 So this program is kind of the culmination of looking at this for the past half a dozen years. I was asked to give a presentation at the North Dakota Governor's Historical Society on the History of Fertilizer in North Dakota. And I heard the word governor and I said yes. And I hung up the phone and said, how am I gonna speak for 45 minutes with one chart about how the nitrogen increased for the last 50 years. So, but then I started thinking about it a little bit more deeply. And that's kind of how this thing came out. So there's a link between soil conservation and soil fertility and that's my goal today as to when you see a dirt and a ditch, you wonder to yourself how much fertilizer's in there. So the soils in this region before the settlers came was really nutrient rich. It was relatively young east of the river and even west river where the sediments are 80 million years old or so. It's still been prairie for quite a while, 10,000 years. It's good and rough guess. And the topsoil we know contained very high levels of nitrogen, phosphate, potash, zinc, all of the nutrients that the plants would need to do well. So the first thing, and maybe your grandparents talked about this a little bit, when they first settled these prairies in both of our states, really all the great plains, is that there were these huge bison herds and they were pretty much gone by the 1880s. But these bones were just everywhere. The bison would die of natural causes. They'd die from Native American hunts. And we always get that story that Native Americans used to all the parts of the bison. But they didn't use all the parts of all the bison. I mean, how many scapulas can one family really use, right? So there's, regardless of what they use, and they used everything, but they didn't use everything of everything. So there are lots of bones from them. And then the great buffalo slaughtered to get the Native Americans into the reservations. And so anyway, that's a sad story. But the end result of it, at least for the settlers, is there are these buffalo bones all over the place. And there was a market for them. The market started down in Kansas, Nebraska, and then as those got depleted and the territory became settled up here, then people that settled on their quarter section a lot of times didn't have a lot of money. And so that really sustained them for a period of time. This is a pile in North Dakota before it went to market. And people would make a business of this. This is up by Devil's Lake. And so I haven't found any stories in South Dakota. Maybe you can find them. Sometimes in a small town centennial, they'll interview the old timers and get some stories from them. And so you can find in the archives on the internet some stories of people from South Central North Dakota, particularly that because Allendale was a primary place to take these. Devil's Lake was and Allendale. And I'm sure there were other points where there was an agent there for several years that would buy these bones. And so it made a big impact. Some people, it was their only income to get them through the year. Or it was the income that they used to buy lumber so that they could have a wood floor instead of a dirt floor. It was an important part. Here's some buffalo bones getting ready to be loaded on railroad cars north of Bismarck. And just all along the Great Plains are there's all these terminals all the way up into Canada. And so one has to wonder what in the world they use these bones for? Well, fertilizer a little bit. But I was interested, I found this. This was a place of Michigan carbon works just outside of Detroit, I think. And that's a place where some of the bones ended up. And they used them in manufacture of God knows what but they paid to get these bones. Does that look familiar? Does that pile look familiar? Does that pile look familiar? Remember Revenant, the dream scene? I saw that, I went to Revenant and I thought, holy cow, I've seen that picture before. Anyway, that was just interesting. So what does all this have to do with fertilizer? So we're picking up the bones and we're shipping them to the east probably. And so a typical bone meal has about a 315-0. So the nitrogen's a very little account but the phosphate makes a huge thing. So before in the natural 10,000 years of a prairie development and the bison roaming back and forth north and south through the seasons, these bones get trampled on and eventually they come back into the soil but now we've taken the bones and we're shipping them off to the east. The Santa Fe Railroad going out of Kansas recorded about 3.2 million tons of bones from Kansas to the to the Easter and the period of time that they were picking up bones down there. And I think that in South Dakota, North Dakota, within the state, that's probably not a bad guess for up here too. So quite a few bones. If you have, what, 3.2 million tons of bones and they contain 15% phosphate, then at least in North Dakota, 480,000 pounds of P205 was shipped out of North Dakota and that's about two years of phosphate application at today's pretty much historic present rate. So that's pretty cool, right? So that was five minutes, so that 45-minute talk. And so, but then I started thinking, okay, so we shipped phosphate to the east. What did we also ship to the east? And what did we ship to the east? But we shipped a lot of soil to the east. And so from the time, you know, going back through the records and looking at letters from settlers to people back east and little news skippets in the, I don't know, Harper's Farm or something like that. New York, from people that come back here, they all commented how dang windy it was. And that every time the wind would blow, the soil would blow and it was just a continual thing. And then the 30s happened and then just all whole brick loose. So this was the way that you tilled a field back in the early 1900s. It's a picture from somewhere around 1910, 1915, Red River Valley, a very proud farmer because he's doing just exactly what the circulars tell him to do, just pulverize that soil into flour. You've probably been to old farm shows and stuff like that or little museums or maybe out in your fence rows someplace. You can see some of the old planners. I mean, it had to be flour. Those things had no weight at all. And they had hardly any press wheels. And so this type of system wasn't very far removed from what Egyptians did 4,000 years ago. Certainly wasn't any different from what people really thought they should do back in the 1700s in England. But we found out pretty shortly that this wasn't England. So another thing to notice there is not a tree in sight. So North Dakota, South Dakota, all the way in the Great Plains, the only time trees would be there would be, of course, the Black Hills. And then anywhere where there was a river, there were the cottonwood trees and all that. For a certain length on both sides of the river, but then there was prairie. And it was prairie because there were prairie fires and it was a dry period. It just wasn't conducive to growing trees. So not a tree in sight and all that flower. So then it turned dry. This is corn growing up in Minot in about 1929, 1930, whatever possessed him to grow corn up in Minot. I have no idea back then, but that's what that is. And so it got dry and the crops didn't make it. My colleague, Tom DeSutter, he is the office right next to me. Wonderful, wonderful researcher. And he did a lot of work that Chris talked about with sodium and salts. And he's kind of an ad hoc member of that soil health team up there. But he's a, but he does volunteer work too. One of the things he does because of an experience earlier in his life is he does volunteer hospice. And so he happened to be at a nursing home in Fargo. And there was a gentleman there, an Orville Stenerson who grew up in Dunn County, which is northwest of Bismarck. And with Orville's permission, he wrote down his recollections of the 30s. And so, you know, 32 was a good year. Although this is relative, you know? And 33 was a bad year. And 34 was dry and lots of dust. 35 was a good year with rains. And 36 was the worst year that he experienced. So, you know, lots of dust, grasshoppers. Not a whole lot of hay off the farm, you know, 15% of what they normally get. The dust storms would come out of nowhere. The dust would blacken the sky. They'd huddle in their house with newspapers and cloth and stuff, stuffed around windows and doors. And, you know, you could hardly see across the room. And it would last for days. And they sold all the livestock, the ones that were still alive. And didn't have any wheat that year. I think they kept a dairy cow, it looks like, and used Russian thistle for feed, but you know, how that goes. So, I was about done with this. And then I was northwest of Grand Forks. And an old gentleman just stood up in the back of the room and he just started talking. He talked about his experiences around that area, Northwest of Grand Forks, how he was a little kid, and how these things would just come out of nowhere and they would huddle in their house, just like Orville, and, you know, for days. And then when they got out of the house, their first job was to try to find the livestock, the ones that were still alive, because the soil, and he said in some of these events, they lost feet of soil from the field, feet of soil from the field. And the soil was just across the fence, just like it was a big snowdrift or something. And so the livestock had wandered out in the storm. And so his first job outside of the house was digging out the fences so that the livestock that were left, they could get back in it. So it must have been hell. So what we learned in the early 1930s, this is a USDA map from the early 1930s, that didn't exist before then, was that this region is one of the windiest areas in the United States. You know, these settlers that came in here, they came in from Sweden, they came in from Germany, they came in from a number of different places, but in all those places, Eastern United States, Ohio, Virginia, a stiff wind is like 10 mile an hour. And then they come here, and it's like 20 miles every day, and then once in a while it gets to 50, 60, 70, you get a storm, 80 mile an hour. You know, you've been through it, you know how windy it gets. And so this was just amazing for them. They weren't prepared for it at all. This is just north, north and east of Bismarck. We're just east of Bismarck. That's a fence built on top of a fence. And look at the guy's tie. Just a typical day on a prairie. This is just across the border in Appleton, Minnesota. I mean, once the soils are dry like this, they're just dry, dry, dry for a long, long time. A lot of people in North Dakota anyway, I think we're just so depressed on the whole thing that nobody really took a lot of pictures. Because why would you want to take a picture of this horrible disaster that you're spending all your time digging out fences and trying to make ends meet? So why in the world would you take some pictures? I went to, in Southwest of Fargo about 40 miles, there was an area called the Cheyenne Grasslands. And so I went there because I know that that area was farmed at one time. Mick here used to be on TV up in Fargo. He's from the cloud. And he told me that his dad would take him around that sand area, Grasslands. And he said, you know, so and so used to live there. So and so used to live there. So and so used to live there. It was all populated. And by the end of the 30s, all, everybody was gone. I mean, nobody really farms around there that started farming before 1950. It's just amazing. So it just cleared the countryside out. But USDA heard that there was a problem out in the Great Plains. And so they sent photographers out. And here's one of those photographers. His name was Russell from the FSA. And this is a dust storm around the Williston area. And if you look real closely, you can see the old water tower of Williston. This is a quote unquote pasture from the Williston area. This is 37 after it's been going for about six years. Minnesota didn't get hit as hard, but that area just west of Morris, where the Tillage Lab is. There shouldn't be any mystery why there's a Tillage Lab in Morris is, you know, they got hit too. So this is for my personal archives. So the North or South Dakota, for some reason, they had more people that had cameras or were willing to take the pictures. But this is my personal archive. This is here on South Dakota on November 12th, 1933 at 1155 AM. And that's the streetlight on. You can barely see that car. Middle of the day. This is a dust storm bearing down on Watertown. I just pulled that off the internet today. You don't have that in your sheet. You don't have this one either. I pulled it off the internet this morning. This is Watertown, May 9th, 1934. 3 p.m., 3 p.m. And then closer to home, this is a photograph you usually find from Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas. This is Gregory, South Dakota, 1934. And this is the aftermath of Gregory, South Dakota, 1934. And if you go on the internet, this is actually a video. The guy trying to walk against the wind in this nasty area. This is a hog building that's almost all covered with soil after one of those events in South Central, South Dakota. So it was horrible, can you imagine? So the government, seeing that nobody's making any money because there's no crops and people are dying from pneumonia, dust pneumonia and all this stuff is, and the livestock are all dying because their lungs are filled with soil. They put out a program where if you could bring in a horse or cow or something like that to give you $10, they'd shoot it and put it in the ditch. And so that went on too. I mean, they had to eat, right? If they weren't gonna move to California, they had to eat. So that's what they did. So when you talk about wind erosion, people tend to be flippant about it unless you really understand this stuff. So a lot of people just think, well, a wind blew yesterday, I went around and oh my gosh, there's dirt in the ditch, I gotta go put it back in the field. And they think that's all that happened. But these events are three-dimensional. They have a huge vertical part to it. And so this is a clipping from 1934 from the Bismarck Tribune. And I won't read the whole thing, but it's talking about in the dust storm that lasted about 11 days and just lasted a long time. And then the 22nd, April 22nd, the real bad day, the worst day was a Sunday. And that was the day back then that people would travel. And so these aviators were coming into the Bismarck airport. And they reported that they were in dust all the way up to 14,000 feet. 14,000, it's like what, two and a half miles. And it also says that this isn't the only dust storm that we've had this year, but it's the worst. So you can imagine, I mean, this is just a continual thing. So Goddard didn't have his satellite set up to take pictures yet. And so all we got is testimonies like this. But now we have the satellites. And so we can see what the distribution of this dust is. This is from the Palouse region in Washington, which is also one of the windier erosive areas in the United States. And those dust plumes are going over 100 miles. So they travel huge distances. And on those dust storms in the Sahara that come off over the Canary Islands, those are thousands of miles away. When the Soil Conservation Service was first instituted, the person that was responsible for it had a network of telegraph operators in Kansas and in the States. And so their mission was to alert him when the dust storm was coming up in Kansas. And so then when it passed Illinois, he'd get a call. And when he passed Ohio, he'd get a call. So he scheduled a legislative hearing when he knew that the dust storm was gonna come in Washington, D.C. And so he did. So he starts his presentation. The dust storm comes in, he says, gentlemen, go to the windows, that's Kansas blowing by. And that's where the Soil Conservation Service was started. So it traveled thousands of miles. So at least in North Dakota, I did some serious looking. And in the 1930s, almost 600,000 acres where it had serious erosion, but 9.1 million acres. And the state only has like 40 point something million acres. 9.1 million acres was so severely eroded that it was not possible to grow any crops on it anymore. And so we have a lot of range in the state and we have grasslands in the state. And most of that stuff used to be farm farm except for the real rocky stuff. So this is published in 36, so it includes data from through 35, halfway through the windiest period in our country's history. And those black areas there are, they consider that moderate wind erosion with 25 to 75% topsoil loss. And then that gray dotted stuff is at least 25% topsoil loss. So huge amounts of loss at that time. And 33, Secretary of Agriculture, who memo to he Bennett with the newly instituted soil erosion service that the topsoil loss has reduced annual production in those areas, 15 to 25% when the soil was fully stripped, it became unproductive and barren. So what's happened? So we had this original prairie soil. And I'll show you how thick it was here in a little bit. All those nutrients on that topsoil must have been heaven to farm. And but it was that bank of organic matter and nutrients that had been built up for only 10,000 years. One of the things I found too was that early wheat yields with only marginally adapted varieties with crappy seeding equipment and not that great cultural practices, just people sticking seed in the ground and watching it, would oftentimes, you know, 35, 40 bushels would not uncommon. And in some places like around the Cheyenne River and some of the river bottom soils, up to 70 bushels an acre a week. Where are wheat yields now? We have each 40 bushels an acre. We've gone a long way, haven't we? Without a drop of fertilizer, no chemicals, no nothing. That's it. So the rates of nitrogen mineralization, just to mention nitrogen, must have been incredibly high. You'd have to have at least 100 pounds of nitrogen coming up from that field in order to sustain a crop that size. I talked about the soil moving so far and there were reports, news reports in Chicago, New York of the consequences of the Great Plains dust storms. That there would be thousands of tons of soil that would land in Chicago or would be in Central Park in New York to the depth that you could scoop it up with a cup. And so some enterprising scientists actually took some of that stuff from New York and they analyzed it, went back to the prairies where they figured it came from and analyzed the soils that were left behind and this is what they found. They found that the dust they analyzed in the Eastern cities had 19 times more phosphate than the soils that were left behind, 10 times more organic matter, nine times more nitrogen and 45 times more potassium. This is a chart of North Dakota wheat yields versus Russia and I won't talk about Russia, but those white boxes up there, those were the initial yields of wheat, average wheat in North Dakota and starting about 1880 and it's in thousands of kilograms per hectare. But that equates into somewhere around 30 bushel, 25, 30 bushel, 28 bushel, something like that. And those yields were sustained all the way till about 1910, got a little bit drier, about then reduced. You're probably getting some soil blowing away and maybe not quite so productive. Even in the 20s when we still had moisture, we never achieved those kind of yields. We were more like 15 to 20 and then the 30s hit a course and a lot of that's just dry weather. But we never got back to those yields until the 50s when people started putting on fertilizer again because the natural fertilizer was just gone. So this is what I figured for North Dakota that we lost about 12 inches of topsoil from the hilltop. I think all this is conservative. 12 inches of soil, topsoil from the hilltop, eight inches from the slopes, average of six inches of topsoil lost in North Dakota from about 30 million acres of cropland, total weights of that, about 30 billion tons of soil. Soil usually has somewhere in the neighborhood of about 2,000 pounds of P205 per acre. So if you do the math, we would have lost, we lost 30 million tons of phosphate and that's equivalent to 150 years of phosphate application at today's present rates. So we've done an impressive export business from the Great Plains. So the 30s were over and it stopped, right? People have learned their lesson. You know, they started working on no-till systems. They did start planting trees, but we had major soil loss events in the 40s and the 50s and the 60s and the 70s and some of you are old enough that you remember those wonderful years from 1988 to 1990, wasn't that a treat? Okay, so I know on North Dakota in some of those windy years when people struggled to get a crop and the fields were bare and that township trucks had to be used in certain North Dakota towns to scoop the, to move the soil off the streets so people could get around the cities in the 1980s. So it's Grand Forks County in 1950s, that's not snow. So it just continues. The soil loss just continues. Millions of acres in certain years. And so the big question is why aren't, I know some growers are and some of you on Pete Preach and the choir, because you understand this, but a lot of people really don't. They just don't. And so why aren't they more concerned about this? And I think it's because they mask the effects of the soil loss with their tillage, that they don't have any check for reference. This is what it used to be like and holy cow, this is what it is right now. I mean, if people really saw that in the field, they wouldn't do what they were doing. So one of the things you see, and I saw it on the way down here, is that oftentimes a rock pile sit on pedestals. You know, the rocks were stuck there 60 years ago and the soil erodes around them and so they're just kind of stuck up there in a pedestal. You don't see it all the time because sometimes the dust makes a slope up onto the rocks and you don't see the pedestal, but when you take the rocks off someday, you'll find a lot of blocker soil underneath the rocks and you will, alongside of it. But I think this is what happens. Is that these are, let's just pretend that it's the same soil, this is a slice of soil. Chris and I, we spend, we're depressed all the time because we spend a lot of our time in the pits. Okay, all right. So, pretend that you're down the soil pit and you're looking at the side of the soil here and so the A-horizon is the, you know, topsoil, the stuff that's, if anything's gonna be black, that's gonna be black and then the B-horizon is a chemically changed by just physical chemistry but then also by plants, the activity, the roots and all this, so it's an area where clay is gonna accumulate and maybe there's some salts coming up and maybe lime accumulates or it's where you have a clay horizon, a little bit higher clay than the top and the bottom. So that's what we call a B-horizon that's been changed and then the C-horizon is whatever parent material or soil is below that changed material. So that's, so in a original soil that we have a pretty good size, whoa. It shouldn't be so Italian. Not even Italian, I'm mostly Swedish. Does Swedes talk with their hands? I don't know. So anyway, the topsoil is really thick, okay? When you start out really thick. So you're plowing, it's blowing, it's plowing, you're blowing, plowing, blowing. Everything's fine, still looks all the same. It's all the same color, it's all the same black. It's still, you know, it's 1920, 25 and the organic matter's still six and a half and you see, you think life is good and then you get to a point where the topsoil is shallower than your plow and so you mix some of the B in with the A. When you get done with the field, you look behind you and it still looks black to you and you lose some soil and you come back the next year and you plow a little more of the B and it's a little bit lighter but it still looks black to you. And you keep doing it and doing it and doing it until the B is all mixed in with the A and you're starting to get into the C and there's really just a shade of what the soil used to be like but every time you look back in the tractor it still looks black to you. So my colleagues, Dave Hopkins and his wonderful graduate student graduated last year, they went out to some sites that NRCS had characterized and by that I mean, you know, the A horizon is from here to here and this B horizon is from here to here and the C horizon. So they went out to those places that the NRCS had located in 1960 and they went back to the same place and they did some transects so they make sure that they were capturing what the NRCS did and all of the fields except the one that had been in Pernham pasture had significant soil loss and the one in Western Walsh County which is Northwest of the Grand Forks was the worst and then 1968, I should wear my glasses, 58, 1958, 1958. The distance from the surface of the soil to the C horizon was 34.3 inches. When they came back in 2014, the distance from the surface to the C horizon was 15 inches. So during that period of time, they lost 19 inches of topsoil and the farmer had no idea. Does it all look black to him? So we have clues. When we're depressed and down in the pits we can see all kinds of cool stuff. So one of the things we see is what we call a Krodovina which is a Russian name and yes we collude with Russians. I'm sorry about that but that's just what it is. And so we find these old ancient root channels or some animal burrows that were there like 100 years ago and they have filled in over the time with the topsoil that was there afterwards. And see how black that is and see how black this isn't? So it used to look like and that's what it looks like now. So there's clues. So there's other evidence for topsoil loss here. It's just not something I'd dreamed up one night when I couldn't sleep. But you can look online now or go to say the SDSU library I think and you can dig up those old original soil surveys and so I did that for several counties and I did one here for South Dakota will to share with you. But this is Devide County which is a very Northwest County in North Dakota and that divide soil series and there's divides in Southwest North Dakota and also up there in the Northwest. Had 16 inches, it was described as having 16 inches of very black topsoil. Well, I've been on divides and done work on divides and it has nothing I would call black. It has a light gray topsoil and I would estimate that they've lost at least a foot of soil from that original soil. Cass County where Fargo is, Bradbask is a world, Bonanza farms, all that stuff. They described a Wheatville Wheatland soil in 1903. Wheatland is about 30 miles west of Fargo just on the north side of the interstage, just a couple houses now. But when they described it in 1903, that soil named for that little town and there's Wheatland soils all around that place. They described two feet of topsoil with organic metal level of 6.9% and today I've worked on those two, 2% organic matter and anything that you call topsoil is six inches deep at best. So they lost at least two feet of topsoil off that whole area. Miami Loam which, talking to soil scientists that probably sort of like our Bearden, they group large amounts of soils into one little series but it sounds like a blue Bearden. They described it as having three feet of soil, seven percent organic matter and today I've worked on Bearden's all up and down the valley and they never have more than six inches of topsoil about four percent. They probably lost two and a half feet of soil over the last 120 years and a Fargo soil is, you know, High Clay soil in the Southern Valley mostly. They described it as two feet of topsoil and now you can't put a probe in the ground anywhere and it's any deeper than six inches. So we've lost a lot. South Dakota, so in Brookings County in 1903 it described that Marshall Sandy Loam soils have an eight inches of 6.7 percent organic matter. I bet anything that that's all gone. Now Marshall Loam, 12 inches of 5.8 percent organic matter soil and then underneath that two feet of 2.8 percent organic matter soil in 1903 and I bet Marshall Loam doesn't have 5.8 percent organic matter either. And then they have, they described something like a Barnes in the present soil survey is having something like six inches, three to four percent organic matter. So my guess is that you were not immune to this either that all across the state I'm sure you've lost one to two feet of the topsoil from almost everywhere that wasn't permanent pasture or covered by a rock. So if we look at soil loss in North Dakota since 1940 I estimate we've lost another six inches of topsoil from about 20 million acres of cropped land since that's the case and we've lost another 12 and a half million ton of P205, 40 tons of nitrogen which is equivalent to another 75 years of nitrogen and phosphate application at today's present rates. And the sad thing is, is that it goes on every time it's windy. People that aren't no till, I mean the River Valley is just, I don't know, all these people think that that soil's gonna last forever. But there's always dust storms anytime the wind gets 30 miles an hour or better, the soil starts to blow. This is from the 90s in the Northern Valley, fillin' the ditch with this stuff and multiply that by 10 or 20 and that's the total amount of soil lost in that area. That area that Chris is in, I mean that area around Grafton, I've seen those soils deteriorate in the 20 years that I've been here. I mean I never used to see white areas and they're not salt, it's subsoil. I never used to see the subsoil. Easter Grafton and I see it all the time now. It's very sad. So we get all this stuff, people rough the soil up, rough the soil up and it lasts for about five minutes and then the roughness gets covered with soil and it starts to blow around a lot. And people are just reluctant to leave residue. They're a little bit better than they used to be but it's, we got a long way to go. And here's the dust storm, Craven Corner, South Dakota, just west of Aberdeen, 2017. Big, big old dust cloud. So people have residue, they wanna get rid of it, right? Residue's bad, gotta have the fields black so you burn the stuff. And so you're lucky enough to have some residue and then you get rid of it that way. And people, people, you know, give it a funny name, snirt, you know, you got some snirt in a ditch and they chuckle. So it's not funny, cause that's money. So in 1930, people had no choice. For one thing, they were pretty ignorant about what devastation could happen. And with the devastation, it probably had happened up to that point because the top soils were so thick they didn't see any productivity loss at least that they could measure or see. And their planting equipment was so archaic that if you had residue on the surface, of course you couldn't plant anything. You mean dragging up stalks and you know, it would just be impossible. But today is different. If you go to any kind of farm show anywhere, you can talk to a dozen, two dozen people that have different cutters and different ways in order to put the seed in the ground. And I have sugar beet here a lot. I know you don't grow sugar beet, I'm not ignorant, but sugar beets are like the most sensitive crops they are to planting problems. They don't like any hairpinning and all that stuff and the roots get wacky and it's hard to harvest and it screws everything up. But you can make it work with sugar beet. So if you can make it work with sugar beet, surely corn and soybeans wheat. I mean, it's been proven that you can do this. Some people, well, I'll take the step and I'll go to more of a conservation tillage. But this is certainly an improvement, but the end result will take longer. But the end result will still be the same. Take a look at that picture. I mean, that's not spray fog in the background alongside that dilapidated tree row, that's dust coming up, right? So you still lose some, it's just not as much. But the real answer is try to get this, if you have the crops that are, you're able to do some no-till in, you do some no-till in. If you've got corn in the rotation, then something like a strip till so that you get that warm soil and it dries out, that's a better option. But something where you leave and cover on all the time. And people have some wet soils and they say, well, my soils are wet, they're too much clay, I can't get it to work. But this field near Rutland, which isn't that far from your border, has been a no-till for 40 years. 25 years ago, the farmer, when it started getting wet, he tiled the field and that helped a lot. But these are very high-clay soils. He's stripped hills, he uses cover crops, he uses the water, extremely successful doing this. It is possible. I have a farmer friend that I've been on their field up around Botno, just south of Canada. And the common theme up there is the soils are too cold and they have Fargo soils in Botno too. There was a little lake bed at one time. And so they have Fargo soils almost as much clay content as what they do in Fargo. And he's been no-tilling for 20 years. And he's patient and he makes it work and he's very successful. So, I mean, there's 100 excuses why a person doesn't wanna do it. But the biggest excuse and the biggest obstacle for anybody doing it is up here. Once you decide that this is a priority, all of you have the capacity to make this work. So, residue is your friend. Stripped hill is like no-till. And if you don't do anything else, consider the cover crops. Getting something to grow in the fall. And, you know, people have put in cover crop seed, flown it on like in September as a crop is maturing and it's already, when a rain or two, it takes hold. And so you have something holding the soil over the winter time. You know, you keep your stalks up if you're gonna do some planting in between the rows so that you don't have pieces of stalk blowing all over the place and filling up ditches and fences and that. The whole thing's a system. It's not as simple as just saying, I'm gonna do this today. You have to think the thing through. But these type of meanings are wonderful because there's a lot of people here and you get to hopefully talk to somebody rather than your buddy. You should also look for meetings where people have the opportunity to break up into small groups. And so you can learn from people who've been doing it for a long time and see what works it is. It's not a, nobody has a recipe for how to do it on your farm. But you have some basic foundational things that you learn and then you adapt them to your specific location. All farming is local. So I guess my take home lesson is that I get questions from growers all the time, areas that do conventional tillage. And the question is why don't my phosphate levels increase every year? Because I'm putting on a little bit more phosphate than I'm using. And the answer to that is well, you're letting it blow away. You know, we really, if we just stopped all erosion right now, we'd probably have about 200 years of phosphate application at today's present rates to get them up to the level that they were in 1880. So, you know, that soil loss helps to answer those questions. Why don't the soil phosphate values improve? Why is the soil pH increasing? Because a lot of our soils have limed at depth. If the depth isn't deep anymore and their top soil is gone, then of course your pH is increased because you've got the B horizon and the C horizon in that plow layer now. It's not fertilizer. It's doing it. It's a soil loss that's doing it. And then why do I have more soil crusting? You really think people had soil crusting in 1890 with 7% organic matter soil? I don't think they knew what crusting was until after the 30s. So the only remedy for this is going to some kind of a no-till, modified no-till, something like strip-till, keeping that soil covered because that wind's not gonna stop just because you want it to. We have a very long history of phosphate export first on purpose through the buffalo bones. And then the second is an unintended consequence of something that people at the time thought they were following the book. Soil fertility, as you've seen, is intimately related to soil conservation. And the only way to restore it is through some kind of long-term no-till commitment. Okay, thank you.