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Talking Crop is a row crop production podcast that brings current trends, actionable management considerations, and research updates from guest experts to farmers, agribusiness representatives, and agriculture agency professionals.
Hello, and welcome to the Talking Crop Podcast. I'm Kathryn Seebruck, Commercial Agriculture Educator with University of Illinois Extension, serving Jo Daviess, Stephenson, and Winnebago Counties. Talking Crop is a seasonal crop production podcast with episodes occurring every other week during the growing season between the months of May and September. In each episode, I bring on a guest speaker to discuss topics related to their areas of expertise. In today's episode, I am joined by Dennis Bowman, University of Illinois Extension's Digital Agriculture specialist. Dennis and I discussed the evolution of technology use in agriculture, its benefits and drawbacks, the application of drones and robots in Ag, and we also touched on the role of artificial intelligence in Ag. In the video description for today's episode, you can find links related to what we discussed as well as the link to the evaluation for this podcast. The next episode of Talking Crop will release on Wednesday, September 4 and is the penultimate episode of this season of the podcast. In it, I will be joined by Nathan Johannning, a Commercial Agriculture Educator with University of Illinois Extension, who is also the Illinois representative for the Midwest Cover Crop Council for an applied discussion on the adoption and application of cover crops. Without further ado, please enjoy this episode of Talking Crop, Talking Drones, Robots, and More with Dennis Bowman. Dennis, welcome, and thank you so much for joining me today for Talking Crop. Dennis your title is the Digital Agriculture Specialist for University of Illinois Extension. Can you describe your position and the roles that you play in Extension in your position?
Dennis:I've been in Extension for 43 years now, and I've been in a variety of positions from a County Extension Agent to the Regional Specialist or Regional Educator and most recently as the Digital Ag Specialist. Throughout my career as an Agronomist and Extension, one of the areas I've focused on has been technology, and that has meshed up with some needs from the University because at the University of Illinois, we've got this organization that's called the Center for Digital Agriculture. It is a safe space for Geeks and Agronomists and Ag Economist to all get together to work on projects and to compete for grants. The Center for Digital Ag has been bringing together some of the the top researchers and faculty members from the College of Engineering and the College of ACES to collaborate together on projects and provide them a framework to take care of the the nuts and bolts of managing grants and stuff so that they can focus on the knowledge generation, solving problems and issues. It's been a very successful grouping to get together, and they've been very good at getting grants. Getting grants is somewhat synergistic in the fact that once you get a team that's familiar with each other and comfortable and knows their strengths, they can form new teams to compete further and to go farther with some of the grants. We've been very successful. With a lot of our grants are being funded by the National Institute for Food and Agriculture at USDA. Being a USDA agency, one of their big things is that all these grants should have an outreach component, that there should be something practical, and that includes Extension. For these teams to successfully compete, they've got to have a good outreach and extension program built into the grant as a significant portion of the grant. They're not just publishing journal articles and going to conferences and talking to each other, but they're actually getting stuff and getting it out to growers and the Agribusiness industry. They need people like myself that know Extension to be part of their teams. In addition to being an employee of University of Illinois Extension, I have joint appointments with the Crop Science department and with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the Center for Digital Ag.
Kathryn:Awesome, that's really interesting. The projects and the studies that are done through the Center for Digital Ag are they focused on campus? I'm thinking location wise. Are these projects just on campus? Do you do projects in other locations, whether it be the state or other areas?
Dennis:A lot of it starts on campus, but it gets spread out. When we're doing field research and field trials, those will need other environments. We're also looking at other states. Sometimes we'll have partners in other states that we can work with. One of our big partners in this a lot of our projects at the Center for Digital Ag is Tuskegee University. Using their constituents and their focus on more smallholder farms in the South, that gives us another avenue to get out and another area that we can test some of the ideas with farmers of different backgrounds, different cropping systems, different income levels, different size operations. Trying to make things that work across the board.
Kathryn:Yeah. Definitely. That's awesome that by working with them you're able to not just differentiate location but also different demographics of different areas, That's really cool. You mentioned in the very beginning that you've been in Extension for a number of years and you've always had your hand in the technology area. Can you talk a little bit about how Technology Agriculture has changed from when you started to where we're at now? I know it's a lot of changes in a very little time with technology so I'm really interested to hear what you have to say about that.
Dennis:Well I came into a County Extension office just a few months before the first personal computer found its way into the offices as an office tool. I'd had a little bit of training in college on the use of computers. I was instantly the guy in the office that could help people figure out how to use these devices that were being added to our office spaces. But going on past that, there was farm accounting software that came in that a lot of farmers started adopting, and that was some of the first use of computers on the farm was basically as farm management tools.
Dennis:But then as we got into the technologies in the nineties when the GPS system came online, which was a really strong push, folks were developing yield monitors for combines about the same time, but without the the GPS to mark the location and record the location, you just basically had kind of fleeting data that was going across the monitor showing yield. Tying the GPS into that really increased the utility of that information and gave it something that we could keep and then start building maps off of from that data. GPS was one of the first steps in that. GPS and soil samples, yield monitors, then we start adding to fertilizer applicators to do variable rate applications. The next step was guidance systems on tractors so that they'd self steer, and then that's technology has proceeded to get even more advanced. It's pretty much a hands off in some of the early stages, it was a light bar that was on the on the hood of the the tractor that you just followed the light and kept it on beam as you went through the field. Now that's all more automated with the narrow shutoffs that increased the efficiency of operations so we weren't wasting nutrients and chemicals in areas where it had already been applied or seed. Just big advances in the control of our machinery. I know I've talked to farmers early on when we first got the the first auto guidance systems and tractors, and some farmers that were nearing retirement had installed or gotten a new tractor that had the system on it or installed it on one of their existing tractors, and they were just amazed at how less stressed out and tired they were at the end of the of a day on in the farm that it just really took a lot of the the moment to moment stress off their bodies, and they were managing the equipment rather than driving the equipment. Sure yeah that's a really good way to look at it. I'm glad you brought that up because that was my next question thinking about Digital Ag. I think a lot of the times we might hear folks call it precision farming. Am I correct in saying that with all this technology?
Kathryn:Okay yeah so precision farming and digital farming wrapping it all together in one big broad package. My next thought and question was does it make farming easier? You answered that in your example of the older generation farmers saying it's just less of a mental toll less of a physical toll in some cases but is it also maybe challenging in the aspect of there's all this new technology coming out and it's hard to know everything about it and it's hard to know what's best to incorporate or what to leave out. Is there that aspect of it too?
Dennis:There's definitely a challenge and with any new technology when you're the first to adopt something we call that the bleeding edge because it often doesn't work right. You have downtime. You've got a piece of equipment that you're counting on, and it's time to plant, and the planter won't sink. And those kind of things can be very frustrating. As the technology matures, a lot of that gets taken care of and goes goes away, but still, it is an issue. There's a lot of different pieces and different manufacturers. They've got their own systems. There's a lot of nuances as you move from machine to machine that you've gotta keep track of. So, yeah, it can be a challenge. There's advantages, but a lot of time, there's more prep work before you get to the field to make sure everything's gonna work.
Kathryn:Yeah. You got to do that upfront work to make things easier on you in the the back half of things, which that's the case with a lot of things. I don't think that's something we can really eliminate going forward. Looking more specifically at a certain type of agriculture technology being drones, I know that you do a lot of work with drones. You were just up here actually this spring.
Kathryn:You did a presentation and gave us a demonstration of drone use. I wondered if you could explain, for those who might not be very familiar, how are drones being used in agriculture? What are all the applications for drone use in Ag currently?
Dennis:It started off pretty much as an imaging tool to take pictures of crops and to make visual maps of fields. A lot of the drones just get used to fly up over the field, take some pictures, look for problems, kind of a visual aerial scouting tool. Then that information, if you go to the next step, that can be converted into to maps. That could be a visual camera or it could be a multispectral camera that could do other wavelengths of non visible light, like near infrared and red edge. That can allow us to look at things that we can't see with our naked eye and create something called Vegetative Indexes that can give us a clue as to how healthy a plant is. There's that visual aspect of those small drones that they've been buzzing around for, oh gosh, a little over ten years now that they've been really available on the market. Most recently, we've added to that the spraying and spreading drones. The bigger drones that can carry payloads and up to around 40 gallons tanks or so on some of these small or bigger spray drones that I'm sorry. It's a 40 liter tank, which is an eight gallon tank.
Dennis:Not 40 gallons. We haven't got that big yet. That can spray several acres at a time. With this technology and fast recharging batteries and not having a pilot on board that it's at risk of life and limb. The FAA has fast tracked the adoption of spray drones, with after initial very reluctant attitude towards using drones for agricultural applications of materials.
Dennis:That has changed, and now we're seeing a really rapid adoption of this technology and folks setting up with systems with these bigger spray drones that can come in and spray large acreages and just kind of fly continuously using one or two drones and generators and fast recharging batteries to keep them in the air all day long and then using those into the fall as we start using them to apply cover crops and spreading cover crop seed. Spot spraying of areas that need it, border areas that need additional attention that would be hard to get from an aerial applicator or from a ground applicator. Some real benefits from these smaller spray drones.
Kathryn:Yeah. Absolutely. With these these larger drones that are being used for application and spreading, is it more of something that's been adopted by companies or are individual farmers also doing this on their own operations as well?
Dennis:I've seen several farmers that have decided to start up a small business. They've got a younger son or daughter that's entering the enterprise that has some technology experience, and they're setting up a side business of doing the spray drones, or some of the aerial applicators are seeing some advantages to using the small drones for areas that are hard to get into. There's a lot more windmills out and about that can create a nasty environment for the airplanes to try to get into areas where big airplane gets a lot of attention and you can get a small drone in there and not cause as much disturbance. You're definitely seeing a wide range of folks that are getting into business. We'll see how that fares over the next couple years on those that are successful and not, but there's been a lot of them that have been approved by the FAA. There's a lot of interest in the technology right now. We'll see how it conglomerates or fits in as this shakes out as we go in the next couple of years.
Kathryn:Yeah. That's for sure. You've talked a lot about the benefits of using drones in Ag. Are there any kind of maybe not unknown but not much thought about disadvantages to using drones? Of course you know they're smaller so they can for being relatively large drones they can cover larger acreages relatively but not as much as a large sprayer. That's an obvious you could call that a drawback. But are there any other drawbacks or disadvantages that some might not consider right off the bat?
Dennis:They are not the perfect answer in all situations. They still have drift potential. The technology in them right now is is still rather untested in some ways. Most of the new spray drones are used rather than using regular nozzles have switched to the rotary atomizer nozzle or spray system. We don't have a lot of good research on setting those up for best applications.
Dennis:The system can make a lot of adjustments and do a lot of things automatically, but knowing if that's the right thing to be doing in those situations is something we need to think about. There are some of these being designed by engineers and with not a lot of experience in agriculture. Things like what's the right swath width, what's the right nozzle setup, some of those things need a little bit more research right now so that we can do a good accurate job. Their heart can be more of a challenge to calibrate because of their flying in the air. You're not just sitting there with a spray boom next on the ground walking from nozzle to nozzle with a measuring cup and a stopwatch, but you're trying to determine this the right way to and the best way to get stuff applied.
Kathryn:Sure. How might a farmer determine whether getting started with drone use is the right decision for them? What kind of things should they think about to make that decision?
Dennis:Well for me as an agronomist background and doing a lot of crop troubleshooting and late season crop scouting is just a real challenge to do effectively and more often than not, you're just taking a few random samples from near the road to see if something is going on in the field, and you're not seeing what's going on in the back of the field. Yesterday, I was out with my imaging scouting drone and surveyed several fields in Western Illinois where there was red crown rot problems. Surveying the extent of the damage in those fields was very easy to do with the drone. Putting the maps together today to share those with the grower and with the research team that's been looking at those fields. I think for any farmer, I can definitely see an advantage to having one of these drones in their toolbox so they can see what's going on in the field in areas where it's not easy to get to. It may just be a fact that it's muddy out and you can't walk across the field to get to the far side to do population counts or look for weed escapes, those kind of things where a drone could easily go up. You could pop that in the air and and check those things out really quickly. I think almost every farm should have somebody that can run one of the scouting drones. They're just such a good tool to have.
Dennis:The spray drone is a little more complicated. If you see a need, if you've got pasture areas, if you've got areas that are hard to or difficult to spray with conventional equipment or hard to get an aerial applicator to your site, then, I can see some advantages for having a spray drone. I was working with a retired grower that isn't actively farming, but he has a two acre elderberry patch that he manages and using as part of his retirement income. A summer hobby of producing elderberries that gives him some some good income bump for his retirement income. He was getting older and was finding it more difficult to keep the sprays that he needs to put on the elderberries to keep the pests out and saw my information on one of my presentations on spray drones and got really excited about it and then has bought one and is using it to make his life a little more comfortable by not having to wander through the his elderberry patch dragging a hose trying to spray his crop there because it's not something that could be done with commercial applicators and it's too small for aerial application. It's a good place.
Kathryn:Yeah. Those are like niche situations that would be really fun to find. Speaking of the advantageousness of these I have a colleague and of course this wouldn't apply to our area by any means but I have a colleague in my office who's from way out West and she said that I don't know if it was her father or her grandfather he uses a drone to scout for where his cattle are because they have those wide swaths of land. He'll use a drone to figure out where they're hanging out and they actually got used to it so they know that when they see the drone they're about to b be fed relatively soon so they'll kind of flock to where they need to go. Those are good advantages in each of those different situations which is really great. If a farmer does decide they have maybe one of those niche situations or they are interested, they want to make scouting easier, so on and so forth, how do you recommend they get started?
Kathryn:Should they just go out and just not put their toe in the water but jump in and go get a drone and try it out? I guess what do you recommend to folks who say that they're seriously interested? What's their first step that you recommend?
Dennis:The first step is to talk to people that are using drones and to find out what they're using and what's working. The market changes a little bit from year to year but using one of the established drone companies, not going to Best Buy necessarily and getting whatever they've got on their shelf for Walmart. But looking around and getting something that's in semi industrial grade as it comes to drones. It's got a good company backing it up. They get good updates, has a strong operating system. That's the thing that a lot of people don't realize is that the drones are pretty easy to fly. They're not that big of a challenge at all these days. The computer does all the work. You just suggest where you'd like the drone to go, and it takes care of getting it there. It'll try to prevent you from making mistakes most of the time as well. The modern latest versions of the drones pretty much all have some type of obstacle avoidance so that they'll try to avoid crashing into things.
Dennis:Not that you can't get into trouble with them, but most of the time, they will do their best to not fall out of the sky. Then if you decide that you're going to do this, then you need to get certified, get the FAA Part 107 drone pilot's license. It's not terribly hard, but it's not something you'd pass if you didn't spend a little bit of time studying for it. There's a lot of free study materials that are available online. Anybody that wants to do that, I can send some resources to them if they want to contact me, which you will provide them with my contact information, and I can share some of my resources that I use. I very rarely fly the drone manually anymore. I pretty much use software to create missions and just basically get the drone to the spot where I want it and get my mission set up and hit launch, and the drone goes off, flies it, and comes back. And sometimes it'll land itself. Sometimes it'll come down and be say, is this is it safe for me to land? Then you can confirm that it's okay, and it'll go ahead and land on its own, or you can take control and move it and adjust it a little bit if it need be. But most of the time, very rarely do I have to take over. If I'm just doing picture work, I'll often fly that manually and try to set up good images that are in the area where I want. So get the FAA certification. If you decide to go in the drone or in the spray drone business, then that's a much bigger challenge, and you're gonna need some help to do that either because you a lot of paperwork because you basically have to do all the same paperwork that a crop duster would have to have with a manned airplane just with slight tweaks to it that fit drone usage.
Kathryn:Yeah. Absolutely. That's all really good information. Like you alluded to, I will include your contact information in the video description. If anyone anyone gets inspiration, they can contact you and you can provide them with that information. Thank you for that. Moving a little bit away from drones now, shifting more towards another fun thing that I know you work with which is robots in agriculture. I know this is currently not quite as popular as drone use, but with robots what role can robots play in agriculture realistically? What do you think future adoption of robot use will be used for in Ag?
Dennis:Well, I can tell you some of the stuff that we've been working on and one of those is actively being used in the seed industry right now is a little robot that'll go up and down the plot rows and collect data using cameras and imaging LIDAR imaging devices on robot. These robots are pretty much designed to take lots of measurements of the corn or the soybeans, whatever plant it is that it's geared for examining. It'll replace teams of graduate students. If you've got a corn breeding program and you're evaluating thousands of lines of genetic material and have it out in plots and you've got these teams of graduate students out there with clipboards and measuring tapes collecting data all summer long to try to figure out what's gonna be the next best corn variety on the market, then this can replace them. It can operate without complaint and collect a lot of data, and it'll already be digitized so it can go straight into the lab for analysis and starting to do evaluations much more rapidly and hopefully have good quality control as well. There are robots that have come out of our robotics lab at Bio Ag and Biological Engineering department that are being commercialized and sold to a lot of the big seed companies around the world for this project. Out of that team, the second project they started developing was a robot that would do some type of weeding to control hard to control weeds, and that was their initial discussion. But as they got talking to farmers and learning more about agriculture, they saw another use that they thought might be a better test for their second round, and that was the cover crop seeding robot that you've seen around the state showing off for the last couple of years. This is a robot that will go into standing corn, basically, about now through and up until harvest, and we can seed cover crops underneath the corn canopy, get the seed out down close to the ground, get it spread, and the robot's driving itself up and down the row, putting out the cover crop seed with autonomous detection of the corn plants and driving itself through the field.
Kathryn:That's fascinating. I hadn't really thought about the commercial application of the robots. In my mind, I'm always thinking of farmers themselves but I think that's a perfect place for an ag robot to be doing that data collection. It kind takes out not human error so much as human variance. say my 5% damage isn't going to be the same as your 5% damage, right? Or rating I should say. That's really interesting and the cover crop thing is really interesting as well. I know up here in this part of the state getting cover crops in in a timely manner is very difficult especially because we don't have a lot less of that window so using something like a robot or going back to the drones those would be really beneficial in bridging that gap that we find ourselves in every so often.
Dennis:Yeah with cover crops a lot of times we're forced into using cereal rye as our number one cover crop species not because it has the best biologics of some of the cover crop species but because it's just so darn dependable even with a late planting date that it's very pretty cold tolerant and will grow late and germinate fast. We get stuck on using it and not that it's not a good cover crop species, it has a very limited range of agronomic potential. Whereas some of the clovers and some of the radishes and those kind of things have some other traits that we might be more interested in. But because we're looking at a post harvest planting window that can be really small, getting the seed out there in August or early September, giving that a chance to get established and having a sufficient time to grow and get going in the fall prior to the cold weather setting in. That's a case where the drone or a cover crop seating drone or the a cover crop seating robot on the ground, those can all be tools that can help us get stuff out a little bit earlier. For corn, the robot works really good under the canopy. For soybeans, the robot does not do as well trying to get through soybeans.
Kathryn:Sure.
Dennis:That's where a spreader drone can get in and seed some of those areas quite effectively.
Kathryn:Yeah. That's really interesting. When you think of robots, the general layperson, that seems like something very futuristic probably very expensive. Is that the case with ag robots?
Kathryn:If they are currently relatively expensive, do you see that expense going down as more developments take place to make these more of a quote unquote mainstream item?
Dennis:Well, you've got things like the John Deere seed and sprayer systems that are artificial intelligence enhanced spraying with a lot of computerized controls that are really expensive.
Dennis:One of the things with our group at the University of Illinois is we're looking at things that are cheap. The image of the robot, for the breeding plots, that has a LiDAR sensor on it that's fairly expensive and works really good. For the cover crop robot, we're trying to make something that's really cheap, and we couldn't use the LiDAR sensor because it would make the unit cost go way up and be one of the most expensive parts of the robot. We're using cheap, vision cameras and a little tiny computer, that, taking what we learned from the LiDAR robots and using those with the visual cameras to make a machine vision system that can see the cornrows and guide the the robot down the center of the rows and keeping it between the the plants. When you compare that to just the price of a crop dusting airplane at 2.5 million dollars apiece, it's quite a bit cheaper.
Kathryn:Yeah. That's quite a discount in comparison. That's for sure. You threw out the word artificial intelligence when you're talking about that other piece of technology which brings me to one of my next questions which is what role does artificial intelligence play in farming today? I think in the mainstream everyone thinks about ChatGPT but what role does AI play in farming today or will it play in the future?
Dennis:A lot of the technology that we're starting to add to agriculture has a foundation in artificial intelligence that, say the John Deere seed and spray, the computer system that runs that basically was built using artificial intelligence, where they feed in lots of images of corn and soybeans and cucklebur and waterhemp and build a system using machine learning in artificial intelligence that you can show it a picture it hasn't seen, and it can tell you whether it's corn or soybeans or weed. That turns the sprayer on. Building that kind of system, the foundation using of machine learning and stuff is a piece of artificial intelligence. Then you've got the more common type thing that we're seeing now with ChatGPT, which we have a version of ChatGPT that's designed for agriculture that we're experimenting right now called Crop Wizard that uses a dataset that is made of publications from all the land grant colleges across The United States. It's using extension material that's non biased. So if you ask it a agricultural question, it'll look in its Extension database and come up with an answer and then give you the references. In addition to the answer, you can take that and look back at the original source to double check that it meets your standards for good information so you're not just taking a computer's word for something.
Kathryn:Yeah. That's a really great resource to have especially like you mentioned it provides those unbiased resources which are really important to have as well. Another question just broadly about this Digital Ag and Precision Agriculture. Does all of this technology or can all of this technology help to make Ag more sustainable? Because that's something that I think more and more people are talking about and interested in is that sustainability piece of agriculture. Does all of this, again, technology and these resources contribute to a more sustainable agriculture operation?
Dennis:It's all in how we apply the technology. I mean, we've seen that from some of the early days when we started adopting the variable rate planner or the variable rate fertilizer equipment so that we're not over applying fertilizers. We're very concerned about water quality, the hypoxia zone, the nutrient loss reduction strategy here in Illinois. The variable rate application is one of the things that we looked at and have tried to apply to some of those situations so that we're not necessarily back in the old days when we put just a uniform rate across the field based on what the average was and instead using soil samples and yield maps to determine how we're going to apply our fertilizer and spread it across the field and using different rates. One of the things we found out with that was that we didn't always use less fertilizer.
Dennis:We just shuffled it around and used it, put it in different areas of the field. It didn't often save farmers money, but sustainably, it made sense that we were putting the nutrients in the right places. I think that has always been a little piece of this technology that we are looking for ways to be more efficient and more sustainable at the same time. The row shutoffs and those kind of things that keep the pesticides from being overlapped or keeping them out of the waterways. A lot of our Ag chemicals have restrictions when it comes near the edge of the field. Having that built into the system to keep those just only in the the right places can be an advantage as well. And then the challenges of new techniques adopting cover crops, utilizing the technology to help simplify some of the decisions there. We've got cover cropping tools that will help farmers look at the decisions as it relates to how much biomass do they have in their cover crop, when's going to be the best time to terminate it based on my location and my planting date, and when I hope to plant my, following crop? That the, the cover crop tool, can help do that. There's a lot of pieces of this and are matching up with what we're trying to do in agriculture right now to be more sustainable and be more regenerative.
Dennis:The use of the cover crops and making sure that they're successful, the reintegration of livestock in some of these systems which you know changes some of the dynamics and the biodiversity in the fields as we go forward.
Kathryn:Yeah there's a lot that goes into that sustainability piece and based on everything you've said today during our conversation it sounds like this technology can really help us make those decisions and do it in a more sustainable way. Dennis I just have one last question for you and it is I know you have a field day coming up in a couple of days which at the time of this recording this will be out after your field day occurs but are there any events coming up in the near or even far future that you want to talk about at all?
Dennis:Well, we have a place at the University of Illinois Research Farm in Champaign, an area that's been designated as the the Farm of The Future test bed area where we're taking some of this technology and applying it in a large field setting. One of the things we're hoping, and we've got it loosely on our calendar, to have a field day in November at the Farm of The Future site to look at the grazing of the cover crops by some of the University cattle and monitoring them and also using drones and herding ground dog shaped robots to help move the livestock around as well as virtual fencing to move the livestock and give them access to the best grazing and keep them off of areas to give them time to recover. How we can use the virtual fencing to do rotational grazing and manage cover crops for a grazing situation? Hopefully we'll get that. Everything will come together with the fences and the livestock and the technology to have that field day this November.
Kathryn:Yeah. That sounds really interesting. I definitely want to try to make that. We have a lot of livestock producers in this area that would be something really interesting to see. It's really great. Also I wanted to mention that we're talking about all this technology and maybe it's something that people haven't seen in action so you guys doing those field days and demonstrating for folks I think is really important because you can think about it all you want but it's so much different to actually see it in play to see if it'll be a benefit. Dennis that is all that I have for you. Again thank you so much for joining me today. I appreciate your time and I will I'm sure catch up with you soon.
Dennis:Thank you, Kathryn.