Relay Cropping with Jason Mauck

Hi friends, this is John and this is the Regenerative Agriculture podcast. Today I'm very happy to have with me Jason Mauch from Indiana. Jason is a corn, soybean, wheat and a hog farmer from Indiana who seems to be pretty much incapable of restricting his thinking to the borders that people collectively would like to impose. Jason is really passionate about relay cropping and having a second crop growing while the first crop does not get harvested. He talks quite a bit about some seldom heard ideas such as the value of capturing solar energy by harnessing the Phi Annual of plant expression. Jason shares a lot of his thoughts and ideas on Twitter and on his YouTube channel. I would very much encourage you to check those out. Some very valuable thoughts and ideas there for you to contemplate and think about. Jason, I'm very excited to have you here. The journey and the pathway to getting to where we are is always interesting and I think it's valuable to understand the context. What are you doing today that is different from the mainstream and what brought you to that point?

Well, I guess it's. Some people call it chaos and I think of it more as kind of managing the finites or kind of managing the weather and mother nature somewhat. So I've started growing these multiple crops and cover crops through basically getting punched in the face. I came back to farming from losing my father and first crop I put out was 2011 and I don't know how many crop years that is, but all but two have been extremely wet. So a lot of replanting and things like that. And through kind of trial and error I've maybe felt like I feel a little bit more in control. I guess that's my main motive, is trying to keep more of a ball in hand approach.

Jason, what are you tell us a little bit about what you're doing. You're excited about relay cropping. What is relay cropping and how is it working for you?

So relay cropping, the definition in the dictionary, if you will, is basically growing two crops at once. But in relay cropping the timing is different. So the simplest and easiest thing to do is some type of cool grass cereal, whether it's wheat or rye or barley, with the summer annual. So we have a market for wheat and it kind of got spurred on from I was selling a little regional company called Broadback and they're coming out with Enlist soybeans, which was a 2.4B resistant soybean. So I thought be pretty easy to handle the weed control with a wheat and soybean. So I started down there and also we have quite a bit of manure, about 5 million gallons a year. So we have tons of nitrogen, high phosphorus levels. I thought it was a way to kind of milk that nutrients out of the soil. But yeah, we're just growing two crops at once. And at first I thought we could just do everything we do with A. So A would be wheat and everything we do with B and we would get twice the product. Right. So simple as that. Well, figured out that's really impossible. There's only so much water, there's only so much sunlight, there's only so much, not so much nutrients. But it kind of took probably really four years to kind of figure out kind of this equilibrium and how to maybe maximize economics and maybe be okay if it was rather dry or rather wet. Trying to find a happy medium.

So what, how, when did you first begin testing and experimenting with relay cropping?

So that would have been in. Well, the first year was 12 or 13 and I picked a wet field. It's just a kind of a throwaway field and it was too wet, we didn't get planted. But the first legitimate year was 2015. And that year I had 30 inch twin row wheat and I threw a cover crop out there of radishes, the fall manure application. And it worked pretty well. But my wheat was actually too good. The wheat made about 110 bushels per acre. And what I figured out was if you excite the wheat in 30 inch rows, they'll grow laterally and capture all the light. So I basically spent money on soybean seed and there was enough moisture light for it to grow. So it's kind of a waste of time. We planted it later on the next year. We went 7 inches wider, a little bit better. We had really good beans in our lower soil where we had a little bit more water. And I got to thinking with the schematics and everything, it'd be easier in 60 inch rows. So I went to 60 and I've been there for about three years. So this would be coming up my fifth year and honestly I've changed it dramatically every year. Still planning on changing it somewhat.

You're growing wheat on 60 inch rows?

Yes. It's a little bit different thought process. Instead of a single row or double row. What I figured out through just multiple experiments within experiments is to empower solar angles, we need wider rows, but the rows themselves need to be wider. So it's a 60 inch row, but the row in itself is anywhere between 17 and 23 inches wide.

Are you planting 17 to 23 inches wide or you're just allowing them the tops of the plants to.

We're actually planting it that wide. We've tried three different ways to do this. 60 inch row squared, if you will. We've blocked off the drill where we planted four consecutive seven and a half inch rows that give us 22 and a half of 37.5. I've injected hog manure and put a gandy box above the manure injection to excite the wheat right above the manure. And that gave me about a 20 inch wide row. And I've developed a strip seeder that is a hybrid between an air seeder. So I get a fantastic stand on the outside and then kind of fill in the row with biochar that coats the seed and fertilizer below the row. So those three different ways. But the idea with the Fat 60 is you need a big enough gap that the crop is going to recognize that space. The lower leaves will grow laterally and collect and bring more energy back to that row. And since it's a relay crop, then the wheat is going to be way ahead of your summer annual. So it's and kind of steal the show of sunlight from, you know, March all the way really into maybe the 5th or 10th of June is collecting all that light so you can increase per plant production band your nitrogen. And as we'll get into later, the plant will conform to phi when it's given enough space. So it'll grow taller in the center through competition and the sides will grow laterally making kind of this half circle crop architecture.

So when you have this 20 some inch wide row on 60 inch centers, do the heads of the mature wheat end up touching in the center? How close do they come to completely bridging that gap?

Well, it's pretty interesting. There's a time when it maxes vegetation out, depends on the year. But it's sometime in the latter part of May where I can actually touch. I can take the vegetation on one row and stretch it to the other one. It touches and it almost touches without me touching it. As it gets closer to flower, it actually raises up a little bit. But the tillers that you create by giving the weed a little bit more space, they'll all find nature finds a way to survive. So those tillers will naturally jet out the side of the row. So it just conforms even from the beginning, all the way to the end into this kind of round circular pattern. Why that's important is, okay, the center of that 60 is your tallest point to the tune of maybe a foot taller than the side tillers. When you make these two circular patterns, it doesn't block the solar angles to the intercrop and you actually kind of make this bisecting X, if you will. One side of the intercrop will driven on the other side. And the intercrop really doesn't feel the lack of sunshine, if you will. But it takes space for you to be able to make this happen.

So I've never heard anyone else speak about phi angles and the golden mean. The golden ratio sometimes discussed when talking about tree structure and tree development, but never in broad acre crops. So what you're describing, if I'm understanding it correctly, is that you have this curve aspect happening across the top of each row where you have a flatter curve on the south facing side and a steeper curve on the north side that allows the between row crop more exposure to sunlight. Is that what you're describing?

Exactly. Why phi is relevant is it doesn't actually. It does show up in the crop shape, but it also phi. The math is one plus one equals two, two plus one equals three, three plus two equals five. So as you get deeper into the sequence, each revolution is of greater value. So if you can allow each crop to genetically express, then you allow that math to play out longer. So that's how you can get a corn plant to put on six or ten ears, how you can get a wheat plant to put on 6 or 10 or even 20 or. I've had plants with. If you let a volunteer wheat plant grow throughout the year, you can have 200 wheat heads from a single seed. It allows that mass to play out longer. And that's where you get all the economics, especially when we're paying so much for each seed. So we can kind of exploit the big ag mentality of plugging all these technologies into a seed. Go get those technologies. You just. There's no gun to your head that says, John, you must plant 37,000 corn seeds. You can plant four, you know, you can plant one sixth of the wheat seed. You can still get the same thing. You just get more value per seed and more value per day and more value. Kind of managing your finite.

This reminds me a bit of what was originally described or called the system of root intensification that was developed by Dr. Norman Opoff at Cornell University. And I think today is called the system of root intensification, where it's kind of essentially the same idea. You give plants more space, allow the root system to develop into A larger root system and you can support a much larger plant and have a much smaller plant population, but in fact achieve the same or higher yields as you've been taking this approach. What have the economic responses been? What are the yield results look like if you're only planting 20% or 25% of the seed, what does the crop yield look like?

Well, that's where. That's where I lose people, because it's, you know, if you want to maximize wheat yield, I would plan it a little bit later, and I wouldn't want tillers. I plant more seed, I give it plenty of shots of nitrogen. All this fungicide and all this stuff, I can't make any money doing that. So to me, the value of wheat is basically time and space. So the value is that it consumes water, it is photosynthesizing and feeding my biology, and it consumes water at the rate of about 1 acre inch per 3 bushels that extract. So my mentality is not about maximizing the yield of the first one, it's about contribution margin. So I figured out different ways to really cheapen the wheat up. So that was why my big motive here at the beginning was like, I know how to make better wheat, but how can I make it as cheap as possible? And I think I can actually have a net negative cost when. So it's all context. But you've had all these hogs for over 20 years, so our soil fertility is pretty high. But I have to pay for custom dragline applications. So instead of paying a penny a gallon, about $50 an acre on this phosphorus and nitrogen I really don't need that much of. I just took off every other shank of my manure tanker and drove as fast as possible. And then I only planted 18 the wheat seed. And the wheat only grew off the hog manure that was locally placed. So I could do that myself for about $10 a week. Seed about $15 in cost. That would be like a net negative cost of $25. That makes. Even though the wheat makes 35, 40 bushels, it's a lot of contribution margin considering this. And this is the biggest calculation. The more that I compromise through time and space or wider rows and not consuming too much of my finites ak water ak time, I can actually increase the yield of the second crop. So we achieved record yields with our soybeans by using the wheat as pattern tile, if you will, and also using the wheat's corpse to reflect the light. So when I harvest the wheat and I push that straw down I can reflect the sun off of the soil surface, but also drive light lower in that soybean canopy, allowing that plant to receive three or four times the sun capture at a key time in R2 and R3 when it's making, you know, all of its grain yield. So it's kind of this play that looks at the whole season and kind of manages sun capture and water, you know, extracting water when it's a liability and not an asset, which is different where you live. Where I'm at, I get 40 inches of rain. So not trying to preserve every drip drop, I'm trying to consume some.

We're using the language of really cropping, but what you're describing, in essence, you're thinking of using the wheat almost as a nurse crop for the beans, the way it sounds.

Exactly.

So when you're thinking about the beans as being your high value crop and increasing yields for those, what, how are your plant, how have your plant populations changed in the beans? We talked a little bit about the wheat, but how are you managing the beans differently from the way they were in the past?

So we try to keep the same row population and you know, we've been around 100 and started about 180. Really when I started farming, we dropped that down as low as 112, 115. The only caveat to this, I'm usually really pushing my soybean planting as early as possible. I've been planting in March to try to get earlier flower, so we're keeping it around 120 to 130,000 plants. But I think I can drop that back a little bit.

You're planting soybeans in March in Indiana?

Yes.

Your wheat must be doing a great job of taking moisture out of the soil.

Exactly. It is taking moisture out and it's also, it's kind of like geothermal heating, if you will. So you kind of make this microclimate and I'll kind of entertain you. I call it, maybe it's not entertaining, but I call it an agronomic algorithm. So you've got your wheat, right. It's going to wake up as soon as our sun angle gets stronger, even in late February and early March. And as soon as we get these little heat wave, it's, it's actively growing. So when we place that soybean an inch in the ground in late March, it's going to take so much heat, gdu sun, you know, sun heat to let that soybean actually emerge. It's usually going to take three or four Weeks, the wheat's doing a job of giving that seed a little bit more oxygen. When we get rain, we get a little bit better infiltration right there. But also in that heat, enough heat to make that soybean arise. The wheat's growing that whole time. So the wheat will go from say 5 inches tall to 15 inches tall in that time and it'll grow horizontally. So when the, when the soybean emerges, it's in a position where it's kind of underneath this California wave, if you will. So the tillers are growing over the top. And let's say that it gets say 28 degrees, which is your 2 meter temperature. Your soil is going to hurt hold some thermal equity, but it's going to be slightly warmer right up against that wheat. So there's really not much fear of killing that soybean due to frost from putting it in that position. So that allows us to get a little bit more aggressive. The reason that's really relevant, it's really important to get to bloom as quick as possible. If I can get that thing to bloom, say June 5th instead of around summer solstice, since it's a short day crop, the earlier I bloom, the later it's going to trigger reproductive or, sorry, senescence through a short day. So each one of those days has been, there's been research that I can get two or three bushels per day. Now it's not a pure day because let's say I'll get into weeds here. But if flowers June 6 instead of June 21, it's not going to give you what, however many days that is 15, and probably give you an extra six or eight, it's still going to give you longer time in reproduction.

So that's really where you're gaining additional yield. And additional bushels per acre is by partially is coming from the earlier planting and having more days for reproductive, bud set and pollination.

Exactly. And also I've done spectrum analysis plots. We've done 17 different varieties. And the later I push the maturity of the soybeans, the more yield I get. And I think I can use maturities that are well beyond where I need to be with my latitude. Because when I prune the wheat and I empower that soybean with three or four times more light per plant, the soybean feels that it's getting a longer day or just strictly more sunlight capture, it changes its vegetative motive as well that prune and more light, it stops having that vegetative motive where it's in competition with the same species. So it kind of shortens the plants themselves, shortens the space in between the nodes. I think that going back to that phi math or compound interest, it increases or lowers the time in between node set. So maybe I'm. Maybe I'm creating a node every two and a half days instead of every four days, something like that. Because I'm getting four to six more nodes in a relay setting such as this. And I've seen that two years in a row. Seeing the relay versus mono.

Jason, let's go back for a moment. I interrupted you earlier when you were speaking about your soybean spacing. How are you spacing your plants between the 60 inch centered wheat?

So to make it simple, just imagine 60 inch rows on center. Your wheat is 20 inches wide, which leaves a 40 inch gap. Your soybeans are planted in 2040 inch rows, but the 20s are between the 40 inch gap. So that gives you about a 10 inch spacing between the edge of the wheat and the soybean row. That 10 inches goes away quickly when the wheat grows because it's going to grow horizontally. So that's about as close as I can get it to the wheat and not have it completely smother it. And then also that 20 inches or that 40 inch gap straddling the 20s gives me plenty room to grow a huge soybean or two. When I harvest the wheat, I push the soybeans down. And even though it's a big bean with branches, I have enough space for my combine traffic to go in between those soybean rows.

You spoke about your fertility applications on the wheat with your manure application at planting. Are the beans also benefiting from that? Are you putting on any additional fertility applications for the beans?

It's kind of a trick play with the manure so you've got some nitrogen there, especially as the soil temperature start to warm up as we get into summer, you're going to release a lot of that organic nitrogen. So in a monocrop setting, it probably would spur on too much vegetative growth and allow them to lodge. But since they're pruned, you can kind of let that nitrogen heat up and release and manage that vegetative motive through that spacing. And any plant by itself, whether it's a tree or corn plant or anything, is going to grow shorter and wider with space. So it's kind of a way to offset that and kind of a way to make the most of wider row spacings.

There's a number of other topics that I want to get to as well. But the one question that comes to mind right now we've been talking about so far about wheat and soybeans. I'm curious, are you doing anything after the beans? Is there a relay that then comes in while the beans are still in the field? Is this a continuous really? Or you're just looking at this as a wheat and the beans as a one off?

Yeah, I'm just looking at the one off for now. The corn really does well afterwards, but we normally get quite a bit of volunteer wheat. It's mostly our harvesting hasn't been quite optimized yet. We're using pans to push down the soybeans and we're getting a little bit of harvest loss on the head. So quite a bit of volunteer wheat will spur on. And we're usually striping the wheat like we're mowing grass when we harvest the soybeans. So you can call it what you want, you can call it harvest loss at our cover crop, but there is a cereal with roots actively growing there.

You're effectively doing relay with the wheat and the beans. Are you doing something similar with corn? Are there any other crops that you've experimented with at this point?

Yeah, with corn and soybeans it's not quite relay because they kind of share the same season. Now we tried to relay it and that might be an answer of growing ultra early corn and harvesting the corn separate and then having the soybeans green and by another five or six weeks on the back half. And that also helps when you're shooting out residue out of the back of the combine. You're not beating the pods and having harvest loss. But I think the true value in the corn, soybeans thing is completely milking the curve. So going back to that phi curve, what's pretty interesting, there was a. About three years ago I took a corn plant and grew by itself and I. I produced 31 silks. Now I ran out of daddy sauce, if you will, and I couldn't pollinate them all. But there's about 22 ears with quite a bit of grain on it. And what we can do with the corn and soybeans is. I'll start. I'll give credit to the guy that kind of gave me this idea. A man by the name of James Bates was a plant breeder in Hawaii and he was seeing a kind of a wilting. He was a. He was seeing. As the day went on, there was quite a bit of heat stress in soybean plants in Hawaii. So he started shading the soybean plants with different obstructions. And seeing as the sun changed position through the day and cast shadows, it would give it kind of a break, if you will, from direct sunlight. So what we're doing is planting corn in 60 inch rows and then putting a diamond pattern stair step gaps in the corn and lowering the population. I did several different studies, anywhere from 11, two and solid rows all the way down to three or 4,000. And as you lower the corn population, you trigger three or four or five ears per plant. And then your soybeans as you get less aggressive on the corn, will shorten and add more nodes. And I think there's a spot there somewhere around 4,000 where we actually may start increasing soybean yields. Then we completely milk the corn curd with corn. So yeah, you're not getting 240 bushel corn, you might be getting 80. But if you can get 80 bushels of 4,000 seeds and only locally placed nitrogen or just locally squirted starter or astronaut food, if you will, around the corn seed that's biochar or humic, that's inoculated with ammonium or some energy source, that just gives a competitive advantage to allow it to capture sun. And you can grow corn for literally 15, $20. So it doesn't take much to add contribution margin. It's just a matter of figuring out the logistics of separating it and all that stuff which we're working on.

Yeah, if you're actually increasing soybean yields, then you could even attribute the fertility cost to the beans and say that you're 80 bushel corn crop is free.

Yeah. Yeah.

Wow. So when you look at the wheat and bean relay or the corn and bean relay, what do the net economics look like in a cropping season versus doing individual crops?

Well, that's, that's why I'm in this a sale of farm, because it can continue to get better and better and better in my opinion. And it all, it's all down to reduction. One thing I talk about when I speak on the stage is that, you know, we're continuously getting better with yield, but we're, we're continuously writing bigger checks. So I think significance is through reduction or eliminating or automating nature, delegating jobs to nature. One thing that's interesting with the wheat relay is do we need to spray herbicide in the space that the wheat resides? So one thing when we push tiller density in that space is we temper the straw to not lodge. We also can't allow you Know, sunlight can't penetrate that canopy, so there's no reason to spray herbicide in that space. So can we take 45, 50% of our herbicide off the ledger there? Can we? And then when we talk contribution margin, if we can raise that wheat for whatever system we're in, I'm getting into now is where we dry down and burn manure down to the biochar. We got this fluent. And I think we can raise wheat for somewhere around 60 to $80 in variable cost. So if we can achieve 40 or 50 bushel wheat and lower herbicide only in that space and achieve $150 contribution margin, that contribution margin is just like raising, you know, 17 or 20 bucks or more soybeans. If we can lower our seeding rate with the soybeans, lower our cost of production down and maybe increase yield or if nothing else, not crap the bed on a wet year, you know, add some resiliency there, that's where they really start adding up, is lowering cost, increasing yield of the soybeans and then getting contribution margin. It's kind of a three way deal there. It depends on the context. But I, I'm very comfortable saying it's at least a $200 advantage with the wheat soybeans, if not three or $400, depending on kind of how good we get at optimizing it.

While you can't afford to grow monocrops anymore, right. You simply can't afford to grow mono crops anymore at that rate. And of course the economics are just, I mean, they're a significant piece of this picture. But I don't think we should discount the climate resiliency. I mean the piece that you were speaking about with having the capacity to plant soybeans early and actually protect them from frost and remove excessive early moisture, that is also adding significant climate resiliency. And in the world we live in today, that becomes a very important piece.

And I know we talk about, you know, the cereal consuming water, but you know, you get into Pennsylvania or we, we even have hills, you know, if you're on a 10 degree slope and it rains 2 inches in an hour and you have nothing out there, where's that water going? It's going right down the hill. You know, after a quarter inch or a half inch, we can just physically stop it in its place and infiltrate it in place. You know, the wheat might not be as heavy in those lighter soil types. We may actually be in a better position come August because we a stop, physically stop the water in its place and then Stop the heat in the soil from that thatch. We may be able to actually increase yields through actually increasing water that physically was absorbed in certain spots of the field. So it doesn't just help your wet areas. I think it helps your drow the areas possibly as well with compromise by not pushing you.

Right. Sounds like a win win.

Yeah, sounds cheesy, but it's cool to see. I've got so much footage of a drone where I have the relay and the monocrops. And the monocrops. You know, it's just so much more spotty throughout the fields. You get the yellow spots where you have too much rain, you know. And the relay just. It's actually easier to grow a more even crop. It's pretty neat once you start kind of pulling the strings somewhat.

What other benefits have you noticed of the relay cropping? We've been talking about climate resiliency and economics. Just now you mentioned crops grow more evenly. Have you observed any other advantages, any other agronomic advantages to the relay cropping?

Well, I think you just get better plant health, which is partly of the infiltration. But think about that. When you get that big 2 or 3 or 4 inch rain before you're getting any uptake and you're basically trying to raise a baby in Baghdad, you've got bombs going everywhere you go loosen stuff in a low spot or whatever, you can keep all your root hairs right. That, that's what really kills you is those stress, those stressful events early in the crops lifespan. If you lose those root hairs and you lose the root mass, then you've shot the top end right off the table and that pays so much more dividends later on. But also I look at plant architecture as a whole life cycle thing. I talk about the pruning and maximizing that during reproduction, but also by kind of tucking that plant in next to the wheat. But also have this ambient light to its side to encourage branching on the opposite side of the plant. And because I can get to vegetative stages earlier in the season and I don't have as many growing degree units as I'm going through vegetative stages since say May instead of June, I don't stretch out so I can encourage branching. Lowering the soybean plant and I can get 3, 4, 5 branches with significant node counts on those branches. So it just goes back to that compound interest. Building more branches and more nodes allows me to exponentially increase my reproductive size on the plant.

You mentioned the impact of pruning and I can imagine we know the impact that topping has on the soybeans. What stage are the beans at when you are harvesting the wheat? And how does the wheat harvest impact the soybean plant and its future yield potential?

Yeah, so the soybean plant we're not harming whatsoever. We worked with a company called Flexi Finger and made this pad that we snap onto the head and it just makes the soybean do the limbo. So it just kind of pushes it over. You can have a 2 foot soybean that pushes down to 6 inches. It takes about an hour and it pops right back up. You're taking that wheat that now. So the wheat has a ground floor of 20 inches, but it kind of is pushing up against the soybean plant. And as it dies, the grain starts drying. Then it loses kind of its force. So just imagine, John, that you're arm wrestling a dude that ages rapidly. Okay, you're arm wrestling. At first he's 20 years old, you're like, oh crap, this guy's gonna beat me. And then by the time he's 80 years old, you just break his knuckles on the table because he has no vigor anymore. So as that soybean plant goes through the juvenile stage and has this rapid growth, it will push up against that wheat and no weeds can penetrate that. But as you now take the biomass of the wheat, it's kind of like Thanksgiving afternoon. You unbuttoning your pants and letting your gut kind of pop out. Those beans will kind of allow them to really kind of expand. It only takes about 10 or 14, maybe 20 days for that bean to zip back shut. If the bigger soybeans may be even earlier than that, that's enough time for the light to drive lower in that soybean plant, reflect off that thatch, and it just the, the plant will. Will completely change his growth habit. I don't know if you ever noticed this, but if you go by the in rows of corn, whether it's east, west or north, south, the leaves will actually conform, just kind of like a sunflower head. And the soybean leaves on the lower part of the plant will grow out quickly and intercept that light.

Interesting. Jason, you get first prize for colorful analogies. I want to have you on a comedian stage sometime. So when you, you made the comment that as these plants are pushing up against each other, first the wheat is pushing up against the beans, and then later on the reverse that no weed can go through that. Earlier you mentioned that you're still using herbicides, but perhaps cutting the application strips down to half or to 40%. Are you observing a situation where, or have you observed the potential where these crops might be so vigorous that there is not a need to use herbicides at all? Because I'm just thinking about this. If you're planting beans in March and they're emerging and start growing, it would seem to me that they would be an effective competitor to the weeds because they may be out of the ground before the weeds are out of the ground.

Yeah, that's one thing we're thinking about doing. It's just, you know, it's going to be a while before the beans really add vigor. So we developed this zero spacing idea for this year and it goes back to that air seeder on the outside and then filling in. So if you use 50% of your seed on the outside and 50%, you're only going to have a inner plant spacing and maybe 2 or 3 inches on the soybeans. And that's basically what you're racing up against is can the soybeans win the race. So can you put a strip till unit in there that does clean tillage in the relative area that where you'll have weed pressure, which is in the center of the row, have a clean slate and then have the beans win? Yeah, I don't know. It's. It's not going to be perfect. You're going to get a little further, but it could be done. I mean, I think, I think if you really wanted to get away from herbicide, you do probably one cultivation pass there, just scratching. So I assume probably planning your 2000 and 40s, having a cultivator shovel in between the soybean row and then in between the soybean rows and have your wheel traffic in between there. You could probably get by with one cultivation pass with that.

Yeah. I think actually this is an important question for our listeners and understanding the context. You are incorporating your liquid manure by injecting it. Are you doing any other tillage? How does tillage play a role in your operation?

Well, it's changed. So in the past we've dragline manure after corn harvest and we're using a chopping cornhead. So we have quite a bit of residue. We're drag lining it and then we're using a soil finisher before we plant the wheat. So we're getting a level seed bed and a clean tillage pass. This past year we only used a strip seeder deal. So we've got zero tillage on 51 inches of it and a strip till A pass for the wheat row and then an air seeder that's basically side card of the strip till unit, about 5 inches on either side.

So it's primarily untouched when we think about nutrition management. You talked about your historical applications of manure and having lots of nitrogen and phosphorus. And so far, twice in our conversation you've mentioned using biochar, which is not something that I commonly hear being used in broad acre production agriculture. How are you using the char? What have you learned with the char so far? Where is it coming from? Tell us a little bit about that.

So the char long term, my company is working on a solution for manure distribution. The short story on that is there's areas of the corn belt where there's three or four or five counties wide, there's just millions of animals and the manure is just too much for the geographic area. So we take the excess manure from growers and we make renewable natural gas. We separate the digestate into potable water that we can discharge back to the animals or irrigate and effluent that's rich in nitrogen and potassium. You make some micros and then we burn the solids through a gasification process down to Manila biochar, which is different than regular biochar. Your wood Biochar is about 70 or 80% carbon, but it's about a fourth of the weight per volume. So there's more carbon, but not in a five gallon bucket. There's going to be more carbon in manure biochar and also organic phosphorus and a lot of the minerals. But anyway, until that's built, we've been sourcing this through a variety of places, but mostly from a turkey manure biochar in southern Indiana. And what we did this year did several experiments in the garden with flowers to kind of get a handle on that. But we also planted 10 relay fields with this strip cedar machine. And we took that biochar and ran it through a really small mesh screen and got it down to basically the powder. And we mixed it with the wheat seed and some fertilizer which was mostly urea and AMS and just a little bit of potash and map primarily AMS and turns it all black as you put it in the mixer. That adheres especially to the nitrogen really well. And the idea is can we place that commercial nitrogen underneath the cereal in the fall and not have it lose through denitrification leaching or gassing off in that time period between application and spring green up. So seeing research online, but until we see it with our, you know, eyes. I really don't have a feel for how that works, but that's kind of the idea.

You're just beginning with this. You don't have any field experience with it yet at this point.

Exactly.

Yeah. Well, I think it's a really great idea. I know that in our work we've done some work with biochar amended compost from wood source biochar, of course, with some really intriguing results at relatively small application rates, 25 to 100 pounds per acre. Actually, growers that we've been working with, quite a large group in southeastern Pennsylvania, have found that they don't get increasing benefits from char applications above 100 pounds per acre.

And this is 5%.

This is. They were measuring it in terms of soil response, fungal to bacterial biomass and bacterial total microbial populations didn't get an increased response above 100 pounds per acre. So, yeah, intriguing. Jason, you have a very different perspective on agriculture than many people do. You're willing to think about it differently. What is something that you believe to be true about modern agriculture that is very different from the mainstream view?

Well, I just don't think we're really going to come up with a real world solution to regenerative agriculture until we connect directly with consumers. It's really hard.