 Dwayne gave me a good introduction, unlike the other guys, maybe I require a little introduction because they haven't been around as long. Like I said, I grew up on the ranch, went off to get educated in some different places, worked in some different places, and eventually came back. So now I'm living 50 miles from where I grew up and I'm happy to be back around here. So I'm going to be talking about integrating livestock and crops. The first question we should probably address is why would you do that? You know, I grew up with our family, calving in March, and I know that can be a pain. So you know, things like that, cattle can be a pain, livestock can be a pain. If you want to get into the livestock business, you should have a good reason for doing it. Some people love it, some people, not so much, right? So what are some of the reasons we would even consider this to begin with? If you're farming, I split up some different crops here on the left hand side that what I called the standard crops that you might grow in a crop rotation. But if you have livestock and then you open up the door to a lot of other possibilities for biological and economic diversity, you can add into your rotation all these forage and perennial crops, right? Now you could plant these without livestock, but if you've got the livestock, you can harvest them and make some money off of it, and you can also keep those nutrients on your fields and improve your soil health. And a couple of these on here are like alfalfa and switchgrass, and those are examples of some perennials we can use too. So you get some diversity that you can add to rotations, and you also get the opportunity to take advantage of some perennial species. One of the reasons we like to use perennial species is illustrated here. This is a, I believe it's a big blue stem, and you look at, you know, it's like six inches taller, so when you look at the root system, it's got under it. And this is, you know, early in the year that the above ground, it's going to grow taller, but, you know, this is a perennial plant. Those roots are down there all the time compared to your annual plants, which are starting from a seed, and even if they do eventually develop deep roots, they don't look like this at the beginning of the season, right? And on the other side, we've got, this is, again, is a big blue stem, and there's a lead plant next to it on a poster, and I put that one in there to provide a little bit of scale in terms of depth. But, you know, these native perennial tall grass species, like big blue stem, switchgrass, even, you know, little blue stem, which is a little shorter, you know, they can put their roots down six feet and more in the ground. And so when they get those roots down that deep, they're accessing moisture and they're accessing nutrients, of course, that your annual crops are probably not going to be able to access or only for a very short period of time during the growing season. And they're taking those nutrients, they're bringing them back up to the surface and cycling them, and making them available again for other crops in the future. And in full disclosure, I also have to tell you that these were grown in pots, and so because they wanted to get the roots out really nicely and look at, so actual results may vary in your field, you know, from soil type to soil type. So this is kind of an ideal situation for those root systems. Here's another example. This is lead plant, again, which you may find in some of your pastures. It's a legume, it's a short shrub, it's pretty short. But you can see, you know, the example of what that root system can really look like. And this lead plant is a legume, so it's going to be fixing nitrogen, you know, in association with the bacteria in the soil. I felt like I had to throw a Wendell Berry quote in here. He's one of my favorite authors and he's a farmer, and I thought it fit this presentation pretty well. He says, like a thrifty housewife, mother nature wastes nothing, not a bite of food or a drop of water. She keeps serving a menu of delectable and nourishing leftovers. So, Duane mentioned my wife being a doctor and me taking care of the kids, and so a lot of the cooking falls on me. So, I love having leftovers around because it's a night off from cooking, right? And the way mother nature sees things is there isn't waste in nature, right? Mother nature is always taking the leftovers and cycling them back through. Cycling them back through. And that's how we should be thinking about our farms. We should be thinking about our farms as biological systems or ecosystems where we have a variety of plants, animals, soil, microbes, these are all working together. We've got flows of energy, water, and minerals on the farm and in this ecosystem. So, in this area, what did the ecosystem look like before? That's a good question to ask if you want to learn about how mother nature did things. How mother nature did things here? It was working for her and as much as we can mimic that, we'll probably be taking strides ahead in our farming systems, okay? So, mother nature's ecosystem here looks something like this with a large variety of plant species growing all mixed together. She had herbivores like the bison, the elk, rabbits, what not. All other species of animals and kingdoms, or I shouldn't say kingdoms. But I'd say birds, for instance, and so many different kinds of animals. And this is just above ground. Below ground, of course, we've got a lot going on there as well. And previously, Doug mentioned the carbon cycle. And I actually wanted to talk about the carbon cycle a little bit. This is kind of a simplified version, but we started out with carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Plants are taking that carbon dioxide up. They're incorporating it into their bodies. If you take the grass and you dried it down, took all the water out of it, what you'd have left is about 40% carbon, okay? So there's a lot of carbon in that plant, both in the above ground part and in the roots below ground. Also, their plants are sending out exudates into the soil. So they're sending carbon out into the soil through their roots as well. When those plants die, of course, their organic matter returns to the soil and they're consumed by herbivores. And so in the case of the bison or cattle, sheep, goats, these are all ruminant animals. And so in the rumen, they have a large number of microorganisms. Just like in the soil, those microorganisms are breaking down the plant matter. And when they do that, they release gases. They release carbon back to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide and as methane, okay? So that's where a lot of that carbon is going. Some of it though, of course, it gets excreted as poop back to the soil and it's feeding our soils again. Now, to quantify that simplified cycle, I wanted to put some numbers to it. And so I made the assumption we had 10 acres per cow for six months. So you could imagine your summer grazing 10 acres per cow, okay? How much carbon is she going to eat over that time? Well, it's up around here, around 270 pounds per acre or so of carbon that she's going to consume. And what's the ultimate destination of that carbon? Some of it goes off in methane. As I said before, that's the CH4 from the previous slide. A lot of it goes off as carbon dioxide. About 40% of the carbon ends up in feces. So that's the portion that you're getting returned back to your field. And then a little bit's retained. And you can see it's a pretty small number, probably around 10 pounds of carbon or so retained. What I mean by that, if we're talking about a mature cow, her body weight's not really changing very much over the long term, but her calf is growing. And so that calf, some of that carbon that the calf is going into the calf and the calf is using it to build up its body. Okay, so now talking about nitrogen, here's a simple version of the nitrogen cycle. It has a lot of similarities to the carbon, but there's also quite a bit of difference. So a couple of important difference, I should say. We've got nitrogen in the atmosphere as a gas. Here we've got lead plant again, which I introduced earlier. Lead plant and other legumes can bring nitrogen into the soil. We've got other ways of nitrogen coming into the soil as well, like Doug mentioned, the storms and through rainfall. But when this plant is eaten by the herbivore, in this case, they're not releasing very much gas and nitrogen gas back into the atmosphere. Instead, that nitrogen is just about all coming back into the soil. And this time we've got urine included in the cycle, too, because that's where a lot of the nitrogen goes. So just about all the nitrogen they consume is going to go back into the soil. So back to the same example of one cow on 10 acres for six months. How much nitrogen does she actually eat? About 10 pounds per acre. And where does it end up? Well, like I said, most of it, as urine and feces, is going back to the soil. And once it does go back to the soil, some of that is going to be released back to the atmosphere as a gas. But it's not directly going from the animal to the air as a gas. It's going to get into the soil first, or at least on the soil surface. And then finally at the bottom, I've got retained. So once again, that's nitrogen as a component of muscle. And so if we're talking about a cow, the nitrogen that's retained really is in that calf, the calf's body as it grows. So when you take the calf off pasture, you are removing some nitrogen from your pasture, but it's a relatively small amount. You look over here, and it's only about maybe two pounds per acre of nitrogen that would be coming off in that calf. Okay, so that's a pasture situation. Now suppose you take that calf, and when you wean him, you take that calf, 500-pound calf, you put him in a feedlot. What happens? How do things change? I put some numbers to that, and anytime you put numbers to a situation like that, you have to make a bunch of assumptions, right? So some of the assumptions I made were 500-pound calf, put him in the feedlot for six months, and say he was gaining 2.1 pounds a day over that time period, okay? How much do you have to take off of your field? So if you've got your field over here, you've got your feedlot over here, you're taking a lot of crop off of that field, bringing it over to the calf to feed him, right? How much nutrients, how much organic matter you take off of your field, and bringing to the calf and putting it in the feedlot? Well, it's going to be about 56 pounds of nitrogen for six months of feeding, six pounds of phosphorus, and 3,200 pounds of organic matter. Now, if you own the feedlot, maybe you take some of that back and apply it to the land. If you don't own the feedlot, that's gone, right? You lost all these nutrients, all this organic matter, and 3,200 pounds of organic matter, that would be, if you calculated out roughly probably a little less than 30 bushels per acre wheat crop. So if you thought about your yield being about 3,200 pounds per acre, then you can look at these numbers I've got here and think of them as per acre numbers. So 56 pounds per acre of nitrogen, 6 pounds per acre of phosphorus that you're taking off your land. Now, if your yields are higher than that, then you're taking off more nitrogen phosphorus. Your yields are lower, you're going to be taking off less. In contrast, this other column here with grazing, in contrast, say we had that calf, we didn't put him in the feedlot, we put him on the field, and now we're grazing in cover crop or corn residue or something, but however we've managed to do it, we kept that calf on the field, and he grazed the same diet, exact same diet. What do you lose? Well, you're still going to lose 9 pounds of nitrogen because that calf's growing, building up his body, and you're going to lose 2 pounds of phosphorus, and you're going to lose some of the organic matter because, of course, he's eating it, and I was telling, I told you that a lot of that carbon is being, you know, that's broken down in the room and goes back into the atmosphere as gas, right? So you're not saving everything, but you are retaining a lot more on your pasture or on your cropland. And I also should mention that when I calculated these numbers here, I assumed that there was no waste. So you had that cast diet balanced perfectly to gain 2.1 pounds per day. Your hay, you didn't have any rotting hay, you know, or you didn't lose anything along the way. So essentially what I'm saying is these are kind of, these are conservative estimates. These are conservative estimates. So what's the value of those? I just took the numbers from the last slide and I just subtracted 56 pounds of nitrogen from the feedlot, 9 pounds when you're grazing. What's the difference? 47 pounds per acre difference of nitrogen. What's the value of that? And you know, I picked up some prices for the nitrogen and the phosphorus. And between the two of them here, then the value per acre, just of nitrogen and phosphorus, you take off $17.50. I put question marks at the bottom for the organic matter because I'm not sure what price to put in there. Maybe it's worth a lot more than the nitrogen and phosphorus. You know, adding that organic matter to your soil is extremely valuable. I wasn't going to go out on a limb here and tell you how much it was worth, but I didn't want to leave it off the slide because I didn't want anyone to forget about it, myself included. So I'm making my case here for keeping them on the soil. The question now is how do we do it? One of the ways we're looking at doing it is putting a perennial in the rotation. And Dwayne's always telling me about this traditional system that they have in Argentina where they used to do seven years of cropping in rotation, and they would rotate that with seven years of a perennial crop. And in that perennial pasture, they'd have a mix of a grass and legume mixture. And so with that legume in there, of course, they're feeding nitrogen back into the soil during the pasture phase, and they're grazing it, they're not haying it. So they're returning all of those nutrients. So they've got 50% of the time their crop land is actually in pasture, 50% of the time. At Dakota Lakes, we've started a new rotation where we've got 15 years in the crop land rotating with five years in perennial pasture. This is new and we're into our third year now of the perennial sequence. So 17 years from now, we'll have reached the end of one of these rotations. So I don't have data from this yet to share with you. And I can't tell you that what we're doing here is 25% of our time we're in perennial pasture. Whereas in that Argentina system, it was 50% time. Is 25% enough? I don't know. We don't know that yet. It's an experiment. This is what we're trying and so in the crop part of it, we've got winter wheat, a corn or sorghum, and a cool season broadleaf. So during the 15 years when it's in cropping, this is what that rotation is. So two out of these three are high residue crops that we're putting in the soil and then we add on the extra years of perennial. So we're hoping that with all value of the perennial plus two out of the high residue crop, then we'll see improvements in the soil quality there. Okay, so the perennial and the rotation, that's one thing that we're doing at Dakota Lakes. Another thing we're doing is winter grazing. This is a little bit of our cow winter grazing facts here to start off with. This is from last year. We started grazing October 31st. We went to April 30th and during that time we used 0.7 acres of corn and residue per cow per month and 0.29 acres of swaths per cow per month. The swaths are cover crop swaths, so we had a lot of oats and barley in there but some other species as well like peas and flax and some brassicas like canola or rape or something like that. And then in addition, we fed them some concentrate and so most of that was peas, flax meal and soy meal and that's, we're fall calving and so during the winter our cows are lactating so we've got higher nutritional needs than say a spring calving person would have and so we did have these supplements that we gave them and they're high in both energy and protein. Another thing to mention is that they had the corn and the swaths and at the research farm we've got fields of corn and swaths that are close enough together that we can give the cows access to both of them at the same time and so they can kind of balance their diet between the two. We also fed a little bit of concentrate to the calves in a creep system and we used a little bit of hay and I put it down here as a hundred pounds of hay per cow per month. That's an average, right? We weren't giving the cows a little bit of hay every day. What we did is we had some bales that we could use for emergency situations or for instance in the spring when the soil began to, the snow was beginning to melt, the surface of the soil was beginning to melt but it was still frozen below deeper, there was nowhere for that that snow melt to go and so the surface soil stayed very wet. We pulled the cows off at that time and put them on some perennial grass and we fed some bales over there for a little while until that we had enough of a thaw that the moisture in the field could drain down and then we brought the cows back on to the field at that time and continued to graze until we had finished up our swaths. This is a picture of this year's swaths and this is like I mentioned before it's primarily oats, barley and then with peas those would be the three primary species that we had out there. There's some other stuff but those are the three primary ones and you can notice some stripes like there's kind of a darker green stripe and a lighter green stripe and a darker green stripe. We did a little experiment with applying fertilizer or not applying fertilizer to these swaths and what we observed just looking at it is that in the area where we applied the nitrogen we had more, it appears that there's more grass, I mean it appears darker green, it looks a little taller and more grass versus where we didn't apply the nitrogen a little bit more of the pea which makes sense of course because pea is going to be able to get some of its own nitrogen and so it did a little better where there wasn't the nitrogen but we didn't see much of a difference in yield. We did this on a couple different fields on one of them it looked like the yield on the nitrogen fertilized was a little higher the other one it looked like the nitrogen fertilized yield was a little bit lower. One thing though that did come out of it also was that the grasses the oats and the barley were a little bit higher in nitrogen content or crude protein content so a little bit better feed quality where we had applied the nitrogen. This was planted with one of the fields was planted July 17th another one July 30th. Yes these are both these are under irrigation so here's what our swaths look like after being cut and again you see those stripes and so you can see where we fertilized we had more regrowth too. Another thing to note here you can see the electric fence running across here it's maybe a little faint there's one of our posts right there and so you can see that what we're doing is running the the fence perpendicular to the swaths and and what we would do is every day we move that fence a little bit further ahead and so what we think that does for us cuts down you know the cattle can't because they don't have access to the whole field at once they're not walking all over the swaths not laying down and bedding in them they're not pooping and peeing on them we're keeping you know we have a lot less wastage this way we get a lot more of that swath going into the cows mouth and you know it's not wasted from the soils perspective I guess if she lays down on it but we'd rather have them eat as much of it as we could before we put it back on the soil. This is just a bit more of a close-up of that cutting date. Dwayne, do you know what our cutting date was? Very early October on most of it. What we... I know last year was October 31st I guess I'm not certain what date exactly this year but it so no so you said early it was in November you said Dwayne. Early November this year October 31st last year. We didn't like it as much and we tried to stage it this year we probably got a bit late the day after that happened in October so we were waiting for that to kind of go away before the frost. Oh the question was they hadn't had a frost and we want to take it before the frost and the oats and marling stuff were pretty resilient the frost and corn shorted and stuff to get waxed earlier so you have to watch when it's working. That's alright. So I mentioned that we're fall calving and so with that of course comes the need for some shelter. If you've been to Dakota Lakes for a tour before you may have ridden up here on the bleachers but if you look back here we now have this little wing thing that we can fold down and we've got a portable calf shelter that we can drive around and the calves can just come under here. This is a picture of one of those fields after we've swath grazed it and what I wanted to draw attention to was for the most part the amount of residue that we've got there. I've got several pictures coming in a little closer here you practically can't see any soil. If you look closely right here there's a little bit of soil and a little bit of a hoof print in it but you look around here and the surface is covered with plant litter you take a closer look and so where we're doing this cover crop grazing these are fields that have been in no till for decades and we've got a lot of residue on the surface so we've got good soil structure to begin with we've got armor on top of that and as I mentioned when we got into an iffy situation last spring where we kind of had those wet soils we pulled the cows off so we're starting with resilient soils to begin with and then we're being kind of careful about when we have them on there to avoid doing damage to the soils. Here's some of the cows on the corn stalks and in this picture we've got our irrigator here and in some of the fields where we it's essentially where it's convenient to use these irrigators we actually hang the fence the electric fence off of the irrigator which with some ropes down here and then we put a fence post and then you can run an electric wire along the irrigator and then that makes it real easy to ration that out day by day every day you can go out there and just move your fence ahead a little bit and give them a little bit more of the corn swath or corn residue or cover crop swath either one in some of the fields we don't have that and so we're out there doing it manually you know putting posts in the ground. How do they handle snow? I know this isn't a real big pile of snow here but I took this picture in the morning before they'd gotten their new allocation of swath so they had cleaned it up really well at that point you can tell there used to be a swath right here you know they just got through the snow and they ate it up now you know if the snow crusts over you may have a little bit of trouble you know the cows may have trouble getting down to it but you can drive across it with a side-by-side a four-wheeler or something to kind of break through that and once you break through it then they have an easier time getting their nose in there and getting under the snow and they'll just once they know where that swath is then they can just kind of follow it along and they don't have to hunt all over the place to try to find it. Here's a picture from last year you can tell you know where the fence is running right here and the cows have been in here already they haven't cleaned it up yet but they obviously you know expose where that swath is so a concern a concern might be what's this going to do to your soil and so we've had cows over winter on the Dakota Lakes Research Farm four years now or this is our fourth winter with cows there this is just we just have one year that we've collected data on the soils to see whether or not there was any impact okay and I have a couple slides here of the bulk density of the soil that we collected it was Dr. Jose Guzman who's a soil scientist based at Dakota Lakes he and his team collected this data he shared this with me and what we found well and I guess so I've got grazed and ungrazed treatments here what we did in the fields where we grazed we went out and we built some cages or we put some electric wire up a little part of the field that we didn't let the cows in so we could come in there and take samples you know right in the same field side by side an area they got grazed an area that didn't get grazed and what they found was in one of the fields they even in the spring right after the cattle came out they couldn't find any difference in bulk density in grazed versus ungrazed in another one of the fields where they sampled and that's the one I'm showing you here they did find a difference they measured at a bunch of different depths this is going down to 36 inches or three feet the only spot they found any difference was right at the surface in that first three inches of soil and so in the spring they did find an increase in bulk density there but by the fall same field it was completely gone so we had a small impact early in the year by the fall it had disappeared another thing we did with these grazed and ungrazed areas is we did stand counts on two fields of corn two fields of soybean that had been grazed the previous year and on none of them could we find any difference in stand counts we also went in and took yield samples in both of them by hand and the two soybean fields, two corn fields and these next four slides all say the same thing I guess I put four in to drive the point home maybe because each field was a little bit different situation but all four of them say the same thing which is we could not find any difference in yield after grazing or not having grazed the particulars about this one is it's continuous corn so we had grazed corn residue and put corn back on it there was no difference in yield this one was corn that followed wheat and so we had wheat in 2017 and then a cover crop so the cattle were grazing that cover crop there was no impact on the following corn crop this one was soybeans following corn so the cattle had grazed the corn residue there was no impact on the subsequent soybean yield and the last one soybean following wheat and a cover crop so the cattle were grazing that cover crop there was no impact on the soybean yield alright so shifting gears now a little bit from the winter to spring summer fall this is an area I'm more of a range scientist than an agronomist and so this is a little bit more my area going back to a few more cattle facts again our 205 day weaning weights was 525 pounds last year these were first calf heifers our weaned calves gained almost one and a half pounds a day from April through July so we kept them on the farm after weaning and had them grazing and we gave them some supplements if we thought the forage quality wasn't good enough from what they could get from the pastures and then after we weaned we kept 10 of our heifers and they gained 1.6 pounds a day from July to October so that's bringing them around to be in yearlings again and we haven't done it yet I mean an idea that we have we want to keep the cattle on the land as long as possible keep them on the pastures, keep them on the fields and out of the feed lots as long as we possibly can similar I think to what Doug was saying earlier we haven't finished any out there yet but I would like to see us go that direction to try to see if we can finish cattle we might call it field finishing or something like that it may be different from grass finishing because in our operation we are feeding them some supplements some of those like the flax meal cake and the soybean cake and we fed them some whole peas as well so it wouldn't be a pure grass fed thing but we would be keeping them on the land we would be keeping those nutrients on the land so as we go into some pictures now of the grass I want you to keep this in mind first of all 2017 of course was very dry 2018 was wet in a lot of South Dakota it was not wet at Dakota Lakes on August 1st we were 4.8 inches short of our normal rainfall and this was after a dry year and by the end of October we had received 9.6 inches and when our normal was 16.5 now that's starting counting in April there so we were very dry so after we came off of the swaths and the corn residue so this picture was taped in early May you can see there's a little bit of green in the pasture not a whole lot we put a bale on the top of the hill and rolled it down here so we still had some bales left over so we started feeding out onto the pasture a little bit and we put the bale in an area where we could use a little more organic matter on the soil now this is early June so we have rented a pasture, a perennial pasture that's right adjacent to the crop farm and this pasture has probably been overgrazed for a long time mostly exotic cool season grasses like smooth brome, crested wheat grass cheap grass, Kentucky blue grass you'll find a lot of that in there and so what we're doing with our cows there is that we're trying to do fairly high stock density and fairly quick rotations so we have small paddocks and we move every couple of days so this is early June and then this is later in June or excuse me this was this was April, well end of April beginning of June and then later in June we have a lot of tall grass planted on the farm too tall grass is like switch grass and big blue stem this pasture they're in right here is mostly switch grass and so at the end of June like when this is taken you can see that it's it looks nice and lush and green and the quality is actually very high cattle did seem to enjoy grazing it as much as we can guess as to what they're enjoying and not enjoying so those that grass maybe I'll take a step back again switch grass and big blue stem they're both tall grass prairie species we would have found a lot of them in the Dakota lakes area in central South Dakota area they tend to like the wetter spots but we have found that we've that the switch grass we have a lot of switch grass around the farm not as much big blue stem but we've been planting more of it and interceding it with the switch grass and increasing the diversity a little bit and we see that it's very high yielding and the timing of when it grows is a little bit different too it's a warm season grass so we see it coming on in June and July rather than early in the year like the exotic grasses like crested wheat grass and smooth brome so we've been planting this into areas to try to build soil health in those areas, some marginal areas and we're utilizing it with the cattle but the quality is not as good as those cool season grasses and so what this slide shows is crude protein content throughout the year from May well until August and in different parts of the farm I went around and I sampled some more smooth brome I sampled some switch grass because I wanted to make comparisons and see just how much of a difference there was and we look at early in the year both of them are above 15% crude protein so that's more crude protein than those animals need anyway so both of them are doing great then and then about the time that picture was taken that I just showed you in late June that's the switch grass and that's the smooth brome the switch grass actually had a higher crude protein content at that time and it's still pretty high it's up around 13% so that's very good quality in June but then after that in this time of year you look at the switch grass it's still nice and green but the quality's gone down quite a bit the smooth brome doesn't look that good but the crude protein was just as good on the smooth brome as the switch grass so the best time for using that switch grass was probably about this time of year and with all of these samples I went to areas and I sampled areas that hadn't been hayed or grazed or anything so what you see when you look at these numbers late in the year that's been growing all year long that's getting fairly old had we grazed it early in the year and let it regrow I'm sure the quality numbers would look better and I'm thinking that that would be one strategy that we could use with the switch grass and the big blue stem is to try to graze it earlier and then let it regrow and then we could make the decision if we needed the forage or not if we need the forage maybe they graze it again and it's higher quality let it feed the soil and just let it stay there this is the TDN or the energy content of the forage so same same sample, same comparison but now instead of protein looking at the energy you can think of this it's like if you read the calories on the back of your Cheerios box that's essentially what it's telling you here and they're both very good early in the year but as we get into mid-summer and even late summer the smooth brome is higher quality in terms of energy but going back to how much rainfall we had this year and look at what the productivity of this big blue stem and switch grass was you can barely see the cattle it's coming up just about to the top of the pickup here and this is on an opal clay soil so it's not a good soil and that's the kind of productivity we had so I think well and here I did some measuring too in that field where I just showed you the picture of we've got some degraded range and then right beside it we've got what I showed you in the picture the switch grass and the big blue stem and so I went and I sampled right side by side I went this direction into the old range land and I went this way into the switch grass and big blue stem and I took samples and I did that at several points of slope and what I found was that in terms of tonnage we had twice as the tonnage of the tall grasses as we did of the degraded range and that degraded range it did have some native species in it some western wheat grass and some needle grass but it also had some smooth brome and crusted wheat grass in it the crude protein content was pretty low for both of them pretty low in the switch grass and the big blue stem so for soil health you know the tonnage is great and like I said I think if we utilize it properly at the right times of year we can get the good quality out of it as well so in that pasture we actually had a few cows wearing GPS collars and every 10 minutes it would mark where that cow was and so what you see here the green dots are showing you where the cow was so all these points are from one cow the water tank was right there so there's a lot of points clustered around there and the corners you know they like to hang out in corners so you find a lot of points there but I was interested in if we could see anything about the cow's preference of where they like to graze so the green part here is the degraded range part and then here's our tall grasses here and we didn't let them have this whole pasture all at once we put some electric fence up so we put an electric fence across there so they started out just with degraded range and then we gave them a paddock where they could have a choice of one or the other so now they could eat all of this coming down to here and then later on we had another fence here so we let them go a little further south and then finally they got to go all the way to the southern border and what the results look like are here the darker red color means the cow spent more time there so if you look at first when they first got here they had basically equal preference between the two next this cow actually looks like she slightly preferred the tall grass to that degraded range but by the time we got to the bottom they were really avoiding those tall grasses I was really surprised I kept going out there myself and walking through and thinking it doesn't look like they're using this very much but it looks so nice and green why aren't they and I didn't have the data back that I showed you just now in terms of the quality measurements but I think what happened is just as time went on this got more and more mature and they just didn't like it and they'd rather be over here grazing what was mostly brown and kind of dried up at that point so that's where we kind of were coming in toward the end of the summer and so we moved off of those pastures and because we're fall calving and it's been dry our pastures aren't great we came back on the crop land at this point and so the plan here was we had a cover crop oats, barley, pea cover crop that we planted in this field and bailed up and we were going to bail graze here and then came back and planted some warm season annuals like a pearl millet, brown midrib sorghum, that sort of thing and so the cows were going to be able to bail graze and have the pearl millet and sorghum that just they were just going to graze it themselves we weren't going to swat that we didn't get any rain so we got the bales but we didn't get the regrowth or we didn't get the second crop and so we're feeding bales back out onto the field here and I have several slides of that so this is a field that has a bit of a slope here most of the bales tried to put up on top of the hills so we're keeping that organic matter back on the field and moving it to the top of the hills so we would have seen more erosion and on the slopes you can see the calves have come along now that's where we were calving yeah so that's where we were calving is here and at the same time we gave them access to some corn that had not been harvested and so they had the bales to eat they had some corn to eat and we gave them a little bit of concentrate supplement too yeah so as the rain said both the the balegrazed area and this corn area and we it didn't work out the way we planned this year I think it's still probably I don't think it's a bad idea but sometimes even good ideas don't work out because of the conditions you get but if you have we did get here with the balegrazed area we did get one crop off of it and in the lower rainfall area and without irrigation you know maybe that's all you can expect you could hope for more and maybe you know we were ready to take advantage of more rainfall by planning that second crop but if you don't expect that you're going to have the moisture for it it may not work out and maybe maybe a better plan would be to go with a full season crop you know just plan a forage crop depending to use for forage and finally I'm probably about out of time but I wanted to at least mention some of the work we're doing out in the pasture I did mention that it's a degraded pasture I mean it's mostly the crested wheat grass, smooth brome etc. there are some natives still in there especially the short grasses the buffalo grass and blue grama which are good quality but they're just not very productive and so with that land what we're trying to do is return it to some more productivity get more of the productive native species back into this pasture that would have been here long ago and you can see here a green stripe and a brown stripe and a green stripe so what's going on here herbicide treatments to kill what's there and so we ran those herbicide treatments north south and then we came in and went east west with some seeding treatments and this is the pasture that where we're doing the rotational grazing you know moving the cows every couple days so the intention is to find out what does it take to transition this pasture from where it is to something more productive you know do we have to have herbicide do we have to seed it what combination of treatments works can just putting the cattle in there on their own and doing this rapid rotational grazing is that enough to build the productivity back here now unfortunately for us we started this we planted it in 2017 so we had a really dry 2017 and a really dry 2018 bad years for trying to get stuff established you know we've seen some of these species that we planted show up but not a whole lot of them yet I think they've gotten maybe one more year we'll see if they appear this year if not we may have to reseed so to just to wrap things up the main takeaway points from here what we're doing at Dakota Lakes and why we're trying to do it we're trying to keep the cattle and the nutrients on the land keeping the cattle on the land as long as possible we're using I just wrote rotate here and I guess in this context we could be talking about crops but I'm actually meaning rotating the cattle you know I showed you different you know they're moving from field to field to pasture and back and forth between field and pasture they're not staying in one place for all that long we're using taking advantage of full season forage crops and cover crops both you know with the irrigation it gives us a chance to have a grain crop and a cover crop afterwards but in a drier area and without irrigation that's when you know perhaps a full season forage crop makes more sense if you don't have the moisture for two and then finally we're we have perennials in our pastures and in rotations and those are certainly some areas where we're still experimenting and the jury is out on how some of those experiences will come out well thank you very much