Okay, hello, hello world. I hope you are as excited as I am about Dr. David Bell's world premier book launch of his third single authored book, Taiwan's Green Parties. Welcome everyone to this exciting book launch event at the center of Taiwan Studies in the School of Oriental and African Studies. So as my name is Jewel Lowe, I'm one of the first people to read and check the final manuscript of this book. And I observed much of the book's fieldwork over the last eight years. So when today's speaker, the book author, Dr. Bell, asked if I'd like to introduce him at his world first book launch of Taiwan's Green Parties, I happily and proudly accepted the invitation. Dr. David Bell is the director of the Center of Taiwan Studies at SOADS. He has published many articles about Taiwan. He has edited and co-edited books about Taiwan. He has read books about Taiwan. And today we are celebrating the launch of his third single authored book about Taiwan's Green Parties. I'm from Taiwan myself and I'm very pleased for Taiwan that there are many scholars working pretty hard for Taiwan outside of Taiwan. Dr. Bell is one of the hard-working scholars. His most remarkable achievements in Taiwan studies outside of Taiwan are, firstly, he helped establish European Association of Taiwan Studies, EADS. Yes, EADS started at and from SOADS. Secondly, he has developed comprehensive Taiwan Studies programs at SOADS. Thirdly, he has been editing this research on Taiwan book series. Next, then I move to the empirical chapter. The series has 37 books published. Last time I counted, including the forthcoming ones. With all these amazing accolades under his belt, one may wonder why he decided to write a book about Taiwan's Green Parties. We will soon find out in his talk later. Since I have the honor to have read the book, here are some of my humble thoughts about his latest page-turner. One of the good things living with an academic is you get to know people to attract, both domestic, when writing a PhD thesis, you have to have a set of crystal clear research questions and a rock solid framework for organizing your research materials and writing your thesis. The book has followed what Dr. Bell has always preached. On top of that, he has managed to give each well thought through chapter an interestingly attractive title. All the effort he put into writing the book has made repeating this academic book thoroughly enjoyable. The book has been written with great sincerity. He has told the stories. As he tells the stories in detail, you can get a clear picture of how the Green Parties have developed in Taiwan. And the development can provide valuable lessons for any alternative political parties. Now, enough from the book author's wife talking about the book. This here, Dr. Bell's speech on his latest masterpiece. Over to you, Dr. Bell. Fantastic. Thank you all for that kind introduction. Can you all see the PowerPoint now? Yes. Okay, fantastic. So welcome to this book launch of Taiwan's Green Parties, Alternative Politics in Taiwan. So it's a kind of a very special occasion for me. Essentially, it's my second PhD book. My first book came out of my PhD and for an academic, it's very hard to get out of the shadow of the first PhD book once we get into regular academic life with pressures of teaching and administration. As soon as I finished my first book, I started out on my second PhD style book, but it was a failed book project after five, six years. And so today's a special occasion to actually achieve that second style PhD book. It's not entirely out of the shadow of the first book. To a certain extent, I'm building on the first book. But I think in some ways, I think I've improved on what I managed in the first book. I think a further thing I would add about the book is that the book has a very strong so-ass flavour. If you've been involved in Centre of Taiwan Studies events over the last 10 years, you'll have met many of the characters that feature in the book. In the book, I interview about 50 Green Party figures. I think something like 17 or 18 of them have appeared at SOAS, either on Green Party and Tree Party delegations, but also as speakers. So we've been able to host speakers from a range of Taiwanese social movements, including the feminist, environmental, indigenous and LGBT rights movements. Many of those activist scholars have spoken about their activism at SOAS. Because this is a book launch, I'm not going to go into a huge amount of detail into the content of the book, but I'm going to try and give you a taste of what I've tried to do in this book. So what I'm going to do today is I'm going to first talk a little bit about how I ended up writing a book on Taiwan's alternative parties. I'll talk a little bit about the research questions that I used to structure my analysis. And I'll talk about some of the research material and field work that's made this project such an enjoyable one. I'll talk briefly about the chapter structure and just talk a little bit about a couple of the stories that feature in the various chapters. And then lastly, I'll talk a little bit about what I plan to do next with this project. Sometimes when we finish a book project, we want to move on to something new, but I'm not quite ready to move on to something new. So how did I end up writing a book on Taiwan's Green Parties? Well, my interest on Taiwan's small parties began on some of my earliest visits to Taiwan, both as a student and in my early years working in Taiwan. And in those years, at the early period of Taiwan's democratization, a number of movement parties first appeared on the scene. And a number of these were labor-linked political parties. So this kind of caught my initial interest. But it wasn't really until I started my PhD that I started to go into the subject of Taiwan's small parties in more depth. My first book, Party Politics in Taiwan, looked at the evolution of three political parties between 1991 and 2004. These included two mainstream parties, DVP and the KMT. But the third party case was the new party. And I kept being quite puzzled at why my explanatory frameworks that work for the big parties didn't work so well for the small party, the new party. Why would the party act in a way that seemed irrational and seemed like electoral suicide? So after I finished my first book, I made my first attempt to kind of make sense of the evolution of Taiwan's small parties in a journal article in 2005 that talked about the evolution of Taiwan's new or small parties. And when I started writing the current Green Party's book, I went back and looked at that first article and found that I devoted a couple of short paragraphs to the early history of the Taiwan Green Party. But I think at that point, I think it was still unimaginable that I would end up spending nine years working on a project on something that was really no more than a footnote in these early writings. The key kind of turning point came in 2012, and it was the result of a random email from one of my former students, Yuanyu, and she'd formerly been a SOAS student in anthropology. And I'd been quite amazed to see that this student within months of graduating from SOAS had gone on to stand for a national parliament in Taiwan for the Green Party. And in October 2012, she sent me an email asking if I would share news about a Australian Green Party research fund to see if any of any of our students would be interested in bidding for this fund. I thought the project looked really interesting. So I decided to design a project that looked at the Taiwan Green Party together with a Taiwanese academic and former Green Party leader, Pongyuan. And although we were not successful at getting the funding from the Australian Greens, we did decide to go ahead with our planned research project. And that was to hold a couple of focus groups to look at the initial development of the Taiwan Green Party. The focus groups included figures that had been involved since the party's foundation in the mid-1990s, and those that had been involved in the most recent election, at that point in time, in January of 2012. And if I still had some doubts, the focus groups really left me hooked on the subject. It was so different from dealing with mainstream parties. The passion, idealism, anger that I saw in these focus groups really left me fascinated and gave me a huge amount of data to start the project. Now, of course, we also need academic justifications for engaging in any research project. And one of the ways that I've tried to deal with this topic is to link the Taiwan case with broader comparative literature on small and movement political parties. And when I go through the research questions, I'll talk about how I try to make those connections. There's also quite a large literature on global green parties. And again, I'm trying to engage with some of those theories. Do the kind of theories that have mainly evolved from European small and green parties work for a Taiwanese case. Another of my academic justifications is that I wanted to try to bring a different perspective on the way we understand Taiwan's civil society and party system. And even though the book is focused on the green party as well as some of the it's kind of linked political groupings, I've always tried to engage with topics of civil society and the party system. A lot of the literature that I've read on green parties in Europe hasn't been particularly exciting. Often it's been a little bit dry and dull. And what I've tried to do is to bring in the flavours and the human stories of Taiwan's green parties. And I'm hoping that readers will enjoy these stories and be moved by the huge sacrifices that the participants in this struggle for environmental and social justice have paid. Okay, let me then come on to the big research questions which really drive this project. They're a little bit different from those that I used for my first book Party Politics in Taiwan. So Party Politics in Taiwan looked at a how question, in other words, how the main parties had changed. A why question which looked at why they changed. And a so what question which looked at the implications of those changes. In the case of this new book, I've been a little bit more ambitious. Not only in the time I cover, which is the first 24 years, but I try to cover more questions. And so the first question is a how question. So I'm interested in how the party has changed over its 24 year history. My who question really focuses on what kind of people have led the party and represented the party over the years, but also what kind of people have supported the party. Then I have my so what questions. And here I'm focusing on mainly focusing on two dimensions. I'm focusing on the electoral impact of the of the parties. But I also look at the international engagement. In other words, I'm looking at the way that the Green Party has engaged with other Green parties within this global greens and Asia Pacific greens network. And then I come to my why questions. And I have three core why questions. A small why question I have is to explain party formation. The next big why question tries to explain party change. So why do we see changes in organization? Why do we see changes in the issue focus of the party? And then the final why question, which I probably devote the most space to, is trying to explain the electoral performance of the Green Party. So all these questions allow us to engage with international comparative theories and frameworks. And I think it also shows I think it's a key challenge that we have when we do Taiwan studies is how do we make our project interesting to audiences beyond Taiwan? And that's the reason why I do try to engage with these theoretical approaches. Okay, what I'm going to do next then is talk about some of the research material that I've used to answer these questions. And I think it's one of these reasons why I've really enjoyed this work. Firstly, we have focus groups. This was something that I hadn't done for my earlier work. And it was something I really enjoyed and generated a huge amount of fantastic data that features very heavily in the book. I did focus groups both for party leaders and activists, but I also did focus groups for party members, both in the Gulsion branch and the Taipei branch. The second type of data that features very heavily is interviews with party supporters, party leaders and party candidates. When it comes to party figures, I've interviewed something like 50 figures. However, what made this project different from my earlier work was that I interviewed a number of these party figures multiple times during the eight years that I was working on the project. Most of the interviews were done face-to-face, and it was only in the final part of the project when I was based in the UK and I was trying to analyse the 2020 election that I did quite a lot of online interviews. We also did a number of in-depth supporter interviews, and in 2016 we also did an online survey of party supporters. And here I'm often using the term we, because at the first stage of this project, I was working very closely with a Taiwanese professor and former party leader, Pong Ye-wen, and the first couple of publications that came out of this project were co-authored. Okay, another really wonderful data set, again that I didn't use in my first book, was Central Election Commission databases, and here particularly useful were the election gazettes. And I've got an example of an election gazette from the 2020 Taiwanese election where we see the party's policy proposals, the candidates' names, their ages, where they're born, the education, and their experience. And e-book, the e-book I think answers questions of how the party's changed and who the party is. These electoral gazettes were extremely useful material because we could look at multiple years electoral gazettes. Okay, a further source that was useful that again wasn't really available for my first book was online sources. We have party websites, for example. We have a huge amount of data from candidate and party social media. Candidate blogs were also extremely useful. For example, Panzen's blog was very useful for some of the middle-term election campaigns. And also there was a huge amount of audio-visual material available as a result of YouTube. So I could look at party news items. And again, it meant even if elections hadn't been on the spot, I could get a feel of these campaigns. Now, one item that does tie you with my first book was political advertising analysis. And again, I try to bring as much of this as possible when I'm looking at the party's communication strategies. For example, I looked at party posters such as this one from 2008 with the slogan, after I grew up, I want to save the world with the Green Party. And on the right, we have a clip from the Green Party's 2016 TV election ad. One that I think a lot of my students have seen me analyzing over the years. So here we can get a sense about the kind of appeals that the party's been making, both environmental but also gender-related appeals. What about the writing then? How did the writing evolve? Again, I think this is something quite important. It's something that both as PhD students but also as established academics we often really struggle with. Why did it take me so long to go from December of 2012 to finishing the book in late 2020? In the initial stage, I published a couple of journal articles and looked at the early development of the party quite broadly, together with Pong Yeowen. But I kind of felt that our data was so rich that we really had more than enough for a book project. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to persuade Dr Pong to join me for the book project. I kept delaying starting writing the book. Originally, I would hope to finish the book at the 2016 election and eventually it got delayed to the 2020 election, which was not so bad as it allowed me to cover a very different campaign. After thinking about the project for so long, when I actually came down to writing it, the process was surprisingly smooth. I had been on an easy jet flight in October of 2019. Maybe because there was no screen, I suddenly worked out my book structure. To a large extent, the book structure with a few slight revisions is almost the same to the one that I drew up on that short easy jet flight. When I actually started the writing, it went quite smoothly. I think I probably wrote most of the book in November 2019 through to January 2020 with a couple of other short writing periods in March of 2020. After the first book reviews came in, I then did some adjustment, some revisions and I added the final two chapters, the 2020 election and my concluding chapter. Let me now then move on and briefly talk about each of the main chapters. Chapter two really goes over the frameworks and reviews the literature where I'm locating my book. I talk about the explanatory frameworks for my key research questions. I'm not going to really go into those in this session. I'm going to jump straight into chapter three, which is called Beautiful Accidents. This term comes from one of the party founders' comments about why the Green Party was first formed in 1996. But as you've noticed, the book title is Green Parties. So in this chapter, I talk about the formation of three parties. The Green Party in 1996, in January 1996, the Trees Party in the summer of 2014. And I also talk about a forgotten Green Party that was established in the summer of 1995. I was attracted by a footnote in Hermann Show's book about an early attempt to create a Green Party. And I started to look in detail and found this actually received quite a lot of media attention in Taiwan in the summer of 1995. The party even had a founding ceremony and TV coverage, but it was a steel-born Green Party. It never registered with the Ministry of Interior. But for me, it was a really interesting story because the concept behind this failed Green Party was quite different from the subsequent Green Party that was founded six months later. But once again, in this chapter, I'm able to engage with theories of party formation but also theories of party switching. Because to a certain extent, the formation of the Trees Party is a splinter party out of the Green Party. So again, that allows me to engage with a different set of conceptual theories to link the Taiwan case. If I was asked about my favourite chapter, then I think this one is probably, it may well be my favourite chapter. Partly because at the time of party formation there's so much hope for the future. Nothing has gone wrong yet. The next chapter looks at the impact. And I mainly look at the impact of the Green Party through two angles. One is in terms of the electoral impact. So here I'm looking at the electoral record. And again, this allows us to look at the consequences of Taiwan's electoral system. So for example, I look at Han's voters who were particularly worried. This candidate on the left, Gao Mengding, was elected in the Green Party's first National Assembly election just weeks after the party had been established. But I also talk about the international impact of the Green Party. And I think one of the things that I found really interesting is that sometimes when the Green Party was electorally quite quiet, it actually was very active internationally. And I also found that a lot of Green Party figures found the international engagement particularly meaningful compared to domestic politics. And here we have an example of where the Green Party delegation came to sow us in the spring of 2017. The international engagement enables Taiwan to engage internationally in a way that is often prevented from doing so as a result of China's diplomatic pressures. And one of my favourite stories in the book concerns the way that the England and Wales Green Party helped the Taiwan Green Party in its first election. And one of the stories I tell in the international section is about how Penny Kemp from the England and Wales Green Party visited Taiwan during that first election campaign. At a time when Taiwan was in the cross-trade crisis of 1995-96. And this is one of the things that I hope to write on in more detail about this kind of forgotten side of UK-Taiwan relations. In Chapter 5, I look at the who question. In other words, I look at who are the Green Parties, who are their leaders, who are their candidates and who are their supporters. And I felt this was quite important to get a sense of the personalities that we're going to look at in the subsequent empirical chapters. So one of the really difficult decisions was who to include, which personalities should I include. In this picture we see two of the personalities who I chose to focus on. One of them is Linda Erigo, who has visited SOAS, and I think many of you will know quite well, who was heavily involved in the Green Party in the first period from the mid-1990s through to the early 2000s, helping develop the party's international engagement. And then the second on the right is party founder Gao Cheng Yan, who had been blacklisted by the KMT in the 1970s, 1980s, as a result of his political activism in the US. And he's a key figure in Taiwan's environmental movement in the early 1990s. And he's the one Green Party figure that stood for election the most times. But of course I also talk in this chapter about the kind of people that have supported the party, as well as the kind of people the party has nominated. And overall I think we can see that the party has tended to nominate more female candidates than other parties. It's also the first parties to nominate openly LGBT candidates. And it's also been more willing to nominate younger politicians. Okay, next then I move to the empirical chapters. And generally what I do in the empirical chapters is focus on a number of those key questions. The how question looks at the, how the party has changed. The why question tries to explain the electoral performance. And the first, this chapter looks at the first Green Party election campaign in January of 19, in March of 1996. And I chose to call this Professor Gull catching the missiles, because one of the reasons, one of the ways that the Green Party was able to attract both domestic and international attention was taken advantage of the cross-rate missile crisis of 1996. And Professor Gull went out into the missile zone to show, to take a strong stand against the China threat. And this was in fact one of the reasons why the global Greens in Europe first became aware of the Taiwan Green Party because of the media attention of Professor Gull going to catch the missiles. So one of the things I do in this chapter is try to explain the variation in the Green Party candidates electoral performance. Why does one get elected and why do some do pretty well and some do not quite so well. Okay, then I moved to the second campaign in 1998, which is a local election. So even though there were national elections, the party focused on local county and city council elections. The reason why it's working with the Australian Green was, why did the party generally do much worse two years later, and why was one campaign, particularly strong network. The campaign that was particularly strong was that of my co-author Pongyuan, who was almost elected to the Taipei city council.  But one of the reasons why it was better than the other campaigns was it was able to take advantage of this issue about whether it was okay to frequent, whether it was okay for politicians or civil servants to frequent sexual nightclubs. And this helped her to get the necessary media attention. And here we can see one of the press conferences on this topic. The next chapter is rather different, because it doesn't really focus on election campaigns, because the Green Party only ran a small number of token campaigns between 1999 and 2005. Instead, the focus is on why did the party collapse after 1998. And then I focus on how Pongyuan and a number of her colleagues were able to rebuild the party starting in 2004, and get it ready again to start competing in elections. And as with step down, a variety of perspectives and stories on each of these, these puzzles, and then try to come to a conclusion about which ones are more persuasive. Okay, next then I move to the way that the party returns to elections between 2006 and 2009. And again, each of my kind of subheadings have some meaning. For example, in 2002 about how active they are an alliance with a Labour rights group. And we see a news conference on the left here between the Green Party and a Labour rights group. So it was known as the Red Green Alliance of 2008. And then we have a picture of the tree top protest from a by election in 2009. But despite these efforts, in these first three elections, the party is still less successful electorally than it had been in the 1990s. So again, the question is, how do we explain these patterns? And what I tend to do is look at a mixture of both party system factors, but also I look at the party agency looking at the strategies that the party adopts. Then in the next chapter, I look at the party's attempt to become a relevant political party with a set of organizational reforms. And we do see improved results in both the local elections in 2010 and the national elections in 2012. It's also noteworthy that in 2010, the Green Party is the first party to nominate openly LGBT candidates. So I think quite an important moment in the struggle for LGBT rights. In 2012, we see the party again contesting national elections. And much of the focus is on Pan Sen and his alliance in one district with the, I think there's a number of factors. However, for me, the campaign that I find most interesting in 2012 is that of Zhang Yuqi. And in this case, we have someone who's really lacking resources. So we have a housewife environmentalist whose campaign consists of her two young daughters. And we see how she's still able to be one of the best vote winners despite this lack of resources. So for me, that was one of the most moving stories, understanding the way that she campaigned with her young daughters. Okay, so then we move to a new round of organizational reform. The party leadership switches to Li Gengshen. And we have an attempt to make the party much more institutionalized. And we see this in the 2014 local elections, which are much, the campaign is much better resourced. And we start to get the first breakthroughs at the local level with Zhou Jianjie and Wahauyu both getting elected. But overall, though, there was a sense of both congratulations but also disappointment. Because many of the candidates did less well than they'd expected. And also this new organizational framework led to the party split that I discussed in chapter three. So this was one of the reasons why I chose to borrow the name of Xiu Tai Lin's film, Unfinished Progress, which was a documentary about Wang Jiuming as my subheading. In other words, the progress had been made but it was still not complete. And we see that in the 2016 campaign when the Green Party works in alliance with the Social Democratic Party. However, despite this alliance, it's unable to make a breakthrough and only improves by a limited amount compared to 2012. In other words, it goes up from 1.7 to 2.5% of the vote. Despite the fact that it was an older party and it had been doing pretty well in the polls early in the campaign. And as with the other empirical chapters, I look at a mixture of party system factors such as the rise of the new power party and the DPP's strategies. But I also look at problems within the GVTs campaign, including its poor handling of its relations with its ally, the Social Democratic Party. And of course, we do have the China factor in the background of this campaign. And the teenage idol here I'm referring to is the Jiu Jiu Incident. Okay, now I move to the 2018 election. This was the last campaign where I was actually able to be in Taiwan for field work. And once again, we have another round on the thing and reorganization. So basically we could say we have our third or fourth model. But this model of the Green Party is rather different. And we can get a sense of this from the party leader or the most influential party figure, Wang Haoyu's comment. This time we're not just campaigning on ideals, we're campaigning to get elected. However, for many Green Party supporters, it felt like the party was selling its soul. It was losing its ideals. For example, we have an alternative approach here, alternative understanding. The people who are left don't really understand the Green Party's values or don't stress these values. They care more about political calculations and that can damage our reputation. So many long-term Green Party supporters began to have doubts about the direction the party was moving into at this point in time. So again, the party does do pretty well. It does slightly improve on its 2014 performance. But we can see that there's a price to this new approach. And then I come to the most recent election in January of 2020. And I call it the Deng Huiwen or Wang Haoyu campaigns. Because these two figures, the controversial Wang Haoyu and the psychiatrist and media figure, Deng Huiwen, were the most visible figures in this campaign. Originally, I would have expected that Party Founder Gao Chengyan, who had come back to stand, would be the focus. And he did try to remind voters of what he did back in 1996, but also back in 1994 when he led a recall campaign against the 2020 KMT presidential candidate, Han Guoyu. However, his candidacy was really overshadowed by Deng and Wang. And this chapter was quite a hard one for me to write because I was writing it and doing the research during the campaign. And of course, I was doing this at distance, so it had to rely quite a lot on online interviews. And it's a very complex campaign. And I think it's the first time that I've, when I've been writing, that I've talked about a Machiavellian plot. And I remember being really excited the first time that I use this term to describe this chapter. So the puzzle for this chapter is why, despite losing so many former supporters, does the party still do almost the same as 2016? And I think the candidacy of Donghui Wen was a key factor. And then I come to my final concluding chapter where I look at what happened after the setback of 2020. How did the party recover after the controversial Wang Haoyu had left the party? How does it try to rebuild bridges? And lastly, I try to do something that I promised to do nine years ago. And that was to talk about some of the practical lessons for the party. So when I first got the email from Yuanyu in December, October 2012, I said that this was something we would do. And I've talked a little bit about some possible lessons based on my observations over the last nine years. OK, so lastly, what am I going to do next? Well, this is the first of what will be a number of book talks. And I plan to do some in Europe and also in American universities. But another thing I really want to do with this book is to engage with Green Party audiences. So I'm hoping to do some sessions with local Green Parties in the future, because I believe that the book should have value beyond academic audiences. And I also hope to do some sessions in Taiwan as well. The other thing that I'm very, very excited about is I'm now working on a Chinese version of the book. But it won't just be a translated book. A DPP co-authors, Pongyuan, who I'm delighted has rejoined the project, and also Wang Yen Han, who spoke at SOAS in 2017. So both are former Green Party leaders. So my hope is that the new version of the book will bring in their perspective. The shift has continued to be their experiences and observations. And we're currently in the process of rewriting this book. And hopefully we hope to finish this year. So lastly, there's so many people I need to thank for making this book possible. In the acknowledgments, I particularly highlight three people. Pongyuan, Yuanyu, and of course, Duoluo, who you saw opening today's session, who's helped me so much over the last nine years, including checking the manuscripts. And whenever she was checking the manuscripts and I heard her very loud laughter, I knew that I'd got that part right. So now the book is only out in hardback and ebook. The ebook, I think, is priced a little bit better. We do have the book in the SOAS library.  And please do encourage your local librarians to order the book if you don't have access to the SOAS library. So the sooner I sell enough hardbacks, then I can get the paper back out. And finally, thanks everyone for listening. If you are a SOAS student of mine, you've heard me talking about this project for nine years. And I've really done it. So thanks for all your support. And thanks to all the Green Party figures for helping me along the way. And let me finish here. Thank you. Thank you.


Hey guys welcome back to my YouTube channel this is Daniel Rosa here in Jerusalem bringing you guys another video today. This one's again about my the optical media and as you know I went those who follow this channel know I recently made a series of video regarding the M-disk. The M-disk is a variant of the DVD and Blu-ray intended for long-term archival storage. I pretty much know that by heart by now. The M-disk looks like a DVD or Blu-ray same form factor etc but it's engineered a little bit differently whereas DVDs and Blu-rays store their data through ablating a dye and that optical contrast can lose it can be lost over time as the dye degrades the M-disk substitutes that technology for an inorganic rock-like layer and the data is actually written through making microscopic bumps engraving it into that layer so as opposed to burning so it's a super interesting tech and I have to be honest after getting all excited about the M-disk doing all my doing all the videos I thought anyone might ever be interested in about it and those are up on this YouTube channel I thought to myself ah maybe I should do some stress testing and if you don't know what stress testing is or torture testing I'm talking about the videos like this you'll see all over YouTube now these videos are kind of old you can see this one's from 2009 and that's because optical media really kind of has stopped being a thing that most people care about anymore but you get the idea this guy is doing various weird things to his to his DVD he's you know etc etc he's warping it intentionally and carving into it and doing all sorts of weird things he's even this is crazy he's breaking it up now I was thinking about doing something like this for the M-disk maybe not quite as extreme I was going to put it on my roof I was going to take it swimming with me in the sea I was going to do all manner of wacky experiments the reason I decided not to is because I don't think this is actually useful or maybe entertaining but it's probably not going to be useful the only useful information or stress testing one could do for technology like the M-disk would be to time travel 100 years into the future write yourself a bunch of discs four or five discs run a checksum on those discs time travel 100 years into the future and when you've arrived into the into the future point in time run the checksum again and tell us if the M-disk is working now the obvious joke here is that time travel is impossible so there's no real actual way to do a useful experiment so what we do instead or what people do and this is the really interesting paper from I'm going to just put myself smaller so you can see the document property from the naval air warfare central weapons division which is as far as I understand a part of the US Department of Defense and they put the M-disk through some insane testing that wasn't quite the same thing as a guy on YouTube cutting up his disc or warping it they it's a 75 page document so the fact that the Department of Defense puts such effort into investigating the M-disk tells me that probably government departments are actually taking this text seriously and committing some really sensitive data because the type of data you might commit for storage on an M-disk would be data that's going to be stored offline not connected to the internet and when you're dealing with really sensitive data storage that's often a requirement a physical network air gap so you can see in this document I'm just going to jump a little bit to the relevant parts here they describe their process under test conditions this is pretty interesting stuff in my opinion if you care about optical storage the stress test is a single combined temperature humidity and light cycle it's composed of a ramp up a 24-hour dwell a ramp down and an equilibration period that is conducted with illumination throughout the cycle figure one one depicts this cycle so what they actually did they took this is a naval naval air weapons research center testing at the M-disk they held it at room temperature for 0.25 hours then they did a RH and temperature ramp RH stands for relative humidity so they brought it from 15 percent humidity controlled all the way up to 85 and they also took the disks from room temperature and up to 85 sorry 80 degrees celsius so these are extreme conditions and then you can see after the ramp up and these gradients the humidity and temperature gradients were both scientifically controlled in this accelerated aging accelerated aging chamber and then they were held for 24 hours at these very tough conditions of 80 degrees celsius and 85 percent humidity the M-disk came out of this pretty much perfect so that's really impressive in my opinion 24 hours at 80 degrees celsius and 85 percent humidity if those conditions existed on earth people probably i don't think would be able to survive exposure to 80 degrees celsius um but if it was even 40 degrees it would be incredibly hot and sticky and unpleasant so it's a pretty aggressive test um and they also controlled for the light intensity so i guess what i'm trying at the point i'm trying to make is as follows the way that professionals stress test optical media is by doing stuff like this in which again every variable is controlled the temperature humidity and even the light intensity is controlled as well and you can even see they've got some pretty crazy photographs in this long document um of the actual testing process you can see the disks there in this um in this exposure chamber and it's a literally physical chamber where and that's where they're simulating um all these environmental variables so this is kind of a useful test it's designed to um you know the the premise i guess of this type of testing is to say well if they can take 80 degrees for x many cycles then they can survive under normal conditions for x much longer i don't know if that's a if that hypothesis is being scientifically established it's true in any event it's more like it's more useful testing to your average data storage person than uh you know cutting or per scratching or warping intentionally an optical storage because if you're storing your optical media archive in a sensible manner there's guidelines online about temperature humidity and you should be following those i've done a video about them previously and so yeah if it survives that that's really all you need to know the only definitive test would require time travel which is an impossibility but this type of information is much more useful than the kind of pretty uncontrolled uh pretty uh sort of rough and ready experimentation approaches you're going to be finding on youtube so if you do want to test your optical media i'd recommend trying to go for something a bit more scientific like this i'm personally not going to do that i have trust and faith in the m disk i realized that the only way to really prove it for or against would be something like time travel so as that's not possible i'm simply putting my trust in it you might not put your trust in it and use a different storage media for your personal backup and archival needs thank you for watching the video and more videos on tech the m disk and other subjects will be coming to this youtube channel very soon


This is stock number 11051A. We are here at Summit Automotive in Phondlack, Wisconsin, near New and used light duty truck headquarters. Today we are checking out this super clean 2017 GMC Sierra 1500 Crew Cab Short Box. This truck has the 5.3 liter V8 motor. It has been fully safety and inspected by our service shop. It has a fresh oil and filter change. All the fluids have been checked and tapped off. This truck is 100% ready to go. It has 4 brand new tires we put on in our safety inspection and is in super nice condition and fully loaded. White Frost Metallic is the color we shoot all of our videos in 1080p 60 frames per second. So if you have HD capabilities on your computer tablet or smartphone device turn them on right now because it is definitely your best way to check out the quality and condition of the truck before seeing it in person. And if you'd like to check out all the photos on this truck in the upper right hand part of your screen is a link to our website. Click that and check us out there. It comes with the 20 inch polished aluminum rims and it has brand new Goodyear Wrangler SRA 275 55R 20 tires. Still see little wear knobs on there. We put those on in our safety inspection all the way around. Front fender, no dents or dings on that. Has the HID headlamps, the LED running lights and the LED fog lamps. We'll turn those on at the end of the video here so you can see those running. Pretty impressive how bright they are. Front bumper is in excellent condition. No dents or dings on that. And it does have the front bumper parking sensors and the chrome trimmed grille. The hood is in really nice condition. I didn't see any dents or dings on that. Looks really good. And the passenger side front fender, no dents or dings on that. Passengers side rim, no scuffs or scrapes. And that tire is brand new as well. As you go down this side of the truck, take note of how clean the body is, how reflective and mirror like that paint is. We take these HD videos so if you are far away or even if you're close by, you just cannot make the trip down but you're still interested in purchasing the vehicle, you can see the truck, hear the truck and have confidence in the vehicle that you're looking at before you even get here. So that when you do get here, there's absolutely no surprises. You can make a smart buying decision from the comfort of your own home and that is why we offer the Summit Auto Fastpass option in the upper right hand part of your screen. A link right to our website where you can apply for financing, get pre-approved, see a payment quote, even appraise the trade all from the comfort of your own home. So when you get here, all you got to do is drive the truck, love it, you'll be all set to go or you get it chipped right to your front door. We do that too. Back tires are brand new as well and the frame and underbody is in excellent shape. Has the Z71 Rancho shocks back there and that frame and underbody is very nice all the way underneath. Lower rockers all look really good. I didn't see any corrosion on there. This truck came out of Illinois so it hasn't really seen a lot of salt. You get the chrome tipped exhaust. Rear bumper is in really nice shape. Full towing package which includes a receiver hitch four pin and seven pin wiring. Back of parking sensors and the rear bumper steps. The tailgate is in excellent condition as well. I didn't see any dents or dings on there and has the shock down assist tailgate spray and bed liner and it does have the LED bed lighting up there. You turn those on with your cargo lamps. Tailgate shuts nice and solidly and you also get the LED tail lamps there. Down this side of the truck just as clean as that passenger side no dents or dings on the box. It does have the capless feel feel which is a really nice feature. Never get gas on your hands again and the back rim excellent shape as well and for the record that tire is brand new too. Down the rest of the side of the truck looks really good. Does have the heated power mirrors with the built-in directional signals and driver side blind spot mirror. Inside the SLT package gives you the tan leather interior. Both of these seats are heated and cooled. No rips or tears on there. Has weather tech floor mats throughout. Power windows, power locks, power mirrors, memory driver's seat and it does have the power folding mirrors. I always like showing that both sides are working so that you know all the options are good on the truck and it does have the Bose sound system. Auto headlamps turned out for wheel drive and factory brake control. You also have tilt and telescopic steering wheel. As we hop inside the vehicle here you can see that this one has 42,258 miles. Instrument cluster is very nice and clean.  Has the heated leather wrap steering wheel. Bluetooth and information center controls on the right. Cruise controls, heated steering wheel controls and forward collision controls on your left. Comes with the I believe it's a six-speed. How you tell how many gears it has you put it into low and then you hit this plus on the tap shift and it'll go up. So this is an eight-speed automatic transmission on this truck. So it comes with the GMC IntelliLink system with the factory navigation system as well. AM, FM and Sirius XM radio capabilities. This is also where your backup camera shows up. I'll show you that when we start the truck. It's got to be running for that to work. Down here is your CD player. You also have a projection manager. Sorry about that. So you can project your cell phone to the screen. So if you've got ways or Google Maps on your cell phone and want to project that to the screen you like that navigation system better. You can definitely do that via Android Auto or Apple CarPlay. Anyways you have all your other apps up there. Here's your heated seats and cooled seat buttons.  That's how you turn on those bed lighting lights. Parking sensors. You can turn those off. That's your lane departure warning and your downhill assist control. You can see you get two USBs, two 12-volt power points and 150-volt, I'm sorry, 110-volt, 150-watt plug-in. Passenger side seat and floor mat are in excellent condition. This one does have the power sunroof and the headliner is in really nice clean condition on this truck as well. Up here you have your power sign, rear window button, your home link buttons for your garage doors, security systems and lighting systems. And then you get on-star capabilities in that rear view mirror. Last but not least you do get the wireless cell phone charge pad there. We'll take a quick look at the back seats and then we'll start it up and take a quick look under the hood. Back seats are just as clean as the front seats. No rips or tears back here. It does have the latch, child safety system for any child car seats you may need to put back here. Power sliding rear window with the built-in rear defrost and these seats are in excellent condition.  Side curtain airbags. Then we'll start it up and take a quick look under the hood. Then we'll check out all those LED and HID headlamps up front. And I would personally like to thank you for checking out the video today and hopefully from this HD video you'll have been able to tell just how clean this truck is all the way around. Inside and out under the hood we have the 5.3 liter V8 motor and Jumpei is very clean runs very smooth. Like I said before this truck has been fully safe and inspected by our service shop has a fresh oil and filter change. All the fluids have been checked and topped off and this truck is 100% ready to go. There are those HID headlamps LED running lights and LED fog lamps and I would highly recommend this truck from a quality and condition standpoint. I really didn't see too much to complain about on it. And to see more pictures of this truck or one of other 450 new and used cars, trucks, SUVs, minivans, Wranglers, half-tons, three-quarter-tons, one-tons. You name it we got it go to our website www.summitauto.com full pictures and descriptions of every single vehicle from two locations all at summitauto.com. And if you'd like to check out more HD videos you can go to youtube.com slash summitauto. Remember to like, subscribe, and share on this video and all the videos that you see there. In fact in a second you will see a link to subscribe to our YouTube channel on your left. It links more GMC Sierra 1500 half-ton truck videos like this one on your right. If you have not been to our website on the bottom link to this vehicle on our website click those check us out and we really look forward to help you with this extremely clean 2017 GMC Sierra 1500 Crew Cab Short Box SLT and White Frost Metallic. Thanks again for checking out the video and you won't be disappointed in this one.


I don't necessarily know if I ever saw it going like this far. I think initially my goal was just to be a protégé that didn't flop. You know, I just wanted to be somebody that was like remotely as important as my mentor. The realization that is possible was extremely important. I don't credit myself for anything other than that. If this person can do this, I can do this too.


the girl from freed slave family who became a millionaire. Sarah Rector was born into a poor freed slave family in Oklahoma in 1902. When she was just 10 years old an oil company discovered oil on her family's land, making her a millionaire overnight. Sarah quickly became one of the wealthiest African American children in the country and was featured in newspapers and magazines. Despite attempts to exploit her wealth, Sarah remained determined to use her fortune to help others. She went on to attend Tuskegee Institute and lived a life dedicated to philanthropy and activism until her passing in 1967.


Good morning. It is a Sunday morning, September 26 2021. I want to talk for three or four minutes on the idea of having some routine in your days. Hear me out. This is why routine is a good thing. This morning on my Instagram story, I had asked everybody what they're doing today, and I'm getting all kinds of cool responses, which is great. And I posted my to do list for today. Now, normally, I would not have a to do list on a Sunday, but I have a lot going on. So today, I do have a list of things to do.  I meditate for a few minutes, I move or exercise, I play my guitar for five or five or 10 minutes every single day. It's a routine.  But at least the little routine is a good thing. And here's why. When you are in a situation where you are confronted with anxious sensations, anxiety symptoms, scary thoughts, intrusive thoughts, those worrisome things, and they make you feel uncomfortable and afraid, they put you kind of against the wall. One of the things that we make the mistake of doing is we try to deal with thinking and feeling with more thinking and feeling. So you're going to sit and scan and evaluate those symptoms and sensations, you're going to engage in an inner dialogue, you try to fight those thoughts, you're trying to prove them wrong, trying to soothe yourself. Thinking and feeling is not a good way to deal with thinking or feeling in our situation. What really is better is to activate, like behave, move, engage with the world, do, do things. You don't have to do tremendous earth shaking things, you know, life changing things, but anything little things. So since behaving is better than thinking or feeling when we get into those situations, what what can we do? How can we behave? How can we engage with the world? What should we do? When you are in that situation and feeling stressed, afraid, anxious, confused, like you're in the midst of it, it can be really hard to come up with a doing plan on the fly right that minute. So here's where routine comes into play.  This is little easy, simple stuff. My morning routine was literally walking to the bathroom, taking care of myself, brushing my teeth, washing my hair, combing my hair, you know, combing my hair, but getting dressed, that sort of stuff. It's very simple, basic afternoon routine might be make a cup of coffee, make a cup of tea, read half a chapter of a book, even if you're struggling to do it, text a friend, walk the dog, clean something in the house, finish some emails, whatever little tiny things your bedtime routine, get undressed, put on your pajamas if you have pajamas, brush your hair, like listen to your favorite music before bed, whatever it happens to be, build little tiny micro routines, even if you hate routine, and you use those as playbooks. So when you find that you wake up in the morning and your morning anxiety is like through the roof right away, and you've got those anxious intrusive thoughts hit you the minute you open your eyes, instead of laying there and try to fight thoughts with more thoughts, feeling with more feeling, activate do. Well, I don't know what to do because I'm anxious and I can't think clearly. Aha. But now you do know what to do. You can use your predefined little basic simple morning routine, and then you execute that routine. So that's why this morning I said, having some routine is a really good thing. Even if you're like me and you hate it. So consider that behaving is better than thinking and feeling in many instances for people like us. And if you cannot think of what to behave with what to do how to activate building little micro routines that you can go to as predetermined playbooks can be super helpful. It's a simple little thing. It doesn't it's not life changing. You're not going to go and climb Everest when you're feeling anxious, but getting up and brushing your teeth or getting up and making a cup of tea or getting up and walking your dog around the garden is way better than just sitting on the sofa and trying to fight anxious sensations and thoughts with scanning and analyzing and more thinking. So that's my little three, three, four minutes for today on routine. Hope it's been helpful. If you have comments or questions, leave them below. I'll do my best to answer them and I will see you guys in the next little video. Have a good one.


One of the first things I'd like to do is thank all our sponsors that helped us put together and provide input and money for today's event. I'm going to just read through the list. South Dakota Wheat Commission, Farm Credit Services of America, Wheat Growers, Mustang Seed, Monsanto, Prairie State Seeds, Next Level Ag, LLC, Millboard Seeds, La Crosse Seeds, Dakota Best Seed, Agronomy Plus, Farmers Likes, Mitchell, First Dakota National Bank, C&D Operations, Davis and County Ampliment, Scott Supplier, CropTech, Ducks Unlimited, Aurora County Conservation District, Davis and County Conservation District, Hanson County Conservation District, South Dakota No-Tail Association, SDSU Extension, USDA and NRCS, and Pioneer Hybrids of Dupont, so let's give them all a welcome round of applause. The first presentation is the president chair of the Soil Health Coalition, Doug Seek, he's from Selby, and Doug's got a lot of ideas that a lot of people think they're kind of off the wall and then all of a sudden a year later you're doing them also. So I'd like to introduce Doug Seek, please. Good morning. Good morning. Thanks for coming. Thanks for introducing me, Dan, that was nice. Yeah, we get to running around in these circles and we get to start doing things that are a little bit different. And Jim Garrish wrote one of the books he wrote was Kick the Hay Habit, and in there he talks about he said you're going to start doing some things a little different and he said you think your neighbors are going to run up to you, pat you on the back and tell you what a good job you did and he said that's not the way it works. He said you're not going to hear much. He says but if you watch in four or five years they're going to come up to you and tell you what they started doing and that's kind of the way that works and it's really cool. I get it. But I'm here to talk about livestock integration. Like Dan said, we're trying to get more cattle back on the land. It's all about the soil biology, right? And when we've got the livestock out on the land it stimulates the microbes. It stimulates all the bacteria in the soil but it stimulates all those microbes and it gets things rolling. And we're learning that the increases in organic matter are coming from those microbes. So livestock are part of the key to the tools that we're using to increase organic matter. Maybe I talk about the picture. That's not a very good picture but that's my place there.  This is one of my pastors but in the background Lowry's down here. So I'm north of Lowry about five or six miles, something like that. When I go in I listen to people do talks like these. They have these neat charts where they've shown their place with all their subdivision fences. I just thought I would be remiss if I didn't show pictures of the subdivision fences. So there you go. Those are 20 acre parcels and I do a rotation through that. We cut those with polywire, sometimes just do one-day moves and make that into a four-day parcel. This one down here we picked that up a couple years ago and I haven't cross-fenced that. And I don't know if I will. It's kind of nice to have a vacation pastor somewhere you can just kick him in and get out of there. This is some cropland that I planted back to grass over the years and we've subdivided that too. So I'll talk about this later but I've made a lot of changes. Some of them are working, some of them are a little bumpy but if you see something up there you want to talk about, track me down. Okay, livestock integration. I just ran into this here a couple months ago. This gal, Cynthia Cullenback, did some research and they wrote a paper. And in the paper the UNH scientists suggest that soil organic matter accumulates from inputs of dead microbial cells and microbial byproducts formed when the microbes eat plant roots and residues rather than from plants themselves as previously thought. In the past, scientists thought the best way to build soil organic matter was to slow down or inhibit decomposition using plants that soil microbes find difficult to decompose. The idea was that the undecomposed plant parts would gradually become soil organic matter especially if the soil microbial community was inactive. And that's what I thought too. And I ran into two different schools of thought. When I started going to HMR holistic schools they were talking about okay let's get the cattle bunched up and let's get them to step that grass and that plant residue down on the soil so that the microbes can get at it and chew it up and spit it out and whatever turned it into plant food. And then I'd get around a more university setting and they argued more that organic matter was increased by the roots dying off in the soil. Well it turns out they're both right. But maybe the HMR guys are more right. It looks like the microbes are playing a pretty key role. So whatever I can do to enhance the microbes is probably going to help me increase my organic matter in the soil. That's the whole theory behind planting the cover crops too right. To get that diverse cover crop mix out there you create an environment down there that the microbes thrive in. I didn't know that that was what we needed to do to increase organic matter. I just knew that it worked pretty well. So anyway now we've got a little research to kind of back that up. We'll see. So microbes make the organic matter, livestock integration, increased organic matter equals increased production. One cow's urine contributes 112 to 117 pounds of nitrogen, a third of a pound a day. 90% of that's returned to the land and maybe 90% is a little high. Maybe 60 or 70% of that stays there for them. But if you have them in the feedlot you've got to push them in or out, maybe compost them, maybe you don't but you haul it back out, you spread it. It sounds like 5 to 8% of that nitrogen gets back in the soil. So getting the livestock out of the land is perhaps a more efficient way to cycle that nitrogen and get it back in the soil. Can everybody hear me okay? I talk fast and I mumble. If you can't hear me wave your hand or something. Thanks Dan. Livestock integration, the low hanging fruit is crop residue grazing right. Corn stock grazing is the big one. How much is out there? How many pounds of corn stover is out there? How much can I graze? 1400 pound bale of hay, well maybe I should answer that. The bottom line, there are just as many pounds of corn stover as there are pounds of corn grain. So for round numbers, if you've got 100 bushel of corn, you've got 5600 pounds of corn grain, you've also got 5600 pounds of corn stover. It's a good rule of thumb, you'll see it all over the place. So a 1400 pound bale of hay at $80 a ton is $56. 1400 pounds of stocks, $21. Now 1400 pounds out of a 100 bushel of corn, is that a third of 5600?  So you've got at least 100 bushel of corn just for a nice reference point. You've got 5600 pounds out there.  How to make that work, you've got to train the cows a little bit. Your best bet on training cows is to spend as much money as you can on a good fencer. But you'll probably do like most of us do.  And everybody says buy the high priced one first, and I don't know, hardly anybody does. But I've had problems with vegetation on the fence, and when I went from the $300 fencer to the $1400 fencer, I didn't have any more problems with that. So if you can, buy the good one right away. If you need to train them during the winter to snow, once you get a snow pack out there, they don't ground to the soil very well. So the cows stay in more out of respect for the fence than they do out of the actual shock they're getting. So what do you do? Train them by going up by your water tank, take a run of electric fence, I don't know, 50 feet or something like that, hook that to just one energizer. Make that the only fence that energizer is running. Run, the top wire is the hot, the bottom wire is the ground, and when those cows are jostling around, get it close enough so they bump into that once in a while. Okay, I'll train them. Okay, even if there's snow on the ground, you'll get them trained. Challenges, the weather, the portable windbreaks, you know, use what you got, old horse trailers, semi trailers. Water, we've learned a lot from the folks up in Canada about things that we can do to make this cattle deal work a lot cheaper and a lot more efficiently than we used to. And we've learned from them that we don't really need to water those cows during the winter if we've got halfway decent snow out there. If I've got a quarter of corn stalks that doesn't have water on it, I'll just wait on it until we get some snow and I'll graze it anyway. The cows are winers, they'll wind the first couple of days. If you turn them out and you come and check them the next day, they're going to come running toward you and try to tell you they're dying. But by about the third day, they start eating snow just fine and they remember it a long time. They teach their cows to do it and it goes down the line. Neil Dennis out of Canada said, you got to be a little careful if you have two cold snaps in a row. And I don't understand what he's talking about there exactly. I know that that's a dangerous place. I wonder if it has to do with dehydration and I don't know. But anyway, if you've got two cold snaps in a row, it's a little trickier. But I've run cows for a month out on different pieces of corn, ground or crop or as they do without water. And they come off it doing just fine. In fact, I brought one set off a quarter one time. They'd been there two weeks, first time I'd done it.  And they knew how to do that. They'd done that a lot of times. And right over here was another cornfield to graze. And I opened the gate and I got them across the road and then just to mess with them, I let them toward the cornfield a little bit. And they ran past me to get to the cornfield rather than to go home and get a drink. So it looked to me like they were doing just fine. I use a lot of poly wire fence. Things that make that work really well. The O'Brien original posts. You'll see some of those in here. I'll point them out when we get to them. But if you're going to use plastic step-in posts, you want to get the right kind. Because you want to make this easy and you don't want to cuss about it. The first time I used plastic posts, I picked some of those up at Runnings. The big bulky things with a spike like that on the bottom. Terrible. They were my first experience with plastic and I said, I'm not using those anymore. Then I listened to Jim Garrish talk and he talked about what kind of posts to use and it makes a heck of a difference. You can push these O'Brien originals into frozen ground. You'll look for a plant rudder or something and work. It's just amazing. But you got to get the O'Brien originals. I get them from Ken Cove. Compaction, move the cows every five days. Split your quarter of corn stalks into 30-acre parcels. Move those cows across them. Okay, but I'm really here to talk about bale grazing. The guys up in North Dakota and Canada taught us about bale grazing too. And I'm skeptical. It takes a while to get me sold on something. When you get me sold, I'll go gung-ho, but it takes a while to get me sold. I heard guys like Gabe Brown and Kenny Miller and the gang up there talking about bale grazing and turning the cows into a week's worth or ten days at a time. And I thought, yeah, I don't know if I'd buy that. Then I ran into one of their events. I ran into a guy out of Canada. We were visiting at a table and he said, I turned him into a month's worth at a time. I thought, well, if you could do it for a month, I could probably try it for three or four days. So I went home and I started experimenting with it a little bit and it seemed to work pretty well. So what I'll do is I'll put out the same amount of hay I'd normally feed. So if I'm feeding five bales a day or whatever, let's use round numbers. If I'm feeding 10 bales a day and I'm going to graze them for four days, I'll give them access to 40 bales. And when I'm really on my game, I'll set it up in the fall and I'll take this 15 acre parcel or whatever and I'll put rows of bales all the way. I'll build a checkerboard with maybe 300, 400 bales, something like that. What you're seeing right here, each of those rows has 17 bales in it. And I just give them two rows, I don't know, every three days or four days, however the mouth worked out. You need at least three bales or at least three days worth. So you have enough hay out there so all the cattle can get to the hay. If you're doing two days worth, then there's too much fighting and crowding. I heard a guy out of Canada talking about like 10 cows per bale when you're setting up. So that's another rule of thumb. But if you've got four days worth of feed out there, you've probably got enough feed so that they can all get to it. And that works pretty good for me as far as being comfortable with how much waste is going on just mentally. Of course, the better quality hay you use, the less residue will be left behind. Those you can see, some of them are set on end and some on the side. I think I had some hay that I'd bought that had net wrap on it. And I thought if I set it on end, I'd be able to just go out in the winter and slice that net wrap off and peel it off. Well, the net wrap goes around the end of the bale, doesn't it? So, swinging a mess. And I've just run into some research that says that you have more waste setting them on end anyway, so I'm probably going to just put them on the side. I use mostly that twine that's supposed to degrade in the sun. Of course, it doesn't, but it's supposed to. And I leave it on. They just dig through. Now, I'm not saying I'm going to keep doing that, but that's what I've been doing. If you do that, don't go out there and cut hay the next year. You'll find that a baler pickup is a really efficient tool for picking up twine. A lot of guys that do this use Cecil twine. And they don't worry about the twine too much and it just rots away. They'll work their way through the bales. They'll eat, sometimes they'll eat what you know to be the best ones first and work their way through. Sometimes they'll eat things you didn't think they'd eat first.  They'll jump around. You can kind of put a couple marker bales in each row if you want. Put a bale all its straw or some kind of not so good hay. And you can kind of watch when they get to working on that bale, then maybe it's time to be thinking about moving them. But I pretty much do the math. If it's 10 bales a day and I put out 40 bales, I pretty much leave them four days. Then about the third day you go out and look and you see a lot of circles and you see a couple bales that still kind of look like bales. They'll lay on them. They'll dig through them. If you're really worried about making it efficient, you can come back again in about 60 days and graze it again and they'll dig through the stuff that they've urinated and defecated on and they'll get a little more of it. I just use polywire. You can see the polywire running along there. I use it if it's, if there's snow, I'm using it right now to bale graze some and we've gone, you know, the snow is that deep and they're staying in. The deer are a little bit of a problem. Not the local deer but the deer that migrate through. The locals kind of learn to deal with it. Okay, so when you bale graze, you get a pretty good bump in production in that area that you bale graze it. And I've been thinking about, well, why is that happening? You know, other than the obvious. But look at, this is one of the bale circles after things have thawed off. You can see that's about a foot thick and that's all snow underneath there with hay on top. And if you guys have been feeding, you've noticed that that hay right now it's insulating those piles of ice pretty good around the hay yard too. Well, the same thing's going on here.  And when the stuff in that bale circle finally starts melting instead of running off down the creek it goes out and goes in.  Oh, that's an O'Brien original post there by the way. It's got a nice tang on the bottom. It's big enough to get your foot on pretty well. It's got about six or eight different choices for where to put your string and then it's got some clips on the other side too. But it's real easy to get the string on them. You can drive along with a four-wheeler and go like this and it's very efficient. Just another picture of that duff. Okay, so you end up with some circles out there where things don't grow back real well. But you can see there's a fair amount of variation. There's not much coming here. There will be next year. There's a little more coming in some of these. Some years that's not a problem at all. In some years I get a little more weed pressure in here. Canadian thistles do like those bear spots. So it's a trade-off. Cattle will eat Canadian thistles. If you get them back in the right way. Canadian thistles like 18 to 20% protein. Okay, so waste. There's been some comparison studies when he used a bale processor. Now this is from Gene Govan. I couldn't find the source he was talking about. But Gene was telling me that they did a research project where they put out tarps and they used a bale processor and they used college kids and they weighed and they did a lot of research to figure out what was going on. He said in that research it showed 18% loss from the bale processor, mostly from the leaves turning into dust. 13% in the ring feeders and maybe 12.5 bale grazing. More circles where you see things coming back. That's my sweetheart there. She keeps me going. She had a kidney cancer deal. Showed up right before Christmas. And so all of a sudden we don't know what our schedule is going to be for the next month. We don't know what we got to do, where we got to go. We were going to graze corn in January and February. And so we just switched it. We got the neighbors to come over and we set out a bunch of bales. We put about a month's worth of bales out and we just went to bale grazing. We gave them, I don't know, weeks worth at a time or something like that. We just got on the road. She's doing fine. They took her right kidney out. They said they got it all. They've done all kinds of scans and she's doing real well. But you can see it's coming back in the circles nicely there. It's when it first starts coming back. This was later, same field just up the line. This was later we got about an inch of rain. And they just pugged that up. That's an alfalfa wahee mix. And I thought, uh-oh. This is going to be bad. Notice the two trees in the background here and the post here and the location of the T post to the REA post. This is the same place just a little bit later. Maybe three weeks later. I don't know. It came back just fine. Alfalfa seems to like to be abused. I run lanes for them to go get drinking water and stuff and I think, oh no, they've killed it in the lane. No, it comes back. More regrowth. More of the O'Brien post. I don't know. This is about a month after we, two months after we bail grazed, I suppose. What forage was that? The green part. A wahee intermediate wheat grass and alfalfa. And if you look close, probably a Canadian thistle or two. Just for the protein content. It works better. Bail grazing works better on planted grasses than it does on native grasses, for me. When you use it on native grasses, you can go into a crested wheat grass situation or a Kentucky blue grass situation and you can suppress them a little bit and you can see the western wheat grass coming back in. So there's a tool to use on native grasses where there's an invader problem, but I have the best luck bail grazing on the tame grasses. Okay, look on the right side of this cow. See how that triangle is caved in in front of her hips there? And then this other red cow up here, it's all bulged out. When you're trying to figure out if your cows are full or not, because cows are liars. No matter what, I go out to move them and they can be standing in this deep of stuff and they're bellowing and crying. If you look at them on the left side and that stomach is pushed out, they're fine.  Don't bother looking at the right side. You'll think they're starving and they're not. This is, you can see the regrowth where the bail grazing lines were. And I just did it on the south half of that field and you could ride across that field and you could tell right to the line, this is where we bail grazed and that's where we didn't. This is this year's bail grazing deal. I guess a couple hundred cows and their calves and I think we're giving them ten bales a day on that bunch. This is a Lakeland Ag Research Association. If you google that or just google bail grazing out of Canada, something like that, but they've got some interesting articles on that. They did the research too. Unrolled onto the snow, 12% waste. Processed onto the snow, 19%. Processed into a feed bunk, zero waste. So unrolling, about 12. Bail processor, about 19. Bail grazing, these are all bail grazing. Standing it on the side, putting it on the end, side end, side end, different mixtures. Average, putting it on the end is about eight and a half or nine.  And then you get to kicking at it and it's not very deep usually. Or if it is deep, usually what's left there is the stuff they weren't going to eat anyway. They would have eaten it, we can make them eat it, but does it have any nutrition in it? This is kind of a neat trick just for winding up string. You can get these deer spools or you can use a welding wire spool or an empty Gallagher fence spool. Take a couple of big washers and threaded rebar, run it through there, double nut it, tighten it down.  If you're going to do this, do whatever you can to make it easy so you keep doing it. Josh is going to talk about grazing unharvested corn so I'm going to buzz through this really quick. Terry Gompert told us that a cow will do just fine on 10 pounds of corn and 10 pounds of corn stocks per day. So you just do your allocations to figure that in. I give them a little alfalfa because I think they should have a little protein. A lot of people don't. You need a good fence. If you're going to graze unharvested corn, you need a good fence because they're going to be hungry. They're just eating 40 pounds and they're only eating 20. But I'm not going to go through this stuff because I don't want to move in on Josh's stuff, but that's what it looks like. I left 30 acres last year and I left 30 acres this year and I just cut it into checkerboards. Leave about 28 rows, combine about 6, 12, something like that. Leave 28, 6 or 12. I'll do some math thinking what I'm going to have there for cattle and then I'll go down the field with the combine and I'll combine perpendicular across the rows so I can have a nice pathway to run the string. That really helps when there's snow. This year, like I said, we had the health stuff.  It turned out to be precancerous, so that's good. But anyway, I had that taken out on Valentine's Day, nine days ago. We couldn't go out, we weren't set up to go graze the corn. We didn't have the time, we weren't around. So we went to plan B on grazing corn and I rigged up this gravity wagon and I put a slide and a rope on it and a spring. Can't see it very well, sorry, but it's just a slide with a spring and I just sit up in the pickup and drive it and I pull on the rope and I count to 25 and pull ahead and count to 25. If they can do it on 10 pounds of corn and 10 pounds of corn stalks, they can do this fine on 10 pounds of corn and 10 pounds of poor hay. They seem to be doing fine. I've still got the calves on them. I usually don't wean until March anyway. My neighbors have been so great about doing chores. A couple of them are learning about feeding corn. They're working into it pretty well. I think that's all I'll talk about. I've got other stuff. Extremely briefly, think about this. We're in cool season grass country and we're out there trying to graze these cool season grasses into the fall, into the late summer and if you're like me, you're whining about how I need more warm season grasses out there and you've already got this pasture. It's hard to shift the species, right? Well, you know, warm season, cool season is April, May, June, July. I got to thinking, why don't I kick those cows out there? April, May, June, July. Maybe I can stockpile and go March. I'll go on the grass, March, April, May, June and July. Then August, September and October, why don't I graze warm season cover crop mixes, sedan mixes. Then November, maybe do corn stocks. Then December and January, February, graze standing corn again. It works out to a little under 500 bucks for feeding that cow for a year if you do it like that. The 484 that I came up with was $3 corn and grazing unharvested corn. There wasn't any allowance in there for grazing corn stocks, which would be cheaper. With the corn stocks, maybe you'd be at 460 to take the cow for a year. You know, this whole haying deal, I figured it up one time because the radio wasn't working in the tractor. I had time to think. So I just ran through, how long does it take me to cut bale and stack, and I figured it's about 11 minutes per bale. You know, it's four and a half weeks just to put up a thousand bales of hay. Now my stuff's a little slower. You know, you guys have better equipment. You can probably do it faster. But the point is it takes a lot of time to put up all that hay. And maybe that's why I don't get to go fishing as much. Well, any questions? Yeah, I'm a slow reader. There, change. Let's look through your laundry there. Some of that stuff didn't work, some did, so... Okay, well, May-Cavin, that's really been working well. I don't know. There's just not much to it. I switched to lower birth weight bulls about the same time. That lets me leave the calves on the cow until March like this. Cows don't really need that greater nutrition until right before the cow. So I'll pull the calves off here pretty quick, and they've got a couple months to kind of put some powns back on before they... before they cow. Maybe I pulled a couple calves last year. I'm sure I did, but it's not like it used to be. I use smaller frame cattle now. Dallas Anderson has a good analogy. He said people don't brag about how big a ear of corn that they sell. He said they brag about how many powns they produce per acre. And Kit Ferrell, he's an interesting fellow. Anyway, he told a story one time or laid some things out for me. Anyway, the short version is that a semi-load of small calves brings you a bigger check than a semi-load of big calves. Think about that. 700 pound calves bring, let's say, $1.20, 500 pound calves bring $1.50. The truckload of small calves brings you more money. The cows eat the same amount of feed. Cow eats about 3% of its body weight. So 150 small cows eats the same amount of feed as 100 big cows. You sell the smaller calves more powns, or the same amount of powns. Assume you have the same amount of powns. But you get a bigger check for the small calves than you do for the big calves. Daily moves. Yeah, that works pretty good. I like the long rest periods. When I do the long rest periods I get to see grasses doing things I didn't see before. We get to see the big blue stem go to maturity and go to seed. I'm not saying it wasn't there before, but we'd graze it, it'd grow back and we'd graze it again. It goes to seed and we see the it's spreading. I've actually seen a little Indian grass in one pasture and I'm kind of excited about that. I'm going to cattle that have less milk. Heavier milking cows take more feed and if you live around my place you have to be kind of tough or you don't make it. I want that cow to milk enough to raise that calf as a supplement. I don't want it to be the calf's only source of feed. My primary concern is I want that cow to breed back. So okay, let's get enough milk to grow the calf but not enough to make the calf into a moose. I wean at 10 months. I don't know, that works for me. I just leave the calves on the cows until about March. If you're going to do that, keeping replacement heifers out of that I'm ending up with more opens and they told me if I did that I would have more opens. A lot of folks that do this will wait to breed their heifers when they're two-year-olds instead of one-year-old. So that's... But the other way looking at it is if you have 50% open the 50% that bred ought to be pretty tough animals with good fertility. So if you don't do... if you don't do any pampering if these calves just ran on the cow over the winter, feed them hay for a month or so before the grass greens up or two months and then kick them onto grass and then kick a bull in with them you haven't got any extra cost into it. So with your heifers or herd of grass cattle that you kicked a couple bulls in and ended up with some bred ones out of. There are parts of that that I don't like but... that's the part. It's hard for me to wrap my head around being okay with opens. Banding... I've done more banding than I have cutting the last couple of three, four, five years. For me, I like the banding because it's fast, it's easy. I use a California bander. It fits on your hand like a slingshot.  If you count to two to make sure you got both testicles it's a slam dunk. I need to talk to people in the feedlot so you can find out, okay are you still discounting for banded calves? Is that a problem? Blah, blah, blah. If you use a California bander it takes a couple months for the scrotums to fall off. The last, the fall calves we did the other day after I put the band on I slit the scrotum. They say then it only takes a few weeks because it dries out quicker. Stay tuned. I don't give much for shots. When we run them through and give them a do the banding in about February, January, February, January let's say we'll give them a seven-way with tetanus and that's all the calves get.  I was having pretty good luck marketing them off the farm through Kim Ulmer for a few years now. And then that didn't work so well last year so we ended up going to the sale barn. But I very much prefer selling right off the place because I don't give up all the shrink. We pencil in two or three percent shrink instead of maybe six percent at the barn, right? I quit using pour-ons insecticides five, six, seven years ago. Probably closer to seven. Cow's still rubbed a little. Cow's rubbed a little when I used IvoMec too. I think I'm getting along okay. Ear tagging. I kind of quit ear tagging for a few years on the calves when they were born and I'm going to go back to that so I can do a little more effective culling. But I may not tag them when they're born. I may tag them when they're about this tall and just crowd them in a pan and just tag them that way. It's me, okay? If I get hurt tagging, the neighbors got to do things for me.  While back I started planting with my cropland acres to full season cover crops. We can talk more about that if you're interested later. I graze more the hay ground and I'm grazing standing corn and I'm cutting into the next speaker's time. Any other questions? When you figure out the number of bales per day, do you allow for the calves or are you just pulling like ten pounds per calf? I allow a little for the calves. Yeah. Same way with the corn. I'm feeding more than ten pounds per head. I think I'm going like 14 right now because I figure the calves are eating part of it.  No, I really have. Well, that's not true. What did that one die from? I'm not sure. I seem to have more cows die from getting stuck on their side than I think should. I don't know what the standard should be. We had one die the other day right after we turned them into a fresh bunch of bales. So maybe I was laying on a circle, maybe it got upside down. But I think the degree of fullness plays a role in them in getting up. So I don't know that I've got very many that just go out and die from bloat.  As far as grazing alfalfa, alfalfa grass mixes, I haven't had any trouble with that. I don't think cows like protein unless they need it. I'll kick them into an alfalfa grass mix and they'll just watch. They'll go out to eat the grass first and then they'll eat some of the alfalfa. But it's better to turn them in in the afternoon when there's no dew on the alfalfa. You get up into North Dakota and up into Canada they do lose cattle from grazing alfalfa mixes to bloat. And water is a key part of that. Maybe, I don't know, half? I don't know. We'd have to ask Dennis in our CS guy. Thank you guys.


Hi everyone, Joe for JaspysCaseBrace.com coming at you with a quick pack break of 2020 Bowman Draft Baseball which will help fill up, pick your team two. We're going to do the break itself first and then at the end of the break we'll re-randomize everybody's name. Name on top, we'll get the Tigers, the Torkelson team right there. Second name down we'll win the Braves and the third name down we'll get the Dodgers as you can see right here. But as always we're going to do the break itself first. Let's roll it. Let's randomize it five and a four nine times for each list, names and teams, nine times break first, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight and ninth and final time. After nine we've got Andrew all the way down to Dean and then different dice roll for the giveaway too by the way. Five and a four nine times for the teams, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight and ninth and final time. After nine times we've got the Orioles down to the White Sox. Alright, Andrew with the Orioles are active for this filler break. I'm not going to read, I've got to save my voice for all the big breaks that we have coming up. Here's the first half of the list right here. There's the second half of the list right there. I guess where are the Tigers on this list? There you go. There you go. In a one-pack break, who knows? No trade windows in these little filler breaks. Let's just go ahead print and rip. Oh, there's an auto here and that Zach Vienn will share. That's pretty good. The auto is Levi Prater. That goes to John Wheat with the Redbirds. Here's some more paper right here. Not too bad. There you go. Nick picked the pack so you can thank Nick. Alright now let's flip back to this screen right here. Now let's grab everybody's names again and then copy and paste it into this list with the new dice roll and then we'll match you up with a team. Top three will be in the next break coming up after this in a different video. Let's roll it, randomize it five and a four, nine, nine times again, didn't I? There is the timestamp here, nine times and then here's the next dice roll, another timestamp. Rolling nines, top three after nine, one, two, three and ninth and final time after nine times. Now from four down to three, I appreciate everybody getting in, thank you. Congrats to the top three. You're in the next break. We've got Andrew, Ryan and Derek. There you go.  Ryan, Harold, you have the Braves and Andrew, Hennessy, you have my Dodgers. And there you go. I'm Joe for Jasper's CaseBreaks.com. I'll see you for that break shortly.


This week in the tent, our bakers will be working on their own twist on a classic American birthday cake. Uh, yeah. No, I actually worked on this recipe with my mom, practiced it at home, and we still aren't talking. So, uh, hopefully this helps patch things up. Kyle enjoys baking at home with his family, and is competing with a very particular goal in mind. I am only here for a Paul Hollywood handshake. I do not care. What else happens? I don't even have to win. I don't. I seriously don't. A handshake? Nobody, I mean nobody, gets to criticize my cooking ever again. Our other semifinalist, Daniel, spends his time baking for a local orphanage. I am excited to give money to those who are in need. I love the show. I'm so happy to be here. I hope all of my fellow competitors have as great of a time as I do. He recently left his job and downgraded to a smaller flat in order to focus on his charity work. It looks like you're struggling a bit to get your sponge cake the right consistency. You used it in order for free? Is it towards you? It's towards me? Well, this is actually my mom's recipe, but I have made some adjustments with you in mind that I think you're just going to love. Well, I hope you don't disappoint your mother. Ah, might be too late for that. Good one though. Put her there. Just right. Right. All right. I like the flavors you're going with this time. Thank you. It's a very clever combination. I like the alcohol. I actually learned this at the orphanage I used to work at, uh, St. Paul's orphanage for limitless children. So all the credit goes to them. Hey, no one cares. It's cooking show, you know, so maybe I'll focus on the cooking. All right. Carry on. He, um, he's very enthusiastic, and I, uh, I wish him all the best. And the bakers will now find out whether they've succeeded or fallen short of Paul and Proust standards. All right, Kyle, you're up first. I think you failed to do the sponge properly. It's much too dense. Hmm. Also, I don't like the flavor much. Where did you get the idea for mint and turmeric? I don't think those flavors pair well together at all. The, uh, icing's runny. It tastes like nothing. I think all in all, it's a poor bake. You'll have to be more careful if you want to make it to the next round. Well, in case I don't, it has been an honor, sir. Just touch my hand. Just touch it. All right. Daniel, let's see what you've got. This may be the best thing I have ever had on the show. Excellent work. Thank you. Yes! I got it. What is the matter with you? Everybody saw that? I got the handshake. I absorbed your power. I don't even need a win now. Good luck, everybody, except Daniel.  Well, I tried my best. I think I did all right. Let's give it a rest, Daniel. Abigail doesn't like the cauliflower or egg because she literally eats rocks. Okay, there's the rocks comment. Yes, we have. Abigail didn't eat rocks 50 times. Why isn't she eating rocks on the floor?