How Clint Cox Built Soil Biology to Replace Herbicides

0:00 Hey everybody, welcome to the Green Cover podcast where we have really interesting conversations with some of the top farmers and business people within the regenerative egg movement. Join us as we learn how to regenerate God's creation for future generations. Let's learn this together. My guest today is both a customer as well as a friend, Mr. Clint Cox from Long Island, Kansas. I've known Clint for many years. Clint, you've been a friend of ours for quite a few years through the no till movement and then cover crops and we'll get into some of the backstory with Elevate A, but just enjoyed getting to know you and your family throughout the years.

0:40 So first of all, tell us where Long Island, Kansas is and is it really an island? It is an island and I'm not sure I want to tell everybody because everybody's wife's like, 'Take me on an island vacation.' No, let's just stay off of Long Island. Long Island is in between Carney, Nebraska for the Husker fans. If you go south till you cross the line and if you're a Kansas person, you come from Hayes straight north. We farm both sides of the border. There's a little town called Long Island.

1:07 And it's an island between what? Well, in the beginning when it was originally named, there's two big creeks that come through and one on the south's bank, one on the north bank. And as the floods, they say it used to the Indians said it was one great big long Long Island.

1:23 So Kansas has Manhattan and you've got Long Island. Is there a Brooklyn Kansas? Not that I'm aware of, but could be. Who knows? Very small.

1:35 So, Western Kansas. Tell us a little bit about give us a context of your operation. I know you're farming with some family. You got a pretty diversified operation. So, tell the folks just a little bit about, you know, what you're farming and what that what your system currently looks like.

1:51 The system is about 2500 acres of crop ground per year and most of those end up being fall crops that don't end up maybe in a grazer of some sort in the way. On the farming side, we farm in Norton County, Phillips County, Harland County, Nebraska, and a rotation that consists of corn, soybeans, we've done milo, rye, we've grown some trite, some graze out, cover crop stuff that we've done, but all those acres utilize the ability to mill into our hog operation. We finish some hogs in the area and so we'll be able to put the high quality grains that we produce into those pigs.

2:37 And you are mostly no till and you're utilizing a lot of these regenerative practices, but tell us a little bit about the journey because you probably weren't always doing that. Tell us about the journey that you took to get here and you've got some related enterprises with family and stuff we can maybe dive into. Yeah, because trust us, we know that that can be interesting to say the least.

3:04 It's great. Dad and his brothers all farm in that area. They all grew up there. They've all took on their own farms and in the early 90s they really transitioned a lot of the acres into no till. So, what am I 9, 10, 11, 12? We're transitioning into no till and trying to put away the plow at that point or the disc and the sweeps and stuff and trying growing consistent crops every year in a rotation. And so, I had that mindset growing up that tillage wasn't really a good thing and I understood why it wasn't a good thing. So that one of those mind shifts I didn't really have to make.

3:45 When it came to when I actually came back with my wife Corine and I from Kansas State and trying to cover out cut out our niche, we had gone to no till on the Plains. I took my wife down there and we — it's a great date, wasn't it? Oh, it's a perfect date. I don't know if it qualifies Corine or not, but she says soil health events aren't great, but she still likes to come to them and I absolutely love the communities there. But I got to just sit and listen and learn about how others might try to fix problems and or generate income on the farm. Dad didn't have a lot of acres. We had farmed with uncles and cousins and everybody and I was kind of the last one to come home in that scenario and trying to cut my niche into where I belonged.

4:35 I wanted to prove my worth and a different way of farming always sounded more fun. Cover crops in everybody else's mind were crazy. So, that starts it kind of fits me and who I am and if you start with crazy. Yeah, that could be, that could be the book you write. Start with crazy. And if you know my mom, that's what she is. She's chaos is what she thrives on.

4:56 So that's kind of the way we moved into the farming operation is seeing what we could shake up and do to these long-term no-till systems because when I was coming back they've been in no-till for quite a while and we'd reached these plateaus and we couldn't get through it and we kind of started dabbling in those cover crops.

5:15 So what year would that have been when you started going to no-till on the plains and started thinking through these processes? I would say '05, '06, '07, '08. From then on I just tried not to miss him. But I can remember being in the room when Gabe Brown is presenting that information. So my turnips didn't do good. My radishes didn't do good, my rapeseed didn't do good. Throw it all together and look how good it does, right? I was there. That would have been '07 because 2006 Amir Caligari from Brazil, he came and he really we can blame him for all this because he shook things up. He was showing us these multi-species cover crops in South America and the success that guys were having not just for the soil but for the livestock and that's what got Gabe and Jay. So they did that the summer of 2006 in North Dakota. And then we did our experiments in 2008. So yeah.

6:10 Right around you were right there from the beginning. Well, yeah. Right around that time, I decided that I had taken over a piece of ground that was in wheat stubble. Of course, you know, when you get the rent, it's as soon as the combines are gone, it's mine. And I didn't have much that was mine at that time. And I'd listened and learned about a lot of these cover crops. So we threw a multi-species cover crop out there. And then I told dad we were going to buy a bunch of weaned calves and going to throw them out there. And oh buddy, did we have a lot of people putting their brakes on and saying, 'You really can't do that.' But we were able to come away with a big success on that.

6:45 We put up two wires where I'd only run one now. And we held them in a little holding pen where I'm not so scared about that anymore. But those cattle on my first successful cover crop were instrumental to being able to put down the foundation of saying, 'Hey, I can do this. And you probably didn't have to pay $2,000 a piece for them like you would?' No. I can remember when I got them home and I was so proud of them. Of course, you always have to pay more than what you scheduled for them and get them there and they just grew well and the fall went great and I sold them, made a profit and we turned and planted those acres back to corn. The corn did great.

7:24 Man, I had the world on fire. I was going to be able to plant cover crops and it's just been rosy and uphill ever since. Right. Not even close. Keith, one of the problems I have being this personality is that I will try anything and I'm not scared about failing at it because I want to push that envelope. If I see somebody's success in Indiana or Ohio where they probably get three to four times as much rain as I do, I try and push the envelope to say, 'Can I do that here in Kansas?'

7:56 Yeah. And I can attest to that because I, you've seen pictures. Well, I still remember the phone call when you called me up and said, 'Hey, Keith, what do you think I could seed turnips through my pivot?' Well, you know, the turn-up-ator is what I termed that one. And yes, you can seed turnips through a pivot. It does come with some logistical hurdles and you really don't get many turnips through the first few spans. It kind of all ends up out at the end though, isn't it? Out at the end. And then after you're done, you will have to unplug nozzles because those seeds will swell and try and grow.

8:35 But I love the creativity and the thought process of thinking, well, why can't we do this or maybe it hasn't been tried or maybe we just need to tweak something to make it work. I've tried that with interseeding into corn early. I was trying that way early. Ended up in hay bales. Okay, I got a win out of it somewhat, but a loss really depending on who's looking at it. You know, we've tried. Do you think because of the interseeding or just because of the year? My soil wasn't ready for it. Okay. I did not have enough of a clean field to actually attempt that. I didn't have enough residue down. I didn't have the soil primed and ready to go. You have to be specific with what you're trying to do. All different fields cannot handle the same thing.

9:29 With the really complex things like interseeding, you start with the simpler things like coming in after wheat and growing a multispecies cover crop to graze. That's hard to lose on that one.

9:41 That one is the one I tell everybody in the beginning that comes and wants to talk to me about my experiences is that the easiest one to get a win is right after wheat. Let's throw a cheap multispecies cover crop. We can go to the smart mix calculator and punch it out with them on their own computer right there and they can tweak it and they can get it in the ground and it's not so much time specific on when you get it in. In my area, you can get it anywhere from July all the way to end of August. You can really get some successes. So the window's wide and then cattle you can go recoup any of those feed and drill expenses with cattle real quick.

10:22 And the other thing is one of the biggest management decisions and where guys generally get in the biggest trouble is poorly timed termination. Winter's going to terminate that cover crop. So you don't have to worry about it. But if it's something that overwinterns now you've got to decide, is it taking too much moisture? Do I have enough biomass? And if you make that decision wrong, it can really bite you. But a winterkilled cover crop, it's pretty safe.

10:50 Yeah. And you and you push me into the other side of things. I love cereal rye. Okay. Cereal rye. Guys always call and say, 'Okay, can I graze it in the fall?' I say, 'You better have it in before the first high school football game. If you want any chance of grazing it in the fall, I primarily use it as a spring grazer for my calving window. I drop cows and calves out there and forget about them and go do a lot of other things instead of start a feed truck and keep those girls happy. I could do that with cereal rye, but then the termination date that you were talking about, Keith.

11:25 I'm not really scared about trying to plant into rye that's this tall. And beans are easy. I've been able to accomplish beans with pretty good success. We've even done it with some corn. Yeah, it can be done, but it's not where you start.

11:41 It's where you should try to get to, but not where you start. And pushing that envelope is something that we needed to do. And for my own sake, that's what I want to do on everything. What is our potential? And if we're not pushing it, we don't ever know that answer.

11:55 Yeah. So when you try a new concept, are you trying it on a large scale, a fairly small scale? You know, what's your proclivity to risk of, you know, how big of a stage are you going to roll this out on?

12:09 Sometimes too big, right? If it works, it's not big enough. So it balances fact. If you have cattle, you can recoup any loss. So that's my ace in a hole. But when it comes to pushing the rye, it's difficult because one of the tools you need is a roller crimper. And if you're only going to buy a roller crimper for a small amount of acres, the cost expense really doesn't work. So one of the first few years that I tried cereal rye was because of circumstances. We experienced a hail crop, hailed out full corn, zeroed in a lot of areas. From my past cover cropping experience, I knew that if we can get rye in right away, we can really get success.

12:58 What time of the year did you get the hail? It was the 1st of July. It just smoked that corn crop. In fact, three days later, the insurance guy came out and said, 'Yep. I guess that's a zero.'

13:08 So I begged and pleaded because it had done the same to my pastures in the area and my cows had nothing to eat. So we quickly got that into that rye crop and spread that over quite a few acres and then looked and said, 'We're going to need a big roller crimper to do all this timely.' We were able to execute into high rye. There was strategy involved the next spring in where we were trying to plant corn versus soybeans because I have a 10-inch drill. And in my past little dabbling trying to plant corn into rye, it's difficult when you get on a root ball or anything like that to get the trench closed and it's just really dry in those situations. So we tried plugging one out of every three holes on your 10-inch drill, which gave you a 20-inch gap where nothing was growing, and that's where we were going to plant our corn.

14:07 That was a success. We had a nice seeded that we did, we could already just shoot right down with the GPS. We were able to get the corn into the ground cover rolled down and not matted on over that row that we had just done. That was important so the corn could emerge nicely.

14:28 And I know that where a lot of people get in trouble with planting corn into tall cereal rye is with nitrogen tie up. Tell us a little bit about how you dealt with that. How did you put the nitrogen on for that particular corn crop? Because that's key. A lot of people will say rye's allelopathic because my corn turned yellow. I don't think it's really allelopathy. They just tied up all their nitrogen.

14:52 So that year that I'm speaking of, the first one we tried this, we went out with AMS dry AMS and we threw it out there and with some more dry urea right ahead of planting and right ahead of rolling so those pearls would be down there. You should have seen the co-op guys going what in the world are we doing?

15:18 On my place. No, but what turned out, I didn't even use enough nitrogen I think in that situation. I still experienced a little bit of slow growing plants.

15:32 I think it was still paying that carbon and nitrogen tax on that one. When we changed it up in the next years, we went to a liquid system and added a bunch of liquid right there. And in fact, even a little bit of liquefied urea in-furrow, which is a big no-no in normal speak when I'm talking urea and any nitrogen in-furrow to speak of. We're able to carry five gallons of that stuff. And so far it looks really, really good.

16:05 So you're saying five gallons of liquefied urea in-furrow, which is one of those reasons why you're going Clint, you're crazy. Yeah. But I was tired of paying that nitrogen carbon and nitrogen tax. I wanted to see if we could really change the game. So you got that super early boost.

16:21 And for people that may not be familiar with the concept, what is different about liquefied urea that maybe would make it act differently than just putting, you know, 32 right down in the furrow? You eliminate a lot, a lot, a lot of salt. In fact, almost all the salt is out of that equation. And it happens to be favorable to things that you wouldn't think of. We'll get into it eventually, I'm sure. My bio side, in my biological world, I live and die that sucker. And when we add biology to it and we look at it in a microscope, we don't have any die-off. And in fact, the biology starts to thrive in the fertilizer, in the nitrogen fertilizer.

17:08 It makes no sense at all. And in fact, we questioned it and resent it in again and resent it in again just to make sure that we were okay with it. And so we went with it and it's worked amazing, putting a whole load of biology in with that five gallon of that liquefied urea and go at planting.

17:30 Yeah. And the liquefied urea is, it's actually chemically changing the type of nitrogen it is and putting it in a form that the plant can use more readily. In my understanding of this and you can correct me, but yeah, the amine form, the plant has to get it to that form. And if you put it in as nitrate, you know, with urea or with 10 or a 32, then the plant has to spend the energy to change it to an amine. Is that correct?

18:01 That is the principle of understanding of how that plant actually gets that nitrogen into it. If you get it to an amine form to begin with, that plant has zero photosynthetic power used to convert that nitrogen. If not, if you're using a different source of nitrogen, it's got to expend goods and nutrients to be able to flip that around. The biology's got to go through it. It's got to go through a couple different stages and then the plant can use it.

18:30 Yeah. So sort of the difference between coming in and having a meal all prepared for you, all you got to do is sit down and eat it versus coming in and you got to get the ingredients out of the cupboard and out of the fridge and put it all together and prepare it, then you can eat it.

18:46 I like your analogy there. It fits quite well. We try and do whatever we can so that every bit of photosynthesis goes to producing yield. Whether that's plant yield or grain yield or what it is, we don't want the things that I'm applying to my ground to be causing that plant other stresses.

19:07 Yeah. Yeah. And you know, we've started using some of the liquefied urea as well. And you know, it's something.

19:13 That people can do at home if they want to. It's not the easiest thing in the world. Well, it's not super hard, but it takes time and you got to be set up or there's commercial products now that you can purchase to do that with as well. So, because it's a fascinating concept, not just because of what it does to the plant, but the ability to put biology in nitrogen fertilizer, how does that change the game?

19:39 Well, delivery is so difficult with some people with their biology choices. And with they're already doing this, all you can do is just let that ride in and ride along and get those roots to actually touch the right things right away as they come out of that seed and then develop the right way creates a synergy with the microbiome around it. You're just getting your plant off to a perfect start.

20:09 So it's already been brought up. Let's talk biology. It seems like it's something you're pretty passionate about. You know, you started with the cover crops. It kind of sounds like biology is maybe that next frontier for you that you're pushing into right now. Tell us about that biological journey.

20:25 You know, the first thing I tried was because why? My buddy said, 'Hey, why don't you try bugs in a jug?' Right. So I tried it and we were fortunate enough to have all the yielding stuff on the combine and it showed a little bump. All right. So I used it year two. It showed a little bump. Right. And then the opportunity to get into a company that was establishing called Elevate A fell at my feet or I hooked into the guys and said I'm going to go dragging kicking and screaming. I'm going to get into this company because I'd seen the potential of it. Once again, we'd been to no till on the plains and they told us this was the next frontier. This was going to happen and they'd told us previous cover crops are going to push it. Now they're saying we're going to be able to make these biologicals and they're going to have an impact on these dead dying soils that are not right in their ratios and populations and then be able to completely go regenerative saying no biology. You just do the work and we'll get out of the way. I'm not there yet 100% on my farm, but that's what I'm striving for.

21:33 Yeah. And so just for full disclosure, Elevate A Green Cover owns a portion of that. Clint Cox owns a portion and then there's what three other Kansas farmers that also. So, same way with you Clint. We wanted to get in number one because it was farmer led and farmer driven, but number two it was a small enough company we could be pretty nimble. Yeah. In making changes and we come to find out that's some good and some bad.

22:03 Sometimes you can be too nimble. But it is something where we can as new emerging technologies come out, we can continue to improve and we don't get locked in. Hey, here's our flagship product. We've got $10 million of R&D into it. We have to sell it. No, you know, we can find something better, we can incorporate that into what we're doing. And how have you seen that play out?

22:28 Yeah. Six years down the road, the product that was called Hypergrow at that time, it's not the same Hypergrow that it is today. And that's kind of our flagship product out there, but same foundation, but we've been able to add more into it. You know, Keith, you live on diversity when it comes to your cover crops. I don't know that people have grasped the idea of how important diversity is into their biological products as well. Yeah. You know, and the reason that we really landed on that concept of diversity is because at some point you have to come to the realization that you're probably not smarter than God.

23:12 I'm there. Yeah. Someday, Clint, when you grow up, you'll learn that. But when you look at how these natural systems were created, it's all about diversity. Both diversity of plants and the diversity of biology. And the magic happens is when they work together. And that's what we're trying to do both with green cover and elevate a egg is help people build that diversity back into their systems. Starting with the plants, but then following with the biology and you can't separate them because the biology can't survive without the plants and the plants aren't going to thrive without the biology. A lot of guys that we talk to, you know, we it's easy to go in there and say, 'Okay, we we're going to

23:54 Go take a Haney test and we're going to go take a T&D and we're going to go take a PLFA test and we're going to get a baseline. We're going to get an understanding and then we're going to maybe tweak the products one way or the other, whether we need a little more fungal or we need a little more bacteria depending on what those test results show to us.

24:10 And then we can make a movement forward. A lot of times we're not 100% sure what part of our equation gave you your best return because we don't understand everything that's happening in your soil.

24:26 Otherwise, we could go like this, right? Sometimes there's a little more shotgun approach, but as long as you're seeing those numbers on the Haney test with your respiration moving and trying to get some of those locked up nutrients that are there unlocked so that your crop can have it, the returns can be great and your synthetics that you can get rid of quickly if you get your populations right there. The word is quorum, right?

24:56 What can be expressed in that plant when we get the biology right and that maybe not the first year, maybe not the third year, by the fourth or fifth year, like on my farm being full into this, I'm seeing things that I've never seen before on my farm and it can only be because of biology because I'm still planting roughly the same types of seeds, roughly the same time a year, using somewhat less synthetics.

25:21 So you haven't eliminated but you've drastically reduced. Drastically reduced, but we are still using some synthetics like that amine source of nitrogen and some other micronutrients to spike the plant when it's most needing of those nutrients. But the biology is giving us different results.

25:40 Plants are staying greener longer. They seem to be a little more drought tolerant. I see a lot of saprophytic fungi all over the soil under my pivots.

25:56 You got mushrooms growing where you've never seen them. Mushrooms everywhere and all sorts of different kind of cool mushrooms. And then you take a step and it goes into the creature world. If you are seeking crickets or spiders or millipedes or pill bugs or earthworms or any of those things, you can flip your script by going regenerative, adding the food source, adding the biology, and letting those critters just thrive.

26:30 And those are all good things, right? All those critters, to an extent, right? I mean, anything out of reach on one side can be problematic, but we deal with it in a way that we're not spraying insecticides to kill all those bugs. No way. Can you imagine how much good nutrients we're getting out of all those?

26:55 You know, we used to think crickets and things like that were eating the crops and stuff, but what we found is, you know what they eat? Palmer amaranth seed. That is crazy. And we feed them well.

27:08 It's unbelievable. In the ride that I talked about earlier that we planted down and went that way, you go into that field two years later and I got one hired man, his name's Martin. He doesn't like spiders very much and he doesn't even like to go in that field because there's, he thinks he may not come out.

27:28 Many spiders out there and crickets. And you say, you know, they attack the Palmers and stuff. Those fields are clean and the ones, the plants that do survive, I've got saprophytic fungi attacking them from the bottom up, of some weeds that I found this year. Never seen it in the past. You see all the leaves being eaten because it's something they can get to that's green, that is in their food web. They need something there. They're chewing down the weeds. I'm not saying my fields are clean as a whistle and don't have a single pigweed out there, but biology and critters are making an impact on my weed seed bank.

28:10 And would you say that since you've introduced the biology and have gone more regenerative, has your herbicide cost and use gone up or down? We're drastically trying to cut that one. We think that every time we spray aside, we have negative impacts on what our farm is trying to accomplish. We want to be regenerative. We want to push a system approach to the extreme to try and cut out as much as we can. And when we apply those herbicides, which we do, every field sees them, okay, we know.

28:48 That there's negative impacts. We have to replace some of those things that it might kill off or feed off. So if we have to go out there and we spray a burndown herbicide, we will follow that with the biology quickly in furrow for that plant to be able to thrive on. And we'll not only put the biology, but we'll put the food source so that that population grows fast and can repopulate and get going as fast as it can.

29:17 The technology is coming out here. We're this close to understanding if I spray X, I'm going to get this result. What happens? How much of a kill off am I going to have or not? So then we can start having prescriptive biology of this will counteract that. You know, like, if you're sick, you may need some antibiotics to get you healthy, but then you need to take the probiotics to get your gut back to where it needs to be because you've killed off some stuff that you're probably going to want later on.

29:48 A perfect example is guys going out there spraying a pile of fungicide, right? And then they kill off all their fungus and then they harvest their crop and go, 'What am I going to do with all this residue?' Well, fungal activity is one of the biggest players in digesting that and breaking it down and getting it to the next crop. So if you got a guy that's going to be on that side of things, maybe our hypers cycle or something like that that can really start that process of really chewing that residue up and getting it ready for next year's nutrients.

30:20 Yeah, I chuckle because you know when we first started no-tilling and this just shows you how far we've come and how little we knew. We used to think we were great farmers because I could take you out there and I could show you residue from like the past three or four years. It's like look at all this ground cover I've got. Here's my wheat stubble and here's the corn stocks from the year before that. Little did we know that was just a sign that we had no biology out there, but we were keeping the ground covered.

30:52 You know, we were providing food for the sun. I don't think the sun needs any of our food, right? That's what was breaking down most everything in those long-term no-till systems that don't have any cover crop, don't have the right biology. And people think, 'Oh, my residue is so king.' Well, the sun is the one eating most of that, and it's just breaking apart, volatilizing this way, and nothing more than a cover is it providing.

31:20 Now, when you start that cycle, that biology, now your systems are probably just like mine. We can't grow enough residue. Look at all this bare soil I have. What am I gonna do? Keith, you're a horrible farmer. Why does your cover, right? Green cover, right?

31:35 Yeah. And so you just have to bring things back into balance by changing some of your cover crop mixes. You may have to go with higher carbon cover crops, and that's okay. You know, we start with lower carbon nitrogen ratio in the beginning and can switch to higher ones like the big shot of rye.

31:51 The big shot of rye does play. Keith, I'm saying that it's not going to be an every year, every field spot. But if it can hold on to two years and flip a soil, one out of every three years if you want to go corn, corn, soybeans, and then be able to get that big rye crop in or something like that.

32:09 Yeah. I think it really plays. Now, this year, we sprayed it out when it was probably waist high because it forgot to rain. But you know, you have to have that management tool in your pocket ready to go at the next Monday because it was supposed to rain last weekend. Well, it forgot to. Time to get out the sprayer and get it over.

32:28 Yeah. Yeah. And that's where the management is going to be the make or the break of how successful it is for you. Yeah. That's a pretty big deal.

32:40 So cover crops. So no-till then cover crops and then the integrating of the biology. Where do you see yourself going after this?

32:56 I really like what Greenfield Robotics is doing and I think technology is just getting ready to explode and I think so explain a little bit about what they are doing. Greenfield Robotics is a Roomba, which everybody's kind of familiar with with vacuuming your carpet on your floor. One right over in that corner. His name is Carlos, and he's my wife's pet.

38:06 Explode out of the ground and be very healthy and start being resilient to it. One of the products we used in it is that is very beneficial is kiten. Well, kiten doesn't kill anything. It's like the bugs don't like the smell or the taste or something about it that they just leave. It's more of a preventative and it's natural. There's nothing wrong with it. I can get it all over my hands and I don't have any problem other than my wife's like, I think you're going to eat lunch outside. It does have a smell to it, but you're a pig farmer. She should be used to that. She is kind of used to that. CO was really nice. Got her smell out. It was great.

38:46 But there's all sorts of solutions out there that our organic friends have been using for some time. Well, some of those procedures have needed to make their way into mainstream agriculture just to get rid of some of those. Yeah, not only bad for us and our ground, but sometimes it's more expensive to run a the insecticide than it is to run a program of all natural things.

39:17 So you're trying to create healthy plants that don't need protection versus trying to protect sick plants that are under attack. Great concept, isn't it? I hate the go kill it scenario. Yeah. And there's a lot of that in our agricultural industry right now. Go kill it. Whether it's a weed or go kill it, whether it's a seed treatment that's on a seed that we don't know if we need. Somebody told us we needed it and then they said, 'Oh, by the way, you'll pay $25 more a bag for that, too. Do we even really need it?'

39:55 And we're trying to come up with other products that can start your crops. And a matter of fact, you use it in the cover crop industry a lot. If you can put a seed treatment out there, you can gain a lot of ground pretty cheap. Yeah. And get established what you need to thin your roots. Yeah. There's no cheaper way to do that. I mean, you know, like with our cover crops, the seed treatments in and pretty diverse package of seed treatments, maybe a buck 25, a buck 50 an acre. Anything else we're doing for a buck 25 an acre? Not much. No, not much. No. Yeah. That's a great way for people to get introduced to biology if they haven't ever done it before is if you are planting a cover crop, and I'm guessing if you're watching this podcast, it might be in your wheelhouse there to do that. Include the biology into that. It just gives you the diverse biology, diverse cover crop. You're just setting your It's a soil primer at that point. Yeah. Yeah, priming for that next cash crop.

41:00 So really good success with the alpha alpha. Tell us a little bit about Clint's crazy faith, which do you get a trademark on that? I did not coin the trademark. I hope Jerome Tang isn't listening. He kind of had the crazy faith team that first year and it was our first year that we really saw the potential of being able to throw a lot of products together and go with it infurral. And I just thought to myself when trying to communicate this food source of a fish and the biology source of a arise and a fungal source of the arise and then the hyperrow to go in there with some of the growth stimulants and the humates and the phobics and the kiten and the seaweed and all those things married together. We said you know it takes a little bit of crazy faith to step out and to try something new. And I don't care what that is in your life. Anything that you step out on, you step out on faith. And a lot of guys, I was asking them to take away their infuro starter fertilizer. Take away that and add this biology, which is, you know, snake oil to most guys, right? And say, 'Hey, let's go. We'll see what we have.' And if I could get that to happen in a sidebyside scenario and they get to harvest and they go, 'Well, Clint, I'm not sure if you want on yield or not.' And I said, 'Oh, that's okay. Well, how much money did I save you?' Then they say that and then we go and we would we dug ruts earlier and we looked at plant health and we got that ball rolling and in the tight margins of our farming economy right now. Anything that can give you long-term benefits at a cheaper rate, people's ears perk up and say, 'Hey, I'm ready to listen.' and guys are kind of tired of the way they've been doing it because it hasn't been putting that many dollars in their pocket either. So they're

43:08 Looking for something new to be able to figure out a way to be able to cut margins.

43:13 So have you gone all the way on any trials of completely eliminating all external fertility, all non-biological fertility? Was that part of the crazy faith? Well, that wasn't good. Well, it was crazy faith at that point. We have every year we try and grow a portion of our farm, not a large portion, without any synthetics.

43:38 Whether it's two acres. Okay. If you farm 2,000 acres, give yourself two acres so that you can learn something. You can afford to bomb out on that. What's your potential right out there in the middle of the quarter? You shut off your fertility program. You're, everybody's got yield mapping stuff now. You can see it.

43:58 And so we do push it. And now whether that's fed with hydraulicates and a way to put some nitrogen back on there, yes. Whether it's fed with multiple shots of biology and a foliar shot of hyperrow and that man that aiming, sure, we'll try that. But a lot of the synthetics I've been able to cut out of my program period anyway. Phosphorus is something that we don't buy.

44:26 We will get some feedlot manure where it's right next door and the guys are looking to get rid of it. That's a great carbon source. It's a great way to feed biology as well. Yes, you'll get some phosphorus through that as well. But in your soil, you've got so much phosphorus there that you can just unlock with biology. You really don't need to be buying it in certain circumstances if your biology is capable of milling it. So we've been at that for 13 years. Another no-till on the plains tidbit: hey, you don't need to buy phosphorus. Hey, I don't want to buy phosphorus. Let's talk. Let's try this. And so we've done that. And so we pulled that off. Now I do have some strip trials this year because guys have been so adamant going, 'Yeah, but what would happen if you'd add it?' So I've got some trials out this year to say, 'Yeah, we put some info along with the biology, see if the marriage can yield something better.'

45:22 But I think you're trying to get at what I've seen overall with my biology movement. And one of the fields that I bought with is a field that I've communicated with you in the past. The first person in the county in the whole area to settle in Long Island picked this quarter, this area. Of course, it wasn't cut up in nice shapes, but this is the spot that was his. And he built an empire starting right there. He built a brand new house. It still stands today. In 1903 is when this monstrous of a house was erected. And he had piles of cattle and he had a whole workforce and he had a citrus grove and he had land in Colorado because he was so successful. He had fueled his success on all the previous biology that was there fully functioning before he got there and he plowed it in and he plowed it in and he plowed it in. He mined it out to the fact that when I bought it from his grandson, it had 1% organic matter.

46:35 What do you suppose it started at? Six, seven. Oh, I don't know. I mean, he picked the best of the best. Yeah. So who knows? It could have been closer to 10. Yeah. I really don't know. The journals say that the grass was well above his head and that there was just critters everywhere. And I have no idea what that looked like, but I can guarantee if Cummins Hoy would come back and look at it today, he'd go, 'This is not what I farmed. This was not the dirt that I farmed.' And I've been at it for 12 years trying to repair it. And with everything I've got trying to repair it, it was so bad that when I dig a post hole for a corner post to set a hot wire, anything, just sand. There was nothing left. There was no top soil at all. So we've tried to add cover crops. Cereal rye has been a very important one in between our crops rotation whether we get it grazed or not. We always try and have that there. The multi-species cover crops where we graze cattle there in the winter. In fact, we even did a summer mix where we migrated through on a paddock situation on that piece one time. And now this year it was in full cereal rye until June 15th.

47:50 That's pushing a little late, Clint. My cows were like, 'Gate's over there. Find me somewhere else to stand.' And I'm like, 'There isn't much growing, girls. This is as good as it gets.' But we kicked them off and drilled it real quick to soybeans. And the soybeans are up thriving in it now. You can make an

48:08 Improvement by the cover crops, by the cattle, and by the biology. I think the biology has played a huge role in this game because there's no way it could have been right. There's nothing growing there. Your soil was dead. The Haney test said there's nothing there.

48:26 You can get there Gabe Brown style. I really do believe you can. Gabe didn't use biological products. He used the factor of time and cover crop diversity and cattle. When I look at it, I think we can use a cheat code by introducing biology into the front start of that. Now, if you want to continue to add the cover crops and the cattle and the crop rotations, that will only amplify the situation. But by getting that biology in in the beginning, you're jumping forward five or 10 years.

49:03 Yeah, definitely speed up that process. So I think a lot of people have seen that and recognize that. And if you can get to what takes people 10 years to get to and you get there in five, well, and that just continues to compound through the history of that farm. Now, you get to leave something for your family that is completely different than what you took it over. The price of land these days, and I don't care if you're in western Kansas, I think the price of land's high. And I'm not even going to the auction in Iowa that they're talking 20 plus thousand dollars an acre.

49:39 You've got to be able to protect your asset and to give it to the next generation and hopefully the generation after that in a mindset in a way that you're not only giving them something better in the soil, but giving them a better mindset of understanding of how it can be improved on instead of just minimizing.

50:00 Yeah. And just like we talked about, we don't need to grow more bushels, we need to grow better bushels. We don't necessarily need to farm more land as individuals or as entities. We need to farm the land that we have better and improve that. And you know, if you double your soil organic matter, you're probably 50% more productive. So you've just increased your holdings, your land, your production capacity without having to go out and buy any piece of ground. Any piece of ground that I take on I feel like is so far behind of what the stuff that I've been doing this for so for 20 years and I'm like how long is it going to take to get this fully functioning and operational and being able to thrive in what I do.

50:43 But you know you can get it there now. Oh yeah, there's no doubt, there's no doubt you can do it. It's just how much are you willing to commit to it? Are you willing to grow a profitable wheat crop so that you can get that multispecies crop in there? That you can get the cattle in there? Or are you willing to go, I can tell that co-op guy maybe I don't need this much phosphorus. Maybe I can use some biologicals to unlock some of my phosphorus. Just little things that you can tweak.

51:14 Yeah, well we've talked about a lot of stuff and I think you've touched on this a little bit but maybe as we kind of close and wrap things up here, maybe just summarize your advice to, you know, maybe it's a young guy just getting started out or maybe it's a farmer who's farmed for quite a while but is ready to take that step into whether it be cover crops or biologicals. What's your advice for them on best ways to get started?

51:43 Well, first of all, you can reach out to people whether it's people in your region or people within our industries. You can contact Keith and his crew over there at Green Cover. You can contact us at Elevate Ag and you can help with specifics in those areas. But after that, it's mindset. And I've got some older gentlemen in my area. I can, one comes to mind. He goes, 'I love what you're doing. I think it's great, but I can't do it. I'm too far this direction. My farming career is coming to a close. I'd love for you to just show me the playbook and just do it this way, but I got to do what I'm doing now.' So if you find yourself in that situation, you need to find somebody younger to interject into your farm.

52:32 One of the things that really made my success as a farmer, as a dad, as a community member, was that my dad gave me ownership in it. When I came home, dad said, 'No, this farm has got to expand to hold us both. But all that expansion is going in yours, in your name. The equipment's going in your name. The lands are going in your name. The farming control is going to go in

52:56 Your name. The decisions are going to be yours. Good for him. And when he did that, I wasn't that wasn't a wise decision in the beginning, right? Because I decided I was going to go to this cover crop and regenerative side that wasn't regenerative. But it was his decision that it wasn't going to be his, his direction that was going to make my farming career successful. It was going to be mine.

53:25 Yeah. And when guys get a hold of that, they are willing to grasp at any resource they can get to. Some of my teachers might watch this and they're going, 'This guy, this guy was not a class A student,' and my college professors don't know who I am because I was probably asleep in the back row, right? But when I got into this, I fell in love with it. I fell in love with what.

53:51 Now you're a student. Oh, now I'm a student. I might not be the one flipping through the books, but I'm reading the pod, watching these webinars. I'm doing the podcast stuff. I go to no till on the plains and all these other soil health events where you can just sit and talk to somebody and then not be afraid to pick up a phone and go, 'Man, I'm stumped. Rusty, what do I do? Kelly, what do I do? Michael, what do I do? What successes have you been able to do?'

54:22 Those guys help bring you through. You got to surround yourself with people that'll bring you up. That's great advice. And folks, you know, if you are getting started, there are a lot of opportunities out there, more so than when we first got started, Clint. No till on the plains is about it.

54:39 Yeah. Now you could literally go to something every week, a lot of weeks, two things. And then people argue with you, but every magazine you open to has something about regenerative land, regenerating your landscape or changing the way you're farming. And the options are out there. And I just encourage people to seek it. You might be a YouTube guy that just spend your entire nights all winter long. You'll be so smart by the end of winter. You'll be ready to go.

55:09 That's right. And take Clint's advice. Take your wife to no on the plains. It's a great vacation. Oh, well, it's not necessarily a great vacation, but I'm sorry. Take your wives. Yeah. Because they can be like, 'Well, Keith Burns says you can do that,' when I go, I can't do that. Corine has done that multiple times, saying, 'Well, those guys have said it's possible, Clint, go get it.' Having somebody to push that side of it. And another thing that I want guys to do is.

55:39 Take pictures on your phone constantly so you can look back and see what you've done. Never been easier to do that. No, you can document everything. I told one guy this spring, I said, 'Take so many pictures that you print off a book and stick it in your cabinet so you can show your grandkids.' This was my first cover crop. This was my first experience with biology. This is how it all changed on our farm.

56:03 That's great advice. And the other thing that you've been doing, you know, with these trials and plots and stuff, with the technology we have, it's never been easier to do that. I mean, seriously, it's a flip of a switch. It's easy, and you can take your pictures, you can take your bricks readings and get right away. You can get more simple or more complex and send a sample off the Haney test to Lance Gunderson at Regen and it can be proven. You don't have to feel it. It can be proven with science now. That science is just going to go like this.

56:41 It's an exciting future out there and I look forward to watching you grow. I look forward to Green Cover growing. I look forward to Elevate growing together and just seeing what cool things are out there. So Clint, thank you so much for taking the time to join us here on the Green Cover podcast. My brother and I started Green Cover in 2009 because we understand what it's like to be a farmer starting out on the journey to improve soil health. We saw the power of plant and biological diversity on our own farm here in Nebraska, but we found that it was difficult to get the right cover crop seed mix. We also learned that there was a big learning curve in successfully implementing cover crops. That's why we built Green Cover so that farmers like you can access the highest quality cover crop seed put into the right diverse mixes along with the technical advice and the educational resources to help you successfully implement cover crops on your own operation. So contact us today and we'll help you with the right cover crop mix for your farm or ranch so you can regenerate your portion of God's creation for future generations.