 One of the first things I'd like to do is thank all our sponsors that helped us put together and provide input and money for today's event. I'm going to just read through the list. South Dakota Wheat Commission, Farm Credit Services of America, Wheat Growers, Mustang Seed, Monsanto, Prairie State Seeds, Next Level Ag, LLC, Millboard Seeds, La Crosse Seeds, Dakota Best Seed, Agronomy Plus, Farmers Eliacs, Mitchell, First Dakota National Bank, C&D Operations, Davis County Amplement, Scott Supply, CropTech, Ducks Unlimited, Aurora County Conservation District, Davis County Conservation District, Hanson County Conservation District, South Dakota Noctil Association, SDSU Extension, USDA and NRCS, and Pioneer Hybrids of Dupont, so let's give them all a welcome round of applause. Anyway, you guys, without any more, this is Dwayne Beck from Dakota Electric Research. This is just how we move wire. You can see there's wire on that irrigator. These are lateral moves that move straight. We also have pivots that go around, but we just have the wire running through there in those buckets. There's a rope hanging down with a fence post on it, and those buckets give it just enough weight that the fence doesn't blow and stuff like that. So that works pretty good. You do like Dan does, you get Cody to do it, and Casey, you know. But these are bar JZ cattle, and once we started moving, if they could hear the irrigator, you can see them. My daughter took that with her cell phone, so it was into the sun. You can't see it so good, but terrible place to work. It's kind of like here when you look out the window, but as soon as they heard that motor, the irrigation pivot motors run, and they're just a whir. They're not very loud, but they could hear them, and they'd come at a dead run. So we were actually moving out of corn stocks into swath grazing. I just had moved that pivot, and I was in the process. And then I've got the next set will show them moving from this field into the corn stocks. So we had a time, what we did is we swath grazed between, I'll show you all the quality and stuff, but we swath grazed between this oats and pea cover crop that was growing behind winter wheat and then corn stocks. And so we balanced the diet. That thing Ken was talking about is exactly right. It's exactly the thing we do with farm ground in terms of trying to build organic matter and feed them soil micro-oriented. It's exactly the same thing, and everybody wants to do turnips and radishes and clover and whatever. Well, that's not enough carbon. You've got too much nitrogen and you just burn it up. And you've got to have the balanced diet. Now here the cows are moving. We've moved this lateral move down here. They're moving. You'll notice if you look closely, they mostly have collars on, and they have little fit bits on their feet. And what those collars do is tell you how much their head is moving up and down and eating, and then the fit bit tells you how many steps. And to be real honest with you, I haven't analyzed all that data yet, because there's just a mountain of data that we've got to take care of. This big draw here, there's some tall grass prairie there, and this big draw there with tall grass prairie. That's our area that they could get into when it got cold and crappy, and that's something you got to think about is windbreaks and stuff until we had that Christmas blizzard. That's what happened. Now I moved the pivot again, and you can watch them coming from back over here at a dead run down to this pivot. So they really liked the swathed pea stuff because that was the candy, but you also have to, it's like we're joking here, everybody's coming over and getting rolls, right? It's a bit too much carbohydrate. And those of you that had hamburgers, you got a chance because you had your protein, right? But I'm not sure, you might have to eat another steak before you leave here if you eat two of them anymore. So, Dakota Lakes Research Farm was owned by farmers, and actually the idea for Dakota Lakes started at the old steakhouse, down over the hill one night after field day in the 80s. And some guys said, well, we should have a research farm. And I just said, you don't want the government to own it. You want to own it yourself. Because the government owns it, you can never tell what's going to happen. And you got to have the government involved, and that's me to a certain extent working for SDSU, but we have to have the farmers own it, and Dan is actually our president now. So, our Board of Directors is important to us. I'm just going to be real brief today. The climate will change, but it will still be a continental climate. We'll still have cold winters here, relatively cold winters, cold and dry. Normally winters will have hot and dry summers. That's not going to change. Now, it's going to change a bit, but we're still going to be a continental climate. We're not going to turn into a California or a Florida. A bigger issue, though, and at least in your lifetime in the next 600 years or something, which is beyond our lifetime, degradation of the ecosystem will have more potential impact. And I just wrote one of those articles for Farm Journal that at one time we had the Cronins involved in. And now I've got a guy from Nebraska that I'm working with. But I talked about that, and especially as you sit along the Missouri River here. And one of the things I think about is all the people used to travel up and down this river and think of what they found when they came through here, and how is it different now from when it was when they came? And, you know, four or five hundred years or when Lewis and Clark came through. And it wasn't like what the Revenant showed, by the way. That was supposed to be here, but we don't have the big forests and stuff. We didn't have that much climate change in the last 200 years. But anyway, but what we've done is we took the land around Gettysburg and we took the organic matter down to half of what it was when we came here. And so it didn't hold as much water, and it wasn't as resilient as it should have been. And so when I taught school here in 1975 through 78, which some of you didn't know, but a lot of you did, she was a student, not one of mine, but she was a student. She's like a freshman when I left. But we had dirt blown over the road all the time. And we could only do wheat and summerfowl. And look at what's different now. And it's because we started to restore that soil to where it should be. And it holds more organic matter than it did in 1976 and not as much as it did in 1776. So this is the thing we need to look at. And that's the thing we talk about. And cattle, I think, integration plays a role in that. Ecosystems harvest sunlight, energy, and drive all other processes. Removing the products from the ecosystem reduces the energy available. One of the worst things you can do is make hay on a piece of ground. And haul the hay off and not bring anything back. It's one of the worst things you can do to an ecosystem. And so our north unit, if you're familiar with our farm, we've got a half section, a big half section plus a 40, five miles north. And it had been hayland for a guy from the 1930s on. Incredibly degraded ecosystem. And we bought it in 2000 and now we've got it somewhat restored. At least it's way better than what it was when we took over. It's better than the neighbor's pasture that's overgrazed. Right, before it probably wasn't. Nutrients are all the nutrients available for plant use or environmental services or have they been leached, eroded or transported from the landscape if you've got saline seeps and those kind of things. It's because your nutrients are leaving where they belong and going someplace else. That's fertilizer in those saline seeps. And we're going to eventually have to put perennials systems back in there to suck up those nutrients and big them back to the top and then graze them and put them back into place. That's what happened in the native prairie. Cover crops will help us balance our water cycle a little better, but they won't totally do it on their own. Ecosystems that leak nutrients turn into deserts. That's what's happened in North Africa and all these places. Think about Israel. The land of milk and honey. Climate hasn't changed that much in the intervening years. What happened is they degraded the ecosystem and you can read a thing that a guy by the name of Lottermilk wrote in the 1930s. It's just phenomenal what he found when he went to Israel and looked at what the soils are and what they should have been. But we're doing the same thing. A 120 car train of soybeans contains 400,000 pounds of phosphorus. Think of how many unit trains go out of Selby and all these little circle tracks here and there and across the United States and they're all going someplace like China. They're not going to send that phosphorus back to us. So we're mining. When we're doing that, we're mining. We're not farming, we're mining. We're going to send the soybeans out, send them across the road. February 20th, last Saturday, or last something like that, it cost $2.25 a bushel to ship corn to the west coast from Aberdeen. I had an elevator manager from Aberdeen talking to me on the phone and he says it's costing me $2.25 a bushel to ship my corn to the west coast. Does that make any damn sense? It doesn't make any sense to me. Why the hell are we doing this? And then they're going to feed animals over there with it and then their phosphorus is there. So we're spending that kind of money and then we're sending the phosphorus with it. A coal train contains 7,200 tons of coal but when you're digging up coal you're admitting to be a miner. That's what you do. You take an oil out, you're a miner. You know you're going to take it and it's just going to be gone. When we started farming and organic matter went down, it was the same thing. We took the organic matter out and gassed it off, right? And it would take at least one coal train per half section just for the top six inches of rain, I mean the top six inches of soil to take all the organic matter that we lost just out of the top six inches. One coal train per half section. So if we're going to restore two percent, I mean two percent in the top six inches if we're going to do that down to two or three foot just think how many train loads of coal we'd have to bring back in. It's amazing. So we're partially using cover crops to large extent to catch carbon in the air and put it in the soil. One of the things I talk a lot and Danny's heard me do this but when you ship out oil we're working with cold pressing sunflowers and soybeans and flax and whatever and we cold press it, we get the oil out of it. We got good meal. I gave Don a bucket of soybean meal that we use for a protein supplement. The stuff that's left when we press the oil out and now when we ship the oil out all we've shipped out is carbon dioxide and water. There's no minerals in there. And Mother Nature brings you back water, she brings you back carbon dioxide in the air and if we do it right she brings you back nitrogen in the air. We're not transporting anything. Now if we use those things here and keep all the minerals here then we cut down this big transportation thing in 600 years or 200 years or 100 years this transportation thing is just going to get a bigger and bigger and bigger problem. So there's our catching the nitrogen we call this catching release nutrients. I stole that from a guy in North Dakota but I got another one from Jay Fuhrer the other day. I didn't put it in but he said a light bulb did not result from somebody incrementally trying to make candles better. Right? We got to start thinking different. So I just keep trying to do what we're doing to do it a little bit better. We'll still have a damn candle. So 1970 the average wheat price was $1.37 a bushel. Average price of barrel oil is $3.39. Price of barrel oil today is just south of 60 bucks and wheat is about three and a half or four. Think about that. 80% of the total input cost in agriculture can be traced directly to energy. So incrementally trying to do better and better and still relying on all this energy doesn't make any sense because we're losing. Oil is going up faster. 120 years ago we essentially were zero. Don brought his dad down, John. He's 103. And he looked at the cows. You remember what he said? He said they're eating the swaths and he says well they're baling, they're hauling the bales and they're hauling the manure back out. Right? I'm going yeah, that's it. I thought that was pretty good. He got the essence of the whole thing right there. 120 years ago that was zero. 120 years from now we're going to have to be zero again, right? Now, today we're talking about grazing. Why? Hell and savory has been mentioned a few times and he talked about brittle environments or dry climates, right? Well, he's saying it's a hoof action. I think it's also in dry climate soil biology slows or stops during periods of low moisture. The rumen of grazing animals remains moist and continuing those biological processes. The processes in the soil are almost exactly the same as the process in the rumen. There's almost no difference. And somebody said, and I thought it was Darwin but I can't find the quote, but somebody called the soil the rumen of the earth. And if you know who that was, Cody, that was me. That was you that did that. It was after you left the school of mines, right? Yeah. But that's the idea behind grazing animals being important in dry climates or relatively more important in dry climates. In cold climates the same thing. Soil biology slows during times of low soil moisture or as low soil temperatures. The rumen of grazing animals are always warm. They keep it going during the winter. That's the role. We're cycling it. We're not getting rid of the organic matter, we're cycling it, okay? So here are some of our cover crops. Our oats and pea thing. We sloth it. The sloths have to be relatively big so they don't get covered up with snow. The Canadians are not worried about snow depth. You know, those cows that go out there in really deep snow if they can see it, they will drive on it. If it gets to be hard snow they'll just drive a tractor on it. Or a pickup and just to break the snow. But we had some pretty deep snow and it didn't seem to bother the cows a bit. That's what it looks like in the fall. You know, nice and green in there. It stayed green like that until basically we were done grazing. Until it was all gone. We had a couple fields where we had oats, peas and rapeseed. Winter wheat stubble was going to be seeded to corn in 2017. In this field in particular we had 7,700 pounds of biomass per acre, 18.2 percent protein and 121 relative feed value. 03, which was that pivot you saw. A little bit less biomass, not a lot. 17.4 protein, 115. Now, since Ken was here you saw me goofing with the computer because I went back and got some... He started using something I didn't have on there. So he was using TDN. So our TDN was 72 percent on these oat, pea, rapeseed things. Protein 17.4, that ratio is 4 to 1. So it's too hot. If all we did is graze that, that's too hot. We're just going to waste it. It's like you guys eating nothing but steak. You need to have some carbohydrate to go with it. So we were grazing these swaths at the same time we were allowing the cows to have access to corn stocks. Not corn, but corn stocks after harvest and that's how we balance the diet. And so one of the things if you're planning to do cover crops it'd be good to plan to have some source of corn stocks or perennial pastures or something like that you could use for your filler, so to speak. And that's what we did. We could vary the moves to make them go to the corn stocks and get full instead of just eat the oats. So this is the reason for grazing the material in association with low quality corn stock aftermath. At the end of the grazing period, mid-January, when Don came and got the cows, we had a few swaths left and went and pulled a sample out of those last swaths. 16.8, still 16.8 versus just 17-something. TDN is 65.1 and still had a relative fee value of 95. So we lost a little bit of quality, but not very dang much in that period. So I'm fairly confident in these here. Now if I lived, I grew up in Platt, which is just west of course, so in that area a little bit more fall rains and stuff, it might be a bit different, but in this country I'm not afraid of that thing at all. So what we did, here's a rope coming down from the irrigators. That bucket, there's two wires, one here and here, and yeah, we should have had a third. When it gets really iced up, you should have that ground in the middle. So we had a couple cows. I can give you the numbers. You'd move them back through the fence and they'd turn around and come right back through. I know this thing isn't going to hurt me because it's icy. Now here I'm moving, I said we should be moving perpendicular to the swaths. We just couldn't arrange it to do that this year, the way we had things set up. So we're moving like Larry was parallel to the swaths and it's not ideal, but we didn't have, we were done with this field before we had snow. We moved about every day and a half we gave them two swaths or 60 feet. And you can kind of see this, these are where the moves before. We didn't have a back fence here. We had water on this road and then there was corn stocks on the other side of the road. But then about every five or six days we would throw back fence in or some side fence so they couldn't get back and just loaf around back over here. Back there. They cleaned it up pretty well and you can see down through there the wheat stubble, this is 120 bushel wheat stubble underneath. This is the stubble from the oats. And they left the stubble, they ate the swath, they left the stubble, and then we had all the stuff from the crop that we had harvested laying down in there. So there's good armor there and you can see it's high quality stuff. And we did fecal sample and they haven't gotten those back yet. But we did fecal sample on a regular basis and we thought that worked pretty good last year when we did study to tell us if we're getting a little low on protein. There it's coming through corn stocks. On wheat stubble that would be seeded to soybeans we put in oats, germ and millet, brown, red, red, sorghum, sedan. And somebody talked about this, not quite as much biomass because it didn't grow into that late fall this year. You know, that sorghum stuff quits relatively early. Protein's a little lower, relative fee value is pretty good. That's what it looked like where the hay mill is just starting to head out. Oats is coming up through there. That's what it looked like in the swath. This is actually from a year ago. I took these and there we had the swaths running this way and we're removing the fence perpendicular to the swaths. And we had quite a bit of snow a year ago and they would just follow that swath just fine. You can't see where that swath is, but it's there. But that tells them there's a swath there. And as soon as you move that wire they'll just come to those spots and there's like 12 or 15 of them in the way they go. We like bigger buckets better than the small buckets. The five gallon buckets work better, actually. So these were bar JZ cattle, mature cows, various genetics. You can ask Don about that. Late second trimester. And we had a few opens in there. 60 day grazing period initial weight of 1392 pounds. Final weight of 1449. 47 pound gain. So I did that wrong. 57 pound gain. Typo. Typo, I've been looking at that. No, they gain more now. And there was a few that didn't gain. A couple of them lost some weight and there's some that did way better than the others, which is kind of interesting. But we did a 60 days, 47 acres of oat pee and six acres of that millet stuff and then 75 acres of corn stock. Swath oat pee, we shot for a grazing or what we had was a grazing intensity of 5 AUM per acre on those cover crops, the high quality stuff and then since we had more acres of corn stocks. Now we were doing these at the same time, so the average was about a two. Is really what you get out of that if you do it and then we just give them mineral and salt at lib. You can't possibly write this down in time. But they're going to have a copy but all I did is you just Google Swath Grazing Alberta and you'll get this. Now the government of Saskatchewan and Alberta and Manitoba have worked on swath grazing since I've been married and we've been married 29 years and we ran into this then. And one of the reasons they really did a lot of this, especially in the interim, is mad cow disease because if you lived in Canada and you're a cow calf guy 15 years ago an old cow, killer cow, was worth 7 cents, American. So you've got to take something out of your system in order to be profitable or you've got to get out of the business and this is one way they did it. And they did this couple of these large studies. Somebody showed something from University of Brandon or whatever. It was actually Ag Canada Brandon. It was one of the stations and they took a 600-cow herd and split it into three herds at 200. One set stayed in the feedlot all year. One set feedlot in the winter and they went out into perennial pastures in the summer. The other set at 200 just was in fields, grazing. Annual crops in production fields. The one that performed the best, they went in for five or six weeks and calved them. They went into the buildings. But other than that, they were out doing their thing and the best herd health, the best performance, the best whatever was the ones that were out. The new manager, the Ag Research Center in Rapid City, the western campus of SDSU, so to speak. The livestock people were Kenworks. The new person there, they were hiring. They were interviewing for that position. I was on the committee and we came down to the last two and I asked both of them the question, do you think there'll be feedlots in 40 years? What a curveball, right? If you're somebody applying for a job and some guy asks you that question. One of them answered, the one that actually got the job, immediately said no. And then the follow-up question is how do you change the way you do Ag Research in western South Dakota to get ready for the eventuality of not having calves go right to feedlots? Now, why do I think there probably won't be feedlots in 40 years, 60 years, whatever? Because you've got antibiotic resistance. You've got huge problems with energy to take, you know, do silage. I don't know what your silage cutting costs, Danny. A lot. I mean, that's the way you say that. And bailing and hauling and whatever. And then you have to try to haul the nutrients back out. And we saw the day to day already that if, in fact, cow peas in a feedlot versus peeing out in the field, it's a huge difference in terms of nitrogen. It's a huge difference in terms of phosphorus cycling. So we really don't have a choice. We need to get them back out in the field. I mean, it's not one of those things like we have a choice. It's one of these things that we're going to be forced to do it eventually, so we're better off to do it when we start. So that's a good place. These are really interesting videos. And Raleigh Leesman, who isn't here, but I hope to bring him today, but he's heading to Falls for the wrestling tournament. His son's in the wrestling tournament. And he didn't want to get stuck not being there. But he wintered 400 head of cows on 370 acres of corn. Failed corn this year. He wintered 400 acres of cows on 370 acres of failed corn. He had 370 acres of failed corn north of Blunt. Some gravelly ground got dry. And he wintered his whole herd there. I said, well, you know, he was just, and I said, why the hell didn't you just put your cows in there? You know, I told him to build fences and stuff. He didn't necessarily do that, but they're still there. And he said, it's the most money you ever made from corn. And it failed. He got his insurance payment, right? Plus he grazed all these cows. He hadn't fed any hay or any silage all year. And I sent him this link. And then I started getting texts last night. He was watching these videos. And he sent me all these texts and commenting and whatever. And I'm going, OK. This picture was taken just on the outskirts of Lloyd Minster's Saskatchewan about 12 years ago. Lloyd Minster's Saskatchewan is right straight east of Edmonton. Long ways north, right? Long ways north, long ways north of the border, probably four or five hours north of the border. Right on the Alberta Saskatchewan border, the border of Alberta and Saskatchewan goes right through the middle of Lloyd Minster. So it's kind of like Pier Fort Pier only. There's not a river there. It's just a line, just like a little sign. They have been doing this for a long time. They grow corn just to graze. Now, more goats, more cows, more sheep. Why do you say goats? Number one meat eaten in the world is goat. Just so you cowboys don't get too arrogant. In Africa, all the little girls take care of the goats, right? 100% grass-fed ground beef. This was produced in Aberdeen, South Dakota by col-cows in Montana. Bring them to Aberdeen, feed them on cover crops and they're grass-fed because they haven't had grain. Interesting concept. Four bucks a pound. The world's supply of minable fosters will be exhausted in less than 120 years. And the people that have the minable fosters are not our friends. Probably even more so now. Use of perennial sequences or perennial cover crops will probably be necessary to get our nutrient cycling, right? Mother Nature does not do tillage unless it's a catastrophic event and she does not export nutrients. Okay? All tillage tools are soil structure. All tillage tools to treat water infiltration. All tillage tools reduce organic matter and all tillage tools increase weeds. And in Central, South Dakota, we all know this. I'm heading to Missouri next week. They don't know this. They're really slow learners in Missouri. Mother Nature does not care... What was that? Show me. Yeah, show me, right. She does not care which species survive or die, right? We don't have to do this to save the planet. The planet will be fine without us, and that will be without us unless we do something different. Bureaucracies, like universities, governments and corporations are operated by people with limited tenure. Some with shorter tenure than others. Whatever. That joke worked better last week. They have short-term goals, right? They're just thinking about three, four years. In society, landowners, farmers, family farmers, we need to have long-term research, and that's what Dakota Lakes does. Farmers and ranchers harvest sunlight, carbon dioxide, and water produced products we can sell. It doesn't make any difference. Some of this is human food, so we need to be aware of a nutritional issue and its off-site impacts. If we want to eat meat, maybe we should concentrate on growing meat. Instead of corn and barley, it goes to feed lot and feeds to animals. It doesn't make any sense. Peak oil is when you're half done with oil production. In the world, peak phosphorus, we've hit both peak oil and peak phosphorus already. Peak soil. When half of the soil is screwed up, we're probably past that. Nobody is panicked other than me. Take the E out of ET, take the T out of Kant, and remember that doing the right thing environmentally is almost always the correct economic approach in the long run. Think about that one. There. It's supposed to be snowing by now, Danny. I figured, does everybody be heading for the door? I made it really short.