Panel Discussion: Soil Health, Grazing, and Crop Rotation Strategies

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0:07 First question is for Jeff Goodwin. Yeah, where's Jeff? He took off. All right, well let's see if any of you other guys are smart enough to answer this. Jeff talked about disturbance — was he talking about mechanical disturbance or hoof activity and grazing disturbance? I can answer that for Jeff. He's talking about disturbance. It may be grazing disturbance, it may be hoof disturbance, it may be fire — any disturbance. But we're going to manage that disturbance for the results that we want. That is correct. Not all disturbance is bad. It's all in how it's managed.

0:53 Okay, next question. This is a question for Paul. Can you talk about no-till planter designs for CRP native type bunch grass pastures? You know what types of drills do you use for planting that light fluffy native type seeds? Then also maybe comment on brassicas and talk a little bit about seed size and mixing them together and do they separate and all that when it comes to different seed sizes and also the different planting depths.

1:28 There's a rough rule of thumb on non-fluffy seeds — whatever the seed diameter is, ten times that seed is supposed to be your planting depth. You take a look at a small turnip seed, for instance. It's a small dot. Ten times that might be only a half to three-quarters inch. You take a look at a large bean — ten times that might be two inches. So I get questions all the time: how do I apply my cover crop cocktails? One of the fears with a small seed is it won't have enough seed energy to make it up out of the soil when it's a monoculture. I get concerned when it's in with ten other seeds. Like, I do the large seeds would come up and crack the soil, such a small seed has a lot more energy to get up and out. And with that in mind, I plan a lot of my cover crop cocktails at two to two and a half inches deep because they've got a lot of large seed stuff in there. And I'm in an area where a lot of times I'll implant in the cover crop. I got that need to find moisture, and I want to make sure it stays in moisture. And I've been surprised sometimes even at that depth, small seeded things would beat the large beans out of the ground. But again, they're working together to get up and out of there.

2:33 When it comes to the different types of seeds, the more seeds you've got in a cover crop cocktail mix, the less separation you'll have. Well, the worst thing you do is like a larger seed, like an Austrian winter pea, and a small seed like a turnip, side-by-side. Load up drill. Some of these seed hoppers hold 500 bushels. You go for ten hours. I can guarantee you're going to have some seed separation. But if I've got a huge diversity and mix, the small seeds and large seeds are always bridged together and sort of flow down pretty well. My box drill, when I'm full up — you know, thirty to forty acres — all I can do anyway. I don't have too much problem with seed separation. I do know a few guys that throw away about a pound of sunflowers. Some flowers in the shell sort of float on top of a mix. And what that'll do is when your cover crop is coming up, if your sunflowers are uniform, distributed across the field, you know your seed is fairly uniform. If the sunflowers are all in one part of the field and all the small seeds you loaded into the field, you had some separation. But again, on a cover crop I don't really care if there's uniform distribution or not because I'm looking at diversity across the field. Now, regards to the fluffy seeds versus the smooth seeds versus those differences there, I run

3:49 Everything through the same box that crust poster drill the slot works but I don't have any fluffy seeds my mixes. I'm not planting the grasses as especially the natives or the perennial grasses. Our research farm that does do a lot of that we do have the separate fluffy sea box and the small seed they call it the alfalfa box on there. The disadvantage with that is you have more sprockets when you're working on your populations. The advantage is you can actually pull the tube from that small seed box for instance drill it on the surface first, the large teams drop it in the bottom of the furrow and so it gets you some flexibility. It just depends on what you've got available.

4:28 The one problem I run into though when it comes to the seating depth, every seed diameter opener has a cutting angle to cut residue and when you're in no-till or going through rut balls or rut masses whatever like that, I want that cutting angle to be about a 30 to 45 degree angle. Well if I take a real large dam and open her and try out in real shell it's going to be pressing downward, you'll do their pitting your residue. If you take a real small diameter and try running in a deep you're going to be bulldozing. And the place I run into a lot of times is a lot of farmers will say wow I've got that 18-inch opener on the John Deere opener for instance that 18 inch disc. It gets to be a little bit duller than trying to plant real shale you can get a lot of hair pinning. Look at the grass drill is a trex drill or some of the early grass drills had little 12 to 14 inch discs on shallow depth you can maintain the cutting angle. While for instance on a new planner they claim they go to four inches deep, I'm planting depth now they went from a 15 inch disc to a 16 inch disc to maintain that cutting angle. And so if you've got a lot of variability in your operation where you're doing a lot of grasses shallow a lot of other things deep it might take two separate drills.

5:40 I've got a follow-up question on planting depth. As the system gets better and the soil structure gets better do you guys think you see less issue with planting it one inch versus four inches because of that better structure? And better system structure wise I'm less afraid of deeper depths. What happens when you don't have the good structure especially if you got a remnants of a tillage pan say down six inches deep. I plant something with four inches deep then I get a rain and saturates that zone. I've got an oxygen starved seed. As my structure builds that extra rain drains away I can plant deep and get away with it.

6:20 I'm a fan of planting deeper. The deeper I go especially my spring planting crops the more buffered the soil temperature is, the more buffer the soil moisture is, the more uniform my emergence is and more uniform emerges always gives better yield. With that in mind work light in our corner three and a half inches deep are my low at two, two and a half an hour beans two and a half to three. Our spring planting crops but I say far more uniform stand down deeper. Again I'm in the area of Nebraska where there are some days you can plant here and get moisture three days of hot dry wind anything shells in dry slow so plant deeper it helps.

6:56 I got a follow-up question Jim for your planting opportunities. You know, so let me ask you this on the window opportunities. Do you plant deeper knowing that August 24th it may be 30 more days before you see in the rain if you're planting in the moisture how are you doing it?

7:20 Depends to me what the forecast is. I'm watching that forecast and taking a gamble of whether I think there's a rain coming or not. Allen, I'd like you to address some of these questions because you planted—no, I want a farmer's perspective on both the seeding depth. You know, you plant a lot of diverse mixes and I think you've run it all through an air seeder. Do you see issues with seed separation? Do you see issues with planting depth? How do you deal with that in the real world?

7:51 Paul explained that pretty well about the seat separations in the diverse mix. We don't see any problem at all with anything separating out. We don't, on the other hand, we don't load up enough for 200 acres and then go out and bounce around for three days planting it. We'll do smaller amounts or one field at a time. Something I don't think anybody's addressed is the first year or two of no-till when there is no soil structure. The hair pinning is a huge problem because you have no structure. You've got nothing for that disc to push against and he ended up hair pinning. That's one of the major problems I see with guys in the first year trying to get a stand when it's the first time they've had residue on their surface ever and they're trying to plant through it and they're just making a hairpin mess.

8:48 Hair pinning is when you get winterkill with like weeds or your cereals not getting deep enough or getting good soil contact or stand. Yeah, the residue actually gets hair pinned into the furrow with the seed and prevents the furrow from closing. Yeah, you get winterkill. You get lots of problems from that. It dries out. You don't get good seed-to-soil contact. The drill just won't work good if it doesn't have something to push against.

9:20 Some good other things that are important: keep your blade sharp. You may have to replace blades more often. Keep them sharp, keep them fairly new, and then don't go out there when the straw is really tough. You know, like if it's damp in the morning. The drier that stuff is, the better it'll cut. Less than 70% humidity.

9:45 Yeah, I run a John Deere air seeder and that's what you're talking about for down pressure. I get away with a lot less weight and a lot less pressure than it seemed like anybody else I talked to, and I don't know if it's just my soils or the fact that we've used a lot of gypsum in our country. My soils don't get rock-hard.

10:13 Oh, that's bad. Yeah, I've helped a lot of people transition and one of the things I suggest is put in alfalfa three or four years, then start. The reason you get along better, Allen, is you've been doing this twice as long as the rest of us and your soil is that much better.

10:41 Yeah, I've been no-tilling 22 years. I've got farms that are 20 years in no-till, but I've also got farms that are just two or three years in no-till and it always just aggravates me to no end when I take over a new farm and have to start that farm from square one. But I'm getting better at it all the time. We're bringing them in faster and faster.

11:22 Yeah, that's right. If you've got cover on the soil, crusting isn't much of an issue anymore and that was the reason for planting a little shallower—is because try to get up through a crust. If you're not gonna crust, then you can plant deeper, and I routinely plant one inch and three-quarters deep to two inches. Yeah, the other thing that's a failure—planting deeper is they're used to setting maybe I don't know the fourth notch or whatever you want to call it.

11:50 Device now also the depth gauge was writing on a half-inch residue you're a half-inch shallower maybe got that residue clump where there's a three-inch clump resident you're out of the soil completely and so I'd rather err on the side of deeper and then when you are right now you are at the proper depth.

12:07 Perhaps give my presentation one time along with a person who work to the C company see corn company he had his position was between R&D and marketing he was like what does the market need what do we have what do we take and he did a lot of field visits on Stan complaints and he said out of his entire 17-year career or something like that he never had a stand complaint where the crop was playing too deep he had more failures planted too shallow and again go deeper.

12:40 With a lot of the producers that I've worked with their first year or first attempt at trying no-till they do end up shallow because their soil is hard and they have a mathematical problem of not enough weight on that drill and they just can't get it in the ground so most likely you'll have to add weight in the beginning and then as your soils get in better shape you can start backing off on how much weight you have.

13:07 That's one reason I showed mark Watson's STX air cedar his weights across the back were plenty for his long-term no-tell it's when he started doing custom work and he's getting called in for first or second year no-till yeah I did 600 gallons of water to 230 foot cedar.

13:37 It depends on how the pastor is managed I've been in some pastors that are harder than til ground and Peterson did a demonstration a couple years ago down Missouri where he had more erosion and runoff from a poorly managed pastor they did from jail ground and again as how is it managed what kind of structures you have what kind of roots do you have there.

13:55 The other thing is when was that existing grass killed or pastor or whatever in Nebraska we got a lot of guys hoe no-till and alfalfa if I let the alfalfa grow in the spring use up the excess water start drawing the soil out kill it that ground is hard compared to if I killed it last fall I went through a freeze thaw cycle it had the spring rains to soften it up both of our no-till and alfalfa and both one was impossible the other is easy.

14:44 Okay we better move on or we're gonna get the two cushions here okay next question is on mycorrhizae fungi the question is how do you increase your mycorrhizae fungi and what happens to the fungus in frozen ground in the northern part of the country who wants to tackle that Nathan you're the reigning scientist here could you read the question again no so the way you get mycorrhizae into your fields are the basic edge effects that Brett talked about they're out there in the range grounds they're out there in perennial for perennial grounds mostly but when you have a tornado come through your house every day or every three or four times a year are you gonna rebuild quit telling quit telling.

15:37 Then the next part that I've understood some of through some of the biologists is that they really don't like the salt that's put into the soil what's that most of our fertility and a lot of our pesticides know what you're managing I'm not saying don't use those products I'm saying no what you're doing when you use that tool like Jim Johnson said but mycorrhizae is a hard thing right now because it's hard to actually see you don't just send off a sample and say do I have it or do I not so we're early in that science in my.

16:13 Opinion and so you have to have a little faith and it's there saprophytic fungi is a really really good fungi because without it we'd be standing in trash up to I don't know about you know 34 or 40 inches. They are the first decomposers that mycorrhizae is what we're after. As it infects the root it can go out into the rest of the soil profile and suck in nutrients and so it's a buscooler. It goes like a tree, it infects the root, comes out, makes a big fan and then goes through them. So to get it in there, start managing by these five principles and you'll see it come in.

16:51 This is my coworker speaking to me, Dale Strickler, mycorrhizal fungi. You want living roots all year-round. Mycorrhizae fungi start starving out after a month of no roots, no exudates. Phosphorus fertility is more critical than nitrogen because that's the trade-off that it uses. That's pretty much it, Dale. You wanna raise your hand? He does a lot of work with mycorrhizae fungi and mycorrhizal fungi for inoculation. You know, make a couple more comments on that?

17:26 Yeah, the things that will deter mycorrhizae are tillage, fallow periods and excess phosphorus. So those are the things that will really discourage mycorrhizal growth. Most plants are highly mycorrhizal and will support populations. The exceptions would be brassicas. Brassicas don't need mycorrhizae, so they won't support it, they can't host them. So that's why we would never encourage you to plant an entire field of only brassicas because you're going to really drive down your mycorrhizal populations.

17:55 Mycorrhiza can go from one host to another, so keep a living root in the ground and it can jump from one host species to the next if you don't have that long fallow period. Part of this question asked what happens to the fungus in the frozen ground of the northern part of the country. You know, when something's not growing they will tend to go dormant and when something's not growing the mycorrhiza really don't need to be eating. Would you say that's correct, Dale? And the other thing is if you feel like your soil is really beat up and you really want to jumpstart it quicker, you can buy mycorrhiza inoculant. We can mix that right into your seed if you want. It's not cheap because it's a difficult organism to grow and propagate, but you can buy inoculant to get yourself jumpstarted.

18:40 Because it's expensive we feel that the best investment in that is when you're trying to go into a perennial sequence where you know you're going to have something growing all the time and it's typically a higher value planting anyway. It might be worth spending some money on making sure you have the mycorrhiza in there for that. And we've probably seen our best success, best return on that investment, in a perennial setting. Or I think I've heard Dale talk about if you have really high salt soils, by high saline soils, the mycorrhizae can help mitigate that. You know, more questions about mycorrhiza? Catch Dale later on because he's done a lot of work in that over the years.

19:26 What's that, compost tea? Compost tea will certainly help with your biology. It's not really going to be a source of mycorrhizal fungi because mycorrhiza is a longer growing process and I don't know that you really are going to get that through compost tea. It will certainly help the mycorrhizae that you already have in your soil, but I would not look at it as a source of new mycorrhiza. It would definitely help expand the populations that you already have.

20:04 Do you suggest increased seeding rates when planting into higher residue and if so how much would you increase your seeding rates? Alan, you got the microphone. If you're planting in a really high residue, how much would you increase your seeding rates?

20:17 It depends on the residue. I plant into 15 foot tall Egyptian wheat stubble and no, I don't increase at all because it's all up in the air, it's not on the ground. If I've got corn stubble where I know some of those gauge wheels are rolling over those root balls and I'm not getting seed where I want it to, I'll increase the seating right a little bit, maybe 10 percent, 15 percent.

20:51 In the early days when no-till drills were first coming out and became popular for drilled soybeans further east, everyone said yes, increase seeding rate 20 to 50 percent and there are several companies that kept selling their planters saying you can save money and seed. Though, is that because the early no-till drills were so lightweight they could not penetrate so low, proper depth, left half the seeds on top the ground? And there are some of the old-timers said well, if you don't see if your beans on the top ground, you're planting too deep. Well, the trouble was those on top didn't grow and so the 50 percent you increased was to give you some to see and those that were in the ground grew.

21:29 My long-term experience when I've done population studies, drill versus planter on soybeans, milo, and corn as well, my seeding rates are the same when my no-till drill is set up properly and get the seed in the ground. I don't change my seeding rates when I go till to no-till on my comparisons and in fact my seeding rates can usually be lower in the no-till because of more buffered soil temperature, better soil moisture, mulch on top. It doesn't crust, it doesn't dry out, doesn't wash out and so for me the seeding rates are the same if you have a no-till seeder set up properly. If you've got one that's not good, seed to soil contact, even half the seed environment, they're not gonna grow. Increasing the seeding rate can make up for it but I'd rather set the seeder proper to start with.

22:13 I'm gonna increase seeding rates again. It's gonna depend on conditions, maybe 25 percent, maybe a hundred percent. I wouldn't go over a hundred percent. Usually I tell people as much as they can afford with the caveat that I'm planning it for forage and so I'm gonna increase my seeding rate so that I can increase that forage production.

22:41 Here's a question for Jimmy Emmons: how do you control weeds in the wheat after milo? And I assume they're talking about after your milo that maybe had companions in it. And then a follow up: what rate of wheat? At what rate? And do you have any trouble grazing your milo? I assume that's a prussic acid probably.

23:05 How we control weeds is in the system. We have a diverse rotation so my goal is not to have the same crop on the same acre every four years. Now when I break that rule, like I gave this afternoon where I followed a summer grass forage crop with a milo crop, then I have issues and I shouldn't have broken that rule. So, you know, let's live and learn and I've done the same thing with beans. I went back to beans two years once again chasing revenue, which I preached against but we all want to sometimes. I get trapped. Every time I break that rule I say I'm not gonna do that again and I mean it this time. And no, I don't have any trouble grazing the milo, especially if I got companions in there. And with the winter wheat then.

24:05 We've dried down the stalks and you know once in a while you might have a grain issue if you got a lot of down Milo but you can't go to watch that a little bit but other than that no we don't have any trouble. The diversity is important. The other thing is you have to know your weeds. Not you don't use the same herbicide to increase the rate because the weed is there. For instance on our farm we raise grain sorghum, soybeans, wheat and corn. Our soybeans is both Roundup Ready and Liberty Link. Different fields depend on what the weed problem is. You make sure the fields labeled you don't want to spray the wrong one on the product.

24:48 The other thing is on our prices we put down an early pre-plant. We have three different early pre plants you put down. Is it going to be beans on beans? Is it going to be wheat in that fall or is it going to be corn or modeled then next year? And so when people ask me what's my being herbicide I ask, what's a rotation? Because like I say between our combinations we've actually got six about three different priests and two different posts and so there's quite a combination there just for weed control in soybeans. But what is your weed? You next crop?

25:15 One of the things I didn't talk about today was my weed control in the Milo. That was no herbicides last two years but I've also facilitated that with the rotation that I've been in small grains for cool seasons before that so that would naturally help you facilitate grasses broad leaves. Once you go to a grain sorghum you're going to start facilitating broad leaves. So in the rotations how how you imagine so I've got by with no herbicides but you also got to watch that in the rotation being managed that you can do it. You're kind of saying your weed control almost starts a couple years earlier by what you did leading up to it.

25:59 Yeah, and if you listen to Dr. Anderson, Randy Anderson, where you have two cools and two warms in the rotation and you do that to cools two different cools two different warms that will help in that weed suppression and don't have to use herbicides. Okay very good. Thank you. Here is a question asking what is a proscope. Somebody talked about a proscope earlier.

26:23 Caleb, do you have a picture of that? Alright there you go. I got it up here. Jimmy, if you want to tell people about that. Yeah, that's fast. I must have the internet here so yeah, this is what we use. Willie Durham and I'm sure Nathan's got some of these too. 149 dollars buys this scope. That scope actually snaps on to your phone but then the scope itself snaps to the bracket so I have multiple brackets one for an iPad one for phone. I like it on the iPad because I can just leave it on there when we're out the field. If you put it on your phone it's hard to put in your pocket and if you need to talk on it but it goes over the camera and it's a ten to fifteen. You can get different magnifications of the scope but typically they're ten to fifteen but then when you go with your camera you can blow your room in on your camera then it will extend that and then I, if I really want a good picture I'll do that to maximum take a screenshot and then blow it up again and you can, you really get some really good pictures in the soil so it's pretty.

27:35 Yeah, you can for 150 bucks I got one and you know it's pretty cool. I did our local. We have an Ag kind of a teaching facility there in Hastings and they do a soil health day or soil festival for all the fifth graders and so I had a session with all the fifth graders and I had a proscope on and you know we were looking.

32:12 Have to do biological things, cultural things to control the weeds and so far we've been really successful. There's a few instances where we've had just weather disasters where the weather is completely against us and I just come in and smoke the whole field, start over again. I won't tolerate.

32:38 Yeah, agree. We, the better we can get a cover crop, the thicker the mat, especially if we're going into spring crops. We want that right. Get pocket shoulder high, thick dense. Steve, we're still planting the rye right now. We've upped the seeding rate because we want that population high, we want that really thick. We can start suppressing those weeds.

33:02 Rotation, as I talked about earlier, is another way. If you keep going, we don't wheat, you're gonna facilitate grasses and all that same way of broad leaves. So it's all about the rotation in the system. I can't strongly say that any more. It's the system. And if you don't have a systems approach and a good rotation, you're gonna have problems. And the better the cover, the better the mat, the better the rotation, the less pressure.

33:36 My cropping plans are usually two to three years out. I need to kind of know what I'm gonna do, what I plan to do two to three years out to know if I need to plant something that's not real competitive to weeds. I need to do other things up front to reduce the weed population before I get to that crop. Or if I know I'm gonna have weed issues, I plant a really competitive crop that will rule that, will out-compete the weeds or it'll grow when the weeds won't grow.

34:12 Okay, very good. I think the key there too is, you know, like Jimmy said, it has to be a whole system. You can't just focus on one principle of soil health. You have to be looking at all of them within its system. You need the coverage but you also need the diversity and the livestock can play a crucial role in there too.

34:30 Here's a question about asking, does this turning crops under, and I'm assuming they're talking about tilling the cover crop in, turning crops under, improve organic matter levels in the soil? I wouldn't know that. I said it took my long-term tillage plots. I started 1981. In 2007 I took the disc treatment, added a cover crop to it with disc unit to kill it versus the no-till. The disc eliminates the benefit of the cover. Don't gain anything in organic matter. Actually lose and yield because I'm losing residue as well, and the cost of the cover itself. When it comes to put in the yields in order, soy beans it's typically with covers is without cover for no-till is next. Disking, discs and with covers the lowest. If you put those four in a row, with corn the top to flip flop for me in southeast Nebraska that moisture early. I had to kill my cover fairly early to keep my corn yields up. And again, it's because Sara or I in there and corn grass and grass just don't quite get along. The beans in there, no problem. But again, where I do the till, I lose the benefit.

35:42 We have a faculty member, he's masters or PhD, before you came on board, Sam Wortman was looking at cover crops for biological weed control and organic systems. He looked at two species, four species, six species, eight species. He looked at tillage to terminate him. Since organic he was not using chemical but he was using a disc to incorporate him completely or blade under cutter to undercut him. He found at two or four species with tillage there was no weed.

36:11 Control benefits at all when he was at eight species with the blade under cutter the diversity on top and the blade under cutting leaving the diversity on top suppress weeds and he was basically saying if you're looking at weed suppression you're going to look at more diversity and I think it fits with more to against the weed diversity as well but again with tillage she found it wasn't effective.

36:30 I think there's a big misconception that if you grow all this biomass that you don't get any soil benefit unless you plow it under because otherwise you can't decompose and that's completely saying that the biology does nothing. And anybody that's been no-till very long understands that in the beginning of no-till you may have too much residue you have to deal with or have a lot of residue but once you get into the system you're going to be fighting to try to keep residue on top to ground because even though you're doing no tillage that residue disappears because it's being deep decomposed and cycled so very fast.

37:05 I just can't stress how much damage tillage does to your soil. I make a comparison in a talk about a tornado. Nathan talked about that while ago, I hope that's where he got that idea from. If you have to have a tornado come through your town you just want it one time in a lifetime. If you think about tilling four or five six times like my neighbors do the infrastructure of the biology the earthworms the biology the mycorrhizal fungi is decimated. So try to get out of your mind tillage if you want to improve soil health because it absolutely is devastating to the soil.

38:03 Here's a question on soil testing. The question is how do you test for soil carbon and if somebody wants to just talk maybe about a traditional soil test and maybe briefly talk about the Haney test as well. There are various tests for soil carbon. The Haney test can measure water extractable carbon. We can use combustion to measure organic carbon or organic matter. We can use acid to measure what sounds crazy but non organic carbon basically carbon that's tied up in things like calcium carbonate and other minerals in the soil. We can use CO2 respiration the CO2 burst test to get an indication of carbon. It's not going to be true to how much carbon there is but it will give an indication of carbon. And so there's various tests and there's even new technology all the time. We met with a young man just recently who's developed an optical sensor for carbon and it's about the size of a phone and you just lay it on the soil surface and it optically can measure carbon and it's got a pretty good correlation when you actually do the lab chemistry so there's various methods.

39:40 None of those methods are on your standard soil test though. If you just do a routine analysis with a university soil test you won't get an indication of carbon other than organic matter and that's going to measure that stable fraction of organic carbon in the soil the humus. But there's other tools to test for carbon and Haney's the one that I personally like the best. If you're not familiar with the Haney test you know get on YouTube and just search for Haney soil tests there'll be a number of good presentations on there talking about what that means.

40:21 Here's kind of an interesting one. You got something to say about okay all right well let you answer this one. How do you bring back land that has had

40:30 A salt or oil spill on it, well you open your mouth. Exactly, so Haney talks about the quality of carbon, I'm just going to ignore that. A question: hey salt spills, I grew up in Archer City. So one of the first things that I was doing for the district was pretty much whatever came through the door, and a guy brought me a sample and said, 'Here, I'd like to see what will grow on this.' And so I did an EC test—electrical conductivity—and there was no plant that I could find that would grow in that. Mudra grass was the closest with like 20-25 EC, and this was way above that. So a lot of those salt-affected soils really won't come back, and the reason why is because if you added enough gypsum, which is calcium sulfate, on top of the ground and watered it in, then the calcium would knock the sodium off of the soil colloid. So then the sodium that's affecting all that could be leached out with water down out of the profile. If you could do that, then you could get a plant to grow, but that takes irrigation, which we didn't have on any of those. And it would take a lot of gypsum with a lot of water to leech that out. So that process has to be done in order to reclaim those areas.

41:52 Some of them, if they're not that salty and if you can't get gypsum and have some big rains, you might be able to flush it out and get something started. I've seen people take hay bales and just line it over and over, year after year, and feed all your cattle down there, and that may get enough organic matter to just start getting little spots of growth. But really, what you need to do is take it, send it off to see what the EC is, find out if you're even close to a level where some plant that we have is adapted to those. So it's hard. Go test your soil, and then really it's about what resources you have. About oil, and I'm probably not the one to look at on that. I would say if it's just oil, it's not an issue. It's going to break down and decompose. You got carbon there—basically it's the saltwater that you have to worry about.

42:45 I grew up with an oil spill around our shop. We called it weed control, and that's where all the used oil went, years and years and years, 40 years of it, until my dad retired and I quit doing that. And after about five or six years, there's nothing left there. There's grass. Oils—not as big a deal as salt. Like Nathan said, get a test. There are some plants that can handle fairly salty soils. That's what you would need to start with. But yeah, you need to kind of have a baseline to know where you're at.

43:24 Here's a good question for the producers, or really anybody. You know, you can talk about other people you've seen. What are the one or two biggest changes that you've made on your farm in the last 20 years to increase your profitability? One or two biggest changes that you've made to increase your profitability: growing second crops after small grain crops. That was completely unheard of in our area. It couldn't be done because you spent all summer plowing it. I started 20 years ago, started growing soybeans, grain sorghum, millet, scout bees, all these other crops that almost always made more money than the wheat crop did. But I could grow the wheat crop, I could pay the rent, and then I had the rest of the summer to grow something else. And that's probably had the biggest thing. And that led me into the whole seed business. A lot of the seeds you grow for us comes as a second crop.

44:22 Yes, a lot of them come second crops because our season is so long. We'll actually wait after wheat harvest until we plant the second crop. We've got an extremely long season to.

44:37 Deal with and then that's also really adding to your soil health because you've got living root growing so much longer than anybody else. Right, we've got living roots basically all year and when winter crop comes out it's not very long before the next one goes back in. Yeah, everything Ellen talking about, but where that starts is between your ears and you've got to change the mindset of the traditional production system and not being afraid of growing something 24/7, 365.

45:16 We try to keep something green in front of our cattle 365 days a year. When we started in that process the neighbor said you can't do that because you're going to use all your water, you're going to plant a second crop behind wheat, you just, we can't even grow one well. Yeah, you can't because you're tilling it, you're mismanaging the system, and we get plenty of rain normally. Now there's going to be droughts and there's going to be wet spells, but on the average in lady Oklahoma I get plenty of rainfall if I manage that by getting it in the ground and protect it down deep enough where we don't evaporate that. The problem is most of the neighbors and the friends that I've got run their water off out of the field and so yes, they're very stressed to raise one crop.

46:09 Once we got that between our ears and understood the water cycle system and aggregation and the cover crop system, then it's just like Alan said, it's no problem for us to grow two crops a year and cover crops in between. I don't have 20 years experience here but I've got 18 and the guys that I have seen the changes that they've made, that I think I could paint a broad brush across the board, is they've got out of the commodity business and they found a marketing niche, whether that's getting out of commodity beef that just go across the scale and going into selling pasture-fed retail cuts or whether that's getting out of commodity wheat that just goes across the scale and maybe as simple as having your own on-farm storage so that you can market it when and where you want. If you're going to grow grains you're going to pay for storage, it's going to be yours or it's going to be somebody else's.

47:20 I'll tell you, if you didn't come to my field day, I'm just getting into cattle and this is thanks Jimmy, not so much on the experience side, but if I didn't have another way to cut back costs I wouldn't be getting livestock. Basically what I'm looking at trying to do with the system is moving once a day grazing forages all year round, not feeding hay. One, equipment is expensive. The little equipment that I can use, Allen is letting me rent. Allen has given me a great opportunity to run cattle on some of his gaps that he doesn't, isn't filling, so that gives me a good opportunity, but the way I see it is I cannot afford large capital items to get into it.

48:15 Paul, yours really cheap. I don't even use a four-wheeler at the moment and I'm, it's taking me 45 minutes to an hour a day to move cows right now. So and you know how long does it take time to feed hay, bale hay, haul manure back out to the field? You figure up those times it's probably 4 to 5 hours in a day just doing all that other work. So that's how I see it as an opportunity for me to get in, or somebody that has been in livestock for 20 years, cut back on some of your capital expenses. Maintenance is another huge one. There's not going to be much maintenance for me so far.

49:02 So just as in nature, stability comes with diversity. So stacking enterprises and diversifying portfolio is the way to be more efficient. That's what gol said. All right, I think that's an excellent way to end the day. Let's give these guys a hand.