The interviews compiled for another special episode Stories from the Field feature Erin Ruhel
and Doug Schuster of Westfield Properties in St. John, Washington, Frank Wolfe of Lester
Wolfe Farms talking with Subodh Adhikari of the University of Idaho in Uniontown, Washington
and Derek Schafer of Schafer Farm and Ranch in Lind, Washington. If you want to hear more
from any of these guests you can find their full length interviews in the On-Farm Trials podcast
archives.
Erin and Doug
Erin Ruehl
I’m Erin, I’m Doug’s daughter. I’ve been farming here with my dad for about five years officially but unofficially I’ve been I was raised on this farm I’ve grown up doing a lot of the things that I’m doing now and I took a little hiatus in going to college and then got a job in Seattle for a couple of years, and then after that decided that I really wanted to come back and give this a shot, and so I came back in January of 2019 and I’ve been here ,you know, just helping dad do the farm thing ever since.
Doug Schuster
We’re not really an anomaly either, there’s several gals, young gals, your age gals in our area that have come back to help their dad farm, so that’s really cool, and yeah, she hasn’t been doing it for five years, she’s been doing it for about 26.
Doug Schuster
I first started [and] had her feeding calves when she was about two.
Erin Ruehl
So, in high school I was like, I’m getting the heck out of dodge, I don’t think this is for me, I want to go out and do something else with my life, so I actually went to WSU and got a degree in construction management, and that took me to Seattle where I worked for a large general contractor for about two and a half years. My husband and I kind of met over there and started dating, even though we also went to college together, but he’s from Spokane originally, so we always kind of talked about moving back, and when the opportunity presented itself and we left Seattle, I kind of thought ,you know, I want to be involved in the farm in some capacity because I don’t want to see it. At that point my parents have started talking about like what their future retirement might look like if neither one of us came back to the farm and I was like, God I don’t want to lose this ,you know, it’s such an important part of my childhood, and I want it to be there for my future kids, and so I thought, well, here’s an opening in my career where I don’t have a job lined out, and so why don’t I just go back and try it, and if it’s horrible and I don’t like it I still have you know, other opportunities to get a job, and if it is for me, then I gave it a shot. So with that we moved back here and I started working on the farm full-time, and it’s been- I think it’s been going great.
Doug Schueter
I think it’s been going just fine.
And there’s lots of things she can still learn. A lot of shop work. We started out with and got her hands dirty building the 350 Chevy engine first thing.
Doug Schuster
I started here working for my uncle in 1979, and I didn’t know it at the time but my uncle was none too pleased to have to babysit his older brother’s kid, and I mean, he put me right on the hard stuff right away, digging fence posts, picking up rocks ,you know, anything to try and break me, and I loved it. I mean, it was years before he even let me drive a tractor ,you know,.
I went to WSU as well, my dad really wanted all of us kids to get a four-year education, he’s an alum as well. so even though I was really focused on this, he said, you go get your dang degree and then ,you know, you can do what you want, and so after four years, it was about three years in, my uncle picked up some new ground and he said, what’s your plan after college? And I said well, if I get a job ,you know, in irrigation or something. He says, well, I got some new ground I could use the help right away, and I said, done.
Doug Schuster
We’re right on the edge of the channeled scab here, I mean, the road you came in on, one side is farm ground the other side is rock, so we do have too many cows because we’re right here next to the rock and you can’t do anything else with it, so as those pieces have become available, we’ve gotten the lease on them, and- but rainfall here can be around 16 inches I would say, a lot of the hills here where, you know, they’ve eroded away because of the great flood are, rather steep and fairly difficult to manage, but it’s fairly good soil, but canola’s, it seems like a good moneymaker, I really really like what it does underground in the soil, and it’s really easy to no-till back into a winter wheat.
we’re building soil literally with with putting that much organic matter in the ground via root structure and those types of things you can’t see overnight, you know, it takes years and years and years to see results but, you know, we’ve been doing that and some other interesting things as far as, you know, growing organic matter or, you know, redistributing organic matter but it takes it takes years and years and years so I can see it from the combine cab, you know, when you get on one of those hilltops and in years past you were eating half barley and half dirt and then one year you’re like wait a minute my headers not in the dirt and I’m clipping off all the heads this is working, you know, so it’s growing better crops on those marginal pieces.
Erin Ruehl
We’re trying to make money every year, as dad has said in the past, but we’re also trying to like do- we’re trying to do more with less inputs we’re trying to like improve the quality of the soil year over year basically trying to just like leave things in better shape over time than they were when we started.
Carol McFarland
So when your daughter grows up to want to be a farmer like her mom, she’s got some great soil to take on.
Doug Schuster
The goal is trying to leave it better than then when you first got here, that’s- we had to do that in Boy Scouts when we went camping, you know, you made sure to [have] left an area better than when you got there, and that’s what you want to do in farming, it, we- back then, me and my uncle both chose not to do CRP. A lot of the neighbors have capped off the hilltops, and they just don’t farm them anymore, because they don’t produce, so you put them in the CRP program and get a payment for growing grass, but we bowed our neck and said, we’re not gonna do that so my hills are still all in crop, so how do you make those hills do better is the big focus.
I don’t know how many years ago a piece of ground up the road we used to farm and we had a big hay barn right next to it and we were getting down to the end of the hay and my uncle said, you know, that’s just crap hay there, they’re broken bales, you know, there’s nothing we can do about them, why don’t you put those on a trailer and run them up here on this hill, just a really onry little hill just yards away from the barn,
the hay bales just decomposing and providing organic matter or water holding capacity for the wheat plant, and it was just it was really amazing, the difference in the size of the plant, I can’t speak to whether it yielded more, but it sure looked better, and the more organic matter you grow, the more you have, so when you’re growing a crappy crop up on top of the hill,
Erin’s coming back and she’s super excited about the the compost idea you know, what a great way to get rid of excess material and so I kind of put her onto the job and we were doing the videos then and she was really having a good time teaching you know, what we’re doing and and then one day when we were in some bad conditions she went for a hell of a ride off a hill with the 40,000 pound tractor and a 40,000 pound spreader.
Doug Schuster
If you want to keep your daughter driving the tractor, you can’t let it scare the pants off you, because then it’s like, I don’t want to do that anymore, that was scary, so got to find something that she’s comfortable with and, you know, you got to get back on the horse. But that was not a fun ride.
You know, you pick your most eroded on knobs and your you know, your worst pieces and you just isolate those little spots so it’s not a huge cash outlay and once again you always got to be very mindful of the fact that this is not gonna give you a return on investment in one year you know, it’s gonna take years and so we’re gonna continue to do those spots and you know, either with that or now we’ve kind of segued into the cover crop thing in those same areas trying to grow the organic matter, you know, underground with a seed rather than sprinkling it on top.
Erin Ruehl
The goal is to, like, improve the yield across the field, right? And the areas that there is definitely a margin to do so is where the yields are not great to begin with, I mean, there’s not as much improvement that you can have in the areas that are the draws and the good ground, because that soil is already doing pretty much as good as it’s going to be able to do but obviously there’s a lot of room for improvement where you have shallow soils, where you’re not growing a lot of crops you have less water holding capacity so if you can improve the soils in those areas then you can increase the margin of yield by a substantial amount and then therefore increase the yield overall across the whole field, so.
Erin Ruehl
It speaks to just this like innate knowledge, I mean you’ve been working with the land for some years right, and so you just have an innate knowledge of what it looked like when you started, and what it looks like now ,and you maybe don’t have any like data to say that it’s improved but you just know that it’s better because you’ve seen results year over year.
Doug Schuster
That’s all I can tell you, I mean, I’m going to be working on getting the yield monitors or whatnot, but at least in the combine that I have a monitor in, the data just it’s so obvious you know, I’m like I know the draws are better I know that hillside had too many wild oats or something you know, I know these things sitting in the seat and now you’ve shown me on the screen, but my little areas are so small that I don’t think…I just don’t know that we’re gonna see it. Maybe. I mean I think a better test for it is, is that field in general doing better over the course of 20 years, even in a drought year?
Erin Ruehl
I think, like, aside from dad just knowing, in my opinion I think the theory of cover crop is really good and I think that, again, it’s not something that’s going to just, like, instantly change things, I think you have to keep doing it a lot of times in order to see good results, so I think that’s kind of what we keep going back to it, like we really believe that like there’s something there, and like in theory this is going to work, and we just believe in that, and so we want to keep trying it long enough to determine whether or not like we are making a difference.
Doug Schuster
Well, I think my daughter would say if I take better notes and do a journal we could keep better track of it. It’s all up here, don’t worry about it!
Erin Ruehl
So we’re involved in the U of I cover cropping experiment, and then we were also involved in one that the Palouse conservation district is sponsoring or putting on and that one we really focused on pasture cover crop, and so we’re gonna be trying that again because last year it didn’t quite go the way that we wanted it to, but we also had a lack of moisture, so that could have been why, so we’re just kind of choosing several little spots out there that have, like, really shallow soil or not growing a lot of grass or do grow grass on years that there’s a lot of moisture and then tend to not grow very much in years like last year, and so we put out a cover crop mix that had like some clovers and some triticale and had millet and peas in it, I think, things that we thought would be good forages for cattle that might take root and then come back the next year and we could just kind of you know, build on them to improve like these pasture areas, so we’re gonna try that again and hopefully see better results.
Doug Schuster
We’re still very nervous about bloat. I mean, we don’t understand the bloat thing good enough to risk just having a bunch of legs up cows out there.
Erin Ruehl
But you’re also doing the U of I thing again.
Doug Schuster
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. We got several more experiments and I said the compost thing is gonna happen again this year, and we’ll just figure out how to get that done.
Erin Ruehl
I think it’s just interesting to like see what happens you know, because I think that something always happens that you’re not expecting either like you know, it doesn’t work out the way that you wanted and you’re like, okay well what happened there or you know, it just does something interesting that you weren’t expecting and you’re like, oh that’s cool, let’s see if we can make that happen again. I don’t know, I think it’s exciting to just talk about and figure out what’s going on out there.
Doug Schuster
it takes a lot of time to do those things and you know, you’d rather be going on vacation or spending family time or going golfing you know, anything that everybody else has got their seeds in the ground and we’re still trying to amend soil you know, so that time constraint.
Erin Ruehl
Oh, every day’s family time!
Erin Ruehl
something that I roll around in my mind all the time, it’s like, how do you make water not the limiting factor for growing cover crops and then your cash crop? Because what I’ve seen in- just in growing hay is that in irrigated hay specifically, when you have a lot of cover and the ground is shaded you seem to have an abundance of water there because the ground is shaded and it’s not evaporating. So, in theory when your cover crop is like all leafed out you should be shading the ground and therefore retaining the moisture, yet it always seems to be that when you terminate the cover crop and then go to seed your cash crop into it, the moisture is gone. So how do we stop gap that is what I want to try and figure out.
Erin Ruehl
one thing that I think is really cool is I didn’t have a lot of female role models in ag when I was a kid, and now just like the amount of girls and women actually that I know that have come back to farm and are farming with their dads and stuff, I think that that will be really cool for my daughter to see is that there are you know, several of us out here doing this, so I think that’s one way that it’s changing. Um, I think another thing that’s changing that I think is really cool and exciting is just like ag’s outreach. I think there’s a lot of people who recognize that like consumers are pretty out of touch with where their food is coming from, and how important it is to consumers to like actually know who’s producing their food, and where it’s coming from and try to have it be local if possible, and so I think that’s something that’s really going to you know, continue and grow in ag in my lifetime, and so just to like try and be a part of that as much as possible I think is you know, in everyone’s best interest and is just really good for like communities,
Frank and Subodh
Frank Wolf
My name is Frank Wolf from Farm in southeast Washington State, just south of Pullman. I’m a fourth generation on our farm, I farm with my brother Ben.
We annual crop 100% of our cropping system, and we’re integrating cover crops without through that cropping system as well. Crops that we grow are winter wheat, spring wheat, spring barley, garbanzo beans, peas and canola. The rotation is determinant on kind of profitability levels. Our rainfall is anywhere from 16 to 22 inch rainfall for this. South farm is right on the bricks of the Lewiston Canyon .
So all the soils are extremely deep around here, but they have aspects of heavy clay on the ridges, clay knobs, very deep loam soils.
Subodh Adhikari
Yes, sure. I’m Subodh Adhikari, the current research assistant professor at the University of Idaho. It’s been almost six years that I have been working at University of Idaho of before as a post doc. But right now as a faculty there, my primary research is to work on or develop some diversified climate change, resilient cropping system and how those diversify due to climate change and diversified systems can impact pest regulation, insect pests regulation, weed suppression, as well as supporting beneficial insects such as pollinators. And that’s what I work on.
We initiated talking to eight different farmers in the region from Washington and Idaho, and then we had some questions to start with. But we started to discuss and then modify those questions on cover cropping. We came up with some covered crop mixes we wanted to try.
Frank Wolf
So we all have different cropping systems, different major different soil types [and] rainfall. So being able to there’s going to be some commonalities that we’re already seeing and then there are some some differences that we’re already seeing too. So that was fun to see that data set kind of come to light.
Some of it was kind of surprising data to me on the water infiltration stuff. So that that is one other aspect to it on the PI side and, and the university allowed us to pick the cover crops that we thought were going to work well on our farm.
We converted our farm from a conventional type tillage system to a true no till, one pass low disturbance. So we went through that transition. We had a lot of learning curve to that aspect. One of the big hopes was that we were going to start seeing less inputs in our synthetic fertilizer needs, but we actually never saw that transition happen.
We had a lot of weed management issues, rotational issues. Once we kind of figured those out, the next step was how do we get our soils to convert the carbon that has been storing into a usable form of nutrients? That kind of brought us to the cover crop that was back in the early teens.
Subodh Adhikari
We have found that way more to pollinators in this cover crop mixture and other beneficial insects and predators like lady beetles and several other ones in these kind crop mixes.
So I wanted to add right now that as Frank said we didn’t really see visually that many benefits. But yeah, in terms of soil health. I don’t know about crop yield. He didn’t see anything, but we found that those crops were actually helping beneficial insects.
Frank Wolf
In the denser little trials that we had, we had extremely good weed control in some of them, but those would not make sense at those rates to seed on a cover crop basis because of the cost to just outweigh the benefit.
Subodh Adhikari
My background is also farming coming from a farming background and especially diversified farming background. I’m really, really interested in low input. But we talked about ROI, so low input and then diversified systems and see how that can impact. I mean, I have witnessed a lot of benefits of this diversification. So most of my work, my other works are also around that area. Sustainable farming, sustainable, ecologically based pest management. I work on helping pollinators, beneficial insects, but also managing insect pests more in a sustainable way, ecologically based instead of just like putting chemistries.
Frank Wolf
One thing that impressed me with Subodh: you need to talk a little bit more about your farming background from where you grew up, because it’s not it’s not our typical farming system, but there is a lot of similarities. I think you said your family farm, is it 20 acres?
Subodh Adhikari
I mean, it was bigger than that for sure, but we used to have in most of the chunk of our farm three crops a year, not just one crop, but three crops, which means you are busy all the time, rotated throughout the season. What you rotate for example, we had wheat, corn, peas.
Many crops here are similar crops, certainly rice also. But when you diversify, when you rotate crops every time, and then utilize some of the unwanted weeds as a, you know, like some resources, I never heard that weeds can be a problem until I came here then see, which is a problem while farming. I never thought that weed was a problem to me because we used to graze before plantation and then after harvesting post harvest and then also used those weeds to feed cattle right?
So, but at the same time, you don’t really have much of the problem because of the crop rotation. And then many crops would easily outcompete those weeds. So using that knowledge is from my own farming. Now I want to test, because when I was farming I didn’t have any scientific background, scientific tools to measure. But now I can utilize that knowledge and then incorporate with the other, you know, like the system here.
And that’s what we are really doing right now in the lab that is still here. But rotation, diversification, I mean, all of that. I’m all about…big fan of a penny saved is a penny earned. Low input.
Frank Wolf
He told me that story I guess would have [been] in 2019 when we met, we just were visiting in the fields and I didn’t realize he had a farming background. I mean, he was a Ph.D student, and we just started talking about the similarities in their farming practices where he’s from and and one thing that made me go home and think was the wheat. It’s like we were looking at weeds all along sometimes. Yes, we know how to manage them so that they don’t go to seed. But those weeds are…those weeds are actually growing for a reason. They’re trying to fix the soil. They’re trying to think…they’re trying to do something, whether it’s the soil or it’s something that we created with chemistries that we put down.
So we’ll look at those weeds as a component of cover. And so once you got your head around that, leaving those weeds seeds out there to germinate they’re part of that. My large acreage right now cover cropping.
What we’re seeing was adding these cover crops into our farming practices is that we’re triggering these weeds to grow at a nontraditional time because we’ve mixed mess with their rotation.
And so we’re seeing a lot of weed banks being germinated that typically wouldn’t germinate at the time that we’re seeing it. So that gives us an opportunity to get those to grow, to terminate so that they’re not in crop again, they’re not will reduce overall our footprint of our chemistries.
Frank Wolf
What I’m most interested in is getting that data collection of the soil, the soil benefit overall and the benefits to the beneficial insects. So to be able to have that, none of that data has been finalized or 100% collected yet, but that is going to be huge for us.
And again, to be able to use that data set along with all of the other datasets that are being collected through the other farms just to be able to extrapolate that information and put it back on into use on what we’re already doing, because I’m sure we’re going to have to tweak what we’re doing right now, but I won’t know until we collect all of that. So that’s, that’s really where I’m at on it.
Derek Schafer
Carol McFarland
We’re on the Schaeffer farm and ranch right here in between Lind and Ritzville with Mr. Derek Schafer.
Derek Schafer
I’m the fifth generation here, like so many others that came on the wagon train in the late 1800s, and I farm with my wife, Susan, and our two children who are both in college now, and then also my parents are still involved in the operation. So it’s a pretty small family farm, but we sure are blessed to be out here.
Derek Schafer
We’re right in between Lind and Ritzville and I think the Lind 40 year average is around nine and a half inches of rain a year and Ritzville is actually and a half so in that mile range you pick up two inches of rainfall.
Some of it has to do with moving further away from the range out of the Cascade Mountains and some of it also has to do with elevation. Ritzville’s a little higher in elevation and it seemed to catch a little more rain up there. That’s a highly significant difference, you know, and we see that difference across our farm as we farm some land towards Lind and some closer to Ritzville and you can really see that that’s a big difference.
Derek Schafer
by having a broadleaf crop, canola is another one that we have enjoyed trying out here, but by having a broadleaf crop you can mix up the chemistries and you can really clean up the grassy weed issues that are a real problem in this you know continuous wheat rotation.
Derek Schafer
I never thought it would work, you know, I mean, we were- we were really good at tillage, I mean, we were good farmers at eight passes across the field to get a nice stand of wheat, and I tell you what, it’s very difficult to move away from something that you’re pretty good at doing to something that’s unknown, um, especially those first years when, you know, you maybe the neighbor across the fence has a really nice stand of wheat, and you’re just out there seeding and trying to figure out, how am I going to get this wheat to grow with this drill that’s unproven and I’ve still got to make modifications to? So, that’s a really big challenge. It was pretty scary but also the most exciting thing we’ve ever done, that along with introducing crop rotation into this traditional wheat area, those have been the things that have been, kind of, kept us looking forward.
Derek Schafer
There’s a lot of retraining, and it really is a shift from, you know, back when I first came back to the farm in 1998 and our mindset was, you know, that clean smooth summer fallow looked really good and, you know, trashy summer fallow was not good. We were getting, you know, the mindset was, well we’re gonna have disease, we’re not gonna be able to seed because we’re gonna plug the drill, and then moving to, I mean, for a few years we ran a stripper header and, oh my gosh, talk about something that looks, you know, a little abnormal, I mean, the fallow year everything looks, you know, rough and it’s hard, like you said, it’s hard to see the wheat coming up in the furrows and, um, but it’s a real big change and, you know, it’s a big change and it’s a real mindset shift to go across now and look at the the land that is really protected by all that straw that’s still anchored to the ground, it’s protecting the soil. We don’t have dust storms around the area as much, the water doesn’t run out of the fields, but it’s a real mental shift and that’s probably I mean, the expense of the equipment and changing all that is a real challenge, but I would say the the mental challenge of being okay with the different look is probably just as significant.
Derek Schafer
Our concern over soil loss was ranked right up there towards the top, I mean this, the blowing dust, the water erosion, ditches if the- if it rained during the middle of summer down the the rod weeder tracks you’d have to go fix, it was just like kind of gut-wrenching to see your soil run away, so that, I mean, that was a big consideration but then, you know, once we realized, okay we can make this work, we can we have the equipment that we can, we can do it, we have a direct seed deep furrow drill, then we really felt like the way we were going to make it work here was to add crop rotation so whether that be peas or canola depending on the seeding conditions at the, you know, when we set out to do that at the beginning of the seeding season if there’s enough moisture for canola, we’ll see canola if we- if there’s not we’ll see peas, but either way we’re going to put a broadleaf crop in there, and then the other thing that made it work was adding a spot sprayer to that chem fallow rotation, because, yeah,
Derek Schafer
you really start to see the benefits of it and you have clean wheat crops, you know, higher yields for the most part. I think the higher yields come from possibly a break in the disease cycle but also you don’t have the weed pressure, you don’t have those grassy weeds out there, I think we underestimate how much those can reduce our yields even if we, you know, can spray something on them to sort of keep them under the canopy, I think they still, you know, the cheatgrass and coatgrass it still reduces your yield, I think, more than than we realize and so, I mean, we grew the peas when they were six cents a pound, you know, since then they’re much better priced and they’re actually economic to grow and when when we have the wheat price what it is today, you know, six dollars locally, you know, peas compete really nicely with wheat especially if, you know, as I talked about before, if you only have to seed the peas once and this year we were facing dry conditions seeding the wheat,
Derek Schafer
rainfall here. I mean, it really is our most limiting factor but, you know, we just try to put ourselves in a position to be successful if the rain comes and I think, you know, overall our yields are moving up, I mean, genetics on the crops are better we eat with canola peas everything’s better. There’s been improvements, you know, consistently over the years on the genetics of the crops we grow, but our yields, I feel like have actually gone up now that we’ve sort of got a handle on how to seed in this direct seed system, and I think we probably have more moisture in our ground than when we were tilling.
Derek Schafer
we’re still growing a crop and, you know, making some money doing it, once you realize that’s all possible then the fear of, you know, what people might think and they see your field has a lot of residue on it, and it looks maybe ugly to them, that goes away, you just don’t worry about that, we’re just focused on, you know, trying to do the best job we can here. I think there is some strength in numbers, I think it happens with a lot of things, you know, as maybe the first neighbor tries it, you know, they’re kind of out on their own and then pretty soon somebody else does it, and then your next neighbor says, oh my gosh, I see that’s working i’m going to try it too, and so it’s sort of a cluster effect, and I think we’ve had that out in our area. There’s definitely more direct seed acres out here than there is tilled fallow.
Derek Schafer
it’s not just the economics return on that crop, it’s about having a system in place, and even if we take a loss on growing peas, the system is so much better for having it as part of the rotation that we, you know, we know it’s sometimes it’s really hard to measure economically because yields vary so widely, it’s the way, I think, we really have to look at a much longer time frame, you know, maybe a 10 year horizon instead of a, you know, a one or two or four year horizon even and just say, okay we just see the benefits here, economic and soil health, and all the above, so a little bit hard to measure but, I think after you do it for a while, you just sort of have a sense like, oh my gosh, this is the right way to go.
Derek Schafer
I just have so enjoyed that relationship with the researchers and staff at the Lind station over the years. Dr Schillinger and I worked together on a few projects on our farm, and I love the evolution of his thought about conservation farming out here. I was part of the undercutter project back when that was sort of the the latest greatest idea here. We did a lot of that trying to, you know, increase conservation on the soil and he was really mindful to change things at the right pace and not push new ideas too quickly on farmers. We’re, you know, we’re creatures of habit and we’re good at what we do, and we need research to support that, but at the same time sometimes we do need to be pushed a little, and I feel like the timing is right for Dr. Singh to be here and have such a great focus on soil health, and I don’t- it is maybe just a buzzword, but we’re seeing that we can, you know, improve soil health and still grow really nice crops, so I think we can do both, and I think he’s the right person at the right time, and we are really lucky to have that research station so close to home and, you know, to serve the farmers out here in this region who, you know, can’t benefit from some of the research directly in the high rainfall areas.
Derek Schafer
It’s really hard to measure. But I can tell you when you walk across the soil of a field that’s been in direct seed for, you know, four or five crop years, it’s different. It’s different. You can tell it under your feet, you could close your eyes and walk across the field and tell the difference, you can dig in the ground and you can see the difference, you can see the root structure still in place. I think some of the positive changes are, you know, the residue on top but I think maybe more importantly is what’s happening underneath the surface with those the root structures that act as capillaries and keep the soil from fracturing into large soil clods when we take the drill through there, we’ve seen that. I will be the first to say I never thought it was possible. I did not believe there would be a change. I didn’t believe it, I was, you know, not on the no-till bandwagon, and I thought, oh that’s no way, but then you see it for yourself, and it is, it’s really fun to watch, so it’s been really rewarding to see that change.