 I have spoken about animals and microbes and corn and the price of wheat and soybeans but it's not often you get to talk about underwear. Stacey Turgeon is our district conservationist out in Chamberlain and I think she's persuaded Steve to partake in a number of these experiments and I wanted Stacey to explain along with Steve what was happening here with the underwear. Okay, so what we decided to do is kind of compare a couple of fields of Steve's that had the same soil type but had some different management practices done on them over the years and so the pair of underwear that Steve is holding is in his field that has basically a corn bean wheat rotation with cover crops being planted after the wheat was harvested and a lot of crop after math grazing and the grazing of the cover crops and we compared it with a field that's just a half a mile away and this one is it has corn bean wheat in the rotation but a lot of times the corn you know might be cut for silage part of it is most typically and it doesn't get livestock on it. So we planted these June 15th or 16th and we left them in for 10 weeks and he only had five inches of rain this growing season until the point that we dug them up but you could really see the difference in the microbial activity compared to the field that had the livestock and the cover crops incorporated into the rotation so it is actually a really cool visual and you can even see that there's different colors I don't know if you can turn it around and he can zoom in on that like there's pinks and yellows and we just don't have that on this pair as much as we do on that one so. So what you're saying is there were more microbes in there what were they feeding on this Stacy? They're feeding on the cotton because cotton is considered a carbon a carbon source there so we were trying to measure the amount of microbes out there. So that's a source of energy for microbes and you said something very interesting that you had a situation where you had a really nice looking multi-species cover and you were perplexed that the underwear was not being eaten up tell me what happened there you had some really really pristine underwear that came back out of that field. Yeah in this other situation it was a full season cover crop and it we if they had nine inches of rain there and when we dug that pair of underwear up I couldn't figure out what was going on there was hardly any activity on the pair underwear they were mostly intact there was one little tiny hole and until we started having more discussions I honestly I wasn't thinking about all the exudates that those cover crops were excreting and that the microbes are actually utilizing that instead of eating the cotton underwear so. Because the cotton underwear is a little bit more difficult to digest right? Not as good as the sugars that are coming out of the roots yeah. Well that's it I love I love these whitey-tidy experiments thank you so much Stacey I appreciate it Steve. You bet.