Think Differently About Your Farm: Steve Tucker on Soil Biology and Change

0:08 I am honored to be here. I am a farmer. I live in Southwest Nebraska. People say, 'Steve, can I ask you a question? Where is it that you live?' I live in Bango, Nebraska, outside of town. It says 'The Buckle of the Wheat Belt.' People that drive through town ever see that. They always remember the Buckle of the Wheat Belt. So I always say to people when they ask me where I live, I say, 'Do you know where Omaha's at?' Yeah, I know where Omaha, Nebraska's at. I said, 'I live nowhere near that.' All right, I'm cleared on the other end of the state. So little difference in rainfall, little different climate, little different things that we experience as we attempt to farm out there.

0:56 So Keith said that we're going to talk about thinking for a change, and I want us to begin. Well, I was talking to Brian, his brother, yesterday, and Brian said that we put the best speakers at the end. So I'm not sure what that means about me here as we begin. So you, I'll let you be the judge of that.

1:14 So what I want us to do is, I don't know where you're at on your operation and I don't know how many of you have ever heard me speak before, but I want us to just start thinking differently. You saw these videos of these guys who were in the box, and they were thinking, 'This is the way it had to be done,' and all of a sudden something forced them to do something different, didn't it? And so as we look at this, one thing is true: change is inevitable, isn't it? I want us to look at philosophy. I want us to look at our paradigms and where we're at in the way we think. Let me ask a question as we begin: How many of you are here at a soil health conference for the first time you've ever done anything like this? Anybody? All right, we've got a few. That's great.

2:14 Where I started thinking differently was my mom calls me up one day, and she said—and my mom is my landlord, one of my two landlords—and she says, 'Hey, there's a no till day. You probably ought to go to that.' Well, we just had a hail storm. I'll show you here in a little bit, and I said, 'Well, just as well. I got nothing else to do today.' And so I went to this thing, and they did the same test over here. I saw this for the first time, and I said, 'You know what? There's something to this.' And so I just started drinking the juice and noticing that things were different. I was no till, but I didn't know why I was no till. And so as we go through this, I'll tell you a little bit about my story. But change is inevitable. Growth is optional. Change is going to happen, isn't it? Change is going to happen in your life, right? You're going to get married. You got kids. Things will happen. Change is inevitable in your communities, isn't it? Businesses come in. Businesses go. Things will happen. Whether you grow with it and adapt is up to you.

3:23 There's another quote I like. Change is inevitable. There's another one: Is it working back there? All right, change is inevitable. Progress is optional. Whether you make progress with it, isn't it? Where you go with it? Here's another one. This is one I like too. This is kind of more of my favorite: 'Change is available except from a vending machine,' isn't that true? Okay, we all know change is going to happen.

4:00 How we deal with it is up to us all. Right, this is supposed to be a little video. Is this going to play for us? Okay, it might. We didn't know if it was going to work. I write this in one thing and then we put it in the other, but here's the story. Here's what happens.

4:23 You see there's a young kid out there on the golf course and the old gentleman to his left is out there with maybe his grandson. He's standing out there on the golf course and you see the lie he has there to get the ball up on the green. There's a tree right there in the road. The old man says to the young kid as he's squaring up the ball to sit it over that tree onto the green, he says, when I was a young man I used to hit that ball over that tree and onto the green.

4:54 So the young man lines up the ball, looks at that tree and he thinks if the old man could do it, I could do it, and he hits that ball. It hits the tree, lands right underneath the tree, and the old man walks up to the young kid and he says, of course when I was a young man that tree was only 6 feet tall.

5:16 And that's exactly where we're at and where you may be on your journey trying to figure out how to implement some of these things onto your farm. Hit that. I must be just barely out of range. I might have to go stand in the back.

5:35 One thing about it as we know is, and I don't know when my grandfather passed away and I was forced to start making all the decisions on the farm, changes are inevitable. Adaptation and survival are optional. My grandfather and I would drive around a lot of times and he would say you should hope you never have to go through the 30s and the drought like I had to go through. I said, and I do hope I don't have to go through the drought like you had, and then when he passed away we went through about four or five years in the early 2000s that it never rained. I had corn that would get waist tall with no ears on it, you know, and I was doing all the things that we had always done.

6:20 And I planted wheat and I would go out and I would top dress it with about 50 pounds of fertilizer and I watched my neighbor who wouldn't do anything, and he cut 30 bushel wheat and I had 50 bushel straw but there was nothing left in the grain to harvest. So I knew something is not right here. Something's got to change.

6:38 And so my mom made me go to that no till day and all of a sudden the light bulbs came on and my journey just keeps going. I start asking more questions. So something that happened was I got to make big change to stay viable and that's what I want us to look at over the next two days as you're going to listen to speakers, that something may change in your thinking while you're here.

7:06 One of the things that changed for us was we started seeing that we needed another crop in our area and so yellow field peas were, we had grown them in the past. It just looked like this would be a fit. And so yellow field peas in Nebraska started coming in and so we started growing. We looked at it and went, well guess what, there's nobody down here that grows seed and it costs a lot of money to drive a semi from North Dakota to bring the seed down in Nebraska. And so we said, well guess what, someone down here should be growing seed. So we started investing into yellow pea seeds. So we started Agra for seed that does a lot of yellow field peas. And so that's a viable crop. And now the question I get is, well now that I grow them, what am I supposed to do with them? And they're a great feed, but you think that the cattle producers.

7:58 The feed lots don't want anything to do with them because it's going to change their ration, so I got a hard sale trying to get them to understand it. But there's also a lot of 100 other uses for yellow field peas, so we're looking at expanding into just finding a way to process them.

8:21 Changes are coming. This is one I like, this is some things that make us think about changes in our global look here. Gail Fuller, a farmer in Kansas, used cover crop. How'd that go over with crop insurance? Not very well, does it? So thank you for Gail Fuller putting up with it so it makes it a little bit easier as we journey and try and figure out that cover crops aren't detrimental but they can be a benefit, just depend on how we use it.

8:49 How about climate change? Is that an issue? It's something that's discussed, whether you believe in it or not, there's going to be regulations that we'll have to contend with, so it's something that we need to be serious about looking at. How is it going to change our operation?

9:07 How about the global economy? Does it have an effect on your economy? Does anything that happen in China affect you? It does, doesn't it? Big time. What about an embargo on beef? How about our neighbors to the south? Are they ramping up production? Does that change your decisions? Does that change what you do?

9:32 How about the price of technology? Is it always a good thing to be the first innovator? Sometimes it is, sometimes it's not. Sometimes it costs a lot of money and is it really necessary? I don't know. I'm just asking the questions.

9:46 So I went to speak at a thing in Colorado one time and I asked them what's your most profitable crop for 2015—this is last year, of course. Now, you got to realize I'm in Colorado, they're going to give you a different answer as to what they can grow there that's now legal in Colorado, so you got to be careful how you ask these questions. But what's your most profitable enterprise for 2016?

10:12 I asked that question to a bunch of grain farmers in Colorado and they looked at me and they didn't have an answer. This is the interactive portion of my talk: what is a profitable operation for 2016? And when I asked that question, they didn't have—I said, would you like to know? And they went, yeah, yeah, we'd like to. I said I don't have a clue. What it is for you may be different for me.

10:36 What changes are you looking to implement in your operation? How are you going to change something and how you going to do it right? How do I position myself and prepare myself for the future? And by being here, you're already trying to think outside the box. You're trying to think differently. What can I do that's different for the future?

10:59 Is there a way I can make money? I mean, that's what it's all about: soil health, improving, making changes that will benefit and basically benefit the bottom line. How do I position, prepare for the future? Where are my inefficiencies? Valid questions to ask in your farming operation, your cattle operation, everywhere. Where am I being inefficient at? And do I have contingency plans? Is that an important question to ask? Is it always good to have a backup? It is. I'll show you why.

11:35 I took that picture. It wasn't last week, that was in.

11:43 July right at the start of wheat harvest that was hail storm 8 in deep of hail. I got to cut about one semi-load of wheat. Now that's back when wheat was eight bucks a bushel. I had good crop insurance. Everybody, 'Oh, I feel sorry for you.' Don't feel sorry for me, I got crop, it was fine. Feel sorry for my wife. She had a garden. She walks out, she says, 'Oh, look at my garden, it's gone.' I said, 'Well, you can grow it back. It's fine.' She says, 'Look at my crops out there.' She goes, 'Well, you have crop insurance.' True, yes I did. That's true.

12:18 How, what do you do in this situation? You know what I did? I did nothing. You know what I do today? I'd put a cover crop on that as soon as I could get in the field to get it on there, get something green growing. See how my thinking has changed? This was four or five years ago. Things change. My philosophy has changed a little bit.

12:37 Here's my story. I'll tell you a little bit of my background. This is my grandfather. This is the only reason I farm today is my best friend. I mean, we, I tell people we're the same person, we're just different. He gets one vote, I got one vote. My vote doesn't count. All right, I got married, she gets one vote, I get one vote. My vote still doesn't count. But there we are in our field. That's a summer follow. Guy came out to take our picture because of the wheat that we were raising, doing what we were doing at that point. But I, I hand it to my grandfather. 86 years old when he passed away and he was willing to do things that were different. He was willing to take chances just to find out. And I mean, we got along great.

13:30 So here's some of the things we did: on the left, wheat summer follow, wheat summer follow. That's the way our country was built for a long time, 50 years. That was just the norm. Then someone came up with the idea, 'How about spray your field, put corn in it, call it heal corn,' right? So we had wheat, heal corn, then we went to millet, started putting millets into the rotation a little bit. And so we had just rotation, rotation, rotation. And what I love about it is the NRCS says, 'What's your rotation?' Well then I could give you a defined rotation. We had plans, we had, you know, was laid out. But anymore, you know, you look at it, we had all grasses. Well, we needed a broad leaf, we need something different into it. So we put some flowers into it. A little bit later, we started adding peas into the rotation. We planted peas in the 90s. My grandpa said, 'Let's do it.' We planted a field of peas, we put them, we harvested them. I mean, these were 60, these were fabulous peas. And so I knew we could grow them in this area. Problem was we took them to the elevator and they sat there for a long time. Nobody knew what to do with them after we raised them. So we knew we could grow them. We just needed to find a market for it. And then started throwing some oats. And now I've got all different kinds of millets. I just expand into all kinds of different things, looking for different options, different ways, different plants, cover crops in the mix.

14:46 So instead of thinking outside the box, just get rid of it all together. One thing I was just thinking this morning when I went to college at the University of Nebraska, eight of the best years of my life, and I barely got a BS getting out of it, all right. I lied, it was only four. It was all about, 'This is how you do it.' It was defined. It was in a box. And conferences like this, we start to see, we don't have to do things like that anymore, do we? You think you're going to learn.

15:20 Anything like what Gabe Brown and the guys in that video are doing at college? No, that stuff is not taught like that anyway, and we're starting to see shifts, but things like that just get rid of the box all together. So this is a soil health conference, so I want to ask the question and I run a great risk doing this, but what is soil health?

15:47 Yeah, Steve, what is it? Tell us, because if I ask this side of the room to come up with an answer and in the middle and over here and ask individuals, we're going to have different definitions, aren't we? If I ask the guys down at the coffee shop what's soil health, I'm going to get a way different answer than anything we may come up with here, especially those guys. It's different, isn't it? So what is it? We're at a soil health conference, we probably ought to figure this out, shouldn't we? So I'm going to give you something that maybe this will help us think about it and maybe that's a little challenge I'll put out to the rest of the speakers, maybe talk about that a little bit. What your definition is for soil health?

16:28 But so I did what everybody else would do, I Googled it, and first thing comes up is the NRCS definition of soil health. It's also referred to as soil quality. Are you buying that? Is it soil quality? Is it defined as the continued capacity of soil to function as a vital living ecosystem that sustains plants, animals, and humans? Is that what we're going with? You know, that's not bad, I think, but is it everything? It's a good start. So then you go to soil, you look up on the links that are on there, and there's soilhealth.com or net. But I like this part—this adds another dynamic to it: the physical properties of the soil, right? The soil structure, how that's made up. Okay, no-till is big on that, right? We don't destroy the soil structure that's in there. We leave those physical properties alone, you know, the makeup of the soil. Okay, that's one part of it.

17:45 The chemical properties, we got this down, don't we? One of the classes I took at school was fertilizers, all the different chemical elements, the soil nutrients to feed the plants. We've got this part down pretty good. I don't know, maybe there's a lot to go, but I mean so far so good. But here's the one: biological properties. Those are the aspects to soil health, all right? Which one of those do we have the best handle on? Chemical. Which one do we have the worst handle on? All right, so we're all in agreement, right?

18:25 Okay, I got to tell you a story about an old farmer that lives in my neighborhood. He's driving down the road on his little Ford tractor, and as he's going down the road, he looks up and there's a car sitting on the side of the road up by the ditch. So he slows down and there's a guy walking along the fence line there. The car has got Colorado plates on it, so he pulls up and stops and says to the guy, 'Can I help you?' The guy says, 'Well, I was out here duck hunting. I shot a duck and it landed over in that field. I was going to go get it.' Farmer said, 'Something, son. You're in Nebraska. You can't just go walking into some guy's field.' The guy says, 'Look, I'm a lawyer from Denver. I shot a duck over there and if I want to go get the duck, I'm going to go get the duck.' The old farmer, my neighbor, he goes, 'Look, that's not how we do things here in...'

19:16 Nebraska he say if you want to go get that duck we'll settle this way we do it in Nebraska. I says how's that he says well I pop you three times you pop me three times we go back and forth like that. Whoever's left standing wins the battle. So this young lawyer from Denver looks at him sizes him up and says all right let's do it. So the old farmer crawls down off the tractor he says well you're on my turf so I go first. So the old farmer rars back boom right in the chops. Little lawyer's down like this and his nose is bleeding he's hurting. About that time the farmer takes a stiff toed boot hits him right into the basket. Oh drops him down on the ground he's on his hands and knees. Farmer looks at him one last time right between the legs drops him down on the ground. Lawyer said oh. Lawyer rolls up he stands up he says to the farmer all right it's my turn and the farmer looks at him and says that ain't my field you can have the duck.

20:33 Making changes looking at things differently right. All right I'm going to go through this quick. This is what I did on my farm and it's looking at the principles of just implementing a no till system. When I started no till and my grandfather and I started it 20 years ago we were ignorant on fire. We didn't have a clue what we were doing but we just figured everybody else is doing it we're going to do it too. And I went to an organic sustainable egg conference here in Nebraska couple three weeks ago. There was a guy there talking and he was doing a presentation on his farm and he was doing compost tea mixes and he was spraying it on his field. So I went to him afterwards and I said what are you trying to get when you put this compost tea on? What's the idea behind it because I thought it was really interesting and he said I don't know the guy just recommends doing it and that's how I do it so I just put it on. And I want to know why it is we do what we do. That's why I ask questions. Yeah always got to learn to ask lots of questions.

21:38 So started looking at this four principles of doing no till farming. These are kind of the standards but there's some more that we started implement and added into it. Number one water conservation. The water holding capacity of our soil and you saw Gabe Brown as he talked about that and as we can increase water holding capacity that's going to reduce the restrictions that roots have to grow down into the soil and by doing that we're going to increase organic matter. Organic matter is key isn't it? Getting that soil carbon going, getting increasing the organic matter, big deal. When you increase soil organic matter, now I know I've done a lot of looking at numbers about increasing soil organic matter and it's interesting. As you, I don't know what the rule of thumb is exactly but when you increase soil organic matter the rule of thumb the basic concept is the more water the soil holds. That's important especially in my country we get 13, 14 inches of rain and we build soil depth that way. Okay now when I look at soil depth what I'm after is soil biological activity.

22:48 All right so preserving the water that's already in the soil is just part of the battle and I'd like to thank Gabe because he stole some of my thunder here a little bit because preserving the water that I get in the soil that's just part of the battle isn't it but like what he said increasing the rainfall infiltration rate is critical because I don't.

23:10 Get 2 inches of rain over a 3-day period. Anymore we get 2 inches of rain in about 6 minutes. I mean it just deluges water out. So how do I do that with the soil biological life? That's a change in philosophy. It used to be deep rippers—rip it up deep, get that water in. A great idea, yeah, but what I chose to do now is to use soil biological life. I've got earthworms in it now. When I go out in the spring and plant peas and I can go down and check depth, there are earthworms all over that soil. My whole life as a kid when I was out on the farm, I never saw one earthworm. I always wondered where. I thought there's supposed to be earthworms out here. In my yard we had earthworms, but never in the fields did we have earthworms. Today, earthworms all over the place. Humus, the microbial gums that come from all the activity, the fungal hyphae, all these activities that contribute to the soil structure, that I can get water in and that I can hold it.

24:16 We had a field day this summer and here's a picture. A guy found this clay and he comes up. Now, anybody know what this is? I got no idea either. All right, my best guess is that is a worm channel that, this field is planted to cover crop and the roots found that channel and then fungus infected the roots. Is it infected? It's inoculated. Isn't what? So we got fungus, we got all kinds of biological activity going on. I just know that's a good thing, okay? It doesn't have to be complicated. So I like to, I mean that's that, I know something's working right. Right, I know I got, I'm going the right direction. I'm all for soil tillage because it increases water infiltration. Here's the deal. You know, I talked about deep ripping. The method is the important matter, all right? How do I do that? Soil fauna and the roots, the life that's going on, that's under the soil. When you look at a field, we'll always see all the stuff that's on the top. And that used to be, I mean, that's where all the focus is at, is the things that are on the top. And that's great. But the real magic and the real good stuff that's going on is going on in the soil. It would be nice if we could just crawl in and watch the beautiful things that are happening under the soil.

25:48 You look at fungus and bacteria. I mean, that just sounds like an appealing environment. Just go in the fridge and look at that. You can find that there. Amazing things going on in the soil. And I encourage number two was no mechanical tillage. Eliminate that anywhere we plant or drill or I mean you can see those tillage marks in there. They're still there. Here's my law of no-till field work. Doesn't matter what happens, how it's set up, where there's a mound or a hole in the field, that's where your tractor or combine tire will travel. And do I speak the truth? I get an amen, all right? I don't know if Google's got some kind of GPS setup that wherever you set the GPS, it just finds out where all the holes are at and you're automatically going to hit them all, right?

26:41 So here we are. I've got a water infiltration. Gabe Brown showed you that. He said that he's got 8 inches of water infiltration. NRCS came out to one of my fields. I've got a no-till field. It's been no-till for about 10, 15 years, right? Across the road I got a neighbor who does summer fallow of wheat. So I said, all right, you do my field. I'm going to get permission to go over there and do that field. They came out and did a water infiltration.

31:02 Used because it will rain again. I'm not sure when, but it will rain again and we're blessed so far with a good amount of moisture in our neighborhood right now, but if it will rain again it will get dry again too, that I can promise you. Also, so how do I prepare with the rain that I'm blessed with to make a plan for the times that it's going to fall short? All right, I'm already preparing now. You got to find crops and put in crops that I can diversify with, that I can put in a companion planning and that is one that I'm still a little hesitant to try and get on that train and make that work. So if you want to try that, let me know how that goes. That's a good thing, but can we come to agreements and learn from each other about things that we're trying out there, whether they work or whether they don't work? And I know Keith and some others have tried different things in companion planning that keep the soil biology and the soil life healthy and happy and working together.

32:10 And then cover crops, started putting in a lot of different cover crops, living roots working to provide benefits for the soil. Then I start stepping out of my element big time. Feeding the soil, how do I feed it with the cover crops, all those roots going on? But one thing that this conference is going to talk a lot about is adding livestock. I am not a cowboy. My grandfather trained me not to be a cowboy and so I'm not. Cows are not my passion, but you know what I've noticed and changed my thinking, they're an integral part into a complete system. And so guess what, cows showed up. I've got a neighbor that's got a lot of cows and he came to that field day and he looked at that and he said, you know what, we're going to try some of this. I said, here's a field, let's do it.

33:06 So he didn't know where when he came and he said, I don't know what I'm going to pay you for using this, but we're going to figure this out together. So we started doing some of that, put on, what was it, about 40 head on 100 acres, and I kept I said no, we're not going to put them out here together. We're going to rotate these things around a little bit. We're just, we're ignorant on fire and he brought 400 head and he put them on corn stalks. But at the same time I had another cover crop field right beside it and those 400 head, guess where they spent their time? On the 130 acre irrigated corn stalks or the 50 acre cover crop patch? They didn't even hardly touch the corn stalks after they figured out that there was turnips and all kinds. It's a salad bar buffet and the cover crops for those cattle.

33:58 So here's my thought on cover crops and that's what I mean. That's a beautiful field of a nice diverse mix. And here's what they are, it's grow your own weeds. Why instead of letting weeds grow and destroy stuff, why not put something that's going to be a benefit to me, a benefit to the soil, a benefit to everything? Why not look at these as a way to improve the system?

34:29 So how my thinking has changed, I listened to Gabe Brown a couple years ago and he said this quote and it just sticks because this is exactly where I was at when he said this. He said, every morning I'd wake up and I'd think what am I going to kill today? And I have a sprayer with a 90ft boom and I was, I mean I am just death on wheels on that thing. But you know what, I'm killing weeds up here, but what am I doing to the life underneath? So I started thinking.

35:06 Okay mother nature does not like to be naked, heard that quote. Okay, let's keep it covered. Soil does not need sunshine to grow. Do you know how much energy the sun gives? I heard this quote one time and I don't know, all I can say is it's a lot per square foot. There is a lot of energy given. You know what uses that energy the best? Anybody want to guess? Plants. It's not a hard question. Plants use that and they take that energy and they convert it into different things underneath the soil. That's amazing. Soil doesn't need sunshine to grow, but plants can use that energy from that.

35:52 Don't do it like I do it, do it like you do it. And I'm not here saying that I have any answers for your operation, but I want you to do it like you do it. Now here's some interesting things I like to scour the journals that are out there. You may take corn and soybean digest. You think the world out there is starting to look at these things? Here's one from plow to no till. Would you have seen that title 10 years ago? No. But you see how things are changing today, all right. Oh, here's another journal. You guys get this one, Nebraska farmer? You do? Okay, Keith gets it, all right. Here you go: research shows cover crops can cut weed pressure. Is that a good thing, all right? New methods for sampling soil sampling help manage nitrogen in fields. Interesting things.

36:57 Oh, and then we start getting it. Here's another corn and soybean digest tenant landlord partners. I spoke last year in Scott's Bluff, Nebraska to the conference, and there was some individuals there, older couple, and they said you know we really like the way your talk went about thinking for a change, but our tenants are not even open to doing, looking at any of this. Excuse me. And they said how do I get them to? So landlords are out there looking at different things. I get phone calls from people saying I want my guys to plant peas because I see the benefits to the soil of adding a legume to it. It just makes sense. So the landlords are getting it, but the tenants aren't getting it. And how do we come to make a partnership to do it? Well, it's coming to things like this to get them to see things differently, to think for change.

37:52 Because what they're doing is it's sustainable. Look at this here. I think this is telling us to what where we're headed because input costs. Take stock of input cost for 2016. Is it, is inputs going down any? How about the crop prices, have they changed any? Okay, is the is the dynamics of the farm today different than it was five years ago, two years ago? I know it is in my neighborhood. The conversations are a whole lot different. So successful farming, there's a whole issue on how to stay farming. That's encouraging, isn't it? Okay, and what's the answers? You know, manage cost better, do a better job at marketing, and then hope, all right? Don't just, I mean just get out of the box altogether. Is there something different? Is there a different angle? I mean, I don't know what it is for you, but I know there's still answers out there, different ways to do it.

39:00 Always ask questions like who made that rule? I'm not normal. I realize that when I put cover crop, I like to put it on the highway so they can see it. I got three miles of farm ground along a highway.

39:17 I make sure they all know I'm not normal and all my neighbors will tell you that. When I was a kid growing up my parents would let me play with my dad's father, my grandfather. He was dead at the time. They put his ashes in my ETA sketch. I mean, it's, I am not normal, okay? I know you'll tell that one later.

39:40 I know you got to ask questions: who made that rule? What if your soil had all the nutrients that it needed for your plants? What if that was the case? Wouldn't that be cool? Guess what, maybe it does. We just haven't figured it out yet. What if soil health, what if your soil health was such that the physical, chemical and biological components all those components allowed for no modern-day inputs? What if we didn't need herbicides? What if we could get the soil to just work like we wanted it to?

40:28 What if the biological component held the answer? Because that's where it's going, isn't it? The next wave of outstanding technology. Anybody want to care to guess what do you suppose the next wave of innovation that is found out there where could we go? Drones, automated tractors, all those things that cost lots of money. What do you think? Well, here's what I want you to start considering and maybe you have one of these, maybe you don't. But this is where we could start looking: is the microscope.

41:15 I have one of these. It's amazing what goes on under the soil that you can pull up and look at. And like I said, I am ignorant on fire again because I'm looking at stuff I have no clue what it is. And my friend John Herman, who lives close to me, you're going to hear from later today, we go back and forth and we exchange pictures. We ask soil scientists what is it we're looking at. One time I had this, I should have showed a picture of it. I had this beautiful organism. I don't know, I think I just discovered something brand new. It could be, it could just revolutionize the world. And so I would take this picture and I got it on my phone if you want to look at it. And I would take it to soil scientists and to soil microbiologists and I showed it to one. Everybody look at, I go, I don't, I'm sure what that is. And I showed it to one one day and they said that he says yeah, you really got something there. That is an antenna off an insect, all right? Well, it looked really cool. So if you want to see it, I'll show you later.

42:12 But there's an amazing world of things that go on there. And what is it? Is it bacteria? Fungi? Protozoa? Pilates? Are you familiar with those terms? Because those, then that's where the magic happens. And we're starting to find out, I heard a soil scientist one time say we thought we knew about one tenth or we thought we knew about 1% of what goes on in the soil. And then we realized we knew on tenth of 1%. There's a big wide world that goes on under there. We got a long ways to go to figure out what makes it work. You think the chemical companies and that are noticing that? Where'd I put that? I got a couple articles here. I find this highly interesting. The change is coming because bioag Alliance, new microbial solution to improve corn harvests.

43:14 Do you know who's bioag, who owns them? Who Monsanto does, don't they? You think they see any value in the soil biology? Biologicals are a big part of the picture. They see it, they know it. We're just starting to look into that, aren't we? With a microscope that's going to help get us there. We've got a long ways to go.

43:42 So I'll leave you with this: get out of the box and just try something new. I don't know what it is for you. My job today is just to open up the discussion, look for something different, a different way to do something, something that will be beneficial. Start thinking differently. Maybe something in your operation can be changed, something that you want to do different. You're going to hear a lot of stories about things other people are doing. When I hear Gaye Brown talk about some of the things that he does, not only in the farm aspect but even in the marketing aspect, it's amazing. It just opens up all kinds of ideas of ways I can do something different, to be more profitable and to be a better steward of what I've been blessed with.

44:26 Feel the fear and do it anyway. Never be afraid to try something new. Remember, amateurs built the ark. Professionals built the Titanic. I don't know what it is for you, but as my good friend Scott Raven Camp, who I think spoke at this last year in Texas, he said, you know, it takes years and years to do cover crops, get rotations in, to build your soil, to affect the physical properties, the chemical properties. And now we're finding the biological properties of the soil. It takes years to get that process going, doesn't it? You just don't flip a switch and overnight it magically appears. It takes a long time to do that.

45:15 And he said, if that's the right way to go, then we're on the pathway to do it. But he said if it's wrong, it only takes me thirty minutes to hook on the disc and destroy, start, and go back the way it used to be. Is it the right way? I think we're headed the right way. I like where we're going. I like what the future holds.

45:37 What is it for you? I don't know, but the theory is that the thought process is: can you do something different? Is there something that you can implement, whether you're in research, working for the Noble Foundation, the NRCS, all these things, your farm and ranch? This conference is great. For two days you're going to get exposed to all different kinds of ideas, and I guarantee there's going to be something that you can get out of this that you can go back and implement changes for the next, this whole 2016, this year, and beyond. And who knows what impact you'll have for the future? Because I didn't know much about the Noble Foundation till I got down here and toured it yesterday. But one guy who makes some money and leaves it for farms to deal with, to benefit farmers for the future, and look what that thing has grown into. That is just absolutely phenomenal. The only thing I wish was that he was in Nebraska, not in Oklahoma. We have Warren Buffett. That's all I'm going to say about that.

46:56 Do something different. Feel the fear and do it anyway. That's all I've got. Thank you. Have a good conference and I'll be around all week.