 So we'll get started here. Again, if those of you who haven't been to these, I'm Blaine Bracki with SDACB. Katie Youthy is also on, she's with SDACB, locally led. We've been doing webinars the last couple of weeks, just on some training topics that we talked about in surveys and got some feedback from conservation districts. So this is the third one, this one we're doing on proposals and then proposal budgets. We have Bailey Kasky with the Department of Ag and then she's gonna do the first half and then we'll have Val Dupraz, Chris Duxbury and Denise Gower with NRCS, giving a talk on the federal side of things. We will, we are recording, so we'll send out the recording of these and we'll also get the presentations and send them out also so you can go over, send them on to anybody else that might be interested. And during the presentations, if you have any questions, you can use the Q&A down at the bottom or if there's some discussion back and forth, you can use the chat also and we will try to get to those as we move along. But otherwise, without any further rambling, I will pass it along to Bailey and she'll get started on some state material. Thanks, Bailey. Thank you. Okay, let me pull up my presentation here. Okay, which one are you seeing? We're seeing the presenter mode. Oh, okay, I didn't do it automatically. Okay, here we go. Yep, that's good. Okay, so thanks for inviting me to do this. I know you had asked for just budget process, but I think the conservation grant budgets, it probably wouldn't take me very long to go through that. So I'm just going to go through the whole grant application process. So let's get started here. I'm going to give an overview first. So I'll be talking briefly about the background of the program and then go into what projects qualify and the common projects and practices that we see applications for. After that, I'll talk about the actual application and go through applying and the budget, the narrative and we'll go through an example as well. And then to finish up, I will go over what to expect during the grant rounds and then what to do after you've been awarded a grant. So a little background on the conservation grant program. The grants that are awarded should meet one or more goals of the Department of Ag's coordinated plan for natural resource management. The goals and objectives are drafted based off of the state's conservation priorities that provide information and assist the commission. So right now the 2012 plan is still being revised. We'll have a 2020 plan released, hopefully in the near future, but the 2012 plans goals included water resources which would be beneficial uses and water quality, soil resources, air quality, wildlife, public awareness, funding and energy which included renewable energy and energy conservation in general. The department is currently, yeah, like I said, finishing up the 2020 plan. So the goals will be slightly different but overall it shouldn't really affect the types of grants that we see applied for. And the commission receives $500,000 for this program each year. So we get it on July one and the first grant round is in November. So the commission will set aside an amount to reserve for the second grant round, which is in the spring. And only conservation districts can apply for these grants but they can have multiple partners included. So we commonly see NRCS, game fishing parks, SDSU sometimes involved with these grants also. Some common project types and practices are those that deal with soil, water and wind erosion as well as livestock protection and grazing management. Those could be windbreak or shelter belt plantings, water development projects, waterway construction and grass seedings, cross fencing and cover crops. There's also been quite a few brush management projects lately which control the encroachment of cedar trees mostly along the Missouri River in the Southeast, South Central part of the state. Then that's to remove cedar trees from grasslands to improve grazing management. Also forest thinnings have been a more popular grant lately especially in the Hills area where the thinning is needed to control the forest stance. Also education and outreach grants are stable projects as well. So next I'm going to show a few completed grant projects. This is a shelter belt planning that was part of a hide hand enhancement project. Here we have a livestock water development that was done in Gregory. And this one possibly has a riparian benefit as well drawing cattle away from the creek bottom down there. Here's a cover crop project that was in Miner County. And another cover crop project that was on the Mallette demonstration plot there. And you can actually see turkeys up in the central left side of the screen there. So wildlife benefit as well. And then this is a forest thinning that was done in Pennington County. And one more here that I thought was pretty cool. I was on Google Earth mapping a spot check to go check conservation practices. And this was in Mallette County I believe and you can actually see them laying the pipeline for that water development project which I thought that was pretty cool to be able to see that on Google Earth. They caught it at just the right moment. Okay, well let's get into the not so fun part now which is the actual application process. So if you want a conservation grant you better file that paperwork. Our grant application I've provided the link here. It's on the South Dakota Department of Ag website and it's updated occasionally. So it's best to not just have it saved on your computer because if you have one that's a few years old it may not be quite the same. We still get a few applications that have the state seal on them instead of the department logo. And those are older applications. Also the most recent approved cost share docket is going to be helpful. It's gonna be something you want to estimate your practice costs and I provide the link for that as well here. Okay, so here's the actual application. It's fairly straightforward and so you have the applicant information at the top and that's gonna be the district's information and then the project contact is going to be the person filling the application out or whoever is going to be communicating with the Department of Ag about the project. For the project information, you have the name of your grant application, start and end dates. Those are always going to be for the start date, January one or July one. And then the end dates are always going to be June 30th or December 31st. For the legal description, the most important part is the county. So the county or counties, if you're doing a multi-district grant, you would wanna put there. Township range, that stuff isn't as important because obviously you're gonna have projects within the grant that are gonna be in multiple places. So it's fine to leave that blank. And then for the financial information, this is important because sometimes the application can be kind of glitchy because it's a fillable PDF. You wanna put these numbers in first because the total project cost, where it says the zero here is going to be pulled over to the budget sheet. And that total, it's going to be where it says this total must equal. So you want everything to add up to that. And sometimes if you don't fill that out right away and then you go and put it in afterwards, it doesn't work. And then in the narrative section, that where this box is, is just kind of a general summary. And then with the actual project narrative, you can attach pages. So I'll be going through that a little more when I show the example. But in addition to the narrative, if you're doing a multi-district grant, you're gonna wanna provide us, if we don't have it already with the joint powers agreement for each district and then a W-9 as well as the minutes that approve the application from your district board meeting. And then if we haven't gotten a financial report from the district that year, we're gonna ask for it. But usually we have them all by now, usually. Okay, and next I'll show you the docket and then go into an example. So this is the 2021 docket that was approved at the last commission meeting. The applicants can use the docket to help estimate the approximate costs. So for example, tree planting was just changed to linear feet recently. And so you can use the 38 cents for linear foot and the approved cost share percentage, which for tree planting is 50%. So a producer is gonna be reimbursed 50% of the approved practice cost, which is the 38 cents. So it's gonna be 50% of that when we do reimbursements. And so when a district submits a reimbursement to Brian and I, we're going to use either the docket cost or the actual cost of the practice based on the receipts submitted with it, whichever one is less, we can never reimburse over the docket cost. So we'll just keep that in mind when you're putting your applications together. Okay, so here is an example from Gregory County. Again, the district contact info is gonna be at the top. And Ken was the project officer on this one, project name and the starting end dates. So you can see here, they have July one, but they also put July one for the end date. So that would be changed. Brian or I, well, in this case, I would cross that out and put June 30th. And of course I would contact the district to make sure that they're okay with that if they don't wanna move the date. It has to be July or June 30th, but if they wanted to change it to December or something instead, we could do that. Also this number here, the total project cost, that's important because it's going to be pulled over onto this page over here and they need to match. And that needs to match all the way down. And then for the applicant's signature, it's gotta be either a board member or a district manager if they've been approved. So at a meeting, the district board can approve or they can approve someone to be, to have signature authority on the grants. Some districts will just approve it for each grant each time or they'll just say in the future, so-and-so has signature authority to sign on all grants paperwork. So that's more of a blanket motion. So let's move on to the budget. In section A, most of the time, the districts are going to mostly use the contract services right here. And that's going to be the actual work, like treat planting, pipeline and tanks. That's what they're applying for in this one. So if they had applied for administration, that would go up in the salary benefits section. And the majority of the time, those are the two we see. There are grants that are applicants that split them all out into each section, but that's not necessary in my opinion. So in the activity budget section B, they have shelter belts, pipeline and tanks. And those are their projects that they're gonna be doing under this grant. So shelter belts is going to include tree planting, shrub planting and fabric. It's going to be all the costs associated with shelter belts. And then same for pipeline, it's going to be the pipeline and associated costs and tanks as well. So where it's split between grant funds, local funds, in kind and other, the grant funds is obviously what the commission would be contributing for the project. And then local funds, most of the time is the landowner money that's put forward or district money. Local in kind is usually like, if there's administration, then the district will either either gonna put it in local funds or local in kind. And that's the match for the administration costs of the grant. And then other funds is usually when you have other partners like if game fishing parks or NRCS is contributing to these projects, that's where that money is gonna go would be under other funds. And again, so you can see they actually have an extra zero down here that I would just cross out because that's not right. Somehow there's, I don't know how this happened with the extra zero and it's still totaled correctly, but whatever, this application can be finicky sometimes. So moving on to the section C where the project partners are in this case, it was just RCNF, which is the grant money and then the landowner contributions. It's straight 50-50 split on this grant. Let's see what else. Some tips for applying. In this case, also they have the producers lined up already. It says they had four producers already signed up. And usually they will, yeah, they'll have the producer signed up and then if they end up with leftover money, they'll rank the producers just to best match the grant funding. And then the board would review that. Also, if you're doing tree plantings, the commission sees it as a good thing if you have the site prep done before the grant is even approved. And yeah, you wouldn't get reimbursed for site prep if you do that, but it looks good because you're ready to go. Because no work can be reimbursed if it's done outside the grant period. Let's see. And then, yeah, don't be afraid to ask for help. If you are applying for a grant and you aren't sure what you're doing, call me, call Brian, whatever, it will help you, we'll get you examples. Oh, also a note on administration. If you are applying for that as part of your grant fund, you can't, the administration costs can't be more than 15% of the total budget for the grant. So here's their narrative. And this is just additional details on project description and need who's going to be responsible, where the project will be located. And some of these are longer. Like Gregory is pretty to the point with theirs. It's pretty straight, simple, but there's definitely applications where there's a lot more information as well, which isn't a bad thing either. And then describe the specific environment, natural resources. This is where you're gonna want to include how, like which goals it's helping. So in this case, they talked about soil erosion and water quality. And what else? Briefly describe specific on the ground activities. And provisions to ensure long-term management, et cetera. Final projects, they put, they had producers lined up already. So they put what they would actually be producing out of the grant and then partners. So next I will go into the grant round proceedings. So the commission has two grant rounds each year. Normally they're in April and November. The deadlines are usually March 1st and October 1st. And I say that because this year, and I believe last year, we pushed the March deadlines back a little bit, just because of when the commission had their first meeting of the year, because we want to give the districts ample time to use the new approved docket in their spring applications. So the docket this year was approved mid-February. So we pushed the deadline back to March 15th this year. And our meeting is actually on April 6th. So that's coming up. So once we get all the applications, we, Brian and I review them to make sure everything is there, like the budgets look good. We have the W-9s and minutes and all that. And then during the grant round, it's recommended that the districts attend that are applying for the grants, just in case the commission has questions that Brian and I aren't prepared to answer. We have the applications in front of us, but sometimes there's other information that would be beneficial if the commission has a specific question. And so the grants are reviewed by the commission and randomly selected. So usually they're pulled out of a hat or something. And so the commission will review all of the applications and then go back and randomly select the order for approval, denial, et cetera. And so, especially in this great spring round, the grants might not be fully funded depending on how much of the money is left. But in the past few grant rounds, it hasn't really been an issue too much. And then, so after the grants are approved, we will ask for a revised budget if you didn't get the full amount. And then we'll send out the awarded acceptance forms for the districts to review and then sign. The award acceptance forms are going to have the terms of the grant on it that's approved by the commission. So like docket is gonna be on in that section. So each application or each grant that's awarded is the docket for that year is set in there. So even if the commission or approves a new docket the next year, that grant that was awarded at that time has to go with whichever docket was approved at the time. And then I said this earlier but work outside the grant period will not be reimbursed. So if you do site prep for a shelter belt planning and you had site prep on your application, we can't reimburse it if it was done before the grant was approved. But we don't actually get a lot of reimbursement requests for site prep because it's not one of the, yeah, it's just not something districts normally ask for reimbursements on sometimes, but I don't see it a lot. Anyway, so yeah, once you get your grant awarded you're gonna wanna let your producers know that you have the cost share funding and the producers are going to have to fill out an application for cost share. Even if you already have them lined up, they need as part of the grant requirements, they need to send in an application for the cost share to the district and then the district needs to provide them with an award letter. And once you are ready to go, you can do the projects, do the work and submit reimbursements. And then when the project is over, we would submit a final report, which includes information on what the grant accomplished. So with that, I think that about covers it. I feel like I went through that kind of fast, but if you have any questions, I will take those. So. Anybody have any questions before we move on? That was really good, Bailey. Thank you. Everybody's pretty quiet this morning. Wow, I'm so good. Yeah. You covered all the bases. Must be that rainy day. Everybody's quiet. Ew. There's. Submitting vouchers. Yeah. You mean like when you submit for the reimbursements? I'm assuming. I didn't put that in my presentations, but I can go over it a little bit here. Let me grab something. So normally when districts submit reimbursements, we want like, we'll just use Shelter Belt as an example. We want to see the application from the landowner for Cauchier, the approval letter for Cauchier to the producer. We'll want to see all the receipts involved in voices from the district that were involved in the whole project. We'll want to see the tree planting agreements. And we'll want to see any like, so yeah, that while the tree planting plan, if that's the case or any agreements associated. So even if it was like tanks, pipeline, water development, whatever, we'll want to see the agreement between the landowner and the district. What else? I think that's about it. Let me look through one real quick just to make sure I covered everything. But yeah, the most important thing is the receipts and the agreements because we want to make sure that it was done within the grant period. And we want to know which costs we're going to use for the reimbursement. So if the producer paid more than what the docket cost is, we can only use the docket cost. But let me, okay, so we've got application and approval letter, agreement, receipt. And that, yeah, that's about it. So unless, oh, and if it's something I'm going to spot check, it's very helpful to provide maps. So I know exactly where in the section, because township range in section is helpful, but it's really helpful to get a little more detailed than that, so I'm not driving around the whole section to find out where the shelter belt was planted. Rates for match. So normally it's 50-50, but depending on the project, so most of the water development grants are 30% for general livestock. Let me grab one of the dockets quick. Okay. So, and I could have gone back to that maybe, but we'll just go with this. So yeah, for tree planting and stuff, it's 50%, but the producers have to provide at least 25%. So if you have multiple project partners for the grant, that there has to be landowner cash minimum of 25%. And then, yeah, so it depends on the project. A lot of them for like grass seeding is, general livestock needs will be 30%. If there's grazing management practices that have riparian protection, that's going to be 50%. Cover crops are 50%. I don't know. I mean, you guys can look the docket up and take a look at that as well, unless there's anything more specific you want me to go over. Bed questions, producer time. I guess I don't know what you mean. You can, it can be counted as in-kind depending on the project. Do they get reimbursed? It depends. Like landowner labor is not reimbursed for anything. Except tree-thinning. They can be counted for that. So that's the only instance that's going to count. Everything else, but it's always going to be match or in-kind at least. So yeah, if you want to email me these two, I can get some feedback from Brian as well. Anything else? Okay. Did you, I'm sorry if I missed it. Did you catch the chat but the district? Okay. I thought. Yeah. Oh no, I'm sorry. I didn't see that one. Maybe you already partially answered it. Oh, okay. The, if a district charges 35 cents per linear foot, reimbursement request is the reimbursement request 50% of the 35 cents for the docket price. Well, you can put whichever one you want to on the reimbursement request, but I'm going to look at it and reimburse whichever one was lower. And sometimes it's actually kind of helpful if I've gotten reimbursement requests where they used the actual cost in the reimbursement section. And then in the notes for the reimbursement, they'll put this was the actual cost. This is the docket cost. This one's lower. So this is what we want. And I like that. It saves me a little time, but that's not usually the case. So I look at the reimbursement, invoices and the docket. If that answers your question. We will see. All right. It must have. Maybe they're. I guess. Okay. Just thinking harder. Yeah, and any other questions, of course they can give you a call or shoot you an email. Yep, for sure. I think most of the districts have my information, so. Yeah, you should. All right. If there's no other questions. Thank you Bailey for presenting and answering those questions there at the end. Yeah, and we'll hopefully let you know if we have any more questions. Sounds good. Thank you. Yeah, and we'll get your presentation when this is over and pass it along to everybody. So with that, we will move along to NRCS. Hello, Val. Oh, you're still muted. There it is. I've had quite the time. Oh goodness. It's a good thing we started early today. Otherwise, it would have been a little frustrating with the challenges that I incurred this morning. But good morning. I will go ahead and start the NRCS pieces of this and we also have some budget material. I'm going to ask Chris Duxbury to introduce herself as she is a presenter with me today. Chris here. Yes, there she is. She just. Hello. There, hello. Good morning, this is Chris Duxbury. I get to help with grants and agreements at the NR on the NRCS team. Great. Thank you, Chris. I am also joined by Denise Gower. She is here with us as well, Denise. Good morning, everyone. Yes, I'm Denise Gower. I'm an assistant for management and strategy and Val and Chris are going to cover the majority of the presentation. I'm predominantly here for moral support and then talk about any budget type questions that arise from the NRCS site or for NRCS in relative to NRCS funding. Thanks. Thank you, Denise. I am Val DePrize. I'm the acting assistant state conservationist for programs. Well, Jeff Vanderwilt is on detail to Nebraska. So I'm going to cover, I'm going to kick things off here and share my screen. And we can get going here. All right, so we're here to visit with you about budgets today. I'm going to touch on the financial assistance pieces of budgets. So I'm going to visit about the conservation implementation strategy known as CIS and or the regional conservation partnership program known as RCPP. So CIS is a locally led conservation effort to sell high priority natural resources in a focused and targeted approach on funds come through the NRCS as financial assistance through Portrags. So CIS was started or entertained or asked for proposals the first time about a year ago. And what that project does is it allows local groups of people, producers, conservation districts, other interested parties to request financial assistance to address specific priority resource concerns within their area. There is some sort of geographic limit or applied on it. So it can be a township, a watershed, some sort of area is applied and tied to resource concerns. And then a proposal is submitted through the NRCS. We review those at the state level and we select them for funding. So in fiscal year 2021 we are using a third of our financial assistance dollars for EQUIP and we're allocating them to this conservation implementation strategy. So we're accepting applications for fiscal year 2022 funds at this point in time and the application date is April 15th. So there is still time. These proposals take a little bit to put together but if you've been working with a group and you have some goals and objectives and some things you'd like to see improved then I would encourage you to consider a CIS application. So if you have questions about it I'll give my contact information to Blaine and he can sure pass that along if you don't have it already. Although I did see quite a few familiar names in the chat box and the attendee list so it's good to see you. So this year we will also entertain other program dollars through a CIS proposal. So if there are some CSP related activities that you'd like to see implemented through CIS we are offering those financial assistance dollars as well. So this benefits our conservation districts by increasing the amount of conservation within your area. It is a targeted approach and our goal is to have a greater improvement in the resource concern conditions in a faster manner. And it's a really good opportunity to bring additional funds to your local area. We also have the regional conservation partnership program that promotes the coordination of NRCS conservation activities with partners that offer value added contributions to expand their collective availability to address the on farm watershed and regional natural resource concerns. So RCP program is generally on a little larger scale. It's evaluated then CIS, it's evaluated at the national level. There's some differences with that. The RCPP will offer technical assistance funds for the partners to administer the program and carry out some of the duties that support NRCS's mission with the implementation of the program. So we've got both programs available that offer both financial assistance and technical assistance. And today we're going to touch on the budgets associated with those. So I've got just a couple of examples here. Our CIS and our CPP program budgets are pretty straightforward and simple for the most part. And our CIS projects have a lot of flexibility within the budgets. This is one example of a budget, the top line is practice one. If you had identified some natural resource concerns and you were wishing to address those natural resource concerns with prescribed grazing, pipeline tanks and fence, you would look at your project area, estimate about how many, the quantity of that associated practice you would need and then plan that practice out like fiscal years or fiscal years run from October 1st through September 30th. So that is something that may not directly align with other fiscal year budgets or fiscal year budget is from September, or from October 1st to September 30th. So in this example, on that top row boxes, if you had entered fence as your practice one and you estimated to implement a $100 rate of fence or $10,000 rate of fence in fiscal year 22, you would enter those values all the way across to through fiscal year 25, 26, however long you'd expect your project to be. You would do the same thing for any additional practices on this table. And then if there was anything that you had from partner contributions, you could include those brief description of the activities and then add those dollars into your proposed budget. Same with in kind, with our CAS project, they're encouraged, not required, but just the partnership alone is very valuable and our efforts wanna support your local resource concerns and so our financial assistance is available to your project areas through our conservation implementation strategy and then our CPP is evaluated at a national level. To figure out the funding request, you would use the current year payment schedule that NRCS issues. Here's another example of a budget. In this particular case, the proposal had contained information about what they wanted to do, their goals and objectives, the practices they planned to implement and they broke it down by fiscal year 2021. They were requesting $361,000 of financial assistance 2022 was greater, indicated 2023, 2024 and 2025 was implementation and monitoring completed by a partner, a different partner. So they didn't have any cost share funds that they wanted or financial assistance funds they wanted to receive that year. They indicated it in this type of format. This is definitely something that we supported on a CIS level. This is very open to what works for you for CIS budgets. So our CPP budgets are a little bit different but there's still the structure, you plug in the numbers and it's all based on what your local goals and objectives are. So with that, I'm going to ask Chris. Yeah. We just had a couple of questions. I thought we tried to jump in too real quick. Okay. Was there any technical assistance for partners through CIS? And not through CIS at this point in time. Through our CPP there is. And then we had one more. How does the, where or how does a district find the current year payment schedule? Okay. That I have, I have it on another screen that is, it's released as a bulletin. And I expect that they may have gotten it through email but if they want a copy of it, I can sure send it to them or send it to you to share with this presentation material. Okay. Yeah, that would be good. Yeah. Or any local office would have it available as well. Perfect. Okay. That answers both questions that we had. Thank you. Great. Great. Thank you. All right. Now Chris is our agreement expert and I'm going to turn things over to Chris to visit about some agreement types. And I look back to Chris. Good morning. I am just gonna go through the different agreements that we have just kind of give you a overview of what we've got. We have several different agreements which you guys are all aware of. We have a contribution agreement which is an NRCS agreement authorized by seven USC 6962. This is a non-competitive agreement for one or more non-federal parties to contribute funds or other resources to the NRCS. This gets to help accelerate the completion of soil surveys or watershed planning. It's to the benefit of both NRCS and the non-federal party. It gets to help further soil and water conservation and the non-federal party contributes resources on a gratuitous basis to NRCS. Some of those that you would be familiar with would be like South Dakota Soil Health Coalition, South Dakota Association Conservation District and South Dakota No-Till or some of our vendors with the contribution agreements. Then we have the cooperative agreement which is a financial assistance internet between a federal and a non-federal entity that is consistent with 31 USC, section 6302 through 6305. This is used to enter into a relationship with the principal purpose of transferring anything of value from the federal agency to the non-federal entity to carry out a public purpose authorized by a law of the United States, C31 USC, section 61013. And this is distinguished from a grant agreement and then it provides for substantial involvement between the federal awarding agency and the non-federal entity in carrying out the activity contemplated by the awarded cooperative agreements. It may or may not require recipient cost share depending on the program and the agency requirements. This may not be used to procure products or services for the primary benefit of the government. Some examples of cooperative agreements would be like the emergency watershed programs. And I would suspect some of you are familiar with that as well. And then we have the grant agreements, the conservation collaboration agreements that you all have heard of, I'm sure. This is an agreement, a legal instrument of financial assistance between a federal agency and a non-federal entity that consistent with 31 USC, section 6302 and 6304 is used to enter into a relationship with the principal purpose of transferring anything of value from the federal awarding agency to the non-federal entity to carry out a public purpose authorized by the law of the United States, C31 USC, section 61013. And this is distinguished from a cooperative agreement and that it does not provide for substantial involvement between the federal awarding agency and the non-federal entity in carrying out the activity contemplated by the ward. It may not be used to procure products or services for the primary benefit of the government. And some of these vendors would be like that's unlimited, that's forever, SDSU, South Dakota Grassland, SD, ACD gets to be one of those as well. Okay, can you click my slide? Thank you. And then we have the memorandum of understanding, memorandum of agreement and the unfunded cooperative agreement, which we've been working on right now. The memorandum of understanding is an agreement that is a documented plan for carrying out a project or an undertaking of mutual interest to the NRCS and one or more other federal or non-federal parties. So this gets to provide for joint sharing in the operation of the project. Each party carries out its responsibilities by using its own authorities and resources, including funding. There's no financial or other resources directly obligated transfer to exchange. It may require parties to enter into another type of agreement that will transfer resources. So this would be like NRCS and state and local agencies, local conservation districts, et cetera. And then the memorandum of agreement and the unfunded cooperative agreement, they kind of go together. The memorandum of agreement is the main piece and then the unfunded cooperative agreement is like the supplement to the MOA. The MOA is between the parties which documents areas of common interest and clarifies the roles of the federal, state and local partners in providing the conservation leadership and technical and financial assistance to customers in order to help them preserve and enhance national resources through a voluntary cooperative approach. The agreement will specify the transfer of resources between NRCS and the partner to accomplish delivery of NRCS programs and mutual conservation priorities. This defines the relationship between NRCS and the district and it sets the goals and responsibilities, data sharing, work and arrangements, et cetera. Then we have the unfunded cooperative which is a supplement to the MOA and it's really gonna specify what exactly who's sharing what, who's providing what as far as office space, vehicle usage, equipment usage, if somebody's storing a UTV, who gets to do that? That's what we're also working on right now. And I think I've been bothering some of you about that. Okay, next one please. Thank you. So should you apply for a cooperative or any kind of a grant, the documents you're gonna need is a statement of work. And a statement of work must be submitted with no tables, no pictures, no graphics and it must include the following pieces. It must have a purpose, the objective, objective, a budget narrative, responsibilities of the party, expected accomplishments and deliverables and the milestones for those deliverals. We'll also need an SF-424 which is an application for the federal assistance and then an SF-424A which is the budget piece of the federal assistance you're asking for, which that 424 will have, the 424A, excuse me, will have to match the budget narrative. So when you get into that, you'll see the budget narrative will have personnel and contractual and indirect costs and all such things. It will have to match exactly what you have on the 424. You'll also need a certification of lobbying and an active SAM. The SAM must match the DUNS on the 424 and you will have to have that active before you apply now. I think in the past, we've been able to work on getting that active as you submitted your proposal, but now they're gonna make us have that active before you submit your proposal. Some other documents that may be required if AppleBagal, a current NICRA, a signed de minimis form or other official indirect cost IDC justification. And that's just required if you're requesting the indirect cost. A signed hardship statement, if the recipient is providing less than 50% match on an agreement and the SF-LLL disclosure of lobbying and if the recipient is engaging in lobbying, you're gonna need to sign off on that. Some resources, you can go to grants.gov, the federal government site. It's got a lot of fun stuff on there. It is really pretty helpful and pretty user-friendly. And then EasyFed Grants is the online system and that's where you'll get to upload your stuff, your proposal, et cetera. So not too hard, pretty fun. So I think that's all I got, isn't it? Oh, yep, sorry. And then here's the forms and abbreviations for all the fun stuff that you're going to learn as you go through the process. All right, thank you, Chris. Uh-huh. So I believe that was the end of the presentation there. So am I still sharing screens or not? Yep, you are. Okay. All right, so we've also have a budget narrative kind of a guide as well. So we will share this in addition to the presentations. So this is something, Chris, did you want to touch on this right now or it seems pretty separate? I can. It looks, it's really not as bad as it looks. Once you get into it, you're gonna figure out how you need to allocate your funding. You're gonna know how much your personnel is gonna be and how to calculate everything. It's really, really important though, and I will preach this. This information must absolutely match your budget narrative information. You're a 424A. They are really persnickety about that. Like you have to put down your travel exactly how you anticipate. Can you go down a little bit, please? Thank you. When you have to line everything out, you have to say Airfare or Airport Parking. You have to line it all out. The only tricky part is this appears that it's in like a spreadsheet format and it can't be. It has to be in a paragraph format, which is kind of crazy, but that is one of the tricks. There cannot be any spreadsheets because that'll get bounced back to us. So, but yeah, in like supplies, you'll have to list everything that your general office supplies, postage. You know, if you're gonna buy a printer, the copies, like if you're gonna run, if you're gonna have X amount of copies for this event or that event, you have to lay it all out, which if you're proposing, I mean, if you're asking for funding for projects, you're gonna have it all laid out anyways. So, just a matter of putting it in the format they want it. So, and you can always ask me or Denise or Val if you've got questions. Can text me or call or message me or call me. So, I think that's it unless anybody's got some questions. Hey, Chris, is this document available somewhere that we can... Yep, I can share it. I can share it. I can give it to you and then you can share it or... Yeah, that would work. I can send it out. Okay, sure. Is there any other questions? I had a quick question. I think it's been brought up before. Was there a plan to move CAS to grants.gov or... No. No. No. Okay. That's just a within-state effort. Okay. So, we'll review all of those through the in-state process. Okay. Did anybody else have any questions for Val and Chris or anything that we talked about today? Probably kind of a lot. It's a lot of info to take in, but it's all good and refresher. We're going to go... Okay, well, thank you, Val. Appreciate your time and effort going through all of that. Thank you much, Blaine, for having us. If you have any questions, Chris and Denise are the agreement and grant experts. If you have CAS or RCPP questions, I can share a service though. So, we appreciate your time today and all of your... The conservation partnerships you have with us and the great things that we do together. Perfect. Thank you. And I'll pass along for those that don't have it, all the contact info from today for Bailey and you guys, for those that don't have them. And the presentation info I'll also pass along. But if there aren't any other questions, then we will wrap it up for today. We landed right at about an hour. So with that, thanks again to the presenters today. We will wrap it up and join us next week. We have one more. Jeff Vanderwilt is going to jump into the CIS. He's going to take a deeper dive into all the intricacies of the CIS. Now that we're in year two, we'll see if we can break that down a little bit more for you. I see a question. Yes, I did get a haircut. Yeah, we're all clean now. But with that, that will conclude our day. Thank you for joining and we will see you next week. Thank you.