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“In ’81, they decided: let’s show what we know. We’ve been doing all this work, we’ve collected all this data, we’ve got this research, bring people in. It was still new. Most people didn’t know what it was, hadn’t heard about it a lot. And so they did. I remember a couple of things. There was almost 1,700 people showed up. It almost overwhelmed us. We had never had a field day with that kind of people.”
--Blake Brown on the first Milan No-Till Field Day.
In this week’s edition of the No-Till Farmer: Influencers & Innovators podcast, we’re talking about one of the oldest and most influential no-till field days in the United States.
Blake Brown is the director of the AgResearch and Education Center at Milan. The center, one of ten in Tennessee, shares a significant anniversary in the annals of no-till's history. The event now follows an every other year schedule which veteran attendees note always "coincides with the state's hottest single day temperature of the year."
Earlier this month, Brown spoke with Lessiter Media President Mike Lessiter about the history-making structure of the Milan Research Center, the field day, and more, including what would've happened had it not been for no-till champions Dr. Tom McCutchen, Dr. John Bradley and the TNT Team of Tennesse No-Till rearchers.
Click to watch the video replay of this podcast.
RELATED ... For other newly posted content on the Milan No-Till Field Day, click Milan No-Till Field Day Showed Real-World Results and Memories of Milan No-Till Field Day.
No-Till Farmer‘s No-Till Influencers & Innovators Podcast podcast is brought to you by Verdesian Life Sciences.
At Verdesian Life Sciences, we believe that supplying healthy water and soil for the next generation is just as important as supplying efficient nutrients for every crop farmers grow. For us, sustainability and profitability go hand in hand. That’s why we call ourselves The Nutrient Use Efficiency People. We have dedicated ourselves to providing prescriptive nutrient use efficiency solutions that improve plant uptake and reduce fertilizer losses, helping preserve the environment and make the most of your investment. Learn more at vlsci.com or talk to your ag retailer today about Verdesian products.
Full Transcript
Brian O'Connor:
Welcome to the latest episode of the No-Till Farmer Influencers And Innovators Podcast. I'm Brian O'Connor, Lead Content Editor for No-Till Farmer. Verdesian sponsors this program, which features stories about the past, present and future of No-Till Farming. I encourage you to subscribe to this series, which is available on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, Stitcher and TuneIn Radio. Subscribing will allow you to receive an alert about upcoming episodes as soon as they are released. I'd like to take a moment to thank Verdesian for supporting our No-Till Farmer Influencers And Innovators Podcast series.
Brian O'Connor:
At Verdesian Life Sciences, we believe that supplying healthy water and soil for the next generation is just as important as supplying efficient nutrients for every crop farmers grow. For us, sustainability and profitability go hand in hand. That's why we call ourselves the nutrient use efficiency people. We have dedicated ourselves to providing prescriptive nutrient use efficiency solutions that improve plant uptake and reduce fertilizer losses, helping preserve the environment and make the most of your investment. Learn more at vlsci.com. That's vlsci.com or talk to your ag retailer today about Verdesian products.
Mike Lessiter:
Hello everybody, Mike Lessiter here from No-Till Farmer and Farm Equipment Magazine. Thanks for tuning in with us today. We've got Dr. Blake Brown from the University of Tennessee and the Milan Field Day with us today, which is just a few weeks ahead of the 2022 event. That's making its first return to a live format after four years. So excited to have Blake with us today. Thanks for joining us. How are things going in Milan today Blake?
Blake Brown:
Going very well. Obviously, we're four weeks out from today from our event. It's July 28th and today is June 30th. So we feel like we've got a lot to get done in the next four weeks, but we always do. It'll all happen. I've got a great crew here. They're working hard. Crops are in place. Everything is planted and sprayed and fertilized. And I was just talking with you briefly before we started, we're ready for a rain. We're getting pretty dry, but that's not uncommon for this time of year in West Tennessee. So all in all, things are very good and appreciate the opportunity to visit you today.
Mike Lessiter:
Tell us about the visual over your shoulder that I'm looking at here.
Blake Brown:
Well, that's actually some of the land that ... Our center was established back in 1962, and it was on land that formally belonged to an army ammunition plant, the Milan Army Ammunition Plant. It started back in the '40s. And in '62, we got about almost 500 acres. Back in about 2000 ... No I'm sorry, '82 or three, they leased an additional 200 acres from the Arsenal that was adjacent to the property that we now own. In 2001, we started negotiating, I did, on this property, that you can see behind me. It's another track of the Arsenal property, another 188 acres. And at that time I thought, "Hey, we'll have all the land we ever need. We've got a total of about 630 or 40 acres tillable."
Blake Brown:
Now that facility is closing down and we're in the process of getting that transferred to the university. And that took literally an Act of Congress that happened on New Year's Day of 2021, and we're about halfway through that process. We're having to have environmental surveys done. And right now we're doing a Cultural Resources Survey, archeological type work with the goal of having that transferred by the end of 2023. And so that's just a little bit of the land. You can see the plots back there, laid out in different fields, but it's just another resource. And the Arsenal has been a great landlord through the years. They've been wonderful, but this will secure our future to have that property under the University of Tennessee's name. So that's what that is.
Mike Lessiter:
Excellent. And just a history side note, the ammunition's factory there was preparing ordinance for our [inaudible 00:04:37].
Blake Brown:
Built during World War II, kind of an amazing story. They said they built that facility in, I believe, 11 or 13 months. It's got like 1200 buildings. It was 26,000 acres, I believe. It's about 22,000 now. It's got rail and water and their own sewage plants and the whole thing, it's kind of like a little city, but they've got a lot of land, obviously where they can spread out these ammunition's factories and storage facilities. And so it has, I guess, run its course. We hate to lose it because it's been the largest employer in our county for many, many, many years. So that's a big hit to our economy here, but it looks like that's going happen, and so we'll see what happens. We hope to hang on to our piece of it. National Guard's going to get a chunk of it for a training ground. And I think there's some still up in the air, but-
Mike Lessiter:
Yeah.
Blake Brown:
Things change and I guess that's progress.
Mike Lessiter:
Yep. Yep. Excellent. Well yeah, I've gotten to know you here over the last year, as we were preparing materials for the 60th anniversary of No-Till, which got its startup in Herndon, Kentucky by the Young Family and you prepared all kinds of photos and things for our museum. But I guess I hadn't realized at the time that you share that same 60th anniversary there at your place.
Blake Brown:
Yeah, we haven't talked about that a lot this year, but yes, this is our 60th anniversary of our center, and we'll be talking about that some at our field day and our breakfast and I think that's significant. A lot of good things have happened here through the years. I think, kind of what I'm thinking is getting this property transferred, kind of sets us up for the next 60 years. And so that's a goal of mine. I've got way less years in front of me than I got behind me, and one of my goals is to get this done before I retire.
Mike Lessiter:
Yeah.
Blake Brown:
And I don't know exactly when that's going be, but dealing with the Federal Government is challenging sometimes. They don't move as quickly as we would hope sometimes, but we're pretty confident it's going to happen. So I'm looking forward to that.
Mike Lessiter:
Yeah. Excellent. Excellent. Well, for those out there, who might not be familiar, tell us a little bit about Milan the town, what part of the state it's in, and how this small little hamlet became such an influential part in the annals of No-Till history.
Blake Brown:
Well, Milan is located approximately halfway between Memphis and Nashville in Western part of Tennessee. Tennessee's kind of divided into three sections, West, Middle and East. We're part of the University of Tennessee. Our main campuses in Knoxville, in East Tennessee. We're about 320 miles from the main campus. And so our system, we have 10 Research and Education Centers across the state, similar to what most states have, probably all. And we all focus on different commodities that are grown in that part of the state. And so we have some that work with livestock, beef cattle, and some that do vegetables and ornamentals and all kinds of things, tobacco, different crops. Here at Milan, it has always been focused on the row crops grown in West Tennessee.
Blake Brown:
Now we have a larger station just south of us at Jackson, about 25 miles south, where there is a component of faculty who are actually located there, who are affiliated with the departments in Knoxville, Plant Science, Entomology and Plant Pathology, Bio-Systems Engineering, Soil Science, et cetera. And so they do work here, we're 35 minutes away, as well as faculty from Nashville. This station was set up in 1962, kind of as a way to do larger plots, do more field scale work, and it's evolved through the years. And so now, we do a lot of small plot research. And by that, I mean a lot of 30 feet long and 10 foot wide plot or five foot wide plots. Somebody said, "How many do you do?" I don't know. A bunch, somewhere probably between 15 and 20,000 a year. We tried to count them a few years ago and that's a challenge, because it seems like it changes all the time.
Blake Brown:
We used to say, we had a hundred research projects a year. Now, we got more than that. We're probably 120 to 150. We have about 25 PhD scientists that are conducting these studies. I have a staff here, I have myself and I have three research associates with either BS or master's degrees that we say they're kind of the eyes and the ears for the faculty who aren't located here because we don't have any faculty located here. And then we have four on our farm crew and we've got a couple of administrative assistants. And then I think you've dealt with Ben at the museum. We have a ag museum here, but I think it's interesting. I'd like to know exactly how the evolution came of starting this system, because as I mentioned, we're dealing with the government and trying to get this land transferred. And I can't imagine in 1962, that there were as many hurdles to jump through as what we're doing now, but I could be wrong. I don't find any of that in the record. So I don't really know how it all came about.
Blake Brown:
Milan itself is a town of about, oh we're probably around 8,000 people now. As I mentioned, the Army Ammunition Plant was the biggest employer. It was put in back in the early '40s as a support for the missions of World War II. I understand at its heyday, the Arsenal as we call it employed up over 10 or 12,000 people. It varied through the years. When I came here in 1997, I think employment was around 700 and it stayed that way up until just four or five years ago. So we're kind of a suburb of Jackson, a little bit. We're 25 miles away, but it's a great place to live. I started working up here when I was 16 years old and I've been here most of my life it seems like, but really great people here. It's been a good place to raise a family, and I feel like we've done good work here through the years and I've been honored to be a part of it.
Mike Lessiter:
Would you be the fourth or fifth director then, in the-
Blake Brown:
Third.
Mike Lessiter:
Third, okay.
Blake Brown:
Tom McCutchen was first and I saw your website yesterday, and he was named the first director back in 1962. He had been an extension agent, from up in Obion County, just north of here a little bit. And Tom came and he actually hired me to work up here when I was 16 years old, and we'll talk about that more later, but he was a really ... Golly, he was ahead of his time, and he was the person who first seemed to recognize, at least in our part of the world, that we were washing away. We had the highest rates of soil erosion of anywhere in the United States. On our sloping land, they're saying that we were losing 30 to 40 tons of top soil per acre per year. And he just recognized that we couldn't keep doing that, that was not sustainable. And so, we call him the Father of Tennessee No-Till.
Blake Brown:
I talked to some of my colleagues in Kentucky and I said, "Hey, y'all say you're first. We say, you're first." Really doesn't matter. We all worked together and made this thing happen. But in our part of the world, he was the guy that led the team that started trying to figure this thing out. And as you know, till's been used for thousands of years, for two things. Number one, get that soil prepped, so we could get a seed in the ground, and number two, for weed control. And in the late '60s, '70s, '80s, we didn't have equipment like we have now. We certainly didn't have the herbicides that we have now, and there were some challenges.
Blake Brown:
I remember the first, the first experience I had when I came here, we had an [inaudible 00:13:02] planter that we were trying to plant soybeans in the wheat stubble. The summer of 1980 was the hottest one I ever remember, the driest one. It was the worst drought I've ever recalled. We had, I forget 17, 18 days in a row, over a 100 degrees. It was miserable. And it got so hot and dry, I can remember hanging weights of every ... We pulled every tractor weight we could find, hang all over this planter to try to get it to go on the ground, where we could get the seed in, and it was just a real challenge. I remember they couldn't see their markers. You're going out through the wheat stubble and all of a sudden, you're off and you're planting across the field and you're just making a mess, because it was just that things were different back then.
Blake Brown:
But there was a team of people, including engineers and agronomists and Bob Hayes was my mentor and was my major professor in graduate school. He was hired as a weed scientist to do weed control work in No-Till. Don Tyler was our Soil Management Professor, hired the same time that Hayes was to work on soil management and those cultural kind of things associated with No-Till, but there were many other people involved. And so they all worked together just to systematically start working through and trying to find answers to these challenges. All the work that was done. What kind of culture do you put on the front of a planter? I remember bubble cultures, ripple cultures, and how big and all this stuff. It was a huge undertaking.
Blake Brown:
The story is told that, and I think it's true that some of the administrators at the university told Tom at some point, to quit messing with this No-Till and go do something productive. I saw a quote in some of your stuff from John Bradley. John said he had it in the back of the station where people couldn't see it. By the time I got here, it was everywhere. We were doing a lot of work with it, but he was hard headed enough, I guess, that he didn't let that stop him and he just kept on working, and fortunately for us now, it took and we worked through those challenges to the point. And I haven't seen the statistics yet for this year. They're not out yet, but we're up over 90% of our acres in the state are farmed with some form of conservation till. I go back to 1980, that was probably less than 5%. I think that's a pretty phenomenal story.
Mike Lessiter:
Yeah, that's amazing. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I've understood that McCutchen at the time, late '60s, it was such a desperate situation of that erosion that kind of had to go right into ... Had to fast track No-Till, not go into just some intermediate steps, but something had to be done quickly, didn't it?
Blake Brown:
I can remember growing up in West Tennessee and literally, I tell people, we've got photos over the museum, we plowed the gullies in the Spring before we planted and we plowed them in the Fall before we harvested, just so you could get the machinery across the field. And it was not uncommon to have ditches, 12, 18 inches deep, two feet deep, three feet deep. It's crazy how fast they would form, but we were plowing, disking, Do-Alling. I don't know if y'all use the Do-All up north, but that's kind of an old Southern field cultivator type machine. And then we were doing in-season cultivation. Cotton? Golly, they plowed cotton every week, all summer. It seemed like it got so big, they couldn't do it. So it was continually working its soil up, and every time it rained, it just washed down the creek. And the old fence rows, the cemeteries, things like that, that weren't disturbed, all of sudden you see and they're two, three feet higher than the field next to them. So I mean, it was a real deal.
Blake Brown:
When I was hired here as a student worker, again 16 years old, there was a professor at Knoxville named Curtis Shelton. Curtis was an ag engineer and I say, he loved to play in the mud better than anybody I've ever seen in my life. And his focus was, we had a set of rainfall simulator plots here. There were 10 quarter acre plots. They put in a three acre pond that we still have now, to provide the water for that. And he did some really cool work. It was backbreaking work, but it was really good stuff, comparing different tillage systems on these plots to no-till or minimum till or whatever. And I don't remember all the treatments, but there were two sets of five. They were a quarter acre, sprinklers along the top and the bottom. All the water came to ditches on either side and along the bottom, and then came to a flume and the flume measured how much water was coming through.
Blake Brown:
It had a chart on it that you had to fill these things with ink. It was interesting. But then we would sample over time and they would analyze see how much silt was coming out, and that's how they came up with how much soil we were losing. And the interesting thing, and we have photos that if you had a conventional tilled plot beside a no-till plot and caught the water in a glass jar, the water coming off a no-till plot looked like you could drink it, just clear. The conventional tilled plot was all nasty, muddy, brown water. And I always said, I felt like that convinced more people to no-till than anything we ever did, because they could see it. And one of the slides I have, and I may have sent you that, I showed in one event that convinced the till lost like 11 tons of top soil per acre, and the no-till plot was 0.05 tons or something minuscule. 180 pounds, I believe it was. And so it was huge, huge differences.
Blake Brown:
I think people knew it, but they just didn't really pay attention and-
Mike Lessiter:
Hit them over the head with a two by four, huh?
Blake Brown:
Hit them over the head, and when they saw that, they think, "Dang, I've noticed that water running down my ditch is brown and muddy and nasty like that." And I think it really got people thinking. So there was that big push back in probably the '80s. And then I think there was another push in the mid '90s. Fuel got high and people started figuring out, "I don't have to make all these trips across this field with these tractors and doing all this tillage, when I can reduce that to maybe one trip with a sprayer, one with a planter and come back and spray another time or two, and wait for the combine, as opposed to three, four, five, six, eight trips with a tractor." Of course, diesel fuel now is $5 a gallon. I mean, that's as critical now as it ever was, but then just wear and tear, time. There's so many advantages that we found.
Blake Brown:
Initially it was all about soil erosion, but once we got going, there's just a lot of other advantages that y'all know better than I do, why it's just a great system. And so it's been interesting to watch this occur over the last 40, 50 years or something, and y'all have been involved as well. So I'm not telling you anything new, but I think to your listeners that's ... And many of them have seen the same thing. But it's been pretty cool.
Mike Lessiter:
Yeah. So McCutchen got the research going and got a reputation for doing good practical research. And I understand brought industry in, when maybe that wasn't commonplace at the time. Tell me about the decision that was made bring this to a head with the No-Till Field Day in ... It was '81, correct?
Blake Brown:
Yeah, yeah. Like I said, I started working here in 1980 and we had just a little field day that year with a couple of tours. Nothing like this, and obviously I was not involved in the planning at all. I was just a summer worker with a hoe in my hand most of the time, but Tom and his committee, his team, I mean, I think they decided it was time to share this. I will share one thing I do remember. In 1980, there was a local effort and it was called Operation SOS, Save Our Soil. It was a conglomeration of university, the Old Soil Conservation Service.
Blake Brown:
I'm not sure who all was involved, but I do remember that Tom, we took our three or four, five tractors from Milan and went to the other side of the county to the dire community. And I think it was the McCurdy Farm and Bob McCurdy now runs a sod farm there. I was over there the other day and they were showing a lot of these new practices, terraces and no-till and diversion ditches, and all these things they had put in place. Again, trying to show people, how can we stop some of the soil erosion?
Blake Brown:
So that was not part of the Milan No-Till Field Day, but that in my opinion, was a precursor, that I think was 1980, because I was there and participated. So in '81, they decided to, "Let's show what we know. We've been doing all this work. We've collected this data. We've got this research. Bring people in." And it was still new. I mean, most people didn't know what it was, hadn't heard about it a lot, and so they did. And I remember a couple of things. Number one, there were almost 1,700 people showed up. I'm thinking, something I read in yours yesterday, you said 500, but there was more than that. It kind of overwhelmed us.
Mike Lessiter:
Yeah.
Blake Brown:
But we had never had a field day with that kind of people.
Mike Lessiter:
Yeah.
Blake Brown:
And the other thing I remember, and we had the tours and nothing like it is today, but there were, I don't remember, two or three or four, five tours, maybe. About noon, it came up one of those popup showers and just rained the thing out. Just man, I mean cars and back in those days, everybody didn't drive a Four Wheel Drive truck and they were parked out in this sweep field and they all got stuck. We all had to drive our trailers, and it wasn't ... Four or five tractors and go hunt chains up, and we pulled cars and trucks out of the parking lot for two hours, just to get them out. But the thing was a big hit.
Blake Brown:
I don't remember if we had the planters the first year. I honestly don't remember, but there was a lot of good stuff. We did have exhibitors here, I know that, because they were the reason, is what I was told that they said, "Hey, this is great. We need to do it again." And my understanding is that it was really never planned that way initially. But when all your sponsors and supporters say, "Hey, this is good. We want to do it again." They planned it again and off we went. And here we are now, 42 years later, still doing it. So, it just kind of hit, and then from there it took off and it just kept growing and growing.
Blake Brown:
I tell people, I said, "I worked for Tom." And then unfortunately he passed away in 1983 as a young man. He was only in his early 50s. John Bradley was named his successor, and I think John started that Fall and I had then worked for John for a couple of summers. I ended up working here six summers, and then in graduate school, working with Dr. Hayes. I did work here for another four or five years. John was a promoter. John took it from what Tom started, and he went and really took it to another level.
Blake Brown:
He was great at that and he got lots of stuff going. He made it famous, no doubt about it. And I think even the success we enjoy today is due in a large part to the efforts that he did in the time he was here. So we appreciate that. And I got to know John back then pretty well. And I don't see him very often anymore because he's down south of us now, but he did a lot of really good things and got this thing going and no doubt he had an impact on getting it adopted widely like it has grown to be.
Mike Lessiter:
So then you succeeded John Bradley as director, right?
Blake Brown:
That's right.
Mike Lessiter:
But your dad also had a role in this couple times, correct?
Blake Brown:
Yeah, my dad was an East Tennessee boy. I was actually born in Knoxville. He and my mom, both of them up there, but they moved down here. He took a job at the station at Jackson when I was three weeks old, I believe. So I've been in West Tennessee most of my life, but he was a horticulture professor at the West Tennessee Experiment Station at Jackson. He worked with fruits and vegetables and oh about, I don't know, '77 I think, he was named the superintendent. So he and Tom then began to work together. And when Tom passed away, my dad got asked to be the interim director and he did that along with the one in Jackson. Then he did it again when John left. And so he's got his dose. He did a couple of field days himself.
Blake Brown:
So yeah, that's kind of an interesting story. I remember I guess he was the interim when John left and I was working in Nebraska at the time. I worked with DuPont when I got out of school. I was a weed science PhD and had a job I loved. And I remember, he called one day and he said, "Well, that job at Milan's open. You're interested?" And I said, "No, I'm good. I like what I'm doing. I like where I'm living." Anyway, long story short, we finally wound up here and it's been a really good thing. It'll be 25 years in November. Never dreamed I would want to come back here, but here I am and it's been a good run. So funny how things work out sometimes.
Mike Lessiter:
Yeah. So interesting how you get pulled back again.
Blake Brown:
It is.
Mike Lessiter:
Answering the call. Yeah.
Blake Brown:
It is, but I mean, it's been a good run. And when I was working with industry, I focused on the very narrow segment of the ag business. I was working with weed control and herbicide, insecticide. Loved it, I mean loved my job. Great company. Worked with the universities out there, but I felt like when I came here, I'm not near as deep, but I get to work with all these scientists in all these different areas, and that's fun. We get to look at some of the cutting edge stuff and see it on the front end. And I certainly don't tell them what to do, but I have some input and ask some questions and try ... My job is to facilitate what they're doing.
Blake Brown:
I'm not a researcher anymore. I'm an administrator, but I have been and I think I still know how to do it, and my job is to help them do their job.
Mike Lessiter:
Yeah.
Blake Brown:
And that's been fun, most days it's a lot of fun. It has its challenges, as you can imagine, as every job does, but been fortunate to work with some really good stuff, really good folks. And like I said, I think we do good work and I think it matters, and that's why I get up and come to work every day.
Mike Lessiter:
Yeah.
Brian O'Connor:
We'll come back to Blake Brown and Mike Lessiter in a moment. Before we do so, I'd like to thank our sponsor Verdesian for supporting today's podcast. At Verdesian Life Sciences, we believe that supplying healthy water and soil for the next generation is just as important as supplying efficient nutrients for every crop farmers grow. For us, sustainability and profitability go hand in hand, that's why we call ourselves the nutrient use efficiency people. We have dedicated ourselves to providing prescriptive nutrient use efficiency solutions that improve plant uptake and reduce fertilizer losses, helping preserve the environment to make the most of your investment. Learn more at vlsci.com. That's vlsci.com or talk to your ag retailer today about Verdesian products. Before we get back to the conversation, here's Frank Lessiter,
Frank Lessiter:
A reader recently asked me, what were some of the biggest mistakes I've seen no-tillers make in switching over to no-tillage. And it gave me an idea to go back to talk to several people who have been to all 30 or 31 of our national No-Tillage Conferences, and we asked them the same question a few years back during one of the events. Bryan Van Holten of Cole Camp, Missouri is one of these farmers who's attended all of our events. And he said, the biggest mistake he'd made is giving up too early on cover crops. He planted his first cover crop in 1997, had a stand failure and had to replant corn. The second year was much better, so he gave up on cover cropping. Looking back, he says he should have had the confidence to stick with protecting the land with the cover crop, and if he'd stuck with that, he'd be over 20 years now into cover cropping at this point. And he would be probably seeing the same incredible results that other no-tillers are seeing.
Frank Lessiter:
Another no-tiller who's been to all our conferences is Alan Barry of Nauvoo, Illinois, and Alan said he was too slow at parking the disk and field cultivator. It took him a few years coming to the National No-Tillage Conference to figure out that he needed to part those tillage tools. And around 2000, the year 2000, he totally quit using those tillage tools and went 100% to no-tills.
Brian O'Connor:
And now, we'll get back to the conversation.
Mike Lessiter:
Well, in 1981, year of that first show, that was actually the year that my dad, who's been the founding editor of No-Till Farmer, every issue since '72, he actually bought it from his employer and went out and hung his own shingle out in 1981. And I'd never got the chance to meet Dr. McCutchen, but my dad Frank has, and it has a real affinity and recognition for what took place there at your facility and how it boosted in advanced fast track no-till adoption here. So it's something to be proud of, certainly. In your view, what is some of the most important practical research on no-till that came out of Milan over the years?
Blake Brown:
Well, one of the things at the field day, back in the early years, were the plant demonstrations, and I mean that was a huge deal. How do you get this equipment to get that seed through this residue in the ground? And so they would invite them, all the companies and we would have 20 or 25 planters, line them up out there in a field of wheat stubble and every, I don't know, 15, 20 minutes they'd plant 30, 40, 50 feet, then they'd stop. Everybody would look, they'd dig. They'd see what they did. And I think it was a neat opportunity for people to see what was going on. Now, a lot of these companies bringing these planters, they were learning too. It was a new game.
Blake Brown:
I remember, and I do not remember the brand, there was one guy, has showed up from Oklahoma and he had in my mind it would be something, it probably wasn't, but it was like a big air drill or something. It was huge for our part of the world back then. And he was going to rent a tractor and it wasn't air. I think this is way before that, but it was a big machine and I know some of our people were like, "What are you going to pull it with?" And he's like, "Oh, I got a Tractor Bottom Line." I'm like, "I don't think it's going to pull it down." "Oh yeah, it will. You all don't know what you're talking about." Well, he rented one from a dealer. It wouldn't pull it. I mean, it just sit there and spin, you know?
Blake Brown:
So there's all kind of stories like that. But I think the planter demonstrations were a great, big hit. A lot of people liked it. They could see, they could compare, like you could do nowhere else that I'm aware of. And then all the other facets that come in. I mean, there was this notion that, "Well, if we no-till, all the insects are going to get everything up." We had to prove that wrong. And I said we. I'm not talking about me. I wasn't in that role then. But, "Diseases are going to take everything over." Well, we had to show that wasn't right. "All you're fertilizing, you're not mixing it in the soil. That's not going to work." "Yeah, we just spread it on top. It does just fine."
Blake Brown:
So all these things, lots of questions we had. "How does lime act if you can't incorporate it?" And then the weed control, like I said, that was the other thing. It was huge. "How do you control weeds?" And I can remember, one of my jobs every Friday, I had to ... Remember the old rope wick applicators?
Mike Lessiter:
Mm-hmm.
Blake Brown:
That we used to wipe down here in Johnson grass a lot. I had a little handheld that was about a foot wide and in a PVC Pipe, and they gave me a two and a half gallon jug of Roundup and a handheld rope wick and a pickup truck. And every Friday, I drove around this whole place and wiped Johnson grass, because that was the only way we had to control it back then, post-emergent. And that was just a job, just a real job. And so when, I think it was Poast, was the first selective post-emergent herbicide that came out, that we could spray over top of beans and cotton. Golly, that was huge. Well, then I graduated from a handheld rope wick to a three gallon backpack sprayer. And I remember man, there was another boy that worked here, who worked here and gone on with John Deere, named Charlie brown. We sprayed this whole Unit One Arsenal, backpack, 200 acres, bad Johnson grass, took a week.
Mike Lessiter:
Yeah.
Blake Brown:
And we got it done. And I remember telling Charlie this, "Charlie, I don't know what they're going to have us do now, but it can't be bad as this was."
Mike Lessiter:
Yeah.
Blake Brown:
So we went and found Don Gibson, who was our former great guy. I need to talk about him a minute. I said, "Don, what do you want us to do now?" He said, "Well, you boys go back and start over where you started. You can tell where you missed." But now, we had to do it all again. But when you spend your summers doing that and you start finding things that work better, and all of a sudden you can spray over the top of this with a sprayer and not have to walk it, not have to chop it, not have to pull it, that was huge for me, and probably what led me to go into a weed science career.
Blake Brown:
I mean, there were lots of things. There's so many issues and so many questions. "How do you manage fertility? How much nitrogen does it take? When do you put it out? Where do you place it?" All these different questions. And-
Mike Lessiter:
It was all unknown at the time, right?
Blake Brown:
It was all unknown. We knew kind of how to do ... We knew how to farm and how to grow stuff, but throw this no-till concept in there, it just kind of stood everything on its ear. I think people had a lot of pre-conserved notions that weren't ... Conceived notions that weren't true, kind of like the fertilizer and the insects going to eat a cell. Well, that really didn't happen. Yeah, there are some issues, you got to think about with no-till, but we had to prove to people that wasn't going to happen. And I think we probably spent a lot of time, educating. Somebody said, "Stomping out ignorance." That's probably not a good term, but teaching and making people-
Mike Lessiter:
It probably was a good term though, wasn't it?
Blake Brown:
Well, it probably was in certain extent, but it was just totally new. You're all Farm Ugly, that was the big deal with Zeneca, I think or ICF. Farm Ugly, used Gramoxone or paraquat or whatever.
Mike Lessiter:
Yeah.
Blake Brown:
It was just different than anything that had ever been done. So, I told somebody, "I've got a slide somewhere that Tom McCutchen prepared. It was kind of a summary of his work." And he says, "Well, this year we evaluated 12 cotton varieties. And we looked at nitrogen on corn and we did wee control on soybeans." And I said, "It's the same kind of stuff we're doing now. Have we not made any progress?" Yeah, we've made a lot of progress, but we still have the same issues. They evolve over time. We eradicated the boll weevil in cotton. You guys don't have to worry about that in Milwaukee.
Mike Lessiter:
Yeah.
Blake Brown:
But we thought, "Man, it's going to be great." Well, we did, but there were other pests that came in and took its place, stink bugs and things like that. So you shift and you adjust. And one thing I have learned in agriculture, it's a system. Nothing is easy, it's all interconnected. And right here on my desk, it says, "If an organism is kept under constant temperature, pressure, like heat and humidity, the organism will do whatever it damn well pleases." And there's a lot of truth to that, because a lot of times we think we understand what's going on, but you got to keep in mind, it's a system and there are a lot of factors at play at the same time. And so it always keeps us employed, and I guess that's job security.
Mike Lessiter:
Yep. Yep. And the words that have been shared with me about the work that you guys have done and they're known for, it's highly, highly practical. This isn't theoretical, nice-to-know someday type ivory tower, lab research. This is stuff that farmers can act on immediately. Is that a fair statement from your view?
Blake Brown:
Absolutely. I've got some good friends that I've met, that came the field day from Texas, and they just came and wanted to learn how to do some of this. I tell people now, "We've been doing it 40 years. Our focus on our field day is not to teach people how to no-till, because as I mentioned, 90 plus percent of our acres are using some form of concept-based till." So we think most of our people know how to do it. Kind of our goal is how do all of these new technologies in agriculture, how do you incorporate them into a no-till system, which is our conventional system in Tennessee now. But now, in 2020, our field day, we had to go all virtual. And I pulled a few of our folks, some who had already retired that had been with us a while, and we put together a tour called, No-Till Basics. And it was on video and we will keep that from now on, and it's going to be part of our program virtually this time.
Blake Brown:
So if you're wanting to know kind of the basics and how do you set your depth wheels and how much pressure and all that kind of stuff, it's still available. But the focus of our field day is moved on beyond that for the most part.
Mike Lessiter:
Yeah.
Blake Brown:
But yes, practical stuff, that's what we're all about. I'm real happy to say, our faculty and our research and extension specialists all doing work here, it's all very practical. Yes, we have some doing very basic research, but at our level here at the centers, it's very practical, hands-on applied type work. And they get a lot of their questions from dealing with farmers and, "These are the issues we're facing. Help us figure it out." We're forcing in our state, we still have a very active extension component. We have agents in every county. We have specialists and it's not that way everywhere, and I hate that because there's still a real resource, and we've got some really great people and they make it happen. And so it's just I'm proud we still do that and we're still making a difference.
Mike Lessiter:
Yeah. A couple other things that you said that I keyed in on, on the planter demonstrations, because more than one manufacturers kind of got the point across that, the conditions were so tough down there. The ground's like concrete from being July baked, that they really had to be on their A Game and had to resort to some interesting ways of getting it in the soil, with a couple secrets told on what was really happening behind the scenes and the demos.
Blake Brown:
I read Tim's article last night. I think I know who you're talking about.
Mike Lessiter:
Yeah. Tim had a good story in there. And what you had said about manufacturers figuring out, outed on the fly, Roy Applequist who founded Great Plains Manufacturing had told my dad and I, this story a number of years back that, they would get back to the hotel all sunburned and kind of have impromptu meetings in the swimming pool, where they asked each other, how do we do this no-till thing? I mean, they were bouncing ideas off one another, some of them competitors in the-
Blake Brown:
Yeah.
Mike Lessiter:
Swimming pool, to see how to get a better result the next year on it.
Blake Brown:
Yeah. I mean, I literally remember going back to the shop and taking weights off of tractors. We had weights hung all over some planters sometime. And of course, like I said, 1980 was the bad drought. It was dry, it was hot. It was terrible. It was like concrete literally, but the equipment wasn't as good as what we have now. Now, these planters you got now, I can drop them down out here, it happens occasionally, in the black top and they'll cut right it through. Those old ones wouldn't do that. It was just tough. I can remember hanging ... One of the guys had some barbell weights, both in those, on in the marker arms, where they would try to cut enough of a furrows that you could see your planter mark.
Mike Lessiter:
Yeah.
Blake Brown:
I remember the first planters we had, there were no markers. They had a piece of metal conduit across the front of the tractor with two chains dropped down on either end, and you'd run that chain in your last row, best as you can tell and that was your marker. And so, all kind innovative stuff. I was looking at some of our stuff. Bob Hayes, the weed scientist was talking, one of the biggest challenges was getting people comfortable with not spraying 40, 50, 60 gallons per acre on their herbicides. They had done a little of that before, because they weren't spraying but a little pre-emergent or something down, because there wasn't anything post-emergent much that you could spray. But getting them to where you didn't have to use 50 gallons a acre or 20 gallons a acre, it was all new.
Blake Brown:
I remember, do you remember the little, they call them CDAs, Controlled Droplet Applicators? Little spinner deals, three, four, five gallons acre. I don't think they took off, but I remember doing a lot of work with them and it was pretty amazing what they could do, and it was just unheard of at the time. So I don't know man, if there's as many innovations and I think there will be in the next 40 years as there has been in the last 40, it's going to knock your socks off.
Mike Lessiter:
Yeah.
Blake Brown:
Things are going to happen though.
Mike Lessiter:
Yeah.
Blake Brown:
I think there's things coming that we can't even imagine, but the last 40 has been pretty incredible.
Mike Lessiter:
Yeah. A question along those lines. So you had mentioned that big seeder from Oklahoma. Were there some really crazy things that you saw attempted? And also were there some things that at the time you thought, "Boy, I'm not sure that's going to work." That did take as a result of what happened?.
Blake Brown:
Yeah. Well, I mean it was ... I'm thinking back to being a 16 year old kid and seeing all this stuff coming. Of course, I was just enthralled with all this big equipment stuff. I thought it was neat. To me, the interesting thing, that all the different ways people went about solving the same problem. Some had cultures, some had shovels, some ... I mean, I don't remember them all, but a lot of different ways to try to tackle the problem. It was kind like, who's going to win this thing, and we kind know now who did. The double disk openers came along and boy, that kind of revolutionized things. And folks kind of went along that model, "Put you a culture out there in front, if you need it." I remember doing lots of work here with cultures, a lot of work with press wheels, all this different stuff that makes a planter work.
Blake Brown:
The other thing I think we learned is that, what works in west Tennessee might not be the best fit in Milwaukee. Conditions change. I know when I went to Nebraska, my first trip out there, they were tilling ground, up and down these hills that look like Middle Tennessee, which really rolls to me. And I thought, "What are these people doing?" And it was perfectly fine out there. That soil had more clay in it. It didn't erode like ours did. They could get by with it, it was fine. They did a lot of ridge till out west and some different things, but you got to find what works in your system. So I learned from that, that not everything's got to be like it is in West Tennessee. We got to find what works for us. You might find some things we're doing that work for you, but probably not everything's going to work for you. You've got to kind of figure that out in your area and see what happens.
Mike Lessiter:
Yeah.
Blake Brown:
These friends I mentioned from Texas, they kind of revolutionized where they are out in West Texas. They started planting cover crops, because they were getting all this erosion from wind. So the people looking at them are like, "They're crazy." But they're planting wheat or rye or something, and then coming in, killing it and planting cotton. And all of a sudden that's taken off out there and they're doing really well. They're conserving moisture, which is a big deal right now, but they kind of took some of the stuff we were doing and made it work for them. So we have had some folks through the years that I won't name names, but they say, "You need to no-till every acre, you need to no-till it every year. You need to never touch it."
Blake Brown:
Well, that's great in theory. In practicality, it doesn't always work that way. Sometimes, you have a wet Fall. You have to clear it, clean up some ruts. You have to go in there and disk things up, and I think that's okay. Sometimes these fields get a little rough after you've been no-tilling them for many years. We got a critter that's shown up around here in the last 15, 20 years called an armadillo, that make these big holes and they would just throw you for a loop, when you hit one of those and they're a real challenge. So sometimes you have to do a little fixing to keep things okay, and I think that's all right.
Blake Brown:
Now, I'm a proponent of get right back in that quick as you can, these implements, these vertical tillage machines and they do some cool stuff. I think they're great for managing residue. In our part of the world though, I will never run one, unless I'm spreading a cover crop or wheat, out in front of it or right behind it, just because they loosen our soil up enough if you get a big rain. One of my employees used to call them, and I'm not going to say that. It's a good machine, that's a good machine, but they got to be managed right.
Mike Lessiter:
Yeah.
Blake Brown:
I think you can cause problems with them, if you don't take care of that. We actually have a study going on with that right now, looking at, does that affect organic matter if you run it once, if you run it twice and comparing that to no-till. So I'm curious to see how that's going to turn out, if it really affects that or not, but we're working on that right now.
Mike Lessiter:
Yeah, yeah. Well, that's a good point. I mean, all agriculture's local.
Blake Brown:
Sure.
Mike Lessiter:
And we have people at our National No-Till Conference who have to do it differently than the guy across the road.
Blake Brown:
Oh yeah.
Mike Lessiter:
And they both same result.
Blake Brown:
Sure.
Mike Lessiter:
But you mentioned cotton a minute ago. And from what I've gathered here and correct me if I'm wrong, but you guys are kind of the birthplace of no-till cotton, right?
Blake Brown:
Yeah. I think John was really responsible for that. Soybeans were the first thing we worked on and then we went right into corn and those were pretty easy, relatively speaking. Cotton typically is a pretty weak seedling coming out of the ground, and it likes warm weather. And of course, we're always planting as early as we can, and we're typically bumping up against that, "Ah, we may be going a little too early." But [inaudible 00:49:21].
Mike Lessiter:
John likes to say, "Cotton is the only plant that comes out of the ground hoping to die," right?
Blake Brown:
Yeah, exactly. And so you throw that residue on top of there. You throw a little moisture on top of there. It's a little cooler, a little wetter. It's just kind of going against cotton. I mean, it's subject to sealing diseases. And so, it took some work to make that happen, and I don't remember all the details to it, but hey, cotton's riding there with our other crops now. I think maybe, these residue managers maybe cleaning that little furrow off, getting rid of some of that stuff, letting it warm up a little bit better, it better helped. But yeah, it was a challenge early on, but now we no-till cotton just like everything else and don't think twice about it.
Mike Lessiter:
Yeah.
Blake Brown:
In many cases, I think one of the other challenges with conventional tilled cotton in our area is if you plant it and you get a hard packing rain on it, and then the sun pops out, it'll back it, form a crust and we call it, breaking its neck. That little Hypokal will kind of work out and the cotyledon can't pop out the ground, and sometimes it'll just break the stem, trying to come up. If you got no-till, you've got some cover, you don't seem to get as much crusting as you do in conventional. So, I think in that aspect, it helps. But yes, it had its own set of circumstances, just like lots of other things did. But again, team of folks got together, looked, figured, adjust, and finally got it where we could consistently get a stand.
Mike Lessiter:
Yeah. Yeah, good. Kind of some memories about over the years of the field then. I understand you guys got as high as 14,000 people show up at this in the mid '90s?
Blake Brown:
Yeah, there was a bunch, I don't know exactly. I think in my records, I've got 11,000, but there were a lot of people. And it kind of just started out ... It grew, grew, and then it started tapering off. Now we'll have 2,500, 3000. We hope we do. We don't know. We hadn't had one since 2018, but we're looking forward to a good crowd, that's what we typically have. And people say, "Well, why is that? Why do you not have 11,000 people anymore?" Well, I think there's two or three things. Number one, it's not new. Number two, we don't have as many farmers as we used to have. And I think number three, I mean the newness has worn off. It's not a brand new technology, but it's still important and we still impact a lot of acres.
Blake Brown:
Few years ago, we asked our visitors, "How many acres did you have?" And we had about 25% of the acres in the state represented here that one day, which I thought was pretty impressive. Obviously in 2020, we didn't get to be live because of COVID. And so we made a decision to do a virtual event, which was an interesting exercise, but we made it happen. And it blew my mind, because we had literally hundreds of thousands of hits from all over the world. And I'm like, "How do you ..." We do a little advertising locally in our marketing communications. We don't advertise in Zimbabwe, but somehow they found out about it.
Mike Lessiter:
Yeah.
Blake Brown:
I don't know how all that works, but word really travels fast these days with social media and the internet. And so we did, we had hits from all over the world. That's kind of cool. You wonder how much of this information is applicable to other parts of the world, and maybe it is, just as well as it is here. I hope so.
Mike Lessiter:
Yeah.
Blake Brown:
But that was a neat deal. And this year, we're basically doing a hybrid. We're going live, but we will have the information available online as well. And so, even a lot of folks across the country that just tell me, they say, "Well, we can't make the drive or ..." So the information will be there on July 28th on our website. It's milannotill.tennessee.edu. And if you just type in Milan No-Till, I'm sure it will take you there, but I think we got seven-
Mike Lessiter:
The day once again is July 28.
Blake Brown:
July 28th. 28th.
Mike Lessiter:
Yeah.
Blake Brown:
I think we've got 17 research tours this year, about 50 something different presentations on all aspects of no-till, as well as some related topics like beef cattle and hemp. And I don't remember what all, but climate smart agriculture is a big deal. In our business, the new term is regenerative ag and we kind of feel like we've been doing regenerative ag for a long time. We just hadn't had the animal component and that's something we're looking at now, because we're looking at poultry litter and all kinds of things, but we've been focusing on the right things for a long time and I think that's good. So we're just trying to continue that on and keep up with the latest trends and issues as best as we can, and it's always changing. It's always changing. So being aware and listening and seeing what's going on and then trying to figure out what can we do to help solve those problems. And so that's why we're here.
Mike Lessiter:
Yeah, very good. Yeah, kind of getting to the end of my question, but I do have one for you that might have to put the thinking cap on a little bit on this one. But you know that movie, It's A Wonderful Life, right?
Blake Brown:
Mm-hmm.
Mike Lessiter:
Christmas movie. And I want you to think in on this one. So, given what Tennessee faced in soil erosion in the late '60s, up until things got rolling, what happens in Tennessee agriculture and how much slower is the transition, if at that time McCutchen and his team didn't say, "We got to study no-till here. Get the research going practical, come out and then have a way of showing the farmers the same thing?" What do you think is different if those things don't happen in Tennessee?
Blake Brown:
Well, I'll answer it this way. Our soils people tell us that our part of West Tennessee overlays a coastal plain sand. Okay? This wind blowing silt lets soils over top of this coastal plain sand. Apparently eons ago, this was all part of the ocean. And if you put a well in and you drill down and you get below the top soil and sub soil, you'll hit white beach sand. I'm saying that, it's crazy. And so, I mentioned earlier, I think that on our sloping land, we were losing 30, 40 tons of top soil per acre per year, okay. Now, if you can follow my math here, going back to our soil scientists, they tell us that it takes about a thousand years to form one inch of top.
Blake Brown:
So a thousand years for an inch. Well that inch, remember the old acre furrow slice is two million pounds or a 1000 tons, six inches deep. So an inch is a 166 tons. We were losing in four years what took a thousand years to form.
Mike Lessiter:
Yeah.
Blake Brown:
You follow that math?
Mike Lessiter:
Yep.
Blake Brown:
And the other part of that, the other caveat that is in West Tennessee, I said these soils form. Well, they form, if you have para-material like limestone or rock or granite, depending wherever you are. East of us, it's limestone base, and so that degrades over time and it breaks down and it forms soil. In West Tennessee, we're over that coastal plain sand. We're over the beach. Sand is in earth, it doesn't break down. When our soil's gone, it's gone. We're going to be back on the beach, and we have that in places. I literally think, had Tom McCutchen and John Bradley and others not done what they did, we'd be a heck of a lot closer to being on the beach than we are today.
Blake Brown:
In some places we would be on the beach. You can ride around. I could take you out today and ride around, because I'd mentioned, we're getting a little dry and you can see the sandy spots in these fields. I passed some corn today that was already brown. I mean, it's chest high and it's turned brown. It's just burned up. So my fear is had that not happened, we'd have a lot of places like that, because we were just losing way too much. We're still losing probably more than we should, but we are not losing near like we would've been. And so I think we're proud of that. Hopefully some of these newer things we're doing with cover crops and stuff were kind of adding to that building instead of ... Hopefully we're building more than we're losing. I don't know if that's ever actually possible, but we're trying and we've obviously slowed it down significantly. So I don't know. Is that a decent answer to your question?
Mike Lessiter:
Yeah, that's an excellent answer. And congratulations to you and the entire team and everyone who was involved in there, because it's a great story. We talked about, your answer was Tennessee-based, but we know that it had far reaching impact well beyond the borders of Tennessee.
Blake Brown:
Sure. Yeah.
Mike Lessiter:
Yeah. You're-
Blake Brown:
Well, a lot of good folks involved all over the country and all over the world and it's not a Tennessee thing or it's not a Kentucky thing. We're all in this thing together. And the great thing is, we do share resources and we share information and we've got this huge challenge of feeding this world. By 2050, more of us than there's ever been with less land, and so we got to take good care of it and we got to do more with less and keep getting better at what we do. So that's kind of our goal and we're going to keep trying it just as hard as we can.
Mike Lessiter:
Yeah, excellent. Well, give us the date of the field day and the website once again.
Blake Brown:
Milan No-Till Field Day will be coming this year on Thursday, July 28th. We will begin at 8:00 AM and go through 1:00 PM. Registration starts at 7:00 AM. All the tour information will be available online. That data as well at Milan, M-I-L-A-N notill.tennessee.edu. Again, if you just type in Milan No-Till, I think it will pop up first thing on your Google Search. So the program is there now, if you want to take a look at that, I think you can start looking, seeing the different things that are offered and just encourage people to participate. And if we can ever help, we'd be glad to do what we can. So give us a shout, come see us.
Mike Lessiter:
Excellent. Excellent, well said. Well, I'm going to wrap us up here then. Thank you Blake, and thanks to all our listeners for tuning in today. And if you have observations or memories about the influence that the Research Center and the Milan No-Till Field Day, we've got several articles about it at notillfarmer.com. And please drop a comment or a memory in at www.no-tillfarmer/milan. That's www.no-till farmer.com/milan. So on behalf of No-Till Farmer and Farm Equipment, and thank you Blake, and thanks for everybody listening in today.
Blake Brown:
Thank you, Mike. I appreciate the opportunity. Nice job on the stuff you put together on our center as well. We appreciate that and hope everybody has a successful year. Thank you.
Mike Lessiter:
Absolutely. Have a great field day.
Blake Brown:
Thank you.
Brian O'Connor:
Before we wrap up today's episode, here's Frank Lessiter, one more time.
Frank Lessiter:
Earlier in this broadcast, we talked about two farmers who had talked about the biggest mistakes they'd made, and I've got two more for you to wrap up this broadcast today. Alan Brooks of Markesan, Wisconsin, who's attended all 31 of our National No-Tillage Conferences says, his biggest mistake was assuming weeds in a no-tilled field were dead when they weren't. And then there's R.D. Walter of Wolcott, Indiana says, "Most farmers underestimate the cost of running their equipment. More growers would shift to no-till, if they knew how much it can reduce machinery costs." He and his son tried variable rate fertilization with two companies, each working with about 10% of their acreage. Over three years, one company wanted to build up the nutrient levels of their soils to much higher levels, and wanted to use pelleted lime to correct the pH. While pelleted lime has its place, R.D. says you don't need to apply it every year.
Frank Lessiter:
He says that their farms have some pretty light soils that don't hold potash very well, and they thought they were trying to build up our soils to a much higher fertility level than it was actually needed. And the way they saw it, all they wanted to do was sell them more fertilizer. The other company followed the four year program and it was a third year before they applied any lime. They had too many acres to cover and, "We didn't seem to be a priority with them. They were sampling on three acre grids while we do zone soil sampling. However, they just split the 21 acre rectangle or field down the middle, with half a grid on each side and that wasn't my idea of how to make variable rate fertilizing work, with either one of these companies."
Brian O'Connor:
That concludes this episode of the No-Till Farmer Influencers And Innovators Podcast. Thanks to our sponsor Verdesian, for helping to make this series possible. You can find more podcasts about no-till topics and strategies at No-Tillfarmer.com/podcast. If you have any feedback on today's episode, please feel free to email me at B-O C-O-N-N-O-R @lessermedia.com or call me at 262-777-2413. And don't forget, Frank would love to answer your questions about no-till and the people and innovations that have made an impact on today's practices. So please email your questions to us at listenermail@no-tillfarmer.com. If you haven't already, you can subscribe to this podcast to get an alert, as soon as we release a future episode. Find us wherever you listen to podcasts. For Frank and the entire staff here at No-Till Farmer, I'm Brian O'Connor. Thanks for listening.
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