How Reece Klug Cut Fertilizer and Built Soil in Central Nebraska

0:00 The spirit of the week that we're in with Thanksgiving, I definitely wanted to express gratitude and thanks to Reese, our guest today for joining and being willing to join. He's our third guest in this webinar series, if you want to call it that, out of four. And all of the guests so far have just been sharing how they've implemented soil-changing practices, soil health and regenerative agriculture. Really excited to get into that.

0:30 Don't want to have too much of a huge intro for Reese, but getting into regenerative agriculture and cover crops using cereal rye, which is probably fairly common. I'm sure you'll get kind of the nuances of that—everybody's journey is a little bit different. But you have a diverse farm and operation of growing soybeans and alfalfa and corn, wheat and barley and some other small grains too. You have livestock as part of your operations as well.

1:09 The only other thing I wanted to share is that one of our core values at Green Cover is Family Matters. Knowing Reese for a couple years now, I know that's a big part of his life too, with his three kids. I think his first slide has the kids in the picture too. Just have a lot of respect for you there, Reese. Without me rambling any longer, why don't you take it over.

1:41 I should mention Reese is from Columbus, Nebraska, so about Central Nebraska. We're bringing it more central. The first week of the webinar series was in California, then last week we went to Virginia and heard Ronnie Knowles, and so today we're keeping it a little more central with Reese in Nebraska.

2:07 Thanks Jake and Jonathan. Really thankful to be asked to do one of these presentations. I like to start out saying that I don't know everything there is to know or barely even scratching the surface about understanding what actually happens in the soil and how we can really improve it for future generations—for our boys and the rest of the family and their kids and just for future generations going forward.

2:39 Those are my two boys on the right, and I've actually got a little girl. Got a picture this was taken this fall. Our house is actually in those trees in the background. Disregard the button weed by our feet—I didn't want to get those in the picture—and the foxtail in the background. But the photographer really said that the view was beautiful and the trees in the background, so I went with it. That's my beautiful wife. She stays at home with the kids and does a really great job with that.

3:15 So starting with the farm, this is the feedlot. This is kind of where everything got started. My dad, grandpa, and their two brothers started three different feedlots kind of back in the seventies. My dad kind of took on trucking to start out with and has done a really great job with that. I farmed with my brother, my brother-in-law, and my Uncle Ed, and thanks to them, they've really opened up to different practices and different ways of thinking. Without them I wouldn't be able to do anything that we've learned over the years.

4:06 So with the feedlot, you need a lot of corn. Before ethanol, there was no byproduct, so it was a lot of corn on corn, which requires a lot of chemicals—insecticides, herbicides, fungicides. That's kind of where I was wanting to get away from, not originally, but I'll go through that later. I went to University of Lincoln and studied mechanized systems management—more about systems-based thinking. I'm trying to integrate agronomy to that. Also went to YouTube.

4:54 University and there is just so much information on YouTube or podcasts. Green cover has so many great resources. John Kemp, listen to him a lot. A lot of what he is doing is really exciting, gets me really excited about the future of agriculture and where we can be compared to what we have done to the soil.

5:21 So we did the corn on corn and when I first came back I got them talked into doing cover crop after we chopped some corn silage and all we did was spread rye on top of the ground, probably about 100 pounds, and worked it in. And that next year we chopped it in the spring. It did really, really well. I think it was 11 tons to the acre, and that was wet tons. But then we went back in and I think it was around June 1st, planted beans, and those beans they were just beautiful all year and ended up around 70, so for starting out with cover crop on the first year it was kind of a home run, I guess, if you could put it that way.

6:13 So the early days of cover crops, we had a 20 acre field and that was the second year that we planted beans into a cover crop. The first year my brother-in-law was out there without GPS and six foot tall rye and he did a good job. He didn't have any markers or anything and just went back and forth and missed a few spots. But I can't really blame him for that in the tall rye and it was on dryland and luckily we had a wet year. It all takes management to do it.

6:56 On this field I went through, we drilled into there. I remember drilling it with my wife, she was riding with me, and it was over my head and I stand about 6 foot one. And we took a picture in there. I couldn't find the picture but this was in July. It was July 6th. I just looked it up on my phone. And what we assume happened is there's a minimum maintenance road that runs right on the north side of this field and we think some teenagers went out there and had a Roman Candle war and they burned about a half acre. I got a call from the neighbor, 'Oh your field's on fire.' We call the fire department. Yeah, so it's just one of those things that happens. We've been fortunate it hasn't happened since that year. As we're trying to keep more residue on top of the ground, you get kind of nervous about this stuff when it gets really dry. It's just something to think about.

8:01 So we have integrated, we did some strip cropping with corn and beans, 30 foot of corn, 30 foot of beans there, and we just staggered the populations going in 45, 40, 34 across the middle eight. And we had some really good success with that over the years. This particular field was an organic crop down on some sand and it did really well. But just because it was sand it was a little bit harder to manage. The first two years we did it on dryland with conventional and we were starting to get into running into herbicide options and the rye certainly helped. But we were running into large seeded broadleaves, buttonweed, cocklebur, and then foxtail is starting to sneak in there too. So we kind of went away from that but had some really good successes on dryland. We're going to look to implement that more and more as we go along.

9:10 Yeah, so we were looking to change the rotation when I got back, so we ended up deciding on a corn, corn, soybean rotation on a majority of the farms. And I forgot to mention that year after we spread that rye on that field we bought a drill that following winter. So we had that drill and we knew that we were going to need cover crop seeds so we decided to keep a field of rye. This is actually a field of wheat and I couldn't find, I probably had some pictures of rye but I like this one with the ladybug in there and then that big huge worm on that rye. On that rye the rye safari roots on the roots there going deep. I think I just pulled that straight out of the ground. I probably should have taken a shovel out there.

10:09 Yeah so we changed to a corn soybean rotation and we also that the year after we bought the drill we bought a strip tail machine, a Gladiator so a shank strip tail machine. And we were running that on the corn on corn acres mostly in the ring because we graze cows on the cover crop or on the corn stocks in the fall. And so after a few years of doing that we were kind of worried about the disturbance going that deep in the spring, we were in about a smear layer down in the bottom and maybe some air pockets. So we ended up changing to a Don Furis row unit and not putting any fertilizer on or anything in there, just to make a black strip because with all the manure that we've had over the years our P and K levels are pretty good. I mean we are maintaining them for as much as we can.

11:12 I'm a really big fan of lower rates of manure application, anywhere from 5 to 10 tons an acre as opposed to 20 to 40 what a lot, what we used to be doing. I mean we had a controlled spill coming out the back and it really made the ground black. But just because there was so much manure going on the ground right there and we didn't really utilize the nitrogen that we were getting from that, we just figured it was all gone because we were leaving it on top of the ground. But I'll go more into that later.

11:53 So in 2019 I had my first boy and sitting there in the delivery room I think that's kind of when everything really started to change. We I didn't want to be around the seed treatments and all that stuff, even though I still am on the conventional side, but we're trying to get more and more away from that. And when you look to the future to try to guess what's going to happen, I think that there's more and more people that want to get away from that.

12:38 So on the transition years, this was one field that we had corn in the previous year and then corn planted rye and then we actually bailed the rye off of it, applied six ton of beef feedlot manure onto there and then we planted a warm season grazing mix, so mostly sorghum, Sudan sunflowers, sun hemp, collards, turnips, there was soybeans, just a whole bunch of warm season stuff that we initially planned on grazing earlier but you can tell here that it's getting pretty late into the fall. I think it was middle of September before we got to this. We had about 10 acre strips that I just went through and shredded off to make the fences.

13:39 And on this field there was supposed to be a frost coming through and my brother and my dad were really concerned about prussic acid poisoning. I mean I was really scared about it too. So me and my brother went out there on four-wheelers and we tried to chase them back onto stuff that they haven't grazed. We were just going to keep them off of there and feed them for a few days but they wouldn't come off, wouldn't come off. It started getting dark and we ended up just turning them out on a new piece and we never had any problems with the prussic acid poisoning. So I think there was enough diversity there that we didn't have to worry about any of that.

14:25 Yeah this is the steers go into there. It's pretty nerve-wracking this whole thing because we were right along a pretty main road, a paved road, and we put that new high tensile fence. I guess you can see it there now, the ground, ground is all bare under there. Yeah turned them out into there. And so that year we're planning or we did all that, didn't plant anything into there in the fall. We thought we'd get some more regrowth but it ended up turning colder a little bit earlier than we planned on. And so that next year it was, you could the guy that lives there, he said you could see a rabbit running from one end to the field to the other. So we were a little too bare from what we wanted to be but that next year was transition year for.

15:20 Corn and we didn't apply all we did was put on some bio gold from advancing ecag and then we did a soil primer actually in the fall before the corn and we worked the ground I think I hit it twice with the disc and then planted the corn rotary hoed once and that was it and then went up there and I took some sap analysis and it called for a little bit of boron I can't remember exactly what it was what else there was but we applied that it was right around tassel time we put that through the pivot ran the pivot as fast as it can go and you know how fast those things can go being from Hastings isn't really fast so we probably over applied too much but we ended up chopping that field of corn and we got 25 ton to the acre and when they appraised it they appraised it at 207 and that's with no nitrogen or anything else the only thing we didn't apply any manure besides before that six tons of manure before the cover crop so we really considered that a huge success I didn't really see too much any nitrogen deficiency in the corn at all no leaf firing towards the bottom and it really blew my mind it really made me question everything like why do we have to apply 200 pounds of nitrogen to get 200 why does it have to be a one to one ratio when we didn't put anything on this and I think the grazing had something to do with it too and haven't really figured it all out yet but the plan was to go that was the second year transition third year was going to be roller crimped rye and we didn't have it set up right so we didn't do it what they really say is to do three bushel I think we only did 100 pounds and they say get all of one variety and we just did VNS so there was a few things that were working against us and since we didn't apply any nitrogen I think we were really short on nitrogen on that rye crop didn't have the leaf mass on there you can't really tell from the picture I wish it would have taken a better one of viewing the whole field but I went out there with a crimper that we borrowed from another organic guy in the area and I made one time around the field and I said this isn't going to work we're it's popping back up even if I hit it twice I tried going the other way and thank the Lord I didn't plant into boot stage on the rye and then come back and crimp like I was thinking about doing.

18:23 And we ended up turning lemonade into lemons and I called my dad as I was in the field I said what are we going to do with this and he's like well we can we can chop it I think one of our neighbors need some more feet I said well that would be great and I can't I don't think I can work this into the ground and try to get a good stand of beans and try to cultivate through all that so we chopped it I think it was like four or five ton it wasn't a whole lot but it ended up paying for a lot of what we needed to do and planted the beans on there kind of struggled.

19:05 I guess the year before we had really good beans really clean organic beans rotary hoed them three times and that kind of ruined me I thought wow this is easy I'm going to grow more beans I barely put anything into them and we got like 65 bush of beans and I was just all pumped about it so we tried to scale that up a little more and yeah it was one of those really learning moments for because I think it was hard to look at every year like I said it was on a paved road the waterhemp got about five foot tall I was looking for Rogers to come in and I just couldn't get them because they were busy because that year the beans were worth 30 to 40 dollars and everybody had beans and it was just a really tough year but they ended up doing 45 somewhere around there and all things considered it turned out really well but I think with the grazing that is kind of where we want to be able to go.

20:21 So on these are just two random pictures that I found in my phone I used to see garden spiders all the time.

20:28 And just around the farm and everywhere, and I noticed I haven't seen them, but when I walk into this particular field it's just loaded with them, and the only time I ever see them is on organic fields anymore. So I don't know if it's the neonics that are causing issues with that or I just don't know if there's other knock on effects from a lot of the herbicides and all the chemicals that we put on every most acres every year.

21:03 Here's another picture I took this year of the garden spider and that blooming flower over there. If anybody's ever seen a collard make it through the winter, that's what it looks like. It gets about five feet tall, looks like canola kind of. But that was another way that we transitioned. We took we chopped rye off and then worked it once and worked the cornstalks once or the rye in and planted alfalfa into there, and that is one pound of collared that made it through the winter, and you can see some sandfoin, and I thought I had some chicory on there too. But yeah, those two are chicory is one of my favorite plants to because if you ever try to dig up a chicory root, there's no way you ever get to the bottom of it, and the blooms are just beautiful. And not to mention it's a non-bloater or has tannin in it, so if you have extra clover in there it really helps with that.

22:19 Okay, so on a different field that we transitioned, we started with wheat. Well, we drilled the corn off and went and sprayed on the soil primer mix that comes from AA and planted the wheat and we got a great stand. I mean, it looked beautiful all year, and then we actually drilled in clover over top of the rye as early in the spring as we could go after the ground was thawed out. And after we took off the wheat, it we didn't think we had a good enough stand of clover there to be able to keep the weeds out of it or to get a cutting or anything, so we drilled a warm season grazing mix into that after the wheat, and it was just amazing how much everything grows during the summer.

23:23 So here is the same picture that the one with the four-wheeler is a little bit earlier on than the other one. And you can see how it kind of goes through waves through there where we weren't really sure why the clover because the darker green is the clover and the lighter is the sorghum and the sunflower sticking up out of there. I mean, there's a few weeds that you can see through there with the pigweed, but look at all that cow feed. I want to say that picture was taken in September sometime. And then so we ended up grazing 70 cows on that field. It was about 90 acres and they were on there for three months, I think, and they grazed it to the ground, but they trampled enough. It was great ground cover on there. The ground was froze for the most part most of the year, and then that next year, this is what the yellow sweetclover looked like. I mean, that was chest high, and there was red clover, alfalfa, all mixed in there. We were kind of blown away at how much how great everything grew. We didn't think we had a good enough stand, and then we get all this. And so we were short on feed again that year, maybe not short, but we were trying to figure out how to make this profitable, and so we ended up chopping that field too. And we planted, this was year two of the transition, and we ended up chopping that, working it, and then planting corn into there. I think it was June 15th that we finally got it put in.

25:12 Yeah, that corn that we did, we ended up chopping that and tried to do the rye roller crimp thing that we did on that other field, but we ended up being short on feed so we chopped that off. But the corn did, I think it was close to 20 to 25 ton, no nitrogen, 210 is what the appraiser said. And so then my mind just really keeps going, keeps going.

25:39 Another field that we had a different way of transitioning, this was oats originally that we were growing for green cover. We hid oats and we seeded red clover with them, and the red clover we didn't think looked good, so we drilled another thing into there and this is what it looked like earlier or that next spring. Cover can be kind of sneaky—you got to really look for it and it's, I don't know if it has like hard seed that delays its germination, but you just want to be patient with it.

26:21 Switching topics on to some 60-inch corn. This guy was probably planting 40-inch by 40-inch corn. I don't know where I got the picture—I saw it on my phone and it just really got me excited again. There's really nothing new that any of us are ever going to do with cover crops that hasn't been thought about in the past. It's just now we have the technology and the resources to get these mixes and be able to use them on a precision agriculture basis to utilize what's in the ground and utilize that microbiology that's there to work for us and with us and just to create more life in that soil.

27:18 Yeah, we did the 60-inch corn. It's down in there, you can see—I think we had a pound of a pumpkin mix. There was a pound of pumpkins, and a lot, you can see the cow peas climbing up. They're dang near up on top of the tassels. The collards, man, they're just huge down in there. They can take up to the mid-teens on frost, so they stayed green. Yeah, the yield hit on there was a little bit more than what we were doing than what we would like to have, but it was probably around 10 to 12% loss.

28:12 When did you plant those cover crops into the rows? Well, it was probably around V5, maybe V6. We were getting a little too late on some of it. We had a drill that's set up to go in between there, and maybe we were knocking a few of the corn over a little when we were going through.

28:44 Yeah, so I wanted to scale it over to the organic. This is me ridging up that organic corn on 60-inch rows. We did it on about seven or eight acres this year to see if we could plant the corn and then just do corn on corn, just moving back and forth over because we would have enough of a different crop with legumes. We tried to get hairy vetch and cowpeas and some sun hemp and annual rye grass all established on there for grazing and for next year's corn.

29:28 So what happened was that corn—the left picture is the 60-inch corn and it's canopied. Those leaves are crossing over each other. I think I took that right around the middle of the day. That is all the light that was going down in there. I can't express enough how important hybrid selection is if you're going to try 60-inch row or maybe low population corn. We picked the wrong one here, but it ended up the 60s didn't do any worse than the 30-inch corn on the organic side, so that was something that we learned. But we didn't get a whole lot of growth out of it. I mean, you can see some of the radishes that made it through that are laying down in there, and then by the time we got to combining, there wasn't much left to go through there.

30:30 This is a video of me planting through there with that drill. Just happens that Crust Buster has everything set on 5-foot centers, which is 60 feet, so it worked out to get that set up that way. It was 10 inches, and then we just slid the row units in 8-inch spacing, and there's 20-inch gap for the corn to run through there. I really thought that we would be doing a lot more of that, but kind of scaling it back a little bit again just because of that yield hit and not knowing what hybrids to do that on or which ones to pick.

31:15 Can see the little tiny clovers coming up that was in that field of wheat. Anytime we plant wheat or any small grain we're going to try to get a clover established in there because those roots are amazing and the weed control and the grazing—I mean there's just so many benefits of the compound on themselves. And Dad talks about how he went, he remembers going out there with oats and spreading on yellow sweet clover and then plowing that in, and he's like, well, what you're doing isn't really new, and it's just what our grandparents used to do.

31:52 The picture with the disc on there is a little bit earlier than what I'd like to hit the green manure. I'd really like to get everything—think like you're feeding the ruminant when you're thinking about feeding the soil. I got that from Gary Zimmer, another great one to follow. We work that in, and then we're coming back in. Anytime we work ground we're trying to do it with a purpose, and as much as I don't like doing it, it seems to not have affected our organic matter levels yet. That's still something that's out there for debate, I guess. But anytime we can keep it covered, keep something on there—if we're keep, I mean we've got about two weeks before something before the corn is coming up, and then once that corn comes up, I mean those roots go down there. And everything is about the roots. I mean it doesn't matter what it looks like on top of the ground. Residue is super important, but if you can get that soil covered in the heat of the summer, that is what the main thing is.

33:19 We planted some trees in 2020, and I found this picture of I think it was from the 1930s and 40s where it's got the picture on the right of the dust bowl with the no trees. And I really think perennial crops and perennial tree crops and perennial cover crops, but grazing crops will be in the future for my kids just for there's a whole list of reasons why it could be that. But we need to figure out a way as farmers to be able to get there without having to do so much to the ground. I mean one of the things I've heard talked about was our pastures are kind of the low-hanging fruit because pasture management hasn't changed in the last 120 years, ever since barbwire was invented. It's usually set stock grazing. You turn them out there and you say, here you go, cows, go figure it out, go fill your bellies up and graze whatever you can. It hasn't—the management hasn't changed. And you compare that to corn and how much corn management has changed throughout the years, it just really there to make a guy think about where the future is going and how can we limit our inputs to be able to go through if we do go through another economic downturn, corn goes down to two or three dollars or ethanol goes away or I don't know, anything that the consumer might not like with some of the practices we're doing.

35:17 This is a picture of this fall. It kind of is we tried to redo what we did with that wheat except last year we had all of our winter wheat, winter kale, besides some dryland corners, but it is still a pretty wimpy stand. So I had already frosted the clover into the wheat thinking that it was just down there and it was going to come up, and so we ended up drilling oats into there. We took bales off, got a lot of bales—I think it was four bales to the acre of oats. And then we came back, got them moved off, went in with that warm season grazing mix and it got about chest high, maybe a little taller, and we wind row that and chopped it. And this is actually the regrowth after we chopped it. We've got cows out there now that clover is about knee high. You can see the collards and everything. I'm not sure why the picture is so grainy, but yeah, the cows are you can see them up there in the top left corner. That's a great way to feed your cows and feed your soil all.

41:57 Did the nitrogen program on the corn? We put on 80 pounds of nitrogen and we added humic carb, which is a humic acid but it also has a humin portion in it, so it ties on to the anion. And then we put a little rejuvenate in there, which is a carbohydrate source. And then molybdenum, which is key for the plant to be more efficient with nitrate because of the nitrate reductase enzyme. We did all this on a couple of different fields and we did some higher nitrogen checks right next to it. There was 80 pounds. It was on bean ground. We spread, I think, just 10 tons of feedlot manure on there. And it ended up 50 bushel with 85 lbs applied in, and that was all through the pivot. Nothing goes on up front for us.

43:06 I should talk about this graph a little bit. So the vegetative stage down at the bottom of the screen you can see 3, 6, 9, and the graph is the nitrogen uptake. So at V6 it starts to ramp up, and at 9 you're about halfway there. And then from V9 up to tassel, I've read somewhere it takes up like seven pounds of nitrogen per day. So on the organic stuff, where is that coming from? Is it coming from the organic source? Is it coming from a bacillus subtilis, something that produces nitrogen in the soil? I mean, you hear about a lot of different companies that are pushing their own biologicals, and they have a lot of the same strains, but it's all about how you apply it and how you can make it work on your farm.

44:07 I really think that it's important to get that corn in the ground and almost have it in a nitrogen-deficient state, but not overly nitrogen-deficient like into six-foot tall runt, because then you can really run into problems because it thinks that there's nothing there. But if you have a little bit of nitrogen, you don't need to apply anything because there's already enough organic matter that's producing that right away to start with.

44:41 Put a biological inoculant with no fertilizer, water, probably a carbohydrate source. And we're using a soil primer that has really worked for us. We're using it on corn and beans in-furrow, right on the seed. That's the greatest point of influence that you can have on any annual plant or any perennial plant, for that matter. We've seen some huge benefits of applying less nitrogen, and we're going to try to cut it back.

45:27 We have had some issues where we have been a little bit low on nitrogen, and I haven't been able to really pinpoint exactly what it is. But I think it's mostly manure history and grazing history. Because on a soil test, you can't tell. They look nearly identical on a soil test. We did a Haney test on them too. They called for the same amount of nitrogen. But you could go out there and visibly see that it was nitrogen-deficient in one field, same program, all went through the pivot. And the other field it was perfectly green. There are some things that I don't understand how it works. I'm always learning along the way.

46:26 That's kind of our nitrogen program. Life compounds on itself, and we can be co-creators with God to create abundant life on our farms and our communities. I got a picture of my boy there. We were windrowing that tall vetch, and as I was windrowing it, I asked him what are we windrowing here? And he couldn't say too many words, but there was a yellow mustard plant right in front of me, and he said mustard. So I think our kids are there to humble us and tell us what's just to help us focus on what is really important. And I guess that's kind of it.

47:15 For my presentation. There, that's really great, yeah, thanks for sharing all that info and journey that you had there with the things you're doing, Rees.

47:26 Real quick, that would be all the vetch you talked about, I assumed to be hairy vetch, is that correct? Yes, okay, yeah. And hairy vetch would be the most cool-tolerant vetch, it's the most commonly used, especially for fall planting, has a really high cold tolerance, can survive the winter and fix a lot of nitrogen. That was really impressive nodulation on those hairy vetch a few slides ago that didn't have much above ground growth. That was quite impressive, I thought.

47:58 Yeah, no, I mean I didn't have a shovel with me, I pulled that out by hand. I wish I had a shovel to see how deep they really went. And then on the clovers, a couple times you're talking about those, I like what you said. They can certainly be sneaky. I mean, sometimes they get maybe downplayed, even by myself, and sometimes how I think of them, they're not always the most impressive growth, but then they're just kind of always there. Shouldn't say always, but I mean they'll be there more than you think oftentimes.

48:26 Can you talk a little bit about red clover and then also the yellow sweet clover? I think those are the main two that you've used or talked about today, and just the differences and scenarios you'd use those.

48:38 Yeah, on the wheats I guess, I always like to have them in a mix: yellow or yeah, yellow sweet clover, red clover, some common alfalfa, and then allight clover for the lowline ground if we got into any water holes or something like that. And usually if you can have one of those four, one of them is going to take off in a certain spot. Diversity always jumps intensity.

49:11 We've on the yellow sweet clover, there's been years that it does awesome and I don't know why, and then we've had other years like this year we drilled it with the oats and it just didn't really take off like it did. We've had yellow sweet clover where it's taller than the oats when we're going through to combine it. It's like, 'Oh shoot, how are we going to run all this through the combine?' And then this last year it just didn't really do a whole lot. So I don't know if there could have been some residual herbicide in soil there or something like that.

49:46 Yeah, red clover, it's not quite as robust as alfalfa or yellow sweet clover in that first year, but that second year it can. We grazed that one crop of yellow sweet clover. We've had cows out there pretty much all year and we actually had to go out there and chop some of it because we couldn't keep enough cows on there because it just keeps coming. As long as you're moving them across the field, giving it enough time for regrowth, it just keeps going. It's really an amazing crop.

50:30 Yeah, I mean speaking a little bit to what you said about the perennials and stuff, that's just kind of a little bit of an untapped thing, not completely but not as much tapped into on the cover crop world as the perennials. I think that has huge part of the future.

50:44 Speaking of cattle, and I had this question, but Mike Rice put it in the Q&A as well. He says, 'How important is grazing cattle in your system?' and then just maybe fill in some context like, do you have areas you don't graze? What percentage of your row crop do you graze?

51:00 So we were talking about it a little earlier before we actually went live. I wish we had more contiguous acres that we could just run the cows right over to the pasture, right back. We have some of those. Sometimes logistics just doesn't allow for enough time to be able to move the cattle like that. I'd like it to become a lot bigger part of our crops and rotation just because of the benefits we've seen, but it can get, you can run into some issues if it gets wet. You get some pugging going on there, and then you got.

51:36 To come in and read that or work it down or something like that. It's certainly a challenge that I don't think there's any one way to manage through. It's really hard to do. I guess it kind of goes back to that sixth principle or maybe first principle of soil health, the context of integrating livestock. And that's a principle of soil health and can be really beneficial for improving soil, but it doesn't make sense in every single scenario or every single acre all the time.

52:15 We had a couple questions or maybe just this question on manure. How do you manage the manure in terms of making sure it has good biology? And then also, do the cattle get dewormer and antibiotics, which negatively impact the soil or soil biology?

52:32 Yes, the ones that I all had, yes, they all get ivermectin. Yeah, that's not good for dung beetles. I've got a few cows here at home and we don't do any of that, and they see dung beetles. I mean, you can look in the patties and it's amazing how much they come in once you stop using that stuff. What was the first part of the question?

52:59 Just how do you manage the manure in terms of making sure it has biology? We don't really manage it too much, I guess. We're scraping it out of the pen, and I think of manure more as a microbial catalyst than a nitrogen source. That's kind of hard on your end because you know where it's coming from too—it's your own feedlot. So right, yeah, we try not to do any of the settling basins. We try to keep the weed seeds out of most of it. And if we do settling basins, it'll go on to conventional ground that we because there'll be plenty of kochia and waterhemp and everything going through there.

53:52 Yeah, here's a good question. Just talk about your practice of applying some of these biologicals or some of the products from AEA. So this one says, do you do a biological seed coating before planting? And I guess take that wherever you want—just like, have you used any of those products applied to the seed beforehand or just right at planting? What have you seen from that?

54:14 Yeah, I should have said that every seed that goes into the ground on the farm gets covered with biocode gold, and I make sure that's a priority whenever it goes in the ground. It might take a little bit more time, but yeah, we've seen the benefits. Then you get those thick hairs, those dreadlocks on the roots right away coming out of the ground. It's just amazing how such a small amount can go such a long way.

54:46 Yeah, because some of those inoculants are by ounce or by pound—I mean, it's a pretty heavy application rate. Some of these like the bio code gold or some of the other ones out there, mycorrhizal fungi inoculants, we measure that in grams, and it's only a few grams per acre or a few hundred pounds. And it's kind of amazing how it messes with your mind of like, how does that even get applied to the whole acre? But it really does. You can see the results oftentimes.

55:20 So yeah, here's one: has there been any thought to changing to short corn and maybe that was, I think we were talking about the 60-inch corn or the different varieties as well? From what I've heard about short corn, it still creates just as big of a canopy, sometimes even thicker, because those nodes are just stacked on there so close. I've never seen it. So yeah, that could very well be an option. I think there's a couple people on Twitter—Bob Recker, Lawrence D Logy. I don't know if he's doing much this year with it, but there's lots of people that are trying to do it. A junior PF sansil or something like that, he's got a lot of data on it. You can look him up on Twitter for yield for hybrids and yields, but yeah, there's a lot more.

56:23 Research to be done on that, be able to make it work. Yeah, no, that's good. As we transition just to 1:00, the audience, if you're okay with it, will go a couple more minutes or five more minutes maybe and answer some other questions. They just kind of laying that out there. One of the questions I had is just kind of what has been well from the time you first started maybe going down more regenerative path, what were some of your main soil health goals, and then I'd be curious to know kind of how have those changed over time to now?

57:02 In college, I guess I didn't go through this, I really started looking into cover crops, how we can graze them, and I remember vividly somebody came up to me and it was Tyler doen. We were in the hallway and he said, have you ever heard of Gab Brown? What you're looking into doing is what he's doing. And so I think everybody goes down the Gab Brown rabbit hole. Really wanted to do that starting out, didn't do that because of where we were located and how we were set up to do things initially. I'm wanting to integrate more perennials into everything. I think they have a really nice fit for, even on the conventional ground to run as like a companion. There's some really interesting guy Frederick Larson, I think he's over in the Netherlands, I'm not sure, but he's running a perennial alfalfa, knocking it back with Roundup with low applications of Roundup and keeping that deep root in there. That is one place that I really want to get into, but first things first.

58:29 Well, maybe with some of what you've already shared, answers the first part of this question, which is do you feel optimistic about the future of farming? And then more so, why would that be? Yeah, very, very optimistic about it. I think we're just starting to get into understanding a tiny little bit of the biology and how it's actually working in the soil and what we can do to influence that biology in a positive way to be able to actually change soils and rebuild them back up to the prairie levels that we were at before, 4 to 8, 10% organic matter. But we've got a long, long, long ways to go on that, and that's exciting, something to look forward to over the next 40 years farming or however many I got left.

59:25 Absolutely. Well, we can close with my last question and then give you the chance to share anything else you would like to. But you mentioned like John Kimp and some of his resources. What's just a couple, either like a book or two, or a podcast, that would just like recommend, one of your favorites to learn? And you know, for resources other than, you know, Green Covers website and YouTube channel, of course. Yeah. One that I really like to listen to is Graham Sate, nutrition farming or nutrition rules or something like that. It's a podcast. It's a longer version podcast. I think it's usually like three hours, but he's got some humor in there and just a lot of really good stuff. He's down in Australia, which and they have those younger soils, and they need to be able to start to build those soils up. We're blessed with really great soils around here. Let's see, Gary Zimmer, Egg Talk, okay. New Egg Talk for sure. Shout out to Bob C, bless me, no farm, Lauren. All of them guys have really helped me learn how to start with organic. And the amount of resources that are out there, you'll never be able to consume at all.

1:00:50 Yeah, those are pretty much main things I guess. Yes, awesome. Yeah, that's great. And then yeah, in closing, any just last final thoughts or anything you would like to to plug or to say? No, just enjoy your family this Thanksgiving. Yeah, that's what it's all about.

1:01:12 Excellent. Well, thanks again, Ree. Can't thank you enough for joining and sharing your perspective and your knowledge with us. So appreciate it. Yes, thank you for having me. Absolutely, any time. Sorry, I got a little long-winded on that presentation, longer than I thought. No, that's good. I loved all the slides there. So good work putting that together. Okay, thanks J. All right, you bet.