 Hello. My name is Mary Dronowski. I'm a beef system specialist at the University of Nebraska. Essentially, my job is to help cattle producers with their operation. And a lot of the work that I do is related to integrated crop and livestock operations. So it's using the resources available on cropland to produce cattle. So using cover crops as a grazing resource, using corn residue and other crop residues to make them into the wonderful thing called beef. One of the projects that I've done with North Central Sare has been related to nitrate toxicity and cover crops. A lot of our cattle producers would take samples of cover crops that they were considering using for forage. And it would come back as very, very high in nitrates and they were worried about the potential of toxicity. We started looking into what we had grazed previously and realized that we also had very high nitrate levels and that we never had problems with our cattle. So we were trying to figure out the difference between what our current recommendations are and what we were seeing out in the field. So we worked with some producers to be able to sample the cover crops they were grazing and look at the cattle and see if there was potential for toxicity. And along the way, we learned a lot more about nitrate toxicity and actually delved back into the information and the literature that was out there to develop some recommendations for producers to use these cover crops that are a bit higher in nitrates and be able to successfully incorporate those cover crops into their grazing program. So this nitrate work was actually a Sare graduate student grant and this was a great program for our graduate student to be able to actually be in charge of a grant from the process of writing it all the way through to the process of the administration including the budget. And then dealing with our system and the university so she got to learn a lot that way. The other thing is she got to work with our producers and so she developed a lot of confidence in being able to communicate with producers, being able to work with them to develop a strategy to be able to obtain the information that she needed. And ultimately I think it helped her get the job that she has now as an extension program specialist at another university. Recently we just got a research and education grant from Sare to work on one of the components of these integrated crop livestock systems which is actually feeding cows during the summer rather than feeding them during the winter and so incorporating them into a confinement system so that we can then use more of these cover crops and residues when we don't have a lot of pasture. And this particular grant is going to be useful for a lot of our producers especially our young producers who are finding the capital to be able to invest in pasture and invest in land very hard to come by and so being able to confine cows during the summer and then be able to use crop land that they can rent from our crop producers has been working very well for some of our producers but there's a lot of questions that surround it because it's a bit different of a situation than has been traditional. And so this grant is focused on trying to help answer some of those questions for our producers and be able to help them be more successful in their operation.