 In 2013, the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service entered into a cooperative agreement with the South Dakota No-Till Association and IGRO, SDSU Extension, for delivering the latest soil health and productivity technology to South Dakota farmers and ranchers. A series of four local events were held in South Dakota in Sioux Falls, Watertown, Belfouche, and Mitchell. I have a hard time remembering names, not because I graduated from South Dakota State, but because I did that in 1972, and I started to work at South Dakota State in August of 61. So let's see, 2014, that's a 50-30 year I'm starting my career, so it's been fun. And these new things and what Mike just talked about, holy cow, I hope I can supplement a little bit of what he's been saying, and soil health score is what we're talking about today. And what I've done is using Rick Haney's slides, kind of his information, to talk about this soil health score. So just to give a count to him, and a handout that's in your pamphlet or in your booklet is from Rick Haney, written by Rick Haney. So we're trying to follow these things as we go along and just talk about some of those things. So nature's way, that's kind of, we're trying to get back to somewhat like Mother Nature did things. And the growth of skin, the growth of skin for a living system, cycles, nutrients, diverse, no monoculture, six of balance, integrated, has research and development experience, and builds plant growth networks. And you show this soil up here in the granular structure, and one of the simplest things that we can remember on our operation is looking at the soil structure. And we don't talk about it, I don't think we talk about that quite enough. You need to be out looking at your soil, and if you pick soil up and it's got organic matter in there, and all the pores, all the, maybe you'll see a mold, kind of white stuff. You know you've got a living thing, or you've got a worm in that little sample. All those things are what you need to look for. And this is where we come from. Why do we do it? It says strip off the soil skin, and you know these things, that's where I grew up. That's what we did. And my dad applied the ditches shut so he'd come by and weed down southeast Nebraska. And so we just had a lot of that, maybe not so much of this kind of thing here. But I see these pictures in California this year where all the dams are drying up, and you see that kind of a crushing thing. So destroys organic matter, increased erosion, increased inputs, wastewater, distruct, root networks, and so as an example of what we did of the soil in, I got a soil survey of Selene County, Nebraska, 1932 published. In 1879, average soil was 40 bushel. In 1889, it was 47 bushel. And in 1889, they had planted 140,000 acres of corn in Selene County, which was county 50 miles south of Lincoln. And then I graduated from high school in 1955, and the average dry land corn yield in Selene County in 1955 was nine bushel. That was with hybrid corn. The 47 bushel was with open pollinated corn. And you can relate your two grandparents of how we deteriorated the soils. There's strictly losing soil by erosion and doing tillage to get the nutrients out of the organic matter. And as we take nutrients out of the organic matter, we would destroy that organic matter. And we'd beat the heck out of the soil for 70, 80 years. And we ended up there in 1956. I started to college, started to learn that you could put nitrogen on. And so these inputs come in. And we started getting the farmers to put fertilizer on. And the crops yields come back up. And then we finally figured out that if we would stop beating the heck out of the soil, we could improve yields more. And maybe reduce some input cost. And this just shows that kind of thing. Rick has this example. He says, it's a great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great problems. Technology, apply. And so today, so why was it going to do that? You know, we're driving down the highway, and I get scolded a lot because that do too much farming anyway while I'm driving them. But once in a while, she say, don't look when she sees this. But I just don't understand that in the, well, because you guys are doing this kind of thing and understand these things. And so if our ancestors didn't have a good planting system to plant directly into the soil, and so that's why tillage is done. But if we had that, what would have been different today? The only thing I don't like about that picture is that they tilled soil in both sides of that drill. But what do we use that? So what can we do about this thing? And that's what we're talking about, is how do we improve the soil health, the soil quality? And he's got here, plant cutter crops. And we're trying to don't till. And then we increase nutrient cycling in what the cover crops is what you're really doing is increasing nutrient cycling. And then that increases water conservation. And that increases organic matter. This is kind of the story that we're after. And in a corn-soybean rotation, sometimes it's difficult to think, how can you get a cover crop established in that? And you know, one thing that Mike just said, with those oats and the amount of mycorrhizae that that oats produce, I think maybe we ought to start thinking about, what did we do after harvest in the fall? And maybe start thinking about, what could we do in the spring before we plant corn or soybeans? I think we might be missing something there. So we had long ways to go to understand how to do all these things. And if you got wheat in the rotation, well, it's kind of easy to plant a cover crop into a wheat cell, but some of these other things are more difficult. So harvest of light, of course that's all we're about. And when we have tours in our laboratory, Karni, you know, asked students, I like to ask the students these dumb questions. Like, what did you eat for breakfast or what did you eat for lunch? And it goes right back to this photosynthesis thing. All we really ate was sunlight. We got the energy from the sunlight and the plants converted it so we could use it. And so then I tell some guys, if you come home with little tips at night, just say you've been drinking sunlight, not moonshine, sunlight. So, concert salt moisture with transpiration and not evaporation. And this is the other thing that we're dry land agriculture. We get precipitation, it goes in here, and then evaporation. How do we stop this? And most of the guys say 30% of the evapotranspiration water, 30% of that's evaporation. And all we have to do is cover this soil and the better cover we got on it, the more we can slow that evaporation. So when we get cover there to stop evaporation, we got chance to grow better crops. This is the model thing here on the leaf surface. That's how it opens to let carbon dioxide in the leaf. And when that's open, it goes out of the leaf, water. So if we can have more cover here, let's give it on CO2, then these stomata don't have to open as far. And we actually have a little better water use. It takes less transpiration water. We got more CO2 in the atmosphere. So, Jerry Hackfield aims, he says that in Iowa, he's got these meters, the carbon dioxide meters around the state of Iowa. And after corn harvest in the fall, his carbon oxide level increases 40 to 60 part per million because the Iowa farmers are doing damage. That's carbon oxide for the plants the next summer. And we don't talk enough about the carbon plant nutrient, but 40% of the plant is carbon. And if we can have that carbon being released all the plants are growing. So I asked Jerry, he was down in Bringson last week in Colorado, so Jerry, what does it drop to in the summertime when the corn's growing? And he says it actually goes down, it's 390 part per million, goes down to 290 part per million above those corn canopies that the plants suck in that much carbon dioxide in. So if we had more stuff lying here on the surface to decompose that summer when the crop is growing, maybe we could increase yields that way too. And we can grow our soil fertility with cover crops and the thing we grow here is as those are looking at them, so we're growing nitrogen. And we have some cover crops that maybe would dissolve more phosphorus. But if we got the cover crops that have the mycorrhizae, the mycorrhizae is able to dissolve or take in the phosphorus that the plant roots can't take in themselves. So they need these kind of cover crops. And here's another picture of the mycorrhizae root system. And these things here, those little narrow bands going out of root hairs, that increase the searching, but then these mycelium are on there. And that's what picks up those nutrients as the good example that Mike had. Christine Nichols up at Bismarck told us that one gram of soil contains 100 meters of this mycelium, this little fine stuff. And first of all, I ask you, how in the hell do you know that? And 100 meters is the length of a football field. And that's in one gram of soil, one three-eighths of an inch cube of soil. It's just hard to for us to imagine what's going on. And so we have to just develop those rotations to do that kind of thing, the root system showing there. And so the traditional soil tests, and this is getting down to this soil health now, Rick says these are NPK and that fall in a little bit because we do a lot more. We need our, we need sulfur, we need zinc and we need a couple other things. So he's using NPK, soil pH, percent organic matter, and then we make recommendations. He says where's the biology? And of course that's what Mike just talked about and what we're trying to measure here also. And so nitrogen, we use nitrate in our land. And we subtract the nitrate from nitrogen requirement and make our recommendation. The soil health test, we do ammonium and nitrate. And then this is water extractable, total nitrogen. Sovieta is a CO2, a carbon CO2 burst test that is a 24-hour test. You have organic nitrogen and then organic carbon nitrogen ratio. And these here when we talk about this is water extractable. It's not the total nitrogen or total carbon in the soil, it's what's water soluble. And then he has this Macweon. I really like some of these terms he has. Microbactivity, microbactive carbon, water extractable, organic nitrogen. And then nitrogen mineralization here. And so we're looking at the water cycle carbon and nitrogen. And then we're doing some other things with phosphate, where YCP phosphate and PO4 phosphate. He says there's seven different extracts here from current labs. And Malik and Bray and Olson are the three that we know here. And then over here we have ICAPP and PO4. And Rick calls ICAPP phosphorous. He does this extract. And if you run through an ICAP or ICP, he calls that total P. Well, it's just what's in that sample that's organic and inorganic in that extract. But we have a lot more phosphorous than total P that he calls it. And this is the phosphate ion he calls it. Those are just the phosphate ions that are available to the plant. And we measure those with the callumetric test or the elements with an inductive couple argon plasma. And then H3A is the extract that he does this stuff with. Memmaged plant roots exudates. Remember when Rick was talking about the plant roots leaking stuff out? And Rick has said that there's about, he studied this 90 different compounds that plant roots will exude. And we'll find out that what the plant, if plant's short of a nutrient or something, or it's got some kind of stress, it exudes out a compound and expects somebody or one of those microbes to come help it. And so the compounds attract different microbes. But he's used three different extracts on this H3A. And I'll have a slide that shows that a little bit later. But there are three of the plant exudates that he said are very important in all plants. And that's what we use it. Then he's got SOVETA, the Organic Carbonide Generational Phosphorous Mineralization. Some of those things down there. So we can say that soil tests in nature's image, we can change our thinking. And for me, that's kind of tough to do that. We can include soil biology. Henry, do you have that problem of changing your mind? And some of those, does that fit all the time? Common soil testing methods are outdated and too focused on highly-buffered chemical analysis. He's talking about me. And he says, what we're doing in our laboratories. And the apparent methods do not reflect the complex elegance of the natural system, which is driven by organic carbon in the presence of water. And this is what all of what Mike can talk about. This is what he's talking about. So fertility is not about single molecules. Nitrogen is about inorganic and organic nitrogen. Nitrate does not represent hundreds of nitrogen compounds that exist in soil water. And so we can extract those in that soil water extract and measure organic nitrogen, which is what he's talking about there. So a soil health tool, measure soil health by asking that our soil is at the right questions. What is your condition? And you can see, with a spade, carry that spade all summer with me, and I like to just dig in that soil to see what its condition is. You can see a lot from just that. Are you in balance? What do you got out of why? And what can we do to help? And the balance here, if we want to increase organic matter, improve our soil health, we have to have all those kind of platenutrients there. Because organic matter is made up with all those platenutrients in it. And we have to have a pretty good fertility to get there. And this is just a diagram that unlocked the secrets. 2 million pounds of soil in 6 inches, 40,000 pounds of carbon, 4,000 pounds of organic nitrogen, 2,000 pounds of organic phosphorus, and 1,000 pounds of microbes. And these are the real little things. And normally, I think there's a lot more than 1,000 pounds of microbes in our soils. But this is kind of what it depicts here. But these things are all the carbon and nitrogen and the phosphorus, and all the other nutrients. Most of it's tied up there in organic matter. So the new solid testing method, this is our routine test here. Then we've got solid organic nitrogen and phosphorus, microbial activity, water extractable carbon, and carbon nitrogen balance. And it goes through here to get the result. And the first one is microbial activity. Go here, and it shows the pictures of the microbes. We've seen almost in that 1 million to 10 million per gram of soil as a microbial activity. I think Mike said a billion, didn't he? He said more than a population. And so there's just lots of those things. To me, it's a little bit hard to visualize all these things. Once we could see those, if we could see them. But I was up at Miles City, Montana, in November. And after we got through with the talks, and I was trying to get out of there because I wanted to head toward rabbit. But the farmer came to me and said, hey, come over to my computer. I want to show you something. And he had a microscope that he got in eBay. And he hooked up to his computer. And he had these water extracts, a whole bunch of pictures of microbes. And what he wanted me to do is tell him which was a clay particle and which was an organism. And we saw nematodes. And you could see the fuzz on the nematodes of fungi killing the nematodes and some of those things. And he said, I got a new one ordered that measures a lot more magnification. So here's a guy that's a hobbyist that didn't know what he's looking at, but he had the pictures. And he wanted me to identify him when he got the wrong guy on the microscope. You know, and I don't know how much time I got if I take too much. But the reason, you know, the microbiology, I took a micro class in college, undergraduate, and it was right after lunch. And this done stuff. And I just finally just stretched back and closed my eyes. When I woke up, of course, the instructor was talking to me and everybody was looking at me, but that's how I appreciated microbes in those days. And it's just interesting to learn all these things. So here I'm soil biology, complex integrated living system. You got oxygen over here. And then organic carbon. It's a water cycle organic carbon, microbial population. And it gives off CO2. And I put this in here. Soil microbes take in oxygen and release carbon dioxide, just like us. And so that soil structure that you have in that soil has to be there so that you can get air to go in as water goes out and for air to go out as water goes in. And so when we have really good structure, we have a lot better air intake and outflow to keep the oxygen there for the microbes that keep growing and doing all those things that we want it to do. Here's another picture we're kind of saying the same. Here's fertilizers and manures that we put on. Here's organic compounds in the soil. And all this is fed to the microbes. And then the microbes release the nitrogen and phosphate to the plant. The microbes release the CO2. So I want this CO2 really to be released when we got crap canopy out there as much as, and then you have to have good soil structures to bring oxygen in and water in to that system. And that's what it's all about. But the soil structure is to really get that going good. You have to have good soil structure to get that air flow. Here's an example of some research. Rick had a whole bunch of things in there and I just took this one because the Solvita test is a test that we do. We wet the soil, put a CO2 panel in the jar, seal the lid, and then 24 hours later we measure the amount of CO2. And the researchers found that when you wet the soil you get a tremendous release of carbon oxide within the first 24 hours. And then they're following this out here and then it tapers off and continues on out for many days. But, well brightened with the woods end laboratories up in Maine and Rick developed this Solvita test to measure that CO2 after 24 hours. And that's what this Solvita test is. Here's a paddle in this jar in the microchrome shown there. And then this reader reads that amount of carbon dioxide that's in there. And that's what we do in that Solvita test. And that first thing is that really develop our bacteria and they're the smallest and so they can develop that real fast. Water soluble carbon, extractable carbon. Rick says, I think he got a picture here. The soil organic matter is a house. Microbes live in and water extractable organic carbon is the food they eat. And so that's what we're doing with this Hainy test is here's a house with 2% organic matter and the food is what's in solution in this soil that the microbes can use. So usually it's from 100 to 300 part per million in that water extract and this is a microbial food. And it just shows here the soil microbial activity. Here in Maine we have the soil is 6.4% organic matter but its activity is less than in Wyoming where it's 6% organic matter but the activity is a lot higher. And so it's also based on locations and soil types. And then here this Texas 1% organic matter you have less soil microbial activity. I think that's pretty easy to understand you should have those differences. And then we look at soil nitrate in organic, soil organic nitrogen which again is a water soluble stuff and we've been missing half the plant available nitrogen. And that's in 4,100 samples. He's found, this is average, 42 pounds of available nitrate ammonium and 37 pounds of organic nitrogen. And so in a lot of the tests that we run, I see that all the time, they're about half and half and then the Hainy test estimates how much of that organic nitrogen is gonna be available. Oh, back up here, this is a thought process here. If plants could take up, if plants could not take up organic compounds, herbicides would not work. And that's Rick's wife that says that. But you know, because we always told you guys that it's just nitrate ammonium, P04 ions in K and now we're kind of finding out that maybe the plants can take up some other compounds or other organic nitrogen compounds and that's a thought process that is used to get it done. And then the carbon nitrogen balance, and so the organic carbon versus organic nitrogen and then the water extract and a high carbon nitrogen ratio greater than 20 to one calculates that no N or P mineralization is gonna happen in that soil that year. That's kind of his, the way he says that. As the carbon nitrogen ratio is lowered, nitrogen and phosphorus mineralization increases but is dependent on soil microbial activity, which I think we've kind of stressed this. And then the soil health calculation is kind of what the title is here. Overall health of your soil system combined several independent measurements of your soils, biological and chemical properties. Varies from one to over 50. I've seen a couple up in about 20 so far. Track the effects of your management practices over years and use to calculate cover crop input. So Rick wants this test to be used, take the samples now or after harvest for planning for your next crop and then use the score to determine what kind of cover crop you should have. And so I think that you have this calculation. And the calculation is not too bad. The Soviet CO2 test is divided by the water extractable carbon nitrogen ratio. And then we add organic carbon, the water soluble organic carbon divided by 100 and organic nitrogen divided by 10. So here we have a Soviet test of 70 divided by a carbon nitrogen ratio of 15 plus 500 is like organic carbon divided by 130 organic nitrogen divided by 10. And so here's a 4.67 plus five plus three equals 12.7 which he says above seven is on the right way. And I just used numbers so you get this good number. And we do not see very many of these in the samples that we've been running. And that's on our farm down in Sling County. I have a hard time in Beckwood or Dwayne would say that I've been using too much phosphorus fertilizer. So soil test integration and the Sovieta one day test here and extractable carbon and the percent microbial activity, extractable nitrogen, inorganic nitrogen, phosphorus organic, carbon nitrogen ratio. And this one here he really doesn't use in the test. Just how we do that Sovieta test then we get soil samples in. And oh yeah, you take your zero to six just like you would for fertility tests. Take and you're new I would say 10 to 15 cores hoping you'll do at least 10 cores for a composite sample. And it'd be better if you did 15. And then we bring those in and we dry them and then we grind them. And so we have this ground soil. These happen to be Texas. We were down the ricks live and took this picture but 40 grams of soil in these cups and the cups have holes drilled in the bottom and there's a fill of paper so the soil won't go through the holes. And then in these jars we have water poured in the bottom of these. And so when you put the soil in there the soil works out for capillary movement and what's the soil? And then we put the paddle in and then put a lid on the jar and then come back in 24 hours and major that. And here's showing how this has changed from this color here to this color here. And you notice I say this color. One of those stories that everybody's got career stories but I majored in soil conservation at the University of Nebraska. I got a degree in 1959 but I had to go and I got lined up to go to work in Washington County, Nebraska as a working in conservationist had to go take a physical. So I went down to my hometown February, Nebraska and the doctor and he pulled out a book about so thick and started flipping charts and I was supposed to identify objects on those charts. And then I took my physical backup to the soil conservation service NRCS person. And he asked me what the color in the wall was what the colors were in the painting. And I didn't know what that word. Didn't hire me because that's color blind. So, and I tell people that's the best thing the government ever did for me. Sorry, NRCS people, ARS people. So the other part of the Haiti test so we've talked about two parts the Sovieta test and the water extractable test. And now we have the H3A test and the H3A everybody names a test after themselves Bray, Melee, Olson. And so this is Haney, Haney, Posner and Arnold is what H3A stands for. And it's a water and a complex mixture plant exudates along with micro-gilled derived enzymes below ground root system flows with elegance and complexity. We extract the soil with highly disruptive acidic or alkaline solutions and call it plant-available nutrients. He's after me again in what we're doing in our soil testing. So I really don't think we're as bad as what he says here. So the water soluble Haney test we just extracted the eye water, distilled water four grams of soil and 40 mils of water shaped for 10 minutes centrifuge for five minutes filter, then we analyze for nitrate, ammonium, organic carbon and total nitrogen are the analysis you do on that water soluble extract. And then the H3A test is where Rick has taken these three organic compounds that roots exude out for the microbes that bring nutrients to the roots. And he's organic acid, excellent food for microbes and the acid drops the pH down to he says about two units less than what your pH is. So it kind of tracks with the soil pH into doing that. But the maleic acid, 1.2 grams, oxalic, 0.6 gram, citric acid, one gram. And then it's buffered with lithium citrate. It's kind of interesting that he says some of that on that other side of the buffer solution everybody has to do that. But 1.2 grams in 2L has two liters. So that's 1.2 grams in 2,000 grams of water. So it's pretty dilute solution. And then 0.6 gram per 2,000 grams of water. And so that's the extract that we use. And he puts them in centrifuge tubes like this. We add the soil to an Erlmeyer flask and then add our extracting solution either water or the H3A and then we shake that for 10 minutes. And this is a centrifuge here and we got one that holds 40 samples at a time. So we do 20 water extracts and 20 H3A samples at one time. We have to centrifuge them and so we're handled every sample individually. In the laboratory, most of the stuff that we do in our normal test, we pick up a tray and it has 30 samples in it. So we're doing a lot of things at one time and in our lab in November we run 3,700 samples a day on regular soil tests. And I think Lance thinks that we can do about 200 of these a day until we just get more equipment, of course. And this is a torch, we call it. And the samples are up here in these tubes, a kind of auto sampler. It measures the total organic carbon and total nitrogen. And we take those two numbers to use. And then this instrument, we call it latchet flow injection analysis. We have our water cycle samples here, our H3A samples here, and it picks the sample up, runs it through all three of these. There's three different systems there for nitrate, ammonium, and phosphorus. And so we run those three samples, three tests at one time going through them. Takes about a minute for each sample to go through there. So it's not too bad. And then this is ICAP, the samples are in here and then this thing is, I don't think, yeah, it's here. So ICAP, there's a flame in there. I don't understand the physics of it, but you guys have heard of plasma welders. Real high temperature, that's what is inside of that box. And every element, as it goes through that flame, gives off light. And every element has different wavelengths of light. So we can pick the wavelengths or pick the elements that we want and the computer finds those wavelengths. And so when we run zinc iron, manganese, copper, for example, it measures all three of those, or all four of those at one time. Go through and it takes 20 seconds to read it. So it's kind of fun instruments to use. So the soil health results, and Rick has an exile file that he emails out. We're doing that yet, but there's five or six different pages and it's pretty kind of hard to understand. And then plan available MPK and fertilizer calculator, soil health, nitrogen fosters, then the explanation sheet, and that's in your handout, that explanation sheet that he has. And here's an example, and I don't know if you guys can read this or not. This is MPK, test here, and he has his pounds of nitrate, and this is pounds per acre, P205 pounds per acre, K20 pounds per acre. And he figures out a dollar cost here. So that's how many nutrients you have in that soil, based on current fertilizer prices. And then here's the grass, it's two ton yield gold, and he's recommended 71 pounds of nitrogen, 25 pounds of fosters, and five pounds of potash, based on those readings there. And then his requirements, he says requirements for each one of these crops. And I've seen different numbers on different tests. So he keeps playing with these to see if he can make those look a little better. The one that the Kansas guys saw here, we, 35 Bushel, and they recommended 12 pounds of nitrogen and three pounds of fosters. And he only has 15 pounds of fosters over here. And of course they pointed that out right away. And I don't know what that calculation is, but these are the kind of things that I'm working on trying to get this understandable with our normal fertilizer recommendations. But down here's corn, 90 Bushel, and it needs 60 pounds of nitrogen, 45 pounds of fosters. But if you look over here, well this is nine fosters, where up here the wheat was 15. So, but he's got 45 here and three up there. So those are the kind of things that I'm having trouble with in the evaluation. We'll get these things. When I get off this speaking circuit, can sit down and kind of work on these things a little bit. But here's the soil health score. And here's the sample one. The Soviet test is 75 or 76. Organic carbon is 1,000. Organic nitrogen is 49. The carbon nitrogen ratio is 20, 21. And then the soil health test is 18 or 19. Pretty good. Pretty good. And what makes that? Remember the calculation? Soviet test divided by the carbon nitrogen ratio. And then the amount of organic carbon divided by one or the amount of organic nitrogen divided by 10. And that was added to that. So we have a wide ratio, but we've got really great amount of food with that carbon nitrogen. And if we can get, grow a little more legume, then we can get this organic nitrogen out and maybe even increase that score. But his carbon mix here is 10% legume and 90% grass. And the interesting thing is there's no turnips, right, just legumes. And I don't know if he means broadleaves or if it is just legume grass. And I haven't gotten kind of straight enough yet. Here's one down here. Sovieta 78, carbon is 760. Nitrogen 74, carbon nitrogen ratio 10.3, really great carbon nitrogen ratio. The soil health score is 22 or 23 and his recommendation for cover crop is grass. So we don't want to overload the system with nitrogen and so the cover crop should just be grass in that case. And now we have here, Sovieta 65 versus 78 pretty close. Organic carbon is way down to 334. Organic nitrogen to 32, we still got a good carbon nitrogen ratio. The soil health score is 13 and we need 30% legume and 70% grass in that case. Here's one, soil health score 7.3. And this example, that's his lowest one and that's 60% legume. So on our farm, you know, we'd probably be 80% legume on a lot of the things that I've taken samples on. Just the nitrogen kind of thing and this again in Ponsprayker. So there's total nitrogen, inorganic nitrogen and organic nitrogen and then he has some equation that he used to calculate the organic nitrogen availability out of there. So he doesn't show all that in here. Then phosphorus, Ponsprayker, this is total P. Total P, remember if you see that and we're gonna change these terms when we're working on a report and of course it has all things to do, you know, we're getting ready to do this and our computer programmer leaves. So we've got new ones coming in to get this working. Total P, that's the ICAP H38 test. The ICAP H38, it's not, there's a lot more total P in the soil than that but that's what he calls that. Inorganic P is the one that's done with the latch at flow injection analysis and he calls that the PO4 test. And organic P is the difference between those two. There he says this is Ponsprayker and he takes the part per million times 2.3 to convert P to P2O5 and if you really do it properly, you should take it times two. So we called him asking, I said I'm conservative so I didn't do it times two. Well, my logic says let's do the calculation right and then put a factor in there, your conservative factor and make it 0.5 and you still have the same answer but those are some of the things that we need to work on. And then his summary is how do you establish your yield goal in doing this nutrient assessment? He has here corn at 100 bushel, you got a thousand acres, 100 bushel and 100 bushel up here and most years he's below the yield that's less than his yield goal. And he says if you would be a little closer on that and here he said his yield goal at 80 and some yields are above and there's some below that. And back here he says if you do this and it costs to the fertilizer, that's how much the crop requires and you gotta put in $63,000 worth of fertilizer to get the 100 bushel, your chance of success is pretty low because you spent more money than you needed to for fertilizer and of course we gotta be conscious of that the way the crop prices are right now anyway. And so here when he set the yield goal at 80 and put the fertilizer on for 80 bushel his cost is 44,000, 20,000 less and his chance of success is very good. And he's just telling farmers that we need to really properly use a set of yield goals properly in some of these things. And then he has other gauges and he's setting established these nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium here and get some ratings and they saw the health score down here is not real good the cover crop mix is none there. So those things maybe we can put some of that in our report too but right now, right now I have a philosophy that if I give you a report and it shows that you're going to excellent, you're going to put it down and not understand and not go back and figure out why did you get an excellent score? And if I say it was poor, you're going to throw it down and walk away and piss. So I like to give you the data and let you guys look at that and study it and try and figure out what is good and bad on your own. And so there's a philosophy difference too and the way I've always approached. So I have never had low, medium, and high on my soil at this time. And I get feeders who call in and they want to know how their forage or their silage or their hay compares with the normal. Well, if you got bad hay, why do you need to know if it's below normal? You've got to balance the ration and if you got good hay, you should be able to look at that and know that anyway. But that's kind of a philosophy there. And that's the end of my presentation. So if you guys have any questions, do you have time for any questions? Yes, yes. Yeah, it goes from one to 50, he said it could be about 50, but if it's above seven, you're on the right track, he says. If it's below seven, you've got to, I think probably work in cover crops or get a more diverse rotation going. And the corn, corn, bean rotation, and I put wheat in every fourth year and we still don't have very good scores. And so the fertilization practices that we're doing we may have to start figuring out how to cut that back a little bit. And that's what Rick done on the nitrogen. He uses, in my example, that 0.9 pound of nitrogen per bushel. Well, Gelderman's using 1.2, I think, and we're using what changed by this fall to 1.1. So right away, he's got a lower nitrogen requirement than what we had. And so that's part of that thing. And then he includes ammonium in that, so that makes his recommendation lower than any organic nitrogen, but he doesn't include subsoil nitrogen, which we, you know, and Gelderman supports that. So there's a lot of, you know, there's just one of those things that, it's a new evaluation. Rick has developed a test, so we have two, three laboratories in the country now. Woods End Laboratory up in Maine, they're lab in Ohio, and then like the three that are doing it right now. And we're charging $49.50 for the test. Rick said we should charge 50 bucks. And I didn't really want to make the price 49.99, so we dropped it to 49.50. This sounds cheaper than 50 bucks. And that includes the three tests, and that's a lot of labs in charge of 20 bucks just for the solvita test.