 I'm going to attempt to address each of those bullet points on their livestock systems, forage finishing, soil fertility, nitrogen mineralization, carbon sequestration, and above all things profitability. Just very quickly, I'm not alone. There's a lot of work involved in this project. So you can see these scientists here. Dr. Sintuklu comes from Turkey and works on it and has for years. Larry Jocic, soil scientist. Cheryl Walkenheim, ag economist, robinaticist, and animal scientist. I do finish the cattle at the University of Wyoming down in Laramie, or excuse me, in Lingold, and then Josh Steffen at Dickinson State University is now working with me on some DNA work on soil microbial DNA and soil. I will touch on that just briefly. The project. The project is to say it's similar matrix, even though we've got two different projects, the matrix is similar. In that, first of all, we are looking at continuous spring wheat similar to what Aaron and Andrew were talking about. Wheat on wheat on wheat on wheat. That's our control from a scientific standpoint. As opposed to that continuous wheat as a crop rotation, made up of spring wheat, cover crops, corn, a deep barley intermix, and we follow that with sunflower. And it's in that particular order for reasons. We don't have enough time to get into that, but a lot of it has to do with water use in the plants. Some of them are much higher water use and higher metric requirement plants. Other are less. And so I would pre-seed with a pea and a barley and had flowers because they're lower water use crops. The cover crop is not that case. Some of those crops in the cover crop mix are more water requirement. But the nutrients in the cover crop breakdown feed the corn. So that's part of the thought process behind the feed cap. In that crop rotation, we tend to graze pea barley. We graze corn and we graze cover crop. Nobody grazes corn. So this is different. This is unusual. That's the goal. The goal is I'm not going to fall into the farmers that want to graze corn and cut soybean. It's not my interest. The central part of the United States does that. In this case, we're looking at how can we turn these crops in this rotation into money? So basically what I'm doing is collecting biological data to do economic analysis through the use of egg economists that are very good at this work. So we're looking at the effect of the system on beef performance in that return in this particular case. Also the effective system on crop production in that return. And finally, our three-legged stool, so to speak, soil health. The effect of rotation and grazing on soil health. So there's a lot wrapped up in this data. Now I'm going to show you a lot of slides. I have a lot of data and I apologize for that. Usually when I have a three-hour program, I use a lot of pictures. We do. Our cafe discussion groups are two and a half to three hours long and I connect with North Dakota's soil health specialist Hal Weiser. And we do them together in the Northwestern part of the state. That's this outreach component. And we do old 16 or so presentations in that January, February timeframe. And some of them are in South Dakota. So we worked the western half of the North and South Dakota with a lot of outreach. This is going back to the first study. So we got control springweed. We've got springweed in the rotation. Notice the trend line in the control. Notice the trend line in the rotation. So we ended up in the fifth year of that particular in 2015 with springweed yielding 50 bushels versus a 14 bushel yield that was less in the rotation. I will tell you about here, we stopped using fertilizer. I've stopped using fertilizer entirely since that timeframe. The soil microbes, the soil nutrients, can be produced as we know very well by our soil microbes. We give them an opportunity. If we put on a lot of fertilizer to put it in a simple way, those organisms become lazy. In other words, what happens is the substrate has enough nitrate nitrogen, for instance, so they're not as active in producing. There's a feedback mechanism in that soil that feeds back to the organisms, okay? We'll move along because we've got a lot of slides and not much time. Basically, the rotation springweed in terms of net return over the five years was $15 an acre greater than the control springweed, okay? And then our highest returning crop was sunflower at $147 net return for acre. The other three crops, I evaluated those based on their forage values. Corn up here, cover crop down here. So like $47 versus $90 per corn. Now we've been also doing some nitrogen mineralization studies. We're looking at both nitrate, nitrogen and ammonium nitrate production in the soils. And we take samples in June, in July, later August and out in October. So we've got the beginning of the season. We've got the middle of the season. We've done a lot of research of that particular research in years 2014. And then again we've got another set of samples in 2016. We're continuing to do these, but they take time. Dr. Jihashic does this in his laboratory here at the Indian issue and partner. But you can see the take home message there. Producing 16.8 pounds of end for each 1% increase in soil organic matter. And these soil organic matters are soil organic matters from our fields. So our fields run in soil organic matter from 2.8 to 5, up to almost 7 in some instances. Depends on the field, depends on the time, depends on the year. But in this case it's 14 and 16. So we can take advantage and you say, well, there's our reason why we stopped using fertilizer, because we see our soils are producing. And if I had time, I don't have time to give you some of the other data, but we'll have to move along because we have quite a bit about this project. Now, in the new project, that's the old stuff. That's the first project that Sarah funded. Now the new project, the current project, which we began collecting data in 2017, 2018, and 2019. I'll give you here a 16, 17, 18, and 19. In 2017, the drought that drew an error and made reference to, we had also. During our growing period when we needed the moisture, we had about 3.6 inches of rain and it would normally be over 9. So we had about 1 third of the amount of water during the drought season. So our yields were very low. What I want to show you though is, and this just happens to be the spring week, in 16, our rotation here is your print bar and your control is your blue bar. There's some variation. I can't explain what happened here in 2017. I have a little bit of an idea. We take a shovel. You put that shovel down in those rotation soils. There's more organic matter. And the soil shovel will go into the soil much easier. Now that's lighter and it's a little bit more, should I use the term fluffy? I don't know if that's the right term to use, but I think it dries out. I know this more organic matter is, we talk about it as sponge and how it holds water, etc. But I also think because of its ability to really dry time when it's 100-something days that we're at 100, close to 100 or a little over 100, there's a lot of heat there. And I think it dried more. And so I think we lost some water and I think it did have a definite effect on our yield. But you can see the trend lines here in terms of the rotation. The rotation week trend line has more positive than is the control. Let's look a little closer now. Here's the four years of 16, 17, 18 and 19. And you can see, and what I'm trying to drive home to you is that you can see the yields here in 2016 with corn or cover cropping up around almost 11,000 pounds per acre. And yet in 2017, look how it dropped. In 2018, it didn't really recover much. And in 2019, we're starting a recovery. You know, this line goes like this. Corn did pretty well. Corn is what I think our purple line or whatever that color is. And again, everything dropped. Then we started recovery and then we recovered some more. But to see our sunflowers in 17, 480 pounds per acre, 961 pounds per acre, 1338 pounds per acre, and it's starting to come up, okay? The point being, when you have a drought of that extent and you're not using fertilizers, now we have to rely on those microorganisms to re-establish themselves, to repopulate that level of organism biomass that produces and processes organic matter into available nutrients for plants to take up, okay? So you can see that change that took place. If I take a look at the biomass, for instance, in this case, it happens to be microbial biomass and comparing the years of 2017 with 2019 and these data were an analysis with Ward Lab. Ward Lab is in Nebraska. Okay, this is Ward Lab data. And along the axis here, we're talking about nanograms per gram. And you can see our different crops by color. So if we're talking about the rotation sunflower here as our first crop, you can see that they increased. P-barley increased is a blackwood note. The P-barley, if you'll notice, P-barley has declined. Corn is increasing in biomass, but if we look at the two springweights, our springweight control is declining in terms of biomass, it's less, and our rotation is greater. I can't explain this, and I visited at some length with Dr. Stefan about it, and we don't know. We don't know what the deal is there with the P-barley. But it continues. Now if I look at the total bacterial biomass in nanograms per gram, we have a similar scenario. P-barley declined. The control and rotation springweights, same relationship. Control, declines, rotation increases in total bacterial biomass. If I look at fungal relationships, same thing. P-barley declines. All of these three crops increase. And the same with our rotation of control springweights. One increase in terms of the rotation and then declining in the case of the control week. I'll move a little bit into beef cattle production here. This is just a, gives you a bit of a glimpse of the type of cattle that we are working with. They're basically, in this particular picture, these are some more traditional framed cattle. We've got an annual cattle cost of a little over $600. We've got a background in expense during the winter of 153. We've got a grazing cost per steer. We've got $285 invested and so for a total of $1040. Is that a dash belt? What was the question? Is that a dash belt in cattle there? It's actually a short one. Oh really? Yeah. Okay, moving right along. The end grazing steer belt, $1466. The grazing net return of $426 per head for a net return per acre of $5170. And we're trying to figure out how you can get that much dollars back from rolling corn. Net return in that set of steers right there. This is a little bit different study. That one was a previous study. That was actually back in the first piece of research. This is the second piece of research where we similar and have a similar set of relationships. But we're looking at frame scores on steers whether they would be large frame or small frame and whether they went directly to the feed yard or they went through this sequence of grazing of crops. Went through that sequence of crops. And you can see here that our larger frame steers that grazed and then went to the feed lot and were finished brought us our highest net return to the system. Aaron and Drew talked about bale grazing and how they're using bale grazing to improve the landscape, to improve the soil condition on their particular farm. I use bale grazing in a bit different way. Not so much from the standpoint, what can I do to the soil in the region around the bale but to feed cattle with. To finish cattle. So here's an opportunity to actually finish, forage finish steers. So if we take a look at the performance of these animals over time, this ugly green bar is the annual steers that graze the sequence of annual forages that we talked about in the first slide. And the native range is just native range in western North Dakota. Blue Grammar, western wheat, stifles and different forages, different grasses in that community out there. And they increase in production over time and they get very full quality as the season advances. If we look at the native range, in this particular bar on native range I graze the sequence cattle and the control steers together as a common group. Because I have to have a point in time, I need to graze native range I don't have enough of them to have them all separated out so I graze them as a common group. And then when we move in and begin grazing peas and barley, annual forage, we separate. The native range steers stay on native range but the pea barley steers, they begin grazing annual forages and they do so all the way through as a separate group. During that very difficult time as we were doing this, this project has all four years involved in it so we've got a few days or years of data collection involved but you can see them when they're grazing corn they're well over. It's quite a bit more. I don't see the numbers right off hand from the side here but corn is not doing as well to the native range when they're out on pastures compared to your annual forages. On cover crops, over time, we've had trouble with cover crops and you saw that in my earlier slide where I showed you the cover crops that yield was kind of low. In this cover crop year what we are doing is we're seeding a winter triticale hairy vetch in the fall of the spring week year. The next spring we harvest that winter triticale hairy vetch as hay, come back behind that and seed the cover crop, the 13 species cover crop. If we don't get germination and get rain, that's one of the biggest challenges in the part of the country is moisture at the time we seed that cover crop and whether or not we'll get germination and get the crop to come up and grow. You notice, remember back in the slide I showed you the cover crop was close to 11,000 pounds per acre and then in 2017 it was 2,500 or something like that, much lower and that's a relationship and then the other years weren't particularly great either. And so you don't get very many days of grazing and this goes back to what Steve was telling you about how the cattle did fall in the wheat. They didn't gain the gain but they didn't gain a great lot, how in 7. Bare to feed like cattle in 369. In this case, over time over the long period of time the cover crop actually lost half the palm of the day. Okay, but overall when we get to the bale grazing that kind of levels out some of this stuff and you see the bale grazing those annual forage cattle gained up close to three tons a day on those bales and the bales are basically field pea and barley. Field peas and barley in our country are a tremendous crop for soil health as well as animal performance. If I look at these gains and performance over time, overall your annual forage fed cattle are gaining at a faster rate. Okay, there's about four tenths of a pound a day difference. Four tenths to half a pound a day difference in that. Keep that in mind as I move into some of the next slides. If I could draw a circle around this keep that in mind as we move forward. In this case, the yellow bar is the native range steers and the red bar is the annual forage cattle. You can see that at the end of that grazing period about 211 days my revised in our annual forage cattle are larger than they are in the native range cattle. In terms of intramuscular fat intramuscular fat is the marbling. When you see a steak in the meat counter we're talking about that marbling that intramuscular fat. You can see here that our annual forage cattle because we're able to keep that the nutritional quality over time more level let's say instead of going like native range we'll go very high proteins in that grass as it matures and we get out later into the season we're down in what that 4 or 6, 7% group protein around something like that 3.5 was really winter dead winter and anyway, we're able to control that better with our type of forages and then in terms of marbling score on the cattle which is the marbling you can see here that there's a little bit of advantage this is not statistical these are statistically different this is not pretty close to average choice averaged a little bit above average choice if I look at male grazing and I look at continuum I'm going to the feed block we're going to look at the carcasses and look at nap return in terms of days on feed get these cattle going into the lotty yard on feed about 96 days the fewest days on feed I've had with this type of work is 60 the average over a long period of time with other studies around 82 this would happens to be 96 gain to feed in other words how many pounds gained in the animals game to a unit of feed about 0.13 no difference cost per steer, no difference hot carcass weight, no difference marbling score, well actually this is statistically marbling score, virtually the same number of percent choice carcasses basically almost all those carcasses except for one or two great choice for better there's about 10-15% of these carcasses great in prime when you go to have prime rip at your restaurant it's cattle like these if you've got deep so we're producing restaurant type beef in terms of gross carcass value these annual forage cattle on carcass weight was higher the price per pound of beef was about the same and so here you have the difference here of 1922 versus 2014 dollars per steer for carcass you have to return remember I showed you those numbers back I said think of these two numbers put a circle around that average daily gain there's a result of the average gain wherever you are that's the effect of that better average daily gain over a long period of time to translate into warm money first year what about carbon what about storing carbon and we're also doing some work we've done some work at South Dakota State University and under grazing conditions and we have here the orange bar is ungrazed control and the blue bars are the grazed portion in the crops and when we go back and look at that data we can see the carbon dioxide measured in kilograms per hectare you see we've got more carbon dioxide being stored compared to where it's not grazed okay so anything methane no data difference in methane but in terms of nitrous oxide similar story we've got less nitrogen loss in the graze than we do in the ungrazed where there's more so the advantage of grazing over non grazing is very good in terms of the greenhouse gases which are very important in terms of global warming if you wish I guess I would ask for some questions this crop that's being swapped here is the attorney Kaley very vetch crop that we we mail it and feed it back at a later time but anyway I would be open for some questions if you have some very vetch isn't that a perennial well yeah but it's a legume it's a bi-annual bi-annual so you have to spray that that if you plant it in annual well because of the crop rotation that we have and the grazing that we do we don't I don't think about it as a problem some people who are in more traditional systems think of it as a weed because it has quite a bit of hard seed and so it will germinate later on in hard seed you know so we've got that issue to deal with it and so what would you put it in after that then cover crop you say well I think if you remember after I got done with this I come behind this with a cover crop and some years it works really good where there's moisture right after or soon after we see I've had some of that cover crop seed laying ground for five weeks just as bare as you can see it after that swath of nothing I don't worry about that is anything going to grow here got rain half inch to an inch of rain I'll come to plants and the problem is in the western North Dakota at least even if you get a rain wipe in the first part of August or later August it's hot but you don't have a growing degree gauge from then until I'd say the middle of October to get enough storage biomass to graze I mean you've got to have a fee to get a material we don't get enough material oftentimes so what we look at more than anything is from the cover crop even though there isn't a lot of above ground biomass we've got roots in the soil that are helping build that fee it's good for the microorganisms for the next crop as far as micro organisms do you see moisture being the main factor in reducing the micro organisms moisture I guess you'd have three things true that moisture would probably be your first limiting nutrient if you want to think of it that way water and then the food and then the sunlight so you need moisture, heat and the more moisture you can hold on to I doubt it absolutely we talk about organic matter being a bit like a sponge of cold water how much can your bucket hold that sort of thing right now in our area our soils are absolutely saturated how deep are you seeing you set up a 7% organic matter is that a 0 to 6 measurement? yeah you see it more important to get to maintain your biological activity if you could incorporate that into the 12 to 24 inch range well you know interestingly if we look at it in that functional soil zone 0 to 6, 6, 12 in that area but we do see some things happening deeper and deeper soil arises but I'm not so assignment so I gotta be a little careful of what I say because I may be totally wrong but I just shouldn't talk when I don't want to talk about that getting it deeper down I was just wondering if that would weather the drought better and see a quicker recovery well what we've done to do that to get deeper are these the tubers the roots your turnips your radishes that tillage type radish you know that can get down that's how we're going to get deeper in the soil zone without some kind of tillage we don't want to do any tillage or at least I don't want to do any tillage what else would you do there other than you know you did your mastery to be on that didn't you? yeah I'm just sorry you're asking is having biological activity deeper to make the system more resilient and to that I would say yes