 My name is Dave Frans and I'm one of the soil specialists here at NDSU, specializing more in soil fertility than Dr. Wick is, whose soil health. So I visited with Naeem the other day and I think what I'd like to reinforce is why we've separated out that Langdon area as a special consideration when we do our nitrogen recommendations for wheat, sunflowers, corn, anything really. So my first summer here, which has been 26 years now this year, I was riding around with a soil survey person, Mike Sweeney, who's passed away now for a number of years, but I was noticing once I got into Langdon that you go past a field and a large part of the flax was laying flat, the barley was laying flat, the wheat was laying flat. Anything small grain you saw, it wasn't a whole field of course, but there was a large part of all the fields and I hadn't seen that in my tour up to that point. So it stuck with me. In 2010 we gathered data, and I gathered data from all over the state for the past decade or two and some recent data from up in that area. The numbers told me that the nitrogen rate we needed in order to grow a wheat crop up there was substantially different than it was in the rest of eastern North Dakota. So I carved it out. I carved out an area that's kind of e-shaped from Devil's Lake, northwest, and then northeast. It includes the Langdon area, so I just called the Langdon area. And without really knowing anything else but the numbers, I just assumed that the reason that was is that the organic matter tends to be a little bit more up there because it's just a cooler climate, shorter season, and it's a cooler climate too, so it's not like Texas where the organic matter just burns up, literally. So I just thought it was like that. And so when we came out with the recommendations, I was out in Bismarck and I was given a talk on the new recommendations, and I was talking about the Langdon area as part of it. And afterwards, a friend of mine, a colleague, Mike Holmer, who's retired now from NRCS, but just a really stellar soil survey person in the state of North Dakota, he came up to me and he was just giddy. He said that area that you described, we always knew that there was something different about that, but we really didn't have any data to substantiate it. So he gave me the links to a couple of peer reviewed papers, and one was from a North Dakota scientist, a soil survey person that described almost like I drew it, a V-shaped area up in northeast North Dakota that he called the Shaley area. And it is true, when we were up there poking holes with Mike years and years ago of every probe that we put into the ground, there's these little pieces of flat rock, flat gray rock, and farmers that farm that area, you know what I'm talking about, because you've seen it too during your tillage, and if you're taking soil samples, you know it's there. So that was part of it, is that that's the Shaley area, there's Shale close to the surface and it's mixed in with the soil, but then the kicker was that a USDA scientist from Mandan got an idea about 30, 40 years ago and took that shale out of that soil, them soil samples and did a nitrogen mineralization study on them. And it turns out there's a high amount of mineralizable ammonium in that shale, which means that that shale releases nitrogen slowly over time. So it's really not the climate that's different, why we have that credit up there, that different recommendation scheme, it's because the soil itself is a slow release fertilizer. And so the nitrogen recommendations, I have them nailed down for the wheat certainly because that's where we had the most data from that area is that it used to be a real big wheat country before SCAB, and so we had quite a bit of data and the data told me that I had to do that, but that's the reason is that it has high amounts of mineralizable ammonia in it. So I would think if I was growing any crop up there that needed nitrogen, I'd back the rate off by 30 pounds at least. If it's not in the recommendations for sure, I mean if it's not written down that you should do this, I'd still just lop 30 pounds off the top just to make sure you weren't putting too much. If nothing else, it's a cost. And we also know that too much nitrogen for sunflowers, for example, increases amount of disease you might have, and it's certainly would increase the lodging and lower the oil content, the canola, too much nitrogen is just not good. So if you're in the Langdon area, back it off.