How Rotational Grazing and Cover Crops Rebuilt Pastures on an Organic Dairy Farm

0:00 Welcome everybody, thank you for joining us today. We are super excited for today's conversation with Eric Zam. He is a dairy farmer up in Upstate New York, kind of close to the Vermont border. He has a background in conventional farming, but as he has said, he got bit by the grazing bug. So he has since transitioned his farm to, or started High Meadows, which is a dairy farm, an organic dairy farm. You guys have a little over 200 cows that you're milking and then 300 acres that you're running that's owned acres, and more than that rented acres as well. So we're super excited. I don't know that we have had a lot of dairy farmers on webinar series, so we're super excited to have this conversation today.

1:00 With that, I will give it over to Eric, and he is going to share his story with us. Great, thanks. Thanks for the team at Green Cover and Kate for having me on, and I always like to share my story and also learn about other people's stories. So we'll jump right in. Here's an overview from one of our pastures looking down at the farm. We're a startup operation from 2018. I finished college in 1999, graduated from Cornell, and returned to my family's operation that's only about seven, eight miles from here, from this location. That was located in Cambridge, New York. This is in Hickory Falls, New York. And we rapidly expanded that dairy from about 100 head over the course of 15 years to a little over 1,200 head and 3,000 acres.

2:10 And somewhere amongst that, in that time frame, I started asking myself a lot of questions about how we were doing things and what we were doing. And I started wanting to get cows off of concrete and wanted to get back to grazing. So as Kate said, I was bit by the grazing bug. I started grazing a lot of our young stock at that operation and got to where I just made a decision, and that's what I wanted to do and how I wanted to manage cattle. So I took a step sideways and was able to come across this farm in Hickory Falls, New York that was easily certifiable and organic, and made that move and was able to secure a milk contract with Stony Field yogurt in London, New Hampshire, now owned by La Talis. And yeah, we were off and running.

3:20 Quite a few things contributed to that decision, and I got asking questions to myself about just because you can, should you? And that had a lot to do with extending, hopefully, the longevity of our cattle by having them out in pasture, and pesticide use, herbicide use, all that kind of stuff. And it came to me that this was the route that I wanted to go.

3:57 So I always say the reason I get out of bed in the morning is right here. And so my wife Jamie and myself in the center. She has a business of her own, runs an equine operation specializing in equine-assisted psychotherapy, works with a lot of challenged kids and teenagers. So she has that along with helping myself on the farm as well. Cole is to the left, he's 17, very interested, helps us on the farms and in every sport and club you can imagine. Casey is on the right-hand side, he's 13, and follows the same suit. Loves baseball and helping me on the farm. And yeah, actually don't want to admit this to the school folks, but pulled them out of school as many young farm kids do to help me harvest.

5:00 Crops this spring so he helps out a lot too. So they're the reason I do what I do. If you want to move to the next slide, we were able to purchase this farm, 300 acres. As Kate mentioned, we are in Herkimer, New York, Herkimer Falls, New York, right on the Vermont border, Southern Vermont border. So we were able to build a new facility here.

5:30 As you see in the background, it is about a 230 head or stall freestyle barn, and we have a swing 16 Dairy Master parlor. So our goal is to milk a little over 200 cows in a little over two hours so that we can get the cattle back out grazing and do what they need to be doing as quick as we can. Built a facility with hopefully labor efficiency in mind, going from the larger farms, trying to be very cognizant of labor efficiency, but then again trying to balance the economics and all that. So our latest project, as you can maybe see on the left-hand side of that barn, we installed a solar array on top of the roof so that we can be one step closer to being energy independent, which is one of our sustainability goals on the farm.

6:38 I joke to people that our cows have a better view than a lot of the people here in our area. So this is a view out of the backside of the freestall barn, some early spring grazing. If we could have a grazing season full of the month of May, life would be easy, but unfortunately that's not the case as we're almost entering July here and trying to balance the heat and the challenges of summertime.

7:14 We can start talking about what we focus on with grazing. So here's another picture of our cattle out grazing. Left, the very left-hand side of that photo is where they were initially grazing, and then kind of split down the middle. We try to accomplish on most days multiple moves, and that just gives us a little better utilization of the different species of grasses and the maturity of the grasses.

7:53 We actually entered this farm in 2017, 2018, and all we had was a monoculture of orchard grass. I thought it would take quite a few years to see the diversity, but through multiple moves a day, good grazing practices, and the default of not having enough money in the budget (which I initially thought I would need to do some reseeding of pastures), we were able to do it all with improve our pastures, all with the basic principles of regenerative organic regenerative agriculture and rotational grazing. So we've seen a really nice diversity come into our pastures.

8:47 Here's a little better view of where the cows were a few minutes before and where we're moving them into, and really trying to get a real good trample. This was something I didn't know a lot about four or five years ago. It seemed more like a waste in a simple general mindset, but if we can get that really good trample on the left-hand side and work in the dung and the urine and keep these cows eating off the best diet, that's really our goal. So this is really what I think one of the keys that helped us develop these diverse pastures. After we started doing this, we really saw a lot of the clovers come in. The legumes seem to really pop, and as many of you probably know, there's a lot of laden seed in the ground.

9:55 Clover stays viable for a very long time, we just had to get it activated. So that's what we're trying to accomplish next slide.

10:08 Just a closer up photo, this is actually in a young stock heifer pasture. What we've moved to here is we're actually trying to graze what would be deemed as overmature forage, grasses that are headed out. So they're actually getting a very balanced diet and it's amazing to see the cattle eat the seed heads and be able to utilize that grain proportion or what I would classify as a grain proportion of the grass.

10:59 Here's another picture. This is something I wouldn't have thought much about four or five years ago, just learning from other successful grazers in both the beef and the dairy side. These are the kind of pastures that we hope to graze for our dry stock and our young stock. I'm still working on this with the milking herd and haven't quite arrived there yet, but this is proven to be what I would call dynamite pasture for these cattle that don't have the higher requirements like the lactating cows. So we are not in a grass-fed milk market, but we don't feed any grain to our dry cows or our heifers through the grazing season. Wean calves still receive a little bit up to about five or six months of age, but after that we've been able to cut that expense right out of our program.

12:29 It's definitely a different concept for a while to get a hold of, but it was amazing to see again what we would originally thought as mature forages, the sleekness of the cattle, and watching them utilize the main portions of the plant with the seed heads. They just perform very well.

13:02 The reason I wanted to make the switch to grazing and have definitely enjoyed the benefits of is I had a personal ethics and issue with some questions I was being asked on my conventional dairy from consumer type folks or people that were a little less educated in the dairy industry. One was the life expectancy of cattle, and as dairy producers we all know that the beef side is part of our business. But I wasn't satisfied with the answer of a little over four years old as the average life expectancy of some of our conventional dairies. We have been really fortunate now, after about five and a half to six years of producing milk, that we have cows that are almost nine years old now that were raised on the farm and came in and calved on the farm and have spent their life here. We're seeing a much greater average age of productivity, so that's something that I believe can help us all as an industry and can be marketable for if you're selling your own product or if we're trying to help.

14:37 Know help market the product that where our milk goes to. That's been a very rewarding sector or part of making this change and seeing that come through full circle. Okay, we go on to the next slide.

14:57 Through all that, in my other operation, my family operation where I was originally, I was in charge more so of the cattle and the people in the milking parlor and related to the farmstead. My brothers handled the cropping, so cropping was a little bit secondary to me, even though I grew up on a small farm and we all did everything and chores and hit the field. So I obviously had a pretty good understanding, but I wanted to take the same philosophy that we were trying to accomplish with grazing and producing milk to the field and see if we could replicate that.

15:48 So I started working with Kate and talking about some of our goals and what we wanted to do, and virtually turned it into just a mass science experiment of trying to see what works and what didn't work. But I really loved the diversity aspect and what I saw that did for our performance, and knowing and researching and being able to enhance the biological activity of the ground, of our land, and all that, we went to some diverse mixes. The one on the right side, in the description, is a barley, peas, oats, and trill. We harvested some as forage and grazed a little bit and we also harvested a little bit as grain. We had an absolute monsoon of a summer last year and we weren't actually able to harvest some of it for grain because we couldn't get the combines on the field.

17:04 Our goal is very little tillage to no till. But unfortunately, where we started, we had to terminate some long-term sod and it happened to be on some clay ground. So that was a little tough but a learning curve. But nevertheless, it grew very well, matured very well, and we were happy with it. On the left is our warm season grazing mix, and this is actually on a field that was a little further from the farm, but we wanted to just see how we wanted to see, I wanted to be able to just monitor it through different stages of maturity and see how it did. But it's just really amazing to see all these species working and thriving together.

17:55 It's simply just amazing. And one thing as farm folks that we do is we always seem to be on the run, and there's a few other leaders in the regenerative movement that I'm just voicing what I've heard them saying, and it's observation. So we try to take more time now to just look and see how these mixes are doing on a hot day, on a cooler day, when it's wet, when it's dry, and be able to make future decisions based on how that's growing. And the other point I want to add is I think we're going to have more of a need for these grazing mixes for our cattle because with our shifting weather patterns, we have become extremely hot and humid here in the Northeast without the normal breaks that traditionally we used to have years ago. So I think our cool season grasses are actually trying to figure out how to perform, and we usually look through that for the summer slump as they say with our cool season grasses.

19:19 But more so than ever I think we're going to need to interject some of these grazing mixes. Also this year we experimented with grazing really tight with our milking cows on a field and then we know till in a very similar mix with this so that's up and growing right now. It's definitely not the easiest thing to do to no till into a standing sod piece but these varieties seem to be pretty resilient and seem to be fighting through the sod base and coming up and pretty good. So this year hopefully have more pictures of those.

20:06 This is a later picture of that same mix with the peas, bar chill and oats and again you can see everything. You can almost pick out every species there and I was pleasantly surprised on how uniform the stand was and again being organic, basically all we have for fertilizer inputs is whatever comes out of the back end of the cow or whatever we can spread on the fields of our own manure. But when we've definitely seen when you add diversity how much you can make up for those lack of inputs, which is a good thing. I mean that's our goal. We don't want to have to spend the money on that.

21:00 This was a field of sorghum sudangrass and forage beans and we're still trying to now that we're actually getting good yields and good establishments, we're just trying to figure out what's the most cost effective for what we want to plant, how we can harvest it. This year we silaged and chopped but the sorghum sudangrass grows very well for us, smother out any weeds. If we have a field that has some weed pressure, we did again this year, lightly till to get established and then hopefully we won't have to till it for a long time again or ever again. And then we followed this up. Nice thing about these summer forages, summer annuals, we can get a pretty early diverse cover crop on so we're able to drill in a cover crop then that provides us some spring forage. It was a triticale blend with some crimson clover and a couple other things.

22:17 All right on to the next one. I think it's going to be a closeup. Yeah, so this was at an earlier stage. You can see the beans and the sorghum sudangrass and you still see a little bit of the grass that we were kind of fighting through because it was probably 15 to 20 years of sod base that we were trying to establish some of these summer crops through but once it got up and going it really took over and suppressed the grass so it ended up being a very nice crop.

22:51 What's next on the slide? Oh this is a little more mature. You can see the buckwheat popped up through and everything in there but you just see what's amazing about at this stage. You see the pollinators, you see the bees and the butterflies and all the insects. This I wish I'd taken a video because the stand in this Midsummer or late summer in this stand, it just all the activity above ground, let alone what the biological activity was doing below the ground but pretty amazing. The cows really enjoyed grazing this also and we definitely saw a little bump in milk production and performance when we came through this stand.

23:45 So then our next goal for wintertime feed was we were trying to establish a crop that we could direct chop.

23:58 Didn't have to swath it and didn't have to harvest it multiple times because as most of you that harvest hay know, or hate crop that's going around for what I would call average yields for hay crop and an organic farming system is questionable on if it's feasible or not long term. So we're trying to decrease the number of silage hay crop acres and do more of these summer annual crops and our goal is if we can put it through a grain drill, it's a little easier for us. We haven't gotten into cultivating or anything like that, more so for just time constraints and busy summers and trying to keep everything else flowing.

24:48 This is a forage sorghum mixture with some other diversity underneath it. I believe we had a couple brassicas in there and flax and some other things. So this grew very well and we were able to take a pretty good crop off it. Unfortunately we had a tornado come through right next to us this past September, which we're not known for in our neck of the woods for that kind of weather activity. A lot of it was flattened but surprisingly most of it popped back up so we were able to get a lot of it harvested.

25:38 What we're trying to accomplish here is whatever we drill is to get good coverage and body armor on the soil and we're starting to analyze all that. And if we can keep the ground cool and protected and have these different species working symbiotically together to thrive, that's what we're trying to do. So far pretty successful on that and we're going to try to keep doing more of it and probably add even more diversity as we progress.

26:29 That's our overview of the farm and I'd be happy to answer any questions if I went too fast or skipped through anything or if anybody wants to elaborate on anything, I'm more than happy to.

26:45 Thank you so much for sharing all of that, Eric. We do have some questions coming in and just a reminder to everybody, feel free to drop any questions you have in the Q&A box and we will get to those when we can. I have a couple follow-up questions just to get started with. I guess first of all though, I love how you were asking the question just because we can, does it mean that we should. I think no matter what industry you're in, that's an important question to be asking because there are a lot of things that we can do with all the things that we know and science and all of this, but it is really important to be asking that question all the time. Just because it's available to us doesn't mean it's necessarily great for us. We could go eat McDonald's every day but that's not a great option.

27:48 So I'm kind of curious where did you originally find out about grazing or what kind of started that whole journey that kind of turned you, quote, like bit by the grazing bug. Where was that seed planted? Well, I definitely one of the things that I didn't like about going to work on my family's operation that I've been a part of my whole life and I grew up, there was no question I wanted to farm. There was no question I wanted to go to college and further my education. And I reached a point where my back was sore, my feet were sore and I was on concrete all day long and I just said, 'Well, if I don't want' to do this.

28:39 To be on concrete all day long, and I'm not here to bash. There's a ton of conventional folks that do a super job with cow care, and I'm not here to down that one bit. I'm just sharing my personal beliefs and thoughts. I said, you know what, I don't want to be on concrete all the time. Why do they want to be on concrete all the time? We had some better freestyle barns and high production and all that kind of stuff, so it was in its own right successful. It just wasn't the way I wanted to be successful myself.

29:17 I remember as a kid, we had all Holstein cattle, and I had my token three or four Jersey cows as a young forager. I got sick of hauling them when I think I was 10 or 11 years old. I got sick of hauling them hay and water, and I started putting up portable fence then. I think I had them pretty close to my parents' front porch after a while. I guess I had it just ingrained in me, and I kind of remembered back to that and how much fun that was. We used to move the cows out all the time at that stage, and we went to one grazing school that was local, geared a little more towards finishing beef cattle. But obviously, as people know, if you can finish beef cattle with the same type of energy requirements as dairy cattle, so it just clicked. Once I started doing it, I knew that was what I wanted to do.

30:23 You talked about improving your pastures, the native cool season pastures. Well, they were orchard grass pastures. But slowly you've been able to revamp those pastures, and you mentioned being able to do that with the rotational grazing. Just for clarification, you did not reseed anything, any of those new or the native—I guess they were always there. No, and that's probably what I'm most amazed about as far as our pastures. I didn't think that would happen quite as quickly. There's a lot of seed out there. Of course, I shouldn't be saying this on the seed company, but hey, everybody knows green covers in this business for the right reason. I don't need to defend them as a company, but there's so much seed out there. It just has to be activated in the biological activity. And then even if you're going to drill in seed, you have to have the right biological activity working. You have to have those earthworms working. You have to be covered. You can't be overgrazing. All that comes into play.

31:42 We just simply, being a startup, we bid off a big capital investment in facilities and everything else on startup. It was just the can had been kicked down the road. I said, well, maybe next year, maybe next year. But as year two, three, and four came, there just became no need, or I felt no need to do that. It's really just putting all the basic principles together of stock density and moving quickly and skipping over a spot. Observation—using observation, if we need to restore a part of a pasture, we put some bales out in spots that had some multiflora rows, towards the end of the grazing season or towards fall, early winter. It looks like these cattle are going to decimate the area, which they do for a short period of time. But it's a great way to revamp some of the soil with that minimal disturbance, and boy, it just pays back so fast. In the moment it seems like maybe you need that sector of land, but just giving it time.

37:32 Cut that almost in half a little more in the winter time but it is on the radar and we're starting to yeah we're starting to take a look at that but it's definitely an option. We don't have a lot of options in my neck of the woods. There's a little more of a cohort of grass-fed producers in Central in Western New York Pennsylvania. I mean I could explore some markets there too and may look into that but so that yeah that's definitely on the radar and as we get better with our grazing that makes that more of a viable option.

38:12 Burke is asking what is the breed of cow are you using. It looks like there's a little bit of a conglomerate so what's in there so I can decide what I like. So I have everything. No, so we're Jersey, we're Jersey based. We had we started with some conventional higher productive life type Holsteins that we pulled out of my family's operation when I first made transition. A lot of those cows are still around but a lot of Jersey and we've actually started incorporating some Ayrshire back in and are milking some crosses. So having haven't found the perfect cow yet but we're definitely trying to stay with that smaller framed Jersey type cow that we're pretty happy with.

39:10 Well there again even for the cows there's beauty and diversity above ground too so that's awesome. Burke is also asking how and what do you feed in the winter.

39:23 So we actually are feeding just hay, chopped hay, some haylage, and then we keep it real simple we feed a cornmeal steam flaked corn mixture and then just a protein mix with minerals and the protein basically only consists of roasted soy and soy meal. So winter time it's usually 9 to 10 pounds cornmeal and 3 to 4 pounds of protein is where we're at and that maintains an average herd average days of milk about 165 to 70 during the winter time, high 40s to close to 50 pounds of milk production per day per cow. Components our goal is always 5% fat but we're about 4.8 to 4.9% fat as we still have some Holsteins and crosses in there and 3.3 to 3.4% protein is where we average on that for our components. And that's definitely the name of the game. I did want to add I think I might have skipped over it but this year was one of the first years we didn't see what's deemed as that seasonal depression in butterfat as much and protein. So we're starting to analyze and we're really not, our feed inputs aren't much different than just our pastures keep evolving so that's been a nice surprise I guess you could call it.

41:06 Ryan is also asking are you able to graze anything during the winter so are you out rotating the cows or anything. So the milk herd our grazing season we're out end of April early May at the latest and we usually graze I would call very successfully quantity-wise right through the end of October couple days in November. In the past few years we've been keeping so that's the milker and then they're usually back in the barn. This year one of our goals was to stockpile a little more feed because we've been able to take our dry stock and heifers because we've been seasonably warm into Christmas time and the first of the year. We've been able to take them almost to that time frame if we have enough stockpiled forage so that's and again the need for less stored feed and eliminating that cost of harvest, yeah we're definitely we're.

42:09 Definitely getting there and we're actually looking at renting more pasture type ground so that we could export some of the young stock during the summer in or late summer Midsummer late summer in order to extend that stockpile and grazing season would take us into early winter.

42:32 Earlier in the presentation you mentioned the solar panel project that you guys were kind of doing. What other new projects are you could explain that a little bit? But what other new projects you have going for either this season or the upcoming maybe 2025?

42:51 Yeah, so that was well, you know the solar project was one of our goals and USDA had a nice grant in order to make that possible so we were able to receive that and get some good funding for that. We just fired that up so haven't received our first bill with the solar panels on yet so we'll see, but it should take care of it's set up for up you know maximum 110% of our usage and unfortunately it doesn't—our state doesn't pay anything back or virtually anything back for if we produce more so it's its main goal is to just ease the burden of our electricity bills and you're figuring that energy costs aren't ever going to soften, they're over time they're just going to keep elevating and increasing so hopefully that just puts us at a stopping point for all that.

43:52 Other things, you know we're just figuring out how to utilize our waste a little better—manure and irrigation has always been on my mind even though I said we were flooding so we're looking at possibly digging and trying to capture some runoff water and store that and be able to irrigate some pastures if and when we have a drought season because as everybody knows it was amazing last year we had a lot of rainfall, tons of rainfall it was basically like natural irrigation it was almost hard getting, even though our laneways are pretty solid it was actually hard getting the cattle onto the pastures just off the main lane. Once they're onto the pastures with everything, with all our infiltration, good infiltration in the pastures and good grazing and coverage and we were able to take that rain water and utilize all of it but in just spots where you had mass congregation where they're coming off the lanes all at once and on the lanes it was crazy but anyway we grew just a tremendous amount of forage and of course that if we do the multiplication of that we could increase the carrying capacity Farm if we had some irrigation possibilities.

45:20 For sure, that's interesting you bring that up. One of the summers that I was in college I worked for a farmer and we traveled around and went and saw other farms as well and they talked a lot about and this was in kind of the driftless region of Wisconsin and Iowa, southern Minnesota and we talked a lot about these little natural irrigation system that happened every morning with the dew because there's so much dew on the ground and the plants are still able to utilize that so and I would imagine in your region kind of similar rainfall probably somewhat similar humidity levels too. I'm sure you guys get a lot of dew every morning that those cool season grasses just love that environment.

46:11 Definitely, definitely, and I think so I spent a summer in California on an internship on a couple dairies out there and that was 1997 and you know water was a huge topic and I you know at that age and it's thinking oh we won't ever have to worry about water in the Northeast and but we have, we've seen

46:31 Some summers that were really dry. And that's the good thing about using the good grazing principles and even the cropping strategies with the diversity and coverage. I think folks that are following this system and wanting to learn more and implement this system, it's going to safeguard us longer than the average neighbor that's not. So I think water has to be and will be more to the forefront than I ever thought back 15, 10 years ago even.

47:04 Definitely yeah, and I would say a lot of people in this regenerative ag space would argue that the water cycle is probably one of the most important things that we need to be focused on no matter where you are, whether you're getting 42 inches of rain a year or five inches of rain a year, it's all about the water cycle.

47:27 We've got another question coming in from Taran. He asks, do you have an opinion concerning A2? Does it play a role in your operation when you're making management decisions? Yeah, I think A2 is, you know, when I first learned about it years ago it was very intriguing. So at that point I was still on my conventional dairy and we actually had a herd of 50. We milk 12,200 cows but had a herd of 50, 60 Jerseys within that herd. So I started using all A2 cows at that time. And a lot of those offspring out of those cattle were the ones I was able to transition my one-time transition in organic. So I was able to start with a lot of cattle that have been bred A2. I haven't gone through and tested the whole herd but I definitely like it. I think there's something to it.

48:27 I've talked to a lot of consumers, friends of friends and folks like that that had struggled with what they thought was lactose intolerance. And for me it's kind of a no-brainer. So we still continue to use our A2 bulls or A2 A2. There's plenty of good bulls out there of any breed A2 now. So I think there's something to it and I think it's something that can only help our industry when it comes to marketing and utilization of any dairy product.

49:10 Yeah, so you mentioned being in conversation with consumers, how has that changed or evolved since when you were in conventional dairy to now being in organic? Are you in conversation with more consumers or how has that conversation shifted? Yeah, so I actually am very fortunate to have worked with Stony Field, our milk company, and have done quite a few meetings with them. I was able to meet with some dietitians from a large grocery store chain to having people out on the farm that are responsible for buying and stocking, keeping the shelves full of a certain organic dairy product or yogurt. So that's really opened my eyes to what people, what certain demographic of people want and they're looking for and the questions they ask. And one of them, and sometimes it gets into a lot of it gets into organic versus conventional or grazing and that kind of thing. But a lot of them ask about the age of the cattle and how long they live. A lot of them are aware of the A2. So there, I think a lot of consumers are aware of that. So yeah, we have to, no matter where you're selling your milk, we have to bring that, bring all the positives—not that we want to hide the negatives but bring as many positive attributes of grazing and for me regenerative organic to the forefront and let them know why that's important.

51:01 Enhancing the product that they're purchasing for them or for the kids. So we actually want to continue to host different groups of folks out at our farm in order to do that, whether it's influencers or moms or dads that are buying yogurt for their two-year-old or they're 18 year old or themselves at 45 years old or 50. You know, so we want to be able to, but I think that's the good thing about our system is we can cover all the bases and make people feel good about what they're consuming, show them our farm, show them our goals, show them where we were, where we're at now, where we want to be, and incorporate all that into the marketing end.

51:53 Because we have to be our own, you know, there's probably immense marketing budgets for large companies, whether they're selling beef or pork or lumber or milk or dairy, any dairy product, but we have to, I believe we all have to aid in that too because everybody wants to hear, most everybody appreciates hearing the message and the vision from directly from the producer, farmer themselves.

52:26 Right, yeah, and that's such a powerful story to share, and you've done a great job sharing that today. So yeah, it's really important that we connect with the consumers and share our side of the story and make sure that they know the full picture and everything that's going into that. So we're getting close to ending here. If anybody has any last minute questions, feel free to throw them in the chat, but I always like to kind of end with a more big picture question.

53:00 So what is most exciting to you about the regenerative egg movement and where do you see this going in the future? And how do you see yourself playing a role in that movement as a whole? So what's most energizing to me is to see the quantity and the quality and the density of what we're producing. So I heard a lot of times about well, we may not be able to feed the world this way or produce the amount of crops this way with these practices, and it's quite the opposite. I am so pleasantly surprised and enthusiastic about the response when you start putting these principles together, how that multiplier effect of it, and I thought it would be much slower, so that's energizing.

54:07 And it's energizing to see how everybody is helping each other and working together. There's not, I don't think there's one producer anywhere that isn't willing to share what they know and what they did wrong, what they did right, try to help, why I wonder why that didn't work for you but it worked for me here, or so that's really energizing. I think the ag community has always been an awesome network, there's always been an awesome network and cohesiveness to most everybody in the egg industry, and just seeing people come together from companies like yourselves to the producers to everybody in between, for me that's energizing because as we all know as producers and farmers, sometimes when this breaks and that breaks, the snowball hits and you can get the negativity can start to crush you, but when you have a strong network of people to rely on and work around, it's you can overcome that in a short period of time.

55:17 So yeah, awesome, and that has definitely been proven in your pastures and the land, it sounds like, so that's great to see that on a personal side too, to see that in the human interactions as well. So awesome, well, there are no more questions in the Q&A box, so I think we'll probably wrap up here. Thanks again Eric, so much for sharing your story, and thank you all for joining the webinar today. We'll see you next week at 12 o'clock. Sorry, no, we're taking a break next week for happy independence day early, it'll be July 3rd next Wednesday, but we will be back that following week, that would be July 10th. We'll be back and we'll have Kevin Wilty on for our speaker, so join us all for that and thanks again Eric, thanks everybody.