Diversity and Pest Management: What the Data Really Shows

0:04 All right hello there everybody. Everybody find a seat we're going to talk about bugs. So I am John Lundgren.

0:20 I work for a Dice Foundation and the Blue to Farm Initiative, so this is a non-profit 501c3. What we are trying to do is bring science to regenerative farming in a lot of ways. You guys in this room are leading the science. You guys know more about these regenerative systems than the scientists do. What we're trying to do is bring and do something a little bit different and bring the science to the farmers who are really trying to innovate things.

1:03 Blue your farm, this is who we are. We are located up in South Dakota right on the Minnesota border. This is the first of what we are hoping becomes a national network of centers for excellence and regenerative agriculture. What is regenerative agriculture? It is conserving soil and biodiversity while producing healthier food profitably. Real strong focus on using the tools that nature is giving us rather than fighting against it.

2:04 We are crowdfunded a hundred percent, no strings attached, because science is manipulated. It's a dirty world. Science is manipulated in a lot of cases. In order to distance us from that, we went out to the farmers and the beekeepers and their support network from around the world and we said if you believe that science is necessary to keep this moving forward, then please consider supporting us. Through small donations we crowdfunded a research facility that's never happened before. I think it gives a lot of credence to the fact that there's something really special going on right now that allows us our startup costs to be addressed. This allows us to answer the tough questions without worrying about where that next paycheck is gonna come from. We can be straight shooters with you. We can tell the truth.

3:12 What is our goals? First off, as I said before, we're going to be conducting cutting-edge research. The science has to be there. We have to have data because right now there is a preponderance of evidence that is being used to support the current paradigm and why this is working. The only way to fight such data is with fire. Next, education. We have graduate students that are passing through our program. We have partnerships with one university right now that is growing to two or three universities. We are training the next generation of scientists to think with systems as opposed to component research. Like, I'm an entomologist, I'm gonna work on bugs and ignore everything else that's in that system. That isn't getting us where we've got to go, folks. We're also developing an education curriculum to train the next generation.

4:18 Of beginning farmers not just training them in systems level thinking but also providing the support network so that as we reintegrate these young farmers back into their communities that they have somebody to rely on and somebody to help make sure that these guys and gals are successful. Because everybody in those communities are going to be watching, right? How are they doing? What are they doing? This stuff is crazy. And if they fail, nobody else is going to try it. We have to make sure this next generation is successful.

4:54 And finally we have an operating demonstration farm because as a scientist I can tell you that, and I'll maybe talk about this a little bit more in a while, but getting up here as a scientist and giving advice—oh gosh, you know, you should do this that and the other thing on your farm, and this is all of the data points to this, and as you can see from this p-value and these error bars on this graph, that this is exactly what you should be doing—that is distance from the real world. So we are putting our practices, all of what we're saying, into an operating farm. And I can tell you that I have never learned so much so quickly as when we have started to keep our own bees and trying to raise our own. We're supporting what we're doing using this Blue Dasher farm. So it gives us that connection.

6:00 Okay, alright, let's see and topology—that's what you all came here for, right? And Tamala G, when I tell people that I am an entomologist, they tell me that the only good bug is a dead bug. That is not true. That is not what we do. But it's understandable, right? Because entomologists estimate that around the world, there's around 3,500 species of insects that are pests. They eat our food. They eat our crops right out of the field. They eat our grain out of the bin. These little bastards, they bite our children in the night. They transmit disease. Insects have killed more soldiers than bullets or bombs through disease transmission. Insects have actually turned the tides of war. 3,500 species. We have got to kill these things, right? We've got to wipe insects off of the face of the earth. We can do it, yeah? There's all kinds of jugs you can buy. Any jug that you might want to, and it's got something that'll kill a bug. So let's spray it, right? Spray the world.

7:14 No. Because when we have a pest-centric mentality, not just towards insects but toward biodiversity in general, we forget that those pests are the minority. Not just a little minority, they are infinitesimally small. But that's hard to get off of the tongue. For every pest species that's out there, there's 1,700 species of insects that are helping us. That we would not be here if it was not for these insects. Entomologists value insects just in the United States at around 63 billion dollars annually. That's what they contribute to human society. How? Because insects, biodiversity is great in its own right, right? But it's great also because it does things. Biodiversity provides services. Services. What do insects do? Well, in a nutshell, they are the basis of complex food webs, okay? Anybody hunt, fish, watch birds? Yes? Four people? Four people do all of those things.

8:33 Right, if you like these things, think an insect. Without insects, we would not be able to support the wildlife that we enjoy for recreation. Anybody like fruits and vegetables? What proportion? Eighty bananas instead of the doughnuts over there? Fess up, all right, that's good, nice.

8:57 One in every three bites. I heard Clint was out here with you guys yesterday out at Jonathan's place. I really regret missing that. For one in every three bites that we eat is pollinated by an insect, and the pollinator crisis is very real. All right, this is a very real thing. This is not some imagination. This is not a cycle. Everybody like, oh, it's a cycle. We've lost bees before. No, folks, imagine losing 50 percent of your crop or your livestock every year for a decade. That is what we are asking the beekeepers to overcome every year. This is just the new normal. And we're go, the bees so go we. Everybody, no bees, no plants, no plants, no people. It's just that simple, all right.

9:59 And you guys, everybody in this room has a responsibility for the land that you manage, and you can make decisions that will help turn this tide. I hate to say it, but insects are a major component of human diets. In fact, European cultures are the only ones on the planet earth that do not rely on insects as a source of protein in their diet. Okay, anybody like crab legs or lobster? I hate to say it, but it's a big bug. It's a big bug, everybody.

10:38 Insects. Wow, what's going on out there? They mowing in December? That the drones coming to wipe me out? That could be all right.

10:51 Return nutrients to the soil. Here's the, yeah, you guys may have heard this yesterday, but here it is again. What's the cycle of things? You got nutrients of the soil. Plants take those nutrients up. Large ruminants and other herbivores come and eat those things, then they poop it out. They're the craps. It's all that nutrients. It's until we can make it bioavailable for the next generation of microbes. Thank you, insects, for that, right? In fact, I estimate that in a healthy crop round that we have more than one billion insects and 500,000 worms per acre. I measured this, okay? I've counted the little guys. Takes a long time. At that at a scale that's more almost half a percent of the total soil biomass is just living insects, okay? That's a significant source of carbon in its own right, all right. And we can manipulate that, right? We can manipulate those biological communities, so that's important, right? Soil health.

12:04 Soil biology is not just microbes. I love them, but come on, you can't even see the little guys. Insects are a really important component of that soil biology. They influence when and where the microbes live and vice versa. Insects are nature's insecticides. Predators, parasitoids restrict when and where your pests are going to occur. Anybody hear of a thing called sugarcane aphid? Yeah, maybe one or two. Guess what? It is a result of your farming practices that you have sugarcane aphid on your property, and we'll talk more about that later, okay? All right, insects are nature's herbicides through feeding on the seeds and the brown and the green.

12:59 Parts of the plants they restrict in shape where weed communities occur on your farm. We can use these as tools, right. We can use these. We often give advice as entomologist, go out there and kill this insect now because you will lose your farm if you don't. The reason are we presume that this is based on scientific information, that this is based on data. The reality is that this is not often true.

13:33 In eastern South Dakota we have a lot of corn and we'd been giving advice to corn producers: kill this bug now, buy this product, buy this jug, buy this bag of seeds and go out there and plant it because you need to kill these bugs. But when I looked into the scientific literature, we quickly realize that there had never been a concerted survey, scientific survey of when and where insects were actually occurring within corn fields in eastern South Dakota. This is a problem. These are not data-driven decisions at that point, right.

14:08 So we tried to remedy that. We looked at corn farms, 53 of them, that spanned a range of different conditions, but they had to be non-Bt and they had to be hopefully untreated with insecticides. This last qualification turned out to be impossible because neonicotinoid seed treatments are on about 95% of all corn acres right now, and they are being used unnecessarily, but you're paying for it, 10 to 15 dollars an acre, okay. And a lot of guys don't even know that they're doing it.

14:42 So what we found is that we would ask these farmers, have you used any insecticides on your corn? They would tell us no. Then we would go out there and we would look at their bag, and then we would explain, well you did use insecticides. Oh, well I just use the seed treatment. And like no, no, no, you don't understand, that is the insecticide, okay. That is the insecticide. So we're hoping that most of that was out by the time we surveyed these fields.

15:10 What did we find? We found a hundred and seven insect species. And by insects I mean anything with more than four legs and less than two legs, and that's just in the corn canopy, okay. Corn is not devoid of diversity, all right. There's quite a bit of species that live in these eastern South Dakota corn fields. A hundred and seven species. All these, though, only 7% of those species were primary pest. What is a primary pest? This is like the corn rootworm or the European corn borer, Western bean cutworm. At 53 farms, none of these were at economically threatening levels. Guys are spending two to three hundred dollars extra per bag to manage pests that aren't even there. That's stupid. That's a bad business decision, right. Who's telling you to do that? Guys who are selling the other bags of seed. That's who's telling you to do that. Question it. Question it.

16:22 Of these 107 species, 13% have some impact on corn, but they're very, they're viewed as neutrals, right. They're out there, they're nibbling here and there. They don't pay to manage. So what is the other 80% of species? We found nearly a hundred and fifty thousand predators per acre, just in the corn canopy. What are these predators? Ants, pirate bugs, lady beetles, damsel bugs, lace wings, spiders. That's a ton of predation.

17:00 So the question that I get is if we've got all these wonderful predators, then why do we still have these pests? And this is a question that I've had to try to answer myself over the years. Because in spouting off the power of diversity, if we've got that much, then why do we still have these pests out there? And I think that the conclusion is that we still don't have enough species. We have to be comparing, we have to look to natural systems to try to understand what's going on in our own cropland.

17:40 When we do that, we see that the corn and other crops that have replaced these other systems—and looking at the relative diversity in these things, this was done by one of my master students. He's almost finished up with his PhD down at Kansas State now. And he looked at Ryan, looked at entire plant and insect communities in prairies, pastures, and cornfields. Nobody has really ever done this before in eastern South Dakota. He counted everything—was a pain in the neck, all right. It's a lot of work to do these bio inventories.

18:20 What did he find? About 3,000 specimens of insects representing about 344 species of insects that were collected. A lot of these we're a little parasitoid wasp, but I'll talk about them in a minute. A lot of the other ones where these little black flies. We found a pair of identical twins, and we also found about 75 plant species in these different systems. So how are they distributed? Here is the total number of species—this is the prairie, this is the pasture, and this is corn. It has about a third, maybe a quarter of the species that used to be in these ancestral habitats.

19:06 Why is that important? Why is that important? Because decisions that are made on your farms influence when and that diversity, and that diversity influences when and where you have pest outbreaks. Here, each of these dots is a cornfield from that 53 cornfield study that we just did. This is a species diversity—high is good, low is bad. This is a pest density. This is log scale, sorry about that.

19:39 And what this is trying to tell you is that cornfields that have high diversity have very few pests. Cornfields that have no diversity or very low diversity is where the pests are occurring, all right. Community evenness—this means within that 107 species, are they all at equal abundances? Are they all over the place? An even community has everything in balance, right? Here we find the cornfields that have an even community have few pests. Cornfields that have outbreak species here, there, and everywhere are where your pests are coming into play.

20:24 Your decisions that foster diversity—what are those things? Planting cover crops, intercropping, rotations, field margins—those all foster diversity and will reduce your pest problems. They are systems that are resilient to pests. What lowers diversity? Insecticide use, right. Herbicide use, fungicide use, monocultures, right. How does this work? Whenever we have tried—this is not my opinion, this is demonstrated throughout history—whenever we have tried to replace mother nature with technology, mother nature turns around and kicks us in the crotch, right? Maybe not right away.

21:17 But eventually she plants one rain on us. Right, how does diversity work? It works in a lot of ways, in ways that we can't even hope to understand. That's humbling for a scientist to try to say or have to say is that we can't even begin to understand the complexity of the natural world, to understand all of the mechanisms that are at play here.

21:43 But we do know some things, and one of those ways that biodiversity works is with predation. So here we have aureus and city osis. Actually, there are these little guys, they're about yea big. You may have aureus Trista Kohler down here. They're kind of kissing cousins, and this is the soybean aphid. These pirate bugs, they have these mouth parts that they inject saliva into their prey, and then they digest them while they're still alive, suck up the juices. It's really cool, and here the aphid is, it's like squirting out of its cortical this anti-predator defense, and it's sticky and it binds to the mouth parts. Lots of cool stuff going on in the natural world.

22:26 Alright, so let's talk about this. Let's talk about predation and biodiversity. My slide is loading. There it is. Alright, this question right here is an, is it? It's actually been going around in the scientific literature for years and years, and if you get enough ecologists in the room they'll fight it out to the death, possibly to the death, alright, over this question.

22:58 Because as you increase diversity within a system, what are all those predators supposed to eat? Is this a good thing for pest management or a bad thing? If you put more predators into a system, then what are they going to eat? They're going to eat each other. And so who knows whether or not this is going on, and so we've tried to study this in very curtailed environments. We tried to bring this out of a field to understand this much better, alright.

23:25 Let me see if I can do this. We decided to choose, and I'm sorry to talk so much about corn, but you got to look at where I live. Okay, corn root worms. You guys grow plenty of corn down here, but you have a little bit different pest complex. Corn root worms though, you do have, if I'm not mistaken, the Mexican corn rootworm is a big deal. This is a beetle, it is a beetle pest.

23:51 The beetles find a corn crop in the fall and they lay their eggs at the base of the corn plants, and then in the spring, if you plant corn in that same spot, the larvae hatch and they burrow inside of the roots, which makes the plants fall over, very difficult to harvest, and it also reduces yields, okay.

24:15 So it's been recognized for a past, for over a hundred years, like a long, long time, and millions if not hundreds of millions of dollars of research money has gone into this to find out that no matter what we throw against the corn root worm, it turns around, it spits it back out at us, and then it flips us the bird, right? This has been an incredibly resilient pest. Thinking that we had it licked with crop rotation, right, corn-soybean rotation, comes about neck that really did a number on the root worm for a long time. It is now resistant, not once but twice, two different forms of resistance. The first is, instead of laying its eggs at the base of corn plant, it now lays.

25:06 Its eggs on the base of soybean plants and so that the next year it hatches into the corn phase of the rotation rather than vice versa so it's figured out what plants to lay its eggs and because it's figured out its rotation.

25:21 Number two as some of those if they involved a resistance by extending its diapause so instead of overwintering one year at now over winters two or three years so bypasses the soybean phase of the rotation that's a smart pest but don't worry everybody don't worry the answers all in the bag right it's all in the bag we've got BT corn seed and neonicotinoid seed treatments.

25:47 It took about three years for the corn rootworm to evolve resistance to BT corn and that resistance is now spreading. Neo Nix has not been documented but I don't know anybody that study in it I think people are too afraid quite frankly so when I began working on this entomologist that had spent their entire careers studying the corn rootworm told me that there was no predators nothing eats this thing like oh okay that that flies in the face of basic ecological knowledge but we decided to try to we tried to develop some new tools in order to study this question.

26:33 Okay number one is it's very difficult right because the larvae of these things live in corn roots under the ground you can't just watch predation going on what we did what we did is we stuck a pin through the so they wrote worms and then we put them out in the field so they can wriggle around and stuff and then we come and watch who came to eat them.

26:53 And what we were able to find is that as predation goes up on those little sentinels we find it within a plot within a cornfield that that is a general estimate of predation pressure within that corn plot and that that is negatively correlated with rut damaged by the rut worms in these fields so more predation less route damage by the corn rootworm.

27:17 We also develop some new tools looking at DNA so we weed catch predators in the field and then we chop off their heads and their butts and then we rip out their stomachs and then we look inside for rootworm DNA sequences and we can actually tell which species of predators are eating corn rootworm in the field and we've been able to identify dozens of species that are doing this so predation is a very real thing for the wrote worm.

27:54 Okay that's good so we could get back to that question that I was talking about earlier what happens with diversity in per day and predation of a key past we did this we decided to study this institute in cornfields all right we did this over two years 16 fields and then we infested those corn fields with our handy-dandy corn rootworm egg in fester this sucker is calibrated to deliver 3 or 1000 corn rootworm eggs per row foot all right so we infested our corn fields and then we took soil cores and we collected out the corn root worm larvae as well as entire insect communities that were out there.

28:40 We then tore out the digestive systems of the Predators and we analyzed more than 2000 individual predators using this genetic technique this is a beetle digestive tract isn't that cool you guys they've got a

33:05 To some kids about beetles and so she asked all of the entomology students, you know, hey, you know, give me some. And so I said, okay, here's some crab and beetles and here's some caterpillars. When you're ready for the show to start, put the caterpillars with the beetles. And so she comes back like a week later and I went to pick up my beetles and I'm like, how'd it go? She's like, well, you actually scared the children, John. You scared the children.

33:31 All right, so this is what often happens right in a normal field setting. Now cue video. This is the corn root worm larva predator, my big burly predator. She comes along, takes the bite and starts freaking out. Look at that. A hundred years we've been studying this. Past the flips over. This is what my kids do when we serve lasagna, flopping around on the floor. In a hundred years, nobody had ever described that the blood of the room had anti-predator properties. It's sticky. It instantly sticks to the predators' mouth parts and it has a chemical repellent to it that actually is repulsive to many predators.

34:27 We spent thousands of dollars developing these molecular assays to study predation events that may or may not be going on with great frequency in the field. So we did some more work on that and we can get back to the presentation. Then we find that this is not universally the case, that some predators, it depends on the types of mouth parts that they have. Beetles that have these chewing mandibles, they are particularly susceptible to the defense. But other predators like spiders that suck and ants that kind of eat are more fluid feeding. They do not seem to be as affected.

35:09 As an example, we had, I did the same assay with a wolf spider, which is freaky because they jump out of the petri dishes on you. I mean, well trained. And Tamala, just we're all sitting around and this, and we've all worked with spiders before, but there is just an 84-year-old. Okay, and so these itty-bitty wolf spiders are like jumping into our laps and people are coming in, why are you screaming so much? There's nothing we could do about it. Anyways.

35:38 So there's this spider takes a bite, right, just like what you saw of the rootworm. It takes a bite and it's like instantly like, oh, you taste like ass, you know. But instead of running away, it keeps its foot right on the rootworm and after a couple of minutes it turns over and it takes another bite and it's like, oh, you still taste like ass. But eventually by the third or fourth try, oh my goodness, I'm kicking things all over the place. All right, we find a place. There we go. Eventually it overcomes that prey's defense system and it's pretty cool to watch anyway.

36:14 So the sucking predators, okay, so this graph is prey consumption index. This is taken in the field. Sucking predators eat more root worms, both the eggs and the larvae, okay? That's what you were, that was the take-home message. So that means that sucking predators do not look at root worms like the orange creams chewing predators do. So we would expect to see this relationship between diversity and predation in the chewing predators but not the sucking predators and I wouldn't bring it up if I didn't.

36:48 Have the data show it here we see a nice flat line where the chew or sucking predators have no reaction regardless of how many species are in that corn community they always eat root worms at the same level but with the chewing predators it's like we have to saturate that predator community to force them to eat the least palatable prey items which happens to be our pests what is this mob grazing that's what it is right this is mob grazing and insects we've got to be saturating these communities in order to force the ecosystem services to work.

37:28 Cool huh it's about balance right it's about balance in these communities how do we get it folks this is simple reduce disturbance and increase diversity it's just that simple.

37:46 Regenerative systems I've talked to a lot of farmers there for general principles that the successful guys have number one stop tilling or dramatically reduce your tillage understand the tillage is a very damaging thing number two always have a living root in the soil number three more diversity is better than less diversity when it comes to plants number four we've got to integrate animals back into our cropping systems that's it the practices are gonna vary depending on where you live and how you apply these things there's lots of ways to skin a cat which is a horrible metaphor but it always works right.

38:39 Why does reducing disturbance happen this is it in a nutshell folks this is our problem we come in we kill all of the biology in the soil or a lot of it and then we plant thousands of acres of their fate of a single plant species that has been genetically selected for large seeds at the expense of just about every other defensive trait that that plant has ever had the first species to come in here are the primary pest we have eliminated all of the biotic resistance to that pest proliferation and we replace it with an agrochemical the more you use the more you gotta use it's an addiction it's an addiction by its very definition how do you increase diversity there's lots of weight there's lots of ways one of my good friends Dwayne Beck says that a one of his favorite sayings is in South Dakota we've got a great rotation of a lot of guys use its corn snow corn that is not diverse enough cotton cotton fallow cotton doesn't work doesn't work.

39:58 Science has consistently shown that a rotation of approximately seven years with at least two years in a perennial rotation or perennial crop is the best for maximizing the profitability of a cropping system over time okay.

40:17 Intercropping corn soybean rows have 30 inches in between them a bare soil let's use it right smaller crops more smaller plots more crop cover crops make a lot of ecological sense they connect growing seasons they provide biological fortitude to support biotic resistance to pests proliferation be it weeds be it fungi be it insects you name it right and you can make money off of them by grazing them field margins conservation strips these are not something to be mowed or hade these are a tool and I hope that Clint hit on this yesterday with this pollinator stuff these are a tool that.

41:05 You can then have spillover effects in your crop plan to reduce your input costs. These are worth money to you. I hate to say it but a zero tolerance policy toward weeds needs to go away. I understand there's constraints of weeds. We've gotten bit in the ass by weeds ourselves, but we need to understand that weeds are telling us something. If you've got a weed problem it's telling you something. These are early successional plants. You're giving them a space and they're going to take it.

41:37 Cover crops, let's put this into practice. All of this talk about diversity, how does this work? That's all well and good until we show that it actually works. We use cover crops, just a single species, because I was just getting into this: slender wheat grass. This is a native wheat grass species that's well adapted to our conditions. And then we compared it with corn grown in bare soil. We terminated the slender wheat grass in spring with an herbicide, so really what we're talking about is the residue left over from the wheat grass.

42:15 We then infested these different fields with corn rootworm, and we counted the pest populations as well as looked at what damage we got down on our hands and our knees. We sucked up with using these aspirators anything that was living on the soil surface. Here we've got our Sentinel RV. What this is is a caterpillar, or in this case a corn rootworm, that has had a pin stuck through its terminal segments. Then we put it out in the field and we come back and we watch who's eating it after an hour. We did this during the day and in the middle of the night. Inside projects we have, we've actually seen how long maggots can survive with a pin stuck through their butts, and they can complete their complete development like through adulthood, all with a pin stuck through there. But actually reminds me of some supervisors that I've had over the years.

43:17 This is what happened with predators in 2007. We've got the cover crops and the bare soil. We had a lot more predators in the cover crop: 300 predators per meter squared. It's a lot of predation potential. These are the pests. This is the youngest care larvae, this is the middle-aged larvae, these are the oldest larvae. We found no difference between cover crops and bare soil, no difference. And then in the third instar, we saw a 67% reduction in corn rootworm larvae, and this translated all the way up to the adult stage by the cover crops.

44:04 What happened? How did this work? Well, we think, and I've got some data that I haven't published yet, but I think what's going on is that when you have a cover crop on the ground, it changes the crop's physiology, the cash crop, and in this case it's changing the root physiology of the corn plant such that those older larvae that require a bigger root are needing a better host. As they leave the plant because the cover crop has changed their host plant, they leave the crop, and when they do, there's about three to four times as many predators that are there waiting to eat them. So it's the old one-two punch. That's how biodiversity works, not in a way that we can predict.

44:55 When we're going in something we have to sit back and observe and appreciate. This is what happened to the damage on the crop. We found that it was reduced in both years significantly just by having cover crops preceding your corn. OK, we've done the numbers on it. Now one of my master students Claire Look and she's just writing up her thesis now but we did some of this work on greens down in Bladen. We looked at a dozen fence line comparisons of proactive pest management versus reactive pest management in corn production. Proactive being oftentimes no-till and cover crops and they did not use any insecticides. The reactive was all in the bag, just conventional production, BT corn, neonics, just a very standard corn production. And these were best practices, right? This was not me putting this onto a research farm and saying this is the way the farmer should do it. This was the farmers themselves defined the practices and we just observed those practices.

46:11 We found that the cover crop fields, the corn fields, and I don't know how I'm going to publish this because it flies in the face of everything that we know, the insecticide treated corn fields had tenfold more pests. The two treatments had equivalent yield. So when you hear this argument well we've got to feed the world, that's bullcrap, right? That we cannot feed the world with soil health, that drives me up the wall. Number three, the cover crop fields had twice the profitability. OK, this makes sense guys. This is not just ideological, like oh you've got to do this to save the planet or something like that, which would be a good thing, but this is also a good business decision, OK?

47:04 We got diverse communities. Bugs are cool. Bugs do things. We can use these as a tool, right? But we've got to change how we think about them. There's two ways of getting biological control or predation to start working for you: habitat diversity, you got to bump it up, or I'm sorry, habitat disturbance, you've got to get that up, and biotime sorry, sound down, and then diversity up. Reduce disturbance, increase diversity. Alright folks, we need a humbler approach to pest management. We need to stop thinking that we're always in control or that we know the best answer. Sometimes the best answer is just get out of the way, right? Because the system's worked pretty well before we started monkeying with them. We should look at these natural systems as a guide and then start adjusting our agroecosystems accordingly. And there's ways that we can do it. Things like covers and all of these plant diversity that you guys are talking about at this meeting are an integral part of that.

48:28 Yeah, we wouldn't be here if it was not for farmers and ranchers and beekeepers like you guys. So if you believe in this kind of research consider supporting it. We look at, we're a 501c3. You can either give the money to the government or you can actually tax time or else you can donate it to reduce your tax burden. Hundreds of people from around the world donate in order to get us up and off the ground. And we just have a tremendous team of young enthusiastic scientists that are just rocking it. They make it so much fun to come into work every day. And there is our contact info. We're on Facebook, we're on Twitter, follow us please and like us. I really dislike social media but we found that it's a necessary evil. And so here's our websites as well and you can go there if you would like to learn a little bit more about us.