I'm proud to be here on behalf of the Coal Lakes Research Farm. It's something we take quite a bit of pride in. This is our main station right there. We have both dry land and irrigated facilities. If you're not familiar with us, it was started by, of course, a group of farmers. This is what it looks like from our property. We're a typical middle of South Dakota thing where we only have trees in major drainage ways. Ruth and I are going to go to Australia here in a few weeks. I showed this very slide in Australia the first time I went there. Somebody in the audience said, where did the trees go? Because they have low rainfall areas, but they have lots of trees because the rainfall comes in the cool part of the year. I just flippantly said, well, Paul Bunyan cut them down. They had no idea who Paul Bunyan was. So you've got to be a little careful when you do these things. The movie The Revenant was actually a true story that happened in western South Dakota. If you went to the movie, there's all these trees.  And that's where the guy got mauled is at Lemon and he crawled to just north of Peer and took a boat down the river to Chamberlain. There's no trees in there. But they had a film that where there's trees. So you have to be a little careful with your audience. Last night, and some of you weren't there, but last night Keith Burns talked about leaders. These are three leaders. I don't consider myself one of them. On your left is Colin Seiss. He's a guy from Australia that does the grain and graze or pasture cropping system. And then next to him and looking very cold in my coat is Rolf Derps. And I think Keith Burns talked about Rolf some today. And the guy on your right, far right, is a guy we call, I call Duracell. His name is Dersu Gasani. He's from Brazil. And probably one of the first guys that talked about some of these natural insecticide type insect control things. Dersu unfortunately left us this year, but they all showed up on a day similar to today. Several years ago at the farm because they wanted to visit. And Dersu really got into it. He's like Dersu. He's always going. Everybody else kind of wanted to stay in the truck. But we get down to the river and there's ice. Dersu had never seen ice. And he went running out on the water and he says, I'm like, Jesus, like I walk on water. So a couple of years ago, five years ago, a fact in my wife Ruth, none of what I have done would have been possible without Ruth helping along the way. And she kind of has really taken the no-till association and kept them going through a lot of years. And they've done a wonderful amount of work in the past. A few years ago we took a trip to France. It was actually right after the Charlie Hebdo thing, but we weren't close to Paris. And we got an English-speaking GPS system on a car and we traveled from town to town doing no-till meetings. And we do the meeting from eight till noon, course through a translator, and then we leave at lunchtime because it takes about two and a half hours to eat lunch in France, which is not a bad thing. It just doesn't mean you can't get to the next spot very easily. So we take off before lunch and travel to the next town and see the tourist spots on the way and somebody would meet us there and fill us in, have dinner, and then the next day we'd do it again. But they all had to show us their castles. And we'd go and see the castles and they had their grain bends and they looked really nice and every town had a castle. And you say, where did you produce the grain that went into the grain bends? Well, around the castle. Well, the only thing they could produce around the castle now is a few shrubs. And if you look at the land that they had there, that is their good land. And they do an incredible amount of tillage. They till up and down the hill.  And so not long after we went there, I started telling them that my ancestors left Europe because they had degraded the soils so badly that they weren't productive anymore and they had to go find some new soils and then they promptly started to degrade the soils where they went to. And we've done a really good job of it, okay? So it's not one of these things that we just lately have realized or re-realized in the 2000s. It's something of it going on forever. South Dakota was quote-unquote discovered. The Native Americans have real reason to not like that term. But the Lavre Andre brothers came from Winnipeg and went across the continental divide in North Dakota. There is one there. It's about five feet high, sometimes some place between Jamestown and Bismarck or Jamestown and Valley City. There's a continental divide. And they got into the Missouri River system and they were claiming that area for France. It was 1743 and they buried a lead plate above Fort Peer claiming this area for France. And that's why we bought the Louisiana Purchase from France and not from somebody else. And before we did that in the late 1700s, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and all the leaders were talking back and forth to each other that if they continued to degrade the soils on the eastern seaboard, as badly as they were, they were going to have to move west further. And George Washington said, well maybe we should try to do a better job of taking care of our soils than we've been doing. I mean really? Maybe we should start now. It's been 300 years and we're still talking about it. And for the reason that they had to move west, they kept degrading the soil so they bought the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and came through Peer, South Dakota right across our property. But Lewis tried to cross our property in 1804 because I went back to the journals. And what were they doing? They were coming out there looking for land to degrade and they're also looking for beavers. Allah the Revenant, that's what they were doing. They came and killed the beavers. Sometimes look at the records of how many hundreds of thousands of beavers they took out of the Missouri River system. Prior to those being gone, those beavers were building dams that kept the water from flooding the Missouri River. All the little draws and tributaries had beaver dams on them. So when you got big rainfalls, you didn't have lots of water and you also had trees in those draws. The only place that we have trees. So once we took the beavers out and then we brought in the settlers and they started to overgraze and season long graze and do tillage. We had floods. So what's a white European male response to that? Not to put the beaver back. Let's put in big dams. So we have fourth dams in South Dakota, one in Montana, one in North Dakota. One of the really interesting things about the Lewis and Clark's journey is early on in our talk about diversity in no-till, I was doing a meeting in North Dakota and I suggested they really needed to do corn in their rotations in North Dakota to no-till and do corn. And one of the ARS scientists jumped up right in the middle of this meeting and said we can't grow corn in North Dakota. And my response was that Lewis and Clark stopped at Bismarck and bought corn from the Native Americans for their journey. And that maybe the USDA research should try to get as advanced as the Native Americans were in 1804. He did talk to me again here about five years ago. So we put in big dams instead of doing what we should be doing and then farmers, they're going to take water from eastern South Dakota to central South Dakota in the Redfield area to irrigate. And Darryl DeBoer, who's sitting here, was involved in some of that research at Redfield and also some of the stuff that subsequently followed when farmers along the Missouri River decided they wanted to take that water out of the reservoir and use centerpivots to put it on. The reason they're going to take the water to Redfield is somebody had not invented a centerpivot at the time they designed it. So they were going to put it on the La Custry and Lake Dakota Plain. They didn't think that you could grow corn at Redfield without irrigation. They didn't think you could grow soybeans at Redfield without irrigation. When I went there to run the farm at Redfield in 1983, there was 1,900 acres of soybeans in Sprink and Brown County combined. And I almost didn't pass my orals on my PhD because I made the statement, not real bright, that I thought we could probably do fine without the irrigation at Redfield if we just no till. And they didn't think that that could possibly be true and I hadn't thought it through very well. But what happened out at Cronin's place, and this is actually Ralph Holesworth's pivot there, high pressure system put on venture water in about 20 minutes or 25 minutes, and it would run off like this. That's a Cronin pivot. Well, that's not acceptable. And so we were looking at ways along the Derral De Boer. We had a project and we were looking at ways of making water go in the ground better. Under center pivots, especially if we switch from high pressure to low pressure, we put the water on faster. And a group of farmers got together and formed the Dakota Lakes Research Farm. And they own that place and they work with SDSU to run it. And I think it's the only one that I know of that really runs that way. And Southeast Farm China is getting there. But elsewhere in the world, it's the government owns the research farms. And therefore, it's driven by the government and not necessarily by the grassroots. And I think we've been very successful. Very difficult thing to do, but I think we've been successful. In 2014, we met with the Board of Regents and they were kind of wondering what we did. We came up with this thing here, the comparison of corn, soybean, spring wheat, winter wheat, whatever. In the North region, North Central, Central and South Central, South Dakota. That area from probably 281 out to Missouri River or Highway 83, roughly. It had increased by $1.6 billion an acre between 1987 and 2014. They just produced that much more crop because they made more efficient use of the water. They better use the resource. We didn't achieve this success because we set out and said we're going to make things better because we've been doing that. Been trying to make the wheat varieties better, but guys are doing wheat and summerfowl on part of those areas. So they're doing spring wheat and barley at Redfield. We didn't set out to do that. We just said, hey, we're not doing a good job of getting the water in the ground. We're not doing a good job of keeping the water and whatever. So let's see what we can get done. And what we found out with Darryl de Bourne and I is if we did no till, we made the water going to ground better. Surprised everybody. This approach is sometimes called a transformational or systems approach or holistic. There's lots of terms. It's kind of like everybody comes up with new terms. I like this analogy better. The light bulb was not the result of incrementally improving handles. And a lot of our ag research is incrementally going to make it a half a bushel better, half a bushel better, instead of going back and looking at the prairie and say how did the prairie work? Because the prairie worked pretty dang well before we got here and started screwing it up. Most present systems that we call no till are only incrementally different from tilled systems. People still take a big tractor, hook on to a big implement and drive up and down. Right? That's not really transformationally different. Now what we have done in Central South Dakota and people talk about that is we've stopped the bleeding. We used to have the highway closed between Oneida and Peer when the wind came up. That actually happened in 1977 or something like that was one of the days. Two years ago Governor Dugard came to visit in the fall and I took the Oneida paper where they talk about the 30, 40, 50 years ago. That was the week they'd closed the highway. They had pictures of that in the Oneida paper and we just said if you want to know what we did this doesn't happen anymore. But we have a lot of work to do yet. President Kennedy didn't say we're going to make rockets a little better and hope someday that we can develop a space program. He just said no we're going to put people on the moon in the end of the decade. I want us to make a commitment today that we're going to stop this dam erosion now. We're going to stop that. We're going to stop the water quality degradation now. Now we're going to try to do a little better. We need to stop it now. A farmer manages ecosystem and takes sunlight, water and carbon dioxide and makes them into products he can sell. Strive to become the best harvester of water and sunlight. Not necessarily the best corn grower. Ecosystem processes, let's focus on the processes not on the results. Water cycle, are we managing or water cycle the way it's supposed to be managed? If we do it the way Mother Nature did it, we don't have water quality issues. If we screw it up, we send a bunch of nutrients to the Gulf of Mexico or to our lakes or we cause saline seeps. Energy flow, how much energy do we capture? And Keith talked about that day. Mineral cycle, are we cycling the nutrients appropriately and the community dynamics do we have the diversity that we need? The rain feed plants will recharge the groundwater, does it runoff? Deep percolate, degrade water. We now can put two inches of water on in nine minutes at Dakota Lakes Research Farm without runoff. We will walk people behind those irrigators after we've done that. It's a fun thing to watch when I try to get them to step into that field. Because their paradigm says I'm going to sink up to my knees. And it's just like walking on a carpet. And once you do that, I think we kind of have people and especially irrigators. But that's how it is on the prairie. You can walk in the prairie anytime you want to after rain. You don't sink in. You don't have water standing on the surface. No runoff. We have the armor. We have the macro pores. Keith Burns talked some about that highway. The macro pores, the breathing that soil needs to breathe when you take any kind of tillage tool. Like a vertical tillage machine. We'll cut our infiltrate one path. We'll cut our infiltration in half. We've done it. Makes no sense. It increases our weeds. We have the earthworms there. We actually had a graduate student that worked on planting earthworms at one time. He looked at us kind of goofy. But if you don't have them, it helps at least speed the process of getting them.  And they're as deep as you do tillage. So if you don't do tillage, you don't get the wheel tracks. It's kind of a nice logical thing. So there's 20 years of wheel track. And when the guys from the first Dakota Lakes boards came to visit us at Redfield, they were all irrigators. They were all conventional tillers. And the thing that they noticed the most was the wheel tracks. When I get a group of irrigators from California, for instance, the first thing they noticed, the first thing we show them is how deep our wheel tracks aren't. Because that gets them. Take the E out of ET and irrigation will use the term evapotranspiration. Evaporation is water that goes away that doesn't do you any good. Transpiration is water that goes through a plant. Somebody asked the question earlier today, how do I get more of this or that in my soil? Increase the amount of water that goes through your plants. Increase the amount of plant growth, make the water grow through the plants. Don't allow the water to evaporate. Maximize the water into the soil with those macropores and maximize the water holding capacity of the soil. When we've decreased our organic matter by the levels we have, and Keith talked about it today, Alan Williams talked about it today, we really change our water holding capacity in the soil. And that means that we get water logged more and we get dry more. Because the bucket is smaller. Make the bucket bigger. Now this good for irrigation is great for the dry land guys. So the impact of Dakota lakes on the irrigators is that most of them quit irrigating. Dan Forge talks about his dry land corn yields. He has awfully good irrigate corn yields and he has very low left so he still irrigates. But anybody with over 250 foot of left is kind of quit. Ecosystems harvest sunlight. And that gives us energy and Keith talked about that today. If we remove products from that ecosystem, then our bugs don't have the energy. So when you take hay off and haul it into the buildings, you rob the ecosystems of energy. Guys in North Dakota that do hay yet have hayland, they have started to hay and leave the bales on the land. They harvested them on and bring the cows to the hayland and feed the cows on the hayland. So they're cycling the nutrients and the energy right there on that hayland and they've actually increased by a bale or two the production of the hayland. I used to have friends that come from Argentina where they did everything with their cattle in terms of grass fat cattle. And they'd see all the balers in South Dakota and they go, so Dwayne, the cows in Dakota have no legs. So when I see somebody hauling hay or something, I say, well, so your cows don't have any legs. And we went into an operation in France where they had the cows hauling the building. And I'm saying to Sarah Singla, one of the Nuffel scholars from France, I said, Sarah, the cows have legs.  Is the energy used constantly for night? Is it benign or potentially harmful? Well, the sunlight that you can harvest is free. It's constant. It's going to come up tomorrow, right? It's benign other than for us light-skinned caucasians that don't wear proper protection. And we can get some cancer, but other than that, it's benign and it's internal. If you look at fossil fuels, you have to buy them. It's external and they're potentially damaging. Are the nutrients available for plant growth? See, and you ask yourself these questions. And when you're starting to do a tillage system, you can't answer these well. Are the nutrients available for plant use in environmental services or have they been leached, eroded, transported from the landscape, sent to China or to the ocean? Ecosystems that leak nutrients and one of those would be carbon turn into deserts. Desertification is loss of nutrients. And what we do all the time is we look at these ecosystems like Israel and whatever that were once gardens of Eden and all of a sudden they're deserts. Man is very good at that. A 120 car train of soybeans contains 400,000 pounds of phosphate. Everybody loves these big unit loaders. A load of unit train in a way it goes takes 400,000 pounds of phosphate with it.  Sailing seeps are when we don't have the water nutrient cycle working and the water exceeds the water-holding capacity of the soil, takes the nutrients are in the soil and takes them down in the saline seep. SDSU and Watertown, Jim Clinton Denon's here someplace, he'll tell you this is a true story. When they bring students to my farm, I'll ask them, what's in a saline seep? And if they say salts, they get in trouble. Not the kids, the instructor. Because what's in a saline seep is fertilizer. Number one thing is nitrates. Now you've got calcium sulfate which is gypsum and calcium carbonate which is lime. What you're doing is losing your nutrients. We use cover crops to help us better balance the water nutrient cycle. And the question came up last night about what happened to the corn that was growing where there wasn't cover crop yield of the corn where there was. Most likely that was a nitrogen problem because the nitrogen got sequestered into the cover crop. And I don't think they took account of that. Where the nitrogen is when you're doing a cover crop is the nitrogen is sequestered into the organic material which is exactly where you want it. If you're going to build organic matter you have to have both nitrogen and carbon. You just made some organic matter. When you till ground you decay the organic matter and produce nitrogen for your crop and that's what my grandfather came to South Dakota to do was to till the prairie to take the nitrogen out. And he didn't really know or care about the organic matter at that time. We often do different mixes of things. We try to do a mix of perennials and annuals. There's some alfalfa growing between rows of corn. One of the little tricks we do to have a deep-rooted guy with a legume in there will do about four years or five years of alfalfa in those rows like that plants corn between them and move the alfalfa row. So we've got 20 inch rows so we have one row of alfalfa every 60 and two rows of corn every 60 inches so we're basically the same as a 30 inch row corn guy. Why do we want to do that? Well the root systems of corn and beans and whatever about this deep and they're only this deep for about a month. Most of you there are like this. We're not cycling the nutrients like those tall grass and mixed grass prairie did. We have one of these deep water things for a frost-free drinker that doesn't need electricity. It has to be buried seven feet. And I buried one in a switchgrass pasture a couple of years ago switchgrass area and at seven feet I still had roots going down. Corn and beans not even close. So I don't think we're going to get by without using some perennials. But maybe we're going to do it like Colin Seist does where he grows switchgrass in the summertime and he grows these other crops in the wintertime, grazes the switchgrass in the summer. I don't know. I don't know how you're going to do it but we have to do that. We don't have a choice. We've done some things with coated seed and flying things on and all kinds of different stuff with cover crops. And the idea is to try to match that water and nutrient cycle. Jeremy Wilson, a friend of mine from North Dakota that's a no-tiller came up with this explanation of cover crops, his catch and release nutrients. And I just went up after he did his talk and said, Jeremy, I'm going to steal that and take the South Dakota rights to that because that's what you're doing. You're putting them in a form they're not going to get in the water. They're not going to get in the drain tile. Our fertilizer program is fairly simple. Some starter pee with the seed, other nutrients are placed near the row at seeding time. The most important thing to do with corn is put some nitrogen near the seed at seeding time. And we can put it on the surface in strips after crop canopy and we do that at times with wheat. Broadcasting fertilizer before or at seeding encourages weeds.  Keith was talking to you about this big, huge root system. And so was Dr. Williams. This is mycorrhizae, root systems, huge root system. If I have a huge root system, I can have less available pee. And soil pee tests, Olsen, Bray, Malik, any of those you use are really a measure of solubility, not how much. And Keith mentioned that too. And so we can run very low levels of available pee and still get enough into our plant if we have the mycorrhizae.  It's very simple. If you do tillage, you don't have them. Weeds and diseases are Mother Nature's way of adding diversity to a system that lacks diversity. Another way of saying that is Mother Nature is an opportunist. If you have a problem, you have provided the opportunity somewhere in your system. So when you have a problem, don't try to figure out how to kill it or get rid of it, figure out where you let it into the system. What we do now with weeds, for instance, in the corn soybean area, get a new weed and we just look for a different herbicide or a different technique to whack it.  And I call that whack-a-mole farming. When my kids were little, they used to have this game where you had to whack these moles. And they keep thinking, if I just whack one more mole, it would be gone. Until you put diversity in the system, you're not going to have that. Does the action address the weakest point in the life cycle of the weed or the insect or whatever? Weed spray or weeds after they're up. That's not the most vulnerable time. It's already established. Getting a plant to start growing, I mean, once it's up and growing, your crop is up and growing, you feel really good about it. The weeds feel pretty good about themselves. They're the hardest to kill at that point in time. The best thing to do is not allow them to have seeds, not allow them to be in the field, not allow them to get a good start. This photo was taken in the early 1990s. It's a pursuit-resistant kosher growing in some chickpeas. And it resulted because, as I animated, come up with what they called at that time, Emmy corn or pursuit-tolerant corn. And I had a young grower say, I'm going to do corn and soybeans now. I don't have to worry about weeds. I can use pursuit in my corn and pursuit in my beans, and I'll never have a weed again. And I said, well, you'll have weeds and you'll have resistant weeds, and they'll be resistant to other ALS herbicides and whatever. And I got a letter from Cyanid wishing to have a retraction. And John wasn't here yet. He wasn't in on this. The dean and the director both got letters, too, wanting a retraction. John was here. Ray Moore, at the time, gave me a call. He said, I think I know the answer, but is there any chance you'll retract? And I said, I'll handle it. And I called the Cyanid guy and said, if I don't have resistant kosher at Dakota Lakes in three years, I'll retract. And then all I did is had Leon Reggie put a plot out. And I went and got my neighbor's lean, resistant kosher and grabbed one of them and shook it over top to plot. Pretty easy. And I called the Cyanid guy. He said, I'm busy. I've got all kinds of complaints to go take care of. Nature's efforts to add diversity can be countered by adding diversity of your own. And that's really the best way to handle the problem. We've had no need to apply broadcast insecticide at Dakota Lakes in 16 years. I never thought that that would happen, but we have lots of predators. Number one thing that kills aphids is fungus. Number two thing that kill aphids is ladybugs. Then you've got the minute pirate bugs and all these other guys love minute pirate bugs. Don't really like the bug that much, but I love the name. Little pirate bug. You imagine the little one patch over his eye or something, I don't know. But now imagine you know that and somebody says we're going to put some herbicide on your beans or weed and let's just throw a little fungicide and insecticide in with herbicide because it surely can't cost very much.  Ralph Holesworth, like one of the guys I mentioned before, he always, when guys would say to him, you say I want to be a no-tiller, he said the first thing you need to do is to go down to Dakota Lakes to learn to think of things differently. No-till is not about lack of tillage but about managing the soil, the water, soil structure, soil mileage, carbon compounds in the soil, the thing that everybody's been talking about today.  Strives to produce a crop which is healthy, not a crop that does not get sick and I don't see anybody here that's sick. But if we hopped on bicycles and went for a 40-mile ride, there's difference in health amongst us and the ones, the crops that are going to do the best when things get tough, get too dry, too hot, too cold are the ones that are healthy. It means that you have to look at all these things around this wheel and you can't just look at any one thing because if all you do is take tillage out and don't change anything else and that's what's happened in the corn belt. Still want to do corn beans which is not a rotation, it's a two-crop monoculture and it's a two-crop monoculture that doesn't have enough carbon. Think of the native prairie with 80 or 90, I mean 90 or 98% grasses with big roots and lots of carbon and you put that winky little soybean in there. So I think about that whole circle in terms of cultural practices, technology and management. You can't replace, you can't replace what you did with tillage, that cultural practices with technology because if you try to do that there's not enough technology available, resistant weeds. Even if it was available, you probably can't afford it. Look at the price you're paying for GMO seed and the chemicals that go on it. You probably can't afford it and if you could afford it and if we're available you gotta sell it to the consumer and frankly they don't want it. Whether that's right or wrong, they don't want it. They don't want it. Okay, let's do something else that figure out a way not to use it or at least to be able to defend why we're doing it and to understand it ourselves. So let's look at tillage, rotation, sanitation, competition. That's the cultural practices. If you take tillage out because in nature, tillage is a catastrophic event. Remember we set out to mimic what Mother Nature was doing. Mother Nature doesn't do tillage unless it's a volcano or a landslide or a flood or something silly like that. It's a tsunami, okay? Tillage is the agriculture what fracking is to petroleum. Both increase the speed of the removal of compounds from the ecosystem and leave the ecosystem or the system exhausted. That's what you want to do when you mine. That's what my ancestors did. They were miners. Okay? We can't do that anymore. If you could know only one thing about a soil what parameter would you want to know? I talked about that earlier today, organic matter and Keith gave these numbers when they were on textural classes one to three percent you double the water holding capacity. It's all about holding more water. If your soil only holds four or five inches of water you're not very resilient if it holds 10 or 12 or 14 and that's what we've done. Short-term studies are not accurate in evaluating things like crop rotations untilage systems and that kind of stuff. We've never run a rotation study that went less than 10 years but you can't get grants to do that and we have a real structural problem in our experiment stations right now because the funding is all short-term whereas in old days we used to have formula funds. That's on the federal government side. So Dakota Lakes allows us to do that. Crop rotation allows time for natural enemies to destroy pathogens of one crop while another crop is growing. Proper intensity. Use the water you save by no-tilling. You're going to save water but you've got to use it. If you don't use it, it's going to cause you problems. Adequate diversity. You don't need to have like Dan Forge, 14 different crops or something. We do because it says research on the gate. My guys say, why are we doing all these things? It says research on the sign out there. So we have to do these.  Native vegetation is the best indicator of the range of intensities which are appropriate for location. Whenever I travel, the first thing I do is look at the native vegetation. That tells you what you can do and then from then on it's easy because the native vegetation has already integrated the climate and the soils and those kind of things. It's already integrated all those together and it tells you this is what you can do here. Most of the plant growth problems blamed on no-till or the result of inadequate diversity or improper intensity. We just haven't gotten that mix right. We're trying to do what we want to do and not what Mother Nature wants us to do. You've got to put that water you saved by no-till to work. You've got to buy water, use crops and then if that doesn't do it you use cover crops and double crops and those kind of things. At least three crop types, long intervals of two to four years are needed to break some of the cycles and we've got lots of stuff you've received a copy or should have of managing agriculture ecosystem should be in your thing and it explains a lot of that stuff. But you should have a situation like this where if you did what I did there where I had my auto-steer auto-steer better than that and you leave a gap but there's no weeds there and that wasn't apparent to me either till people would come and visit and they'd walk out and they'd find a gap in the field and there wouldn't be any weeds and they're going why isn't there weeds in your gap in your skip and we control the weed seeds. Organic matter makes a difference. Here's a wheat field in 2006 the year before that wheat was peas the year before the peas was corn in that field doesn't look very good, it's a dry year but if I turn around and look to the other side of the road there's a wheat field that the year before it was peas and the year before that was corn as well. They were both the same for two years before we planted the wheat. What's the difference? Well for ten years we had done two different rotations one was corn pea winter wheat that's the one that looks good nice and red in an infrared photo and the other one was soybean corn pea winter wheat. Every other year broadly if there's not enough carbon in that system you can't add organic matter without adding the carbon corn soybeans and peas don't have very much carbon you just don't have the right carbon and nitrogen ratios okay so I call that my Canadian where they do wheat, canola, wheat, pea or my corn, soybean, corn, soybean rotation those are the same kinds of rotations so does that happen every year well in 2006, 60 bushel versus 29 7.9 inches of rain between the time we harvested the peas and we harvested the wheat in 2005 when we had 23 inches in that year 92 versus 57 and if we look at 2000 to 256 versus 28 but we didn't see that for the first ten years you could see the soils weren't as good but you didn't see the yield differences we still see that difference, here's some stuff from 2016 the good rotations are like 95 and those kind of numbers and the other ones are dropping down into 60 and such okay how about under high rainfall conditions, we have irrigation the same thing happens with irrigation corn, soybean, we average about 63 bushel an acre up until this is until 2013 if we did a corn corn soybean wheat soybean more diverse rotation the first year soybeans 76 bushel the second rotation in the system after the wheat cover crops swing 82, 81.2 so if I look at those two we got 62.9 and an average of 78 on the other one if I had a real farm of 5000 acres let's think about that and I got corn in there if I do continuous corn I get about 200, if I do corn soybean I got 217 and if I do that corn-corn the first one is like 240 or 50 or a little better 237, something average between those two corn so the corn is doing better as well with more diversity and if I had 5000 acres I got over a million bushels of corn but I have a big dryer and lots of semis if I do 2500 acres of each then I got less you know just under half a million bushels of corn and I get 157,000 some odd bushels of beans if I do corn corn soybean wheat soybean I get more bushels of soybeans on 2000 acres then I did 2500 acres of corn soybean I get less corn but I get 120,000 bushels of wheat so do you think it makes sense to trade 72,500 bushels of corn for 120,000 bushels of wheat and 350 bushels of soybean but all the time in the corn belt I have guys go I can't do any but corn beans I can't afford to grow that wheat you can't afford not to grow the wheat because you have time to do cover crops and time to get rid of the weeds and weeds and get rid of ses nematodes and all those things that whack-a-mole stuff you've been doing you don't have to do that anymore as citizens of the US and the world you need to decide what you would like agriculture to look like in the future the Coal Lakes Research Farm looks too in 600 years in advance we try to have that exercise once a year where we sit down and think about if we keep doing what we're doing what the heck is it going to look like do we want our communities to totally go away nobody looks at that stuff anymore the university should be looking that far in advance in some of the research governments aren't going to corporations aren't going to because they have short term goals Native American culture based decisions on their potential impact for the next 7 generations that's 280 years at 40 years per generation then pulled this one out I still use it never in history has all of mankind not only faced this type of impending catastrophe with a change in soil and the pressure on food and the change in the climate research needs to be transformational not transitional or incremental 80% of the total impact costs in agriculture right now non land cost variable cost can be traced directly to energy average price of weed in 1970 was $1.37 a bushel average price of a barrel of oil was $3.39 what's that today we're taking something that's going up in price to produce something that's going down in relative price doesn't make any sense okay we're getting better at it right takes the energy one gallon of diesel fuel to manufacture transport and apply five pounds of N and Keith referred to this issue 150 pounds of N is equivalent to 30 gallons of diesel fuel there's probably very few people in eastern South Dakota and Minnesota that use less 150 pounds of N per acre just think of going out there and throwing 30 gallons of diesel fuel in every acre fossil fuel input in agriculture 120 years ago was essentially zero in 120 years and probably less it'll have to be zero again have we started to think about that somebody really means to think about it we don't change our eating habits until we've had our first art attack right maybe we should start before then the Coal Lakes Research Farm would be fossil fuel neutral by 2026 we cold press our oil seeds flax canola soybeans but especially flax and we use the meal for our cows and the flax oil we can sell and sunflowers another one we should be addressing the problem instead of treating the symptom I hate to be hard on NRCS but they spend a lot of years building terraces which are treating a symptom and waterways people always ask me if I know Gabe Brown and I always tell them well I know both Gabe Brown and Jay Fuhrer and Gabe Brown was a conventional tiller when I met him and Jay Fuhrer brought him down Jay had just won this award for building most terraces and waterways in North Dakota and I ruined her whole day but they've now become famous so that's what terraces do they don't treat the problem I've learned more from observing nature than trying to change it Mother Nature has been managing ecosystem better and for longer than anyone else she harvests a maximum amount of sunlight she leaks very few nutrients including carbon which is a nutrient from the system she recycles things she makes maximum use of water and nutrients by having webs of mycorrhizal fungi and other tricks she uses animals big ones and little ones as part of the system in dry or brittle environment this is Alan Savry's statement soil biology slows during times of low soil moisture and that's why he thinks you need to have the animals I think it has to do with the rumen of the grazing animal remains moist during those periods of dryness continuing biological processes and in cold climates I think we have one of those here soil biology slows during periods of low soil temperature the rumen of the animal remains warm continuing soil biology so we think the animals are part of the reason they're important is they bridge us through the cold and whatever so we're using our cover crops especially on our more humid areas our irrigated areas we grow cover crops so oats and barley and peas and whatever that's what you see here we swath them and then we will leave that swath in place into the winter that crop was growing after we harvested a wheat crop so that rotation I showed you where we had wheat in there we also had that cover crop so we get this nice 4-H crop stays nice and green cows are fine today under the snow that's not a problem stays nice and green under there and they can find it if it's in a swath if it's just in and there it gets snowed under there's some really good work in Alberta I think the Dean might know something about some of this stuff he's from Nebraska he probably reads their neb guides and things and then we use our we move fence every day to make that easier whenever we can we put it on the irrigators and move the irrigators it's easier to move the irrigators and pull posts out and move them Gabe Brown told me one time he said I don't want to move in fence he said I like moving fence he's welcome to come do that for me today he wants to but I think Gabe goes to meetings and his kid moves the fence anyway we move it like that the nice thing if we're moving them every day and really keep them track of them they spread the residue back out we've thought through that quite a bit where do you get wind protection well we don't need our big tour trailers for people in the winter there's not a big bunch of people who want to tour today so we built these little wings on them and that's our calf shelter because we're fall calving and so we got babies out there not real babies they were born in August and September but look at the quality of that stuff 18.2% we'll get three and a half to four tons of dry matter RFV of 121 and then we they have access to that and then also access to corn stocks so that's how we balance their diet how are we going to feed 12 billion people 9 billion all these numbers I hear well we're not going to send food to them because they can't afford it well I went to Ghana a few years ago after we went to France I went to Ghana and warmed up quite a shock to go from France in the winter time to Ghana it's just but it was great but they make three bucks a day they can't afford our food and they can do a good job of feeding growing their own if we help them do that get the heck out of the road how are we going to take this marginal land and turn it into human edible food high level protein we got to use rumen and animals we're not going to do it all organic vegetables we're going to have to use animals on these fragile soils 40 million more cows more goats and more sheep the number one meat eaten in the world is the world's supply of minable fossils will be exhausted in less than 120 years use of perennial sequences or perennial cover crops will probably be necessary what mother nature does not do she does not do tillage unless it's a catastrophic catastrophic event and she does not export nutrients now we used to export a few nutrients down the rivers and the salmon brought them back they were sturgent and the bear ate the salmon and the nutrients were cycled and we put in dams so the salmon can't get there anymore oh we're so smart commonality amongst tillage tools all tillage tools destroy soil structure I wrote this because somebody had given a 45 minute talk on different kinds of tillage tools and I was going to be the next speaker so I made this slide up and I was looking at it and somebody snuck up behind me and said what are you doing with that and I said I'm trying to figure out if I'm enough of a butt head to actually show this and that person closed their computer and walked out of the building so it made it easy all tillage tools destroy soil structure all tillage tools decrease water infiltration all tillage tools decrease organic matter and all tillage tools increase weeds we got data for every one of those bureaucracies, governments and corporations are operated by people with limited tenure or short term goals that includes the university John is not going to make his living being here he's going to go somewhere else or he's going to move up or whatever that's where our system works there are very few of us college professors that last a whole career in one spot and you have to be mentally challenged to do that society farmers and farmers deserve to have long term research so we're going to have to we as farmers have to run it the climate will change in the next 600 years but by studying Lewis and Clark yeah the climate's changed but we've had much more impact on the ecosystem with man's activity on the land than the impact by what's happened to the climate degradation of the ecosystem will have more potential impact farmers and ranchers harvest sunlight carbon dioxide and water produced products we can sell some of this as human food we need to be aware of nutrition issues and offsite impact I got a call from Cargill the director of sustainability and whatever the other day they want to source food that they can sell to the consumer as being regenerative sustainable healthy whoopee whatever and the new one Patagonia how many people know what Patagonia is the company yeah the girls all know they want organic regenerative in France I kept getting the question can you do organic no till and it's hard to answer that question through an interpreter so after the first day because I thought about this after the first day I said yeah I think we can but it's going to take seven species of animal and they were fine with that they went okay and let me go ahead so I get back to the United States and Gabe Brown comes to this meeting I'm at he and I are both speaking yes I said yeah I said that he said what animals I said it depends on what your problem is and he said I got Canada thistle I said well it takes goats or horses he closed his notebooks I don't want any goats or horses on my farm but the funniest part of that is Ruth she would come to some of the meetings and some of them not when she's in France she had better things she could do it than listen to the same talk in French and we got back and I was telling somebody about this and I said just came up with this number seven they were good with that and she said don't you know what it is I said I have no idea we got to do the research but I think it's seven might be it you know it's I don't know peak oil is when half the oil is gone we're past that peak phosphorus we're past that peak soil we're probably past that over half of it's gone what the heck are we waiting for Keith last night we were at the meeting and showed Iowa we started this organic matter soil was this deep and then 20 years later it's this deep and then 20 years later it's this deep and they still got this much left after a hundred some years why is that even acceptable we should throw them in jail or something we can't be doing that anymore take the E out of ET take the T out of Kant doing the right thing environmentally is almost always the correct economic approach in the long run thank you


Hi, I am Ashwin Jha, I will be presenting the paper towards tight security bounds for OMAC, XCBC, and TMAC at AsiaGrid 2022. This is a joint work with Shomo Jotapathya and Mirzul Nandi. In my presentation, I will be focusing on four main points. First, I will describe OMAC, XCBC, and TMAC, which are popular CBCMAC variants. Note that CMAC and ISO standard and NIST recommended algorithm is just a simple variant of OMAC. So, our results implicitly apply to CMAC as well. Second, I will discuss the existing security bound, which says that the security holds up to the square root of 2 to the N over L queries, where N is the block size of the block cipher and L is the maximum message length. Third, I will talk about the tightness of the existing bounds. Interestingly, there is no matching attack for the existing bound, and the general belief is that the bounds can be improved up to the minimum of square root of 2 to the N and 2 to the N over L. So, the existing bounds have a quadratic degradation as compared to the four-core bound, and it was not clear up to now how it can be improved. Finally, I will present our improved bound, which effectively says that the security holds up to the minimum of square root of 2 to the N and 2 to the N over L squared queries. While we do not achieve the four-core bound due to the additional L factor, our result is still an improvement over the existing bounds. To get an idea of the quantitative improvement, take N equals 128 and consider this graph of the number of queries versus the maximum message length. Here black curve denotes the existing bound and red curve denotes the four-core bound. Obviously, there is a clear daylight between the two bounds. Now if we put the new bounds, that is the curve in green, you can see that our bounds are very close to the four-core bounds up to the message length of 2 to the 30 blocks or roughly 64 gigabyte, and are still better than the existing ones up to roughly 64 terabyte long messages. For further details, I will invite you to my IshaGrip talk. Thank you.


Welcome to the 18th meeting of the Criminal Justice Committee in 2023. On that, we have apologies this morning from Pauline McNeill and Katie Clark joining us online. Our main item of business today is consideration of an affirmative instrument, the police negotiating the Police Negotiating Board for Scotland Constitution, Arbitration and Qualifying Cases Regulations of 2023. I'm pleased to welcome the Cabinet Secretary for Justice and Home Affairs Angela Constance and her officials to the meeting. We're joined this morning by Peter Jemison, Police Division, Graham Thomson Police Division and Louise Miller, legal directorate of the Scottish Government, and I refer members to paper 1. I'd also like to refer members to annex B in our briefing paper and thank the Scottish Police Federation for their comments. I'd like to now invite the cabinet secretary to speak to the instrument. Thank you, convener, and good morning to everyone. The Criminal Justice Scotland Act 2016 provided for the establishment of the Police Negotiating Board for Scotland, and those regulations will give effect to the constitution of the new body. The constitution is published and linked in the regulations and sets out how the new body will carry out its functions, namely to negotiate pay terms and conditions of police officers in Scotland. Our aim is to create a modern negotiating body in which consensus on the matters under its remit is the norm. However, the constitution also sets out how conciliation and arbitration should be used when all other options are exhausted. The new Police Negotiating Board for Scotland will replace the Police Negotiating Board for the UK that now only extends to Scotland. That follows on from the abolition of the Police Negotiating Board in relation to England, Wales and Northern Ireland, where officers now have their pay considered through the police remuneration and review body. The new body will become operative on 17 August 2023. To helpen from the development of the regulations, the current members of PNB, including Police Scotland, the Scottish Police Authority and staff associations, have been consulted on the detailed arrangements that are set out in the regulations. ACAS Scotland has been consulted on the arrangements for conciliation and arbitration. The views of the stakeholders have been taken into account. I can report that the PNB members agree that collective bargaining should be maintained and that they support the introduction of the Police Negotiating Board for Scotland. The regulations will give effect to the constitution of the Police Negotiating Board of Scotland, which has now been published. The regulations will supply what would otherwise be mandatory statutory arbitration rules and the regulations define qualifying cases, which are cases in respect of which ministers must take all reasonable steps appearing to them necessary for giving effect to the representations made to them following arbitration. The regulations will supply the mandatory rules that were made under the Arbitration Scotland Act 2010 and in the constitution. PNBS members have set out that the default arbitration rules under the 2010 act will not apply to the arbitration and the PNBS. Disapplying the rules will allow there to be continuity on arbitration procedures between the PNB UK and PNBS. ACAS Scotland will carry out conciliation and arbitration in line with the guidance that is set out under the constitution. Arbitration findings are binding on the PNBS and would forum the representations made to Scottish Ministers. In 2016, Parliament agreed that ministers should take all reasonable steps to implement the findings of arbitration, but there was also agreement that this should be limited to two cases each year. The regulations and the constitution set out the criteria for the two qualifying cases where ministers will take all reasonable steps to implement the findings of arbitration. There may have been other disputes that go to arbitration in any given year and ministers would consider the representations made by PNBS, but they would not be legally bound to take all reasonable steps to implement the findings. It should be noted that, since 2014, when the PNB UK was abolished in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, there has not been a need for arbitration in Scotland. Pay terms and condition claims in Scotland have been successfully agreed by the PNB. However, it is right that police officers have the protection of arbitration, set in legislation to provide the police staff associations with an agreed route to resolve disputes. Police officers are not employees, are not governed by normal industrial relations, and they cannot withdraw their labour. They therefore need their terms and conditions set out in police regulations and to have a fair mechanism to negotiate and resolve disputes. We are also currently recruiting the first chairperson of the new body, and I would like to take this opportunity to thank Ian Mackay, the current chair of the PNB UK, for his eight years' service in chairing the PNB. In these years, the PNB has agreed a range of changes to officers' terms and conditions and reached agreement each year on an annual pay award. I believe that the PNB continues our commitment to collective bargaining and gives an effective voice for police officers. PNBs will provide them with a mechanism to discuss and negotiate their terms and conditions with the organisations that fund the service in Scotland. I am happy to take any questions. We will move to questions now. I refer to a paper that the Scottish Police Federation has submitted to the committee ahead of today's meeting, in which it outlines its position and views on the proposals in the SSI. It makes reference to the proposed constitution of the police negotiating board for Scotland. It has made a number of comments around the proposal. I am not sure whether you have had the opportunity to see those comments, but I wonder whether you have had any comment to make on the points set out by the Scottish Police Federation in and around the comments that they have made. I am happy to answer any specific questions that you have in any matters that have been raised directly by the committee. On that note, I mean that they have made a number of comments. Whether or not there is scope to incorporate them at the moment, my understanding is that there is not in the SSI, but if it is the case that you are not aware of them at the moment, then perhaps we will come back to that, given that we are looking at the SSI in the format that it is at the moment. As I said, I am happy to answer any questions that the committee has. If there are matters that the Scottish Police Federation has raised, that is not a problem. That was my question. It was just if you had had sight of the submission from the Scottish Police Federation and had an opportunity to consider some of the points that they have made about the constitution. It is important to recognise that, from the Government's perspective, we want to be actors in good faith. While I referred to, in my speaking note, that there has not been a need for arbitration procedures, for example, to be utilised in the past, I consider protecting on-going arbitration arrangements, not as a sign of weakness but as a sign of strength that is absolutely imperative that, bearing in mind that police officers cannot withdraw their labour, they have access to other mechanisms. The Parliament agreed, as I referred to in my speaking note, in the 2016 act that the Government would have to take all reasonable steps to implement any arbitration agreement, if I could put that perhaps into more human speak. We absolutely would seek to, in the spirit of fairness, fulfil any obligations placed upon the Government in terms of arbitration. The wording in the legislation does say all reasonable steps. It is not uncommon for that wording to appear in the legislation. Other than extreme circumstances, the Government accepts that there should be arbitration arrangements in place that we would act in good faith and we seek to implement any arbitration decisions other than in some very exceptional circumstances. I do not think that our position has changed over successive terms of office. Thank you very much. That is helpful. I would point out that, in the submission of the Scottish Police Federation, it says that the proposals are relatively strong in our favour and, in the spirit of fairness, acceptable to the SPF. I will now open it up to other members for any other questions. Good morning, cabinet secretary, and other guests. Following on from the convener's opening line of questions, the submission from the SPF was dated 24 May 2023. It is addressed to the committee, but I wonder if, just to clarify where the cabinet secretary had sight of it and had, if the Government were intending to respond formally to the content that it is in, because it did make a number of very specific suggestions about changes to the constitution that it would like to see. I am happy to go through them in public if it is helpful, but it would be quicker and easier if the Government just responded on block to their suggestions. I wonder if the cabinet secretary was posing to do that. In terms of picking up the core issue here, it is around arbitration and the binding effect of it. The 2016 act is where we have legislated for almost binding arbitration, and that is the closest that we could get to binding Parliament and ministers. That is a real high threshold in terms of binding the Government, and I would hope that that would be of considerable reassurance to the committee and staff associations who have been consulted on the regulations and the constitution. It is important to stress that there are three levels in terms of how the PNB will operate on a practical level. The regulations, the constitution has been published and is therefore shared publicly, and the constitution is rooted in the regulations, but there is another layer below that in terms of the day-to-day operating guide. That will be developed—in fact, it is currently being developed—but that will be for all parties within the police negotiating board to come to an agreement about their own processes. It is that second one that I wanted to comment on. I presume that it is a draft of the constitution that has been published. On a number of points 3, 9, 37, 42, 43, 44 and 45 have made specific comments as to its content. I guess that the original question is, will there be scope for that constitution to be amended prior to being finalised? The issue about the constitution is referenced in regulations. We are agreeing the regulations today in which the constitution is rooted. It has been a matter for Parliament in terms of the legislation and regulation. It is now for the PNB to agree its own day-to-day operations. I will check with officials that I have articulated that correctly. I have not explained myself properly in my apologies. It is just to ensure that the very specific comments that they have made will be taken into account by the PNB as they finalise the wording of the constitution. No. The constitution is what has been published and what I have tried to distinguish between that. We have the regulations, the constitution and then there is the guide of the day-to-day operability of the working practices of the PNB. If I asked officials to give some practical examples of what will be in the guide, that might help. In doing so, perhaps they could make reference to the issues that the SPF raised, because they clearly have pre-empted some scenarios that might be problematic and therefore feel that they would need to be addressed in order to avoid any future deadlock. We will pick up specifically the point about deadlock. I have spoken effectively to the principle point and the importance of arbitration and acting in good faith. We would be accepting any arbitration decision other than very exceptional circumstances and you would expect any Government over any term to articulate that. I have also addressed the issue that regulations are for Parliament and the constitution is rooted in the regulations. The constitution has been consulted on and we have worked and negotiated on and we have come to a consensus and agreement on that. I will ask officials to address the issue of the guide and how that will be developed and the type of issues that will be addressed. Your other point, Mr Greene, was that you were worried about the arbitration process being stifled about blockers being put on that? Yes, so very specifically on that and it is worth putting on the record because this letter is a matripoly record. The feedback certainly on sections 37 and 42 of the constitution that I refer to by the SPF state that there seems to be an end quoting here, there seems to be scope for either of the sides to prevent such a matter going to arbitration or for the chairperson to decide not to refer matter to arbitration. This could lead to deadlock. It is hard to envisage the board failing to make a recommendation based on an arbitration award. It seems to open the door for either side to delay or block a PNB agreement based on an arbitration award and this would be highly unsatisfactory. The whole purpose of arbitration is to avoid deadlock and the whole purpose of having an independent chair is that if there is an inability to agree they bring sides together and normally it would be for both sides to agree that the matter needs to go to arbitration, but if the independent chair thought that one side or the other was blocking procedures, they therefore, in terms of the powers of the chair, have the ability to kick off the arbitration process. I will hand over to officials to give Mr Dymour more detail. Peter. The independent chair is there to ensure that the process can be taken forward independently and it would be for the chair to decide that all discussions have failed and the failure to agree would be taken to arbitration. We do not see that there would be a total block when there was a total failure in the process. The other issues that I have seen from the federation are real practical issues of how the body would manage certain issues about non-members being at committee, working groups and meetings. That happens at the moment. It will be set out in the PNB guide that the chair can invite or the chairperson of a working group to invite non-members to meetings. The other issue that was highlighted was about disagreements on how previous agreements were being implemented. That is quite a technical process, so we did not think that that was for the constitution. The constitution has been consulted on everybody and it was agreed that that would go into the guide. If there is a more technical discussion about how we implement an agreement, there will be a process put in place where the sides will get together and discuss it, and there will be a proper process for that in the guide. You are right. I refer to a request to the size of me, nominate persons who are not necessarily representatives to serve on such committees and working groups, but with permission of the chairs, I presume, that permission will be carried forward in the new set-up. The reason why it is important for us is that we have seen in the past year or so where there has been a disagreement on pay settlements. Of course, the cabinet secretary is right to raise the fact that they cannot perform the same type of strike action, for example as other public services have or are threatened to. However, they have taken industrial action of a different type and that has had an effect on clearly their ability to carry out certain functions and resorting back to principle statutory duties and remove goodwill, if you like. We have seen that happen already. I wonder if the new scenario is more or less likely to produce agreement on pay knowing that there is a history of a disagreement on pay and whether there will be any alterations to what action police can and cannot take in the event of a dispute or indeed a deadlock. There are no changes in terms of what police officers can and cannot do in terms of whether that is withdrawal of goodwill. We all know that they cannot withdraw their labour because they are office holders not employees. The agreement that we have reached in terms of those regulations is very much about continuity of a previous arrangement. Obviously, there is public scrutiny of those regulations and the constitution. It certainly gives ministers an opportunity to say that we will participate in any process as fair actors. We are committed as a Government to collective pay bargaining and the principles of fair work. In many ways, that is a legacy agreement. We agreed that the nuts and bolts of this in 2016, but now that there will be a new chair, we need to move to a Scotland-only arrangement. Otherwise, I will have to ask the Prime Minister to appoint the new chair. We have used a system, a UK-wide system, that has only been operable for Scotland for some years. Some of this is just about the practicalities. I understand that. I think that the problem with the continuity is what people would be concerned about is the continuity of the status quo, where we end up in a scenario where we have annual pay bargains that end up in industrial dispute and the removal of services and goodwill by officers. The purpose of a PMB is for that negotiation to take place. I am not speaking about specific pay claims here or specifics, because where there are processes, they have to be respected and there has to be an integrity to the process.  Some parts of the public sector have negotiated multi-year or two-year pay deals, so that is just about ensuring that we continue to have solid arrangements in place that are fair and in particular fair to police officers who cannot withdraw their labour. Indeed, thank you. I thank that clarity. My final question is what role would the Scottish ministers play in any of those proceedings? On how the PMB currently works, you have all the sides. There are the staff associations, and you have the SPA Police Scotland, and the Government is there with officials. Then the PMB makes recommendations to ministers. That is the size of it, is it not? I have not missed anything out. Is the PMB making recommendations to ministers to approve, agree or disagree, or is it the final decision that the PMB's recommendations have presented? We would seek to fulfil what the PMB agreed. Because you supply the resource budget, you have to sign off the check. We are part of the negotiating process, although I am not personally sitting in the PMB for all sorts of reasons that you would understand. Does the Government have any override function at all in terms of decisions that are made? If all sides cannot agree, it goes to arbitration, which we have always avoided in the past. That does not mean that we will not go to arbitration in the future. I do not view arbitration as a negative. I would view it as a strength and a weakness that we have built into the system. The best way to describe it is a tripartite arrangement, so the agreement is between Police Scotland, SPA and SG. They are the three partners that we need to from the employer side, if you like. We would have to agree to find. In the policy note from the Scottish Government, the instrument allows for the preparation and publication of the Constitution of the Police Negotiating Board for Scotland, but, if I understand you correctly, that has now been published. The Constitution has been published rather than this allows for the preparation and publication. The Constitution is linked and has been published so that it forms part. It comes under the regulations, but it has already been published so that it is in place for the regulations. The purpose of the instrument allows for the preparation and publication, but it has already happened. It has been published. The Constitution was consulted through the members and published so that, as soon as the regulations come into place, the Constitution is ready. The Constitution was submitted to the Criminal Justice Committee. Are we at the site of that? It is a link of the regulations, so it is part of the regulations. It is part of the package, when they see me, but the regulations, the policy note, it is referenced. It was the date that I have got, and this is May 2023. I know that Jamie Greene has touched on this already, but the Scottish Police Federation submission to the committee has the Government seen that. Have you talked about the correspondence May 24? Yes. May 23? Yes. It effectively raised five points about the Constitution, one of which, in fact, could probably deal with the other four in that it talks about the first section 3 that the board would be allowed to consider matters affecting its constitution. Has that been listened to and rejected by the Government, or is this news to the Government? No, it is not news to the Government, but it is a matter for Parliament in terms of law and regulations. The lawyer will keep me right, but it would not be a matter for the PMB to be changing its constitution, so that is the purpose. The constitution has just been published after consultation. So it is published May 2023? Sure, but it could include if you were so minded the issues that the Federation has raised, the very specific issues. I think that we are, with respect, happy to repeat or go over in more detail any of the issues. I think that it is well within Parliament's rights here, bearing in mind the 2016 act, and that it is for Parliament to pass regulations. I do not think that it would be the norm for the PMB to be changing its constitution. It could, of course, come back to ministers who, at some point, in the fullness of time, if there was something inoperatable about the constitution that could be changed. I am very conscious that there is time and effort being invested around coming to an agreement around the constitution. MSPs would be well within their rights to be somewhat concerned that, if those matters were not dealt by Parliament via regulations, if matters of constitution for this very important body were dealt in a more ad-hoc way. We cannot amend what is in front of us today. The Scottish Police Federation has brought to us five quite specific concerns. I am still not entirely clear as to whether they have been considered by the Government because they do not feature in the constitution that has now been published or whether there is any scope for the Government to look at that again and amend the constitution. I think that we have the highest level of expectations on binding arbitration that is possible on the Scottish Government. That was one of the issues raised by the Federation. In my view, I have addressed the matter to committee around who, where and when is appropriate for regulations vis-à-vis constitutions. In terms of the issue about 37A and B in the correspondence, in terms of being able to bring in non-members of the board, by that I assume that people mean different experts to come and give advice or an input. Those things currently happen, and that would be a matter for the PNB in its normal day-to-day process, as opposed to setting that out in a matter of the constitution. It would be my view that we have addressed those points, and I am happy to continue to do so with committee. The nature of the regulations and how they cannot be amended is, of course, rooted in the 2016 act, but I will check in case officials want to add anything. Just to make it clear that, under the 2016 act, the constitution has to be given effect to by-parliament via regulations. What those regulations do is give effect to the constitution that was published recently after consultation with the various parties. The constitution is not set in stone forever, and it can be revised, but any revisions would have to take place via the same process, so that means that they would need to be referred to in regulations that would go through a parliamentary process. The same consultation process, as was followed for those regulations, would need to happen again for any revisions. That is the way the process works. Just for clarification, when you say parties, you are talking about the various entities who are interested in this, not political parties. The Scottish Police Federation, presumably at that stage, made those points, and whatever the decision-making process arrived at was the constitution as published. What they are now referring to is what is under the bridge, but there is no real. I do not know if they did make those points, and policy officials would be able to confirm that. Just to say that I met the Scottish Police Federation, I must have to check the date of my diary, but it is not that long ago. It could have been three weeks ago, and these issues were not raised with me. I have seen the letter that was sent to committee on 24 May. I did not see it on 24 May, but you would not expect me to be privative correspondence that is sent to committee. I am slightly uncomfortable with the fact that they have said that they have made a couple of comments in their submission about this being weaker than what they would have liked, although they are dredgingly accepting of it. They make some very specific points, and I am still not entirely clear whether there is any mechanism for the Government to look again at those points. Not today, perhaps in the fullness of time, if the PNB was finding that any of those matters were in some way affecting their substantive business, my view here and now, and I am just going to put it direct, is that we have addressed those matters. There is nothing raised in those matters that would prevent the passing of the regulations. I do think that some of the issues would certainly be matters for the guide that would be developed in consultation with all PNB members. I think that some of those issues are much more about the day-to-day working of the PNB, so you do not need to have in the constitution that non-members can come and make representations to a sub-committee or to the main PNB. If I can come in and clarify just the picking up point that you were asking about in relation to what are the options today, as it were. Obviously, we are aware that the Federation has made a number of recommendations to amend the SSI. The cabinet secretary has pointed out that it is not possible for our committee to do that in so far as SSIs come to committee in their form, as they are, and either we agree them or we don't. The only option available to members if members wish to see changes is to vote against the motion this morning or to see if there is scope for the SSI to be withdrawn and brought back in a revised version. I think from what you have been saying, cabinet secretary, that is not something that you would be mindful to do. I hope that that provides some clarity. I am going to bring in Rona Mackay, if I may, and then I will come back to Jamie Mackay. I think that, with respect to my colleagues, they are making this much more complicated than it needs to be. I think that the cabinet secretary and our officials have clearly stated that this is about bringing continuity and a fair process for police officers in Scotland. I think that we have gone down a rabbit hole a bit here with all these questions, so I am quite content for this to go ahead. The rabbit hole that we are going to is based on the evidence that we have in our committee papers from one of the leading protagonists of the negotiations. I think that it is absolutely right that we raise them, given that they are not here to give us evidence prior to this. I think that the problem that we have is more of a procedural one. From what I can understand, there is a potential to revise the constitution, but that would need to be done under regulation. What is the point of passing a regulation to understand the constitution as it is now, knowing that there are stakeholders who will see changes to then have to come back to Parliament with future regulations with those changes? Why do not we do it in one go? The better thing for the Government, in my view, would be to have that discussion with those who have presented his evidence. If there are any necessary changes to the constitution that have to be made, come back with regulation that we do as a one-hit wonder. I have no problem with the regulation, but I do have a problem with being asked to understand the constitution by which clearly some stakeholders have problems with. Any other members want to come in? I agree with Rona that we all want a system that helps police officers to get fair pay settlements that goes without saying. As for our rabbit hole, I think that it is perfectly proper that we ask these questions, because we have not even seen as a committee the constitution that is going to be adopted. The papers suggest that this is going to be published without now discovering that it has been published. I fully agree with Jamie that if we are going to or rather to rubber stamp this today, it would be a missed opportunity for the Government to go back to the Scottish Police Federation and just address these points. I think that it is probably what you are visiting. Just to try and pull this together, I appreciate the points that have been made by members and the cabinet secretary's responses to those. It is probably important to clarify that what the Federation seems to be seeking is that the wording of the constitution be amended. I think that what we have heard and make a specific reference to the update from Louise Miller was that down the line, the constitution can be amended. That would be a separate process from agreeing the SSI in its current form today. I have no objections to answering any questions brought forward by committee members. Let me respond to the convener in a way that is helpful and clear. I will do my best to be succinct. The process in which we are all now following was set in the 2016 legislation. There was with the papers in terms of the constitution, people may or may not choose to read links or to print links or whatever, but the information has been made available. There are many more ways in which I can commit to the way in which the Government values and sees the importance of arbitration and, as always, working in good faith and as a good actor. There are some matters in the correspondence from the Police Federation that could be addressed through the guide, as agreed by all the PNB members. I am conscious and, of course, with the great respect to the Police Federation, who my understanding was that they were certainly broadly content. There are other partners and other staff associations that were involved in the process. They have not made any representations to the best of my knowledge to committee members. We have a situation in which people are happy to move forward. As with any set of arrangements, people are, of course, within the right of the Police Federation or any other party to be boring down into the detail, but that will, in my view, be a matter for the guide in which all partners will work collaboratively to develop. It is, convener, time that we moved on to have a police negotiating board for Scotland, as opposed to using a legacy arrangement of a UK body. If I may, the police negotiating board scenario with the protection of arbitration bill is far preferable, in my view and in the Government's view, to a police pay review body that exists down south, which is not a negotiating body and which can make recommendations to the Home Secretary because it is accountable to the Home Secretary. Of course, there is a pattern there of recommendations not being accepted, and I think that I have put on record in the strongest possible term that we want to and will continue to enter all of this in good faith and accept the principles and purpose of arbitration. That has been helpful and provided some clarity for members. On that note, I will now move on to inviting the Cabinet Secretary to move SSI number S6M number 08783 that the Criminal Justice Committee recommends that the Police Negotiating Board for Scotland, constitution, arbitration and qualifying cases, regulations 2023, be approved. The question is that motion S6M 08783, in the name of Angela Constance, be agreed. Are we all agreed? Yes, we are all agreed. Okay, thank you very much indeed. I finally invite members to agree to delegate to me and the clerks, the publication of a short factual report on the SSI. Thank you very much indeed Cabinet Secretary and officials for joining us today. Thank you. I will have a short pause to let the cabinet secretary read. In fact, that concludes our business for the morning. There is no formal committee meeting next week as planned. I will close the meeting.


Who would like to share today? I'll share. I'm the Charmin bear. Practing Gamble uses me to sell toilet paper. But I'm a bear.  What's worse, they're chopping down all the trees. I've got no place to go. It's all stumps and no berries. I feel terrible. Thanks to brands like Charmin, caribou like me are going extinct. And for what? Toilet paper. Take a good look at me now, because in a few years I won't be here.  When will Charmin stop destroying our homes and driving us to extinction? At least the dinosaurs got taken out by an asteroid. We're going to get taken out by toilet paper.


CNN reporter Daniel Sullivan showed up to an America first rally with Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz And at this point I'm convinced that CNN is trying to give this guy brain damage From too much exposure to MAGA Cheds because he's constantly at these rallies Asking them questions and you could you could probably sense that by now his soul has been sucked out of him Nonetheless, he showed up and he spoke with two Donald Trump supporters who believe the big lie about the 2020 election And that Joe Biden stole that election but more outrageous than the fact that they believe the big lie Perhaps is the reason why they believe the big lie and it is a quite Interesting the things that you're gonna hear them say take a look you guys both genuinely believe the election was stolen Yeah, I Mean, that's you know if you believe that that's true That is that horrible. Yeah. Yeah, I know it is horrible Is it horrible that we would even be in the situation to even think that? But it's false. No, it is not. Why would they have all those ballots hidden under tables? Why did that man drive that truck all the way across state lines? It wasn't like the ballots the ballots under table thing with Giuliani and Georgia. That's all been proven to be false It has not I watched it on TV Of course what they mentioned there are conspiracy theories about the election that have been debunked for many many months But it goes to show that the message the big lie about the election has a very very Receptive audience here in the villages take a listen to what happened inside the event Did anybody in here vote for Joe Biden? Do you guys really think he won? And while some might look an event like this as a fringe element of the Republican Party It really isn't take a look at these poll numbers from last week It shows 70 percent of Republicans believe the big lie that Joe Biden didn't really win the election The Republican Party would continues to grapple with conspiracy theories So the proof That the election was stolen from Donald Trump quote. I watched it on TV I watched it on TV. So case closed checkmate liberals Can't argue with that logic Also, you know, uh, just speaking for myself here, but I've also seen People who can fly on television. I've seen dragons and magical wizards on television So I guess that that must confirm the existence of people who can fly dragons and magical wizards checkmate libtards I mean, I shouldn't have to explain this to someone who's probably twice my age But not everything that you see on television is real I mean Things might be presented as if they are real reality television show stars quote-unquote news But that doesn't mean that it's real And of course, you know in the event you have Marjorie Taylor-Green still continuing to spread lies about the election Presenting zero evidence that it's been stolen and any arguments and evidence that they've presented It's all been debunked Now it's funny, uh, Donnie O'Sullivan flabbergasted by their stupidity. Um, he says, you know, um so you still believe that the election was stolen and uh The guy chimed in and said, isn't that horrible? Isn't it horrible that people would even believe such a thing? Yeah, but that doesn't necessarily speak to the severity of the situation. Um The reason why you believe in evidence-free conspiracy theory Is because you're unable to push through the cognitive dissonance that you're feeling You thought Donald Trump would win You're angry and refuse to accept that he did not win therefore you're making up all of these conspiracies about how he actually did win and Joe Biden just stole the election from him And uh, the lady cited how Well, you know, why would they have all those ballots hidden under the tables? Why do that man drive that truck all the way across state lines? Listen, I'm no expert on things related to election integrity, but I have to say that if I Wanted to rig an election.   And all the things that she's referring has been debunked Again and again and again. So at this point If you still believe the big lie, I have to assume That you're just not a reasonable person But don't take it from me take it from one of the individuals who was an attorney for donald trump who pushed the big lie I'm of course referring to sydney powell whose attorneys argued on her behalf as she faces a defamation law student court That quote no reasonable person would conclude that the statements she made were truly statements of fact So even the person who spread those lies Doesn't think that you're reasonable people, but she still believes the lies.  It's hard to actually pinpoint out of the millions of trump supporters Which one is actually the worst and who believes the most deranged things But I mean like to say I know something is true because I saw it on tv She has to understand how silly that sounds right. I mean when she Felt those words leave her lips that she not think for a second.  I hope that she Has gone home.  So at this point I'm not shocked that there are this many folks who believe the big lie But I have to say it's still is soul-crushing to see people that deluded believe something so Stupid with no evidence. It's just honestly. It's demoralizing But it's important that we Call these lies out because when we're talking about democracy, we can't mince words We have to be very clear the election was not stolen But if you truly care about democracy, you can look to all of the states controlled by republicans I'm of course talking about ronda santis in florida Brian camp in georgia who are actually trying to steal elections and act voter suppression laws That make it more difficult to vote see to them They don't see that voter suppression as election rigging Things that they like That's not voter rigging things that they don't like That's fake news or voter rigging They operate purely on the basis of what their emotions dictate. They believe And that's a really dangerous way to Create a political ideology for yourself. It's weird. It's not based on facts It's based on Emotions and that's that's deeply dangerous for democracy if enough people believe it And that is the case.


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