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Hosts David Nicolai and Seth Naeve discuss the progress and challenges of Minnesota's agronomic crops. They are joined each week by a diversity of specialists representing all crops and agronomic disciplines to discuss their research and its impact on Minnesota crops. Dave Nicolai is a crops Extension educator and Seth Naeve is the Extension soybean agronomist.
Good day, and welcome to the University of Minnesota Extension and CFANS podcast, Minnesota CropCast. I'm Dave Nicolai, University of Minnesota Extension crops educator, along with my cohost, Doctor. Seth Nave, University of Minnesota Extension soybean specialist. Well, back to the University of Minnesota CropCast podcast. I'm Dave Nicolai, your University of Minnesota crops educator and host along with my cohost here, Doctor.
Dave:Seth Nave, University of Minnesota soybean specialist. And Seth, we're honored today to have one of our, will call the pioneers in the crop consulting in the crop service area, Ken Franzky. Ken is the Agronomy Services Manager with Central out in Western Minnesota and they're kind of headquartered out of that Marshall area but it's expanded widely from there across Central Minnesota and parts of Southern Minnesota. And we asked Ken to come on board here to tell us a little bit about himself and how it's organized, what are some things that they're doing, but also to get a little update on how crops are growing here this summer.
Seth:Sounds good. So, Ken, why don't you give us a little bit of background? So where are you from? Where did you grow up? And give us the short story on how you got to Central.
Seth:How's that sound?
Ken:Sounds great. Well, appreciate the opportunity, Seth and Dave, not only for myself, but for Central Crop Consulting as a company and as an organization. So I'm a Western Minnesota native, born and raised. Who moved around where my my father came across from Germany, believe it or not, in 1965, with the goal to become an American farmer. And that took a little time for him to get there.
Ken:So he had a career path from Central Minnesota, kind of in the Hutchinson Silver Lake area to Granite Falls and eventually bought a farm just south of Bellingham, Minnesota, which is along Highway 75, almost what you'd say directly straight west of the Twin Cities Metro, just a little north of of Highway 212 along Highway 75. So I grew up for the most of my life as a as a farm kid, diversified grain and livestock operation back then. And that kind of sparked my interest in in agriculture. Decided to attend the University of Minnesota in the Twin Cities on the St. Paul campus primarily for the AG programs and sneak across to the East And West Bank for some general classes and science classes, things like that.
Ken:So, you know, graduated out of the University of Minnesota proudly in the in the early 90s, then started my my career in agriculture after that. Currently live just south of Dawson, Minnesota, so still a Western Minnesota native.
Seth:Sounds great. So where where did you go after after you graduated? You went right into industry then.
Ken:Yeah. Went right into industry. So I'm on my career path from the the mid nineties on to the current day with my eleventh season, starting with Central. But, you know, right out of college, I started my career as a crop management specialist with back then it was Farmland Industries Incorporated. So you kind of had Cenex, Land O'Lakes on on one side of the industry and kind of farmland industry on the other side.
Ken:So I was a farmland industries employee, kind of have a program where they, in a sense, leased you out or cost shared your services out to the local cooperatives that supported their fertilizer crop protection product. So, you know, I worked in Clarkfield, Minnesota at what was Tri Line back then. Now it's part of Prairie Drain Partners that's accumulated over the years from Tri Line and a joint venture with ADM. So I was there for about two crop seasons, then took a phone call from an internship contact that I had in the seed industry with what was Garst Seed Company back then, transitioned myself into the seed industry in an agronomy support role, primarily in my career, did a little bit as a district sales manager or sales rep, did a little bit as a regional manager in the absence of some employees. So I spent from '96 to 2011 within GarcCast company.
Ken:And obviously, for some of the listeners may or may not know that transitioned into Syngenta seeds. So I watched things from Garst bring in interstate Paykel, bring in Agripro seeds and then watched Syngenta that had MK seeds at that time brought in Garst seed company and Golden Harvest seeds as a brand. Then in 2011, an opportunity to kind of downsize some things geographically. And, you know, a lot of times we talk about work life balance. I thought a few less miles would would help with that with the growing family and took an opportunity with with pioneer hybrid seeds in West Central Minnesota and Lincoln and Lyon County.
Ken:And then in 2015, took this opportunity as kind of a newer carved out position within Central CropCast. As that company was growing. We continue to grow for a technical support role as an Agronomy Services Manager. So from 2015 to current day, starting my eleventh season this year in July, will technically be my eleventh full season here. So I do a lot of the technical support, technical training across our 57 consultants and across our other departments.
Seth:Okay. So let's dig into that a little bit more. What you're doing, your primary role is train the trainer or train the trainer out in the field. So you're the one that's providing that education internally organization, for your consultants? Is that is that what I hear?
Ken:Right. Technical training, technical support, troubleshooting, certainly do a collaborative effort with our internal meetings. If that's bringing in external people like people from the University of Minnesota or other universities or industry sales and technical people that to support and fill in, whether that's new products, new technologies. And then we'll work across our other departments, our area business manager, our operations manager, our precision ag team, our environmental services team. There certainly is a lot of cross training there.
Ken:But for me, the nuts and bolts for my role is that technical training, technical support around crop science, weed science, soil science, pest management, and how do we get those things right from a technical standpoint for the recommendations we make for our grower clients.
Dave:So really it's very specific in terms of the technical situation. So are you involved with a lot of one on one or classes or is it similar to an advisor in a college situation and you say you, you and you need probably to take a look at this kind of a training or do you provide materials to them? But how do you what kind of benchmarks do you use and how do you implement them to make sure their expertise is up to a certain level?
Ken:Yeah, a great question, David. And a big question. I mean, we don't necessarily have one size fits all because every person is unique in their skill set, their experiences, their knowledge base. So we have roughly four to five, you know, kind of annually scheduled meetings for various purposes that will host various trainings, we'll have technical talks, some will be internal presentations, whether it's myself, another consultant, another department manager, kind of just what are those hot topics we need to address? Certainly there's accounting and human resource things involved in that as well, too.
Ken:And then we'll have a series of kind of smaller group, maybe we'll use the term regional meetings, maybe it's our Northern Minnesota half of our group, our Southern Minnesota half of the group. And a third would be our South Dakota consultants as well as we're based out of Marshall, Minnesota. But our reach is a good chunk of Minnesota, a good chunk of South Dakota because crop rotations are different, pHs are different, climatic conditions are different. And then that funnels down from, you know, groups of 15 to 20 to then we'll work with bringing our newer consultants and technicians in for different sets of meetings at different times of the year to increase their baseline knowledge. Those would be, you know, maybe newer people that come to us out of college, out of our intern program.
Ken:Maybe they've come with five, ten years of experience out of out of industries somewhere, but they've never worked for a crop consulting company that's independent, not connected to selling products to the farmer. Our goal and responsibility is to help them understand how to get the best out of their input decisions or maybe steering them clear from making a bad input decision that has a low return on investment. It's kind of an a la carte, if you will, Dave. Pick off the menu. We assign it as as a managerial team and as a leadership team of of of kind of who needs what and when.
Ken:But we we do a lot one on one, but we do a lot from small groups to our entire organization.
Dave:So growers right now are paying so much obviously on on some kind of a fee basis. It's different than when it first started in Central and we had more of the backing and maybe of local coops per se but it's transitioned to be much much more with a menu and so forth whether it's a a per acre or size and you know you know per se for the different situations Is that how that has evolved over the last couple of years?
Ken:Yeah. That's a great summary, Dave, that yes. I mean, we, you know, back in 1979, you know, kind of were forged out of Cenex, Land O' Lakes and another company called CropCast, CropCast, trying with to be an agronomic advisory arm that was disconnected from the sale of commercial fertilizer. 1979, that's forty seven years ago. It doesn't seem all that long ago.
Ken:We don't talk about agriculture without talking about fertilizing our crop. But as we went through the 60s and 70s, even in the early 80s, synthetic fertilizer was a relatively new set of products. A lot of research being around it and response base. So yes, we are 100% service based company. So whether it's a per acre basis, a per field basis, a per hour basis, we're getting paid for our expertise and our knowledge and our data collection on that.
Ken:So yes, we have to stand on our own merits, providing the expertise, the knowledge on the agronomics, the precision ag, environmental stewardship. So our growers pay us on an annual basis. And that does depend on what they want. Maybe a grower just wants help with weed management and pest management and insects and recommendations to go along with that. And then follow-up.
Ken:They work right? Do we have any resistance issues? Another grower may want our foundational level that we were kind of forged out of on soil science, soil sampling, soil fertility, crop nutrient recommendations. And then it scales up from there on precision ag, you know, environmental services and regulatory services that hinge around government programs like through our NRCS offices, things like EQIP, CSP, you know, stewardship programs, or things that are related to livestock operations, manure management, you know, helping with, you know, permitting for a new building site or, you know, retrofitting or adding on to a building site. So what started kind of off as soil science, soil sampling, crop scouting, pest management has really involved in a holistic wrap your arms around that growers in entire operation and help them do better and ultimately help them make more money.
Seth:Okay. So I have lots of questions here. But here's I'm trying to frame this question for you. I wanna know, because you've been around a while, you've seen a lot of change in farmers, you've seen change in the industry, you've seen change in the climate. You've seen change in the biology that we're dealing with.
Seth:You've seen changes in the technology that farmers have access to. I'm kind of curious, what are your biggest challenges in all those changes that you have to deal with in terms of your role? Because I see all those things coming at you, and you have to identify how to best help those farmers. So what's the challenge, or what's the most frustrating part of it? Is it purely the biology and resistance management?
Seth:Or is it the industry and how the industry is structured? Or is it the way that new products are being developed and sold? Or is it the economics and farmers just can only afford so much and to do so much? Or is it the farmer psychology where everybody knows what the right thing is, but the farmers are just unwilling to do that because it's too far out of the box? I
Ken:don't know.
Seth:I'm just throwing a million things out at you. So what what's what what kind of keeps you what are the biggest challenges you see over or the changes in the challenges over time?
Ken:Yeah. A lot you're you're kind of asking and revolving around and we can keep spinning spinning off that axle with spokes in in different directions, Seth. But, you know, obviously, you know, the the number one challenge is we work in an uncontrolled factory setting. You know, we're 100%, you know, at the mercy of Mother Nature and our good Lord. We we don't have control of of the weather, whether that's temperature, whether that's rainfall.
Ken:Yes, we have irrigation systems that partially gives us better control. That that always makes it a challenge. The best laid plans need a contingency plan or two because it rains at the wrong time or it doesn't rain at the right time or it's too windy when we're trying to make herbicide applications or or we don't get the right rain to get herbicides activated, you know, brings in different pests. You know, working around the weather is that uncontrollable, you know, takes a lot of perseverance, you know, test your sanity, you know, makes you work, you know, sixteen to twenty hours a day. And other days, you're you're locked down in the office because it's just too muddied even if you're gonna go walk around.
Ken:So that that's a very big challenge we deal with. You know, new products, you know, to that question, Seth, there's probably less truly net new, but a lot of things with new names that are recycling things, especially from chemistry standpoint on our crop protection products. We haven't had a new truly new active ingredient in a few decades or maybe close to three decades now, at least on the herbicide side. So that ultimately has led to weed tolerance, weed species shifts and all resistance. That is an ongoing challenge where, you know, instead of having something new to to plug that problem or plug that hole, you know, we're reverting back to some of our oldest chemistry, the two forty and dicamba type chemistries.
Ken:They all have first came out in the late fifties, early sixties. And, you know, I've joked with my team, what's old becomes new again. And that can be said maybe with tillage, You know, precision ag has continued to evolve. Whether that, you know, I think back in '94, '95, starting my career, what are we gonna do with all this yield monitor data? And I can remember as an industry we talked about or certain individuals talking about, let's just leave that in the top desk drawer for about five years.
Ken:Then we'll figure out what to do with it. Or we need more data to smooth out the edges. Well, what a terrible mistake that was, you know, as time went on. I mean, if you have one good quality yield data here, there's a lot of great decisions that can be driven off of that. But you know, learn as we go along and sometimes we learn and we repeat history and sometimes we relearn what we maybe forgot.
Ken:Another challenge for us as a company is finding our 70 to 80 interns for the summer to help with our scouting and our soil sampling. And I think that's a challenge in a lot of professions of finding good quality employees full time and and part time. So, you know, we're we're constantly looking at technology and autonomy, you know, robotics. You know, are there things that could replace, you know, human hours and do some of those repetitive things for us? And then, you know, lot of the imagery technologies, whether that's satellite imagery, you know, airplane, aircraft imagery.
Ken:Now we talk more about drone imagery, you know, to look for problems, you know, that maybe detect things that the human eye can't quite see for another three, five or seven days. But high quality camera imagery can tell us things along NDVI, plant health indexes. So there are some of these new technologies are challenging for us to wrap our arms around and figure out how they fit, how they gain us efficiency versus we like what we see, but now there's a time inefficiency that we have to work through and still take it to the field and go do the ground truthing as well.
Seth:Awesome. I just want to come back to your first. I think the first topic you hit was roughly around this kind of risk management standpoint. And I'm thinking about kind of dealing with tighter times now. And do you feel like your job is significantly different in economic times where we've got lower prices and higher input costs than we have in the reverse when farmers are just like hitting for the fences out there?
Seth:Or do you pretty much do the same thing, but maybe it's communicated with the farmer just a little bit different? You know, do you see where I'm going with this? Is this are you is your job basically the same, or is it completely different now that we're kind of under tighter times?
Ken:Yeah, you know, our growth has been steady. But you know, the first twenty years were tough for farmers to understand what an independent crop consultant does versus you know, a local ag input supplier, you know, that's in town or things like that, you know. So it's getting them to understand, you know, what are the features, benefits, pros and cons of an independent crop consultant. You know, the first, you know, twenty, twenty five years were were lean and survival type mechanism. Can we bring this thing into the thirtieth year, the fortieth year, the fiftieth year?
Ken:And we've been able to strive to do that. So, you know, we see things in the the real we'll call good farming years where farmers are willing to invest. And maybe that's more precision ag based tools. Maybe they'll do a livestock expansion. You know, then some people will joke with us, boy, the farm economy is a little tougher.
Ken:You must be losing business like crazy. No, that's kind of the opposite of what we generally see. Growers start to recognize the need to make sure they're getting it right. Not that they're not getting it right, but maybe getting it right and taking it to getting it right better and more consistent. And then, you know, in the last ten, fifteen years, we've also engaged a lot more with with our rural ag lenders so they understand what an independent crop consultant or central crop consulting does differently to to help, you know, Okay, I see this expense item for $10,000 on on Ken Franzky farms bill.
Ken:You know, what is that? Help me understand that. So we've taken it upon ourselves to engage with some of those ag lenders to understand. But it seems like through the the better years and the more challenging years, we've been able to survive and expand. But there is a mind shift, I guess, to your question of that, you know, some growers are willing to invest because they're set up better financially.
Ken:Other growers aren't set up as well financially. So you have to adjust for the individual operation. I think in these tighter economic times with high fertilizer prices, more low to moderate commodity prices for our grains, you know, you've got to make sure every pound of plant nutrition is is being spent wise. And that does change recommendations.
Seth:For sure.
Ken:That doesn't mean putting on less. Maybe that involves a deeper discussion, variable rate, technology, precision ag, nutrient A versus nutrient B, things like that. Where's the better value?
Seth:Yeah. I'm kinda hogging the conversation. Dave's trying to get in on this. But I have one more short tangential question, just phrased a little bit differently. Do you think Cenrol's value to producers is best bringing the bottom up and helping manage risk from the bottom side?
Seth:Or do you help them most with the top end, getting that top yield and getting more total bushels off? And so it's kind of a trick question because you can't give an answer, I don't think. But how do you feel about what you do and what Central does relative to the kind of that holding the bottom up versus, you know, the top end?
Ken:Yeah. No, I I can try to provide an answer and also provide some insight. You know, ultimately, goal on every field is to produce more bushels at a more profitable level. So we have to accept what are yield limiting factors. If that's a stand streak through a field with underlying gravel, that water is the most limiting factor.
Ken:That's probably not a 200 bushel corn environment. So let's manage it for what our yield data would say historically is maybe only 80 to 120 bushel corn. So let's adjust our crop nutrition. Let's adjust our seeding rate. Maybe we adjust our crop rotation or our crop selection.
Ken:Then on the very opposite end is, okay, we fertilize the field for maybe, let's say, an average of two thirty bushel corn on average. But we've got areas where we exceeded two thirty bushels on a two thirty bushel budgeted plan, and maybe that was two fifty or two eighty or 300 bushel area. So that makes us think differently on the high ceiling side of what should we do differently that if we could achieve another 10 to 50 bushels or 70 bushels an acre over what we planned and budgeted for, maybe 300 is not the goal. Maybe it is. Maybe it's two seventy.
Ken:Let's meet in the middle. Or we saw 300 bushel off the yield moderate. Maybe we should be striving for three twenty five. So, you know, again, pushing that whole field yield upward and managing all the inputs accordingly is really the ultimate goal. And there's times where you've got to accept there's some nonproductive areas that maybe we should look at a government type program, CRP or something like that, that no matter what we do, it's not gonna be profitable on these five acres in this 100 acre field or something like that.
Dave:So, Ken, in in the time we have left, I'm gonna just flip around a little bit here and let's talk about 2026. You see a lot yourself but you hear a lot from the the folks that you're working with that are consultants. Houses crop looking this year and so forth. What are some of the challenges certainly you know, the the season we have a warmer or rainfall. We had big high pressure systems over us.
Dave:I know sometimes in Western Minnesota, it's always a challenge on there but but you're covering a lot of geography But as a whole, anything that you want to point out or are things looking fairly good right now? Are you optimistic or what are some of the challenges here? The remaining part of the season in terms of this year's crop?
Ken:Yeah. Yeah. Big big geography like you mentioned, Dave. So, you know, for our listeners, we go from roughly in our Northwest corner, Detroit Lakes, Minnesota. We come across towards Wadena, kind of start skimming down towards Saint Cloud, Sauk Center to the Twin Cities, drop South of the Twin Cities, start angling back towards Mankato to kind of Wyndham, come across the rest of Minnesota.
Ken:And then we go from Sioux Falls South, along I-ninety in South Dakota, to Mitchell, South Dakota, kind of back up towards Huron, South Dakota, kind of coming back towards Watertown and Millbank, South Dakota. Big geographic area, but we'll focus it on Minnesota. I would say generally we saw kind of a north and south split difference again, which is calm. But Southern Minnesota was drier last summer, drier this winter, got an earlier start to the planting season than Central Minnesota. Let's just say U.
Ken:S. Highway 212, the Twin Cities running across the Watertown South Dakota. If I got to draw a line that's kind of going north of there, we'd have what I'd say was a very normal, probably timed planting season. South, we started planting some corn and soybeans, probably around the April eighth, tenth, twelfth was probably our earliest windows. Some other years we saw some things go in in late March or early April.
Ken:Some guys started with beans, some guys started with corn, things like that. Overall, I would say we're pretty optimistic. You know, generally speaking, there's always going to be a few holes, you know, some whether that was too dry, you know, early on. Some of that has persisted since really the whole winter season with lack of snow, lack of March, April, May snow and rain events. So there is some conversations around stress from lack of subsoil moisture.
Ken:Certainly the heat the last two weeks hasn't helped. We had variable rounds of frost in areas was more damaging in Southern Minnesota because the crop was further lost in Central And Northern Minnesota. Not that there wasn't a little frost damage, but it didn't require any replanting of soybeans like we saw in South Central Southwest Minnesota across into Eastern South Dakota. Probably the biggest, I think, unusual event was the big winds and the dust storms that created problems with residue bearing crop, soil bearing crop, just the normal beating up of the crop from dehydration, the sandblasting, the residue blasting. But now here in the last couple of weeks, we're seeing some herbicide interactions from moving soil and crop residue around.
Ken:So that was probably one of the more big unusual one, those two to three days of huge, you know, May windstorms that persisted for four to eight hours. So, you know, I think a good summary statement had a conversation last week with a consultant kind of in South Central Southwestern Minnesota, where we had a phenomenally great crop last year, probably one of the best for a lot of producers. And he made the comment, he said, You know, we might be set up better this year than last year. Planting dates, stand establishment, you set the wind and the frost to the side. They're pretty optimistic there.
Ken:And just recently, you know, there's always been the round of, Oh, we got four to eight inches of rain out by Morris, Minnesota. We've had scattered hail pockets across the state of Minnesota and some with some intensity. There's been some replanting and some ongoing continuous evaluations going on. Will we have to make some replanting decisions yet? Or will we adjust what some of those yield potentials are?
Ken:So I don't really think there's a real what I'd call big widespread poor area. Compared to last year, late May coming into Father's Day mid June, we started to get hit with these big rains in West Central Central Minnesota, you know, that really caused a significant amount of drowned out, crop loss. Right now, we've kind of got one pocket kind of up around Morris, Minnesota that I think is now in that six, seven ish inch rain here over the last seven, ten, fourteen days. Other than that, there's been some two, three, four inch rains, but they've kind of spaced themselves out a little bit more manageable. And that was on top of fairly dry subsoil.
Ken:So we were able to absorb some of those heavier rains better. So I think all in all, small greens, sugar beets, corn, soybeans, I think we're pretty, pretty optimistic all the way around right now. Knock knock on wood. Don't want this to to, you know, to let the the shoe drop.
Seth:Yeah. It I I'm just I'm just amazed. I have this kinda weird view of the world in that I do a lot of international speaking with a lot of traders, and they're looking at they're always looking at drought maps in The US, and they're always concerned about Minnesota being dry over the winter or whatever. I I keep telling them, don't worry. Dry is good.
Seth:Dry is good. And, boy, when we have dry springs, as long as we get rain later, it really positions us well. Early planting, good stand establishment, the crops don't need much rain in this early part of the season. They can get down there and find something down there, put a root down. And I'm just amazed when we have unusually dry conditions in the spring, how good the crop looks.
Seth:And honestly, from a pretty big geographical area, if you look broadly across the Upper Midwest, we've had quite a few of these relatively dry springs that have set us up well. So I'm I'm with you, fingers crossed on this thing. Let's let's get a let's get a big crop.
Ken:Yeah, we just got to have the water turned on at the more The high consumption biggest challenge with these dry springs, other than talking about some of the wind events, has been, yeah, our our activation of our residual herbicides. You know, that's that's been a swing and a miss and that has a snowballing effect for us with the post applications.
Dave:I'm going to give you the last word and I want you to talk about what your biggest challenge in terms of being a manager, a teacher or a mentor going forward and you'll see that you know the clientele and everything that's coming out and the fact that you know a farmer can go on and it get AI on a laptop or a computer ask the questions and so forth. But what is the biggest challenges for yourself, Ken, a manager, teacher, mentor going forward with your folks that you're in? I'm not talking necessarily about the farmer but keeping these folks up to stuff in the multiplier effect. What you know is, I shouldn't say what's keeping you up awake at night but what do you see as in next five years things that you either have to do better or help them do better?
Ken:Yeah, that that interesting summary question, Dave. And and I think, you know, you you hit on some key things there that, you know, in today's technology, you know, world we live in, you know, nothing is away from your fingertips just because you can Google it or ask an AI bot type program to provide you the answer. You have to know from a fundamental standpoint, the foundational levels. Is this right or is it wrong or incorrect and somewhere in between? So for me, one of the challenges, you know, I think of more on it on a daily basis and an annual basis as we've grown as a company, you know, from people that have been in our industry for forty, forty five years to the newest ones that are in their their first season in agriculture, there's a learning curve that's different and there's a knowledge base that's different.
Ken:You gotta slow down and pull back the reins and make sure we've got universal understanding. Now sometimes, you know, us veterans forget a lot of things too. Not that we take it for granted, but the nice thing with our overall central network of right at about 100 employees is we tap into that. Who can remember what they saw when this hail event happened or this other weather event happened or other factors like that or heat stress? Should we change something we're doing with our herbicide application?
Ken:So making sure my team is technically rock solid, knows the fundamentals or knows when and where to go ask the questions before they just maybe shout out an answer to one of our grower customers and things like that, to me is very, very critical for that transparency, that technical competency and the trust. That's what we build our business around. And that's what the veterans on my team, to the newest employees on my team, we all have to live on those kinds of three Ts that I like to talk about because it's about preserving our reputation as individuals and as a company, as a whole for Central CropCast. If we're not good at what we do, farmers aren't going to keep hiring us back every year. And then that's our goal.
Ken:Retain the customers and know and engage with them and their farming operations and understand their fields. We always tease them, we're gonna know your fields better than you know your fields. That's our kind of internal goal.
Dave:Thank you, Ken. We appreciate you taking the time to visit with us today on the University of Minnesota podcast, Minnesota CropCast. And we look forward to visiting with you some more in the future and as we go down the road here and talk about different opportunities and with that. So thanks. This has been Ken Franzky.
Dave:Again, he is the Agronomy Service Manager out of the Marshall Central Office and covering a lot of Western Minnesota but certainly covering geographically a large section of Minnesota and South Dakota as well. I'm Dave Nicolai with University of Minnesota CropCast educator host along with my cohost here Doctor. Seth Nave, University Minnesota Extension soybean specialist. And this has been another edition of University of Minnesota CropCast. Thanks for listening.