 So it's Dr. Lee Breeze is an independent crop consultant from Temple Worth, Dakota. He provides agronomic consulting service directly to growers including fertility, pest management, crop management, precision eggs, reduced pill, cover crop management. Lee and his doctor plan health degree at the University of Nebraska in 2019. So think about this, he's got a lot of acres, he's got crop consultants working under him and he still went to Nebraska, he lives in Jamestown and he went to Nebraska and got his doctor's degree. So I mean it's a, in 2017 he won the International Crop Advisory Award, the International. So I mean I was, what I like about Lee, he tries to, he looks at things that look differently because he tries to make sense of things by not getting really high temp. So anyway, no further than you, Dr. Lee. I think I turned on the right button, is the mic working? Okay. Thank you, appreciate it. Good. I tend to be kind of a skeptic, so don't be surprised by that. I have a ton of slides and I don't get any more lunch if I get through them all. So if you want to talk about something else, if you want to interrupt me, if you want to ask questions, I would much prefer to do that rather than getting through my agenda. So feel free at any time to interject, interrupt, argue, disagree, that's cool. Alright, these are just my opinions and what I've seen and that's what I want to share with you. Okay, now my opinion evolves and changes when I get good information. So this may not be the same thing I say in five years because five years ago I didn't say the same thing I'm saying now, I continuously learn. And I think that's why everybody's here, so hopefully I can learn from you as well. Let me talk about these principles and guidelines. We've all seen them, they're everywhere around here and they're really good places to start. And I'm going to say that I don't think there are laws or rules or regulations, I think they're guidelines and good principles and I think you can use them and interact with them. There's one that I think is missing often in this, it's kind of a given, but this is really about profitability, right? We have to stay profitable. It's wonderful to talk about great things for our soil and the environment. Those are all really good. If nobody's paying you to do it, it's pretty hard to keep doing it, okay? So I think that's an important part and this is something that frames a lot of the things that I talk about and the way that I look at things. So I hope it frames that for you as well. So how do you get started on this thing? Because I was tasked with this whole putting it all together. Well, I think you have to assess your farm specifically. What's going on on your farm in your field on a specific acre? What do you need to address? What works for you? I think it's that personal, it's that specific. It's great to hear what's going on in Canada, in Oklahoma, in Kansas, in Ontario and all those other places, but what's happening on your farm is what's really critically important because those are the things that you need to manage. So what do you see? And here's the thing that actually trips me up a lot of times. I go to farms, I go to a new farmer, I'm looking at his fields, I'm digging in his soil, I'm seeing something very different than he sees. I'm going to ask you to go home from here and take a look at your farm with new eyes. Because we all expect to see certain things and we kind of put them in our brains and if you dare every day, you may not notice some of the changes or some of the obvious things. I'm going to show you some pictures of people miss obvious things. And then where can you make the most gain? What's most important? Start there or whatever you've done, what's the next most important thing for you? So here's some of the things that we've learned over time is that erosion is a terrible thing and it can be devastating. And these are old pictures. Where are they? Okay, folks. And this literally was Earth Day. I'd like to say that these are all old pictures, but they're not. Okay, the one before was a grower I worked with was no-till on the one side and the neighbor did some summer follow because he didn't get it planted. He worked it a couple of times to manage the weeds and there were six to eight inches of sand along the fence line and it went out for 200 yards. This one, this road, that sign is just across the road as you turn the corner and I'm sitting right at the intersection, eight more and 50 yards away. Both sides of the road for miles is no-till soybean. It has been no-till for over 10 years. I don't think I have to explain this one. In North Dakota in many places our snow is black and our soils are white. Some may rate. This is a drone photo that I picked up a drone just because of this whole ag-tech thing and my growers are like, really you need to get into this and I haven't figured out a way to make any money on it, but boy, can I see saline spots. This is an important view because you don't see this from the ground. This is kind of what I'm talking about, have new eyes when you look at your fields and your farms and the whole thing. You don't see how devastating this is. This is a different crop. This is soybean. This is barley. Look at the difference. Anybody want to farm this quarter? How profitable is that? Is this guy making any money? I want you to look with new eyes and maybe it makes a new perspective. If you know somebody who's got a Cessna, get up in the air and take a look. You know somebody's got a drone, have them come out and take some pictures. At least look at it with different eyes. My friends have called job security. That's solid kosher in a barley field. Resistant to four different herbicides. That's solid kosher in a soybean field. I think there's issues out there. I'm not saying you have them. I'm saying your neighbors do. And if you can't see what's wrong with your farm, just ask your neighbor because he knows. Okay? So that's the whole point. And talk about systems. This is really where it goes. This whole idea of finding a problem, solve a problem, is what's led us down the path that we're at. So when we start talking about weeds, and even now weed scientists are really common to say that there's a lot of herbicide resistance, but there's no weeds resistant to tillage. I've heard that several times. I'm sure some of you have heard that. First of all, that's a lie. Because quackgrass loves tillage. It's a good way to spread it. Tillage has never been very successful at killing Canada thistle. So it's a lie. But it's a single-minded type of situation where you're looking at one problem and you're trying to figure out all solutions for that one problem, ignoring the issues of erosion, soil loss, soil health, and it aggregates by doing tillage. So I don't want to talk about problems. I want to talk about systems where you think about everything. And I don't think they have to be complicated. Derek is doing amazing things, but my head was swimming yesterday. Anybody with me? He's doing a lot of stuff, boys. That's cool and more power through him, but I don't think it has to be that complicated. Now, he didn't start there either. Keep that in mind. It's evolved over time and moved and grown and gone. So he's at a different position in his soil health journey than other people are, and that's totally cool. I always tell folks, if you want to learn how to play piano, you don't start with Beethoven. You start with Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, and you work up from there and you build your skills, right? This is the idea behind this. You can get to do cool things in the event, but you're only adding one or two things. You're not adding 10 or 20. So that's my idea with that. Start where you're at. And again, I don't think there's rules. I think you can take and choose and do what you want. Derek talks about it's really, really hard for him to do cover crops. He just doesn't have enough time. Okay? He's getting plant diversity through intercropping. It's a different way to do it. If you didn't have the opportunity to do intercropping, get all that plant diversity. I still think reducing your tillage, keeping this soil armored and keeping your coverage is all positive gains. What I don't want people to do is come to these meetings where there's fantastic people and go, God, I'll never do that. I can't do that. I'm not going to try. Every gain is worthwhile. So here's my simple system. And you can blow holes in this left and right. Like, this is not a system. It's not a rotation. It's a terrible idea. The fact is this is where most of agriculture is at in the Midwest. That's where it's at. Corn and soybean. That's where the production's at. Okay? There's our soil health principles in there. Those gains are worth it. If I can get a corn, soybean, conventional guy to pull off this fall tillage, reducing his erosion over winter, that is a huge gain. And it's worthwhile. If I can get them to try direct seeding a few fields, it's worthwhile. Okay? But these guys haven't done this stuff before. Maybe you haven't done this stuff before and there's some tripping points that can really hurt you. And actually, this idea of being stupid wet in North Dakota and South Dakota like we are, it's going to force people into direct seeding, but we all know that isn't the right condition for the first try. So I think there's going to be a lot of challenges and a lot of stress and a lot of failures with it. And guys are going to say that no-till doesn't work. We tried that in 2020 after 19. It doesn't work. Dude, you're trying to plant it in the mud with no soil structure. It's not going to work. It's not really no-till. Diversity. I'm trying to get guys to add a third crop into this. It makes a huge difference, especially if you can add a small grain. Now you've got time to do other things. You've got time to add in cover crops if you want to. But just adding that third crop changes the system. I've seen it. And if people want to add livestock, we can broadcast cover crops in the corn or if you just want to add the living root. If you don't really want to deal with the livestock. So I've taken a corn and soybean system. I've hit one, two, three, four properties, principles of soil health with a couple of practices. Now I'm not saying this is the end of the game, but I'm saying this is a system that improves on it. But it has to be a system so that they understand that the tillage is part of it. Reducing tillage is part of it. It gets you into this. Having the living root helps you reduce the tillage. So in this system, I'd actually rather start here broadcasting that cover into the corn. Get that COI out there. Direct seed that into the COI next year so it gives them some traffic ability. And there's a higher success rate of that. This year we're going to come into a preventive plant that I want to see cover crops on. I'd like to see a lot of COI and I'd like to see those things set up for soybean. Potentially corn. If it's going to be corn, I'm going to change my mix a little bit. But to give them traffic ability so they can direct seed it. That's the thinking ahead of the system. It's not just, well, the problem is water. I'm going to dig it out. This can work. But broadcasting corn is more hit and miss than a lot of other things, especially the 30-inch corn. That's one of the reasons 60-inch corn is a big deal. But we've seen it work. This is rye. That's it. It's still adding diversity. And you can argue with me and say, that's not enough. Okay, I'm with you. But it's adding diversity and it's making a difference in this and that's moving in the right direction. And this is what it looked like after harvest. And we see these results fairly commonly. Here are some of the stumbling blocks for these folks. For the beginners, whether that's you or your neighbor. Residue management, right? How fun is that first time in a hotel when you didn't pay attention to the combine? That's really tough. But they don't know that unless you talk to them or tell them. So if you're that guy, don't raise your hand, but I'm telling you, manage your residue is your first thing for no-till. It's one of the main things you want to do. Get it back to where it came from. Okay? Broadcasting cover crops. Whether in herbicides or two big stumbling blocks. I think herbicides get blown way out of proportion, in my opinion. I've been testing this a little bit on some acres in the corner that don't get seeded. And I think herbicides are blamed for a lot of failures that are not related to herbicides. This last summer, we had this monstrosity cricket population. Like they were everywhere. The grown would move with these little buggers. And broadcasting rye was feeding the crickets. They love that stuff. And there was a lot of failures with the broadcast rye that were blamed on herbicide when there's 30 crickets per square foot. And they were eating the germ. You look at the rye seed and you can see they ate the germ off the rye seed and went to the next thing. No, I'm not ready to condemn crickets. Guys are like, well, I should have sprayed the crickets. Well, they eat seeds. They're not particularly whether it's rye or water hemp. They're my buddy. I'm okay with that. But understand, if you put it in the soil, you protected it from the cricket. So it was more of a misapplication by broadcasting it in that situation. All of this helps out. The traffic ability, I think, is one of the first stumbling blocks. When you get that new quarter, when you start getting into this, trying to get out and get across it before you've built your soil structure. I think that's why you need the plants and the cover crops and the diversity first in a lot of systems to do this. And then the water management. I put a note on there to show pictures. I'm sure you guys have seen this kind of yee-haw, like water, water everywhere. So this is a grower I work with. I don't work with all no-till guys. This is the grower that I work with and I'll show you another field of his that he's finally caving a little bit. This is what he had to do this fall because that field's gonna be too wet. And there's my pictures and there's the picture of my boots. Kitty corner across the corner, 50 yards away is this field that I've been arm-twisting him on. Same soil type, same field, same thing. Two years with a no-till. I'll take this one every day. This one's still too wet. That's still too wet. But it's a lot easier to manage. I got the guy to do one field and I'm thrilled. That is a huge gain. He doesn't like it. He complains about it. That no-till, ah, rah, rah, rah. He did two fields this fall. I'm hoping for 100% in time. It's gonna take time. His dad hates it. So let's talk a little bit about stepping it up a ton, a tad. I'm not gonna even talk about how I'll get to Derek's level because I'm not sure I know how to do that. Adding diversity and living good. Three to four cash crops. Three to four crops that you know how to make money on. So covers can be your cash crop if you can run them through livestock. They can bring back finances to you. To me, that's one of the really, really good ways to add livestock in covers pay. And I'm good with that. So if you can do that, that can be your third or fourth cash crop. But what I've seen in rotation systems with guys that are even conventional tillage guys, when they have four crops in their system, things change for the better. Management-wise. Weed pressure goes down. Disease pressure goes down. Water management increases. Just by having extra crops. And I'm not even talking about wild crops. Corn, soybean, wheat, and barley. Three of those are grasses. Wheat and barley are almost the same thing, but they are planted at a little bit different time. They do canopy at a little bit different time and they do harvest at a little bit different time and it makes a difference. It makes a difference. And the weed thing you'll hear people talk about, well you can use different herbicides in those. No, we're not using different herbicides in different crops. Not by a long stretch. It's a little bit different, but not a lot different. It's about timing. Canopy, harvest, planting. Different biology, different type of plant makes a huge difference on that. It makes a difference on insect populations and pathogens as well. You start adding reduced tillage to this and you really start getting some oomph in the system. You really start getting some things that are working. Because you're not destroying your biology here and you're out. You're allowing that to proliferate and continue to grow. You had a longer living road into that and there's nothing cool going on. So I'm asking growers to put in three cash crops, adding a small grain so they can put cover crops behind the small grain. Maybe still applying some broadcast stuff into their corn. And this is a pretty good soil health system. I've seen guys get to this level and just kind of hang out here and I've seen huge changes in their soils. Good changes. Reduced erosion, reduced salinity. Better nutrient cycling. All kinds of cool stuff. Better traffic ability. You want to plant 12 crops more power to you. I don't think it has to be that complicated. Strip till works. And I think one of the things about strip till is it's really really expensive in my opinion. And I think no till could work anywhere. But strip till helps people manage water. If you're having trouble establishing cover crops and getting cover crops to work in your system, strip till can help you manage water. Cover crops have been using to help us manage water. So that's another way to do it. And I'm okay with it. Like it's reducing the tillage by a lot. Specifically if they're only stripping in front of corn. So one out of three years are doing a strip till. Guys are hell bent on they got a place their fertilizer, their phosphorus at a certain point. Fine. That's a really good way to do it. I don't think you have to do that. I don't think you have to do a lot of things. But it works. So okay, cool. If that's where you're at and that's what you're comfortable with, do it. And here's a really simple thing that a lot of people don't do. Your fields don't have to be quarters or eighties or forties or square. Well hell, nothing in North Dakota Square. The boundary is but you can see there ain't a whole lot of square in there. Okay. This is the road. Heavily saline affected. You can see some saline effect here and here on this corner and over here. The roads dam up the water and they contribute to our saline problem. We ended up putting long-term grass in here. This is in CRP. I would rather have it in some type of hay or forage or grazing, because I think that's a better managed system. But rather than farming the salt ground we put it into something else for the landowners making some money. Then here's kind of the next level where there's a lot of water and there's a little bit of salinity. Instead of planting soybeans which don't grow in salinity, we plant a rye which can and can yield. It doesn't grow everywhere, but it grows a lot further than soybeans do. And he didn't have to have a thousand acres of rye. He had a hundred and fifty, total. And that was doable for this guy. When we planted the soybeans, where did the soybeans grow? Concept, right? Put them where it works. So these are three different fields in that quarter. And they're actually not that hard to manage. There isn't even that many boundaries or borders or any of that kind of stuff. If you spray it and plant it, the whole thing. Now you want to ramp it up a hair. This is a half section. This guy's got six crops. I don't even have them all in here. This is saline management area. We're not even really using the cash crop on here. This is a lot of cover crops. If he gets a little hay off it, it's a bonus. Okay? This is corn that had a ton of gosses wilt. We got hit with that with a poor variety one year, but the corn was still pretty good. This is a saline spot. Corn, again, doesn't like saline. So we didn't plant corn there. Planting corn in the saline spot is negative $350 an acre. That's what it is. So we put $30 worth of barley in there and came out positive $75 an acre. That was a swing of over 400 bucks on those acres. Anybody got time to plant five acres of barley for that? I would think so. Okay? And granted, the barley sucked. We didn't put any fertilizer on it. We didn't hardly spray it. We just treated it as a cover crop and we were able to harvest some barley out of it. This is a soybean field with some barley around all the low spots and they're really bad saline areas. You can see you probably should have went a little further, but you got to draw the line somewhere and that's what he did. Drew the line somewhere. Doesn't mean that we can't manage this acre better, but we've managed more. We're gaining on it, getting somewhere on it, going somewhere on it. That's kind of the point. His profitability is going through the roof with this soil health system. We're just farming the acres like they should be farmed. Like what works? Start adding three and four crops. Marketing becomes a significant issue. Now, when I listen to a lot of these guys that do a lot of soil health stuff, one of the things they're really, really good at is finding value-added markets. These guys are selling seed. They're going into organic markets. They're going into food grade markets. They're going into value-added stuff. They're going into the grass-fed beef type of things, things that people are paying them more for. One of the best successes I hear from these guys is how they market their crops. They actively seek out better markets. I think every farmer should do that. But take that page from their book and they'll all talk about it, but they don't really talk about it as being one of the key things to this. I think it is one of the key things to this because the profitability is super important. Find ways to market and get value out of what you're doing. But you're not going to haul flax to the local elevator. You can put it in your system. I read this point in my area of small grains for specialty. Okay. Here's the other stumbling block. I'm all on board with livestock editions. But let's be honest, cows aren't for everybody. Right? It's a different type of management. And there are some cash crop guys that have no business owning cows. And you know this. I know this. I grew up on a ranch that had all kinds of stuff. I'm not a cow guy. I'm a plant guy. I know this and I know where my limitations are. It doesn't mean you can't have cattle in your system, right? With you guys, your grazing trades and all that kind of stuff. And you can have the neighbor come in, graze your stuff, manage the cattle. Derek was talking about doing some of that too. That's a really good way to do it. But I think trying to get a cash crop guy who doesn't have the constitution to grow cattle is a train wreck waiting to happen and a really expensive one. And then this second system, you go into strip tiller. You're starting to buy more machinery and change things out. The no-till excuses, my drill can't do no-till as a lie anymore. It maybe was true 10, 20, 30 years ago. But there's a lot of drills that'll work even if they're not specifically designed for it. But when guys are learning about no-till, they have to learn how to set that drill. That's the first thing they have to learn. It's no longer fluff at four inches from end to end on the corner, right? Your soils change. With the residue, they change. Moisturize, they change. Texturize. Setting the drill and learning how to do that is really important. The other thing a conventional guy will argue with is down pressure. He will freak out when you hit 100 pounds down pressure. Anybody run under 200, 300 pounds in no-till? 400 pounds? Derek was showing up there? Sometimes you've got to give her the coals to get her in the ground, right? Seed placement's really important. These guys are all worried about compaction. Compaction in no-till? Not near as much because you have structure, right? So it changes your problem. I'm going to ramp it up a little bit, not Derek Axton level, but this diversity armor thing, the intercropping stuff. I had a grower play with this this year. This is really cool. I'm super excited with it. I think there's a lot of cool things you can do. It's easy to get more than four cash crops when you start adding two in one field. That's pretty cool. So your intercropping doesn't necessarily have to be a harvested crop or something that you're planning on. It can just be a crop in there for a reason to help your other crop. Like chickpeas and flax are an example. Flax with chickpeas reduces asca chyta dramatically, better than any fungicides do. So then these guys are getting away from fungicides. They've got the flax center to help with it, helps with standability, helps with disease and whatever flax they get is a bonus. A lot of guys are setting their combine to grow a cover crop now to grow. So you can add several covers in this kind of system because you can grow two at one time. You can grow oats and peas together, whatever you want. There's opportunity in there. This living root livestock, so overwintering covers and cover crops and then the perennials is really important. To me, that's another level that we need to get in agriculture. We need to get more perennials into these systems. And you can put perennials in a cash cropping system. You can definitely do it. L-felf is worth a lot of money. Even orchard grass can be worth a fair amount of money. Those things can be done. But the idea of these 60-inch rows with maybe even putting a perennial cover crop in between those 60-inch rows and farming those strips and alternating years is another way that we can possibly do this. So there's a lot of ways to do that. The nice thing about those perennials is that long-term living root. They're out there doing all kinds of work. There's consistency for the microbes, consistency for soil building. There's a lot of stuff going on. The other thing about perennials is that their nutrient demands are different. When we think about corn, corn gets really, really hungry at certain life stages. Keeping up with the nitrogen demands of corn at certain times of its life stage is really, really hard for your soil. A perennial has a longer, slower time than it wants nutrients. So it's much easier for your soil to provide those. I was talking to a guy earlier about this. It's kind of a water heater thing. When everybody's getting ready for church in the morning, family is six at my house. Everybody's getting ready for church in the morning. If everybody wants to take a shower, somebody's going to get a cold one. We are soils supplying nutrients and through all this biology and all these fun things that we're talking about, it's kind of like the water heater. There's a reservoir, and you draw upon it, and then that gets refilled. The biology helps refill that, but it does take time. So when you have a high demand crop like corn and potentially soybeans in these systems, it's harder for that biology to keep the hot water supply when that crop is hungry. When you look at it at perennial system, that crop gets hungry at times, but not near as hungry as that corn does or that soybean does for a short period of time. So it's like everybody taking a shower every two or three hours. The water heater's got plenty of time to refill and everybody gets a hot shower. I think that's the key for some of these guys that are able to reduce fertility. I think that's the key. I think that's really important that they're using different types of plants that have different demands at different times, and not everybody's hungry at the trough or standing there waiting to take a shower all the same time. That's part of it. I think that's why it's harder for guys in corn and soybean systems to back off fertility. Beginning of the reduced hill, there's a few guys doing the bio-stripped hill which I think is really, really cool. They're planting radish or frost kill in the rows that they want to plant corn into. Then they're planting another mix of covers in between. One guy I think of is Joe Brecker up in North Dakota who's doing a lot of this type of stuff. Then frost kills in the middle. He's got a nice bare strip, so to say, low residue strip where he wants to put his corn. He thinks his corn does better in our environments that way. Yet he still has residue cover for reduced erosion and good soil structure that he can terminate whenever he wants. That's another way of doing it. It's a strip hill, but it's not till. It's just using biology to do that. Running low on time. Some of my things on this are separating intercrops. Derek talked about it. Did you see his plant? That's just something you can throw together tomorrow. Even the first one with the three trucks and four augers and returns and back and forth. He's one good man running. I had no doubt in that. How long did it take one good man to figure out how to do that? I made it work. To keep this stuff in mind, we have these really good ideas. I'm going to mix this and that, and I'm going to get double a crop. This one's worth this. How are you going to get them separated to do that? We've seen guys screw this up with Ryan, Harry Vetch. They're actually pretty close in size. They can be separated, but not cheaply. If you're just going to expect he might not be able to do it. He might not want to do it. It might cost you a lot of money to do it. Think about that before you start mixing things together. How are you going to get them apart? There's other ways you've got a really expensive cover crop mix. That's anything. The other thing about these things, when you're stretching it out, adding different crops, adding different timings, the planting never stops. The harvesting never stops. There's no seasons anymore. That can be good and bad both. It changes how things are happening. So labor gets to be a significant issue. And weather is always a problem. We're talking about biological systems that need rain and the right amount of temperature and heat to do what you want them to do. We don't always get that. Here's some of this cool stuff. This is one of my favorite farmers. He hates having his face on the picture, so he's always ducking away. This radish is 28 days old. I planted it out for field peace. I love that radish. This is in a mix of other things. We have reasons for every crop in there. We have a reason to put them all in there. He went to stripper header and more control traffic. The grain cart doesn't wander through the field. It follows the tracks. That's the biggest issue because it makes it easier for him to seed after the stripper header instead of laying the straw in different directions. It's not necessarily control traffic, but it kind of is. Adding multiple systems into this. This is four species mix. I'm cool with that. You want to do more, great, but we're covering a lot of bases. Cool season grass, warm season grass, cool season broadleaf and a legume in four species. Pretty cool. To separate the seeds, this is with a disc drill. One's small seeds in the back tank, larger seeds in the bigger tank. We actually threw a little pea with this. You can yell at me for that. It's set up for corn. This guy's not quite there where the biology is working. He's getting a lot of things. He's getting his phosphorus supplied. He's getting a cover crop out there. He's getting things prepped up. It's working. This is saline spot where we were planting soybeans. The idea was that we knew the soybeans were going to grow here, so instead of 1152, we put barley in the back tank because it grows better there. The idea was that the grower would shut the soybeans off. When he hits this, he didn't necessarily because they might grow. Obviously, the soybeans did not grow. The barley did. Now I've got a cover crop in my soybeans. It doesn't have to be on every acre. We needed it on these acres. It helped reduce the salinity. It helps manage the kosher. It helps do a lot of things. We got a little creative with our herbicides, and we never killed the barley. It's doable. This is the intercropping. They call them, Atlanta called it fleas. Flax and peas. The idea here was just to get the flax to hold the peas up. These are yellow peas. They're always flat on the ground at the end of the year. Harvesting at one mile an hour in one direction is pretty hateful, but the guy makes good money on them. He loves the peas for the cover cropping and all that kind of stuff. We put some flax in there. We did two different rates. 12 pounds on one, 20 pounds on the other. He did two acres or three acres of each just to try it. It was amazing. It held the peas up to this height. We think we gained a lot of bushels just because we weren't on the ground with the vacuum cleaner attachment on the combine. He was able to triple his harvest speed. He was up to almost three and a half mile an hour. He was thrilled about it. We're going to do more of it. Did it help with diseases? I don't know. It helped hold the peas up. It was worth it. There's some flax in there. He's got to separate. Peas and flax are big. It's easy to separate. This is a later picture. The flax was a little bit late compared to the peas. We were going to look for an earlier variety of flax. This is some biostriptil. These are fava beans planted into cereal rye. This was a trial. The idea here is that fava bean is pretty cold tolerant. It grows up really well. It uses a fair amount of water. It would help dry out the strip. And the residue turns black. It grew corn this year. I don't know. It worked. I guess. I don't know if it was worth doing, but it's worth trying. We have minutes left. We have to do this too. Is it working? Are you gaining? There are some really easy ways to do this. There are some cool soil health tests that you can send to the lab. These guys give out shovels and everybody talks about shovels. The shovel is your friend. It's the most important tool that you have. You take the shovel. You look for aggregates. You can do some infiltration. You look at this lake test. You can do it on your farm. It's not hard to do. I think you should be doing it. Early on, middle, later, every couple of years you should be doing this. You pick up a new cord or do this. If you don't have new land, go to the neighbor's land and compare it to yours. That kind of thing. You think of that soil, folks. That one has got a ways to go. It would be pretty good to make bricks out of it. This one is pretty lumpy and chunky and not a whole lot of structure. You can see that there was a slab cut out of here. There are really no pore spaces. There's roots in there. There's residue in there. There's no wormholes. There's no structure. There's none of that. This is what I want your stuff to look like. Okay? Now, notice there's a fracture layer here. This is a compaction zone. This is a natural compaction zone based on a soil texture change. This was not built by traffic or driving across. This is natural inherent to this soil. It's there. It's not restrictive, but it's there. So not everything's going to just go away. These are my favorite pictures. I love to do this. Take a handful of soil and take pictures. These are the aggregates, folks, and if you don't know what I'm looking for in the shovel, this is it. I don't want to see flour. I don't want to see fluff. I want to see Lego blocks and chunks. I want to see your soil held together in these aggregates. I'm not particularly concerned about what shape they are, but some soil scientists are. Some shapes are fine. This is a loamy soil. This is 60% clay. Look at how wet that is. That is glistening with water. That first shovel I showed you, that slab of dirt, was across the road. Okay? This is what it can look like, and it can hold you up, and it can be structural. And this is 70% sand. You can see the sand grains in there. You can build structure you're working with that matters, but you can build it. I want to see roots in biology. This is not a compaction layer. It's an obvious layer. Roots don't like to grow through water. Standing water. This field was very, very wet. One of the reasons we threw radishes in it. When this radish grew down early on, there was a water restrictive layer right here. And the roots would rather be oxygenated, wet soil than total water. As that went down, the roots go down. Not every root deviation is compaction. Water infiltration test, slag test. This is it. Stick with the science. Be questioning. Watch out for experts. Including me. Especially me, maybe even. Just because it's my opinion doesn't make me right. That's what I had. I don't know if I went too long. Okay, I went a little long. One or two questions, I guess. I'll be around, too. One thing I want to let people know is that we were lucky enough that the last two years at Lee came down to our soil health school. So how would you like to be around this for two and a half days? It's not a good thing. When you're out in the field, you're actually running the soil through his fingers and explaining that. He's getting his magnifying glass out showing you the mycorrhizae and stuff. If you guys are even thinking about going to soil health school, we hope to entertain him again. But anyway, we've got time for a couple. Okay, we've got any questions? Perhaps a dirty word but I'm going to bring it up. Drainage. Drainage spots. Drain tile. Move water. So the question is, what about drain tile for saline spots? The issue with salinity is water. Water is the main issue. It dissolves the salts in the soils, brings them to the surface. That's what happens. Evaporation is a strategy to make saline worse every time I can prove it. It'll cover up the white, but it makes saline worse. So moving the water. There's two ways to move water. There's plants and there's pipes. Those are the two ways to move water. When you're moving it through a plant, it evaporates into the air. So your sink or your source where you're depositing the water is in the water vapor in the air. When you run pipes, you've got to have a place to put the water. So in my territory, some of these saline spots could be drained with tile drainage to move the water, but some of these don't have outlets. So that's, to me, that's one of the largest things. The other thing about this, and this is I love saying this too because I'm glad I used to play basketball. I don't do that anymore. Maybe I should, but I don't. I've changed. I've gone through aging. Your soils age and change. These saline areas may have been the best in 88 and 89 when we were really dry. They're no longer the best areas because of the water that's been there for so long. They've changed and dried. So a significant investment in tile may not pay you back very well because I'm never going to play basketball again. I can lose weight, but I'm never going to play basketball again. So they can get better, but it may not get good enough that you can get the money back off of that. And I think some of these saline areas should never, ever be planted to susceptible crops again, to the most susceptible of corn and soybean. We've got time for one more question. Someone's got to have one. It's way too much talent up here not to ask that question. You're bragging me up too much, Danny. Okay, here we go. We're going to talk to our friends in Canada. By adding flax to your peas in the polycrop, that will eliminate fungicide application. We haven't been using the fungicide because we haven't seen significant enough results. So we did use it just to see if we could get something out of it. So I'm not in an area that grows a lot of peas. Okay, keep that in mind. So there's very few peas. I think that adds to why I don't have as much disease. And we just try to harvest them early. We did flaxen peas and a strip with fungicide. And we did peas without flax and a strip of fungicide. And we couldn't see any differences in the fungicide of applications for yield. That's what I can say. I had a ton of diseases here because we were stupid wet and the fungicide didn't do a whole lot to disease because we had so much pressure. In chickpeas, I think it will every time. But I don't know about field pea. It's least stated he'll be around. Don't be afraid because you're just such a caring person. If he could help somebody, he'd be willing to do it.