 My presentation here at the field day was the last 30 years of soil health, but I want to go back 50 years to the time where in Western North Dakota and the Canadian provinces and other parts of North Dakota, people just kind of woke up after seeing their dirt blow away every spring and decided that they needed to do something different or their kids weren't going to have anything left to farm and I think largely that was correct. So people got together and banded together and started figuring out ways in order to make a no-till system work. It wasn't really popular with Extension or Experiment Station or USDA ARS at that time back in the 70s. Eventually after figuring out that no- till didn't equal no farm, they got on board and they started working on it too, but really the farmers in this state have really made the big steps in order to make it work. They found that using the monoculture is not a good plan. They used diversity into the cropping system really helped out a lot and they told me after being in it for about 20 years that after a period of time they could start shaving their nitrogen rates back to the point where they didn't even follow our recommendations anymore and I took that to heart later on. So no-till built across the state and especially in the 80s when it was relatively dry, so in this area and around Northwood and up around Bodno and Devils Lake and really all over the state except for the valley, there were a lot of people that started to go that way because it's saved on fuel prices. The weeds weren't so bad back then and the soils were dry and it was really giving them a nice yield pick up by going that way. So about the time I came here in the early 90s it started to turn really wet. I mean really really really wet. Big huge downpours, double the amount of rainfall during the year. They thought Devils Lake was going to dry up in 1990 and by 1993 they were worried that the town was in danger. So it was a huge turnaround. Nature just turned the tap from one from an off to an on and it terrified people and rightly so. People couldn't get into the field to plant. They couldn't get into harvest. The scab was horrible in the wheat and the Durham and and it took hundreds of hundreds of farmers out and so people being very scared they backed away from no till thinking that being tillage would help them. Only found out it didn't. That it was still too wet to plant. It was still too wet to combine and they still had scab but it was too late by then. They'd already made the transition. In the 1980s in corn soybean country there was concern with people that were looking at soil health that there wasn't enough diversity in the system and so primarily out of the Beltsville USDA station just north of DC there was a lot of work on cover crops and they were very successful. They were keeping the nitrate out of the Chesapeake Bay with the growth of the cover crops. They'd put it in after corn. They'd put them in after soybeans and it would grow all winter. At least what they call the winter. But it's not really winter is it? I mean if you once you move to North Dakota you understand you have a different understanding about what winter is and cover crops don't live here. You can get you can put in a winter rye crop or winter wheat and most of the time have it have it live through the winter. But clover and many other cover crops there's no way you can keep them alive. But the information about the cover crops moves moves this way too and so NDSU has had a big program the last six years or so looking at cover crops. What we found in corn and soybeans and if you intercede the corn and soybean with cover crops it doesn't take away yield potential from them if you get them to grow. And I think that's because of the dew that falls on the cover crop is enough in order to replace the moisture that they're taken out of the soil. So but that being said when you get to the end of the year and measure how much cover crop you really have grown in that mid-October when you have the freeze most years you're looking at maybe five hundred to a thousand pounds of biomass it's really low to the ground it's really not going to help you with snow catch. It's not a very much nitrate being taken up and so that really doesn't work and so it really makes you in order to have the diversity in the system and get a cover crop to grow and increase the rate at which your soil health improves. You need to think about a third crop and the third crop being being a short season crop, a barley, a spring wheat. After those here we are even after a late year in what the third dish fourth week of August there's still going to be maybe six weeks or so where the volunteers from this if we get some rain we'll start to grow and then I think that's that's the opportunity but without the third crop without the short season crop it's really not going to work.