Episode 123: Breaking Traditions in Dry Climates with Keith Morter

Hi, friends, this is John. Welcome back to the Regenerative Agriculture podcast where we have all kinds of fun conversations usually related to agronomy and soil health and plant health and regenerating ecosystems. I've been looking forward to the discussion today where we get to have a conversation with Keith Mortar, who I first met a couple of years ago from up in the Pacific Northwest farming and I think one of the driest places on the globe where wheat is grown. And yeah, it's been interesting too. I think Keith also produced the highest test weight wheat that I've heard of recently and I think we'll have some fun conversations. So, Keith, thank you for being here. Thank you for being willing to share your story and what you've been working on and thinking about. Tell us a little bit about your, your farming context, the history of your farming operation, the scope of what you're working on today and how you got to be where you are now.

Yeah, John, so my parents didn't inherit what we have. My parents bought what we have. They moved here in 1961 and we did conventional agriculture like everybody did until about 2009. And in this dry environment, we did everything that a regenerative person probably would not do. We plowed the ground with chisel plows, we rod weeded the ground all summer long, put our fertilizer down and seeded. That was the traditional means of putting the crop in in this area. Hundreds of thousands of AC in the Pacific Northwest is put in this way. In the early 2000s, direct seed came in. A lot of guys started switching over to it. There was a lot of soil erosion benefits to it. That's one of the reasons for it. Finally we got on the bandwagon and finally bought a drill and started direct seed in fall of 2009. By 2012, at this point, I was pretty much in charge of what I was doing. My dad had retired by that point and so I was pretty much in charge. So by 2012 we started doing a lot of grid sampling and variable rate seed and variable rate fertilizer and weren't having the effect on the soil that I was really hoping to see long term. The changes just were not coming. It was very disappointing that these changes weren't coming. You know, it wasn't what we thought it was going to be.

What were the changes you were hoping for with the variable seeding and variable fertilizer application rates?

Yeah, so I was hoping to see yield come up and costs really go down. And the cost never really went down, not like we were hoping Some places we saw yield come up, but the only reason for that was, is we were shutting fertilizers completely off. We farm a lot of land that has really thin soils on it, you know, 18 to 20 inches deep. You say, well, why would you farm across that? Well, it costs more money to farm around it than to farm through it. And in those areas in the past, they would just raise a lot of fly.

So just for clarification, when you say soil that's 18 to 20 inches deep, is that down to bedrock or is that how much topsoil that's down?

Yeah, bedrock. It's a bit of bedrock. And some of that is due to soil erosion over the last 80 years of agriculture. And not knowing what we were doing. And some of it just. That's the way it was for nature. We were seeing some improvement there. And looking back on that, the reason we were seeing the improvement is we were cutting all the nitrogen out of the system. And I really feel like that we also were cutting seed rates back to where the seed rate being able to supported by that ground, the seed rate we were using was compatible with the soil that was there. We were getting yields off that. We doubled yields in a lot of cases where the soil cover was. Was then. And so I guess it was just ahead of COVID I was at a direct seed conference, and John came in to talk about soil health and kind of the rest is history. I kind of had a personal meeting with John after you. After the meeting, my wife and I sat down with you for.

I was about to say, are you talking about me and the third party?

No, I guess I had a meeting with you. My wife and I sat down with you and had dinner with you. And it was a very interesting, enlightening time. And you made some comments to me. We've had talks about it in the past. We talked about everything from religion and the Bible through what we were doing. And it really got me to thinking. And so over the next couple of months, I did a lot of research. My son and I talked. I farmed with my son Austin now, for the last five years since he came home from college. And we've just fallen in love with the system, this regenerative movement that we've started doing. I would have never thought that you could raise a crop with zero nitrogen until you're at flag leaf on wheat. And the reason I say tell flag leaf is because our system hasn't gotten up and going biologically strong enough to support that crop through the flag leaf. And so we're still having to add some nitrogen, but the crops usually thick enough that we're never getting the nitrogen on the soil. It's all in the full year. It's all in the top, and we spray 100% of it on with the ground rig. I don't use airplanes for anything. Our disease pressure is virtually non existent. Our insect pressures are virtually non existent. We don't have powdery mildew like a lot of people get into. We don't. There's just a lot of problems that we just aren't seeing currently. And I'd like to back up just a little bit and say this.

That all happened fairly quickly, too.

Yeah, it did. I would like to back up and say this. That crop of. I think we saw you in 2020, if I'm not mistaken, it was January of 2020. It was right ahead of COVID And so that spring, the fall wheat we had in that year, because we raised fall wheat and spring wheat and that fall wheat we had in that year, we switched that midstream. And, you know, the agronomists really didn't think that was a wise idea, but we did it anyhow. I was so headstrong on what we were doing. I was convinced that what we were going to do was going to change it. And. And part of that had to do with going back and looking at these shallower soils and saying, well, these shallow soils, we haven't put any fertilizer on for five or six crops. What's the big deal if we go ahead and change this? Maybe it's got enough nitrogen to make the crop the way that it is. And so it was a tremendous decision because all the whole country, we had a good crop. In this area where I live here in ion, Oregon, we had a good crop that year, but everybody got to spraying rust. And we're out in the field and we have some varieties that are very susceptible to rust. You go out there and you look at the crop and there's no rust in the crop. And you're going, holy cow. The neighbors are all over here spraying. We got rust, you know, 30, 40ft out in the field, but it's not rust. Like they're spraying across. Across the road or across the fence. You know, I'm not trying to put my neighbors under the fence or anything. They. They do their own thing and that's fine. But this is. These are observations. I'm just a farmer, I observe.

Yep.

We walk, you know, you walk the whole boundary and you're like, well, it's not out in the field. Did we worry about it? Lala, you watch it, it really didn't get any worse. And I don't know if that was because of our brix level being high, our nutrient levels being good, but we had top dressed and brought all of the micronutrients that were low up and we achieved those levels that we needed. So I think that was the key.

Yeah. For clarification, are you saying that the crop that you had planted in the fall of 2019, you attended a conference in January of 2020 and then that following spring when you emerge from dormancy, you switch that crop in midstream to focus on more regenerative agronomic management?

Correct.

Or was this, was this 12 months later or was that year.

No, this, that was that year. It was right in midstream, right when it came out of dormancy. And you know, we were kind of advised not to do that because they didn't think we could get it converted. But I really think you can convert a crop. I tell people nowadays, if you're not convinced about what you're doing or you're a little off, shaky about what you're doing, you don't have to put the whole farm into it. Take half a field or take 30 acres or 50 acres, go do it. But make, try and make some kind of change. And I think that's the key.

I want to come back to speak more about the changes that you're observing in disease and insect pressure and susceptibility. But before we go there, give us a bit more context of the environment that you farm in. What is your annual rainfall like and what does your crop mix look like? What types of crops are you working with and how has that evolved since you've been managing?

So we're traditional wheat ranch. 30 years ago we used to raise barley because government programs mandated that we raised barley. But over the period of years, there's no more of those mandates out there that we have to raise barley. I'm in a 9 or 6 to probably 10 inch rainfall area. It varies a lot.2021, we got 4 inches of rainfall from October to the end of June, which is our growing season on our winter wheat. It was a complete wreck for a lot of people. It gets hot here, it's 100 degrees in the summertime. You know, middle of harvest, we're harvesting and it's 100 degrees out. Soil temperatures will get up to the 150, 165 range. Quite often it's detrimental to biology.

How deep will Those soil temperatures go.

To that soil surface temperature, oh, six, eight inches. I mean, it gets hot. Wow. And so it's very detrimental to the soils. And I know that it's really hard to avoid that, you know.

Well, it's hard to avoid that while you're growing wheat.

Yeah, yeah. And I think that's part of what causes our soil health issues is the fact that we run a lot of summer fallow land, which John and I agree it's not a good deal. It's very detrimental to the soil, as I'm finding out. More detrimental than I ever thought it was. And so we farm at about 1600ft is the average elevation on the farm. We go from 1400ft all the way to 2200ft in elevation. We farm everything from a sand Loomis type soil to a clay type soil and everything in between alkali soils. And so it's really. We've seen a lot of changes in our soil. The changes you can't even describe. You walk out across the field and it feels like you've stepped up on your. And this isn't a growing crop. You walk out on the growing crop and it feels like the soil is like you're walking on your mattress or your bed. It's that soft.

Wow. That's particularly remarkable given the heat and the dry environment that you just described.

Yeah, yeah. And that'll stay all the way through harvest quite a bit of the time. The agronomy people say that, you know, it's due to all these other factors, but I really think it's due to the fact that we're not using nitrogen fertilizer, you know, and I think that's a huge part of society's problem, is we've gotten brainwashed into thinking that. And I hate to use that word, but I can't think of anything else. Nitrogen fertilizer is the only way to grow crops. And, you know, that was the part that when I saw you the first time in 2020, that I had to swallow. The biggest thing is how do you grow the crop without nitrogen? We've all been told you have to have nitrogen, and I didn't realize how. Calcium was a huge portion of the equation in a plant, and that's the hardest thing to get into the plant is calcium. It's one of the harder things. I shouldn't say the hardest thing, but it's one of the harder things to get into the plant. And so the softest of the slow hygromists, and I walked across the fence line into the neighbor that was using. And I don't want to bad mouth anything, and I apologize to anybody for saying this, but he uses ammonia, anhydrous crop growing side by side, seeded within days of one another. And his ground was like walking on your sidewalk out in front of your house. It was just that hard. It was like concrete. And they had water leave their field every time there was a rain. And it was. It just made me sick to watch that happen after knowing what I had seen. We had the same rainfalls, waters leaving his field, waters going in our field. This is in 2021. And so they cut about a 22 or 23 bushel crop. We cut a 43 bushel crop that year. And I just sit there and shake my head because some of these people, you can't convince them to go otherwise. I really think that I'd rather farm for myself and farm for my soil than to farm for some big fertilizer company or chemical company. And that's what really got me to change in my mind about where we were headed is we're going to have to buy some of these micronutrients. I understand that. We're going to have to contribute to the biology. We're going to have to provide food for biology. That's the one thing I learned off you. You got to feed that biology in order to get it rolling, to get it moving, to get it to sustain itself. And that's the part that nobody is really willing that I see outside of the people that go to the soil health conferences, they don't want to do that. They think you're going to have this big, huge yield drag. And I never saw the yield drag at all. In fact, I probably saw a yield boost the first year out. And that's a huge thing. You think you're going to lose all this yield, and it's just the opposite. I'll give you an example. So I was off, busy doing some work with sprayer. I told my son, I said, go cut 12 inches of the neighbor's wheat down on the stem. Take, cut the heads off it, put it on the tailgate while you're waiting for me to come back to fill, thrash out all their green kernels. Go do the same thing in our wheat. And I told him, just go pick a random spot. And so he thrashed all these kernels out. I wish he would have videotaped it, but he didn't. And there's 14% more kernels in our head versus the neighbors. And what the neighbor was missing on the bottom of the head, he was missing about. We call them mesh. I don't know the technical scientific name, but the places where the kernels of wheat grow, they were missing an average between 4 and 6 mesh on the bottom of every head. And we were filled clear to the bottom of the head. And not just filled, we were filled three mesh. And that's huge in this dry environment that we're in. So you take 14% over 1,000 acres, that's 14% more wheat you're going to have to sell in the end. And it's really kind of interesting because it's probably healthier for society. It's healthier wheat. It hasn't been sprayed with fungicide. It hasn't been sprayed with any kind of weed killer. We've cut the weed kill and stuff out as much as we possibly can on our growing crops. And if we have a few mustards, the outlooks doesn't look very good out the field. I don't care. I don't care what people think. It's $20 that I've saved because I didn't have to spray it.

Yep.

If I can get it through the combine, I'll just cut it. Is the way I'm looking at it anymore. The one thing I guess that I've learned off of you and Ray and Christine and Joel and all these other people that you're friends with, John, and you're all in the same business is there's a purpose for the weed being there. And that's the hardest thing for people to get over. Will I let my field, on the kinfalic side, have weeds? No, I don't do that. I try to control them the best I can with as little a chemical as possible. Chemicals are one of those expenses that I'm trying to cut the expense down on. And those weeds are there. You take a SAP analysis to say we have a weed here. We call it prickly lettuce or china lettuce or whatever you want to call it. It's extremely high in micronutrients. And the reason that weed showed up, I believe, is we're spraying a lot of glyphosate. And glyphosate is a chelator in the soil. And that plant is bringing those micronutrients back to the surface to have our weed extract those later on out of the organic material that that plant puts it in. And it's just kind of a really. Just another observation because that's all I am. I'm an observer. But we'll turn cows out into a pasture that has a lot of prickly lettuce in it. And the first thing they do is they'll go around and they'll mow every prickly lettuce clear down on the ground. So obviously our cattle are missing that in their diet and they'd rather get it in that form out of some mineral block that's man made. You know, that's just an observation that I've made about our cattle. We do run a few cows, just enough for some beef that we have here because not all of our ground is farmable. We have a lot of canyons that we can't farm. We have shallow ground that's just not farmable. And so we run, I don't know, six or eight cows is all we run at this time. And it may increase as time goes by, but right now that's about where our populations are at.

So, so many questions that I want to ask you. Keith. You started saying that you were primarily wheat and did some barley 30 years ago, but has your crop mix evolved at all? Are you still primarily wheat? Are you including any other crop diversity into that?

Yeah, so we are including some crop diversity. We raise sunflowers from time to time, we raise some sorghum from time to time, and we raise some non GMO corn from time to time. I try to stay away from any modified crops the best that I possibly can. I'll just give you an example. We do raise one hard red winner that has a Clearfield gene in it. We pulled SAP on it this year and really got to look at the SAP in it versus the SAP in a non clear field hard red winner wheat. And when they put the genetics for the Clearfield crop into the wheat, all the micronutrients are gone. That was a major eye opener for the agronomist and myself.

When you're saying that all the micronutrients are gone, as in they're not showing up in the plant anymore.

They're not showing up in the SAP analysis anymore. They're showing up, but they are so low that the amount of micronutrients we, we had to put on the crop were like, you know, 4 ounces of, say, Molly and 4 ounces of manganese, couple ounces of boron, couple ounces of zinc. They were so low that the plant was unhealthy out there. You know, you've always said in several podcasts and every time I've ever seen you in person, you've always said, we don't know what A healthy plant looks like the wheat crop. Look fine growing wise, but the minute the SAP came back, it was so unhealthy. And that variety is extremely, extremely susceptible to rust. But the minute we got the micronutrients up good in it, we never saw flag leaf rust in that crop, which that was totally impressive that we were able to bring those micronutrients up, but it's not able to get it out of the soil. I firmly believe that that variety in particular, and I'm not going to name the variety or anything, but that particular variety. I firmly believe that that's what happens with a lot of these genetically modified crops. I don't even call them genetically modified, just modified crops that they're using a chemical to control the weeds with. I think the micronutrients are just. That's how they're able to ward off the chemistry on those plants. I don't know how to put it any better than that. The chemistry also kills so much biology. When they spray that chemistry out there, it's unreal. People don't really realize what that chemistry is doing to that biology on that soil. And I'm sure you're scratching your head going, well, that doesn't make any sense. But I'm just. Like I said, all I am is an observer. I have no scientific proof behind it. I think that's something that people need to be looking at is when they're planting these genetic crops, what the SAP is telling them. Because if they've got some non gmo. I hate that word of gmo. But these modified crops out there, you need to look at the non modified crop versus the modified crop and see if you see a difference. And that's what we did. There was a difference between the SAP we pulled on our regular crop without the Clearfield gene versus the Clearfield gene.

Yeah. This is not an uncommon phenomena and it's one that we've spoken about very carefully on occasion here on the podcast. And I've spoken about it publicly as well. I think the bottom line challenge, there's this quote by William Albrecht. I think it's attributed to Albrecht, who says that we've become incredibly accurate at hitting the bullseye of the wrong target.

There's a lot of truth in that. We have.

The reality is we are now trying to select crops and breed crops for disease resistance. We're trying to breed crops for insect resistance to some degree. We're trying to breed crops for herbicide susceptibility. And we're introducing some of these genetic modifications such as Bt, for example, for insect resistance. And the reality is that these are nutritional problems and microbiome imbalance problems. Like we're trying to select plants to survive starvation. How much sense does that make? Or we're selecting plants for a really unhealthy environment.

Yeah, that's a great point. It's a nutritional problem. Why do we have cheatgrass? Why do we have goat grass? Why do we have kosher? Why do we have Russian thistle in this area? Prickly lettuce? It's because we basically destroyed our soil health. We're raising plants that are inferior to what we used to raise. And you go back, you know, when my dad was farming, he raised a wheat called New Gaines soft white Wheat out of Oregon State University. It was one of the first high production wheats out there. It was a great wheat. It had a few kinks to it. And then later on came along a wheat by the name of Stevens Wheat out of Oregon State. And it was the king of soft white wheat here in the Pacific Northwest, which is what we primarily raise in the Northwest here, soft white wheat. And so Stephen's wheat was the longest continuously grown weed in the Pacific Northwest, almost 50 years. And that's unheard of nowadays. If you get three to five years out of a new variety, and this is probably true for corn or soybeans or anything like that, you get five years out of a particular variety, you're lucky, because the seed companies don't want you raising a wheat that long. And so I don't remember the wheat breeder's name. I think it was Dr. Kronstadt from Oregon State. The reason Stevens was so successful as a wheat and had a wide range of adaptation in the Pacific Northwest was because he had to go someplace and told his technicians to pull certain stuff out of the genetic makeup of the crop. And when Dr. Kronstadt was asked about this years later, he basically said the reason it was successfully growing as long as it has been was because he had to go someplace. And he told his technicians, so the story goes, he told his technician he wanted all this stuff pulled out of the variety. And the technician read his notes wrong. And when he went back and looked at what the technician did, he left all the garbage in the variety, and that's the variety we ended up getting. And it was the first wheat that consistently went 150 bushels an acre in the what we call the Palouse region of the Northwest. And there was a lot of really good wheat cut when that variety came out. A lot of 50, 60 bushel wheat. Prior to that, we were cutting a lot of 25 and 30 bushel wheat in this country. We're talking the 1970s and early 1980s. But you go back and you look at that and you say, well, they left all the garbage in that for genetics. Well, sometimes I wonder if they, they pull too much out of genetics that makes varieties. You know, I don't have the answers for it. I'm just an observer and you know, I've heard things and whether that's right or wrong, I don't know. But it's a good story to tell.

One of the things that I find interesting is that I know of several other anecdotal cases where the parent seed stock genetics that were selected ended up having staying power within a particular space for a run of five or six decades, or in some cases even longer. And what most of those stories have in common, I'm not familiar with your story of wheat, but what many of them have in common is that they either deliberately or in some cases unintentionally ended up selecting for very robust root systems and large stem diameters. And when they did that, they got a similar somewhere to what you're describing. They got a significant yield increase and the varieties had long staying power in the space because it was very difficult to catch up with where they were performing.

Yeah, and maybe that's, you know, I was pretty young, I mean, I was young when the variety became widely available. I mean, it was released I think in 1976 or 77. So to run clear up until end of the 2000s and still be raised on a pretty substantial number of acres is really amazing. Unfortunately, as far as genetics goes, you know, wheat hasn't seen the big jump in yield that soybeans and corn and a of lot lot of other crops have seen. You know, if we, in the last 50 years, if we seen a 20% yield bump from 1980 to present day, we would, I think we would be lucky to see 20% jump, especially for the area that I farm in. I look back at the stories my dad and mom tell about, you know, cutting 25 bushel wheat. 25 bushel wheat was a really good crop. And, and now we're looking probably in that 35, you know, you can conservatively say a 35 bushel yield. And you know, we've been better than that over the last, I don't know, three or four years pretty consistently. You know, we've been cutting anywhere from 45 to 55 bushel crops. And I contribute that a Lot to the regenerative movement that we've kind of gotten into.

That's a pretty substantial yield bump. And you're seeing that at the same time as the nitrogen.

Yeah.

Cutting down hydrogen, Other things. Yeah.

Like I said, we cut the nitrogen out and I just dumped the nitrogen. I didn't, you know, so many people say, oh, you want to taper down, taper down, taper down. And I'm like, I kept coming back to this because of what we were doing earlier on, from about 2012-20, cutting the, cutting the nitrogen out of these, I call them shallow grounds areas, and realizing that the shallow ground we were seeing the yields come up. So if you cut the nitrogen out there, why won't it work on out here? You know, and, and I mean, between listening to you and yesterday, listen. Or a couple days ago, listen to Dr. Christine Jones talk about nitrogen. I'm more convinced than ever after Ray Archuleta talked about. About the soil Haney test and, and the Haney test for soil, I should say. And I believe it's the organic nitrogen that's in your soil. Correct me if I'm wrong, and what the value that has on it, because that's. Correct me if I'm wrong on this, John, but that's the nitrogen that's really available to the plant is the organic nitrogen that's in the soil. It's not what you add. And please help me if I'm wrong on that, John. Feel free to step in.

When we develop these, these truly regenerative agronomic systems, we are relying on getting nitrogen to the plant in the form of bacterial cells through the rise of ag cycle. And that is when you have biology delivering nitrogen, then you don't need nitrogen from a jug.

Yes, that's so true.

Yeah. As you've observed, these yield improvements over the last four or five years. What has been happening with grain quality?

Our grain quality went through the rough. So when we started into this, and I guess the summer of 2020, I sent some wheat down to Claudia Carter at the California Wheat labs there. And you gave your name and her number. I sent it down to her, and it cost a little bit of money, but, you know, the baking qualities have went through the rough. The stability of the dough between making, say, bread and putting it in the. In the oven is twice as long, according to what she tells me, as standard flour. Bread is. Even organic flour doesn't have that stability. And so as a baker, the way I understand it, as a baker, if you have this little longer time, that if you have a mistake someplace or something happens, you have more time to get that dough into the. Into the oven. And that's one of the huge things. I had some nutrient density testing done on it, and I couldn't make heads or tails out of the test, so I can't really speak to that too much. One of the things they do on that test that Claudia performs is they cut their little trowel loaf in half, and they look at, you know, how much air you have in your bread and how dense it is. And the way I understand it, and I apologize to Claudia because I'm probably massacring. This whole thing, is that it's what they like to see. It was at the top of the scale because they got scales for it. All is at the top of the scale. Our test weights consistently run two to three pounds over. So number one, soft bite weed is considered 60 pound. We're usually running 62, 63. Our hard reds are running the same way. We've had hard reds run up to as high as 69.7 pounds per bushel. And my son will tell the story to people when we start talking about this, that we load in the semi and, you know, you loading a normal load in, and you pull on the scale at the elevator, and you're 125,000 on a set of doubles. And then you go back and you reload, and you look in the trailer, and the trailer is half empty. The next time because you don't want to be overloaded. Going to the elevator, the Department of Transportation pulls you over. That'd be a big ticket. They wouldn't let you move off the site, so it can pose some problems when it comes to that. But our test weights have been through the roof, and the baking quality has been there. Our sunflowers, we struggle a little bit with on yield because we don't get those summertime rains that the Midwest or the Northeast gets. The west is not known for that. Our moisture primarily comes From September to 1 June in the Pacific Northwest here. And that's why there's predominantly a lot of irrigation around the area out of the Columbia River. And then there's all the dry land, wheat raised. They can raise all kinds of things on that irrigation that we can't raise. But we struggle on a little bit on yield. We're 500 to £1,000 on that. Our sorghum that we raise, our milo sorghum, whatever you want to call it, 22 to 25 bushels an acre. And we can make Money on both of those at that. Our corn yields are running anywhere from 35 to 43 bushels an acre. If we just happen to catch half inch, 3/4 inch of rain, it can make all the difference in the world on yield, depending on the stage of the plant. We've learned a lot about growing those three different crops. We bought a planter. That's how dedicated I am to the system. We bought a planter to plant them with. Nothing real big, nothing real fancy, just something to get them in the ground with. Plant basement. When you only get the 6 to 10 inch rainfall that we get, and you're relying upon what's in the ground to grow, that crop becomes more of a critical mass than people that get 40 inches of rain. I envy people that have 40 inches of rain. I'm like, why would you mess around leaving your ground bare all winter after you've taken a corn crop or soybean crop off it? Why would you leave your ground bare all year? And maybe I don't understand it, and that's fine. But after seeing, you know, Christine Jones talk, you talk, Joel Williams talk, I'm at fall because we have summer fall, and I know it's bad. We're working on it. We don't have it figured out because moisture is everything to us, conserving moisture. But those areas that get that extreme amount of rain and have phosphate trouble, nitrate trouble in their water, I don't understand it, I guess, why you wouldn't be covering the land 365 days a.

Year when you're growing corn in a rainfall environment, that's 6 to 10 inches of rainfall per year. What is the. What's the plant population? The plant spacing that you're running? You know, I'm reminded of a conversation with Bob Quinn here on the podcast a couple of years ago, where he's in Montana, also in a dry land environment. He was growing watermelon. He was growing a number of different crops, and this was on a small scale. He was growing a number of different crops that you don't really associate with that type of environment usually. And his comment was, well, he's providing a much larger plant spacing and he is planting. He's determining the plant population to optimize water and the water, the rainfall per square foot rather than on a per acre basis. So if you actually look at the quantity of water that they provided, his population, tracked population for water use instead of population per square foot, how is that translating into your environment?

Yeah. So on our corn and our sunflowers we plant for about 16,000 plants per acre on 30 inch rows. Our sorghum we're planting for between 22 and 25,000. I haven't really made up my mind what I like best. I've planted sorghum or milo at both populations over the last four, three or four years. That seems to be the number that works best for us. Your sunflower growers in the Midwest, they'd rather have a sunflower that, you know, that's, you know, that 6 inch, 6, 7 inch in diameter. I'd rather have the sunflower that's, you know, nine, ten inches in diameter. And I'd rather try and make it up on head size than the number of plant, you know, more plants per acre. Our sunflowers are generally done by Labor Day weekend. We will plant them the last week in April, which is a major no no, and we'll be done by the end of October.

Why is that a no no?

They worry about in frosting in the soil temperatures. We really struggle with the soil temperatures getting up there. But if we don't get them in by then, we found that the crops aren't as good. If we can get a few spring rains on sunflower in, in May, that seems to really help the crop in August when it, when it's making seed. The same goes for corn. The earlier we can get it in, the better. The corn crop is sorghum. Boy, that one's been a challenge. Spent a lot of time in Oklahoma learning how to raise sorghum in Oklahoma. The first couple of times that I raised it, I mean, it was a major wreck. We had Russian thistle all over the place and went to Oklahoma and a guy drove me around down there and I talked to a few growers. And our biggest thing is understanding you can plant sorghum deeper than what is recommended. That's what it came down to. They really didn't have any advice on seed population because obviously a lot of that was under irrigation. The dry land guys, I mean, they still got more rain than what we did in the summertime. It's all it comes down to. And so that's basically where we're at on our, on those crops, our wheat crops. Everybody says, well, how many pound acre do you plant? And I said, well, I don't know how many pounds per acre it is, but generally we're running between 21 and 22 plants per lineal foot a row. And that's on a 12 inch spacing drill. And we like to get at least four tillers on every plant. I heard a podcast here a while back that that says that the guy was talking about you want. I believe it's 232 heads per square meter is what that guy liked to have. And this guy was in Missouri. And you say, well, how does that apply to Oregon? Well, when we did the calculations and he was like a 4 inch row spacing, it's still when we did our calculations, those numbers still work.

That's interesting.

That gives you the maximum, and I think it holds true even in high producing areas, because the wheat head is going to be bigger in the high producing areas. And when we did the counts, those areas that were like that gave us our highest population, our highest yield. I should say when we watched our Y.