The addition of VCA today, very excited, we got a great lineup today. Our topic is going to be increasing grazing datums in eastern Virginia. And we've got a lot of different topics that I think are going to be covered by our two guest speakers. Everything from stockpiling tall fescue all the way down to using some summer and winter annuals in rotational grazing, touching on some of the greys 300 initiatives within virginia cooperative extension. So with that being said, we're very pleased to have our senior extension agent, our coal pepper Virginia, Mr. call staff for joining us, as well as Mr. Tim Tobin as a producer of swallow Hill Farm and Caroline County, Virginia. And in both of those gentlemen are going to be speaking on these topics as mourn and hopefully facilitate a great discussion afterwards and get some questions answered as we move into the fall grazing season here in eastern Virginia. So to appreciate everyone joining us and call, we appreciate you and tambien with Assess mode, and it will turn it over to you all. Thank you. For video. Stafford with virginia cooperative extension. Where in Madison County, Virginia. And you're coming ONE late winter. It we can hear columns. Cattle had been grays and stockpile since all the end of October first and November. We had a bad season this year. They wanted enough rain. We didn't grow the grass that we needed to to make it through at least 300 days of grazing. But we bought extra, hey, and that's the idea behind grace 300s so you can carry more cattle, feed hay more days, and have smaller nets, but more of them. So total net revenue higher. When you graze more days, these are fall Kevin chaos. Chaos mourned started in August through first of October. And there'll be they'll go to market to June or July as wean vaccinated cattle. So right now the market is separate now, cattle that have not had anything done to them will be as much as a $100 ahead discount compared to Canada lumen Weine in vaccinated, at least double vaccinated in. That's what we're kind of having to go towards now to get those those extra dollars. We're looking at costs between 6, $800 a cow. In effect, that's the value that the calves have got to generate to break even. So it's possible in this market with producer groups to generate as much as $900, maybe a thousand. You gotta have big cattle to do that. But $900 is not a reason on average, between steers and heifers. So if you budgeted 800, it looks like you they'll be able to meet that budget this year into 2020. So we're stripped grace and we've got a poly wire in the foreground. That gives them an allocation of grass by the day. And some are really good at calculating how much grass to give so many feet. The way I do it is I give them a chunk of grass and I look at what's left the next day. So excuse me, in the cattle feeding industry, they call that calling the books. So you offer the cattle in a feed lot, so much diet. The next day you look at what's left and make adjustments. So that's exactly what's going on here, is there's adjustments almost on a daily basis. And the better you get at it, the fewer adjustments you need to make. But there are differences. There's elasticity in this system. It's whether it's whether it's the big factor, but the elasticity is also in the grass. So we measure grass, but we can't measure every square foot. However, the cattle or in our measure and every square foot, every day. So that kinda feedback gives the manager very reliable information to use in our day to day basis. Daily moves just about maxes out the utilization of the grass. You don't want to utilize every bit of it. 80% is a good number. Leave in some residue, not force him to eat stuff that would suppress their performance. And those are just thoughts for you to consider. This is Carl Stafford, grades 300 meters. Okay. So that video is self explanatory. Let me switch to a picture. This is a still shot of bale grazing. So in the lower right-hand corner you can see that poly wire and when I'm doing is moving across this landscape. The bales where preposition and they're turned to the baled hay as they move across a landscape with the graphs, as we'll see, you noticed they've had access to that bail, but now they're refusing to eat it. I'm not real proud way that hey, isn't there pretty proud of the quality of the grass or eating? These are our spring Kevin Kale, first calf heifers actually in. Not, not too hard to keep the conditioner in, but so bale grazing, this really is a fertilizer program and fertility program. You set it out where it's needed. You seen the background mix those patterns where they've eaten a couple males I chose as spots in the spot there in the foreground for, for a place that I thought needs some fertility. One based on a soil sample was based, based on a visual appraisal of the voice. So bale grazing or there's a big grant in, by several states led by West Virginia and Kentucky in Virginia is to spending in that we hope to learn from it and make some definitive statements about, about male grazing. So we will finish up with a classic. You all can see that and you think so. Extinction, people do a lot of this with PowerPoints and I've tried not to do it all that way. Grace 300 is a random program. Virginia walk the extinction thinks there's value in and so do I. And it originally started in 2005 and it's an understated the principle of trying to get people to graze your RAM will found that backed into the idea that it actually was less profitable to graze year-round. And we'll get into that. So what is a Bobby Clark prepared this this PowerPoint, so I give him credit for that. If you're doing anything, never use somebody else's work without giving them credit. And so it's a systems approach and we're going to focus on stock and rate those for resources, labor and, and in theory, try to graze 300 days. And so why? Why 300 days? Well, we're about trying to reduce that biggest cost. And so folks, when we're when we're Grayson and the big boys are feet and hey, we're competing with them economically to me, that's a, it's the only thing a small producer can do to compete with the big operators who have all the other advantages of you can figure out how to graze more days of the year. You begin to compete with the big ones that can, you know, by, by the palette and sale by the trail load. And we don't do any of that, but we can control our biggest cost. And that's one of the things that I think drives this. So we're going to make some money that way. And so how do you do it? Well, you've gotta have nature to cooperate with you. I'm not reading all the stuff that isn't in writing there, but you've gotta have rain first and then you gotta have rate and time. So if it waits to October to reign, you've lost couple of months ago and season it's it's wet now, at least in my area. I hope it isn't yours in it began in the fall, stockpiling in really good shape. You gotta have some control of the animals that infrastructure that the districts and the USDA or paying for are great and they're giving you some control if you use it. And then you've got to have some, some filling in the gaps with whether it's bale grazing or so manuals. But keeping keeping those cancel well fed and were often renting land. So maybe we can't pay the mortgage on a piece of land. The wicking, she'll pay the rent. And then that stock and rate really drives it. So you've gotta cow-calf pair to the acre. You're going to be theta1, hey, before Thanksgiving. And you probably already know that Bobby has made a nice graph here about. But in the cows, the count population on the lower right, lower left as the biggest ties talk and write at that farm, 250 acres, so experienced and then over to the right. And so what you find is that the return begins to go down if you were animals, of course, but the high gross isn't that big herd of cows. And let's see what that was all about. So that high gross was over a $100 thousand. And but they, they didn't make any money rights and they will all 6 thousand new net group of cows, but they sure grossed a lot of money and that would often be the approach. In fact, it might be the normal approach and I'm workout will make us more money, right? If you make money. Now the comparison is the ad, is the 300 days and it's yttrium figures by 200 cows less, didn't gross near the money but needed. Goodman made it $36 thousand of a $200 here. And you see all around the net off the $200 in profit is, is not bad and we can make that, make them do something force. And so I'll quit right there and if the floor over to Tim. So I'd like to give you a little bit of background on our farm. We we raise grass finished beef for direct sale to consumer. And an indirect sale, the consumer gives us a bit more flexibility and that we can make a better margin per animal. And, and the background of this picture you can see summer annuals and, and that's prior to the first grazing. And lets me alright, so we have a 142 acres here on the farm and about a 100 of it is open. We lost a little bit when we put in the livestock exclusion system. This slide gives you an idea of our paddock layout. We once had at 22 large fields that we would run our cattle in, pretty much in set stocking. But we found through the education that we've received and, and through practice that we actually can extend and increase their availability of forage by rotating our animals. And so we have 11 paddocks. This kinda runs a little counterclockwise. But each of these paddocks are divided into smaller segments. And and you can see, if you look at paddock to be you can just barely see where the the next couple of rotations have occurred. One, that darker green is starting to disappear from right to left. And that's where the cattle are being, are being grazed it in this particular picture, we have, fortunately with the assistance of the NRCS and the soil and water conservation district, we were able to install a watering system when we installed our rotational grazing strategy. And in the blue, in this picture gives you an idea of where water is. We have 28 permanent watering points. A lot of those are quick K'nex or, or frost-free hydrants. But again, having this infrastructure really helps us in our ability to extend our grazing because we can extend the availability of, of our forages by allowing that, that forage, whether it's perennials are annuals to bounce back, it's grazed one day, they move to the next little cell. That grass gets the chance to start covering. And it is usually a month or more before we come back around and grace that same piece of ground. Again, our operational strategy is to raise naturally produced products. Are advantage is, as a fortunate thing, even though this area is a little higher cost where accessibly located between Richmond in DC where less than ten minutes for my 95. And we'll get a lot of drop in folks. And maximizing our forage production. We have. When we first got into the rotational grazing thing, we, we recognize that a lot of our perennial pastures are not producing that well. So we've started renovating our perennial pastures with improved varieties. Every year we put a little bit of additional overseeing in mostly ligands, but also some brassicas, clovers. Hairy vetch, things like that do really well. Just by being for all seated, Perry benches kind of a large seed, but it does well with proceeding. We also double crop seasonal annual. It's an expensive process because we spend around $15, I'm sorry, $1500 in the spring and again in the fall. For the seeds alone, to plant those seeds, seasonal animals. But the biomass production is amazing and that's one of the things we found is we can produce a lot of high-quality forages for our cattle to eat and has a lot of great diversity, gives us great ground cover so that we can encourage the development of soil microbes. We've also started to establishing native warm season grasses. Are first paddock to be done was Eastern gamma grass and we just started grazing that this year. Given that it's his first year, we're not hit that too hard, but so far with grazed at twice, we expected grades at least once or once again before the fall. And as I mentioned before, the daily moves help until the forage is gone. Some years we graze all the way into late January, early February, will be grazing those cool season annuals. I would say the majority of years. We are not as fortunate to to be able to do that because we either have a dry fall or it's too wet. Just as Carl said, it really depends on the, the, whether, whether you are able to grow a good crop are not matching livestock to available forage. That's the area where I think we need to do a better job in. We have been working to grow our livestock herds. We do we do cattle in and sheep as well. So we've been trying to increase the amount of production on our land. And of course, the, the ultimate conclusion to that is you find that you're overstocked. We produce beef, lamb had been producing goat. We do eggs and honey as well. So this gives you an idea of the production that we're currently getting off of our our farm. Do you think we need to cut back a little bit on our beef? We have 75 beef animals. That's not animal units, that's actual price, actual beef. We produce 20 to 25 finished beef per year. With sheep we have 26 Use, that'll produce 30 to 40 finished lambs. Chickens, we do eggs, that gives us over 1000 dozen a dozen eggs, beehives. The honey has been an amazing product line. Unfortunately, bees are challenged to keep. And and we work on kind of increasing that. We got up to 23 hives, but that was a little hard to manage. So we're ranted about that acheive level right now. We have guard lamas to protect our small animals and hogs we buy into r by n to outperform. This is, may be helpful to some folks, but this is kind of a rough and dirty revenue projections spreadsheet. Just to, you know, you can do this on your farm just to see what kind of revenue you might be able to bring in. And then of course, you have to work on the cost side. Most of this is gross revenue. Some of it as an example, the hogs, because we, we buy them and I've put in basically what our expected net is after paying for the hog. So we should get $200 per hog. And we, we purchase anywhere from six to ten. And take directly temperature so we don't have to worry about them. Consuming product forges off of our, our farm. Our sales strategy. We want to produce a high quality autosome DPH. They're, the prices are based on USDA grass-fed beef report at least until this year. This year has changed a little bit because of the coded issues. Beef prices has been going crazy all across, all across the country. And we've, we've increased our beef prices by about 18%, which is below what if prices nationally are doing? We sell most of our product. Buy shares, quarters, halves and holes. We, we reserve about 25% of the animals we take to the butcher to be sold by the individual cut in our store here on the farm and work open seven days a week. Our biggest challenge right now as is meeting the demand that people are showing four grass finished beef. So there's an opportunity out there for producers. If you're not already taking advantage of that, it's best to be at price setter rather than a price taker. If you have that opportunity to be able to set your prices and, and, and draw that, that this to your farm. It's a lot better than having to take your, your animals to the livestock market and basically take whatever they may give you a form. We do refer unmet needs to other farms. You know, we can't produce enough beef to satisfy our customer base. So folks that do a really good job raising grass finished beef, we refer our customers to if we're not able to meet their needs. I mentioned improving perennial pastures. We have we have our pastures on a rotation now trying to replace them with a more productive forage, this field was receded, are basically started from scratch. And 2016 we planted alfalfa max Q fescue orchard grass, and Ladino clover. And this this is the way I looked at the beginning of a grazing, grazing season. More just a little before the grazing season. And you can see little scary because you end up taking this this whole paddock out when you're renovating it. But what you get in return is a very highly productive. Pasture that also is very good for your animals because you, you're, you're replacing, eliminating the, the into fight infested and Fest in fact, are infected fescue, that's interesting to say, with a non-infected or a beneficial and define fescue. So the animals produced really well on this. I pretty much exclusively allow these paddocks that we've renovated with this mix. For our finishing beef, we finish steers and heifers. And they really do put on the pounds when we have them on this this type of forage. This is just showing how the alfalfa looks in the pasture. And what's interesting is even though alfalfa is supposed to have a pretty long recovery time with the deep root that they alfalfa has. It comes back a lot faster than the fescue and the orchard grass does. So I've been really impressed with its performance. It's hard to get a really good stand inside of fescue orchard grass pasture, especially if you're just doing no till seeding is we do getting that seed bed right for that little small alfalfa seed is somewhat of a challenge. This is the second grazing. If you look at the picture on the right, that's the second grazing this season of our eastern gamma grass pasture. And so it responded really fast after that first grazing, it jumped up quite quick and the big clumps as you see in there are like add Susan. So we'd have issues with with encroaching weeds just like anybody does. But the cows love that, perform really well. This is a, is an image of some, some of are highly productive bank annuals. Are cows just can't wait to get in there. We run both are finishing heard and our cow calf heard in there. And, and they all love it boy, when they run out, they they really give me a hard time. And this is a picture of how tall the fork ridges app I'll narrow it down and they don't eat. They'd tramp along to the ground and it helps to build our soil. These are pictures of some of our finishing animals. And and they really do gain Well on, on both of these. The one on the left is is the annual pasture. The one on the right is the perineal pasture. And like I say, there was finishing paddocks are pretty much reserved for the finishing beef. We want to give them the very best forages. And and when they run through, we kind of run them through as quickly as we can, give them as much as they can, as much as they can eat in a day. And don't worry about eating everything. And then we'll run that that the cows and calves back through there and let them do the cleanup. These are some pictures of our Seasonal annuals which you see on the left from December 2017, that was the year we were able to to graze all the way into the end of January. And that includes a lot of brassicas and tillage radishes. And those cows get down in there and they'll they'll pull the radishes right up. Generally they'll eat about half of them and they will eat the greens on top. And, and if the weather is right, some of that will re-grow that same winner. But by a spring, you've got more to graze. And the picture on the right is the most recent view of the animals that were growing or grew. Our guru this past winter. And it was a little slow to get going. But boy, when it came on, it came on strong. And and that's our finishing heard in their eating that mix of cool season annuals. Another opportunity for increasing production, not so much increasing the forage availability, but heat stress management. And, and are the picture on the left was our strategy for dealing with our finishers when they're out in the summer annuals where we have no shade and I just have a a spring quarter there and they they knew to come over. They would come over to the fence line up and I'll turn the sprinkler on, cool them down and they go back out and grazing and turn the, turn the sprinkler off. But a better strategy is to provide shade for them. If you have, if you have trees in your paddocks, it's good to be able to give them access to that. But an even better strategy in my mind is the portable shade structure because you can actually move it around. You can put, put it where you have some poor soil and of course what they'll do when they're grazing, they'll eat, they'll come back, they'll lounge around underneath the shade and they'll deposit all those nutrients in that area. So you're basically it's almost like and where you can have them drop the nutrients in that particular area. And that will help you to maximize the production of forage on your farm. Improve the areas that are, are not as highly productive as they could be. So. So what's next course that these are a couple of our products that we produce here. But what's next in my mind for our farm, we try to do something a little somethin every year to improve our performance. In what's next for us is finding that sweet, sweet spot. We feel way too much. Hey, we do extend our forges using those different techniques. The native warm season grasses fill in that summer slump that you see with with fescue based pastures. And the annuals fill in a little bit more of the summer slump as well as the slump that we see during the wintertime. So finding that sweet spot is trying to figure out exactly what the best stocking rates going to be for our farm. And and I think reducing the stocking rate a little bit is actually going to increase our, our net revenue because we are buying way too much. Hey, and whenever time is right, I will be happy to answer any questions folks may have about how we do things here as well. A little farm. Thank you. All right. Thank you. Ten, We really appreciate you taking some time to join us this morning. Excellent presentation. With that being said, I just took a look at the chat window and I don't see any any questions or comments there, so I guess at this time thank you again, call and Tim for joining us this morning. So go to your favorite was when you sin to slaughter the minimum that we use for the animals as 18 months for the heifers and 24 months for the steers that we end up. That's basically trying to figure out what the minimum it is. But we that usually usually occurs between higher seasonal harvest periods. We harvest our animals in June and October. So ideally, our animals will be just short of 30 months for steers and about 20 to 22 months for our heifers. And, and we found that the quality of the meat is by far more superior. The longer we go, we get a lot better. We get a lot better marbling by waiting. And I kind of think about it like my teenagers when I was when I was younger and when I was in college, I can eat anything. I can eat as much of that is I wanted to. But once I became a, I guess a full fledged adult, it wasn't hard to put on weight. But I couldn't put on weight. I was trying to I was trying to achieve a certain weight when I was younger, couldn't do it. I can eat as much as I wanted to do, as much as I wanted to eat and I couldn't gain that, that extra weight. And I think that's the way the cattle are when they're younger. It's difficult to put that weighed on him on a grass based system. I think if you were able to sit that ice cream, corn in the grain in front of them. They of course, can gain a lot of weight, but, but it's more difficult on forage. And and our customers are very pleased with the product they receive. Tim, I see a question here in the chat as an absolute price, your meat products. Historically, we priced our meat products using the USDA report on grass finished beef. And and as I mentioned before, that's changed a little bit because the USDA report doesn't really keep up with what's going on with this coronavirus. And so to supplement our, our knowledge about pricing will, will look at businesses like Wegman's and, and other grocery stores to look at their grass finished beef prices and set to some extent based on that. And and the, the total revenue per animal that we receive is anywhere from $2800 or an animal up to over $3,400 and animal. So a lot of that depends, of course, on there hanging weight. But then when we started out, we were starting at the, the low for the USDA grass finished beef prices. But as we develop more and more demand, we're moving that price more toward the average for the grass finished beef prices. We also use there's a there's a grass finished lamb, goat report that comes out as well that have quite as good information in it. But we utilize that. We set our land prices at the 50th percentile, right at the average for grass finished lamps on that USDA report. You know, one of the things you, you remember probably about economics is it's a supply demand type of thing. If you have more supply than the customers demanding, your price is going to have to be lower if you have more demand than you have supply, which witches are fortunate problem right now, you can work, gradually work your pricing up. I don't see us setting prices be up above that 50th percentile. But if you look online at grass finished beef prices at these, at these websites that that ship products those are selling online are probably twice what we're charging. So there's a lot of, it was lot of range there for farmers to look at, to be able to draw some additional revenue went to their farm. That your next subject area reminds me that in eastern Virginia and in the co-pay for area, you know that, that crop harvest residue corn stops in particular. It's a wonderful resource if you could just get, figure out a way to, to utilize it in me became my measure in corn yield might broader some thinking, gosh, this looks like good feed right after harvest, didn't know, or some grain on the gram. So you, you graze and people listening today figuring out how to use some of that core stump residue and talk to your corn growers, enriched some land from or something. So overcome the water in the fields and then get that corn stalk residue into your grace and playing. Him isn't like broadest Hayden today? Hey, good my car, you I'm good, sir. Good to hear from me. Youtube with ambulate all. Yes. Oh, damn. I gotta question. Wouldn't walk and what does your stocking rate? I have been by your farm and I had seen you grow that grandma grass and I did not know what it was. I thought it was Sudan grass. What's up front is sorghum Sudan grass. Ok. Yeah. So that our stock and rate is about 1.3 acres to animal. Now the or to to the beef animal. That's not a that's not 1.3 acres per animal unit. So it's probably a little higher than that. It's probably about 1.5 acres per animal unit. Okay. And though early on you said you weren't brazen 300 days a year, but you wanted to and I've been trying I've been redone. Unfortunately be The real incentive for farmers as to keep adding animals so that you can increase your revenue. But of course, as you increase your animals, you increase your, your costs, especially at that upper end in an exponential way. So every animal you add, add, it might add my data $1000 of revenue to you. But if you're spending $1500 on, on hay or on other expenses, it's not a good ad for your business. And, you know, we've been really struggling to try to meet our customer demand. But at some point you have to say, as I mentioned before, here's another good farm that you can take a look at. And, and if all of us work together as producers that are trying to meet the customer need, we can capture that customer base and our region rather than having them go to places like Wegman's or ordering offline or online. So there's no reason why I have to try to keep everybody in in my customer base if I'm not meeting their needs, it just frustrates that many more people, so send them to, send it to a friend, send him to another farmer that is doing a good job. And by that, we support the ag community. We support the family owned farms. And it's a good thing for our community. Yes, sir. The bulk of that vector, that gamma grass, I was very impressed with the pick you, you, so you just showed up gamma grass. It looks to be a provided a local quantity. It does and it's a little more thinly spaced than I would like ultimately, but there's gonna be a lot of receding that goes on. And it was, it was already producing seed this year. We planted that gamma grass plot in December of 2018. So this past year, we didn't graze that pasture at all and we burned it in the spring. I'm going to want to save, burned it burned with fire, not with not with glyphosate. And and it came back really nicely. Gotcha. That, ya know, and those producers who play it, Bermuda grass, the plant cramp gray as well in July and August and early September grazing. I've never I've never dealt with gamma. I said I had to look it up actually will do with all. Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to combine some time. I'll show you around JP's coming by today to help me figure out what's going on with my other native warm season grass. We just plan we did it in blue stem lowest him an indian grass. So I'm looking to see if that's going to give us good production as well in the summertime, you know, all of you guys know better than than I did. Probably. The the fescue in this area as soon as it turns hot, man, it just turns off, right? And and so you've gotta have something that fills in that gap. I think folks that live in the up the higher elevations out west and the Blue Ridge, you can get a little better production because you've got cooler nights. But in this area, that stays. In the eighties at night, and that just q just shuts down at that time. Thank you. Thank you, sir. My pleasure. Thank you. We'll call attempt the question that I had and maybe you can just touch on this a little bit briefly. I know, I know a lot of producers rely pretty heavily on fertilizer fertilizer usage in late February, early March on their pasture Lana stuff. Can you all talk a little bit about maybe some results or which you've seen. I know you both briefly mentioned utilizing refuge, hey, moving around your shade areas and stuff to kind of strategically placed some of those nutrients and a passion. But could you talk a little bit about how you have seen that work throughout the years and maybe incorporating some of these legumes into your Pratt pastures to help with some of that nitrogen credit, Have you seen a big benefit to that and may be a reduction in, in more traditional fertilizer usage through some of those better management methods. Come on, you're going to start. I've I've substituted the purchase of poultry litter, ten same dollars and bought hay and so haze now my fertilizer program and what drives it is understanding that once you have a long-term pasture, there's a nitrogen cycle in that ground. And organic matters the source of that nitrogen and as it breaks down, it releases carbon dioxide and you can run a carbon dioxide test to get an indication if your ground is released and the amount of nitrogen you hope you should have. And so alan France Lucas, USDA Ag research services, the source of this information. He's done work all over many, many locations. So if you've got an old pasture, nitrogen is probably not needed in that pasture. Now, you'll get a boost from the nitrogen, but is it an economic boost? And that's Allen's work is, is the yield you get from added nitrogen paying for itself. And then in many cases it's not. So the distribution of that bale grazing, it is important that the males go where the land needs it in. That's, that's my fertilizer program. Now that sounds pretty familiar. Sounds like what we're doing to large part when we first started using the annual. So we fertilized after every planting wants that forage started to come up. We'd put fertilizer on it. And, and that really increased our cost of production quite a bit. So we've been working to get away from that, working to build the soil life on our farm so that we can get that natural nutrient cycling working here and a much better way. And as I mentioned, we also process seed, a lot of legumes on our perennial pastures and that produces a lot of nitrogen for us. I'd say in the normal year we probably have a good 30% legumes and our pastures in the, in the established pasture, the older pasture. That legume also helps to dilute the toxic into fight that's in the fescue. So that's a good thing from that standpoint as well. This past year we put 200 tons of poultry litter on our farm. And the idea there was this is going to be a game changer for us. It Gets our soil nutrient values to the, the proper level that we can actually have that, that cycling of nutrients would get enough potassium and phosphorus for the other revenues. And seven are ground now. And if we can get that to continue to cycle, will do a lot, do a lot better financially. And making that transition from fertilizing with commercial fertilizers to not fertilizing with those commercial fertilizers has been a difficult transition. We can see the drop in forage production as a result of denying that, that quick boost of nitrogen to our forages. But every time I think to myself, OK, I need to, I need to throw a little more fertilizer out there. It looks like it's start and slow. I just try to calm myself down, be patient. And I've been surprised if you can get past that, that what looks like a little slump and growth where things are starting to yellow. I don't know if they're really get down to a certain level and start tapping into nutrients or whatever. But it comes back around and, and we're committed at this point to avoiding any use of commercial fertilizers on our farm going forward. Now we probably will have to put more poultry litter later on from time to time. But every crop we have in the ground has legumes in it and it is fixing nitrogen for us. So there's really not any need to put it, put nitrogen down. And if you do you actually, you actually set your soul back and you set your legumes back, they don't need to work. And that symbiotic relationship with the soil biology to create that nitrogen. They just take it from whatever you give it. And, and I think it diminishes your, your future production. And, and basically it's like a crack addict. Now your land, your, your soil is dependent on that commercial fertilizer. And you're going to have to keep on using it. So it's a tremendous cost to put down half of the nutrient value on our farm that we did with the, with the chicken litter. It would cost us the same amount that it costs us to put twice as much in the twice as much for commercial as Sorry, I've got somebody dial and in here I'll me twice as much for the commercial fertilizers as it does for chicken letter. Boosters, listen and need to remember the words removal. So if you've got a hay harvest, you remember nutrients, you gotta replace him and hard, maybe for some b, feed hay back on the hay land, but that would solve part of the new removal issue. We tend to feed over on pasture and not all these nutrients and pasture. But if we could feed it back when we took the nutrients from we could we could still keep that balance in, in place. Yet we, we stopped making, hey, a couple of years ago. In fact, this year I sold all my hey equipment because Costs me as much to bail it, make it as it does for me to buy it. And and so if I'm taking those nutrients off, it's really hard to get it back where it took it from. Even if your bale grazing, it's still kind of clumpy. So we, we, as you do Carl, what we see are our cost for our cost for our, hey, a portion of that as our, as our fertilizer strategy. So when we're buying a bale of alfalfa or a bale of regular, hey, we figure about 20 to $25 of that is going to be nutrient value. So, you know, I don't feel, I don't feel quite as bad about buy-in hey, because of the fact that I'm importing all those all those nutrients to our farm. Thank you, Tim, and call that. That's exactly what I was hoping to share with folks. And any other questions or comments for our guest speakers S more kind of a last call before we wrap things up. Be on the lookout for work that gave pant is doing it. The steels term Research Center, a Rick and he's he's looking at some of this nitrogen economics and is there a, is there a economic boost in, in production? And then also he's given to you. Co2 is greys in this early in its restarts the growth curve. So look into them. Alright, thank you. Call any any other questions? Last call. Alright, well, not hearing anything. Thank you again, Carl and Tim, we really appreciate your time this morning. Thank you for joining us and sharing those great updates, great presentations on both of those gentlemen have a wealth of knowledge. So if you have future questions or if something pops in your mind after the presentation this morning, just reach out to you, to your county extension agent will be glad to work. Were called Tim, hopefully maybe get you an answer to your questions. So thank you both again for your time this morning. Enjoin us present next week, just to make an announcement you see on your screen there next week, our topic of discussion is going to be planning for wheat planting season. That's as fast approaching us here. So we're gonna have our small grain extension specialist, Dr. Wade Thomas and join us, as well as a local producer and retired extension agent, Mr. Paul Davis, I New Kent County. They're gonna give us some tips on, on Considerations for wheat planning. Polls go maybe share a little bit of some of his success and he's a very successful small brain producer, has wheat yields near a 100 or over, so bushels to the acre. So we're going to hopefully have a great comment and presentation from those two gentlemen next week. So please join us next Thursday morning at nine AM for that. Also, if you joined us this morning, please take a few moments to fill out our evaluation. Think Stephanie was generosity to post that into the chat box, the link to that. So please take a few seconds to evaluate the programs. Share any comments, recommendations if you have a topic of interest that you'd like to see us do a session on, please, please share that with us. We really encourage your feedback. And lastly, I'd just like to thank the production team. This effort of BCA today, all of us ages that are involved, especially my colleague, agent Stephanie Rommel check and Westmoreland county, lower Maxine a. In Hanover County. Mike brought us and Caroline and King George County and Trent Jones into a fumble and in Lang, faster counting. And also the help that we've had from some of our summer interns this year, Shelly Underwood and scholar swan. So thank you all for your efforts and making this possible. So with that being said again, just like to thank everyone for joining us as always, please help spread the word about the program to anyone you think would benefit from Join unless each week. Thank you again and hope everyone has a great rest of the week. Thanks Robbie, U2.