 So, basically, I'm not going to talk about anything that you probably don't know. I don't mean to be an expert on any of this. I've made many mistakes on this, and it's been a real eye-opening experience, but it's been really a lot of fun, too. So my wife grew up in Northwest Nebraska, which has six inches of snow. And then I grew up in Central Nebraska, moved to Southwest Nebraska, where water has always been very, very, very dear to us, very important, as it is in a lot of Kansas here. So as we look at it, everybody talks about cattle and what's doing. So we've tried to incorporate cattle as we look at it. So what I want to do, first of all, is I want to kind of give a background a little bit about why and how I got involved with this. And then I'll go into what we tried to accomplish. And then second or third, we'll talk a lot about what we found out and what we didn't find out. This is, in all honesty, I was really blessed to be able to teach in higher ed for 20 some years and taught South of Lincoln. So we'd worked with over $10 million worth of grants, but this has been the most difficult grant in some regards, but also one of the most positive, because the weather has been so challenging. In a lot of grants, you can control a lot of things. And that control word sounds terrible, but when you envision it, you can write it so it sounds good to get funded. But the weather has been really, really hard on doing a good job in this grant. And so there's good things, but there's things that if I knew I would have 45 inches of rain, I would have done differently there. But that's part of the way it is there. So anything you need, Joan, NCR, Sarah's been fantastic. They have many good resources, so I can't speak highly enough of Sarah and what they've done through our help on this. And you're welcome to contact me, anything you need here. So basically, everybody talks about more acres, getting more acres. I know we had a sale by us yesterday. I haven't talked to my neighbor who went for a week and a half ago. We had land that no sold, no sold, that last year would have went for $5,200 an acre. It was going up at $25 an acre, and it took a no sale at $3,500 an acre. So people are scared. I was talking to my farm credit guy because we were trying to hold off on operating loan. He says the number of people in danger this year are already 25% higher than last year, just in the Nebraska region. And he goes to all the land sales. He's as sharp a guy as I've met. And these aren't people that are just saying, hey, we can't do it. This is scary times that are coming and people are really worried. So how can you make what you have work better? And so I've met a lot of really neat friends who work together. Two of my friends from our seed co-op called yesterday and we're trying to co-op together to get cover crops and you can't pay $280 for a bag of seed corn. It just doesn't add up. Okay, so a really good guy that I've gotten to know through the years, Paul Ackley, and some of you might know Paul, Paul is just a great guy. He's almost 70 and it's amazing what he's done in Southwest Iowa over the last few years. And so practical farmers of Iowa recruited Paul to be one of their spokespeople. He doesn't know computers, technology, whatever. The jump drive I used here is from his presentation he wanted to share with me that he used in PFI. And he's been very helpful. And I had a neighbor, Russell Moss, right by me. He's younger, wanted to get going on this, so we did some things together and part of this went well with this project. The part is a challenge when you have moving parts and then overall produce a rancher deal there. So keep this in mind. We each had corn, soybeans, wheat. We each had four acres and four acres. Corn, four acres, wheat, four acres, soybeans. So over the last two years what it had that had cover crops after that and what didn't have cover crops in it. So we tried to do different than university plots because one of the things is we found in talking to people. The university plots and the research are very important and very valuable, but they're usually very, very small plots. And they're usually not as open to different variables. And most universities are dying to get a hold of different producers land to do long term research. And so we purposely structured this a little bit bigger. And then we also second of all looked at soil types. We purposely took our worst soil. We don't have our best soil. So we tried to look at the different types of soils using those constraints. So whenever you look at that, this is not going to have, don't want to get real statistical oriented. This is not going to get into LSD, least significant deverence. It's not going to get in a one way, two way tails. This is just going to be anecdotal. What did we see here and now? So please, anything I say, don't take this. If this study says if I drink two cups of coffee, I'm going to live five years longer. This is just looking at here and now. I want to put that caveat out there. Okay, so just giving a brief background using as many pictures as possible, Darren Williams, good friend. I got Noah last several years. He has the best pictures, so I didn't want to steal them. So these are all mine. So some of you I know, know Darren. Our neighbor will not do squat on his land. So we have hundreds of acres to the west that in Kansas you have SWCSs, some water conservation districts. In Nebraska, we have NRDs. You're the first one in Nebraska. So the Kansas, Nebraska, all the fighting over the water, you can blame our NRDs for that, a lot of that. So water has been very important to that. Well, one of the things with NRCS and NRDs or SWCSs, there's only two ways that you can stop that. If you proactively step into it, or you turn your neighbor in. Well, how many of us want to turn our neighbor in? So my neighbor here, this has happened year after year after year. And so I basically get his soil, but it's not a good deal. So this is my neighbor's land. We had 45 inches in 2015. I talked to John and things. I was going to back out of this when I first started, because I didn't want to do something and just take money. Because we couldn't rent a planting, and it was hard. And then we had 37 inches this year. But the thing that was difficult, it wasn't just one inch, two inches. In May, we wanted to get our soybeans in by the first week of May. We didn't get in until June 11th. So we had a five inch rain, and then we had a six inch rain. And they were just those penetrating rains, just hard humongous rains. So how do you capture that, seeing the quarry there? So that was one thing. So this is the soil we got from him just last year. And it blows me away that NRCS, and this isn't critical NRCS, by any means, but one ton is acceptable. Is that right? Depends on the soil. Depends on the soil. So you can see there's a heck of a lot more in one ton. And it's not just the crappy stuff. This is one year. Look how many cubic, I mean, I got a ton of good soil. But I also lost some, and I don't want that. OK, so this is at our place where we did it. And we converted this over the last three years because of this grant, rotational grazing. And so part of that we changed because of the weather. And Ron Nichols from NRCS, from North Carolina. Asheville? Thank you, Asheville. He came out this summer, just did a great job of writing and doing a story. So things kind of been more beautiful with it. And then we have bees over here. So this kind of gives you a little bit of context. I won't talk to you about that. OK, I love this term. I don't know if it's Ray Archuleta's term or somebody else, biomimicry. I just love that term. I don't know who it is and what's going on. But we try to replicate as much as possible what's going on in Mother Nature and what's happening and not trying to come in and control it and what's happening with it. And so carbon, the more I do this, the more I learn. I want as much carbon as I can. I want to be a carbon hog. I want to get as much carbon all the time that I can. And not just above ground, I really want to get carbon below ground. Because the more I read, the more I learn, it's what's going on right now with the sun out here, what we've got below ground right now, that we're getting growth. That's what I want. More and more, I want that carbon, the exudates. The sun, obviously, I want to get something out the 11 months out of the year growing. I want to have something. OK. So this was actually the first year of our project. And so you'll see my wife played Vanna several times. So you'll see several times we've gone out there. So as we look at this, a really good friend of mine, Ray Ward does the soil testing. And Ray Ward and Midwest Ladd's Momhawn, there's the third one, or the three biggest in the Midwest. So Ray Ward has a guy that's one of the sharpest guys I know, Jody Sadoff. He's been to Dakota's 15 times, Gabe Brown, Rick Beiber's many places. He knows cover crops more than I can ever, ever imagine. So he was a guiding force in a lot of this. He calls these winter sentinels. So as we talk about the mixtures, when I sent this to NCRSare, I wanted to be sure on what's our mixtures here. I got to make sure I don't screw up, because this is way off, but it's kind of funny. Last year, my uncle died, and it was really hard to get the eulogy. So the priest said I had 15 minutes, and I asked him for 45 minutes. So I don't want to do the same thing I did there last year. That was hard. I didn't go, you got me, Gianna? OK, I didn't bring it up here. OK, sorry. I didn't go that long, but my uncle was a great guy. OK, this, we had our annual meeting in DC in March, and this is a common picture we see all the time. But the Smithsonian, if you haven't been there, have you seen it lately on agriculture? Isn't it amazing? I mean, you don't think Smithsonian would have some. It's truly amazing what they're doing with soil, what's going on with it there. So you see this picture, but when you see it up front and it's living colors, that's the roots. You all know that in the prairie down here, that's what we're looking for. OK, Jill Clapperden is one of the brightest people I've met, and she has a research background. And one of the challenges that I've found in doing this because of all the variables with what we're trying to do is there's so many, if you do this in Missouri, if you do this in North Carolina, if you do this, well, my neighbor doesn't do it. People don't want to share a lot of times. You meet the best people, but they don't want to share. Well, Jill has some stuff that's really, really good. So when I saw her research plots and what she did, this is good stuff. So if you get anything what I talked today, Google Jill Clapperden, see what she did here. OK, so I talked to her when she was in a slanted no-till-in-the-planes conference in January. We sat by each other. And so I got permission, but I got an angle. So it's not a great deal here, but she doesn't want to give out her PowerPoints. So she gave permission, but she's real protective, which I understand. OK, so when we set up our cover crops, it wasn't the generic silurai. It wasn't the generic cheap whatever. We purposely wanted to focus on those things that work with AMFs, our bus gear and micro-Ise. That's what we always wanted to do because that tied to carbon. So she, and you look at it, these exudates, the different types of ones, blue, amino green, yellow, and so forth, we are looking for those compounds. This is what we're looking for as we look. We're looking at exudates. There is something about oats and barley. If you look at these at the very top, there's something about what they do to your soil. And those of you that have been doing it, the old timers did it over and over. But there's something about that. So one good thing from ours, I'll come up to it, is our crop failed. And so we put in fall barley. It did the most magnificent to our soil that I could ever imagine. I'll have to be honest, my ulterior motive, we got so many people drinking beer. I wanted to sell the barley to new hopspices. But we had a tough winter. So it's going to be there, I know. Oats, we've used every year increasing more and more and more. And we'll come back to that. But if you look at that, remember this. And so Jay Fear convinced me to try spring barley. And he's exactly right. If you haven't listened to Red Jay Fear, he's just a great guy and he's one of the best questioners. He convinced me we could do it. Well, there's a small problem on the old farm bill. Under Nebraska, the four southeast corners, for some reason it was included that we can't get crop insurance for barley. Well, I didn't read that small print. So that was a $6,000 mistake that, because of the tough winter we had three years ago, that this grant and many others for the cover crops help. But barley, we use that. And that was part of rotation rather than just straight weed on them. And please ask any questions the whole time. I'll stop here in just a couple minutes here. OK, here's the second part. So the first part was looking at the exudates that we really wanted to hammer on over and over. If I was redoing this grant, that's what I'd focus on, totally, totally measuring that. But this is really, really what I'm looking at. AMF, our Buskler, mycorrhizal, fungi. This, the more I've read and what I learned from this grant. This grant was fantastic for this, is fungi. I want to get as much fungi as I can for this, as we look at it. OK, cut off here. But basically, this is wheat. This is corn. This is soybeans. This is grazed, ungrazed, OK? Get anything here that grazed? It's unreal what the cattle would do as they peed and pooped and as they ate the barley and oats. So I purposely then, and we had prevented planting, I was only intending to do the traditional cover crops after corn, after soybeans, after wheat. What we've been able to do the last two years, we've had three windows of cover crops, OK? And that was something that just come up from this grant I would have never envisioned. So in our soybeans, we couldn't get in, because I couldn't get crop insurance, and we were basically out of luck. We come in then with a warm season mixture. And when they grazed that, we come with a cool season mixture. And then we come back, and we did a dormant seeding. So you'll see some pictures there of the clover. We have too much clover now. I would have never, ever envisioned that at all in this, OK? So as you look at this, this is what we're trying to get to. So look at this, the AMF, and as a number, I'm not sure, 250, 100, whatever. The Haney I'll pull up in a little bit. But I know anything about right here, and some of you that want to feel comfortable sharing, this is good, good stuff. Because I want that AMF working right now this time of year processing the soil. This is big stuff. This is huge stuff. So Jill's been looking at that, and others. Questions on that? I'm going to come just a few minutes here. So I don't yapp it the whole time. OK. So we've talked about just leading it a little bit. This is just the dorky picture we took. So over the last couple of years, we took a picture here in Janice Cowboy Hat. So we tried to show our plots who had been grazed and what had been ungrazed. And so as we look at that, it's a really good picture where our soybeans failed. Then we come into the warm season, cool season mixture. And that's grazing corn. So I've got two friends. We've got a learning group of eight of us. He's going straight grazing corn. And I didn't know all grazing corns are the same. There's different types of grazing corns. But you know when the cattle go into that, it's like they're going into the forest and chomping. They know what's a high sugar. I mean, you know what I'm talking about. It's just like kids, they're going there. They know exactly. So looking at the sugar in those exodates, it's just like you and me. Those lemon cookies were awesome yesterday. We know what they were there and we look at it. The cattle are the same way as they look at it there. OK. So what's the first thing that comes to mind that I've emphasized so far? Yep, soil biology. Yep, yep. This is good stuff. This is ours this year. Thank you. He's not a plant. He's going next. So we're not going to ask each other questions. OK. Soil biology. OK, what's the second one that I've really tried in him? Exodates. Exodates, yeah. Exodates. I'm sorry, ma'am. No, he said livestock. Yeah, livestock is the third one there. Exodates but think above and below ground. Everybody wants to see that. So our rye this year was five feet tall. I got nervous because you know when that rye uses and was going to put soybeans, I was stupid. I should have stuck to my guns and drilled into it green. So I killed it May 5. Then I was in quandary because it's starting to rot. We had rain. So stick to your guns. If you're going to do it, you're going to do it. OK. Water would probably be one. I probably should emphasize there too. OK, one of the nice things about this grant, I know Joan, they're looking at a change a little bit, which I think is a good change. It's not bad, but I think this is a nice improvement. Keith Burns and I taught together many, many moons ago in South Nebraska. Keith is just a really good, decent guy. And so when he got the impetus for green cover seeds, it was from a SAR study. And I didn't know that. So when Keith left teaching vocational education, this is one of the things his dad, I think, was sick. He started. So in research and talking to people, they want you to go back and look at other studies out Keith just got into cocktails then. And they just got into different basics of how you use it. But they're mainly interested in moisture. OK, so when you read his study, and this isn't against Keith. It was just when he was starting on baby steps in 2007, they didn't have very big plots. If you go to his place now, they're slightly at a different level now. The second thing is here, he would do totally different cover crops and the mixtures. So when you read that, if you apply, which I hope you do apply for these grants, I would look at that. The third thing, and this is a big, big deal, it's the timing of when you do your cover crops. And I wish the term cover crops wasn't there in a way, because it makes it sound simplistic. We're just putting cover crops, and oh, I'm just wasting it. So I can't tell you how many people come and they tell me, well, I can't afford $20 an acre. I can't afford $3 acres. So the co-op last year, they asked me to go in. And the co-op, doing cover crops, that's like anti-Christ, because that's going to cost them herbicides and fertilizer. So they literally asked me to put in six acres. And they come back this spring, and it says the best they ever did. And we dormant seeded the day before Thanksgiving. And they still haven't taken out their plots this year. So I just cleaned up my drill, so I don't know. But if they're starting to think about it, because their bottom lines are going down, then that's probably as big as anything. So make sure when you read his study or others, you really compare apples to apples. OK, his soil tilth, which when you see it, you can tell. And then he looked at the different aspects of cattle and how they used with it. OK, so in a nutshell, this is what we tried to do. And we probably met about 30% to 35% of what our original envision was. We want to look at cover crops. We want to look at soil health. And when we say soil health, biology, chemical, physical, biology is the top at that triangle to us. So as you look at soil tests, chemical, I mean, I only had a couple of chemistry classes. But basically, we're talking about chemistry. And physical is no problem. NRCS knows that coal, they're going to help you. But it's a biological. So what can we use that's going to help us? And this is a really, really hard one. What's reliable? So put it in this way, when I was learning basic stats. I can be a really good high jumper, but have crappy form. So if I can give a 4 foot, what I'm doing is reliable. I can do it over and over. Validity means when Fosver did the flop, when I went from vice versa, which is better? If I can't replicate it, then it might be crap. And so it doesn't make sense to replicate something that's really bad. So you want to have reliability, and I should have validity up there. Reliability, can I do it over and over and over? Validity is a good one, I'm repeating. And most times, it's very hard to get those. And that's very simplistic, I'll explain that. Corn, wheat, soybeans. Half a corn, half a wheat, half soybeans, cover crops, not cover crops, and then grazing it. I had way too many things going on, way too many. I wanted to get funded, I'll be honest, but I had way too many things. Okay, so this is what everybody wants to know. And so I had a friend when he was teaching class, he said, if you ever want to get people in your class, always put sex or always put alcohol on your topic. You're always going to get kids that take your classes. So I should have put sex in this. And I had no problem. Okay, I put economics, so I come close, because everybody do it with your checkbook. Okay, so as we look at this, I'm not going to have all the numbers, and Joan and I've talked several times, and I've been honest, I'm very scared about this, because I know when people search, they put out, they're going to say, if I do this, this equates to this, it doesn't work that way. So I'm covering my butt and putting it anecdotal, because I can't, in almost every case, say what I originally was going to do on that. And I had one guy, his brother got ticked, he did not want their cattle participating, and their dad died. I had no control, and I didn't know how to handle that. And then Paul did a good job, but then he had so much rain the one year, he had to change his rotations. So that can't fault him for that. Okay, pure and simple, whether it be corn, soybean, or wheat, when we put a cover crop in, we're pretty 99.9% sure that we were able to get almost a pound more per day in our cattle, after each of those, versus if we didn't have cover crops in that. So we did corn, we put cover crops, we did soybeans, we put cover crops, we did wheat, we did cover crops. It's pretty consistent across the board, regardless of anything else there, that we can pretty reliably say, now that's above their normal gain. So this year our cattle that we had, I had 41 on 21 acres for five weeks. That would have never happened with all these rains, okay? I couldn't keep ahead of them. We literally were going from place to place, and we had them from the middle of May till November 1st, we had 21 on 20 acres. That's unreal. So we're pretty sure, we haven't got back from the vet yet, we're pretty sure they were right at two pounds a day. Good healthy cattle, okay? Not counting the pee and the poop there. I was ecstatic with that. Okay, this is probably the biggest disappointment. We, and it was a big part of the grant, the water sensor moistures, these neutron probes, you can get them cheaper now, but the water sensor moistures to do what we wanted were very pricey. So when you have 45 inches of rain and 37, it would be misleading to say, I use these cover crops, it impacts this soil, I use these cover crops, it impacts this yield. So really, it would be mislaving what we did there. And so we held off and we just didn't do that because it would not be accurate to do there. But we're pretty sure for the infiltration rates and we're pretty sure where we had the more intense cover crops, it had 15% for soybeans and corn and the wheat we're pretty sure was higher than that. Okay, but you can't compare Paul's, you can't compare Russell's and mine. Steve? Did that extra yield pay the price of the seed above and beyond? It did because we did something different with our seed. If I was doing the seed just strictly on my own, Steve, I think I'd be breaking even, but what we did is one guy raised rye, we cleaned it, a group of us went together to bundle our prices. We did our own mixing. So it still would be worth it, but it wouldn't be like a typical guy just putting their order in for cover crops and paying it, whatever. We wanted to go higher rates and we wanted to get more diversity. So to cut our costs down, we tried to do a few things so we could get more seeds. Okay, that's a good question. Did somebody else have a question there? Okay. Okay, the hanging I'm gonna come up to right now, water infiltration by far went up, but what we're finding out here is the clover is getting so massive and so developed. I think the clover's getting too strong. It's kind of like alfalfa and I don't know about this. I'm just anecdotal, but I can tell the clover's almost getting too powerful and getting so massive. And the other thing that was a good and a bad, we had a mild winter last winter, none of our annual rye died, none of it. And you know, annual rye, you do not want that out there at all. So I had to use paddocks and move them around the annual rye. And so it kept grazing and grazing. It was wonderful, but that stuff is just like your lawn. It just is massive. I have no weeds there at all, but I cannot allow that annual rye go to head out. So hopefully this winter, so let's get a cold one, it'll nail it, but it's wonderful. But they don't do that. Most people don't want annual rye with your wheat and everything here. Back east, a lot of people do it. And that's another thing Jody had me do there. Okay, biomass. Gary Lessling is our state coordinator for Sarin. Gary's been bearing very, very wonderful to help with. And that's one of his personal. So we wanted to do that. And the Mary Junowsky is a new four-aged cover crop research person at UNL. And so we had a conservation innovation grant at UNL that just finished here last month. And so we worked, the three of us worked together. And so ours that we did in our SARE, I don't think I've told Joan this. No, I think about it Joan. We use some of the parts of ours as a part of a state SIG grant. So we had 39 producers in the state. It was a $75,000 grant. And we formed five learning communities. So we took parts of this that would work and parts of DIN. And we use that as a part of that seed. And there's only two that were funded in Nebraska. So we were pretty pleased on that there. Okay. They do the square. It's a three foot by three foot. Is this on right, Kenny? For the biomass four-aged testing? You know that all? Okay. They come out there and they use a PVC three by three and they do it. And so generally when we looked at it, we were double the rate of basically of where we put cover crops versus where we didn't have cover crops at four. Let me say that more clearly. Where we had corn and we did cover crops versus corn, no cover crops. Obviously it'd be more biomass. But the next year where we had cover crops continued, there was 30% more. And we don't know if that's just because of the rain, but we don't have a way to prove that. And that was something we were looking at. But it was very noticeable that the soil and what was going on with the soil, something's happened. Particularly in the barley. The barley was out of this world. When you drive across the barley and you look at it, you can tell for sure something is going on with that barley. Even when you drive on it now, it's like different. Okay, I'm gonna talk about PFOA and economics. I'm gonna, Steve asked that. I'm gonna come back to that there. Okay, just real quick. We had three field days. Two were funded by this grant. And one I did on a separate day on our own. So we had one in Paul's place. And then we had one at our place. And then we have a big dairy, South of Lincoln, about 2,000 cattle. So we did it with them because he has things that he's got going on with so many nutrients. And we had 67 and I didn't put that down for Paul's. Paul had almost 50. And so we went over this grant and it turned out really nice. We had people from Kansas which really surprised us there, coming up there. Okay, general things. You don't know when the rain's coming. Don't plan on it. You don't know when it's gonna be dry. Don't plan on it. But look at those windows. The herbicides cannot overstate the herbicides. We've had drift two years in a row, okay? So the co-ops know and I don't wanna be anti-co-op but I don't know if you've noticed but they're trying to change the rules on spraying. I was just reading yesterday. So do you know you can't register non-GMO on DriftWatch? It's, thank you, I won't spray. You can't do that. I didn't know that. So I registered everything. You can do beehives, you can do that. You can do grapes but it's like, oops, I'm sorry it happened. So we were out there putting paddocks up and the co-op of some was 22 miles per hour. Jana had the app on. We smelled something. We go, what in the heck? And they were just trying to cover acres. It was from the south and we lost some clover. But luckily we caught them soon enough. A year before we had non-GMO soybeans, we lost an acre and a half, okay? And we lost several friends with orchards. So this isn't going away. And with the new standards of soybeans, people are going cheaper and they're gonna go cheaper on 2-4-D and the Dicamba. So don't put your heads in the sand on this. This is happening now. In Nebraska, they said the new type of soybeans, it's Endura, is up 38% that people bought this year for next year because people are going cheap on herbicide. They're cutting costs. You know how nasty that stuff is. So if that's impacting you, you need to kind of know what's happening there a little bit. Okay, you all, for time's sake here, cover crops, what it does. I'm gonna look at the weeds, which is something I didn't look at there otherwise, and then looking at the diversity. Okay, we've talked about this. This is a neat chart. We had a guy actually from K-State moving to Nebraska, Alberta Blanco. He did a nice job there. Okay, as I get a couple last things here, and they're gonna put this up on Sarah, so it's got way more. So, the Haney is getting hammered right and left. Right and left all across the nation because they say it doesn't look at P and K. And the big boys who look at it from a chemical standpoint, they don't agree with the biological. Okay, and it's one of those big things. So, candy was kind enough to come up. NRCS across the nation is getting figures. So, it's like everything, you gotta look at it. How many of you do the Haney? Okay, a couple of you there? Okay, I don't want it because of time, but also don't want to go too much here. Anything over 10 or 11 is a good score, okay? Do you know my poor land? We started this for the grant, it was an eight? That's not coincidental. That was on purpose for cover crops and what we did with cattle there, do it there. Okay, so what I'm looking at is the burst. When I take this out, I'm taking a look at this, what they can do to show how much microbial activity is. And as I get to this, they burn all these off and they put them high temperature. I'm looking at what the carbon dioxide given off on it here. This is what I'm looking at. So, for the economic analysis, this is what we're looking at. So, I can tell you what Steve asked is dead on. Most typical guys are gonna ask, how much is gonna cost me? Oops, I'm not gonna pay that. Okay, now this is a year and a half old. So, this is the nutrient value. I've not put on P or K in three years. I had way more. So, I purposely plant a buckwheat, barley, and other things. Keith Burns has a great term. And so, we're working on a grant. We wanna know cover crop markers. So, if he could put a third column in his smart mix calculator, we wanna have a column that we can say, if I put buckwheat, how does it directly impact nutrients? Then that way, I can tell it like a DNA sort of marker there. So, this is what I'm looking at. This is where I can put numbers there. And this is what it's all about, okay? This organic matter is right at four. It's really, you hope to get 0.18, give or take a year. So, we hope to get there a little bit. Okay, the fungi is what you're trying to get. And for time, six won't get here. But, if you look at this, 1.491, look, we're out here. Look, we're out here. When we started, it was right at 1.19. And again, you gotta look at that insurance. You can't just say one year, you gotta kinda look at it there overall, okay? Okay, so how this has impacted me, kinda wrapping up here. I would have never done this into my soybeans before. Okay, so I had some bottom land. So, we flew on 95 pounds. That's a lot. But what we changed is, we put oats. We put barley in our mixture. So, that oats is this tall. It's gonna freeze off. But think what's going on below ground. I would have never done that before. I would have just simply been thinking about rye, triticali wheat. So, when we combine, it was starting getting to head. It was getting about four inches tall. So, that was flown on September 19th. That's in my soybeans. That's pretty cool. Thanks, John. I'll skip that. That gets in details. The next thing is weeds. We won't have time here. But when I show you the picture of clover, water hemp is not going away. My neighbor who has it, I have it, we all have it. Looking at cover crops, how they can purposely use it. These are two good charts of different cover crops that impact your weeds. We all hear about rye, have an alleopathic. This is a great chart. Looking at weeds. Right now, water hemp and bet, they're growing. Right now, they're doing the thing. So, this is where you want to be doing things. Not wait until the spring. This is our clover. We dormant seeded. It sat there for five weeks. I hope we got it rain yesterday. I haven't talked to my neighbor. But can you see? You can barely see where we drilled. This was brome. Three years ago. Before this grant, this was brome. This is all clover now. So we interceded. Warm season, cool season, oats some. I could not get my oats to come up this spring. I put two bushels of oats per acre. I had so much clover, I could not get my oats to come up. So the oats come up later. I would have never envisioned that. This has been grazed five times this year. That would have never happened before this grant. This is water hemp. We first started. It's, they'll eat it. And so we use the paddocks as part of this. Pollinators, I copy John Lundgren. I put this on another field. I don't know if it did anything, but it was pretty. This is what we put in as a part of this grant. This is pollinator strips. It wasn't part of the grant. We just did this as I was talking to Johnathan reading. We put this there. The bees. This is a separate grant. We wrote a separate grant this fall. And we wanted to do some things of 4-H. And we had kids out. And we had a field day on pollinators. Tied to this grant, which I didn't write into the grant. Candy took that picture. That's, that's Jane. Oh, this is you though. Was she come here and took this? This is what we're looking at. Trying to get organic matter there. And candy is kind enough to drive up there a little bit there. That was two years ago, in the corn. Oh, we did. Okay. Biggest mistakes. Take, take away here. Okay. Think about intentionality or cover crops. I'd have never thought of this before this grant. And Jody's a big key for this. Use a roundup ready alfalfa. That gives you more options of your alfalfa and I'd have killed off. Trita Kailey, Sir Ray Elbon. Most people do this. Elbon from Noble comes up early in the spring. I'd have never known that until the past year. So most of us are now doing more and more Elbon. It won't do much this fall, but in the spring we'll get more grazing. Trita Kailey, because you're getting more diversity. And you arrive because of the weeds in the roots. Small seeds. Blancet clover is cheap. It's, you don't have to put as much. You can get more for the winter there from it. And Camelina is a different type of brassica that you can use that most people use. Okay. So what I suggest to you, work with Sarah, form a learning group. There's many different programs you've learned from different here. And the grant itself. When you write grants, always write it from the evaluator. Don't write it from your eye. Write it from the evaluator like they know nothing about your grant. You want to make it as easy as possible. So one of my advisors had a great term. Be parsimonious. Write it in the most succinct, clear terms you can. And have somebody who knows nothing about your system write it, or not write it, review it. So they'll be totally honest with you. Don't have a friend who's going to tell you what you want to hear. Have somebody who's going to be your critical friend. My title, I did way too much. It's called confounding. I should have focused on carbons and left it at that. Plan backwards. Plan at the end and go backwards. Don't go from here and then plop on the test at the end. Plan backwards, how you're going to do it. It's just a little thing, but it's a big deal. And I'd add to that, have the grant evaluation in front of you. Don't just write your grant. Have a matrix with the evaluation here. And what they're asking for in their RFPP and matrix it. Write it as an evaluator to make it as easy as possible for the people writing the grant. And last thing, the one guy, I can't control his brother. His brother didn't want to do any grant. His dad died. So basically, when you do this, you need to understand when you do this particular grant, there's several, you're going to get the money and you're going to pay taxes on it. So I was pretty stressed and Joan is awesome about it. I can't control that the one guy didn't finish his project. So Joan was flexible as he did it, but then I didn't meet my objectives overall. The second part of that is, just make sure that they sign off on the contract. The way the grant is now unless they've changed it, it's me. So it's my head and what's going on. I would have him sign off on a contract you have between them, just to cover your tail there. I want to thank everybody for the chance and Sarah has been awesome. And I want to thank all the people here. I want to thank Janet.