 In 2013, the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service entered into a cooperative agreement with the South Dakota No-Till Association and IGRO, SDSU Extension, for delivering the latest soil health and productivity technology to South Dakota farmers and ranchers. A series of four local events were held in South Dakota in Sioux Falls, Watertown, Belfouche, and Mitchell. Well, I'm pleased to be here to visit with you, and I enjoyed the deal this morning. It's really quite an honor when the people that got you set up in this conservation deal invite you to come and speak, and so Jim Dilla was instrumental in getting me into the CSP, which has turned out to be very good for our program, very good for my son, and we've benefited greatly by people helping us in the system. I guess my personal involvement stems back to just the way we were brought up. You know, it's wrong to waste, and it's not about the money. It's a lot more involved than that. I don't know if it's an addiction or an obsession, but you start looking for more ways to be more efficient. So I got some pictures, I guess we'll go ahead and stumble through them and be informal. I don't have anything prepared specifically, but if a question comes up, just blurt it out and we'll talk it over a little. Go ahead. This is my wife, Karen. We married in 82. My son, Lee, and my daughter, Angela. Angela is an 84 model, and Lee come along in 86. Angela is now married, lives in Brookings. Works for the high school down there, and her husband works for the college. Go ahead, Pete. I like this picture. It's my granddad and my mom and her brothers and sisters. And I look at that picture and I think about the level of technology that's available. When they were doing that, that picture is probably in about 44. That was where technology was. That was cutting edge as state of the art right then and there. And we need to be open to accepting and trying the state of the art technology that's out there today. I also like that picture there because I'm about the same age there as my grandpa was in relation to his children. And so that's a treasured picture of our family. That wasn't in South Dakota, by the way. That was in Southwestern Missouri where my mom's from. Pete, we have a bull sale. We have just a portable ring. We just drag it into the machine shed. We do that for biosecurity reasons. We like to be able to say our bulls have never been off the place. We're very careful about bringing in animals. A lot of our breeding animals that we bring in are in the form of embryos. So we don't go to a sale and bring every disease in the sale barn home with us. Third week in May. Go ahead, Pete. I was putting these pictures together and that's our house. It's built in 21. My wife said, don't show them a picture of the house. But it has a conservation in my mind. It has a conservation point. And that is we got to get used to not living beyond our means. It had a taxable value of $6,400. And against my better judgment, Karen put window shades in. And that raised it to $6,700. So go ahead, Pete. And the barn was built in 22. We don't use it much anymore. But I'll be darned if I'm going to let it fall down on my watch. So we keep it up. It basically houses the cats. And we get to hang our bull on the wall up there on the door. Those are our registered, South Dakota registered brands. We still put them on, even though we're not West River anymore. We like to be able to identify them. So go ahead, Pete. There's Jessica Mahalski helping Lee and I with our CSP stuff. Again, another valuable instrumental person in the NRCS. Pete, here's a frost-free drinker. We bought this half-section, I guess, in 96. There was two or three dugouts on it. The water turned out to be inadequate. It's got quite a slope to it. You can't see it here. But we lose a lot of runoff water. And so we put in another dugout. And that still water was still a limiter. And so we put in a wagon-wheel type of a grazing system piped in rural water. And we use that. There's no electricity up there. If you have maybe 150 cows drinking out of that, you don't need electricity. It'll keep itself frost-free for quite a while. We have an inside that is a geothermal deal. The water comes in from right over there. And it comes underground and comes up in there. And it's eight feet down. And we just have a couple of PVC pipes in there that allow ground heat to come up there and warm the valve on the inside of that tube. And that seems to be enough. We also have, occasionally, when it's below zero for a high, the float is underneath this. And I just have a hole drilled there, maybe a 3-8 hole. And I can just take a pencil and push the float down so that fresh water starts coming in and knock, usually it's a thin layer of ice, knock that out, and then it's up and going. And you can't see it on here very well. But we put some rubber around the edge down into the water so the wind can't swirl in underneath and freeze it up. And so it's fairly inexpensive and fairly effective. So you can get a couple in green. Yes. No, we can shut it off. But we just have a portable gas-powered deal that we suck it out like a vacuum. Those aren't very handy to clean out. This is another dam. It's a dam located maybe 200 yards away from that row water drinker. It was put in with US Fish and Wildlife funding and NRCS Engineering. Go ahead, Pete. And here's a dugout that was put in. This is in my son's pasture. He got a beginning farmer equip thing, which he ended up plowing every penny of it into water. We're kind of hooked on water improvement. And he's over there bailing. That's part of the pasture over there where he's bailing on. But it got polluted with musk thistle. And so rather than kill the alfalfa with spray, the cheapest way to control the musk thistle was to just bail it up fairly early. And then that serves as a protein supplement of the regrowth when the native grass is starting to get kind of brown and kind of hard in the fall. And that helps. They can kind of balance the ration a little bit there with some higher protein regrowth. Pete, that's the close up of the same dugout there. Go ahead, Pete. Here's a dam that Karen's grandpa put in in the 30s. It was put in with the WPA labor. And it lasted all those years. But the dam got kind of thin and needed to be redone. And so that's Kent, a foot there. And that's John, a foot. Kent's in the... Well, Kent and John Lewandowski out of Wilmot. They're doing that for us there. And those are field stones that have been piled on ground through the years. And we put them to work. I was contemplating hiring somebody to dig and bury. And I was kind of pleased that we could have them do something constructive. And we'll say that that Leopold Award includes a $10,000 check. And that's where the $10,000 check went. That was my share of redoing that. It's surprising how much it cost to move stones. There it is. That was in 12. And we were getting pretty dry. And so that's what the people saw when they came to our place for the tour. A dry hole. OK. About 10 years ago, we seeded down 200 acres of some really good level crop ground to native grass. When we did that, we got participation from the game fishing parks on that seed to plant that grass. And it was my theory, and still is, eventually, to fence that and use it for grazing. You go through quite a few years that it takes for that ground to get sod and tight enough that it doesn't get trampled up. And so we've been haying it. And we leave these strips out there. That's about a three-foot-wide strip, or maybe not quite. They catch a lot of snow. And there's some benefit to the habitat. The wildlife people say it's minimal because any kind of a predator can go up and down those strips looking for the game. But the thing about it is, right now, those bales are 67 and 1 half inches high. And that grass has just kind of begun to grow. And so they get tall, and they hold a lot of snow. Go ahead, Pete. And the stuff really yields. We'll get right around 4 ton of dry hay. There's a trade-off there. If you take it a little earlier, you've got a little higher, a little more digestible nutrients in it. If you really need tons, you let it go a few weeks longer, and you get more tons. You get more bales. Do you add protein or protein? We do add protein to our ration. Where do I sit the next? Based on what it's costing. If it's fairly reasonable, we put a little on. If it's fairly high, we skip it. Go ahead, Pete. That's what it looks like if you don't cut it. And that big blue stem really gets tall. That sunny-view big blue is what that variety is. And the neat thing about it, I think, while the wildlife people really love it, is it'll stand up at the wintertime. Your brome grass will lay right down. And this stuff, the pheasants or whatever, can get in there. And they have some protection from the hawks. And it really catches snow. That's a major benefit for us. About a third of our moisture comes in the form of snow. But here's kind of what happens. Of course, we're totally surrounded by cropland. And it seems like everybody wants to fall till. And so I get all their snow. And what happens a lot of times is the first snow that comes, of course, our snow always comes with wind, the first snow that comes gets hung up in those. And so that ground doesn't freeze underneath there. Or if it does freeze, it's very shallow. And so in the spring, when that stuff starts melting, it doesn't run off frozen ground. It has a way to get right back into the soil profile. Go ahead, Pete. And I believe that's Sandy Smart. We're doing some burning there. I believe that's some CRP we're burning there. But Pyro Pete here has been involved in some of our planning and stuff. And Shannon's been out helping. We appreciate the help. Eric Mosul was one of Lee's teachers at college. And he was preaching at him burning. And we were needing some burning done. And so for four or five years there, we benefited from the school bringing students out that wanted to be able to put, that they had actively participated in some burns. And so we helped them out and they helped us out. Apparently that's changed now, huh? It really benefits all the native grasses evolved in the presence of fire. Those native grasses don't really start waking up until getting close to the 1st of June. And so a lot of the weeds we're battling is brome grass and some other cool season grasses that tend to take over and dominate in a population. They'll use up all the moisture. Since most of our moisture comes in the spring, they'll use up all of the moisture before the native grass wakes up. So if you have a fuel load, and this CRP is a good example of that, if you have a fuel load there, and the brome grass that's in there comes up, and you can toast that off good by burning that fuel load off that old year's grass, you really suppress that brome grass. And within about four days, that field will be green again. And so we're usually looking at burning way late in April or way early in May. We try and burn some every year. The burning is something that just doesn't work every year. You plant it, you get the people lined up, everything's ready to go, and then it'll rain, or the wind will come up. And so we try and burn every year. That usually means we get to burn about every other year. Pete, that's kind of typical of the way our pastures, we're kind of on the edge of the cateau, we're on the east edge of the cateau, or the west edge of the cateau, the east edge of the James River Valley. So we have some pretty good draws and some pretty good drainage. Pete, we have some coyotes. And so this is our coyote control program, these little donkeys, they won't kill them, but boy, they sure anything different. And they're right there right now, and coyotes don't like that. And so it's a little bit frustrating, we don't get to see that because they're used to seeing us, and so we're not a threat. And so we don't get to see them in killer mode, but the neighbor was paying with a haybind on the other side of the county road. And one of them donkeys that happened to be a jack recognized it as something different. And I wish I had it on tape. He said that little donkey just hit high gear and come running straight at him for everything he was worth. And there was no doubt in my neighbor's mind that donkey was not gonna be able to stop in time for the fence. He knew that donkey was coming through the fence. And he said he locked it up and skidded to a stop, snorted and stomped his feet, and then herded like a stock dog, herded the cattle to the far corner, the farthest corner of the pasture away from that threat. And so I don't know, they're cheap, they're kind of fun. You can buy them donkeys all day for a hundred bucks a piece. Okay. We kind of have spent a little bit of money on trying to control buck brush. We don't really see a value to it. It does hold snow. It's good for wildlife, but it takes over. And so we've been trying to kill it and there's some new products out there that actually work. There's a couple of pretty good products for that. And so we've been kind of patting ourselves on the back that we were getting that kind of rubbed out or reduced or any way it was no longer taking over our pastures. And I was just out there at Cottonwood at Pat Guptel was last year's winner of the Leopold Award and he's dealing with Western wheatgrass and we don't have that much in our neighborhood but it really is quite similar to quackgrass. It's very well-rooted. You just can't kill it. It's tough competitor. And he's been trying to find something that he could sow in there to increase the nutrients, the feed value and the protein in that Western wheat. Especially as it gets later in the season, this stuff's tough and it's just not very palatable and it's just not very nutritious but that's what he's got. And so he's tried all kinds of clovers and just not had anything that would get a toehold in that Western wheat. And so I ask him, well, what are you gonna do, Pat? He says, well, he says, I found the answer. It's bug brush. He's gonna plant bug brush out there. He said they'll, he actually tested it. It has runs about 16% protein. He says where he's got it in his pastures now, they eat it. He's on a, I'd call it a mob grazing deal. They'll maybe have a hundred and, all right, well, maybe 75 cows on two or three acres per day and then move them and that little paddock doesn't get used for a full year. And so in his, there's a perfect example of definition of a weed as a plant out of place. He'd be pleased to see that. Pete? Yeah, Jim, I think we're talking to you just to be clear, crested, this is. Okay, okay, crested. Yeah, that's the non-native. Okay. Point well taken. Okay, okay, thank you. Thank you. You can kind of see those bug brush patches in there. Pete? Pete? Like to see the lead plant and of course that's one of the problems with using those herbicides is you take that, take the broadleaf population down when you do that and then so it's a trade off. Pete? Again, yeah. You want to see soil that'll stay in clumps like that. It means the roots are deep in there. This was during our society arrangement tour and we did some tests of how quickly the water would go down. You'd drive like a piece of stove pipe into the ground and pour water in and see how quickly it'll go down and where this guy who's now Jason Weller, I think is his name is now one of the big muckety mucks in NRCS in Washington, I believe. Is that right? Jim? Jim? Jim. Did he get any title? Is he asking? Jason Miller? Is that what you're, Weller? Jason Weller. Weller. Weller, yeah. Anyway, where they decided to do this test was out in the pasture, but they didn't do it in a nice area. They went to the gate that goes into the hub where that tank is and they did it right in the rabbit path, right where we'd been driving and that soil right there still percolated that water right down. It wasn't about compaction. It was about the trails left by the roots, okay? We're not anti-farming. I kinda kicked that nasty habit a few years ago when it was just totally unprofitable for us. We were clearing maybe 12 or $15 an acre and then we were going out and renting grass for $25 an acre. And so it just didn't make sense to go fix somebody else's fence and pay them to do it. And so we sowed nearly all of our ground back into alfalfa and use it for hay and a couple hundred acres of it did go into native grass. But we still have one quarter that we do produce wheat on. Our rotation is spring wheat, no-tilt to winter wheat, no-tilt into soybeans. Okay Pete, I don't know what Angela's seeing down there. It must be a weed, Pete. And so the thatch that builds up that crop land has been no-tilted down now for about 15 years. And that thatch is very important. It insulates that ground for the soil bugs to be healthy. They need to be damp and they need to be cool. And so without that insulation, that just doesn't happen. And so any kind of tillage really eliminates that insulation on top of the ground or reduces it. And it also, all the, where the roots have lived and then died, leaves a hole in the ground. And any time you, no matter what they tell you, vertical tillage or any kind of tillage, you're gonna bust those holes so that they can't let the water down. Okay, Pete. So our experience with cover crops has been pretty well limited. It's been, we do it, but we do it for forage is why we've been doing it. And so Aliyah's standing in a field there of, I believe that was winter wheat stubble. And we just turned right around and planted it. We use the cyclo planter, it's not a no-till planter, it's just your garden variety cyclo planter and socked it right back into corn. We put it in there at about 16,000 population. We just went around the elevators and bought it, whatever they had left, as cheap as I could get it. Some of it was food plot corn that didn't get planted. And the reason we wanted Roundup Ready Corn was we were fighting a cheatgrass problem and I knew I needed to spray it a few times and in the fall to keep spanking that cheatgrass back. And so that corn actually did, well you can see it's tasseling, it did make ears and we fully intended to use it for grazing as it turned out the snow came early and we didn't get to use it. They caught a lot of snow though. Roundup Ready, Roundup Ready, late corn, any day, right, whatever they had. Yeah, we were just looking for something. My CSP contract includes that I will use cover crops, but it kind of messes up your opportunity to chemical control cheatgrass. And so that was the. And the cheatgrass problem was on the way. Yes, yep. And anyway, we were pretty surprised when we got the Leopold Award. I was out choreing in my Belarus tractor and got a phone call from Kyle Shell and he said, Jim, what do you know about that Leopold Award? And I said, yeah, I remember we did that for Douds last year and he says, yeah, that turned out real good. And I said, well, who are we gonna nominate this year? And he says, well, we're gonna nominate you. And so I was really surprised. I guess I would consider myself not any kind of an expert on that stuff, but a student. A student, we're all on our learning curve. We're learning to adopt the technology that's now available, the technology, not only in equipment, but in the genetics, the seeds that are available and what they can do and learn and how to use them. And so here's our, we're receiving that award. That's Brent Hoglin there in the red shirt and Todd Mortensen there in the orange shirt. And Jim Faustick there way on the left, who was instrumental in getting the Leopold Award initiated in South Dakota, South Dakota Grassland Coalition. Pete, my son-in-law, Kerry Brown, helping Karen hold that sign. Pete, Lee's giving him the talk. Pete. For bouquets on the table, we had just, we picked some native grass seed heads at the time. Okay, Pete. I think we have other people in the room that can talk about this rainfall simulator. If you've never seen it, give it a close look. How many people in here have seen the rainfall simulator? Next shot. This is, it's just totally incredible for the few people that haven't seen it. It looks like probably 90% of the people in here have seen it, but it's totally incredible how different management systems allow for the infiltration of water. On the left is properly managed grass and it's been tick out like sod and put into a cake pan. Then there's, the next one over is overgrazed pasture. The next one over is no-till right underneath the rain gauge there, that's no-till cropland. The next one over is minimum-till and the furthest one on the right is conventional-till. And so there's a rain, a sprinkler head up above on that pipe and it's going back and forth and it's putting down a couple inches or whatever water. Anyway, you can read it on the rain gauge and every one of those little pans gets the exact same amount of water. It's coming right down out. I mean, it's not a gentle thing. And so there's two jugs underneath there. The back jug, it's like a pickle jar, you know, one of those big old pickle jars. The back one is what went through and the front one is what ran off. And so you can see on the left the properly managed grass, basically nothing ran off. It's all in that back jug and it's clean water. And the exact opposite, well, then right next to it, the mismanaged grass didn't fare as well, it didn't do as well as the no-till or the minimum-till. It was more like the fully-tilled crap land. And as you look at the one clear on the right with the conventional tillage, you know, we were all taught to believe and the soil books encouraged, it took tillage to get the water to soak in. Well, that's just not true. All the water ran off, it carried mud with it and none went through to soak into the soil profile. We took that, then and flipped that over on a tarp and looked at it and it didn't even get the bottom of that sample damp. It just, it was powder dry. The slag test, healthy roots and enzymes hold the soil together. So if you take a no-till or pasture type chunk of dirt and put it on the left and you put a conventional tilled chunk of dirt on the right, as soon as it hits water, it just starts crumbling away because there isn't the binding capacity of the roots and the enzymes holding it together. Pete, this is a tour for our Leopold Award. And you remember the excavator on the dam working on the riprap on the rocks. That's what we're all looking at there. And again, that was, there was an irony there. We had just gone through a droughty summer and now everybody was coming to look at our management. So it was a little scary for us, Pete. This is a couple miles north of my house. It's a small pasture. Ours is the pasture on the left of that dividing fence there. And probably this piece of ground gets used the hardest of any of our pastures. It's close enough to home. It kind of gets thrown into the mix almost like a dry lot. A creek goes through under that fence. It goes in and it goes around through the dugout and comes out on the other side. And it's a rented pasture. It's an old fence. And so we can't really use it during the breeding season because we got bulls on both sides. And so pretty much it goes through the season ungrazed. We use it very heavily in the spring and very heavily in the fall. And so if you would see it when we pull out of there, you would think that that's clearly abused. But when you compare it to continuous grazing on the other side of the fence, you can see that it might not be the level of use, but the length of use. Grass is very resilient. The moment of impact is fairly short. It goes down, not quite as short as that is between those musk thistles, but nearly that short. And then we get off it and we hit her again and we get off it. And it comes right back and that right there is some beautiful big bluestem, wild big bluestem in there. I didn't bring this. This is a nice sign that there are a picture that the Leopold Award gave us. Shows a little bit some of our land around the house there. It's not quite that large, but anyway, it would have been a problem to haul it here today. So the picture was a lot easier. Feet, that grass is, it's very satisfying. You know, when the neighbors are out planting their spring crops and they're fighting the moisture and they're hustling and they're pouring a lot of inputs into their crops. And every time it rains, it hits us just right. We don't have to get out there and fight the elements. We can either graze it or sell hay or sell seed, but we're not out there re-establishing a root system every year. And if fertilizer is cheap, we'll put some fertilizer on it. If fertilizer is high, we'll just skip it and still get pretty darn good production. Feet, I look at this picture and I think you know, the next generation maybe, in a lot of these conservation applications, it's not really about what you've done, it's maybe about the teaching part of it. Teaching the next generation or anybody that's interested or has the capacity to adapt and to learn that you don't have to beat mother nature into submission, you can work with her. And a lot of times you've reduced your risk, you've reduced your stress. And at the end of the day, you have as much money as you would have had if you'd have cropped it. Now, the last two or three years, crop prices have been good. But prior to that, I could always buy corn cheaper than I could raise it. And so, must be my turn to run the baler, it looks like. Feet, feet. That's some of that native grass we planted a few years ago. Go ahead, feet, feet. And I took part in a South Codagra leadership class here a couple years ago and we do an international travel experience thing. And so, over in China, where our group went for a couple of weeks, it was amazing to see what a countryside looks like with no importance given to conservation. I did not see a squirrel in two weeks. I didn't see a sparrow. I did see some sparrows, they had them on sticks, they'd been roasted to eat. There was no wildlife at all and no place for them. Go ahead. Another deal that South Codagra leadership does is go to Washington D.C. for a week. And this is a school there in Washington D.C., a shepherd elementary is the name of it. And it's a very progressive school. Those little kids there can talk at least two languages and write in two or three also. And so it's a highly sought after school to send your kids to. But they'd never seen a farmer or a farm. And so we divided up our group of 33 people, students and we each took a couple of us went into each classroom and we had videos. I think some of these pictures I also showed there in China to those kids, they have misconceptions about what goes on on the farm and it's mostly a lack of education. They've been sadly neglected. Their education, they've had no exposure or no experience with commercial agricultural production. And so it gets to be kind of a boogeyman. They never see him, they never know. And so they asked some good questions and some of the most intense questions came from the teachers. The teachers were no better off than the kids. They had no idea. And so it's important to share our story with others and then not to just go straight for the throat on them. Probably they really don't know real world agriculture. Pete, back to the barn. Go ahead, Pete. I like this picture. I didn't take it, Colette Kessler took it. But as I look at it and imagine myself taking the picture, I see my kids and they're straining to see something. I don't know what it is they're looking at, but they're looking over my shoulder into my past. They're looking to see what I left them. And I'm hoping I didn't leave them a mess. Pete, is that one of those skipper jacks or whatever you call them? We'll call them. Okay. Okay. There's one of those environmental deals where a couple of butterflies that passed through this area now are being looked at for maybe being called endangered species. And I don't know if that's one of them or not, but it's a pretty butterfly. Pete, and if I had to entertain any questions or discussion, anything at all? Yes, sir. Back to those dockies, do they ever help you in the safety of trying to take your calf on one? I've never had them stepped in, but the dog's always behind me too. So I don't know, no, I don't, you mean by the cow beating up the calf or the cow trying to whoop on me? Yeah. No, I've never seen them do that. And I don't know that they wouldn't, but normally we put some ruminsin into our cow feed. We help, we think it reduces coccytosis and so generally when we're calving, we don't have the donkeys with them. When we put them out to pasture, we try and have one donkey in each place where there's calves. If you put two, they become a herd of one and go to the far corner. And so we just have one with each group. Yes, sir? Do you, he's talking to me that water is important in your pasture. Do you pump water out of the dam into a water tank or anything like that? No, I haven't. I did, I've seen those deals where the cow pushes them with their nose and those look like they'd be a good deal. I don't have anything like that. I think it would be a good idea. Do you? Yeah, we use the soil panel which has been working with. It was, yeah, the CFCS got it going on. I just wondered if you would do that. We've not. Was it expensive? They helped pay for it and I only had to pay about a fourth or a third of it. I think it would be a good deal. It would be about a few years, both in a well and also a dugout. And our dugouts would get in there and get a lot of foot rot and stuff and get less of it. I think they'd be an excellent deal. Yes? Can we go back to your cover crop? That corn that you said it snowed in? Yes. How early would you have turned cows into that? It looked pretty green when Lee was standing there. I mean, that too. Have you ever tried doing much of that with forages for the fall or winter? We normally will use sedan grass. It's cheap and I can plant it in the cycle. And so sometimes we'll put in quite a little of it. And if it rains, we've got quite a little bit of grazing material, primarily for forage. It's for forage and then it gets the manure out there where I don't have to haul it out there. Although you don't get the benefit of having several, you know, the cocktail of having a half a dozen or maybe a dozen different things out there. But in the answer to your question, with sedan grass, we're always afraid of acetic acid and nitrate poisoning. So our general idea wouldn't be to use it until well after a frost. And so that would probably, just the way our rotation ends up, that would probably have been in the way, unless it had been in a particularly dry summer, that's probably the way we'd have used that standing corn. It would have been brown by the time we'd have gotten out there. Are you going to experiment more with some of these other mixes, do you think? Yes. Yes, we are. I'd like to, since we only have the one quarter of crop land left, I'd like to cultivate a situation with my farming neighbors that would allow me to fly on a cocktail type cover crop into their standing corn. And then those agronomic benefits would be their compensation for letting me come in and graze those crops down. And I'm working on that. We're almost there. And can you give us some species that you would recommend the answer? I think for feed value, I think turnips are tough to beat. They're cheap, and they grow on top of the ground to where an animal can grab onto them and get a hold of it good. And I like sedan grass. I've not tried a lot of the other ones. I'm looking to learn on them. In this picture, and I was thinking the same thing when you were going through the slides, there's a lot of open space in that field. Or maybe not, but that's at least released in there. Can you keep, as far as toxicity and stuff on the sorghum, if you would go in with a mix earlier on, there's a lot of theory on cattle will also balance their diet and stuff. So if you do all those things kind of go away, if you can go in with, whether this was sorghum or just forage corn or whatever, but as you go in with more and more species, do you worry about it? I think you'd worry a lot less. I think you'd worry a lot less. That ground is, we're dealing with maybe five inches of topsoil and pure D sandbox type sand for a subsoil. And so we didn't want to plant it very thick. It's planted then kind of on purpose, and then it's cocktails wouldn't have worked there because we were trying to kill that cheat grass. But corn works really good for us. We're producing a lot of growth, and I think there's a place for it in those mixes and sunflowers too. What's your theory of between the light stand and the soil quality if you didn't want to... Well, I wanted it to grow. Yeah, I wanted it to have, if I planted it too thick, I thought I wouldn't, you know, I'd have a bunch of boot high corn instead of actually get tall enough to do some good. That also made excellent pheasant habitat. By the time pheasant season rolled around, that was the only standing corn, so. Yes? And I don't know if you can answer or if Pete can answer, but do you think we're getting the full effect of the cover crops? If we're going in and grazing them off with the cattle, you know, we plant our cover crops after the weed or after those, whatever. But then we're gonna winter our cows on that quarter, and they're going, they clean off every turn up radish, everything out there and take it back down. Are we getting the full effect versus leaving them till spring? Well, you know, at least half of your plant is underground and those roots, when frost kills the top, it's also killing the roots. And so that's what's making your macrocapillaries getting down into the ground. And so that part of the benefit is still there. That plant's not gonna make it through the winter unless there's some rye or winter weed or triticalia or something in there like that. But as far as the foliage on top, putting a cow in there, a cow just isn't all that efficient. It goes in one end, four days later, there it is again. She's took a little energy off it, but it's still out there. And you've speeded up the process a little bit. That's quite a little bit closer to plant food than happened to rot down over a year or two. So I think you're getting the majority of the benefit. I think that it helps having them out there, distributing that manure with the CSP and other programs as soon as you cross over the 500 head limit and become a CAFO. And you have to be measuring or sampling your manure, concentrated animal feeding unit. You have to be sampling your manure. You have to be predicting what your yields are gonna be and in what level the nutrients are gonna be removed and then have to go back afterwards and retest the soil and report your yields. Whereas if a cow just leaves a pile out there, you don't have that red tape. And so there's some benefits for not having to move that manure and there's some benefits with not having the red tape involved with handling that manure. So I think that using cattle, the problem maybe becomes more agronomic with people concerned about compaction. I don't really think that's as big a concern as I think it is. I think that you end up, if you just dump them in a quarter and let them graze on it, then you have paths. They pretty soon they got a path. But if you subdivide it into little chunks, they'll go out there, harvest that area, give them another little chunk, they harvest that area and you don't end up with the paths. I guess I think the paths are maybe more or less user-friendly, especially in a rented grazing situation than removing those nutrients. Because the benefit is still there. There's a lot of agronomic benefits that that cow can't take away. I think though that Chad's question isn't really good one, especially if you're using cover crops following, say, where you got maybe an earlier harvest season. I think what you're getting at Chad, if I'm not mistaken, is grazing, the grazing pressure, the re-grazing, can you keep that plant producing longer with appropriate grazing pressures? Late in the fall, am I trying to get down what you're saying? Late in the fall when it's gonna die anyway, you got that road action and all that, that's already there. But if you're talking about the mid-to-later grazing season, I think there probably is some benefit to managing the plant. I don't know on all these cover crops, I can't answer this, but maybe someone else in the room can. If you take a turnip that you've got an opportunity that's put some work down and you remove 50% of that forage layer, that leaf area, does that turnip shut down like it would on most of our grasses or, you know, our forage plants? Or if you rotate them through that a little quicker and keep that solar panel going longer, are you maximizing what that cover crop needs for you? Well, some of them, yeah, some of them I think are less susceptible or less benefiting by regrowth. I don't think turnips would regrow, but radishes, forage radishes I think would respond well to being clipped and re-clipped and re-clipped. I think they would do well in that. Well, that's what we're just kind of saying. Usually the turnips you pull down. Yeah, they're not, yeah, they can get a real good hold of them. But if they get a real left and they're still rooted in the ground, they'll re-grow. But it's simply, you know, we don't have to, it's on the, like Gabe Brown up there, he's planting like a 15, 20, or 20, 20 species cockade. He manages, they manage their grazing as you would, you know, with good range management. Not taking it down too far, letting that regrow. That's more of a forage, that's more of a forage cover crop scenario where that's the goal, is to raise the forage and forage crop. He's growing that on a piece of your own, rather than a cash crop. Yeah, that's probably without a cash crop. And that's the same thing that Jerry Dolan was talking about, the Black Lake Ranch, we had him down here a couple months ago, where we kind of get caught in the same forage or cover crops, but in reality the cover crop is the crop. Is the crop, that's. And so if you're managing more toward that cattle end, and I think Jeff's question is really valid, you know, I think the same trappings can happen where if you graze it down too hard, too fast, then he might be actually working backwards. Limiting your yield. Yep. Isn't there something you said about just trampling some of that residue into the ground, I guess, or putting that residue into the ground for old loopy and cycling as well? I guess we're all grazing the old end of the standard. Yeah, that trampling has a very beneficial effect and that thatch, that layer of cover, you know, it's just interesting, I mentioned a little bit about the technology that's available today, and my grandpa using the cutting edge technology now that was just like cave dwellers looks like now, but the technology and as we learn about how the cover crops and how the thatch insulation, the thing I'm thinking about is fall tillage. Tillage, you know, it's debatable now whether it does any good at all. Maybe it's totally counterproductive, I don't know. But the books that should know the soil books and stuff, they all recommended chiseling in the fall to promote water infiltration. And right now in my neighborhood, every place that was worked blew off clear. And I guess what I would think of when I think about that thatch that gets stomped down, not only was that not tilled, but that's holding that heat in, whereas that bare land over here, you know, it's probably got a six foot layer of frost down. And so when they say your fall tillage ground warms up quicker, I'm not sure if the stuff under the thatch is maybe only an inch or two. And the reason I know that is because when you get the loader bucket out in the lawn to move a little snow when you get just a little deep, you know, that's, there's no frost there, little, if any. Talking to Duane Beck and asking him that question about the trampling it down and fall tillage warming up sooner, he said that the French have been researching that for a long time. And they've got quite a little bit of research on that that shows that cover cropping over several years, it doesn't happen immediately, but puts down enough roots and opens up those macro capillaries that the heat of the earth comes up and takes the frost out. Again, if it's only a little bit of frost as compared to a six foot slab of frost, you know, we can benefit by having that insulation there. And the other thing that happens is you may, you may actually be able to go out and take the temperature that fall till ground and see that, yes indeed, it is warmer but overnight it hits down to 20 degrees and it cools right back off. So you're not having a good friendly environment for your microorganisms either. So there's, there's just, there's a lot of benefits to that thatch and that trampling down and the insulation that we don't even, we don't give a value to it all. Then in the end, that picture in France, that biological activity going on where it's snowing on the two fields, one was conventional and one was cover crap for several years, the little cover crap one was melted and the conventional one was white and snowy. Well, Dick was just saying there, you know, a good example, can I voice it, Dick? You wanna voice it, is a grain bin and if you've got a grain bin with bugs in it, where does, where do you get the spoilage? It's from the heat of the bugs. And so if you have a thriving population of microorganisms in your soil, there's gonna be a certain amount of heat released from that, from that also. But I was thumbing through YouTube there and found a website where they had, they took a drain tile that was five foot or six foot down and plugged it on both ends. And then they forced smoke into that tube and that smoke was coming up everywhere. So the micro or macro capillaries were there and the idea of them bringing heat up is believable to me. I think we're kinda missing a boat with the fall tillage thing. Really should be grazed. Any other questions? Well. Kind of a question that there may be more of a topic, you know, related to all this. Jeff, you can probably chime in if you can, I don't know, that works with the camera, but with all the things that we talked about today, organic matter and 1% organic matter increases in 16,000 gallons per acre total capacity on crop ground. And a lot of these lessons on crop ground have been learned that, you know, when you hear that some of these people talk, they say, and if you wanna understand this better, compare it to good native range land, you know, compare it to that, as far as the benchmark. So when we talk about compaction layers and runoff and conventional tillage, then we talk about freezing and frost issues. We know that drier soil freezes deeper than wet soil. And so you got, you know, with these way we think about how we manage these soils, if we're not getting that water infiltration going down through the root layer late in the fall, you know, I'm just wondering how that all balances out because we're probably getting frost depths, actually, that are artificial as well, because maybe not having as much of a soil layer as we should have, is there anything to do with that? Jeff, or Rick, or we're forgetting all, if most of our water's running off, let's take that. No comment, Jeff, or? That's something. Well, Jim, you got a video yet? I'm gonna show you. Yep, let's take a look at that. And if there's any other questions at all, we can discuss them. Before we get into Jim's video, I'm just curious that we're gonna break about 12.30. I know you guys, you've given us a few hours of your day-to-day. Does anybody have any desire to come back after lunch, say around 1.30 and continue discussion or watch the rainfall simulator videos or anything like that? I guess I'm gonna make it available if there's any desire. If not, we'll break after Jim's talk. Can you see some of those videos online? They are all online. Yeah, and if you've written down your email, I have, I think I sent it out once already, but I couldn't send it out to this group again. So, and that's fine with me. I've got other things to do, because we just wanna make sure that we can put it out there, so. All right, we'll watch the video. Fire it up, yep. Took these guys like six hours to film, six minutes. I'm fine. I'm fine. They came all the way from Denver, and we told them those GPS things just don't work. Those Tom-Toms, you know, they'll, they get them over on a rabbit pass somewhere in Spring County. Next thing you know, they're opening gates. I'm fine. Sure enough, they ended up about four miles away from home. They got there, and it was in June, so the pictures are green. Does your soul good to see some green? Welcome to Capriva, Angus. I'm Jim Capriva. Karen Capriva, Angela Capriva, and Lee Capriva. We're the recipients of the 2012 Liverpool Award. Very honored to receive that recognition, and we'd like to take a little tour of the place. Jim and I have been married for 30 years, and I'm the fifth generation. We're really lucky to be the fourth and fifth generation to be living here. Coming home to a family operation is really a challenge in today's agriculture world. I have an operation that is big enough to provide several families income, and so one of the most difficult things is, is finding more land to expand or to expand from within the operation. The land has to be taken care of to be given on to future generations. We're constantly looking for methods so we can utilize our resources wisely, more wisely, and optimize what that resource can give us. It's very humbling to know that our work is being looked at as one of the best and something to pattern other operations after. Creek Refuge pulled in Alan Savry to talk about rotational grazing. Well, Alan Savry didn't show up, but his team did, and taught a one day course on rotational grazing. And the theory of that was the United States is over grazed, but understocked. That we could graze more cattle and improve our grassland and instead of less cattle and abuse our grassland. They started them in the brome grass because it came on first. When the brome grass was all used up, they opened the gate, let them into the next jump. And when that was all used up, they opened the gate and let them into the next jump. Really, all we've done in that rotation is we close the gates behind them. We start them on the brome grass, we let them into the next chunk, we close the gate behind them. So the brome grass gets a chance to recover. When that next chunk is utilized fairly well, we let them into the next one, close the gate behind it. So we're always resting and keeping them off so the regrowth gets a chance to build the root reserves. We appreciate the wildlife and we try and protect it. The main problem around here is habitat. It's all farmed up, fences are removed, trees are bulldozed down and there literally is no place for wildlife. And with the grazing, as opposed to crop production, the grazing land is still suitable for habitat for wildlife. The grazing cattle will walk right around a pheasant nest with the rotational grazing. The cattle are in there for relatively short time and then they're moved on. So the conflict, the moment of conflict is fairly short. No tilling is a far superior method for dry land farming. The problem with conventional tillages is it exposes the soil to wind and water erosion. Also, the no tilling preserves moisture so that that crop, those seeds actually get to moisture and actually have some moisture to start with. You still need rain, but every time you stir the dirt up, more moisture is lost. And so it's counterproductive to stir it up and dry it out real good before you put the seed in. That's something you can't buy, it's that moisture. I'm here to tell you that it's doable. The information's out there. If you're interested and you'd like to learn, there's people that are very willing to teach you and oftentimes help cover the expense that you're gonna run into. You gotta do what you think is right and if people see that it's working, maybe they'll try it. The most impressive thing I think on Capriva's ranch is how they've designed some of their pasture systems and they've talked a lot about rotational grazing and I've had the opportunity to be out on their land looking at the different cross-penses and water developments and those types of things that they have implemented and they've really worked well for them. The strength of a country is based on its food source. I just got back from a South Dakota agro-ship foreign travel experience where we went to China and Vietnam and when you see how fragile their food source is, it makes you really appreciate our food source. They count heavily on imports to feed their people. The moment the imports would break down any political or worldwide shortage of food, their people would be out of food within days, maybe the same day. We look at it as a strength where the food basket of the world and the farmers are the true conservationists. We have the job of feeding not only our people but the whole world. Last call for questions. Yes, sir. From working with those people, but what are the biggest limitations as well and how has it prevented you from... Very little limiting issues there. When we got the seed from the South Dakota Game Fish and Parks for planting that 200 acres of native grass, that was about 40,000 bucks worth of seed. Seed was kind of high. And the only limitation there was if we intended to hay it, we had to wait until after the primary nesting season which doesn't conflict with hay and native grass since native grass isn't suitable to hay until after the primary nesting season has passed. And also with that one, if we were going to quit and decided we didn't want to do grass and we wanted to farm it up, say five years into a 10-year deal, it was a 10-year deal, we would have to give half of the seed money back. So I figured I wasn't out anything. So those restrictions were fairly small. And as far as with FSA and with NRCS, I'm just not very friendly to doing anything I wouldn't do anyway. And so if they're going to cost share with me or they're going to pay me something like with the CSP deal, it needs to be something pretty darn close to you anyway. I would say that I probably wouldn't write down when I moved my mineral feeder or something like that. I might look at the grass and decide when to move them. With the CSP program, for example, I need to write down the day I moved them. And so in order to comply with their regulations, I found them to be reasonable. And as I look back on that, probably educational too. So I would say the resistance or the level of extra red tape has been very small. As a young farmer, I think getting into a 10-year contract or something would just be so limiting to what our possibilities could be in the future. On the other side of that coin, as a 50-year-old farmer, I wasn't interested in getting into the CSP unless it was a 10-year deal. I wanted something that I could count on. I wanted to tie onto him and know that that was gonna, I could count on that, that that was gonna be an enterprise. And the CSP, my son is 27, had the CSP not been existent, he probably wouldn't be able to operate. It was that beneficial. And the CSP by the time he got into it was a little bit different. He couldn't get a 10-year deal. He could only get a five-year deal. So that CSP allows him to compete with more established operators. The problem with expansion, no matter what HR, you were maybe looking for a quarter and all you can find is a section. Or you're looking for a section and all you can find is a quarter. Well, if you've got a CSP program that can maybe be paying you a certain amount, whatever it is, I don't know, 15, 20 bucks an acre or something like that, you might take that section and grow into it over five years. Whereas you wouldn't be able to, or 10 years, you wouldn't be able to do it if you had to compete with 15 other guys that were willing to pay top dollar, fully planning on stocking it and probably in the back of their minds, fully comfortable with abusing it. Because they were paying more than it was worth, so they're gonna take more than the land had to give. So there's several angles there. Their cost sharing programs in Equip was the big one. I think they end up buying about 11 miles of smooth hot wire for us, you know. And smooth hot wire isn't all that expensive, but pretty soon you add that up and if they're willing to pay for 60% of it, you know, I'd say let them pay for it. You have to have landlords that are, maybe the landlords won't commit to renewing your lease, absolutely guaranteeing that they'll renew it. But you have to have landlords that we're about two thirds rented acres. And so we need to have a rapport with our land owners that they're comfortable doing business with us and they don't plan on booting us out. So there's, the long-term commitment kind of is more challenging on rented land than it is on land you own, but with land selling for what it's selling for now, that it's very difficult for young operators to be operating on land they own anyway. So it's kind of a three-way deal. You got your operator, your landlord and whatever programs can help you pay for it and help you get established.