 In 2013, the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service entered into a cooperative agreement with the South Dakota No-Till Association and IGRO, SDSU Extension, for delivering the latest soil health and productivity technology to South Dakota farmers and ranchers. A series of two local events were held in South Dakota, in Lemon and Fort Peer. Good morning. I want to start the talk this morning by basically, I took a clipping out of the Bismarck Tribune and my wife and I are that age where we still get the newspaper every morning. That's kind of a bygone era, isn't it, especially for younger people, but we're still that age where we like to be at the kitchen table, have a cup of coffee and talk a little bit about the news. There was one clipping that came out just the other day, very recently in the Tribune, about study finds crop diversity lessening. We know this, but now there was actually a study completed on this. I think what's kind of disturbing on that all is, when we look at that, broader picture, not an individual farm in this case, but maybe a broader picture, we look at the lessening of crop diversity. If you've driven through North Dakota lately, you've probably noticed the stacks of tree rows, so we're taking our tree rows out. You've probably noticed where there used to be perennials and native range land, it's now an annual crop, so you really see a changing landscape. When you start looking at all those aspects and you start adding them together, does that sound like food security to you? I think if we're honest about it, it really doesn't sound like food security, and I think that's one of the scary items about a changing landscape, when we simplify. If you went to retire today and you took your fortune, let's just say you're Rick Bieber, so you have a very large fortune, and you want to retire and you're going to go ahead and the financial planner says to you, I'm going to put this all in one pot right here, you'll be fine. Would you be comfortable with that? Probably not, because everything is going to tell you that diversification is going to be the key for that long-term survival, and so it's that way with our food security too, so with the topic today, I think it's a timely topic, I think it's something we need to be taking a much more serious look at, and I'm going to walk through it today and talk to you about cows on cropland, and when I think of covers, I think of them as annuals, biannuals, and perennials, I think of them as all three, and then finding the fit, and so what we're going to talk about in this talk this morning, there'll be a little bit on the perennial aspect of it, a little bit on the biannual, a little bit on the annual, and we'll wrap this thing kind of in a package together, and some items that I want to bring up now for thought, so you're thinking about them as we go through the program, some livestock considerations, grazing systems, you know, in North Dakota and especially in Burleigh County, we principally have used once-over systems and sometimes twice-over systems, the once-over system usually favors more so the resource, the twice-over system, kind of a little more favoring of the livestock end, but the really good ones, it seems, can come together and there's a combination in that grazing system of once-over and twice-over on these pastures on a grazing system, and the reason I'm bringing that up with the perennials is if we're going to integrate these livestock, they have to be someplace, right, before the integration on the cropland, they've got to be someplace, and so we have fewer and fewer places for them to be, so I'm going to throw out some options today, some alternatives. Another one is heifer selection. One thing the ranchers taught me that if you want to do a good job on heifer selection, if the calves have their head in a creep trough, that's a difficult heifer selection process, because you're going to take them out and put them into a grass environment and expect them to produce a profitable calf and raised on creep, that kind of disguises a lot of their strong and weak points, and so a lot of our producers, you know, there isn't going to be any creep on those calves, and that allows a much better heifer selection process, especially when they're going to be on grass. If they're going to stay on grain, that's a different situation. And then always keep in mind the 100-day window as we go through the program this morning, keep in mind the 100-day window for nutritional need for a bread cow or a bread heifer. That 30 days before the calf and 70 days after the calf, what do you got? You've got the spike in nutritional need in protein and energy, and so you always want to be aware of that as you're looking at integrating livestock. Where are my livestock going to be in that 30 days before the calf and 70 days after the calf? Where are they going to be? In our environment, we like to have them on green grass during that period of time. Cheapest way to meet that need. And if you're going to integrate them onto covers, you want them on the low end of the need, the first trimester and the second trimester. Their nutritional need is much, much lower, and we can go ahead and monitor that. So we always want to be aware of the 100-day window. So those are just some items. We'll probably touch on them again at the end as we walk through this and get some idea on why are those cows on your cropland. It was just at Oatana, Minnesota recently, and we talked about cattle on cropland, an interesting day, and actually probably more acceptance than I was thinking. My wife was in the car and she had it running, and I knew where the door was. But it was interesting because there was way more acceptance than I was thinking of. So I think we need to take a look at this thing as we regenerate soils and we take a look at landscapes. To illustrate the point on the grazing system, I had to walk through this very slowly in Minnesota, but I was told this crowd is quite elevated, both in IQ and other advancements, and so we're really going to fly today. So this particular unit, let me see if I've got this on. Looks good. Let's give that a try. No. Yeah. I'm trying that one, and it is on. That will make quite a difference, I think. We've got the receiver now. It's kind of a South Dakota thing. You hand it to the North Dakota guy, and then you watch him. I see how this game works. Okay, thanks. Appreciate it. If you're going to move into livestock integration, move into no-till, move into cover crops, think about writing down your mission statement why. Write it down. If you think about it, that's one thing, but writing it down forces you to really analyze it. Write it down with your family and other partners. This one's pretty straightforward. They also have some other goals where they get a little bit more in depth. The first half of my career, I didn't bother asking anybody to write down a goal statement, but the second half of my career really realized how important that is, and so if you're willing to write down some things, we can really partner and do a lot better job of partnering. We know where we're going to go with these scenarios. This is just their particular goals, and they said it's fine to show these other people. They don't have a problem with that. It gives me a good idea on how we can partner. This was the before on the grazing system. Six pastures and six herds. What does that mean? It means you're going to graze all season long in that pasture. If you have enough forage to get to the end of the season, but there will be no recovery time. There's going to be no rest recovery time on those grasses. This was the before. Six herds, six pastures, feedlot weaning. It's a sand site. If we look at what we did afterwards, we moved to 30 pastures, and we combined to three herds. Now we're building some recovery time. If you have four pastures of equal size and one herd, you're going to have about 75% recovery time. Everyone's with me because three of those pastures are in recovery. It's been my experience over many years. I like to get to 90% plus recovery time. That means more than four pastures. When I get to 90% plus, I really start to see a lot of these things happen much quicker because now our recovery window is so long and our exposure window is so short. This was the ranch before, the six pastures, the six herds. It looked a little more like this afterwards. It's gone through another change now. He's added six more pastures, but he understands recovery time. He puts in another single wire. This is the 100-day window, and he's well aware of this 100-day window. He likes to manage the livestock accordingly so that when we're in that higher need, whether we're going to be on cover crops or whether we're going to be on perennial grass, we can have a good chance of meeting their needs and we can monitor the livestock. That's one of the key items that's always important. They do monitoring as a family. Monitoring is a family activity. Everybody gets involved and does the monitoring. I think little William and Anna and Linda, they all get together and they all have the little process they do. They also monitor pollinators in their cover crops. They put up a 100-foot line and they walk by it and they add up the plants on where there's bees, and so they monitor also their cover crops. Now, their recovery period is 75 to 90 days, so they'll have 75 to 90 days before they come back because keep in mind, if you're going to move your calving to May and June, you're also moving the breeding period. It goes right along with it. Now you want those cattle on a good plane of nutrition during the breeding period. To me, that's where the second grazing on some of these pastures can play a critical role. The exposure period per pasture is usually less than two weeks, so generally less than two weeks between moves. Then he can put high carbon material down or low carbon material down, depending on what he's looking at in terms of the season of use change. I think there's an advantage to that as far as cycling. Then when he gets to his covers, this is just one of his mixes, just a warm season mix. What he does is he weans his calves on it. He'll wean the calves on this cover crop. The cattle will go back out onto the grazing system and the calves go on to the cover crop. It kind of makes sense. They're herbivores. You can acclimate them to a feed bunk, but I think they acclimate a little quicker here. A lot of his health issues clean up nicely when he gets them out into this environment. It takes them a little while to acclimate. They don't want to walk into it first without their mother. Another thing I've learned from the ranchers over the years is the replacement heifers, they like to wean them later. Why? Why do you want to wean the replacement heifer later than the rest? It's more time with mother, right? It's that learning environment. So they get more time with their mother. And if they get a chance to do some grazing of cover crops with their mother, that's a pretty good replacement heifer. It learns that, it learns those concepts. So they walked around the perimeter a while before they walked inside. They like to balance their diet too if they have diversity, if they have diversity, they'll do a pretty fair job of that. And in this particular case on those few acres, 210 calves, we had 187 grazing days per acre. What's a grazing day worth for a calf? That you have to decide yourself, but you can get an idea on value. So grazing days is a nice way to put some, you can put your own economics to it. I like to have a surface that kind of looks like that. So when I look down, I don't see soil. I got a nice situation. I got some low carbon, some high carbon materials. I got a nice carbon nitrogen ratio. And we have some ground cover. We can take rainfall compaction out of the game. Rainfall compaction is going on to bear soils, whether they're no tail or any other form of cropping system is an issue. So we can take that compaction energy out of there. And then we had, I always had trouble establishing cover crops on this ranch in the fall. It's high leech sands, very low water holding capacity. He only holds, he doesn't hold much water in a four foot profile. And he always grew some oat pee for forage. So we started, instead of putting cover crops in after harvest, we started putting cover crops into this forage crop. So what we did is we took the the vetch or annual rye grass turn up and radish and we tucked them in with the oat pee. And the oat pee was already harvested off here. But then in the fall, we get a pretty nice cover and we don't have to reestablish or try to establish in a very dry brittle environment. And so because it's already an understory, it's already established. And so that was one way this ranch taught me that we can go ahead and get this established a lot easier. And it's only one seeding operation instead of two. So there were some advantages there. But it got the understory in there. It all went in at one time in the spring. But that second line, the second line evolves in the fall. This is his primary forage crop. He still took that. But then we had a nice flurry of the understory that came in the fall. So it's just another way for us to get a cover in. At the Monocan farm, our sheep talk, first of all, and this year we had 20 yearlings and we had three sheep. That was our herd. And the day we introduced the two groups, the sheep looked at the yearlings and the yearlings looked at the sheep, what do you think the sheep did? They moved right toward the yearlings because they're a flock animal. They just moved right to them. What do you think the yearlings did? Turn around and ran and they put a lot of pressure on a four-wire fence. I thought it was going to go. It was a lot of pressure on a four-wire fence. So we introduced them. It took them a couple of days to acclimate to each other. And after that they were just, nobody went anywhere without the entire group. So that was our herd. And I want to go through a scenario here with introduced perennials, which is another alternative for us, and take a look. This was seeded in the fall of 14. So in the fall of 14 we put the cool seasons in and then in June we put the warm seasons in. And then in 15 we grazed it. It was kind of interesting because we had seven Holsteins and 13 red Angus. The seven Holsteins were pin raised and when they got into the grazing system they went into the cell center by the water tank where there's a fence around the cell center. They went into the cell center and laid down. They didn't want to come out. It felt comfortable. They were pin raised. So they found the nearest thing that looked like a pin and they went and laid down in it. Once the red Angus got introduced with them then everybody went out to graze. So we can establish rotational. We can establish, at the Minocon farm we have rotational perennials. And this allows us then to run the grazing system again. If we're going to integrate them, we've got to have them somewhere. So I don't have native range land but I can put some introduced species in and I can do pretty well on this. So it's a 12 acre field. They get an acre. They get an acre at a time. And so we'll put an acre at a time that's enough for about three days. And so we kind of do this based on quality of life. That way nobody has to move them over the weekend. The move is real easy. Just a single wire and we like to take a look and leave some material on the surface in this environment as well. And the other thing that I like I like to go in there and just sit down and let them come over and once they're past the curiosity stage they start to graze and then I like to see what they're grazing. What are you taking? What aren't you taking? So we start to get a little better idea on this whole preference thing as well. So that's just me sitting there observing them. And I like to have good ground cover when I'm done. And so we again I don't want to see ground. I don't want to see bare soil. And so we'll get a pretty good, pretty good mount. We'll let them take 30, 40 even up to 50 percent. And the rest I like kind of on the soil surface. Not exactly all because if you're going to manage for wildlife at all and you want to have maybe nesting as a concern then I might not want to complete trample. I might want to back off on that some and I'll go ahead and I'll have more of a mixed height. So we can do some different things with time. And then they got to be somewhere until you need them at a particular point. And this is a warm season cover crop. So I'm coming in here and I'm topping it. So I'll let them take the top half off and then I'm going to take them off and then let it regrow. And then we'll try to do a little monitoring of the carbon on there as well. And see if we impacted carbon because if we get the plant to regrow we can get this longer period of time to harvest CO2 out of the atmosphere and get the carbon into the soil. So there's some advantages. Can you see the cowbirds and blackbirds following that herd? So they're just on a, that's about a nine-specie mix of warm season plants. And so they're in there topping it and again about an acre a day on cropland. This is the cool season mix and so you can see the Holsteins played the role of scout. They could look around and see forever. The red Angus are in there. You can see the tops of them and the sheep take my word for it. The sheep are in there too. You just can't see them. But this is the cool season mix. I'm going to come in there and top it. So we're going to take off. Do you think they're going to be on a pretty good plane of nutrition? Yes. They're going to be on a great plane of nutrition. Next summer we're going to have the capability to weigh. Didn't have that capability this past summer but I was working off of grazing days but this coming summer we're going to have the capability to weigh and so it's going to be interesting to monitor the weights on them before and after going into these different mixes because that allows us to take a look at this whole production of a pound of beef. In the fall from one of the neighbors we brought in some pears, some fall cavers and this is some of the regrowth of what was harvested earlier. So earlier we had the yearlings and sheep in here and we topped it and then in the fall we got the regrowth portion coming, annual rye, brassica, harry vetch. If you want to see livestock bloom up nicely get them on an annual rye grass. They will do very nicely and if you have a combination of plants like this it allows a little more, I think, a little bit better job of plant diversity for their selection and I think their ration is a bit more complete but they did a nice job of they really bloomed up really nicely when they got into this environment. So again it's cropland but it's the second grazing part so I can get some grazing days on the first scenario, I can get some regrowth, they can come back, I can get some regrowth. McPeak grass and cattle again we got to have the cattle somewhere and what this ranch taught me is that we can go ahead and have cattle for long periods of time in our hayland during the winter and so something Dwayne Beck taught us years ago he said we got to get legs on the cattle we got this high tunnel this is a quick Dwayne Beck story we got this high tunnel at the binocan farm inside the high tunnel are feed bunks we got the legs back on the cows no longer needed the feed bunks now they're in high tunnels so how you can always find another use for these items so putting the legs back on cattle, the cattle used to be wintered at the headquarters on this ranch and so they would winter 500 head at the headquarters and one day they wanted to know why the grazing system in drought periods was doing so much better than the hayland system well on hayland our classical production model is one of exporting right we win-wrote, we bail it, we take it off it's fed somewhere else so on this particular ranch they changed all that they roll out the bales and so if the bales came off of 40 acres it's rolled back over 40 acres over the course of the winter and so everything is everything is recycled 75% plus of what comes in the front end of the cow comes out the back end so that allows us to recycle a lot of nutrient a lot of NP and K a lot of carbon minerals, vitamins whole different line of thinking the bales become the bio windbreak he has water or they have access to water as well and this allows him to go ahead and feed different locations every day and recycle everything back there's no cattle on the headquarters and he explained to me he said it's no colder here than it is on the yard I said I understand so here he's got four pastures in a row you can't see the division fences in here there's four in a row here it's recycling on hayland so they're going to spend the winter on the hayland if you're going to have cattle you're going to integrate them somewhere they've got to be somewhere here they can be on the hayland until it starts to warm up he's done this since he started the winter of 1112 so he started with 155 bales you can see his progression this is a 75 acre field yet improved his production one bale per acre it was just a change in management a bale and acre maybe doesn't mean much to some people to us it's a big item that's a big item that's a lot of production and it didn't come out of a container it was applying management and understanding that the carbon is the big food source for the soil when groups come through the manoken farm last summer we had 24 groups come through the manoken farm about one a week from wherever and sometimes we'll stop out of this ranch and we'll get out the canister rings and we'll do infiltration so the first inch anybody want to guess what the infiltration is on that place that's really close were you there it's 15 seconds for the first inch the second inch it really slows up it goes to 18 seconds that's infiltration but he's got a lot of carbon carbon for the biology the biology builds the aggregates in the pore spaces and we start to improve infiltration a little biology this was where we started nanograms per gram biology that number doesn't really mean much when you first get the number because there's not exactly a book to go to you build it with time you start taking a look at it with time after three years we were averaging quite a bit higher but we also had more respiration and we had more carbon after three years soil monitoring is only good when you start to get usually a number of years behind you so that was after three after four years the biology is looking pretty high infiltration is high now but the carbon now is in the 300s it's come up quite a bit so when you have more food you typically get more biology so it's like a civilization you give a civilization more reliable food and diverse food and they typically flourish and then they respire more as well so now after five years now you start taking a look what we've done more recently now is we are starting to take a look at the NP and K production per cow per day because there's some pretty good data on this especially out of the University of Saskatchewan with Dr. Bart Lardner and so he's been to North Dakota and we visited with him a bit and we can actually take a look at and decide how long we want to leave him on a field because we know what we're going to generate then for NPK etc coming out of those bales and there's no reason to go beyond a certain point because you'll always have a weaker link somewhere else and you can move the cattle to the weaker link start to bring those areas up and then maybe come back to one of these in a year or two so there's different ways to monitor that but here's the place where the cattle can be for a considerable period of time so the beauty of North Dakota in the wintertime besides our scenic landscape but the beauty of it all is when you freeze that hard that deep it's a beautiful place for livestock I mean it is just it's just made for it interesting scenario these are the forage analysis the ranch completed and this line right here is the ones that are recycled this is where the recycling occurs these other locations are rented land and the landowner won't allow him to feed on the hayland so what's happening with nutrient density now we got higher protein and higher energy where we're recycling we have higher protein and higher energy in the next year's feed kind of makes sense doesn't it now just this is a rancher observation but he's told me on a number of occasions when they get into these fields they eat less so you get into the whole nutrient density you get a peak at it with livestock this is PLFA this is out of word labs and Lance knows a lot more about this than I do but I'm just going to make one or two quick points here's my numerical weight a little over 8700 nanograms okay that's that's one of the highest I've seen in the county that's really high for us in our environment and the other thing every line is populated there's no zeros we've got saprophytic fungi we've got mycorrhizal fungi we've got protozoa, we've got bacteria every line is populated now I'm going to show you a follow up one this one is about 1100 nanograms this is the farm I work with this is potato production this is one year after vapaming everybody with me on that that's a soil sterilant so one year after a soil sterilant okay now let's take a look and see what we've got we're showing some zeros in the analysis and the reason I'm working with this particular farmer is because the residue isn't decomposing so it's not and he said it doesn't matter if he plows it, discs it shreds it, leaves it lay on the surface he said the residues just isn't decomposing if you can't decompose the residue the verticilia of wilt is an issue with potato production in North Dakota and so it's very important that the residue cycle well when you start taking portions of the soil food web out it's very difficult because that's your decomposers especially saprophytic fungi and so here we have a scenario where our attempt is going to be to build this back but I just put that in here as a comparison this one's the ranch you can see the higher amount of the soil food web you can see there's no zeros and then with the potato production we've got to work on that but that's one use lance that we're using for the PLFA that really paints a picture Blackleg Ranch Mr. Dolan's been here in this building before and he continues to move down this road of soil health and livestock integration and if you had a chance to listen to him where he has grown the covers with more frequency we start to get a little higher populations and where we grow them with less frequency and more annuals we got lower populations so I've seen this typically when we take the cover the following years of monoculture we'll see it start to come down and you go back to combination of plants it typically is going to rise again okay we're looking for more of a consistent food supply this is just one of his covers but his covers are full season covers so they go in in June this past year the ranch put in 700 acres of full season covers in their cropping system the entire cropping system I'll be a little off on this but it's probably around 22-2300 acres maybe just a little over that but this year about 700 acres were put into covers and you're saying to yourself how can you afford to do that and I think his answer would be I can't afford not to because this is some of the most profitable acres on the ranch but you gotta be thinking in multiple income streams okay because before the livestock come in for winter grazing it's used in the hunting enterprise and then once the hunting enterprise is over the livestock come in and there's roughly about five different areas or segments or fields if you will that they graze through and so it allows them to come in and you want them you don't want them to have access to everything at once because then you know what would happen between the first period of grazing and the second period of grazing you'd have quite a reduction in protein and energy and so you want to balance that out these are made June cavers so we have a pretty good situation there and it allows them to be a herbivore the other thing that's really interesting the ranch has a real history of rounding up livestock with an airplane or checking them with an airplane and he said my cows he said are notoriously he said they just spook at everything he said mostly because there's a plane ten feet above their back he said make some really jumpy well we're out here one winter and we're just walking out there with them it was the most relaxed setting you can imagine he said I can't believe they're not bolting he said they're just all standing out here so it kind of changed their demeanor a bit as well now you've got to be taking a look again where do we at nutritional balancer to me is a good tool if you're going to integrate livestock nutritional balancer would be a great tool send them a nurse sample into Texas A&M you know you freeze it send it into Texas A&M fill out their body condition score and that type of information and you get a read back so we do that and then we also do some forage analysis both and so nutritional balancer I also like to take it at the end of the grazing in a particular cover crop field I don't like to do it at the beginning I like to do it kind of toward the end and see what are they doing how are they doing toward the end well you can see on our protein our protein was holding pretty good over those analysis the energy in those particular years as well and then you look at what their needs are now they were again they were not in the window so they were more in the mid so was the protein being met yeah no need to supplement protein probably in that environment was their energy being met pretty close pretty close and so you start looking at monitoring the soil cows tell you a lot of and so we can get a pretty good feel for how are they doing if you're going to integrate them and use them in the wintertime how are they doing I think that's really important the Oswald ranch how are we doing on time okay the Oswald ranch set aside crop land this year planted covers on it and did some grazing on a portion of it so they turned in on July 6 turned out in July 9 Audrey Rose is the herds lady she does a really good job so we take a look at the mixture so it's just again a mixture of plants spring seed it single wire electric harvested his goal was to harvest 30 to 40 percent of it top it let it regrow and the portion over here was not grazed so we had grazed not grazed we had 150 pair out there on 10 acres for three days so we picked up 45 grazing days on the first go around and then the second go around was in I believe toward the end of November went out and took a little soil monitoring now this is just one year's worth I don't hang my hat on one year's worth did we have a change we had grazed versus where we didn't for the biology yeah did we have a change on the carbon yeah a little bit and we had an upward movement in the respiration the respiration of the biology and the rip mass to the soil surface so I want to monitor that again next year so we start to get a little bit more information when I start to get a few years of soil monitoring I feel more comfortable with it but this is just one year's we'll probably finish with this one so we can have a little bit of time for Q&A if we want I didn't really see this one coming but a lot of the ranches just started planting full season covers with the thought of winter grazing and some of them have planted an acre per pair so that's about what this one did this is about a 90 acre field and he's got about roughly 90 pairs and it gives him a nice supplement so he winter grazed half of that cover crop after he was done winter grazing it he fed on a portion of it rolled out bales on a portion of it and so what we did is we came in again this is just one year's monitoring but we went to the wheat field, his wheat field which has no covers and no livestock on it then we looked at the cover crop where he just grazed the cover and he fed on and so to me carbon, the water soluble organic carbon is an item to look at as well as any of the other tools and we start to see some different things occur and what it shows is when we can use livestock as a tool to recycle the interesting thing is you can look at them as very efficient or you can look at them as very inefficient to me they're very efficient and 25% plus is going to return to the soil I think of that as very efficient now the next person might look at that as very inefficient but because of that we have a tremendous tool here to use for building soils bringing more carbon to the soil surface so we're probably going to end with that right there and if we have some questions we can visit a little bit I just kind of want to touch back on some of the points we talked about before we started again the grazing system from the viewpoint of a once over or twice over to me so many of the ranches end up somewhere with both they'll graze some of the pastures once I'm talking perennials now and they'll graze some of them twice and if we have adequate recovery time that second grazing can be strong and it also is a little higher protein and energy and so when you're looking at your breeding cycles anybody ever have any issues with second cavers I mean that's always the one that we kind of work on because it seems like that's the herd that typically you have the most conception issues with those that are coming in to be second cavers that allows us to maybe look at bringing them on to a higher plane of nutrition with the second time around so we'll have some of those pastures where we want to graze them the second time bring that up the next year might be grazed once and we'll move the second graze pastures somewhere else so it's a it's a management item so I just wanted to mention that as a livestock consideration heifer selection if mama can graze with that calf in some covers because there's selection in there and the mother's got to train it and teach it on the selection on the higher protein the higher energy I think there's value in that and a little longer period of time with the cow I think there's value with that when you had teenagers in your house and they were 14 or 15 did you kick them out tell them they have to go out into the world you maybe wanted to but you kept them right and so they went out into life a little later and it's kind of that way with the heifer replacements I think if they get a little more time with their mother it's always stronger the other thing I've learned from the ranchers when the heifer heard their bread heifers and their wintering I was out on the McPeak ranch the other day and there was this behemoth walking out with these bread heifers and I said what's the story there oh that's Jack I said tell me about Jack well Jack's the steer and he said we just keep it with the heifers and he said he's six years old so he's the adult and he said the bread heifers they're kind of like teenagers and he said it's a calming influence and it takes away stress and when it's time to move them somewhere Jack just walks and the rest get in line and he said I do it for stress and he said stress is disease and disease cost me money and so it was interesting to watch and he said last year he said we were going to take Jack to the slaughter plant but we couldn't get him through he's well over 2,000 pounds he's a semitol well over 2,000 pounds he said we couldn't get him through he's a shoot so they said take him home so he said I happily took him home and he said he's going to die on the ranch someday but that kind of thinking I think is too is something that we used to probably have more of but it's still so important so the heifer selection May June calving if you're going to do that keep in mind when are you going to be turning the bowl in what you're playing in attrition at that time because you could use covers or you can use covers there's ways to bring up protein and energy that might be helpful before the bowl gets turned in to improve conception rates if that's an issue and then the 100 day window always keep that in mind 30 days before 70 days after I think that's really important and myself I think of covers as annuals by annuals and perennials and where or what fits is different on every ranch so with that if we've got time for a question or two Ruth if that's okay okay good the concern is nitrate on covers and especially when you go on your bowl bed early and then the second question I'm going to give you two of why do you go so many species I mean get it done with less species let's take the first one first nitrates I like a lot of pearl millet in my mixes in lieu of maybe a sedan sorghum cross or something like that I still use the sedan sorghum but then it's a lesser amount and the pearl millet is more forgiving in that arena and so the other thing this is just observation now but when you're in one county forever you get a chance to see some things and before we moved into the combinations it wasn't uncommon for something to die from plastic acid or nitrates or at least that would maybe without posting it but maybe what the vet considered was the issue and once we went to the combination and they have a chance for diversity selection really went down so it's another reason why I like a lot of diversity it's so much safer grazing and you know when you bring them into a 100% sedan sorghum you got nitrates what's the choice for that steer he's going to either die because he's not eating or he's going to die because he eats it he's going to eat it even though everything inside of him might be saying don't but if he has diversity selection and then pearl millet I think has kind of been our friend we like to have a certain amount in there and that really helps so that's one of the reasons I like to see a bit more diversity the other reason is I've always used native rangeland as our template and our native rangeland you know we can still find 50 plus, 75 plus, 100 plus species depending on where we're at in the county and so that tells me that that diversity so if I put 8 or 10 species in a cover in comparison to what I see on the native rangeland I don't see it as excessive and I think you have to weigh that out with what you are able to handle you know what's your labor what's your facilities that all weighs in there any other questions South Dakota people I grew up just not too far right on the state line between North and South Dakota so this feels a little bit like home yes sir I think it's better to let the cows go and stick with what they want you can control that with the impact of the herd on how dense you want to run them how short a period of time so if you want to run a lot in for a short period of time you know you're going to get a fairly uniform topping if you decide to leave them in there for a longer period of time they're probably going to you know pick out the more finds and the higher proteins etc well normally I'm kind of lean toward I like quite a few head for short periods of time I don't like leaving them on long periods of time because the sea and ratio on the mixture starts to change then and I end up with a lot of high carbons and not much low carbons on the soil surface and it can slow up my nutrient cycling there's different ways to do that I don't know that you know identify your goals and I think it'll sort out then which way you want to go I like quite a few head for shorter periods of time but now if I'm in nesting season I might do some changes there I might not leave them in as long as I might go in on a bigger area and because they're not going to go hunt for that nest to walk on if you allow them the opportunity they'll go around it and so I sometimes I'll weigh in some of those items as well I don't think there's really a right or wrong there it's kind of depends on what your goals are but I lean a little more toward higher densities myself yes sir yeah okay what I've observed over the years if I have bear soils and it's a no-till system I'm going to compact I'm going to get some compaction just because the rainfall is such a heavy contributor to compaction if I have residue to take the energy out of that rainfall because you get to be an old man you don't have much hair on top of your head you walk out in those rains you really notice it but it is a lot of compaction and so this is something that's pretty well established I mean we know this it's a contributor it's not the only item but it's one of the contributors to compaction so if we have some residue at the monocon farm I have a no-till wheat field it's been no-till wheat since 09 and I also have access to some tilled soils with low crop diversity I put those in the rainfall the tabletop runoff have you seen the tabletop runoff I can runoff there won't be much difference between my tilled site and my monoculture no-till site they'll both runoff just about the same amount of water and you know you start looking at this whole thing on carbon and cover and you know it will run it off cleaner but it really speaks to diversity and so you start looking at diversity of residues equates to diversity in the soil food web and so that whole thing starts in and then you get back to this gentleman's question on how much residue on the surface and that depends on how active that biology is if you've got 1100 nanograms of biology it's probably going to be really slow and especially when you're missing parts of it if you've got 8-9000 nanograms it's going to go pretty fast so you know it all connects but there are bare soils bare soils are an issue whether you're no-tilling them or whatever you're doing so just they're a compaction issue yes it's one of the reasons I like to bring in a large number ahead for a short period of time and so I like to bring them in and if I'm summer grazing and the plant's green that's got a lot of load bearing capacity because it's a green plant whether I'm driving on a tractor or whether the livestock are on it if I'm in there in the winter time most of our covers we really start at summer grazing them most of our grazing in that area is winter time grazing just like today I'm very comfortable with that it's 5-6 feet frozen deep we're looking pretty good but if you're going to graze during the summer I think there we got to be there we got to manage to a higher degree if we got into a 3-day period of rain at the Minoakon farm I'd move them on to the perennials I would and I do yes sir the question was in terms of compaction with livestock so if you didn't hear the question it was in terms of livestock creating compaction in our old systems first half of my career in that area after harvest we'd have livestock on for 2-3 months and we would have trails and we would chiselplow those trails and I mean this whole thing you know we didn't really manage it we just opened up some gates and we walked away from it and we didn't worry about their plain nutrition and we didn't worry about compaction because we were going to till it and so you know it's a whole different thought process that we're into now when you understand more of the biology of the soil in terms of building soil aggregates and infiltration because infiltration is just one of the keys for production agriculture got to have it typically depends on what we're doing and where our water is the question thank you Ruth just keep talking to me I'll figure it out the question was are we running a back fence so we move the cattle are we running a back fence and sometimes depending on where the water is sometimes we do sometimes we don't typically they don't go back on that much anyway because you know they've already defecated on it they've already grazed it but sometimes we will run two fences also we've done that a number of times as well and I like that system as well but we've done both single wire electric is you know it's like a wedding ring psychological barrier everybody understands that right okay yeah we've done the swath grazing we don't have a lot of swath grazing in the county Ruth you were supposed to tell me to repeat okay sorry the question was swath grazing and we do have some swath grazing not a lot we have more bale grazing than swath grazing but I like swath grazing as a tool with a warm season species planted later in the year and usually we can maintain pretty good quality on that situation if we can open up the end of the swath the way they go I think it still plays a role I like swath grazing the question you start looking at is you look at something like Blackleg Ranch where they don't windrow it so you don't have the cost of windrowing you don't have the cost of ailing and those type things the local college Bismarck State College has a farm management portion of the college and they do the books for the ranch and they figured the cost savings was 8 cents a day per cow now they still put up some bales but they haven't fed a bale for 3 years but they still put it up so now and there's partners in the ranch and now some of the partners are saying to the old man they're saying to him we need to quit these bales or sell these bales or whatever and he said no that's your insurance policy and so you gotta work with your partners which brings me to one more comment another thing I never saw coming was the number of people livestock people and cash grain people that have started to look at some partnering and so we got some pretty good partnering going on in a couple situations and I think that's got potential you don't have cattle but you got the cash grain, you got the cattle and man it can be a win-win I feel but they gotta sit down and talk and that has to be worked out last comment I was starting to say I grew up on the state line south of Strasburg, North Dakota and north of Harriet South Dakota right on the state line so I went to high school in Strasburg, North Dakota and in the 60s Lawrence Welk would come to the school and everybody would go down to the gym and it would be an afternoon of polkas and waltzes because what you saw on TV that is exactly the person that came and I wish now in 2016 when I think back about that I wish I would have had the forethought of more appreciation of what was happening of what you know because it wasn't just an everyday thing you know here this person came in with the largest running television show in history and comes in like you couldn't tell them from the janitor I mean you know they were just both there and now when I look back at it but us guys at that age you know when we were in high school and this is like in 68 and 69 and Tommy James and the Chandels was big and that's who we thought was cool and so crimson and clover would outweighed Lawrence Welk but now when I look back at it yeah man what an opportunity and I'm appreciative that I was there but I wish I would have had more awareness to be thinking of the magnitude of it all but I appreciate coming to Peer and Fort Peer to visit with you folks so thank you very much