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Mike Howell (00:08):
The Dirt with me, Mike Howell, an eKonomics podcast where I present the down and dirty agronomic science to help grow crops and bottom lines. Inspired by eKonomics.com, farming’s go-to informational resource. I’m here to break down the latest crop nutrition research, news, and issues. Helping farmers make better business decisions through actionable insights. Let’s dig in.
(00:38):
Well, hello again everyone. Welcome to The Dirt. I’m glad you’re tuning in today, I think we’ve got a really enjoyable episode this week. We’re going to do things a little bit different because it’s Thanksgiving here in the United States, and I wanted to take a few minutes and talk about the Thanksgiving holiday and what it means. Now to help me do that today, I’ve got our nutrient agronomy team here with me. Now, you’ve met all of these people before, but we’ll introduce you briefly to all of them again. First we have Dr. Carl Wyatt, he’s the Director of Agronomy. Carl, how are you this morning?
Dr. Carl Wyatt (01:08):
I’m doing very well, thank you.
Mike Howell (01:09):
Great. We have Dr. Alan Blaylock. Alan’s a senior agronomist based in the Denver, Colorado area. Alan, how are you this morning?
Dr. Alan Blaylock (01:17):
Doing great, Mike. It’s good to be with you again.
Mike Howell (01:20):
And Dr. Cristie Preston, somewhere in Kansas, southeast part of Kansas. Cristie, exactly where are you located again?
Dr. Cristie Preston (01:26):
Columbus.
Mike Howell (01:27):
Many of our listeners I’m sure have heard about the first Thanksgiving way back in November of 1621 when the Plymouth Colony and the Wampanoag shared a harvest feast. Now, this celebration continued for many years, and finally in 1883, President Abraham Lincoln made the last Thursday of November a national holiday, and we’ve been celebrating it ever since. So the first thing I thought we would talk about this morning is what Thanksgiving means to you. For me, Thanksgiving is a time of being thankful for what we have.
(02:01):
A lot of times we seem to focus too much on what we don’t have and things that others may have that we want or focus on how bad things are, like the economy and the high prices of everything, or even how bad the weather was this year. But we really should stop and take a look at all the things we do have, be thankful for what we have. This is going to be different for every individual, but I want to encourage everyone to slow down and think for a few minutes during this Thanksgiving season about all the things you do have that we often take for granted. Alan, if you will kick things off and tell us what Thanksgiving means to you?
Dr. Alan Blaylock (02:34):
Well, Mike, I want to echo some of your thoughts. Thanksgiving is in some ways a holiday we maybe don’t take seriously enough because it is a chance to reflect on the many things that we have. And many cultures have long had celebrations of the harvest, celebrations of thanks to whatever gods they recognize, whatever higher powers they recognize, but thanking for the harvest. And that was part of the intent of the original Thanksgiving and obviously it’s grown a bit beyond that, and we have so many things around the holiday; but I agree with you, we need to back off some times from some of the things that have become our traditions. Really take on an attitude of gratitude for our life and all the things that we have in our modern society that really make our life so much easier than those early pilgrims who really had it rough those early years in the new world.
(03:31):
And also give thanks for those cultures that helped them survive. They depended on each other with the Native American cultures. And so, there’s a great many thoughts that go through my head. And one of the key meanings Thanksgiving has to me is it’s usually a time of family gathering. I have grown children with grandchildren, and every other year we’re usually all together. And so, it’s a time together as family and enjoy each other and celebrate the things that we have as a family.
Mike Howell (04:01):
Cristie, what about you?
Dr. Cristie Preston (04:03):
I echo what Alan said. Great time for family to come together, slow down. Unfortunately a lot of times here in the Midwest, it’s harvest season, so trying to catch people in and out of harvest can be challenging, but knowing that you can have one meal where you can sit down and just hang out even though you’re arguing over cranberry sauces or stuffings, it’s just a time to come together and be with family and watch football, the greatest American pastime.
Mike Howell (04:36):
Very good. Carl, what about for you?
Dr. Carl Wyatt (04:39):
I’d say that time to slow down. Usually for many of us in the ag world, especially when you from out west like I am, harvest has been done for a while, and it’s time to just kick back and clear your brain and hang out with your friends. Have a Friendsgiving or have a traditional family Thanksgiving. I think taking that time to just take it down a notch and get rested up for what’s coming next is important.
Mike Howell (05:02):
Okay, very good. So we all came from different parts of the country and Thanksgiving means a little bit different to each one of us, but I’m sure we can all go back and recall some special Thanksgiving memories over the years. Carl, you want to start this one off? Do you have any special Thanksgiving memories?
Dr. Carl Wyatt (05:17):
Yeah, mine connects back to Christie’s football comment. My parents are from Michigan, as is both sides of my family. They’re from Michigan, so naturally we’re Detroit Lions fans. And my Thanksgiving memory is watching that Thanksgiving Lions game that started in 1934 versus the Chicago Bears. Naturally the Lions lost that first game, and they’ve only won, let’s see, 37 games ever since that first game. So a lot of my memories are of yelling at the TV and trying to get the Lions coaching staff to hopefully hear the plays that I’m calling right or wrong. But it’s always a good memory and I’m hoping this year that we can come out on top against the Buffalo Bills on Thanksgiving.
Mike Howell (05:57):
We’ll all be watching some kind of football I’m sure that afternoon. Cristie, any special memories?
Dr. Cristie Preston (06:02):
I just recall always Thanksgiving was always a day of cooking at grandma’s house. And so, as soon as you got up trying to start getting things prepared for the day and then the Macy’s Day Parade watching it on TV and then of course watching the Puppy Bowl and then finally the football games. But being with family and learning grandma’s recipes, even though I’m definitely not the cook that she is.
Mike Howell (06:32):
Okay. Alan, any memories?
Dr. Alan Blaylock (06:35):
Yeah, a lot of my early Thanksgiving memories around my childhood were kind of birthday memories because my birthday is right around that time, often falls on Thanksgiving Day, and we usually went to grandma’s house, which was about a quarter mile down the road. They had a farm across the street from the one we rented. And so, we were usually gathering at Grandma and Grandpa’s house. And that being my birthday, it was good for me as a kid, right, because that was a big day for me as a young child. And so, I have a lot of memories around those birthday celebrations and even some of the presents I got for Thanksgiving. So I always associated in my early years Thanksgiving with my birthday, which kids, that’s great. My later years, it’s really those memories are getting together with, like I said earlier, my children grandchildren and playing games and sometimes watching football, but family arguments over politics or religion or food or whatever. So yeah, lot of pleasant memories as a youngster around Thanksgiving.
Mike Howell (07:40):
Well, Alan, I can definitely sympathize with you about that Thanksgiving birthday. My birthday falls on Christmas day every year, so I get one or the other. Very rarely do I get both of them. Looking back and thinking back to Thanksgiving when I was a kid, that was the one time a year that we went to my grandparents’ house. They lived probably three hours away and with everything that we were doing, it was awful hard to get away and go see the grandparents very often. But Thanksgiving, you could write it in stone. We were leaving home, we were going to the grandparents’ house for Thanksgiving, and like Cristie said, the ladies would get up and start cooking early that morning. The men were highly encouraged to get out of the house and don’t be anywhere around, so we would always go hunting. That was the first weekend of deer season most of the time, so we always took advantage of that and would be in the woods until close to lunchtime.
(08:28):
We knew lunch would be ready when we got back, so we would eat way too much and everybody would pile around the television and watch whatever football games were coming on. You know what everybody thinks about the professional football games, but for us, Mississippi State and Ole Miss, the Egg Bowl is usually played on Thanksgiving and I remember a lot of Thanksgiving nights sitting around watching the Egg Bowl. So that kind of leads us to the next question. Let’s talk a little bit about the Thanksgiving table and what that looks like. Cristie, if you don’t mind, we’ll start with you this time. What’s the Thanksgiving table look like?
Dr. Cristie Preston (09:01):
So I’ve actually had a variety of kitchen tables for Thanksgiving over the years. I kind of feel like we grew up with the traditional turkey and turkey stuffing. Homemade stuffing, of course, none of this Stove Top. Don’t get me wrong, I love Stove Top stuffing these days, but grandma’s homemade stuffing was always the best, and of course, gravy smothered over everything. But since moving to the Midwest, I came more accustomed to the green bean casseroles. And I thought, “I came from the south, I should be the queen of casseroles.” But no moving to Kansas, that’s the green bean casseroles, the sweet potato casseroles. And one thing that I’m actually looking forward to this year is we’ve had a good crop of okra here out of our personal garden, and so adding fried okra to the menu.
Mike Howell (09:56):
Sounds good. Carl, what’s on your Thanksgiving table?
Dr. Carl Wyatt (09:59):
Like Cristie, I’ve had all sorts of actual physical tables. I remember in my 20s when I think I had a card table that I had Thanksgiving that was barely standing up from Goodwill. And now that I’ve got a little bit fancier table, as I’ve gotten a little older. I can thank the wife for making us buy a real table. But on the table really what sort of, I’ve come from up in the tradition of the New Mexico, Arizona Thanksgiving is a lot of the same sort of staples, the turkey, the mashed potatoes and things, but it’s the sides and the sauces that are much different and most of them are derived from some form of a chili pepper, whether it’s red or it’s green. We kind of have invented this sort of New Mexico desert Thanksgiving that it’s hard to find outside the region. And it’s interesting, not a lot of casseroles for this part of the area, but certainly lots of great sauces that you can smother your food with similar to gravy like Christie mentioned.
Mike Howell (10:51):
Okay. Alan, what’s on your table?
Dr. Alan Blaylock (10:54):
Ours is fairly traditional. We have the turkey as everyone else does. We’ve always got potatoes in some form or another, usually mashed like the candied sweet potatoes, that’s pretty traditional on our table. Rolls, my wife likes to make rolls for Thanksgiving, and usually some vegetables. We don’t have a really elaborate table. My wife doesn’t like to cook a lot of elaborate things. We keep it fairly straightforward, fairly simple, but we usually throw something in there that’s a little bit different. In recent years I’ve started making mushroom soup for Thanksgiving, so that’s been a little practice in my own culinary creativity as it were, but something I like. And so, I’ve started doing that as a Thanksgiving tradition as well. One of my things that I like to have at Thanksgiving, again, it’s both a birthday and a Thanksgiving treat, is pecan pie, or as they say in Georgia, pecan pie, so that’s usually on our Thanksgiving table as well.
Mike Howell (11:54):
As far back as I can remember, I don’t know that our table has changed very much over the years. The people that prepared it have changed, but the menu has been about the same. We’re going to have a turkey and we’re going to have a ham no matter what. Those are both going to be on the table and there’s going to be a lot of different casseroles, broccoli casserole, different green bean casseroles, things like that. There will always be plenty of vegetables, things that came right out of the garden, but the variety of those will be different depending on what was actually harvested that year. But one thing that’s always going to be there is a big bowl of sweet corn. You can’t put too much butter in that sweet corn. You can always see the butter floating around in that sweet corn. There’s always going to be a sweet potato casserole sitting there.
(12:35):
My parents both came from Calhoun County, Mississippi. My dad was from Vardaman, and for people in that area, they are recognized as the sweet potato capital of the world. So we are definitely going to have sweet potatoes on the table. I think it was Cristie that mentioned stuffing. We don’t do stuffing, we do cornbread dressing. And if you don’t know what that is, that is definitely something different, and that’s what I look forward to at Thanksgiving is the cornbread dressing. My grandmother started making that when I was just a little bitty fella and I could eat the whole pan if nobody would stop me. Later on, my mom was the one tasked with making the dressing, and I think hers is even better than my grandmother’s used to be. I do all the cooking now, but that’s the one thing I still don’t do.
(13:17):
I let my mom make the dressing and bring the dressing to Thanksgiving. One of these days I’m going to have to figure out how to make cornbread dressing, but that’s the one thing I haven’t picked up on yet. And there’s always plenty of desserts. We’ll have different kind of cakes and pies, and as Alan mentioned, there’s always going to be a pecan pie. You can start on that end of the table if you want to. You may get in trouble for it though. I started on that end of the table one year and I ate the whole pecan pie and nobody else got any.
(13:43):
So after that, my aunt started making two pecan pies, one to leave on the table and one for me. But my Thanksgiving table is going to be about the same every year. It just changes who’s actually doing the cooking that year. So we’ve talked about the table, let’s talk about a specific food on the table. So I’m going to ask each of you, if you’ll tell me what’s your favorite food at Thanksgiving, and then give a little bit of details about how that food is produced. Alan, you want to start us off?
Dr. Alan Blaylock (14:08):
Yeah, I’ll start you off. One of my favorites, as I mentioned, is pecan pie, but I can’t tell you much about how it’s produced, so I’ll go with the potatoes. I like potatoes in a lot of different forms, and I grew up in potato producing country, and in our neck of the woods in eastern Oregon, an area they call the Treasure Valley, it’s just west of Boise, Idaho. A lot of specialty crops grown, but we talked about Thanksgiving and traditions, but sugar beet harvest and potato harvest were usually finishing up just a bit before Thanksgiving, and those crops were then out of the field. And so, potatoes were always a big staple for us because I grew up in potato country, we always had potatoes around. We occasionally grew some on our farm, but we didn’t have good soil for growing potatoes, but we always had farmers who were willing to give us a bag of potatoes or a few bags, and we stuck them in the pump house.
(15:04):
Potatoes are a pretty interesting crop to grow to produce. They require a lot of intensive management. And commercial potato production is a highly specialized industry, and each variety requires different management, require different nutrient inputs, particularly a little different water regimes. But from start to finish, potatoes are highly specialized. We plant the seed and we’re not planting seed, we’re planting a piece of potato that has the eyes that will sprout a new potato plant. So we call it seed potatoes, but they’re not a seed in the same sense as a grain or some other crop. So we’re planting these seed potatoes and it takes a few weeks for them to come up out of the ground, and they grow fairly slowly at first, and then they start to establish this vine canopy and produce these vines. And eventually underneath the ground, the potato sends out these underground stems, and at the end of those stems, there’s a tuber produced, and that’s the potato that we end up harvesting.
(16:03):
And so, over the course of the season, the plant is storing starch really in those potatoes. And at the end of the season, they’re dug out of the ground. They’re run over a harvester that lifts them out of the soil and dumps them into a truck, and that truck goes to some sort of storage facility, or it may go direct to a processing plant in some cases if they’re being made into french fries or other potato products. But the baking potatoes that you might have on your Thanksgiving table, those often go into storage, and those potatoes may be stored from harvest in the fall, typically September, October harvest, and they may sit in storage even until May of the next year if their conditions are maintained with proper temperature and moisture. Those potatoes can keep very well for a long time. So those baking potatoes are just going into storage hole where potatoes that are processed into other products, like your french fries at McDonald’s, they go to a factory where they’re cut and fried and processed.
(17:06):
So it’s a crop that I’ve worked with over much of my career. I’ve learned a lot about potato production in the last 15 or 20 years working in industry, but it’s again, a highly specialized, highly technical production crop. And I, in all good fun, poke fun sometimes at our corn growers in the Midwest who… And I know I’m oversimplifying, they plant the corn, they spray the corn, they harvest the corn. Where potatoes, you’re doing something with that crop almost every day, so big contrast in how that crop’s produced.
(17:37):
Now, I just want to make one comment about potatoes. In the US, they’re a relatively small acreage compared to some of our other crops. Something a little over a million acres of potatoes grown in the US where we have roughly 90 million acres of corn. But globally, potatoes are very significant. They’re the third most consumed crop for direct human consumption after wheat and rice. So they’re a really important crop globally, even though we may not grow a lot of acres in the US and they have a long history in other parts of the world. Potatoes originated in Latin America, really in the Andes Mountains, and there’s some really bizarre looking potatoes that are grown in some of those areas, but it’s a fascinating crop that I’ve had the chance to work with over the years. Very interesting to me, and I like to eat them.
Mike Howell (18:25):
I do too, Alan. Can’t beat a good potato. Dr. Preston, what is your favorite food?
Dr. Cristie Preston (18:31):
Well, like I said earlier, it’s not traditionally something that I’ve had on my Thanksgiving table, but I’ve been trying to look more into okra just because we had success with it in our garden this year because it was hot, it was dry, even though we did irrigation. I mean, it’s an interesting crop because we had plants that grew over eight feet tall. My husband can attest that you definitely need to wear gloves and long sleeves whenever you’re harvesting it because it gets completely sticky. But was trying to dive deeper into actual okra production and found out it was originated in Africa. And some of the top states that produce okra in the US are Texas, Georgia, Florida, and of course, California. And we did pretty good here in Kansas. It’s a very interesting crop. It’s kind of like a tomato. If you keep picking it, it’ll keep producing it.
(19:30):
And by George, if you don’t harvest it every two to three days, those pods, they elongate and they get fibrous and then it’s not any good anymore. But looking at okra production, yields range all over the place. It’s actually a pretty hardy crop for being able to be grown over various pH range. But one thing that I did note was the amount of nitrogen that an okra plant takes up, which it actually uptakes and removes quite a bit of nitrogen per ton. So I’m looking forward to, we’ve been trying to play around with recipes, different flour to corn meal ratios, and trying to figure out how to best prepare it for this year’s Thanksgiving.
Mike Howell (20:16):
Outstanding. Nothing like fried okra. My dad grows okra in the garden every year and it gets eight to 10 feet tall, and he makes a lot more than he can even give away, so it doesn’t take much okra to make a lot of okra. Carl, what’s your favorite Thanksgiving food?
Dr. Carl Wyatt (20:30):
Yeah, great question. So my Thanksgiving food is more of a process here before and after. Before you have your roast turkey, so that’s the staple that most of us have at our table, but it’s the gravy that I want to switch up. There’s a great recipe for green chili gravy, and it sounds interesting. I’m reading your folks’ body language here. It’s hot, it’s got some heat to it, but it’s still got that gravy taste that pairs well with the turkey, and you can smother it, however you will, on everything else on your plate, save for the cranberry sauce. On the after, it’s after Thanksgiving, the day after Friday, and that’s where you can take your turkey and make turkey enchiladas. Super good and that pairs really well with their red chili sauce. Now the interesting thing about chili, especially the Mexican chilies, New Mexico number nine or Anaheim or number eight, their green chili is the unripened version of the fruit.
(21:23):
And that’s got a crunchy taste, a crunchy mouthfeel, and it’s got more heat on the front end of it, when you go to taste that and there’s like professional chili sommeliers out there that can tell you all kinds of interesting words about the chili taste. I just know if I like it or not. The red chili is a ripened version of that same fruit and that has more of an earthy sort of backend heat to it. And so you can mix and match which meats you pair it with. I like to have my enchiladas with the red sauce. I like to have my pork and my beef with a green. I think it pairs super well.
(21:56):
So I naturally prepared some ag facts about chili production, and I think it’ll surprise you. Green chili or red chili, depending on when you harvest, it has been a staple of New Mexico culture since the late 1500s. It’s thought that the Conquistadores brought green chili up from Mexico into the Rio Grande River Valley in the late 1500s, and that’s where it started to spread to different pueblos along the river. So you have different varieties that are at these different pueblos. You have the Yakima pepper, you have the Jemez pepper, you have the Zia pepper. And so that sort of spread throughout New Mexico cuisine along the river.
(22:32):
And it wasn’t until the late 1800s that New Mexico State University, that’s the Lion Grant School, they formed a chili pepper improvement program, and that’s where we started to see the modern chili production. And I’m saying chili with an E on the end. It is the correct way to spell it, according to every Mew Mexican that’s ever lived. New Mexico State is actually home now to the Chili Pepper Institute, and they have one of the only chili pepper research institutes and breeding programs out there worldwide.
(22:59):
And there’s a great video out there of a reporter, a very brave reporter at the Chili Pepper Institute eating a ghost pepper live on air. He didn’t think it was going to be as hot as it was, and judging from the reporter’s reaction, I think he surprised himself and his taste buds. So chili pepper’s production is pretty small now relative to some of these other crops we’ve talked about. New Mexico has about 9,000 acres depending on water supply in the markets every year that gets get planted into a chili since we’re about 54 million a year to the region. Interestingly, New Mexico produces about 77% of our domestic chili supply. There’s other regions scattered throughout the Western United States, but if you look at the Twitter feud between the New Mexico governor and the Colorado governor, there’s a great deal of debate about who produces the actual best chili pepper here in the United States. My vote is with New Mexico naturally.
Mike Howell (23:52):
Of course, it would be Carl, but we appreciate the insight on the chili peppers. So when I was preparing this episode and looking at the different questions, I thought this was going to be an easy question for me, but turns out this is probably the most difficult question for me because I like to eat so much and there’s just really not anything on the table that I don’t think is great. I’ve already talked about the cornbread dressing, and I’m not going to touch that one because I don’t even know for sure what all goes into that. Alan kind of mentioned to pecan pie, that’s one of my favorites. I told you I ate the whole pecan pie one year. I’ll touch on that one in just a little bit. The US produces between 250 and 300 million pounds of pecans each year, and that’s going to be about 80% of the total world supply.
(24:35):
Most of these pecans are grown in Texas and Georgia. They produce over two thirds of the pecans produced in the entire nation. Pecan trees take about seven to 10 years before they’ll actually produce a full supply of nuts, but once it starts producing, it can produce those nuts for over a hundred years. Pecans will grow all year long. Harvest is going to begin in September and October here in the southeast, and then it’s going to progress westward. The further west you are, the later that pecan is going to mature and fall out onto the ground. So states in the far west growing areas, states like Arizona may not actually harvest their pecans until sometime in March, depending on the weather conditions.
(25:13):
Another crop that I’ve just got to talk about a little bit today is sweet potatoes, and I love a sweet potato casserole. Now you can put the pecan topping on top of that sweet potato casserole, but I kind of prefer mine with the marshmallow topping on it, but I’ll eat it either way, and it’s really hard to beat. But sweet potatoes are a crop that are really growing in terms of acres and consumption here in the US in recent years, and that’s due largely to the new popularity of sweet potato fries. They seem to be a more healthy option for a lot of people in their diets. But the top five production states in the US are North Carolina, Louisiana, California, Mississippi, and Texas.
(25:51):
The US produces over three billion pounds of sweet potatoes each year. Sweet potatoes are one of these foods that are not only good, it’s good for you. They’re full of vitamin A, full of vitamin C, really low in cholesterol and a good source of fiber. Sweet potatoes are grown primarily by planting cuttings or what we call slips in the early spring. They’ll grow throughout the year and then harvest will begin in the September timeframe and continue on through November.
(26:18):
Well, I want to thank all of our agronomists for joining me today and talking about Thanksgiving and what Thanksgiving has meant to them. As we close, I just want to wish each one of you a happy Thanksgiving to you and your family. I want to encourage everyone to reflect on the holiday and what it’s really all about. Also, I hope that we’ve made it clear today that Thanksgiving is different for each region of the country, but it all comes back to the farmers. None of the foods that we have talked about today would be on your table without the farmers producing them. These farmers are usually in the fields shortly after sunup, and it’s not uncommon to find them in the field long after the sun’s gone down. It’s harvest time for a lot of these people. While we’re enjoying our Thanksgiving dinner, a lot of these farmers may still be in the field getting the crop in so we can enjoy the fruits of their labors.
(27:03):
But I want you to ask yourself another question. Why do these farmers do what they do? I can assure you it’s not for the money. If you ask most any farmer why they farm, they’re going to tell you that it’s because it’s a way of life. They love to do what they do, and they take great pride in what they do. And if you’ll continue that conversation for any length of time, you’re going to find out that these farmers love the land, they want to conserve the land, and they see it as their duty to manage it in a way that’s productive, not only now, but for generations to come. Want you to never forget that Americans enjoy the most bountiful and safest food supply in the world, and it’s all because of these farmers and what they do every day. So I want to encourage everyone to slow down for a moment this Thanksgiving season and give thanks for what you have and for the farmers that keep the food on our tables.
(27:54):
Well, listeners, it’s time to talk about our Friday night football game, again. The Poplarville Hornets defeated the Newton County Cougars this weekend with a score of 49 to 21. Really good ball game, and the Poplarville Hornets advanced to the third round of the playoffs now. This week, they’ll be taking on the Stone County Tomcats, so they’ll be on the road for this week’s action. Can’t wait for Friday night to see how that comes out. Only three more wins away from the state championship, so it’s getting really close. Going to be a lot of hard football games here in the near future.
(28:28):
Also, want to remind everyone that this is going to be our last podcast for this year. We’re going to be taking a break and we’ll come back to you in March. So for those of you that have been listening for the football scores, you can catch those on my Twitter account. I’ll try to tweet those out. You can find me on Twitter pretty easily. Just look for those updates every week there and you can keep up with the tailgating menus and the football results on Twitter.
(28:57):
From all of us here at The Dirt, I want to wish each one of you a happy holiday season, a happy Thanksgiving, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year’s, and we’ll see everybody back in March with fresh new episodes of The Dirt. Now, in the meantime, I want to encourage everybody to go back and catch up on some of these episodes that you may have missed during the regular year. They’re all still available on your regular podcast channels, so go back and have a listen at those. And until next time, this has been Mike Howell with The Dirt.
