Long Live the Soil: Building Farm Systems That Last

0:08 Go ahead and grab your coffee, grab your biscuits, and come on back. We're going to be starting here in just a couple of minutes with Jimmy. I'll let everybody kind of get settled down and then we'll get Jimmy up here and get started.

0:56 I'll say one more thing about the sponsors and then I'll say Jaqen is going to come up to introduce our first speaker. I just want to once again thank all of our sponsors and vendors for coming and being part of this. Their sponsorship makes it possible to do this at the cost that we're able to do it at, have all of the great food, bring in all the great speakers. So thank you once again to all of our sponsors and their support of what we're doing. I want to bring Jaqen up. Jaqen is going to be introducing our speaker. So where's Jaqen at?

1:46 Our first speaker here this morning is Jimmy Evans. I don't think Jimmy is a stranger to most people here. Jimmy is a friend, a farmer, and a very passionate advocate for soil health. He comes to us from western Oklahoma, and trust me when I say that if Jimmy can make it work where he's farming in Leedy, Oklahoma, the rest of us have nothing to complain about. It's a harsh environment, it's a low rainfall environment. What do you average, 16 inches probably on average? Yeah, probably 20 to 30. He went through a very severe fire a few years ago. He may talk about that a little bit. So Jimmy's been through a lot. The transition that he has come from being a conventional farmer to where he's at now is really inspiring. And Jimmy's story is inspiring, and part of what makes him such a great speaker, a very sought-after speaker on national stages, is the passion that he brings around soil health. And he's passionate because he's seen it work. He's seen it work on his operation and he's seen it work on just about every ecosystem, every soil type across the country. So when he says it will work in your area, you just have to figure out the practices. He's saying that from a place of personal experience.

3:16 Jimmy, come on up. The title of his talk, and I love this, and he actually trademarked it: Long Live the Soil. And just think about that. Long live the soil. The richness around that. So Jimmy, tell us how we can make our soil live longer.

3:34 Well, thanks a lot Keith. That's a big introduction there. You know, everybody makes a big deal out of it. I'm just Jimmy, farmer and rancher, grew up in western Oklahoma. We still operate the farm that my granddad, my great-granddad brought my granddad there in 1926. And actually, they rented the farm from '26 to 1934, and he bought it. And to really put that in perspective, you got to think what happened in 1929 with the collapse of the stock market. Yesterday we saw evidence of what happened in the '30s with all the blowing dust, and he was still able to buy the farm. And so I'm going to do my very best to keep that farm the way that God provided it for us. And so I am very passionate about it. Long live the soil. I did trademark that. I let a lot of my friends use that term. I didn't trademark it to make money off of it. I trademarked it to save it so that we could use it. And I tell everybody, it better, because it's everything to us. And so we're going to cover a lot of ground this morning.

4:59 Told him this was going to talk about today, and I hope y'all will like it. So it's not the strongest of the species survive nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change. You got to think about that. Charles Darwin was known pretty good for being pretty smart and he's so accurate there. You don't have to be the smartest, but you have to have the ability to change because life is ever changing every day. And so we don't need to be locked in to one certain way to do everything.

5:45 And you know this morning Keith and I were coming back in and we are sitting at the same table and I see Sean sitting in his seat this morning. We are creatures of habit, you know we can't help it. And we need to think about that as we move through life and change.

6:04 Many civilizations have come and gone because they didn't understand their soil and they couldn't feed themselves. Anybody know why they couldn't feed themselves? They destroyed their soil. I went to Italy a few years ago and the Roman Empire—the Romans were probably one of the best architects and building society that I've ever seen. There's other places that built great things as well. Do you know what happened to the Roman Empire? They just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger and growing more, and they destroyed their soil. And so they spread themselves out so thin and they couldn't feed their people and their people were hungry and the price of food was so high that when the barbarians came it was very easy to overrun them. One of the smartest civilizations you ever saw destroyed themselves.

7:19 So why should we care? Because everything comes from the soil. Everything. And its health depends on our health. If we have an unhealthy soil, we have an unhealthy body. And if you look back and you think when our grandparents and our parents grew their local garden and they canned everything and they ate everything on the farm, how healthy were they? My granddad lived to be nearly a hundred. My mom was in the nursing center and she wanted biscuits and gravy and bacon three times a day.

8:11 And we were paying the bill at the nursing facility and the nutritionist said, 'No, Florine, you can't have that. That's not good for your health. You know I'm a dietitian. I know what you need.' So I went down there and we had a little Jimmy conversation, and I said, 'My mom is 94. I don't think biscuits and gravy and bacon is going to kill her, and you're going to fix her what she wants.' And my mom died a very happy woman from a disease that was very devastating, but my point is that local food grown on your soil can't be replaced. I'm telling you.

8:58 Here's why we should really care, and by the way there is some new data out that goes to 2017. These are erosion rates in tons per acre per year from NRCS. How many of you are happy about that? Look at what we're comfortable now—we're doing a lot better than we used to do, but if you notice them numbers are

9:26 Starting to trickle up at the end. Why? Because we're still tilling a lot. Now, what does that really mean in the big scope of things? In billions of tons per year, that is the largest export that we have in the United States. Is our soil. We don't export any more tonnage than we do of our soil.

10:01 Holy cow, people. Can how much is that we're going to look at that, really how much is that? 1.69 billion tons of soil is. And we're going to divide that by 2 million pounds. And why are we going to divide it by two million pounds? Because that's a furrow slice. A furrow slice is the top 6.7 inches, the sweet spot where all the activity happens.

10:33 So we're going to take that number of furrow slices. And that's 70 billion 416 million semi long at 80 feet. That's a billion and some miles. Now I don't know about you but that's a heck of a road trip. That's a long ways.

11:02 So if we look at that and we divide that number of billions of tons by the U.S. population and that's growing. And that number is a little flexible but 329 million. That's 5.1 tons per person, every man, woman, and child in the United States. And we seem to be happy with that or content with that. I don't know if happy's the word. That's alarming to me. And that's the reason I'm so passionate about that. We can do better than that.

11:43 You look here and we talk about the 30s and how bad the dust was back then. Actually in Oklahoma, the water erosion in the 30s was more than the dust erosion. The dust was very visible to everybody and it was horrible. Don't get me wrong, but in tons it was. When it did rain, it was so buried and been blowing, it's so fragile. It was millions of tons washed away.

12:10 But in 2019 a series of storms hit Pennsylvania in the shoot a few short hours at the Susquehanna River. Now that's in the Chesapeake Bay and they have done a wonderful job over the past several years with cover crops and really trying to manage what's going into Chesapeake Bay. But in 2019 look what happened. Look here, look at all that silt and soil come down the river. And you can trace it clear on down into here. In 2019 it's like holy cow, man. It's just astounding. I mean, it's hard to believe we're still doing that.

12:58 So you know, no matter how big the hammer is, you can't pound common sense into stupid people. John Wayne always said, life is hard, but it's harder if you're stupid. You know, I don't mean that personally to you guys because generally we all love our land and we all care. But how much do we really care?

13:26 We're supposed to embrace our neighbors and help our neighbors. And yet I have neighbors that are eroding away just like in the picture. You know, how do we get to them? How do we get them to see the light with us? That's a challenge. It's a big challenge because we don't, I don't want to tell you exactly how to run your farm and I don't want to tell you you're doing a bad job. That's, you know, I need to embrace you and help you and try to get to a better place.

14:04 Playing the long game is following the road less traveled by turning down what feels good now in favor of what we think will set us up for feeling awesome later on.

14:15 We all need to be playing the long game. One of my best friends that I went to high school, he's got two daughters. One's a doctor now in LA at a trauma center, the other one's in Washington DC operating nurse in charge of the operating room there. They're not coming back.

14:36 Mike the other day, his land was blowing, his very sandy land. And I said, 'Mike, you know y'all try to keep that covered,' and here's what he said to me and I didn't know how to respond to this. He said, 'Well it's going to finish me out. They're just going to sell it anyhow, so why should I care?'

15:02 And man, it's like, Mike, you don't really mean that. You can't mean that because first of all it's an asset to you. But that's the way he feels and it's sad.

15:20 So if we look at soil, one dime thickness is about a ton an acre. That really puts it in perspective, doesn't it? So it doesn't take much erosion, whether through water or wind, to add up. But how much is that if we really want to look at it? You know, we're allowed 5T. It's in that team, it's not necessarily a ton, but it's tolerable. That's what it stands for.

15:52 So in this, I've done this presentation a year ago, so now it's 38 years, but I didn't want to change all this. So Ginger and I have been farming ourselves 37 years. We'll be married 40 this year.

16:05 And so we're going to look at, so if I'm allowed 5T and I've been 37, that's 185 dimes. That's 12 and a half inches of topsoil in theory that we've lost.

16:20 Now where I live we don't measure soil in how many feet of topsoil I have. We measure in inches. Imagine you measuring inches around here. So if I'm not taking care of it and I've lost a foot just in my lifetime, it's getting pretty thin.

16:45 But if you really want to look at it, we've had the family farm now 95 years, 94 in this illustration. That's 30 inches. You know, a lot of people talk about, 'Man, this whole farm don't produce what it used to. Man, when granddad farmed this it raised this much cotton, wheat was really good, didn't put on much fertilizer, grew a great crop.'

17:14 And you know, a few years ago I was in the construction business and ran dozers. So we cleaned up a lot of fence lines for new fences and whatnot. And everybody kept saying, 'Oh look at all what built up in the fence line.' One day I said, 'Have you ever thought that it didn't build up in the fence line? That is gone from out here.' And the guy said, 'You're full of it. It's just blew in here, built up.' But did it? Think about that.

17:45 So we're going to look at our farm here a little bit. And what we have, we run a lot of cow, mother cow-calf operation. We used to run a big stocker operation and actually run a lot of cattle in the Flint Hills in Osage County and Oklahoma every summer. We'd send two to three thousand head over there. But we have about two thousand acres of farmland. We run about six thousand acres of range land, give or take a little bit.

18:14 If we could add one percent soil organic matter to our farm, now soil organic matter is very, very important. Why? Because it is the lifeblood of the system. That's where the carbon is, that's where the nutrients are. It's very important where the water holding capacity and how important it is to water infiltration. So if we could raise that one percent and the reason we need to raise it is...

18:46 Originally in my area it was somewhere between three and four percent naturally. We think ten years ago I had some land at point six tenths. That's how much we've degraded it. So if I could add one percent I could add 27,125 gallons of water per acre that I could hold when it rains.

19:16 Now keep in mind, ten years ago when I started planting cover crops everybody said you can't do it Jimmy. We barely get enough rain to raise one crop. You can't grow something 24/7, 365 because we don't have enough water and you know what, they were right because the water infiltration rates at my farm back then was a half inch per hour. So if I got a six inch rain, how much rain did I really get? No wonder we couldn't grow but one crop.

19:52 But if I could add that to the system on 8,000 acres that give me 217 million extra gallons that I can hold for what? For later use because you know we are going to have dry spells. Anybody noticed that lately? So what would that mean and I put this in kind of irrigation terms but that's water holding capacity but that would be 326,000 gallons acre feet I could irrigate 665 acres with a foot of water and that's for free.

20:33 If I could tell you you could buy a rain everybody would laugh. I'm telling you you can if you invest in it. So can we control runoff with organic matter? Yeah we used to.

20:52 This is a study done by Alan Williams. We're going to talk about if you had two percent soil organic matter that's about where Alan's at that's about 32,000 gallons and that depends on your soil and where you're at that's your reason. I'm base mine on 27,000 gallons. There's places that's 25 or 20,000 it depends on your soil and your location but in this particular case we're going to go with that. And at that rate you could hold 21 percent of a moderate to heavy rainfall.

21:24 So that means if you dumped out a six inch rain you could only hold 20 of that and you're going to shed the rest of it down the stream. If you could get to five you could hold 80,000 gallons now you can hold 53 of that moderate rain. If you could get to eight percent and a lot of the prairie up through here was in that range seven to eight percent you could hold 85 percent of that heavy rainfall event.

22:00 So see what we've done? If we were naturally at eight percent and we used to be able to take 80, 90 percent of a big rainfall event in why is it flooding nowadays more? It's not because it's raining more it may be more intense but we can't hold it and that was Dr. Alan Williams in 2016.

22:26 So we're going to look at a bigger picture now, Mississippi River Basin. If we could raise it one percent and the reason I'm saying the Mississippi I may have heard about hypoxia and what we're doing out in the Gulf? Yeah we're doing that. Americans are doing that. So we're going to look at that that's about how many acres is in the basin. 736 million acres, billion acres the Mississippi River flows approximately 4 billion 435,000 gallons per second. Now folks that's a ton of water. That's a ton of water going down the river. If we raised one percent organic matter in the basin at that 27,000 gallons theoretically we could dry the river up for 52 days. That's how much water we could hold.

23:26 Now I got a good friend Greg Simons up in Salt Lake. Done a study and looked at the Mississippi River flow back as far as Lewis and Clark coming through. And it used not to flood much, it did some, and the river would fluctuate a little bit up and down a little bit. But it was very navigable. As we started plowing the prairie, it started doing this, and we started loading the river with sediment and moving it to the gulf, and it's just got worse and worse. That's the reason the river is above New Orleans. New Orleans wasn't below the river originally.

24:12 So what can we do? What can we do as a nation, as a state, as an organization, as common people out here, what can we do? Well, in Oklahoma we tried to do something, and I'm going to give an illustration what we've done. I was the state president of the conservation districts, and I had some really good partners with NRCS and the conservation commission and Noble Research. And I went to them and I said I want to build a plan called Stepping on the Gas for Soil Health. How we going to do that? And how are we going to get the conservation districts to step up and help send education out so that we can all learn how to be better at this?

25:00 And we figured out a plan, and we started in 2017. I had 84 districts in Oklahoma, and I went to them and I said your state allocations are coming. It's going to be directly tied to how many events you can host and put education out about soil health and cover cropping. And so that first year we held 16 events. Only 16 districts stepped up and said we'll do something out of my 84. I said that's a start. We had 611 people show up that we had trained as a trainer. We had 30 educational events and 2,000 people came as a start. But I wasn't happy because only 16 districts stepped up. So in '18 we put a little more pressure on.

25:57 We had 26 events. We had 484 employees, board members, directors, whatever you want to call them in different states—everybody calls them different things. We train them in how to work with your neighbors and friends and host a field day and really put out plot work and show. We had 51 educational events and 5,000 people came. Now we start frying with bacon grease—everything's a little better.

26:35 2019, guess what? Everybody stepped up and some done it twice. We had over ten thousand people came to events like this. Now that's where the rubber hits the road, because we're helping one another. Everybody thinks that as Keith was introducing me, I travel everywhere. I'm going to be in like 10 states here in the next 60 days. And you know, Jimmy's the expert. Jimmy's not the expert. I learn every day. I learned more yesterday than I think I'm going to share or teach today. That's what we got to do.

27:25 We changed the face of Oklahoma dramatically, and you know how I know that? If you look at the census in Oklahoma, the 2017—of course now we've got new data coming out. Here's the key points: we decreased intensive tillage 29 percent. We increased the farms using cover crops by 24 percent, and 51 in the use of cover crops. Keith, have you noticed that? Yeah, yeah. This is how you get started. Sitting around complaining about markets and weather and I don't know what to do won't cut it. We got to work together to get this out.

28:19 You know the districts, and this is the districts, but it could be this Kansas Soil Health Alliance. It could be any association that you have or group of people, but they have the ability to demonstrate, to coordinate, to help producers learn from one another. We can be our greatest enemy or our greatest friend. That's what I like about regenerative ag is that we are very open to one another, to help one another, to share, to explain.

29:07 In regular production agriculture, I used to be very competitive, and I didn't want to tell my secrets to my neighbor because he's my competition. But what I learned is he's my brother, he's my friend, he's my community. We've lost a lot of that, and we need to bring it back.

29:28 Now this is a story of a young man that reached out to me. He was a grad student studying soil biology at Clemson University, and he wanted to come to my farm because what he was being taught wasn't what we are talking about in the soil health regen arena. So he came out and I took him to three places. This farm here was at my house, and Keith and several of you in the rooms have been there. We've worked on this the last four or five years pretty hard. But upland had rock planet and grazed cover crop. It was a dark brown from memory, burnt brown—this is his words, by the way—for about the first five inches. Now this was January 2nd, and we were frozen. It may not be this year, but it was that year. The frost line was about a quarter inch, based on the soil mainly on the surface. It held its structure and was able to crumble to the bottom three inches of the carbon-rich soil in my hands. His words: carbon-rich. And I'm telling you, it wasn't carbon-rich ten years ago. It was very red and very sorry—it was not that color. But it's only five years in. Now I want to tell you something: remember about the first five inches. I've been working on that farm about five years intensely with cover crops, grazing, rotation, diversity—all the principles. Remember that five inches, because we see if you do that, no matter where I go, we can add about an inch of carbon layer to the soil per year.

31:26 So then we went to my neighbor's field, and Darren is an all-guy—whatever he plants, he's going to graze it to this cement floor. And he grazes his wheat out every year. He only plants wheat, and he's going to farm it six to seven times all summer long. Anything sticks up, he either wants to kill it or eat it, period. Good friend of mine. But compacted red clay—now this is one mile from the other field, characteristic of the region. And it is, because we've taken the carbon out. He didn't have the chart that day, but it was tougher to get a sharp shooter in the ground. Mr. Emmons hopping on it with both legs, and I'm telling you, side profile—when I hop on it, it should go in because I can put a little weight behind it. But it was frozen. The frost layer now is five or six inches versus a quarter where we just came from. And yeah, maybe it froze on the other side of the road a little more. I hear that a lot. The frost layer was inferred because when the shovel lifted out, the bottom broke off—about five or six inches had ice crystals on the underside. The red clay was frozen, difficult to break apart, and it stuck to my hands, broken off, which I observed in the first field.

37:32 I can do that, you know, sometimes that's hard, but I'll do that. And I was actually giving my speech on acceptance, and it just kept on. And I finished up and we were eating, and just every few minutes. And I looked down, I finally looked at you and said what are you doing? I said well, I missed seven calls and 25 texts, I really need to look. It was a friend of ours and we were having a big wildfire at home. Burned 200, nearly 90,000 acres in nine days, and it burned us about half out.

38:14 You know, last year Will Rogers said things can't go on like this, and they didn't, they got worse. And boy did it get worse. This was the first picture that we took when we got to the farm. The fire was going by us. The forest service was telling us has burned 118 acres a minute. Like yesterday we were having 60 mile an hour winds, 3 humidity, and we're about 90 some degrees.

38:46 Lot of eastern red cedars across the river from me, but it missed us. We were able to put the fire out because I control my cedars there. God's blessed us, we're okay. Well, and I actually hauled hay to the neighbors across the river to help them feed their cows the next day. And then like yesterday what happened? The wind changed and it came from the north instead of the south and hear it come back.

39:24 I really need that hay back that I hauled over there to help another neighbor, but it's a good thing I hauled it because it would have burned up. And I had made a statement when I started this that my land would never blow again. Never say never.

39:56 We know what the problem is. We know what the solution is. We have to use the principles of soil health. Mimic, I love this: mimic, don't fight, mother nature. We've got to remember that: keep the soil covered, minimize disturbance and stress. Our systems are just like us, they don't handle stress. Increase plant diversity, maximize root growth, and properly integrate livestock. Pretty simple, can be pretty hard, but it's really pretty simple what we can do.

40:45 If we apply them and you saw if what I applied on my farm, what we've been able to do. So this is after the fire. This is me on this side of the fence. That's my neighbor. Once again, this is another neighbor that likes to take it all. See how my grass is rebounded on this side of the fence? Got a new fence by the way. I had to put up 25 miles of new fence. We got pretty good at building fence.

41:21 But Garland is still trying to take everything instead of giving his grass and his pastures a long rest after stress. When you go to the hospital and you have a procedure, what do they tell you? Go home and rest. Give your body time to heal. In our lands just like that. Now I crawl over the fence and doesn't it look like it's been mowed with a shredder or a bat wing on this side? Because Garland is trying to take it all. Mine has recovered now and I'm ready to start putting animals on it.

42:02 This is another neighbor. Look at all the bare soil and the weeds are coming. They never took their cattle off once it started greening up. And across the road this is us. We've let it come back, we let rest. I did have an advantage because I've been doing a really good job grazing. My soil health was better. So when we did get a rain after the fire, what happened? I and I like to tell you, you know, when everybody says Jimmy, how much rain do you get today? What I really want to say now is I got—

42:39 It all. Because used to I would say well we got, you know, seven eight tenths, but what I really meant back then was well I got a half inch and I run the rest off. Now I like to say I got it all. This is what it looked like so it's really recovered very well. And we're recovering financially and mentally from that. It's still tough.

43:07 And by the way, if you ever want to see, we got a video out on YouTube called 'From the Ashes' that Noble Research done with us. I don't watch that very often by the way, but it's a good watch.

43:19 We talked about this yesterday during the grazing, and I thought I'd throw this in. This is how you measure what you have. This was Denise Turner, a grazing land specialist there on the right. This was an intern that, by the way, we've hired now from New Mexico NRCS. She's very good. And that's Carson, my hired hand. Carson's been with us 13 years now. Square on the ground we clip everything and we weigh it. That's what the bag's for, to know what we have.

43:51 To know how to graze you gotta know what you have and you gotta know what your cattle, what kind of cattle you got and how much they're gonna need. We do that. We did that with our summer forage mixes as well. That's what we're doing here. Again, they got a hoop on the ground. Now Jimmy can look at that and say that's about 4, 4, 500 pounds because I've done it enough to know that I can look at the density and look at the height and I can guess pretty close.

44:29 So I don't need to measure anymore, but it was a great learning tool. And if you don't know how to do that, you need to get with somebody and you need to do that. You also need to know where your water infiltration rates are. The first thing you need to know that.

44:48 This is how we graze with polywire. This is what we want, a trampling effect. We don't want to take but half, maybe less than half if we're really wanting to improve. Now, like Sean said yesterday, there are times and after the fire I had to take more than half to survive. But that's Mother Nature and that's the system. But if you do that, what do you got to do? You got to give it rest.

45:19 You can't expect it to give all the time. Now I've always told everybody, it's easy to see rain coming down like we saw yesterday, but it's dang hard to see it going up. And Rush Jackson called me and said, 'You know, you dummy, you can, it'd come of rain down at Mountain View, Oklahoma.' Notice where the tillage is and where the green is. And what's the water done? Living roots in the ground in green is, I believe I'll take that.

46:01 And he got a couple of different shots. When the soil gets so hot and you get a rain, what happens? Keep it cool, keep something growing, and you can take it in. We're very good in our country at putting CO2 and water up, and then we all want to grow. It's dang, how long has it been since you got a rain, Jimmy?

46:28 Well, it's been about 80 days at home, but the last one I got it all. I'm still trying to survive. I need one. But we can remember what Key said yesterday about keeping CO2. If you keep a good canopy, how you can cycle that down there. We talked about that this morning over here on the side bar. How it used to be when it was lush and green, and now we talk about CO2 levels being high. Well, maybe we've caused that and we keep H2O in the ground.

47:05 Here is Russ Jackson, I just talked about him. We had been on this farm on the left the day of the week before and we measured his water infiltration in this.

47:17 Field out here and all this field is rusted. This is the road to his focus's house. Six inches per hour everywhere we measured it was six inches or more per hour.

47:32 His neighbor constant tillage one crop over here half inch per hour.

47:41 It rained 5.3 inches and Rust called me and he was so excited. He said Jimmy I got it all and I was like yeah I told you you could take six. You need some more. And he said my gosh Jimmy it's running down the bar ditch and behind these houses there is a creek and that water is going right down that bar ditch and through a ten horn right there and into the river. This guy had fertilized the day before with dry fertilizer.

48:18 Now you'd ball today if you'd paid 1300 a ton or about that. But look, management no-till crop cover crops planned grazing management six inches an hour he took in a hundred and forty three thousand nine hundred gallon.

48:39 Management conventional tillage small grains no cover crops no grazing half inch per hour, sixteen thousand five hundred gallons.

48:50 If you're an insurance company, I'm going to pick on RMA here. If you're an insurance company who would you rather insure? You know what happens in the U.S. We'd rather insure this guy than this guy and we'll pay this guy because he didn't raise a crop. Russ planted cotton here and raised three bale cotton without irrigation. Why? Because he can catch it all.

49:23 Now everybody said hell Jimmy you know that's a localized event and when I put this on Twitter I had guys say you doctored the photo the drainage is from left to right that you know Jimmy you don't know what you're doing. So guess what, this is this year at Meno Oklahoma.

49:46 We were at this farm the day before. Mark Thomas over here on the right and we had measured water infiltration rates over here and over here it had rained so far six inches that morning they wound up getting almost seven six eight nine or something like that. They were harrowing this ground the third time getting ready to plant wheat when we were there. I mean it's horrible.

50:18 This is another shot down the road. Mark's still on the right. This is planted by the way already. Neighbor Mark it stood a little bit across the road heavy tillage. Mark Thomas on the right good system. The neighbors on the left, who wants to drink what?

50:52 This is what we can do. Now this here is in North Dakota a good friend of mine a Leopold Jeremy Wilson. It rained for 12 hours, 13.8 inches. Look no erosion to speak of it is running out but look at the water how clear it is and he's actually going to take a drink of that.

51:23 My point in reason I wanted to show you this in flooding situations we can't take it all. It's going to get full but when it gets full if we have to run some off it doesn't have to take the farm with it or our nutrients. It took a little of the residue. There's no ditches. Why? Because his soil aggregates are so good and his structure is so good that it held together. If you ever saw a slake test then you understand this.

52:08 If anybody's ever saw me I use this a lot I love John Wayne I love Westerns my wife gets tired of Westerns but I think it's good wholesome fun and I like to watch it how many has ever saw John

52:20 Wayne or any western actor stop a runway stagecoach. Yeah, and how would he do it? He would jump from A to B to C to D to E to F and save the damsel in distress. And that's the way it was, that's the way we've always done it. If they made a new movie today, guess what? A, B, C, D, E, F. But has anybody ever thought there's another way?

52:53 Now I'm sure that after shooting hours, John Ford and John Wayne was standing there, probably having a bourbon and talking. I'm sure John Ford said, you know, John Duke, tomorrow I want you to shoot the horses. He'll save, we can save filming time. We'll stop and everything will be fine. You think they talked about that? No. And I'm not promoting that we shoot animals, please don't take it wrong. My point is there is other ways to do things that we never think about because, like I said earlier, remember we're creatures of habit. Keith sitting in the chair that he set in yesterday, I'm going to sit in the chair I said. Sean sitting there, I see Audrey and them back there, you know, we typically do that.

53:45 Now this is us at our farm and ranch, and we like to have fun anymore. Sean and I talked about family time. This could be Carson and I working in the shop. I scared the far out of him a week ago. We like to have fun, but my point being is not rocket science. People like you think, but what's wrong with having a little fun while we're building the system?

54:12 We have lost our fun and lost our family time as Americans and worldwide because it takes more and more and we gotta get bigger and bigger instead of getting better. Will Rogers said better than anybody: even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there. Think about that a little bit. Some of us go down the wrong track, but if you're on the right track, Jimmy, can't be content and then we can't sit there. That's what we like to do. I'm going to rest a little bit. Nope. You're gonna get run over.

54:56 If not now, when? There is no planet B. We done went to Mars, we done went to the Moon. Looks like we done them in there because there's nothing left. We don't need to go anywhere else. We got the natural thing to fix right here.

55:19 Failure is part of life. If you don't fail, you don't learn, and if you don't learn, you'll never change. I'm pretty good at failing. Somebody talked about this, I think Kevin mentioned this yesterday. I tell everybody, my granddad, he wasn't a great philosopher. He always told me, we were chopping cotton, he said: slow and steady, keep moving. And if you fall when you're doing that, guess what? You're going to fall forward. If you get overwhelmed and you can't figure out what's happening and you backing up and you fall, where you go?

56:10 I think it's pretty important. Long live the soil. It better. And it will. It's always been here, it's always going to be here. It's a matter if we're going to be here with it. We've got to take care of it. This is how you can get a hold of me. My emails, I work for the conservation commission as well. I got lots of videos on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter. Don't hesitate to call me, email me. I got six of them while I've been up here, and a few texts. We're here to help and we want to.

56:54 Thanks a lot.