 So, if you can see the title, it's a pretty long title, you know, the whole systems approach to integrating crop livestock production to enhance the soil health profitability of cropping the livestock systems and other plants. So, that's kind of a mouthful, but you'll see what all that means is because it's kind of a, like I said, a holistic project looking at a number of different factors. So, basically some of the keys to the project are, you know, as we're looking at, you know, the cropping system and the soil health effects on that, you know, how the cover crops and whether there's cover crops or not cover crops or whether it's graze or not graze and how that has effect on the soil health and then also to how the livestock systems and how that affects the beef health, you know, in terms of meat quality and other things to see if there's any effect. So, we're kind of looking at, again, looking at a broad picture here and the economics to tie all this together. The economics in terms of was those cover crops profitable, was the game for the beef profitable and really then the social implications and we often wonder what that is, but you know, it's very important, but really that's really to bridge the segregated enterprises into a complete system, whether the, and that means basically whether the person has livestock or doesn't have livestock, whether the farmer does not have livestock and the use integrates a rancher or brings on livestock on another component and to see what effect that will have because I think there is a lot of room to be for people to use cover crops that don't have livestock to where livestock can be moved on to this and that's kind of what we're looking at too, to see what some of the economics of that is. So, basically we're looking at two different crops in this study. It's corn and wheat and cash crops and then again, these crops will be looked at with and without covers and with and without grazing and in doing that then we're going to compare the cash crop performance with the inclusion of cover crops and our livestock to see how that impacts that. And what are, how are the soil characteristics changing? We saw that in the last presentation of how that can have an impact. And how are these soil characteristics changing as a result of having livestock or covers? And then another question that we're looking at that seems to come up a lot often is whether we're grazing our livestock on cover crops and what we're looking at on the cash ground is do the livestock cause compassion? And so we were kind of looking at a unique way to answer that question and we'll show that in a little bit here. So the other component obviously besides the cash crops and the cover crops are the livestock. And then so the questions that we want to look at in a short, shorter growing season area such as North Dakota once we take our crops off, take them with corn is how long can we spend to graze these livestock on the cover crops after the cash crops? So obviously a year like this had a big effect on that with a later year, the week coming off later, you know, we weren't able to graze as much to get that cover crop seeded. And also corn, because corn as we all well saw, there's a lot of corn left in the state so some of that didn't even have the capability to be able to graze because the corn was not harvested. And then we'll also look at, you know, basically the livestock that are going to graze on this are weaned calves and we're going to look at also then compare a set of calves that are on the cover crops to see how they're doing in the dry lot because basically at the research center where we work, our livestock operation is all combined with dry lot. And so we want to compare to see how they're doing on that so that's a unique approach to that. And then also too to look at how is beef quality affected by these two systems, you know, grazing versus being in the dry lot system. Economic analysis is obviously another component and here we want to be able to compare any of the farmer's performance with and without covers and livestock and then also then compare the ranchers performance with grazing and again to look at that economic component of whether they have livestock or livestock are custom grazed on that. And then again, you know, compare an integrated system versus not an integrated system. And so again the question asked was what is that value of the livestock to the cash crop producer that does not have livestock to graze that cover crop and then also the effects of that soil and also the soil health of nutrients. So another component is we're just not doing work at the research center, you know, there are farmers involved, farmers and ranchers involved in this too. And so basically we have three farmer cooperators in Central North Dakota and Gray City, Lamora and McCluskey and they will incorporate covers into grain or silage corn and graze them. An outreach component is over field tours on site in the fall for each two years of the project. And then overall question is, you know, the feedback is what is their satisfaction system? How do they like it? Did it work for them? Questions to be answered. So we're looking at the research component and also the farmer component which is important. And then another outreach would be kind of tailoring after some work that Abby Wick has been doing is doing some of the existing cathetox to visit informally with producers. This has been known as a very effective method of getting people in their setting with low numbers, meaning, you know, not large 50 people meetings but where people are more willing to interact with the researchers and with farmers which I think is a very important tool that exchange information. I think we all learn a lot about that. And then also we will host tours at the research center, that's the Carrington Research and Census Center, for two years. And then we'll use social media along with traditional reporting methods such as our annual report and other practice to report on the salvage. So here's a slide showing where we used our, we just used an old 71 Flex Planner and, you know, offset the rows, changed them a little bit. And then this is where we're seeding our cover crops into the corn at that V5, V6 stage. And there are some of the cover crops. We did have them particularly once we got into June, July and we started getting some timely rains and then started getting quite a bit of rain. So we had success in establishing the cover crops, as you can see. And here the cover crops are barley and rye, lentils, turnips and radishes, you know, and you can see them in different rows, places there. And that's in the corn. In the wheat then, so this was interceded during, while the crop was growing, in the wheat we seeded the cover crop after the wheat came off. And obviously the factory was there because of the cooler year and a lot less heat minutes. Our wheat crop was later and then with a lot of the rain it got off quite late. And so then, therefore, again the factory that's always hard with trying to seed a cover crop after you take your other crop off we really are looking at limited growth. And so obviously there are many different ways and not always to try to look at seeding our cover crop and getting them established. In this case with corn we have to do it while we're seeding, you know, while the plant is growing because we just don't have enough time. But that is always, obviously a big factor in trying to establish cover crops in our cash crops. Well we're using precision ag to measure to try to measure the soil compaction. And if you see here this is a slide showing the implement. It was basically a it was the, I'm not quite sure what it's called, but it's hooked onto the drawbar of the tractor and it measures the drag pulling the implement. And that's the tool that we're trying to use to measure the soil compaction. You can kind of see the tracks and stuff here that's measured and if you look at the colors it's basically the engine load. How it's trying to measure that. So again, this is after the wheat crop come off. And obviously the early October blizzard had a big impact on grazing that. So you can see the cover crop is growing there. And I think as I looked down the bottom this slide was taken October 9th right before the blizzard came. But again because there was not a lot of time to get the cover crop growing we had limited growth. And I think this is going to show you what it looked like as the time lapse thing. So yeah, the snow came pretty neat. And so this was on October 11th when as you can see the time going by it was quite as slow into the 12th, 13th and we're starting to melt though a little bit. After we got that snow it was amazing how fast the snow melted. So you can see there by October 15th the snow was gone on that. Now interestingly enough too when it's once a little warmer when you do have a little bit of green plants there it's amazing how that heat and how that will make a difference on measuring that snow. We see that quite often with the cover crops. Okay, so then this is amazing. Now I did look at this earlier and this also says it's a time lapse. But I don't know if it's going to work. But what we did do is we were able to graze the cover crop on the wheat and you can see we put up a portable tank and we used electric convince wire there. And again these were weed calves. But again just to illustrate the fact that we were able to get some grazing on the wheat. With the corners no growth. There was no poor growth opportunity and obviously too we didn't get the corn out. But with the wheat we were able to graze from the 12th November to the 25th, 13 days close to two weeks. And again because of that limited growth of the cover crops that also gave us a limited grazing window. But we did do some measurements of the performance of those livestock out there. And then compared to the dry lot. So if we look at the grazing on the wheat on those 13 days we got 1.69 pounds gain per day. In comparison to the dry lot there's almost a little more than double. So 3.9 and I know that's usually what they get on there. But just showing you that basically adding those livestock to that land in that cover crop we were able to still get some gain and have some effect on the soil. But obviously not the beans that we're seeing in the dry lot. You're asking a lot in 13 days? Oh yeah. And basically we didn't have much time there but it was basically just to be able to get them out there and raise it to help work on the study. And that's a real thing. I mean obviously this is a factor that happens a lot in the north for the north like we are compared to other areas that have more heat and longer growing seasons is that we are going to have limited so novel approaches are to be very important to being able to utilize livestock with cover crops. And obviously on winter so we don't get a lot of snow we don't work much better. But with increased moisture and cool weather it was a tough scenario but it's real life. So we're experiencing the same things that farmers did. So really what have we learned so far? Well on the farmer's fields basically they were flying on rye and basically that was a failure. Almost 0% establishment success and 3 tries on the farmer's fields. So in this case a aerial seeding rye into the corn didn't work. And again corn cover crop raising is a risky business in North Dakota due to the weather. That's not only due to the snow coming in but obviously the maturities of our corn. Depending upon when we get that corn off is also going to determine when we can start getting our animals out there. So in areas and winters when we have less snow it will be much better. But again it can be risky. And so one of the things that Mike and some other researchers are going to look at here not in this project but you know sidelines to it is they're going to start looking at 60 inch corn as many people as you've probably started hearing about the 60 inch corn why do they jump to 60 inch corn? Well the basic principle the majority of them are more sunlight and to be able to integrate cover crops into it. I mean if you're doing a 30 inch and you're still integrating cover crop and you're using your, I mean why 60? Well it's basically to open that up to get a lot more light for that. So some of those preliminary results that I have looked at and stuff it basically showed that they're not taking a big reduction on corn yields. What a lot of the people are doing is they are putting the same number of plants in that one rule. So in other words if you're doing, if you're seeding 30,000 in 30 inch rows they're putting 60,000 in that. So they're using most of the people are using the same number of plants giving that wider area than where you know the cover crops, some of the numbers I've seen are pretty high biomass and so it's really to complement the system, to integrate the system of crops and livestock and to try to make that concept of raising in corn work better. I mean a lot of the I think the concept is pretty young and a lot of people are looking at it and so it's going to differ by where you're at. And one of the reasons Mike and Kelly Cooper folks did get some funding for this and I think Mike was visiting with me and said is there going to be a few different things like roll arrangement, things like that, directions and stuff like that. But I think what he stated was this was probably the, this will be some of the first studies that have done this far north on the 60 inch row. So I think that's important to see will that concept work further north and go more in stuff too young. But it is interesting. I know the first, when I first started doing it I thought that seemed kind of odd. You know particularly when we want to, the idea of integrating cover crops or possibly some intercropping or multiple cropping. Are you evaluating any other correlations to like factors of weather or like grazing density? I don't believe that's, grazing density isn't real high because the paddocks that we have aren't that big. I don't believe that's being looked at but I can't answer that with 100% confidence. So I thought that it was basically like livestock compaction certainly different than any other kind of compaction. That it actually contributes to better soils because poop and pee and bacteria. I mean I thought that would remain consistent. And their hooves aren't made for walking on soil. Right, right. So basically part of the reason why we addressed that was to answer the questions because a lot of that is one of the naysayers of the negative things that people not say that there's always a lot of compaction. And I do believe, you're right, the benefits of the urine and the dung and other things are very positive. It's going to increase the biology there's no doubt about that. But also certain areas or conditions, in other words the really wet conditions we have are going to be able to lead to more compaction. And you have to probably manage certain areas, in other words if you're watering in the same area, those areas are going to get more compaction because you're coming in on that. So I think it's still important to try to at least look at and try to answer some of those questions. Yes. So being in the cabs and the feedlot was that just an estimate for the daily gain? Those were weight. The grazed ones were weight going in and then weight coming out and then the controls in the feedlot were weight in that same time area.