 So quick history Alan I'm Alan and I met because with carbonation 1.0 Bill Curtis was the narrator and when I started wanting to learn more about the grazing because I knew that this would be my First short film for the whole carbonation 2.0 series and that's what this is I called Bill and said teach me about the cattle business and long conversation I said who can I speak to and he said speak to Alan and so Alan I've known each other if I look at my notes I think it's about two years now on phone calls and then we met last June in Starkville film in the film that you just saw and and then I filmed the other Gabe and Neil in August of last year Alan let's talk about your your growth you got your masters from Clemson you got your PhD from LSU and what was your PhD in and and then you talked for 15 years sort of the conventional style correct tell me about that well I yeah my PhD is in basically livestock genetics and reproductive physiology and I grew up on a family farm in South Carolina we were very diversified operation and really that had a big impact on the transition that I've made in my career and what I'm doing now but when I went to graduate school and got heavily involved in in research and so forth I also got heavily involved in the in the conventional or commodity sector of the ag industry and for many years I was sort of wrapped up in in the way that we were doing things there but there were some things that I noticed I noticed that we were using a lot more inputs whether it was with the livestock whether defined inputs inputs everything from pharmaceuticals you know medications antibiotics so on and so forth even even anthalminix or dewormers you know all of these types of things parasiticides and so forth for livestock in terms of the land inputs such as inorganic fertilizers pesticides herbicides fungicides all of those things that you typically see in a commodity or conventional ag operation and the thing that I noticed was that over the years we were losing net margin okay our because of all of those inputs our costs were rising and and so our net margins were going down down and down even though our yields were going up whether we're talking about weaning weight or yearling weight in cattle or whether we're talking about crop yields or whatever they were going up they were increasing so we were succeeding in that regard but at the same time we were not succeeding financially and we became very heavily dependent on on a lot of these inputs and so after noticing all of these things and I became heavily involved in the feedlot sector and and and I noticed the amount of antibiotics you know that we were using and you know and in the feedlot sector and it's just the nature of the beast but you know you have pen riders and in their function every day is to ride the pens to check for sick cattle and and so forth and in that typical type of situation you do have cattle that are sick quite frequently and and so growing up on the farm I said you know we didn't have that and we rarely had to treat our animals and the truth is a lot and that was in the 60s and 70s and a lot of the inputs that I started using in the 80s and 90s and so forth we didn't even have when I was growing up and and I kept wondering how did we make it without all of those inputs then but now I need them and so in the whole process of that I was doing consulting I had clients ranchers and farmers around the US and in Canada and and so I started to notice some of the innovative things that that some of my clients were doing and and now I tell my clients I really learn more from you than you learn from me but but that was a huge benefit to me because I started to see things that that there were other ways to to practice some of our management techniques and so forth that would allow us to reduce reliance on inputs to increase profit margins and yet have a very healthy ecosystem and to even restore that so I came back home and I started putting a lot of these practices into place myself experimenting no one knows no yeah it's just a brand new world it it I assure you it was pure trial and error yeah and even with our clients and you know over the last 15 years we've done a lot of this on our own farm and and on many of our clients farms and ranches and it has been lots of trial and error just figuring out how to do things and I assure you we made a lot of mistakes but here's the deal if if you have skin in the game you know if your livelihood is dependent on what you're doing on an everyday basis then your trial and error teaches you an awful lot very quickly because when you're losing money you got to figure out how to make money and and so but the way it was looking for you if I get this right is you were losing money anyway so the trial and error was actually already trying to stop that that's correct so your risk was almost staying with the system that you were in versus trying something new is that accurate it that that's accurate in the same thing that you saw from in the film from Gabe and from Neil you know very similar type experiences and it wasn't that any of us were bad at what we were doing yeah it on a conventional or commodity basis it's just simply the nature of the beast yeah and that's an important point you and I were the idea of this whole project is let's learn if we're seeing ways to make the soil stronger more resilient that's what we're exploring this isn't a game of saying someone's doing something wrong or someone's grandfather did something wrong that's not our game at all no this is this is a celebration of how do we strengthen and we are in America so how do we strengthen the American rancher to be more resilient to make more money and to be healthier and happier in their animal welfare that's the game that we're that we're playing so well and that's correct and the honest truth is we sort of found ourselves trapped in in a way of thinking in a way of production that that basically take us took us away from day to day observation of our animals of our plants of our soil in the whole environment around us and what I mean by that is when I was producing more conventionally we would spend all our summers cutting rake and balan hay and hauling the hay out of the fields putting the hay up and then we would spend all winter feeding that hay back out and so it became this this sort of almost vicious cycle that you know that's what we were focused on you were growing hay we were growing hay yeah and we were growing the feed stuff to feed our cattle in the winter so we literally spent almost all year with that focus in mind and in the winter time in the summertime we weren't observing the cattle we weren't observing the soil and in the pastures because we were out in the hay fields and then in the winter time we weren't observing much because we were so intent we had to feed all the different groups of cattle during the daylight hours yeah and and the enjoyment actually was almost gone you know it became a routine and it became rigorous and if the enjoyment didn't come back until we shifted the way that we were doing things and what we learned is that through sheer powers of observation just watching the animals every day looking at your at your plants at your forages and everything else that's growing there looking at the the the arthropods the insects the wildlife the water quality you know and one of the things that in the film that Gabe and Neil talked about was the fact that we have been able to significantly improve water infiltration and so now we're capturing a lot of water that before was running off of our farms and running into streams and creeks and ponds and lakes and so forth and when it would do that what was it taken with it what was taken the nitrates and the phosphates and the sediment the top soil all of that as well so we've been able to significantly reduce that but the power of observation is incredible and that's how we've been able to make the progress that we've made but it has also restored the joy in what we do on a day to debate and every day now i love going out to the farm i love discovering what's new what's the new plant growing now that wasn't there last year or even the week before let's talk about that there's a thing called the latent seed bank it's literally seeds that are in the soil that have said for a hundred years basically screw you i'm not going to grow because you're not treating me right and until folks start treating these seeds right they don't grow but they're there so you're seeing seeds you're seeing plants grow that weren't seen in your county in a hundred years is that accurate actually we have uh we have species that you didn't plant that we didn't plan right what we did was the the farm that was in the film uh when it was purchased and it was purchased because it adjoined another farm uh that my partner and i had so uh so it made sort of a contiguous area but it was in terrible condition all grown up in weeds and brush and bramble and in Mississippi everything grows okay so everything was there and not much of it was good and uh and and we had no more than three to four documented forage species there as along with all the other junk uh so when we went in we decided that we were going to use the livestock as our tool rather than chemicals and mechanical methods and that type of thing we were going to use a livestock and so we went in with high stock density short duration grazing specifically with the intent to build soil organic matter and tap into the latent seed bank yes let me just open it up we're going to open it up to questions because we need to get the mic to so the folks online can hear that but the question was did we ever switch to longhorns we can talk about that but we'll get it going yep so back to the latent seed bank okay well what we were doing is uh we wanted we knew from from other examples around the country that with the right type of livestock impact they could actually tap into that latent seed bank stimulate or scarify those seeds to germinate and grow and then with the high stock density short duration grazing where we allowed long rest periods then those newly germinated seeds could come up and have time to establish themselves to establish a strong root system and thrive what often happens with conventional grazing is that because the cattle return again and again to the exact same spot even if they do happen to tap into the latent seed bank that seed cannot establish itself okay because they're going to bite off that new growth because it's tender and young and tasty and literally pull it up by the root and it's gone so it doesn't have time to establish but now remember I said that we started with no more than three to four uh documented forage species we have over three dozen now and none of them were planted and we've had nrcs personnel and extension personnel from Mississippi state come out and document the different species that are there now and they've asked us when did you plant this or this or this we didn't and they said no wait a minute we haven't seen some of these species haven't been documented in this area for more than 200 years yeah so so another thing that's happening at your uh at your ranch in starkville that I think is fascinating is the insects are coming back you're getting a great diversity of insects and you're getting a great diversity of birds you're getting a great diversity of wildlife and all of a sudden your spot is the spot for hunters and and and they're making money by selling rights to hunt on their land they actually have a you have a hunting lodge so there's a whole new income stream for you and the thing that I like I know I'm talking for you here but um the hunters are now the stewards of your land correct talk about that that blows my mind well it's um in actually there's a little more story behind that but there there there's a little company called malci oak that many have probably heard of the camo company that that actually owned that same piece of property they bought it as a hunting property okay but but the hunting wasn't very good they as it existed in that state okay and they had planted food plots and all of this but they still weren't pleased with the amount of wildlife on the property and so forth so that's the reason it was up for sale in in five years of owning the property we have increased the wildlife population so significantly that they have offered to buy it back but uh but actually you know what happened is that the the wildlife population from the white-tailed deer to wild turkey to grassland birds like quail and so forth uh to small game species so forth have just exploded and in conjunction with that we have seen an explosion in the insect population uh particularly in pollinator insects we're seeing pollinator insects there now that we haven't seen for many many years and they're everywhere they're they're just all over the place we see earthworms everywhere now even in the middle of fields on a hot summer day we can dig down and and find earthworms because it's cool because it's cool because we leave cover we don't take it down to the bare ground we protect it keep the soil moist and cool and we routinely monitor our soil microbial life as well so what I call our wildlife beneath the soil yeah and uh and they are thriving you know and and that is that population has exploded as well now the question I get almost every day when I'm out talking about this is why isn't this being done everywhere and are your neighbors still calling you crazy you know let's let's talk about that perception piece they are calling you crazy so we have the answer there okay it in agriculture particularly and and it's probably this is just human nature but but in agriculture we're really tough in this regard is that we're traditionalist you know we grew up that way we were taught that way we were trained that way and uh and I was too uh but so effecting change in agriculture when you look at every major change that has occurred here in the U.S. and ag it has typically been somewhere between a 25 and 30 plus year cycle to effect any major change okay and one of the key reasons that people are slow to change again you got to remember this is our livelihood okay so they're afraid there if if I make these changes how is this going to impact my bottom line you know the revenue that I'm generating in my profit and so it scares them to make any kind of wholesale change I think that's reasonable absolutely and and so just like in anything else you do you have the very small percentage of people that are the the pioneers and the innovators right that actually jump out and do the trial and error and and fail and succeed and fail and succeed and so forth and then you have those that are the early adopters and then you have those that are watching the innovators and the early adopters and waiting to see what happens with them and then you have those that are what I call just the out-and-out scoffers you know that you know you're all nuts what in the heck are you doing and so you start with less than one percent and they want to observe and then you grow to five percent 10 percent 20 percent now when you get to 20 percent that's the critical mass that's when you can start making very rapid change and and I can tell you this that I speak at a lot of conferences and so forth around the country and 10 years ago we would not have had a room of even this many farmers and ranchers as the number that we have of folks here today to talk about soil health to talk about the things that we're talking about today now we're speaking at conferences where we have thousands of farmers and ranchers so they are interested they do want to learn yeah we met at the we met up at the grass-fed exchange they had a conference last year and they're going to have one in Colombia and Missouri this summer and there's about five six hundred people at the conference and I thought everyone there was going to be people who are practicing these methods of ranching but it was mostly people who hadn't done it yet and I thought that was very encouraging so we're talking about a way of of using cattle as a tool to turn on the soil and get land to a very healthy state the end product for a lot of people would be a grass-finished steak my vegan friends get caught up in that piece and I say you want cattle on your land if you're growing food whether you're going to eat the cattle or not what do you say about that because that's what I say and I'm asking you now well what I'll say is that first of all the fertility of many of the great plains globally not just in the U.S. and Canada but but globally that fertility was built from the action of enormous herds of large ruminants followed by small ruminants followed by birds sort of the serengeti model and and when we started practicing agriculture on a large scale and particularly when we started fencing everything in and animals no longer were free to roam and in just grays wherever you know like the bison in the U.S. were still in packs but right on their own right predators you know if you look at the way that and it doesn't matter whether we're talking about bison here we're talking about wildebeest or you know or any large ruminant around the world you know they they were obviously impacted by the action of predators so that kept them you know for sheer protection mechanism congregated or mobbed up so to speak and they were grazing forward continuously you know because and they didn't know that they were you know improving the land this was just what they were doing but that's what built the great fertility in the tremendous depth of soil organic matter through centuries and centuries of that type of impact and we found that you know with unfortunately when we started plowing all this up and everything we we started losing a lot of that carbon sequestered carbon we started losing a lot of our organic matter and you know most of you've probably seen the figures today you know we're averaging around 75 billion tons annually of global soil wells you know and over 7 billion tons in the U.S alone and let me wedge into that yeah I was in Ames Iowa at Iowa State and we speak with some folks from the USDA they said for every pound of corn grown in Iowa they lose a pound of soil and I see some friends who know this knotting their head so just for the folks at home okay yeah well and we we did some research in in Wisconsin along the same lines with the University of Wisconsin and NRCS and other entities and and we found that the average row crop farming operation in Wisconsin is losing right at three tons of soil per acre annually and the average dairy cropping system and we're talking about a conventional dairy operation is losing about 1.8 tons of soil top soil per acre per acre annually and that's like an income engine that they're they've reversed so it's an out outgoing well if you put it on economic terms for every 1% soil organic matter per acre that's $750 worth of nutrients okay so so if you have 5% organic matter you know that's over $3,700 worth of nutrients per acre now if you're losing that it's actually costing U.S farmers more than 20 billion dollars annually to replace those lost nutrients from that top soil when it could be happening naturally right saving money and be more resilient so there's a lot of logic here that's just I just think of it as just new you know it's obviously old systems but it's new ways of letting nature kind of be a you know dancing with nature as as as gay brown says in the movie you know he's not as stressed when he's working with nature as he was fighting nature it's so old it's new and like I tell a lot of people if if you're old enough to remember the barber mandrel song that was country when country wasn't cool you know that's what we are now you know so so it's we're you know there's very little that's new in this world all we're doing is we're reaching back and finding ways and and sort of you know retooling or retailering some of the thing practices that were used centuries ago and I'll give you a couple of examples in five years on our farm of using these grazing methods we built soil organic matter from 1.2 percent to 4.5 percent now in five years gay brown you know you heard what he he talked about in the film you know they have gone from less than two percent soil organic matter to over six percent and from less than a half inch water infiltration rate per hour to over eight inches water infiltration rate per you know folks those changes in a very short period of time are astounding and to be honest with you you know and again from an academic standpoint if if I think about this as a scientist it's actually hard for me to wrap my mind around that because we've believed for a long time that those kind of changes would take centuries and we're seeing them in years a few years yeah I mean tell me something you probably learned in school let me know if I'm right it takes a thousand years to build an inch of topsoil right that was something you were taught right we were and then what I'm saying is maybe if you're a glacier it'll take you that long but if you're Neil Dennis it's taken him about a decade or even less exactly because because on Neil's ranch you can dig a hole in the ground he could say you know four years ago I put a whole bunch of hay down you can see that hay in the layer and then you can see the soil on top of it um why don't we open it up for questions now there's so much I want to talk about um and and Susan let's hold on one second let's get the mic to you hi I'm gonna actually just ask a quickie and then the real question one do you work with front Bailey 25 by 25 no he's based in Jackson so okay later I'll connect you guys yeah I'd love to talk to you um my question is actually buttons on to what you guys were just talking about soil development and I'm an anthropologist and archaeologists recognize that human beings actually create a lot of dirt and so I'm wondering if there is some cross-disciplinary research that could be applied here because I would say that we usually estimate that people are creating some type of dirt at more like a rate of about half an inch every 50 years or so I mean because you can see like London and Paris where they were in medieval times it's like 12 or 13 feet you know 600 years ago you know do the math because I'm not good at it because I'm a cultural anthropologist but is there something that you might want to look at would that be helpful to you looking at other disciplines maybe or some cross-disciplinary well I think that would be great yeah I would I would love to to take a look at that well human behavior is a big piece of this yes it is if we want to scale how can we scale fast if we don't have ranchers speaking to ranchers trusted voices speaking to trusted voices and you know this how you're going to do that you're going to get ranchers to do that and and so it's a huge piece of this the natural sciences piece of this and the human sciences piece of this social sciences piece of this huge any other questions okay we've got some in the back hi I'm a PhD student at Washington State University Julian Reyes I love the video by the way I love the little precipitation gauge by each of the three people I think that was great anyways how do you reconcile this method with what's happening in the inner mountain west where is the invasive annual grass cheatgrass right and so there's that vicious cycle where where there's more soil disturbance there's actually more cheatgrass and so I was just wondering if you've looked at this method in that area and or farmers found that this method works in the inner mountain west for example yeah actually and that's a very good question but actually we have quite a few clients in the inner mountain west and then going on down into Nevada and Utah and New Mexico Arizona and so forth so you're absolutely right however again it all has to do with the great the specific grazing methodology okay what we have found is that we can accomplish the exact same things that we've accomplished whether it's in Mississippi whether it's in Saskatchewan or or in North Dakota as was shown in the film but in the inner mountain west and even in the more arid regions we've done a lot of work in in in the in northern Mexico in the Sierra Madre range and so forth with a lot of ranches there and what we have found is that again using high stock density short duration impact and longer rest periods that you know it what it boils down to with the cheatgrass is it's all about competition if the cheatgrass is given a chance to outcompete anything else it will but if you use the livestock appropriately then the cheatgrass is just a small part of what's growing there and many other species that are in that latent seed bank will come up and actually outcompete the cheatgrass because they're the native species to that ecosystem exactly exactly any other questions cut one more back there and then we've got one in the red hi so I have a quick question about this is a really cool method of new kind of ranching but with the system of production the scales of production that we have today with concentrated animal feed operations and intensive livestock operations do you see this as a way of scaling out of those systems or are there elements of this ranching system that can be adopted by CAFOs and ILOs to sort of replace them or to modify them or yeah how do you see a supplying beef to the American appetite over a long-term situation I'm going to add on to that question can we feed the world doing this okay first of all we have we have studied very intently the amount of grassland acres that are that are available in the U.S. if you look at a well-run grass fed grass finished system okay it takes about eight tenths of an acre to finish a steer just during that's during the finishing phase okay so you've got the cow calf phase and all of that and so we're not talking about taking acreage away from cow calf operations okay we're talking about grassland acres that are available to finish a steer or a heifer to harvest weight so it takes on the average on well-run operations about eight tenths of an acre in the U.S. we have enough available grassland right now that is not you know encumbered in any other manner that we could finish over 35 million head annually on grass alone now if you look at the number of fed cattle coming out of feedlots right now it's only about 26 million so we can right now we have the capacity in the U.S. and grassland to actually finish more cattle than we're currently finishing in the feedlot situation now to the second part of your question are there ways to be able to integrate and to and to make maybe the the concentrated animal feeding operations better more efficient reduce issues with runoff waste and so forth yes we can we can certainly keep a lot more cattle on grass a lot longer that will cheapen the cost of gain number one and graze properly we're providing tremendous benefit like we saw in the film to our land and we're able to more effectively use the feedlots because now they become basically much shorter term finishing operations and what was the the other one was can we feed the world and then i'm going to wedge in on on the whole idea cattle on grass for a longer period okay one in one more point i guess i want to make about that uh at last year's grass-fed exchange conference bill helming i don't know how many of you're familiar with bill helming but he is uh the former ncba national cattleman's beef association chief economist and was also the founder and former ceo of cattle facts which is for any of you that are economists you you'll definitely recognize cattle facts that's the leading uh you know leading entity out there for for economic and financial information in the cattle industry but uh so bill has been heavily tuned to all of this for his entire career and at the grass-fed exchange conference last year he made the direct statement that we must move he said right now the us beef industry is a one-trick pony and it's to our detriment and we must make some varying moves within the industry to be able to first of all satisfy the growing consumer demand for different types of beef products okay so what he said was he's projecting that within five to ten years the grass-fed sector will become 40 percent of the entire us beef production what is it now right now it is about six percent it's that big it's that big now yeah believe it or not which is significantly more than it was 10 years ago and you're saying that 20 inflection points what you're aiming for for the last 10 years the grass-fed sector has been has had an annual growth rate of 25 to 30 percent you know which far surpasses the growth rate of any other protein product in the us at this point in time but don close who is chief analyst and vice president for rabo mic also just recently put out an article a couple of months ago where he agreed with bill helmings assessment you know so we now have commodity commodity industry economists that are saying yes we are moving more and more towards more grass fed beef production in the us and even in the feedlot sector because of the higher grain prices cost of gain and all that we have certainly seen feeder cattle stay on grass longer before they enter into the feedlot sector now can we feed the world using this methodology my answer is yes and more so because this is truly sustainable this builds soil when you want to when you want to definition of sustainable in my mind it's not maintaining status quo it's building you seem you seem what we've done okay if you can build soil organic matter if you can improve water infiltration if you can build soil microbial populations and reduce your reliance on all of these inputs like Gabe and us and Neil and many others have done then absolutely we can feed the world doing this and we can feed the world better because we'll have better land more land that is arable and available for growing crops particularly if we start back into livestock crop rotations i think that's one of the keys you know is instead of having land continuously in row crops let's go back to a livestock row crop rotation mentality build that land give it rest from the row crops and i think if we do that we are absolutely creating the foundation of being able to feed that what nine million plus projected by 2050 a couple of things i want to talk about animal welfare and i also want to talk about methane you saw at the end of the film we're alluding to a team of scientists that were putting together at asu and um and so we have one of those one of those team members is a guy named jason roundtree at michigan state university and he's studying the methane cycling of the animals and um his early data it's early but he's finding that in the healthy soil in a healthy soil system there's microbes called methanotrophs that are actually taking up as much methane as the animals are eruptating or burping and or and that he's thinking that the methane question is a red herring and that's that's what's coming up right now with with with with jason just got a few minutes left i want to talk about animal welfare and let's just talk about what's happening to the animals in the systems that you're doing and promoting maybe even just around weaning and those things let you carry this thing out well i'll tell you right now we've changed every everything that we do okay we have completely changed it you know used to when we weaned calves we weaned them at the typical recommended weaning age you know six months to seven months and uh and and a weaning day we would gather the herd up you know we would vaccinate the calves castrate dehorn whatever had to be done to the calves deworm them all of this you know run them through the chute to do all of this and then take them away from their mothers you know so they were they were highly stressed they had no you know their youngsters okay a six month old calf would be like a a 10 year old okay for a human and and so we're doing all of this and stressing them yanking them away from their mothers and so over the next few days what do they do they're they're cooped up in this lot because if you turn them out in the pasture then they're going to run all over the place because they're naive they don't know what to do without their mothers okay and so you could have calves running through fences and getting out so you keep them up in the corrals and and because they're cooped up and they're bawling they're not eating or drinking very much they've been highly stressed you're asking them to eat hay when they've never done it right they they don't know how to necessarily drink out of those trawls and those corrals or eat what you supply them in the corrals because they've always been with their mothers and doing and nursing from their mothers and nibbling forage here and there so they're very naive i guess is the best way to describe them and so oftentimes we get a lot of what we call breaks which means that an outbreak of respiratory illness and things like that and so you have to use a lot of antibiotics and so forth to treat these calves what we have done is we now have moved to we our calves stay on their mothers till they're nine to ten months of age okay now and they're not separated from their mothers until then now a calf that is six months of age remember we said that's like a 10 to 12 year old okay a calf that is nine to 10 months of age guess what now you've got an 18 to 20 year old all right and you have 18 to 20 year olds that you're ready to kick out of the house right you know that you're you're deemed them ready go to college go to work whatever get out of here those calves are the same way they're no longer naive they have had those extra months to learn from their mothers they are now grown up so to speak so they know how to forage they know how to forage they've learned they've had more opportunity to learn behavior from their mothers and therefore they're easier to work with they don't get sick they're almost naturally weaned because their mother's natural milk production has already tailed off so much that they the only thing they're really really reliant on their mothers for at that point is companionship and not nursing okay so it's a natural weaning process the calves simply do not get sick we don't have to get them up and confine them in our pens or corrals anymore all we have to do is just fence lines separate them from their mothers they'll look at their mothers a day or two maybe walk up to the fence line where they can nuzzle noses and then it's like okay mom see ya i'm on my own now and it's that simple that easy and we have eliminated our health problems you know we don't need antibiotics anymore you know it's very rare that we actually have a sick animal now and that's wonderful so it's one system you've adjusted it's three more months the animal yeah with its mom you're taking all that stress out right so those stress hormones don't get produced and and the the medicine that you need to feed the animals goes down a lot or almost all and and here's the other thing they actually perform better for the rest of their lives perform better you mean they get fatter better they'll they'll fat and quicker they'll they'll gain better again they're not sick a lot of times what happens is when these calves get sick at weaning from respiratory disease and they have to be treated they have permanent scarring in their lungs and that can affect them later on in life okay and cause them to get sick again and again with these calves they just they stay very healthy their entire lives and because they have learned that they have had longer to learn that grazing behavior from their mothers and what plants to eat and all of this type of thing when they're on their own they just blow and go and in the calves that we wean in the old method they actually lost weight you know for a month or so after weaning then had to gain that back and then move forward so so the calves under this new way of doing things are actually far ahead in their development of the others using nature as signals using natural signals the whole way through and we have far fewer inputs both in pharmaceuticals and in feed supplemental feed costs so they are actually cheaper for us to produce therefore you make more money absolutely which to me is a good thing that's a good thing yeah so is there any other questions we're going to wrap it up we're going to end it on the rancher making more money no right right all right well alan thank you so much thank you so much for being here I really appreciate it