Yes, today the fruit crop update will focus on how to select a muscadine cultivar because I think that it's time for some interested growers to place their orders for fall, for plant material and we're looking at those relatively newly released muscadine cultivars and probably they can benefit from the information that we're seeing about those cultivars in our Central Obama location. So everybody around knows that muscadines are a very popular, very favorable favorite crop for the population around and no wonder because they're native to southeastern United States and pretty well adapted to the hot and humid climate around like many other crops, fruit crops that are considered exotic. So they're having this resistance not only to different insects but different diseases and most of the cultivars of muscadines are resistant to pierces disease, this bacterial disease. They're also a very good candidate for organic production and in my personal opinion probably the best candidate for organic production in our states on the fruit crop side. They are very productive and versatile, they can be consumed fresh, they can be processed into juices, pies, gems, jellies and we're also having this growing binary type of industry in our states, a lot of vineyards are processing their crop into different types of wines. What we need to keep in mind when we're planning to grow some muscadine cultivars, one thing that comes to mind this is their pollination biology. Unlike grapes from white is vinifera and American and French American hybrid bunch grapes they are requiring pollinizer very often because they're not all of the cultivars are cell fertile. So we're having in production in cultivation two types of muscadine grapes based on their pollination biology and some of them are considered to be female or self sterile and you can look at the picture of Pam here which is self sterile. Regrettably most of the large berry type of cultivars of muscadines are cell sterile and they would require a pollinizer to go with them for successful production. Another type of muscadines are those that we call perfect flower or self fertile and a good example of self fertile muscadine cultivar is noble that you can see here on the picture. Why we need to be planning ahead when we're growing muscadine cultivars because some of the cultivars like those that are considered female they would require a pollinizer to be planted together and it's even considered that planting two pollinizers for one cultivar in production would provide better results. But then what do you do with the crop of the fertilizer cultivar so all of this needs to be planted. And also current breeding programs especially at the University of Arkansas and University of Georgia are taking those features of muscadines into consideration and they're focusing to develop new and improved muscadine cultivars and one big purpose of the breeding program why big goal of the programs right now is developing muscadine cultivars that are perfect flowers so they wouldn't wouldn't need to have a pollinizer planted with them so this will facilitate the growers tremendously. With that the University of Georgia has recently released some type of new cultivars of muscadines that are having those qualities and we acquired those cultivars and planted them in our center of Obama vocation and the Children's Research and Extension Center together with some of the most advanced muscadine selections from the University of Georgia and University of Arkansas. And on the list here we're having those released cultivars that we're looking to evaluate together with Supreme which is we are using Supreme as a control cultivar that we can compare the performance of each of the cultivars with Supreme and see which outperforms Supreme. Today I'm going to share some data from the last season that applies to those recently released cultivars because they were planted in 2019 and they started producing their commercial crop last year and our advanced selections were planted later so we expect to see their first commercial crop this summer. With that I will go through the season according to the season of ripening of all of those muscadine cultivars and the first one that I'm going to mention is Hull. It was released in 2014 as a cell fertile and large fruited cultivar and it is reported to be one of the earliest varieties that farmers can pick beginning in late July. This cultivar tastes sweet and can be picked early and produces a very attractive color that reportedly the consumers in the South East prefer. This is the crop that we saw on Hull in 2022, summer and fall and this cultivar was harvested initially on August 18 and we continued harvesting until first of September. The total yield was kind of surprised for us. This was the largest among all of the cultivars in our test and the crop per vine resulted in 61 pounds per vine. This is pretty good. The average berry weight was 11.4 grams so every berry date is larger than 10 grams is considered to be large for the sugars for Hull were 16.5 percent. Then we are having Lane and that was released in 2012 as a cell fertile and large fruited cultivar as well. This is the first early ripening blackberry cultivar so if you are a fan on the black berries of muscadine here is a good choice for you. Lane is large fruited but smaller than supreme. We found the average berry size to be like nine grams slightly below 10. The vigor was moderate for the vine and yield was also lower than supreme and as I mentioned supreme is our control cultivar that we compare all others or the new materials and it is better producing than the female cultivars though. Lane has the tendency to split and tear during picking and form this what we call wet stem scar which is not very good feature if you intend to store Lane for longer period of time. Lane was or the first ripe berries of Lane were ready to be harvested again on August 18 in 2022 and continued until August the 25th so relatively short harvesting time in 2022. The total yield was about half of that of Hull about 33.5 pounds per vine with average berry weight of 11.1 grams so really large berry sugars for Lane was again 16.5 percent so pretty sweet. Another very interesting choice would be muscadine which is actually a hybrid between muscadine and European Norvites vinifera grapes. It is so fertile but it is also a seedless cultivar. It is different from other muscadines in terms of it could be harvested on clusters so because the berries on each cluster they ripe uniformly. Rosmatasi is also very continuously fruiting along the shoot so it can form up to 24 clusters per shoot but again remember those are small clusters with really small berries. Rosmatasi is sweet and tasty and the flesh is kind of having this crisp texture so it's more like vinifera rather than muscadine where we having when you kind of bite on this berry it is not crisp and of course the skin of Rosmatasi is very thin as well. It is reported to be highly disease resistant and because the plant is relatively or could be grown in a relatively smaller area it is very conducive for being grown on different patios or smaller spaces that a homeowner might have around the house and here is what we saw in 2022 for Rosmatasi. The harvest started on August 18 and we cluster harvested this cultivar as you can see on the picture the entire cluster was ripe. Total yield of course is relatively low only 5.6 pounds per vine and the berries were the smallest berries in this experiment only 1.1 gram on average but Rosmatasi produced the sweetest berries in last season and had the highest sugar content of 17.3 percent. We have included Eudora in this experiment because yeah it is an earlier release from USDA in Poplarville, Mississippi but we haven't had this in research trials so we decided to compare it with other cultivars that are now available. So Eudora provides in general medium to high yield and berries are large 10 grams on average with high percent dry stem scar which is a wonderful feature for a muscadine grape but Eudora needs to be planted with the cell fertile cultivar or two of them because it has those female type of flowers. Eudora can be cluster harvested because it has this type of even berry ripening so that's why we were interested to test Eudora and harvest in 2022 season began again on August 18. A total yield was pretty high 55 pounds per vine and it was actually the second largest after the crop of whole that had 61 pounds per vine. Average berry size was considered large 10.6 grams on average and sugars were 16.6 grams. Here is the supreme, our control cultivar. It also requires a pollinizer, so whoever is interested needs to keep that in mind. The harvest in the previous season started on August 25th so a little later. Total yield of supreme was 33.8 pounds per vine and supreme had the largest average berry weight, 17.6 grams on average, a real winner here. Sugar though were a little lower than for the other cultivars but still relatively high, 15.4 percent for supreme. Then we were looking at this southern home, which is also a hybrid between masculine and some French grapes. Southern home is so fertile, has small to medium berries. It has a very good flavor and crisp flesh texture. It could be very good for homeowners and for your landscape because of southern home's ornamental qualities. For example, this cut leaf pattern, it looks very nice in the landscape. Southern home is also resistant to berry rot diseases and there are many of them but some of them to mention black rot, pita rot, ripe rot. It is also resistant to xylella fastidiosa that causes pierces disease. We started harvesting southern home on August 25th of the last year and total yield was pretty high, 36.5 pounds per vine but southern home had the smallest average berry weight. Sugar's were pretty good, 16 percent on average. Here at the end of the season we had our poke that was released in 2017 from the University of Georgia. Again, this is from the South Fortale Muscanine Cultivar series. It ripens mid-season in Georgia, obviously. It has large berries on average 15 grams and has this long pedestal which makes the berry easy to pick. A poke also is reported to have dry stem scar which is a very good trait for muscanine cultivar berries are significantly larger than other South Fortale cultivars and again does not need a pollinizer to produce large fruit. Poke was the latest ripening cultivar in our experiment last year. The first harvest was conducted on September 16th and continued until the end of September. Yield per vine was very good, 29.55 pounds and the average berry weight was 16 grams. Poke also had those sweet berries with 16 percent sugars in them and with that I would like to thank you for your attention and try to answer questions you might have.


All right, thank you for the introduction. As you said, I'm Cody, and I'm adjunct at SDSU, which means they kind of like me, and I kind of like them, but they don't actually pay me. It's the Dakota Lakes Research Farm that pays me. How are we doing with the microphone? Do we need to? I'm just going to shut this one off. Will we? Yeah, don't come too close. Might get ugly. Are we okay now? Yeah. A little better? Okay. Thank you, Sarah. Do I need to move? This around, maybe? Or maybe get this out of here. Maybe it'll work a little better outside. Okay, so I consulted the Dakota Lakes Research Farm I have for the past several years now, and it's been a fantastic experience for me. I wanted to start things today just by recognizing my grandfather, who passed away this past year. When he was 14 years old, his dad gave him the choice of buying some cows and raising cows, or he could go to high school, and he chose to stay on the ranch and raise cattle, and because of his hard work throughout his life and his generosity, his kids and his grandkids, like myself, didn't have to make that choice between the cattle and going to college, and so I just wanted to say thank you, Grandpa, and he's one of the many reasons why I'm able to stand here today with education and with the background on the ranch that I've got. The Impossible Burger, you guys probably have heard of this. It's a veggie, it's one of the latest veggie burgers, right? And when you look at the picture, the whopper on the left and the Impossible Burger on the right, they don't look a whole lot different when they're presented this way, and I'm not here to talk about whether it's a good idea or it's a bad idea or good things or bad things about it. My interest in it is something else and it's the question of why will people buy it and what does that mean for people who might be raising livestock or raising beef in particular, and number one on this list I've got up there is to Save the Earth. If you look at the website from the company that produces the burger, they're very straightforward about saying that's why they're doing this because they believe their product is better for the earth, they're saving the earth if we're eating the Impossible Burger rather than animal products in our burger. And like I said, I'm not gonna go into those claims and whether they're correct or they're not correct. I wanted to focus a little more on the other two points that number two I've got there is taste and then I've got the price. You know, research has shown that people who grow up eating grass-fed beef prefer it to grain-fed and vice versa. You grow up with one thing, you tend to like it better and it's in my head, I wonder if people who grew up eating veggie burgers might actually prefer that to a regular beef burger. In any case, there are a lot of people who do eat it, there are people who like it and so it's out there, people are eating it, people are gonna enjoy it, right? And finally, not that everyone will but some certainly will, and then finally price. If I understand right now the price is probably a little bit higher than your regular burger but this is made in a lab, it's an industrial process and I assume that they will get better at it. This is a pretty new product, right? Chances are they're gonna get better at simulating the flavor of beef and the eating experience of beef and they'll probably be able to do it cheaper too. And so what happens if they do get the price point down to being the same as a beef burger or less and they get the taste to be pretty close, what happens then, what are people gonna eat? Well, I suspect we'll see a lot of people choosing the burger, right? And it might not be one or the other, it might eat some of one and some beef and some of the veggie burger. And right now, keep in mind, less than 2% of our population in the States now, they say, is involved, directly involved in agriculture. So most people who are eating don't have a real clear understanding of where their food's coming from and the main choice that they've got is something kind of like this. Most of the beef is coming through our conventional methods which includes a feedlot and then we've got the impossible burger on the lab on the other side and when people are presented with this choice, some will choose one, some will choose the other, right? That's the way it's gonna be. But those don't have to be the only two choices and that's what I'm suggesting is another way that we may produce some of our beef and I think when the consumers are presented with this choice that we'll get some more people choosing to eat beef. And I wanna put out there the idea of this artisanal beef and I've got under there wine, coffee, tea and chocolate, those are products that where this idea is already, is already out there and in the back near the coffee there's a little table set up, there's a bottle of wine and a box of tea back there. I encourage you to go back there, read the labels on those products because when you read those labels, you find out all kinds of information about how they were produced, what the soil was like and maybe what the weather was like, what the guy's name was, who ran the vineyard, what this product is gonna taste like and so you get all this information before you even open the bottle or the package. And I wrote, there's some pieces of paper there too, I wrote up some examples of what that might look like for beef in central South Dakota. And I just, the idea, the main idea is the sentence I've got here down at the bottom, tell people how we care for the land and the animals. Because if we're doing a good job of it, caring for the land and the animals, we wanna communicate that message to other people and chances are we can be rewarded for it in the marketplace and I think we can get a better price for the products that we're producing because there are a lot of people in this world who are buying food, who care about how it was produced and they care about how we took care of things. And I think that along with this there's the opportunity to develop some terroir for South Dakota beef. This is a fancy word, usually you see it in relation to wine and the idea is that the particular environment where those grapes were grown impacts the quality or in the taste, the particular flavor of the wine and right now we think of beef mostly as a commodity where it's all the same but I think there's a lot of opportunity to develop particular tastes or flavors or terroirs of beef and market it that way. So today I'm kinda gonna talk about several different ideas and I'm hoping that at the end they'll all come together and it'll make sense why I jump around a little bit and then we'll have this constellation that comes together, that was the marketing part. Now integrating livestock with crops. Why in the world would we do that? Because as you guys know having livestock around is a lot of extra work, they can be a real pain in the butt especially if you're trying to cav during the middle of a snowstorm. And so why would we do that? Well some of the reasons on the left that I've got some of your standard crops on the right I've got some forage and perennial crops. If you integrate livestock into your operation it gives you a lot of, it gives you some opportunities for biological and economic diversity. So these forage crops I've got on the right you could grow those even if you don't have livestock but the livestock, if you grow them and you have livestock now you've got an opportunity to harvest them and make some money out at the same time. So if you believe that you need more diversity in your rotations, if you wanna put more, you wanna grow a cover crop after the wheat that you had after you harvest your wheat and you wanna make some money on it at the same time and not just put all of it back into the soil that's where the livestock come in and you can make some money on it. And because if you're just growing these for hay and you cut the hay and you sell it to your neighbor or to wherever, you're exporting, you just lost the benefit that you had most of the benefit you had from growing that crop because you didn't keep the nutrients and the biomass, the organic matter right there on your farm. So you get the opportunity for diversity and a couple of these things here I have down at the bottom alfalfa and switchgrass, those are both perennials. You have the opportunity now to put some perennials in the rotation and make good use of them. Why would we wanna do that? Well, this is an amazing picture, this is a big blue stem plant, you can see there's just a little bit of green up on top and look at that massive root system below it. This is why we'd like to have perennials in our rotation for those massive root systems. That's one of the big reasons anyway. And in full disclosure, these plants were grown in special containers that allowed them to get nice deep roots and then they can harvest them and wash the roots out and make a nice picture. So there is that, but they didn't just go out into the field and dig them up, but these perennial grasses, like these warm season native perennial grasses like big blue stem switchgrass, they can have roots that go well beyond six feet under the right conditions. And so, compare that to our annual crops which have much shallower root systems typically, but even if they do get the roots way down deep, like say a corn plant, that corn plant's starting over every year, so those roots, even if they do reach a pretty good depth, there's very little of the growing season that they actually get down to that depth, whereas the perennial has those roots down there all the time once they get established. So what are some of the advantages of these deep roots? Well, nutrients going up. So those deep roots are extracting nutrients from lower down in the soil profile, nutrients that your annual crop can't get to, and they draw those nutrients back up and incorporate them into their body. So now, after that perennial's been there, what your annual crops are gonna be able to access some of those nutrients that have been brought back to the nearer the soil surface, a wine being one of those examples. Another reason to have those deep roots is bringing the water table down. That's something that people are probably more interested in now than they were five years ago. With those deep roots, they're gonna be able to access a lot of that water that your annual crops can't get to. So now, transitioning a little bit from the ideas to what we're actually doing at Dakota Lakes, native tall grass plantings, and we can point to an example of where some of this idea came from. In Argentina, there used to be a traditional practice of having seven years of crop, annual crop, followed by seven years of a pasture. And so these pastures typically would be a grass, legume mixture, and so they go back and forth, and that's one way they would maintain some of the fertility of the soil. At Dakota Lakes, we're trying something a bit similar, except we've got 15 years of crop followed by five years of perennial pasture. Now, we just started this, and so I can't say that these are the magic numbers, that it's 15 and five, right? But we believe that this is gonna really benefit the soils that we have in this rotation. During those 15 years of cropping, we still have a crop rotation, so as you can see here, we're gonna go from winter wheat to corn or sorghum and a cool season broadly. So we do that for 15 years, and then we transition into the perennial. Now, this is a picture of our switchgrass. So the perennial that we've used so far, this first time around, has been switchgrass. It's, for the most part, it's a monoculture of switchgrass. Half of it, half of the field we designated for seed production this year, and harvested seed off of it. The other half, we grazed. And we've grazed that for two or three years now. You can see the cattle out here in July. The advantage by grazing, of course, is that the nutrients are going back to the soil in the organic matter. Now, one of the challenges with putting that perennial in and only having five years of having that perennial in, and remember, our objective of putting it there is to benefit our soil. Now, when you start a perennial like a switchgrass or something, that first year, a lot of times they only get about yay big. Even if you've got good conditions and you get a good stand, you might not get much growth. Second year, they're getting bigger, but they're still not at, say, maximum capacity. So there's establishment year down. Second year, we're doing okay, but now we've got two years gone by, and we haven't done anything for our soil yet. In fact, because of the low productivity in the first year, I wouldn't even be surprised if we returned less biomass than usual. So that just leaves us with three years out of this five year of the perennial to really do a lot of good stuff for the soil. And we're choosing, we chose switchgrass, it's a high biomass crop, and it also has a high carbon to nitrogen ratio. So idea there being that we're gonna put a lot of carbon back into the soil to build up that soil organic matter, but we only got three years to do it. So something Dwayne and I have talked about and we've tried out is try to accelerate that establishment process a little bit by planting the switchgrass in a year when we still have a grain crop there. So what we did last year was we planted two rows of wheat and then a row of switchgrass, two rows of wheat and a row of switchgrass. We also tried putting the wheat and the switchgrass together in the drill and to planting them all at once. And then the other thing we did, we planted the wheat and then we came back later and planted the switchgrass over top after the wheat had already come up. And that last treatment, it appears that we did damage our wheat yields with that. All three treatments, I went out there and counted switchgrass plants, which was rather tricky because they're pretty little, but it looks to me like we probably got a pretty good amount of switchgrass out there in all of those cases. Not to say that you might not have to come back and reseed some, but this growing year now when things start greening up again, I'll be going back out and checking on winter kill on that to see if the switchgrass survived because it didn't get very big, especially being there under that wheat canopy. This is a mixture of switchgrass and big bluestem. This is on some heavy clay soils, pretty shallow soils, heavy clay. And this picture was actually taken in 2018, which was wet in a lot of parts of South Dakota, but at Dakota Lakes it was extremely dry. And it just amazed me how much productivity we got out of these native warm season grasses, even in a droughty year like that. And this picture was taken in July, end of July, and it's headed out here. And so in terms of quality, I mean you can see the cattle are here grazing. This is not great quality at this point. It would be better to graze it earlier in the year. But also depending on your objectives, if your objectives is to return a lot of biomass to the soil, it can still meet that objective even if the quality is low. And so right next to that, we had some degraded range land, and I say degraded. It didn't include these warm season grasses. There were some native grasses, some exotic grasses. And I just went out there and I took some samples to check on the productivity. 3,600 pounds of productivity on the native range and about double that where we had planted the switchgrass and the big bluestem. Just amazing what they could do. Now in terms of quality from an animal nutrition perspective, neither one of these is very good. But the switchgrass and big bluestem was very poor quality. But a key factor here is this is taken on July 26th. So we wouldn't expect it to be very good that time of year. Another thing I like to do on the farm, we've got around a lot of the field margins we have switchgrass planted. And so we've got the field over here, switchgrass over here. And in this particular case, we've got smooth brome growing back here. You can see it's brown and it's headed out. The date here is July 8th of this past year. And I'll go a lot of times to these areas on the farm and try to make a fence line comparison side by side. Because a smooth brome, that's something we have in a lot of our pastures. And if you've got cattle, it's really good forage early in the year. Cattle love it, it's high quality. But what happens as you get in towards the end of June into July, it gets mature. Same thing with crested wheatgrass. They're great early in the year, but we don't have enough cows to graze all that lush green grass we have early in the year. We get into summer and then it's not much good anymore. On this date, on July 8th, when I took these samples on either side of the fence, the switchgrass was three and a half percent higher in crude protein than the smooth brome was. So that's a big advantage. Now, typically you would think smooth brome's a better quality, but again, it all has to do with the date because at this time, the smooth brome was already mature and the switchgrass is kind of just getting going in June and here in early July, it's still high quality. So we've got some good quality for the cattle to graze that time of year. I made a similar comparison for the past several years. I've made a similar comparison in the ditches by Dakota Lakes, switchgrass and big bluestem on one side, smooth brome on the other side. This year, I actually didn't find very much difference in quality. Again, this was in early July, but in past years, I usually find in early July the switchgrass and big bluestem are a little better than the smooth brome, but in all these years, I will find that we're getting more productivity out of the big bluestem and switchgrass than the smooth brome. And in early July, that's the case, but they're not done growing. If I waited until later, there'd be an even bigger gap in terms of productivity. We're getting more productivity from those tall grasses rather than smooth brome. Okay, so now transitioning, those are some more of the planted stuff. Now, transitioning to a pasture situation, three years ago, Dakota Lakes rented the pasture that's right across the road from the farm. And this pasture had been continuously grazed for a long time, and mostly dominated by exotic cool season grasses like crested wheatgrass and smooth brome. Some, we have some cheatgrass and some Kentucky bluegrass out there too. And so we wanted to transition it from that into more of a native dominated pasture. So specifically looking at putting things in like the big bluestem. And so in order to do that, we were trying a lot of different strategies. So we set up an experiment where we sprayed out with glyphosate. So going north-south, we'd sprayed with glyphosate or atrazine or both or no spray at all. And in this picture, you can make it out, I think that there's a brown strip here and a green strip here, brown strip. So you can tell where those strips are.  I have to give that disclaimer because this, as a range land guy, I definitely don't want to suggest that. This is a case where we pretty much had exotic species and I think a lot of this land where we did it may have been go back land. It was probably farmed at one time. So mostly there wasn't a whole lot of native that was left there to spray. But so we've got the spray treatments going north-south and then we seeded going east-west. So what we end up with is a big checker board of treatments. A mixture of grass is mostly big blue stem and then we did that also with some forbs or some broadleafs and then we did areas where we didn't seed anything. And after, and those first two years were just bone dry at Dakota Lake, 17 and 18. And we saw very little results from that. But this past year, we finally got to see some of those grasses coming that we had planted. And what it looks like now is that, after three years, the story's not over, but so far what I can tell you is that where we sprayed glyphosate and where we drilled, we had fairly good success at getting some new grasses established there. But if we only drilled or if we only sprayed, neither one of those treatments really worked. And we did do one other thing, one other change in management besides the spraying and the seeding and that's the grazing. So rather than the continuous season long grazing, we've been moving the cows. In this particular pasture, sometimes more than once a day, in other cases, maybe a day or two. And we don't do that all year long, we don't do that all the time. But with this rapid grazing, even that was not enough to bring those species back on their own over three years. So there's kind of a lot of caveats there. I don't wanna say it can never happen, but I think that this particular land where we were working, we didn't really have big blue stem there to begin with. I don't know that if we even had a seed bank left for it to come back on its own. And one exception to the rule of having to spray and drill both is that there were some areas in the swales, so some wet areas, if you follow along these, where the low places in the landscape where it's wet, some big blue stem that we planted did come up there, even without herbicide in those spots. And with circled there, you probably can't really make it out very well, but that is a big blue stem plant that's not very big. It's only about this big. And there's a lot of that out in this pasture. And so I think that over the next year or two, we're gonna see a lot more. Chances are, if we continue to get a little bit of rain, chances are this project is gonna look more and more successful as time goes on. Three years really isn't enough to judge it. And this picture is in here just to basically show that there's a lot of diversity out there in this pasture, which as an ecologist, that's something we always like, diversity. Okay, similar issue, but a little bit different site now. Dakota Lakes just this past year got a lease on the land between the farm and the river. And so this was the core land now. The Game Fish and Parks has it. And there's a little spot there that's just beautiful. It's full of Indian grass, which is one of our native warm season grasses. And Maximilian sunflower, you can see them here. But this is the real exception to the rule. Most of this land is just like that pasture, dominated by the exotic grasses that we wish we didn't have so much of. And I loved this picture because I took it on October 3rd and most of the landscape is brown and there's no flowers to be seen, but this Maximilian sunflower, if you're interested in wildlife and pollinators, where else are you gonna find flowers like this in October? So one of the things we're doing there, we're trying to get those grasses back and we're doing the rapid grazing thing again. And what we do, we're focusing our grazing early in the year, in the spring, because these are those cool season grasses, we're trying to hurt them, right? And tip the scales in favor of the warm season grasses that we planted. So we grazed this several times really early in the year. And the other thing we did is we broadcast some seed out there. And then we just did that. We also broadcast seed and rolled some bales out over top. And then we also drilled some spots. And so, you know, this is what it looks like in May or right after we've rolled the bale out there. Here is in July. There's still a lot of it visible. And even into September, a lot of that bale's still visible. In some places it was on pretty thick. And so to this point, we don't have many of those species that we planted, if not many of them have come up. I looked around and I did find a few plants. I might even have a picture. I'm holding one there, you can't really tell, but there are a few out there. But I'm hoping that a lot of those seeds are still viable and as the bale breaks down, maybe we'll get more of it out there. And those bales, we used bales of mature switchgrass and big blue stems. So there was a lot of seed in them as well. Okay, now I'm gonna transition from all those perennials to the cropping side of things, but being an ecologist, even when I transition to the cropping side of things, I start you out with a slide with bison and grass on it. Because if I'm gonna talk about a cropping system and trying to design it for wherever your farm happens to be, I think the place you need to start is think about how Mother Nature did things there and learn lessons from her. And so this is a picture that could be taken in a lot of places in South Dakota. We've got grass and bison. And so you've got a diversity of plant species in this picture. You've got some of them that are green, some are brown, so some are actively growing, some are not. We've got an herbivore eating it. And we could imagine that they're not in the picture, but the antelope are just over the hill and the rabbits are hiding in the grass. And we've got lots of different, we've got lots of diversity, both plants and animals. And this is what built up our soils, right? This is what gave our soils fertility. And if we think about the flows of nutrients here, there wasn't, there was hardly any export, right? Because the animals eat stuff and they're not shipping it across the ocean to another country. They're not, we're not taking stuff very far away. And that's a real key factor. And if we dive into a little bit of the details of that, if we talk about nitrogen, for instance, there's a lot of nitrogen in the atmosphere and it gets into the soil, plants can take it up. This is a picture of a lead plant, which is a legumes like an alfalfa or a pea or a soybean. You know, it's gonna, along with the bacteria, it's gonna fix nitrogen. When that nitrogen or when that plant is consumed by the animal, in fact, very little of that nitrogen stays in the animal. Almost all of it is gonna leave the animal in feces in urine and go back to the soil. And if we look at what those actual percentages are, we've got the retained nitrogen. And this is on pounds per acre here. So it's only about a pound or two per acre retained. And this, you know, to do, to put numbers to this sort of thing, you have to make some assumptions. So I said 10 acres per head for six months. And what's the nitrogen that's retained? Well, if you have a growing animal, nitrogen is a key component of muscle, right? So that's where most of that nitrogen is gonna end up. So if you've got a, you know, a stalker calf or something out there that's growing, that's, the nitrogen is going to that. If you've got a mature cow, her, she's not really changing much in weight. So she's not keeping a lot of the nitrogen. But if she's got a calf at her side and that calf is growing, that cat, when you sell that calf, you're taking nitrogen away, right? But it's not very much. It's not very much nitrogen relative to what they ate. Most of what the nitrogen they eat stays in your field or pasture in the form of urine and feces. All right, now suppose you put that calf into a feedlot instead. Well, if we, again, we have to make some assumptions. So what I said here was suppose you had a 500 pound calf and you fed him to gain at a rate of 2.1 pounds per day. And that's a pretty low gain for a feedlot, but, but let's just, so basically what I'm giving you is a kind of a baseline scenario, kind of a best case scenario. If you wanna feed that calf and you have no waste, so again, that's not realistic, right? It's gonna take 56 pounds of nitrogen.  And that's best case scenario.  You're also taking off a lot of phosphorus. And the nitrogen you can get back from the atmosphere. The phosphorus, you're not getting it back from the atmosphere, it's gone once you take it away. And then you're taking off a lot of organic matter too. Now in contrast, if you look over here, if you, these are what the numbers look like if, rather than taking it from the field and giving it to the calf in the feedlot, what if you took the calf and you put him over here in the field, so everything he eats, all the manure and urine and everything is going back onto the land. Well, when he's, after six months, that calf has grown. And that's why you're still taking away some of the nitrogen and some of the phosphorus and some of the organic matter. But you're keeping a lot more on your land. And if we take a look, if we just subtract these numbers like 56 minus nine and six minus two, so I've got that on this next slide. What's the difference? Well, 47 pounds of nitrogen, if it costs 30 cents a pound, you know, that's worth $14. How much is the phosphorus worth? 340, and this is elemental phosphorus, not P205. So you've got $17.50, roughly, worth of nutrients just in nitrogen and phosphorus and then organic matter. I know it's very valuable, but I didn't put a number there because I know whatever price I put in for it was gonna be wrong. So I don't want us to forget about the value of the organic matter. So with that in mind, then that, to me that presents the challenge of, that I've got stated up here, how long can we keep our animals and the nutrients that they eat on the land? So to me, that's the question, that's the challenge that we have to look at. So specifically, what are we doing at Dakota Lakes? This is something that we're just beginning to try. These are electronic feeding stalls and they're actually designed to be used in a dairy. If we flip around and look at them from the back, this is the end that the cow would come in. So she walks in there, this green deal reads an electronic ID that she's got hanging from her neck and it says, oh, this is, you know, cow number 326 and today she's gonna get a ration of, it's a pound of corn and then a pound of peas and a half a pound of soybean meal. And so it's tailored specifically to this animal. So if I've got a 1,600 pound cow out there and I've got an 1,100 pound cow out there, they can get different amounts of supplement based on their needs. Same thing if I'm trying to fatten calves out on field and pasture and I've got a 600 pound calf and a 900 pound calf with different nutrient requirements, they can get different levels of supplement.  So we can actually provide three different kinds of supplement in any combination that we want, any mixture that we want. And we envision that these things will move around field and pasture with the cows. And that's where this comes in. Dwayne and Jim, Jim's our fabricator. Jim's, they've been working on designs. Jim has mounted this solar panel on top of an irrigator. And so we envision that this will also have shade on it. It'll pull those feeders around. We may have the water getting pulled around with it. We eventually, maybe we can build other things on like scales and fly control, things like this. And if we can, because if we can move this around the pasture, we can get better grazing distribution. And we can have that urine and the manure spread out all over the pasture, all over the field, rather than having it all end up in the one spot where you set the feeders, right? So with any luck, we'll have this operating sometime this summer. Now, what have we been doing? I'm just going to kind of run through a year in the life of the cattle at Dakota Lakes here. What kind of, what are they eating at different times of the year and what's the quality there? Early in the year, we start on those exotic cool season pastures, the crested wheat grass and the smooth brome. They're very, very good that time of year. Then we, as we get into June and July, we tend to, we transition more to our tall grass, our native tall grass species like the switch grass. And this one, in this particular picture, you can see we actually interceded some peas and it was a kind of basically a cover crop mixture into the switch grass. They didn't actually graze this until early July, but I can tell you they really enjoyed being out there with the combination of the tall grasses and those cover crops. It was a good diet. In this picture, when we are grazing the tall grasses, we prefer to move the fence pretty frequently. And you can definitely tell in this picture where the fence was yesterday, right? Right there. And at this point, it's July 30th. The quality of this is quite low. The crude protein is getting to be down pretty marginal even for a dry cow. And so it may require, this time of year, it may require some crude protein supplementation. Another thing we did in the middle of the summer was on the pivot corners, we had some cover crop swaths and we grazed those. And being that it was in the middle of the summer, you can see dates down here going from late July to late August, it was hot and it was humid. And those are great conditions for breaking down organic matter, right? So I was wondering what was gonna happen to the quality of these swaths over the summer and that's why I took samples at several different times. And you can see that for crude protein, we lost a couple percent points of crude protein. And TDN, that's the energy content, stands for Total Digestible Nutrients. So that's the energy or the calories. That's what you need to put pounds on an animal. And you can see we lost some quality there, too, just over the course of a month. As we get into, we have in August and September. And on this particular field, this is a dry land field, not irrigated, and we got two forage crops off of it. And so the first forage crop was we bailed up and set aside. And in fact, before we bailed it, we, while the swaths were on the ground, we went through and we drilled the next crop, which was the German millet, which you can see here in the foreground. And so then, when we were ready to graze it with our cows that are calving, we started putting the bales back out onto the field. And so they've got a mixture of, you know, they can graze the bales and they've also got some of the German millet. Now, we move the fence every day for this, too. So we kind of ration it out little by little. And it worked very well this year with rain. Now, this is a picture taken from the same spot last year, when it was very dry. It did not, it didn't work quite as well. We got the first crop, we got the bales, but we didn't have enough moisture to get that second forage crop. The idea was the same. In fact, I think the previous two years, it did not work very well. This year, it worked excellent. So back to this year or to 2019, this is the same field from the other direction. You can see, you know, all the manure that we're leaving behind here, just what we wanted to do. They also had access at the same time to some standing corn to graze. And as you can see, we, that was, we fed a lot of soil.  A lot of it gets trampled. But they, I think they had just gotten into this area. So they would be able to clean that up a little bit better. I mean, the cows would eat a little bit more of it if it's on the ground there. And the other thing is that they, we gave them some switchgrass. There's a, so at the same time, they had access to all three of these different crops. And the switchgrass, at this time of year, it's not that good of quality. And so it's providing, it's more of a bedding, sort of, probably. But it was interesting to me to see that they still ate some of it. And it just goes to show that, I mean, we all like some diversity in our diet. Even chocolate cake, if you ate it for every meal every day, you get tired of it eventually. And cattle are no different. They like to have some diversity in their diet. Moving into September now, we grazed a standing cover crop. And the quality on this was just fabulous. 26% crude protein and 64% digestible nutrients. Okay, now, as we're getting close to the winter, one of the questions we've been asking in the last couple of years is about fertilizing or not fertilizing our cover crops. And this is a picture from 2018. And I put this in here because you can really see the difference between the fertilized and not fertilized. You can see these strips out there. However, when I actually went out and collected the samples, I couldn't find very much difference in yield between the fertilized and the non-fertilized strips. Sometimes our eyes can be deceiving. But another thing, but there, I mean, there's definitely some impact there. I mean, you can see it. You can see that there's some impact, but it was not as dramatic as you might think. And in fact, the statistics said that there really wasn't a difference in how much grew. But another thing we noticed is that where we fertilized, we see this, we got green up again. So the fertilized, the strips that had been fertilized after we swathed, they grew and greened up and where we had not fertilized, they did not. But they didn't really add a whole lot of biomass to the equation in terms of forage or soil health. So we did it again this year. And this year, besides going out there by hand and cutting stuff and weighing it and all that, I also used a drone to take images. And we got the regular visible light images. We also used some near-infrared cameras and calculated a NDVI, which is supposed to tell us how much is out there. And so I did both the drone and the hand sampling. And on this particular field, which is not irrigated, you can see the yields that we've got here, 3,000 pounds per acre fertilized, 2,400 pounds per acre, not fertilized. But whether I collected my data with the drone or by hand, the statistics say there's no difference there. That was hard for me to believe. And I'll get a little bit more into that in a minute. But the other thing we see is that the fertilized part had a little higher crude protein. And so that's also beneficial. But again, the statistics didn't support me there in saying that there's really a difference. But statistics aside, we got a 25% increase here going from not fertilized to fertilized. And if we calculate just on the non-fertilized part, it costs us $62 per ton. If we assume that we had to hire someone to go out there and do all the field operations and bought the seed and everything, $62 per ton using custom rates. And then if we consider that we put on 45 pounds of nitrogen and the extra forage we got for that, the use of fertilizer, it cost us $59 per ton for that extra tonnage. So neither one of these is a bad price for the quality of this forage. We did the same thing on one of our irrigated fields. It did get irrigated one time, three quarters of an inch is all. And on this field, the yields are very similar, 3,100 pounds of 2,200 pounds, very similar to the other field, to the field that was not irrigated. This time though, the statistics support the difference and they say, yeah, yeah, there really is a difference. You know, the fertilizer really did something. And we see it in the crude protein also. And so cost per ton for the non-fertilized is similar, you know, $68 per ton to produce the non-fertilized. But then with the addition of fertilizer, it cost us $40 per ton, the cost of that fertilizer to produce some extra forage. So again, good prices for this high quality forage. So what we do with it then, this is following wheat, we've planted this cover crop and we're planning to graze it over the winter and we swath almost all of it. And we have the cows eat the swaths. Dwayne also left some standing strips this year so we can make a comparison between the swaths and the strips, but mostly it's just the swaths. You can see 11 days later, this picture I took now, a lot of the green has faded out of that, out of that standing crop. And a lot of you are probably familiar with this, but with the way we prefer to move the fences over the winter is with the irrigator. So we don't have to be moving posts all along.  So we've got the swaths running one direction and the fence running perpendicular to it like this and we just move that fence along the line. So the cows get an extra 20 feet or whatever the number is, every day we just give them a little bit more, ration it out to them. If you've taken a tour at Dakota Lakes, you've probably been on top of our calf shelter. On the backside, you can't see in this picture by the backside of it, there's a piece that we can flap down and then it covers up the backside, the calves can get in there. Here you can see the fence is back here in this picture and this undisturbed snow right here, the cows haven't been there yet. You can see yesterday, this is the area they were working in and so here's a swath. You can see this swath in the foreground that they were eating and they haven't bothered the snow near as much in between and then here's another swath. So the cows, they do a fine job of finding it and if you think about grazing the swath versus grazing the standing, if you've got a 20 foot swathor, you take all that 20 feet and you condense it down into two feet, right? And now, if there's no snow, that doesn't make a whole lot of difference but once it starts to snow and cover that up, now the cow only has to search these two feet where the swath is, right? And so the kind of the action she does, she reaches down in there and she kind of takes a bite and then she, as she picks her head up, she kind of flips some of the snow to the side and she reaches down, she picks it, takes a bite and she kind of flips some and so it's almost like she's tunneling along where that swath is, moving the snow to the side and because we're moving this fence every day, she can see where that swath was yesterday and she knows where to look for it tomorrow. Now you get a bunch of new snow or if it, you cross over on top, sometimes you might have to come through and help them out a little and maybe drive over top and they can see where it is or they, so they can kind of get in there, get that first bite in there and start working at it but they don't come at it from above, they come at it from the side horizontally and they work through it that direction.  So I did the same thing here as I did during the summer with those swaths. I went out every month and I collected quality samples to see what's happening and of course during the winter we expect it to be preserved better than during the summer so with those cold temperatures we expect the quality to be maintained versus the hot, humid summer and that's pretty much what we see. We lost a couple percentage points just like in the summer but it took three months to lose it rather than one month and the difference between the, one of these is standing, one is swath. Well, there's a little bit of difference here but there's a lot of variability in the data, not much difference between them in terms of quality. The difference I think is mostly in the causability to get to it. I also measured the TDN again, remember this is the energy or the calories that's in it and we see a decline over these several months but and this is one field I collected the data on another field too and if we look at this second field the loss of crude protein isn't much at all same with the energy, not a whole lot of loss of energy so we can see that we do lose some quality in these swaths over the winter but it's not real dramatic and it's better than the summer. So besides giving the swaths every day we also give them some corn residue every day and the swaths are high quality and if that's all the cows got it would be a great diet. The corn residue is not as good a quality and but it provides some fill and they do find some ears in there they're the combine mist and so you put those two together the diet's not as good as what we'd like the cows to have over winter and so we also give them a little bit of supplement which could be in the form of flax seed meal soybean meal that we produce on the farm could also be corn or peas or lentil sorghum. This is another drone image that I took and this is on a corn field you can see this spot up here where we had some really wet soils this year and all this part of the field is on the right that got planted later because it was wet and so from the drone imagery you can definitely see those differences and this is supposed to be telling us where we had more corn or less corn right. I also have cages out there that we don't let the cows into because and I do this on a lot of the fields where we let the cows graze to find out what kind of impact they're having and so I thought and I go out there and I harvest with I do some hand harvesting or some small plot combines to harvest those and try to compare yields to say well if we had a cow out here last year you know is it hurting our corn yield? Is it hurting our soybean yield? And so far I haven't been able to find any differences so this year I enlisted a drone to help me out and the drone couldn't find the differences either so I have not been able to find evidence of the grazing hurting our yields at Dakota Lakes and so how do I explain that? I know some there are some people who have said that they have had trouble and I don't have a scientific study where I set this up to make the comparison yet but I suspect that what's happening is it's the particular way that we're managing things at Dakota Lakes you know these soils have been in long-term no-till for decades and the way we graze those cover crops is first we have a wheat crop and we harvest it with a stripper head and this is a picture of what the soil looks like you know we have I mean look at that I mean it's just completely covered with the straw from the wheat and then we've got our cover crop in here and the cover crop gets swath and concentrated in one spot but that ground is still covered with the wheat straw so when our cows are out there they're stepping on that armor the wheat straw is the armor and the other thing is we're moving these fences every day right and so they're never staying in one spot for a long time and if we do get really soft soils you know it's some moisture and the soils are not frozen we'll tend to move the cows off of that field and put them into a perennial grass area for a while and feed them some bales but even if they're you know it's everything doesn't always work out perfectly it's a you know Dakota Lakes it's a real it's a even though we do a lot of research there we have challenges everyone does and sometimes the cows are on the field when it's the soil is a little bit soft you know and you can see some hoof prints but even then we're moving that fence every day so they're not camped out in one spot beating that soil to death for a month at a time and I so that's what I that's the speculation as to why we're having the success we are so that is the end of my presentation and but I just wanted to post this question up here again at the end the challenge that I see is how long can we keep our animals and then nutrients they eat on our land and I hope that the all those stars form the constellation the marketing part and the the read the the beef label in the back you know how that if we can get a higher if we can get a premium for doing the good things we do for the land and keeping the cattle on the land and the nutrients on the land and the organic matter on the land hopefully we can we can bring that all together so I should have time for a few questions at least if there are any yes sir on the question was on the shields pastor when we did the grazing how many head were out there uh... we have thirty cows and so you know from year to year plus or minus thirty cows and the the whole that whole pastor is around eighty acres but uh... that part where we're doing the experiment we tend we have them in uh... paddocks that are less than an acre like the smaller some of the small paddocks are about uh... two-tenths of an acre and then the larger ones are about four times that i think so just so just under an acre so thirty cows and in that area so it's not it's not as intensive as as some of the really high stocking rate mob grazing uh... but it is much more intensive then uh... typically what you would see okay thank you very much thank you