 Thank you everyone for attending today, speakers, presenters and sponsors. This event is put together by the South Dakota No-Till Association's SDSU Extension and some help from the NRCS. Crop consultants, you can receive your CCA credits for each session. Each speaker has a separate sheet if you want to receive credits you have to sign in and sign out before and after the speakers. The sheets are in the back of the room over by Ruth Beck. The first speaker today is Michael Thompson, he's a farm and rancher from Almena, Kansas. Michael along with his family and brothers operate Thompson Ranch and Farm and Ranch LLC. The farming operation grows wheat, corn, oats, barley and a diverse cover crop mixes. The ranch consists of a cow calf operation that grazes on native range and cover crops on farm land acres. In 2009, Michael began a soil health regimen program which has boosted yields, lowered costs and improved profits. He's also built a network of no-till producers he has brainstormed with over the years. Today, he's going to share his knowledge and successful strategies for a profitable no-till farm and ranching operation. Everybody hear me? All right. Yeah, I am from Almena, Kansas. I live in Kansas by where my house is, but everything that I farm is actually in Nebraska, and I'm kind of an oddity in that I am president of the Colorado No-Till Association. Before we go too far, I'd like to invite you all, since I am president of the Colorado Conservation Tills Association, this was 32 years ago they named it. It actually is now the High Plains No-Till Conference February 4th and 5th. We'd love to have you there. If any of these things that we're talking about today with grazing, with cattle on cropland interest you, we have a lot of speakers that are doing this in western Kansas, eastern Colorado and some dry land climates about like here. Our farm is basically myself, my brother Brian and my father Richard. Basically my father Richard was the only full-time person up until three years ago. I quit my elementary teaching job as a kindergarten teacher and came home to farm and help him out. My brother is a full-time accountant and he helps out all the time when he can. Basically we're in an 18 to 22 inch rainfall zone depending on what you look at, whether it's 50 or 100 years, but we're in a pretty similar climate as you, we're just a little further south. We do have rolling topography. Our flattest field is 1% slope, but most of it's 12 to 20% slope, so we have a lot of rolling topography. I guess I want to start off by saying I'm not here to step on anybody's toes. I think that's how we grow is maybe hearing some new ideas, so I'm not trying to insult you if you're still doing some of the practices I'm talking about, but I think that that's how we grow if we hear how other people have got away from maybe like summer fallow or going away from going to different processes. Please keep that in mind today. With that in mind, I think that we've done a really good job as farmers of being very proficient in chemical farming of treating the soil like a chemistry set, knowing how much nitrogen to put on, how much phosphorus to put on, how much potassium, how many micronutrients the soil needs to grow a crop, but in doing so we've kind of discounted soil biology and the benefits that soil biology can give to us. I'm going to talk a little bit more about the ecological functions and about what we're doing on the cropland to actually stimulate the cropland to kind of do a little bit more with a little bit less of the fertility and the input. First off, we've kind of become ecologically blind. Like I said, we've really got good at treating it like a chemistry set, but they always call this country next year country. You know, if we don't hit it this year, there's always next year, you know, maybe it'll rain next year or maybe we'll get an extra snow or something to get a little better crop. But a lot of times we discount what we do in this year, makes or breaks us in the next year. So that quote up there, you know, about it's not next year country but last year's country, you know, how we treat the ground this last year is going to determine how our success is in the next year, you know, in 2020. So, you know, a lot of times I think also we've always got the mindset to get just a little bit more, maybe a little more profit or get that extra grazing or get that extra haying out there. And sometimes we've got to defer that and leave it for the next year to feed that soil life so that we can have a better soil. So I believe in this quote that by Gandhi it says that there's enough for every man's need but not every man's greed. You know, going back to when we first started farming, we were conventional till. We did wheat fallow on a lot of our acres and I can remember it would set up like a brick and even when we switched over to no till when we're chem fallow, it set up like a brick. We didn't have poor space. Our water would run off, you know. We need to farm more like that sponge, you know. We need to keep a living root in the soil. We need to have that poor space so that water and air and biological life can live. You know, I'm not here to criticize anybody. This is in our area. So I know that there's people that are still doing to this today. You know, how close are we to actual soil? Are we close to dirt on our farms? You know, I want you to think of that introspectively on your own farm. Are there places on side hills where you've still got ditches? Are there places, you know, where you know you could do better? And so that's kind of how we got started into this. But you can see that, you know, water erosion is still a huge problem in our area. Wind erosion is a problem. This was actually a soybean field that was no till. And it still blows. So if you don't have that cover, the wind can be a pretty big problem. This has been a huge problem since grain prices were high in the, about 2008, 2009 on a lot of our rangelands getting converted into cropland. This is about six years in. So what have we done to our rangeland? We've taken productive rangeland and turned into really poor cropland. You can see that there's a lot of places on there that, you know, our water cycle isn't functioning. Our water cycle is causing a lot of erosion. And we're losing a lot of topsoil there. So I'm taking some productive ground and turning it into unproductive farmground. You know, it's great to be ecologically aware, but that doesn't pay our bills, does it? We also have to see where the profit is. So protecting that soil resource, I can tell you there are some profits and some helpful things, you know, that are profit-wise that will help you. And first off, it's estimated that about half of the fertilizer we currently apply to farmland is actually applied just to make up for all of what we lose to erosion, whether it be wind or water erosion, you know. So that's a pretty huge amount. And we really don't think about how much erosion actually happens when we see ditching across a field, but if you think of thickness of a dime, that's five tons of soil topsoil lost. So, you know, it doesn't take much to blow or much to wash away before you have quite a bit of nutrients and quite a bit of topsoil leaving your field. You know, as we go through this talk and as we go through when you go home, I hope you think about it, are you a banker or are you a miner of soil carbon? Soil carbon basically most of our farmland and even most of our rangeland has probably been mined since we first came out here and converted it to either grazing or farmland. We took a really carbon-rich soil and, you know, we took grains off it. We took hay off it. We took many pounds of beef off it. We overgrazed it. A person that's more like the banker would probably be somebody that's returning their manure to their soil, trying to use some cover crops, keep something growing as much the year as possible. They're probably also trying to plant some diversity in their rotation somehow to get that soil carbon. You never really think how much soil is capable of because what we currently call soil is much more like dirt than it is soil and I never even knew this. I'm kind of a soil, I guess you'd call junky or obsessed with understanding how soil works. So actually I was watching a, it was a documentary on the 1930s what led up to the dust bowl and how we got there. You might think that this is basically Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, somewhere that had really rich topsoil. This is actually Springfield, Colorado, which is down by liberal Kansas in southeast Colorado, where if you go through today it's full of yucca and basically looks like a desert. But when they first broke that look at how much carbon they didn't use fertilizers in 1900. This was just freshly broke ground and that carbon grew that crop, even this guy's short. Those oats, the heads are over a foot tall so you know that there was an abundance and they talked about the abundance that they first had when they came west. And as they tilled, they burned a lot of that soil carbon out. So growing up, I was no different than maybe a lot of you. I'd like to say I come from 40 or 50 year no-till operation, which is not so. Basically, we're right at 20 years. When I came back to farm with my dad, we basically converted from conventional till. My early recollections were on a 4386 international tractor and my job was to follow the combine and disk as fast as I possibly could because our ground set up like a brick. The other thing I remember is when I was doing fallow, there were ditches all over on our side hills and my job was to go out and work the ditches in so then I could work across it so that we could go ahead and plant that ground without the ditches. We never thought about why the ground was hard or why there were ditches there it was just the things that we did, you know, we just didn't think about soil that way. Same way on our grazing operation, we'd feed all winter long in a dry lot setting. We'd kick the cows out probably the 1st of April and we'd leave them till probably end of October 1st of November and bring them back to dry lot them. Our pastures were always out of grass by about August 1st. They'd be tearing down fences, getting into crops and I absolutely detested cattle. So if you think that I love cattle and I got into cattle, you're wrong because I remember at about 16, 17 years of age, I was like, when I become a farmer, I'm going to get rid of every last cow in the place and we're going to farm everything. Luckily through some college roommates and through my dad talking me out of it, you know, we still have cattle in the place today and I have found that they've been very beneficial, which we'll talk about in a minute. The thing that killed me though was by age of 18, I was set down from my mom and dad, well, technically my mom because my dad didn't really want to tell me this, but break the news to me, but they said, dad's going to be the last farmer in our family. That the farm's not big enough, it's not making it financially. You know, go to town, get a good job with benefits and stay away from the farm. So I was pretty hard headed though. So I went and got my elementary education degree and I returned home. I started teaching kindergarten and farming nights weekends and I was able to rent and buy some ground that way. So I didn't give up on it. But I knew that that conventional tillage way was not going to be the way. So basically I started looking in, how was the soil formed? Our prairie soils were formed under, you know, animals, livestock out on them. They had a living cover or a cover on them year round and they had a living root as much of the year as possible. You know, so we needed to have more of that on our cropland to start restoring those water cycles and the nutrient cycling. Some might think that I'm open to change because I'm young. Actually it was the other way around. I kind of liked that if it isn't broke, don't fix it, you know. But I knew that that wasn't going to work for me because I had to fix our soils if I was to have a chance, you know, at farming. So back when we were under conventional till, we never thought of soil as anything more than just something we planted into. You know, it was either dry or it was wet or, you know, it was eroded, whatever. We didn't think about it. We just put the fertilizer down, the plant grew. Well, now we look at soil as being the priority and the most important thing on our farm. Because whether it's on the rangeland side of things or whether it's on the cropland side of things, that's where all your profit is derived from. You know, there's no tractor, no plan or no combine that's going to make your soil better. You know, you're going to have to put the investment into it and see how you can make that soil better. I like to view the soil like I view my son or my children. I wouldn't leave them out in the sun, you know, on a hot day because they get a sunburn, right? Well, think about if you go out and you hay or you go out and you work your ground and leave it bare to the sun. It's going to, you know, get a sunburn. It's going to hurt that soil life. Same thing, you know, with the tillage. You wouldn't stick a sharp implement in your kid. They'd probably bleed to death, right? Well, the soil doesn't like all that tillage and that disruption either. So, you know, some of those things are things to think about. Here's been the hardest thing for me personally to shake. I think most of us in this room have always grown up. We only get so much rainfall, so much snowfall. There's only so much moisture, right? So, we come from that, let's bank it. You know, that's that whole back mindset with summer fallow. We've got to bank that soil moisture. And I'm not going to say it doesn't take moisture to grow covers and also grow crops, but without that good cover over the soil, you can't really regulate your, you can't regulate any of your, you can't regulate your moisture at all. You know, there's a lot more days with our winds and our sunny days to lose moisture than there is to gain moisture. You know, we have a lot more windy, sunny days than we do rainy days. Also, when the first time when it gets dry, what happens to our soils that don't have resiliency? They start, the crops start hurting and they look like they're starting to burn up. So we pray for moisture, right? Well, if we pray for moisture and we only hold a third of that moisture, have we really done us any service? No, not really. We have to have a place for that moisture to be held down in the profile, not just on the top of the soil. You know, if I can say one thing that changed my mind about moisture the most. There's a PDF down here at the bottom called the New Water Paradigm Water and Recovery for a Climate. That is an absolutely free PDF you can get off the internet and it talks a lot about the water cycle and recovering that water cycle. So if you're interested in that, it's about 75, 80 pages worth, but it really goes into depth about how the water cycle works. So I really suggest looking that up, you know, as a PDF. It's really good. You might have to read through it a couple of times, but it's not really like a scientific paper. It reads pretty easy. So something really to look into. You know, in our area, we're always told cover crops use too much moisture, right? Well, this was kind of the side-by-side comparison. This was really apples to apples because the planters rolled on the same day. The only difference was my neighbor stopped me or my neighbor's hired man stopped me and he's like, what are you doing for down pressure on your planter? You know, we can't get it in the ground up here at the top of the hill and we're getting stuck down at the bottom of the hill. And I was like, we just have backed our down pressure off the soil, it swells mellow. And so that's the difference with the cover crops. Basically on their side, that was just wheat stubble. You can see how it's browning up and burning up. On the other side where we took wheat stubble and we planted some millets, some daikon radish, some rape seed, things to help with the infiltration. We did use moisture to grow that crop, but then when the rains came, we were able to keep the rain further on the side hill and not all down in the bottom. So here's the after effects. You can tell pretty much probably which side had the cover. If you look between those rows, it's not too hard to see that there's still some cover on the cover crop side and on the side that was just wheat stubble, there's basically nothing left. A lot of that heat heated the plan up and it burned it up basically. It couldn't pull enough moisture out of the soil fast enough and over here. So it was about the difference between 110 bushel corn and the neighbor had an insurance check. So, what excites me about the whole thing about covers and about soil improvement, we don't have to spend a lot of money on them. Yes, you have to spend money on the seeding and the seed, but we can use a lot of the free elements. Number one, the sun. We're using capturing all of the rain and snowfall that we possibly can. We're also using the carbon. We're capturing carbon from the air, which is totally free. And I think that in the next few years, they talked about it for 20, 30 years now, but I think that we're really close to getting paid for carbon credits, that you will see that as a big thing for your car. If you're starting to sequester carbon in your soils, we will start seeing a push for that. We're also increasing organic matter by having that living root in the soil. We are stimulating soil biology, the earthworms, the fungi, the bacteria, they're all making nutrients that are plant available. A lot of things that we put on as fertilizers have to be converted with this biology. And if you have the biology working for you, there's a lot of amino acids and a lot of peptides and other things that feed the plant and you don't have to put it on. It all starts with the sun. Most of us don't think anything about the sun at all. The sun has a huge amount of horsepower. 500 horsepower tractor is pretty big, right? Well, that's five with, I think, 24, 25 zeros behind it for horsepower. To put it in another way, if there was an ice bridge that was two miles wide and one mile thick from the earth to the sun, it could be melted in less than a second. The sunlight that falls in a square meter could power the desktop computer for over a day. So there's a lot of energy. And if that energy doesn't have a green growing plant, it's basically like an oil spill. It's a wasted opportunity. We're wasting that sunlight. So we need that green growing plant to have photosynthesis and to pump sugars or exudates into our soil. Those sugars feed the soil life and then the soil life feeds our crops. So if we don't have that like this field, if we have bare soil like this, even though it's planted to a wheat crop, there's nothing up there, it's basically the sun's working against us. It's drying the soil out. It's killing off our microbial life. It's doing a lot of things that are working against us. So I'd rather work with the sun than against it. How effective is your rainfall? This is pretty common in our area on people that are still following. You see that it seals off and it goes down and it sits in the terrace channel. Well, that terrace channel, you might grow a little bit of crop in the terrace channel, but that water should be across the whole field and stored down in the subsoil so that your moisture is there when you need it later in the summer. How effective is your snowfall? We do rotationally graze. My dad still likes to put up some hay, so he does a few lands around the outside of the field and then maybe puts a few swaths through for our wire to go. So you can see where he actually haid over here. There's about an inch and a half to two inches of snowfall and that actually had about eight to 12 inches of residual to hold the snow, but it just didn't hold the snow. Where we had the stockpile, basically there was almost a foot, about 11 to 12 inches of snow out there. So that's making the snowfall more effective because that's creating a little microclimate. It's still staying warm under there. When that snow still melts, it can still do some infiltration. So you're actually making more effective. You're using water to improve the soil. Dad thought that I was crazy. I went and got some of these moisture probes. Basically they're a irrigation probe and we're 100% dry land. So he laughed at me. He said, we can't turn the water on, son. So what are you gonna do with this? And I said, well, I just wanna know that I'm doing right with these cover crops that they're actually doing what I think they're doing. So the black line up here is basically the moisture level in the soil. This green band is the optimum growing conditions for your crop. And anyway, so this black line, as you can see, when we put them in, it was in mud. It was over 110%, almost 120% of soil water holding capacity. It was wet when we put these soil probes in. Well, we put our cover crop in and as everybody knows, cover crops use moisture. So we started using moisture and moisture. And down here at the bottom of that green band is when it started turning brown and it started getting a little sickly. So we decided we'd start grazing it. And dad was pretty much laughing at me saying I wasted my money on these because he could tell me what was happening. You know, I was using up all my moisture. Well, I was feeling pretty low by the time this band got clear down there, it was pretty much getting to be pretty brown. I mean, the tops were not blue, white stages burning up. So one night in the evening, we got two inches of moisture in 45 minutes. So it was a horrible rain, it just rained buckets. And I was sick to death because the cows were out there. I thought, oh, they tracked my field up. Probably the terrace channels are completely full. Maybe even washing terraces out as fast as it came. But as you can see, when I got to the field, it really wasn't tracked up that much. There was a few spots on the channels that had some water, but they weren't full and we didn't have any terraces washed out and I couldn't understand why. Well, we'd use that moisture up up here. But then when we got that rain, look, we recharged everything. So it helped the infiltration enough that we did use moisture, but then we regained that moisture because it had a place to go. If we would have followed that in that same time period, it probably would have had 80 to 90% moisture in that subsoil. And then when we got that rain, we would have had like 160 or 180%. I guarantee you, we would have had lots of ditching. We would have had terraces washed out. So we are using moisture, but we're creating an environment where we're increasing the infiltration and getting more water into our soils. We do this by retaining residue. I know this looks crazy to a lot of people probably because you're like, oh my gosh, grazing days. Most guys want to take it down to where they see some bare dirt. That's not me. I need that residue on top because that's what's gonna keep my evaporation at bay. So I am giving up grazing days up front, but it comes back to me the next year in little to no chemical use. And then I also have a lot better crops that make it through the dry times because it's got that covering between the rows. What does grazing look like? This is 12 hours of grazing. When they go out on the sorghum sedan, there's 120 pair out there. You can't hardly see them. This is about two and a half acres. And by the time they come back, you can see them. And for me, that's time to move. Most people would have probably gone another day out there till they take it down even more. But for me, I want that standing. I want some standing residue left. They've stripped all the leaves and all the good stuff off and it's time for them to move. So that's what 12 hours of grazing looks like. Why is that residue key? Because that residue regulates your soil temperature. You can't make it rain more but you can keep that evaporation at bay. So 130 degrees, that's basically like a lot of bear fallow or work ground or a chem fallow. It could get up to 130 degrees in the summer. Maybe not quite that much up here, but it could in our area. If you can keep it covered, you can keep it down towards that 70 degrees and that 70 degrees, 100% of that moisture is used for plant growth. So the cooler you can keep that soil, you can't make it rain more but your water can go further. We are limiting evaporation. This is the same soil probe that we had. It also has temperature sensors every four inches. This pink line up here at the top is the top four inches which is gonna fluctuate most with the soil temperature cause it's gonna be closest to the top of the soil. And on some of our hottest days when we're over 100 degrees, it got up to 87 degrees there. So we're keeping it more than 20 degrees cooler. We're keeping our soil microbiology happy in that soil and we're also keeping it from evaporating that way. I will harp a lot on soil covering carbon because that's what we're deficient in. We're gonna have to give a little bit to get the system started. So why is it important? Because all life, we're all life forms, we're all carbon based life forms on this planet. So it's pretty important. This is what I want you to take. If you don't take anything else from my talk, please take this home and think about this. Carbon holds seven times its own weight in water. So basically every little bit of carbon you're putting in you're drought proofing your soil. It will hold the water like nothing else will. There's no tillage equipment or anything else that will do as good as carbon will. And that's why I'm gonna harp a lot on soil covering carbon. Carbon is essential in the healthy soil because it's the food for the microbiology. I think we've all found that out if you're no tilling for a long time and you have those fallow periods, your organic matter doesn't grow, does it? It's because the microbiology starts eating it. They don't like to eat on that organic matter because it's like eating cardboard to them. They'd much rather eat exodates or eat those sugars coming from the living roots. But they will feed on that organic matter and that's why we don't see the organic matter gains. If you're not growing plants to increase soil carbon basically they're just gonna tear the house down. This is the difference that soil carbon makes. Looks like a totally different soil. This is a holdridge silt loam. That's 2.1% organic matter. That's a 0.7% organic matter. This isn't perfect by any means but there is a lot more pore space. Down here this is a yule clay. That's like our side hills. And you can see that's a lot darker, got more water holding capacity. A lot more carbon in there than the no-till neighbor. So the difference that carbon does make. We can change our soils. And I would have never known this had I not had a field day on my farm. They wanted a soil pit dug and I never dug a soil pit. I suggest everybody go out and dig a pit and see what you're doing in your soils. On the stuff that my dad had, it was pretty good soil. Really raised good crops, good corn, good wheat crops. So we really didn't push the covers. When we first started out I got a lot of side hills and stuff next to the pasture that was pretty much not functioning like it should. It was poorer ground. So where we had the poorer ground, where we did the cover cropping and we did like stat cover crops. We did like a cool season spring one. Grazed it out, followed by a warm season one. Grazed it out and then planted it back to wheat. That's a pretty tight rotation. We didn't have a lot of wheat but then after the wheat came off we put a warm season cover back on and grazed it. You can see the carbon that we put in there. Those exodates, that's 36 inches of carbon. This is about 11 to 18 inches of carbon there where the no-till. So we're actually putting more carbon and that's holding more water so we can up our rotations more. Again, this isn't as far into the system. This is on our fifth year in no-till. This is only the second cover crop because we worked, this was on a crop share and our landlord didn't think that covers worked until she started seeing our other ground progress more than hers. So we started doing this on her ground. You can see there's still a lot of problems but what are we doing? We're starting to get those, we're starting to get that carbon put down into the soil. Microbiology is money in the bank and that's why it's important to take care of it. You know, a soil that's rich in carbon is also rich in fungi and microbes and all these things are cycling nutrients and making plan available for free. We don't have to go and we don't have to pay for it. And they also, when we do put fertilizer on they stretch that fertilizer dollar even further. I'm not advocating that you severely cut your fertilizer especially right off the bat because that would be a train wreck but I am saying that you will, if you follow these programs and you make targeted applied versions of your fertility they will go further. Soil life creates basically the enzymes and some amino acids that are beneficial to plants that don't have to be converted by the biology that our plant available. This is fungi in our soils. The thing about fungi that's important is that fungi, roots can only go so small than to get into the fissures and cracks in your soil and then they can't go any further. But the fungi is so much smaller and more microscopic it can go into small, small cracks that are microscopic and it can go find moisture and find nutrients that the roots can't. And then it'll take it back to the plant because the plant's gonna feed it sugars to keep the fungi alive because the fungi's feeding the plant so it does work together so that's important. Even in dry times don't be afraid to put something cheap out there. This is primarily a millet cover crop but they did put some Dicon radish and turnip in there. I considered this a failure because I planted it with intentions we were gonna get some rain after harvest at some point. It was dry, bone dry when we planted. I didn't think it'd come up two weeks later, three weeks later we had this, you could see it coming up. Only got about ankle to boot top high. It didn't get over a foot, two foot tall. So I determined it was a failure because I wanted it for grazing. The cows actually, the deer knocked down an electric fence next to this and the cows got out on it and they were just going wild and I couldn't figure out what were there after and never even went back and looked at it. But they were going after these turnips and this radish. They're recycling those nutrients that were left over after that wheat crop. So we can recover some of those nutrients. This is what a cover crop looks like. You don't see much bare soil. You see a green growing plant. This is millets, this is forage sorghum, sorghum sedans, some rapeseed, sunflower. So I've got a diversity of broadleafs and grasses and this is kind of what it looks like and this was in wheat stubble. This was probably planted or this was probably filmed, what, about the end of September. So if you get a grain you can do some pretty great things. Grazing, I always say grazing so easy even a baby can do it. Most people don't want to hear that grazing can be a lot of work is what most people think but it doesn't have to be work. I highly suggest if you have never been around polywire or abraded wire like polywire that you experience that because it's really easy to subdivide and to get better use of your cropland. This polywire, I like to step in post with a very smallest spike that you can find because when you get into frozen ground or dry ground it goes in the ground. If you get too big a spike, like you go to some of these places that are like the local tractor supply they have cheaper posts but they have a really big spike on the end and they won't go into frozen or dry ground. So try to find one of those portable posts that's got a small spike on it. Basically that's all you need. Really, really I suggest if you do this spend the money on a fence charger. I mean $500 to $800 on a fence charger which sounds like a lot but it'll have enough jewels that it'll keep the cattle back. They'll respect it. Whereas if you go get a cheap fence or they'll be out all the time and it doesn't take much crop damage to have a lot of problems with the neighbor. So I'm not totally into electric fences being a good thing but you have to have a good fencer. Integration of livestock on the farm like we talked about they're basically incorporating the residue down to the ground where the microbes can start breaking it down. They're trampling it. Basically something that most people don't talk about is the benefit that they're stressing the plant. They go out when they wrap their tongue around there and pull it off. They're pulling on that root and that root's getting a little stressed so it's putting more sugars into the ground. They're also putting some saliva and some bacteria on there and a lot of the things that are in the room and coming out of the back end of the cow start to stimulate a lot of the soil biology. I will show you in a little bit what that looks like on our farm. Why high stock density? I like running a decently high stock density so I get the trampling so I get the ground cover. I get even residue distribution instead of bare spots. You know, I think that it's important that you have what you can manage. You know, it doesn't have to be daily moves if every second or third day that's fine too. But I think that you need to have them moving across your cropland because if you just leave them out on one piece of ground like a quarter for 30 days you're gonna have some pretty serious compaction in places. You know, who wants to move fence? It sounds like a daunting tax doesn't it to go out and move this fence and change the fence around. Well, for me on foot I timed it one day and to cross fence a quarter it took what, about 35 minutes for me on foot holding the post and stringing the wire out. If you have a four wheeler or a side by side or something it's way faster than that. But you know, it doesn't have to take a lot of time. Couple that versus the way we used to look at cows and we used to subdivide them into groups and put them all over the country. It would take us four and a half hours just to check cows. And a lot of times it's a whole day endeavor if they tore the fence down and they're in our crops or the neighbor's crops. So you know, it's actually a lot less time. It's a little bit more time to get your idea of where your watering points and stuff are gonna be but it's a lot less time than the way we used to run cattle. And most of all why I like being out there every few days with my cattle. Cattle are tame and they're easy to work with. These are my two year old twins that just they just turned two in December and they can come out with me and be around these cattle. They don't act like cattle. They act like oversized puppy dogs that'll kind of freak you out a little bit because they'll follow you around looking to move fence. And I'm gonna show you real quick what a fencing, what a move looks like on our farm. People think moving cattle, you have to get behind them and hoop and holler and everything else. All you have to do is drop the wire. Once they see the first couple go by, they're smart. They know they're gonna get their next rotation and big herds are not hard to move. One person can do this. This happens to be where we had all three of us there one morning and we just moved them in but you can see how fast they are. The cattle are in really good shape. They might be a little bit bigger than, we're trying to shrink our cattle down but they are really full. They've got a good coat on them. That's something that you can't, I was talking with some other people, the sale barn, when they go through the sale barn they've got a lot better coat, they're a lot fuller and that's something that you can add revenue to. If you're doing this, watch forage levels. If anything move with forage on top, don't be like when we first started this. Dad and I decided that we'd leave them one more day. I thought we should move them, dad thought we shouldn't so we did it dad's way on this first piece. The rest of it we left more forage and the difference in that following was about almost 30 bushels of wheat. The top only yielded about 22 bushel of wheat because it was so dry and we had compaction and everything else. Why leave residue? Residue holds it up. It works kind of like a snowshoe does. You don't break through the snow and when you got residue cover over the top those cattle don't really break through down into the soil and pug it up very much. They just kind of lightly incorporate that on the top. Something else to think about is this isn't wasted forage. This forage feeds the soil so your soil can feed your livestock in the future so it's an investment in your future. What about compaction? This is on my own farm. Compaction's not a problem if you keep them moving. Basically this is soil bulk density. This was done in a joint Colorado State and Kansas State study on cover crops in the Western region and you can see it's statistically insignificant. The difference is between fallow, grazed and ungrazed so basically it's the same. As long as you keep them moving. This is a pentatometer. This shows this was grazed right before we planted corn so we'll see how much compaction we actually put in the ground. If it stays in that green zone basically you're able to have your roots move through so I can do it with one hand so I really didn't have a lot of resistance so that's working pretty good. So anyway, so that's something to think about. I prefer strip grazing. Everybody has a different way to set up fence. The longer or narrower the paddocks you're gonna get a lot more of that back and forth movement which you thought might think would be compaction but it does a lot more with laying that mat down. If you do more in a square pattern you're more likely to probably have better forage utilization but you're probably not gonna have that good residue mat laid down. So we like to strip graze and that works good for me because I can put my tank next to a road or I can put my net tank at the end of the field where I've got a well across the road and just run a hose across the road so it helps me with water on some of these things. This is the nutrient spread with strip grazing. We'll talk about cycling nutrients, the free fertility that we're getting. If you put one fence around your corn stalk say it's a corn stalk field you put one fence around there and you leave them continuous out there it would take you 27 years to get one cow pie per square yard. I think that, yep, per square yard. If you subdivide and you move them say every 14 days it'd take you eight years to get one manure pat per square yard. If you move them 24 different times you don't have to have 24 fences set up you just have to have it divided up so you can move them 24 times. It would take you two years and you can tell down here where we did it daily you can see the manure paths that are gonna feed that grass so it does cycle nutrients it's your free fertility. Remember to leave that soil armor. So many times guys are probably thinking that they could probably get a few more grazing days out of it or they can get the extra 10 or 15 head on that ground and take it a little bit further down but you really need to leave that soil armor so that you let those earthworms have a good environment, let that biology. Eat the best, leave the rest. Don't be afraid to stomp the bottom of the stalk. You can see that there is a pretty significant amount that we did waste on this but the next year you can raise some really good crops when you put them into this so you're just using the, you're capturing some value with the cattle out there but you're also capturing the value of the next year with that increased soil function. Again, I've told you several times but remember to leave cover. That cover is essential to make the whole thing work. Why I like grazing, a lot of people say oh I've got a cover crop, I'm gonna hay it. Well just know if you hay it you're gonna take off a lot of the good that you did with that cover crop. So let's say you run 500 pounds of beef per acre that's 18 pounds of nitrogen, nine pounds of phosphorus and 1.0 pounds of potassium you're removing. So four tons per acre I figure is probably a dry land yield might be a little bit low but 200 pounds of in, 40 pounds of phosphorus and 160 pounds of potassium. You take that to an irrigated yield that's over 400 pounds in so you're losing a lot of nutrients when you hay that. So you're gonna have to make it up with a lot of added nutrients. Something else that we get on our farm is we get a really nice regrowth on our pasture when they're out on cover crops. So that helps us grow more range. This is an August. The neighbor has buffalo grass and weeds and basically bare soil. This out here you can see some clovers and some grass. So we know that we're making a difference on our ground. I'd be amiss to tell you that this all happens in one year. So many people I get frustrated when I first started this because you'd hear these guys talking and they'd have these beautiful, wonderful looking crops. Well, I think 2012 might have been a little drier up here for you guys. For us, 13 was the year that really dry in our area. So we did everything right with this corn crop. We had really good soil coverer. We planted the corn crop in there. If so dry, the corn didn't really even come up. We didn't get hardly a stand. So we did strip graze the corn off but we did everything right. This is the same fertility package as here and look at the difference we've got. This is last year's corn. We even have the ground starting to cycle nutrients. You see some bare soil there. As soon as the corn comes off, it needs that residue to keep it going. But you can just see a lusher and a stronger plant and that's the soil biology that's making that, you know. And I like to have fun. I planted a little bit of open pollinated corn. It was a Jimmy red corn. So just for fun, you know, just to see what it'd do. Remember to leave that soil cover. And this is what it looks like where we have cover crop between the rows and this was harvested. This was, this fall's harvested. So you need to have that soil cover. Leave that soil cover even if you're grazing. And this is the different soil cover makes. You see the cover crop on one side. This guy hate all of his corn stalks off so he's got no residue. And look what's happening to his soil. So it makes a big difference. We chose the way, you know, to change the way we farmed and the way we viewed soil. You know, we dissed, we plowed, we ripped. We did everything, you know. So, you know, I think that it's important that we think about the soil and put a priority on soil. This is the difference that the high input no till. This is guy that uses a lot of chemical and fertilizer in there. Basically, you know, oh, it is gonna work. So all these little dots, that's bacteria. Do you see a lot of other life in there? It's pretty much all bacteria, right? So bacteria is what's pretty prevalent in a lot of soils. So I'm gonna show you on our side, this was the grazing. The little worm like things, a nematode, that little fast things, a protozoa. There's bacteria. You've got a lot more cycling of nutrients when you've got all those little guys working for you. They're dying, they're killing each other, they're giving off nutrients, and it's all plant available. So that's the difference we're getting. And for me, this is what's important. I'm leaving a legacy of good soil management. I hope to heck that I don't have to tell my three kids someday that, you know, you can't come back to the farm. I'd like to think that we'd find a revenue stream or a way to bring them back, you know, and that our soils will be in a good enough shape, you know, that we can do that. So, like I said, I taught kindergarten. In the spring, when the kids would get restless and antsy, we'd go out and we'd have a soils unit. And as part of our soils unit and conservation theme, we'd read the Lorax. And in the Lorax, it says, unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing's gonna get better, it's not. It starts with, you know, you, your neighbors, you know, just trying something and making it work, you know, being committed to it. If you are into this, I'd suggest reading. There's a lot of good books out there. And that's how I got my start. I didn't have the neighbors that were good at doing this. I just had to read and figure this out the hard way. But grass-fed cattle, it's not really about grass feeding as much as it is. It talks a lot about mobile structures like watering, fencing, that kind of stuff. It actually gave me my start into this whole grazing thing. Holistic management kind of tells you some of the things about, you know, range and stuff. Nature and properties of soils, that's my Bible. That tells you so much about soils. It is a college textbook, but it doesn't really read like a textbook. A lot of good info about water cycling, nutrient cycling, things like that. Stubble over soil. That's about a South American farmer who took some really poorly degraded ground and brought it into high productivity. Good no-till book. Kalsy, The Planet, Water and Plain Site. Those are both books that kind of talk about the water cycle and how cattle can actually help restore our soils. Building soils over better crops. That's a free PDF file that you can get from Sarah. Teaming with microbes, teaming with fungi, and teaming with, excuse me, teaming with nutrients by Jeff Lowenfels. Those are really good books that talk about a lot of the biology happening in our soils, you know, and how the nutrients get into our plants. So if you're interested in that. And I think the most important thing for me that helped me grow as a person was farming the dust bowl. That book is a first-hand account from a Southwest farmer that he was doing everything right for his day conservation-wise, trying to grow crops, but he kept having crop failure after crop failure. So it kind of tells you the what if if we don't take care of our soil. I know that what I've said might be a lot to chew, you know, or might have a lot to think about, but I heard the same thing years ago from other speakers and I thought, what do I have to lose, you know, and it's really been kind to me and so that's why I'm here today to kind of pay it forward and to help other people. Hopefully you have success on your own farms and ranches like I have, but a lot of it's the mindset. Whether you think you can or think that you can't, you're right. And Henry Ford said that and 90% of it's mindset. If you want to make it work, you're going to find a way to make it work. So if I can help any of you in any way, here's my contact information. If you're on Facebook, Kansas, Nebraska soil stewardship group was me and a few neighbors that did it because we're in Kansas, Nebraska and it's all across the region now. So if you'd like to be on that or on Twitter, there's a lot of good people doing stuff on there. So please reach out and if I can answer any questions, great, thank you for your time. Thank you.