 South Dakota's educational effort to raise awareness about the importance of soil health continues. The USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service entered into a cooperative agreement with the South Dakota No-Tel Association and IGRO South Dakota State University Extension for delivering these seminars with the latest soil health and productivity technology to South Dakota farmers and ranchers. Hello, thanks for having me here today. We're going to talk a bit about our farm, some of the things we do, some of the things that we need to be doing. So, here's a Jake's song in 281, so it's not too far north. There's quite a bit different than around here, I wish I was farming this far south. I think our crops have grown quite a bit taller. So, we're looking at about 4,000 acres of seeded crop land. We've been farming since 1690. We've been at this site since about 1930. The recent run up in these markets have narrowed our rotation. Regrettably, our farm is mostly rented and a lot of our landlords, well, they like top dollar too. So, we have Sprinkly going back into our rotation this year and Rye, after all you guys go and source Rye seed for next year. Well, you got to buy it from somewhere, right? It grows so well you don't have to do anything, it just grows. You can spill it, you can seed it, you can eerily apply it, just get it out there. So, we have times the dry period will go up quite a few years. The dry period is like many of you have led my father to look into this no-till and he slowly adopted another farm. Once we got a taste of the air seeders and the single disc openers, it was pretty much a slam dunk for us. We were minimum tillage and I think that was worse than full tillage. We thought we were doing something, we were still destroying our soils. So, we have 14 years in this no-till. We need a little bit of tillage and that's if we get stuck or we're moving fence row. It's tough to, you don't want to have jumps in your field. So, we have to limbo soil a little bit when we do fence rows, expired tree rows. Recently, we've had 200 visitors. That's in the last year and a half. So, I don't think we're doing that great of a job. I see what I'm doing is inadequate and I need to do more. Basically, there's no end to how you can build your soils and how much diversity you can put in there. So, one of our goals is just to continue to build as fast as we can for soil structures and our diversity. And basically, the recent run-up in markets, everybody's pulling new equipment out to lots or pulling the used tillage equipment out because they want more and they want it faster. That's no different in our area, in our region or in our country or in the world for that matter. So, all these visitors come on because there's not very many farms left to see this on. Every one of the visitors likes what they see. We get wet. We get really cold and wet. We get hot and dry. That's bad. He worked for us for 15 years and he had never seen tillage before. We broke up some CRP and here's my trusty grain cart guy and he says, we have to tillage fields too rough. He said, we have to tillage fields too rough. He said, we have to tillage fields too rough. You can't sit in the seed on that grain cart. He got really good at making his one lane through the field, missing all the bumps so we can have speed and then still keep our combine going, harvesting corn. But he said, we either till this field or you get the grain cart. I said, well, what do you think we should do? He said, we should till the field. We need to level it up. I said, well, four years from now we'll have a chance at our rotation where we'll have a lower residue. We can not have a cover crop one year. We can do some leveling then. He said, he won't be there that long. So I look at this rental property. I think I don't want to have it very long anyway. And I said, well, do what you'd like. He tilled it. First tillage he saw, he took a disc out there, smoothed out this CRP that we've been farming for five years without tillage. So he took a 26 year piece of ground and I've been tilled in 26 years and he tilled it up. I didn't watch. I didn't deliver the field. He could not believe how much fuel he burned and he said he's never doing tillage again. The next year he just saw the results and he said it's not worth it. Not worth it at all. We can't go back. So today we're going to talk about equipment. We're going to talk about cover crops. And we're going to talk about strip tail. We've been talking about cover crops I guess for many years. We didn't know what we were doing when we started with this. There wasn't any data really to go by. We saw a little bit here and a little bit there. We had monocultures. It wasn't until up in this 0809 before we had any real mixes. We started mixing in this region, but we're just testing. A lot of testing. Just picking problem fields or problem spots. But that doesn't fix anything. Until we decided to do pull fields and these mixes we started really seeing benefits. So in some of our dry years we seeded. It was too dry to seed, but it was early enough in the year. We just seeded anyway. It's going to rain sooner or later, right? If not, the seed doesn't do anything good in the shed. That stuff really grows. I think it's great for a university. My kids think it's great because it's fun. And it's stuff you don't see every day. My wife thinks it's great. She doesn't have to go to the grocery store. She pees and sets it up. But it's all a result of what we're doing and why we're doing it. Our early years in no-till, it was great. We had all this residue, our grounds protected. What do you do when you have sterile soils? All this fallopian. You build yourself a problem, but you have to maintain 100% residue cover. Without that residue cover, well, you can see from Ray's presentation that the whole system falls apart. And just having residue cover isn't enough. These roots are the most important thing that we as farmers can do for our soil. Put them there, keep them there, and do them diversity. Mobile nutrients, the EPA, the Obama administration. Who here is afraid of that rule that they're trying to put through? 96% of our farm touches a drain that touches a James River. My wife grew up in Maryland, upper Chesapeake Bay. We were recently there, we were there last week. And I spent some time with her uncle who farms, and he was going to a farm meeting like this. Yeah, I want to go home. I don't want to sit around. So I went with him and we found a room full of farmers, looked just like us. USDA personnel, NRCS personnel, the local agronomist talking. Not one of them talked about best management practices. Every speech, every presentation was on. Regulation, how to fill out the forms. What you can't do no longer. Not one thing was on best management practices. They're using that as a model to regulate a policy in the Gulf. They're going to take away every tool we have until we change our ways. We can do it the way we need to, the way it fits for our farm. We can do it now. Raise map about that degraded soils across the world. The big red streak to the northern plains. I thought we had pretty good soil. What's it going to be like in 100 years when we give that building for our next generations? We've got to start now. We can't wait. The government is going to tell us how to build the soil. How is that going to work out? We're going to do that. I'm sure it won't be as complicated as a new farm bill. Precipitation timing. That's a real fun one. We started seeing cornice here on the 17th of May. Our ride cover crop was an inch tall. It rained every three to four days. There's 100 acres I never got to with the corn planter or the soybean planter. But with our forecasting and weather, we can see a wet spring coming. Our most fragile soils, I was out on March 30th. I loaded the drill on March 29th and I seen a cover crop on March 30th. So a whole busload of French people came out to visit us. And I had this great place to take them to because of a huge failure on my part to see the crop, right? But we stood in Rye this tall. Right about this tall was the turnip radishes. Actually, the radishes didn't grow. I don't think they let itself enter the zone. But the turnips went through that. So having a mix out there, that's important. What doesn't work? You've got something else there. So we still had our brassica. The peas, the entire group, all the eight of all our acre peas. Their timing was good. They were a little bit too crunchy. They weren't as sweet as they should be, but they're still delicious. I think more peas were eaten than cookies. And the sunflowers were just ready to bloom. So having that out there really saved the day. And that piece of sandy soil, they had life for a whole year. We got our fall cover again. It's a winter annual. We get our spring cover. That's spring fallow period. That's my favorite thing. My favorite cover crop comes up on its own when the soil is ready. That's winter wheat. You can see it in the night in this starvation. There's more here, less there. Those brassicas over winter, it's pretty tall. That's a great place to be seeing your crops. Over here you've got weeds. Over here you've got competition. We're trying different mixes and different types of cover crops. You can see in the background there is winter wheat only. But winter wheat is kind of slow, not much roots. We got into winter trinicale. I was much more aggressive. We really liked that. If I really liked that, I figured how much would I like cereal around? It's more aggressive yet. More roots. We're going after those roots. Chemical residues. These are long residuals. That's great for crop production, but how do we tailor that to allow our cover crops? Well, here we're just fighting with ourselves again. If we have an appropriate system, we can get by with all the counters. If we can incorporate these rollers on this rye across a broad acreage, then we can have, we don't have to take the time to test to see what's going to grow. There's an area of vetch on our farm, cow peas. I test everything in the garden. We start out in the garden because we always walk by that every day. So we can inspect it every day. 100% residue cover. When we're seeing soybeans into our rye, you can see how much residue is in between the rollers. Not much. Our biology is switched on and it's consuming everything we give it, mostly because we're not giving it enough. The more I give it, the more biology is there, the better it is. So where is the limit? Is it the amount of sunlight and the amount of growing days we get per year? Or is it? What happens in the wintertime when you're old cow in February and you think, well, what's happening in my soil? Your buddies are telling you, hey, come on, where are you waiting for us? Come back and look at this. So I move the, we move the residue away in February and you see earthworms die out of the, it's cold. They go back in their hole just like in the summer. But the earthworms are out feeding in February. So I'm asking myself, how do I achieve that on every acre? So we're working on that. We're seeding early when there's not a cover crop. We don't want to eat very soil in the spring rains. Here we're seeding peas for a crop. Seeding early, it starts my garden as well. Here's this March 30th this year seeding that dry cover crop. That residue wouldn't have made it to July. And then we'd be having blowing soils. We seed late in the year. We're having to contract the end of October. A whole section. Four soils, very degraded. Well, I didn't use up all the rye in the truck or the drill. And I had to drive by there on the way home anyway. So we run the drill out. How many living rooms in the spring? Your ecosystem starts up quicker. You have a diversity. So we're not going to plant that crop, right? We would have to go back out there. Here we're seeding fennel beans in the rain. Up in the hills, there's a lot of animals living up there. They get the soil. So that's where the monatars come from whenever you go over a little mound. There's enough mounds in that field that living cover crop really never gets the tires all the way. We don't like to go under our fields at all. But we're farmers so we have to do a little bit, right? So we got to see the crop and harvest the crop. But we do it with as minimal passes as we can. The nutrients are cycling year-round even in February because I'm pretty sure those earthworms got a poop too. So we're cycling nutrients all year-round. The mobile nutrients are always mobile. Strip and cut stubble is awesome. Anybody have stripper heads? Raise your hand. I love salted photo. There's a couple in North Dakota too. Those 1800-pound pinnall beans seeded in the rain. You know, winter wheat cover crop. Here's the winter wheat cover crop. We had plenty of delays that year. So I was a little surprised that I'd been seeding soybean ground and corn ground with soybeans. And then I got into pinnall beans and I pulled into this field. It's out of the way so I don't see it every day. And I really thought I made a mistake by pulling in. There was a lot of winter wheat out there. That drill's in the area. It's not in the ground. So, you know, all the top of the SDS is before we put it in the ground. So do I seed or not? That's free. So I put a little bit, put out a little bit of nitrogen to make sure I fill those kernels. Either way I'm going to put the sprayer out there. Nitrogen or to kill it off. So we're doing math. We ended up seeding. It turned out good. There was a good price on pinnall beans in here. No fertilizer. Some chemicals were still addicted. That's a pretty good deal. So we started no chill before no film was cool. Before we realized that these aren't very fun to work on. And before we knew about cover crops. And this was so much better than minimum tillage. We really thought we had it. And stomping that erosion immediately was a really good deal. That 100% residue cover that we achieved right away. That's really it. Do not let your soil see the sun. No bare soil. That's the goal. Sometimes you don't get enough sun. And this is a corn on a corn crop. They weighed about 36 pounds. They came in to sell that. We're not going to get rid of it. We're not going to kill it under. If you can go up to the disc. You might as well have an aircraft behind your disc. So here's our 45th disc. Just pin on our corn and then make it. So corn on corn makes a lot of residue. I pull in here in the evening. And I had about an hour of run time. So I thought, well, this is so much residue. I better sit my drill a little deeper. Make sure I get my seed in the ground. So I was seeding at a modern age. And I wanted to maintain that inch. You can see the next morning, when the tractor was warming up, I was out checking how I was doing. See what adjustments I needed to make for this field. And I had it at two inches. So I put it back in the same settings I had. And I pulled in the tube. Strip and cut stubble sticks around. Just long enough to get past your legumes to get your next high carbon crop. If we had platform cuts stubble, we had bare soils and we'd have eroded. So this was spring week, followed by a cover crop, followed by pinnall beans on one side of the field and the sweat beans on this side. And the ASU thinks that's real neat. And they wanted to test it. And I'm always on their case about where are you going to find these no-till studies? Where are you doing these no-till studies? I've been involved with the research stations and through the 90s and early to late 2000s, their no-till studies were on one year no-tillage. They just stopped till they saw for one year and did these studies. They've since changed their game and we're getting good research now. But when you go on the country, where do you find long-term no-tillage? In our area, it's pretty far between. Equipment sales are... We have really good equipment sales. So they were out and they got their weather stations and they measured well everything under the sun. You don't want to get those caught in your corned. So one of the things they're doing is measuring, like I plane that our stripper cut stubble, the soils underneath it are warmer and drier in the spring. That's pretty unbelievable in our area. Well, they're able to show what's going on. And here's the air temperature and here's the three resident studies. So we took our stripper head out, harvested our entire field. He come out the next day with his equipment and I've gotten on a platform. And we cut... I think we cut at 18 inches. Couple passes with that. And then we cut, we shaved the ground. So we had all the material run through the combine just like we're using a platform. We compared it with the stripper cut stubble and he's taking temperatures. Those strips are the only part of the field that didn't get covered up. So here's zero degrees. Here's 30 degrees. So out here in February, it gets cold again. Our stripper cut stubble is above freezing. 18 inches still above freezing. And the stuff that's shaved is 31 degrees. Up here is 32.6. You can use a platform and have one or two years. It's fine. You still have your soils covered. You still have your biology. But taking a snapshot in one year, if this was... If I used a platform head every year, I wouldn't have the biology I had. I wouldn't have the soil cover that I need. I'm not kneeling down, by the way. So our corn really likes the residue. It really likes to grow. It really likes the biodiversity of soil. It really likes the exchange capacity that we get with the diversity. With our soil structures, by keeping the soil covered, the corn just grows to 10. That's a 79-day corn. Everyone in the area goes 85 to 91-day corn. We grow a shorter day. And we don't suffer yield loss. We got to get out there and look. With a shovel. If you don't have a shovel, you can still look. There are 17 eggs and there are 17 babies. Those are ladybees, ladybugs, before they're in their wings, right? There's critters everywhere. Where it's gone for 8 years. You see, that one's about to be lunch. The kid's legs gone, too. It's like a maze. I haven't lost any yet. But I walked slower. In the corn. They love what we find in our soils. Everybody heard that? Our healthy soils? Diversity. We don't run cattle on our ground. Fencing and water supplies are a limiting factor. Water rented ground. Got a manual. Doesn't mean we don't need that to happen on our farms. That's not strip till. That's not a till-way plant. You can see all the advertisements. That's our residue. A lot of times it's 2 to 3 inches thick. The fresh residue is up on top. There's that fine deflator at the soil surface. We don't move any soil. You take the edges of those. You peel them back. If you can feel this, if you get down to the bare soil, you can feel a bump. We cannot move any soil. Otherwise we get erosion. We have problems and we can't get a planter to work. We need that residue there. No cover crop. We need weeds. One pass. We don't want anything else driving around in our fields. But it's tough to get it in the sand and corn. There's another planter. So we have to go out there once. We put all our nitrogen, all our fertilizer, the whole load down. If we get in conditions where we're going to have a lot of corn, then we can go out with a sprayer or liquid nitrogen if needed. I like to get in the habit of doing that every year regardless. But if the corn plant is not going to catch it, I'm not doing any good. So when we can get our inner planter up and running, we can apply nitrogen every year. We can build our soils. Not much quicker. Soil structure. Aggregation. Some of those nears get pretty wet. You can see our cover crop. It's a little piece that I picked up. Been farming it for three years. We don't go through the water there. It's not going to happen. So then we have to drive all around and make all this extra companion. That's not soil. That's our residue from two or three years ago. Dust is on top of the soil. The larger residue protects it. It keeps it in the smaller bugs. Can't take it by a big piece as a residue. There's no cover crop. You can see that the neighbor's got it going. No shortage of water out here. There's a lot of subsurface water. In fact, about two and a half feet down year-round is the water table. So you have to really work it up and you can plant every two to three years. Or you have aggregation, living roots, and a submarine-gated corn crop. That's working real good for us. Look how clean this water is. Look how clean the tires are. What's the value of aggregation in your soil? How well does that work? Because you don't see a cover crop water. This is going to go away. We're not going to do that much longer unless we change what we're doing. I'm happy with the job we're doing. We've been getting recognition for it, but we're still wrecking it. This is not enough. I need to do more. This was alfalfa for 18 years, and it's been in the cropping system now for six years. When it first took alfalfa, in a no-till system, it would be two, three years we were back to having one. So we're making progress, but there's still no cattle out here. We don't have biodiversity in our the above-ground animals. It doesn't always work that good. Some of our best soils, you saw the soybeans growing in the stripe cut stubble. That was taken right about here. You know, a year before this. So that's stuck. You see the mud on the tires? There isn't any. They'll deeply sink. There's a subsurface water problem. There's some sand and different material. So I was actually, since it was so wet, I couldn't lift the planter out of the ground. What was made near the end of May, we like to have a little bit of corner harvest. I had seen in 60 acres without pulling a planter out of the ground. Get to the end of the field, go two, three rounds over, and then go back up, and then two, three rounds over. Just kind of worked the field though. One of my biggest mistakes was when I ran out of fertilizer, I went up, loaded back up. I didn't fill it all the way up, because it was pretty soft. I pulled into the field with a half a load, I put a three-quarter load in, and my soil didn't like it. There's also coming on the ground, subsurface water and sand. There's no structure down there, because there's always water there. There's no air. There's some spots in our field that need addressing, but it's tough to tile on rented ground too. So you see, that's liquid sand and clay. Real nice mixture. The water moves through pretty well, and it actually squirted. The weight of the cart made it squirt up. See the bottom of the tires? There really is that. But we're stuck. Look at the slop, and the hole. Look at the aggregation. I carry that cable with me, and it comes in handy from time to time. We've got spots like this everywhere. Look at this squirted right out. You can see my abandoned fertilizer. Look at the aggregation. How many people get stuck on clean books when they're done, right? Well, rough years like that, it's just abandoned. The heavy weight. Sometimes a lightweight wins a fight, right? That pulled right off, but it was no big deal. Sometimes we try to farm where we're not supposed to be. See the cat tails? I love stuck pictures. Who likes stuck pictures? They're so funny. Look at what we did. So I just filled my hair guys in a sprayer. I just filled about any size after this foreign train. Look at the mud all over everything. It's not there. Four inches of rain. We're applying nitrogen on our on our corn. We didn't get it all done before the rain. And we forget a lot of times when we fill up our tank that it gets pretty heavy. So we're out here with our skinny tires on, and he's crossing a drainage ditch. He says, oh gosh, that's right. I'm heavy. He pulls it back. He just parks it right in the ditch, but then he couldn't come out. So he just kind of worked it down. It wasn't a big deal. But look at aggregation. That's not slime. That's not soup. There's water running out of the soil. This is an erosion ditch from the tillage days. We've got that filled in now, and as we wash back out, we're targeting and we're fixing it. He thought it was pretty funny. Here's our neighbors. That same year, we had a really problem in the year 2011. This fella was no-tilling before me. He uses a concord. He's since bought this drill. He's doing more no-tilling. But he's in 2011, he was still using his concord for his corn, but his fertilizer out. That just doesn't work. You just lose all your aggregation. One pass wraps everything you build. Stay on the feet. Many of you will ask how we accomplish these things. Exapta. Everybody gets an Exapta folder. Every other little sales brochure. There's more pages than knowledge than there is of products. You can't buy your way into success. You have to do the things right. So he's cut, spread into our seed and ferment, and make sure we close our trenches. This works the same across the United States. This is tilling 7% of my corn ground and drives me crazy. If I can get my soils better, I can go back to non-aggressive closing webs. I set these about 3 inches over at two and a half. Certain years, you can get a little bit of urea burn. I don't know if it's urea or the stuff in urea that's doing the harm, but at 3 inches we don't have any problems. Dry years, wet years. We put down between 400 and 600 pounds of fertilizer. We have to re-design our fertilizer openers because Delaware Dutch thing, well in the back leaves, I'm sure there's got to be at least two guys in the room to try that. You're limited to 200, 220, that's all you can get down for fertilizer. So then you're at multiple passes. You can't have multiple passes because then you're out wrecking your soil vernet fuel. So we've got this two-way and the opening has got more surface area than that too. That's an inch and three-quarter exhaust pipe. I have about 6,000 acres of corn fertilizer through those tubes. And they're not worn out yet. I think my days are numbered. But that is awesome. It seems to have opened up. We can have our full air pressure on that cart and not blow anything out of the trench. Everything's inserted. There's a pressure draft in here and it just kind of pours out of it. So that works pretty well. So we've got two rows and intense foam covers should go and I didn't want to stop. So I see it across the field, two rows not working. And you can see not much for weeds. We still have residue cover. Not much left. You can see where our row clears went here and here. Everybody get a successful farming magazine? Did you read it yet? Just come what, two days ago? Compaction. I have tires. That's the new newer style radials. So NDSU and John Noatsky are out a year before the roll track that they're selling now. That really nice shiny tractor with the skinny tracks. And they say they need area to do compaction study on. They want to look at compaction plant and corn and they want to look at the rows that are in between the tires and the rows that don't have tires around them and look at the difference. Well, that was a great right. Everybody wants different, something different on their planer and receive less yield right behind the tractor than on NEL. So they're going to measure this. That was great. Well, you're into what I find out is funding the research. And I thought well, I better watch these guys. They're doing unbiased research not this research project. I'm talking about the one that's on our farm with NDSU. They're measuring soil compaction on five different soil types across our field. So they're out doing three replications. You should see the amount of pin flakes in that field. That's really something. They took tire pressures and on our planer, I had those metric tires on our tractor. Those things are running about eight pounds and I'm seeding corn into that. So they're all sighted then now they have this tractor that's not actually going between the rows. It should be the most compacted row. So they're testing the most compacted row which my tractor drives over top of. My planer drives on each side of it. There's two rows of this on each side of the center of the planer. So they're measuring these rows. After the planer goes by on my air cart it drives right between them. I don't think you can get more compaction in the spring. They're finding zero. They're finding little to no difference on all five soil types on our ground. They started out with this project and they said we'd like to bring out three tractors and just switch them out on your planer so we can test the difference between these tractors. And one of those row tractors was one of them. So I read this two days ago and I thought I knew I liked those metrics for a reason. Those big tires are key. But if you drive across a field every square inch every year three or four times your big tires are the best thing you can do is stay out of it. There's no reason to be out there. Our neighbors are doing six to seven passes before they see. There's no reason for any of that. So we're in the article. This is a John O'Reary and it drives on a little bit later. We have a shrink swell place. The soil fixes itself. River Valley Harvestation they compacted the soil the best they can. We know how to compact soil, right? People, we know how to do this. So they compact River Valley soil in the fall. They come out in the spring and they find zero compaction. Read this study. Look it up on your Google NDSU compaction. There's a bunch of them. They go through there until you find that one and read it. The soil fixes itself and it does it pretty quick. You stay out the soil within a couple of years most of your compaction is gone. A couple more years the rest of it is fixed. Getting wet and drying out is what it does. It's not free-staws. Free-staws do a little tiny, tiny, tiny bit. Drying out. Anybody go to big iron? Ever drop your keys on a dryer? You're not going to get them back. You've got two inch wide cracks and three inch wide cracks. Your keys are gone. You're walking home. The shrimp soil plays are saving drinks. You go to the east coast, they don't have shrimp soil plays. We do zone management. We're starting to not care so much about that because, well, what we're finding is the soil is taking care of our needs more and more every year. We have to do less and less which is great. We like that. But we like to measure things. So on our zones here's what we started with in the soil test. That's what we applied. Here's what we have left over so there's the quick, easy use efficiency. Well, don't take the soil's contribution into the bag. You can see the healthier soils are more efficient. These are all the same soil take. Why aren't these soils doing this? These are more eroded. So let's talk about strip tail. Are there strip tailors in the group? I think this is strip tail. So, MDSU, they want to compare strip tail and no tail and stillish. It's not too much long-term no-chill engineering area. They say we have to do this. Reluctantly we let them out here. They didn't help us pick our rocks, by the way. But I said no to the tillage. They said, well, that's fine. They're going to do the soybean growers for this. They're going to do soybeans on strip tail. Of course strip tail is great for corn, right? They assumed. But you can also use it in soybeans. There's benefits to it, right? Well, they didn't find any benefits. It sure was fun. It was a nice day to be out there. 30-inch rows from the front of my forehead and the back of my forehead on the row right next to it. I wasn't grabbing on those rows. I don't want to mess up their data. So, two 30-inch rows, that's what I got to link to my forehead. Should we really do more erosion? What are we going to find in our soil to do? Well, here's a little preview. Some people like strip tail because of the detailers. We do some detailers too, but it doesn't work for us either. Some of the things down there you don't want to mess with. Let your roots do the work. They're afraid. That's what we're after. I don't want to have these three all in the office filling out government forms for their farm. Last week in Maryland that's what it takes. You want to be a farmer, you better have a dedicated person for your paperwork. Small farms. We have any questions today? It goes about an inch and a quarter inch and a half. With the residue cover it's more than enough. We used to put it down to four inches and that was just a nightmare. We created all kinds of problems. All the question was how deep was that banding the fertilizer on the corn plant? Many of you have that same open around your plant. There's really only two settings. You've got two positions for the depth and two positions for the spring. So we have it in the light spring position and the light depth and it goes in all the time. The soil with the 100% residue cover that soil is just beautiful to see it in. If we spread too much soil away or too much residue away then it all muds up. Not on most of the fields, there's a couple spots they sure wreck the day. But if we keep our road cleaners out of the ground and we leave part of the residue there you can see the rain and the corn plant. I didn't mud up any wheels this year. It was a wet year. Those who came on the planter it's a dawn they moved rocks. What kind of road cleaners are on the planter? What kind of road cleaners are on the planter? The depth control is sick by the gauge wheels on the planter. They do a really good job they're the kind of walking canopy they follow the ground real well. They hold that road unit just right. It's a great place to have a road cleaner. You can eliminate with that weight of the all that stuff hanging on your road unit it's spring pressure it's constant it's not variable, it's spring and the depth of the sift it's constant. It takes about two days to get them every year it takes about two days just to get them just right. I don't know why, year to year it's different. I think somebody comes out at night and adjusts my gestures. Now every year I play with them until they're just right in different conditions. A little bit different conditions every year I just need them quarter turned here and there. How are you choosing your varieties? How am I choosing brides? It's pretty easy. You get down to 79, 80, 80 quarters only a couple of them. Those ones. When new ones come out don't line right away. What percent of you are talking about? Come on, crap, mean variety. They really come a long way. Try them out. I have a mod. When you're writing a test plot every year everyone says, oh it's a new seed this is a great new seed and you're really going to like it. I'll take four bags. Oh and we only have the totes. Buy me a different variety then. We're going to test it first. I think that if you're going to have 120 days and you look at the seed books I think you need to test them all on your plot too. Everybody does things a little bit different. Hey, try a high calcium lime on your soil. Um, there's some. There's some. There's much more. Actually in our soils are just loads of lime. You dig down a little bit and there's more lime. I don't think I can apply fertilizer in five generations to furniture. I'm applying the fertilizer in five generations to burn that up. Calcium is not a problem it doesn't matter. We've got plenty of calcium, plenty of magnesium plenty of pH but having that biology in there as a buffer makes that stuff not be such a problem. Now I do have with the zone management I have found areas of 5.6 under pH so if you can use a little bit more lime a little more calcium some of the balances are different with bare brain management it's achievable to get a couple of truck loads of lime and put them where you need them but for the most part plenty of lime. Let the earthworms work and really bring up to the top what you need. Go ahead. I was just once driving I didn't want to get just a bigger planting window and less lime so they seem to work better. Our soils don't go to 90 degrees right away they don't start killing biology the first every day in the sun shines it's more moderate we lose some growing new units in May we gain everything we lose we gain back in June, July, August our soils are cool they're just what they need to be they're perfect the corn responds to that but when we lose degree units and they're early in the spring you can't make that back up some years we get enough sunlight to bring it back but it's not worth betting on every day is seen through your corn when they take cop insurance away then what are you going to do go down another five degree units probably? but these 90 day varieties some of them really dried on well and they respond I had to go up to 94 days in my test plot and some of those are just fine but I don't like seeing those long day varieties why would I choose the earlier named varieties is the question about corn around from how much time do we have any other imperative questions you can grab me over here until they flow down here thank you