 The next speaker is Dr. Dave Franzen, Extension Soil Fertility Specialist from NDSU. Dave Franzen is a professor of soil science and extension soil specialists at North Dakota State University. He received his BS, MS, and PhD at the University of Illinois and worked for 18 years as an agronomist manager for a chain of fertilized retail locations in Illinois before coming to NDSU in June of 1994. His research is focused on strategies for site specific nutrient application and nutrient rate studies to serve as a foundation for crop nutrient recommendation revisions. Alright, thanks a lot. This is as far west as I've been in South Dakota to speak. And I haven't been here for a very long time. Last time I think I was about this way that was signs for 6 foot prairie dog ranch store. When did that die, finally? 20 years ago? I don't know. It's still there? Is it really? Oh my God. No, I don't think it is. My sister wanted to know because she still remembers that. She lives in Florida. Alright, so history of phosphate exports. So you didn't know you had a mine here, did you? You didn't know you had a mine. You thought the phosphate came from Idaho or Florida. But here we go. So the way this thing evolved is that I got a phone call about 8 years ago and it was somebody from the Governor's Historical Society of North Dakota and they wanted me to give a presentation out of Bismarck on the history of fertilizer application in North Dakota. And so I heard the word Governor and I said yes. And then I hung up the phone and I thought, what the heck am I going to talk about for 45 minutes? I'm going to show a chart of NPK since 1950 and it will take all of 5 minutes. And then I started thinking a little bit more about things that I've heard and talking to farmers and especially older farmers and that and so it kind of developed from there. To give you background is that the soils in this region and our former speakers showed the ones in Colorado but this whole area, this whole Great Plains was a really remarkable area. It had been prairie and a grazed system in this area more than 10,000 years. We have relatively fragile soils out here. The sediments are way older than they are east of the river. But the prairie has been around for a long time and they've built up all of that organic material to very deep depths and most of our soils, really high levels of nitrogen and phosphate, all the nutrients that a plant could need were in those soils when our settlers, when our great-grandfathers came to this area. A lot of the people that came west were not really well off and one of the things they saw as they're going across the past or wherever their homestead was was there were bones everywhere that we think of the natives that lived here before that you hear the stories that they used all the parts of the buffalo and that's true. But they didn't use all the parts to all the buffalo. I mean how many scapular could a family really use? Once you got a shoulder blade to use as a shovel, do you really need 20? So there was all these bones all over the place. There are buffalo bones mostly but deer, elk, whatever, you name it, it's all in there. So there was a cottage, more in the cottage industry. It was a big, big industry at one time. The first states that took advantage of this were Kansas, Oklahoma, states to the south of us but the settlers would pick up buffalo bones and they'd put them on a rail car and they'd ship them east. And we think that maybe they used some for fertilizer but I'll show you, they used them for other things too. And sometimes there's some big bucks. This is up by Devil's Lake in the 1880s, big piles waiting for the trains to come by. This is in the Red River Valley. Those are the medicine Indians that had the Red River carts full of bones that they're picking up and taken to either to the river boats on the river or the rail on the northern Pacific that just came through Fargo. So let me see, back around 1980 roughly was centennials for a lot of North Dakota little towns and probably years too. So in some of those towns there was enough of a push and enough of a history that they would interview people that were old enough to remember things and then they would put them out into these little booklets. You know, 100 year anniversary of Ellendale or Edgeley or some place and then they have quotes from different people and so you can pick these up on the internet and maybe if your little town has one of these things you can go back and read some of this yourself. But this is in the first paragraph there is from Cullum, North Dakota which is in Dunn County, northwest of Bismarck. It says first several years were especially hard due to crop failures and low prices. Buffalo bones were picked up and hauled to Ellendale in exchange for food and flour. Ellendale was the nearest town at the time and 42 miles from the farm. I was wrong, I was thinking of somebody else. But anyway Cullum is near Ellendale 40 miles away. Then the next one is Mr. Kruger broke up about 10 acres of land the first year but 1889 was a drought year and he didn't get his seed back. Mr. Kruger having nothing else to do after seeding started picking up buffalo bones. He sold them at Edgeley and Ellendale for 12 bucks a ton which is really pretty big money back then. He'd go out one day, come home the next with a wagon load of bones camping out overnight and sold about $70 worth of bones during that early part of the summer in 1889 and helped them quite a bit as they had no other income. And then their lair North Dakota which is in kind of southeast North Dakota they planned their first flax crop collected buffalo bones received about $2 a wagon load. So many many stories like this across the area. These are some buffalo bones near Cram that's what I was thinking about. Eight miles northeast of Hazen with the piles of bones there. You can see the wagon where they brought them in the rail cars and they load them all by hand and hand labor was about it. So you see pictures from all over the place. There's pile of bones up there in the top. You can see pictures from Canada. There's one down in North Dakota. These are some in Saskatchewan. That big line of skulls over there is from Saskatchewan. And some bones being picked up on the train car in Ellendale in 1888. So they used them for fertilizer in the east but this comes from I got this picture from the Detroit library and it's the Michigan Carbon Works in Rougeville, Michigan and it's this big pyramid of skulls. Does that look familiar? Ever see Revenant? Where do you think they got the idea for that? Anyway, that's a movie that was out here a while back. But anyway, so Carbon Works, I don't know what they made there but you know they used buffalo bones to do it. So a typical bone meal, you go to the store, go to the organic section or whatever and you have bone meal that's about 315-0, about 15% P2O5. And so a lot of the nitrogen that came from the bones probably went back in the soil. But the phosphate, of course, was picked up and moved away. In Kansas, they still have the records for that and this publication that I looked at. And their big time period was 72-74 where ours was somewhere around 87 to maybe 91, 92, something like that. Although people still picked up buffalo bones in North Dakota up into the 20s, you know, really. But they shipped about 3.2 million tons of bones from Kansas to the east. In North Dakota, Northern Pacific records were destroyed by fire but it's pretty reasonable to assume that about the same amount of tons was used. So if you figure about 3.2 million tons of bones were shipped, they contained 15% phosphate. Then about 480 tons of P2O5 was shipped out of North Dakota and probably similar amounts out of South Dakota. And that's about two years of phosphate use at today's present higher rates. If you looked at the trends of phosphate use over time, you were kind of at the peak. Probably peaked out when, you know, those marvelous years when corn was seven and soybeans were 15. But it's slacked off a little bit since then. But anyway, we're very high rates about two years. So that was cool. So I got down with all that research and put some slides together and I thought, well, now I've got 15 minutes. Now what am I going to do about the other half hour? You know, when I sat and I thought and I thought and I thought. Well, I'd been around not quite 20 years at the time and most of those years have been pretty wet. But you know, I've seen my share of dust storms, especially in the Red River Valley where people don't get it yet. And I've been around no-till people and had plots all over the area, all over the state and worked with no-tillers and that. But I never really heard anybody talk about how much was really lost. And so I started to dig in. And the more I dug, the more appalled I was and the more amazed I was at the losses that we've experienced since that pile first turned what the natives said, you know, you turned the grass upside down. You know, what happened during that time? And what I found was really our great phosphate export. Business has been going on since that pile first came out. And it comes in the form of losing all the topsoil because it's just been devastating. I mean, you guys struggle with it every year, unfortunately. This is up, you know, in the Wilson area back in the 30s. So, I mean, why did that happen? I mean, our ancestors were not stupid people. So what in the world? So they came from Scandinavia and they came from Germany. They came from Czechoslovakia and different places in Europe. And they came from the Eastern United States. And all of those places, stiff wind is probably 10 miles an hour. And the technology of the time was to run back and forth and back and forth. This was probably like the fifth time that that person and that tractor has gone across that piece of ground to get the land to the consistency of flour sometime. And some of you that are older know this right away, but some of you that are younger really haven't grasped it. But go into an old, old fence row sometime and look at one of those discs that they had, or one of the planners. I mean, look at one of those planners. I mean, there's hardly any down pressure on them at all. These openers are just, you know, one step above what the Egyptians used 4,000 years ago. There's a reason we call them drain grills. And so, you know, it had to be flour in order for them to get in the ground and put the seed in the ground because it just wasn't heavy. And things you pulled it with weren't heavy. And not like the kind of equipment we have today. So this is what you're supposed to do. You're supposed to work your ground out to the consistency of flour so that you could get a good stand. And then, just as a little aside, but it certainly related to this, there was some joker called Campbell that came out about 1900 roughly. And his idea for the Great Plains was to make sure that you pulverized the soil enough so that when the wind started blowing, you could create dust mulch so that your soil didn't dry out so much. And, you know, he had pictures from Colorado. And he had pictures from Kansas. He had pictures from North Dakota. I mean, this is like the Bible for farmers in 1900. So you can Google it. You can probably find it online. Campbell, dust mulch. I know you can find it. Anyway, this guy, I mean, it's too bad that the wind's temperate union wasn't active at that period of time. And that would have prevented a lot of problems, I think. Anyway, the other thing is on these prairies, there's not a tree in sight, right? And so once the wind blows, and you know the wind blows, once the wind blows, you've got all this, you know, it's just free to go. It's just gone. So people think that this started in the 30s, but it didn't start in the 30s. I came up north of Fargo about 30 miles or so, a little town of Hillsborough. There used to be about a 2 to 3,000 acre red clover seed farm. You know, alfalfa really hadn't come in the area yet. And red clover was the thing. And so these people, you know, they found their brochure, their sales brochure. And then people didn't write just, you know, they didn't have just little tagged lines like we do in the ads today. I mean, they just told this whole story about their farm. And just in passing, the person said, every time it blows a little bit, the ditches fill up with black soil, and we have to come and clean them out. And then he went in and talked about something else. But this is just in passing. It's just like, you know, it's just kind of a pain. But the soils are just so deep, you know. You didn't care if you lost anything. You just didn't, it didn't matter at all for a long time. So anyway, then it got dry in the late 20s. That's corn up by mine out. Why somebody would grow corn up a mine out back in 29. I have no idea. But anyway, it was a bad idea that year. And so successive dry years and it couldn't grow anything, work in the field four or five times and you can imagine. So my, my, the person has the office right next to me. Tom DeSutter. He's an excellent researcher, a great teacher, just gotten the award this last year from NDSU. But he does volunteer work out in the community. He does volunteer hospice, which I think is, you know, pretty heavy stuff, but, but he does it and he enjoys doing it. And he, he, that, that, that's his thing. So he, he came across an old farmer from Northwest Bismarck. And, and so he asked his family, him if he could use his recollections of the 30s. And so this is his recollections and I bet if there are really, you know, some 90 year old people here in the audience that they could say the same thing. So 32 was a good year. 33 was a bad year. 34 was dry with lots of dust. 35 was a good year with rains, I suppose everything's relative. And then 36 is a very bad year. The worst, lots of dust. Grasshoppers had three loads of hay where normally they get 20 to 30. Dust black in the sky, they had to turn on oil lamps to see it noon. They sold all their livestock, kept only a dairy cow. If you had to use Russian thistle for forage, it got sick. There wasn't any wheat. 37 was better than 36 and still bad. So it was pretty much hell. It was just hell. And a lot of people, a lot of people left. I was talking to a no-till support group and Fargo here a couple days ago caught a bunch of farmers and the one farmer I was at, he and his wife keep track of abstracts. They do abstract work for sales of deeds and stuff. They said some of these pieces of land back in the 30s, they would change hands like eight times in about two years. People, they sold it for nothing. They tried to make it. They couldn't make it and they sold it and sold it. So it was pretty awful. A lot of farmland was deserted, I'm sure, in this area too back in that time. So the Northern Pacific Railroad did not advertise this in 1880 when they were trying to get people to move into this area, did they? I mean, the big pumpkins and the big ears of corn and all that kind of stuff but they failed to mention that a low wind day is 20 mile an hour. So this is a big deal. So in the beginning of the 30s the USDA finally figured out that we were in some of the highest wind erosion areas in the country. So yay. All right, so this is by Bismarck. This is in the late 30s. That's a fence built on top of a fence. And look at the guy's tie and it's going like this. This is in western Minnesota. You can't escape either until you've got maybe about 100 miles into Minnesota and it's okay but they have the same problem. And look at that soil. I mean, it's just like flour. Any old wind at all. Dust everywhere, every day, all the time. This is a dust storm by Williston. The USDA kept hearing stories about how horrible it was. They sent a photographer out, Mr. Russell. He took a series of photographs in northwestern, in western North Dakota at that time. Here's a pastor during a dust storm in 37. Look at that great forage. Isn't that great forage? It's a wonderful forage. And this is an aftermath of a dust storm in western Minnesota with all the ex-soil in the ditch and covering the fences up halfway. This is my own personal photograph collection. It's here on South Dakota, 11.55 a.m. just before noon on November 12, 1933. Those are the streetlights that are on. And you can just barely see that car. Middle of the day. These things lasted for days. And this is from up by Watertown. We see pictures like this from Kansas and Texas and Oklahoma and kind of accept it. There aren't that many pictures from up here because I think that you get out of your house and you try to collect what livestock didn't die. I mean, the last thing you're going to do is pick up a camera and take a picture of it, right? I mean, it was just really horrible. And so down there, bigger populations and now there's much risk of freezing to death. And so there were more pictures from Kansas and those kind of areas. But we have the same thing up here. Black blizzards all the time, multiple times during the year. This is one by Watertown as well. This is three o'clock in the afternoon on May 4th. I think it's May 9th, 1934. May 7th, 1934. Can't tell. Yeah, it's a nine. Doesn't matter. Anyway, same kind of thing as in Huron. This is like Gregory, South Dakota. We're not that far away from Gregory right now. But that's Gregory, South Dakota. And it says one of South Dakota's black blizzards, 1934. It doesn't say the South Dakota black blizzard. So you see what's going on here? I mean, this is just awful. This is an aftermath of a dust storm down by Gregory. There's a few, if you, let me see. I think this is a still from Ken Burns Dust Bowl series. And I think it's animated. And this guy is just walking against the wind with all this dust bowl and all through him. This is a hog building by Gregory, South Dakota after one of those blizzards. So, you know, the farmers had livestock. They had no income. The soil had all blown away. It had been dry for a year or two. They don't have any crop. They don't have any money. A lot of people have moved away. I mean, whole thousands of acres, you know. Southwest of Fargo is a fairly large area called Cheyenne Grasslands. The town on the west side of it's McLeod. And I don't think McCare was a TV personality in Fargo when he has a radio show out of Lisbon. I don't know if he comes out this way or not. Anyway, he grew up in McLeod, and we talked one day. And he said that his dad would take him around the grasslands and said that, you know, Mr. Knudsen lived here, Mr. Smith lived here, Mr. This moved here. You know, every quarter section was populated during that time. And now it's just dunes. It's just dunes. And there's huge bluffs along the Cheyenne River that didn't used to be there. And he said if you dug down into those dunes, you'd find the trees that were there in the 30s when the wind would stop and the soil would just drop there. So the government had a program where you could send a cow in or a horse or anything. They would give you $10 for it. And then they would shoot it and put it in a pit because it probably had dust ammonia anyway. It wasn't worth anything. So anyway, you get some money to live on by putting your outlier stock out there and having the government shoot it. One of the things I run up against all the time is the farmers think that their only problem is what they see in the ditch. Is that, you know, they had a dust storm, awesome soil, oh, it's just a pain. They got to go out and they got to grate it out of the ditch and put it in the field. And that is definitely not what's going on out there. What you see in the ditch is just a small portion of whatever was lost out there. So this is a clipping from the Bismarck Tribune around April 22nd or 23rd, 1934. I'm not going to read the whole thing, but it's talking about their latest dust storm that year. And then they had a really severe one in April 21, 2122 in 1934. And it says, a ladder storm caused the most comment because of the fact that the 22nd was a Sunday and travelable by automobile and by plane was hazardous and difficult. And of course that was the day that people would travel, you know, because they work all week and if they're going to travel, they're going to go to some place. Several aviators reported that dust was encountered at all levels up to 14,000 feet. You know, almost three miles. So we didn't have satellite photographs back then, but we didn't have aerial planes. So these things, no matter how small, how large, they are three-dimensional. You got the stuff that goes in the ditch, but then you got this aerial stuff that just goes for like a long way, a long way. So now we have satellites. That's the Palouse about a decade ago. And the plumes on those, the scale of that is over 100 miles. So the dust that came from these North Dakota, South Dakota, the whole regional storms, blanketed cities in the East. In Chicago, they had to use, you know, plows to clean off their streets. In New York, they had to use plows to clean off their streets. In Washington, D.C., the reason we had the soil conservation service is that the guy that really tried to champion it had telegraph people across the country, from Kansas to Washington, D.C. So he could time his presentation when the dust storm was going to hit D.C. And so he received word that it was going to hit in the next half hour. And so he gets up and he starts to talk, and it hit, and he motioned to the window and he says, gentlemen, that's Kansas blown by. And they created the soil conservation service. So these things traveled for a very long time out into the oceans. They can core them. You know, this is a couple thousand miles out from the Sahara. It just, once it gets up in the air, it's there. So this is the assessment of the USDA during the 30s, at least in North Dakota, that almost 600,000 acres with serious erosion. They could maybe fix it if they really worked hard at it. But 9.1 million acres were so severely eroded that further use for crop or livestock production is economically unfeasible. And that probably exists today. 40-some million acres of possible land that could have been crop, maybe. And quite a bit of it is range now, almost 20 million acres. And we have the Cheyenne grasslands. We have other grasslands that are just, you know, they're grazed with a very low livestock population. But we lost a lot of farm ground during that period of time. Whoa. What happened there? All right. So anyway, in 33, this is early on during that period. It is estimated that topsoil losses reduced annual productivity 15 to 25 percent. And when soil was fully stripped, fields became barren. That's a memo to the Secretary of Agriculture in 1933. So we had all this soil. And it was just wonderful. And now it's largely gone. It was the bank of thousands of years of soil plant microorganism activity. And I didn't look up any figures in South Dakota, but I challenge you to do that kind of thing. Minnesota State Moorhead has a historian, he's from Kentucky, and he wrote a, he's written several books about the Red River Valley and that region. And so he found records where we yield Southwest of Fargo when they were first put in the ground with crappy planters, with only marginally adapted wheat varieties. We're over 40 bushels an acre. A lot of times we struggle to hit 40 bushels an acre in some years. And so here we are 140 years ago, and they were going 40 bushels an acre. We've come a long way, haven't we? That would only be possible if those soils were releasing over 100 pounds of nitrogen per acre. And the phosphate and everything else was sufficient. Today, even on fairly high organic matter soils, the people follow it. Almost always less than 100 pounds of end per acre on fellow soils. So some enterprising researchers or scientists decided to pick up some of that stuff that was in Central Park in New York and had it analyzed. And they had a general idea about where it came from. And so what they found is that the soil there, the dust, had 19 times more phosphate than the dust was left, 10 times more organic matter, 9 times more nitrogen, and 40 times more potassium. So all the good stuff, all the good stuff left. These are wheat yields of Russia and North Dakota from 1880 up until 1990 something. We won't care about Russia much. But the white boxes on the top, those are North Dakota Yields. And it's in kilograms per hectare. And someday I'll redo this thing, but not today. But those are 25 to 30 bushel yields in 1880 to about 1915, something like that. And then they started to drop even before it got dry. They were going down into the 15 to 20s. And they really didn't recover. Of course, those really horrible yields were the really, really dry years. But it never really covered up to 1880 levels until people started putting on fertilizer in the 50s. So these are my estimates. And I think they're very conservative estimates, but this is what I think we've had. I'll show you some evidence about that in just a minute. But I estimate we lost about a foot of soil from the hilltops, about eight inches from the slopes, average of six inches of topsoil in North Dakota from about 30 million acres of cropland. The total weight of that is 30 billion tons. And soils, productive soils, almost always contain around a ton of P205 an acre. So that means that we would have lost during that period of time in the 30s about 150 years of phosphate application at our today's present rates. So we exported quite a little bit and got nothing back for it. So after the 30s, everything changed, right? No problems at all. No erosion events. That's not true, is it? Every time it's windy, we lose. So across the Great Plains, millions of acres in the 50s and there's periods in the 60s and the 70s. And who can forget those wonderful years of 88 and 89? That was a treat, wasn't it? And so we've lost lots and lots of topsoil back and bought that all during that period of time. And it was, you know, in the late 70s, probably that a few people around here and in southwestern North Dakota just scattered around and up in the Manitoba and Saskatchewan decided that if they weren't going to do something, their kids wouldn't have anything to farm at all. It's all going to be rangeland. And so they started doing that no-till thing and the first extension really wasn't that excited about it but seeing the success and working with them and they decided that this is a good idea after all. And so then the Manitoba-North-Till-North Dakota No-Till Conference came about and now a lot of states have their own like you do. No-Till and you all can see the benefits of it. During that period of time after the 50s, that's not snow up near Grand Fork County. There was still a lot of soil losses, you know. You know, in 77 alone, we had, what, 13% of our cropland was damaged by wind. We lost about an inch of soil in 1980 from about 2.1. You know, just all these years we've just lost. So I guess the question, and now that, you know, we have some tools that can do this, but you all know farmers that aren't all that concerned about this. That, you know, they don't have any idea of what's been lost or what they stand to lose. And so why aren't they concerned? And I think the reason is because they mask the effects of whatever erosion they have with tillage and they don't have any check plot. They don't have any check for reference. Or if they do, you know, they kind of ignore the obvious. One of the things that I see from time to time is these rock piles. Is that, you know, these rock piles were started, I don't know, 50 years ago or 80 years ago. And a lot of them are on pedestals that the soil around it is eroded away. And so the rock piles are kind of heaped up on top of it. So what happens is, let's just start out in, I don't know, 1900. Let's say you broke up the field in 1900. You have an A horizon is the really black stuff. And maybe you've got two feet of it. And then the B horizon is something where chemically changed. Maybe you've got some lime down there. Maybe there's a little bit more clay down there. The color is certainly different. The chemistry is a little bit different. It's been changed somehow by the prairie grasses and all that. And then the C horizon is whatever you have in the bottom of it. It has been changed by biology at all. So you start to plow and you start to chisel and the wind starts to blow. And then for quite a while, you know, maybe 20, 30 years, something like that. You know, it's still pretty much as black as what it was when you first started to plow it. And you don't see any difference. But then at some point in time, you've lost enough topsoil that you're actually working into the topsoil, some of that B horizon, some of that lower organic matter stuff. But the person looks behind them at what they've just done and it just looks as black as it ever did. And every year it still looks as black as it kind of ever did. And they're digging more and more and more into the B and more and more in the B. And so eventually it's really not the A anymore. It's just kind of a mixture of A and a little bit of A and a lot of B. And they get to the point where they're actually digging into the parent material that didn't have hardly any organic matter in it at all. And they look in the back of the tractor and it still looks black to them. But it's not. It's not nearly as black as what it did. So my colleague, Dave Hopkins, and his graduate student at the time, they revisited some soil surveys. There was some soil survey benchmarks NRCS made back in around 1960 roughly. And so they went back to those same locations, did transects and identified where they'd worked before. And so in Western Walsh County, which is just northwest of Grand Forks, there was a site. All the sites that weren't in pasture were affected, but this one was the worst. In 1958 when they characterized this, they found that the sea horizon, the place where the parent material was, was 34.3 inches below the surface of the soil. When Dave went back and they redugged the holes in 2014, the distance between surface and sea horizon was 15 inches. During that period of time, they'd lost, what, 19 inches? 19 inches of topsoil during that period of time. And the farmer had no idea and still looked back to them. And so you saw a picture of this just the other day, you know, just the prior speaker. But when you see those kind of things, the dark layer over junk, that means that dark layer is not the original dark layer. That's just whatever might have left over from the original topsoil mixed in with the subsoil. That's when you see a boundary like that, that's what that is. Little, little, little tees of a topsoil with the junk underneath. Sometimes you can look down in the soil, if you grow a soil, if you do a soil pit. And next time you go see one and you know, there'll be some here and there field days and things. You'll see an old badger hole or an old ground squirrel hole or a root channel or something like that down at depth. And it'll be filled with the original organic matter and if not the original organic matter, organic matter from long past. So you can look back in time and see what the organic matter used to look like. So this is kind of a topsoil roughly that's been in CRP for a long time. We can see the old worm channel in there and see how black that is compared to the soil on top of it. The black is what the soil used to look like and the gray around it is what the soil was made through tillage and erosion. So there's a lot of additional evidence for the topsoil loss, not just my estimates. So in Divide County, which is in northwest North Dakota, you might be able to find your old county soil survey on the web. A lot of these have been scanned and so you can kind of look this up. If you're lucky enough to have a county that has this scan. Anyway, Divide County 1900, Divide Soil Series, and there's Divide Soil Series all the way down almost to Lemon, South Dakota, was described as having 16 inches of very black topsoil. And I've been on Divide Soils within the past 20 years and it has no black topsoil. It has a light gray topsoil and they probably lost at least a foot of soil off those and that's conservative. In Cass County, the one that's far goes in, they describe a Wheatland soil, is a two foot of topsoil with organic matter of 6.9 percent. And I've been on Wheatland so it's about what, 10 miles west of Kasselton, it's a Wheatland exit, north side of the road, but there's Wheatland soils all through that area. And generally they're about 2 percent of organic matter down to about 6 inches and stuff down underneath that. They've lost it all. They've lost it all. At least two feet of topsoil, they've lost off that soil. They describe a Miami loam which is probably a Bearden, is having three feet of 7 percent plus organic matter. And today, if you go on a Bearden almost any place, it's about 6 inches of 4 percent, probably lost two and a half feet of topsoil on that soil. And a Fargo soil is described as two feet of really black 7 percent plus organic matter. Today it's 6 inches, around 5 percent. In Brookings County, in South Dakota 1903, a Marshall sandy loam soil is described as 8 inches of 6.7 percent organic matter soil. A Marshall loam 12 inches of 5.8 percent and then two feet of 2.8 percent. It's probably a Barnes or something like it described today, which has a typical A horizon of 3 to 4 percent. So in these kinds of soils, they probably lost one to two feet of their topsoil. So from the 30s to today, I estimate we've lost another 6 inches of topsoil from about 20 million acres of crop ground. That's an additional 12 and a half million tons of P205, about 40 million tons of nitrogen. That's the equivalent of 75 pounds of nitrogen and phosphorus application at today's present rate. It's about two generations of fertilizer inputs. In an area, it still hasn't stopped. I mean, every time it's dry in the spring or in the grounds bare and the wind blows more than 20 miles an hour, the soil starts to move. You see these clouds everywhere. That's an aftermath of a storm in the Red River Valley. People try to rough up the ground, but then it smooths over. I don't know. I think as long as they think they're busy, they're doing something nice. This is a dust storm at Craven Corner, South Dakota, West Aberdeen in 2017. So any time you have work ground and it's a little bit dry in the spring, it's starting to dry out and you get one of those fronts come through, you lose more soil. People call it snurt, but it's not funny. So we're not the 30s. We're not even the 50s. There's any number of different tools that a person can put on their machines so you can plant through about anything. You can plant through stalks. You can plant through wheat residue. You have to manage the whole kind of system, but there's really no excuse not to do it anymore. There is a conservation tillage, but you can see the dust in the end, and certainly it's not as horrible as if they plowed it and then worked it clean, but it's just delaying the inevitable. The NRCS has what I hate in their surveys is they have the tolerable soil loss. I can't think of any tolerable soil loss. Why is that tolerable? They say it thinking that the soil is going to build itself up, but unless there's some change, it'll never build itself up. You'll always lose that little bit. It's not tolerable at all. So where was in charge? Let them know. I don't think that's a good idea. So the answer to it is as a previous speaker, make sure that something's on the ground all the time. You need the mulch. They especially need the mulch, John and Candice, where the evapotranspiration in the summertime is just abominable, and they think they have winter, but they really don't. So there's just a lot of evapotranspiration that happens almost 12 months a year, and so they need that mulch, and some you're kind of a little bit in that area here. I mean, you're not quite as hot, but it can get dang hot here too, and your season is shorter, but even yesterday with what, 37 or something like that, outside I thought I was in the tropics. I looked for mangoes. So having that mulch there for the temperature is a very good thing during the growing season. Depending on the crops you grow, though, you also have to think about how the soil is going to warm up in the springtime. So things that are fairly cool season crops like wheat, and I don't know, there might be a scattering of canola around here, barley, some other cool season crops, they don't really care if there's mulch everywhere, but you start getting into, say, corn for real and not just a forage, then you need the soil to warm up a little bit, and that's where something like striptill would come in, some striptill down in southeastern North Dakota, and it still has the same nice no-till properties. It still acts like a no-till field, but it has that little bear strip in the middle where it warms up, dries up, and so you can make as much corn as non-erodable conventional till if there is such a thing, and build your soil up over time. The farmer that has this has raised his organic matter over 40 some years from what his neighbors were around 3.2, something like percent. That particular field is like 7.2 percent, almost approaching prairie levels. He does cover crops, he does striptill, he no-tills his weed into that, he has a multi-year rotation. There's no excuse that a person could tell me that there isn't a workaround to make a no-till or striptill work, and that's the only way that you're going to stop the soil from eroding, and that's the only way to get on the other side of it and start to build your soil up, so we're actually going to get some benefit out of this. One of the things we see, and the previous speaker alluded to it, we're the only state that has this, but I think others, when they get serious about it and have turnover of people retire and have new people come in that seriously look at it, when I first came to North Dakota, the No-Till Association, they invited me out to talk in Minot, and so coldest night I've ever been in North Dakota is minus 45 degrees in the morning, no wind chill, but I also remember it because they invited me to the smoker that was in the Holiday Inn, and we got the chance to meet a lot of the original people, the Beach Boys and Joe Brecker and others people. So they were happy to see me, but I also said that they didn't follow NDSU fertilizer recommendations anymore, and I was surprised and asked them why, and they said after they've been in No-Till for a number of years that they could start shaving their nitrogen rates back, and they shaved them off enough that they didn't even pay attention to what our recommendations were. So I said okay, and I remember that, and in 2010, I think, when I put all my wheat together, I remember the conversation, and I divided up between long-term No-Till fields, which I define as six years or more continuous No-Till, not hobby No-Till, six years continuous Serious No-Till, and Conventional-Till, and they were right that the credits were like 50 pounds of and less use on wheat, and so when I did my corn work to reinvestigate those recommendations, my sunflower work, I specifically looked at fields that were conventional and No-Till, and I found similar credits with both those crops. So one of the things we found lately is that long-term No-Till crops, long-term No-Till soils have a lot higher asymptotic nitrogen fixing organism bacteria activity than conventional-Till neighbors right across the fence of the road. So that's part of that credit. That's where part of it comes from is the activity of these asymptotic things that aren't living on the route, like a rhizobium, they're just out there. They're in all of our soils. It's just that we destroy their food, we destroy their housing, and we limit their food so that it's just kind of a background level. They're just barely surviving out there, but once we have stable housing and a multiple food, as you saw from the nematodes and little things and big things and intermediate things and all these things are dying in poop and in slime and all kinds of stuff going on all over the place, that these things can survive. And so that's where some of the credit comes from. So people that are in these systems that can be more conservative on their fertilizer and still have hellish high yields. I mean, this guy in Southeast North Dakota, he pulled 250 bushel corn off his field last year. I mean, he's 70, 80 bushel beans. So you don't have to be poor to be no-till. All right, so despite the historic high rates of fertilizer nutrients, levels of phosphate on many North Dakota and South Dakota fields, I know that they are still very low because we lost all of our native stuff. I mean, it's almost all gone. And so we have to make it up somehow. So we have at least about 200 years of no-soil loss and continued phosphate application to catch up where we were in 1890, and that should be pretty sobering if it's not. Some of you that are in the retail business or maybe you've had these thought yourself, why don't my soil phosphate levels improve? You know, I'm putting on more than I ever have. You know, I'm conventional-till and I just never build up. Well, it's because you lose them every spring. Well, why is my soil pH increasing? You know, it's because a lot of these subsoils have high pH in the subsoil, and guess what? Now you're farming the subsoil. So there's anything to do there, anything else you're doing except tilling it. And then why do I have more soil crusting? Because your organic matter is so desperately low that there's nothing to keep it from crusting. All right, so the only remedy for continued soil degradation is no-till or modified no-till such as strip-till. So we've had a long history of phosphate export. First on purpose with the buffalo bones, and then second as an unintended consequence of doing what people at the time thought was right. Soil fertility is intimately related to soil conservation. There's definitely a tie between them. And the only way to restore it is through long-term no-till commitment. Thank you.