MSU Extension MI Ag Ideas to Grow With

Again, my name is Monica Jean and I'm a Field Crops Educator from Michigan State University Extension. I'm based out of the central Michigan area. I'm in the Alma office right now, and I live by Mount Pleasant. My family has a small farm around Mount Pleasant. We actually have about 150 fruit trees, and I mentioned that we're about to talk about deer and we have fought deer. I have a lot of personal experience with this too, but I'm joined with Eric Anderson. We did divvy up the presentation like I'm going to run first, and then I'm going to hand it over to Eric and he's going to finish us out. Eric, did you want to introduce yourself now or do you want to wait? Senor field crops educator, down in the southwest part of the state. All right. Thanks. All right, let's get this screen going. As everyone loves to talk about deer, right? It's people's favorite thing. What we're going to run through today is a little bit at, it's my top portion of the slides. It's going to be how we've progressed in our research, the findings we have come to, and then where the future is at. This is the sequential plan I have. We're going to go through our variety trials with corn, what we found in, so the repellent work we've done and then this idea of whole farm plan. We know that the wildlife damage is pretty complex even to a farmer, they may both struggle with managing the amount of deer damage they have on their soybean crop, but also have a hunting lodge that themselves may go and enjoy hunting themselves or may even use that hunting lodge. A economic surplus for the farm. I had a lot of farms I worked through in the UP that they just couldn't even grow soy beans. The was so bad, but a pretty good income from having people come up, travel up there and use their land as a hunting opportunity. It's just really complex socially, right? We have people who feel strongly about hunting and hunting rules and regulations. We have people that feel on that spectrum in a different place. Along with this high economic stakes, very passionate and complex stakeholder groups around deer recreation, deer damage, the fact that we're really dropping off in the number of hunters. We have recently saw a DNR presentation. It was just really shocking the amount of, of hunters that are dropping in the state of Michigan. We also know the state of Michigan doesn't have good numbers on the amounts that deer cause. But we can see here, Wisconsin growers, they have pretty good survey that gets done and they estimate 28 million to white tailed deer alone, that you can see some of the other states. That's also put here on the slide what we're trying to concentrate in our research because this is a great picture that encapsulates all the complexities that go in to the extent of deer damage you may have on your farm. What we're trying to look at with our work is their food preference. Whether they prefer one crop over the other within that crop, is there a species preference to and what makes that species more attractive than another one? Then how the availability of the food and this baiting or trap idea may work. Either planting something on purpose to try to keep them out of your field, or planting things differently to deter them from your field. How that interaction can happen to first, what we started assessing was palatability. What is it about that crop or that variety that makes the deer choose that over another one, damage one field really bad, and then leave the other one alone? Right. Is there something specific about the palatability of that crop that drives them? We have seen this right across research. I think anecdotally people see this. They plant certain things maybe in a mixture they put out during hunting time for deer because they know they really like that kind of legume, let's say. Right? I've definitely observed even before doing this research, that deer really loves soybeans. And they'll tend to pick that over maybe a corn crop, Identifying what it is about those, is it the high sugar, is it the digestibility, and then what the trade offs are if you select to not have those qualities within your crop anymore. What was the first Aha moment for me that made me start was this field, this very interesting field and I see quite a few. I'm just going to make sure there's no questions in here. Okay? I don't see any. The field you're looking at here was not just deer damage, it was actually deer damage within what looks like this giant cut out square. We also had some bear damage throughout it. It was multiple animals making for some damage out here. But what we saw was each one of these little mini squares within this large block, you can see is a different kind of variety. The varieties were replicated four times within here. And what we saw is we had four or five corn varieties that were completely decimated. They went through, they selected it every single time and ate it. Why did they select that one over the other ones next to it? That is an idea of just if you're wondering what a completely decimated plot looks like, what we found was that, of course, there was a relationship between yield and damage. The more damaged areas there was less yield, very intuitive. But what we're finding was a relationship with starch. And why does starch matter? Well, it's the relationship of starch and sugar, right? As a nutritive quality of this crop. The corn crop varieties we had, and some of them were silage. We did have some BMR, right? The crops we had that were considered more digestible and had higher sugar quantities in it, which is something we also would like to see for cattle. That's how we select a lot of our silage varieties for the cattle as well. Those are the ones that were selected and damaged across. Now, maturity did play a little bit of a role, but not as the correlation was much stronger for sugar content. We got that taste, let's say across those corn variety of trials for that sugar content palatability relationship we saw. We wanted to know if the same thing is existing in soybeans because we may not be able to change the varieties that we choose within corn. Within reason. Just because of the whole, if you're feeding out to cattle, what the end goal that corn is, what market it's going into, but soybeans a little different, right? What could we do? Does that still exist? And then can we start to select diff varieties for sugar content? We put out plots, this is Escanaba, Michigan, where there's all sorts of deer damage. So we put out plots first in a fenced in field, that's what the top right area is. We actually had a large, very tall fence and then we put an electrical three D fence even within that to keep them out. This is what are we going to get for these varieties if they're not damaged versus the other one is completely open And we put those exclosures out there, the floor posts with the netting around it, so that we understand what those beans would have been if they wouldn't have been open for deer grazing. What we found too, in soybeans is that the amount of damage we saw was also strongly correlated with sugar content. And we also did see a little bit by brand as well. I'm not going to, I don't want to look like I'm picking on one brand versus the other because the kind of varieties they offer are really huge. Right? And so they may have some with very low and very high sugar content within one catalog. But I want to point out Eagle, the reason I circled it is because they actually do advertise a lot of their soybeans for deer. Like if you're putting out a wildlife food plot and they have been across a lot of our trials. One of our highest yielding sugar content makes a lot of sense if we know that about a variety. Is there a way that we can harness that power of the sugar and plant two different species within one field? The higher sugar content in the areas that we want to trap them and keep them out of the rest, is that a way we can harness that data? Of course, we can also ask our breeders to select for less sugar content, but this we know is a variable that is driving the deer to select certain fields over others. Another one we want to go into, after we worked through this palatability preference with the deer, we started to wonder, okay, if we plant a low palatable one and then we also spray something to repel them, how would that work to improve our management of deer. Hey Monica, Before you get into that, there's just a question about clay. As traits were added, did you see less corn damage back into the corn? The traits were added clay. It was it was from what I remember, I can pull up that data later if you would like to look through it, but what I can remember that really vary. The strongest correlation was definitely that sugar to damage not so many, how many traits were within that H. Okay. Repellents. There we go. So there's a lot of different repellents that are available. These might look familiar to you. I think plant skids, one that people see at the conservation districts or available if you like, go to Tractor supply. Right. The reason that some of these labels and some of them, plant scape is one I believe not only is it labeled, but it also is approved for use in organic systems. That's a common one that people see and have used. But these are all about contact repellents directly, putting these onto the vegetation to deter them. And they have a variant of their active ingredients and why those work. And that also plays a role in how variable and how good they work. This research project was really cool. It showed across a large body of data that the best ones in general are ones that are meat, blood, or predator, urine, hair, feces. Fair ones are that stinky egg, hot pepper and then poor ones are like milk, proteins, feather and citric oil. These repellents are trying to do is mess with their smell and taste so that it deters them from eating the crop. In general, across, across, putting these out with deer, there is definitely a variation of how well they use. What we did is we wanted to try and compare some of them that are commonly available and have labels that was plant skid and deer out. They are a little different. Plant skid is a blood base one. It would rank more in that best where deer a fair, it was more of a stinky, hot situation. They did mix differently. I'll say Plant Ski has very specific recommendations on how you need to mix and load that product. Because it is blood based, it can clot where some of these other compounds are much easier to throw in the tank and go. Just something to think about, this example of this. These trials are fun to set up in the sense that they really have to be well positioned so that they have the equal advantage of getting damaged by the deer. We try to put them in an area where woods are coming up against it equally. That can be really hard, but that's the goal. The Xs you see there are where those explosure cages are. So we can see the potential for what that soybean would have gotten without deer damage. What is replicated throughout here is deer pro control plant skid. And it is replicated four times every week. We went out and through quadrats to measure the amount of the percentage of deer damage done and how many plants, the population of soybeans. That's what those cages look like. I did want to mention quickly that we have flown the drone several times to see if we could get an idea of deer damage without having to do those hand measurements. That way we could spray at a larger scale and takeover damage across a larger field scale, but it wasn't actually as accurate as what we were comfortable with. There was a relationship, but it wasn't a very strong one to hand samples we have to do. What we did find the red arrows represent where we sprayed. You do want to spray pretty much. As soon as things pop up, they'll feed pretty early. Then you can see there was a second application that needed to be done. You can see here that when things were applied, feeding went down a little bit. Overall, The deer pro and plant skid did help, although you can see that it wasn't also as statistically significant it did he? Overall, what really got us was the cost for these products. That is a big limiting factor. There are definitely price points that if your crop was worth a certain amount, it would make a lot of sense to spray. I've had it penciled out in dry rotations that doing plant skid and a dry being rotation may be economically worth it. But for this project and what we were trialing here, although we did see a suppression in the deer, it was so expensive that it wasn't quite worth it. If you're wondering how much is too much. Okay. David said Coyote Urine works. That was one of them that was listed pretty high. They don't like the urine. Here's another research trial that just got done this past year out at Agro Liquid Michigan. Soybean is kind enough to us that they fund quite a bit of this deer damage work and this is one of the projects they did fund. They did. I went ahead and asked their granum is there if I could share their sides and make sure to give them credit. And they were very gracious about that. What I really appreciate about this is to see the very clear idea of what your yield and total cost and man hours were. And so like the Miller's hot sauce, that total cost was not very high. But they had to go out and apply four times because of rain, right? And it wasn't that what was season last year. Something like that is going to be time draining. You can see there that their yield really wouldn't have been significant. The check was 72 and they got 69 out of the Miller's hot sauce, But that was something that sold at the Breckenridge elevators was why they trialed it out. You can see another one plant, skid, deer stopper, an electric fence, and Bob X. I also like to point this one out because we can see the cost of a fence in here which was $330 per acre compared to the use of a repellent. What I want to point out is an electric fence is going to have to come out and be put back in, right? That's going to prevent you like, those are close to the plot, so it's not easy to come in and harvest. You got to knock it down every time. What would be more expensive, but less annual maintenance or like having to take it down every time you come out to the field would be like a wooden structure, not just electrical fence. There's definitely different types of fencing and different ways of doing it, and so the cost usually reflects that too. Okay. So I want to come back to this because we've covered like if food is available and it has high sugar and it's a certain kind of crop, right? Like all these things played a role in the extent of the deer damage we can see on our fields. But one thing we haven't taken to trying to bring it in and understand is that deer behavior, If we can think like a deer, what would be a way for us to use that to our advantage? The next one I want to show you is this idea of whole farm plan. This idea of trying to think like a deer and develop a plan for your whole farm. Not just to spray within one field or using a trap crop in another field, but just really laying it out for your farm to keep those with what I heard to the DNR refer to it into the wildlife corridor. That an interesting thing, they also said we just have too many deer right now. Unfortunately, a lot of these things aren't going to work as well if our predation was lower, there's just a lot of deer damage. Getting those permits, like Eric's going to cover, is probably definitely one of the number one things you should do. But doing this together and having a whole plan around it's probably going to be your most effective way of achieving some improved yields. What we did out here is the slide to the right here with the arrow dropped in it. The red part that I boxed in is where our research plot got put out. The purple is where we put cameras so we could watch what the deer we're doing. Both are known till, but this farmer didn't have a cover crop. On the right picture, on the left picture, we just put out demos to see because he had some suspicion that when he sprays his repellent with a cover crop down that he actually has improved success with that. That would be cereal rye that he plants green into for his soybeans. We put a cage in the low part next to that little creek there because I figured they'd be a hot spot where deer would come down the creek there. It's very well hidden. Then the top part of the field there you can see I put the purple spots, a camera and another explosure cage to see what happens. And the reason I put it all the way to the edge is because the field next to it, in the top area that the farmer I was working with, it wasn't his field that had no spray on it. What a good way to see, are the deer going to move into the field that's been sprayed with the repellent, that interaction as well. At emergence here, what we would see is you can see the cover crop down here. He had just sprayed probably like a week ago. Took forever for these plants to emerge. This last spring. That was hard waiting. But you can see they're pretty similar, right? Like they got planted around the same time. It's the same variety. They look like they're coming along good. This was the end of the season. The field that we did the demo plot out that did, I'm trying to remember, I believe it was like 60, 62 bushels per acre. He was really happy with that. The other field had zero yield. The predation was so high, the deer damage was so high that they actually knocked down my cages and ate out the plots. Even. It just makes me think like what did that cover crop, how did interact with them trying to feed? Because we know that deer don't like bearded wheat. Did that prickle their nose And they didn't like it. Did it cause the spray that got put down, right, you're maximizing your mob sprays on even more biomass at that point. Trying to understand when we create these systems that come at the deer in several different ways, like why does it work? Well, how can I replicate this? Because that's pretty cool. More research to be done in the following years, that's why we're working more towards a whole farm plan implementation. The last thing I want to mention is that these buffers and trap crops idea, I mentioned them. We do have farmers that are doing some NDVI imaging to see that they have buffers areas, these two white lines you see going around the edge of this field that are repetitively damaged. And they want to do something about it because they're getting no yield. It's not worth the money to continue to crop those areas. Looking at, do we put out just like biomass like miss camps or a forage and harvest it off. Do we put down like a prairie strip that then you could maybe get some cost share money with what do we do there. And if we put a trap crop down that's more attractive to them, do they actually stay in that area or do they continue to come out? Dnr does have research that they don't typically like to go out more than 150 yards from the field. But if your whole field is not that large, then they're still going to move all the way across it. Understanding how these edge of trap or buffer strips would work is also part of this upcoming research we're doing. All right. Monica talked about large things. I'm going to talk about small things. I will talk a little bit about some permitting towards the end. But first thing, I will just share a little bit about a project that I've been working on with Michigan Soybean over the past couple of years. Got one more application for this year. That's with Vol Management. I'm just going to primarily talk about what we experienced in 2023. Touch a little bit on 2022. For those of you who are not familiar, vole pretty similar to a mouse, a field mouse, really the only difference is the length of the body. Voles have more stocky bodies. Short legs, short tails, field mouse, everything would just be elongated, particully brown or gray like you've seen in the picture here. They eat a wide variety of things. For our purposes, they like to eat soybean, in particular, soybean seed. And the codes developing seedlings, just in the first, I'd say a couple of weeks after emergence. All kinds of different species of voles. The two most common in Michigan are the meadow and the prairie vole. Turns out that they act the same, we're just going to lump them together and call them voles. They're going to have five to ten litters per year. Each litter can have three to five young. And again, that just depends on the amount of food that they have available to them. Predators around, how bad the winter is, all that thing. Mild winters are obviously good for rodents that overwinter outside. If we have a high snow pack or other ground cover, that tends to increase the populations. As with other species, voles have a cycle that they go through a boom bust. Every three to five years those populations will spike and then they'll come back down. They will generally nest on the surface of the ground if there's quite a bit of vegetation to nest in. Otherwise, they can burrow underneath the ground not very far. For those of you who are familiar with moles or mole damage particularly, you probably have seen it in your yard in a turf setting where the tunnels will actually, you can see them above ground. Really annoying Les will actually burrow below the ground. They will not build up the tunnels like they would with moles. For our purposes what's important is that they really like a dense vegetation for covered. We have one cooperator in particular down the Southwest part of the state who's been battling voles over the past somewhere 5-10 years. Heavy into cover crop and conservation. Tillage practices, for the most part, either no till or strip till. And they've had fields as bad as 90 plus percent damage, needing to replant the entire field. This idea of having a dense cover out, especially over the winter and in the off season, that's what we wanted to look at. The particular study that we're going to talk about has to do with ground cover. One way to try to manage vol, populations would be with some poison. A bait. Probably not realistic in the scenarios that I want to talk about today. Could have pet coyote like this. Apparently, rodents don't like coyotes as you're seen in the picture here. Really anything that you can do to increase predator populations, whether that be stop shooting coyotes, to encourage your neighbors to stop shooting coyotes, or to perhaps put out raptor poles. Snakes, foxes, different birds of prey will also feed on voles and other rodents. There are natural ways to try to keep that population down. We're going to specifically talk today about how to keep them down with regards to the cover crop termination timing. I'm not going to talk anymore about the actual vole itself. I've got a quick little Youtube video that you can Google, just type in something like Vole Damage in Michigan or something like that, and that video pop up and they'll be more information about voles in general. The study that we've done over the past couple of years has to do with termination, timing of the cover crop. Again, the folks that I'm working with down here, they have covers on essentially 100% of their acres. They really are not looking to change that. There's obviously benefits to conservation, tillage and cover cropping that they don't want to give up on these fields that they're having problems with. We're trying to figure out how to deal with this particular problem so that they can continue those practices in 2022. The field that we chose for the study just didn't end up having a high vol pressure in that field. We were unable to collect data off of that. This 2023 study that I'll talk about here was essentially the first replication. There are three timings to the termination that we decided to use, terminating in the fall. Which essentially was trying to mimic what it would look like if there were no cover crops. Fall termination, 30 days ahead of pre plant and then planting green herbicide going down shortly after planting. And you can see the size of the plots, whole field plots, to try to measure what damage we were getting. We were doing drone flights every couple of weeks until canopy closure, trying to quantify the amount of damage that we're seeing, and then also taking those fields to yield. In 2022. I mentioned that the field that we chose did not have significant pressure, but this was another field that the cooperator had is actually an irrigation study going on in that field. You can see just how much damage voles can do. This is nothing close to the field that they had maybe five or six years ago, where they had to replant the entire field, but still pretty significant. This image here, maybe a little bit easier to see. This is a false color image. All the red would be bare ground at first. When you see some of these images, you're thinking that looks like a planter issue. A lot of these lines like this one here, it's very linear. I'm thinking there must be a plugged hole in the planter, But it turns out that's not the case really. The telltale sign that you've got a vole issue is the irregular patches in the field. So you can see here all these patches, they are regularly placed, regularly shaped. But you will have these lines that are void of vegetation. Talking with one of the wildlife specialists down in Kentucky, they have, I'll call a very serious vole issue compared to us up here. They have not seen this linearity to the vole damage like we have up here. We think that it has something to do, number one, with the fact that this grower is doing strip till in the corn year they're growing seed corn, they're using strip till. It could have something to do with just the fact that the voles are finding it relatively easy to feed on the soybean seeds in a line, in a particular rope. So anyway, we were able to do some level of quantification in 2022, basically just based on the color variation, how much of the color is out there. And we came up with something like 11 to 12% of that particular field was taken out by the voles. This is from 2023. You can see here's the strips where it was planted green. This is prior to planting this strip break here. This was terminated the previous fall, so it doesn't look like there's really any cover crop. And then here you can see that there was cover crop growing and then got terminated about two weeks or so before this picture was taken. You can see that it looks like there's some strips in the cover crop and that's because this was seed corn the previous year. Obviously, we're going to have a lot more vegetation growing where those male rows were taken out. Just right at planting time, you can see that the cover crop is pretty well filled in. But the growers said, yeah, they definitely had a lower density of cover crop than they normally would. But even at that, this is at the ground level. You can see it's decent. It's not a great stand, but it's a decent stand. What we did with the aerial imagery, you can see it on the left hand side. That's just the stock camera, what that looks like, and then false color so we can take that working with some folks on campus who were able to do some quantification within each of the trial strips. And then that's where the data comes from as far as the damage at the top. And again, this is just the one, the one site. Those are the averages both for the yield and for the damage and square feet. And then down below is the differences between these different treatments. For example, this first one here is the difference between the fall or the essentially no cover crop and planting green. The yield difference. This number tells you that it's not significant. In other words, if you look up above these two numbers, they just aren't large enough. The difference isn't large enough to be able to distinguish statistically difference between the two. But this number over here with damage that's bolts, that says it is significant. That's a real difference. When you look up here, you say, well that's pretty obvious, Anderson, we've got 13,000 versus just a few hundred. Looking at the same thing down here with 0.30 days, you can see both of those were different. Not really sure why there wasn't a difference in yield between the fall termination and the zero just variability within the field. The last thing I want to talk about today is just to follow up on some of what Monica was sharing about deer. And then just give you a little bit of, I'll say, a smorgsboard of some other wildlife species that you may be dealing with. If you want to find out more information about the few things that I'm going to share today, you can go to the Wildlife Management website on the MCU extension website. It's under the IPM. You can either follow this little QR code or here's a URL. We can probably drop that into the chat at some point. Again, I'm going to cover just a couple of species, not all of them. And it's not going to be at all exhaustive really. Just to give you a taste of what we've been dealing with here in Michigan. A couple of the slides that I'll be sharing here, I got from Tim Wilson with USA Wildlife Services. Just talking about who's in charge. Whose purview is it to oversee these different species? The federal government, US Fish and Wildlife Services, for the most part, they're focused on migratory game birds and the state Michigan DNR on those water fowl and bird species that are not migratory. And then all the mammals like the deer. The other person that I'd like to shout out to is Ashley Ashley Otnreathser, biologist with Michigan Department of, excuse, Michigan Department of Natural Resources. She also was part of a couple of presentations that we did a few years back on this and had some really good insights no matter what kind of permit you're looking for, whether it's from USDA or whether it's from MD and R, they're going to want you to try some a non lethal deterrent. And Monica talked about some of those already, so I won't go into that. What I'll focus on is the lethal. A lot of folks say, well, I've tried this, the fence, I've had the cannons out there, maybe even I've tried a dog or two, and it just hasn't been effective. And I want to look into lethal options. Hunting obviously is one option if that particular species has a hunting season. Otherwise we need to look at what the options are for permits. One species that again, I'll just touch on. It's not an issue throughout the state of Michigan, mainly in the southern tier that sandhill cranes. The damage that they do, they uproot corn, soybean, and wheat. For potatoes, they'll actually spear the potatoes, making them not able to be used for things like potato chips, replanting loss. Another area of damage that we deal with down in our area is for seed corn. If you have significant enough damage, let's say mail rows, there is some specificity on what they'll eat. They'll walk right down the mail rows and they'll take all of those. I'll show you some pictures in a minute. Obviously, that's going to be detrimental, not only to the grower, but also to the company that they've contracted with. Those dollar values can be substantial. Again, they want to see some non lethal harassment shown first and they want you to document that. But then if you do need to acquire a permit that is going to go through US Fish and Wildlife, There's not a hunting option in Michigan at this point, but you can get a permit with sandhill cranes. They'll give you a certain number of kill permits, and then you're not allowed to utilize the meat from that. You'll probably hear from folks that Sandhill Crane, the meat actually is pretty good, pretty tasty. But that's one species that you're not allowed to use the meat from. Just some idea of what that damage looks like. This is corn. This is a corn field where you can see they've gone right down the row. They'll jab their beak into the ground. They'll pull out the seedling, eat that. If there's already corn growing there, they'll just leave the top growth that will die. Want to document that damage before you go to get your permit? Canada Canada geese and turkey, those are two other species that it's not terribly widespread. We do have farmers down in our area that will report that they lose quite a bit of acreage. Some fields they just, again, can't plant to certain species because of one of these particular birds. Canada Goose permits. Again, that's a migratory animal. Us fish and wildlife is who you need to go through for that. They've got very specific details on what you can and can't do with these permits. I just put one in here, two geese per day, no more than eight total. But there are several other limitations. Again, that is a species where you cannot use the meat, you've got to dispose of it. Turkey actually has a hunting season. Obviously increasing hunting during season is encouraged. And then they also have out of season kill permits. And you'll need to contact your local biologist with MDN R for that. All right. Now on to deer. The last couple of slides I'll show specifically about deer permits. There's really two general types of deer permits. One is Deer Management assistance permit. A lot of times folks will just call it a map, Some folks I've heard also call it a block permit. Those permits are given for, in other words, during the deer hunting season, you'll be able to get additional tags at a reduced cost. But that hunting is during the deer season, generally to just drive down the population in that area. Not specifically tied to any damage that you're seeing, but it's based on you'd be seeking it based on the damage that's occurring in your crop. The damage that's occurring probably is not going to be at the same level as for the next permit that I'll talk about. Again, lots of different rules. I've just highlighted a couple of them here. Those permits are for antler, lest deer only. You've got to follow all the other rules, whether it's during gun season, bow season, whatever the time restrictions and all the other rules going along with that season, you've got to follow those. This is different in that for deer, you must utilize the carcass, which again, is probably not a surprise to most of you. The other option is the deer damage shooting permit, or sometimes it'll just be called depredation permits. Those are given out outside of the deer hunting season, usually during a time of the year when the damage is occurring, probably in that, in that spring, sometime during the spring or early summer time frame, those permits are free. Again, you have to document that. You've got damage similar to those crane pictures that I showed. You'll need to have some documentation that there's damage and that it's caused by deer and raccoon or some kind of a bird. That damage has to be at a level that is causing economic loss. Again, if it were just, let's say a quarter acre along the edge of a field, you may not be able to make a case for that. If you were growing seed corn, some a specialty crop like that, maybe a little bit easier to make that case with these permits. Again, ants only have to utilize the carcass, which sometimes is an issue just because the availability of processors in the off season isn't always the same as during the deer hunting season. And of course, it's warmer, so being able to properly address the animal and not have the meat spoil, that could be an issue. As you get into the summer months for this, for these deer damage permits, you can actually have, for one permit, you can have multiple shooters listed. So if you've got, let's say multiple farm hands, or you've got relatives who would or neighbors who would like to do some shooting under that permit, that's allowed as well. Monica had some interesting trail camp picks. Monica, once you talk through Yeah. This is just to end it, make sure you guys are all awake still because me and Eric could have put you to bed by now talking about all of our wildlife stuff. The quintessential picture of a giant buck is where we're starting. Because I feel like that makes some people, I guess not happy, makes a lot of people I know happy to see a nice big buck. What do we think this one is? Anybody? Yeah, you got it right. The next one. Wait, not everyone can see that. Danielle said coyote. Coyote. Sorry. Thank you. I forget that it's not going to everybody because we're on a webinar. Yes, it's a coyote. And this is the same trail cam, by the way, out in that demo field that we talked about. Just thought I mentioned it. A lot of activity. All right. Any familiar with these little stinkers? Mm hmm. You're killing it, Wild turkey. And the next? Any idea there? Yeah, I think we should mail you like a price. Yeah, I wouldn't have gotten that one that way. Yeah, I know. Then I thought this was fine just because they're hanging out together. We just plotting your demise. Yeah. Anyone have a guess at this one? Yeah. We think that's a fish that the bald eagle has. I thought that going through all this trail camera footage from the year was going to be just a little daunting, a lot of processing of pictures. But I actually like capture really cool stuff. I thought it'd be fun to share just what's going out on these fields that we're trying to manage. It's complex. A lot of activity with that finny one. Had any questions? I like the pictures too. I didn't really take them, but I did collect them. I guess it looks like that eagles dropping some nutrient software. You Yeah, that's a good way of looking at that. Madeline? Yes, They're all kind of dropping nature. It took, like, most of the season to find out what it was, because all I saw was tail feathers. For a while, it was definitely using the camera post as a hunting post for your P. Yeah. And then finally I got to see what it was. There's a juvenile too that comes around and there was a lot of activity. Well, that's very fun that scouting seems a little bit more fun than scouting for moths. Thank you guys. Both. Thank you all and thank you Eric and Monica again for presenting on this session.