Note: these are live captions, some transcription errors may exist.


>>  Getting starting with our conservation webinar I'm Holli Kuykendall, national technology specialist for NRCS' East National Technology Support Center.  I'm pleased to turn the webinar over to Steve Woodruff.  Steve is an agronomist  at our center and will introduce today's topic and presenter.  Steve, you may now begin. 
>>  Thanks Holli.  Our topic today is farming implements in action, impacts on the soil, erosion potential of till age systems and economics.  Our presenter today is Giulio Ferruzzi, he's located in Portland Oregon.  Guilio has specialized in our erosion program RUSLE2 and our pest management program WINPST, as well.  Giulio received his Bachelor's of Science from North Carolina state and his PhD and Master's from University of California in Davis and with that, Giulio.  I'll turn it over to you. 
>>  Okay.  Thank you very much.  So today we're going to be talking about, as Steve said, farming implements in action and we're going to be looking at how they actually impact soil.  So what exactly we'll be covering today is, we're going to look at the types of soil disturbance that these implements have on the soil.  We'll look at some examples of the farm implements that can actually demonstrate these type of soil disturbances, and then we'll take a look at different, a few different corn bean till age systems to see tillage systems to see what kind of effect these systems.  What kind of effect these systems have on soil loss.  The impact of the soil disturbance on soil loss.  And finally we'll touch on the economics.  We'll see, we'll view the fuel or energy consumption from the RUSLE2 tool that we get just by running the toil loss calculator, and then we'll also take in to consideration a few other things that are necessary for a full economic analysis. 
>>  So to begin with, let's take a look at the five different types of soil disturbance.  These are the five different types of soil disturbance that are actually modelled in the RUSLE2 soil loss calculator.  And all the operations that are in RUSLE2 have one or more of these types of soil disturbance associated with them.  The first one that we'll be discussing is the inversion soil disturbance, so we're inverting the soil, and in RUSLE2, we look at inversion with some mixing.  Then we look at mixing only.  We look, then we're going to take a look at what mixing and some inversion does, that's a little bit different than, mainly inversion with some mixing.  The third one is mostly mixing with some inversion.  And then the fourth type of soil disturbance is the lifting and fracturing, and the last type of disturbance that we'll be looking at is the compression AL effects that some tillage equipmental effects that some tillage equipment have on the soil. 
>>  Before we look at those soil disturbances I want to like at STIR.  STIR stands for soil tillage intensity and rating.  And here we have an equation that we use to calculate a STIR value for all operations that are in those models where you can see that STIR is a function of speed of the implement, the tillage type, the depth, and the area disturbed.  And so that tillage type is our five soil disturbance types.  So here we have those five disturbances in a table and the modifier value for plugging into the STIR equation, so sometimes when you're comparing, you know, we talk about well what has more soil disturbance, does, does a shallow light discing, is that more disturbing than a deeper CHIS he will plow, which one is, or you know, or field cultivate or running at six inches versus a plow that, or versus a disc that may only be three inches, which one is more disturbing.  This equation kind of is a way to rate all the different type of disturbances may only be three inches, which one is more disturbing. This equation kind of is a way to rate all the different type of disturbances on a single rating system.  So with that equation in mind, I will be providing STIR values for some of the equipment we'll be seeing today. 
>>  So let's talk about inversion tillage first.  So looking back at some old, old books.  I came across this picture of how to plow your field, and how that if you remember owe slice should lookfurrow slice should look, and, obviously this was this is from an really old document.  You can see they're really inverting that soil there, and it actually was done pretty much by the book.  Here's a black and white photo taken down, I believe in Australia where there's a plow, a plow man there plowing the field with a single plow and you can see that the furrow slices pretty much looks like the textbook.  They have been inverted. 
>>  With today's equipment, our plows leave the field a bit more like this, and what we tend to see here, this is, this has been plowed, this side of the field has been plowed and here's the fleshly plowed section.  We don't see the distinctive ridges of that, of that furrow slice.  And so that's why with the larger equipment, we don't just model just inversion in RUSLE2.  We look at in version with some mixing.  You can see there's quite a bit of mixing here going on.  So this type of, of tillage is, is looked at as inversion with some mixing. 
>>  The mold board plow is the most common type of implement that, in RUSLE2 is modelled as inversion type tillage, and if we look at the STIR value off to the right there of the picture, we see that that tillage type has a STIR value of 65, which is one of the higher STIR ratings for the tillage equipment in the database. 
>>  So let's take a look at what inversion tillage looks like.  If we take a look at the screen on the right, we can see what a few bottom mold board plow looks like in field and the effect that it's having on the field.  You can see the soil being peeled up and rolled over, and you can see there in the foreground what that field looks like after the pass of the plow.  You can see that the soil has been inverted, but you can also see that those slices are coming off and kind of crumbling too, so there's quite a bit of mixing too.  There's crumbling and mixing going on, but mainly the soil has been inverted. 
>>  If we now look at the video on the left being we can see what this looks like from behind, and you can see right here at the top of the screen how that soil is just coming off and, and I'll play it again so you can see again just how it's being peeled off and, the soil is being peeled over and inverted and there's some crumbling, so we see inversion with some mixing. 
>>  Okay.  Moving onto the next slide then.  Examples in RUSLE2.  So if you're in RUSLE2 and you want to find, you want to ensure that the inversion that you see in the field is actually being model in RUSLE2, these are some of the examples in RUSLE2 that use inversion with some mixing.  So the mold board plow, and mold board plow 6-7 inches and the mold board plow ten inches and so she's are some examples of RUSLE2 operations or implements that use the inUSLE2 operations or implements that use the in version soil disturbance, [ INDISCERNIBLE ]  [  INDISCERNIBLE ] 
>>  So we're now mixing up those layers and that's, that's the effect that mixing has on the soil.  So what kind of equipment does that? Well, roto Tillers are a good example of the tools or the equipment that mixes.  And if we were to look at a Roto Tiller in action, we'll see this roto Tiller is actually being used to work into the ground some rotting bump continues and there's even a yellow pumping kin that hasn't quite rotted yet and you'll see how it chops things up and really mixes the soil up, so you can see very little of what was on the surface remains on the surface.  It all gets mixed in, and so this is a typical mixing implement. 
>>  Okay.  Moving onto the next slide, and I do want to point out one thing here that the STIR for this particular implement is 18, and it may seem a bit low, but we'll get into why that may not be so after we coverall the tillage types. 
>>  Some examples that have mixing are Harrow and rolling basket incorporator and the roto tillers of course, have that, and there are some combination tools that may also have mixing in it such as the sub soiler in row strip conditioner.  And I'll talk more about combination tools in RUSLE2 at the end of the tillage type discussion. 
>>  Now, let's look at mixing and some inversion.  So if we look back at that soil example that we did in the mixing, where we, where we colored every inch of soil a different shade, here we actually are, are going to give each individual section a separate color, and so we can see that we grade from darker to lighter as we go down.  Then the mixing with some inversion would also result in that checker board pattern that we saw with mixing, but we can also see that many of the lighter blocks that were at the bottom of the profile find themselves at the top here.  And many of the darker blocks at the top of the profile find themselves at the bottom in the mixed and inverted soil on the right.  So this is sort of the mixing with some inversion that we see with certain types of tools. 
>>  So let's take a look at one of the tools that actually does this mixing with some inversion tillage.  And that of course, everyone can recognize this as a tandem disc, this is a relatively common piece of equipment, and now let's take a look a little bit how, at how that, this tool functions.  I do want to point out that the STIR for this type of still age is 39, and this is specific to the tandem disc in RUSLE2 and it has of course, a higher STIR than the ROTO Tiller, and we'll talk a little bit about why that is later, but let's take a look at the video on the right first, and take a look at what a disc does looking at it from behind, so here we see the front discs moving slow out and the back kind of discs moving slow back, and so we can see the roughness of the soil as it's left, it's pretty rough in this case, because we're using fairly large discs.  But that throwing, the front disc throwing the soil out and the back disc throwing the soil back in does the mixing with some inversion. 
>>  Take a look at the video on the left, you can see if you run these tandem discs very shallow, not only do you get that mixing and some inversion, but you can also, if you run it shallow enough leave quite a bit of the surface residue on the surface, so depending on how deep these implements are used, there can be smaller or larger STIR values, because remember depth is part of the STIR equation. 
>>  Okay.  Moving onto the next slide, we will see some of the operations in RUSLE2 that actually have this mixing with some inversion, and there are many operations and I didn't include them all here by name, but I did point out the type of operations that we have.  We have chisels, cultivators, discs, some drills, actually have mixing and some inversion, some planters and there's several others. 
>>  Lifting and fracturing.  This type of soil disturbance is usually considered in someplaces, it's kind of considered conservation tillage because it tends to leave quite a bit of residue on the surface, and the reason that it does so is because it's mainly just lifting that soil up and in the process fracturing that soil and you can see here it's achieved by relatively deep shanks that go into the ground, and then the points either winged tipped or conventional tipped here have different types of soil disturbance, depending on what it is you're trying do.  How wide of an effect that, each shank has. 
>>  So what kind of equipment can do that?  Here's a, a picture of a couple of similar V rippers.  V shaped gangs of sub soil ers.  One on the left is probably sheer bolt mounted and the one on the right you can see here has the spring, so they can pop out of the ground and then reset themselves.  And so what kind of an effect does this have in the soil?  So we can take a look at that with this video that we'll see here, but before I do, I do want to point out the fact that the STIR value of this particular implement, the sub soiler ripper RUSLE2 is 33, and so that's similar to what the disc does that we saw earlier.  So if we look at this video, we can see the sub soiler being run in an orchard, and if you look closely at where the shanks are, you can see that the soil is being lifted and, and then dropped back down as, it's being lifted and you can see that surface being fractured and you can even see there's some weed being stuck on one of the shanks, but most of what's on the surface, you she's  V those weeds just being left on the surface and not being buried.  So the implement just lifts that soil, fractured it and drops it back down.  So it leaves a, a looser soil behind without burying very much residue or surface material at all.  But it's running relatively deep, so if you remember the STIR equation, this does take depth into account, so even though lifting and fracturing has a smaller tillage modifier as it being run in a much larger depth.  Moving onto the next slide.  We can see that some of the operations in RUSLE2 that have lifting and fracturing are some hoe drills, is some fertilizing applicantors, Soma in your I knowtors, some sub soilers, and some sweep MROUZ and there's in other operations and anytime you're looking at a separate, anytime you're looking at an operation in RUSLE2, you can always click  click on the disturbed surface folder it will tell you what type of STIR process that has in RUSLE2. 
>>  Now, as we move onto the last type of soil disturbance here, we get into the, sort of the least impactful soil disturbance.  When we look at the, if you remember from the slide where he talked about STIR and the soil, the tillage type soil modifier, what that T value is, it was a one foreign version, it was a 0.8 for mixing, I believe it was.  When it comes to compression, that's the lowest value of all.  So this does the least disturbance for the soil.  And what we're looking at is basically taking you know, expression is taking loose soil and compacting it.  And there are several pieces of equipment that do that.  When we look at some of the pieces of equipment in RUSLE2 that do that, we can see that there are several, well, the one, the equipment on the right is a steel roller for smoothing out rough fields and you can see that since the cylinders are smooth, all parts of that cylinder are going to be contacting that soil, the STIR is 0.98 on that, and it's very low because, first of all, the amount of soil that's actually being impacted by that is relatively shallow, but also the tillage modifier is very small, and so the STIR value is small. 
>>  And on the left we see roller KRIMer that's being used to lay down a cover crop, and we see that that STIR is a whole order of magnitude even smaller.  And that's because that the design of that roller with those crimping bars at that angle ensures that only certain points of that roller are actually in contact with the vegetation and the ground at any given time.  And so a much smaller footprint in terms of compression on the soil than the steel roller that you see on the right. 
>>  So taking a look at how these pieces of equipment actually operate in the field.  We'll take a look at the steel roller first on the left of your screen.  You see this field roller moving across the field and I'll pause it right here, and you can see that there's not much difference in that field even after the pass of the steel roller and so that compressional effect even it may be significant in certain points, overall the entire field, it's just getting lightly compressed. 
>>  Obviously there's different degrees of this.  If the, if the client decided to fill those drums with oil or water or some other material to weigh them down, more compression can be achieved or if they're completely empty and they're just lightly smoothing things down, there's going to be less compression.  We don't take that into account in Russell.  We don't give you different STIR values whether or not those are weighted down.  We just give you one value, one represented value. 
>>  Over to the right, we'll be looking at this video, and we can see the roller crimper in action, you can see as it's rolling that vegetation down, there's no soil being thrown up.  You see it mainly touches on the vegetation, mainly crimps that vegetation into the ground, and so only those, those cross bars, those angle irons that are touching the ground are hitting.  It's not the entire roller.  And you don't see any soil on the surface, so pretty low soil disturbance overall for the roller crimper. 
>>  Giulio. 
>>  Yes. 
>>  So start off, the amount of cover really doesn't make a difference in your STIR rating does it 
>>  No, it doesn't. 
>>  But yet if you didn't have that cover on there, you would roll that roller crimper, you would see more soil disturbance than with that cover on there right? 
>>  Correct.  Correct we make some assumptions in RUSLE2 to say that this roller crimper is being used to roll down a cover crop, so when you use the roller crimper in RUSLE2 it's assumed that there's some vegetation that you're rolling it on.  If, if there were no cover crop there, then the STIR would not be representative of what's actually happening. 
>>  Okay.  Thanks. 
>>  Okay.  Moving onto next slide then so examples of RUSLE2 operations that have compression in them, obviously the rollers have that, we also have some manure spreaders that have compression, mainly from the weight of the spreader, and then we have, some of our graze operations that try and model some hoof traffic basically the cat will being there, being actually compacting the soil.  And so these are, there are many operations, but these are some of the representative ones that are there. 
>>  As I mentioned earlier, there's a lot of combo operations.  A lot of the verdict call tills equipment has several gangs of things, and so in RUSLE2, we can build these combo operations, RUSLE2 and [ INDISCERNIBLE ]  both do this, and we try to build them so that they're fairly representative of what's going on.  It's not just as simple as, for example, if we see, we look at this accelerator at the bottom left-hand corner of your screen, we see that there's two gangs of Culters.  Then we have two more gangs of equipment, and  is we see the last one is just, looks like a rolling basket incorporator, that that would basically have, probably slight mixing component to it.  If you would add these, you know, these four components back to back in RUSLE2, the STIR would be actually quite large because of the different effects.  When you put these things together, like the multi-gang tools, though, some of the tools don't have much more effect on the soil than the previous one.  So if we look at the top right-hand corner of our screen, you see that there's a [ INDISCERNIBLE ]  Harrow right before the rolling basket at the very end, and you know, how much soil disturbance that KWIL tine Harrow is doing after those gangs of wavy Cultver is probably not as much as of what that KWIL tine Harrow would do an any new surface.  So we adjust the STIR a little bit.  In each case both these pieces of equipment in RUSLE2, have slightically different names but they have similar STIR values, so there are a lot of operations in RUSLE2 that have sort of combinations and we can see many of them under the titles seed bed conditioners, and seed bed finishers.  There's some chisels with harrows, there's this cultivators with harrows and there's some disc with roller behind them.  So there's several pieces of equipment in RUSLE2 that are combination equipment.  This also includes some vertical till equipment, and as you can see, I'm just going to go back one slide.  I just want you to pay attention to the top right-hand corner of the screen.  Where you can see in the back of this multi-tool, this combination, you can see the soil flying in the air quite high there, so some of these pieces of equipment can actually disturb quite a bit of soil, albeit relatively shallow, the disturbance itself is quite large, so you can see there soil's being thrown three plus feet in the air there behind the equipment, so these, these pieces of equipment are not no disturbance.  They do disturb the soil quite a bit. Okay. 
>>  So Guilio, if you're looking for something that's a vertical till and you're looking at what's on the piece of equipment that you're looking at, and you don't see that in Russell, so you don't invite, you don't advise just adding the pieces together in a, you know, in a profile or in a, in Russell to get a soil also STIR. 
>>  Correct.  Because if you were to, if you were to say well I've got a tandem disc and then line two in the management would be quil tine harrow and then line three would be [ INDISCERNIBLE ]  Basket incorporate or those three lines if you added up in STIR would be much more than you saw in the combo tool and your STIR would be higher in your management than --  the STIR is basically a way to see what's happening to that soil disturbance, and the best thing to do would be to find the closest seed bed conditioner or seed bed finisher, the closest one that matches the piece of equipment that you have, and if there's nothing lining like it, that's when you need to contact me to potentially build a new seed bed conditioner, or a new seed bed finish error something similar. 
>>  Does that answer the question? 
>>  That's good.  Thanks. 
>>  Okay.  So moving onto tillage systems, so we're going to take a look at, now that we've talked about all these different types of tillages and how we look at speed, depth of tillage, type of tillage, and the area disturbed, and how all that comes together to give you different stir values, we're going to take a look at how STIR values can play a role in soil loss by looking at different systems.  So we're going to look at a conventional corn soy bean system, versus a reduced till system, versus a no till system.  And so when we take a look at this conventional corn soy bean rotation, we see that we have, we have a plow, and then a disc, and then a field cultivate or before we put the corn in, and then we also have a plow and a disc and a cultivate or for the soybeans before they get planted.  And so we can see that the management STIR is 231, so the management STIR is the sum of all the STIRs of each operation.  Since this is a corn soy bean rotation, it's a two-year rotation, so the average annual STIR would be the management STIR divided by two, which is 116 or  115.5, so if we then compare that to a reduced till corn soy bean rotation, where we basically now have removed the plow and the disc but we left the field cultivate or in, we now have a management STIR, we actually over, we halved or more than halved the management STIR from 231 to 107, and therefore the average annual STIR is now 54, 53.7.  And if we were to adopt the full no till system, where we've now taken out all the, the soil tillage equipment, the only soil disturbance here is that we see is going to come from the planter and maybe the, there might be some compressional effect from the fertilizer application, but the planter and the, and the drill are the main soil disturbance where we've now almost, we've now dropped the management STIR by more than an order of magnitude, and on the average annual STIR we're now at three.  So this is a very low soil disturbance system.  And so if we look at that from very high to very low soil disturbance, we want to see what kind of impact that disturbance has on soil loss.  We can take a look.  We can run this in RUSLE2 and so I did that, and by just planting corn and soybeans straight up a hill, we see that the conservation planting soil loss is about 13 for a conventional system.  We can see that the corn soy bean rotation looking at the soil organic factor gives us a bio mass to actually have a good soil system.  The tillage overcomes that amount of bio mass, burns it all off so our soil conditioning index indicates that this system, the MROURD rotation, the convention rotation is most likely decrease inning soil organic matter over time. 
>>  When we look at the reduced till system, the conservation planning soil loss is about six tons per acre, so if we were to be looking at a soil with a T of five, we are looking at this system being close to meeting T, but not quite.  Although we do see that the soil conditioning index is now barely positive, it's a little more promising that this system might actually be maintaining a steady amount of organic matter, maybe, quite possibly.  We look at the no till system.  We now see that we reduce the soil loss to almost an order of magnitude from the reduce till system.  We see that the SCI, the soil conditioning index is now much greater than 0.2, 0.2 is a trigger for soil conditioning index.  We know for sure that any SCI of 0.2 or greater is always, is always correlated with an increase in organic matter in the system.  So we, if this grower still wanted to plant straight up and down the hill, we know that with a straight no till system of corn and soy beans that they would be achieving a high error DPAN I can matter overall in the system with time and that the soil loss will be well below that 5T value.  I do want to point out the fact that we do have some fuel costs associated with.  So each piece of equipment has and associated fuel use with it, and so we can see that fuel consumption goes down obviously as we start to remove soil engaging tillage implements, so we don't have to pull stuff through the soil, that means less fuel consumption. 
>>  Guilio, does soil loss and SCI and STIR, do they always kind of fall in line if you're reducing one, you're reducing all or is that just not always true? 
>>  Generally speaking that's, that is the expected trend, but there are reasons for why things don't follow that, and it really depends on, on, you really have to get into the details of the system.  But generally speaking as, as the soil condition index improves, the soil loss will tend to go down and the, you know, the SCI or organic matter factor is going to go up also.  I mean, as you, as you produce more bio mass for example, the SCI organic matter is going to increase, which is going to increase your SCI, which will reduce your soil loss because you have more bio mass and therefore more residue, right? 
>>  Yeah.  I think the SCI and the STIR planner, in RCS planners have a little more difficulty in disconcerting you know what is good, better and best, where we've all GRUD up in NRCS, and SCS for me too that we always had a T of 3, 4, 5 and those were the goals we always had, and we knew what that meant, and sometimes with STIR and SCI, you know, we don't always really equate to what those numbers always mean. 
>>  Correct.  And, and it gets a little bit more complicated when we start talking about soil health, because with soil help, we really are trying to create an ecosystem that maximizes the potential of the Mike robes in the soil so we really need to minimize STIR as much as possible in those systems, and so you know, what does that mean is a STIR10 okay? 
>> Exactly. 
>>  Is a STIR of five okay, can we get away with 15?  In the end there's really no number, it's really what's happening with those bugs and when is it a good time to disturb it if you have to, and when is not a good time to disturb it at all.  It's really not necessarily the value itself, but it's also the type of tillage and the timing of that tillage is also critical, so you can't just look at a number and say that's it. 
>>  Thanks. 
>>  Okay.  So what I did was I ran these, these scenarios between, the plowed reduce till, and no till, but now what I've done is I've added, I've planted the corn and soybeans on the contour, and added a 15-foot wide mid slope buffer, so now we're looking at not just the tillage effects but also adding other conservation measures.  So you know, these two essentially are practices right.  Con to our farming and mid slope, contour mid slope buffer, these are two conservation source, if we were to add that, we could see that if our client wanted to continue to plow but you talked them into planting on the con tour and putting in a mid slope buffer that would bring their soil loss down to, you know, less than five, if I said this, this soil T value was five, and you needed to plan to T, he could meet T by continuing to plow, but I want to point out that the soil conditioning index is still negative.  So over time, we would expect that the soil would still be depleted in organic matter. 
>>  You have to couple a reduce till, so you would have implement 345, so you have to implement contour farming and a mid slope buffer before you reach below T, but you also then at this point can guarantee that soil conditioning index is greater than 0.2 and therefore guaranteeing that over time the soil loss would be, be, the soil organic matter would be improving.  And we're achieving that even though the STIR value you can see here [ INDICATING ]  Is 48, so the amount of bio mass produced by this crop is significant enough to where it can still overcome this STIR.  And of course, the best system by far is the continuous no till system with about a third of a ton per acre of soil loss if planted on the contour and with the mid slope buffer and no till.  So here we have a soil conditioning index very large conditioning index of 0.78, again, very large organic matter sub factor, and more importantly a very small soil disturbance value.  So this is, you know, obviously going to be the, the better system for soil health and for soil loss. 
>>  And Guilio, what caused those STIR ratings to change? 
>>  So this average annual STIR value is actually for the slope.  So the management is not, has not changed.  The STIR value for the footprint where you're actually still growing the crop is still 115.  The reason you see 104 is because the STIR value has been averaged over the entire slope plain, and we have a mid slope buffer in that slope, so there's a part of that slope that doesn't get planted every year.  It's in permanent grass, and so the STIR then is averaged. 
>>  So this is, this is not the STIR of the management.  It's the STIR of the slope, and that's why you see it change a little bit if, but the reality is that the actual STIR in the cropped area hasn't changed.  That's just the way that RUSLE2 reports the STIR on the entire slope and that's important because if you were to be strip cropping for example, you have different crops with different  different tillage regimens, you would get an average STIR forever that slope. 
>>  Okay.  Thanks. 
>>  So here is that data that we just saw, if we were to plot soil loss versus the average annual slope STIR, we can see that the effect of reducing the tillage, so going from a conventional till to a reduced till to a no till system drops the soil loss down.  And here is the same set up for the, the field with, being planted on the contour and with the mid slope buffer.  Here's the conventional, reduced, and no till points, and so you see the effect of reducing the tillage reduces soil loss, but what we also see in this DWRAF that is the effect of adopting the buffer and contouring also drops the soil loss, and what I want you to see here in this graph is that you get bigger effects in adopting practices if you have a high soil loss.  So if you have a high soil loss and then you plant on the contour and, and put in a buffer, you get large drops in soil loss.  If you are already no tilling, adopting additional conservation practices doesn't change your soil loss a whole lot.  Maybe percentage-wise it's the same, but, but quantity is, is the, it becomes smaller and smaller so there's diminishing returns, right?  So I just wanted to point that out.  But this is the effect that you're seeing in that table, so you're seeing the effect of reducing tillage, and then the effect of, of adding other practices. 
>>  So let's talk a little bit about economics.  So in economics I do want to point out the fact that earlier what we saw was in that table we saw that there was fuel use, and you can see that the fuel use dropped as we, not only in those first three rows it dropped as we adopted less and less tillage but in those last three rows it dropped a little bit more also because you have a . 
>>  Of course, we have in RUSLE2, do we have the ability to deep with depths for instance, because I know you can run a disc, a primary disc and it really can do as much as disturbance and would probably cause as much soil loss as any kind of, any kind of plow, and also like, so the shallow versus the, shallow versus the deeper discing, and maybe even the, how concave the disc blades are, if that's impacting it, and is there any way in RUSLE2 to deal with that as well? 
>>  So yes, the answer, short answer to the question, yes, but with, with caveats.  The RUSLE2 user does not have the ability to go into an operation and change the speed or the disturbed area or the, the depth of operation.  However, the RUSLE2 database have several tandem discs.  They have some deep ones and some shallower ones and you have a primary, you have a secondary, you also even have a light tandem disc and if you were to go into each one of those, look at the process that says disturbed surface, click on that yellow folder, the depth of tillage is actually in that information box, and so you, as a RUSLE2 user or even in [ INDISCERNIBLE ]  when you go in and look at the disturbed surface process, you can read what that operation that you just selected, how deep is it going, and then you can ensure that that's exactly what your client is doing, that's one the questions that you need to be asking your client is, when they say said I disc, you need to say how deep so that you can then select the appropriate operation in RUSLE2, and in terms of concavity of the discs themselves, we don't, we don't really address that.  That's a relatively new phenomenon in these vertical till systems where they're starting to include some of the really shallow concave discs.  I would just say that probably, if it's concave and it's at an angle, it's a disc and you can model it, as maybe it's a light disc that's running very shallow, but it's still a disc.  It's having, what it's doing is it's picking up that soil and flinging it in the air and it's doing that mixing with some inversion, especially if you're running two gangs where the discs are throwing the soil, the first gang is throwing the soil in one direction and the second gang is throwing it back the other direction. 
>>  Great.  Great.  And lastly, you mentioned WEPZ.  You touched on wind inversion tool, is STIR dealt with the same way in WIT that we have at our disposal in RUSLE2 and just comment on the comparison between STIR and WITS and such. 
>>  Sure, the STIR value in RUSLE2 is the output of the model, and so when, when we build an operation in RUSLE2, it spits out a STIR value for us as we build it, as the database managers build stuff it spits out a STIR value.  That operation is then exported to the WITS database, and the STIR value is exported from RUSLE2 to the WITS file, the XML file, and WITS reads that STIR value as a value, it isn't calculate it.  It just reads it as a value.  So whatever we have in, in RUSLE2, that same STIR value will be there for that operation in WITS.  Now, having said that, I will say that WITS doesn't have as many operations as RUSLE2 has, and so a lot  of the seed bed finishers and seed bed conditioners all get mapped to 1 or 2, it's fewer options in the WITS emergency, and so you won't have as many choices in the WITS model as you do in the RUSLE2 for operations, and it may be that the STIR in, in your RUSLE2 management isn't going to match exactly as the STIR in the WITS but they'll be very close. 
>>  Great.  Great.  Well great.  Guil OISHGS, I believe we're out of time, and I sure do appreciate all this good information today and with that, I'm going to turn this back over to Holli.  Holli? Okay.  I want to thank Guilio for developing and presenting the webinar today.  Excellent job and thank you Steve for moderating the presentation, and thanks to all of our participants for your interest in our webinar, and our webinar program.  Payments to provide your feedback about the webinar and if you selected to earn CEUs, please return to your browser window to continue the process.  It's offered by step two at conservation webinars.net and with that, this concludes our webinar presentation today, thank you everyone. 
>>  Thank you. 
>>  Thanks.  [ EVENT CONCLUDED ]