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John Dobberstein:

Welcome to the latest edition of the No-Till Farmer Podcast. I'm John Dobberstein, senior editor of No-Till Farmer. In the latest edition, brought to you by Yetter Farm Equipment, University of Maryland Soil Scientist, Ray Weil shares some fascinating information about his three-week trip to Ukraine over the summer as he shared his expertise with farmers so they can do a better job protecting their soils and improving their farm operation. Let's listen in on our discussion with Ray.

Glad to have you here and share your experiences there. Could you tell me a little bit about how the trip came together and what the goal was?

Ray Weil:

Back in spring, I got an email out of the blue asking if I would go to Ukraine and be part of a group of soil and agronomy experts that were going to work with Ukrainian farmers to try to improve their productivity and also bring some more regenerative sustainability to what they're doing as a largely to support the war effort because that's their biggest money earner is I think 41% of their exports or agricultural products. Although these days, maybe the drones are going to take over that. So it's a big part of their economy, and I wanted to do what I can to support them. I'm a little old, to support them in other ways. But yeah. So I said, "Yeah, I could do it." Because they wanted, it was in the middle of summer and I was available that time, so I said, "Let's do it."

And this was organized by a Ukrainian, it's an interesting story, really. This Ukrainian guy had nothing to do with agriculture. He was an English teacher, so his English is good. And he had worked for USA translating for US people over in Ukraine before the full-scale invasion started. And he had also branched out, I think I have this story correct. He started a travel agency. Because he knew English, he could take people on trips. And it turned out the people that were interested in visiting the US and Canada were farmers. They wanted to see what the US and Canadian farmers were doing. And so his core business is called Travelite, and he changed it to Travelite Agro because it became an agricultural tourist company just because that's who his main customers were. So now he does this, I think he's currently got a trip to New Zealand. And of course the Ukrainians mostly don't speak English, so they would be hard up.

I suggested, "Well, you could go to the No-Till conference." But he said, "Well, they wouldn't understand anything and translation simultaneous doesn't work." So they're really interested in learning what we're doing over here because it sounds strange, but they're new to modern farming. You have to remember that Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union had this collectivized system with big state-run farms, and there weren't any real farmers. They were just employees of the state agency. And it is surprisingly recently that farmland became privately owned, I think it was 2019, so it's just not many years ago. And once it became private that you could buy and sell farmland, then it started to agglomerate into large farms. So you had the rural peasants that had an allocation of land when they did that, and they kept an acre or two with their house and then sold the rest.

And so now they're big farms. They're privately owned farms, pretty similar to the size that we'd have in the Midwest in the US, a few thousand acres. And then there are corporate owned farms which are bigger than that, 10, 20, 30,000 acres. And we met one corporation that we met with, went to some of their farms, that farms in the neighborhood of a million and a half acres. So that's a pretty big operation. And we met the woman in charge of that. So hopefully our message had some influence on some land.

So that's the background, is the people that are doing the farming now are fairly new to farming and they have a lot of modern equipment and doing it at a large scale, and they're doing some precision agriculture and even some variable rate stuff and zone mapping and whatever they can pick up. And some of this they've been picking up from these trips to Canada and the US, but the concept of regenerative agriculture and conservation agriculture and no-till, I mean, I didn't see any no-till. At the end of the three weeks there was a conference, and it was a two-day conference in which there was, in the neighborhood of 400 farmers showed up, and apparently a couple of those were trying some no-till. And the ones I talked to had not tried cover crops. I'm not sure what equipment they were using.

So cover crops were, we talked about it, but we didn't see any places that used them. I think maybe one farm, it was just starting again because of what they learned recently. We didn't see any no-till. It's all tilled, lots of erosion, lots of soil degradation, all the problems that come with full tillage. Now you can see the same thing if you go to North Dakota and Manitoba, there's lots of people still doing tillage. So they have beautiful soil similar to what you'd find in Manitoba and North Dakota. That's their climatic region. These are grassland soils, so black soils. But yeah, pretty badly degraded. So it was really interesting to work with this kind of farmer. There weren't a lot of people that were trying to do it the way granddad did because granddad wasn't really a farmer in the sense of being a modern farmer. So it was pretty interesting. Yeah.

John Dobberstein:

Where were you at in Ukraine and describe what you saw when you got to the country. What was going on around you?

Ray Weil:

Yeah. Well, first of all, you can't fly to Ukraine. You'd get shot down. There's no open airport. So I flew to Warsaw, Poland. They flew me to Poland. There was a couple of other people along. There was a Canadian advisor, cover crop specialist. You might know him, Kevin Elmi.

John Dobberstein:

Yep.

Ray Weil:

And there was a guy from New Zealand and a guy from Germany, and then two people from Iowa mostly. One was a retired professor and the others are crop advisors. And so we all met in Poland, and then we drove into Ukraine and had crossed the border and stuff. So life looked pretty normal during the day.

It's European, it's Eastern European cities, but has an American flavor to it more than European in some ways. The Ukrainians are very free enterprise, individualistic. Life looked normal until nightfall. And then in nightfall, the Russians would be attacking different places. And even when we were in western Ukraine, which is farthest from the front, we'd still have sirens. So on my phone, they gave me an app to put on my phone, AirAlert app, and basically you put in where you're located, you don't use a GPS to do that because you don't want the Russian missiles to home in on you, right?

John Dobberstein:

Right.

Ray Weil:

So we did use Starlink, that was in the van that we drove around with, but you wouldn't want to just turn that on. So you put in where you're located and it'll tell you what's coming your way middle of the night. And there were a few nights when we were in caves. We had to get into bomb shelters. And in fact, I mean the windows were, the explosions were close enough, they were shaking the building, put it that way. It didn't hit our building. So yeah, that's pretty unnerving at night. And I think Ukrainians are pretty damn tired, literally, you can't get a good night's sleep if most nights you have to get up at 02:00 in the morning and take your family down to the bomb shelter or the basement or something like that. And so everybody's staggering around the next day. So that's what life is like there. Yeah.

John Dobberstein:

How does that look like when you have a war going on and you have people who are trying to raise food? Are they able to do what they need to do without much harassment? Or-

Ray Weil:

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we didn't go right down to the front where the shells are landing. And those fields, if you're within a dozen miles or so from the front lines, those fields are full of tank tracks and pot marked with explosions. And there, their concern is after the war, there's going to be contamination from chemicals in the explosives. And I mean, those are shot up, but when you get farther away, you take precautions but it just looked normal. But we didn't know exactly where we were going the next day. They didn't announce it. So had this was being broadcast and we had a big audience, so we had about 50 people in each pit. So you probably know, I do soil pit talks. I might have even originated soil pit talks back in the '80s before it was a thing. So at every place I went, they had prepared a really nice soil pit, and my job was to look at their soil and see what the problems were and make some recommendations based on the soil profile.

And the other guys were looking at plan analysis and stuff like that, but we didn't know the coordinates, and they didn't announce those until we went because you didn't want to make a target, have a bunch of people. So there's this threat hanging over things, but otherwise looked normal. It just lots of cropland and everything looked pretty normal, a little different than here. There were storks on some of the poles and whatnot, but I don't think the war is interfering with that, except of course, people-wise. So the really interesting thing was most of the people that we met that were farming and running the farms were pretty young, I'd say in their twenties and thirties. And many of them would pull out their phone and show me pictures of their dad in their forties and fifties, and their dads were in the front line in uniform holding off the Russians in the trenches. The opposite of what we think of here.

People here, if you look at the people that are in the Ukrainian army, a lot of them are in their fifties. Their draft age goes up to 59.

John Dobberstein:

Wow.

Ray Weil:

But they let the younger people stay and run the economy and make children. You got to keep [inaudible 00:10:59], so they figured these older guys have already had their children. So I'm not sure all of the reasons for that, but that was definitely the case, that this is a pretty old army, and the kids in their twenties and thirties, their dads are in the army. It's be the opposite of what you'd expect here. So that was an issue. Manpower, they're definitely short on labor.

John Dobberstein:

Well, from the standpoint of farm supplies, you look at equipment, fertilizer, seed, things that you typically need to have or run a farm. Were they having problems with that, getting supplies in? Or-

Ray Weil:

I didn't get the sense they were having any problem. I mean, stuff's expensive, but they get that mostly from Europe. They manufacture some of their fertilizer, and some of the seeds were local. They get them from Europe. They had, I think Syngenta was there, at the conference we had the different vendors were represented, and we had some familiar names. John Deere was there, Syngenta was there, and a lot of European countries, so they get a lot of their farming equipment from Germany and some others. They don't buy from Russia. They don't want anything to do with Russia, of course. But I didn't get an impression that there was, oh, we can't get that. We'd make recommendations. Even cover crop seeds, it was available mostly from European countries, but so they were able to get that. And I think since the drones chased the Russian Navy away, they're shipping their grain out. They're major exporters. I think they're number one for sunflowers and about number four for wheat in the world. So that's working all right as far as I could tell.

John Dobberstein:

Yeah. So in terms of the soils in Ukraine, you're talking it's fairly heavy, dark soil. Did you see widespread deficiencies in certain types of nutrients, or how would you characterize the soil resource they're dealing with?

Ray Weil:

Yeah, so Ukraine of course is famous for what soil scientists in the US call Mollisols. Most of the world call them Chernozems, and I guess the farmers here would call them prairie soils. So the black grassland soils, and that's through the center and southern part of the country. As you go towards the north towards Belarus border, the soils get sandier and they're more forested. So they're a little bit more like you'd find these in the northern part of Wisconsin and Minnesota and stuff. So they're more forested soils, and some of them are quite sandy. So it rains. We found some very sandy soil somewhere actually were quite acid, and they were just starting some new farms. So there was one guy whose sons set an example of this. So this young farmer, probably I'd say around 30, maybe 20, late twenties, his dad was in the trenches and his dad, they used to farm in what is now occupied by Russia.

So the Russians took over their land and they were starting a new farm in this forested area. I don't think they cleared the land, but I think it hadn't been farmed much for a while. And it was on very sandy soil. And so it was quite different. Instead of being calcareous and high pH silt loams, it was now sandy loams and acid. And that was a soil where I said, "Well..." I went into their cornfield and it didn't look so good. And I started making measurements. I had my kit with me, I had a pH meter and EC meter and a moisture meter, and I could do a bunch of tests. I had a little penetrometer, all this stuff. And so I'd go in there and I work up some data, and their pH was down around four, between four and 4.5. I said, "Well, the first thing you need to do is this needs to be limed." So it was probably aluminum-toxic. So that's one extreme.

And then in the other extreme, we'd have soils that had about a foot of black soil on top of just calcium carbonate and shirty, rocky carbonate, high pH, pH eight material. And those soils had a pH of eight and everything in between, they had some of those deep, deep, beautiful black soils with a pH near neutral. They had quite a few of those, too. They have lots of that land, and that's what they're famous for. I think that's part of the reason Russians want it, is to get all that good farmland so they have some very productive soils.

John Dobberstein:

Interesting. So you're-

Ray Weil:

But with the deficiencies. Yeah. We did see some deficiencies. Yeah. Fairly often, we saw sulfur deficiencies. I don't think they've got that message yet. Few micronutrients. Copper seemed to be low in a lot of places. Boron was low, but they generally fertilized. I think they probably put a little too much nitrogen on, but a lot of farmers do. I measured nitrates in the profile because they dug these nice deep pits I was in, they were all about five, six feet deep, and I could sample all the way down and I had a nitrate meter with me, and this was in the middle of the season, late June, early July, but they had a couple hundred pounds per acre of nitrate nitrogen at that point when I was in the field with them. And that was pretty common. So I think there was a lot of over application of nitrogen, especially all put down before planting.

John Dobberstein:

Well, if there's a lot of heavy tillage, maybe you would expect that, yeah, they're not mining much out of the grounds they're having to apply, I would guess.

Ray Weil:

Well, I think they could be more efficient in the way they apply it. And the tillage definitely left them with a tillage pan. I think out of the 27 pits that I examined, probably 26 of them had a tillage pan that was serious enough to interfere with deep rooting. And so a lot of these farms, they had this deep, beautiful soil, but they were farming the top, if they were lucky, a foot of it, 10 inches or so. And then it was compacted and the roots just weren't getting down below that. And of course, it's semi-arid is pretty dry. They have about between say, 450 and 650 millimeters. So what's that in inches?

It's like North Dakota, they got maybe 20 to 30 inches of rain, but it does come during the growing season mostly, so not too bad, but they're all complaining about not enough water. That was their reason for not wanting to do cover crops. But we don't have enough... You've probably heard that story everywhere that cover crops used, "Oh, they're just going to use up my water." And I tried to convince them that they could go the other way if they manage them right, they could let more water in, but there was enough moisture in some of these soils with high water holding capacity. In the subsoil, we calculated they had about 10 inches of water stored down there that the crops couldn't get to, and the top was dried out. So they had all the typical problems that come along with full tillage, and they would [inaudible 00:18:07] quite a bit, and some chisel plowing and some deep ripping and that kind of thing because they knew they had a compaction problem.

John Dobberstein:

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Clearly not, I guess widespread knowledge about no-till, but it sounds like they're amenable to at least learning about it.

Ray Weil:

Yeah, I'd say widespread interest, but not much adoption and a fair amount of skepticism. I mean, you hear this everywhere you go, right? When you try to spread no-till, it's either too hot or too cold or too wet or too dry, or the soil is too fine textured or it's too sandy or it's something. It won't work here, right? Oh, it'll work there if it won't work here. And you see that in the US too, when people, and I warned them that they, I guess my suggestion to them, especially since they had big equipment, but when you got down to examining the planters, so they had 90-foot wide big, big planter operate with a central air seeder kind of thing. Some of these are made in Germany and they look like really nice high quality equipment. But when you got down to what met the soil, what opened up the furrow, it wasn't a disc. And so there was no way you could no-till with it. It was designed for tilled soil.

So the point was it was a planter shoe that had to push through the soil, and there's no way you could have gone through anything with residue or with an untilled soil with that. So there were some units that I saw at the conference where the different displays were there that could be used for no-till. They weren't claiming that, but they had a pretty nice, either a double disc opener or some kind of coulter in there that opened up. But most of them just had boat prow they had to go through the soil. So they had to get equipment. So I suggested would be how to get a used six-row no-till planter and start playing with it and figure out how to get good stands in their soil and under different levels of residue conditions and stuff, because it's going to take a while.

It doesn't usually work perfect the first time you try it. And rather than go out and buy a huge piece of equipment, that's what I suggested they do. So I think there was enough interest. They're going to start moving. They're going to start trying it and moving towards that. And I think the cover crops as well. The couple of farms that use cover crops plow them in, and of course if you plow it in, you're not going to get much moisture benefits. You get some other benefits, but not much moisture conservation in the summer. So we demonstrated that. We actually carried a hay bale with us. So we contacted, we asked the farms if they had a hay bale to just spread out a few square yards of hay on the ground before we got there, a day before we got there because we wanted to do some demonstrations.

And so they either did that or we brought it with us, and we just showed them the difference in temperature, surface temperatures. So I'm thinking centigrade because I was over in Europe doing it. We were measuring with the infrared thermometer, you'd measure 50 degrees, that's 150 degrees Fahrenheit, that's cooking temperature. And under the mulch it'd be like room temperature. So that really woke them up because if you're cooking, you're killing everything, including the roots. And so we did those demonstrations. One of the really convincing ones was where they did put the straw out the day before. It had been pretty dry, the soil was pretty dry and it felt dry. And they put that straw out and I measured the moisture in the field, and then I picked up the straw and measured the moisture. They didn't add any water to it, they just mulched it the day before.

And that water was moving up by capillarity. And then because of the mulch, it didn't evaporate. So they actually had much higher moisture in the soil, and you could see the difference and feel the difference just by putting that, it was like it rained here and not there. So we did a bunch of these types of demonstrations. I think we opened some eyes. I think we got them thinking about it. That was our task is, I mean, these are educated people and they were good at what they were doing, but they just hadn't been exposed to this because their background was more either from the Soviet days or from Europe. And Europe doesn't do much no-till in general. You see lots of plowing in Europe.

John Dobberstein:

Yeah. I remember going to some different conferences and hearing about what was happening in France and some of the other countries, they just plow the heck out of it and don't really-

Ray Weil:

There's some things they do that's hard to believe. I mean, if shallow plowing 10 inches doesn't work, well, let's start plowing deep at 20 inches. You see this actually happening. So yeah, that's an issue, I guess. But I think there's some interest in Europe and no-till is starting to grow. And the Ukrainians were definitely interested in learning it and trying it. But as I say, it's difficult to start out if you don't have the equipment, that you do have to get a no-till planter. You can't try no-till until you get a no-till planter. So they have everything else.

John Dobberstein:

Definitely, the crawl, walk, run approach would be best it sounds like. You got to start somewhere.

Ray Weil:

Well, I think that's better than having a big field. And these were some big farms. So the landscape looked a lot like North Dakota. Some of it was a little bit hillier than that, but big fields. Big fields, no tree lines. Just there were some tree lines around the field a little bit, but pretty wide open. Some questionable agronomic practices, but we advised them on that too. We saw some outlandishly high soybean populations. Now, their seeds are probably cheaper than ours because they're not using GMOs with stacked traits that cost so much, but they had some really high populations and really narrow rows that I thought were probably overdoing it.

Yeah. And their rotations were a little more complex. Most farms were growing four or five crops, so they would grow sunflowers, a big one. Then in winter they might grow rapeseed like the Canadians do. And then they usually had small grains in there, barley and wheat and soybeans and corn. So not just corn, soybeans, corn, soybeans. It was a little more complex than that, which is good. Lots of opportunities for cover crops to fit in, say after the wheat harvest and things.

John Dobberstein:

Right. As far as harvesting goes, I guess you probably weren't there when they were harvesting crops, but do they have problems with the wheel traffic and the combines and everything and not much attention paid to how they're running their wheel traffic?

Ray Weil:

I was not there during harvest. I don't think they were running tram lines, but some of them were using GPS, but the GPS is not that reliable because of the war. So in some cases they could use precision, in some cases they couldn't, but they definitely had compaction issues both from plowing and from wheel traffic. And yeah, some of these fields, when they get wet, they can be a real mess. Fortunately for them, the rain comes mostly in the summer, and by harvest time, it's much drier in the winter. So there's rain when the crop needs it, and it's not real wet and sloppy during the winter.

John Dobberstein:

Interesting. So what do you think it's going to take to move in the direction that they're trying to move in and reduce tillage and improve soil health? Is getting to that goal really dependent on how the government supports them, or are there ways of... Because you see this in other countries around the world where if the government doesn't support conservation, it's just difficult to make it happen. Is that the same in the Ukraine, or are farmers able to get where they need to go?

Ray Weil:

I don't think they're getting a lot of government support right now, although we did have the Vice Minister for Agriculture at the conference at the end. So they're paying attention and they're giving it moral support or they were on board with what we were doing. I don't think they were... It was privately funded. The farms, these bigger farms actually paid to have this service. So it was all, I don't think there were public funds in this. It was all private. So some of these farms are really big so they could afford to pay. So my travel, I didn't charge anything. I don't think any of the experts charged anything, but our travel was covered. And they worked us pretty hard, we didn't get a lot of sleep visiting all these farms. There's a lot of driving between farms and that kind of thing, but I think they were interested.

I believe... When you're used to it, you don't see it. I'd walk out in those fields. I'm from Maryland, so not only do we have a higher rainfall, but I'm from a state and you hardly ever see a cloud field, and you hardly ever see a field in winter that doesn't have a cover crop on it. There are a few now then, but almost every field has a cover crop, and almost everyone is some version of no-till. It may not be pure no-till. They may do a turbo till over it to plant the cover crop or something like that, which I really don't advise, but it is quick. But my eyes, I'm used to seeing soil covered and armored and usually with something green on it. And to walk out in these fields that were just bare, and of course it looks great the day after you till it, and then it looks more like asphalt pavement by the time I get out there, and it's rained a few times.

So to me, it was literally shocking. I mean, it was almost made you want to cry. It is just gorgeous soils being mistreated like that. Of course, if that's what you've always done, you don't notice it. It looks normal. And so getting them to see that it's not normal, that that's not what nature's done. We did all the demonstrations I could think of. We did slaking demonstrations and they could see what was happening. We did infiltration, we did all those things, and we may go there and actually do it again next year.

And we reached a lot of people because we not only had a pretty good crowd at each of these farms, but they were live streaming it, so the organizers kids, like teenage kids were doing the IT and the whole thing was filmed and live streamed in Ukrainian, so there was a few hundred more online. So I think we had some impact, and each of these farms are fairly big.

John Dobberstein:

Well, that's great.

Ray Weil:

We'll see. I definitely felt it was worth my time to go over there between the interest and the impact that we might be able to have.

John Dobberstein:

Yeah. Well, that's great. You look at regenerative farming and the pressure that the suppliers have to be more sustainable and they're putting pressures on farmers to be more sustainable. And you look at how big of a wheat producer Ukraine is, do they have any inkling of what's going on with that, or are they really in any position to deal with that? If the food companies said, "Hey, I know you make a lot of wheat, but you need to start being more sustainable." Or-

Ray Weil:

I would say, I don't think they've hit those pressures yet. So we had conversations with dozens and dozens of farmers at all these different farms for three weeks, and I remarked to them, not once did environmental impact ever come up. Nobody was concerned about nitrate leaching or water pollution or anything like that. They were concerned about the effect on their farm, but that wasn't in their mindset. And I think they wanted to be sustainable, but I don't think they really, they were thinking in terms of the health of their soils and productivity and what they would do long-term productivity. Most of their grain is exported directly en masse to countries like Egypt and places in Africa that aren't putting these, they just need food. They're not going to pay a premium for sustainably raised wheat. So I don't think they're under those pressures yet. They're not marketing much to Europe. Mostly they taking the ships out through Turkey into the Mediterranean and shipping it down. I think Egypt and some others are big customers. They got big populations and not enough food.

John Dobberstein:

Right. Right.

Ray Weil:

And then the sunflower oil goes all over. But again, I didn't hear any talk about the food companies wanting to have certified regenerative practices, putting pressure on that way.

John Dobberstein:

Well, yeah, I thought I was just curious knowing how much wheat they produce.

Ray Weil:

So that has some influence in the US, especially for direct human food. If you're growing soybeans for edamame or for tofu or if you're growing wheat for bread or something. Most of our wheat is human food. So yeah, there's no question about it. These food companies are getting on board. People care about how the stuff's produced. Yeah.

John Dobberstein:

So what do you see the future hold with the US and Ukraine and this intellectual sharing between the countries in terms of farming challenges and technology and all that? Do you think that will continue?

Ray Weil:

Well, I think this particular company plans to continue. They were already advertising next year's tours. And they're emphasizing, I think they go down to Iowa too, maybe even down to Missouri. A lot of the people involved with this are part of the cation balancing crowd, if you know what I'm talking about, that comes out from the Albrecht. So I think they probably ended up in Missouri partly because of that. I'm not sure that's exactly what the Ukrainians needed at this point. There was probably some imbalances, but that probably wasn't the main issue.

But I think that's going to continue. I think they learned a lot. And yeah, they're anxious to learn from the best around the world and get ideas. So I think they're, Ukrainians are pretty impressive folks. I think just looking at what they're doing in the war, they're pretty gritty. The same thing with agriculture. They're going to make it work. And like I say, they don't have a whole ton of experience because most of the people are new at it, but they're embracing technology and making it work. So I think once they get convinced and try it, I think they can move pretty quickly.

John Dobberstein:

Yeah.

Ray Weil:

I'm hoping they will, because definitely there's some real limitations in productivity as well as soil health and environmental impacts that they can improve on if they move towards... Cover crops and no-till is a great combination for restoring soil productivity from degraded soils. You see it in a lot of places in the Midwest too, these white caps out on those prairie soils where the soil's white on the shoulders of the hills, and that's from basically losing all the topsoil and plowing up the calcareous subsoil in there. And those are really low productivity parts of the farm. And when you start looking out on a landscape or look at it through Google Earth, you can see it's a substantial part of the fields. I mean, it looks to me like 20, 25% of some of these fields are these really negative profitability, negative return on investment areas that they're just so low because of that damage, and they really need to think about how they can restore that or not crop those areas, put them into permanent grass and use the grass for something.

I saw very little integration of livestock, so certainly nothing like grazing cover crops. That's off in the future. But even livestock operations, they had some. Few of the farms when they were near a livestock or had a big livestock operation there was manure to be spread, but generally we didn't see a lot of that going around, which would be true of North Dakota too.

John Dobberstein:

Right. Right. And that was one of the questions I was going to ask was livestock, but I guess you do what works in your climate. I mean, is there anything that prevents them from raising livestock successfully or is it just not-

Ray Weil:

Oh, no, no, no. It could be done very successfully. Yeah, I mean, it's a natural grassland. Like I say, it's pretty similar to North and South Dakota, so it's like the Dakotas and Southern Manitoba. You got the Gabe Brown up there doing that kind of thing, but that's the leading edge, right? It is not everybody doing it, but it certainly is an environment in which livestock could be integrated, and that would be a big help both economically and ecologically, improving the soil and whole system. That's a big jump.

John Dobberstein:

Oh, absolutely.

Ray Weil:

Crop farmer to do livestock, that's not easy.

John Dobberstein:

Yeah, you have to do that in stages, I'm sure. Great. Well, I really thank you, Ray, for coming on here and sharing your experiences with your time in Ukraine. And I think people here will find it really interesting and they'll get a new understanding of some of the challenges their colleagues overseas have to deal with and maybe appreciate all the opportunities and resources they have in this country that aren't in other places.

Ray Weil:

Yeah, no, we definitely have a lot of advantages here in the US, although we're losing a lot of our competitive advantage. We used to be the place where we could ship grain around most efficiently and all that. And I suspect the Brazilians have caught up, so have another number of other countries. So yeah, we have to be careful how we handle international relationships, I think. I think we're learning that.

John Dobberstein:

Yeah, I've heard that discussion-

Ray Weil:

You need customers.

John Dobberstein:

I've heard that discussion and clearly there's a lot of discussion about our markets here, and was shipping cheap grain around the world going to work for us? That was the system that we were handed and what do we need to do now? And I'm sure those discussions will continue.

Ray Weil:

Yeah, I think that's important that they be discussing it. If the market is giving you such a low price, you can't produce a crop, isn't that a market signal telling you that you should be doing something else? And believe me, I don't have the answer of what something else would be. That's the big issue. If we're not growing corn and soybeans in the Midwest this much, what the heck else are you going to be growing? Yeah.

John Dobberstein:

Yeah, it's a challenge.

Ray Weil:

It seems like that's what the market is telling us.

John Dobberstein:

That's it for this episode of the No-Till Farmer Podcast. We'd like to thank Soil scientist, Ray Weil, for his revealing discussion about the challenges Ukrainian farmers are facing and how they're beginning to learn about soil health practices. We also want to thank our sponsor, Yetter Manufacturing, for helping to make this podcast possible. A transcript of this episode in our archive of previous podcast episodes are both available at no-tillfarmer.com/podcasts. For Ray and our entire staff here at No-Till Farmer, I'm John Dobberstein. Thanks for listening. Keep on no-tilling and have a great day.