peanuts and drinking beer. And just... So she got... I didn't know who she was. You know, she's telling us what she does. And she said, I might have a course. You know how to teach people how to identify a mycorrhizal fungi. Well, we would be super interested in coming to that. So, I don't know how long it was later than the next summer. David Brown's farm. We got an email, booked our flights, and we were there. So many interesting things came out of them courses that I could do a one hour on those. But one of the big things was we learned that we don't have to be buying nearly as much stuff as we think we would. And the fact now that we can manage these things. We've now looked at all the crops we've grown on our farm the last four or five years. We're seeing excellent mycorrhizal colonization. I don't have to buy stuff in a jug. We can count on our natives and encourage what we have. So this is sort of what we... Okay, the backup here. After Wendy's course and Elaine's course, by this time this is like 2015. We're being diverse and we're growing intercrops and we're doing all these wonderful things. And so we're doing a good job, right? You know, we're going to make a slide and it's going to be wicked awesome. No, it was terrible. It was actually quite bad. It was all bacteria. You had to look a long way to find a fungal strand. How kaboda? You know, full stop. Now what? Well, at the same time, we've been learning about how to make these compost extracts and how we can really back our synthetics down even more and bring those in. And to me it was just a... We need to make more drastic changes. And I looked at that training. I guess like I'd look at any other training. You know, we've been to management courses. We've been to financial training courses. This is just another training course. One more course. One more thing we can learn to do. And today, if we look at some of our soils, we'll see things like this. A lot more diversity. Decent fungal hyphae, you know, decent microarthopods, nematodes, not a dirty word. You know, for us, we don't see the nematodes, I guess the root feeding ones, I think that have become a problem that got the bad rap for all the other nematodes. And luckily, as we've been moving forward, we're seeing more of this. But you don't have to have a microscope to look at your soils. I don't ever want to overwhelm people and make you think like, well, I don't have a microscope, so I can't do that. Still, probably the most used tool on our farm today is the shovel. And we can really relate a lot back from when you look at a good well-aggregated soil. You know, you can tell pretty well back to that what you're going to see. I can never say for sure, but for us it's a really simple, easy way to go. Now when I go to visit people, I always like to see if they actually take a shovel out of their truck, if we're going to actually look at soils or if we're just going to walk around and talk about it. So, and I also want to include this picture. I've seen some of the photos you guys put up down here, and they are so awesome. But this is a bit of reference for what I have to work with. Martha Mintz was there from the furrow this summer to do a thing for us. And she wanted to take a picture of a comparison, and I had never thought about doing this. So we just bought a farm right beside us this spring, and we noticed the crop wasn't as good, obviously. But when we went out and dug in that soil that's literally 400 yards away from the other soil, that really showed us the changes that we have made. And trust me, I've got a lot of work to do. That is not super awesome, but it is a lot better than the other one. And that's the things we want to look at. So this soil is the first, the lighter color one obviously is some stuff that we just took on, and the other one is some stuff we've been working on for about eight years. We worked pretty dry at the time, so you can see we're a little crumbly, but we are actually seeing drastic color change. And for me, I mean, that knows we're definitely going in the right direction. So the other thing that I love to do, and I think is nice and cheap, and I actually got my infiltration test from you guys, so thanks for that. We do as many infiltration tests as we basically feel we have time for. I think it's been a real indicator for us as far as management goes. This spring was unusual for us. We were dry. We had no rain from snow melt until June 18th. And then June 18th, 19th, and 20th, we had an inch a day. On the 21st, we went out and did an infiltration test. I think for us, that's a pretty good time to do it. I'm going to make you watch the first 29 seconds, the last 10 minutes isn't nearly as exciting. So our first inch was 29 seconds, and it actually amazes me that we can make that much difference. So this is given as six inches an hour. It's still not back two inches and nine minutes, but we're getting there. We're gaining on them. So this was flax lentil stubble. And I'll get into why we still see residue later on, but we actually do have decent ground cover still. So when I look at our whole farm system, it's just the five pillars of soil health. But Tannits and I like to go back to this. Every time we make a decision, every time we're going to make a major change, if we're going to try a new product or if we're going to try a new farming practice or a different, you know, something major, we go back to this and make sure that we're going to fall into these five. It's something that's helped us guide our daily decisions. You know, and I don't think of any of these things as specifically one's more important than the other. I think of them all as tools, you know, and everything we do in our farm is tools and everything has a place. And for us, this is the matter of making them fit where we can in our farm. And I've always found too that I'm learning as I get older is there is no hill that I'm willing to die on. You know, there's things that I've had to do that I don't like, but I'll do it sometimes, you know, for the greater good in the end. So where do we start? I like to start with seeding. I would say that this low disturbance seeding for us has addressed two things. That's what I seeded with in 2006. Before I went down to see back, that's a shank, FlexCoil 5000. If you come to Saskatchewan, you're no-tilling if you seed with that thing. When you leave the field, it's black, but it's no-till. And one of our seeding outfits today, we've actually, which is super unusual. I mean, you guys have seen planters. Yeah, whatever, that's a planner. Good for you. But in small grain country, this is unusual. We've actually gone to wider spacing for lots of reasons. One of them is 15 to 10 inch is 50% less soil disturbance for me, and we haven't seen any yield reduction in that. And I'll give it into a little bit of detail about what all we're doing with that planter. But so far, so good. Because I like to obviously keep more surface residue intact, and we also find that we're doing way less damage going into the fields of this compared to the 1890 that we seed with. So stripper headers, we were just actually having conversations here right before the presentation about stripper headers. I think that they should be sold as a matching pair with this drills. I learned very, very much the lesson. Had my ass handed to me, I guess, the first year, I think, for lack of a better term. We had 36 foot headers and 9,600s and didn't really pay attention to straw droppers. So that very first year, we learned about the word hairpinning, which, well, I'm lucky, actually the dad let us go one more year after some of the wrecks that we had the very first season. But we went back to back and same thing. He said, well, obviously you need a stripper header and we didn't know what those were. We had to go to Kansas to buy our first two stripper heads. And since then, we've had a few other ones, but those are the stats. I'm not going to read them all for you, but I mean, for us, the big thing is harvesting snow. And it's not so much the volume of snow, but it's how we harvest it. We're hilly, and we find that if we don't keep even snowfall, we get great big snow banks. You know, we're hilly, right? So the wind blows off. Every time it snows, the wind blows. That's pretty much a guarantee. And we get these big snow banks on the side hills and our hilltops are bare. And then when spring comes, our hilltops are bare and drying off and we have to wait to get to the field. But in the strips double, the snow catches even. Up doesn't matter how steep our hills are, the snow catches even. And the other interesting thing is how the snow stays soft and mellow and you can walk through it. All my neighbors at Snowmobiles love me because they come in right around in there because it's nice snow all year and it keeps the ground from freezing. So we seem to get on those fields the soonest. Funny story, like the 2008 would have been the first winter we went through. We were growing Kyle Derm. Derm is just like a tall, old wheat. It's super tall. We stripped it and then the coffee shops roll. Accidents aren't going to be seen until July because the fields will be full of snow until then. That's the first field we've seen in. So there has been a slight bit of uptake there since that. But what an eye opener. I mean, this is one of the few pieces of equipment I think I would have a hard time giving up the stripper heads. Combine efficiency is fantastic. The amount of things it allows us to do. We're stripping more and more crops all the time. And I'll get into that when I start talking about our intercrops. This is one of the hills that I won't die on. I wound up in control traffic for funny reasons. At the same time I was making changes biologically, I had been in contact with enough field scholar by the name of Steve LaRocque. You guys are familiar with enough field scholarship that they kind of, this guy gets a scholarship and they get to travel all over the world and learn from other people and it's pretty cool. And his topic of study was control traffic farming. Nothing to do with soil health from his perspective. He's in Morne, Alberta. He's on heavy clay soils. In my opinion, high input, shank opener, high disturbance. We went to his farm in 2011 for the first time, 12, in there. It's the first time I've seen soil aggregation that somewhat resembled becks and games. Only thing that was the same was control traffic. I'm super impatient if you haven't noticed. I want changes yesterday. And so I just thought, well, I'm going to do all these different practices and try to make things happen faster. You know, this water infiltration is a big one with this soil structure, but it allows us to do so many other interesting things that I didn't think about once we got on this tram system. We can do inter-row seeding. We can do relay seeding. We can do, oh gosh, all sorts of wonderful things. But one of the cool things about it was, I lost my train of thought. Oh, one of the cool things about it for us is that we run on a 30-60 system. So all of our, we actually want to work backwards from your combine. If you're ever thinking about doing this, we can email or whatever, but it's start with your combine and then work backwards from there. We want to make sure we can spread our residue and we also want to make sure that it works in our hills. So our combines are 30s, our seeders are 60s, our sprayers are 120, so on. One of my biggest fears of control traffic in the hills is tram line erosion. Because trams basically get, we seed them, but they get traveled on and, you know, eventually, right, problems. So ran into another Australian innovation, these chaff decks. So what they do is, well obviously put chaff on the tram lines, but how it happens is behind this black piece of rubber, I'm not exactly sure, but I always like to tell people there's magic because somehow it separates the heavy portion of your chaff, so not all your chaff, a very small portion of your chaff, which is mostly weed seeds and crack, and puts that on and then delivers it out behind your wheels. So it does a whole bunch of things. It is a mechanical form of weed control, which is great because we all have resistant weeds, I think. I know I do. And it also eliminates the chaff, the dust and the erosion on our trams. Like I said this spring, no rain. Our sprayers are running on those trams, no dust. And the neighbors were just rolling in balls of dust, no residue and big fat tires running in all sorts of weed skips. We wonder how resistance happens. So this thing kills about three birds with one stone and is super simple, hooks on. Once it's on and running, it's running. And no horsepower requirements. It looks to me like it's helping. Sort of problem solved as far as I can tell. When we came home from Gabe Brown's and Dwayne Beck's with all the, you need more diversity in your rotation. You need to grow cover crops. Yeah, but I'm too dry. I don't have enough season for that. So that was my mindset, 2010. So how are we going to do this? How are we going to... Well, I can't grow cover crops. So we, once again by accident, discovered intercropping through a mistake on our own farm in 2009, we learned about growing two different crops at once. And in 2011, we did our first official P-canola intercrop, I guess for lack of a better term. We grow two crops, same time, seed in the same time, harvest in the same time. Obviously we control everything the same time. The only noticeable layout difference, and I'll get into this, is alternate row versus same row. We try to do as much same row as we can, but there are some things that we do alternate row for disease, plant health reasons. Land equivalency ratio. You see LER there. So I'd like to explain this. Land equivalency ratio is simple as if you had a 50-acre field of canola and a 50-acre field of peas and did them all separately and how you do it, however you do it, and then combine them separately and your yields and your net profit is a one. That is. Then, if you took that same field and seeded them together and combined them together and harvested them and paid some money to separate them and sold them, what would that number be? On our farm it's 1.27. I know farms that are 1.35. I know research farms that have proven 1.85. Like numbers that really make you go, show me how to do that. There's a research farm at Red vs. Gatua and another one in Southern Manitoba, Wadow, Scott Chalmers. They've been doing some phenomenal things. The higher the rainfall, the better this seems to work. It's one of those things that there is no recipe. It's taken me a long, long time to figure out the crops that work on our farm. This is a list of crops I've tried and they actually don't all fit since 11. There's been more since. We intercrop all of our broadleaf acres. We found broadleaf acres work every time. Mixing, like so I mix a legume and a forb, so, you know, Camelina and large green lentils. That's a good example. We did that this year. Worked very well. Cereals and legumes I've struggled with. I'm not saying that they don't work. They just haven't worked for me. But the forb legume thing has been working phenomenally well. I have yet to have a serious problem with maturity. I've talked to guys who have had problems. I'm not sure what we're doing. I've talked to Jack Schultz a little bit about that. I mean the plant signaling and plant communication, I feel like is helping us. Flax and lentils should not work, but it does. We've got to the point where the flax would just start to get a little dusty on the hilltops and the flax should be continuing to grow but the flax comes. We desigate normally. We swass some. We use reglone. We don't use glyphosate. That's harvest them together and separate them afterwards. That picture, the little red arrow, that's faba beans and flax. That one hates me. You may be here, faba beans. Faba beans just don't like Saskatchewan because they need August rain to fill and we generally don't get that. So we'll get top growth and then a whole bunch of flowers and empty pods. So it's a little bit into flax and lentils. This is one of our winners. It's one of our home run crops. It's one I like to talk about a lot. This might be the only original idea I've ever had. I think of all the research I did, I don't think anybody else was doing this one. We had been growing our lentils with yellow mustard which is a pretty thin brassica and I always felt like the brassica was holding our lentils back. So we decided, well, flax is thin and basically non-competitive. So if we go a low seeding rate, if it gets that tall, that's a win. And man, it didn't ever work good. The first year we did flax lentils, our neighbors across the road. I don't know if you guys have a, there's a root rot. We have really bad in Central Saskatchewan in Montana called the finna myces. It's a oo spore base. It's bad. You don't want it. It's a yield killing. Can't get rid of it. It starts in the low spots. This is my across the road. You can see the premature yellowing in low spots which is usually the opposite of what happens in Saskatchewan. Normally we get dry and the hilltops turn yellow. So where all your yield is for the most part goes away. There's a couple of labs. One is Swift Current. One in Lethbridge that's got some of our soils now. They're actually doing some work on this. They're trying to figure out what we're doing that we're not seeing it because it's literally across the fence and we're not seeing it in finna myces. So the other wonderful thing about the intercropping with safe flax or any of the time we add the other forb to it it completely changes the carbon nitrogen ratio of the residue. We've noticed that before with lentils or peas I mean you guys have probably seen it two months after you harvest residue's gone. Fields are bare. Eats it up. It's gone. Burns it up. Add the flax. Completely different environment. Now we have residue through the spring over the winter which is a big game changer for us because we can't always get a cover crop in place. And harvestability. Those are finna myces lentils they go flat as a pancake. With that little bit of flax in there you can just those calm buds can stick along. We can cut lentils at six miles an hour which is for us is that fast. Normally we, you know if you got lentils they're laying down. I remember in like years ago we used to spray fungicide intentionally just to make them stand better. I remember having that conversation we're going to spend $10 to make them stand better. Well we can do this. We can make more money. Not use fungicide. And make them stand better. And get better residue. Another one of our winners is doesn't have to be forage peas. We use forage peas because we move them into a sprouting market. You can just put specialty pea there. I mean generally I like to put down when we started we used a yellow pea canola simple weed control. You know in my mind right away went well why are we using canola to seed expensive and yellow mustard I can keep my own seed and yellow mustard was shatter tolerant before shatter tolerant was cool. You know so that's we started that in 12 we started we switched to mustard and then also that same year we well why are we growing a pea that stands up? Let's grow those peas. I remember growing forage peas for seed back in nearly 2000s for good money but harvest nobody wanted to be around at harvest. Now they can trellis and they stand you know the peas that were this tall will stay trellising the whole way and at harvest they get a little leany but we can still get under them. Once again residue I mean not adding that mustard I mean it doesn't have the CN ratio of flax straw but it's significantly better than the peas by itself. Flax and chickpeas I pretty much tell everybody this was kind of the game changer for our farm financially. We and we lucked on to this right when chickpeas went crazy. We so that was it was good timing for lots of reasons. We quit growing chickpeas in the early 2000s because it was sort of a joke that we ran out of seed because the disease was so bad. Basically it was awful. We couldn't spray them enough. So when I went to Redverse to the research farm and saw Lana Shaw was growing these things in a four inch higher rainfall zone than I was with basically no fungicide. I was like well Lana you need to tell me what you're doing because I'm doing that and at that time her research had said that the alternate rows was sort of the promising. Since then things have changed maybe a little bit from her perspective but for us in the alternate row scenario it gives the plants more room to breathe I think. Not exactly sure the flax forms a bit of a barrier. They're both highly mycorrhizal which is super awesome. So I mean I don't know if there's any sharing but we don't use a whole bunch of fertility in front of these. Actually in fact I should have mentioned this earlier all of our intercorrops we don't use any synthetic fertility. We use a little bit of microbes and we use some of our biological stuff but we haven't used... that was sort of my gateway drug to stopping fertility. When we did our first intercrop that was kind of in the back of my head when those guys were talking about these multi-species covers well let's just do that with our grain crop. So fast forward flax and chickpeas. This is what it looks like and if anybody's ever growing chickpea crop when there's flowers on the plants and you can pull it back and not see a bunch of brown spots or corn flakes I like to call them when they're on the ground because the disease is moving in, that's a good sign. And then this is kind of what it looks like in the grain hopper. Combined settings, they're surprisingly easy. That's a desi chickpea. We grow kaboulis as well, they're a large white. We grow yellow flax just because we grow yellow flax. If you grow brown flax I highly suggest you continue to use brown because they don't like... it doesn't matter what kind of flax you grow but you can get a surprisingly good sample out of these intercrops without having much of a problem. I'm going to show a separation slide here in a bit what it looks like when you separate. This was a little bit of a challenge. The very first year we had a Borg-O 3710 I think everybody lovingly called it the boat anchor at our place and we actually took the hoses from the front, from the mid-row banders and did a bunch of whatever farmer adaptation I guess we'll call it to make it work the first year. Chickpeas don't like corks and holes and plugged off runs we just didn't get really good distribution. We did enough to know we had a good crop and it was going to work. The next season we ordered this 60 foot AT-90 and intentionally ordered a double shoot cart because that's a bit of a challenge with AT-90s lots of them don't have double shoot carts and we pulled the jaundry manifolds off because it's pretty tight when they fold and we actually got these the smaller towers from Xaptu I actually see has a booth here they're smaller and what I like about them too is the hose goes over the outside so what we do is we have this one over here so this tower with has no hoses that becomes the chickpea tower we take the hoses from this side and we just move it over they're all numbered. One guy can genuinely run down the drill or walk carefully I guess from a safety perspective down the drill and with a screw gun and move hoses from one to the other we put plugs in where the hoses come off that becomes a flax tower and the tower with the proper number of runs becomes a chickpea tower because the chickpeas then seem to be okay flax doesn't seem to care if they have corks but if you try to take a tower and put corks in and do chickpeas you have plugged runs and you learn all sorts of new words and ask yourself questions about your life while you're in the field so I highly recommend doing something along this line and the seed view those tower those break things they totally talked me into that I thought it was a big sales thing but man for doing this and trying to split up air the 1890 or that card the 1910 card hasn't always known been great for air balancing and these help a lot so this works really well and we're also able to move our blockage so then I don't have to do anything fancy with blockage on the computer because my 73 year old dad runs this most of the time so he doesn't want too many buttons to push hook feed so he wants to make sure this is working well so we can keep up with social events so the other because I'm not satisfied basically with anything as far as seeding goes on our farm we just wanted to go one more and I've always been intrigued with a double disc planter opener and singulating small grains and this is our fifth planter Tannis my wife's been she's been putting up with my purchasing random things for anyway so this is our first season the guys at harvest were great so the question was how do we get two seeds in the furrow to do our inter crops or companion crops in a planter row unit that was a struggle so the guys at harvest I'll get the next picture will show so really we're just feeding from a valmar it's a 24 run valmar 48 run planter 60 foot and then we've got the CCS splitter so we just run 24 hoses and then split them and it goes to each row unit goes into these handy dandy little pipes that they bent up for us so we can deliver a second stream of seed right behind the seed tube and then the Keaton and whatever can put them in this in it worked really well the only problem was it showed up on the 28th of May so we were a little pretty much done seeding by the time we got this thing running so Mike we got enough seeded to know that it works got the bugs out and we'll be more than ready for next year very happy with what we saw it gave us a lot of things to think about and a lot of things to work on for next year we're going to probably do all of our cereals with this machine next year one of the things that blew my mind was how low we can seed things seed from what I'm used to from a seed saving standpoint and crop health and light penetration there's things that this thing's doing that I had once again it wasn't the reason we did it but I'm happy that's a pound and a half or out of seed that's a really good example of what not to do for diversity but we wanted to see what it could do so we just kept lowering and lowering and lowering you know normally when we were seeding radish in a mix we were doing two or two and a half pounds in a mix to get if you wanted that much the thought we were trying to if we were going into a new field we really wanted to put radishes in you know to get that many was was quite a bit more so from a seed savings protective and that is wheat at 42 pounds an acre on 15 inch spacing there's yellow brass and sweet clover under that that we'll hopefully have for next year worked really well I'm finding that the wider roads with more light penetration are giving is green leaves right to the bottom something I always thought was maybe a deficiency thing or a drought thing for me but we're seeing green leaves way lower on the wheat plants than I ever saw before and this is kind of what I really why we want to do this we're struggling to add diversity to our cereals I've tried every kind of an inter crop I could think of every time I add a P I just get less wheat really limits our wheat control options so I started thinking maybe we're doing this wrong maybe we're trying to add diversity at the wrong time and with you know in the spirit of everybody really seeding soybeans into their winter wheat and whatever I started thinking well why don't we just really seed it's not a harvestable crop we don't have the season for that but let's get our cover crop seeded sooner because we know that we have a certain amount of time to put carbon in the ground and from the point of harvest coming like crop maturity harvest seeding crop emergence 6 weeks 2 months for us I might only have a month after that I might only have 2 weeks after that if I can have that cover crop growing in the standing crop that's a game changer for us and the other thing reason in my mind that I have to do this is because the way things have been changing is we don't have by the time the crop gets this big you look in here you can see how crappy my surface our residue is gone so we it's getting to be we need to do this we need to have a cover crop there in place so when I should cut my crop I'd roll over this and protect it again so that's kind of the other with the 15 inch rows in our control traffic we can go into 48 rows and drive over 2 which are the only they're the trams so it's not a big deal and we can get our cover crops and I personally have a lot more time to seed in July before harvest than I do during harvest when we're trying to seed in combine and separate inter crops and whatever keep my sanity and then try to seed on top of that it's a real struggle so this has been an interesting thing so far in our farm happy with what we're seeing it allows us to use some herbicides in our cereals we have weeds and with cover crops we sometimes have to be careful this time usually gives us enough time that if we seed them basically at this stage sort of after flowering then they start to dry up the sunlight penetrates and they seem to kind of take off I need to do more of this we did not get hardly any of this done this year thanks to Mother Nature but we've got proof of concept and we know that this works so one of the other unintended consequences I didn't even know what this fancy green box when it came with my planter what all it did I mean you guys are probably well versed but it really answered a lifelong question of why I can never set the downforce properly on my 1890 this is a delta downforce sorry this is in kilograms I will translate 200 kilograms is like 450 pounds and negative well 50 pounds so our headlines now you're seeing is like 450 pounds you know in the middle of our field and lots of places it's lifting up 50 pounds so I go out there on my it really explains a lot you go well if you guys the hands and knees guys behind your drill when somebody else is going back and forth trying to figure out how to get this thing set right no wonder I had no idea there was this much difference we're playing around I don't sell that stuff I actually it drives me the guy that told me drives me crazy but it's quite interesting the information we've got from it and how yeah interesting I guess so I just wanted to show that and with that low seating rates and the delta force yeah we're just we're seeing root growth like I just never seen before this is an old crop actually Christine I had Christine in this field in the summertime and yeah it's there's been some really interesting changes so that planter thing has got some it for small grains has definitely got a fit for us so how do you separate those intercrops how do you harvest those intercrops harvesting is surprisingly simple the member I had a lot of anxiety about this the first year because I you know we grew it great now what we've tried about every specially concave known to man but I've today in our combines I've got green ones so one small wire two large wires and I can put covers from one to five as I need them generally we start with one and five covered that's a return we don't have big ones we got class sevens so we cover our return and we cover number one and then it's just a matter of fooling with covers till we get that kind of thrashing that we need and it works great anything from chickpeas like ten mil chicks down to Durham down to flax doesn't matter seems to work but I love this picture because we were doing we were stripping flax in chickpeas two years ago three years ago had snow laid them down broke them down we had one quarter left went out tried to strip them couldn't get and we were shelling more out than we were getting so we went home dropped them off grabbed their flax heads that's the same crop like what a substantial difference from what we could strip though what we didn't you and this is those this is we had those advanced fancy advanced power cast whatever they're supposed to spread no matter what well I have a space you know so I'm not happy I don't have to worry about it here because we don't have to spread what we don't cut yeah the ground cover just I thought this was well worth putting in so if you drive in my yard in August or September generally you would have seen this it actually only takes one ring master for this circus generally if he's good what we do is there's we have a surge bin and so we started with rotary okay we started with rotary screens that was awesome first year did that for two three years quick clean did you know that there's nothing wrong with those we just needed because the half the farm now is intercrops that the rotary I just there wasn't enough hours in the day so we wound up buying this machine in the middle which is a mobile cleaner there's this indents scalper aspirator big air screen and a gravity table so to me when I bought this this is intercrop separator great big fast one so we just pull in here we dump and then we have a surge bin and the clean stuff comes here so say lentils flax over there and something we started doing a couple years into it was refuse lights all of our pods sticks fluff weed seeds that goes over here because that ends up in our compost so a year into this again unintended didn't think about going there well we I can make it clean enough to sell it as export so that's worth more money so well then why don't we grow stuff that we can clean and sell a seed so this is how we wound up being seed growers because if we're going to run it through a plant anyway we might as well clean it to export standards or seed spec and then capture some value this thing will put two cents a pound on most stuff you know as far as exports back and then if you want to get into seed I mean sky's the limit right so today hopefully there's a whole bunch of guys working around this this isn't a live view it's only two months behind schedule but this is what we're doing now so this is a this will be food grades back we're actually taking a different direction again which has happened because of everything that happened in 2006 because of back basically if I wanted to stay home it would have been so much simpler yeah so this yeah there'll be legs and pipes and this we're a long way from as far as we should be this is a yeah it's a high throughput food grade cleaning facility and we'll be able to get into food markets and then there's some other value out of things we can do once we have that food grade quality and yeah it's all thanks to one trip to Gantiesburg's out Dakota so people are maybe kind of curious this is a close up that's a flax lentil dirty out of that's in the combine that's what it looks like so not so bad you know looks like a mess this is a flax that's through so this flax is not export clean by any means there's still some weed seeds and whatever but that could go to town I mean you can phone your broker and say I've got some flax and put it on a truck and go away you know there's 2% dockage in that lentils they're not a one obviously but I mean there's a few little blemishes but as far as cleanliness goes they're pretty good those can get spit into a ccan or put into a 50 pound bag and value out and then our refuse I don't know what made us do this other than it we didn't start doing it for the reason we're doing it now we were actually what would happen is so you'd have 100% product right so you separate it and take the lentils out and I've got this 50% and I've concentrated all the screenings into your flax that's a problem that's a bit of a pain to clean again so let's just get it out well we started adding up how much refuse we started we were somewhere between 2 and 300 tons a year we would hold back at home well that was a lot of stuff I was either paying freight or paying someone else freight to get rid of and then giving it away so that now goes into a compost back to the Elaine stuff one of the big things with compost that I find that's super important is low cost low cost low cost low cost so across the road from our farm is a cow guy, I don't have cows but we have a arrangement with a cow guy and he has manure that he is landlocked that he can't get out so I'm actually making him money by taking his manure because he has to pay someone else to make it go away so we take the manure we include our other products refuse when I say straw it's other people's flax straw people in our area have a tendency to want to give away their flax straw instead of do something with it so we'll gladly, it costs us the bailing generally to get it if we need it and then slew hay on our farm there's a bunch of little blue spots and I have a guy with like 60 cows he goes and cuts all the slews and he gives us a third of it and the slew hay actually is an interesting catalyst we found in our compost that we found in compost quality, final quality by adding that bit of slew hay and then obviously the grain screenings and hulls so this is actually makes the tannises department but she made this really nice slide for me so what we do is we do this we like to get it nice and warm and we turn it multiple times but what we found is by using this big old TMR this thing that nobody else wanted because it takes 300 horsepower to turn it we get a really really nice even distribution of ingredients so we get this really nice even heating so we know that we're getting our pathogens and we know we're getting our weed seeds killed which is super important because I'm putting weed seeds in there so I want them dead and then we make our compost extract so interestingly we had Christine Jones at our farm this summer for a field day luckily and we used to always think it was just the biology the things we could see and we still do I mean obviously we use that to monitor some of the things we can't see plant signaling compounds and stuff that I'm sure she's going to tell you I just know enough to be dangerous so we we take so there's like 12 windows let's say 14 windows, 2,000 tons, 3,000 tons a year we make and tannis picks sort of our best ones and that's what we put in these little buckets on top of so the tank we fill with water there's air pumps in the bottom we fill these little containers with compost and there's an air thing in the bottom of it and we fill that with air and water and bubbles and we get this compost extract so it's basically washing the biology out of the compost and into solution and that then becomes the base of our the base of our liquid product that we put in for seeding we used to be like a low salt starter user so this was kind of our crutch and sort of our transition to getting rid of our low salt starter so from that we had, oh there's a little video so what it looks like nice little rolling boil we're going to change those a few times usually to get the concentration that she wants into that liquid but then we had about 5 gallons of that per acre plus the micro mix we make which is I guess sort of what we come up with on our farm and a few biological foods we had and then that goes right right to the field so we just basically use this as a holding tank and we have all of our stuff off to the side and then the tender truck comes we just take our micro mix we take a certain amount of this compost extract and put it in the furrow so that actually is like right in the furrow with our seed I guess is how we, sort of how we do it um peristallic pumps once again thank you no til on the planes I met an Australian there I was actually having the same talk about this and explaining about how I was having so much trouble with chunks of this and that plugging everything and how Tannis and I had arguments about that and he offered this solution these things are made in Australia and now it's just a peristallic pump we use a 16 mesh we use way coarser stuff it's actually almost like you can see chunks and now for our liquid and we just everything we pull a liquid cowdy just like everybody else does but there's different things in it and it just gets metered out with these peristallic pumps and it works great and another wonderful thing that I learned from this Australian I used to be a big believer in granular inoculant especially for chickpeas and other non-natives and we he said well why not just what they do is they just get the cheapest peat powder inoculant they can buy so super cheap stuff we just dump it in the tank with our other liquids and we have fire holes we mix it in and then it just goes in furrow with our you know with the mixture and right in the furrow and like that chickpea I dug like I tried to do a nice job some of the soil off of the nodules but it's like as big as your thumb and that was a dollar I used to spend 12 this is Canadian fun so just cut that in half so it cost is about a buck now so yeah I mean cheaper and I'm feeling better so what we're seeing now is things are kind of coming to life I mean now if we have a we make a slide this is what we're looking at was a slide from a fall ride from two falls ago if we it's like just popped and we got roots like that this is what we'll see if we make a slide out of that so we're kind of we feel like we're sort of heading the right direction now and then when you have things alive like that what do we want to do we want to keep putting carbon in the ground and cover crops I mean I think somebody said someone will put and take an E out of ET right so that was that's this we found in our farm that we took these pictures under residue beside residue huge difference I mean that's that we're seeing those differences we know we got to keep it covered by all means and that's what I was getting back to why we had covers because you know we're struggling to lean on our crop residue like we used to it's starting to go away so we're trying to replace the crop residue with a live root instead or a live plant I've never had a cover crop that I've ever grown and as dry as I am in the fall that's ever cost us any yield in the spring I feel that every time I grow a cover crop we're just building our sponge bigger just some examples of covers I mean you guys have seen lots of them the big thing about this for me the pay combable cover crops when I learned that if I increase my soil organic matter by 1% that's about an acre inch well in 2017 when I had 1.5 inches of rain all season boy one more inch would have been nice you know so everything we can do if we can harvest that snow and make it go in the ground or we can do right back to that built resiliency you know this is what I can do in my short growing season I mean if you guys got more rain and more time things can only be better a quick note about companion crops back to the whole idea with really seeding my covers if you can seed a annual clover with your annual crop in the spring it also provides that same bridge for me I guess the only downside it's been is it doesn't grow the biomass of a regular cover I haven't found but it definitely is a good plan B for me I think so really like the companions so at harvest there's a canola root and that's how big the clover is at harvest already so that's a win that's way way way better than nothing I could have an entire day long talk about this if you'd like but it basically boils down to have a plan and use mixes I think if I could sum it up in two words know your herbicides and have a plan and if you have a mistake it's a fantastic time to incorporate livestock we have a neighbor that has like 1000 cows so we're super lucky he brings large groups I do what I think rick beaver coin flash grazing we don't have super small paddocks in the winter we do the bulk of our grazing in the winter we have cows out there now on our ground we have his cows 400 older cows and we basically two things happen we don't have a small paddocks but we find the snow helps limit it don't have to worry about compaction obviously when the ground is frozen nearly as much and he's super flexible and he understands sort of our needs and our wants and our goals so it works really well we have done 24 hour grazing just one of the pictures he asked me when we're going to do it again he's super cheap if you can imagine so for us to share that profit it gets to be a bit of a struggle financially to take the land out so kind of what does this all sum up to I wanted to put these in real quick this is some saft analysis that we do this is sort of our grading this is our score sheet what they look like I work with a fellow one of the guys I work with I guess is Joe Williams I'm sure you guys have maybe heard his name he's so smart and he looked him up he sort of helped us build this micro program this is from the very first year we did it we had some holes in the system we just used a full extraction soil analysis to build our micro program so first year this is our second year got better we increased things like a half a pound like slight amounts you know so like our micro program is kind of a $10 thing I don't spend a bunch of money on anything if I had to spend a bunch of money it's something wrong and Joel's very good understanding that he's got a really good understanding of biology and chemistry and how those two things fit together so anyway one of the things we have been noticing I've got 15 of these on is our ammonium levels are through the roof and I'm looking for advice even Joel's struggling with that we put a total of 16 pounds of anion on our cereal crops so every other year that's the amount of anions and we've got more in than we know what to do with so we feel like we're going in the right direction but this ammonium thing I think something's wrong I mean it shouldn't be like that so the last score card I use is this grain nutrient analysis we've been working with Jill Clapperton Reseterra this was sort of a store card to start with but once again no chill on the planes I met a lady by the name of Sarah Harper who's running this Ground and Growth and she's connecting farmers using regenerative practices I never want to call myself a regenerative farmer because I'm not there yet it's more of a journey so farmers using regenerative practices and food companies who are looking for farmers like us and they're out there so we're using nutrient density analysis of our grains which they find very very attractive and the fact that there are differences and we'll do like for example on our farm we'll do chemical residual testing glyphosate it's a big thing if you can imagine for glyphosate testing to prove that we don't have it on our grains you name it yeah those companies want to know our story just like a lot of people want to know things about their food they want to know about our story and I highly recommend you look her up and she's been a game changer and that's why the seed plan is going up for part of the reason and there's my contact if you have any more questions and I'm pretty sure I'm over close close right on I knew you would be oh man thanks a lot I'm going to grab the mic thanks a lot you know he kind of made your head sweat a little bit but Derek I think instead of the guitar I will help the questions not already we can do a few now where we're getting loaded okay sounds good oh yeah does anybody got a question on this question we got one on how we spread this compost how do you buy your compost how do we spread it? okay yeah so good question because we use literally three tons to do the extracts very little you don't need much and the other two thousand we have a bunning vertical spreader with what they cover simple canopy just covers the beaders and we go out and we actually try to spread our compost in the standing crop because then the leaves can capture the losses right so we try to spread compost in the standing crop ahead of a rain I mean if you weather forecasters right so we sure try if things are good they can spread 70 acres a day hauling from home if we are more efficient we can do a better job yeah that's what we do on our trams right so we got a question here sure you talked about flax and lentils you talked about mustard and forage peas do you have a crop that you would raise with soybeans so yeah okay so everybody got that with soybeans there's been some experimenting with flax again one nice thing about flax is it's non-competitive for the most part if you keep your seeding rates low something I didn't talk about with seeding rates we were on super way lower than you think like our flax and our lentils is like 12 pounds like when we grow monocrow flax it's like 50 but we find that 10, 12 is lots I know guys that are growing like a couple of pounds of flax with their just simply to add to cover you know they don't even they don't even bother separating it but flax is I know one people have been fooling with for sure and it's easy to separate we control works we got time for one more question you know you guys write your questions down or at least remember them because Dr. Christine Jones and Derek are going to be on a question answer deal at the end of this and don't get afraid you'll see them in the social whatever but we got time for one more question let's at least have one more with the group here you do any foliar feeding of your crops? do we do any foliar? good question with compost or just in general yeah we've done we do like if we pull those saps and we got some okay the question was do we do any foliar feeding with compost or with anything or and we've done both we did a lot of compost ease sort of the first year we really got set up and we didn't see a huge financial payback we saw benefit but not huge but we have done if we pull we sap you know everything every year sometimes multiple times and if we see a big hole we'll go back in and we'll use a compost extract as a carrier just because we can and it's super simple and cheap we got to put something in the sprayer and then we'll just same thing just buy some the micro we have to and go out there but it's been very little this year we this year we had to spray our chickpeas and we went back in it wasn't super ideal but yeah does that answer your question? thank you Derek