 I'm Dan Rasmussen. I ranch and live on a family ranch in Southern Mlatt County. Ranch that my grandfather homesteaded. I'm the third generation, fourth generation is here. So we're going to talk about drought planning. But in this segment, it's going to be drought planning from the early days on this ranch that would be 30 years ago when we started more intensive grazing management. Hello, my name is Tans Herman. I'm with the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service. I'm here with Dan Rasmussen of the 33 Ranch to discuss drought planning, but also the factors associated with the drought status that we're currently in throughout most of our state. We want to provide some resources from the Grassland Coalition and partners to folks that are struggling to make some hard decisions and lay the groundwork for being prepared for the next time it's dried. Because by the grace of God, it will rain again, and we'll see some normal conditions moving forward at some point, whether that's this year or two years from now. We'll eventually get back to a situation where folks are pretty happy about what they're doing. Dan, take it away. Thank you, Tans. So we're going to do this in two segments, and we're going to start with the Before the Drought segment right now, and the next one we'll be working through a drought plan, trigger dates, and goals. So before the drought, our goal would be to have healthy soil and healthy rangeland. And so now on this visual here, this sheet, we have a line going across. On the left side of the line is season long grazing. On the right hand side of the line is more rotational grazing. And as you move, the way I've got this set up, as you move to the right, go from season long to a slow rotation, faster rotation, and a more management-intensive grazing. So the point of this is that everybody is on this line someplace, and that is determined by your resources, whether it is financial, time, labor, and so forth. And so it's not like we're comparing one to the next. It's just some people, the best place to be is over here, and some people, some ranch is the best place, is farther to the right. But understanding that as you move to the right through increased management, the organic matter gets higher in the soil. Soil water infiltration gets better. Plant diversity goes up, and stocking rate can potentially in time go up. On this side is just the opposite. Organic matter is going down if you're in a season long grazing situation. Soil water infiltration is going down. Plant diversity is going down. Stocking rate is going down. So if you're on this side of the line, you're over here farther, you're going to be able to withstand. Your pastures will be able to withstand a drought better than if you're over here. Season long grazing is using a season long approach, having cattle in from, say, the 1st of May to the last day of October in the same pasture. And as palatable plants are growing, the cattle are grazing them off. And then they regrow, cattle come back and re-graze that nutritious, easy to digest leaf. There are plants that are often just not even grazed because the cattle have missed their palatable time. So you can look across a pasture, a season long pasture, and see some pretty good grass there. But on closer inspection, there are areas that are overgrazed in plant species. And that reduces the plant diversity. So over here, plants get more rest. Plant diversity goes up. You have shallow-rooted plants and deep-rooted plants that take advantage of moisture profiles. As organic matter goes up, this soil will hold water. 1% of organic matter can increase the infiltration rate by about 1 inch of rain. So it's very common for pasture range land in this area on the graph to be in the 1% organic matter and over in this area to be 2% or 3% or higher. And so improved grazing practices, build soil health, and the management must give the pasture's time for soil to become healthier before increasing stocking rates. This can take years to go from here to here. And we're talking about it now because this is a good time to be thinking if you're over on this side, how do you make progress to move farther to the right? Management or holistic resource management is a very good educational tool to learn how to make this move. And it's never indicated that it should be done overnight. It takes time. Education is the key to learning how to move to the right on this line graph. Hello there. We're here again with Dan Rasmussen of the 33 Ranch, talking about an actual written drought plan and the value it has not only for this ranch, but the value that we're trying to convey to folks that have written drought plan or contingency plan, whatever name you want to associate with it, how it can really help you in times of crisis like we're in make some decisions that are difficult to make in the right priority order so that you don't regret things later. Thank you, Tans. This is the drought plan that my brother-in-law and partner and I, Blake Layman, put together in the year 2000 when we went to the Ranching for Profit School. Since then, we have implemented this plan. This would be the third time. And we have changed it a little bit. And I've learned that as you go through a drought, it's a learning experience. And you become a little smarter about how to go into and come out of and survive the next one. So I'll go through the main points on our drought plan. Our overall goal is to protect the land and the resource, which is soil and grass for wildlife and for our cattle and to keep the core cow herd intact. And to explain that a little further, it's a cow-calf operation. We have yearlings that are summer commodity days. Some are organic that we sell through the summer and we have a custom yearling herd usually too. So we can start selling yearlings early in the year and in a really dry year or a series of dry years. So these aren't all in the order of priority, but I would say that leaving adequate standing forage to supply litter for soil health is the main priority. Now we work off of that by measuring what we leave behind, which the goal is to leave 12 to 1500 pounds of forage per acre. And sometimes we measure this with the grazing stick and sometimes clipping, but that's the goal. During a drought year, that number can go down to 800 pounds per acre, and which NRCS defines that as maintenance, maintaining what you have as, but to keep improving soil health, you need more than 800 pounds. So maintaining adequate litter in the pastures is a result of the amount of forage you leave behind when you come out of the pasture. Part of this, part of this drought plan is that once we have a dry year, if the soil's healthy enough, it's a lot easier to go through that first one, but once you've been through one and it looks like the next consecutive year is gonna be dry, then we start implementing with trigger dates. Down here I have the trigger dates for de-stocking as we sell cows in the winter, and next we start selling yearlings. And we sell those classes of yearlings, organic commodity, purchased yearlings, home-raised yearlings and custom ones in an order that is the best for whatever market we have, but second year into a drought, we start looking April 1st to start getting out from under some of the yearlings. And a year like this, we may be all done with the yearlings by the middle of May. In 2004, they were all gone by the 20th of May. Back to our overall goal. If we can keep that cow herd, that basic core cow herd, the most productive cows intact, that's our goal. So another goal is to avoid being backed into a corner and making decisions that you don't want to, that are gonna hurt the business more. Planning ahead can avoid that. It also helps with stress. Having a plan and working through this plan in a timely manner can avoid a lot of the stressful parts of going through a drought. We know we're gonna have financial hit, that's just a given, but thinking about the land, we need to be de-stocking at an appropriate time so that the soil is good, the land is healthy, and our pastures are in reasonable shape so that when it does rain, which it will, the grass will grow and grow quickly. This, that's our main goal. Reducing stress is a big deal, a big part of drought planning and having a plan puts us in the driver's seat at least from making decisions in a low stress environment. Back with Dan Rasmussen on our rapid fire questions, and Dan, I'd like you to tell me the story of when you decided you needed to do something in relation to the drought conditions we're currently facing. Thanks, Tans. Well, here on the 33 Ranch, we started experiencing the drought conditions in 2021, and it was pretty evident during the winter that we were going into a drought, and by, as we got into the summer, we started planning to sell our yearlings early, and our stocking rate was accurate enough and we had every, we had a little more rain than in Northwest part of South Dakota, which helped us and so we were, we didn't have change much, but we did sell our yearlings a month early. So I'd say mid-summer 2000 or early summer, late spring 2021, we were all already looking at what's the next step. All right, Dan, I'm gonna ask you some questions. We are asking for some fairly concise answers that may lack some detail and for our viewers, if something triggers in you and you need more information, the automatic answer is to reach out to the Grassland Coalition, reach out to your local NRCS office or area range specialist for some additional information on those topics. So number one, Dan, we speak to the rancher who's out of grass right now and feels like they're out of options. What do you think the first steps they should take are? I think the second and the last 10s, the date is 5th of April, I believe, and if you're out of grass, the 5th of April and have been out of grass, you know, a winter and part of last summer, then it's time to destock. And that's already started in South Dakota. There have been West River, there have been a lot of cattle go through the sale barns, but think of it from the plant standpoint. The drought was stressful, being grazed during a drought was stressful to the plant. And it's becoming more vulnerable to having weeds, other plants and other grasses to move in, annuals near it. So now if we get a little rain and an inch of rain and things start growing, and then it's grazed again and then we're dried out for the summer, that's gonna be a seriously stressful event for the native grasses and we'll be very hard on the pasture. What we're looking for is range of management that creates resiliency, so that when the drought is over and we get a rain, the grass will come back quickly. So it's important then to allow that growth to take effect and really not hit those plants until they're at least at the three to maybe four leaf stage so that there is some real root reserves built through photosynthesis as tempting as it is to hit that green lush grass and we know how livestock are. They're leaning on the fences to get out and get onto that lush growth. For the long standing performance of the range resource on any given ranch, it's important to give that as much of a chance to grow as possible. And I think Tans, that we just keep needing to ask the question, does nature want us to do? And take the stress off the plants is really what nature wants this time of year. If we look at the historic buffalo migrations, they weren't on every acre of green spring growth all the time. Certainly if you've got livestock and you need to be on pasture because your feed resources are gone, make careful decisions as to what pastures will be utilized and at what stocking rate and for how long. Those are key considerations for folks. Yep, and de-stocking in a good rotation can really reduce the time the cattle are on those pastures for that few days. Certainly, okay. Dan, I'd hoped that you might be able to help folks recognize where they are themselves with respect to the priority of ranch resources. And I'm curious for the 33 ranch how you would rank ranch resources such as land, cattle, grass, equipment, and so on. Even human resources. Yeah, Tans, the range land is probably the most important thing to look at when we're talking about drought because that's our bread and butter. And soil health is the key to coming out of the drought and having more grass to graze during a drought. So for quite a few years, I'd say 30 on this ranch, we've focused on that from the standpoint of wanting to improve our range management, subdividing pastures, rotating more, giving the pastures more rest. And the cattle are actually a tool to manage that. We need cattle for healthy land. We need it for our income. We need it, the cattle are a great fit to pasture management, sheep work too, even goats can work. But we're, so I would say that's the priority, but you change one thing, it affects everything. And that's the whole process of holistic resource management, is identifying your priorities and then looking at how a change will affect everything else. You have family and financial and the cattle and livestock and the environment, you know, the land. And they're all equally important. But when it comes to drought, we have to start focusing first on the plants and plant health. Yeah, the land is a lasting legacy. Cattle have a service life, right? Yes. You're not necessarily married to them. So wonderful, thank you. And the question is, oh, you started. I did. Sorry. It's okay, this is homemade. All right. How does the 33 ranch diversify income streams to protect profitability? Well, from the time we went through the ranching for profit school in 2000 and before that, we've looked at different opportunities here to diversify. And we've tried a few and it's a good thing to do. Some work and some don't. Now we tried retail meat and we did that for a while and that did work for a while. We've certified organic and we do have a premium on some of our cattle. We keep organic and sell as yearlings. And it gives us a little more flexibility in marketing. We certify the rest of the commodity cattle as NHTC and it opens some doors. So the premium isn't always as big as I'd like but that's, it does open doors to bring more people into the marketing part of it. I think there's, we have yearlings. We have cow cap yearling operation. We can sell our yearlings early in a drought like we're in right now. We can, I think we can look and we have looked and are open to other classes of cattle. Sheep goats, there's potential there since they, especially goats, can eat quite a few of the more woody species that are high in tan and the cattle won't eat. We have a lot of cedar trees and oak trees and ash and elm on this place. So, and shrubs, sage. And so we're, I think it's a good idea to be open to that. If this drought persists, that's probably, we'll look harder at those options. Some conversations to have with the other stakeholders in the ranch. Yes, yeah. Great. I think everyone would agree, Dan, that there's uncertainty in the ag world. What will markets do for the commodities that I raise? There's conflict overseas. Will this drought last? Or are we headed into a more normal spring? Even in that situation, there might be lowered forage production just because of the dry summer that we had in 2021. I'd like to know how do you make decisions in an environment where you don't know the future, but you do have the track record of the past to work from. Yeah, Tans, that's the life we live. We don't know what the cattle market's gonna be six months from now. And we certainly don't know what the weather will be. So we have to look back and look back at what's happened in the last year from the drought standpoint. And behind you is a drought plan and have a drought plan with trigger dates so that it takes the weight off your shoulders of trying to figure out what's coming. We can look back now and say that, okay, we've had a year of really serious drought, West River, our soil profile is very dry going down deep. So we know we're behind the eight ball just starting out. With that uncertainty, NOAA has a prediction through September of being below normal moisture levels and above average for temperature. So if they're right, then we're really behind the eight ball and looking at it from the plant standpoint, they've already been stressed. The plants have been stressed last year, 2021. And some of these, some areas of the state were dry in 20. So looking forward, I like to ask the question, what does nature want us to do and nature wants us to protect those plants? And so make decisions based on how we're gonna come out of this drought when it does rain with some vitality in the pastures and destocking lowering numbers so that they can have more rest in the rotation is a great way to do it. Dan, is there a minimum amount of surface protection or plant litter residue that you aim to maintain on the ranch and why is that? Yeah, so litter is last year's plants fallen down, incorporated on the top of the soil that provides the protection that the soil needs for the bugs. And so a good estimate of how, and what I use, how much to leave is to, is a handful, a heaping handful of litter out of a square foot. So you take your feet and make a 90 degree and a square, you know, one foot on each side and just dig up the litter. And if you've got a handful of litter, two handfuls, that's about 900 pounds, 900, 2000 pounds per acre. That's a good rule of thumb. That leaves protection, that's ground cover. So looking in your pasture and seeing bare ground is gonna be, is not good for the soil. And you're gonna see problems come from that. If there's litter and protection on the soil, when the rain hits it, it doesn't erode, it doesn't wash soil away, that provides food for the bugs and it cools the soil off. I've seen people that have these little bearing temperature guns that thermometers, they can shoot a laser at the bearing on a machine and get a temp back. And if you shoot that on the ground, point that on the ground, on bare ground on 100 degree day, the ground can be as high as 120 degrees. And if you pull the litter away and check the temperature, it can be in the 80s or low 90s. So as that temperature gets higher, the soil biology stops. And ideal soil biology temp is in the 80 degree range, 78, 80, within five or 10 degrees. But then, so it's really dramatic that what that protection can do to just extend your, the amount of time that the roots are actually doing something growing. And creating organic matter and just biological, all the good things that the bugs do. Certainly. And we could probably also safely say that that litter cover is a protection from evaporation. It's like an umbrella for us sitting in the park on a hot sunny day. Yes. Or blanket in the winter time to keep some warmth in so that biology continues to work. And that is the future organic matter in the soil. And as that organic matter goes up, 1% to 2% to 3% to 4% each percent. And we'll give you what is a 28,000 gallons of storage capacity in that acre. Or it's about a one inch of rain. And that's a lot of difference. 1% to 5% is four inches of rain that would have normally run off down the creek. Ended up in the Missouri. That's right. That's money in the bank. It just doesn't have a dollar sign associated with it until you go to market. To build off of that last question, Dan, about plant residue or litter, as we call it, on the soil surface, I know folks that would consider that wasted grass. What benefits does that quote unquote wasted grass provide in terms of building resilient soil? So probably the most important thing we can do to look at pasture management is start with the soil, soil health. And that gives us the soil that's healthy, absorbs water quicker. It comes back after a drought when they talk about resilience. Resilience is being able for a pasture to go dormant during a drought and then come back very strong when there's rain. That's what nature intended. This native rangeland is built to do that if we work with it. And by working with it, we need to leave some litter and standing forage. And so on this ranch, our goal is 12 to 1,500 pounds we want to leave per acre behind when we go out of the pasture for that year. And if we were in there for 30 days or 10 days, whatever, that's what we want to leave behind. And what that does is it creates that armor on the soil. That's the future organic matter right there. And so that's really the bottom line. How do we manage these pastures so that there's adequate rest and especially West River adequate rest and standing forage that will go down, either your cattle knock it down depending on how congregated or how dense the herd is or just snow in nature brings it down because that works too. And then makes contact with the soil, covers that bare ground, provides shade, and then the bugs consume it. Dan, what does that look like if it's standing forage? What does that look like in terms of inches of above ground height to compare to the pounds per acre? So on our pastures here, I figure about 225 pounds per inch. And so we're at 10 inches, that's 20 to 50. Since we like to leave about 1,200 pounds, we're talking about an 8 inch grass going out and having an average of 6 to 8 inches left behind. Certainly. And not every inch of that plant is weighted equally when you put the base of those plants as much heavier than the leaves towards the top. And that's where the importance of the grazing stick to get the calculations comes from or better yet, just that clipping where we clip away. Yeah, and that's ideal. Clipping and getting your ground truth in those inches, you can do it with like people learn at the grazing school with a scale and a hoop and clippers and drying it out. And it is actually pretty simple process. But not all plant communities are created equally as far as weight per acre. And it's different from one ranch to another. Yeah, and we're not doing research. So we need to just have general be close. And that's why we ground truth the grazing stick so we know how many inches there are with a clipping. And then you don't have to do it every year. All right, Dan. So my job with NRCS is as a soil health specialist with a focus on grazing lands. And among the things that I try to convey to the public and to the land managing ranchers of our state is that we've got to have the soil covered with residue. We need to minimize or in case of grazing lands, optimize disturbance. So grazing would be a disturbance to the resource. We need to maximize the living roots in the soil for as many days of the year as possible. We need to enhance diversity wherever possible. And if we're talking about a land use that doesn't always have livestock inherently present, then we need to incorporate livestock wherever possible. Five principles, residue cover, optimum disturbance, diversity, living roots, and livestock incorporation. So with that framework in mind, and I know you employ those principles here on the 33 ranch, do you expect your land to recover rapidly when the drought breaks in favorable conditions return? So Tanz, that is the kind of a million dollar question. And since I can't see into the future how that's going to play out, we won't know until we get there. But what I do know is past experience. So this ranch was a season long graze ranch until 91. And in 91, we started with a simple rotations and have added pastures, subdivided paddocks ever since. So when we went through the 85 drought, it was a long time. It was several years before we got back to normal production. But we thought it was normal. Now, after we started rotating in 2004, we came back much quicker. And that was a similar drought. And in 2012, we snapped back out of that pretty well. I expect that this year we will even be doing better. I just see an improvement over time by implementing rotational grazing in long rest periods. So along with those factors, I presume that you're building that recovery capacity in the plants because you've got more robust roots and living roots with the diversity of species and its courtesy of grazing management. And like you showed us on one of your graphs earlier, there's this progression from on the left season long grazing to on the right management intensive grazing where moves might be as frequently as daily or seven or 10 days or something like that. And what you're telling me there is that just like an athlete, grass needs rest to recover quickly. Yeah, and so we figure about 12 months average between graze here. Sometimes, since we kind of move things around, we could be in 14 months, some pastures of rest. So that I think is the key identifying understanding your environment, which is going to be different than an environment east of Chamberlain. Being out here 130 miles west of Chamberlain, we're in an environment that needs rest. And we need a letter. We need protection. And I think what's going on is that as the longer we do this, the healthier the roots become of these plants. They become, there are more plants, the soils healthier, and is able to hold water better. And it does rain. They're in a good place to take off. But we just have to observe and adapt. That's the job of being a rancher. Dan, would you talk to us and share with us what it looks like on the 33 ranch? A, how important is planting your annual grazing rotation, and B, what does it look like? So having a grazing plan that serves a lot of purposes, the first thing going into it, and this sounds a little contradictory, but probably your grazing plan will change once you get into the summer. If you're saying our grazing season starts first of May and ends April 31, you've grazed year round. But we just don't know what nature's going to throw at us. But having the plan in place lets you ask the question, what does nature want us to do here? And nature wants us to graze pastures at a different time. So you're adjusting season to use and shuffling them around. Sometimes from a management standpoint, that's really hard to do. But where I see on this ranch, where we went, for example, when we changed our calving date to May, from March to May, those pastures went from primarily shorter grass to a nice mix, native mix. We started seeing Western replaced buffalo grass, big blue, little blue, Psydos grommets start coming into those pastures. They were just being hit too hard when those grasses were vulnerable in early May and late in early June. So just having being set up so that you can adjust season of use is a big deal for pasture diversity, plant diversity. Just, I think that everyone's going to understand that. But just to be absolutely clear, when you say the phrase season of use, is it correct to say or switch that out with turn in date for any given pasture or paddock? Yeah, so in this place, we graze 12 months out of the year with all classes of cattle. So what season of use would be when is that pasture graze? Is it the first of May, or is it the first of July, or is it the 10th or the first of December? Every plant has its cycle and it starts out with a tiller a lot of times in the fall and then that tiller gives it that energy to take off and produce a good plant during the summer. Well, if we graze that tiller in December or November and then expect to graze it again first of May, now we've really depleted and stressed the plant. So if it's okay to do that, graze that tiller in first of November, but not every year. And if we do that every year at the same time, even not going back, it starts decreasing that plant. And so we're putting, we're stressing it. And stressing plants is what nature wants us to do. But only, but then there has to be a rest. And if that rest is adequate, now we've made it better. We've invigorated the roots. We've transferred some of that plant material to manure and we've got hoof impact. That's all good stuff. It's just we have to understand these plants need rest and we need to figure out how much and graze them at a different time every year. So some ranches will use this period of drought to enhance their ability to weather the next one because we know what's coming, right? Droughts seem to fall in cycles by making investments in water infrastructure, pipelines, tanks, maybe new dam, maybe new well, things of that nature. Dan, I'd like to know what role water developments play on this ranch. Well, we've got a lot of shallow dams here. And they've been through every drought we've been through in the past, I've been through 40 years, they dried up. And we still had grass. We had grass that we could graze and maintain pasture health. So this has been an ongoing thing on this ranch for my lifetime is more pipelines, getting more wells, row water, that kind of sources. And what we're accomplishing with it is being able to treat our pastures better. When if you've got a thousand acre pasture and one dam, you know where the heaviest use is gonna be. So with good management, if you've got, we can keep that grazing pressure kind of distributed throughout the ranch better. And this is a good time. We're in the middle of a drought. If you don't have good water distribution, then this is a good time to start. There could be some cost share programs that would help get going. It might be too late for this drought, but certainly it's a key thing in maintaining pasture health and keeping cattle on the ranch. Right, Dan, it's tough time. Folks get a little stressed out when in crisis mode, right? If they find themselves in that situation without a plan and without a lot of options. So we'd like to know how important personal and business relationships are in a time like this for you. Well, I've been through now a few droughts. And one of the things I've noticed is that for sure as you go, each time we go through it as a ranch, we're a little smarter on the other side of it. We learn something and we're gonna learn something, some things, getting through droughts a little easier on this one. So I think it's a good idea if you haven't been through before serious drought where you were actually managing the money and in the cattle, it's a good idea to talk to somebody that has. A mentor can really be valuable. The Grassland Coalition has a mentor program and you can go on the website and there are categories, people there that... So having a team is really critical from the standpoint of managing. Having the banker, the mineral guy, the people that buy your cattle, they need to be on your side. Have your interest in mind. And if they're not, then they don't belong on your team. So yeah, that's... Dan, you've indicated that the 33 Ranch has been implementing rotational grazing strategies at least in some capacity since the early 90s, 91 or so. Now with this many years of experience, 30 plus years in existence, curious what you see the lasting values are of having a grazing and a drought plan in place. Well, a good drought plan starts with a grazing management plan. And in previous low videos, we've gone through, Tanz and I have gone through this sheet, which shows the advantages of following a grazing plan and increasing the rest and litter and protection for the ground and moving to the right on this line makes you put you in a place during a drought that is more responsive and the pastures will come back after the drought quicker. The drought plan is just a response, a plan to when you dry out, you just have to respond. And sometimes making a decision is the hardest thing to do. A drought plan really takes that weight off your shoulders and makes these decisions and planning easier. So long term, a drought plan is really just a good grazing plan with some trigger dates put in.