00:00 Well, we're talking about soil sampling here at Miles Farms with the two people that have been doing soil sampling. Four miles farms. 00:06 This is Seth with the new apparatus, and this is Regina with how it's been done for the last decade. Regina, for the last 10 years, 00:12 you've been in charge of pulling soil samples here for the miles. Tell us about the methodology you used to use and we're gonna get into the new 00:18 apparatus. Okay. Used to, we would take this and we would do it on two and a half acre grids. And um, we take this and there's six inches marked right in here. 00:27 It's got a tape measure in there if you can see it. Yep. And then you take it and you would dig down and dig a hole. 00:35 Then After you got down your six inches, and Once you get your six inches, you get you a slice of it right here. Mm-Hmm. And you would go down and make sure you got all six inches of it. 00:43 And then you got your top, your bottom and your middle. And you put it in the box, it's barcoded, seal it up, 00:50 Seal it up, and then I send this off. Now you used to do, how many of those per acre or per two acres or per 10 acres? Um, 00:58 We've done it two and a half acre grids. It just take that, divided it by, I guess the number of acres you had that, I mean, it's less than what he does. 01:06 So When you would go out there and do you drive around and then you knew you were supposed to pick up at every spot on a two and a half acre grid. 01:12 Pull one of these. Yes sir. We have a, uh, program on a, on an iPad Yeah. That we use. And it marks the spot on each one of them. 01:19 And that's what we go from there and it's marked and we follow that until we pull the next one. 01:24 Regina, you're still doing that? Some, but we decided at Miles Farms we're gonna start doing more sampling. So we've uh, mechanized a bit more. Seth, 01:31 tell me what we're looking at and also we're gonna do this a bunch more than Regina had to do. 01:36 Yeah. Uh, so this is basically just a six inch core, uh, sampling machine. It's, it's, it's a patented machine that, uh, a gentleman came up with in North Carolina. And, uh, 01:49 you pretty much just raised this arm and that auger will come on. It goes down, forgive the noise. There you go. Sorry. 02:00 And then you, you're gonna go all the way down to here to get six inches of soil and that's when you pull it back up and then your soil's gonna be in your cup. 02:10 And I like to kind of get a little bit of, shake it around a little bit, grab the box 02:14 And then you, and you put it in one of these boxes. One box, and you put it in one of these boxes. Yes sir. 02:17 And you're gonna go from one soil sample every two and a half acres to now what? Uh, I will lift this arm and pull five cores per acre. 02:26 Per acre. So instead of one pole from Regina, every two and a half acres, we're gonna do five poles every one acre. You know, 02:33 it used to be you pulled into a field lane and back in your dad's age and my age, if you got two samples out of an eight, eight acre field, 02:39 you thought you were doing your job. Then we went to grids and it was five acres, then it was one sample per two and a half acres. 02:44 Now it's five cores per one acre. We're almost hauling the farm away. One box at a time, aren't we? 02:50 Yeah, I mean, we're getting close. I mean, you keep, you keep getting any more cord. We ain't gonna have nothing left. Uh, but basically, I mean, Damien, it comes from, you know, 02:58 back when we used to do composite samples and now doing them from even to two and a half acre grids to one acre grid. 03:05 We're just trying to get a little bit more precise in, in, in every acre. This fits into the new methodology of like variable rate seeding, 03:13 variable rate fertility where, you know, we, we can work in tighter patterns than just one pole per 80 acres and it was, you know, a five acre grid with something, two and a half grid. 03:23 This is something that the technology allows us to do. Now you've got a computer screen on here, Seth. So that coincides with the same information that's in their planter. 03:31 Uh, it can or Or their Fertility Equipment. Oh, A hundred percent. Uh, you can, I mean you can get as specific or non-specific as you want to get with the 03:39 program that we run. As in like she, she explained you can take the grids, um, map out the grids, take your samples, send it off to the lab, 03:48 and then import it into the program to where you have whatever variability and soil nutrients, even the variety top. Yeah. And it'll, it'll specify 03:57 Whatever you want. I'm a little concerned Regina, like John Henry and the steam shovel. You're getting supplanted by mechanization. Are you gonna be without a job here? 04:05 I sure Hope not. No she ain't. No sir. I've got plenty to do. Matt and 'em keep me plenty busy. So are you gonna be now helping them take what they find in the soil samples and 04:13 then hand it off so they can then put this into their technology? Yes, sir. Okay. May 04:18 She, she, I'm gonna be honest with you, she does a good job at not only keeping us all organized, but she keeps him organized too. On, on sampling. I mean, she'll have, 04:25 he gets ready to go sample, she'll have all his boxes ready to go per field. Oh man. I mean, she, without, without her don't, none of us run. 04:32 So I've got a question for you, and this is where we're gonna probably wrap it up here. Obviously we love collecting data. 04:36 We've had the Miles Brothers on a number of times talking about the data. Is it too much five pole cores per acre? I mean, 04:43 are we getting to where it's like a little more than we really need? I, I don't think so, honestly, 04:48 just because we're like was, that was explained before. The technology and ag is advancing even more. And I don't know why we can't go from two and a half acre to one acre grids to 04:59 be as precise as we like was we can be now. Right? We used to not be able to be as precise, but now it's, the data's out there, Is there any challenge? And, 05:08 and now are we gonna get to where we have more data than we can maybe even really use? Or you think that it's right on target? 05:14 I think we still got a long way to go. I mean, I, I think, I mean, just technology in general. I mean, we've got, we've still got a long way to go. 05:21 Uh, it's, it's, it's never gonna stop. Uh, You know what, so l Sam has come a long way just in the last 50 years. Here's the next generation of it with, uh, this device. 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