Fresh Growth
Fresh Growth
Eckhart Farms: Increasing Soil Biology and How it Pays
Join us in this dynamic and wide-ranging conversation with Chris Eckhart about diversifying his farming operation, increasing organic matter, monitoring soil biology, and creating a work-family-life balance, all while remaining profitable. Eckhart Farms is a multi-generational family farm in the heart of Wild Rose Prairie in Washington that focuses on soil health and diversity. He is passionate about family farming and has experimented tirelessly with diversifying crops on what was primarily a wheat operation.
Chris and his family plant barley and alfalfa, among other crops; make use of cover crops; started researching biochar; and added livestock grazing. They have marketed locally and regularly monitor both soil biology and the time impacts of too much diversification. They have seen significant increases in organic matter in a relatively short period of time.
“We’re seeing results carry over year to year, from having that cover crop in.”
And it’s paying – “In our area, at least with what we have going on, it’s proving to be profitable by taking things out of rotation and seeing a 10-15% bump in yield year after year.”
Chris speaks passionately not only about farming, but science. He first got excited about soil health when looking at bacteria and life under his microscope. He relies on science and experimentation to be as successful as he is.
He recognizes he has limited capacity and getting higher yields from fewer acres due to increased soil health allows him more time to focus on family and “going fishing.”
Chris’ advice to those starting out, “Find somebody willing to mentor you that has fruit on the tree, not just in farming, but also in their life outside of farming.”
Photo by Vo von Sehlen/Vo-tography
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Steve Elliot
Today's guest is Chris Eckhart of Eckhart Farms in the Wildrose Prairie of Eastern Washington. This multi -generational farm started in 1974 with Chris and Samantha taking over in 2014. Chris, welcome and thanks for sitting down with us.
Chris Eckhart
Glad to be here. Thanks for having me.
Stacie Clary
Yeah, thanks Chris. I guess just to start out with, please tell us a little bit about your farm and the area. I definitely want to hear a little bit about the Wild Rose Prairie and also family members that you work with on your farm.
Chris Eckhart
Yeah, so primarily we took over operation from my folks in 2014 there. We were primarily a wheat farm. We were just direct winter wheat, spring wheat rotation, and mostly all conventional, a little bit of minimum till, a little bit of no till, no hay. We played around with some canola and stuff, but mainly just a wheat farm is what we were at that time. And since that time, we've kind of evolved into definitely more diversification, you know, perennial crops, hay, grass, alfalfa, that kind of thing. And then canola, barley, wheat, oats. And we've started to implement some grazing and stuff on our cover crops too. So cover crops in rotation. More heavier in cover crops all the time. But again, just mostly an annual crop farm at this point. So we're in a pretty much just dry land dominated region. We don't have a lot of irrigation here to speak of. And so we rely mainly on rainfall. And we're in what they would consider anywhere from a 12 to 18 inch rainfall zone. Pretty variable from year to year. But we really try and count on that, you know 14 to 16 inch plan for that anyway as far as rainfall goes and so that limits us crop wise on what we grow to just with moisture limitations.
Steve Elliot
Yeah. Explain that diversification and how it came about. Why did you go away from just the spring, winter, wheat rotation?
Chris Eckhart
Yeah, so the diversification piece came in just because we've always kind of had this focus on soil health. I guess my dad got heavy on the wheat rotation side of things from a simplicity standpoint.
And as we were going forward, we always kind of wanted to figure out more of that soil health piece and different things that we could grow on our operation. We knew that going heavy wheat was making us, you know, fairly fertilizer dependent, chemical dependent. If we could, you know, change some things up in this as far as what we were growing crop wise, that maybe we could help out the soil that way, that way backing off, you know, some of our chemical inputs too. But the diversification really was limited both just just regionally in terms of what crops we were able to sell here. Just about 20 miles south of us, garbanzo beans do very well. But you go north of Spokane and garbanzo beans for whatever reason, struggle up here. And so that was tough rotation at that time. Peas were just not doing very well price -wise. And so we got into the canola side of it. And then we started getting into more of the local markets for supplying barley and oats for local people for feed. And... you can kind of reach a little bit of a crazy cycle with too much diversification and with limited labor just switching up all the crops you can drive yourself a little bit crazy just trying to get everything set up for that piece and so we've tried to manage that piece as well too so you know really not more than four different crops we try to do you know limit that to three and of course there'll be you know both spring and winter crops sometimes in there too and then you put that hay piece in there and you wonder if you're ever gonna go fishing again. So, but we have seen jumps in our soil health, right? So we got really focused on like the organic matter piece of it. We knew that one of our limiting resources in our area was moisture, you know, rainfall. And so how can we bank more moisture? And we really struggled with there was a real heavy push for no till up in this area. A lot of incentive programs and a lot of these guys do no till and some people have been doing it for 20 plus years and they were mainly in wheat fallow operations. And we would ask them, you know, what's your organic matter trying to figure out which way we're going to go. We would ask them what their organic matter is and we'd get these, you know, comments back: half a percent, a percent, percent and a half and I'm like this is this is no good this is this is no better than what we were doing at the time and you know we were still at that time plowing every few years or at least chisel plowing cultivating you know packing pretty intense tillage you know to get the crops ready and we were running those kind of numbers at that time too and I'm like this is not really any better there's got to be more to this and so when we started getting more focus on the biological side. I got my first microscope like in I think 2016. I'm like, let's just see what's in the dirt and a comparison stuff that was in a grass waterway versus what our fields were. And I'm like, look, it's all live. The whole screen was moving. It was all bacteria at that time. I didn't know what I was looking at, but I was fascinated. I just saw all this life in this tiny little, you know, speck of soil that I just I watched in YouTube videos on how to do this. You know, you put it in a little milliliter shaker, you take your, you know, 10 to one ratio and you put an eyedropper, you put that on a slide and was just blown away by by what we saw. And so we kind of got to focus on that. But again, limited on what we can do in our area was really tough to try and we tried to, you know, do cover crops in the wintertime with limited moisture going into the fall. The cover crops just didn't turn out very well.
And so what we've gone to now when we implement cover crops is we just we take our cash crops basically out of rotation for a whole season to do a cover crop to bring the soil around and we're seeing results carry over year to year from having that cover crop in so And it's been known in our area for a long time like you take a piece of alfalfa out of rotation and in especially if it was in part of a field where it was divided you can see 10, 15, 20 years later where the alfalfa field was versus where it wasn't. It just grows better where there was an alfalfa field. And we're kind of seeing those same results with cover crops in our area. I know there are reports in Iowa where they're saying it's just not feasible to do cover crops. It's not justifiable and I get it because I mean they make so much per crop there. It's hard to justify taking something out of rotation. In our area, at least with what we have going on, it's proving to be profitable by taking things out of rotation. When you can see a 10 -15 % bump in yield year over year over year. And again, we're low dollars per acre range compared to Iowa. We're excited when we can do a gross of $300 an acre, $300 to $400 an acre. That's fantastic. Weed's like at $5 right now. But if we can see that yield bump and less inputs too. So controlling the weeds.
Steve Elliot
Right, yeah.
Chris Eckhart
Dude, you know, you don't have as much pressure from weeds after we've ran those cover crops out there.
Steve Elliot
What are your organic levels up to?
Chris Eckhart
So now we're on average, and this is through three different labs too. I mean, this is, we have like the city of Spokane, Best Labs, and then Soil Labs have all verified with multiple different companies too, three, four, and up to 5%.
Steve Elliot
So significant, I mean, you've seen that significant increase in, you know, just by changing practices.
Chris Eckhart
Over a relatively short period, the common thoughts were by switching to no -till, what we had heard is you could increase a tenth of a percent per year. And those numbers are definitely not true. You can go way faster than that, but we attribute that more to, I think, biological gains than anything.
Stacie Clary
I have one other question, I am curious about the size of your operation because when you say you're taking, you know, a part out of production, like how much land are we talking about for that?
Chris Eckhart
So we farm annually roughly 2 ,000 acres, all rental ground. And yeah, we're now right around that 200 acres a year. So roughly about 10 % of our ground a year into cover crops. So the math roughly works out to, you know, once in 10 years that field's gonna be into a cover crop of some kind. And we're thinking about going even heavier, like possibly a quarter to a third of our operation, possibly cover crops, if we can see the merit to that. So mainly because winter annuals do so much better in our area than spring ones do. And so using the cover crop as a fallow period and going more heavy on the winter crops than the spring ones.
Stacie Clary
So I had a chance to visit your place last summer and you talked a lot about incorporating biochar as well and you had different test plots. So can you talk a little bit about what you're doing with the biochar and what you're learning with that?
Chris Eckhart
Yeah. We're excited about that. That was an experiment. So we got in on the ground floor of that. That was through Stevens County actually. And the local power company here has a place up in Kettle Falls where they're basically burning wood to create electricity through steam. And then they end up with these massive piles of wood ash. But then there's also this biochar component to it too. So I want to say what we were getting at, at that time it was roughly an 80 20 80 % wood ash 20 % biochar but then they had ramped up the biochar piece of it. So the numbers were were mixed on what we were actually getting for a component out there. They were wanting to do the experiment from a liming standpoint using ash for liming like old technology way back in the day when they were liming and I didn't see the feasibility of that. We do deal with low pH's and stuff here, but we seem to have to mitigate that from the crop standpoint, our crops seem to tolerate it well. Lining just never really penciled out for us in this area. A lot of guys have tried to line, but it's just the logistics behind it, it's so intensive and the cost per acre was so high that nobody really justified the liming part of it. And so this wood ash looked like they could do that as an alternative, but still it was gonna be too expensive. But what I looked at is like this biochar component to it. We need more habitat for our biology. If we wanna increase our biology in our soil, I know, that biochar has this incredible ability to create almost kind of like that a coral reef type setting for biology in the soil and so I was like even if we get a little bit of that biochar in there I said that's got to be helpful and so I was convincing them to not just do the seven tons per acre trial that they were wanting to do but I'm like let's do like 750 pounds an acre and see what that looks like and even lighter because I think that it stands to benefit from that from the biological side of it and I've seen stuff where putting material on a as heavy as they were wanting to do it can actually be detrimental because there's a lot of micronutrients in that wood ash too. And depending on what your soil needs, you can make soils I think toxic too with that wood ash. So we just did a small area. That was where you were at, where we were standing at on one side of that telephone pole was where it was seven tons per acre. And I think we did a quarter acre like that because I just, I'm waiting to see the results from that. I'm going to have to look at this for the next 20 years. I don't want it to be you know 20 acres or my whole field and so we did a small area at that trial and then we we split the difference we did like five acres at three tons and then we cut it back to a ton and then 750 so To do those trials and stuff so we'll see this is the first year of actually having a crash crop on that ground and so we should have yield results this next summer and see how that turns out but I'm more excited about the biochar from the biological piece. I've been fascinated with the Amazon rainforest, the terra -perita soils, finding out more about that all the time. There just continues to be more discoveries in that area. And especially in low carbon soils, I think that biochar really has a lot of merit to it. So for our area to make it more productive, hold more water, hold more nutrients.
Stacie Clary
Great.
Steve Elliot
I find it interesting that this conversation is about farming and we have been talking about science the whole time. I mean, when did you sort of realize that those things were that connected or had you already, well, no, just the whole, you know, look at get by your first microscope. I mean...
Chris Eckhart
Yeah. On the biochar? Yeah, that was the piece that got me was when I got a microscope and started looking at our own soils because I think we'd got onto a friend of mine, I remember.
We got GPS on our tractors, right? And we got auto steer. And so we got auto steer and then we got YouTube and this millennial generation were always on our phones. And a friend of mine, Josh, he goes, hey, you got to check out this guy, Gabe Brown. And I was like, oh boy, here we go. Another guy to check out and stuff. But I got fascinated by some of the things he said. And at that time we were struggling. I mean, we went from, I think, what do they say? Something's the mother of all invention, struggles is the mother of all inventions. Necessity. Yeah, and we were coming into this necessity of
Steve Elliot
Necessity, necessity, yeah.
Chris Eckhart
Needing to figure out how to make our farm profitable and we were listening to Gabe Brown from this profitability standpoint but he got onto the soil science side of things and that put us on to Elaine Ingham and Elaine Ingham was talking about all the stuff that was going on in the soil. My dad had talked to me about you know bugs in the soil and he knew that there was some you know importance to that and he'd messed around with some companies that were doing biological way before it was ever popular and they just those companies struggled back then. I mean that was in the 90s where some of these companies doing biologicals where they kind of gained some traction and then and then backed off and there's a lot of trials with mixed results and farmers were pretty chemical heavy at that time too and you get chemical heavy it affects biology in the soil not usually in a positive way and so. But watching Elaine Ingham, I was like, well, I wonder what's in our soil. Like, are we bacteria dominant or not bacteria? Do we have these bugs? Do we have these nematodes? What's going on? Because we were dealing with wireworms and there was always a new product on the market that cost X amount of dollars. It was promising, you know, five bushel increase, five bushel increase. And in my head, I was like, if we put all these chemicals together, we should be growing 255 bushel wheat. But we're not, you know, we're doing 50 bushel wheat. And the input cost just kept going up and up and up. And Elaine Ingham was talking about this message how so much of what you're doing was potentially antagonistic in the soil. And I'm like, well, how do we figure this out? How do we figure out what's going on here? And I Yeah, I mean, we I think it was like a $400 microscope at the time with a camera and we got it and put it together. And then I saw myself I was like, Josh, we got to check your stuff out. So I took my computer and everything over to his house and I'm showing him stuff. And that just started us down this journey that has it's exciting because it's like it's like the never -ending story now at this point you know you get on the chemical side of things and it's very very limited you know you're dependent upon the chemical suppliers of what you're getting this has been very empowering because it's put I feel like more power back in the farmers hands of being able to control their destiny a little bit more so you're going down the chemical side I mean if you follow everybody's recommendations a year your inputs and everything it's spent before before you even get it in your hands because you know what you're gonna need to try and produce and how much it's gonna cost. It's just wasn't, it's not fun. It's not fun.
Steve Elliot
Yeah, yeah. So, since you started down this path, what have you noticed about input costs and your costs of farming compared to yields? I mean, where has that equation changed?
Chris Eckhart
Yeah, so we operate from kind of a place of scarcity just from the point of… e don't have a lot of dollars per acre to work with. And so we're working off of a net profit per acre model. And so the inputs have to make sense for us. It wasn't just this, you know, all out assault on trying to go for soil health. We tried to pencil and things that made sense. And some of the things that really made sense for us early on was when we started playing around with inoculating our seeds with mycorrhizal fungi products. And, you know, we've tried multiple products and stuff and seeing if we can get great crop responses from mycorrhizal. I think most of our organic matter gains have come from implementing mycorrhizals, but just the sheer fact of being able to have crops tolerate heat stress better, you know, increasing yields that way.
I'm not saying that mycorrhizal just the answer by itself, but that's what really kicked us off on the biological training. We're like, oh my gosh, this biological stuff is amazing because it's not just, you know, you put one unit of nitrogen in, then you know you got one unit of nitrogen in the soil. The biological piece is, it's... multiplication working for you in the soil. You know, you put one spore in the ground or on the seed and then that spore can link up with that plant and then multiply, right, and create this exponential effect in your soil. That's what's really amazing about the biological component of it. And so that's increased profitability at the same time cut our need for fertilizer inputs. And so we're seeing that show up on our soil samples by, you know, increasing organic matter, being able to benefit from, you know, there's nitrogen, there's, there's organic nitrogen fixing bacteria that are available for grasses too. I'm, you know, I've had multiple conversations, people, everybody knows that, you know, legumes will fix nitrogen. Grasses can too, if they're given the right environment. And, uh, but you have to have your soil, I think, functioning in a way to really benefit from that type of bacteria in your soil to, to fix nitrogen for your grasses as well. But, you know, if you, if you can save, you know 30 -40 pounds of nitrogen just by having free -living bacteria in your soil that's huge on an input side of things as well. So... It's just freed up some of our, you know, expenses that would have just been tied up in inputs. And so we're still not getting rich by any means, but we're surviving. We're, we're one of those farms that has, you know, maintained at the 2000 acre level where a lot of guys saw the writing on the wall in order to make it. We need to get bigger. We need to get bigger. We need to get bigger because it's all, it's these economies of scale that really end up taking a lot of farmers out of these operations. So somehow we'll be able to maintain it at the 2000 acre mark.
Steve Elliot
Yeah.
Stacie Clary
And that's the size you and your family want. You used the word fun a little bit earlier, like what's fun, what's not fun. And you've stayed in farming. You joined your family farm in 2014, took over. You wanted to farm. This is the level you are finding enjoyment at, works for your family.
Chris Eckhart
Yeah, that's that's very relative, but we've actually given some of our acres up the the last couple years here to another neighbor farmer that came in the area and they're trying to expand their operation, young family and stuff. I like having more people in our area. I don't want to be the last young dumb guy farming in our area. I want to see other people farming too, because we rely on each other, you know, for help. I didn't want to be the guy doing it all. I mean, we have a lot of where I farm out, I guess that would have been a good thing to share too. We have a lot of urbanization pressure going on in our area.
Steve Elliot
Mm -hmm.
Chris Eckhart
Houses make way more money on the soil in our area than farming does and so that's that's a challenge that gets presented to us, but to do everything with limited amount of help, I think a person has to keep things into perspective what works well for their family. And the more productive we can stay on fewer acres gives me more time to spend with my family. I'd rather make 200 acres 20 % more productive than I would to go take on 400 acres and have it less productive. I could just take that time that I was gonna spend on that extra 200 acres and just put it on this other 200 acres, and make it 20 % more productive because it's days, it's hours spent on that other ground too and I think it's better when we can make you know, fewer acres more productive just through making the soil healthier too, right? So it sounds kind of euphemistic, but at the same time, I realized that I have limited capacity. So my dad is my, he's my main helper on the farm. And then, you know, my wife and kids help out where they can, but my dad is my main guy. Like he's my go-to guy. So part -time slash full -time help. So.
Steve Elliot
Mm -hmm. Yeah.
Stacie Clary
Okay.
Steve Elliot
And you gotta have time for fishing.
Chris Eckhart
Gotta have time for fishing, right? Yeah, and it's, boy, when we got, when we rode on the diversification train, we went maybe a little bit too far with that. And there was some years in there where, I think the whole family was just a little bit like, okay, yeah, I mean, we are doing everything, but when do we get to enjoy time for ourselves too? So you can take that too far. So I was like, we're gonna do the commercial markets, all the local markets, we're gonna integrate animals, we're gonna do it all. And we weren't putting quality into anything at a certain point. So there's definitely a balance of quality when you're doing that too, knowing what you do well, and then figuring out how much capacity you have to invest in exploratory operations on your farm.
Steve Elliot
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. And sort of discovering the things that don't work and backing off of them is part of that process.
Chris Eckhart
Yeah, it's, yeah, yeah… That's all I have to say about that.
Steve Elliot
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Stacie Clary
And you said your dad still works with you and is your biggest supporter on the farm. You and your wife took over 10 years ago and started making some changes. How did that dynamic work if you don't mind sharing with your father still involved and you started looking at doing things a little bit differently?
Chris Eckhart
I, boy, Stacie, I look back right now, I mean, we're 10 years down the road, and my dad is incredible from the standpoint of what he let me do. He had this very, you know, I don't wanna say sustainable, but this model that he knew worked and then it was simple. And then we took over and we went off the wall, my wife and I did, because we had access to the internet and we knew everything. And we were gonna try all this different stuff. And I don't know how my dad, like, he stayed so calm and positive through all of it, and he never shared with me that he didn't think it was gonna work. He was, always kind of had the standpoint of, he believed in soil health, and he's the one that challenged me. He goes, you know, Chris, if you can figure out why that piece of dirt there is doing as good as it is, and why that one isn't doing as good, and figure out how to make that piece like this piece, he goes, you'll have something. And very variable yields in our areas. And that was what the organic matter was one of the biggest, you know, when I took soil samples like the organic matter over here is like two and a half and this one's like a half a percent, you know, we just need to get the organic matter up. Simple, right? Let's just get the organic matter up. And so I went off on all these trains of, you know, we were going to graze sheep on our winter wheat in the springtime and implement sheep out there and all the crop rotations and participate in the local market. But one of the big struggles was when we took over from my dad, the wheat price was 10 bushels an acre. My wife and I are sitting down and you were like, yeah, these finances, this works out. We can do OK. And I think we were farming like 1200 acres at a time is what my folks were doing. And I'm like, this all pencils out. We can make this work on these yields. And then the wheat price, I remember going and seeing Dr. David Cole, speak at a local farm thing saying the super cycle in agriculture was over and that we're not going to see these prices again for a really long time and the wheat price went from $10 to $6 to $5 to $4.
And we were sacking wheat like crazy that next year. We were sacking wheat, sacking oats, sacking barley and selling out local feed because that way we could at least get, you know, 10 cents a pound for it and just selling truckloads of local feed as much as we could to just try and make the bottom line work at that point. But my dad was just very positive through that whole deal, very supportive and come to find out from him later. He goes, yeah, I didn't know if some of that stuff was going to work. But, you know, you, you, you pulled a rabbit out of your hat, you know, on different things. He would have these different sayings, right? How old dads have these different sayings and stuff. And I was just like, really? You thought that? Like, I never got that feeling from you. He goes, yeah, he goes, I just knew that you had to figure it out on your own. You he goes, I couldn't hold your hand along the way on this kind of stuff. And I'm just so grateful for how the transition went with my parents, because I hear in so many other people's stories, it has not gone that way. The old generation has a really hard time letting go. And I think that if it was me, I think I would have a hard time letting go. I want to control everything. And I don't, I'm going to have to find out from my dad what the magic formula was for, you know, that letting go piece. But yeah. Yeah, I guess. Yeah. Well, I see.
Steve Elliot
Age. Age. 30 years from now, you'll be ready to let it go. It's like, yeah, it's your problem then.
Chris Eckhart
But I see some of these guys, you know, and they're farming with their sons that are 50, 60 years old. And the... the father is 70, 80 years old and still the primary operator, you know, controlling everything, making the decisions. And they're not letting that new energy come into their operation and letting them go with their creative ideas that they have going on, you know, right? If anything, suppressing that creative energy. And so there has to be room, I think, on those operations for that creative energy to go and explore.
Steve Elliot
Yeah, that happens in all family businesses, not just farming. I mean, that transition is dangerous for continuity of business. It really is. But kudos to your dad. I mean, yeah, for sure, for making that work as well as he did.
Chris Eckhart
Yeah. And we're thankful for sure.
Steve Elliot
What advice would you have for young farmers who do want to change a practice and change the way their farms work into becoming more sustainable and successful.
Chris Eckhart
Um, you know, this sounds very cliché, but those SWOT analysis that they talk about strengths, weaknesses, um, you know, What what you have for an asset in your area what your region looks like as far as supplying I hear things go on You know, we're gonna we're gonna do this kind of a farm and they they don't have a region that supports it very well like support in your area matters but I would encourage somebody to get onto the soil health side of things too, to get a microscope and see what you have going on in your soil. See what you can work with in your area. I think there's definitely some overlooked opportunities that go on out there. I'm looking at some stuff right now, like some of the struggle that we have in our area is... we're messing around more all the time with compost extracts and quality composts are hard to come by. If somebody could get onto creating quality compost and what a quality compost looks like that I could put under my microscope and I could find you know, fungally dominated, diverse bacteria, nematodes, those kinds of things. The amount of compost that I've put under my microscope now and not found a single nematode. I'm just like, it's just, it's frustrating. And so now we're getting to the point where it's like, I have to make my own compost. And so I just got done building a vermicompost bin. I don't have time to do all this stuff, but I'm understanding what a vital component that is on my farm. And that's a quality control piece that I need to control right now.
So we're investing in that. But that's, I think, an opportunity that people could do anywhere. And there's all kinds of waste products that they could make stuff from as long as they understood what the need was for. I don't know if everybody needs a dairy waste compost product, but there's lots of other components out there that they could make products from. And in understanding some of these products, you don't have to buy as much fertilizer as what the university book tells you. There's a lot of things functioning in the soil for you if you focus on that soil health piece that you can work with nature to some degree and still be a productive farmer. So…
Stacie Clary
All right.
Steve Elliot
That was well said.
Stacie Clary
Thank you. Well, this was really informative. I loved hearing about everything that you're doing and the science and the farming and how it's helping your farm and where you've bumped up against some challenges and pulled back. But thank you for sharing all of that with us.
Chris Eckhart
Yeah. Yeah. You bet you guys. This is fun. It was fun chatting with you guys. I appreciate the opportunity to help you folks out as well. So I watch your videos, I feel better now that I can actually contribute, you know, so yeah.
Stacie Clary
Great, thanks! Yeah, thank you. Thanks.
Steve Elliot
We're glad to have you. Thank you, Chris. Appreciate it.
