 So my name is Erin and I work at the Central Grasslands Research Extension Center full-time and try to farm and ranch part-time on the weekends and in this position it's given me the opportunity to work with a lot of people like Carl Hoppe and others who have educated me about different opportunities through the SARA program and it's sort of opened up my eyes to different opportunities for management like bale grazing and so with these opportunities it's hopefully going to give me an opportunity to transition back to an operation that will be sustainable for myself and for our family as well. I'm Drew Gardler just want to say thanks to SARA it's been a really enjoyable process so far. I worked away for about ten years from the farm and I came back in 2015, worked all over the world, saw a lot of different techniques in agriculture, different regional schemes and ecosystems. So this is where we live where we grew up 14 miles north of the South Dakota border. I've moved into my great-grandfather's home renovating that. It's been a long and slow process. Right here is where my great-grandfather settled and our bale grazing area that we're going to focus on is right over here. She should also pay attention to the surrounding landscapes just looking at the degradation of the land. So this progresses from 57 to 95 in 57 early 50s where we're bale grazing or where we were going to bale graze. They had farmed it to the point where it wasn't even raising a oats crop and they walked away from it. It blew away the soil and you can see all that white that is not alkali, that's clay pan. The soil is blown away, it's just down to the subsoil and to the east that's sandy hilltops that are blown away. 2004, the bale grazing area where we're going to be working on that progressed. They didn't plant it back to anything back in the 50s but it reverted back to native mostly Lugrama and buffalo grass, some sedges, but to the east look at all that washing. This was farmed wheat on wheat on wheat for about a hundred years. So this strip farming wheat on wheat on wheat, this area was planted back to alfalfa and brome grass and that was just left to go to whatever reverted to Lugrama and buffalo grass. So 2010 there was an ownership change and the owner requested the person that rented it plant in alfalfa. It was better than cropping it but you see in alfalfa field there's still a lot of background. To the west it's still slow on its growth back. So focused in on our area that up there is more alkaline high water table. First thing we did was trenched in water lines. There's a water tank here and I'm actually in the process of trenching to get a water tank down here. 2017 we had eight inches of annual precip that year so that's why you see a lot more of the clay pan shine through. It wasn't covered up by vegetation. And the area to the north of here has degraded at the same rate and so you're seeing high water table that's where the alkaline's come from and it's traveling down. So given some of the history that Drew talked about there was some obvious concerns that came up of course. We watched the soil loss happening whether it was through summer fall practices to the north of us. Different management that was happening on that landscape over time. We also saw concerns with water management. There's been several talks throughout this conference of watching water run off the landscape and I think one of Drew's main priorities and objectives with his operation is to try to increase that water holding capacity as much as possible. And I know that we are in East River and so the challenges here are very different than the challenges that we have out west. This year for instance we were loving it. The moisture was we were ready for more if we had the opportunity to capture it just to kind of put that into perspective for you. So managing that water and trying to capture it was a focus for this project by doing the bale grazing, trying to spread out that residue, holding more of that moisture, ultimately holding more of the nutrients that would be coming from the actual grazing component of those livestock. And capturing the neighbor's soil. And as Drew just mentioned if you didn't hear him he really enjoys capturing the neighbor's dirt as it's flying and trying to take advantage of the water as well because it presents a lot of opportunities to quickly capture a resource that is a slower process to build and so we can put that resource on the ground and promote some biological activity to remediate it. It's something that we're trying to do as well. And then the other resource concern that went along kind of as a symptom of the soil loss as well as limited water management became the poor forage production and a reduced quality. So this is just some pictures that kind of go through and highlight those resource concerns that we had. You can see some fence line pictures here where there's an obvious difference where this area had been farmed. Some of these areas it's as much of a two or three feet drop cattle trailing over here. I have a couple of videos here just to show some of the soil loss that was happening if they will play. So this is actually over the hill from my brother's place at my at our parents place. That's dirt flying. That's 2017. It's nothing dirty there. And then this video next to it is the road ditch where some people are able to normally take that area. That was alfalfa grass that tall. How's one storm? This picture here as in Druze Yard directly to the north is where that area had been summer followed. So there's a culvert here. Whenever it rains we like to watch the water run off of the neighbors place and flood through that culvert. And rather than watching it go through our land and down into the next neighbors and on and on and on trying to capture that. And then this is in our study area where the soil is a bit of a challenge. A lot of exposed clay pan areas as Drew mentioned some alkali challenges. And that area is mostly no till right? So is the soil blowing off of just these exposed clay pans or? That area to the north has been summer followed for about the last 30. Yeah. So the area to the direct north has been managed in summer follow since 1924. And most of that is what you're directly seeing. But that's what you're directly seeing, you know, on those windstorms coming from the north to the south through his yard there. So the project that we proposed fail grazing to build soil health was essentially designed, of course, to meet the project objectives that I have outlined here to improve soil health and fertility to increase our nutrient cycling reduce runoff. We also wanted to as a result of those efforts, build our soil productivity in hopes of building our forage production and quality. And then for ourselves as producers, being able to reduce some of the feed and the labor costs, which we enjoy working with our cattle. And we do hear lots of comments about wanting to be able to go out and see the cattle every day. And we do have that opportunity with fundraising. And so for some folks, the idea and the concept of not starting the tractor every single day and being able to go out and look at those animals is a challenge for them. But it was an interesting opportunity with this project because our location was next to the highway. And so when we began this project, there was a lot of skepticism over what we were doing and how, you know, why did we have our cattle out with our bales and people not seeing us taking care of our cattle. And yet they would drive by on their way to the sale barn or they would drive by every day to come out and feed their own cattle. And they would observe that our cattle were taking care of, but they weren't seeing us out there all of the time. And they struggled with that. And so having the location was helpful for us actually to start a lot of conversations with those folks from the, what are you doing and why are you doing this and having that evolve with the project over time into people stopping by and asking us more questions, which has been a really good opportunity to work with those folks as well. And then also to take opportunities like this to share through different outreach efforts. In various ways, we serve on different boards in our communities. And so there's opportunities there to share about projects. There's different tours where people can come out and we call it like a mailbox tour, the information's available in the mailbox and they can kind of come out on their own and look. Sometimes we struggle with the different conventional ideas of outreach because we feel like the people that do need to hear that information they may not be ones to attend those events. And so we're hoping that through this project we can reach out to different groups that might not be here today with us. So here you can see the veils are tipped on end. And some, there's some areas in between. We just run a polyelectric wire. We start out with two polyelectric wires to limit the cows and do about a week's worth of hay. And then when the cows get into a group they are somewhat limited at going into all the veils at once by the net wrap. But also before that you need water. So this is my wintering and it's used by a solar well that's in my yard and is tied into another well that pumps at night. But this is just during the day. Water comes up and you've got a ground sink for the ground temperature to keep your water tank open. We never had a problem with keeping water to our cattle. And that's what most talks, my experience is they don't get into a why and how. It's good to be theoretical and it's good to talk about the benefits but this is how I water the cattle. There's no heater, there's no nothing. If the water tank is getting frozen all the time or you're having trouble with building up around the float, stick a siphon hose in, you can run some water out of the ground. Water has a great heat source and it's cheaper than running a propane heater or an electric heater. So by just bumping a little water with solar we provided windbreaks. We're unloading panels. I didn't see a little dog there. We found that the cattle would much rather stand behind a bale and eat them, stand behind a steel windbreak. But the windbreaks were useful on the cleanup days, the last couple days in each rotation cattle would use them. It was good for during winter storms and stuff because there wasn't any natural wind protection out there. This is all permanent fencing. Part of the program we did plant trees along this area for a long-term solution because we're planning on continuing this. We planted, we put the portable windbreaks about here and in here and the water tank, the winterized water tank was right there. We would kind of do a pie shape out of here from where the electric wire and then down here it was more of a brake feeding where it would just progressively go through the system and trail back. This is about 45 acres and you can see this is, this is season-long cover crops that I planted. I think this was 2018 and then I was hauling in CRP hay. So instead of driving over and turning the mirrors off the truck, I cut a couple strips to get in there, but we grazed the cover crops first and then distributed the bales. That's us after we progressed to single wire. Once the cattle got used to the hot in the ground, we didn't have any trouble with them challenging it. So it's just much easier when it's, you know, 20 below zero, wind's blowing and snow. Just roll up one wire by yourself when you're out there. And everybody talks about waste. Do you see much for waste? And that's kind of how the cattle eat it. They start at the top of the bale and they just work it down. I challenge anyone to look at their bale feeder and the corral and look at that amount of waste and those cows haven't, I mean they haven't gotten to a cleanup day yet. A lot of that will disappear still. But that isn't bad for, in my books, this is in the winter. Cows are happy there. For every bale, the snow swirls around and there's a clear area around the bale and the cattle can drop down to them. They actually clean up the hay better when there's high snow mounts because they're lazy and they're like humans. I guess I'll just stand here and eat this even though they can see a bale over there. They don't want to walk over there and get it. They'd rather just, well, eat this one until it's gone. So the efficiency on the hay utilization was better. But on the other side, sometimes you kind of wish they would leave a little more residue. So this is them just starting in. So it started at the top, worked their way down. We don't cut the net wrap. A couple days before we move the cattle, I'll go out and pick up the net wrap off the ground. Cows don't want to eat it until they ball it up and they just kind of push it off to the side usually. And I don't want to go out there and wrap all the bales and let them end up all the bales at once. And if it's really a bad winter, I'll just wait till spring and go out there and take a day in the spring and pick up the net wrap. Is that like an eye plan or something? I mean, we cut all the twine off, but we don't do twine. I mean, the net wrap, I'm sorry. It's plastic. Mostly it's to deter them from getting into all the bales at once because they'll make, I mean, they'll be more haste, boilage, because they'll bed on it then. Where it'll be... So once they break into that bale, they stay on there and work on that bale before they decide to go to another one and have to break into that bale all over again. And it's funny, they'll find... The bales that they like. And the bales they don't like. They'll just seek it out. If a bale was made a little wet, you know, through a bottom and there's some spoilage in it, it doesn't smell right, it'll sit there and sit there and they won't look at it. So... And that's the balenet wrap. They pushed off to the side and that's the rest residue. I mean, it's easy. I'm not sure how. Later, I can show you. If there is any evidence of, you know, like if we feel like we didn't get a lot of the net wrap or things were frozen down because we tried to pick it up earlier, we did modify a harrow to where we can put that on and drag that through. And that collects a lot of the net wrap. But we're still trying to figure out the right management with that as well, because we feel like the more you disturb some of that residue, you're kind of losing some of the benefits of having, you know, that residue holding, the urea holding, you know, those potential nutrients. And we don't want to lose a lot of that to the air. And so we're trying to figure out the right balance there, whether it is using a harrow or whether it's maybe that next spring in a hayfield where you have bale grays, rather than taking that first cutting, maybe what we do is we actually graze that off and their hoof action can agitate it a little bit, but not cause too much agitation too quickly to where we lose those nutritional benefits. We did do some basic soil sampling with our project from basically the beginning and then an ending. And so you can see here there was a cover crop only sampling a bale grays area where there was a cover crop and then a bale grays and cover crop, but there wasn't a direct impact. So yeah, the difference between those two is that the direct impact was a sample that was collected underneath where that bale had been placed in that bale grazing area and this one was outside of the bale. Just going through without, I guess, diving too much into it, there's a general theme of nutrients with the exception of pH. Organic matter hasn't changed a whole lot, but some of these initial samples showed quite a difference here in the phosphorus, potassium, solute, zinc, manganese, copper, and I'm not surprised that we didn't see a change here. I think that's a long-term thing. Did you want to comment on the pH at all? And this is only a snapshot, so that's one thing I'll put out there just so you're aware it's a one-time sample, but in 2019 this imagery just came out, which was really helpful. Here's just a close-up area of our project and you can kind of see the distribution of where some of those bales have been placed. Interestingly, in 2019 we had a lot of moisture, so yes, the areas are green, but there's still a change and a difference that you can see here. The bale areas are much darker. We can see a production difference in terms of the height of that biomass, so we're still noticing differences in those years even when it's not dry. And this is just a close-up picture of an area where the bale had been, so the bale was sitting right in here. That was in late October. There's various opportunities where people start asking you questions, even getting phone calls, because they saw all of our cows in with our bales and they were driving down the highway and they didn't want our cows to eat those bales. But we still feel like there's quite a need to reach out to those people, and so any of you have different ideas of reaching out to them or sharing them, the information that, you know, some of us, we all have some of that information here, but how do we reach out to those people? Go back to the soil sampling that we did was in this area mostly, and so the pH, I guess, that I said I didn't want to comment on, the soil can vary in a matter, I mean, the feet, which you saw in that picture of the clay pan, and we wanted to have it direct spot of testing to compare as close as possible rather than a cumulative sample, but even within that small area we got a surprising results on our pH. But we think we're representative because the organic matter was the same throughout the test, and the baseline that I had done before, well sure, after I acquired this land in 2015 was similar too, but you can see the overall trend. And the outreach, yeah, the main thing that I like about it is the non-traditional outreach, the people that should be here, the people that have the most to gain aren't listening. They're not at extension events. Who knows where they're at? So going forward, we'd like to expand our bale grazing area more to the land east of where I live, experiment with some pasture clay pan areas. The pasture was season long grazed, it was opened up into, I think the pasture was about 1200 acre pasture all together, season long, and there was one well on it, so that's where you can see the trailing. I'd like to continue to experiment with management and reducing our labor. Last winter, I blew a lot of snow with my tractor, but I only used a half a tank of diesel fuel all last winter for feeding the cows. If I can drive that a little bit more. The only time I'd started tractor was when I wasn't ready for the cows to move, because they were the last couple days of cleaning up an area, and there was a blizzard coming in, I didn't want to move them to the next set of bales because they'd cover up that hay that they were cleaning up, and I don't like to see that waste, I guess. So I would feed them a few bales to get them through the storm, and then a few days later, let them into the next set of bales. Aaron talked about residue management. Yeah, we'd like to experiment with grazing that area, rather than having to harrow some, sometimes when a blizzard could happen, we didn't realize you had all that hay there, it would get a little thick, and I mean, you don't want dead spots out in your alfalfa field or in your pasture, so we'd like to do some select spot residue management trials. We'd like to incorporate multi-species grazing. We expect that to be a pretty good challenge with getting sheep to respect a one-wire fence when sheep generally are needed. Open wire and lots and lots of strands of barbed wire and electric, and we'd like to experiment with the incorporation of byproducts, because sometimes where we're at forage quality isn't great, you know, when we're in a drought in 2017, I had to buy a lot of hay. You know, so you wonder what to do in that case when you don't have the protein adequate for alfalfa grass. I'd also like to experiment with straw windbreaks, whether that's flax, rye, whatever's available. I expect cowl or other stand behind a windbreak that's of that sort, then a steel portable windbreak, and then how long would it last, you know. The more comfortable you can keep a cow during adverse winter, whether the better condition you're going to keep her in, so that's kind of what we're thinking. What are the benefits of multi species grazing? We're hoping to see a change in the utilization of the feed and some of the parasite control. Through a procedure question, as you, how many years have you done this now? We did one year in the bell grazing. As you look at the green areas, when you go in with your next year, are you going to stage those bales the next year in between the green spots so that you tend to get coverage of the field for your lay-off a little bit? Yes, we'd like to move it, and then we'd also, looking down the road if we're going to do it for the next 20 years or whatever, that's why we'd like to include the additional acreage to the east. We don't know what the nutrient bill will be long-term, so the longer you can, or you can distribute it, the better we can get the benefits, I guess. I also noticed in the pictures on your drainage is it possible to concentrate your bales long-term drainage, because that's where you've got a lot of there. It was way too wet at that time. Pretty hard to play. That area was, yeah, it's still really soft. Like this winter, I tried to get out there in those spots, and I just kept breaking through. The springs were running out of those high areas, actually.