 Okay, without any further ado, I certainly don't want to ID on this time. Our next speaker from Blackwell, Oklahoma. Tom is a member of the fourth generation of Goodson Ranch, Pioneer Farmer Ranchers. He has been awarded the Oklahoma Governor's Conservation Award, Natural Resource Conservation Service Environmental Stewardship Award, NRCS Cooperator of the Year for Oklahoma, Quail and Peasants Forever Conservation Award, and the National Accountants Beaconssociation Environmental Stewardship Award. Sharing his successes and failures with regenerative agricultural through public speaking and engagements and personal relations, is an increasing priority to Tom. Relationship with God, family and friends tops his list of priorities. Soil and the soil's biological relationships are foundational to the success of the Goodson Ranch. Let's give a warm South Dakota welcome to Tom Cannon. Probably ought to turn on my mic. Can you hear me? This lady is an amazing lady. Absolutely incredible in the history of my operation. She was, well, it'd be back in July in the late 1800s. She was in Missouri contemplating what the rest of her life was going to be like. She lived with her brothers, and they found out about a new deal that was going on where they were going to turn loose some land in the Cherokee Strip of Oklahoma. So they loaded up. They got on a wagon train that looks very much like this. This picture was taken within about 20 miles of our home place. Wagon trains weren't like what you see in the movies. They were almost a moving community. Incredible amount of diversity in that group. Everybody looking for a new change, a new time, something new. Most of these people were desperate. There were gypsies. There were pastors. There were whores. And there were people just looking for land. And they were headed west. While she was on this wagon train, she did meet up with a set of gypsies, and one of them decided to ask her, do you want your fortune to be told to you? She thought, why not? So it happened to be a lady, and this lady told her that you're going to be married three times and you're going to marry your first two. Kind of a scary proposition for a 17-year-old. She went on this land run with her brothers, but she wasn't able to stake a claim. She was 17 years old. Had to be 18 to stake a claim. So she waited and watched, and she helped her brothers. And part of being in a land run situation where you stake a claim is, in order to keep that land, you had to live on it and improve it for five years. Interesting thing about improvement in those days were usually resulted in some kind of tillage, working at planting something, maybe having some cows. They did have some cows. And while she was out tending those cows, she got to thinking, you know, I can go get some land. This person next door over here has not been proven up their land. So she went to the land office and for 50 bucks, she got a quarter of land. Got one of her own. Thinking she'd just turned 18, and she had some brothers there to help her some, but she lived in something very much like this. It's a dugout. They dig it out. It's called a sod home. They'd use that sod, put it on the roof to help get rid of the water that came in. She lived in something like this. She lived there with the help of a cousin, female cousin. Her female cousin lived there. She was absolutely a pioneer woman in every sense of the word. While she was out tending cattle after she finally had her own claim, there was this gentleman from a little ways off. And he'd seen her a few times. And he rode up and he said, darling, I've been watching you. I think you're a fine looking woman. Someday I'm going to make you my wife. And she looked him square in the eye and she said, well, I plan on burying the first two out of my three. You might as well be the first one. How's it possible to start an operation in the middle of what was considered at that time the Great American Desert? The early explorers that came across the United States looked at this great expanse of grass in the central plains, and that's what they called it. They called it the Great American Desert. Obviously, there must have been coming through in the middle of the winter whenever it looked brown because it probably looked very much like that. Look back in this a couple of deals. One thing that you don't see in this is very many trees. That is a major river. It's a salt fork river in our area and they're going around to bend in it. And there's hardly any trees. It had been managed for however many thousands of years with fire and with cattle and incredible diversity. It is an incredible diverse habitat. It's a very rare habitat. The tall grass prairie is now. About 4% remains. We have some of that on our ranch over at Eastern New Kirk. And then our farming operation, 28 miles to the west is on ground that is considered the good ground of the area. That's my pioneer woman right there. That's our ranch. Whoa. Sometimes I get emotional when I see that picture. But she has a real passion for the cattle too and the land. But that's what our ranch looks like. You can see a few trees that are down along the Arkansas River. This land is really what developed in me a passion for the soil. Seeing how incredible it was. To my story, back whenever I was young and dumb and I liked to party a lot before I had met this beautiful lady, I tried to go to school a couple of times. Epic failures. It wasn't epic failure. I became quite social. I had some really good influence and some really bad influence at the same time. But I learned how to get along with people. I learned how to socialize in a great way. I learned how to put on functions and stuff like that. I was in a frat house. But I failed. I went home and I went back to work. What I did there and what my work was was getting on a tractor. We did like a lot of you all have. We worked 12-hour shifts all summer. I would chase the combines around right after wheat harvest. And that's what we did. Got really good at changing out disc bearings in the dark with my little spotlight. But at school, while I was there, I'd heard a little bit about no-till. They said it won't work there. They said it won't work here. It just doesn't work in this part of the country. I'd heard a little bit about it. And really decided it probably wasn't for us. Well, I met my wife, this beautiful lady, and decided I needed to make a radical change in my life and I went back to school. Lo and behold, when I applied myself, I was pretty good at it. It really wasn't that hard. You know, you think about college whenever you reflect and you think, my gosh, those are probably some of the easiest days of my life. Compared to what we're doing now, the decisions we have to make now, it was a cakewalk. So I went back. I wanted to be in biological sciences. You know, microbiology to be more specific. Well, what happened? My father had a really bad wreck in January 19. A really bad wreck. He about died. He was on the way to Pratt livestock where we were going to sell the first cattle off of wheat pasture. That's what we did. We went out and worked everything. Planted everything to wheat. And, well, we worked everything, putting in hydrosaum, planted everything to wheat. We'd graze it all winter and we'd have, you know, 1,000, 1,500 stalkers running out on wheat and 20 miles of electric fence, got good at that. And then we would pull them off and we'd cut 25 bushels of wheat and then we'd start over. That was our system. The amazing thing was that looking at some ledgers, my great grandmother way back in the day, when she came from the east, she planted corn and did really well with it. She planted soybean. She had incredible diversity in the fields that she did plant. And we've got ledgers where she was buying corn seed, where she was buying some soybean seed. You know, where she was buying oats and all these other things. Well, the Dirty 30s hit, the Dust Bowl hit, and she was the first, she was in the first graduating class from OSU, Oklahoma State University. Then it was called Oklahoma A&M. And they told everybody he had to plant wheat because that could handle it. So that's what they were still doing all those years later whenever I was came back to the farm. Well, when my dad had his bad wreck, I decided, you know, I'm just going to drop all my classes. I can go back to school later. The thing is, once he got over his wreck, so to speak, he was somewhat physically de-habilitated and then his mental capacity had dropped some. But he did get healed up. He was back to helping a little bit. And in that, I saw the books for the first time really in my whole life. As an adult, as someone that was now responsible I saw the books and we were hopelessly in debt. I didn't see a way out. Our equipment was completely wore out. So I went to No Till in the Plains and I listened to Dwayne Bet. Are you here today, Dwayne? Is Dwayne here today? Oh my gosh, did he kick my ass that day? He really did. He's probably here and didn't put his hand up. But my gosh, and the weird thing is he can do that and you all know this and make you enjoy it. You really, isn't that crazy how he does that? Well, he really did. I scheduled myself on the Dakota Lakes tour because I couldn't get, you know, I needed some more punishment, needed some more abuse. Went up on the bus and on my way up north on the bus Dan Gillespie happened to be sitting right next to me. He was also a newbie. Really didn't know what was going on with this No Till thing but he liked it. He's sitting right next to me on the left. We get to Hastings, Nebraska. Ray Ward sits down on my right. Never met either one of them. What an amazing story, right? What a great way to get started in learning about soils and learning about the biology that's going on. Learning about No Till. Came back home, sold everything bought an air drill and then we started our learning process. That was in 98 when we did that. It won't work here though. I kept getting that from our extension agents. I kept getting that from our area agronomist. But I came home and planted corn. What in the world? I planted corn. I planted it on 40 acre field. Six acres of it got flooded out and it still made 134. I couldn't believe it. That's amazing for us. We're talking about an area where your rental rates are 40-50 bucks. 134 bushel corn was amazing. So, that's a little bit of my story. Here's a story about a field. This field I happened to live right there, right there. It's my house, my barn. These are shooting lanes for whitetails and we got a little window in a deal right there in the barn. But as you can see some from this picture I really love wildlife. And a lot of what I learned about No Till I learned with food plots at the ranch and then along the creeks and rivers there at the farm. I started learning about different things that I can put into our system. All different kinds of things. I mean, I could try anything on that because I didn't have that much expense, right? This particular field is where I learned how to drive a tractor. I was eight years old riding with my older sister. I learned how to plow. Plowed up every one of these terraces, took me about a week. Because she gave me about a five minute tutorial and then she left. And there I was on an open air tractor with a little four or five bottom plow and away I went for a week on this whole field. Well, whenever I got back from No Till on the Plains I'd heard some talk about perennials and I thought, well, this is the worst field we have. This field never on its best year made 25 bushels a week. We ran our heifers out here every year because it was easy to put the heifers out here and then in the spring we'd cave them out and we got a little post over there that we could rope one if we needed to pull it. We'd rope it wrapping around that post and we'd pull the calf, so that's what we'd done as long as I could remember. In the summer, planted it to wheat and then we ran our heifers on it. Well, I thought, what a perfect place. This field is some of our worst soils. It's a Nord soil. It's the closest thing we have to a rock in our area. It's a little bit gravelly, a little bit of sand. It's a sandy clay rock. There is such a thing. That's about what it is. But matter of fact, it's so sandy you scrape off about the top six or eight inches and right here is my sand pit that I pull sand out for pivot roads and stuff like that. Or if I need to put sand down under the barn or anything, really high quality sand right under the surface and it's about 15 foot of sand that hits shale and there's no water in it. So it's a dry spot. So I thought, what a perfect place I'm going to try perennials. So I go out here on this place that had been worked forever because that's what I did. This can't work without water though, right? Well, these three stories are doorways to a much richer system. All three stories. You think about my great grandmother and the hope that she had coming into a new land with really people saying you probably aren't going to make it. You can't make it. Me, whenever I was in school and they were saying that no-till won't work there and I really didn't go to class much so I didn't hear that much. So really my prospects also were very poor. This particular field, they said it won't work. I didn't care how to new air drill. I'm going to figure out how to use it and how to plant something. So I go out here and I start planting some Paiodortia grass, Lincoln smooth brome, a few clovers, some vetch through all this stuff in there. And I went out there. Has anybody ever tried to run an air drill with Paiodortia grass and Lincoln smooth brome? Just to tell you it will not feed. I went out there and I went round around, planted half the field, everything's plugged up. I go back and I get some 11502O. I put that in there. Blended in real heavy. Go out there and I plant and plant and plant. You get about two thirds of it planted and I haven't already planted anything. I didn't have any blockage monitors so you get out and you fill for air and it wasn't working. Go back to the house again. So I'm going into my third day on 50 acres. Go back to the farm and I get a bunch of wheat. I did screw it. It's that time of year. It's in the fall. I'm going to plant wheat on it. So I go get a whole bunch of wheat, mix it all in there, throw it in there and I finally get it to flow. I planted this thing three or four times. There's no doubt I did. Finally got it all in there and it grew well. It grew really well. I was amazed at how much it was growing. I had no idea what the hell any of it was. I didn't know what was wheat, what was brome, what was Paiodortia grass. I didn't know how to skip anywhere because I planted it four times. The whole thing was solid matte. It looked like cheap grass. We turned cattle out. They did really, really well on it. Went out there and dumped a much fertilizer and ran cattle on it all year. Then it starts coming up and extending and I pulled the cattle off. At the same time I pulled the cattle off wheat, first haul of stem. Pulled the cattle off and it was just amazing how incredibly thick it was. I guarantee you there was probably three million plants per acre out there. We normally plant our weed at around one four. Good three million plants out there. Most of it I didn't know what it was. Maybe four million because there was a bunch of red clover in there too. A little bit of seed and I dumped a whole bunch of that in there. I'll tell you how that worked out a little later. That's what I did. I went back and forth for most of my life. I went back and forth and once I had gone skiing one time I realized in 12 hours I can get to Colorado. Or in 12 hours you can never leave the same quarter. You can go back and forth all day. You all know the feeling. That's what Tom did and I was right there. That was my job. And that's what I was pretty good at. So obviously I didn't know hardly anything about what I was getting into whenever I jumped into an hotel except the Dwayne Beck commanded me to go do it. So that's what I was going to do. That was my only option. What we had been doing wasn't working. So what's my goal? See I got fancy slides, right? Look at those gold. What's our goal? Our real goal and I didn't hear this really in this conference until Lee talked about it was absolutely profit. We can do a lot of great things but what is sustainable? You're not sustainable if you're not making money, right? That's our goal. That's our main goal. If you're improving the soil, you bet. You bet we have to. That's our stewardship goal is to do that. But we've got to be able to make some money. But we did this forever. See my fancy slides? We worked ground back and forth all over this country and the results of that have been catastrophic. Just from the amount of tillage and the amount of degradation that we have done to the soil nationwide it's been catastrophic. We see that in different ways and we've based it all on chemistry because that's what we're told we're supposed to do. Land Grant University has told us you've got to use chemistry with very little regard to the biology of it other than what your actual plant would do. How many people growing up and as you were evolving in your agriculture career heard people talk about soil biology. The only soil biology they talk about might be coley-altiolink of your plant or how deep to plant it or if this plant happens to be cold hardy or if it's winter hardy. You heard those kind of biology things but it was always about what you had above the surface almost always. Here we go. Somebody told me I needed more slides having to do with profit so here you go. I wrote that out and throw it in there. There's profit on the left inputs on the right and as our inputs have gone up our profit has gone down. It's really simple. It's so simple. They went way up. What happened to our inputs? They went way way up. Prices come down. What happened to our inputs? They lagged behind if anything and they really didn't come down much. A little bit. They say that they came down a little bit. Nowhere near as much as our commodity prices. So what do we do? We're more bigger. We want to get bigger because we're stressed right? We see what our neighbors are doing. We see what other people are doing. We have more acres, more inputs, more equipment, more time more sweat and more blood. We just go for more and more and more. They told us we got to scale up. Scale up because the margins are tighter. So that's what we did. We scaled up. What comes with that? Yesterday we heard a lot about the stress that comes with more bigger. More bigger is no doubt more stress. Less time with the family. Less time for your relationships that really count. Relationships with your lord, with your family, with your friends. That's what really counts, right? And then we ended up with this. We got this hypoxia zone going on in the Gulf. Because we just had more and more and more. More inputs, more tillage, quicker, faster, more and more and more. We got to have more yields. We ended up with this huge hypoxia zone. Almost 7,000 square miles last year. That's incredible. That is not sustainable, people. It's just not. You know, chemistry tends to kill stuff. Like I've heard many people say, especially Gay Brown said, tired of killing stuff. I'm tired of it. I'm tired of killing stuff. What we need is more life. Then we got this. Farm debt is still increasing. This is 2016, mid-2016. It's significantly worse today. You can see what happened in 2011, which was great for some people. We had the hottest, driest year on record in 2011 and it was close behind in 2012. So in the midst of where we'd been in no-till for a long time, we'd started some cover crops. We relied on cattle. Thank God that we're in the cattle business. That's probably my primary business on a year like that. And the drought year, that's what comes in. On a year like this where we had record butt flooding in the spring, as soon as we could get on it, we're out there planting rye and covers and then we've got cattle turned out right now. They're out there grazing that stuff. Cattle are a great savior at a really tough point. But this is what's happened in our industry. And that's undeniable. That's a fairly unbiased Farm Bureau slide. I say fairly unbiased because it's hard to find one that's truly unbiased. So what do we got to do? Romans 12, it's my favorite scripture. I've leaned on this scripture for at least 25 years. I'm going to read it to you. I'm not supposed to do that. But I'm going to. Do not be conformed to the patterns of this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is. His good, pleasing and perfect will. I'm a devout Christian. I believe that my faith has saved not only me but my family and my relationships many, many times. That's part of the reason that our mentoring group that you all heard about yesterday is so important to me. It started out as a production group. I was going to get guys together and we're going to figure out how to make more bigger, better, right? Within a couple of months, the banker, the stockbroker, dropped out and then it was just us five producers left that could share with each other and talk about our faith and talk about how one guy was going to try to get through his divorce. Thank God they've came back together and I think it's a direct relation to what we talk about in that group and we were able to help him. He's been able to help me and in that 2011 year, my pivot got stuck twice a day. We were running this one pivot, it was all corn, it's a half mile pivot, got stuck twice a day. I didn't have a support group at the time other than my family so I was eating all that stress and it's a TNL pivot hydraulic drive, you walk out there you work with the cables, you try to get it out and ended up running the sprayer out there a lot of times with skinny tires and pulling it out but by the end of that summer I'd lost probably 40 or 50 pounds I was down around 190 got low on electrolytes and just about killed myself on purpose with a car accident wouldn't have been an accident I'm driving 90 mile an hour down a dirt road looking at a bridge thinking man just a turn of the steering wheel and all this stress and pain is gone that's not the way to do it I renewed my mind then on that time went home, told the kids we're going on vacation, we went to Colorado for a month, we left so how do we do it now I on purpose picked cotton I wanted to pick cotton and go through the life cycle of a cotton to explain to you kind of how we do things because I don't want y'all to see exactly what I'm doing I want you to see the concepts because what I'm doing won't probably work here but the concepts and the designs will the species that you choose the way you do it will be different I'm not trying to tell you to do it like I do it I'm just telling you what works in my neck of the woods so I chose cotton because I don't think y'all grow very much cotton up here right I don't think so as you can see I got a good heavy residue there you can see some of it is a little bit older in here some of it is younger where I planted some some oats and some brassicas had about a six way blend and while I'm talking about the blends I'll tell you this I used to spend 30 to 40 dollars an acre on cover crop blends today my max number is 20 bucks I will not spend over 20 bucks on a cover crop on companion crops it's 10 bucks I'm not going to spend over 10 bucks on my companions and I run a lot of companion crops now I don't run them I'm not near as advanced as some guys were in here yesterday with the seed cleaner and everything he's amazing I love that I love what he's doing but what I'm doing is I'm putting crops out there that probably are going to go out the back of the combine or they're not going to it or they're going to winter kill or something like that but I do a lot of companions too story in the life of these cotton plants I hadn't planted cotton in 15 years I'd swore I'd never do it again two years ago I planted a thousand acres of cotton don't know what the hell I was thinking I was able to lock in a price of about 78 cents and I thought well man if I can make a thousand pounds of cotton 780 bucks if I can't grow thousand pounds of cotton for less than 780 bucks I need to be out so I thought this is a pretty good deal that's what it looked like mid-summer whenever we were going out we were trying to regulate the growth on it a little bit the growth on this stuff was crazy this stuff was not very old this was only a few couple three weeks maybe four weeks after the previous picture I couldn't believe how this stuff was growing so they told me you can't let it grow that fast it's going to get six foot tall and you're going to have big trees and you're not going to grow any cotton what do I do I called a buddy and he said you got to put a lot of picks on it well as I looked at my fields I had some areas where you know some heavier really really heavy soils where the cotton was growing slower pretty small then I had other areas where it was this big and some areas where it was waist high so I took satellite imagery and I thought I'm going to use satellite imagery to decide how I picks it so I got a guy that could interpret this satellite imagery we made some maps put them into the spare and we variable rate applied all of our picks and all of our stuff so we were only using it where we needed we do the same thing with phosphorus a lot of times with potash we do the same thing with all of our lime applications it's all very rate applied based on grid sampling and satellite imagery and yield maps there's my boy he's sitting right down here grabbing me up here but this was a little bit later we're at full bowls we've got a few top blooms out there very few you can just see a few they're about done so in other words it's becoming fairly mature we're getting later in the summer early fall and we flew on a bunch of cover crops we thought you know this stuff is going to be so late before we harvest cotton a lot of it didn't get harvested until January I got to have something growing that's just unacceptable to me I can't have something bare out there for three or four months I've got to have a green growing crop in it all the time so we flew a bunch of this stuff on and it was amazing how well it did I was surprised in cotton it works really well and with my experience in corn it works really really well I haven't figured it out on soybeans I've had some pretty big failures with soybeans trying to do this that's not the fault of the seeds it's not the fault of the soybeans I still got to figure that one out but in corn and cotton it works great that was harvest that particular field that you saw the pictures of made two thousand and twenty pounds of lint we did that with thirty pounds of potash and sixty pounds of nitrogen split applied that's it that won't work no-till won't work right that's what they say that it won't work to cut your rates that's a third of what was recommended for a cotton crop like this and I attributed all of that to soil health all of that to nutrient cycling years of cover crops and nutrient cycling and running some cattle this particular farm hasn't had cattle on it in years but we used to run cattle on it so it does have a history of it that's what it looks like the day of harvest look at that that's amazing if you look real close you can see the cattle in the background right there now we won't turn them out because they'll rub on those big old pretty pink bales and they'll tear them up so we've got a fence up there but shortly thereafter we can turn them out and it looks like that gets a little more growth on it and at this time we had a lot of grass finished cattle we were still doing as of a year or two ago we were selling forty head every couple of weeks of fat cattle finished cattle that we've really really backed off of due to some ethical reasons that I believe we need to work out in the industry whenever you do it at scale now we still do it small time we still can sell twenty to thirty locally a year but in the large scale industry just be very very careful if you're thinking about going that route with grass finished I think it's a wonderful thing the meat is amazing it's about the only meat that we've ever had growing up what did we eat you know if a bull broke its leg or got a stifle or if a cow was not productive you know you'd go ahead and finish it out on grass and that's what I ate growing up that's what I love I'm going to back up a couple of slides here because whenever my ground looked like that for a number of years probably around year six or seven and I was planting soybeans and stuff there was an older gentleman that came by a guy that I really looked up to as a mentor because my dad is now advanced right he got leukemia after he had his right it about killed him lost another ten or fifteen percent of his mental ability within two years he had Alzheimer's he was never able to go back to school but there's no doubt I'm in microbiology so this guy came by he'd heard that dad had early onset dementia so this guy came by he became my mentor and he was very concerned and he asked me to get in the pickup with him I did and we drove around and we were looking at my fields and they looked pretty good but he said I'm really concerned about what you're doing with this ranch you're the fourth generation you're going to lose it wow man this is the one guy other than my dad I respect more than anybody one of the biggest farmers in the county been doing it forever big seed dealer sold for Monsanto lots and lots of seed number one seed dealer in our region and he's telling me I'm going to lose the farm guys I said it wouldn't work sometimes it takes some faith right it takes something more than just I think I'll try it you really have to be all in because then when you start seeing how incredible it is below the surface you start realizing just how amazing your crops can be above the surface dad always said take care of your grass it'll take care of your cows don't worry about the cows cows will be fine especially on native grass just take care of your grass manage your grass, rotate we've been rotating cattle for years as long as I can remember we've had a good rotation with our cows it's a ranch the grass is amazing up there but what was even more amazing is what we lowered our thoughts down below the soil surface and started managing that living system we started managing that livestock and keeping it fed it's crazy our organic matters have gone up 200% on most of our fields started at around one our average right now is around 3.5 some fields that are higher than the native grass that we have east of Newkirk little history on me what happened to me whenever I got through going to no-till on the plains and came back I realized something it was very very important and it kind of changed my life I realized that I wasn't dumb I realized that I had a capacity to learn this stuff I realized that my whole life I'd been learning common sense my whole life I'd been training I had to think on my own quite a bit and I realized that there is more to life than this and this in 1997-98 over that winter between 97 and 98 we had some wheat that we got in pretty late it was very dry and we this is not an old picture look at the houses this was going on again in the plains in the early spring late winter I guess I'd say late winter between 97 and 98 this was happening again we had this on some of our fields we had blowing not like that but we had some significant dirt moving in 97 right before we went no-till so it was actually pretty good timing it was a real wake-up call because what I saw was this bare ground that didn't have much on it I'm out taking shanks off the chisel so we were running a 40-foot chisel and we brought it down to where we only had like six shanks on it trying to strip these fields God it was horrible and I'm just watching this soil just gone that was pretty devastating really then I go up to the ranch and I look where we're feeding cattle feed areas you know and we kind of change them but where we've been feeding cattle all winter the ground was pretty bare too you know because we were feeding cake that's what we did we fed them four or five pounds 20% cubes every day and then they go eat the native and that ground was pretty bare too you could see dirt everywhere out there at the ranch never been worked but I knew that that right in there that area this area the size of this room or bigger probably three times the size of this room I knew what that was going to look like next summer I knew that was going to be eight foot tall that was going to be big blue stem Indian, switch, little blue you know yellow clover sweet clove, partridge pea and 150 other plants that was going to be incredible what I was looking at looked very very similar from the surface but I knew one place the stuff that was blowing was dead and I knew another place I was looking was completely alive I thought wow that is that's revelation knowledge I've got to change I've got to change that's another one of the things that spurred me into seeking out more information on no-till was the fact that I could have ground that was blowing and looked dead but it looked exactly like stuff that was fully alive man I'm not doing something right this land is fully alive that's going to be eight, nine foot tall you know eyeball high horseback the next summer was the ground that nobody even broke out because it was so poor it's never been broke out it's still native grass that ground was so poor they wouldn't even break it out real shallow limestone rock out croppings shallow soils pretty sandy really really terrible soil if you wanted to go out and try to farm it yet it was unbelievably productive the soil that they actually broke out at the farm best soil in K county was blowing and looked like crap and looked dead man that's a wake up call this right here is what I'm talking about this is my dad out gathering some herffords we used to have all herffords and this particular country can grow more grass than you would believe because it's healthy it's diverse and it's always alive those are the main three things it has in common you got healthy soils incredibly diverse plantings and it's always alive we always have a green root in this you know we've got some ranch roads up there whenever you run over it a few times you kind of kill the grass back in that road when it gets wet where do you drive you get over on the grass where it supports you we have living roots you try to drive on that old road you'll start sliding around if you lose structure on that there's more to the story really there really is more to the story you know my great grandmother um whenever she was, she did eventually marry that guy she did say yes and they went on to have a great life she did bury him, never remarried but she ran that operation while they're alive they'd have big dinners they ended up building a pretty big house pretty amazing operation good spread that they built and they'd have all these people come in to eat it was the same thing if it was a new crowd anyway it was the same thing every time Oli'd sit down in there his name was Oli Goodson he was the cowboy that met her he'd sit down and he'd go up man Dora you look mighty fine today and she'd say oh Oli I wish I could say the same about you and he would say you could if you're as big a liar as I am they went on to have a great and fruitful fruitful life together but this is what it really depends on this is kind of my key point what if success as you define success in your operation depends on your intimacy with the living soil it's not something that you can just think well that's a median that's going to grow my crops you think about what this soil does for you put your kids through college puts food on the table it really sustains your life it helps you to give to others that are in need helps you be a good steward it is a very connector of who you are with creation and it is a very intimate relationship it's not something we can take lightly and without developing an intimate relationship with something that's alive that gives you so much how are you ever going to reach your potential as a producer a little story that I've got about something I learned last year in Memphis at the beneficial ag conference I learned that worldwide sustenance farmers if they're female can outproduce by 40% men that are sustenance farmers why is that? women will always outproduce men if they're sustenance farmers and the majority of the crops that are grown in the world is through sustenance farming where people are trying to stay alive why is that the females can do better they're providers why else? nurturers, that's the word I was looking for they are created different they're created to be nurturers get your wives involved get your daughters involved because they're the ones that will understand the intimacy that is required especially when they're ladies like this the only way that their kids are going to get fed is if they develop an intimate relationship with that soil they understand it much better than men do and they're better producers my great-grandmother, incredible producer intimate relationship with the soil won one of the first governor's conservation awards in the state of Oklahoma was my great-grandmother what was amazing was that this guy that was speaking had been in charge of climate change he was speaking on climate change he's not the enemy but he was speaking on climate change and they had 150 research scientists in this group and they did not understand why women were so much better at producing obviously we're still in the bible belt we understand creation we understand how incredible women could be in the nurturing gift that they have but this research scientist stood up there and he said we really don't know why oh my gosh are you kidding me it's so obvious, they're nurturers and that's what we are we have to nurture the soil because it provides for us that's what she was an amazing nurturer a lover of the land that instilled that in every generation since what if we don't develop intimacy what if we don't develop this passion for the soil that enables us to help our soil be alive and grow and produce what if we don't I mean as a nation and even as a world over time if we don't develop this intimacy what's going to happen more degraded soils less production more inputs more bankruptcies that's the result of turning your back on this intimacy with the soil that's it and there's no denying that I don't know how long that might take 500 more years but populations are going to grow we are going to need more food eventually I'm not going to tell you it's in 10 years or 20 years or 100 years but eventually we will and if we continue to degrade soils like we have then there's going to come a tipping point the soil is a great connector of lives and the source and the destination of all it is the healer, restorer who passes into health age into youth, death into life and without proper care for it we will have no community because without proper care of it we will have no life when they'll bury one of my favorite quotes there is nothing more critical in production ag than one to be sustainable we have to learn how to make money but we have to do that in parallel and in unison with the soil that is driving it because it's alive and it cares for us what if we do I can tell you this on our place we went from horrible debt to manageable debt to buying land and now I'm being asked to be on boards and do this kind of stuff I never would have dreamed it never would have dreamed this would have happened 20 years ago 22 years ago but if you do develop that intimacy that relationship with the soil will you understand that it's alive and if your system has to be fed and cared for then you'll stop doing some of the things that kill it and you'll start doing things that make it more alive we're not zero fertilizer obviously I told you about our cotton in 2018 but I will be there I will be to the point where I can grow crops without chemical inputs because I believe with everything I have that for every problem we have in production agriculture biological fix we just got to figure out the system and we got to stop throwing chemistry at it chemistry kills biology is alive thank you very much now I do have one more thing I want to touch on before I finish up I got these questions and there's some students in the room local students are that you all right back there the local students that are here visiting would you all stand up I think it's amazing that you all are willing to come out here today look at all of them I love it so important the future of our industry is right there and they have a couple questions for me so I'm going to ask them and answer them right here at the same time what is your ground like and what is it like in Oklahoma it's a living soil just like it is about everywhere if it's cared for right we have some really good soils in Cape County we have some of the best soils in the state and also in Cape County we have some of the shallowest toughest soils to manage in the state with our limestone southern flin hills so we have very very very diverse soils we've got blow sand and heavy clays in the same field and that's pretty common on a river bottom a lot of you all have river bottom we've had that how much land do you farm enough I farm enough right now that's for sure we're not looking for anymore we're not going to rent anymore ground although I would trade some of my farms for some better farms but we farm plenty what kind of animals do you have on the ranch oh my we've got big white tails some of you all will be interested in that we've got some of the biggest white tails I think in the world thanks to my son incredible wildlife manager we've got cows obviously and then we've got coyotes we've got feral hogs at the ranch we do not have them at our farm yet but we've become very good shots we kill a ton of them we hire helicopters we don't have to pay for them but we get helicopters in to kill them killed 180 a couple of years ago in one day with a helicopter on our ranch so we didn't have any 10 years ago so we have feral hogs too and then we have over 6 billion living organisms per handful of soil think about that kids over 6 billion plus some soils maybe 10 billion living organisms in one handful of soil that is amazing that is the life giver of our system is the soil that's where most of our life is significantly more pounds of living life below the soil than there is above the soil 10-20 times I don't know what the number is I just know it's a whole lot more a couple more questions I love these student questions so what was your best success in the last couple of years probably that cotton crop although a fairly close second with some ground that we had in preventing planting this year weird right preventing planting how is that going to be more successful we had cover crops out there I don't want to get in trouble for this but what we did we had all this seed out there and it had been flooded and we had to prevent any planting some of it most of the fields were flooded where it wasn't any good and all we did was catch 3-6 inches of silt which was awesome but there were some high ground that had some seed left in it so we went out and harvested some of that and it sold for $12 a bushel it was nuts and it was a blend we scalped it we scalped it off and we sold it and we replanted a lot of it ourselves but it was rye winter barley VNS and some vetch in there there were other things in there too some of that winter killed where do you see your best success in farming and ranching right there it's my best success my kids my kids wow it's emotional wife's name is Laurie oldest son is Jacob next one down I went and wrote them every two years next one down is Reagan then Rachel and then Reese Reese is the one that keeps me up at night she's a live wire man oh my gosh I hope this is being Reese if you're watching this on YouTube I love your soil but I love you she's also the most fun being the fourth generation on your farm and ranch what have you learned the most over the past years I shared a lot about that I learned how important it is to have an intimate relationship with that which gives you so much your soil thank you all very much have a good time good there you go I normally walk around quite a bit but I was scared I was going to fall or something how many of your neighbors have you converted all of them you can drive from Blackwell to Ponca city right now and there's one farm that's still tilled really some of them will go in there and they'll do a little recreation tillage one that really is and he happens to be my cousin hard headed he was a superintendent of the biggest school district in Oklahoma for a while he's very intelligent I just don't know why he just still goes out and works at plant suite he's retired good guy but by far the majority we had some horrible flooding this year because of the timing but overall our frequency of flooding has gone down a lot because we've got trillions of little dams between here and the headwaters up at Pratt so much of the Shackaskey river bottom has been converted to no-till that it's really helped us quite a bit I heard another guy say the other day one of the hindrances to sharing no-till is competition why do we want to educate our neighbors to do this one thing to remember is this intimate relationship with the soil and you love the land right that's number one but also we're already 10 and now 20 years ahead of a lot of these guys they'll never catch up because this soil will continue to improve our management practices will continue to get better so really I'd love them to get started because some day who knows I might want to buy that property and I'd love to have 10 years in no-till in it my question is on serial drive and we're in one of these countries in South Dakota and so you raised the wheat as a cash crop correct you Harvey so is there an issue trying to use serial drive without contamination not at all our rotations just allow us to rotate out of it and a lot of times the serial drive now this year was an exception because we were so wet so a lot of it went to seed turned out to be a blessing because we were selling it we just you know Keith the green cover and I called him up said hey I don't know what to do all this cover crop I was going to plant cotton in it and corn in it and all this couldn't he said well do you have quite a bit and I said well not a lot but what we have is pretty good and he said well it's worth 25 cents a pound I went holy cow are you kidding me so I went and cleaned it and we stored a bunch of it and we sold it and I was selling wheat for you know less than $4,000 a load at the time and I was selling rye for $12,000 a load why would I care if rye encroaches you know bring it on got a quick question for you first of all thanks for sharing your story it was very inspirational particularly the young you're selling a lot with you but what's one piece of advice you know we got all the younger men and women in the back but what's one piece of advice you might offer all of us and them included more specific thank you I love that question more specific to the youth that are in here whether you're in college or wherever just realize that if some professor or some teacher tells you you can't cut it you can everyone has created perfect for their calling so whatever your calling is we're ever going to end up with stay in line with the Holy Spirit stay in prayer realize that his calling is perfect for you and he created you perfectly for that so in your calling whatever it is you're a genius you're a genius you are the best available for that calling and that'd be the main thing and I would say that for a lot of us too as adults we tend to forget that that we were created for where we're at because we're following the Lord's calling therefore you're a genius in that area you're as good as it gets in that area he has equipped you perfectly for what you do it's good time