 Dakota Lakes Research Farm, you know, one of the things as I go through today, I think I really want you guys to think about where you want to be in a hundred years because you've got to get in gear and get the agricultural research system working to get you there. If we had the system we have now, if we'd have had that 30 years ago, we would not have Dakota Lakes and you wouldn't know any of this stuff. Okay? So you really need to start paying attention to what's happening at all the land-grant universities in the United States because they're just totally being taken over and it really isn't applied research, a lot of it. So there's the Dakota Lakes Research Farm. It's owned by farmers both irrigated and dry land. We've been 100% low-disturbance, snow-till, production enterprise profit support to research and that's why we've been able to continue. If you're not a member of Dakota Lakes, you should be. If you haven't visited Dakota Lakes, you should. I have people from all over the world come to visit us there and I have a lot of people in South Dakota never been there, which is kind of interesting. And we're building an addition on our shop, so if you want to really get involved you could make a donation to that. So there's our native vegetation. This is one of the most exciting days I've had. My time at Dakota Lakes, this is not quite a year ago, January last year. This is Colin Seiss. He's from Australia. He's a grain and graze guy. I've talked about kind of a perennial cover cropping system in Australia that works really well. This is Rolf Derpx. I think a couple people mentioned Rolf. He's from Paraguay. And this is Dersuga San. We call him Duracell because he always goes. He's from Brazil as well and they came through. Now these guys, you notice Brazil, Paraguay, and Australia is about 23 below that day and they wanted to take a picture by the sign because they'd come to the Dakota Lakes Research Farm so they wanted this sign so we're standing out there. We found all the coats we could. And then we went out and showed them some of what we did. This is irrigated corn on corn. We planted between the corn rows. We'll do a two-year stack and then this past year we planted canola right in this little spot here. And we dug around. Dersu is much more excited than Rolf. And you notice Colin isn't even there. He's in the damn truck. He's had enough of it. Okay, so a little bit of biodiversity growing there. Anyway, 1979, I've shown you this before, the average wheat price in 1970 is $1.37. The average price of barrel oil is $3.39. So you just do the math for today. It's about 89 bucks for a barrel oil today, but nine bucks for wheat. Minnesota where tillage is king, it takes slightly under 10 gallons of diesel fuel per acre for tillage seeding in harvest. So that's not a lot. Four bucks a gallon that's 40 bucks. It's not a big input if you're looking at price of land in Minnesota for whatever. No till is not about taking out the energy cost. It takes the energy one gallon of diesel fuel to manufacture, transport to five pounds of nitrogen. So that Minnesota farmer puts on 150 pounds per acre of land. The energy is three times. 30 gallons that he used for tillage seeding in harvest. So the big energy input is nitrogen fertilizer. The big problem with doing tillage is it screws up all the things these guys talked about. Hey, one guy come up and said, boy, I'm a conventional tiller. You're really making a conventional tiller feel bad and whatever. And I said, well, you better go home before three. So 80% of the total input cost in agriculture can be traced directly to energy. We all feel really good about how good of farmers we are. 80% of that's due to energy. 120 years ago that was zero. 120 years from now it has to be zero again. Because we're going to be out of fossil fuel. No. Now, some people say I'm going to use biodiesel. And we are cold pressing our oil seeds and stuff, right? At the farm because we're going to be fossil fuel neutral by 2026. But if I took all the oils and fats in the United States, beef, towel, pork lard, all the corn oil, soybean oil and whatever, and made them into B100, we would have about 20% of our road diesel plus home heating needs. And that's it. We'd have nothing for agriculture, nothing for electrical generation, nothing for industrial, and we still need 80%. It's not the answer, okay? It's a way for us to have diesel fuel in case we can't get it to run our combines, but it's not a long term solution. So I'm a farmer. I take sunlight, water and carbon dioxide and make them into products I can sell. You notice I didn't say anything about energy and iron and whatever. How well do we do this? One of the things we do is we get hung up on these terms. Randy England was over here running all these terms by me and I had this put together already, Randy. They sat there and smiled at you, right? Sustainable, no-till, regenerative, organic, zero-tills, direct seed, what the hell you want to call yours, right? I don't know. Yeah, I got another name, right? The new one is soil health. Okay, but you have a hell of a time defining that too. We had NRCS had a whole soil health team, right? Remember all the boys out in Colorado? They showed up one day and they're trying to write a definition. This is what you got to do to have a healthy soil. And I took them out of one of my fields and I dug up a little soil and I said, smell this. And they smelled it and I said, now, you know, if you get something to measure that smell, that would work. But I also challenged them. I said, define a beautiful woman or a handsome man. How tall, what size hair, what color hair, what size different things, right? You can't write a definition for, but we all know one when we see one, okay? Mine happened to be our 25th wedding anniversary about two weeks ago. She needs a sympathy card, not a... When I get a really kick out of it, I was traveling in Canada last year, they came up with this turb ethical oil. It means that the oil from Canada, even though they dig it out of the tar sands and heat to have her 11 hell out of it and do all this stuff, at least their women are well treated and they get educations and whatever, whereas in some of the Middle Eastern nations they aren't treated as well, right? And they have human rights and whatever, so their oil is better, it's ethical oil. And I'm like, yeah, okay. That works. Okay, we spend lots of time trying to find what we should do and should not do and little time focusing on where we want to be. Or do you want to be? Consequently, much of the research and management effort is devoted to optimizing a single component like canola or corn. How can you better manage? How can you kill that? What event do you have in that corn? And when you're resistant to that corn, you've got to get another event. Right? Spend all this time looking at the little tiny detail. And we're using more and more specialized treatment. We're really focusing on the end instead of acting to get where we want to be. We're reacting. Reacting from going where we do not want to be instead of focusing on where we want to be. It's a little bit like trying to drive your car down the highway by looking at the edge of the ditch. Okay, that works in a blizzard for you boys from the south that don't really understand how to drive in a blizzard break. See, all these South Dakota guys know how to do this. When you're drunk driving in a blizzard in the old days, it's really fun. But it's not ideal way to get home. Now, there's no better time than now. We've never been more profitable. You know, I can tell by all the four-wheel drive pickups around people have some spare cash, right? So, where do we want to be? Where do you want South Dakota to be in 200 years? What do you want to look like? If we keep doing what we're doing, what's it going to look like? Okay? So, what 30 years of no-till and crop rotation work have taught me? Remember that I'm a slow learner. You don't believe that? Ask my wife. I have learned more from farmers than they've learned from me. And I've learned more from farmers because they call me up and say how would you do this? Or I did this and this happened. And my advantage is I've talked to a lot of farmers that have made a lot of mistakes. And we all learn. And I've also had 30 years to make mistakes on my own. I've learned more from observing nature than trying to change it. And I gave a talk last spring at SDSU to a bunch of really young faculty members that don't know South Dakota about where Dakota lakes came from. And I started with the Lavre-Andre brothers. Many people here know who the Lavre-Andre brothers are. Yeah, people from around the period. Okay? They are the French fur traders' sons from Winnipeg that came across the Continental Divide from the Red River Valley to the Missouri River Valley, looking for a westward passage and also to claim this area for France. And the reason we bought it in the Louisiana Purchase from France were those guys. But they're also looking for beavers. And then Lewis and Clark were looking for beavers to kill. And once we killed the beavers, we no longer had the beaver dams that kept the water from flooding the Missouri River. And a white man wasn't smart enough to build his houses up on the hills. They built them in the river bottoms. And we start flooding so then we had to build big-ass dams. And when we built the dams, we had to take water from pier to redfield to irrigate because you couldn't possibly grow corn and soybeans in the Jimmerer Valley without irrigation. Duh. Right? I've learned more from observing nature than trying to change it. I thought, hell, we can do this. We can grow corn and soybeans in Jimmerer Valley if we no-till. We can grow corn at pier if we no-till. If we better use the water because mother nature could do just fine doing that. No-till is just one tool among many that we use to help us manage our ecosystem. But if we do tillage, we've got everything screwed up, we can't manage it anymore. So the first step had to be quit doing tillage. And then you do adjust all these other things. And you guys have seen this before but a lot of guys just quit doing tillage, didn't change anything else. We're just going to do corn beans like we always did and it collapses. Okay? So cultural practices, technology and management. We have to, tillage is a cultural practice. We have to replace it with other cultural practices not with technology. Technology is fine. But if you try to replace what you did with tillage with only technology there's not enough technology available. If it were available we couldn't afford it. You know, it's not available because we get resistant. If it were available we couldn't afford it and even if it were available we could afford it you got to sell it to the consumer. And they frankly don't want us doing that. Nature tillage is a catastrophic event so when we take it out let's do this rotation, sanitation competition. Proper intensity using this water and cover crops is part of that. Adequate diversity. Mother Nature tends to produce lots of diversity when given her way. And we try to crunch this down to do one or two species and she's trying to have all this diversity. We're just going against what she's trying to do and trust me she's had several million years of doing this and no matter what them gene jockeys at SDSU think she's better at it than they are. And so they can keep doing it, that's fine but she's just going to say oh I see what you're up to. Here, try that. And if we can get this part right then we're going to be stable and sustainable. The other way to look at it is water cycle. Are we cycling the water the way it was cycle before we start farming? If not we're leaking stuff and we're leaking nutrients out. And they're going like Ray said to the Gulf of Mexico or whatever. If we put drain tile in we really screw these up. Energy flow. How much of the energy that's falling there are we catching? I'm going to Manitoba tonight. They used to do summer fallow. Last week I was in Montana with Paul and they still do summer fallow. What percentage if they're doing spring week summer fallow what percentage of the sunlight that falls on the ground in two years do they catch? Well everything from May, June and July one year out of two. Three months out of 24. Not very good. And community dynamics. What happens with how many species do you have there? Farmers and ranchers harvest sunlight carbon dioxide and water, right? Some of this is human food. We need to be aware of nutritional issues and offsite impacts. When you raise food in different ways, wheat for instance, it has different qualities. People are starting to become interested in that. What we're doing right now is having long discussions with the people who buy grain and things for Kellogg and Kashi and Starbucks and whatever based on this factor. And they initiated it not us. If we want to eat beef that's great. Maybe we should concentrate on producing beef instead of trying to grow corn and barley that feeds beef and feedlots. If we all want to grow some beef out here let's figure out how to do it to do that. Weeds and diseases are Mother Nature's way of adding diversity to a system that lacks it so that more you try to concentrate on one species, the more she's going to try to offer alternative. Nothing new. You've seen these before for me. Savings might be expected in the amount of fertilized irrigation water used in a three year rotation. He's talking about wheat because of healthier, more functional root systems. That could be corn. When you have a drought year like this year, would your plant root healthy? Was it in a healthy soil that had all these macro pores so that it could explore the whole root zone? Because that's part of what has to happen. Biological control of soil and residue inhabiting paths to wheat is accomplished by not growing wheat more frequently than every third year, second or third year. The change in cultural practices may not pay off in the first one or two years. Ray was talking about that. It might take a while. So did Paul. But we'll pay off in time. Each future wheat field or corn field is treated to the extent possible as an ecosystem to be nudged rather than shocked in a desired direction. Right now everybody's trying to shock the thing and we'll throw this fungicide on, but that kills his beneficials. If you put fungicide on there, fungus is what the earthworms eat. Bad ones and good ones. So you're going to starve them to death. We haven't used an insecticide at Dakota Lake in 12 years. Not because I'm and gee, we don't want to use an insecticide because we don't have to. We have predators. We use some seed treatments and things, but we don't use the high rate cruisers and stuff either. It kills our predators. The surest way to guarantee that I'd have to use a post-emergent insecticide is to put some insecticide with my herbicide just because it only costs a buck. Crop rotation is the single most critical factor affecting the health and productivity of future crops in general. Crop rotation allows time for natural enemies to destroy the pathogens of one crop while unrelated crops are growing. This is not hard. Choose a sustainable economic approach that optimizes productivity while taking maximum advantage or at least not getting in the road of Mother Nature's contribution to the health of a crop. Overreliance on herbicides leads to resistant weeds and maybe disease problems. Is there anybody in this room that was in Denver in 1994 at Monsanto's big conference out there where I did the close? 1994 I did the closing talk at a Monsanto conference in Denver. 2000 people and I predicted roundup resistance. I have the tape. Not a popular position to take at a Monsanto conference in 1994. It's simple. You had to know that was going to happen unless you were just totally brain dead. Monsanto knew. They were just hoping that their pattern ran out before it happened. And it's not their problem. It's your problem. It's because we misuse it, right? And maybe disease problems. If we use surfactants too frequently may increase disease issue. Have we seen an increase in bacterial blight and gossas will? Those used to be associated with hail and wind and things. Which weaken the wax on the leaves. So we go out and spray surfactants with fungicides, surfactants with herbicides, surfactants with whatever. We weaken the wax on the leaves. Makes it easier for the bacteria to get in there. It also kills beneficial bacteria that attack fungi. In Saskatchewan they found that if they spray fungicides early on wheat to increase the amount of fursarium because they kill an official fungi early. Go to the web. It's there. In public real science. Fungicides and insecticides cause collateral damage. They are disturbance. Just like anything else. So we're going to use them but we're going to try to use them judiciously. So we look at some other things like chloride soil testing. Can be used to minimize the need for early season fungicide. If you have a chloride deficiency it makes you susceptible to leaf spotting diseases. Rotation interval in weeds. If we want to prevent weeds. This is if you have a resistant weed 10 of them here with 10 seeds per weed. And you do a rotation that's every other year like corn bean. You have 10 million of them in 7 years. And that's assuming that you kill it during the bean year. So around a persistent this doesn't count. That's more like it. Whatever. If I go 2 years out. It never happens. If I'm going to do half corn and half beans I'd be better off to do a stack where I do 2 corns to bean. Here's a study that we did years ago where we did 12 years of different rotation. On the 13th year I just planted the whole thing to spring weed. And Randy Anderson from ARS came out and counted the weeds. That came up. He counted the weeds. We sprayed round up and then we planted our spring weed. And then we just didn't put any more herbicide on and he counted the weeds. Where we had wheat chickpea and this could be corn and soybean if you want to. He had 94 weeds per square yard. Wheat corn chickpea 40. Pea wheat corn soybean more diversity 7. Now high disturbance techniques increased wet pressure and caused tillage erosion. This is 97% weed control by the way with no herbicide. In case you're wondering. High disturbance techniques increased weed pressure and caused tillage erosion. He did the same count in a tilled site with a 2 crop rotation. There's 225 versus 94. 4 crop rotation 7 versus 44. This is due to the tillage causing more weed. Somebody talked about that earlier today. Was it you Rick? Yeah. Coddy's good isn't he? Worth all the money we spent getting him here. No you're not. We're all taxpayers. We all paid for you to come here. I knew you were going to say that. You may be cheap but you're not free. Tillage is servants of poor rotation 225 weed per square meter. No till good rotation 7. There's your 97% weed control. Tillage was good at eliminating weeds. The damn thing should be all gone by now. Especially in Iowa and Illinois. Best weed control is a good crop canopy. We keep this old crop canopy in place or a cover crop canopy or anything like that in place until a new crop canopy forms. That's one of the things with a cover crop you just go out there and put another crop canopy there. Instead of trying to kill it with an herbicide. This one we had an auto steer. We have an auto steer now. But this one we had an auto steer better. You don't pull in straight. But this is no herbicide on weed with a spot there that's left and no competition. That's what you want to be able to see. But there's tillage erosion. We took the dirt from here and pulled it down here. Started out looking like this. Medium term we've got this bear. That's about where we're at. If we keep doing that we're going to take the crappy soil and cover up the good soil down the bottom. And we're all going to use variable rate technology so we fertilize the top of the hill and drag the shit down the bottom down here. Now in Canada they do bale grazing They put their bales up here and turn the cows out and the cows poop and eat and whatever and you restore fertility and organic matter back to top of the hill. Makes a lot of sense. They put a fence around the bales. Really kind of a good system. Sanitation rotation competition of the primary message of pest control. Herbicides are part of competition. They're part of sanitation. They're part of rotation. I don't use herbicides for pest control. I use them as tools in this other little goal. Pesticides are only part of these. Fertilizer placement and residue distribution are part of competition. I'm going to place some fertilizer maybe move a little residue or much less gung-ho about moving residue than before. But if I put my crop here and I put fertilizer there and nothing out here then my weeds don't have a chance. So again I can get this guy going before these guys have any nice warm conditions and before they get any fertilizer. This guy's got to learn to drive on the other side of the field so this blows away. If you get a 45 foot head from somebody like John Deere and say you know if you make an ad 45 foot wide you should make a thing in the back that spreads it out 45 feet. It would be a requirement. We use a lot of stripper head for that reason. John Deere hasn't figured that out, neither has anybody else. Place of fertilizer, you know, strip tail's hot but basically it's a fertilizer placement thing. And here's that bar that somebody was talking about today. This is the cheap bar. Now some guys want corn heads that chop it all up and whatever but then it blows away and floats away. You leave it tall and you use this thing to put a little fertilizer in plant. This is a Michael Ernie plant or from whatever. So what we do is some starter pee with the seed, other nutrients placed near the row at seeding time or on the soil surface after crop canopy. If you broadcast fertilizer before or at seeding it encourages weeds. Three key factors. Available nutrient. Moisture and roots all three in the same place at the same time. Ray Ward would tell you how much available nutrient you have there or estimate it. Give you his best guess. How many of you guys know Ray Ward? Yeah, okay. Do you know that he got his PhD from SDSU? He used to run the soil testing lab. His major professor and his PhD is the same guy as my major professor. He ran the Redfield farm at one time. More like twins. Okay? Maybe not. He's a lot better looking than I am. Okay, we don't kill our coyotes. You can't figure out why everybody wants to kill their damn coyotes. They eat mice. We don't kill our rattlesnakes, right? One of the reasons we don't kill our rattlesnakes is somebody who does organic comb. And they say, well you're using these terrible chemicals and they say, well we only use natural stuff. It's not dangerous. It's good. I got a rattlesnake you need to move because he's not going to hurt you obviously. Because it's natural. Proper nutrient cycling is important. Ecosystems that leak nutrients for extended periods of time become deserts. If you ship your weed out and don't bring back the nutrients in terms of fertilizer you have a desert. You're exporting, you're leaking. We had a Taiwanese, Randy was there, right? We had this Taiwanese trade delegation. One of the things about being close to period, we're just handy for these trade delegations. They got to meet with the governor and they got to stall them for an hour and a half. So let's go see some wheat. We're going to sell you wheat. So I'm talking to them and I got this wheat coming up and the cover crop is dying and I'm talking about how it's feeding the nutrients to the wheat and everything and the guy goes, oh you don't need to use fertilizer. They say, well yeah I do need to use fertilizer to ship you the wheat. To Taipei. Because I'm shipping you nutrients unless you're willing to take the poop from Taipei, put it in a container and ship it back. And he got this real stun look on his face and said, okay I started a diplomatic problem here and then all of a sudden he gets it and he starts laughing and he translates and then they're all making a little scoopy. Saline seeps are symptoms of improper nutrient water cycling. It's not salty when it was in the prairie, it's you've done something. Nutrient placement is part of cycling. Try to make it go into the plant. Developing proper water cycling information is important. You need to know soil's water holding capacity characteristics, long-term rainfall, and covering forage crops are useful to help fine-tune. So here's my North unit. Peer shale derived promise soil and opal soil's pretty crappy. Don't hold much water. Went to Websoil Survey which you have in the United States. How many people have been to Websoil Survey? Good. Good on ya. Go home, go to Websoil Survey, get a map. This is Corco's Buckinghorse pasture. If you're watching the national finals, you see my neighbors. You know, because Corco takes my neighbors, you go into Las Vegas and I don't get to go. And this shows you how much available water holding capacity. This is 3 inches, this is 5 inches. Total water holding capacity. And that really heavy soil. It's like a sand with a really bad attitude. There I use cover crops a lot because it gets full very quickly. I'm not going to talk about a lot of what we do there. There's the main farm. There's my good soil. That's about 12 inches. Total water holding capacity. Those are my good soils. Then we take someplace like Oneida, which is kind of dry. There's your rainfall from October to September. I use October 1 to September. Take the E out of ET. Yeah, Paul, I know you can't get it all out of there, but it sounds better. You know, take part of the E out of ET. You can't take it all out. So, from October to June, from the time you would harvest corn until sunflowers would start using water, Oneida, wait the hell out there, gets 10.36 inches of rainfall. If you make it go in the ground and you keep it there and you have a promise soil, you're saturated. And you're getting saline seeps and you're screwed. Now if you have a good soil, if you were way dry when you harvested the corn, which you usually aren't, you're going to be way full. So you can do that kind of exercise. Half of normal is usually a drought. This year is a little bit less than half of normal. And then this is one and a half, that wet year. And you can do that for different time periods. The long fallow, the wheat long fallow that used to do it at night, a one crop of winter wheat every two years. They tried to put 24 inches of rain into soils that hold somewhere between 7 to 12. Is there any wonder they had saline seeps? Duh. No-till does make saline seeps worse because it makes the water go in the ground unless you do something beneficial with that water. Why is land sell for more in Iowa than a dozen South Dakota? They get more rain. But yet we have guys here trying to get rid of their water. So if you put this rain in here with no-till, you got to use it here or it becomes a saline seep here. And what's this saline seep? Ray. Calcium salts. What else is in there? Sulfur. Is that a fertilizer? And calcium is a, like, lime. What's the other one that's in there? Chloride. We use that for fertilizer? Nitrate. Do we use that for fertilizer? Who said salt? What's these really good salts? Sometimes you get a little sodium. But most of the time what's in there is the good guys. Your fertilizers that you're paying the hefties for. And what they really want to do is get you a drain tile so you can get that damn stuff going quicker so they can sell you more. Duh. Cover and forest crops provide opportunity to increase both intensity and diversity in situations where production of grain crop would not be possible. So where you can't do a double crop like the guys in Kansas you start doing some of this stuff and add biological diversity. In humid environments, tall grass or wetter, which is kind of here and east, the goal should be have something growing all the time. Where we have limited growing season, this will require use of cover crops and forage crops or double crops. So that's here. You don't have long enough season like the guys in Kansas. Subhuman to the west of here, semi-arid environments cover crops are utilized less actually but it gives us a chance to add organic matter and biological activity. Sometimes we have to keep our powder dry. So, here we're adding carbon. This is going to go to beans next year versus not doing anything. So here's strip leech stubble, here's adding hay millet and oats in there. And then here we have some feed that we can graze for our tall cows and our short cows. I like that joke. Now here's a real mixture of stop and that's what we look for is this diversity. They grow at different times. They'll start with like cowpeas and the brassicas and the lentils and the cowpeas are grow early when it's hot and then when it gets to be first night it's 36 degrees they go, oh damn, this is in Oklahoma and they just die. And then we've got the next step. Same way the forage sorgans. I use oats in forage sorgans and the hay millets and when they get too cool for them they die and the oats come. So that's what we're looking for is filling these different niche. So there's a cowpea that comes early this stuff back here actually got this in the wrong order this comes later okay. Does it work kinda? Here's a study we did where we had a cover crop lentils, chickpea, chickling vetch and turnip between a wheat, the wheat, wheat, corn, corn, soybean, soybean so right in here between the wheat and the first corn. We put no nitrogen on the next spring we got 176 bushel of corn with 36 pounds of nitrogen we got 236 bushel of corn with 72 pounds we got 214. Now sometimes you get, you know what we gotta do is start figuring out how to predict that's going to happen but the good thing in South Dakota is if I want to use this nitrogen I can cell test and I'll have it again next year. Just get it in the pool and it doesn't hurt to have it there. So this is what I call catch and release nutrients and a lot of people use this and we should give the credit for that to Jeremy Wilson from Jamestown, North Dakota. Really good young no-till farmer from Jamestown, North Dakota and he used this term and I walked up after he'd used it at a meeting and I said Jeremy can I use that? Oh sure, he didn't know that everybody else is going to start using it, right? So anyway we need to acknowledge that. If you get stranded in the rain in the back 40 you drive home across a tilled field or a pasture. That's that soil structure thing that Jim Horman talked about. It doesn't get there if you do tillage every other year or whatever. Some components of a rotation do not fail in excessively dry years it's an indicator there's not sufficient intensity. So if you failed on something this year you did good. Some of us did better than others. A rotation does not but I'll give you an example. We do a third of our dry land corn at Peer in Soybean or Sunflower Residue a third because I call it my mother-in-law or my banker corn because they come to visit in June that's my corn that looks good and then two thirds of my corn is in wheat stubble and if my banker comes in September or August I show them the stuff in wheat stubble right? But in a good year that's my cheapest corn in soybean stubble. I don't have to maintain the wheat stubble, right? I just harvest the beans first thing in the spring I plant the corn. That's it pretty easy to manage. Last year I had 140 bushel corn there. This year I had zero. On average we're about 110. It's okay. It's not as consistent as the stuff in wheat stubble. But if I don't fail in the really dry year I haven't taken full advantage of this normal year when I get 108 bushel and I fail badly in wet years and that's what a lot of us did early on we're so afraid of being too damn dry that we get too conservative in terms of pushing the rotation and we fail because it's too wet. What you want to do is fail parts of the rotation when it's too wet, fail and parts of the rotation when it's too dry and most years they'll all work pretty good. We also harvest bushel wheat. So 99 8 or something like that average on the main farm. So we had a good year from that sample. Crop insurance regulations impact risks associated with different rotational intensities and also make sure that your crop insurance rules fit what you're doing with cover crop. So we got a guy in Kansas basically lost his whole payment because he did a bunch of stuff with cover crop and they came out and said that's not approved. There should be no need for ground engaging component to seed and fertilize crops. We should be able to shoot them in the ground with something like this. So all this talk about trying to cut residue and do all that kind of stuff and we just have a seed in the thing that looks like a golf tee and just shoot it in the ground would be great. Go out there with our floater and put it on. Ray talked about one straw revolution using clay seed balls. Same idea. Seed steaks would do the same thing. And basically what he's doing is he spreads these seed balls out grains the rice fields spread the seed balls out for his wheat crop. The wheat crop takes off and grows after the rice. Before he harvested the wheat put seed balls out, grow cover crop and then he throws these rice out and floods the field in the rice grove. I read the book. Livestock integration will be needed if you want to cycle nutrients cause help. It gives you better nutrient cycles. It gives you more rotational flexibility more crops you can grow. We need to work on automating that and making a multi-species and we're working or hope to be working on these self-propelled grazing cells. But we have the technology now. You just have a cell out there. You can call up on your smart phone and go home like I was doing. Looks like they're out of feed. Push a button and the thing would move. We could do that now. The technology's there. Somebody said shit, that makes sense. We've automated them in feed lots but we haven't automated them in the field. And there's way less disease pressure and stuff that we kept them in the field. It gives us a chance with these high prices we have for land to get people back into the business. Best biomass digester has four legs and goes move. I like this one. We're soil testing and then they're going to apply the fertilizer. I couldn't resist that one. That was too good. But here the Canadians do a lot of this. They swast the residue and whatever. And the reason they do is they have had more BSE, mad cow. So if you have a cow over 24 months old it's basically worthless in Canada. And for you guys that came to the conference several years ago, we had guys talking about doing this kind of thing. Perennial sequencer, perennial cover crop will probably be necessary because annual crops don't go deep enough to bring the line back to the surface. In Australia they have a huge problem with this. And that's where Collins size thing works. But I was in a sorghum field one time where they thought it was drought problem with sorghum. But the only place the sorghum looked good was right around the tree. And then Ray Ward can tell us what that is. What nutrient deficiency symptom looks like drought problem? There you go. See how good he is? So when we tested what the tree does is it brings the potassium up and puts it back at the surface. So in high rainfall areas that's our cycler. In prairie areas it's a deep rooted grass because we don't get as much rainfall. That's enough. You need a tree where it rains more. They get the rainfall in the winter time. So what happened is we had 100 parts per million potassium around the tree, 5 parts per million where we're away from the tree. So the drought wasn't a disaster, it was a catastrophe. Nutriencycling, rotational flexibility, building organic matter. We need to do all those things. We might, if we're going to do fuel, we might want to do biomass fuel. In our new building we're building we're going to heat it with solar, wind, and biomass. Biomass only when we need to because we like to keep our organic matter in Peter Cowes. The Argentines have systems that were 7 years of pasture and 7 years of grazing. So here's cover crops, no cover crops, but this field would have been in 7 years of pasture and then probably in about its 50 year of crops. Look at the soil structure. That's 1997 and then the Argentine government outlawed the export of beef and they said it was so the poor people could have to buy beef because they eat twice as much beef per capita as we do. Great place to visit if you're a young single male guy especially. Pretty girls, wine and beef. Doesn't get any better than that. But Ruth said are they pretty and I said yeah, but I said it's kind of like a dog chasing a car deer. I wouldn't know what to do with it if I caught it anyway. But when they outlawed, the real reason for outlawing the export of beef is they wanted more soybeans because the way they collect taxes in Argentina is they take 32% of the soybeans that leave through the port go to the government. So we have the IRS and all these rules and everything, right? Frick buildings, cars, computers, they got one guy and auger and a gun. But anyway, so everybody went to doing lots of soybeans because if you can't do cows can't do the pasture, we're going to do soybean. And I finally in 2006 got to go back to the same field because I've been there a couple of times and I was noticing I thought they were losing soil structure. But unless I went back to the same field, I couldn't tell you. That's the same field in 2006. That happened in ten years. Soybeans on soybeans on soybeans, there's not enough carbon, there's not enough to do. Your carbon, nitrogen, and racers all screwed up. You're just going to totally destroy structure very fast. It's like doing tillage over and over and over again, and this is a plady type structure. Here's one that we're doing right now. We have alfalfa. This is our long-term 23-year cornfield, but we planted alfalfa in half of that and we're keeping the alfalfa alive and the corn alive. And so far so good, but we'll find out next spring. So the idea is that Colin Seiss is doing a warm season grass as a grazer. Looks like switch grass or big blue stem. And then he grows canola and wheat during the winter time, during the dormant phase. Here during the dormant phase of the corn, the fall and the winter, we're going to have this perennial guy. We'll see if we can keep them both alive. Organic matter is the most important factor in determining the productivity of soil. Small amount of organic matter by weight has a big impact on poor space. Within all texture groups we go from 1% to 3% available water capacity, doubles go to 4% to 60%. Your soil does not hold as much water as it did when Grandpa got here because he's taken out the organic matter. So if you had a soil web that says, okay, it holds 8 inches. Now it maybe holds 6. What's that mean? A rainfall makes you saturated sooner. And then when you get a crop planted there, you get dry sooner. You have less resiliency. Your bucket is smaller. The best thing to do is get a bigger bucket. The other thing that happens is we might be changing carbon dioxide level in a canopy because if residue of the cover crops decompose after crop canopy is established, or the residue that decompose then can feed carbon dioxide to, especially C3 plants. Cook and Viseth talked about that. Perhaps some of the improved water use efficiency results can be attributed to enhanced carbon dioxide concentration. So here's an example of ours you've seen before probably, but here's two rotations that look almost exactly the same. Corn pea winter wheat. This one though has another soybean in there. So it's half broadleafs. This one up here is only a third broadleaf. Look at the difference in a dry year. 60 versus 29 was 7.9 inches of rain from July to July. In 2006, in a good year, 92 versus 57, that's when we had 23 inches of rain. Here we had 6.456 versus 28. That tells you the difference in resiliency. There's what it looked like. This is the low-residue rotation there. High-residue rotation there. That's what it looks like in aerial photo. When you take off half of a 150-bush of acre corn crop, you're taking off 50 pounds per acre of an, 5 pounds of pea, 100 pounds of K, and 3,000 pounds of carbon. I had a guy last week when I was traveling in Montana. Somebody called me in the phone one to buy my bale that we had spread out to do some bale grazing and stuff. It took me like 20 minutes to convince him I didn't want to sell my damn residue. You can't have it. You know, I was like, whoa, pay you good for it. You can't have it. Don't you want to know how much? No. You can't have it. A friend or guy from South Dakota, no-tilling. It's not about no-till. It's about residue. It doesn't have any residue. It doesn't do any good to not do tillage because it's all sealed up, right? It's all screwed up. There's no residue. It looks like Paul Yaz's organic thing. Where'd the residue go? Abdul took it. And he took the roots along with it. Because in Muslim culture, if you leave anything out there, it belongs to the community. So you take it all. And you put it on your semis or your straight trucks. And you take it to the building. But we laugh. But that guy, that's the residue he's going to feed to the goats that's going to give milk to his children. It's not because he's a greedy bastard that just wants a bigger four-wheel drive pickup. It wouldn't be anybody in this room that would do that. Take the E out of ET. Take the T out of Kent. Go to thesatakotanotill.com and we've got a good thing for doing rotations. There are different styles of rotations that you might have fun reading. Thank you.