 One of the first things I'd like to do is thank all our sponsors that helped us put together and provide input and money for today's event. I'm going to just read through the list. South Dakota Wheat Commission, Farm Credit Services of America, Wheat Growers, Mustang Seed, Monsanto, Prairie State Seeds, Next Level Ag, LLC, Millboard Seeds, La Crosse Seeds, Dakota Best Seed, Agronomy Plus, Farmers Eliacs, Mitchell, First Dakota National Bank, C&D Operations, Davis and County Amplement, Scott Supply, Crop Tech, Ducks Unlimited, Aurora County Conservation District, Davis and County Conservation District, Hanson County Conservation District, South Dakota Noctil Association, SDSU Extension, USDA and NRCS, and Pioneer Hybrids of Dupont, so let's give them all a welcome and round of applause. Hi everybody. Well, started out with one of them kind of a deal that had went and mowed some cane down, raked it up, was going to have it bailed. Well, made two big winrows, the guy come to bail it and he said, can't bail it. Well, it'll just lay there, you know, and whatever happens, happens. Well, put some cattle in there and, you know, they ate it all up. Well, wow, that's kind of neat, but anyway, went to, I don't know how many you've heard of bootstraps. Anyway, I think Laura was there. People from Canada was talking about it. So, got this idea, well, we got to give this a try. Went and planted, started out with plant and millet, and it worked real well. We like pearl millet to swath grays. And, but it got to doing that, and the problem I run into was not having, what I say, enough land. I'm all basically all grass, I had just about 120 acres that I was using for this millet. And I was planting a year after year. That worked pretty good about three years. This is like probably close to 20 years ago, and we didn't have all the good cover crop mixes and knew anything about cover crops at the time. So that was kind of fizzling out and said, well, I'm going to have to try something different. So I decided, well, I'm just going to, was always putting up intermediate for to bail. I thought, well, I'm just going to do, try, win an own intermediate and leaving it. Everybody says, well, I don't ever work. So then I knew right away it would work if everybody said it wouldn't. And did that and it works real well. You know, it was like Ken was talking earlier, the big thing, and you're back to the pearl millet or anything you're going to swath grays, cut it at the normal time so you retain your most nutrients. And that's probably the key. I don't know, I really liked, had good results with doing the intermediate. And I guess probably the biggest thing, you know, Ken really hit on it was on the cost of it. And the one thing that he didn't mention that probably to me is the most important, is you don't have to hominer. It's already there and it's spread over the entire field. It does a very good job for getting nutrients back on the field. And one thing about a cow, they return 90 to 98% of the nutrients of the crop raised to feed them. And that to me is a big thing. So you really cut down on your inputs. And doing my intermediate, I had three different fields that I would swath grays. I rotated through them. Two years I would bale it. One year I would swath grays it. Probably the biggest key to that. You will see probably a little problem of killing out under the windrow. But it ain't real bad in the next year. It's already coming back and you give it another year and you never notice it. And then the next thing when you are going back to them fields, you know, you start by the fence always, or whatever on the edge of it. Don't do that. Move over so that that windrow, even though it's three years later, is, say you're using a 16-foot cut, move over eight feet so you're still putting it at a different spot. I think it's really important on that. Another thing is placing your windrows. I found that it works way better in our area, like here in South Dakota, east-west windrows for the snow deal. Always, you know, how much snow? Well, you talk to the people in Canada and you get far enough north and they'll talk four feet of snow. I would say here probably 18 inches, whether they're blowing or wet or snow packing. But if you have a spot in which most of our land is rolling enough, you get a bare windrow on a hill or something where them cows can get started. They'll just plow down through it. Like I say about 18 inches. One thing I never worried about getting it used up. I don't start calving until 1st of May. By then, it's gone and I can get the windrows all used up. One thing, and Ken was talking about the nutrition, one thing I've added to all my intermediate, I started planting ciceramilk vetch in it. And I really like that it adds to your protein. Ciceramilk vetch will run 3-4% higher in protein than alfalfa. The big thing I like about it is it'll stay green until 20 degrees. It won't freeze until about 20. It's got 40% more leaves than alfalfa does. So that's where they pick up the protein. Yes. I did that once on a field. It was like, I don't know, 10 to 15 years old. And I said, well I'm going to try this or else I'm going to have to break it up, you know, how intermediate it gets. And it's turned it into a wonderful field of forage and without having to go at the expense of receding or that, and increase the quality of the feed. Another thing when you're doing swath grazing on intermediate, you've got to take into consideration, you should probably clip it and check. And of course this depends a lot on the year, how much new growth you get between your windrows. You'll pick up a lot of feed there. Besides, one thing I always did on my swath grazing, or when you start out swath grazing, is go bail two windrows or something. So you've got a production idea of what you've got out there, how much you're going to have to feed. And now just bailing was, a couple of windrows was an idea of what you got there. Like I said, it works better with the east and west for our snow. Another thing about the snow, moving fence, one thing that happens is that there's nothing like snow to insulate an electric fence. Sometimes you've got to run two wires to make that work. I always moved every day. I just found it easier to move every day because it made it easier to do than trying to move over several windrows. When I'm moving my fence, the longer and the narrower the field is, the better it works. Because usually your cows are at one end. Go to the other end, start moving your fence. I was using the rod posts. Would take them out to about where the cows were getting there. And there was enough given the string that you could make your angle fence, get the two more windrows. It would be a big enough area that the cows would start eating and it would be satisfied. Then go the other way and take out posts and work towards the cows, put it in going back and just work that. Good dog helps, but it really is not that hard. And to get your posts out in the wintertime, you either take and hit them. It's like you're going to drive them in some more. And that's probably another thing, Dennis, on doing that. Your posts don't freeze in as tight if you move them every day. And if all else fails, a pair of vice grips, give them a twist. They're out. So then you let them expose. They're not locked away from what they've already been on. Right. I don't back fence because it's basically everything is gone. A rebar post, yeah. On it. Yes, I do. Yeah, I do grind them sharp so they're pointed. And so you get them in three, four inches. Good enough. What's that? Oh, it probably would, Rick. Yeah, I think hard snow would work. Too warm. Yes. I'm south of Chamber, 20 miles. Yeah. Yeah. Cicermilk vetch. Intermediate. I planted in the intermediate in the spring after I had swath grazed it. So there wasn't a, vegetation was real short because cattle had grazed there in the winter. And then I just went in and interceded five pounds. That milk vetch has quite a bit of hard seed. It's not going to be real fast. Or my luck wasn't real fast, but it just keeps coming. And then it's also rhizomial. And it seems like it really likes the bear spots. If you've got a fairly good size bear spot or any, I shouldn't say good. It just fills in the bear spots is what I'm seeing with it. Have had guys come and look at it and went home and planted it. People that are in the pheasant business, they said that's best pheasant cover there is. Don't know anything about that. And I suppose it is good for pheasants because it probably has bugs and that kind of thing in there. But they said the cover and it's kind of what it reminds me of. Kind of like Creep and Jenny. It stays pretty flat to the ground. But on a good wet year, you lift it up, you get a hold of a plant, you get it up. You know, it'll get this tall, but it's just kind of laying flat on the ground. So you really have good ground cover. So you're not getting sun, wind, stuff drying your ground with it. I'm going to say, I put in five pounds of probably five years. I just kept on my same thing Dennis. I just kept, well, so I planted it the spring after I had grazed. And I thought that would be the good, better deal with there wasn't as much vegetation, competition thing. More sunlight to it. And so then it was, so then I hailed for two years before I went back and grazed. Talked about the, oh, another thing on moving fence. So you, somebody has complained about the warm weather. So you get these days and it gets really warm, especially if you're doing something like the pearl millet. And there's mud out there. What I found, you know, if you give them the two wind, I was, I was set up so that my length of my fields that I'd moved two windrows. Well, what happened to two windrows and first thing, they're all of them. Overall, the windrows, they're all mud and they got not deep. So I would move twice a day and either set the fence either right in the windrow or just on the edge of it. So they had to reach under, under the wire so they couldn't, couldn't walk on the, walk on the windrow. Had to move it twice a day, but no big deal to go do that. At least you weren't ruining your feed. It just looked like, when you do that, it looks like cattle at a fence line feed bunk. They're just lined up there. I guess probably my advice would be if you're going to do it, I would try a small, smaller patch rather than go out here and do like a quarter section or something. Try it on a smaller basis to kind of get familiar to it. I don't know. I never worried about my water because I, I didn't, in the situation, there's really nothing growing, nothing you really got to worry about. So I wasn't doing any back fencing and so I'd have my water wherever. One thing that Ken talked about, about corn stocks, there was a, read an article from Iowa State about fencing corn stocks. They say you'll increase your efficiency of your corn stocks 40% by stripping them off, giving them just what they need every day on that. And another thing about if you're doing the swath grazing, I guess it's, it's really handy. If you want to be, you know, doing it every day, but if you want to be gone the next day, if you go out there last thing at night, you could move your fence last thing at night and you'd have it done for the next day. If you hit some reason you're going to be gone. I guess that's about all I got on it. Yeah Kelly, how much I was giving them? Oh, I had different fields. I had one was like 60, I had two of them that was 60 and I had one that was 120. What happens Kelly, they eat, they clean up everything. So there's really, the amount available feed is basically the same every day. Oh, as far as coming back, I didn't really see any difference. Yeah, different. It probably would. I guess I was, one reason I was doing it basically one way was I had water on one side. So I kind of had to start so I'd have water all the time. Yeah, I worked out every third year on it. How do you feel about if you had, say you have two foot of snow, would there be such a thing you could drive a tractor over the window with that help? It probably would depends how hard it is. Yeah, I've never really done it. I had read of deals is taking a V plow and running. I actually seen this done. We had an old guy there at home and he had a plow on the front of an old Dodge pickup. And he went out there and he just peeled it off and turned it up on top of the snow. We lift it up on top of the snow. Paw. Yeah, the way they go. If you get, like I say, you're rolling ground on the hills where it's bare, get them started. In most cases, I think that in snow, that's perfect. Because then they all find a slot and they can see the end of that slot from yesterday. From the day before, yeah. And they all find that and they spread out better and they don't step on it. Because you're only moving 20, 30 feet. Yeah, it ain't like where you're giving them. A half a mile wind wrote down. And they get running up and down that windrow looking for the good spot. But if you've got a bunch of windrows and you come perpendicular, then they'll dissolve. Six or eight of them will find a windrow. And the other ones run by them. They'll go look for their own windrow. Yeah, but that's what the Canadians say. In deep snow, you want to run perpendicular so they can always find it. Like Danny said, they will drive a tractor on top of that. They'll drive a tractor on it with one of those little blades, three point blades behind just to scrape the top of this big, hard snow. I don't know if Ken was saying it was as deep as a fight for the coast. Well... Special tractor. I've had them people from Canada say, you know, you get really way up northern Canada, four feet, but then you get up there and four feet of snow up there that's kind of like feathers. But we would call feathers. Yeah, then cows will probably plow through that much. Well, some of those videos, I haven't linked them to any of them. But I have in Canada, with a friend of mine, who moved wire with snow boots. Yeah. And that was hard snow, but you just... both were just sticking to the snow. That's all you needed to do. You just stick them up and move them to the snow. Thank you. Any other questions?