 I'm very excited to be up here with three folks, three gentlemen who they get their hands dirty. They're folks who've been farming, I guess, pretty much your whole life, so for at least two of you. And so I have to, to my immediate left, I have our Martin Kleinschmidt. He's retired, sustainable agricultural specialist, used to be with the Center for Rural Affairs. And he owns and manages a 380 acre grass and grain farm in northeastern Nebraska. And to his left, we have Jeff Moyer, farm director at the Rodale Institute for about the past 30 years. And he helps farmers transition to sustainable agriculture. He's also the former chair of the National Organic Standards Board and founding board member of Pennsylvania Certified Organic, author of the book Organic No Till Farming. And to his left, we have Johannes Lehmann, associate professor in the Department of Crop and Soil Sciences at Cornell University. And he studies Bile Char, which is, I learned last night, a rebranded term for charcoal, but charcoal used in a very specific way. So I'm going to start with Martin to my left here. At dinner last night, Martin told me a very interesting story that sounded to my ears almost biblical. It was a story about turning sand into soil in a certain patch of land in Nebraska. And it intrigued me because it was a technique that I had never heard about to basically produce healthy soil in a way that is new. The term is mob grazing. And when I first saw that term, I got this image of busloads of tourists descending on the Philip Seafood Buffet here in town. But it's something totally different. A little bit different. Yes, Bradley. The field I was talking about is a patch of ground about 4,000 acres along the Platte River in Nebraska. And if anybody knows about the Platte, it's what we call a braided river. There's lots of sand in it. And I heard about this project for many years and know the people involved. And so we looked at it when it first started. This is a piece of ground that was growing up with nothing but weeds. And thank God, there were thistles. Thistles are considered awful weeds, but they will grow when there's no organic matter. And so they cover the soil. And it's obviously needed. So this ground was taken over by the power company there. And there was pressure to not use any chemicals on this, but of course, get rid of the weeds and make it a habitat for wildlife, because the wildlife people had something to say in that as well. And so a friend of mine, Chad Peterson, introduced goats to the system. 600 goats, I think it was, or 1,200 goats. And they came there for two years, and they ate thistles. And they ate the brush, and they ate the cedar trees, because that's what goats like to do. Then he followed that with four years of cattle grazing. And these were not baby calves. These were yearlings. Normally, you go to the feed yard at the age of 12 months. Well, in this case, they went back to grass at 12 months. So we didn't bring any corn into this. And the cattle came and they grazed for four years. Each year, a different set of cattle, of course. And so the day I was there was that sixth year or the sixth anniversary of this. And I'm introduced to this lush prairie with lots of grass, thick grass, and it walks soft. And then I stepped across the luxury fence, which is what Chad used to control the animals. And there was, I spread the weeds, it was some broadleafs, and I spread them and I looked down and I saw grass, gravel, sand, and pretty coarse sand, something that wouldn't support very much life. And again, all there was was these few broadleaf weeds. Then I stepped over the luxury fence again and I looked down and all I saw was grass, thick, thick like you would have on your lawn. And so I reached down and started digging in this grass and I found litter, which is half decomposed grass, and about a half inch to three-eighths inch thick. And this is kind of an insulator thing. It catches water and it keeps the ground cool. And I went a little further and I found what I would have to say is a quarter inch of soil, black soil. And it was crumbly and it was just what I want on my farm in Nebraska. And I don't have that much sand, so this was really an experience. And below that black soil was the same sand that was on the other side of the fence. So what did we have here? We had a system, and again, this is a system. I hate when people take things out of the system and try to analyze them. But this was a system where we brought livestock in. They took the weeds and they took the grass and buried it into something that the soil biology could use and the soil biology then took the carbon that was in this created by the sun into the vegetation and turned it into a stable form of carbon that, hey, grows more grass, which feeds cattle, which is food for us. What a great system. So this is a system that we kind of put on our farm too. We don't quite use it as intensively as Chad did, but the important thing about the high-density, high-stock density program to mob grazing is that we have a lot of animal impact. We want a million pounds of animals per acre for a short period of time, only for a short period of time in order to get the animal impact. This is the same impact that our prairies experienced before we got here. The Indians knew how this all worked and let it happen. And we came and took the animals off because we had better uses for the land. So but that's the resilience that Fred was talking about is in that litter and in that stable organic matter because the litter keeps the ground cool. We're going to need that. The litter also acts as a sponge to grab the moisture so it has a chance to soak in rather than run away. And we're growing grass or a vegetation that maybe we can't use so well, but the animals can. And then the animals turn that over and we can consume them and get fed. This is not for all areas, all acres, but it certainly I think needs to be part of the acres, especially those that are not suitable for farming, that are marginal lands. So this is what we're wanting to do on our farm. There's another organization called the Carbon Farmers of America and there's a book out there called Priority One that I haven't heard anybody mention. I'm not a scientist, but I've read the book or most of it, it's pretty thick. It's available online and it talks about how we can take with the right management and most of it includes this animal impact. We can actually capture all the excess carbon out of the atmosphere and put it back in the ground by the use of this method plus something called the key line method. And we can do that within 20 years. What an opportunity. I think we ought to look into that a little more. So do you know, has anybody tried to figure out, tried to calculate how much carbon you can capture in an acre with this technique? Has anybody run those numbers? Do you have any idea? Absolutely, it depends on your environment, on your climate, but since organic matter is about 58% carbon, I'll let you do the math. Whatever you can do, I mean, whatever we can do helps. So let's do that. Great. It might be a better one. Some lands will do better than others, obviously. Right, right. So you're saying, yeah, this is a selective technique. Well, in the Southern climate where it's warmer, this is gonna be a slow process because they lose so much. Every year we lose carbon. Unless we keep replenishing it, we will lose it. So that's a natural function that's always happened and that's how it got in there in the first place. So we have to maintain a system that keeps putting it back because losing it, it's a dynamic, so we have to do that. Right, right. Great, thank you. I wanna move now to Johannes who has, who's working on another technique to put carbon back into the soil and to keep it there for a little longer. Johannes mentioned to me last night that biochar has become a very hot topic in agricultural research circles that there's almost as many papers published about biochar now as there are about composting science. And it's apparently the oldest agricultural technology, I guess, if you wanna call it that, going back with thousands and thousands of years. Yeah, thank you, Ryan. And I wanna preface an answer to your question by being in a session with solutions is it always makes everybody feel uncomfortable because there's not one solution. There may be not even a lot of solutions. There's a whole toolbox of technologies that we unpack as needed. And so we just wanna restate the obvious that there's no silver bullet, but there are several technologies. And what biochar exemplifies at the moment is among many other good ideas that are coming up that this is not the end of our ability to innovate farming. We can be creative, and I think we should be creative in farming, and we can learn from ancient farming systems, and we can develop new ones. And they're always appropriate for some locations and not appropriate for others. And before we try it out, we'll never know. So back to biochar as an example for that, that has been very prominent in the discussion. Starting five years ago, biochar is a charcoal-like substance created through slow heating under the exclusion of air, which then transforms biomass into a charcoal-type substance that really fundamentally changes the chemistry of the material, makes it much more durable in the environment. So instead of a leaf that would decompose within weeks or months, a charred leaf would decompose only within decades, hundreds, or even thousands of years. So that's a huge asset to boost organic matter in soils. And it turns out that these char-type substances in soils are much more efficient per unit surface area or mass than any other organic matter in retaining nutrients. So there are a few pointers here that we actually most recently studied and trying to copy from the dark earths from the Amazon, so-called terra preta soils, that have been manipulated in that way, adding charcoal hundreds to thousands of years ago, and then abandoned, and they maintain their high fertility and high carbon content to this day. We now learn that this is actually not an anomaly or a speciality of the Amazon. We find it in Africa, we find it in Australia. We find it even in the Midwest in the prairies. It turns out that probably up to half of the carbon in Midwestern soils, in fertile Midwestern soils is char carbon from periodic burning before the arrival of the Europeans. The prairies were burned almost annually. So that's a remnant of that. So we find out that there's actually quite a bit of legacy that we are capitalizing on now with our bread baskets of the world. But similar to Martin, I wanna stress that beyond biochar being a material, it's very important to employ a systems view because otherwise that could derail any type of innovation and any type of management. It depends on the location, it depends on what else you do, and that's again exemplified quite forcefully by something like biochar, which you always actually said biochar systems because it's more than a material. If you produce biochar from the wrong feedstock or in the wrong way, you might actually harm the environment more than you benefited. But judiciously applied, there are opportunities and the question's now how many opportunities there are where you can produce biochar from a material that might otherwise be burned. See for instance, pine bark beetle kill in British Columbia or rice straw in China that then improves soils for the long term, mitigates climate change by burying carbon and reducing emissions from agricultural soils and possibly landfill material, and generate energy at the same time because 70% of the energy is actually driven off during the charmaking process in form of gases and liquids that can be captured in modern energy systems called very often pyrolysis where we can generate liquid and gaseous fuels and electricity. So packaged in that way, it is a very appealing and complex system which I see as an advantage and the way that we have to deal with our rather complex agriculture and agro ecosystems. But it's very knowledge intensive and local knowledge intensive which might pose an obstacle to judicious application and adoption. Right, so you've helped start a number of small projects it sounds like and I'm just curious, if what the system looks like if somebody is trying to both make biochar out of a feedstock and capture, say gas that can be turned into like you said, a low grade diesel, what is the technology? What does the system look like? It can have a lot of different shapes. There are projects that look at very small scale cook stove applications, single household in Africa, for instance, there are dozens of projects now that look at stove applications where by switching from burning with wood, where the family and very often kids and women have to track for long times into the forest to hail out wood, which in itself has a lot of environmental ramifications. Switching from combustion, burning to pyrolysis affords you the possibility also to switch your feedstock, whatever you burn. Now you can switch from wood to for instance, rice husks, leaves, grasses and that allows the opportunity for saving time, saving money and improving soils at the same time. Up to larger systems, there's a poultry farmer in West Virginia who uses his poultry wastes for heating the chicken farm, houses and offsets all his fossil fuel energy costs as well as the energy used and mitigates an issue of adding phosphorus to agricultural land that then ends up in the Chesapeake Bay. So that's another level up. Another level up is county or village scale systems that might or municipality systems that might aid in managing agricultural or household or garden wastes. So they can range from simple clay stoves for just a few dollars to larger systems that cost a lot of money and still need to be developed. On all scales, there's a lot of development that still needs to be done. Great, thank you. And we'll touch on some of the barriers to implementation. I want to come back to that maybe in a minute. But first I want to get to Jeff who has a lot of experience helping farmers. You used an analogy that I guess is inflammatory in some circles, the drug addiction analogy. I hope so. You hope it's inflammatory, right? You have a lot of experience in helping farmers move to organic and off of chemical fertilizers. But it sounds like there's a lot of ins and outs in how you do it, and there's a transition period that can be more or less painful, I guess, depending on how you go about it. So explain how that transition, depending on what crops you're working on, how that transition can be made as smoothly as possible. Well, certainly before any farmer can enter a transition period, we first have to understand what we're trying to move away from and what we're trying to move towards. Clearly, I think there's some consensus from the podium here, not complete, but some, that we have certain issues with our current food production system that need to be fixed. There's some breakage there, some components that are broken. And unless a farmer can understand what's broken on his farm, it's very difficult to understand where you're going to go and how you're going to transition. The real exciting part about the work that we're doing at the Rodale Institute and my own personal work is that we do have solutions. The title of this topic was Solutions to the System that's Broken. There are some really exciting solutions out there. Of course, one of them is the work I do in organic, or certified organic farm production. And while there's components of that that are, as was mentioned from the podium earlier, connected directly to a very rigid, or somewhat rigid federal standard, there's many of the principles that are involved that can be adopted and adapted across a large spectrum of agriculture. So it's when we start to look at those principles and move them from the drawing board out onto the farm that we have to analyze each individual farm separately and look at what kind of mitigation strategies we can impose on the landscape to transition a farm without having any kind of downgrade or penalty to the yield. Now, yield is important, but it can't be the only indicator by which we judge the success of a farm. That's what got us into the trouble that we're in today with our broken system. That being said, we're all aware that we have to produce food. When I took over management of the farm that the Rodale Institute owns, and it's been quite a number of years now, close to, I guess it's about 36 years that I've been there, Bob Rodale, who owned the research station, was the son of the founder, said to me, your challenge is not simply to grow food. Yes, you have to produce food if you want to keep your job or someone else will be doing it. But while you're producing the food, you have to improve the health of the soil, which means we're not, as Fred just mentioned from the podium here, we're not going to be degrading the resource that we need to produce food. We have to build up the resource at the same time that we're producing food, and his premise was that because food production is based on a system and a science of biology, not merely chemistry or biotechnology, which are legitimate sciences, but so is biology. If we base our production strategy on biological principles, it's one of two things. It's scale-neutral, and we know it's going to work. So we can actually improve the health of the soil while we produce food at the same time. So it's that strategy that we use when we begin talking to farmers about transition. So to go from a conventional cornfield to a organic cornfield is not a simple leap of faith where you just start planting corn this year and you don't have anything in place to substitute for the chemicals, and that's where I use the drug addiction analogy. You're going to run into trouble. So if we know that, we simply don't use that strategy. We'll move into other crops like soybeans or some kind of forage crop, a hay crop. You can do it on vegetables, you can do it on livestock. There's many different strategies. But the idea is that you think and plan through the process to mitigate those problems. So there might be a drop-off in production, you're saying, for a few years that folks have to prepare for. No, what I'm saying is there might be a drop-off in production if you don't plan properly. If you plan properly and organize your transition according to biological principles, there is no drop-off. So one of the themes that I'm hearing from all three of you is that there's a huge amount of specialized knowledge required for each of these techniques that one of the barriers maybe here is just the knowledge. I mean, what you're talking about is it sounds like very specific for the field by field almost. Yeah, I mean our premise is that farmers are going to have to learn a whole lot more about their farm and particularly a whole lot more about their soil. For most farmers that enter this kind of a process, that's a challenge they're up for and they're excited to step into that arena and learn. Clearly if we continue down the road that we're doing, we talk about sustainability. On our particular farm we had done some anthropological and archeology studies with a local university looking at Native Americans that were managing land. They were burning using stone tools and fire to manage the landscape and plant food. They were doing that 8,000 to 10,000 years ago. Anybody in this room who thinks we're going to be using 8,000 to 10,000 years is foolish at the very least. That kind of a system is not sustainable in the long term. So we would hope that people would be farming on our farm at Rodale or my farm at home, I have my own farm at home, 8,000 to 10,000 years from now. I have no idea what that system is going to look like. I do know that they're going to need the soil just like we do today and just like the Native Americans did. And if we don't take care of our soils, if we continue to farm them the way we're doing, we're going to have trouble. A good example is the idea of no-till soybeans, which we heard about again. The problem with no-till soybeans as it's practiced today across most of the United States and much of the world is it grew up hand in glove with synthetic herbicides. When you spray those herbicides, the intended result is that we can kill weeds. And that works. The problem is there's many unintended results that happen as well. There's side effects. One of those side effects is we're killing off all the microbiology and the muscular mycorrhizal fungi. Now, you go, well, I can't see them. What's the difference? Well, that mycorrhizal fungi has a very important role to play in keeping our soils healthy and actually gluing the soil structure together so it doesn't wash away in the rain. Why are we losing so many tons of topsoil even in no-till systems? It's because we're killing the fungi. It's not an intended result of the herbicide, but it happens just the same. So if we really want to make some changes, we're going to have to look at fundamental philosophical differences in how we manage soil. I'm interested in hearing from all three of you about places in the world where there is interest in adopting these systems. Jeff, I know you said that China is very... You've noticed an uptick in interest in ecological agriculture in China. Well, we've just finished a report on 30 years of our work in our one farming systems trial where we've been able to document that our yields over 30 years have been equal to or in many cases, depending on weather patterns and we were here to talk about weather patterns, organic systems actually out-yield conventional systems. What happens in... Let me just stop you. That seems like a very important point. I don't know if the general world knows that if that's a point that's made enough. Well, there's new information coming out daily about that topic. It's not known well enough partly because there's very few organizations like the Rodeo Institute that are publishing that kind of information and there's a lot of dollars trying to not allow that to be heard widely. I mean, let's face it, people make money with the system the way it is and those people are not interested in hearing a different paradigm being projected. Now, we all realize that over time it's going to happen anyway. So, when you look at China, yes, China's interested. We've had a lot of interest from Argentina. It was just in Paris. The French government is very interested in these sorts of issues because they all realize that changes in the wind. We heard about the exciting changes that are happening with young people getting involved in agriculture. How do we move more of those folks in? Somebody talked about the age of farmers approaching 60. We know that's happening. I'm not 60 yet, but I'm getting closer. Someone who's going to take over, we need to work on those things. So, when you look at what's happening in other countries or around this country, there's a huge upsurge in interest in transitioning maybe not directly to a certified organic operation, but certainly to incorporate the kinds of principles and practices that we're talking about in organic. And we as a society have to recognize that we incentivize farmers to farm in particular ways. I get incentives. Bob Rodale gave me some very strong incentives. I've got incentives on my farm at home. When I talk to my neighbor who farms 3,000 acres of corn, he doesn't see himself as a food producer. He's a farmer, but he doesn't produce food. He said, I produce corn and soybeans. Could be ink, could be ethanol, could be high fructose corn syrup. I don't know what it is, it's not food, it's a commodity. I get paid to produce as many tons of yellow stuff as I possibly can as cheap as I can do it. I said, what about the soil? He goes, I don't get paid to manage the soil. Well, as long as we as a society reward people for that, that's what you're going to get. If on the other hand we reward farmers or incentivize them to plant cover crops. It's an organic type principle. You don't have to be certified organic to plant cover crops. But if the landscape from Washington D.C. to your farm in Nebraska was green instead of brown all winter, make a huge difference. We have the power to incentivize people to do that. We just don't. I want to ask about that. In the context of biochar, last night you were telling me that there was a company that maybe 10 years ago had come up with a system that could be used maybe on the scale of a medium-sized city like Ithaca to turn some waste into biochar, but that this system, 10 years later, however many years it still has not been commercialized. Why is that? It's more convenient to go the way we've gone and it requires quite a commitment to move that financial commitment, but especially commitment by innovators on the ground. Where we see innovation is less from big corporations that take this on, but from small and medium-sized farmers who see an opportunity on their land to deal with a certain soil fertility constraint or residue management constraint and they drive the innovation and they usually don't have the cash to put a million dollars on the table to develop a technology if it's not already there. We see now a lot of innovation again in China. They had nothing in this area three, four years ago and now most of the long-term field trials and most of the industrial scale or farm scale units are being developed in China. In two or three years they completely outstripped the rest of the world in development of the technology and I think we'll probably see that in many other areas as well. We have also I think we all agree soil carbon and soil organic matter is key and this conundrum of yes we know that but the knowledge system is much more difficult than managing a new variety where you can scale it by here's a box, it has a new label on it and you distribute it in the way that you distributed all your other boxes before and that's very easy but the knowledge system is so specialized to the farm and even the farm field that it is much more difficult to scale up but I think now we need to recognize that even with the best GM or otherwise bread crop they still take up water and nutrients and they will in the future and they will still need fertile soil and the soil needs to serve all the other ecosystem services beyond food production so I think we have to be creative in tackling this knowledge system problem. Can you describe a few of your projects I know you've been working in Africa how are you trying to see that knowledge and I guess you know kind of farm by farm is there a way to try to spread the knowledge on a larger scale? We need to start farm by farm because that's where the development gets to a maturity where it actually can be spread more efficiently if we take an Ethiopian small scale farmer we know very well that to maintain soil fertility and soil carbon we should leave the crop residue on everybody would agree but they can't because the cattle need to eat the crop residue we know that the manure should go back in the soil to feed the plants and maintain organic matter but they can't they have to use the manure to heat and to cook so we need to find these local issues which then might not be addressable by zero tillage or other technologies but they need to feed or take tools or ideas out of a big basket and reassemble them for their needs and bring them to maturity that they can be more widely disseminated and then being cautious that that dissemination takes account of local conditions as well so there's a lot of back and forth and we see that with biochar with no till with all kinds of projects that I can give help in identifying the most likely type of biochar that addresses a significant soil fertility constraint at location X I can maybe also help identifying a technology to produce the biochar or look at different feedstock options for that biochar but to make that system work we need to work with farmers on their farm and that just takes a while and then we can grow out from there I guess you need the idea to go viral to share it with each other so how about the mob grazing idea have you seen other farmers get interested in this is it a very very new idea how widespread is it well there's a growing demand for grass finished beef so that's kind of pushing this but it's no longer a niche market but it is still a specialty market so we need that market to support this there's a lot more that we could be doing right now we have this CRP program which takes land out of production for ten years and we know that as the grass that's the federal program and as the grass grows it gets thicker and thicker and it becomes ill-suited for pheasants and that's a big issue with the wildlife people so the solution then is to burn it once every three years or so which certainly spurs the growth of warm season grasses but it also burns off and kills all that or evaporates all the carbon that has been grown up during those three years and so there may be a better way to do that and that would be to introduce livestock to that in order to trample that grass down and bring it in contact with the soil the bacteria do a great job of breaking down those minerals and all that organic matter but they have to have access to it and they don't climb stocks of grass very well instead what happens is the grass becomes over the winter it becomes white and it's oxidized so the carbon is going back in the air and instead we need something to put that grass and all those plants down on the soil where the bacteria can convert it and sequester it and instead we need that fungi, those mycorrhiza to then grab that carbon and tie it up then we have a successful carbon sequestration program and oh by the way we had cattle at the same time but right now the federal program is designed to provide the farmer with a payment for that land but that only if he would decide to graze it or something he can do that but then it cost him in a payment loss and so there isn't any incentive to do that right so it sounds like the deck is stacked of course that the federal incentives are against this program so how can I mean does this policy have to change on the federal level or can this idea spread in a way without having to change policy I think policy would be the easy way to change it although I'm not experienced with changing policies most people in this town aren't either actually but we need more awareness of what is going on in that soil and the need to have a live soil and I understand that at the University of Nebraska research project trying to identify how much carbon could be sequestered in a corn bean versus a corn-corn rotation under irrigation and under dry land and in every case at the end of the growing season they had excess carbon in the soil they had done something but by spring it was all gone because they missed the micro-rise they missed the soil part the soil bacteria and fungi part the roles that they play so we need to understand that you know the farmers need to know some of these tricks and this process knowledge but so do the policy makers so let me ask the other two of you what policies would you like to see are there must be ideas for federal policies to help folks go organic and to spur the biochar industry start with you Jeff well sure we have a farm bill in this country what we really need is a food and soil bill if we had a bill that we just simply changed the name and started concentrating on producing food and protecting soil or improving the health of soil and stop worrying about subsidizing particular entities that are benefitting from the system way it is I think that would go a long way to changing things now what are the chances of that you know as well as I do start pushing we also need to get more of the voting public interested in the kinds of systems we're talking about and supporting them I think people in general underestimate the power of their own personal vote we heard last night that some votes count more than others or bigger than others and I don't think that's true I think some entities choose to exercise their vote more vigorously than other entities simple things that happen in Washington when people start emailing and calling their congressman and do it in mass like what happened with the organic farm bill that we had where consumers when they wanted to change the organic standard and consumers called Washington in mass 400,000 or 500,000 of them in a week's time Washington gets the message and no we're not going to do that we're going to leave it the way it is so people do have power in their ability to vote with their food dollars to support a particular type of food system farmers need support I mean if you're not going to buy my product I'm not going to grow it so we need to incentivize farmers by supporting the food and then also use that vote to push congress the way we want them to move I think if you could somehow link organic farming to shutting down parts of the internet you would have a huge if you remember what happened when there were some bills recently so Joe Hannes what federal policies would you like to see to help spur the biochar industry I would like to see more investment in adaptive research I see I think on the fundamental research side we can be successful or not it depends on our ability to write grants and how smart the idea is but I see a lack in supporting in various forms adaptive research whether that's in the US or internationally where there's a distinct disconnect we either implement and support and subsidize or we don't but we don't bring the innovation to the farmer in a way that the farmer is in the driver's seat of the innovation because I think 50% of the development needs to be done by the farmer but then very often we leave the researcher out and the researcher cannot access that information or cannot help the farmer to develop that information and I think that's critical to the success of any integrated and knowledge intensive innovation with all three of you we just have a few minutes left there's a theme that I'm hearing which is that there's no giant conglomerate egg corporation that's going to benefit from any of this is there a way to make that is that true? that's a problem unfortunately I don't know that I agree with that the systems we're talking about are scale neutral we have some very very large organic farms I don't want to pick on anybody in particular but you look at somebody like earthbound farms it's a conglomeration of farms it's huge 45,000 acres I don't know that's just a guess I know they're giant it doesn't necessarily exclude people who have large aspirations or large management potential it all depends on how well you can manage the system so I think the fact that it's scale neutral the kinds of principles we're talking about in the door wide to adoption across a broad spectrum it's not for you know the cover crops are not for gardeners necessarily gardeners can use it it's not for family sized farms of what 250,000 dollars in in gross sales it could be for multi-million dollar operation it doesn't really matter so I think that it is scale neutral and people of large farms could benefit just as well when you mentioned corporate what I was thinking of the inputs the corporate inputs are huge and in the grazing system there are a few of any corporate inputs but certainly the size you're not buying seed you're not buying fertilizer we're just putting livestock on them and actually the beauty of it is all we do is harvest we do it in a managed way in a timely way but we harvest whatever is there and then we harvest the animals too so I mean they don't get any better than that and the beef tastes good it's good for you and everything but yeah but the timing is there but I've seen operations of you know 3,000 head in Nebraska where they move them through the life through the pastures and actually they the change they did is that they changed their calving period instead of doing it in the spring or winter as it turns out in February they moved it to May and June and lo and behold they didn't have any calving problems the cows were better the only problem was the cows gave too much milk because what they did they were on grass that was green and growing and lush and they had a really high nutritive diet because of that green grass and so they were able to have the calf and then breed back within 60 days so they could again have a calf you know on their anniversary and everything worked well and the only difference was the farmer had much less to do he didn't make any hay anymore he didn't use his machinery for that because the cows were turned out into these into the winter grasses or the dormant grasses during the wintertime without a calf they don't need much nutrition then and then they came back to the good grass in spring before they calved and well I mean great and when I was talking to this individual he said he smiled on his face and I said what's so good about today and he said my third son said I'm coming home to farm dad so that's good I can't think of a better way to end this panel it's like you had that planned out so thanks for making my job easy I appreciate it I learned a lot and you know my grandfather was a farmer dairy farmer and you know I never once I spent some time on his farm and I never once stopped to think about the importance of the soil and the health of the soil so I thank you for bringing that for illuminating that topic and thanks for a great panel thank you