 Hi, my name is Doug Lamblum. I'm a beef cattle specialist with North Dakota State University I'm located at the Dickinson Research Extension Center at Dickinson, North Dakota and We're here at the Lucas Hoth farm Lucas is one and his wife Jolene are cooperators in the Sarah project that we've been conducting for the last five years but basically what we did in the research was to What to take a five-year crop rotation that had a diverse representation of crops both cool season and warm season crops that were both broad leaf and grasses and Then the other thing that we did is an integrated system So we integrated beef cattle production into the cropping system The goal was to get a revenue stream for both cash crops, which would be our wheats and our Sunflowers and to get income from beef by grazing our cover crops our corn and our field P. Barley crops Very unconventional. We don't graze corn. We combine it. Well in our system We graze it and we take advantage of producing high quality beef from this cropping system another avenue that we added to it so we had another level of complexity and that was Frame score size of the steers that we use we used yearling steers in this particular project to go from conception to slaughter They never got marketed they stayed on the farm for their entire lives until they went to the feedlot for a very brief time We were able to graze these cattle for over 200 days of grazing from May to December then sent them to the feed yard These yearling steers after being in somewhat genetically held back from their ability to gain their maximum potential When they hit the feed yard with a lot of good corn type diets Corn based diets and supplements and protein gained four and a half five pounds a day So they explode when they hit the feed yard And so it's a very short period of time that they're in the feed yard and very economical the soil health improved dramatically a Dramatic improvement in soil health. So we got improvement in soil organic matter. We got an improvement in soil nitrogen Fertility increased and this of course was a driver behind increased crop production in the cropping system for all of the crops and Yet when we compared though the the spring wheat in that rotation system to continuously grown spring wheat We found that spring wheat continuously grown yields declined Whereas in our cropping system spring wheat yields increased to where we had a very remarkable Ending amount and very very good classic demonstration of what Integrated cropping system will do in terms of improving soil quality soil health and the ability to Produce crops we got to the point after the second year actually in the cropping system where we no longer applied fertilizer So no additional fertilizer. The soil was doing the work. So we asked the question. Are we more willing to? Be a situation where we work for the soil or will the soil work for us and indeed if we allow the soil to do What it's capable of doing in terms of microbial activity nutrient cycling? Those microbes will work for us instead of us working for the soil same key with a livestock the small frame steer Gives us a better net return at the end of the grazing period than does our large frame steers However, we have a flip side to that point when we put those large frame rapid growing steers in the feedlot they have a Better net return to labor and management than did the small frame steer So it depends what we're doing and how we want to use these cattle as we visit with our producers our farmer Cooperators that are actively involved in the SARE project We find that when they have taken some of the principles that we've been doing under research And they put those under a farm situation a farm scale Example like Lucas Hof did on his farm like Derek and Angie Ducart did on their farm and are doing on their farms They found that what we were telling actually worked and they were able to show increased net return to their enterprises by backgrounding calves grazing unharvested corn by grazing grain corn or a silage type corn and then sending some yearling Feedlot in the case of Lucas Hof He was able to return on some of his poorer quality calves that he didn't really want to sell It was his lower end of his calves. He netted $617 per steer by sending them through the feed yard and it worked To add to that when he put his corn crop on when he grew his corn crop He had a little more corn than he needed We had a bad winter it was tough. He couldn't come by so he waited until this spring to harvest the corn So I took six hundred and seventeen dollars per steer Net return on his low-end calves and then turned around and sold nine thousand dollars worth of corn That he didn't use because he sent the cattle the feed yard It's money money money and it's profit profit profit