Episode :

David Sauchyn

Transcript

Toban Dyck  00:03

This is the extensionist conversations with great thinkers in agriculture. I’m Toban Dyck

Jay Whetter  00:08

and I’m Jay wetter.

Toban Dyck  00:14

Hey, Toban. Hey Jay.

Jay Whetter  00:16

I got a story about, sort of about trees, but when I was a kid, I decided that we needed to build this large fort in our pasture, and I was 14 or so. I’m guessing my brother John was 12, and his friend Jake was with us, and we went and I done a lot of post hole drilling digging with my father, at least he taught me how to do it, and we had, like a manual, like it wasn’t an auger, it was actual shovel. Okay, so I went out into the into the this little grove of aspen down in one of the little ravines that led to our little lake called Chain lakes. And anyway, we dug three, four post holes, and we then we brought these old hydro holes from the back storage area, and kind of lifted them up and dropped them in these holes. So we had these four big hydro poles, and then we built a three and a half story fort, and and I would climb to the top, and then we had this little platform, like almost like a little diving board. And right there were some ass, some poplar trees, and I would climb off this, this little ledge onto the top of the tree, and there was a little fork of the tree, and I would just sit there. And I, to this day, I remember that feeling of being kind of at the top of an aspen tree, just kind of like swaying in the breeze. That’s cool. And I, when I think of trees, I like trees. I don’t know whether you would say I’m a tree hugger, but let’s just say I

Toban Dyck  01:45

like trees. But have you you invited the question? I’m not gonna.

Jay Whetter  01:51

I don’t think I have hugged a tree, but maybe I should next time I see when I’ll hug one. Yeah, favorite tree I do. So there’s

Toban Dyck  02:00

a couple couple stories. One is in I think it was like, oh, nine, my wife and I went for a road trip on a car that should never have taken us on a road trip. We were young and had no money and all that kind of stuff. So we went. We drove through Northern California. So we drove through the redwood forest. And, like, I didn’t know what we were about to drive through when we when we did it, but that was, like, that was such a magical experience driving through, like, a little Jetta TDI happening upon redwood trees. Like, have you ever been? Yeah, well,

Jay Whetter  02:38

I’ve been not to California, but I’ve been to the cathedral grove on Vancouver Island, right?

Toban Dyck  02:43

So just, just Douglas, hundreds of meters high, and, like, just just straight and massive, like, massive. And I just, I’ll never forget that. Like, I wanted to go back ever since, just kind of the, you know, hate to use it, but, like, the majesty of it, and so like, so there’s that as a favorite tree story, but the other one is in the in our bush, just, you know, few 100 meters from us right now, there’s a massive tree along a trail that I carved in our in our backyard, and it’s a big, massive oak, okay, huge, huge, huge oak. It’s the biggest tree in our in our forest and my burrow? My it’s a good question. So my nieces and nephews, which are the niblings, my nibblings, called him. His name is PD Biggins, the oak tree is PD Biggin, the oak tree. And he’s also a him. He is like the Lord. He’s like the Lord of the of the Okay, I like Forest. So we have

03:44

you hugged. PD Biggins.

Toban Dyck  03:46

We acknowledge PD Biggins every time we go, okay, on the walk, we put our hands on Peter. He’s just, he’s, yeah, special. I like

Jay Whetter  03:55

that. Well, we’re going to talk about trees with, with David Sachin, our next guest, which is why we’re rambling on about trees. So let’s get on with it. Let’s do it to Dave.

Toban Dyck  04:07

But before we start today’s interview, we want to thank our episode sponsor, task oil seeds. Task oil seeds on farm research trials. Program aims to address farmer challenges by focusing on field scale research delivering valuable insights and solutions directly to canola farmers.

Jay Whetter  04:31

The program started in 2023 with one protocol on 10 sites, and grew to four protocols and 23 sites. In 2024

Toban Dyck  04:38

there are seven protocols available for the 2025 growing season. Saskatchewan farmers interested in becoming a cooperator are invited to contact Sask oil seeds at 306-975-0262,

Jay Whetter  04:53

or visit sasconola.com for more information. You. Uh, my name is Jay wetter. This is Toban, and our guest today is David Sachin. And David is the director of the prairie adaptation research collaborative, is what I have written down which park for short. And he’s also a Professor of Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of Regina. And Dave joins us from Regina. Welcome. Hi, guys.

Toban Dyck  05:28

Hi. You presumably know Jay a little bit. I’ve never met you before, so it’s a pleasure. Likewise.

Jay Whetter  05:34

Yeah, Dave, I’ve talked to you a couple times on the phone. We’ve emailed back and forth, and you may remember I was in your lab there in Regina with the farm writers group two or three years ago, and we talked about the Palliser exploration and the Pallisers triangle and how the weather today is. I mean, there has been times, anyway, where the weather has been almost that bad, maybe as bad. So we’ll get to that eventually. And then we also talked about trees, which I definitely want to talk to you about some of that tree ring research, and how you use those to talk about climate, the history of climate over the last few hundreds of years, anyway, on the prairies,

David Sauchyn  06:19

you bet, just far away, I think

Jay Whetter  06:21

we should start off. Start off with a little a quick discussion about the Edmonton Oilers, because so our colleague Ashley who, who talks to you, ahead of the interviews, she gave us some really interesting notes, and one of them was that it says you said to her that you watch the you’re an Oilers fan. You’re from Edmonton originally, you watch the Oilers objectively as a scientist. Do you recall saying something? So yeah, I might

David Sauchyn  06:47

have said that. And by the way, I’m kind of, I’m kind of dozy today, because the game last night went to she went to shoot out. It did, and they lost. So I couldn’t sleep properly.

Jay Whetter  06:57

Wow. So you are an intense, perfect time.

David Sauchyn  06:59

Come on. I was born and raised. I played minor hockey in Edmonton, so

Jay Whetter  07:03

and so. But you’re not answering. Obviously you’re not, you’re not as as reserved or as scientific as you you wish you you were, because if you couldn’t sleep after a game, obviously you’re a little bit more. Yeah, you’re bringing emotion,

Toban Dyck  07:22

you’re moting.

Jay Whetter  07:24

You wish you could watch.

David Sauchyn  07:28

You haven’t got Exactly, yeah, that’s my aspiration, to watch an Oilers game without getting emotionally involved. But I’ve just suffered. It’s been too painful. And you know, if you look at it objectively, if you are a big fan of a team over the long term, they’re going to lose half the time, that’s the probability, right? So half the time you’re going to be disappointed.

Jay Whetter  07:53

Well, there you go. So as an Oilers fan, it’s still painful to be an Oilers fan. Yeah, the Oilers have won five cups, and I’m a Jets boy. They haven’t won any cups. I

Toban Dyck  08:03

mean, jets are, jets are having a great year, but, I mean, it’s got to be a bit of a roller coaster with the Oilers. I mean, I know for sure, but the last two seasons maybe, maybe three, you could probably correct me, they’ve started really poorly, like they’ve, they’ve had a poor showing at the beginning of the season, and they both seasons are like, the seasons they’ve, they’re, they’re now, what? They’re number three or four in the league. Interesting,

Jay Whetter  08:25

the Jets are one, Oilers are third, and Washington is in between. So they’re both very good.

Toban Dyck  08:30

Well, Washington, yeah, yeah, they’re both very good teams. But yeah, I mean, it’s always that kind of slow start, and then that build up, and they just, like, they just work at it. The Oilers do throughout the season, and I have in my notes Toban, you can ask him if he thinks McDavid deserves to win a cup. So I’m gonna ask you

David Sauchyn  08:50

not, not based on last night. Oh, they had a two on one in overtime, and he lost the puck. He rolled off his stick. Oh, yeah. Oh, I don’t know. I’m sure he deserves a cup point on we all deserve. We all deserve,

Jay Whetter  09:05

sure, yeah, yeah, the Jets deserve a cup more than the oil

David Sauchyn  09:15

station.

Jay Whetter  09:19

Well, let’s, let’s switch gears. So let’s stay in Edmonton. But I want to, I want to see if, mean, you’re a scientist in in climate and environment and other things, but you, one of the things in the notes was that you switched high schools to a new high school, and you didn’t have any friends, and you spent a lot of time by the river. So I’m wondering, was that? Was that a formative moment for you, career wise, like, Was that where you got a passion for scientific figure? Well,

David Sauchyn  09:53

first of all, as if the Oilers weren’t enough of the sub story, you had to bring up high school. I. Well, I wouldn’t say it was a formative moment, because my dad was even though we grew up in suburban Edmonton, he was a fanatical hunter and fisherman, so we spent a lot of weekends out on the foothills and out on the Aspen parkland, hunting and fishing. So it just seemed natural that in high school, when I didn’t know anybody, I preferred to go down by the river and light a fire and watch the river go by. Yeah? I mean, I saw friends. I just they’re at a different school.

Jay Whetter  10:34

Oh, yeah, right, yeah, of course, you had a lot of friends and but you had to move schools and you didn’t have all those same friends, yeah, something like that. But you

Jay Whetter  10:43

are a person who seems to be comfortable being alone in the woods, and I’m jumping ahead a number of years to your time in the cabin in the Rocky Mountains when, while you were at the University of Colorado, how did that come about? Yeah,

David Sauchyn  11:06

yeah, that came about because after I completed my undergraduate degree in Edmonton, I got the best job on Earth, which was delivering mail, because I like to walk, and I walk quickly and pay for it, but I found that intellectually, it wasn’t that challenging, and I my mind started going places that bothered me. So I thought I had too much time on the job

11:33

to think you were going to go post. Yeah,

David Sauchyn  11:35

no, quite that bad. But I thought I’d go back to university, and I ran into one of my professors, and I asked for his advice on where I should apply. And he goes, Well, what do you like to do in your spare time? And I said, Well, I like to hike. I like to ski. Apply to Colorado. Okay, I did. Got accepted. And when I got there, they said, you know, the University has a group of log cabins up in the mountains that they inherited, and we’d like some students to occupy them so they’re not vacant. And they charge me 50 bucks a month, but they also gave me 400 a month to live there, which was back then. It was good, good cash, and apparently most of the students turned them down because they didn’t want to be living in a log cabin up in the mountains, no plumbing, no heat, and 40 kilometers to class. Had to drive 40 kilometers through the mountains. It was paradise. It was just paradise. Absolutely

Toban Dyck  12:45

these, these cabins were completely off grid. They were like, well,

David Sauchyn  12:49

the it was actually the university had created a research station. So this was a place where people could go in summer to do field research. But they wanted a few students to live there year round. And so there were some facilities, but my cabin was no it had a light, it had electricity, but it had no plumbing, and had a log stove, so I had to chop wood.

Jay Whetter  13:18

Wasn’t a big what was the field research.

David Sauchyn  13:21

What were you doing? My research in Colorado was on natural hazards, because shortly before I moved to Colorado, the state government had passed legislation that required all the states in the mountains to produce a map of natural hazards. They had a problem where people from the flat lands, people from Oklahoma, Kansas and Texas, would come to Colorado in summer and fall in love with it, and they’d buy some property. They’d come back the next year, and it’d be gone. Well, the buildings would be gone because they didn’t recognize they had bought, bought property on an avalanche path or on a landslide. So they needed a bunch of students in the earth sciences to spend two summers hiking and mapping

Jay Whetter  14:13

and mapping my hazards. I got paid

David Sauchyn  14:15

well to hike every day for two summers throughout the

Jay Whetter  14:20

what’s better being a postman

David Sauchyn  14:24

for that job? Well, hiking in suburban Edmonton or through the Colorado Rockies, I have to give the edge to the Colorado Rockies.

Jay Whetter  14:35

Yeah, fair enough. So we’re setting the foundation for Dave the the scientist, the environmental scientist, What? What? Took you to Regina, and then we’ll get into some of the work, but we’re just doing the background for now. I

David Sauchyn  14:50

went to Regina via Waterloo, Ontario, because after I did my master’s thesis research in Colorado and overstayed my welcome, i. 50 legally for a few months, because I just couldn’t bear the fact of vacating that log cabin. But I did. My visa expired. Fortunately, I’d met a young woman that summer, in June, and we got married in December, and we moved to Canada. Well, I dragged her to Canada.

Jay Whetter  15:24

She’s from Colorado, or some Nebraska, but

David Sauchyn  15:26

doing her thesis research in Colorado, I should have got her permission to say these things. But yeah, anyway, that’s all I’ll say about that. But yeah, so moved back to Canada, and I still had the itch to do mountain research, and I discovered that at the University of Waterloo, there was a professor who was from Calgary, original, originally, he was from Calgary, and he did his field research in the Rocky Mountains in Alberta. So I applied for him and said, Would you consider taking another student? And he said, Well, let’s talk about it in the Rocky Mountains. So we met, we met in the back country, in canon, ask us and camp for a few days, and talked about what I would do if I was a PhD student. Went to Waterloo, Ontario did that. And of course, then you, when you, when you have maximized university education, you have to go looking for a job. And the job became available in Regina.

Jay Whetter  16:38

Tell me about the periap patient research collaborative. When did that start? And were you? Were you the person who started it?

Toban Dyck  16:47

No, I’m

David Sauchyn  16:48

I’m emphatic, because people keep insisting, oh, it’s Dave’s thing. No, it’s not. I didn’t create it. What is it? It was created by the federal government. In the late 1990s the federal government decided that there should be somewhere in Canada a climate change science and adaptation Research Center, that climate change was becoming a policy and issue, and that they needed scientists who would produce the science necessary to make policy decisions. And so they said, Okay, we’ll create we’ll start with a research center based on the prairies, because they saw that climate change could potentially have serious impacts for the prairie provinces, and they chose Regina. And the reason they gave that at the time there was an organization called the prairie farm rehabilitation administration, PFRA. You may have heard of PFRA. It I can’t believe people these days don’t know if PFRA was just it was a phenomenal federal government organization it was created.

Jay Whetter  18:04

I associate it with plant, yeah, tree,

David Sauchyn  18:06

shelter belt, yeah, the shelter belt at Indian Head, for sure, they they gave away millions of seedlings. And so a lot of the shelter belts on the prairies are contained, uh, tree, or have trees that were seedlings at the Indian Head tree nursery. But PFA was created in response to the drought of the 1930s and it was created to rehabilitate the farm economy. And it was, it was very successful, and such that by the 1990s and 2000s it was still around. They their mandated change somewhat, but they were still practice. They were they were still encouraging the farm community to practice solar water conservation and to deal with climate change. And so it was natural that parks should work closely with PL for a at least in our first decade, because the federal government, the Harper administration decided that they would eliminate pfre So, yeah, so they put, they put Park in Regina. It was launched in 2000 and the board the director contacted me and said, We need a scientist. We have no staff yet. We need a scientist who will develop a research program for Park would you be willing to move your office a couple buildings away to the to the park facility? And that was 2000

Jay Whetter  19:42

Well, can you tell me about the palaces triangle kind of recreate what you’re trying to tell us as farm journalists when we were there a few years ago at your office, if I recall, but you’re gonna have to set me straight that the climate at the time. Time of palaces triangle or the weather? You can tell me whether I’m saying it right, but when Pallister came out and did his explorations and assessed that that palaces triangle was going to be useless for agriculture, maybe those aren’t his words, but I think you said that we’ve had similar weather patterns or climate patterns since then that that may actually have been worse, but because we’ve, we’ve adapted, or learned to adapt, that they the actual effect on potential farm productivity is is less. I know there wasn’t per se farming at the time of Pallisers exploration, but like farming in the way we know it anyway. But can you elaborate on that?

David Sauchyn  20:50

Yeah, certainly. Well, like you said, we’ve had some years or two consecutive years that have been extremely dry and probably is nearly as bad as it gets. What’s unique about the Palliser drought of the 1840s to 1870s is it was a couple decades, almost three decades, in which most of the years were dry. So it was the duration of that drought which was unusual. And we haven’t we’ve come close. I mean, the 30s were dry, the 80s were dry, but not quite as dry and prolonged as that drought of the mid 19th century. And what Palliser said was there would be a large region that would be forever comparatively useless. So he was talking about the driest part of the Canadian Prairies, you know, South Western Saskatchewan, southeastern Alberta. He also referred to a fertile belt further to the north, the black soil zone, the moist margin of the prairie and the Aspen park land. He acknowledged that there was potential, but he advised the government to stay away from Southwestern Saskatchewan and southeastern Alberta, which we refer to as now Pallisers triangle.

Jay Whetter  22:08

Is there a message today in any of the experiences that from from Palliser or the 30s or the 80s that we could use to help with adaptation?

David Sauchyn  22:23

Well, I mentioned the extent to which PFRA facilitated adaptation when you think of dugouts and shelter belts and row cropping and irrigation, not so much irrigation, because it was around before the 30s, but a lot of the farming practices that we associate with soil and water conservation were facilitated by by PF Ra, and in fact, we wouldn’t. We wouldn’t have an ag industry that’s commercially successful. It wasn’t for a lot of adaptation. When you think about it, we practice agriculture in a pretty harsh climate. It’s cold, it’s dry and short growing season, and there aren’t too many places on Earth where they practice agriculture, commercially, industrially, that have a climate as harsh as ours, and that’s entirely enabled by a whole lot of adaptation, including the breeding of crops that can thrive in this climate, and a lot of a lot of farming practices which continue to evolve. And so there’s a pretty strong argument to say that amongst the most adaptable people in Canada and if not the world, are those who farm in a harsh climate like ours, and they adapt on it from year to year, obviously, because it’s an annual rotation. So there’s an opportunity to adjust farming practices on a on an annual basis.

Toban Dyck  24:01

Is there? Is there a sense of kind of, what the next big adaptation is for, for? AG, well,

David Sauchyn  24:09

there was a major adaptation 1980s or so, and that’s minimum tail or zero, till they discovered that summer follow was not a good idea. Interesting. I read recently that there were actually AG, scientists way back in the 20s saying, Well, this was a mistake. Sorry, we shouldn’t have recommended this. But it took 5060, years for the entire community to recognize that summer follow was not a bad idea. So not a good idea was a bad idea. And at the time in the 80s, the reason that minimum till was introduced was to control soil erosion. But it turns out to be a good adaptation to climate change, because you’re also, you’re also, you know, you’re also, you. Are improving the infiltration of soil water, you’re also keeping the temperature of the soil lower. So there’s a lot of research and producers will tell you that this fairly dramatic change in farming practices over the last few decades, over the last few decades, is is good adaptation and preparation for the kinds of climate changes that are occurring now and that we expect in the future. Can

Jay Whetter  25:23

you quantify what kind of climate changes are are occurring now?

David Sauchyn  25:29

Yep, that’s what we do. I mean, it’s, you know, sitting in my office and outside here, I got a team of fantastic scientists who do a lot of modeling and measurement and analysis. We analyze huge sets of data, and we have a lab down the hall that Jay has seen with 1000s of pieces of old wood, and we have millions of measurements of tree growth, which is a proxy of soil moisture. I mean, trees need water, so we know how much water was in the soil for the last 1000 years. So just outside my office here, we have a box, which is a storage device, and it stores up to 96 terabytes of data. Because we have, we have a whole lot of measurements and observations and modeling of climate and soil and and soil and so on, but it’s just numbers, you know, unless there’s some kind of context, unless there’s a question, unless there’s a hypothesis, unless there’s some kind of application, it’s just a big mess of numbers. So we do a lot of work for the ag sector, for producer groups, and for banks that loan money to the farm, the farmers, and for government. And in every case there’s they got questions. And so we can, we can produce data and facts to address those, those questions, and the big question is, well, how do you know the climate is changing? And what’s really ironic and unusual about our work is we work with people who, a large segment of our audience don’t believe in climate change, and yet we work with them, but they’re willing to work with us. They’re willing to fund our work, even though they don’t believe in

Jay Whetter  27:29

climate change. But Dave, I want to get to that. Yeah, this is the key, but I want to come back to my question, so you’ve got all this data. So what is what is happening on the prairie? So we have more frost free. Days. Our summers are hotter, our winters are wetter. What’s what? Yeah, so what

David Sauchyn  27:46

their summer, our summers are not hotter. Okay,

Jay Whetter  27:49

so this is what I want you to how has, yeah, the climate change say in the time that you’ve been with, with park like, has there been or maybe, I don’t know what time horizon would be right, but we what is what is happening? Well, the time

David Sauchyn  28:03

horizon we use is the length of the weather record, which is back to the 18 days. So when we use weather data, we go back to the 1880s when we use triggering data, we go back to the year 542, 1500 years ago. When we talk about the climate of the future. We go out to the end of the century. That’s the kind of time horizon. What what’s to you? It’s not getting hotter, and that’s a big misconception. And and we deal with a lot of misconceptions, because most people, not necessarily farmers, but even farmers, they get their information from the Internet, right? That’s the source of it. Of Knowledge these days is the internet, and there’s just a whole lot of misinformation. And even if the information is correct, it’s not about the Canadian Prairies, right? It might be, but typically we’re told how the climate of the world is changing. We’re told repeatedly that the climate of the whole world has warmed by about one degree in the last 100 years. Okay, what does that mean? I mean, have you noticed? Have you noticed

Toban Dyck  29:13

that the world is warming? I wouldn’t, yeah. Wouldn’t have the tools.

David Sauchyn  29:17

Well, nobody does. I mean, grab your phone, yeah, to the weather app and find the temperature of the whole world. It’s not there. It’s the Earth is not an option on your phone. And what does the average mean? The average doesn’t exist. It’s a statistical concept, right? So, yeah, we’re told the whole world is warm by a degree. And so people think, well, it’s warming everywhere, and it’s warming all the time. No, that’s not. Some places are warming much faster than others. The Canadian Arctic is warming way faster than the rest of the world. And it’s not warming all the time. Some years are warmer than others. And when you look at the Canadian Prairies, if you look. At the weather record, the warmest, the highest temperature we’ve ever had was in 1936 at mydale, Saskatchewan. It was 114 degrees. Well, yeah, it’s never been warmer. Now our our summers are getting longer, and there’s more heat. There are more more warm days, but we don’t necessarily get more days above 40 than we used to every few years we get, you know, 41 degrees. So it’s not getting it’s not getting hotter, it’s getting warmer, but mostly, mostly, it’s getting much less cold. That’s where, that’s where we

Jay Whetter  30:45

see the lows are exactly but the highs aren’t necessarily higher.

David Sauchyn  30:49

The minimum temperatures are rising faster than the maximum, maximum temperatures,

Jay Whetter  30:54

and the summers are getting so the summers are getting longer. I heard you say, so is that? Is that the same as frost free days. Or how do you define that?

David Sauchyn  31:02

Yeah, we define that in terms of days above zero or days above 10 or days above 20, and growing degree days. That’s a real handy index that is used a lot in the ag sector. The growing degree days how much heat is available during the growing season, and that’s that’s going up. But the strongest indicator of a warming climate in our part of the world is that winter is much less colder than it used to be. But that is people like to whine and complain about our winter. Shut up, and I feel like an old timer. I was just you don’t believe me, if you just just go to the Environment Canada website and just download the weather record for any location on the prairies, and then look at the the minimum temperatures, which almost every year, almost every day, the minimum temperature is right around sunrise, right? So when you’re scraping the frost off your truck, that’s usually the lowest temperature, and it’s gone up quite a bit, all right?

Jay Whetter  32:17

And then, so the last thing I want to touch on is as moisture, anything? Any noticeable changes in moisture patterns, rainfall patterns, precipitation patterns,

David Sauchyn  32:26

yeah, and that’s what we spend most of our effort in terms of research, because it’s so extremely variable from day to day, month to month, season to season, year to year, we have amongst the most variable hydro climate. We say hydro climate right, those climate variables that involve water. The two most variable hydro climates on Earth are the middle of Eurasia, Kazakhstan, Siberia, Western China, and the Canadian Prairies. And what we have in common is you can’t get any further from the ocean than the middle of North America in the middle of Eurasia. Yeah, yeah, we have a Western Kazakhstan. Is we had a delegation from Western Kazakhstan. They felt at home in Saskatchewan.

Jay Whetter  33:17

Yeah, that’s interesting. And how So, how does is there a so we know we’re a highly variable hydro climate. Is that, is the variability changing, or is there, is there anything of note that farmers should recognize as maybe different from when they were first starting as farmers, is there any noticeable change for them?

David Sauchyn  33:43

When we look at the future, and we have no rainfall data for the future or tree rings, so we have to use these models that simulate the climate of the world. And when you look at the output of all of these models, a pretty consistent scenario or projection. We call it, is an increase in the range between the driest and wettest years. So the volatility of our climate is increasing. We say that in a warmer climate, the hydrological cycle is amplified, and this makes sense in terms of just basic geophysics, because most of our water comes from the Pacific Ocean. Our weather comes from the West, and the Pacific Ocean is to the west of us, and so these storms form over the ocean, and eventually they reach us. Well, the oceans are heating up, and as they warm up, they’re producing more water vapor, and eventually that vapor has to form rain and snow and precipitate. So a pretty there’s a pretty good body of science that says, if you. Warm up the world. Rain should be heavier, and it seems to be happening. So when we get rain, it seems to be more intense, and that’s something we can expect. But if we don’t get rain, let’s say the storms go someplace else, and we have a warmer summer, then you can expect it also to be drier. So it’s like, it’s like the extremes are the wetter places and wetter years are wetter, and the drier places and drier years are drier. The problem is, yeah, the problem is, it’s just so extremely variable, it’s hard to see, yeah,

Toban Dyck  35:41

what are some of the you’ve spoken you said it’s in the notes here too. You’ve spoken to farmers in areas where they don’t believe in climate change, and you’re exposed to them a lot. I am a farmer from Southern Manitoba. I’m exposed to a lot of farmers who don’t believe in climate change as well. What are some messages and some techniques that have really stuck, like, are really kind of, you’ve been able to kind of get in a little bit with with your messaging?

David Sauchyn  36:08

Yeah, apparently I got in because I’m asked to give hundreds of talks to farm groups and rural audiences, and I really enjoy it. My academic colleagues say, how can you talk to people who don’t believe in climate change? Well, I just imagine I’m talking to my aunts and uncles and cousins, because on my mother’s side, my mother was raised on the farm, and I spent summers on that farm, and I still have a few aunts and uncles, mostly cousins in Alberta, one cousin in Saskatchewan, but for the most part in Alberta. And I just imagine I’m I’m talking to them, and in fact, a couple times I’ve been asked to speak in Alberta, and my a cousin and an aunt showed up. They’re in the audience. So you know, I’ve and but the other thing is, I enjoy talking to people who are exposed to the weather and climate I have so many friends and colleagues and people in the city who tell me about climate change, but they get the information from the internet. You’re sitting behind a computer. I’d rather talk to people who I really enjoy talking to, indigenous knowledge keepers and elders and people in the foreign community, because they’re out there in the weather and climate Yeah,

Jay Whetter  37:32

and how do you then take some skepticism about climate change and then turn the conversation to, you know, to a weather or, and I don’t know whether you feel like you need to change the mind, change the mind, change the mindset, yeah, because you ultimately you want to do what, but you still need to talk about how to adapt. I think we ultimately, we need to get the prairies to to tools to adapt, to the to the to the changing climate. But what? So what? What is the point of going to these hundreds of meetings with with farmers who may not believe in climate change, but you still have a really important message to them. So how do you get that message? I’m gonna

Toban Dyck  38:21

tack on to one, one thing before you answer that. Just and then, as you think about that, has there been a moment when you’ve been at an event and someone’s come to you and just kind of, you’ve reached them, like, you’ve kind of like, you know, I know you’re not intending to change minds. You’re you’re talking, you’re listening. But has there been kind of those, some of those moments where it’s like, I see this now.

38:42

It happens anyway, yeah, yeah,

David Sauchyn  38:44

all the time. Somewhere on my desk here, I just printed off an email from a farm group in Saskatchewan thanking us for our work. And if you’re going to find skeptics anywhere on Earth, it’s going to be South Texas or Southwestern Saskatchewan. So they even admitted, their board of directors said they admitted, most of them, or some of them, don’t believe in climate change, but they really appreciate our work. So that’s very gratifying. It’s much more gratifying than another referee journal article. And also it’s when they explain to me why they’re skeptical. It makes sense. You know, after I spoke to a group of producers in Taber, Alberta, this one guy came out to be he was a manager of an irrigation district, and he said, you know, Dave nice talk, but I’ll believe in climate change. When we get weather I don’t expect, and I say, Can I quote you? And I’ve quoted him hundreds of times because he just defined climate change. If you get weather you don’t expect, then it’s outside. The realm of your climate. And the climate has changed, maybe not once, but if you get it a bunch of times, it’s and so I realized, well, climate, I don’t expect. Well, what can you expect on the Canadian Prairies? Anything?

40:19

Anything. Yeah,

David Sauchyn  40:20

in the spring, it’s

Jay Whetter  40:25

subtle, yeah, then the change is subtle and people don’t notice it. Is that exactly the message there is, yeah,

David Sauchyn  40:31

it’s, it’s subtle. It’s, it’s, so far, it’s gradual. I mean, there could be tipping points or abrupt climate change, but so far, it’s it’s a relatively gradual change against a backdrop of huge variability from from year to year, season to season. The way scientists describe it is the signal versus the noise. So if the signal is climate change, it’s hard to see against the background of a huge amount of noise, which is the natural variability.

Jay Whetter  41:07

You know, yeah. Do you think we’re Yeah, I do want to, just to build on that question Toban had about, like, getting through to people, and how do you convey a message of adaptation? So I think that the climate change debate, is it real? Is it not? Is almost is that maybe it’s not even, doesn’t even matter. What we need to talk about is what’s happening on your farm, what’s affecting your ability to produce a crop, and how do we improve the practice, to adopt a longer season, warmer summer nights, maybe milder winters. It may affect insects or pathogens, I don’t know. So how do you how do you take the skepticism and convert it into some helpful action on the farm. You’re

David Sauchyn  42:01

exactly right. It’s hard even necessary to talk about global warming. In fact, I I try to avoid using that terminology. And there are people, you know, most producers, are curious people, and they their industry is science based. So they they read the science and online when they have time, and so they’ll ask me questions about global warming and the causes and so on. And I, I’m always reluctant to go there, because we’re really here to talk about not the the causes of a rise in temperature of the whole world. But how is your operation? How is your community affected by weather and climate? And how do we see that changing into the near future? And what are you going to do about it? So that that’s the crux of the discussion. And I, you know, I’ve had, and I also appreciate the fact that producers are very aware of the fluctuation in soil moisture from season to season and year to year. And it’s, it’s so large that it’s difficult to see that that gradual, we call it incremental change as resulting from a warmer climate. And so to me, it makes perfect sense. I have colleagues in the social sciences and social psychology and psychology who try to explain the attitude of producers in terms of who they are, how they behave, and what they think, but I think there’s a much simpler explanation. They’re just exposed to a whole lot of variability that obscures the gradual changes. And when you say, Well, how do you get through to them? I usually start with the tree rings.

Toban Dyck  44:00

Yeah, that’s gonna be great. Great segue. All right, what do you

David Sauchyn  44:04

do because, and for various reasons? I mean, one reason is most of the trees are on farmland, ranch land, actually, so we have to work with producers to access the trees, and they’re incredibly cooperative, like they say, the cattle don’t eat the trees eat the grass. So as long as you don’t set the grass on fire, you can take those trees down. Well, not take them down, but sample them. So we have a lot of interaction with producers, just in the course of our field work to gain access to old trees. But also they understand that trees are a plant and need moisture, and they understand that the tree ring story, the reconstruction of climate from tree rings, is real. It’s a climate that actually occurred, and it’s very. It models. It’s just make believe. It’s just made up. I mean, that’s all we have for a future climate. But after all, the climate that the models produce is just hypothetical, sure. Yeah,

Toban Dyck  45:12

easy to dismiss anyway, yeah,

Jay Whetter  45:14

when I think of a tree ring, Dave, I think of, you know, a dark line, I don’t know whether that’s winter, and then a lighter colored space that that varies, and then you get another black line or dark line. So what? Walk us

Toban Dyck  45:30

through that walk. Walk us through it. Here we go. Nice, nice visual. So

Jay Whetter  45:35

I want to know what, what is a tree ring, and what does it tell us? Oh, here we go,

David Sauchyn  45:40

nice. My office is full of old wood. Smells good, and down the hall we have 1000s and 1000s of pieces of old wood. It’s the annual growth, and we have an ideal climate because we have a very sharp and short growing season. So there’s a definite end to the growing season to the growth of the trees. You can’t do this kind of work in the tropics, because the trees never stop growing, right? Although they try, but it works well here. And so if you look at the tree ring, it’s actually got two parts. There’s a light colored part and a dark colored part. The light color is the early growth in the spring, we’re usually just decent soil moisture. And then as the summer and growing season proceeds, the soil tends to dry out, but also it’s cooling off, and so the tree growth slows, and it produces a darker, denser ring. So we actually take two measurements per year of the early wood and the amount of light wood, and we take very precise measurements. So we have almost 4.8 million measurements of tree growth. And in a dry climate, it’s a proxy for soil moisture, because that’s what limits tree growth. So, yeah. I mean, if you took, if you took wood from a cold place, you get a temperature record. But in our part of the world, really, nearly every work, soil moisture is what limits growth.

Jay Whetter  47:19

Yeah. Okay, so the width of the ring, what kind of message indicates how much more? Yeah, so, so we’re learning how much moisture happened in a year based on how wide that the light colored ring is. What else does it tell us? Does it tell us? Anything else useful? You said temperature in the north, but, yeah, well,

David Sauchyn  47:38

it depends where you collect the wood. I mean, we’ve collected wood high up in the Rocky Mountains, and you get to a certain elevation, and the trees disappear because there’s not enough heat. So those tree rings tell us how much heat was available each year, and that’s why scientists who do this kind of work are able to determine that there’s been a lot more heat in the world in the last few decades than prior, prior millennia. It’s some of the most convincing evidence that, yes, our climate is warming at unusual rate. It’s from tree rings collected at cold places, but we do most of our collecting up and down the foothills and the eastern slopes of the Rockies across the southern part of the Boreal Forest, down into Southwestern Manitoba, southeastern Saskatchewan, where there’s oak trees, old oak trees. And we cross the border, because the climate doesn’t change at the international border. So we collect tree rings in Montana, North Dakota, and dry where it’s dry. And so we know that what’s driving tree golf is how much water was available each year.

Jay Whetter  48:48

What is it? Why oaks?

David Sauchyn  48:50

Oak, because oak, because they get old 304 year treated 400 years, some of the oak trees and they also are quite sensitive to the availability of water,

Jay Whetter  49:03

more so than other trees. Did you ever test that old oak tree in service that just fell down? It was 600 years old or something? No,

David Sauchyn  49:11

we should it’s gone. I know we have to check it out. Yeah.

Jay Whetter  49:15

Well, if anyone tells us about old oak trees, mind you probably know where all the trees are on necessarily. You know, what’s the oldest tree on the prairies? Or the, yeah, oldest,

Toban Dyck  49:25

the oldest tree in

David Sauchyn  49:26

the prairie provinces would be in Alberta, for sure.

Jay Whetter  49:31

Oh, yeah. Mountains or out in the mountains, you get

David Sauchyn  49:34

trees that are over 1000 years old. Yeah? That’s because in the mountains there’s a natural fire breaks, right? Yeah, and you don’t, you won’t find old trees elsewhere, because there’s nothing to stop the fire and kill the trees. But we keep looking, we keep looking for places where the fire hasn’t been recently, and we find a. Yeah, trees that are centuries old, but they’re really old ones, the ones that are exceeding 1000 years would be out west from here.

Toban Dyck  50:09

So have the trees ever told you something Data Wise that that other data, it wasn’t able to show?

David Sauchyn  50:19

Yeah, and that’s the big advantage that trees have, is their annual the rings are annual, right? So we have annual, we have sub annual, we have seasonal data from the tree rings. There are a lot of scientists who do what’s called paleoclimate research. We look at the climate of the past, and they collect ice cores from ice sheets and glaciers, and a lot of the work is based on lake sediments, because everything in a watershed eventually gets washed it to the lowest elevation, into a lake or a wetland. So a lot of these scientists have produced incredible reconstructions of the climate, including the prairies, based on cores taken from lakes. Only problem is, you can’t necessarily know the age of a layer of mud to within a year or to within a season. There’s a few exceptions where the in deep lakes the sediments laid down in layers. But on the prairies we have fairly shallow lakes, and the wind comes along and stirs up the mud. And so it’s like, it’s like the record is being averaged. Every time the sediments get stirred up and settled back down, you’ve destroyed the chronology. And so there is really good information of the climate of the last 10,000 years since the glacier left, but it tends to be relatively coarse compared to the tree rings, which are sub annual. So that’s a big advantage we we have.

Toban Dyck  52:00

Yeah, yeah. Where are you going? I want to talk about extension, okay, I do want to. There’s one topic I want to talk about before we close. Okay, okay, but before you go first, well,

Jay Whetter  52:15

so David, you’ve got the evidence now, centuries old, evidence now showing that, and I’m going to repeat what we already talked about, that winters are getting milder, summers are getting longer. Summer the days that the highs may not be getting higher. We’ve had, like you said, the warmest day ever was 1936 at mydale, Saskatchewan, but our overall temperatures are getting higher, maybe because the evenings or the nights are getting warmer. You’ve got the data. Your job isn’t necessarily to extend that to farmers to suggest adaptation. Maybe you do some of that. But how do you partner them to help organize, like farm organizations, researchers, extension groups, recognize the data and then try to think of ways that they can adapt. How do you take what you know and try to encourage adaptation at the farm level.

David Sauchyn  53:25

Well, first of all, we never tell farmers what to do. It’s it’s not our job, and we’re not, we’re not ag producers. We don’t do agricultural research. But they ask, they ask for it. They they ask us to supply them with information about how the climate is changing. And we can make recommendations, but not about specific best practices, but we can say, okay, there’s pretty good scientific evidence that the dry years are getting drier and the wet years are getting wetter. So you want to farm such that you can take advantage of the excess water and that it’s available in those dry years. So basically, what you want to do is you want to manage the soil and the crops such that you’re able to store water and and take advantage of that stored water when, when you need it. Now obviously you can obvious adaptations include the storage of water in reservoirs and, irrigation, the obvious ones, but a lot of that has been tapped out unless there’s a well there is the government of Saskatchewan, and the all three provinces are. Are, are have plans to expand irrigation, but you can’t irrigate everywhere. So a more, I guess, universal approach, is to farm such that the soil retains water. And I know that there is a certain segment of the farming population who thinks they have the answer. I’m not here to endorse what they do, because one thing I’ve discovered is that the farm population is incredibly diverse, much more diverse than the people in my neighborhood in Regina, right? And so you can’t generalize about I was told a long time ago, if you’re going to give a talk to anybody that scientists know your audience, know who you’re talking to. It was actually a politician, quite a famous politician, who told me that. He said, you know, Dave, scientists know what they want to say. They have no idea what they’re talking to say. Politicians don’t speak until they know what the audience wants to hear. So, yeah, there’s somewhere there’s a middle ground where you got to know who you’re talking to, and you got to be I’m always careful to advocate or suggest any particular farming practices better than another, because it depends who I’m talking to. I so, you know, I liked, I like to get to know, even though I know they’re they’re producers, but the nature of their what, what brought them together is it, do they share a commodity, or do they share a location, or do they share a certain attitude towards crop production or grazing, or whatever? And so I always, I always go into a talk or a meeting with that kind of information, because there, I know that there is a constituency of farmers who think that we should farm to maintain soil health, and we should farm or they should farm to maintain a cover for as many days as possible, and In other words, practice the principles of regenerative agriculture, and I’m careful not to use that terminology, because it’s somewhat controversial. Unless I’m speaking at a conference on regenerative agriculture, then it’s safe to use safety. I was asked to do that a couple years ago. It was two years ago. Last December, there was a western Canada conference on soil health in Edmonton, and I was asked to give one of the keynote talks. And so I did a bit of research on regenerative agriculture and this and and some of the the media coverage was saying, it’s all the rage, really, is it all the rage, you know, but, but I got, and I was expecting a handful of farmers, and I got there, and there were 500 people in the room, and they were turning people away. So, oh, there is, there is some interest in, you know, in the principles of soil health, and I’ve been asked, I get asked quite often to speak to organizations that are quite supportive of these practices. And I go in there and I tell them, you know, you seem to have a good idea, because according to the climate projections, you can expect more variability between the wettest and driest years, and you seem to have a means of protecting the soil, enhancing the soil, and getting it to store more water and carbon. And they like to hear that. And I come away thinking, Whoa, this, this regenerative agriculture seems like a good idea until I attend or until I speak to another group of of producers who take a different approach. Yeah,

Jay Whetter  59:15

yeah. Toban, what was your question? Well,

Toban Dyck  59:17

my question was I was gonna go a completely different you said something, we were talking about a winter, and you told people to shut up. Our winters were so cold, which i i really like, because my wife and I often talk this way as well. Because even even on the theme of adaptability, you know, I’m looking at your screen right now, I can tell he’s wearing a merino wool sweater, maybe even a smart wool sweater, or so we he’s adapted to Canadian prairie winters, and it’s just like, drives me nuts when people complain about winter, because we have, especially nowadays, we’ve access to so much great game. Gear and clothing and like, there’s no reason why we can’t walk out in minus 40 with wind chill and be completely comfortable, like the gear is there. So I and the amount of time you’ve spent in the in the wilderness and in the Rockies, and you’re, you know, you know, cross country skiing, I just wondering, are you like, I have an, I have an old canvas outfitters tent in my in my the bush by our farm, and I like to go out there and build a fire and the wood stove and get it warm and and I love that kind of stuff. And we love, we love cross country skiing as well. I was wondering, are you a bit of a gear Are you a bit of a gear junkie?

David Sauchyn  1:00:40

Yeah, you could probably say that to a tool junkie, gear junkie, yeah, yeah. But I mean, we’re kindred spirits, because I love being outside in winter.

Toban Dyck  1:00:51

Just love it, yeah. No, we Yeah,

Jay Whetter  1:00:54

yeah, Dave, I just want to, we have one last question, and then we have to wrap up. But I just, I wanted to make sure we captured, you know, whether you had a note down of something you really wanted to get across that you didn’t get a chance to say, yeah.

David Sauchyn  1:01:11

And I’ll, I’ll preface that by saying that some of the best questions I ever get are from ag producers. I gave a talk somewhere in central Alberta at a hockey rink, and I talked about the tree rings, of course. And this producer says, Why do you click? Keep collecting more wood? Don’t you have enough? Wow, what a good question. And I made us some, I don’t know, silly answer about, oh, you know, in science, it’s all about replication and so on. And then driving back from central Alberta, back to Regina, the whole way, I was scratching my thinking, wow, what would be a better answer to that question? And it actually prompted a bunch of research, because we thought we’ve got so much wood and so many trees, how can we take advantage of that? And we discovered that by having collected so much wood, which I do, because I need to get outside and off campus for my sanity, but by collecting so much data and so much wood, we can answer questions that that very few other labs can.

Jay Whetter  1:02:29

I think that’s almost a metaphor for where we’re at with data. Sometimes I feel like or and research, and I don’t want to suggest that we don’t need more research, but I think sometimes we we we forget all the work that we have, or the data we have, or the or the wood that we have, and then we forget that, yeah, you know, we need to start talking about all that, what this wood is telling us that we’ve got the wood now, how do we how do we talk, and which is what this podcast is all about. It that’s the extension part. And it

David Sauchyn  1:02:59

turns out, you know, when I started collecting wood in the mid 1980s in the Cypress Hills, I didn’t foresee that. You know, 30? What is it? 4040? Years later, it would be of more more applicable and a more value than ever, because the worst case scenario for the prairies moving forward is when a long drought will reoccur in a warmer climate. It’s going to happen. It’s going to be devastating, right? Well, what would that long drought look like? Well, we can go to the tree rings, and we can tell governments and producer groups and so on, what a long drought looked like, because it happened in decades prior to the settlement of the prairies.

Jay Whetter  1:03:46

When will we have another long drought? Like, is there any way to impossible to predict, but a 30 year drought like that? 1840s 1870s like you said, would, would would be devastating,

David Sauchyn  1:03:59

plus occurring in a climate that’s warmer in the back, then we can’t say, you know, it’s the best analogy is earthquakes, because that geologist can say, I know for sure there’s going to be earthquake right here, but they can’t tell you when we just have to prepare. We just have to be prepared. I’m

Toban Dyck  1:04:15

going to go back to the outfitters, the gear thing. So two things, what’s your favorite piece of kit or gear for for wilderness adventures, and to what when is when and what is your next next adventure?

David Sauchyn  1:04:35

Oh, boy. My favorite piece of gear, the pad, thermos pad, because I love, I love sleeping inside, but it’s getting more difficult to sleep on the ground comfortably. So that’s that’s an essential piece of gear in the next wilderness adventure. Who knows my wife and I are having a. A capping trailer built.

Toban Dyck  1:05:02

Oh, wow, yeah, the custom built, custom

David Sauchyn  1:05:06

built. Yeah, it’s been two years. It’d probably be another year yet before it’s done, like,

Toban Dyck  1:05:11

a teardrop style.

David Sauchyn  1:05:11

Or is it like, Yeah, well, it’s, it’s, you know, remember the bowler trailers. It’s, yeah, it’s, it’s very small, yeah. What

Toban Dyck  1:05:19

if, yeah. What a fun project. That must be to kind of conceive of this thing from from a blank slate and build it out. But,

David Sauchyn  1:05:29

you know, I just love exploring the prairies. There’s just people really don’t appreciate this landscape to the extent that some of us too.

Toban Dyck  1:05:40

Oh, well, I appreciate this. I appreciate your time. Dave, this has been a

David Sauchyn  1:05:44

pleasure. Hey guys, you could talk with you. Okay,

Toban Dyck  1:05:47

yeah, bye. Dave,

Jay Whetter  1:05:56

thank you to our episode sponsor, Sask oil seeds. Results from their 2024 on farm research trials program, or online@saskanola.com

Toban Dyck  1:06:05

in their second year, Sask oil seeds, top notch farming trials, had a big expansion, a testament to the program’s impactful contributions to the farming community.

Jay Whetter  1:06:13

And once again, thank you to our episode sponsor, Sask oil seeds. You

Toban Dyck  1:06:23

are you curious about what Jay and I get up to behind the scenes at the extensionist? The extensionist

Jay Whetter  1:06:28

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Toban Dyck  1:06:34

and important updates. You’re never gonna miss an episode again. Please

Jay Whetter  1:06:38

sign up at the extensionist.com you com. Well, that was another great conversation. We’ve had so many, we’ve had so many, and I learned a lot about climate change and the prairies. So the summers are getting longer, the winters are getting milder. Yeah, the the highs aren’t necessarily getting higher, because he said the highest ever temperature was the 1930s 114 Yeah, 114 Fahrenheit, yeah. But the summer nights are getting warmer and then and rain or precipitation is just thoroughly unpredictable. I don’t know whether that’s you,

Toban Dyck  1:07:21

but, well, I really like that. What was the one comment? He said, The One farmer had told him I believe in climate change, when, when he’s when he’s surprised, or, yeah. What was the comment? Which, yeah, I think it’s something unexpected. Or, yeah, which I think is an interesting one, right? Because I think a lot of farmers, a lot of people are just used to unpredictable weather, yeah, these plow winds,

Jay Whetter  1:07:50

which are very strange.

Toban Dyck  1:07:52

So how do you how do you fit climate change means into that narrative, right? It doesn’t really fit properly, because it’s like, sure, but everything’s in flux and kind of unforeseeable. How do you, yeah, how do you carve space for this other, this thing that’s climate change, but at the same time it is changing, it is changing, and we need to think of ways to adapt to that, right? And so the trees is very interesting, right? Like, that’s a very interesting model for, like, visually representing climate change. I saw

Jay Whetter  1:08:29

your eyes light up, like you had a story when he was talking about hockey. So I know we didn’t want to talk about hockey. Obviously, that’s but what

Toban Dyck  1:08:36

I would have, I would have I did the whole time I was thinking about, Do I come back to hockey? You know, telling myself So my story is incredibly, incredibly colorful. Okay, yeah, so I played minor hockey for a number of years. I forget when I think, I think I left minor hockey just before you’re allowed to body check, whatever that is. And I think that age has changed. Yeah,

Jay Whetter  1:08:59

12 or 14, it could have been neither of those. Yeah, yeah.

Toban Dyck  1:09:02

So a couple things. I was the only kid on my team that still wore the pants, cooperalls, yeah, something like that. So the other kids had the shorts. Yeah, they look so cool. I just pants. And I, in my many years playing, I did not score one goal, and I played forward. I was like, a way. I was like, right wing. There was one time, there was one time, one game where the puck kind of trickled in front of the net, and I was like, This is my this is my shot. I’m going to score. All I had to do was nudge it. And what happened? What happened was I went in and I was I in my memory anyway, I was gonna go in, and I was gonna just like, slap shot this thing in, right? Well, I miss the puck, and I fling up and I lose my footing, and I fall down and I slide into the nail, and the puck did not move at all. So there was my one. My one. An option by one chance, that’s, that’s the, that’s the incredible hockey story.

Jay Whetter  1:10:05

Yeah, well, I don’t have really super incredible ones. I just will say that my very favorite year playing hockey was when I came back at age 15, and I was a goalie for a delaraine was a team, and I still think about those guys. It was, we had a really good group at 15. You said, Yeah, at 15, yeah, yeah, goalie,

Toban Dyck  1:10:24

yeah.

Jay Whetter  1:10:26

Oh, my I was we didn’t have a single practice before our first game. We lost 17 to two. So that’s like the Toban sliding into the net. It

Toban Dyck  1:10:35

is equivalent. It’s quite similar. And

Jay Whetter  1:10:38

my teammates were very supportive of me. That’s good. Yeah, they helped me through. Anyway, maybe I would have been able to score

Toban Dyck  1:10:45

on you if you were Ned. I’m just saying, I’m just saying, tee that

Jay Whetter  1:10:51

up. Yeah, that’s right, but probably not, yeah. Anyway, we should wrap up. We should, we should we are the extensionists. You’re Jay wetter, I’m Jay wetter, you’re Toban Dyck. It’s true till next time. This has been a burr forest group production. We also want to thank the people you don’t see. We’re

Toban Dyck  1:11:12

here. We’re chatting away with our guests, but there’s tons of people who work behind the scenes to make this podcast happen. Brian Sanchez, our director. Ashley Robinson is the coordinator, and Abby wall is our producer and editor. You.