 Like I mentioned earlier, we had kind of burned ourselves out of peace and I was looking for a way that I could add them back to the rotation. I'm always looking for ways to cut costs. Anytime I grow canola, specifically canola, it's probably the most expensive crop we grow. We consider it a miner or a mining crop or a taker. And of course anytime we grow it, we worry about possible phosphorus deficiencies the following year because there's no connection with the Michael, Ryze and the soil. And I feel by adding these in with them, at least we're keeping some of that biology fair. I actually remember the first time I heard of a neighbor thinking about doing intercropping and I looked at my brother and I said, who would ever take the time and headache to manage that fiasco? And then after doing my own research, going through the possible net income benefits, we decided to give it a go. The first year we did it, we started out small and did a couple of 15 acre plots and it worked out really well. And we've just been fine-tuning our system. Well, I've got probably a little bit different story. I didn't have the opportunity to grow up on a farm so I kind of got into it on my own back in 2016. And even prior to that, going through school, I kind of saw some articles about intercropping and heard some other people talk about it and saw that there was a potential to increase some of the efficiencies as well as benefit soil health. So when we had the opportunity to give it a try, we jumped into it just because the size that we were at that point, we couldn't compete doing the same thing that everybody else was. So we had to try something a little bit different to make us competitive in our farming operation. Lance, do you hear anything from the growers that you work with on why they're looking to adopt intercropping? Some of the reasons is sort of to do with soil health and being more aware of the potential effects of diversity to, I think a lot of it is that there's a lot of risks right now with the herbicide resistant weeds and with a lot of the pests that are really hard to deal with. We've kind of come to, there's so many of those pests that if we could manage the problem with just the genetics and chemicals that are available, it wouldn't be an ongoing problem, but there's some ongoing problems that aren't easily dealt with in that really oversimplified monoculture system. So there just seems to be kind of more appetite, part of it's connected with this kind of soil health movement. Some of it's being driven by a realization that the consumers, if they knew what we were doing on this would, they appreciate some of these more ecological efforts on agriculture. So I think it's to some extent an attempt to get ahead of that trend and maybe differentiate products or have the sort of niche products that gives a far competitive edge. The Morgan, Greg, you guys have been, I don't know long, you've been far from Morgan intercropping, since 2017. Okay, so Greg, you guys, question is kind of like to disease you were talking about. And now when you deal with this and you put into intercropping, what have you see or how are you thinking that maybe have a rotation in such a field where you have that the problem that you've been having? How long are you looking to go back into disease or intercropping or what's that look like for your guys' rotations? I'm thinking four. I'm thinking we should be able to go back after four years, similar to what we do with peas. I had hoped, before last year, I had hoped that we could maybe shorten that maybe to as close as three years. But after seeing what I saw on some of those yield results, we're not getting full innovation of the root, rock, flung guy. So then what does your rotation look like, then you're thinking in those four years? So we typically, we like to keep oats in the rotation. In a perfect world, I would be doing oats followed by probably chickpea flax, followed by springweed or germ, followed by the maple pea and mustard. But it's not that simple. My wife would like it to be that simple, but we like to keep soybeans in our rotation. We'd like to keep sunflowers out there. There are straight flaks, I guess. It's one of those that we can probably cover more acres of in a given year, but we keep our options pretty open. And thus far, other than that little strip that I showed where we had come back, and that was just to kind of even out the quarter section, we haven't come back on top of that again, but we will be pretty soon. Are you having disease issues, Morgan, or seeing that, are you dealing with that? Yeah, I think anywhere, these have been grown extensively on our heavy faced soils that we'll see, see root rot issues coming back more so on wet years, but on our farm, we don't actually, I mean, we don't have a set rotation, kind of like what Greg was talking about, we'll grow eight, nine, 10 different crops a year, but it's not sequential. There's a few different rules that we'll use determining what comes after what fields, we'll see which crops, we don't have a set rotation. We try to stay four to five years on peas, but I think one thing's important with intercropping, I heard Lana say it first and it's a really good point to make. If you just say you're growing springy peas and canola and now you're gonna do peas and canola or peola mixture, the idea isn't to turn that three crop rotation into a two crop oscillation. So stay diverse and don't just combine two crops that are in the rotation, just to say we're intercropping. Did you get in trouble, Greg, because if you were rotating the peas like every other year, for how often were you rotating? You know, we have, at times there were certain instances where we did in every other, that was a huge mistake. This was also in the 1990s where we knew what root rot was. And then we actually increased to kind of a third year. For a while we were doing Durham, canola and peas and just we kept doing that rotation, we just took it too hard. I guess, Justin, you wanna talk about your crop rotations in a left leg? I guess we're still kind of constantly involved in our crop rotation, but we're kind of kicking around the idea of starting with a spring wheat, following it up with an inner crop. One top that we're looking at right now is like a flax pea, some sort of flax inner crop, following it up with a cover crop. After that coming in with a barley arrow and then going to our pea canola and then cycling back, but it's going to probably be more of an evolving rotation like similar to Morgan's theory. What crop rotations look like in your area for those who have adopted inner cropping? I think I can echo what some of the other ones were saying that the idea for the longer term inner croppers that they've kind of thrown the crop rotation concept out the window in so far is that it's set and repetitive, that it's much more of an adaptive kind of crop sequence plan that is subject to change. There's crops that they frequently grow each year, but it can change somewhat maybe due to crop prices, but it might be more due to what herbicides do I need to be able to use this year, or I had a whole bunch of volunteers or I'm set up for a lot of volunteers because of hail. What do I need to grow in that sequence to be able to deal with that? So, but a lot of serial monocrops interchanged like interspersed with broadleaf intercrops, that's a very common pattern, I would say. And then to follow up on the root rack question, how long do growers wait between their pea and lentil crops, typically? I don't think I've got a very wonderful answer on that. Like there's certainly people that are pushing things a bit and you even have to be careful like if you're using clovers, some types of clovers are, most clovers are our hosts as well. So some people are going heavy on a lot of hosts and maybe don't have problems and probably some of them are using too much peas and lentils and clovers in rotation and do have a problem. But I think it probably defaults to having peas every four, five years. It's the same as the other ones, but it's still a developing response to a relatively new issue. And as the pathologist in the room, I'll remind everybody both peas and lentils are hosts for the same root rot pathogens. So pea or lentil, yeah. So don't do a pea intercrop and then two years later do a lentil intercrop and think you're safe because you're not. But chickpeas, soybeans, fava beans, dry beans are basically resistant to it. Is that correct, Audrey? Except for dry beans and you need resistant varieties of fava. Yeah. Okay. Some of the rice. All right, so I don't want to ignore the people online. So we have one question online. Have you only seen it in the same row or experimented with using the mid-row banders or host blocking to try alternate rows? Lenna, I think you showed your research on that. Chickpea. Yes. Not, I haven't done the alternating versus mixed myself with like pea canola or pea mustard. Very, well, not very much. Mostly with chickpea flax. We did do some in that master's project with pea mustard. And you know, when both worked, I think I forget how it sort of shook out which one was a little bit better. But I think they were kind of similar. So it just depends what you can do. And we have a seed master. So we will put our, when we're doing the larger seed goes down fertilizer shanks and the smaller seed goes down the seed shanks. So it's like offset and a little bit deeper. That works nicely. But if you don't have that enough to use mid-row banders then you just want to think about like seed packing. Those mid-row banders aren't usually set up to seed. They're set up to put in fertilizer. So they're not really trying to create a seed bed. So you want to keep that in mind if you put, and then the depths on them I think is kind of variable. So just keep in mind you're trying to plant something into some moisture that will actually grow. It may not have any packing. So do the best job you can getting a seed into a nice seed bed. Justin? So in 2018 we looked at the difference between alternating and mixed rows. And honestly, I was looking at the data again and there wasn't much difference. Originally it was kind of, we leaned towards there being more difference on the alternating rows. But again, looking back at the data, I don't think there was as much difference as we initially thought that there was. I like alternating rows, especially when you go to two different crops that have varying seed depths. I like the alternating rows from the aspect of being able to adjust to that particular crops and needs. At home we've been doing alternating rows since we started and I've been very impressed with what a new drill that's going to allow us to do that even further. I'm excited to see what the results are gonna look like. On our operation, we use a 1890 John Deere disc drill and we just haven't seen a need to modify it to be able to see alternating rows. We've only done mixed rows. My advice to anybody who's thinking about starting on a smaller scale is don't spend a bunch of money changing equipment until you try to see a fit something that's gonna fit in your operation. And we run the same drill as the Jacobs do. Again, there are certain years when conditions are adverse where you'd like to be able to place the pole seed deeper and the oil seed shallower for optimum emergence. But thus far we've been happy enough with mixing them that it isn't worth the extra investment to getting a third row banner in there. All right, do we have a question in the room? A question, Greg. You got three tanks on your therapy system. I do. So do you do like, do you mix your inoculate, you mix that with granule or your mustard, anything like that for the peas? You're putting any dry fertilizer down, you know, because you always run out of tank room. Yeah, in the years when we've tried to put some ammonium sulfate with, we'll use a liquid treatment on the peas. And in the years where we want to use a granular and we're not using fertilizer, we will run the granular down the middle. You know, as we're with a granular inoculant you treat by the acre, not by the bushel. And since we're using reduced bushels, we found it's a lot more cost effective to use a seed applied type of inoculant. Yes, you guys want to address your fertility and how you apply that on that? We haven't been applying any synthetic or added fertilizers to any of our inter crops. And we also will just use a liquid to inoculate the peas and the chickpeas. And we just broadcast over the top prior to planting and then we just use the peat on our peas. Lana, what's your approach to fertility and inoculation? I'm trying to make sure it's in the same spot as the pulse seed. But sometimes I've messed that up. But as far as phosphorus goes, lately we've been putting down whatever is the safe rate with either the small seed or the large seed depending on where I need to put things. I think it's usually going down with the small seed because we're already putting granular down with our pulse or something. So it just depends what's available. But I have done it before where we just haven't put down any fos that year. We probably should, but we didn't. And then when we need to put down nitrogen for whatever trial, then we've been broadcasting it because we just don't have the, if we had a mid-robander on our plot seeder, we could put nitrogen down in mid-roband, but we can't. So just broadcasting an enhanced efficiency product of some sort that's right ahead of seeding and it gets mixed in a little bit. All right, so we got a question online. It seems like the stripper header is unable to harvest crop mixes with canola or mustard. Have any of you ever had success with that on a consistent basis? And I guess I'll just throw that out to anybody. We've actually always harvested our mustard peas with a stripper header. You'll see a little bit on the ground, but it's not, I don't think it's substantial enough to forgo the benefits of having a standing stubble and not having to worry about the spread of the residue behind the combine. And it's also, I mean, it's a quicker harvest process, not tapped to chew through that stuff. So we've always used, it's always worked out all right for us to use our stripper header mustard peas. I have seen shatter if you wait too long, if you fall a little behind like we did this past year. I have used the stripper header on straight canola if it's a shatter tolerant variety. It's not every year, if you're Johnny on the spot, maybe taking it when it's just on the edge of being dry enough, you might get away with it. I was sure we were gonna get away with it on our mustard this year and I was disappointed. We had done a couple of passes and looked at the ground and my wife's kind of a tyrant when it comes to seeing any seed loss. So we went home, got the draper header and finished it. So that's, I guess, when the value of these oil seeds are high, you wanna get every one of them. Anyone else wanna add to that? Any question? Morgan, what intercropping seed combination you like or has been working for you? We try to hold a bunch of them. The one we keep coming back to is yellow mustard and we have done able to, like Greg said, the reason for using a maker pee was because it carried a premium price and now it's not that way. So to be honest with you, I haven't decided if we're doing intercrops this year because of the lack of insurance and the increased input costs, that's depending on how much risk you're willing to shoulder, but that's the one we keep coming back to time and time again. It seems quite foolproof. We've had good luck with it every year we've done it. The other ones from our experiences have been early in this. Lana, do you have a favorite mixture? It depends what day you ask me. I don't know. Chickpea flax is kind of what I'm known for and that's a big deal. The camalina and lentil one is sort of a new one, I'm excited to dig in on if they'll, somebody if I can get the funding we've applied for us. So I guess we'll go with those two. Old one and new one. Greg, how about you? Yeah, I go back to has always been the maple peas and either canola or mustard. Still looking for a canola variety that's short enough to match the charities. There's going to be a lot of demand for canola, I think in the next 10 years with the number of processes that are going up and but that's not to downgrade the yellow mustard. That's a premium market as well. It's just when you compare the two, we used to think that mustard yielded half of what canola does. I'm thinking canola is probably even more so. It's maybe more like 40% not. You ever thought of swapping? Yeah, see the lady? I'm not going to have to know back there. She doesn't, she's quite averse to swapping. No, we would worry about rolling, I think about the swaths blowing away on us. And of course anytime you swat, you have to have something to kind of hold it up and you end up cutting lower than what we like. And we like leaving as much residue standing and as little in the combine as far as residues as we can. Anyone else on the, sorry. Anyone else on the panel want to address the swatting question? I mean, I guess we'd never swat. I busted up our swath or had her cut an A once. I never got the urge to fix it. We never swat anything across. Any time I've thought about it, the timing hasn't been right. I haven't felt comfortable doing it. So we've looked at it a couple of times but just haven't pulled the trigger on it. How about our Canadian friends? How many of them are swatting? I don't think it's usually a plan A. It's maybe more of like a plan B if they're like for a P-O to a P-Canola where one of those typically is coming in quite a bit later. Some of the time that it's either that or desiccation and it's gonna take almost the same amount of time before you can actually harvest it. So it kind of depends whether you think it's more risky to leave it in a swath versus leaving it standing after the desiccant works. But yeah, people do sometimes swath. And it might be more common with some of the organic farmers that of course not using desiccant to be out there with their swathers. And then you've also got, if they've got weeds in the mix too, then that helps drive down the weeds. I'll get back to you, I promise. Gotta go back and forth. What are your earliest maturing intercrop mixes for Northern growers? What are available options? So I guess that, you know, what's earliest out of your intercrop mixes, essentially? The earliest one I found, yellow peas and mustard. Yeah, I would agree that they seem to mature pretty well together. And it's always been in a timely fashion. It's been our most steady intercrops. So the other ones are very variable. I don't have a good handle on the maturity to some of the other intercrops. Yeah, I'd say pea and canola are probably one of the earliest ones, pea, mustard. And when it comes to finding one with maturity, I mean, that was the reason why we went with Agassiz for our PC because it's a little bit longer on the maturing side. And then the 2500 CL was the shortest clear field that we could find at the time. So yeah, it's just about trying to find the two that match together. But I think peas and canola are pretty early on. Oh, I would say that our POs can be relatively early. And the nice thing about that one is that you can seed that end of April. You can seed it while there's still a lot of frost risk, whereas you can't really so much with the mustard and the canola. So if you can seed it really early, you can be combining in August. And, but it depends how far north are you talking because I've talked to intercroppers and Prince Albert or like Northern Saskatchewan and Alberta. And there's some intercrops that work there. But if you're talking North Dakota, then there's a lot of combinations that are relatively very doable. What a nice question, yeah. Greg, we talked about it earlier, but it's always crop insurance. And I'm thinking crop and hail insurance. You just leave that out of the mix in that quarter or whatever it is. I do. In some ways, I feel like they kind of self-insure. You know, again, you saw the photo of the peony beetles that just wiped out the mustard with peas were there. And in the areas of the field where I showed where the yield had decreased to the south, we had a way higher proportion of mustard in that area. So the two really help each other out, but, you know, if a person had to be doing thousands of acres of this or wanted to do thousands of acres, yeah, it's a huge risk. Hopefully after we get some history, RMA will give us a written agreement type contract. So that's what I was going to ask you. So you are reporting that to your crop insurance? Yep, yep. Yeah, they want to see what we're doing with it right. And then as far as a hail insurance, you just hail in one dry or the other, whatever. You know, after going through 2020 and you saw what the hail did to me, I thought, you know, maybe I should put some hail on this year. And they quoted me a price and I said, oh, no thanks. I think I'll just take my little bit of ice. Yeah, so when you go to get that hail quote, they'll look at both crops, whatever they are, and they're gonna, they'll be the higher premium. So it's not really feasible. And part of the reason you're doing an intercrop is to increase your net profit. It's not really, and it doesn't really fit to pay that high premium because the hail premium on muster can only even hold some stuff in our area anyways. It's really, I just thought maybe they'd look at, say the peas and then just tell them the pea loss. Yeah, I mean, that makes sense to me, but that's not what I'm talking about. The other thing to keep in mind is, so. Just tell them it's wild mustard. Yeah, some of them might not know the difference when they come to look, but. So to get the written agreement, of course, it's like, it's three years of history they need. And so you're doing canola and yellow peas, one year you canola and maple peas next year, that's not two years, that's one year each. So it's a government-written crop insurance policy and to say that it doesn't make a lot of sense at times might be an understatement. So when you're reporting that, right? So whatever you're getting half your yield, your are turning in to crop insurance. It's not telling against you. Actually, they don't even have a line item for it. It's just considered, I don't have a line. So I have kept my histories so that I can find them for when that day comes because they'll go back and they'll take tickets from 2018, 2019 and 2020 or whatever it happens to be. I was curious, Greg and Morgan, have you successfully insured an intercrop yet or you're still building that history to be able to do it? We're still building history. We have to have three years of the exact same product. So the first year I started with yellow peas and canola, then the second year I switched to, for the most part, maple peas and canola. Well, that's starting all over to square one. And then in year three, I switched to maple peas and mustard while I'm starting all over again. So after this year, I should have three years, if I've ever make up my mind. Yeah, we've actually completed three years of maple peas and yellow mustard. So it'll be interesting here in the next couple of months to see what kind of response we get from RMA on a written agreement. So we had a question online. Referring to seeding days, would you typically seed intercrop mixes before or after your monocrops? I guess we seed them the earliest possible or the earliest we feel comfortable seeding the most cost tolerant of the intercrops. It's something that you can't treat an intercrop as after thought and hope to get a good return out of it. You have to give it a fair shake. You have to treat it like any other crop that you're gonna grow. So I think it's important to seed it on time and harvest it on time to see if it's really gonna work because if you find something that works for you, I'm a firm believer that an intercrop is gonna increase your net profit. It might not look as good when you get the gross check, but it will in the cases we've seen a lot of times increase your net profit. And I guess I would say monocrop peas are seeded probably two weeks before the Naples pea mustard. And we do still seed some yellow peas by themselves on fields where we have less history, but we're worried about frost on the mustard. But then we typically seed the Naples pea mustard and then if we're gonna do some monocrop mustard that'll come after that. So. Justin, how about you? Yeah, I guess we've been kind of right in line with what we would normally be seeding our peas. Lana? I think a lot of the time people would be sort of doing that compromise thing where you maybe seed it a little bit earlier than you optimally would your more frost sensitive one because you've got a little bit of risk mitigation. If there is a frost, you've got another crop that will help out there. So, but yeah, there's varying levels of frost risk for each of those. Some of our trials we've tended to for my research stuff I've kind of weighed in till the last week of May often because then we've got a lot of my less fun trials, less complicated trials already out of the way. And then we carry on with these more complicated ones that take some time. But we don't get paid on how much it yields and farmers do, so generally do that so much. A question in the room? Since you've grown both canola and mustard, have you had concerns or problems with bulbs here? Canola, can you mustard in marketing? It is a concern. And yes, the first year I did the maple tea and mustard, I kept it a little bit too tight on one field. And we did have volunteer canola in there. And it was a end of sample grade and a huge clean out expense down where they take it in. So yeah, that is a little bit concerned. I only gave it, so I think a three year break and we just had enough volunteers that particular year they just had to come that year. So yeah, that's a concern. Yeah, I guess it is an intensification of the management. But we've been careful to keep them five years after a canola crop to go to the mustard or even try to maybe keep this quarter just to be mustard like we grow a lot of crop mustard and then maybe three or four years later we'll go back to the intercrop with mustard. I'll do that a little bit. But I think if you leave enough time between the canola and the mustard, it's definitely doable. We've done that one. Of course, going from mustard to canola is not an issue. Does anyone have anything to add to that? We talked a little bit about fertility. Someone's wondering, is anyone broadcasting sulfur or zinc with plaques for a yield boost? Well, like I mentioned in 2019, we did do some trials where we just put down 25 pounds of ammonium sulfate. And I realized that it's very little sulfur. When you look at pounds per acre, we didn't see any visual difference and any yield difference as I recall. So we know we haven't been. And we never have tried any FOS or straight nitrogen. Yeah, I guess our, the question was the plaques, right? Yes. We, our soil tests haven't gotten to levels where we felt the need to apply zinc. And we don't, I still, in that matter, we don't apply any fertilizers to our plaques. Monochroma plaques, sometimes the top dress, some nitrogen that work in a, in an auto field that's maybe that's low soil, nitrogen carryover. But there's also times you don't apply any fertilizer and monochroma plaques either after soil testing. Nina? No, I haven't done anything with or AMS. And we just usually use some FOS. Sometimes a bit of nitrogen, a bit of nitrogen can help to give things a boost where needed. Not very much. Jessen, have you tried any of those? Question's in the room. I guess I can say I know Derek Axt and uses AMS, Romeo and Selfie, a fair bit. That's his mean, bit of nitrogen for, it's not about the only fertilization that he does, but I haven't tried it. Go ahead. Have any of you experimented with intercropping so that you have a living plant after harvest and maybe only single-cash crops we have one cover crop as your companion crop? I personally haven't. I mean- Red clover. Oh, yeah, that's a good point. I did do one year where I tried red clover with both oats and red clover with sunflower. And I just didn't have very good luck. I had better establishment in year two, actually. So it's something we'd like to try, but a lot of times we use our cereal grain as a way to control broadleaf weeds more cheaply, I guess. So we haven't spent a lot of time or resources trying to do that. Maybe we should, but we haven't at this point. Yeah, I've looked at the use of clover and under-seeding spring wheat, but just haven't pulled the trigger on it yet. I know Carrington's done some work with inter-seeding cover crops into barley, wasn't it? And wheat. Oh, and wheat, okay. Man, I don't know if you heard the question, but the question was have you tried seeding, inter-seeding something where one of the crops is going to remain living after harvest and act as a cover crop? So more of a companion cropping scenario. So the one we're talking about right now is the perennial ryegrass that you do with oats. So we tried a few different ways of doing oats, but it's kind of using oats as a nurse crop to establish the perennial ryegrass, which is for seed production. So that's kind of a neat one where you're seeding twice and getting two separate harvests over two separate years. We had tried doing alcite clover and red clover with a bunch of different grain crops one year. It was supposed to be as a means of establishing those also for forage seed production. And they did not survive well underneath those crops. We're not in a wet enough area to do like red clover seed production. And I don't think we can reliably have a good enough plant establishment that that's going to survive the hot summer and make it into fall. So it's been a bit of a fee on that. I have tried sunflowers under seeded to a few different things this last year. And we did winter tree, Kaylee, we did. We're going to be evaluating that in the spring to see how much growth there was with the vetch, terry vetch, I guess. And then there was crimson clover but the crimson clover is an annual. So I wouldn't expect to see it next year unless it's being volunteering. So there's a little bit, but it's definitely still a work in progress for figuring out what works on kind of the drier parts of the Northern Plains, I would say. It's not as much a gimme as it is in the wetter areas like Ontario or parts of the U.S. that are more moist. Should follow up with Gary here. He's tried a lot of that, so. All right, question about biologicals. So a lot of you have cut out the synthetic nitrogen or fungicides have any of you replaced that with extracts or biological primers with inter crops? Anyone take that if you have, I suppose. I got crazy and started farming worms for a couple of years. I don't have a biology background so I didn't really have any idea what to be looking for. Didn't take the time to send it in and get it tested. We treated some zebra bitten side-by-side trials and of course I didn't take the time to do tissue samples or any of that. So there was no visual difference. Nothing we could see with the combine, but I didn't test, we didn't do any extensive tests on soil microbes afterwards or plant tissues during the growing season. The worms have since been forgotten about, like I said, I don't have a biology background so I didn't really know what to look for. It was just kind of something to play around with. I could ask Morgan, what about some of the summer and fall grazing you've done on crop land? So we've done some full season cover crops and raised those. I'm kind of a little at the moment sour on that idea just in our drier environment. We've seen quite significant yield drinks the fall of the year. So we're gonna take a couple of year break from that and see if the process catches up. It's also maybe not quite a fair shake because it has been so dry the last few years but just for example, this last fall, we harvested winter wheat or spring wheat done side-by-side quarters. The one ran about 45 bushels in across the quarter line where we had full season covers and raised them twice over the year before it was 30. And that's kind of hard to swallow in here sitting in the combine. It does wonders for the cows in the summertime. They do really well on them. It does provide a lot of good nutrition and extended grazing on the cows but it is hard to sit in the combine and watch that the next fall. Anyone add to anything on the biological? So anyone try those? I haven't tried much of that. And it's the hard thing to convince people to give us funding for because there's so many of them that are definitions of what the benefit is supposed to be is sometimes unclear and hard to get, apply it, get an obvious difference where we can build a trial around or get funding for a trial for it. So it's been a little difficult but we'll see. I think there are eventually that some of that will hop to happen. Well, I think that's pretty much it for questions. I guess I'll ask one to kind of finish out. What's your goals for intercropping moving forward and what would it take to increase the number of acres you're putting into intercrops on your farm? Greg, do you wanna leave that up? Yeah, again, like I alluded to earlier in a perfect world we'd have every acre on the farm growing companions whether it'd be faba beans in our oats or a legume of some sort in our wheat but we're long ways from that, practicality, being able to use, we know we're gonna have weeds that's just a given, being able to control those weeds. I part of the equation is having crop insurance but I hope to get back to doing the flax and chickpeas on more significant acreage and but to continue with the peas and a brassica of some sort. Yeah, I guess for us to increase acres on our farm I guess at this point my brother and I operate the farm together and we're rather new to the game we have to keep the banker happy so we can farm next year and so really for us it's being able to shoulder that risk. Like I said earlier, being honest, I don't know that we're gonna want to shoulder the risk with the high input cost this year and go without having some sort of protection. The other thing is, is weed control and being able to get a system down where we're able to see ahead three years instead of behind one. It does take increased management to line up line up your weed control program to allow yourself a year or two of minimal weed control and still not have a wreck. So those are the two biggest things is having some sort of risk management tool and being able to control weeds. And actually the third might be being able to manage separating all these crops, you know, when you're dealing with a, you tried the PDM and also a lot of bushel strung through the fingers. Yeah, yeah, we were actually part of that general mill study that Lana talked about and it is, we were one of the ones that thought we'd add a little bit of peas to the oats and having learned what we did from doing that for a year if you're going to do peas and oats and combine it for grain, it's really to add a few oats to your peas and maybe use the oats as a tool to manage soil moisture in your pea crop rather than add a few peas to your oats and try to eliminate some nitrogen. It's not feasible as far as the cleaning standpoint goes for separating that amount of bushels and it's also hard to separate split peas from oats. So it's really time consuming. Yes, going forward for us for our operation as previously mentioned, I think insurance and risk is probably the biggest thing for getting some things in place. But once we can kind of have a little more assurance there, we'll probably do more acres. I guess that's probably right now the biggest hold back of life that is possible. Like Greg said, in a perfect world, I would like to have everything with two different crops in one field as possible. I see there being a lot more benefits to it than I do drawbacks. It just takes a change in mindset. I can't remember who it was that said you're not going to have a very even looking field. You've got to get kind of used to looking at what a field looks like with two different crops. I mean, that's very much that there's a lot of truth in there because you're definitely going no uniformity. We might have to change our paradigm about what a pretty field looks like. Yeah, it's a thing to point out that our definitions of what a good field looks like is just dramatically different in an intercrop and that takes some head scratching for the neighbors. And I feel like some people ought to be putting a sign up outside your fields thing. This is an intentional intercrop and it's supposed to look like this. When we first, before we put our first intercrop in the grounds, it just so happened that our three small field plots were right along the highway. And dad looks at me and he goes, well, maybe we should put a sign up and use a few choice words. But he said, maybe I should say this is not a screw-up. I would be on the crop insurance being really important. It's an important obstacle right now. Like the people that have been intercropping for a really long time on big acres usually aren't even clients of a crop insurance. They've organized their farm around not having it, but for relatively new farmers, for young farmers, for ones that need the security or their bankers need the security of the crop insurance to be able to operate. They need to have that there. And Saskatchewan Crop Insurance is trying to develop a program for 2023. So hopefully we'll have something by then. It takes time. And it's hard. The minor use registrations for things, for some of the herb sites and fungicide even would be helpful if there was some expansion of those that might help because there's some intercrops like flax and lentils that might be working really well in some areas. But if you don't have the group two herbicide registration on for emasmox on lentils, well, then we can't really be talking about those as much. Good for thought. Well, let's thank our panelists.