No-Till and Crop Diversity in Dry Land Farming: Scott Scheimer's 33-Year Journey

0:00 Thanks again everybody for joining us. Today's going to be a fun conversation. Our guest today is the third in this webinar series on regenerative seed growers. Our guest today is Scott Shimer. Scott and his team, his family, they farm out in Cheyenne Wells, Colorado area, the eastern part of Colorado. So if you think you the tough environment, you'll probably not, it'll take a tough one to top Scott's tough environment. He'll talk a little bit about that, but it is a harsh, brittle, dry arid environment out there. He'll talk a little bit about that. Now those environments can be very good for growing high quality seed. So we'll talk a little bit about some of those issues. But in addition to farming and growing seed for us, Scott wears many hats, like the hat that he has on right now, Simple Farms. He'll talk a little bit about that. That's a farm management software package that he has built. But our conversations that may start in farming and growing seed, but we may end up talking about growing shrimp and trading cryptocurrency, so who knows where this will go. So it's going to be a fun one. So Scott, so glad that you could join us. Glad that you are part of our seed growing team. We certainly, in addition to that, Scott's a customer as well, as you will find the majority of our seed growers are customers. That's how we got to know them first. We know that they're a good farmer, but just because you're a good farmer does not make you a good seed grower. So then we reach out and work with them to see if they'll be good, which Scott is. So Scott, go ahead and introduce yourself. Tell the folks a little bit about where you're from, your operation, background, some of that kind of stuff.

1:52 Well, thanks for having me on. I greatly appreciate it. Yeah, when Jonathan asked to let us know where you're at, that's definitely. I, it's hard for me to relate to most of you other guys. We are dry and arid. I took on the family farm for my granddad in 1991. I was at the age of 19 and going to CSU. Always wanted to come to the farm, just didn't realize I was going to be on that soon. So I've had a few years experience under my belt through the process. When we first started, that was still at the point in time where there was the freedom to farm act. So we were wheat, fallow in this region. And at that point in time, my biggest concern was if I farmed for 50 years and raised wheat and fallow, I was going to get 25 crops on one field. And boy, I was going to have to perfect it and I was going to have to figure this out how I was going to do the best job. And you knew just with a 12-inch annual rainfall, you weren't going to get that crop each year.

2:57 In '96, the world changed for us. We were able to switch up and start growing milo, and that was actually the first year I lost a wheat crop. Prior to that, it was in great shape. We were raising crops every year. It was raining. But we switched and added some milo into the mix and some sunflowers, and that kind of opened my eyes at that point. Hey, we can diversify and start growing a lot of different crops. And then hit 2000, and I thought we could raise a 30-bushel wheat crop every year no matter what we did around here, until 2000, and we turned. I think we were 2 inches of annual rainfall that next two years. All we did, I didn't sleep at night. We ripped all day just to keep the ground from blowing. And that's about all we did. And we finally got going again. And at that point, that's when I got introduced to green cover and looking at trying to keep life on the soil. That was kind of a key thing. We dabbled in that a little bit and found that it was a struggle with the rainfall. If we had dry years, we just didn't even have enough growth. Our ground was hard as a rock, and still exposed. So from there, we went back to just doing as much diversity in the crops as we could.

4:08 Today we are doing millet, milo, corn, wheat. And last year, introduced ourselves to green cover again and said we would love to try some rye and grow up more in the seed aspect. And so last year was our first year doing that. Just sold, completely sold on it. We did a little over 800 acres in variety test plots, and the residue we stripper cut it, and the quality with the grain was good. And from there, we're just we're sold on going that way and very excited for the residue we're going to plant through this year. We then have expanded that rye crop into, I think this year we're at 500 acres that we're doing for green cover. And we introduced that rye through millet stubble, corn stocks, milo stubble, everything that we had just harvested in the fall. We put that rye in and some of it didn't come up through.

5:10 The winter but we caught some of those winter snows and we got emergence. We went out and top dressed and things look dynamic now, very excited. Everything's got a nice cast of green, looks solid. And my reason for doing that as well is you guys know it looking at the wheat market and these prices. I am trying everything I can to get away from fallow in our region and do something in production. My attitude for some of these Rye acres were we were having some weed pressures and just didn't want to go spend another $70 an acre trying to keep these weeds under control. So let's put the Rye in and if we harvest a 12 bushel Rye crop we're still better off. We're going to have somewhat a residue and we're going to keep this weed pressure in check and just get reset for that next corn or Milo crop that we want to follow up with that stubble. And so those are that's a quick background on my end I guess of where we're at today.

6:13 So Scott Raven Camp, who is our contract seed production guy, works with all of our seed growers. So you know him very well. He used to farm in a very similar environment to you out there in Colorado as well. He told me way back when he was growing seed for us before he was working for us, he says Keith, everybody in eastern Colorado should be growing rye and there should be no wheat. What makes Rye better adapted to your environment there than what wheat is? I just from my experience, I mean I'm not a true agronomist, I'm just a farmer trying to write the checks. We would try to follow up our Millet stubble with wheat. So we would get our Millet in a little earlier than we would typically around here so we could get that Millet off and just have a nice window to get that wheat in there. And it just we have found each time the wheat struggles. It just struggles in that kind of environment. It needs a fallow period to really produce in this area. And the Rye, I'm telling you right by my house here, we had cornstalks and after we picked the corn here in late October, and just scattered in the Rye. And then we put cattle on it to eat it and they pound it in. That rye, we got a little bit of moisture. And I think the big thing is that rye will come out of dormancy so much quicker than wheat and still give itself an opportunity and be ahead of the game. And I think that's what's created his advantage over wheat. It's just a little earlier, aggressive in the spring.

7:49 We also again last year was our first year we're doing custom cattle care. And we thought, oh, we'll put some cattle on that Rye. And we got caught with our pants down. We were thinking it was going to act like wheat and we had some time to get the fence up and get the cattle out there. And boy, once we got a little temperature and a little moisture, that rye grew so fast we didn't have time to get the cattle out there and the fence up. So we kind of decided next time we're going to be a little quicker. The fence will be up ready to go. And we'll just take advantage of a two week window even to put those animals on and then move them on the grass right next to it.

8:24 Yeah, I've often said if you're gonna graze Rye, you need about three cattle for a month. Then they need to go somewhere else because once it takes off. And part of that, you know what you just talked about and described, is why cereal Rye is the number one cover crop across the country simply because it's so well adapted, it's such a tough plant, so deep rooted, has more residue. You know, cereal rye will germinate at 38 degrees. At photosynthesis or sorry, germinates at 34 degrees. And 38 degrees and above it will actually do some photosynthesizing. So just a really tough, resilient plant.

9:09 I want to go back, you talked a little bit about the residue from the Rye and how that was shifting and changing your whole system. Talk a little bit more about that. You know, how much more residue does it have than wheat and then what does that residue do for the rest of your rotation, the rest of your system? So we've been stripper cutting. We actually got stripper heads before our planters were even capable of getting through the straw. The original planters we had, so we got out of the stripper heads because we just couldn't manage the residue. And then we got newer planters, modified them, got back into the stripper heads because residue's everything for out here with 12 inch annual rainfall. And then August turns to 95 degrees for one week with 30 mph winds. I mean, if we don't have that ground covered, it's just death for us. And I know everybody around here survived for generations plowing this.

10:04 Dirt and planting a crop, but we know saving that moisture and preserving that profile with residue is everything to survive in this area. So wheat, even by the next year it's starting to break down and by the time we're into July August we got nothing left on the ground. That's telling us too our biology is doing some work, but what I've seen this last year going over last year's stuff with the spray rig here just a couple weeks ago to get the volunteer under control, the straw is just so much heavier and stronger.

10:46 A unique one was we did some trials for green cover as well. We did some hybrid variety called a covermax and it went right as a strip right through the middle of this elbon that we've got out there. The elbon it's lodging a little bit now, that straw got a lot of wind on it, a lot of snow, but that covermax, that straw is still standing vertical, pretty impressive. That stuff was almost shoulder high when we cut it and I was very impressed with that. You can just see that differential line even since harvest last year on that.

11:18 Our planter is rigged up, we can get through it, we can move it out of the way and just open up a nice strip. I don't run strip tillers, just a full no till right through that and very excited about what kind of mat we're going to have out there. We feel like too we got some tools in our toolbox we work with elevate and we're using their biologicals and have been for quite a while. I think that's helped our quality a ton. But also we went out and we just put some of their product called hypercycle on, so we're going to break down that residue. We did it in zones, mostly on the irrigated areas where the residue was a lot heavier. We didn't touch the dry corners and see how that breaks that down, making nutrients available to us but also allowing us to get through with the planter a little easier.

12:06 And I think that's such a good point. The residue, it's residue because it's high carbon, but that carbon has to be the base of your whole system, your whole rotation. So until you start having problems with too much carbon you should be trying to produce as much carbon as you can. And before you go out and do a tillage pass or even do a biological to help break that down, make sure that you do have the best equipment possible or your equipment is adjusted as much as possible, because having too much residue early on may be a problem, but you will never have too much residue later in the summer when that next crop is growing because it helps the infiltration, it cuts the evaporation, all those sorts of things. So even if you have to sacrifice a little bit on the front end to have that residue out there later is such a huge thing, especially in a very brittle environment like what you guys are in.

13:13 So we can definitely want to talk about the biology and how you see that changing what you're doing and changing your system and the quality and all that. But I do before we go there I do want to go back. You talked about weed pressure as well and I know even before we started the webinar live here we were talking a little bit about weed issues and weed pressures. How do you see your rotation, what you're doing, how do you see that affecting your ability to manage weeds as compared to maybe some of your more traditional neighbors who are still just doing wheat fallow?

13:48 The big one where we talked to Scott Raven Camp about was where we're going to put our rye. I had explained to him that I have a section with three circles and then the rest dryland corners. It's one well, three pivots limited irrigation, so we were finding ourselves doing a variety of different crops on each of the circles and then something else on the dryland corners. We were getting to where drift or anything else, we were just getting terrible escapes and weed pressures that we were having difficulty managing on the perimeters until we hit the point a couple years ago that the pigweed just took that field over. You know we even had agronomists from bear come out and recommend on our soybeans what to be putting down. We threw the kitchen sink at it and we ended up doubling it up and still didn't get control. So Scott had mentioned hey why don't we try rye in that zone. I mean it is aggressive, it will choke things out. So we went in there, put the rye in, harvested it. When I'm sitting in the combine I'm the guy in the combine, I'm the guy in the sprayer, as was in that combine we had.

14:58 Very limited plants out there. I mean just did it that Rye was really aggressive and really choked on that wheat, choked that wheat pressure out. And grasses, it just dominated in the grasses. I mean we had just such limited pressures that we had seen in zones that were so bad years historically. And then I followed up post-harvest, went out there with the sprayer, threw down the Roundup. Actually it wasn't round, I hit it with garone and even sitting up in the sprayer, weeks later after a little moist, we just didn't have the pressures out there, but I went ahead and put the chemicals on just to get that final cleanup.

15:37 So moving forward our game plan is we're trying to avoid as much herbicides as possible, throw Rye in the rotation and use it to really choke out some problem areas. And that's what we've done this year on a few fields. And so there's still more to be said, stay tuned, but we're excited what we think it'll do for us there. And those fields that Rye didn't come up till this spring, but it's already a full stand, already got strong stooling and way ahead of anything else coming out of the ground. And I'm hoping that really gives us choke pressure on it.

16:09 Yeah, yeah, for sure. And you know we've talked about this in other webinars, other articles and stuff. You know the Rye has the ability to control weeds. It easily controls early weeds, you know, winter annuals, marist tale, henbit, things like that. They just don't exist in a Rye field. But in order to get the later season control on weeds, you know like what you're seeing, you have to let that rye really grow out. So growing it for grain like what you're doing is one solution. If you were in a more lush environment, you know, as you move east into the corn belt and stuff, those guys are letting their Rye get five feet tall, rolling it down and then planting their beans into it, and they get weed control deep into the summer because of that. Now obviously you can't do that in an arid environment, but so your option is you say well, okay, I'll grow the rye as the cash crop and not try to plant that spring-planted crop.

17:15 So how is it socially being the guy in wheat country planting all these acres of Rye? Yeah, you know, the younger guys don't have much of an opinion about it. You got the older guys that approached me through the winter at school athletic events. I hear you're growing Rye and you know you better be careful. And what I try to remind these guys is the last time we were really fighting Rye was when we were tillage, we were doing fallow wheat and we didn't have sprayers and Roundup. And since then I've told these guys, one neighbor I even thanked him, or didn't thank him, I, he says you better not get Rye on my property. I said well, I owe you for all the sandburs you gave me on my property. Just we'll trade it out, you know. We're just all fighting a new dynamic with Roundup and all the different rotations. Even for us, anything that's following this Rye will be either Roundup Ready corn or will be the new herbicide-resistant milo that you can control grasses with. And we actually do a rotation that the milo follows the corn or vice versa, so we get two years of grass management out of our next crops that follow that rye anyway. So we are taking that approach, but really in the end aspect, every tank mix we're throwing out there, unless we're doing top-dressing on wheat, has got Roundup in it anyway. We've got to address it with all the other grass pressures. So I'm not so concerned about that. You know, it's funny the way the neighbors are handling it, but I'm being neighborly as well. When we go out and harvest the first two rounds on the perimeter, we wind Rye, we're running a stripper head, so you're not leaving much residue on the ground anyway, but instead of spreading the chaff, we'll actually windrow it. And then once we get deeper into the field, we'll put the spreaders back up.

19:05 Yeah, that is that's good, insightful. You know, and for people that are listening, if you're not from wheat country, you don't understand why this is an issue for people. You know, Rye was the weed or maybe still is the weed when you're doing continuous wheat, when you're growing nothing but wheat. Rye is an opportunist and it's going to find its way in there. And then what happened is that rye became feral and it developed lots of hard dormant seed and so it laid out there in the seed bank for many years. But that's completely different than the Rye that Scott's growing for us that we're selling to people.

19:46 Does not have dormant seed. It's not feral and so it's a different animal. And really that rye growing in those wheat fields is a symptom of not having the right rotation more so than anything else.

19:59 So Scott, you talked about biology and I want to kind of go there a little bit because you know we're talking about regenerative seed growers and obviously you're not organic. You use herbicides as a tool when needed because in your brittle aid environment, that's a better tool than tillage to be able to do that. But talk a little bit about some of the biological products that you're using, what they are, what they're doing, and how that is reducing your reliance on commercial fertility.

20:34 Absolutely. I think that makes us kind of a unique area as well. We're a very sandy soil with high pH. I mean, so we're growing soybeans on 83 pH soil here, but we have high calcification as well. So the first thing I did is, I mean we're going way back, is instead of using just 32 and 1034 or map or mes, we started throwing a little sulfur out there, right, just lowering our pH and putting that soil to work a little more. From there we moved into humix, both raws then dries and processed then liquids. And then at that point we got introduced with the guys with Elevate who are saying, hey, we're actually creating a concoction that you can put in furrow for me. I've set up for liquid years ago. I quit putting the dries in there years. I would go dig for seed and find the previous year's little granular of phosphorus in the ground. We were so dry, so we switched a long time ago both our planter and our air drill or shank drill into a liquid so that we had that more available. And then when we got introduced to Elevate and their product called Hyper, that was kind of a big game changer for us, showing that getting that biology alive in the soil with these products, waking it up and putting it to work, and freeing up all these tied up products that we've been putting in for ages.

22:04 I've gone back and I had tried. I was a believer in the cover mix and I really wanted to get that in there but we just didn't get the rainfall. So I feel like I tell everybody, what these products are, these biologicals we're putting in the soil, are that supplement that you just couldn't get out of growing a green crop. It couldn't keep something alive on the soil for whatever dynamic. This is going to the biological aspect and introducing them into the soil. I built my program, my Simple Farms program. It's a margin analysis managing the numbers. And I just wanted to see if we couldn't keep shifting dollars, not necessarily adding more dollars into our program, but shifting, maybe some of our 1034 dollar into these other products. And I could tell you at this point, working with the Elevate guys and a couple other companies we work with, this is going to be the first year we're putting zero phosphorus down on our ground. We've done trial fields and we've got so much tied up phosphorus out there in this high calcification soil that we have just shifted the dollars more into the biologicals and put those to work and free this up. We've had great success. Wheat last year, we were delivering to our location West and Grain just south of us, and they ended up setting an entire grain bin aside the elevator for us. Our quality exceeded everyone's. We were dry going right into summer. We got pretty dry, but we just held a consistent 61 to 62 pound test weight on the same variety, Westbred variety wheat that they're doing in Western Kansas and Eastern Colorado. Nothing special on the seed, but we just had a healthy plant and we were 13 and 14 protein on those plants and we held consistent throughout. They told me we helped them move two trains out with the mix and blend to get the other qualities of 58, 57 pound weight out of here because we had healthy soil, we had a healthy plant, a healthy seed, even with extreme drought. I mean, we turned dry, we turned hot and dry, you know, the old worry about maybe being shriveled up a little bit and losing test weight, and that didn't occur because we have the good biology in the soil.

24:26 Well, I hope you compensated well with the premium for that. I did. Those guys, Wes and Grain, was very good to me, very good to me on that. Well, and who else, you know, who else can say the elevator hasn't been just for my product so much? I mean, that's pretty cool. It was an honor. It was an honor. We did a Simple Farms presentation here a few weeks ago and they came in and had that conversation with the other producers.

24:57 Around is they did they flat out told them we held a grain tank for Shimmer operation. Yeah, and so that'll maybe move us into the actual purpose of these webinars is to talk about how growing seed in an environment like you, when you're using these regenerative practices, how that translates to better seed. John Kempf was on our first webinar and he talked a lot about the science and stuff behind it, but that's what you're seeing in that higher protein, higher test weight wheat. That's exactly what he said—the best seed, larger seed size, heavier test weights. That's just an indication of being nutrient dense. The higher protein, same way.

25:46 So you know, talk a little bit about—you're fairly new to growing seed for us. This is your second year. But do you think, and have you seen—you know, over the years, have you saved some of your own seed and replanted it, whether it be these cereals or millet or any of these things? Have you noticed the difference there between other seed sources that you've gotten?

26:13 No, Keith, we haven't. Not in that aspect. I don't take the time to store the grain separately, segregate it out, and clean it, so we're pretty much sourcing all our seed from somebody else. But what we do do is we use the Grain Sense tester, and so we're always checking the quality of our grain. The one that we really saw too was—it doesn't pay out there, but we got good test weight corn. I mean, for Eastern Colorado, what we go through in dryland, we get very excited about if we exceed 60 lb test weight. So when we're in that 61, 62 lb test weight, we're pretty excited about that around here. The other thing is, as though we were using that tester just to see what kind of dynamics we're seeing in the seed and our protein levels. I think a standard on corn was 10, and we were showing 13 to 15 protein levels on the corn, and it was consistent. It didn't matter whether it was a decal or a channel. It was very consistent on that end. And so we're having dialogues with the feedyards that we're delivering to: hey, we can bring you a higher protein source right now. They're nutritionists. They don't much care about that. They just pay the same price. But we'll keep the statistics going on that, keep checking all those values, and maybe someday that'll translate into something more with a little value added. But we do see that we see a lot better quality. I run the combine. I could definitely tell consistency. All the trucks got to report back to me every single load, and we're way more steady and stable on our test weights. And you know, test weights are exponential in a field's yield, and that translates as well.

28:08 Yeah, you know, the late great Dave Brandt, one of the pioneers of the soil health movement, he was seeing the same thing in his corn—that extra quality, the extra protein, the extra nutrient density. And he did eventually find a hog feeding operation that would pay him on the value of what he had. So yeah, my encouragement to you would be to hang with it. You know, you've got lots of trucks in your area. You can ship that corn as far as you need to to find someone who will actually pay you on its value, because you know there definitely is value in what you're doing and what you're growing. So you've talked about it a little bit. You've mentioned the Simple Farms program. Tell us a little bit about what that program does, how you came to develop that, and then how you're using that to help make management decisions to ensure that you're doing the right decisions by going to rye and doing this diverse rotation versus the way that Grandpa did it, the way that many of your neighbors still do it.

29:14 Well, I grew up in a family—a financial planner, my mom is, my brother is. So the stock markets, even tax shelters, was an education in junior high for me. So when I took on the farm at the age of 19 for my granddad, I mean right from the very beginning it was numbers. Everything in my world was numbers. And I was always wanting to figure out exactly what our cost of production is. And so early on I tell everybody, I can remember I bought a farm logs program—I think it was, it wasn't Farm Logs, one of the farm programs. I mean, it was floppy discs and VHS videos to watch to learn how to use the program. Oh my gosh, the...

29:57 Dating entries and the redundancies and the nightmare of it, so I bailed away from that, went into spreadsheets. Then jumped into a new program, maybe some of you guys remember Apex. That was kind of the one that threw me over the cliff with John Deere is the cost of it. At that point as well I was having dialogues with my local banker who was one of my best friends. Is, hey, how are farmers figuring out their cost of production where they need to market? He says nobody's showing us anything. You know, guys are coming in with napkins about how they performed that year.

30:34 We'll call it a midlife crisis through the whole dry spell of the early 2000s and the opportunity came up to be the grain marketer at Cargill here in Shy Wells. Thought man, this is the opportunity I'm going to be on the road meeting farmers, trying to get them to sell bushels to Cargill. And I got on the road and covered from I70 South all the way to the panhandle of Oklahoma. And I would say 95% of the producers I met with had no bookkeeping program out there that knew exactly what their cost of production was. And that kind of was the point there, on top of me being involved with another startup company that inspired me to develop a program.

31:10 I got in and said I'm going to build my own program. So I took my spreadsheet concepts and found a development team in Denver, Colorado, and off we went and built Simple Farms program. My concept was almost gamifying spreadsheets, simplifying it to a level where you can plug in all these details of what we're doing. You guys know all the different inputs we put in with our planter or with our sprayers, and putting it all together and it immediately telling me what it's costing me to raise that corn crop, that wheat crop, that milo crop, and exactly where we need to be marketing that.

31:50 So for me I use the tool to make decisions on lease structures. Fallow has been the most devastating these last few years, especially limited rainfall and these poor market prices. Other than that nice little rally last year right at wheat harvest, our margins are so tight and so difficult to actually price at these levels and make any kind of money. And I was trying to find other opportunities and I kind of foresaw that green cover was really taken off with the cover mix. I knew rye was kind of the staple, and I couldn't do cover crops but I could sure grow a seed crop here. Taking out a fallow period and putting that in right after a millet, milo, or corn crop. Even if I lost $20 an acre, was better than spending 90 days an acre, $90 an acre, keeping that ground clean, trying to struggle for that next year's wheat crop.

32:50 So that, anything to get myself where we're cash flowing better and not tying up such big dollars for each year's production was kind of the vision I got out of the program. Probably the biggest one is I developed my own program, launched it in 2019, and even I lacked the discipline here during July, August last year. My program told me I should be marketing more bushels because we were in the black, and I was optimistic about the markets. My analysts were, that I hire to tell us where the markets are at, and I didn't pull the trigger. And that is definitely a discipline I've even learned out of my own program. If it tells me I should be marketing a certain level, I will be doing that this year. So even the guy that built the program can still make poor marketing decisions.

33:37 My program doesn't give you all the answers. I developed it basically just to give you perspective on your operation, where we're at on these inputs, what's this crop do for us, what's my lease structure work with my landlord. You can look at anything like that. It involves everything you want to look at on your farm, and it calculates it out and discloses to you where you need to be at.

34:03 So listen to your wife and listen to your data. You're exactly right. We get emotional and bullheaded, and yet again, yeah. So see, tune in for farming advice, get life advice for no extra charge, right?

34:28 If people want to learn more about that, I assume you have a website they can just go to find out more information. They sure can. They can just search Simple Farms dot ag. I do warn there is a Simple Farms dot com. They beat me to the dot com, and that is a pop farm down in Arizona. I think they're quite successful, but that is not us. We are Simple Farms dot Haag.

40:19 I say hey what crazy thing would you like to do and one of the gentlemen that's with me, maybe some of you guys even know, I'm Jim Lingle. He travels around and does Cajun boils for fundraisers and he also helps me sell Simple Farms. So we were on the road and he has shrimp in his Cajun boils and he's like, I've always wanted to raise my own shrimp on the farm. So I said let's do it. And in doing so, I invited every employee the opportunity to invest in this project. So Jim and Julie and I are the ones doing this project. The rest of the guys didn't think they wanted to be involved.

40:55 We've been growing shrimp for two and a half years now and it's just inside a shipping container with a bunch of aquariums basically, clean new chemical totes that we cut the tops off of, and we're growing these babies inside. Julie just posted on the website and we just sold locally. So we fish them out of the tanks, drop them in the ice, and people come pick up a pound of shrimp.

41:24 My daughter kind of gave me guff the other day. We've been selling them for almost two years and I haven't had any shrimp at home yet. We've been selling out so fast we have a waiting list of 75 people. So I went and fished some out and we have our own beef as well. So we had a surf and turf, homegrown, and that was kind of fun.

41:49 That's super fun, and you said those are actually prawns and not shrimp but very correct. Yeah, they call them Pacific whites. I mean, tastes just like shrimp, but they'll grow up to a quarter pound and that's what we're trying to do now is grow them up to a quarter pound, which is a monster.

42:08 That would be fun to see. One more thing Scott before we jump to the questions here. Because I didn't fail to really kind of address this earlier, livestock integration. You talked about, you know, we could graze this or we've grazed that. Tell us just a little bit about how, because it's one of the principles of soil health, how are you integrating livestock into the rotation that you have with both dryland and irrigated? How's that working or what do you do?

42:35 Right now we've been doing custom cattle care. When I launched Simple Farms, I actually got myself out of my cattle operation and I was lacking personnel. Since then, I brought in some guys and this has been the second year we're actually doing some custom grazing for others. That makes it a little easier. You know, guys can admit to this too. I was that way—oh, I can leave them on another week or two—and then you kind of start to hurt yourself on the ground. Doing this custom, I can kind of set more ground rules and your cattle are off when I say they're off, and I kind of get the emotion out of it.

43:16 We've been, this last year we did rye following our corn. So we were going to grow, we were going to graze the corn stocks anyway, and that came on through the winter and the cattle kind of nipped at it here the last three weeks. But we were just wrapping up on just grazing about all the corn corals and cobs off the field. So it worked great. The cattle just maintain gain and condition and looked really good. So we're just going to keep playing the balancing act of integrating them in with it. I think it's very important to put that in. We're also involved in the carbon credit program with Locust, and that's kind of a check mark bonus for them as well. They want to see that and help you on a higher payout on the carbon market as well.

44:06 And what the heck, the cattle market's phenomenal. It's put these on these animals when you can't market this commodity anyway.

44:15 That's a great point, and we've got you know people interested in, you look at corn and it's maybe a break even at best. So we're really encouraging people, hey, take that field that's going to be your lowest producing field anyway. Don't plant it to corn, which is just going to be a break even at best. And if you've got your own cattle or if you've got access to bringing others in, you know, grow some forages, graze them out on the ground. But you can't just turn them out there and leave it. You mentioned that you can take your soil health backwards pretty quickly with livestock if they're not properly managed. So that's the whole key—you got to manage them within the system, and then it can really be a benefit and a boost to the whole system.

45:01 All right, let's go to a few questions here. Robert is asking a couple questions about, you know, well.

45:09 Number one your soil organic matter levels—where did you start and where are they at now and where do you hope to go with them? My OM's are very low, they're crap. We've done the Midwest samples for years, we just switched over to Haney last year. We don't have organic levels. We're so dry, so sandy, so arid. That is a big goal—to actually create something where we can dig up and actually see a humate in the soil. We got none, so we got a long road ahead of us. It's going to take a lot of years of growth.

45:48 You've got a number of things working against you—number one sand, number two dry weather, and then number three you do get very hot. All tends to be detrimental to soil organic matter. And that's probably one of the reasons why rye kind of shines because it's got a reputation of being a tough plant. It can get by on less. It's a survivor. So do you think that's one of the reasons that rye is so well adapted—because you have essentially very poor soils? I agree. Yeah, I'm hoping our goal here is actually just to make wheat maybe a little supplemental on the corner, and rye become our staple for our next crop rotation of corn or milo. Pretty much eliminate wheat and the fallow. I'm hoping at that point our organic comes up. That's when we'll start seeing it. So if we can keep this ground out of fallow for six or seven years, I think that's when we can start to see that dynamic.

46:51 Because any gains that you would make growing a crop, you're going to immediately lose those in a fallow year carbon gain. Because burning that up—and you know, to that point, you mentioned it a little bit, you know, you grew a little bit of hybrid rye for us in seed production. It's kind of an experimental thing with green cover and KWS. The company is able to sell the second generation of that hybrid as a cover crop. We have a license to do that, but I think, and again Scott Raven Camp is a big believer in this too, there's a huge potential for hybrid rye in your area to be grown as a feed grain and sold to the feed lots. Hybrid rye is a huge yielder. They did a bunch of research at K-State, which is similar to your environment. They're seeing 100 plus bushel hybrid rye yields on dryland environments. So hybrid rye is definitely something that we're going to be looking at. Now it's expensive—the seed is like planting corn—but if you can get 100 plus bushel and sell that as a feed grain to a feed lot and have all that residue because it's still going to leave that residue behind, could be a big game changer for crop rotations in that area.

48:16 Robert's also asking about the carbon nitrogen ratio of the hyper cycle. I don't know that we even know what the actual C to N ratio is on the product, but it's definitely lowering the C to N ratio of the field when you put it out there. My understanding is it has both the biology and some of the enzymes and stimulants that just speed up the biological degradation of the residue. Is that correct? That's correct. Robert, that's where I am—that's out of my realm. I lean hard on those other guys that represent Elevate and lean on their science, and sometimes I get over when they start explaining all that to me.

49:00 So yeah, I don't know what that ratio is. And then with our high pH levels, I don't know if that changes that quite a bit. So we're just kind of dabbling on it and getting started to see what we see out there on the field.

49:20 Yeah, so again, be careful about doing it. The first your first consideration in my opinion is make sure your equipment is as well adapted as possible to get through as much of the residue because it may be a pain now, but you'll thank me for it later, kind of a thing. But then, you know, I'm assuming you're doing this mostly in irrigated where you just have a lot more residue. That's correct. Right now the irrigated—we did mess with it just a little bit last year in some dryland where we had some seriously heavy residue that we were going to shank millet through, and we weren't sure we were going to get through it with the shank drill. We fought it even after we put this down, but what was interesting and nobody can really answer it—my hired help even pointed it out—is they felt like we had a lot less.

50:14 Weed population in that field whether it's because of soil health or did we put some harm to the seed that was there because we were breaking down the dry matter. Did it go after the seed population as well? We don't know, but we definitely saw that that was a visual anecdotal feature.

50:32 So maybe the increased biological activity helped eat up some of the weed seeds that were laying on top the soil. That's what we asked the guys at Elevate and they wouldn't say yes that would happen or not, but they thought that was quite it. Makes sense. And the absolute best place to have weed seeds in your field is on top the ground. Worst thing you can ever do is bury them because they'll survive for years down there, but if they're on top of the ground something's going to eat them, something's going to want to break them down because they're a food source for all those critters and all the biology.

51:06 So yeah, that's a good plan there too. And you know, from an equipment standpoint, if you can consistently have big residue crops and the ho drill or the shank drill is the problem, then you know, looking at a disc drill, because you could cut through it with a rolling cutter versus a static shank that you're dragging. So you know, you may have to graduate to higher rainfall equipment there, Scott, if you keep doing such a good job.

51:36 Well, that is our hope and our goal, but we're a little ways from it yet. But yeah, that is definitely my hope and goal. I did have a disc drill but it was a little soon and we sized too much residue and ended up blowing. So it's a tool that fits, it's just we got to use it in the right application.

51:55 Robert's asking some questions too about your pH and you said some of it is 83. You know, are you kind of 7.5 to 83 on a lot of that? Yeah, you know, our best soil or best production areas are at 7.5. That's as low as we go, at 7.5. 8.3 is our highest. But we are, we have 83 circles. Most of our circles are a little sloped and sandy and we have an 83 there. But last couple years we've been able to avoid the chlorosis completely by putting the biologicals in. And this year we've got a circle that was rye from last year, so I'm very excited to put the beans through that one and see how we do there.

52:35 Because one thing that we've seen time after time is in environments where you have more carbon, you know, more whether it's organic matter or long-term carbon or carbon that is cycling through the system, the pH matters less because the system can buffer itself. So whether you're in our area, you know, we have a lot of low fives, your area you have, we just need to get our soils together. We'd be about average there. But you know, that carbon, the carbon allows it to buffer, you know, right where that root is growing, right where all that biology is growing. And so when you're using some of these products that help with the carbon levels, when you have the root exudates from your growing plants, you know, that's liquid carbon that helps that whole system do that.

53:28 Ton is asking here. He says he has been tasked with helping dryland farmers in San Juan County, Utah, right on the Utah-Colorado border, 7,000 feet, moisture like you, 12 to 13 inches, mostly coming during the winter. Would your type of system work in an area like that? You know, they're doing wheat, fallow, safflower, fallow. So probably the biggest difference is they're just higher elevation, but do you think a similar system would work?

54:01 I absolutely do. I was actually just over there because we had regional basketball over in Dove Creek in that area. And I think the biggest thing I'm seeing with a lot of those guys is they're still tilling. My gosh, all that ground was worked. Everything. First try to get those guys to at least try a little no-till. A lot of them have gone to hay over there. They were big bean country but they're more cash revenue with the hay. So integrate some of this stuff with their hay, maybe go with the rye for the hay instead. And yeah, I know exactly where he's talking. In their soil, it's red as can be over there. Reminds me of Oklahoma. But yeah, I think a lot of these rotations will throw these rotations in, put these varieties in, and yeah, I absolutely do believe it'll work over there. The only one they probably won't be able to get away with, obviously, is milo with that altitude and time frame, but everything else absolutely.

55:04 Yeah, yeah. And again, you know, in arid areas where you know moisture is always.

55:09 The limiting factor, if you've got livestock, it takes about half of the moisture that a crop will need to grow the majority of the biomass and then the other half to get it all the way out to mature seed. So if you only have half the moisture, well you can still grow a lot of biomass, run it through a cow instead of a combine. The majority of the nutrients, majority of the carbon then cycles through that animal, stays in the field, and that's a way better path towards building soil health than taking hay off, removing 100% of those nutrients and carbon. And unless you're bringing manure back, then you know that carbon is lost off of that.

55:52 So anything that you can do to get the livestock back on the field, move some of those acres into a grazing situation, it's not done very commonly because it's a lot of work, it's hard work. But again, systems, you know, you get a good fence system, you get people that understand cattle, you get the right cattle. You can't just bring feed lot cattle out there and have them be high performers on that type. So we'll have future webinars, we've got lots of information on our website about people that have done that and doing that and doing it very successfully. Especially now, you know, those guys look like geniuses now because the crops stink and cattle are the gold mines.

56:37 So that would be, if nothing else, try to get a demonstration farm like that started in the area to let people look at. I think too, Keith, if you can find a way to take care of cattle for somebody, it's a nice cash revenue, you can learn a little bit about cattle that way. And instead of hauling the hay off, bringing them in, just like you said. And I can tell you, once you put word out that you got a place that you put cattle for somebody, they will show up, they will call you. It never ends. They would love to put the animals on your property and take advantage of that, save you from having to haul that hay off. And yeah, it'd be just like growing shrimp, you'll have a waiting list of people that want it right. You will, they you let them know, you just get word out there, it is mindboggling.

57:24 Yes, the shrimp too, that's right. And Tron, you could probably grow the heck out of shrimp in that area. Well, you could sell that all day long. So well, Scott, we're kind of up against our time here. I think we've covered most of the questions here. But closing thoughts, you know, for somebody in an arid environment like you, maybe they're still fairly traditional. You know what would be a piece of advice that you'd give them for how do I get started? You know, what would be a good low-risk first step?

57:57 Just pick a field or a couple fields that you have and try a little diversity on it. Whether you want to try no-till first or you want to try a new crop, you don't have to go all in. There's no reason anybody has to go all in on anything, just try it. But I, it's kind of a lesson like, I'm a craps player and I teach people how to play craps. The only way you're going to learn is put your money on the table and write the check. There's just no other way. You can ask all day long, but get your feet wet some aspect. If you don't have the equipment or anything like that, find a neighbor, somebody that's got it, and have them come in and just do a little test plot, trial run, lease equipment. But try to change. We have such a narrow window of time to actually learn and change our operations. I've been at this 33 years, I go to these conferences, listen to these guys like Keith, and my biggest regret is not doing it sooner. It honestly is. I wish I'd have been a little more aggressive sooner from what I've learned now, and just to make my ground a better soil.

59:02 Well, keep up the good work out there. Thank you for being a good example of what utilizing some of these regenerative principles can do. We look forward to the rye crop that you're growing for us this year. I would guess that there's even people on this webinar listening or that will watch the recording that will actually plant some of the seed that you're growing, which I think is kind of cool. That is cool.

59:26 So thank you, Scott, for joining us. Folks, we will be back again next week. John Herman, another one of the guys, he not only grows seed, he cleans a lot of our seed. In fact, he cleans a lot of the seed that Scott grows. John is out at Haxton, Colorado, so still out in that eastern Colorado area. John's a great regenerative farmer, a great seed grower, a great seed cleaner. He'll be sharing some of his operation, some of his experiences, what he's learned. And we look forward to that conversation. So hope everybody can join us again next Wednesday at noon for the next session. So thanks everybody, have a great rest of your week, and thank you again, Scott, Keith, thank you so much. Thanks for everybody coming on.