Cover Crops and Livestock Integration: Economics and Soil Health Across Regions

0:08 I'm going to talk a little bit about bricks today but I saw a bunch of you grazing on bricks at the break this morning with all those donuts and breakfast pastries and of course we had some more bricks with dessert after lunch there.

0:25 So what I want to do this afternoon is I want to talk about the integration of cover crops and livestock into cropping operations and all of that and we're going to talk about some of the things that we're doing in different regions of the country and we're going to talk about some of the economics associated with that.

0:47 Some of the things that we do in conjunction with this, I'm working with AABON and various State Departments of Conservation as well as Departments of Natural Resources and so forth. We have developed what we call bird friendly grazing protocols and we are implementing those on ranches across the US. One of the areas that we're concentrating on predominantly is the Midwest and the Great Plains and the Northern Plains particularly relative to Grassland bird habitat.

1:25 We've also worked very heavily on stream restoration and we've done a lot of this work out west and in the Upper Midwest where we've taken trout streams and basically recharge those streams using grazing methodologies to achieve that. Which is really sort of the antithesis of what we keep being told we need to get the cattle off the streams but actually what we find is that using the right time type of adaptive grazing we can take cattle and actually refurbish a stream and make it a very valuable fishery and a very healthy fishery.

2:10 You know all of us have families and my in-laws live in Houston Texas and very early on after my wife and I got married it was sort of our tradition to go down to Houston for Thanksgiving. Now I like all of my meats whether it's poultry beef, doesn't matter what it is. You know like for instance all my beef I eat it medium rare so I like my meats juicy. My mother-in-law grew up in an error or at least maybe it was her neck of the woods but she believes in cooking meat to death. I mean she wants to make dang sure it's dead.

3:02 So every Thanksgiving during those early years we would have what I now call the great turkey Wars. And so when she would go to roast the turkey you know I would sort of slip into the kitchen and turn the oven down because she was one of those cooks that always cooks on time. Whenever the buzzer sounded the bird was done. So I figured if I could turn the temp down you know it'd be a little juicier when the buzzer sounded. Well she caught on to that fairly quickly and so she would walk by and turn the temp back up and I would walk by and turn it back down and all of that.

3:41 The other thing though that she likes is she likes the biggest turkey she can buy. I mean absolutely as heavy as possible. But my wife has a fairly large family so she wanted to feed a lot of people with one bird. So one day she was in the grocery store in Houston there just prior to Thanksgiving and she was selecting her turkey and she likes to go by the heft of the bird. She doesn't trust the pounds written on the package. So she was at that bin and she would pick up a turkey and sort of feel of it and set it aside and then she'd reach down pick up the next one and heft it and set it aside and she kept doing that till she picked up the very last turkey in the bin and felt it and she noticed a stock boy standing over there leaning on a broom. He had been watching her this whole time and she turned to the stock boy and she said Son did these turkeys get any bigger and he said no ma'am they're dead.

4:55 Now you most of you in here probably have kids and or grandkids. We talked a little bit about that yesterday so that may make you feel some days about like this boy you have exceeded the limitations of my medication. So let's define part of our problem in agriculture today. We've been talking about it over the last two days.

5:22 Various speakers have highlighted a number of different challenges that we're facing. Number one is if we're not careful in the western section of the country, and especially the western portion of the Midwest, we're headed fast back to another 1930s dust bowl. This picture here is a satellite image of a dust storm in the middle of January in Western Kansas and Eastern Colorado. In the middle of January, it shouldn't be happening, shouldn't be happening any time of the year, but especially in the middle of January. And that's what that same dust storm looked like at ground level. Now we're seeing these dust storms more and more frequently over the last 45 years. So they are becoming more frequent, more of a problem.

6:12 Another thing that we're experiencing, and I'm working with a number of foundations—the Windrock, the Walton family, the grace foundation, and a handful of others—on a project that we call the pastor project. But the ultimate objective of that project is to significantly reduce the dead zone, the creation of the dead zone each year in the Gulf of Mexico. You know, and that thing extending anywhere from 4,000 to over 8,000 square miles each year. So that's another problem, the hypoxia problem. And it's not only in the Gulf of Mexico, it's in the Chesapeake Bay drainage area and so forth. And the honest truth is, folks, if we in agriculture don't solve some of these issues first, we're going to have government breathing down our necks, you know, wanting to solve them for us. And I don't think we're going to be happy with what they are going to tell us we have to do.

7:07 Another issue that we're facing is grassland being plowed under more and more and turned into row crop ground. And particularly during the years in the late 2000s when we had high dollar corn, high dollar beans, we saw this at an extremely rapid pace. And these are several Upper Midwest states as you can see here. And all of the blue—it's almost like a weather radar where you see the yellows and the reds—that's where we had the greatest concentration of acres plowed under from grassland and turned into row crop ground. And most of that, when you drive through all of these areas, it's very, very marginal ground. It should stay in grassland and not be put in row crop ground. And so basically what has happened since 2006 in the Upper Midwest, we have had more than 8.4 million acres that have transitioned from grassland into row crop ground. So again, we have a number of different issues that we're facing here, and it's incumbent upon us to address those issues.

8:32 So if we look at some of the problems as identified by various researchers across the US, and these are statements coming directly from their peer-reviewed publications, first of all you see the statement that the problems of many current tillage-based cropping systems can be aided by ecologically sensitive practices. And basically what we're looking at here is the integration of cover crops and livestock as we're going to talk about today. And some of the benefits that we've seen from the integration of cover crops and livestock is documented in these studies has been increased carbon sequestration, improved soil nutrient cycling, accelerated soil stability, enhanced watershed function, and enhanced biodiversity and wildlife habitat.

9:35 Now, according to Dr. Richard Teague, he makes a statement that common tillage practices and application of inorganic fertilizers and herbicides have reduced soil surface cover and have decimated soil microbial communities that control our soil ecosystem. So collectively, these crop production inputs have contributed to the degradation of physical, chemical, and biological properties of soils. And again, as we go down through here, you can read this list, and you see declining microbial communities, declining soil function, declining organic matter, declining water infiltration rates. All of these issues are becoming more and more pronounced and are becoming very well documented in our scientific literature.

10:37 So what they're proposing and what we're proposing is the incorporate the reincorporation—this used to be common practice, but over the last several—

10:50 Decades, you know, particularly after World War II, we very quickly moved away from the incorporation of livestock into our farming operations. And so over the last several decades, the honest truth is, to a lot of farmers today it is an absolute foreign practice to incorporate livestock. And when you talk to a lot of farmers about that, every connotation that they have about incorporation of livestock is what, it's negative, isn't it? That's immediately what you hear—all the negatives that they believe livestock do to their ground, to their soil. And therefore they want them all gone. They want them off of the farms to the point that most farmers have ripped up all their fences. They've ripped up, taken out all the water systems and everything else. So they don't even have the infrastructure anymore for the livestock.

11:51 But again, according to Richard Teague and many others, ruminants reintroduced to our farmland ecosystems are extremely beneficial, particularly when appropriately managed. And we're going to talk a little bit more about that today. We did yesterday with our adaptive grazing. We're sort of going to reiterate that today. But again, when we look at a lot of the things that they're finding, the beneficial effects when you reincorporate cover crops and livestock include increased water infiltration, improved water catchment, greater biodiversity, improved ecosystem stability and resilience, and improved carbon sequestration.

12:39 And again, you can see some of the benefits here of that that have been documented in some of the literature from reincorporating livestock into the systems. Again, I'm not going to take a lot of time with this slide. You will have access to the presentation. So we're going to move forward to some of the actual things that we're doing out there and talk about that. This is some of the data that was collected by us. We collectively did some of this within the PASTOR project and then the Driftless Area Management Team up in Wisconsin and a handful of others at University of Wisconsin Madison and so forth. But what you're seeing here is you're seeing the impact of various types of farming and grazing systems on topsoil loss.

13:37 If you look over on that far right-hand column, that is a typical row cropping system in Wisconsin and that's the degree of documented annual topsoil loss. Annual, okay? If you look at the next column, that sort of purplish column there, that's the typical dairy cropping system in the state of Wisconsin. So conventional dairy operations in their cropping systems, okay? That's the degree of soil loss annually that we're seeing there. Now, when you look over further to the left, those columns that you can barely see, that's using adaptive grazing practices. Okay, so we've pretty much been able to mitigate topsoil loss again through the application of proper grazing practices.

14:30 So let's look at some work first of all from Friend Lubers and co-workers. What they were doing, and this was a rather simple project that they did—they were not using complex cover crop mixes—but yet their data still was very relative to what we're talking about here. So they conducted a 4-year trial from 2002 to 2005 and they compared a corn-rye cover crop and a wheat-millet cover crop rotation. And they looked at both a disttill and a no-till situation. And then they looked at the impact with just the row cropping and cover crop only. And then they looked at the impact of the cover crop and row crops with cattle integration.

15:29 And so here's what they found, okay? You can see that in the corn with the rye planted as the cover crop, we had—and again, keep in mind the time period here and the price of grain and so forth—but they only had returns per acre ranging from the distill to no-till of $6 to $37. And then in the wheat and pearl millet, it was $6 to $5 return per acre. However, when livestock were integrated into the system, it totally reversed that situation, okay? So in essence, they weren't making any money, you know, with the row crops and that singular cover crop. But when they did integrate livestock into that system, you can see that net returns per acre increased significantly over just the row crops alone.

16:30 Grain cover crop alone. So there, conclusions from this particular trial were that investing in cattle and cover crops increased return per acre by more than $100 annually over the 4-year period. It improved their soil microbial biomass. Now in the way that they were grazing — they were grazing in sort of a what I would call a slow rotation with low stock densities — they found that it had no effect on soil compaction, and they viewed this as favorable because obviously the typical connotation is that the cattle are going to further compact the soil, and they found no negative impact on soil compaction. It did improve water infiltration rates and it contributed to increased soil organic matter.

17:26 Now the USDA ARS in Georgia did a study in the southern part of the state, and down there of course you got the coastal plains and sandier soils, so they grow a lot of cotton and peanuts in rotation. So what they found in this particular study, they looked at the typical cotton-peanut-cotton rotation and they integrated cover crops into those for the winter months, and you can compare the yields in 2001, 2, and 3 for the ungrazed control versus when they added in livestock, and you can see that the yields weren't tremendously different but they were steadily increasing as we went from year one to year three. In this particular trial, these were the crop values for those years for each individual crop, and then you can look at the cattle average daily gains across the years, their gain per acre, the value of that gain at the 2001, 2, and 3 value, but then I went back also and calculated the value of that gain currently in today's dollars, and again you can see that the value of gain ranged from about $250 per acre down to what is that, 100? Well, almost 300 down to 140, so still $200 to $300 basically.

19:28 All right, in a Canadian study they looked at the integration of cover crops and cattle into road cropping operations, and again where this was located — this was mostly across Saskatchewan and the eastern portions of Alberta Province — so most of the crops being grown there were small grains. But what they found here was when they integrated cover crops and cattle, first of all they noticed that they had significant suppression of the soil seed weed bank, so significant suppression of weeds as well as suppression of the soil reservoir of pest and pathogens. They increased their beneficial soil microbes and nutrient availability, and out of 253 participating farmers — so this was quite a few farmers participating in this study — 80% reported a reduction in weed pressure following the grazing and 68% reported higher grain yields following the grazing, so again very favorable results in that particular study.

20:44 Now this is a study that we have currently ongoing, and I'm one of the principal investigators involved in this particular one, but we're conducting this study in the upper Midwest. We're looking at the states of Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, so those states are where we have participating producers, and what we're doing is we're looking again at the integration of cover crops and livestock into a typical upper Midwestern corn-soybean row crop rotation. We are aerially seeding — and yesterday I was talking about that and I forget who I was talking to and they were having trouble with my Mississippi accent so they thought I was saying 'air seating' — so I'm talking about airplane seeding. We're airplane seeding into the existing crop prior to harvest. So that's how we put there. We're probably about half and half. About half we're using an airplane and flying on, and the other half we're seeding immediately following crop removal, crop harvest. We're averaging about one to two grazings in the fall and then about two to four grazings in the spring prior to preparing that ground and replanting, and we're monitoring a host of soil health.

22:20 Animal performance and crop performance data points we have 16 participating farmers and ranchers in that particular state. Some of the Cooperators or the other institutions and agencies and so forth that we're working with in this particular trial include the Pastor Project of the Windrock Foundation, Practical Farmers of Iowa, the Sustainable Farming Association, the USDA NRCS, University of Wisconsin Madison, Iowa State University, and the Minnesota Cooperative Extension Service. And we're also forging farmer grazer relationships and partnerships.

23:03 Here's what we're finding: a lot of farmers are starting to see and understand the benefit of cover crop and livestock integration, but they still don't want to own and manage the livestock. They would love to have the impact on their land, but they don't want to do it. So what we're doing is we are matching up these farmers with adaptive high stock density grazers who want access to additional acreage. And we're being fairly successful at that, and that's key to this program. Actually, in every one of these instances out of these 16, 13 of them are farmer grazer partnerships, and only three are farmer owned and operated livestock operations and they're reintroducing the livestock themselves.

24:04 So none of the 16 had livestock prior to initiating this project on their farms. They had long ago gotten rid of all of their livestock or never had livestock in their particular lifetimes. These are some of the data points that we're collecting. So we're looking at and we're collecting baseline data on all of these and then doing twice annual measurements on these each year as well. So soil compaction, water infiltration rates, all the soil fertility and health parameters, which include organic matter, soil organic carbon fractions both inorganic and organic. We're looking at bulk densities, we're looking at livestock gains, gain per acre, animal unit days. We're also looking at plant Brix and plant tissue analysis. We're looking at crop yields and then the economic data. So we have an economist involved in this as well.

25:07 These are some of the cool season cocktail mixes that we're using in this particular trial. Nothing new to any of you, you would all recognize this type of mix pretty readily, but this just gives you an idea of what we're doing. And then these are pictures of some of our cooperative farmers. That's Bruce Carney over there that you see in that one picture in Iowa. Bruce is the grazer, he's not the farmer, he's the grazer. So again we matched him up with a neighbor of his to get this done.

25:41 Now here's some of the results and we're just early on into this, but here's some of the results that we have seen so far. And again, this is a multi-year project. We're going to be running this project at least four years so we'll have a lot of really good data to come out of this that we can present later on. But right now what we've noticed is we're adding an average of another $150 per acre in revenue with the livestock integration. We have reduced crop fertilization by anywhere from 35 to 45%, particularly cutting nitrogen 35 to 45%. Water infiltration rates have increased more than 300%. And we've only had one round so far. That's pretty good, but let me tell you where we started on most of these farms: it was below an inch, and on some it was below a half inch. So 300% isn't that great yet, but it's still a lot better than where they were. They just weren't hardly keeping any water. Organic matter has already increased 40%, and the soil compaction has been reduced by 27% so far.

27:00 So that's some of the data that we've seen to date. I'm also working with some guys down in the South Georgia, Florida Panhandle area. And I showed you the research earlier from the USDA looking at the cotton peanut cotton rotations and the integration of livestock into that with cover crops. But this is, these are real producers here. This is not research, this is actual production in the field. And so again, what we're doing is we've got more than 20,000 stocker calves annually moving through farmer operations down there. And so we've started with the cool season plantings and grazing through the cool season cocktails, but now we have farmers that

27:47 The impact has been so significant that they are now wanting to move to full year rotations so that we now keep portions of their farmland out of crop production for an entire year and keep them in cattle production for an entire year. So what that means is that we're going a cool season, a warm season, and a cool season cover crop grazing prior to going back and putting in cotton or peanuts again. Okay, so that's a lot of impact, and when farmers are willing to do that, that's telling you that they're really starting to see the economics of this.

28:36 These are some of the fields down there, and I'm going to tell you now, a lot of these fields, you know, they're very, again this is Coastal Plain, they're very sandy. You know, organic matter where we started in a lot of these fields was very, very low. For most of these fields it was below 1%. Okay, and CEC's were way down in the single digits. So we're seeing significantly increased productivity, and again here's cattle grazing the warm seasons.

29:08 Another fairly recent development is I'm working with Delta Farm, and Farm is an acronym for Farmers Advocating Resource Management. And this is also associated with another organization called Delta Wildlife. But I'm working with some of their personnel, and they're working with quite a few farmers in the Mississippi Delta there. And then I'm working with additional farmers in the Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas Delta, and they are highly, highly interested now in the integration of cover crops, which is where they started two to three years ago. But now they're seeing, you know, they don't feel like they're making rapid enough progress with that alone. So what they're wanting to do is now introduce livestock.

30:06 We had a big meeting in Yazoo City, Mississippi last week, and we're going to be dropping some cattle on the ground here on a few operations in just two weeks. Okay, and we're going to continue with that. And we actually already have farmers who haven't done any livestock integration yet that have already said, you know, what, I'm not making much money anyway on this corn and beans. So, and 2016 don't look to be that promising a year. So, you know, we're interested in looking at this four-year rotation deal. That's exciting.

30:47 So we've got farmers that are already agreeing to do a full-year rotation. And in this network of farmers that I'm working with, over one million acres is represented. Okay, so we have the opportunity here to be quite impactful. And of course, most of these farms, you know, being right there in the Delta, this could also have a very, very strong impact in terms of reduction of harmful runoff and reduction of flooding problems.

31:23 You know, I've talked to a number of you over the last couple of days about this, but I am absolutely convinced with the data that we've been collecting across North America that if we can rebuild our organic matter and water infiltration rates, we will significantly reduce drought and flood issues that we're currently experiencing in North America. We can significantly and positively impact those now.

31:55 Again, though, in this particular situation, these farmers in the Delta, again 80 plus percent of them do not want to own and control and graze the livestock themselves. And the Delta folks down there, what do they want to do in the winter time? Hunt. That's right, okay. Hunt. And they don't want anything interfering with their hunting time. Okay, so, you know, it's a lifestyle, right? And they've become very, very used to this lifestyle. And they view livestock, if they have to run them, is something that interferes with a pretty darn good lifestyle. So they're quite happy for us to match up grazers to come in and do all of that for them and let them continue to do their hunting and everything. You know, everybody in Delta has their hunting clubs, you know, and all of that.

32:47 These are some pictures that I took last week there of the cover crops that are growing now. This top left, that's a neighbor field connected with one of these farmers that's not doing any cover cropping or anything like that at all. More very, very conventional in what they're doing. And then just right across that little dirt road there is this particular farm. And over in the bottom right-hand picture, you can see the depth already of

33:18 These tap roots from these radishes, okay, they're very, very happy with that. We did some preliminary measurement on soil compaction and water infiltration that kind of thing last week. Again, water infiltration very poor, so hard pan starting at about 6 inches, okay, and they're very concerned about that.

33:41 Now this is at Gay Brown's up there near Bismarck, North Dakota, and he's grazing the cover crops. I think he was here last year. He probably showed this picture, but this is grazing cover crops in the winter on one of his row crop fields. Pay attention to that tree back there. This is the value of those cover crops that he was grazing as it stood okay there in the dead of winter. So you can see that the millet and the sorghum sudan grass maintained very, very nice nutritive value in terms of crude protein and TDN. This is the value of the hay vetch that they were grazing, and that's the value of the radishes in that mix that they were grazing, okay, in the dead of winter.

34:33 And then this is what that farm looked like in next year's corn crop, the following year's corn crop, okay.

34:44 Now I've been to Gabe's quite a few times, but we were up there. I took some people up there last year in August, and so we were just walking out in fields in the dead of August, you know, and it was about 95, 96 degrees that day, and it had been pretty hot and dry there. And we just took the spade with us, you know, and out in the middle of these fields, no shade anywhere, you know, we would just stop wherever we wanted to just randomly and dig up a spade full of dirt, and every single one we have earthworms. We didn't fail to find earthworms in a single spade full, okay. Middle of August, 95, 96 degrees, no shade, earthworms with every single spade full.

35:38 Then we went across the road to his neighbor's farm, okay, and we actually tried to do it earlier in the day, but his neighbor happened to be close by, so Gabe said, well, we better wait. So we waited. He saw his neighbor drive off to town. He said, okay, now we can go on over there. So he walked into his neighbor's field and did the same thing. And now keep in mind that this guy's been living across from Gabe for more than 20 years, okay, so he's seen everything that's gone on over just right across the road. But he's still farming very, very conventionally. When we went over there, first of all, there was no—you noticed as you were walking through the field you weren't kicking up any kind of life. There were no grasshoppers or any insects, you know, clouding up, billowing up in front of you. You know, there were no spider webs, no spiders, no anything. I mean, there was no visible life to be seen on the soil surface. We couldn't find any anywhere. And then when we dug up the soil, it was what we would call dead soil, basically sterile soil. There was no life in the soil, no texture to the soil, okay. It was just dead soil.

37:05 Now we've talked about livestock integration. So what's the value of their manure as a fertilizer, okay? So first of all, if we look at it in terms of NPK, what's in manure, okay, what's in it right on a per cow per day production basis, we've got .23 nitrogen, .15 phosphorus, .52 potassium, okay, or 85, 57, 190 per cow per year, all right. So if we take 100 cows times 11 days per acre, they apply 256, 156, 572. Now think about that, okay, think about that. But to get that applied evenly, you have to use the proper grazing methodology, okay. If you've got very low stock densities, you got those cattle too spread out, you know, you're not rotating frequently, then you're going to get that here and there and there, but it's not going to be even, okay. So the movement frequency and the stock densities have everything to do with influencing the evenness of the distribution of that NPK value.

38:45 Now here's the other thing, and I think it was Darren that mentioned this this morning, but again, armor or cover on the soil, okay, and we do this all the time. This is something that's very visual to farmers, and you can make a point very

44:39 Accurate with what you're doing and make sure that you're collecting them properly doing them at the right time of day right conditions all of that so that your results are comparable. What we have found and Brix is a measure not a lot of people associate it with just plant sugars. For instance the wine industry, the vineyard industry has used refractometers and measure Brix on grapes for a long time to determine optimum sugar content for picking grapes for various types of wine production. But it's not just a measure of plant sucrose and fructans and all of that but it's also a measure of plant proteins minerals free amino acids lipids and plants. So it's a combination of all of that that you're measuring.

45:35 One of the things that we have found is that for the vast majority of forages that we're using to achieve the best Brix content on a repeatable basis they need to be slightly beyond midstage of maturity. And we grass finish a lot of cattle. This is very important to us to get high level and economical grass finishing. So that's when we target turning our finishing steers and heifers into new paddocks is when we're at or slightly beyond midstage of maturity because that's when the Brix typically tends to be highest in most of our plant leaf and blade material.

46:23 Now this is some data that we've collected looking at in various states looking at plant Brix where we've compared adaptive grazing to conventional grazing. And you can see that and we've got Mississippi Louisiana Alabama Virginia Pennsylvania Kentucky represented in this particular slide but you can see in every instance we have higher Brix where we've used and implemented the adaptive grazing versus conventional grazing. So again we're getting a plant Brix response relative to the grazing methodology.

47:07 And here's why that's important. We have collected enough data now over the last 15 years to run some correlation analysis and regression analysis and what we have found is that for every 1% increase in plant Brix we're adding another 1/10 to 3/10 of a pound average daily gain.

47:36 Now when I go across the US east to west and it doesn't matter what type of forage and where I'm at the typical plant Brix when we first measure somebody where would you guess? Three two three? Okay two to five. Five is typically the best, two to 5% okay is the and again the higher the percent the better okay for those of you that aren't familiar with this. So that's what we're typically finding.

48:14 And here's the deal without supplementation. Okay if the plant Brix is 5% or less you can expect average daily gains no better than the low ones or less okay on the whole. If you have periods where the average daily gains are higher than that go measure your plant Brix. The plant Brix is higher during that particular period okay. When we can consistently get Brix in our pastures 15% or greater we now can achieve feedlot level average daily gains in grass finishing cattle okay on the exact same forages.

48:53 So a lot of people ask me what forage, what's the secret forage, what's the silver bullet forage or forage mix to plant for high quality effective economical grass finishing? There is none okay. Every forage can be either low Brix or high Brix, every forage that exists out there okay relative to the type of forage that it is. And so if we through our management practices can influence higher Brix in any forage, practically any forage will do a good job of putting high levels of gain on cattle okay. So the ability to increase Brix is very important.

49:37 And let me show you another reason why it's very important to increase Brix. That's very important, Mississippi and Louisiana, ain't it? So we're now our hunters are routinely killing and you know prior to implementation of these practices and increasing these Brix and these forages we were hard pressed to kill deer that were 120 class. That was a big deer okay it was a 120 class. This is a 175 in the picture okay.

50:14 And that's routine now our hunters can kill this kind of deer and a little better every year now okay so this is not the exception to the rule anymore and this influences the grass-fed beef potential okay what we can do there and as many of you know we also have an we own and operate a grass a branded program so we market grass high quality grass-fed beef and pastured poultry predominantly to restaurants and we're graded programs so we sell USDA Choice grass-fed beef to our restaurants but so this is the potential okay.

50:57 What's the federal quality grade stamp on that carcass can you read it says USDA prime doesn't it and that's 100% grass-fed and grass finish and that's a maturity that's not a B mat you can't have a prime B maturity carcass okay so that's not a 30-month or old or older animal most of our animals are 18 to 22 months when they're harvested.

51:21 This is again some of the grass-fed beef that we're producing just to show you what you can do okay when you get the right mix of forages in there the right grazing and you're able to raise that bricks up then it becomes relatively routine to be able to produce this type of beef and of course this will compete head-to-head with any of the grain high quality grain fed beef out there as well okay so it's readily achievable and of course that translates into a high quality eating experience.

51:56 Now the last thing I want to mention today is the and I sort of briefly hit on this yesterday there is a new technology I've been working with a lab that and as I said yesterday I've worked with a lot of different companies and their microbial products done a lot of field trial research across the US but this new technology has really got my attention and honestly I wasn't even aware of it till they brought it to my attention but it's called Quorum sensing and Quorum quenching.

52:30 And as I said yesterday Quorum sensing is just simple all of this is just simply a communication among microbes okay it's the it's their communication pathway.

52:44 So utilizing this Quorum sensing technology we've been able we've worked with this with quite a few clients in different regions of the country different crop types and we've been able to design a product that has helped them to kick start biological activity in the soil.

53:04 Now I've been very honest and I've told them you know my goal is we're we don't want to have to use something like fertilizer that you have to use every single year so the intention is you know if the product works the intention is that with management practices you know do the quick start and then wean off of anything like this okay.

53:29 And frankly they're fine with that I mean the honest answer they gave me and I love the answer they gave me because it is very honest they said Allan it doesn't matter there's a ton of farmers that are never going to change their management practices so they're going to need our product every year anyway and then they said then there's others that you know are going to be transitioning and there's so many of them out there that even if they're transitioning and transitioning off we're going to get new ones transitioning in so they're not even worried about it.

53:56 And they're also selling into the they're selling to M Oak they've got products for Moke and Bonnie plant so they're selling to the homeowners and all that so you know so they're pretty good with working with me on this type of project and the honest truth is a lot of the other companies weren't interested in that kind of thing because they just wanted to keep selling product over and over again to the exact same people.

54:24 But basically one of the reasons that I'm interested in is because it's probably one of the most effective and natural systems designed by nature and again there's a lot of research out there predominantly in the human microbial area about Quorum sensing but microbes are microbes they all communicate the same way and the other thing that allows you to do is custom and so from my standpoint as a consultant it allows me to custom design products very specific to any particular clients need so type crop types and so forth and you can even piggyback micronutrients with this as needed.

55:04 And I showed this picture yesterday but I'm going to show it again because I'm attaching data to it today this is the farmer in Southern Illinois that I

55:11 We mentioned yesterday that we went in and we've been integrating livestock cover crops and then we also use some Quorum sensing technology with this farmer and again all of those arrow yellow errors are pointing to worm castings, wormholes and earthworms and all of that. Remember I said yesterday we couldn't find any area in more than 2500 acres of corn that didn't have evidence of worms and worm castings.

55:38 This is some of the data that we've collected so far. When we first started this was pre-test, so this was pre-plant in 2014. In the spring of 2014, his soil pH was averaging 6.5, organic matter 2.4%, the CEC 10.3 and then you can see the PK, calcium, magnesium all of that. By harvest time, right after harvest of this past year in 2015, we went back in and took these same measurements and he had increased soil pH to 7.3 with no lime application. There was no lime application here. Organic matter had increased to 3.5%, CEC to 15.8 and we had significant increases in PK, calcium. And on top of that, on that particular corn crop he cut nitrogen application 55% and actually yielded another 2 and a 1/2 bushels per acre with cutting it 55%.

56:48 This is a trial we did in Minnesota in the potato growing region up there, looking at russet type potatoes and again we were comparing conventional fertilization to the incorporation of some Quorum sensing technology. These are just some pictures of collecting the potatoes from the various treatment groups and running some of our measurements. That lower right hand picture is measuring brix and the potatoes we measured it both in the plants and the potatoes.

57:26 Here's some of the treatment areas that you see there and here's the results. What we found is one of the things that we noticed was that both the plant brix and the brix of the potatoes that we harvested were significantly higher in the treatment where we applied the Quorum product, the Quorum sensing product versus the control. And then when we get to yields, you can see that they did have significantly higher yields where the Quorum product was applied and when we went in and we looked at soil microbiological activity it was significantly higher. Total living microbial biomass, our ratios were better, all the profiles were significantly better. They ended up over $600 per acre to the good in this particular trial.

58:28 Then we also did a cattle gain trial, forage trial in Mississippi, basically doing the same thing. This was a farm that we hadn't worked with before so this was the very first time we had worked with them. We went in, applied 60 units of nitrogen per acre to the control and that served as the control. Then we had two different treatments with Quorum sensing product: one was with a 50% reduction in the nitrogen rate and the full Quorum sensing product rate, and then the second was just the full Quorum sensing rate. Three 4-acre paddocks stocked at two head per acre. Calves were randomly weighed and randomly assigned treatments for 75-day grazing trial. It was a warm season perennial mix. There were also some white and red clovers in the mix as well.

59:29 This is applying the treatment so it was applied as a liquid and sprayed on. We did a lot of preliminary baseline measurements ahead of the start of the trial and then these are some of the results. Some of the things that I want to point out here, you can see the start weight and ending weight of the calves and then the average daily gain. We significantly increased average daily gain over the control with both of the other treatments but you also see what happened with plant brix. The other thing that you notice is what soil temperature was lower. Why do you think that was? When you actually look at those paddocks, we had denser swards of forage, much more shading and moisture retention where we had the treatment. And again, here you can see the bottom line, the economic data here. Basically in the two treatments compared to the control, we ended up anywhere from $117 to over $300 to the good compared to the control.

1:00:44 In the control, the cost of what—typically it's coming in, and again it's custom design, but typically my experience has been they've been able to come in on the average somewhere between $16 and $20 per acre is the average treatment cost, right around in there. So that was significantly less than the nitrogen treatment—the cost of the nitrogen treatment on a per acre basis—but that's been the typical cost.

1:01:25 Okay, in some instances when we get down into the very low organic matter soils, it's running up to $30 per acre to address those issues. But in most instances it's been in that 16 to 20 range, is what they've been able to deliver at. So pretty reasonable compared to a lot of products.

1:01:46 This is another one where a cover crop—summer annual cover crop was planted—and again treated versus control. The Quorum sensing product was applied right after planting on both the treated and the control. These were both drilled in on the same day, and you can see quite a significant result in plant response. And again, same thing here. We had multiple treatments of this across the same farm, and pretty much wherever we did this, you can see quite a stark contrast in the results and the plant response.

1:02:32 And then the very last thing I want to mention—and I mentioned this a little bit yesterday—you know, I am working with these guys, helping them and being able to decipher and further develop their technology. But the folks developing PastorMap app, you know, I've really found this to be quite helpful. So any of you that are grazing, you may want to take a look at that. The PastorMap app, you know, it has quite a bit of capabilities. It is an iPhone or iPad based technology at this point in time, but you know, as I said, I think I mentioned yesterday, they're this year adding satellite flyover data, so you can download that and look at thermal reflectance data and that type of thing. So they've got a lot of pretty unique applications with this PastorMap technology that I'm really liking and enjoying using it myself. So I did want to mention that to you, and again, you can just Google them—Google PastorMap—and you can take a look at them if you have any interest in that as a tool to help manage your grazing and keep grazing records.

1:03:47 So, you know, anybody in here work for the government? Okay, you just close your ears right now. But yeah, we do, don't we? We all pay the government. But anyway, I got just this closing story to tell. You know, there was a guy that had to pull off the interstate and get some gas, there. And so he was fueling up, and he went inside the store to get himself a Coke to drink, and he walked back out. And he was sitting there waiting on the gas to quit pumping, and he was drinking his Coke, and he looked across the road there, and there were two fellas walking down the side of the road, and both of them had a shovel. You know, and the first guy would walk about 15 paces, stop, dig a hole, and go on, and kept doing the same thing. The guy behind him would come up behind him and take his shovel and fill in the hole. And they kept doing this. And so this guy kept watching those two fellas, and finally his curiosity got the better of him, and he said, 'I'm going to have to check this out,' so he walked across the road, and he said, 'Hey, what are y'all doing?' And the first guy said, 'Well, we're digging holes.' And the guy said, 'Well, yeah, I can see that, but I don't understand this fellow coming behind you—he just covers up the hole. What in the world is going on?' And he said, 'Well, you see, it's like this. There used to be three of us—it was me and then it was Elmer and Leroy back here. We work for the government, and our job is to plant trees. But a few weeks ago we had a budget cut, and they fired Elmer. And now there's just the two of us.'

1:06:03 But this is what it's all about, folks. It's about building for future generations. You know, we've talked about that a lot over the last two days. You know, I do—you know, Sam, you said earlier, you know, this is a ministry, and you're absolutely right. I consider this for all of us to be a ministry. You know, we're called to be good stewards, and this is something that, you know, we're to leave behind a better world for our kids, our grandkids, and those to come. And I take that very seriously. And I thank you all very much. I have tremendously enjoyed being here.