 So, I guess I'm going to talk about grazing management to improve soil health and this is kind of focused on grasslands primarily, talking about grazing on cropland would be a whole other maybe hour talk with some help from an agronomist. But are there impacts to soil health from grazing and yeah, there's positive impacts, manure and organic matter and biology has improved grazing just stimulus to plants. And there's some impacts that can be positive or negative nutrient distribution and then there's some that can be completely negative depending on how you manage your grazing. That's disturbance leading to negative feedback or we're grazing or under grazing. So it's a number of ways that can go. One of the things about grazing is it changes the carbon cycle a little bit. If you think about this carbon cycle with just the plants in there, you know, the plants are doing photosynthesis, they're returning organic matter back to the soil and that. But if you add cows into the mix, you make the complexity of it more and you improve the cycling. Is that? Should be good. Okay. Is it advanced slides? Yep. Okay. It does. I didn't trust it. And here's just a graph showing that grazing pressure impacts on soil organic carbon. So with cattle stocking rate, I'm assuming that's a pointer, with the stock, as increasing stocking rate, you increase the amount of organic matter that's supplied to the carbon or up to the soil up to a point and then it starts to drop off when you get to the higher levels of grazing or stocking rates. And then you have Haidland way over here with a much less return to the soil with that. This is just some data from a rancher here in South Dakota. He acquired the place in 1995. At that time, it was season-long grazing. And then in 1997, he implemented rotational grazing and then he went to more intensive grazing management, what he calls mig grazing. And you can see the percent increase over season-long as far as his pounds of beef per acre. With every year, except for one, he had a much improved increase in his pounds of beef produced per acre. Sorry. In addition, with all the years, he has a trend of organic matter increasing on the place with the exception of 2012 was an extreme drought year, as you recall. So that year, it did dip down. But the trend is an upward trend on organic matter. So in South Dakota, we've done these what we call dynamic soil property study sites. And so we take a site on each side of the fence with extremely different management and we compare some of the characteristics of the soil. This is in Millett County, a cube soil. This is the organic matter. On the left here is rotational grazing. On the right is hayland. And the range is this red line. So as you go down in the profile, you can see the percent of organic matter. And it's up here about 8% at the surface. But it's continuously higher than the hayland in this case. That's the organic matter. This is just what we call reactive carbon and particulate organic. And in all cases, the carbon on the rotationally grazed range land is higher than the hayland. Also cation exchange capacity is quite a bit better on the range than the hay. That just allows the plants to uptake nutrients better. Aggregate stability is quite a bit different. Look at the aggregate stability on the range land, on the rotationally grazed range land versus the hayland, significantly different. This beta-glucosidase is just an indicator of biological activity. It's also higher on the rotationally grazed range land than the hayland. And then hydrologic effects on these sites. So this is a site in eastern Nebraska. Basically, you don't have to look at all the numbers, but look at the runoff here. On the native range land in eastern Nebraska, the runoff with 25 inches is about 5 inches. With 75 percent Kentucky bluegrass and 25 percent brome, it's more than twice as much runoff. And then with 75 percent brome and 25 percent Kentucky bluegrass, it's kind of in between. So the plant community will have an impact on hydrologic function of the site. This is another study up in North Dakota. These are season-long, low, medium, and high stocking rates over here. Kentucky bluegrass dominated, and that's the inches per hour of infiltration. But then compared to high-intensity, short-duration grazing with its diverse native community, much more higher infiltration rates on those sites. Then you have the brome-dominated one, which in this case was the lowest of all of them. So this is one of our first study sites we did. This is up in Duel County. Basically, like I said, two different sites, same soil right across the fence from each other. This is about 95 percent introduced grasses, quackgrass, Kentucky bluegrass. And on the right, it's just the opposite. It's about 5 percent non-native grasses like the Kentucky, and about 95 percent diverse mix of native grasses. And here's the infiltration. And this is a little different than the previous graph. This is a lapse time. So on the right-hand side of the fence, it took 12 minutes for the second inch of water to go in the ground. On the left-hand side, with the quackgrass and everything, it took 109 minutes for the second inch to go into the ground. Huge difference in infiltration. And look at the profiles here. This is the left-hand side, continuous season-long grazing with the introduced species. Look at the difference in the color and the structure. This is blocky pretty much all the way to the surface. This is granular, down about 8 inches, and really dark colors. So you can see the difference in the soil and as well in the infiltration. This is another site, a little closer Hyde County, on a Glenham soil. This stick kind of represents the fence line. On the left-hand side is a rotationally grazed, pretty good native community. On the right-hand side was continuous season-long grazing for probably 50 years or better, as long as the owner on the left side could remember. And then just nine months prior to when we took this picture, they broke out that continuous season-long grazing and put it into cropland and look at the difference in the color. And it's all the same Glenham soil and look at the difference in infiltration. On the left-hand side, it actually was about two minutes for the second inch to go into the ground. For the continuous season-long grazing, it was about 29 minutes. And for the recently broke out cropland, it was 120 minutes, two hours. So we take a six inch ring, put an inch of water in, let it soak in and time it, and then we put a second inch in and we time that. And it took two hours for that second inch to soak into the ground where they had broke out that. Cropland. So this is that mullet one I showed earlier, two minutes compared to 102 minutes. You've probably seen the rainfall simulator. Usually we do a couple cropland trays and a couple grass trays and a cover crop usually in the middle. This was actually one where I did five different grassland deals. And so the effect I was trying to get, if you think of the bars on your cell phone, you know, the bars going from lower to higher. On the infiltration jars and back, I was going for kind of that. That's what I was going for, is that upward slope and then the runoff just the opposite. And it worked good except for the one in the middle. That one didn't work. So what happened was at the time when I was, this is early on when I started doing this stuff, and in my mind I thought plant community was the main driver, you know, that caused hydrology impacts. And so that one in the middle is straight Kentucky bluegrass. What I didn't take into account is that management is actually half of the equation. So you can have a plant community that's not really super desirable, but if you have good management you can overcome some of those hydrologic impacts. And so what happened was this tray right here, which has great infiltration and no runoff, was diverse. It had big blue stem and green needlegrass. It was only about 15 feet from that tray. It's in the same pasture. I just found a patch where there was some Kentucky bluegrass and assumed it would be poor on infiltration. Well, management messed me up there. So this was a prairie dog town, actually. This was a bluegram of buffalo grass sod. This was that Kentucky bluegrass. This was a smooth brome site that hadn't been grazed. It was in the section line road between the fences, so it never got grazed hardly ever. And you can see the runoff and infiltration are almost equal. And then the well-managed diverse community had the best result there. So anyway, I just say that to say that you have to look at plant community and management. They both influence hydrology on a site. This is the kit I was talking about. You can get these from your local NRCS office, or usually when we do workshops, like the soil health school we have those on hand. So this is that when you... you can rate the plant community and the management on a scale of one to five. Native plant community is the best with a rating of one. Rating to five is non-native cool-season grasses or short grasses being completely dominant. You can also rate the management. The best rating of one is prescribed grazing is applied according to the prescribed grazing standard. Number five is very heavy stocking rates for extended periods, often for the entire growing season. You multiply those two together and you get a score of zero to 25. And what we found with a whole bunch of infiltration studies is that infiltration correlates real strongly to that rating of plant community and management. So you can pretty much predict the condition of your site just by finding out what the plant community is and what the management is. You can tell what's happening with the soil health with just those two factors. So I'm going to talk about soil health principles here. And you've seen these before. In fact, they're up on that banner right there and do a little different words, but maximize presence of living roots, minimize disturbance, maximize soil cover, and maximize diversity. So let's start with the living roots. The object is to grow and enhance the roots in the soil. Obviously, photosynthesis is derived by the uptake of nutrients and water to the upper part of the plant. We want to see some rhizosphere activity on those roots and it's key to organic matter and nutrient cycling. This is a healthy grass root with a nice rhizosphere. When you pull out a grass root out of the soil, you should get a lot of soil with the root. That's indicating a healthy rhizosphere around that root. That's what you want to see. Oops, went too fast there. This is just showing root development, how it's impacted by clipping in this case. On the left-hand side, they cut it to two inches every week. On the far right, they cut it to two inches every four weeks. Look at the difference in the roots on those grasses. This is showing why that occurs. With a 10% removal of leaf volume, there's no effect on root growth. 20% same thing, 30%, 40% same thing. When you get up to 50% removal by volume of the leaf area, you have a slight impact on root growth. There's a 2% to 4% stoppage of root growth for about a week. A small portion of them stop growing for about a week. When you get up to 60% utilization of the leaf area, it jumps up dramatically. Half of the roots stop growing for about two weeks. When you get up to 70% utilization, you're talking over three-quarters of the roots stop growing and it goes for a month or more. If you get up to as high as 80%, you'll get 100% stoppage of root growth for probably the rest of the growing season. It's a pretty tremendous impact when you get up to those higher levels. Part of the reason is, and I'll get into this real deep, but in a plant, there's xylem and there's phloem. Xylem is the main function of transporting water from the roots up to the plant. And phloem is transporting larger molecules like carbohydrates from the plant down to the roots. And interestingly enough, the more complex molecules cannot be transported for the most part in the xylem up to the plant. And that's important. I'll get to that in a minute why that's important. So this is just showing the impact of grazing. With good grazing management, you're going to have a healthy root community down there. And what this diagram here is showing is that in a grass community, 30 to 50% of the roots die back each year. And that's just natural. And it's actually probably closer to 50% in most cases. So half of your root biomass dies off every year and that grass plant has to replenish that through photosynthesis and feeding it with those carbohydrates. And so if you impact the upper part of the plant, tremendously, that the grass can't catch up down below and the roots shrink over time because they're not getting the food they need to replenish all those roots. And that's just a natural process in grasses. One of the ways they increase their efficiency in getting those nutrients through mycorrhizal fungi. And this is showing mycorrhizal fungi that are actually inside the plant roots. And so they colonize the plant roots and they add by 10 times more the area that that plant can effectively get nutrients and water and stuff like that. It's pretty amazing. So it takes money to make money. You've heard that before. And this is a little verse to back it up. For to everyone who has shall more be given. So it's just a principle. In the same way it takes leaves to make leaves. You can't grow a plant without leaf area. And because the plants feed the roots and stuff, it takes leaves to feed the microbial life in the soils as well. So here's some facts of growth with leaves. Roots uptake and send water nutrients and minerals and micronutrients to the leaves. That we know that. Roots do not transport carbohydrates to the leaves. We've heard for a lot of years that that root mass down there is a big carbohydrate sink. And when the grass gets stressed, it's going to tap into that sink and draw carbohydrates up and get growing again or whenever it's stressed. Well, that's not exactly true. They don't get carbohydrates from the roots. But we know that leaves use carbohydrates to respire. Everything that lives respires and uses has to have energy in the form of carbohydrates. Roughly 5 to 10% of new leaf growth. And that's either in the spring when they start initiating growth or after they've been grazed. About 5 to 10% of that new leaf growth is from the residual sheath of the grass plant, the crown, or the node. They've recently discovered some parts of the grass node, that bulgy part on the stem. And within the node, there are these sites that store carbohydrates for just that purpose whenever the grass is disturbed, it can tap into that carbohydrate sink, if you will, in the node. So the sheath, the crown, and the nodes is where the leaves are getting that 5 to 10% of their carbohydrates. But 90 to 95% of new leaf growth comes from carbohydrates resulting from current photosynthesis. So you have to have leaf area to get that plant really going. It only gets about 5 to 10% of it from carbohydrate storage. And it's not coming from the roots. So the bottom line is it takes leaves to make leaves. In addition to that, there are several growing points on a grass plant. The apical Mary stem, that's the main growing point of the plant. And that's what slowly comes up throughout the year and eventually turns into a seed head and that kind of thing. That's the main growing point of the grass tiller. Then there's these scenes called intercalary Mary stems. And if you take a grass leaf and you look at the base of the leaf right where the leaf joins the sheath, it's kind of yellow right there. That's one of those growing points of a grass plant. And the other growing point is the internode and the node. So take a look right after you do grazing. Take cattle through and graze. Go out there a few days later and you'll see these leaves that have been clipped off. And one tiller, the leaves will be clipped off here. And then as it grows, you'll see different levels where those clippings occurred. And that's that elongation growth. And that's one of the most rapid ways of regrowth after a grazing event is elongation from those intercalary Mary stems. Big words I know, but anyway, it's a pretty important concept. And then the other growing point is the auxiliary buds. And those are way down at the base of the grass plant. If that apical Mary stem is removed, so grasses like big blue stem and even smooth brome, when they shoot up that apical Mary stem sooner than other grasses, if you remove that apical Mary stem, that tiller is shut down. It's done for the year. And then it can no longer do elongation kind of growth. It's got to start from a whole new tiller from that auxiliary bud. And those are down at the base of the plant, just kind of waiting to grow if the grass needs it. So it'll start a new tiller once that apical Mary stem is removed. So I'm going to talk a little bit about drought here. Think of drought as basically a grazing event. I mean, it has kind of the same impact as a grazing event. But this is showing what can happen. This is a study that was, if you look here, in 1963, 1964. It was kind of near the year I was born, actually. Anyway, they were tracking this. The study tracked it a few years before. So they had a drought in 62 and 61. There was two drought years. And these little stars here indicate the amount of rainfall. So for this site, the average rainfall is right about 15 inches. And so you can see that in 1963 they had that much rain here. 1965 was a little bit drier, but 1966 was really dry. So 61 and 62 were really dry like that. Now look at how these plant communities responded. The shaded bar was range sites that were in fair condition. The solid white bar was range sites that were in excellent condition. After that drought, this plant community, and this level right up in here, is about 1,200 pounds, I think, is normal for that site. So this excellent plant community, excellent condition plant community, responded about halfway after the drought. And the second year after the drought, it almost completely recovered. Third year after the drought, it more than recovered. But look at the fair condition range sites. Three years after the drought, they still hadn't recovered up to the potential production. And then you have one year of drought again. And just with one year of good rainfall, the excellent condition range site came back really quickly all the way the year after this drought year. And this was a dry year it came down. So the point here, a lot of drought management is actually your grazing management before the drought happens. You can try to manage your way out of a drought after the drought hits, but that's not likely going to be very successful. How well you do through a drought, and think about that hydrology thing, too. The more better your hydrology is, the more moisture you're going to retain on your site, on your ranch, than having to run off and go to the neighbor or something. So that's part of it. The condition of your range going into a drought is going to have more of an impact of how you manage. This is just showing that root response to grazing again. So another principle of the soil health principles is keeping the soil covered. It affects temperature. This was at the grazing school last year. So if I'd known what was going to happen about an hour later from when I took this picture, I would have taken a better picture. But this is the trailer. If you look here, you can kind of see a difference. This is where we're doing our grazing allocation exercise. But look at that line right there. This is kind of, the grass over here was kind of yellow. Over here was pretty green, and there was some shrubs mixed in. Well, what that was is, if you stood over a little bit further that way and looked out to the north, it was like night and day. One side was kind of yellow. The other side was pretty green. What that was is prior to the guy that bought this place, about 10 years prior to this, that left side had been hayed every year. It was hayland. When he bought the place, he turned it into grazing. But still, 10 years later, you could see that impact. There was a line still there, no fence but a line. And we took the soil temperature over here. It was about 88 degrees that day. The soil temperature right in the surface was 87 on that side. On this side where it had been hayed but was now being grazed, it was 104 degrees in the surface. Huge difference in the soil temperature. So hayland removes all the organic matter and doesn't replenish it in the soil and you have that bare surface. But even after almost 10 years of grazing, it was still having an impact. So that can be a long-term impact. Obviously, if you don't have the ground covered, you're going to have impacts to soil erosion. This is showing real erosion. This is a pteroset and a pedestal. This is a water flow pattern on a range site. Water flow pattern that's forming into a gully. This is an actual gully now and this is a really nice gully there. So if you don't keep the ground covered, you can end up with things like this. And just for the fun of it, those indicators I was talking about are all rangeland soil health indicators. But we were on a cover crop tour and we came to this field that was cut for silage and we found the same, Hem anyway was pointing them out to me, found these same indicators. So this is a water dam and a little bit of pteroset. A pteroset is where soil builds up behind an obstruction. This is on cropland. You can see water flow patterns here going through the field. And actually there was a head cut I think right up in here, a head cut in the gully forming in the field. So the same kind of indicators you can see on cropland too if you don't keep the soil covered. But what about this? On cropland, I think usually, correct me if I'm wrong, we're pretty much cover is good. I mean we want to see cover out there. On rangeland, it can be good or bad. Too much cover can be kind of a bad thing as well. This is showing just a dominant Kentucky bluegrass sites and that litter cover starts to build up. And it impacts the hydrology and it also impacts the plant density and the plant community as well. And it builds this duff layer that really changes the site and how it responds to management. This is a confusing wire dag in a way. This is from what we call an ecological site description on rangeland. And if you think of, you've probably heard the phrase that the Bible is like God's owner's manual for each one of us. I mean that's like a piece of equipment. You have an owner's manual. If something goes wrong, you go and you look it up. Well this is in that same way, the ecological site description is like the owner's manual on a rangeland site. And just about everything you need to know about that site you can kind of find usually in the ecological site description. I'm going to focus though. This is a native grass state and then changing to an invaded state. We're going to look at this threshold right here. And this is what's happening a lot in North Dakota and South Dakota is this invasion of Kentucky bluegrass and brom. And the site description talks about how you get there and how you can get back from that kind of thing. But the impacts of too much litter, that's what we were talking about. It's a positive feedback or shift of energy flow from full season to spring and early summer. So when you have just Kentucky bluegrass, all your energy flow is happening pretty much in the spring. Instead of if you have a mixed plant community, you've got energy flow happening throughout the year. That's an impact there. It's reduction in the amount of carbon sequestered and the reduction of organic matter distribution in the profile. All your organic matter is right in the surface. Reduction of infiltration due to discontinuity between litter and soil surface, like I showed you in that patch layer. Alteration of the soil structure. Usually under these invaded plant communities, that granular structure starts to change back to a blocky structure. You actually lose the structure in the soil. And changes in root morphology. All your roots are in the upper surface instead of being scattered throughout the profile. So all kinds of changes occurring there. Reduction in native mycorrhizal fungi as well. There's two studies I have found that show that mycorrhizal fungi are reduced in these invaded systems. So diversity above ground equals diversity below ground. These are just showing, this is a clay site. By the way, that rainfall simulator picture I showed you, those were all clay ecological sites from five different management types. That's another clay site with scurf pee and purple comb flower and prairie comb flower and green eel grass and western wheat grass. Good diverse community. This is a pasture with really good diversity. Different legumes and different grasses. Another one there. So what about weeds? Lamb's quarter is considered a weed by most. Does anybody keep in time on my talk? Like how long? Am I okay? Okay. So lamb's quarter is a weed, right? Actually it's good and salad if you've ever. But it's actually pretty high protein. High protein content, 18% in some cases. These are just some other weeds and look at the protein content of those weeds. So are weeds a bad thing? Well, it depends on how you look at them. This is a website called Livestock for Landscapes. And Kathy Voth actually trains cattle to eat some of these plants and manage the weeds like a forage instead of trying to eliminate them. And look at the ones that she's successfully trained cattle to eat. I mean all the bad ones you see on there. Candidate thistle, bull thistle, musk thistle, Russian napweed, diffuse napweed. If you've ever been around napweed, that's a nasty stinkin'. I wouldn't want to put that in my mouth. But anyway, she's successfully trained cattle to each and every one of those weeds. And you looked at the protein content of them. A lot of you know Jim Falstick. His philosophy is use what you've got and manage for what you want. So in the interpretation here, there are no weeds on rangeland and pastureland. They're just really an opportunity maybe for your cattle. This is showing that diversity though. So these four sites here are cropland. Don't worry about the words on this, but just look at the pie chart. This is looking at mycorrhizal fungi species. So each color represents a different mycorrhizal fungi species group. And these were different, some different cover crops on cropland, but again they're all cropland. So they're all pretty much dominated by this red group and this green group. The oat cover crop had the most diversity, but pretty much red and green is all you see for the mycorrhizal fungi species groups on the cropland. And then this is a native prairie site. Look at the difference in the diversity of mycorrhizal fungi and the change in the species groups that were the dominant in this case. Dr. Mike Layman over at ARS and Brookings, he said these two species groups they've come to know are what they call generalists. They don't really care who they live with. And they're not as effective as doing the things that mycorrhizal fungi do well. And so these are the two that dominate on the cropland. With more diversity both on cropland and grassland, we're going to see more diversity in mycorrhizal fungi. So that's the key to soil health in a lot of cases is getting that diversity going. Optimizing disturbance. From an ecological standpoint, a disturbance is not necessarily good or bad. Just talking to Jason and he was talking about how some impacts of grazing cause some compaction and that can happen. But in most cases, a disturbance is not necessarily good or bad. It depends on how you manage it. And the same management action can result in negative or positive feedback depending on time and intensity. And actually non-use on rangeland is considered a disturbance and for extended periods of time can also result in negative feedback. So this is just some impacts of overgrazing, stimulates weeds, reduces fungal biomass, reduces infiltration, increases soil temperature. We've kind of talked about all those. Potential effects of grazing management. I mean, defoliation, if not done correctly, can lead to selective grazing. You need to manage the duration and time of grazing and the frequency and intensity of defoliation. The treading on plants can be positive or negative depending on how you manage it. And again, manure and urine distribution can be good or bad depending on how you're managing it. You've heard, you know, how did the prairie soil develop? This is just throwing in some little trivia here. You know, you always hear about, well, the bison is how those deep prairie soils develop. They're one of the main drivers and they probably were. But grazing fire also had a pretty large impact on how the prairie came about. But in reality, probably the thing that had more broad spread impact on the prairies was insects. You ever hear of those infestations of locusts? I mean, in most years that hit every acre clear across the plains. It was a huge deal. And so they consistently probably had as much remora impact than the bison. There's a really cool book. It's called The Devastating Rise and Mysterious Disappearance of the Insect that Shaped the American Frontier. It's all about the Rocky Mountain Locust. If you ever get a chance to read that book, it's pretty amazing how they figured out what happened to the locust. Another one is the nature of eastern North Dakota pre-1880 historical ecology. It just talks about how really how much impact fire and grazing had on the plains and the distribution of that. Anyway, but some insects that are very beneficial, dung beetles. This is a picture showing several different species of dung beetles all over this manure patty. And there's kind of three different kinds, manure dwellers, burrowers and tumblers. And the famous one is the tumbler. And I had a video in here, but I knew I wouldn't have time, so I took it out. But anyway, just some of them, they live in the manure pile. Some of them take the manure and bury it in the soil. But in a situation where you have good insect population and some of you can attest to this, those manure patties will only last probably a week or two out on the pasture. And then they're gone. And that's when you have good interaction between the dung beetles and the site. So grazing systems, some of the keys to managing grazing, these are pretty critical. Proper utilization. Like I said, that take half, leave half is pretty critical. Somewhere around that range that really manages the roots really well. Adequate recovery periods. Having a long enough period of time so the cattle aren't re-grazing the same plants over and over again. Things like that. The reason of use, that's a real critical factor as well. And just as a goal, strive for year-round grazing. Try to get the four-legged harvester to do the work for you instead of sending another piece of equipment out there. The overall key is adaptive management. It doesn't matter what kind of grazing system you use necessarily, but if you're getting feedback from that all the time and adapting your management to that, you're going to be successful in managing soil health, most likely. Just a couple, so drought, I'm in with a couple of maps. This is showing the current status based on the South Dakota drought tool as of February 1st. And this is kind of like the potential growth that could happen as of February 1st. So it's looking kind of bleak for western South Dakota again and even a good portion of eastern South Dakota. And this is the predicted projected peak production for July, the July 1st peak production. If we had normal rainfall from here out to July 1st. So even with normal rainfall, it's probably going to be dry out west. And then someplace cease to ever self. I think that's all I had.